We Sat Down With The Internet's Most Knowledgeable Gamer (ft. ⁨@JoshStrifeHayes⁩ ) | Trash Taste #260
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Back to the episode. Hello and welcome to another episode of Trash Taste. I'm your host for today, Gant. Joining me once again are the boys. And we have a special guest today. Josh, do you want to introduce yourself? Absolutely. So welcome. I'm Josh Strife-Hayes. I'm a YouTuber, Twitch streamer, content creator. I've been an actor, a teacher, a martial arts instructor, a paintball marshal, a trampoline party host, a

- I can keep going. - Your voice is already butter to my ear. This is gonna be a very easy two hours. Cheers, we have some alcoholic beers or water or I mean, oh my, this is the one that dropped. - You got the one that dropped. - I didn't say anything. - It's a good start. - It's an excellent start already. - What a great start. - I wanna say to those who aren't familiar, your main thing now is YouTube, right? And mainly MMOs.

and retro games. Yes. So my main channel, Josh Drive Hayes, specializes in MMORPGs, massively multiplayer online role-playing games. So World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, all that jazz. I have a long-running series called Worst MMO Ever, where I try and find the worst possible MMOs and play them for as long as it takes to really judge them and get a feel for them. Right.

and my latest series is called "100 Hours In" where I take a popular MMORPG and play it for 100 hours 'cause people keep saying to me, "It gets better 100 hours in." I'm like, okay, bet. - You drop the word 100 hours so casually like it's nothing. - That's a lot of time. - That is a lot of time. - Thank you.

I'm glad that you understand that. - That's like four and a half days. - It really is. - Persona is considered an extremely long game. And that takes 80 hours on a 60, right? - No, it's like a hundred. - I think it can be a hundred depending on how many side quests you do. - This is one of the warped ideals that the MMORPG genre has really driven into people. When I say to someone, "Hey, I've played your game for 100 hours." They come back with, "That's nothing."

I've played it for a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand. Get back to me when you've played it for five years of your actual life. - They've played nothing else. - Exactly. - They have no frame of reference. - That's what I try and explain to people. If you have just played one game for several thousand hours, as long as you've had fun, great. But don't think that that gives you a broad overview

of the genre as a whole. I think what I bring to the table is a broad overview without necessarily having hyper-specific knowledge of each game. And that is sometimes to my detriment. People will say, well, you've got it kind of right, but you've missed this. But I think, you know, instead of being a game reviewer, you've played a lot of games, you offer a more, like you said, a broad perspective on these kind of things. I played Final Fantasy Online. Mm-hmm.

- Which is a famous game for like not getting good until at least like 100 hours in. - And this is something that I encountered a lot where, you know, people were very excited for me to play it. They were like, "Oh my God, he's gonna play it." And you know, the fans of that game love it. Everyone said the same thing. "Realm Reborn," which is like the first major act of this game. They're like, "It's completely garbage. You need to get through it." How long do you think it takes?

- I was told 60 hours. - It's like 50, 60 hours. It's ridiculous. Do you know how crazy that sounds to any normal person who plays video games? That you need to get 60 hours of a game before it starts to get good? - Imagine if you were to say to someone, "Hey, this TV show gets good in season seven, season eight, but keep watching it 'cause it's totally worth it."

I'm thinking maybe we could just cut seasons one through six. Maybe we could just start where it gets good. I like Final Fantasy XIV. I went to the Eorzea Cafe. Beautiful place, fantastic food. I've been like three times to that cafe. It's ridiculous. It's lovely. It's great. But again, you are pointing out the MMORPG mindset of it's okay to go through this dire, terrible, rubbish experience because the end is worth it. And there's almost a level of prestige that comes with trudging through that slot. I did that.

- It's a badge of honor to say, well, I've experienced all the terribleness, therefore you must as well. - Yeah. - That's the problem that's holding on. - Which is not a way to get somebody to again. - It's not. - They sound like they are hostage when they talk about it. - Yeah, it is stalking. - 'Cause they're like, no, but the Dawnbreaker? They're like, this is amazing. And I'm like, okay, when do I get to, oh,

- 400 hours, oh, okay. - Yeah. - It is amazing once you have invested 400 hours into garbage, then it's really good compared to that. - But I'm sure I would say the same about like taking edibles. Like if I had 400 hours worth of it, I would think that it's really nuanced. - Edible experience. - You know, so I feel like, yeah, to that extent. And then also the worst part is that

they've remade the first part of Final Fantasy XIV, I think twice. - Several times now, several changes, they've cut down quests. - And it's still very bad. - Yes. - I did finish it. So I just finished around, not just finished, but- - How many streams did it take?

three 14 hour streams to be around Reborn. And that was with me not reading a single dialogue. - You're just space barring through it, focusing, pressing on. - The thing I learned pretty quickly is that it was pretty hard to sit through it. - And your stream was okay with that? - They wanted me to skip, they were begging me.

The Final Fantasy fans were like, you've got to skip this. This is nonsensical. Because they also then recast and redid all the voice acting after this part. So it's almost a different game, but you just learn these abilities that you press all the combos in the same fashion. I

I'm not very good at MMOs, so you're probably looking at me and all the battleground noise in your head are going off. No, not at all. MMOs are about having fun. They're an online adventure with friends. If you have to be exceptionally good at them for them to be enjoyable, then that's a game design problem. You can approach a game that you are bad at and have a really good time in.

I'm bad at lots of games, but as long as I'm playing them with friends, I'm playing them with a group of people that play them in the same way that I play them, then it's a really good time. And I think you hit on a really nice note when you said that chat were begging you to skip. The problem I see with MMORPGs is people try and force several players who want different experiences to play together. Some people want the narrative, some people want the mechanics, some people want the PvP, some people want the PvE. And when you force everyone to go through the same adventure...

you end up forcing people to experience aspects of the game they do not like. And that's why people say, oh, this game isn't for me because it's made me do something I don't want to do. If you want to skip things, the game should still be mechanically good. If you want to read it, it should still be narratively interesting. Right.

- Yeah, he's being very polite here, but we don't skip story here, right Joey? - Well, you guys don't play- - We've had several disagreements. - They don't play MMOs. I feel like with MMOs, sometimes the writing isn't as conducive. - I have also played 20 hours of "Realm Reborn" and I- - You have? - I have, yes.

like ages ago. I mean, part of the reason I just- - So you booted up the game. - Yeah, so I booted up the game essentially. And I do understand about the dialogue skipping in Realm Reborn. It is hard. It is hard. - Okay, my defense with XIV, I haven't played XIV yet, not because I don't want to, it's because I know that if I get into it and my past love for every other mainline Final Fantasy game, I know I'm probably gonna be obsessed with it.

The problem is I just don't have the time to be obsessed with it right now. I've got like stuff to do. Spot on. Stuff to do. That is what I think a lot of people fall down on with the MMORPG becoming not only someone's game, but also someone's life, someone's personality. That's part of the danger of me reviewing MMORPGs. When I say this game is bad, people don't hear this game is bad. They hear you are wrong.

Your personality is bad. Your hobby is stupid. Because people make these games their lives, their personalities. I mean, the Final Fantasy XIV, I was blown away by the mechanic of you can, on your player card, you can say the hours you're online during the week. Like a time card? I'm on like 8 to 10 every weekday.

It's like a stream schedule. It is. If you join a high-ranking guild in a high-ranking MMORPG, people will say to me, "Right, I need you to be ready to raid from this time to this time and this day to this day." And I'm thinking, "Hang on, I haven't signed up for a second job. I just want to jump on it, have a little bit of fun and play off." But that is the difference between the online kind of social sphere that EverQuest was and the more group finder-focused games that MMORPGs are today.

Okay. So let's also, I'm interested, when did you first get into MMOs and reviewing them? How did this all come about? So I was an actor full-time before COVID shut the theaters down. What happens, I've had a lot of jobs in my life. I've been in situations where people have said, hey, do you want a job? And I've just said yes. And I was lucky enough to have a lot

I was a party host at a trampoline park. I was the guy, not even lying, that dressed up in the mascot costume of the big trampoline and used to just do front flips and back flips on the major trampoline. That was my job for a while. Whenever I arrived to work, everyone was like, who wants to wear the mascot costume? And everyone else was too cool to do it. And I was like, me, I'll do it. Put the mascot costume on me. I will flip around. This is great. Yeah.

And I was a go-kart mechanic for a bit, martial arts instructor for a bit. But what I would do from all of these jobs is I would come home and I would play online games. RuneScape.

Bit of World of Warcraft, bit of Final Fantasy 14, Guild Wars 2. This was my kind of escape from the world, my relaxation into a big virtual world. My acting career was going relatively well in London, doing some theater, doing some film and TV stuff, nothing major, but paying the bills. And then COVID hit and shut all the theaters down. I came home from a rehearsal one day and just thought, right, my income stream has dried up now. I need to go and start teaching, acting, teaching, performing. And I was still making YouTube videos at this time of me just playing games for fun. Didn't expect anything to come of it.

Then I was playing a game called Neverwinter Online, which is an old Dungeons & Dragons action game. And I was stuck on a boss. I could not find a guide for how to kill this boss. And I thought, I can teach acting, I can probably teach video games. So I made a guide on how to beat this boss in Neverwinter. It was very basic, one take, didn't understand editing software at the time, camera set up, I just go through the in-game dungeon, kill the boss. People said, this guide is great, please make more of them. Started making more, they did pretty well. Yeah.

While I was doing this, I was looking for other games, and I kept getting these banner ads around the side of my browser for a game called Evony. And it was, "Help me, my lord, the angels are in trouble," big busty woman on the advert. "You must click here. You must help out." And I thought, "This is obviously just bait." But I'm in. I had a free day. Well, what I actually thought was, "How bad can this be?" And that's when I realized that people love terrible things.

People love the morbid curiosity of what is bad, but nobody wants to download it because nobody wants to give their computer all of the viruses. That's fine. I'll do that. There's nothing important on here.

- So I downloaded a game called League of Angels, which is a terrible game. - I've heard of that. - It's awful. - Oh my God. - It's absolutely awful. - I remember seeing those ads. - Yeah, you've seen the ads. - I have seen the ads. - You've seen the ads. - League of Angels. - League of Angels. - This is like a generic awful. - There's League of Angels, Heaven's Fury. There's League of Angels 3. - League of Angels sounds like a game that like your grandma would be like, "Are you playing that League of Angels?"

- This is the kind of ad that you would find on websites that are very desperate for any kind of income and would take any kind of ads. - It is entirely autoplay. You don't do anything. You just click level up, you get extra items, you spend money, you watch it play itself. So I made a video called Worst MMO Ever: League of Angels. Because I thought this may be the worst game I'd ever played.

And while I was playing it, they released the sequel, League of Angels Heaven's Fury. And I thought, well, I've got to review that one now. So I made a video called Worst MMO Ever, League of Angels Heaven's Fury. Right. But then I realized, oh, no. There you are. There you are right now. It's still there. But then I realized, oh, no, that's a series. Ha ha ha.

I've made two videos now. Yes. How bad can it get? Both are the worst ever. Both are the worst ever. So then I started adding a question mark to that title saying, is this the worst ever? And that began my journey to find every MMO I possibly could, play it through and see, is this the worst game? And it's taken me from some absolute dire shovelware junk all the way up to games like Star Wars The Old Republic, The Elder Scrolls Online. I've discovered Guild Wars 1, which is now one of my favorite games. And I've been able to...

journey around these dying online worlds with one or two players almost as digital archaeology. And that's what supported my main channel for five years. I mean, banger title, I will say, for a series. So, like, if you get a game like this, how many hours do you give it to, like,

get a proper, let's say, opinion of it, would you say? I think that can change depending on how many games I've played and what the game is trying to be. When League of Angels starts, it literally gives you the most powerful weapons, most powerful items. You run into a boss, you kill it in one hit, you run to the next boss, because it's just meant to be...

digital visual noise that you leave playing while you do nothing else. I mean, people describe me as second monitor content, so I have fully leaned into that. You don't watch my videos, you have them playing on the second monitor while you're doing something else. So I've discovered that these video games will tell you very quickly what they are trying to give you. And it depends how long you want to experience that for.

- So, idle MMO, is this a thing? - Yeah, I don't know. - What? - I mean, there's lots of idle games. - I know the idle game, but idle MMO, I didn't- - It's absolutely huge. There are adverts for it. There's an entire genre built up around it. You start playing the game. You will kill all the bosses for the first 20 or 30 minutes, and then you will hit a boss that keeps killing you until you level up. And you can watch the game grind itself

for two hours to get the power, or you can open your wallet. - Wait, wait, so where, okay. So I get the concept of it being like basically an idle dungeon crawler type of game, but like where does the MMO aspect come into it? Like how do you, like how do you, how do you like, like, you know, 'cause in games like RuneScape, right, there's like that whole element of like, you can talk to other players, you can interact with them, do all sorts of different things with them. How do you do that?

in a game that plays itself? That's a very good question. So I'm glad you brought up RuneScape. RuneScape was one of my favorite MMORPGs. I was actually hosting RuneFest, the RuneScape convention in- Oh, shit. Yeah, back in the UK a couple of weeks ago now. It was really good, guys. To be a RuneScape player from a kid and then to be hosting the convention was absolutely insane. It was super, super cool. I know, it was absolutely amazing. Inside, butterflies the entire time while I was doing it. But the argument, what is an

MMO has been raging for the last 10 to 15 years. How many people do you need to be considered massive? If your game only hosts 20 people per kind of town or area or zone, even if you have a million players, if you're only interacting with 20 or 30 of them, is that massive?

Is it massive if you can team up with five people? What about 500? What about 5,000? I always thought of MMOs as more of a feeling in the game as opposed to like the number. It's a vibe. That's what it is. The game, it's a vibe. The problem now is that the label MMO has been taken by almost every single game developer who wants their game on Steam to trend on every single tag. So they'll say, yes, of course, this five-person shooter is an MMO. And we'll say, well, you don't pass the vibe check on this one. That's weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So RuneScape's been your ride or die since the start? It's been like your main- I love RuneScape. The adventure of RuneFest was absolutely incredible. And the people that I've met who also play RuneScape has, it's opened up an entire social world to me. I've met so many people who I've admired for so long, people whose content I've discovered, who've become good friends over the time. And then games like The Elder Scrolls Online, games like Guild Wars 2.

You mentioned earlier that people do nothing than just play their MMO. I've been very careful not to fall into that trap. I give a couple of hours to this, a couple of hours to that, a couple of hours to the other. You need to be varied within it. It's tough, but I know RuneScape, people who like RuneScape, man, it's... Oh, they like RuneScape. The thing I've noticed is that they try to convince me that they're doing it on the side and that it's a second monitor thing. And when I watch them, I'm like, you know this is...

- Yes, it is second monitor for the 30 seconds you look away, but then you've clicked something else. So your string of conscience is constantly RuneScape. - So RuneScape, and again, to get technical, RuneScape works on an internal system called the Tick system. Every 0.6 seconds, an instruction is sent either to the game or from the game. So if you click attack this enemy, you will start attacking it on the next available tick. There is a gameplay style called Tick Manipulation.

which involves playing the game, clicking every 0.6 seconds to send the exact instructions at the exact time. There is even, if you use the runelite client, an in-game tempo counter that beeps every 0.6 seconds to make sure that you can click at exactly the right time. That's insane. Oh my God. So it's like,

- Yeah, so it's like the next available frame you are doing something different. - Absolutely. You can play it in the background if you want to, or here's an example. If you have one health point left and an enemy launches a ranged attack at you, that ranged attack damage calculation will be done based on the maximum health you currently have. It will not be able to hit you for more than one. If you are able to eat some food

after the attack has been launched, but before the damage has registered, that attack will still only hit you for one, because it was calculated with that being the maximum. That is sometimes called tick eating. You have one health, the enemy attacks you, you eat food that gives you one health, taking you to two, you take one damage, go back down to one. As long as you keep doing that every second,

You can beat some of the hardest bosses in the game on one health. And there are videos of that happening. I believe it's called the level three fire cape. I want to see that. That's crazy. Yeah. One thing that I, cause I occasionally go down the runescape rabbit hole, um,

The law of RuneScape is crazy. Like the amount of video essays people make on certain things. - Rendy was the guy that did it. Video essays, this game has been absolutely mined for all the possible content it can have. - I've seen a lot. - So these guys are phenomenally talented at working out exactly how much damage is going to come into them at exactly what second, what game tick,

As long as you click at the right time and then move and click back, you will hit the enemy before they hit you. - He's level three doing this. - So you'll see what he's doing there is clicking on the prayers. The prayers are immunity from certain types of damage. But the damage and the prayer only matter if it's calculated when the damage impacts you. But the prayer only drains prayer points if it's on for more than two ticks. So if you can have your prayer active for one tick,

avoid the damage and then deactivate it, you don't lose prayer points, meaning you can pray indefinitely. - I was such a dumb kid. I remember when I was, I'd be like, why is my prayer running out so fast? - But you have to click it every 0.6 seconds. - Holy shit. This is so cool. - Oh my God. - Am I the only one out of the three of us who played RuneScape growing up? - No, I did. - You did too. - I was the only one who didn't play it growing up. - I remember when I first got membership,

as a kid and that was like life-changing. When I was like, oh my God. - You go through those gates and suddenly all the armor opens up, all the weapons open up. - See, I couldn't convince my parents to get me this. - Dude, that was the- - I was stuck behind the gate. - The first month of membership was the longest in my life, dude. I got so much done. But I remember that I got, what's that? Everyone had this like ab armor that you got from playing that- - Oh, the fighter torso from Barbarian Assault, yes.

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Back to the show. - That took so long to get that. And then I let my little brother go on my account and he lost it. And then I, yeah, I was furious. - Disenherit him immediately. - I can't remember how long it takes. I think it took me like a week to get it. It takes so long to get the stupid app.

I don't even know if it was very good, but. It was. Okay. It was because I'm going to tell you exactly why. To my kid self, I remember I needed this and the hat with the. The horns. The Nate's knot. Helm of Nate's knot. Yes. From the Promenic Trials quest. Yes, yes, yes. I did all of this and then he lost it all. I was very upset. I was very upset.

Oh no, I can understand. I'm hurting now. He wanted to borrow my account. And I was like, yeah, sure, man. What we've got onto here is a really fascinating thing about video games, especially in the modern world, is we all played games as kids, but now we're watching people push them to their mechanical limits. They're saying, can they do that? And challenges within video games have become a massive genre on YouTube. I've got a friend of a girl called Luality who beat Dark Souls on a dance pad.

- Oh, I've seen that video. - Oh, I think I've seen the dance of that. - Yeah, I've seen that video. - Beating Nameless King. So when people say, "Yes, I'm gonna play a video game." Okay, cool, what's the challenge? What are you going to do? What's the difficulty? I'm currently doing a Twitch stream called Dark Swoles where I'm playing Dark Souls. I don't know if you've seen this.

I'm playing Dark Souls, I've got a walking pad under my desk, so I'm constantly walking forward while I'm playing it. I've got a barbell behind me, and whenever I die, respawn at the bonfire, level up, equip an item, I spin a big wheel of fitness. And then I'm either doing push-ups, press-ups, sit-ups, bicep curls, shoulder presses. I'm trying as hard as I can, because I thought, right, I need to get fit. Let's use Dark Souls, because everyone uses Dark Souls for everything. But the idea of taking a video game and...

playing it in a way that is challenging, that's engaging, that's silly. Video games are something we all love. - Yeah. - And now we're seeing them through a different lens. - Well, it's kind of like the evolution of like becoming in terms of like a let's player or like a Twitch streamer. You have to make a challenge or a content around it. You're not just playing a video game. You are making content, you know? And it's always finding that new avenue or that new way to sell an audience to get you watching a game that they've maybe seen people play before, maybe an entirely new game.

but keeping that interest in that. - I mean, that's also why, like, you know, especially like in the past five, 10 years, like speed running has just become like, oh, like so huge now. Like it's like, oh, I grew up playing this game and I just watched a guy beat it with his eyes closed one hand in 20 minutes, you know? - And then you'll watch entire documentaries about that happening. You've got people like summoning soul or people like Carl Jones. - The goat. - Yeah, oh, we love summoning soul. You will say, right, I've got,

I mean, I've played Tetris, but I've got no particular interest in Tetris until he says to me, do you want to know about the world history of Tetris? I'm like, yeah, I do. Three and a half hours on the app. Whenever a YouTuber uploads some kind of three-hour video essay on a game that I've heard of,

and I'm like you know what I'm going to watch all of this there's Accursed Farms who does the Game Dungeon series where he plays old PC games I will watch all of those easily I have a 73 hour Morrowind playthrough on my channel because I was playing it

on Twitch and then my editor just said I'm not going to edit this I'm just going to take the entire gameplay and just smash it together turns out it's quite difficult to upload a 73 hour long YouTube video yes it is how the fuck did you do it so what he did was he had a program that spliced together several 24 hour long videos and then just clicked upload and hoped

So it's up there right now. It's up there right now. You can go to Josh Strife. Wait, look it up. Josh Strife Morrowind. Josh Strife Replays. I think there's Morrowind and there's Fallout. So all my channels rhyme. There's Josh Strife Haze, Josh Strife Plays, Josh Strife Says, and Josh Strife Replays. But yeah, Morrowind, full playthrough. Go back, go back, go back. There was a full playthrough of Fallout. 73 and a half hours. 73. Three days. Yeah, 73 to three. I didn't realize that YouTube has a days counter on the video. But there's also a Fallout. Wait, how did you?

because I've tried to upload like 20 hours and it like shits itself. I will, my, there's this guy called Visa, he's lovely, I will pass on all the details. Oh my God. That's insane. Yeah, there is a full, there's also a fallout. You have 400,000 views on a three day video. Yeah. I, I,

I'm not going to lie, the ad revenue was pretty good. You know, normally when you go to sleep to the video, you wake up and it's over. Right, so this is exactly what's happened. People put me on the second monitor and they play my videos and they fall asleep to it. I have a friend, a YouTuber called Kadikaris. Kadikaris has started a second channel called Caddy Sleeps, where he's literally just taken his old videos, slightly lowered the volume, and people fall asleep to them.

- Amazing. - That's such five hours. - Absolutely incredible. But yes, IM people's sleeping content. - Sleep content has just become like a big fucking boom in the massive. I don't, I know it feels like massive. It's been massive in the last few years. I remember someone uploaded like six hours worth of American dad content on YouTube. I don't know how they got away with it, but Sydney's,

- Been falling asleep to American dad because just because it's a six hour compilation of American dad clips. - Is American dad the kind of show that you can fall asleep to? - Why would you wanna fall asleep to American dad? - People can fall asleep. I think you don't understand. - It's a comfort show. - People can fall asleep to anything as long as this is a six hour long video, right? This is something I've,

found out. It's a comfort show. People want content on that they know that they know they'll enjoy that they need to engage with. For me, it's Star Trek The Next Generation. If I need something on in the background while I'm doing something, The Next Generation is going on. People do it with Breaking Bad. People do it with Lord of the Rings. It's just...

There's a level of kind of parasocial attachment to the media itself that makes people feel comfortable. I mean, I laugh, but I would probably do it to like the first five seasons of Simpsons, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Like I would do that. I have done that actually. Then you'd find a three hour video essay about something random in the Simpsons. Yeah. I'm going to watch this. I'm going to watch this. This is like that joke of, uh,

- One more video before bed. - The Josh Strachan. - Look at the comment, look at the top comment. I'm pretty sure the top comment is, "It's my party and I get to choose the video." - Wait, scroll down guys, scroll down. - You can scroll down to the comments on that video.

- Just one more video before bed. There we go, nailed it. Absolutely nailed it. Oh my goodness, the Brazilian aviation joke. So let me give some context to that. I got messaged by a guy who works for an industry within the Brazilian aviation industry. I think his job is translating blueprints for planes from one international standard to another. He has just a system that does this.

He's discovered that his PC shuts down after about eight hours unless there is something playing on a media player. And my worst MMO series was the longest playlist he could find that looped. So he plays that while Brazilian aviation industry technical schematics are being translated from one thing to another. So he messaged me on Twitter and just said, just so you know, Josh, if you ever take your content or channel down, the Brazilian aviation industry will suffer. LAUGHTER

He messaged me a couple of months ago saying, hey, just so you know, I've now got a new job. I now work for YouTube, but it turns out there's the same problem. So my videos play on a random monitor in the YouTube offices just to keep the monitor on.

- That's my contribution, you know? - I mean, you know, that's such like an engineering solution. If it works, it works. But there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. - I need to now upload 70 hour videos. - Yeah, I guess so. - I mean, Josh, if you look up here, you can see this is not a professional piece of work. This is something that we have known.

And this is a temporary piece of work that we said, ah, we'll fix it eventually. - No, you don't need to, it's doing its job. - It's been almost five years now. - This is absolutely fine. There's nothing more permanent than temporary. But if you do need a 70 hour long video, Final Fantasy 14's got you covered. You could play that for 70 hours. - Shit, I might have to. - But you wouldn't really understand the game until you played it for 700 hours. - I can't wait to see a two week long video. - You gotta step it up, you know?

- Don't worry YouTube, I got you now. - Yeah. So the main channel was fantastic. It was really satiating my desire to create content. It was paying the bills. I was enjoying doing it. Then the Twitch streaming was allowing me to stay active and actually talk to people, engage with the fans. But even MMOs get a little bit tiresome after a while. So I started a second channel called Josh Strife Plays. This was just to give me a mental break from MMORPGs. I wanted to play classic games. I think the first video on there was me reviewing the old Command & Conquer games, which had just been rebooted for PC.

And then I thought, hang on, this is going to give me a great variation. So the Josh Strife Plays channel is now classic games. So Kingsfield 1, Kingsfield 2, Tenchu. Oh, you played Golden Sun? Golden Sun, hell yeah. I fucking love Golden Sun, dude. I hadn't played it before, so people said to me, amazing combat system, so clever. So I've now been able to work with the company GOG, or Good Old Games, on their kind of Dino Crisis 1 and 2 reboots, on the Soul Reaver remasters, on the Tomb Raider remasters. You played Croc? Croc!

Argonauts. So Argonauts software have remastered Croc and they messaged me recently saying, hey, do you want a code to play Croc? Yeah. I'm like, that's really kind of you, but I'm not good enough time right now. Completed it, mate. So yeah, we did all of them. Well, when you came in the office and you said, I haven't had a holiday in six years, looking at your website,

I can kind of understand why. Six years ago was when I think I really started taking YouTube seriously. I was able to move away from my retail jobs, my entertainment jobs, my acting jobs, and just do YouTube and just do Twitch. And I've been very fortunate, very lucky that a lot of my friends and family have supported me in doing that. And after finding the success that I've found, I was able to buy a house, which is an incredibly rare thing for a millennial to do. I know, right? That is the flex. That's the flex.

- It was difficult explaining YouTube to the mortgage advisor. He was like, "So what do you do?" I'm like, "I make YouTube videos." He's like, "Oh, that's cute. What do you do?" - You just see the interest ticking up. - Yeah, exactly. - Slowly there. - We were gonna give you two, but now it's 10.

So after that success, I kind of sat back and I thought, I need to find a way to slightly compartmentalize my thoughts and maybe avoid the burnout that a lot of YouTubers will go through. I'm going to go to Japan for a bit. Hell yeah. Excellent. Amazing country. Absolutely stunning. Met up with Mother's Basement a couple of days ago. Lovely guy. I had a drink with him. Met up with one of the, I think it was the communications director for Powell World.

He's a fan of the video, said, "Hey, if you're in Japan, come and hang out." That was super cool. And I think I messaged you guys about four days ago as a joke on Twitter being like, "I'm in Japan if you are, you know, I've got some time." And you responded straight away saying, "Yes, we're free." - Yeah, I was like, "Oh, shit, turn up, turn up." - It kind of just worked out 'cause I'm literally flying away

- So this was like our last recording session for a while. So when you hit us up, it was like- - Beautiful. - Hey, actually that works perfectly for- - Serendipity worked perfectly. - And also we were like, when are we ever going to get an MMO? - There you go, you're right there. - Well, like I'm curious because you've said a little bit about your background. What kind of background do you have? Is it like an acting background or?

So my, I was born into a very working class background in general. My dad was a policeman and my mother was a civil servant for the UK government. And I think she unfortunately lost her job during the massive reshuffle about 20, 25 years ago. And then she's kind of bounced around from a couple of things, but they always, they did right by me and my brother. And I just wanted to be an actor. That's not a thing in our family. It's never been. In fact, I remember vividly, we used to have a VHS with a couple of copies of GoldenEye, the old James Bonner.

And I would watch Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan, you know, endlessly. And one day my mom walked into the living room and I turned to her and I said, mother, in my very kind of middle-class accent when I was like eight, mother, I want to do that. And she looked at me really proud and she's like, you want to be a spy? And I'm like, no, mother, I want to be Pierce Brosnan. And then I just wanted to act. So I did the kind of school drama club or the acting jobs I possibly could.

I was a martial arts instructor for about three or four years, which has put me in front of people. Then I was a civilian-- Was this part of the acting thing or just something completely separate? I think my mom just wanted to get rid of me for a few hours every week, so she made me learn karate, as everyone else can do. She was like, "Just go over here." And my instructor pulled me aside and said, "Hey, I need you to teach the kind of younger kids how to do punches and kicks." That's where I got my foundation and my grounding for teaching and for engaging.

And then from there, I went on to work with the Royal Navy for a little bit as a self-defense instructor. That was super fun. I was never a commissioned officer. I was just a civilian contractor for them. But super cool guys to work with. Really good fun. Then I decided to go to university and study acting. Thankfully, I was able to get one of the university student loans. My main plan to pay that back is to die.

And then from there, I was able to find small work in theater, small work in film and TV. Right. And that kind of pushed me now into the entertainment and the education world. And now you play MMOs. And now I play MMORPGs. Hell yeah. It's a...

It's an interesting life, it really is. - Yeah, that's so cool. That's so colorful. - It's definitely exposed me to what I would call the more extreme fringes of the video game community. So I put a video up on my main MMORPG channel recently where I ranked 250 MMORPG games.

Okay. I mean, sorry, have you played all of these? Most of them, yes. Okay. Not all of them. If we go to Josh Strive Hayes, it should be one of the most recent videos. How long is this video? That video is, we'll find out. Josh Strive Hayes won, and it's the tier list. There we go. The one, nearly two hours.

So what I did was I said, okay, I want to rank every single MMORPG, but I don't have time to play all of them. So what I did, in fact, if we let this play through for a second, you will see me holding up a sheet, a physical printed paper sheet. What I did was I found every single MMO tier list, top 10, review, video, publication, over the last 20 years. And then I...

kind of conglomerated all of that information into a massive chart. - Oh my God. - Jesus. - Where I weighted every single possible video and every position of each game within that video. So if the video I was watching said, you know, top 10 MMOs, the MMO in position one would get 10 points, position two would get nine points. And then I would take all that data, all those numbers, spent weeks adding it all together,

and managed to scientifically, mathematically rate 250 MMORPG games from worst to best. And did the... I mean, I'm obviously not going to ask what the best one was because people can go watch the video, but like what did... Mathematically...

the top 10, was it also kind of reflective of what you thought was like the top 10? - Yes, without a doubt. So mathematically, it's a terrible idea to do this. My methodology was awful. People messaged me saying, "Josh, I'm a mathematician and you're wrong." And I'm thinking, I'm not a mathematician and I know I'm wrong watching this. That's how bad this was.

But yes, so what's happened is over the last, I'd say, 10 years, MMORPGs have really pushed into the mainstream, which means there was simply more data available for the last 10 years. Games like Meridian 59, which is the first 3D MMORPG. Games like EverQuest, which completely changed the genre with its battle against Ultima Online. These are titans of the genre, and they're super important games.

but they're not popular now. So there were simply more videos comparing World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV than comparing the island of Kazmai to Tibia. Right, right.

I know Tibia. Tibia is, I think, one of the longest running still active MMORPGs. It's still going. You can still download it, still play it. Some of the original people are still there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the longest running games. I remember I played this for a little bit when I was a kid. Annoyingly, it's not the longest running social MMORPG, and that's a bit of an embarrassment within the... No, not that Tibia. No, no, no, no, no.

What's the longest running? This is a bit of an embarrassing fact within the MMORPG space, but as we've got Google in front of us, I'm going to ruin your search algorithm now. Okay. Could you search for a game called Furcadia? Oh my God. I'm not even kidding. Furcadia. No.

- This is the longest running MMORPG. - Furcadia is, whether it hits our modern parlance for MMORPGs is debatable, but it is the longest running still socially active online game. - 96. So it's almost 30 years. - I believe it was in the Guinness Book of Records for being the longest running. It has just kept going. That's something we try and sweep under the rug,

Respect. You know, shout out to the furries. It's the furries propping up so many parts of society. After working on the internet, I realized that it is 90% furries. Of course. It's always the furries. I was at a convention recently and there was like an IT convention in one place and then a furry convention in another. And it took me a while to realize they were the same convention. It was just...

All the IT guys were like, ah, I see what you're into. Okay, cool, you know, keep it going. Keep propping up society. Everyone else comes from Seattle. I've got friends from Seattle that were there. LAUGHTER

It's almost a rite of passage. Well, it's because you need that kind of income to support the hobby, you know? Of course, yeah. I've had friends that actually make fursuits as a living and they are incredibly detailed and remarkably expensive. How did we get here? An incredibly rich ISU. And all MMO discussion eventually devolves into this. So what's your thoughts on furcadia?

- You know what, I've not played "Fuck Adia." - Is it good? Have you played this one? - So I don't want to be on every FBI list. So I've decided to stay away from "Fuck Adia." There's just a couple of, you know, as a YouTuber and a Twitch streamer, there's a couple of lists that you'll put on straight away. I thought I'd stay away from this one. - There must be some MMOs that you're like, absolutely not, this scares me. Or the thought of getting into this is too daunting. - What is the most cursed one? What's the most cursed MMO that you know of?

- Oh my goodness. - There's two different questions, I guess. - Oh wait, I thought that's what you were getting into. - No, no, no. - So the game that scares me that I won't play is EVE. - That's what I thought. - EVE Online. - Okay, okay. That makes sense, that makes sense. - Not because of the gameplay, but because of the player base. And I think anyone that does play EVE will absolutely understand where I'm going here.

They are a player base of spreadsheets. They understand data. They understand timing. They understand backstabbing. There is an official Eve PowerPoint. It's not PowerPoint. Excel. There is an official Eve Microsoft Excel add-on. You can Google it. Because the game is just about spreadsheets. It's about working out data, working out missiles, working out everything. It's an Excel add-on for it. It's incredible. Microsoft Excel add-in Eve Academy. Yes. What?

This is how much data goes into Eve. So if I say something bad about Eve Online...

They will find me. You're getting added to the spreadsheet. Yeah, immediately straight away. As far as the most cursed, I've played so many MMORPGs that have launched with the best intentions. They have died. I've played ones that have launched as complete scams and have then died. Scamming in the MMO world is massively prevalent. People saying on Kickstarter, you know, give me a million pounds, I'll make your ideal MMO, and then they just run off with it. But as far as the most cursed,

cursed personally it would be probably my favourite MMO that is now shut down a game called Otherland and if we can google Otherland I'll bring it up for you Otherland Otherland is a series of novels by the author Tad Williams and

And they made an MMORPG of Otherland. I found it through a PC Gamer article saying this is one of the weirdest MMOs. And if we, you might be able to find my video on the first page of Google for this. I played the first bit and it absolutely intrigued me. The visuals, the aesthetic, the idea, it was incredible.

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The story is effectively about billionaires who create a virtual world to ingrain their own personalities and brains into so they can become immortal. The MMORPG Otherland was touted as being one of the first billion-dollar revenue games. It, of course, didn't get there. What does that mean? Exactly. It was meant to make a billion dollars. It didn't.

Its development was completely rushed. It was destroyed. It ended up dying halfway through before being finished. But the framework of what was created was uploaded onto Steam and held by a smaller company. Right. So after playing it for about two or three hours, I got so intrigued, I finished the game.

I am one of the only people in the world who has gone all the way through Otherland because the mechanics don't work. There were no other players. It is janky as all hell. Damage doesn't register. You get killed straight away by random off-screen effects. The game ended up deleting itself halfway through. I had to restart the entire process. But over about six months, I finished Otherland.

And now the game is offline and you can't find it anywhere. Oh, shit. So my videos of Otherland and the screenshots that I took of those final areas are now the only surviving digital artifacts of this game. People have contacted me saying, hey, I want to try and recreate Otherland, but I'm having to use your videos to do it by watching. Why would someone want to do this?

The digital kind of museum aspect of it, the preservation of video games is a massive thing in the gaming space. Ross from Accursed Farms, I think, is pushing his Stop Killing Games initiative. I've worked with him a bit on that and I very much support that. But the idea is these are worlds that someone made, someone programmed, someone created, and many people lived in for hundreds of thousands of hours and now they're

gone. Walking around the empty cities of EverQuest 2 and when people say to me, oh I loved EverQuest 2, I wonder what it's like, and they go back, it's like returning to your childhood home and seeing that it's now a parking lot.

- It kind of like falls under the banner of like lost media, you know, where it's, you know, it's not just MMOs. Like, you know, sometimes you have like a YouTube video or something that, or a video online that you swear you saw as a kid and then you try and find it and then you don't know if it was like a dream or something. Cause it feels like it's,

stays in that ethereal space where you're like, you're pretty sure it existed, but you can't find any evidence that it actually happened. It's weirdly liminal, the entire thing. I mean, there's a game called Secondhand Lands. If we can Google Secondhand Lands. So I think it will probably be my video that pops up for it. Worst demo ever, Secondhand Lands. This was almost a Looney Tunes style game.

but adult videos. - I love the Comic Sans, but whatever. - Yeah, there's death, there's gore, there's horrible kind of blood everywhere. The hospital that you go to is- - Oh my God. - You go to a mechanic shop as a hospital and there's blood everywhere. And the idea there's like a car raising platform that you get healed at, it's extremely strange. Some of these projects might just be a university project.

- Right. - Right. - So would you look at this? This looks like the kind of game that you would see a kid playing in the background of a Netflix TV show. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - What are you doing? - That's not a real game. - It's super liminal. But I play these for hours to see what they have to offer because someone made this. Someone is paying to host it. Someone wrote this, someone coded this.

This is someone's best attempt at making a game. And so I give it a fair go. I've always said critique systems, but don't critique people. The person that made this is not wrong for making it, but what they have made is wrong.

- Yeah, that's a very mature way of approaching this. - That's very fair. - Have you ever met like any plays in games like this where it's kind of like desolate and it's kind of like meeting a person in the fucking desert and you're like, wait, what are you doing here? - Yes, so when I was playing my 100 hours in EverQuest video, I played on the EverQuest official server. There are multiple servers for EverQuest and some of them kind of bump you all the way to end game.

About 50 or 60 hours in, I was in a town running around. There weren't many people there. But then a guy ran past me as a frog, and I kind of just got chatting to him. Turns out he is also a brand new player. He's not done too much. So me and this frog became best friends for like the next 30 hours. We organized to log on at the same time because I couldn't take down a boss. He couldn't take it down. We worked together. And that, I think, is the beauty of MMORPGs. EverQuest is the world's prettiest chat room.

That's what this is. It's a chat room with an RPG attached to it. There's so many fucking menus in Star Wars Open. EverQuest is the menu game, without a doubt. Jesus Christ. This is absurd. What do you even have open? So right now, I don't know. But if I went back and played it slowly, I'd be able to work it all out. Yeah, right. So EverQuest is a perfect example of MMORPGs. And the reason they've started to die is they started as online social chat rooms. Meridian 59 being one of the first MMOs that was 3D, had the chat to it. We had...

Games called MUDs, or M-U-Ds, Multi-User Dungeons, which was a text-based game with no graphics. In fact, RuneScape started as a game called Devious MUD before having the visual aspect added to it. So these games were never designed to be games that stand up on their gameplay merits alone. They were designed to be cultural, societal facilitators where you and your friends got together for four or five hours and chatted, chatted,

went to kill a boss, got some cool items. Occasionally does something. Occasionally, yeah. You had a good time together. For sure. And now people don't need the social aspect because that's been taken over by things like Discord, by things like WhatsApp, by groups outside. The social aspect of an MMO is no longer novel enough

to sell the genre. 20 years ago, if I said to someone, "Hey, you can chat to 100 people from across the globe at the same time." Yeah, that's pretty cool. But now, Sayer, that's expected. We need a game on top of the social element, which is why the social element itself is slowly being phased out and dying because it is no longer impressive. I can't recall, and perhaps you can correct me on this, I can't remember any recent MMO launch that was popular.

Other than Final Fantasy XIV, I guess. Right. But that's not recent, surely. That's quite old. It's quite old. So the latest video on my channel, if we go back to the main channel itself, the very latest one is called Are MMOs Dying? And the video is... It's exactly the discussion. The idea is...

What does an MMORPG player want? That's me simply saying, mum says it's my turn to make the RMMOs dying video, because it's one of the most popular videos within the genre. Yes, of course, of course. What does an MMO player want? They want a massive game. They want a game with lots of content, lots of history, lots of bosses, lots of ideas. And unfortunately, that is best served by games that have already been around for many years.

To compare this to TV, many, many years ago, if a TV show launched and season one wasn't very good, they might be given season two, season three, season four in order to correct it, to course correct, to improve. Many people say, yeah, the first season of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, not its best work. The first season of Star Trek The Next Generation, not its best work.

But allowing it to exist and to grow and to patch its problems and to learn makes it good eventually. Nowadays, if a modern TV show launches and season one isn't good, it doesn't get a season two. To apply that back to MMORPGs, when a brand new MMO launches, if it isn't good, what happens is everyone just goes back to the established games. World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Guild Wars, Elder Scrolls. RuneScape to a degree. So now the modern MMOs simply don't have...

the ability to be bad for a couple of years before they get good. If World of Warcraft launched now as it launched back in 2004, it itself might not succeed. Right. Yeah. I mean, Final Fantasy XIV, especially.

Yeah, I mean, there is no way Final Fantasy XIV is getting off the ground with the launch that it had and the fucking reworks that it had. I mean, it didn't initially. That's why I had to remake this. The idea of Realm Reborn is from the fact they blew the entire game up and kind of started again. And there were so many interesting stories for that. Part of the...

Part of the history was that the development and the creation of the game focused on a couple of the wrong things. The game's designers and companies didn't know what MMORPGs players wanted. There is a famous story, I can never work out whether this is true or not, of a plant pot in, I believe it's Final Fantasy XI, that has so many polygons on it. It is so detailed that if you have more than four or five on the screen, your game will crash. Right.

If you Google Final Fantasy Plant Pot, it is... That's so awesome. So MMORPGs are held together. It's Flower Pot or Plant Pot. It might be in the game. Final Fantasy MMO. Yeah, Final Fantasy XI. Yeah, try MMO Plant Pot. Could be Flower Pot. But there is a... It might be on the images somewhere. There's so much stuff with that. A lot of MMORPGs are actually designed in the background around stuff that you would never notice. World of Warcraft is entirely held together by invisible rabbits.

- What? Okay, so. - Can you explain? - That's a wild sentence. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - World of Warcraft, if you type in World of Warcraft rabbit,

Again, you'll find it. World of Warcraft needed a way to link certain events happening at certain times to certain player locations. And they couldn't work out an invisible way to do it, so one of the easiest things they do, invisible bunnies that power wow. So what they just did was put bunnies in there, make them invisible, and attach events to them. So when a player walks past, it happens because the bunny saw it happen.

What? This is video games. Have you played Fallout 3? Yeah. Okay, so did you know when you use a train in Fallout 3, that is a hat?

Google this, you'll appreciate this. Fallout 3. It's either New Vegas or Fallout 3 train. The stuff you're saying makes me like Russian if I understand English or not. This reminds me of League of Legends as well. It's all coded in Minion. How do you teleport a player in Fallout 3 when you can't just immediately remove them from the world and replace them into the world? Well, it found out one of the easiest ways they could do it was by putting an NPC on the track, basically...

making the train that you click on a massive hat on the NPC. And when you talk to them, you get attached to the NPC. That NPC runs really fast to where you need to get to, and then you end up there. So the train movement in Fallout 3 is an NPC with a Metro hat.

That's crazy. That's how it works. That's so cool, though. That's how it works. It is... Video games are designed around just saying, right, can we make this work? Will it work? Yeah. There are so many. With the retro channel. That makes so much sense.

There are so many things I've discovered with the Retro Channel about how games do and don't work. Many old PC games actually tied the speed of the game to the speed of your CPU in your actual computer. The problem with this is when they were made, computers had slow CPUs, so the game ran at the correct speed. Now, if you try and run an old game like King's Quest...

On a modern PC, it goes lightning fast because it's trying to keep up with your CPU, which is now lightning fast. So old games were, they were wild, man. It was the wild west of game design. This is so cool. I still think even now, you don't know what goes behind the coding for even like a lot of modern games until developers always just...

unlocked somewhere. - It's the Team Fortress 2 pineapple. Again, if you Google Team Fortress 2 pineapple, I understand that without context- - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - It sounds like you're making shit up. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - You're making shit up. - It's either pineapple or coconut. The coconut, that was the one. It's the coconut. - All right, all right. - So there is a coconut image within the Team Fortress 2 game files. If you delete this, the game doesn't work.

- Like what the fuck? - People- - The fact that someone figured this out as well. - People don't know why. I'm sure the coders don't know why, otherwise probably

Or it's someone on the TF2 team that was like, yo, you know what I mean? Real funny. So there are so many other old video games that just have these ways of working. It's like how you can write bits of code to certain sections of video game memory. And it will use the same bit of memory for multiple things.

You play Pokemon Red and Blue. Yeah, of course. Remember the missing no glitch? Yeah, yeah. That was simply about writing a thing to memory by speaking to the guy in, I want to say, Viridian Forest, before Viridian Forest, and then flying Cinnabar Island and surfing up and down. The game wrote a bit of data to memory because of your conversation with that man, and then when you next caught a Pokemon, it used the last known bit of data to work out the Pokemon's number.

That number doesn't exist. And so you got Missing No instead, which is why it created it. Video games are a wild west of design. Yeah, I think I remember that actually. And I remember going down a deep rabbit hole of that. And apparently, like that's just one instance of that glitch happening. But depending on what you do right before you fly to Cinnabar Island, you can actually trigger a bunch of

other versions of MissingNo and like, you just need to spawn like any Pokemon. You can actually catch Mew in the original Red and Blue games without using any of the GameShark codes by talking to a specific trainer at a certain time and then walking up and down in a specific bit of grass because the conversation sets a flag to a value and that value is then used when you next run into a random Pokemon. But,

all this stuff is what I have discovered by reviewing retro games and playing too many MMORPGs. Do you even get bored of MMOs? Absolutely, which is why I have to say without a doubt. We don't even know what an MMO is. My greatest guess is it's a game with fishing.

- That's it. That's the- - It's a game of fishing. - RuneScape has fishing, Final Fantasy 14 has fishing, Warcraft has fishing. It's the connecting narrative. That's what it is. - You always have to have a fishing. - That's like all JRPGs now as well, man. - Yeah, you gotta have fishing. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - You gotta have fishing. - I mean, I can't imagine after, 'cause you've played so many MMORPGs, the thought of like having to sink 100 hours

into potentially something that will just absolutely bore me the entire time. And then I have to then not only spend the hundred hours, I have to then edit the video about the hundred hours. That's what people do not get. And this is why I don't,

I've let other people edit my videos before a couple of times. There's editors that I work with. But when people say to me, "Okay, here's 100 hours of footage. Here is where I want you to put every bit of footage for every bit of script and every bit of thing," it's quicker for me to do it. It's quick. I know exactly what's going to happen at what point, so I'll just do that.

So when people say, oh yeah, playing 100 hours is nothing. It's difficult, but you can do it in 10 hour days over 10 days and then editing for the next two to three weeks to make it work. Again, you make that sound easy. Yeah. I make it sound normal because unfortunately within the kind of gaming sphere I'm in, it's been normalized. Someone will look at me and go, oh, you're only playing for 10 hours a day. You're absolute casual. Ha ha ha ha.

play for 12 hours a day. Why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you grinding the entire time? You don't need sleep. But the reason that people watch my videos is simply because they don't want to play the game for 100 hours, but they do want to know what happens. You suffer so they don't have to. Exactly, which is why there is a YouTuber called GrandPooBear.

And Gran Pube, he plays the old classic NES games. I love his stuff because I don't want to finish Turtles on the NES, but I want to watch someone finish Turtles on the NES. Someone's going to do it. And that is the area that I'm in. People don't want to watch bad anime, but I force myself to watch all of, I think it was called Gibiate.

Oh yeah, Gibiata? Yeah, it was terrible. It was absolutely terrible, but I was morbidly curious for how bad it can get. And halfway through, I think I really- Wow, out of all the anime you chose to watch, one? I know! Are you trying to live your life consuming only the worst things for you? That's what I realized halfway through watching Gibiata. I was watching this going, I'm only

doing this because I'm curious as to where it goes to but I've not watched Evangelion I could go and watch that instead since I've been in Japan I have watched all of Evangelion except the movies the OVAs are the new ones haven't seen the end of Evangelion haven't seen the new stuff either but I've seen the 26th it was good

- So you've seen the OG. - But you've seen Gibiate. - You've seen this, which I remember is basically the shovelware of anime. - It's terrible. - Yeah, it's what I've always described Gibiate is this is what Jojo must look like to people who hate Jojo.

Yeah, the problem is because I've played so many crap MMOs, I kind of felt at home. Like I was watching it going, this is dire. I get this. I feel comfortable here. No, I get it because I've slowly started to turn into the dude that watches all of the terrible anime. I mean, I did a video where I watched the 100 worst rated anime. See, people want to watch that. And people love that video because it's like, I'm glad you did it and not me. That's exactly why I'm in the position that I'm in right now. People don't want to play through these massive...

If a new game releases, a new RPG, and it says, this game's 200 hours long, that's no longer impressive to me. If a game comes along and says, hey, this is six hours, but it's good. Good. Stick it on my PC. I want to play it. Someone said to me, oh yeah, Soul Reaver 1's only six hours. I'm like, you shut your mouth.

It is six perfect hours. It is exactly what we need a game to be. That's what we need more of. I mean, the one thing people don't have nowadays is just time. Time is the big one. And I think the MMORPG genre really exemplifies this with, it exploded. World of Warcraft came out in 2004 and it absolutely exploded over the next, I want to say, 10 years. So about 2014, we got the Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King. People still hold those as like the

pinnacle of the genre. A lot of people who played it at that time were either in college or in school or in university or out of work or they had jobs that allowed them the free time to do it. And now that player group is aging out. That player group is mid-30s, early 40s. Kids are

don't want to play MMORPGs because if you say to a kid, "Hey, do you want to play this game where nothing happens for the first 50 hours?" They're going to say, "No, I want to go and play a better game, a faster game, a good RPG." "I want to play Fortnite." "Yeah, I want to play Fortnite. I want to play Looter Shooter, something like that instead." So the MMORPG genre has aged with its audience, but it's not kept up with the new, more modern audience. Yeah. What's your opinion of gacha games? I'm so curious. Yeah, that's true.

- There is a weird- - Are those MMOs? - Are we talking the games like,

- And Genshin Impact. - Yeah, yeah. - Honkai, all the waifu games. - I think I've made a video on Genshin Impact called, what was it? Legend of Gacha: Breath of the Waifu. - Oh, okay, brilliant, yes. - It came out around the same time. - That kind of was its setting point when it released. - Yeah, it was. It's anime Breath of the Wild. - Yeah, there we go, it's just on the main one. And I played that through. So I have been...

and are very much exposed to the Western idea of MMORPGs, which is quite greedy, as in they must be free, there must be absolutely no cash shop, and if your game is fantastic, I might consider giving you a shiny penny. That's the kind of attitude that the gamers in the West have. The Eastern values, from what I've seen, is...

I will go to work, I will work hard, I will earn money, and then if I want to spend the money I have earned on the game I enjoy, that is my way of supporting the game, showing my love for it, and instead of spending 10 hours in the game, I've spent 10 hours at work, and then spent that money on the game for 10 hours worth of progress.

People say to me, you shouldn't be able to give any money for a game to be pay to win. If you spend 100 hours playing a game and you get a good item, could I go to work for 100 hours, spend the money that I've earned from doing that on the same item and be at the same place as you? Should that be allowed? And the Western view is very much no. The game is the game and

no amount of money should be able to change that. Whereas the Eastern view seemed to be much more kind of healthy and around the idea of, well, if I spend my money on the game, I get better. There was the anime...

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That was it. I'm...

Shangri-La Frontier, where there is the kind of pay-to-win aspect within the anime itself, and everyone's kind of fine with that. I think what has happened is the Western view of MMORPGs, this is very World of Warcraft, very kind of Elder Scrolls Online, is you find your game and it becomes your life. You will play this game for the rest of your life. People say to me, is it worth getting into this MMO?

And I say, well, just play it. Just spend three or four hours in it. If you don't like it, stop playing it. But the Western view is, I want one game that will sate all my needs for the next 10 years. Whereas the Eastern view seems to be, there will be a new game coming out in six months' time. Enjoy this one for as long as you want. Then go and enjoy this. Then go and enjoy this. If you want to spend 50 or 60 quid on that game while playing...

Great, do that. - I actually think it's the opposite of that because what you've described is I think pretty much correct, but the big difference is that instead of invest, there is a big cult following about what's in the gadget space. There's a big cult following about what games are you playing

For example, there's a lot of toxicity when this game called Wuthering Waves released, and there was a huge kind of rivalry between Genshin Impact and the Wuthering Waves player base, at least in the Western sphere. At least, I'm not sure about the Eastern sphere. But it's kind of like a different kind of investment because...

Players for like, let's say who have played Genshin Impact since launch, they have not just invested their time, but they have invested clearly their money. So there can be a lot of toxicity in terms of like players, like jumping over. It's almost like, as you said, part of their identity, not only because they've invested time, but now they have this extra investment. - There's more at stake. - But that might be perhaps

an amalgamation of both of these points of like, they are taking the Western outlook to an Asian game, thinking I have, like you've mentioned, sent the money in. I need to get my value out of this now. I can't leave. What I find it,

is do you remember the old school console wars? Like people had the identity around which- - I was Xbox. - Yeah, I was Nintendo kid, you know? I was PlayStation. So we've got the three- - The three genders. - Yeah, like they were fighting for their console. Like they had stocks in the company. - Yeah, yeah, right, right. I mean, we would literally like bully the other side and be like, "I can't believe-" - People make songs on YouTube back then.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Totally. - You're making fun of PlayStation 3 being useless at the time. - And then you get to that age where you realize these billion dollar corporations don't even care. - They don't care. - But a really interesting point you've raised is you've used the word investment, invest your time, get value. - Yeah, that's what they feel like. - Yeah, let's take another kind of idea. You played Final Fantasy X. - Yeah. - Okay, great game. - Love Final Fantasy. - When you bought Final Fantasy X, were you thinking this is an investment for my future? Or were you thinking,

I just want to buy this game and have a good time with it. I want to buy this game and have a good time with it. Exactly. But the MMORPG and the gacha thing is, I am not putting money in because I am enjoying the moment. I am investing within this product, being a part of me, a part of my life, part of my culture for a long time. The fact that we treat video games and...

the things inside them, like weapons and armor and cosmetics, as investments alone, is a silly notion. Well, it's like the Rolexes for teenagers. They're just like, look at what I have. These are the five stars, the items, the legendaries. I think that's, it's just a...

It's just flexing. It's the commodification of your gaming time as almost a business investment that you must get back. When someone says, oh yeah, I've played, I've invested a hundred hours of my time into this game. I'm like, no, you've played it for a hundred hours. I wasn't investing time in, I wasn't investing time in, you know, Simpsons Hit and Run or,

burn out or tent you. I was just playing a game for a bit and then moving on. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think people have this idea that your time, it's hustle culture spilling over into video games. Your time is a commodity that you can make money from if you want to. But the idea that you have to look at the games that you're using to relax and say, right, how can I min-max my efficiency within this game to get the most back from it?

I watched a video of a guy who played Skyrim while not running, just walking. Right. Walking through the game. It took him three times longer because it's much, much slower. But the experience was so zen. Yeah. So meditative. And it was a totally different experience. That is personally, I think, a better investment of my gaming time than playing the game three times and not really paying attention to it. I need to piss quickly. They're all peeing. Sweet. You guys okay with carrying on? Yeah, of course, of course. Brilliant.

- Damn, yeah, no, that was such an eloquent point. I'm blown away by how eloquent you are about all this stuff. - I have done a lot of talking on MMORPGs. I've consulted with a couple of gaming companies. - You already, you know the- - Oh, I mean, when we went to the Bulgaria thing, it was being, it was flown over to consult on the creation process of a new MMORPG. - Oh, wow. - And after they showed me what they have and they turned around and went, "So, do you want to support us?" I said, "No, this is terrible. This is awful."

Well, you've got to die. Let me say quite the awkward conversation. It was brilliant. So what happened was that they flew me over. Beautiful plane. I landed there. Lovely five-star hotel put me up. There was a day in the mountains in a spa. Delightful. I was sat there, you know, the lovely kind of snow covered peaks in the distance, the massage, the drinks. I played the game for about half an hour. And they were like, so what do you think? And I said, I'm going to be honest. You've pampered me, but you've not let me play your game.

And they said, well, you know, do you want to support our Kickstarter, our Patreon? No. Wait, wait, wait. So they flew you out to try and get you to then go and talk about- The point of them getting me was because they wanted access to my audience and they wanted access to the kind of influence that I had there. So when they said, you know, do you want to support us? The answer is no. I would have- It was a beautiful five-star trip. Don't get me wrong. I loved every part of that trip except the game. That's so funny. Oh God. They haven't got me back. Yeah.

Yeah. They've got a couple of other people back. You've got your massage. You've got your five-star hotel. I've got my integrity. That's what's important. Yeah, of course. No, the integrity is the important aspect. I mean, look, you can always get another five-star hotel. You can't get all your viewers just back. This is what I've said to my viewers so much. As soon as I say that a game is good when it isn't,

That's when I lose viewer trust, I lose integrity. I've turned down so many sponsorships from so many companies because they've had bad games. And I've turned down sponsorships from good games because I don't play them. And I don't, my voice wouldn't have any weight to it. I would just be lying to the audience.

- Yeah, I mean, obviously as a game reviewer, I feel like it is quite tough to- - Yeah. Well, don't worry, the Morrowind video will probably give you all the money you need. - Yeah, that'll help. - Yeah. - I could retire now. - As soon as we play Oblivion for the 80 hours. - Oh gosh. Walking only. - Yeah, walking only. - How about crawling next? - So when I played Oblivion on stream, I played it entirely by punching.

I didn't use any weapons. And I think the title of the series was Fisting My Way Across Tamriel. So we just punched all the way until the very final boss where you can just punch him to death, which was great. But the idea is as a video game reviewer, my...

My power, my influence comes in being trusted. Trust is a currency. I've had this discussion with a guy called Chris Wilson, who was at the time the CEO of Grinding Gear Games, who makes Path of Exile. I worked with the Path of Exile team a couple of times. They love it. You play Path of Exile? I've played Path of Exile. I'll send it across. Beautiful, brilliant game. I only play Path of Exile 2, but I loved it. A really good game. I love working with Grinding Gear Games. I had an interview with Jonathan, the guy that is the head of Path of Exile 2. He's a great guy. But we basically agreed that trust...

is a commodity and you bank trust when you do things where the audience can see you being honest and genuine and you spend trust when you take risks. So if I say, right, I'm going to make a video on a game that no one's played, but trust me, it'll be good. And if people have seen my videos, they'll go, okay, I don't know the game, but I know that Josh can make it entertaining. I'll go and watch that. If I keep saying every game that I come to is the best game, you should go and play this, hashtag ad,

eventually that has no weight and no value to it. So I try and push back as much as I possibly can on that. Whereas games that I'm not sponsored to say that I like, I will still say that I like anyway. In fact, I had a conversation with, I think it was Blizzard many years ago. And they said to me, we've got X amount of money. What would we need to do for you to say that this expansion is good? And I would say, take X amount of money and make a good expansion.

That's it. If the game is good, I'll say it's good because that benefits me playing the game as well. For sure, yeah. Damn.

My strategy is to make it abundantly apparent when I'm playing a game that I do not fuck with it. - Yeah. - And then I'm like, I will take the- - Without explicitly saying- - I guess 'cause my old strategy has been, I do expensive big projects, require money. I will take the money and be like, wow guys, we gotta play this more offline. This is so weird. - Join my guild. - We have to play. I will stream this more totally. Yeah, but I mean, it's, yeah.

I feel I'm like shameful. I'm like, yeah, I play shitty games. I play shitty games. The only game that I have got into recently since being here was, because I saw everyone playing it, was the Pokemon trading card game. I'm deep into that. Okay, so he's way all deep into that. I have what you could say invested in that. This is the last meshes. We were talking about Kadikaris earlier. This is the last meshes that I sent to him of a card that I pulled and the lovely response that he gave me. Oh my God. Oh my God.

I've been trying to pull that Mew gold card for so long now. - Oh yeah, there we go. So we got that. So I started playing that. I've seen people kind of play it on the train. I'm like, I'm gonna get involved in this. It's really good. - I'll get too addicted to that. - I am too addicted to it. - Yeah, I know. - I have thrown an embarrassing amount of money at that game and I do not regret it at all. - So this is a really interesting, you mentioned money. One of my favorite MMORPG facts

MMORPGs are, they are monetized. You can get the cosmetics, you can buy the weapons in some of them, you can buy the kind of battle passes in the other, you can buy the expansions. FIFA Ultimate Team. Ha!

makes more money than most MMOs put together. - Yeah, I believe that. - I think we spoke about this one time. I was explaining how like to be a pro on FIFA, I think the amount you have to spend is somewhere in the range of like, I think it's like 50K or something absurd or 5K. It was like some absurd number to be able to like,

to have an ultimate team that is able to compete. It was some ridiculous, maybe we can fact check that guy, figure it out, like FIFA ultimate team, I don't know. - Yeah, I mean, FIFA ultimate have just got an insane monetization system that is just- - It's the EA special. - It's just the EA money, like cash cow, you know? - Did you see the whole thing with, so it's not called FIFA anymore, did you know this? - Yeah, yeah, it's called- - What?

They lost the FIFA license, didn't they? Yeah. Oh, shit. So actually, it was like FIFA just wanted more money from EA. And FIFA, I mean, FIFA's not a good company. You know, FIFA are the most uncorrupt company in the world that are not money hungry. It was the one time where somehow EA seemed like the reasonable party in all this. They went, now slow down, guys. This is too much. But FIFA went, you go.

"You guys are money-grubbing a bit much." EA went, "EA's told FIFA, you are money-grubbing too much." - EA had that sense of pride and accomplishment themselves, and they went, "No, we're not gonna be doing that." - They took the gamble, released the game,

the next, what would have been FIFA. Which is just called FC now. And they had no difference in the money made and nobody cared that FIFA was dropped. And now it was probably the best business decision that he's made in a very long time. They don't have to pay FIFA. It was like, but they had to pay them billions, I think. The license was absolutely huge. Jesus. Oh,

But this is the example that I use when people come to me for MMORPGs and they say things like, you know, our genre, our game is massive, it's super important. And I've had to say, look, you're existing within a bubble. The MMORPG player base exists

per game is a bubble. The Guild Wars 2 players think Guild Wars 2 is fantastic. The World of Warcraft players think World of Warcraft is fantastic. When you look at the entire genre as a whole, the genre compared to other genres is tiny. We are within a niche. It is not the juggernaut it used to be. No, not at all. Back in the day, you talked about the whole social experience. And now, the younger generation have just gone to other genres of games and whatever they can give. Like EA...

Obviously FIFA, massively, massively popular. Obviously anime games, gacha games, which is like, I guess my specialty, that's like very, very popular in like the new generation.

also things like Fortnite as well. I think one of the biggest examples as well is that mobile phones are now the biggest video game console in the world. And you can play a lot of gacha games on mobile. When we saw the footage of EverQuest earlier and you straight away said, oh my God, how many menus are there? You could not put EverQuest on a mobile, but you could put most gacha games on mobile, which just gives you exposure to a much bigger audience. Exactly. There you go. That's a new challenge for you, playing EverQuest on the

mobile phone oh there we go okay it'll be an hour of you just zooming in when it's kind of like wait I think I clicked the right thing yeah so they have managed to port a couple of successful MMOs over to mobile RuneScape is a good example RuneScape and Old School RuneScape because they're two separate games their mobile clients are fantastic they are genuinely very good

I consulted on the RuneScape 3 mobile client, and it was actually a really interesting day. I sent them my review video, which involved me finding a couple of bugs and glitches. And they sent back saying, we don't like this, but fine. So they appreciated that I found that. Talking about mobiles and talking about consoles, especially MMORPGs,

Mobile gaming makes more money than console gaming. Mobile gaming makes more money than PC gaming. And on the PC, the MMO is a small genre itself. It doesn't make as much money as other PC games, first-person shooters, third-person shooters, adventure games, that kind of stuff. So I think because I exist within the MMO sphere, it's very healthy for me to walk outside. For example, I've been in Japan for three weeks now. I have not seen a single World of Warcraft thing. Right.

I've not seen a figure. I've not seen a poster. I've not seen a game. I don't think it was popular in Japan. It's not popular over here at all. But when I exist within my MMORPG sphere, I get messages daily, hourly in some cases, from people saying, World of Warcraft is massive. It's the biggest thing in the world. It's absolutely global. Everyone should love it. It's fantastic. Why aren't you playing it more?

And I said, because I don't want to. And because you're existing within this tiny bubble, we need to step out of it. I'm sure that the gacha games ideas, you get people who are hyper enfranchised within the gacha games industry who don't understand that there is another games industry out there at all. Yes, exactly. And, you know, they have a very, the gacha space has a very specific thing of doing, a specific way of doing things. And a lot of the other gaming spaces just don't fuck

with the way you got your game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But how much money does it make? But it makes a lot of money. So much money. It makes so much money. Did you see that one of the most profitable games is this fucking Monopoly game? Have you seen this? Yeah. I think you talked about it. Yeah, it's fucking insane. It's this garbage Monopoly game that makes billions.

But people realize that you can give one pound or one dollar much easier than you can give a thousand or ten thousand. So games companies said, right, if we are in everyone's pocket, literally on their phones, then let's ask everyone for a dollar. The game has made two billion dollars. Three billion. Let's ask everyone for one dollar. See, in sales, it's sometimes easier to sell one massive thing to one person. Whereas in games, it's much easier to sell...

a million small microtransactions to a million players, which is why the microtransaction boom has happened. RuneScape 3 uses a lot of gacha mechanics. In my review of RuneScape 3, I go through their entire shop system and break down all of the currency

Oh, this is an entire separate conversation with MMOs. Yeah. When you purchase an item in a gacha game, you spend money to get a currency. Yes. Then you convert that currency into another currency. I hate this. Yes, I hate this. It's done on purpose. It's a psychological trick. It's what casinos use. Yes. You cannot track...

the conversion rates between multiple currencies. So let's say that you spend $10 and you buy 10 bits of gold. Then you spend 10 bits of gold and turn them into 35 moon shards. Then you spend 35 moon shards and turn them into 170 crystal bits. Then you spend 16 crystal bits to buy a shard of a sword. And you need 200 shards of a sword. How much does one shard cost in real money value? It's like a math problem. You don't know. It's the guy from the math problem that turns up with like 100 watermelons in his car. Ugh.

How many times do we convert this money? It's a psychological trick to distance you from the value of whatever the thing is. And companies can then say, legally, they didn't sell you the sword shard because that would be selling power. They sold you the virtual gold. What you then did with that is a completely separate transaction. So it's not pay to win. It also takes away the value of the thing. The digital thing has no value. Only the gold does.

but the gold never buys the things. The gold buys other currencies, which then buy the thing. Do you think this is one of the reasons why newer MMOs are struggling? Because there is such an expectation to monetize? Yes, without a doubt. So games release with a special version of the game. They release. If you go to EverQuest 1 subscription. Like what? Like $2 a month or something? Well, there's actually three different layers to it. So go to membership.

So here's the thing you can do with EverQuest 1. Not only do you get stuff, but you can also enhance your membership with EverQuest with these things here. So let's say that you want to be an adventurer. You get a 5% experience boost and you have 10% more coin from killing enemies. That is an extra $3 a month.

Let's say you want two perks, the adventurer and the challenger. Well, the challenger perk gives you mercenaries gaining experience quicker and you don't lose levels when you die. The merchant gives you even more. So if you and I are both playing EverQuest and I am paying an extra $5 a month for all those things, I have an inherent advantage. Is that morally wrong if EverQuest need to make money? Because people will play it for free. What's better?

Taking the idea that it's a $5 game with a massive free trial, or taking the idea that it is a free game with a $5 boost that you can play for. Because both those things are exactly the same, but one of them is reframing how you see it.

Are you playing a free trial and then paying for the full game? Or are you paying by playing the full game and paying for advantage? Yeah. I think some people, they see this and they'll see the $5 a month and what they see is commitment. Yes. And I think that's, like in most things in life, they're scarce people. They're like, oh, now I have to play X amount of hours. Whereas, you know, for free games, often they're like, oh no, just play as much, as little or as much as you want. Mm-hmm.

In reality, they're getting you in and sucked in and, oh, this will make your life easier right now. I mean, this is monetization within gaming, which has gone through a really weird cycle and ended up almost back where it started. As in, when games first started, one of the first games I think was called Space War. And it was this idea of almost like a

ping pong style tennis thing on an old oscillating scope. And then we got games like Pong, games like Pac-Man, and they went to the arcade and you put more money in to play the game more. We had games like Time Crisis where you would die at the second boss. Great game, but you would die. And then you put some more credits in. This was almost accepted. You put more money in to play the game for longer to get more lives. Then when we had the kind of home console revolution, games companies realized, oh, we can't keep dragging money off people forever.

How do we make the most of selling our games? Well, we just make them really difficult because a lot of people still rented games at the time. There was a thing called the blockbuster level, as in the old rental shop blockbuster. The games, The Lion King, The Nez and The Snez, they have a notoriously difficult second or third level. This was done on purpose to mean that you had to rent the game several times, which means Blockbuster wanted to buy the game in order to rent it out far, far more. Right.

Right. So we're still taking more money off people. Then we have the home console revolution with PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Games companies realize once they've sold the game, oh,

What now? How do we get more money off people? Well, suddenly that's when Battle Passes creep in. That's when the idea of cosmetics creep in. It all started with the stupid Oblivion horse armor, which was when... If you Google Oblivion horse armor... I remember this when this happened. This was massive. It was the idea that you could spend an extra couple of dollars to get some armor for your horse in Oblivion. Yeah.

I remember seeing this post as well. And that was almost opening the floodgates for what could happen. And now we're in this position where when you purchase a video game, you don't own the video game. They're pushing games as a service. You are renting the idea. And one of the worst ways this comes around, this is one of my personal pet peeves. Have you ever played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater? Of course. Okay, classic. Could you please Google, I think it's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.

So what happened with this was, it might not be 4, correct me in the comments if I'm wrong with this. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 launched on disk. But what happened was, all the disk gave you was the rights to download the rest of the game from the server. So you had to have an internet connection to get the game. The problem is, those servers are now offline.

Which means if you have the disc, you only have level one. You cannot get the rest of this game. It might be a different Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game, but the idea was you no longer purchase the data that has the game on it. You purchase a temporary license to access the data, which is super annoying and frustrating.

The games industry is monetized to all hell and back. MMORPG players sometimes just seem extremely entitled with the amount of game they want for the amount of money they're giving. The thing about MMOs is that because you said it's like a juggernaut of the old days, that mentality of the same monetization system that worked back then is still with the same expectations without gathering in the new players that have another different set of expectations and what they are okay with in terms of monetized games.

I mean, the original games you played, you paid by the minute, by the hour. You paid not only for the internet connection, but also for access to the games. There was an old game, I believe it was called the Island of Kazmai, one of the very first kind of text-based MMORPGs that you would effectively have to pay...

per instruction you sent to the server, per word you sent, per flick you did. - It's like an OnlyFans. - You know, you want to go and raid this dungeon? Cool, it's probably going to cost you about £5 stuff. - But it was popular? - It was very popular because it was new, it was different, it was strange. That's what it looked like on the far right. That is the more modern graphics. The extreme old ones are the ASCII graphics. - Far right, far right, far right. - Far right top, the ASCII graphics. - God, they're actually like dwarf...

- Your fortress. - Your fortress. - So you would pay per instruction that you sent to the server because your internet time was limited.

In fact, MMORPGs, and that's one of the reasons that RuneScape really took off, most MMOs required a download. They required a game to be, an EXE to be run. The browser game, RuneScape, didn't require a download, which was why it was able to take over school computers, library computers. That's why I wrote it too. Any public computer that blocked files, blocked EXEs and blocked downloads could still run these browser-based games. Games like Adventure Quest and games like Dragon Fate. Oh my God, Adventure.

In fact, if you Google... Oh, yeah, that's right. I've made a video on that. That was the first video I watched of yours, was Adventure Quest. So after I made the Adventure Quest video where I kind of finished the main quest of the game, the guy that runs Artix Entertainment, Adam Bond, actually reached out to me and said, hey, Josh, really cool video. Got all the staff around to watch it. Yeah, it wasn't any good Adventure Quest. Had a really good time. He then...

hand wrote me a letter of appreciation. I've got it in my office, in my office at home, kind of propped up. And it's like, thank you for doing this. It brought back a load of memories from when he was first making the game. Cause I, I played some quests that he hasn't seen in years. So it was almost a nostalgic trip. Yeah, that was a shit one. So when I question, I'm like, yeah, why is your game so inconsistent? Why from this screen is this different to this screen? Turns out adventure quest had no framework.

for how menus needed to look or where buttons needed to be or where colors needed to be. So every single screen was new. And he was making it as best he could from kind of the previous screen. It is like...

It's like a ransom note at times of like mishmash menus and text. You're like, what is this? I called it consistently inconsistent. Every single quest, every single idea is new and it's different. Games like this, games that we played as kids and experienced as kids, this is kind of my bread and butter on YouTube. I will sit down and say, right, I haven't played

Tenchu 2 in years. But since walking around Japan, I kind of want to play Tenchu 2. So I'm going to get home, I'll launch up Tenchu 2, I'll play it through, I'll say, right, was it good? I'll critique it through a modern lens and people want to watch these videos.

- I mean, yeah, I think we want to see a, it's fun to see your childhood nostalgia be torn apart. Like it's fun to see it like actually be confronted with it. I'm sure you've probably played some games in your childhood that you've had fond memories of and you boot it up, you're like, oh. - So this is a really interesting thing actually. I've tried to explain to people that it's okay, and this is something that MMO players push back against so much, it's okay to like something that's bad. So one way, I love the first "Power Rangers" movie.

It's a terrible film. It's really the first, Power Rangers, the first movie with Ivan Ooze. It is an awful film. But I love it. I haven't watched it recently. Damn, it's terrible. It's still like golden generation for me. But it's great. Sit down, watch it. It's amazing. I love it.

So it's okay to play something that's bad and say, I had a good time. I think when people watch my reviews, people watch reviews, people watch my MMO things, they almost want to feel validated that the time they enjoyed was good time. It was well used. We're so scared that we didn't like something good. Exactly. And I can say, look, this game is bad, but I like it.

- This game is not great. It's got flaws, but I like it. And if you like it, that's fine. It's a healthy attitude to have that MMO players just struggle with. - I think it comes with maturity. - It really does. - It takes a lot of time to realize that you're a dumb kid. - I think with MMOs specifically, it's actually difficult to mature. You are spot on with this. It is difficult to go through that mature process if you are playing the same game that you've been playing for the last 10, 15, 20 years, and you've never been exposed to either outside opinions,

different games or different systems. If you aren't forced to acknowledge the flaws in something, you almost blind yourself to it and just say, this is great. - It's tunnel vision. - It's tunnel vision for it. It's okay to recognize flaws. This is how we grow. I recognize flaws in all my old videos and then I try and grow from it. - Yeah, exactly. - I mean, I think there's also this thing where sometimes when we're talking about nostalgia or like a thing that we really enjoyed as a kid, sometimes there's like fear

to like go back and see if it's different from like the memory that you had, you know, because you're kind of afraid that you're not going to get the same emotions that you felt when you first experienced this. Because you go into it wearing rose tinted glasses. Yes. And you know, you're wearing the rose tinted glasses. Yeah. Like, I know I have to take these off,

But I don't want to. So I've got another really long video about MMORPGs where I discuss the impact that nostalgia has on our enjoyment of a game. Let's say that you want to sit down and play, you know, GoldenEye on the N64. Great game. Really good game. But it's probably better if you've got memories of getting in some pizzas with your friends, sitting down, passing a controller around, having a good time, playing the split screen. If you sit down and play...

you have Goldeneye right now on a big, massive TV on your own with all the lights on and you sit there and play it. It's a good game, but it's not the same journey. Not the same experience. There's a famous saying that you can't step in the same river twice because you're not the same person and it's not the same river. Mm.

Everything you go through and experience then becomes your frame of reference for the world. And we can play old games and appreciate them mechanically, but they won't be involved in our lives as they were kind of socially or narratively as it was back then. We're not in school anymore. Yeah.

But we can sit down like this and talk about games that we did play when we were in school and have that moment where we all smile and we all go, you know what? TimeSplitters, TimeSplitters 2, absolutely cracking game. Burnout, brilliant game. That kind of stuff. Did TimeSplitters age well? TimeSplitters... Oh, no. TimeSplitters 2 aged really well because TimeSplitters 1 was the same team that made GoldenEye.

And I've got a video on my main channel. It's having Josh drive Hayes TimeSplitters. Yeah. I mean, I remember TimeSplitters 2 was like the GOAT when I was in school. So TimeSplitters 1 was the PlayStation 2 launch title created by the same team that made Goldeneye. And it's fantastic. God, I haven't seen this in years.

Okay, TimeSplitters 2 was when they really nailed it. Every level, I've not done a 2 video yet, but that is next on the list. Every single level in that game is about focusing on a certain mechanic, whether it's open map, whether it's verticality, whether it's tunnels, whether it's corners. It is brilliant. Mechanically, absolute masterpiece. Not very long.

Basically no story at all, but mechanically, spot on. And then with 2, they really nailed what they were going for. So I found a couple of games, like you mentioned Golden Sun earlier. I'd never played Golden Sun. I did a full analysis of the combat system, you know, with the setting and the unleashing of the djinns in that game. That's genius. And then the fact that Golden Sun 2 actually flipped, you played 2. Yeah.

I have not played 2. Do you want me to spoil it for you? Sure. It flips the narrative and it turns out that you were playing as the bad guys in Golden Sun 1 and in 2, you are then playing as the other team trying to stop you from the first game. Oh, that's sick. Where if you would have succeeded in your mission, bad things would have happened to the world.

So you start playing Golden Sun 2 thinking you're the bad guys, and then you realize actually, no, no, you are the heroes now. You were just misguided and misled in the first game. Oh, that's so sick. It's really, really clever, and it stands up today. Medieval, a game that I'd never played before, played it, stands up really good. A couple of other games. So the first Kingsfield games, you played Dark Souls, Elden Ring. Yes. That was made by From Software. From Software made educational games before their very first video game called Kingsfield. I've got a video playing Kingsfield.

There is so much in Kingsfield that you can see the foundations being laid for what will become Dark Souls. You can see the bonfires. You can see the warp points. You can see the Estus flasks. You can see the distance and hit-based timings. You can see the obtuse hidden storylines. You can see...

all of the characters, you can see where it starts and where it goes to. The vibe is the same. It's still so surreal. It's so liminal. And this is why I love going back and playing the very first games from companies and saying, right, where did you start? Where are you now? What have you learned? Where have you gone to?

How do you find the time to play all these games? Yeah, you play a lot of games. I just like- I don't do anything else. That's kind of it. So I've got a gym, a small gym room in my house that was previously a dining room.

And I kind of walked in there one day and I went, I don't need this. So I pulled up the carpet, replaced it with black rubber gym tiles, stuck a gym machine in there and went, cool, that's happening now. So I will wake up, I will boot up the PC, whether it's an emulator, whether it's a console. I will play a game for eight to 10 hours

Yep. So what I've done is, this is the system. People have asked for this before. The system? This is the system. Okay, okay. Got the screen in front of me. I'm recording it using OBS. There's a little time code of where OBS is. I've then got a laptop running next to me, which is on voice recording mode. So if something happens in the game, let's say that I find the fairy in Kingsfield, I will look at the time code on OBS. I'll say it's 7 hours and 38 minutes in, and I will say out loud, 7 hours, 38 minutes, find fairy.

And my laptop will then write that out because it's listening as voice recording and then go to a new line. So after I've played a game for 10 to 20 hours, I will then grab my laptop and I will have a minute to minute breakdown of exactly what happened. That's smart. I will then turn every single note that I've made into a sentence for a script. And then I'll record the entire voiceover for the script.

then sit down and simply match up the game footage to the script that I've done. It's very, very efficient. It's a framework that I've got. It works for most games. I review them in quite a linear way from the start to the end. I don't focus on systems such as combat or trading or inventory until they naturally pop up in the game. But that is all I do.

That's literally it. As soon as one game is finished, I will go on to the next game. Okay. But then how do you find time to make videos? Because for me, I get like, the consuming stuff is actually the easy part, actually. It's actually the more time consuming for me to make the video about the content And then knowing that you edit your own videos

as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My editing is very simple. It's extremely easy. So because it's so linear, when I'm playing through Kingsfield, when I get to level one and I say, now we open the door and go in, all I have to do is find the footage of me going into the door, cut it, stick it there. And then my next sentence will be, and round the corner we find a shield on the floor. I simply edit out all the bit that isn't that, find the round the corner, grab the shield, cut that out, stick that there. And then just do that for the next 10 hours. It's boring and it's repetitive and it's linear, but it's not...

complicated. I don't use any keyframes in my videos. I don't have images moving around the place. I have things fade in and fade out. It's not worse than some of the games you play, I'm sure. Honestly, no. My editing is about as good quality as Kingsfield. It's extremely basic. It is the meat and potatoes of the actual video. I've tried to say to people, don't worry about the bells and whistles. Worry about the content. Worry about the core of it first. And then we can add everything onto it. People come to me and go,

I'm worrying about this. I'm worrying about that. I'm worrying about the other. It's almost like building a house from scratch and worrying about what color curtains you're going to put into it. It doesn't matter until the house is built. Build the house first. Let's edit the rough cut of the video first. Then I'll go back and fix it all up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, a lot of my, I mean, I played Kingsfield. I finished it in three days and then I wrote the script in a day and I recorded it the next day and then I edit it together in about four or five days after that. So one video takes about two weeks. Throw it up.

Onto the next game. The only ones that take longer are the 100 hours in videos because I have to play it for 100 hours. And then you have to edit through 100 hours. I had to pay for the upgrade to the Google Drive because I was trying to put about three terabytes worth of footage of, you know, like 1080 4K footage of EverQuest, which doesn't even play in 4K. I just recorded it. Well, YouTube compresses

- Exactly, YouTube is good for, you can't tell anything above 1080. People always go, "Why don't you record in 4K?" You don't watch my videos. You put them on the second monitor. It doesn't matter if they're in 1080. I've made videos in 720. No one noticed. Just to see if anyone would. Nobody did. So I guess this is just all I do now. And then on Saturday and Sunday, I do the Twitch streams, which are the dark swoles kind of fitness streams at the minute. Because if I don't, I would go mad. I would just go insane in these four walls. It's a way to talk to the community, talk to the players.

talk to the viewers and just kind of get involved with it. - Not to sound mean, do you hang out with people? - No, no, this is like the most social I've been in weeks. This is why- - We're not real. - This is just me in my room still, still playing. - That's what it is. - You will wake up soon. - What it is, I've discovered that the, I live in the middle of the countryside, which is beautiful for about five minutes.

It's almost like being inside some kind of Disney opening of a movie. I set out, there's a third, there's a wrap. It's fantastic. And then you're like, right, cool, what's going on? Nothing. Nothing's around. Everything's at cities. Everything's in the... People assume that I live in London because I'm from the UK and that's where everyone lives in the UK. Yeah.

I haven't found time to go to a lot of social events just because I'm spending so much time making videos. And we're losing a load of gaming conventions in the UK. We've lost the Insomnia Convention. EGX and MCM have teamed up together. We might be losing the WASD conventions. The Developed Conventions are still going on, but...

But the social world of the UK is crumbling, which is why I wanted to come to Japan. It's why I want to go and visit the USA. It's why I want to go and visit Australia. It's important to me over the next year or two to focus on the social connections, not just the digital content creation. I hear about your schedule and your throughput, and I'm like...

I hope you don't burn out because this is... Damn. It's a long time. It's managed to... I mean, it's given me a very... It's a very lucrative job. It's given me a fantastic lifestyle that I couldn't have dreamt of before. I am, because I am a small independent creator, I've not got staff underneath me that I need to kind of pay. Yeah.

I am able to take the freedom and the time to create what I want to create. So when I make a video on Future Cop, LAPD, or Croc, or any of the old random obscure games, Asylum Bomber, games that no one's ever played before, but I remember them from my childhood. Even if those videos fail,

I know that I'm still going to make enough from them and from the Patreon support that allows me to take these risks to then go and just keep doing it. I put myself in a strong position, but what I have paid with is social time. Right. Yeah, it's interesting you said that because you kind of said how I feel about the UK because we had a really good friend group in the UK and we hung out a lot with our friends. But that felt very unusual. It does feel like the UK, like social...

abilities are crumbling slightly. There's just not much to do. Not much to do. Things are expensive. If you don't go to the pub, then what is there to do outside of just, you know? That's pretty much what it is. It's the idea of, it's a drinking culture, it's a drugs culture, it's an idea of just partying. Whereas I walked out my hotel, I went to the Meiji Jingu Shrine. It's gorgeous. It's absolutely fantastic. I,

didn't realize that the Fushimi Onari was a mountain. So when I got to the bottom of it, I was, I was like, I was properly wrapped up in this nice big coat and I was like, ah, 45 minutes. I can do that. It's 45 minutes up steps. Yeah. I got to the top and I was absolutely dripping with sweat. It was fantastic. There was so much to do. I, I,

I have met people from all over the world, whether it's digitally, whether it's through MMORPGs, through kind of events like this, through corporations, that I want to go and spend time with because we share values, we have a good time together. But it's difficult to do in the UK because trains are extremely expensive in the UK. And unreliable. And unreliable. And slow. Trains here, to the minute,

is amazing. Absolutely fantastic. Absolutely love it. But I've been lucky enough to meet a lot of people, but I feel that the social element of video games is one of the strengths of it. We talked about MMOs, and the strengths of the MMO is the social aspect. I don't have that sitting in my room or walking on a treadmill while playing Dark Souls. I've got thousands of people watching me lift some weights while I try and kill, you know, Artorias. But it's not the same as going to a convention. So to answer your question, no, I don't talk to people.

Yeah. A lot of YouTubers and Twitch streamers I know, it's a very lonely job. Remarkably so. You can go...

if you do YouTube solely you can go like weeks without seeing another face if you just forget to get yourself outside I've gone weeks without leaving my house I've gone weeks forgetting that I have a living room in my house I've sometimes opened the door and gone alright cool Christmas tree's still up and then just put it there it is still up because I haven't it's June I feel cold now with my living room I haven't gone into the room to take the tree down because I just don't have any reason to go into that room there's no entertaining to be done there's no one coming round

it's just me kind of making the content. But then we have the parasocial element, which is where people have spent...

Let's take the Morrowind video, for example. People have spent 73 hours with me, but I don't know them. So I've had people come up to me before going, oh, hey man, good to see you. And I really quickly go, do I know you? Have I met you before? Are you an old friend? Are you an acquaintance? Or are you someone who knows me? Mate, trust us, we know more than anyone. I'm sure you guys know. We have about, what, 500 hours just on this channel? There is a level of parasocial to it, and there is a level of kind of social...

I want to say intelligence that is required by a lot of viewers if people want to come up. People have recognized me walking around Japan. People have come up to me, recognized in the Pokemon Center, recognized on the streets, like six o'clock in the morning, people come up, which is extremely flattering. And I will always take time to talk to people. I've taken selfies of people. We'll always chat, sign things, whatever we need to do.

But there is a level of social understanding where if someone comes up to me, I appreciate it when they introduce themselves and let me know how I know them or how I should know them. Because I'm sure you guys have had it before. I've had people come up to me and just stare at me. Yeah. I had this one post on the Reddit the other day where I was just drinking outside, enjoying the sunshine.

And then I go on my subreddit and there's just a picture of me from the opposite side of the, from the opposite side of like the roads, like a fucking paparazzi pic. And I'm like-

And the quote was, "I didn't want to disturb him on his date or whatever." And I was like, "I would have rather you guys disturb me on my date than just me log onto the internet and find like a- - You got TMZ'd. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Find a paparazzi pic of me like online. - Even if I'd taken that picture and I,

Didn't want to disturb you. Don't stick it on a record. Why would I post it? Oh, no. I've been lucky enough to have a lot of people who are very socially aware walk up and chat. And I'm going to call a lot of people out here. I'm sure I'll get hate for it. But the MMORPG sphere itself...

I'm going to try and be extremely democratic. It tends to appeal to people who are maybe not the most socially gracious. So what you're saying is the South Park episode about WoW is super accurate. It is remarkably accurate. I don't think it's any... That's not a hot take. It's not so mind-blowing. It's like a lukewarm take. I describe my content as whelming. I'm neither over nor underwhelming.

That's exactly what I try and be. So my takes are not hot. They're lukewarm at best. Because that way I don't anger anyone. And everyone's kind of super happy with it. But the MMORPG community does have some difficult individuals within it who are hard to engage with. I think that's every community. Without a doubt. I'm sure that Gacha is... Oh, Gacha is... Yeah, here we go. Let's talk about the anime sphere in general, you know. People...

People have their identities to you their favorite anime, you know I people are very very very passionate about anime to the point where even if you criticize it a little bit you are like you said criticizing their identity almost because it's You're challenging their life for you. Yeah. Yeah, I guess they help your investments wrong. Yes. Yeah, I mean Emotional investment, I guess. Yeah, where sometimes I just see it as entertainment, you know a lot of times I

So no, I totally get what you're talking about. That's a healthy way to see it. Thankfully, a lot of the people that go to conventions or go to actual meetups tends to be slightly more approachable. RuneFest was a great example of people coming up to me and having a really good time and just a really good chat. I think the strangest one was when I was having breakfast in a kind of hotel bar with a friend of mine and a guy walked over and stood up and went, you criticized my favorite game.

And I kind of looked up and went, was I wrong? And he went, well, kind of. Well, okay, we can discuss this after breakfast.

And then thankfully he walked off. But the fact that he just walked over straight away and did that, his worldview is his favorite game. I don't know the dude. I don't know if he's having a bad day. But his worldview is his favorite game. I said something bad. I became the main bad guy, the arch enemy at that moment. And he had to come over and say hi. Thankfully, I haven't had too many people come over and be aggressive. You became the raid boss. Yeah. Yeah.

saying yourself, you don't have particularly strong takes. No, no, I don't have strong takes at all. I am whelming. And that's crazy that someone would come up with that. Absolutely. You know, if I say this game is okay, I mean, it's fine. It's okay. It's got some good stuff. Most things in life are fine. Yeah. There are very few things that are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, but I try and find the entertainment value within them. Yeah. Hmm.

Why did you choose to come to Japan for your first holiday in six years then? So, big anime fan. Like Steins;Gate a lot. Let's go! I love Steins;Gate. Fantastic. Finally finished watching Evangelion in the hotel room the entire time. Blitz through that. That was super cool.

What else is that? Big My Hero Academia fan. I know a lot of people are against it, but I went to the Shibuya Sky where they've got My Hero Academia stuff going on at the minute. Really enjoyed that. We have slandered My Hero a couple of times. Oh no, slander it all. It's fine. Yeah, it's fine. It's totally fine. It's fine. I enjoyed it. I think season seven was pretty damn good.

I haven't watched that one yet, but the music gets me. The music, I think, is absolutely phenomenal. And many years ago when I was doing the martial arts instructing, it was Waterloo-style karate, which has kind of Japanese and Okinawan links to it. And I've always wanted to visit Japan. I've got some friends down here as well. So I popped over, thought I'd walk around, see what's going on. I've been, yeah. You sound like...

That sounds like such a colonial thing to say. I just thought, what's going on? I'm just going to pop in and see what these people are doing. I had to see how they were doing. No British flags anywhere. Terrible. My horse is outside. I've got the bayonets ready. I'm going to go check on the colonies next to make sure they're all doing okay. What are they doing? You've had it too good for two weeks.

- It's been too long. Do you know about the Queen? Terrible news, that one. - Have you been enjoying the food? - Amazing. My favorite thing is that McDonald's count nuggets as a side, not a main meal. So I got there, I ordered a burger. They're like, "Do you want nuggets?" I'm like, "This is the future. This is brilliant."

But no, in all seriousness, love the ramen, loved the load of the dumplings, they're fantastic. Went to, I'm not sure the exact term, where you cook the meat yourself over there. Beautiful, really good, really cool stuff.

I am loving Konbini culture as well. Hell yeah. Konbini culture. I mean, Konbini culture is like Greg's culture for us. Eggs and teriyaki chicken in the morning in that sandwich. That is doing me. The fact that when I was sweating too much yesterday, I'm like, I'm just going to buy a t-shirt. This is great. This is a Konbini shirt. I wasn't expecting to be doing a podcast.

thank you. I wasn't expecting to do a podcast. I've got no kind of formal clothes. So yes, you found a shirt in the community that fits you. I went straight into a Lawson's and I'm like, shirt, found it, picked it up, done. Honestly, Lawson wear is great. It's brilliant. I'm loving the community culture. I'm loving the, um, the drinks culture with all of the vending machines everywhere. Phenomenal. Yeah, it's nice. It's just, it feels like I'm sure there are many problems that

I'm not aware of because I'm not seeing under the surface, but on the surface, it seems like a polite and accepting and nice society. - Yeah. - Yeah. - I mean, definitely. I think it's like, I've always said Japan is one of the best countries to just visit. And you know, like you get that like kind of trial period type of like, you know, experience of the country and you just get to see all the best and most interesting and unique parts of that culture. And that, you know, I've never, I've met so many people have come to Japan, not once has everyone ever been

Yeah, it was all right. Yeah. I mean, I think we've been pretty open on this podcast to say it's not the perfect country. No, not at all. Nowhere is. But there is none. There is none. Nowhere is. And at the end of the day, we moved out of the UK and we have stayed here for, I guess, coming up to six years now. And there is a reason for that.

I'm considering moving out of the UK with the way the UK is going with the kind of there's lots of kind of behind the scenes issues that a lot of people take umbrage with and so far I know that I've seen a very sanitized version of Japan I made sure I was talking to you about this earlier the one thing I wanted to see was a salaryman fall down drunk in Shibuya

There should be a meltdown. Oh, that was brilliant. So we stayed in Shinjuku for a bit. I made sure to walk around at three in the morning. All the maid cafes were calling me over. I'm sure they personally wanted me over. I was like, no, ladies, I must see a drunk salary man. Sorry, I'm too busy. That happened. It was great. Everything I expected it to be. And then the...

sunrise in the morning at a couple of temples. I went on a hike through a forest. A friend of mine, Gokul Bry, was like, Josh, trust me, there is a temple about 30 minutes through this forest, but we have to hop over this little barrier and then just walk. I'm like, okay, Bry, I'll trust you. One of the best parts of the holiday so far. Absolutely beautiful. Walking through and there was signs saying, where are the monkeys? I'm like, I kind of want to see one. But no, that was absolutely gorgeous. It has been a stunning time so far. The people have been polite. I haven't learned too much Japanese. I've learned some

Very important. Do you understand English? And everyone says sumimasen to move out the way. Yes. And then...

- Thank you, which would be arigato gozaimasu. - Yeah, that's it. - That's all I know. - Honestly, that's all you need. - Yeah, you said colonial. Colonial attitude. - No, no, no, that's not. If you're colonial, you wouldn't even learn it. You'd be like, no, no, no, I won't say that. - You will speak the Queen's English. - I mean, there's a couple of things I've disagreed with when I've walked over and gone, cheese does not need to look like a rainbow.

That doesn't need to be that many colors. There was a cheese sandwich that got pulled apart with a load of colors in it. Technically, that's Korean. But the Japanese ate that shit up. It's like cheese hot dog. You remember the deep fried hot dogs? Rainbow cheese sandwich, if we can Google it.

- Oh, you mean corn dogs? - Yeah, like the corn dogs, but it's just filled with shit. - Oh, those things. - They took that and was like, "What if we made it rainbow?" - Oh, that's disgusting. - Yeah. - Ew. - Yeah, so it's full of just food coloring everywhere. - Oh, that's disgusting. - I believe, yeah, this originally came from Korea, and then the Japanese were like, "That is gonna look great on my Instagram."

I'm going to bring that. My food should not be some fucking child's play there. It shouldn't. No, it absolutely shouldn't. But in general, the food has been healthy. It's been nice. The portion sizes have been small because it's extremely frowned upon to walk and eat at the same time. I've been kind of walking around not snacking, which has been great because over COVID and lockdown, I put a ton of weight on because I discovered Uber Eats. And it's been lovely. It's just been a nice experience. I would definitely love to come back here. Yeah, Ronald.

- Come on, dude. - Nice. Have you been retro game hunting at all? - I went to Akihabara on the first day and then I walked around all the shops and then a few friends of mine said, "Look, Akihabara is fantastic, but I think that's Nakano Broadway." - I was gonna say Nakano Broadway. - That is the more- - That's the real stuff. - That's the real one. Aki has become a little bit, look at me saying Aki. That's become a little bit kind of,

tourist focused if you will whereas Nakano Broadway still has all the old stuff I mean they jacked up a lot of the prices yes they know that people were coming to scalp and yeah so I've been sat there with my translate app on my phone just scanning along all the PlayStation 1 games to make sure I find the exact ones I needed that's been lovely have you picked up a bunch of games so I've picked up the original Kingsfield which is fantastic just the display I didn't want to take too much back with me so I've also picked up a statue of the Ava 1 from Evangelion because I thought after watching it I've got to

buy something memorizing it myself then I bought up some Pokemon cards and then a couple more My Hero Academia things so I've ended up buying another suitcase just to take back all the stuff that's what you would yeah that's what we do it's what the second suitcase to take some stuff back with I've really enjoyed it so far it's been good energy good vibes bumping into people just

seeing people read the amount of manga and pick up all the video games and the fact that there are so many kind of 18 only floors that are just filled with old Japanese men looking at these comics I'm like you go granddad you live your best life you buy that big boot boat go for it I'm out of the way I need to see it so you and me are friends now what have we got it's no it's been a fantastic extremely inviting culture hell yeah dude hell yeah that's what's up well

Well, glad you liked it. And thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for educating us so much. This is basically a history of gaming or like... Yeah, I want so much. Your energy is very infectious with games. I love video games. And I think we all had excellent times as kids. We all had really good memories of it. We can still love video games. It doesn't need to be about the culture wars. It doesn't need to be about the grift wars. It doesn't need to be about who's got the best console anymore. I think most of us hopefully have...

surpassed that and we're now at a point where video games are now the most popular entertainment medium in the world. They're bigger than films, bigger than TV, bigger than anything else. We can all love video games, we can appreciate the differences we have and we can just enjoy gaming together, which brought together so many more people than I ever thought it would. That was a fucking speech and a half. That was a fucking soliloquy if I'd ever heard it before. You know what? I am a gamer now after that speech. Capital

- Paral-G gamer. - Paral-G gamer. - I am proud to call myself a gamer. - Is there anything you'd want to tell the viewers about? They're just gonna check you out. Where should they find you? - If you're interested in MMORPG games, don't be, save yourself, go and do something else with your life. It's a much better use of your time. If you want to see terrible MMORPGs, it's Josh Strife Hayes on YouTube and Twitch. If you want to see classic retro games, it's Josh Strife Plays,

best clips of the Twitch are over on Josh Strife says and complete replays of all the Twitch streams, such as the 73 hour Morrowind stream are on Josh Strife replays. The name is the same over on Twitter. I refuse to call it X Instagram and discord as well. The patron support allows me to do all of this stuff, but I'm generally pretty accessible on all of these places. Oh yeah. We'll leave all of that down in the description below. And speaking of patron, Hey, look at our patrons.

Hey Josh, why don't you point to your favorite patron on screen right now? The scrolling right now. The scrolling right now. That person. That was actually the guy that I saw in the manga shop. That was the man standing next to me. He was great. You called out for us. But the patrons that have supported this, thank you very much for supporting the show because I genuinely did tweet out about three or four days ago saying, hey guys, I'm in Japan for a bit. We can make something happen. I just kind of threw it out into the ether and you picked it up and came back straight away like an hour later saying, hey man, let's make it happen. The amount of people that said,

you've got to go on Trash Taste while you're in Japan. It was the most requested thing for me to do in Japan. And you guys have made this a highlight of my trip, man. - Yeah, this was great. - Thanks so much, man. - Thank you. - And hey, if you guys, by the way, want to go check out, we have our own Patreon as well, patreon.com/trashtaste, I'm sure you know. By the way, every single week we have brand new Patreon exclusive weekly content. We have one that you guys can go check out right after this one. But hey, if you want to check out the show and support us in the process,

head on over to patreon.com slash trashtaste. Also follows on Twitter. Send us some memes on the subreddit. If you had our face, listen to us on Spotify. And hey, go check out Josh's stuff. Links in the description below. There you go. All right. See you guys next week. Bye.

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