Detroit: Become Human Review - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 172
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What's up everybody? Welcome to the Kind of Funny Gamescast episode 172. I'm one of your hosts, Greg Miller, alongside the Hispanic heartthrob, Andy Cortez. Yeah, great to be here. I like this members only jacket. Yeah man, come join. I can't, it's members only. I'm not one of the members, you know what I mean? Does it have an unbutton? I think it does.

Now, over there groping you right now, of course, is don't break the jacket. I don't want to break the jacket. The Reverend Jared Petty. The Reverend Jared Petty. Hey, Doki Doki, what's up? So run me through the history of the Members Only Jacket because I feel like if you remember in Shallow Hal, there was a joke, a barb thrown out because Jason Alexander's

character was wearing a members-only jacket to when Gwyneth Paltrow said, what are you, like the last member? Yeah. And I was like, ha ha ha. But are they back? Are they back? You're a hip guy. I have no idea if they're back. The only reason why I like them is I saw... Well, obviously it's sort of a...

an evolution of the bomber that I used to wear, but they're not cheap and shitty and they don't break. The pockets don't tear as easily. They're much higher quality. Now, granted, they're like twice the cost, but I'm fine paying for quality. And Ricky Bobby's dad is wearing one in Town Digging Nights. And I think it's the same color, Grace. And I was like, I want that gray jacket.

fucking members jacket. I bought the black one, then I bought the gray one. I'm trying to buy one that's called Sea Blue. If you see it, shout it out. They don't have them in smalls. They're sold out on Amazon. I remember the Sea Blue ones. I'm old enough that I actually wore one of these unironically.

back when they were still new and relevant. And mine was actually about the same color as yours. Well, that's my thing, right? We've come around is what I'm saying. They started off being popular. Then there's the shallow Hal Joe because they're not popular, but now they're popular. Have we come around? I don't know. Andy. Andy. Andy.

You are one of the coolest people I know Bobby wore it Yeah, I don't know yeah, Reese Bobby's is a guy keeps a cougar in this car. He knows what's up Yeah I just bought it because I I wanted a higher quality better version of the other jackets I've been buying and a lot of people seem to like him whenever I'm wearing them on these podcasts. Hey, where'd you get that jacket? Maybe it's no longer sort of frowned upon or sure. I don't know. It's rad. I don't really care. Well, how are we evoking shallow howl?

It's just what came to mind about the members-only jacket. It was such a great burn for him. I remember that. What are you, like the last member? It's a good joke. But I'd forgotten that movie even happened. Oh, really? I feel like Shallow Hal is one of those ones that...

There was a good few years where it was always on Comedy Central or TBS or something. So I've just seen it not start to finish a million times, but we just drop into a middle portion. Like, oh, here comes Tony Robbins. One of those movies where the rights wasn't that expensive, so some network bought it and just ran it all the time. I feel like when I support Jack Black, I'm supporting Tim Schafer. Oh.

And as long as I'm taking care of Big Tim Schafer, I'm happy. That's wise. There was a solid two years where on Stars and Showtime, nonstop, like Rush Hour, Shanghai Nights, like, I was all about it. I was like, yeah, HBO, sure, it's more expensive, but

But they don't have all these buddy cop movies that are really hot and popping right now. I was all about the Rush Hours, Shanghai Noon, Shanghai Nights. Sure. There was a few others that I don't remember. Sure. Or Rush Hour 2, 3. Sure, yeah. Dang, he ain't gonna be in Rush Hour 2. Blue Streak. Blue Streak was on HBO. Blue Streak was HBO. Martin Lawrence. Oh.

Remember that? Luke Wilson. I still have stars through Amazon. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I went and grabbed it, and I still like having it. I watch a lot of movies. I don't watch that much TV, but I watch a lot of movies. Sure. Stars is good for that mid-level, just like, hey, I kind of want to watch a movie at 11 before I go to sleep and watch half of it and then go to bed. Stars is great for that. Blue Streak was known for Martin Lawrence saying, believe that.

Remember that? No. You don't remember that? No, I don't remember that. So Nick and I were sleuthing, and we had Rudeo Google quotes from Blue Streak. Wait, you had Rudeo? Rudeo. Yeah, the guy in chat. I was thinking Rufio for a minute. I was like, whoa. I thought we had a new nickname for Cool Greg or Kevin or something. We were asking Chad, what are the quotes from Blue Streak? There's a line that, because Nick was comparing it to...

to, oh god. Independence Day, welcome to Earth. No, no, no, no. With Will Smith, Martin Lowenthal and Will Smith in Bad Boys. In Bad Boys, where he's like, Mike Lowry, you know, he's doing that thing or whatever. Well, in Blue Street, he says, believe that, like, believe that or whatever. So, there you go, guys. This is some deep lore. If you didn't know, this is the Kind of Funny Games cast, where each and every week we get together to talk about all the things we love in video games. You can get the show early. How early, Andy?

Oh, the four days. So early you could be watching us recorded right now on Patreon.com slash kindoffunnygames each and every time we record it. However, you could also go to Patreon.com slash kindoffunnygames, get the show when we put it up as one MP3 or...

One big video that has a pre and post show that no one gets to see unless you catch it live or support us over there on the Patreon video. Of course, if you don't want to give us any money, you can get it for free. YouTube.com slash kindoffunnygames and podcast services around the globe each and every Monday morning. Some housekeeping before we get into the heart of the matter. That is Detroit Become Human Review.

Next week, it's what you've been waiting for, what you've been subredditing about, what you've been tweeting about. It is our annual E3 Predictions Gamescast. We will all come with multiple predictions for what we expect to see from the show when we talk about Sony, Xbox, Nintendo, and then all the third parties. Then, of course, that means E3 is right around the corner. At E3 this year, kind of funny, is going hard, going deep, getting in them guts, as Andy says. Hell yeah, man. Do you not say that a lot? No, Kevin says that. Really? Yeah.

Yeah, you do. Kevin, do you say get in the guts a lot? Because it's about eating food, right? I mean, I wouldn't say I say it a lot. He said it once on a party mode. I've said it a couple times. Gotcha. I did say it on a party mode. That was the nasty party mode. And everybody was like, what? He was like, oh, it's an anal joke. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, 100%. It just isn't sex in general?

It's specifically able? No, no, it's sex in general. Thank you. Yeah. E3's coming up and we're getting in the guts of going hard for each and every press conference other than the PC one. We'll be doing pre and post shows and live reactions. You can watch along on twitch.tv slash kindoffunnygames with us. If you want to watch it without our commentary, no big deal, but make sure you come back for the post shows. If you miss any of that,

the live reactions the post shows go up on youtube.com slash kind of funny games the post shows of course are games cast they'll go up on your podcast feeds as usual we will be doing that Saturday through Tuesday before we go down to LA to see a bunch of games do a bunch of things probably do a live stream wink wink that I can't tell about next year yet but one day you'll know about it and then we'll be able to promote it correctly

While I'm here, patreon.com slash kindoffunnygames keeps all the mics on. Thank you to all these people for their support. Of course, thank you to who, Andy? Paul Walker. No, Tom Bach. Tom Bach. Now, while we're here, of course, thank you to Paul Walker as well. Yeah. Come on now. Rest in peace. Tom Bach, we love you, man. Go Spurs, go. Next season, baby. Let's do it. And finally, this episode is brought to you by Blue Apron and 4Hims, but I'll tell you about that later. For now!

Let's begin the show with what is and for once will be the Detroit Become Human review. Let's get into it. Time for a David Cage review. Oh, Tim's not here because he's at a bachelor party. He's not dead. Andy. What's up, Greg? You and I have been playing Detroit Become Human. Correct. Have you beaten it? I did.

I beat the game. I did not try to go back and get multiple endings. Okay. Not yet. Okay. But I have talked to other people and gotten other endings. Yeah. Who have also played it. Sure. Barrett Courtney, who works at IGN. Never heard of him. He played it earlier. No. He and I just had a nice little discussion after work and talked to each other about our stories and how our stories unfolded. How different were they? So different. Yeah. Holy shit. Right? Yeah.

And I think that, I mean, obviously I think that's the most compelling thing about the game is like having, you know, telling your story. And sometimes that can be kind of watered down because some of the decisions may not be super important or that changing. But in this game, I feel like they, I feel like they are. I mean, like compared to old games,

Oh, okay. Your pass ones. Yeah, to old games. I want to point out too, just while we're getting into the weeds here as we start to dip our toes in the water and go to the deep end, we're not going to spoil the game. We're going to stay away from specific spoilers. Right, Andy? Sure. Okay, cool. No asteroids are crashing here. So I've beaten Detroit, become human as well. I've played through it with my wife, Jean-Pierre St.-Ange Miller. Um...

And we haven't actually talked about our endings at all. We'll have to dance around that a bit. But I am interested. Jared, you've played none of it, right? Absolutely not. So you're going to play the role of interviewer a lot here. I will play the role of interviewer? You can put on your press hat and chime in. Interested bystander. There you go. That's what I like to hear. But you guys have the meat of the conversation. So take it away, gentlemen. What I want to know, Andy, is what do you think of Detroit Become Human? I think it's a good, not great game. I feel like...

All of the different endings and all the different branches that you can take is not only the strength but the weakness of the game. Where some decisions that you make, your characters start to... Their stories and their statements and how they feel sometimes contradict how they felt earlier. And I know that... I was talking to Kevin about this. I feel like if you pick certain... If you have certain decisions made in the game...

Somewhere in there, there is a flawless narrative that's told perfectly. Sure. And it's like, yeah, this is a really well-told story. But I feel like if you do take different paths here and there, your characters start to not only contradict themselves sometimes, which... They're incongruent. Sure, but that could be the fault of the player, but the choices are there for the player, so...

Somewhere in there, there's an incredible story. And I do feel like I really... I experienced a lot of moments that blew me away. And I was like, holy shit. And talking to Barrett about this stuff and telling him my story. He was like, fuck, I didn't know that. Like, yeah, dude. We were really excited to talk about it. I was really excited to talk about some of the outcomes of some of the characters. But I think at some point, the...

It can feel a little bit too overdramatic. Oh, yeah, of course. I do feel like this really wants to be a dramatic...

Motion picture and at some points the the characters react some ways. We were just like I don't really know if that was earned that melodrama and a David Cage Yeah, that's getting kicked around the internet. So I'm not making fun of you at all But yeah, it is it's kind of kind of the guy's trademark ham-fistedness is he's a super direct storyteller I do I'd like to go back before you move on and ask a question about that near dissonance if you don't mind and

you were talking about characters kind of making choices that earlier contradict choices you made. Do your choices change dynamically with earlier choices? Like as you move forward, are you the one choosing to make your character act out of character or is the narrative changing

taking what you did, then making that decision, and then placing you with a decision you wish you didn't have? I feel like they try to lead you in certain directions, right? But towards the end of the game, if you act in a certain way, certain decisions are then not unlocked for you, if that makes sense. So sort of like, I don't know, Telltale games, where decisions unlock for you and show you like, oh, or even like Paragon Renegade stuff in Mass Effect, where if you act a certain way a certain amount of time, you get...

additional options, additional conversation trees unlock for you. But because I acted a certain way, I felt like I was... It's hard to get into this without spoiling stuff. But I feel like I was acting a certain way with one of the characters because I felt like it... I think, for the record, I don't know what thing you're driving at. I'm not saying...

We can't say any specifics. I think I don't. I'm looking at the camera. If you're an audio listener, I don't know how many people are coming in this sight unseen. I think what we knew from preview material can be used going forward. Right. Where car, I think we already knew was going to, I, cause I pitched this all in the games daily show based on like trailers. Right.

Kara was the android with the girl. It seemed like that would be motivation for her to leave and try, because the whole thing is about them breaking out and becoming human, right? Or are they going to become human? Connor is the cop. He wants to be the cop robot. Great. And then Marcus is the one that they've shown through Stone trying to lead this robot revolution kind of thing. Correct. Fight for androids. And for me, the story, because I don't want to handicap you, or it's not even a PC term anymore. I don't want to take you out right now before you get going and then have it go to me and me talk about like,

what Marcus means because like Marcus for me is the weakest thing because his story I think it's so fantastical and makes so many Quantum leaps of like how the fuck okay? That's what's happening all right and to clarify. There's three main story. There are three yeah Yeah, so Marcus is one of those three main areas you travel through yeah And you know of course as you go through the game that you know the story lines do sort of mix up with each other but for for Connor who's the cop

I felt like I was making decisions that would best tell the story of the game rather than sort of curate this experience that...

You were playing Connor to try to get the most out of the game, not necessarily what you wanted. Exactly, yeah. And it did kind of screw me in the end because I ended up with a Connor that I didn't really want. Where I got too deep into a certain side of the character that I didn't really want him to be. Interesting. And I thought it fed the story better early on.

Connor's somebody who's becoming conflicted, and you know he's a cop and he's he's still a robot But he also is he abides by the law and he wants to wait a minute. It's in Detroit Yeah, and he's a robot cop. Yeah. Yes. That's right. Really is Robocop Gun in his leg - what I'm thinking he doesn't Yeah, so he I want telltale's Robocop so bad. He's he tries

Obviously, he's all for the law, and he's like, if you fuck up, I don't care who you are. I don't care if you're a robot. I'm going to stop you. That's what I was made to do. Yeah, I'm programmed to enforce the law. I am programmed to enforce the law. But you start seeing some conflict there where he starts feeling a certain way, and the game sort of wants you to break those restraints, but I... You didn't want to? I chose to kind of lead it on for as long as possible before I eventually did. Oh, wow. Interesting. Interesting.

And by the time I wanted to, it was too late. Like, my character had... Well, you can do that to yourself. You can't blame the game for that. Sure. I mean... For me, I thought... I just felt like things were changing too quickly. I felt like his opinions on things were changing way too quickly and way too dramatically, where I was like, man, like... That's fair. That just seems like... That's out of character. Yes, exactly. Exactly. For me, I hear you on that front. That makes sense to me in terms of... For me, the Connor storyline...

I think was my favorite. And I think it's just because they, you know, it's a, it's your traditional buddy cop movie, right? Where, Hey, you're the, you're Connor, you're this Android. Guess what? We're of course partnering you with the incomparable Clancy Brown, who happens to be a down on his luck, alcoholic detective who hates Androids.

Right? So, like, you have that thing. And then it is the, I totally leaned into the Buddy Cop movie. Yeah. Cool. Like, no, no, no. I love Clancy Brown as an actor. And then even the performance he's giving here, I'm all in on him. I thought he was great. I'm backing him up. I want to do that. Whereas you could have pulled back and been more, I'm going to follow the letter of the law and be the android, which puts Clancy off of you rather than on your side. Oh, go ahead. Which threw me off. That's part of the storyline that did throw me off because...

I feel like Clancy's turn happened way too quick as well. But that's just how you played it, no? Or do you think that's how it just happens? I don't know. Again, I think that just some of these decisions rush different parts of the story where it doesn't feel natural at all. For me, what's so interesting in my playthrough and my review, I guess, of Detroit Become Human is that Jen and I, it was very much we're getting ready for Judges Week.

I got Detroit Become Human, but when I get back, I'll have time before this review right here. I'll play it when we get back. I don't want to start it before we leave. And it was that Friday night. We cooked dinner, and they were sitting there. I'm like, I got Detroit. Do you want to just pop it in and play it for a little bit? And we played however many hours and then played a whole bunch on Saturday, and it was like we were riveted. It was like, wow, this is so interesting and so well done, and wow.

The characters and their motivations and the people they're interacting with, you know, their families or whatever you want to call it. They're, you know, employers or owners. Yeah. This is all really, really great. And there's a pivot point where Saturday night we stopped playing and we went out to dinner and in the car there was this great moment that I think I'll always remember when I think of Detroit of us sitting in the back of this Uber just silently, both of us looking out different windows.

And then Jen just turned to me like, but I don't understand why. And I was like, I don't like us talking about it as if we were watching a Netflix series and we left there. And I was like, that says something for a video game. And so we did that, went down to judge. We brought the PlayStation with us because I'm like, I want to play every chance we get or whatever.

And then started talking to other people who were further ahead of us, including yourself, where I texted you and I was just like, man, this game. And you're like, yeah, it's good. I just beat it. Oh, man. Some parts I like, some parts I don't. And then I got done. I talked about it a little bit on Games Daily today, right? Like talking to Kim from Game Informer who had already beat it. And she's like,

yeah, but then this stuff happens. It just doesn't. And we're like, really? And it was literally as soon as we started it back up, we were into that section where things just start happening way too quickly. And it was just like, whoa, like, okay, that's what's happening. So just a jilted feel to it? Yeah, it was like, I thought we were doing so well and I thought the story was being told

intimately where it was like, all right, cool. But I mean like at the start, all of them, Cara, uh, Connor and Marcus, all their stories are so tight and so small. Like it's a small circle. Let's see how we go from there. And then for me, it's Marcus's. That was just like,

What? Like that, it just starts like, it just, I feel like it just, it's tumbling down the hill and it's going slowly and well and then it like hits that bump where it starts, and then it's just out of control and it's like, things are flying off of it as it goes. It starts feeling cagey. Yeah, it starts feeling cagey. I'm not here to crap on the work.

at all. There's some fascinating stuff in Heavy Rain. There's some interesting stuff in Beyond Two Souls. Did we sync up? No, we got some Ghostbusters. It's my refrigerator again. I still haven't brought you those figures. It doesn't, for me, fall apart. It just goes for me like, holy shit, I can't believe we're doing this. I want to make sure that I put up an embargo of just like,

I loved it for a long time, and then it was like, oh, okay, I like this. I'm enjoying this. I recommend you play this game if narrative games are your thing. Okay, you're scaring me here, though. So this is all great. But there's something very frightening you just said. So here's my challenge to both of you. I was very interested until you got to, and then it gets jilted there toward the end. Now, for narrative games, I live or die by the strength of the ending. That's the part of if it falls apart at the end.

I can't help but walk away disappointed from a narrative game. I've gotten through narrative games that have weak metals, but if it's got a weekend, I end up angry that I spent any time in the whole thing. Convince me otherwise with this one. Bring me in. I don't think the ending is weak. Okay. I don't think it's as strong as the start was. And nope, I don't feel like I wasted my time with this. Yeah. When I beat it, the first thing I did right was I want to go back and reload the save point play again. Because it was very much like, you know, obviously it's one of these games...

characters can live or die, right? And I totally fucked up a choice at the end where it was just like, it's, we're going to get to reader questions. Thank you for submitting them. But I fucked up a button combination that wasn't,

Fast or anything like that there's no part of this game That's like in heavy rain when you to drive into oncoming traffic, but it was just like I screwed up a button combination I should have held something longer than I did and it killed this person and I was like fuck I went and went back and replayed that and then while I was there I was like well I'll make a whole bunch of other choices and I did different I got to a different ending and had a great time and You know I want to platinum it so I was looking at the trophies now like looking back I'm excited to go back and see the alt decisions and see how they go like I

I don't think it falls apart. It just becomes ham fist like you're talking about, right? And it's that thing of, you know, so many people were worried about like when the car stuff happened and it looked like the domestic abuse with the kid and like, well, you know, is David Cage a person who can address that, this, that, the other?

That I thought was fine, right? You get to the end and it is... I mean, again, this is Detroit Become Human. We already talked about Mark as leading a revolution. There are the choices of like, how do you want to address this or that? And what do you want to say to the androids or to the humans? And it is like, I have a dream. You know what I mean? It's beating you over the head with that stuff. And that was when I was like... There's a lot of stuff that's really on the nose of like...

you know, comparing these robots to slaves. And, you know, I guess that's kind of the comparison they're trying to make, but it gets really, really, it gets way too on the nose and just kind of cheesy at points. And like, there's a conversation with a human being in there, right? Where they're like, why are you helping us? And she's very much like, hey, my people went through. And it's like,

Yeah, that's a real conversation and that's a real character motivation in this world. I can understand that. But you know how this game is being viewed. You could have not said that. I think I can get through why you're doing this because it's the right thing to do. You know what I mean? That's enough, I think. Well, yeah, allegory is hard to pull off anyway. I think about something like District 9, which I really enjoyed. Did you guys like that? I liked District 9. Not many people, I think, were willing to rush out to a theater to watch a movie about the plight of refugee camps.

but they'll watch a science fiction movie about aliens and the plight of refugees. And it does manage to do that kind of old Twilight Zone thing where he would sneak social themes and current issues into science fiction and people could look at it and go, oh yeah. When you do it right, it's great. When it comes off hammy...

And that's the thing is I don't think it's as bad. I've seen the screen right before doing this. There's some screenshots going around from a review of like the I have a dream thing up there and like people really just fucking beating it into the ground of like what the fuck. And it's like I didn't think it was that egregious. It is on the nose. It is very much.

oh, okay, we're not even going to joke around. You're not even going to hint at what it is. You're going to tell me what it is. Rather than show me, you're going to tell me, which is never what you want, right? You want to show, don't tell. I want to come away with those ideas on my own. Have you seen the postman, the Kevin Costner post-apocalyptic thing? No. No, have you seen it?

Oh, Kevin's talking about the Postman. Kevin from the weeds likes it. So yeah, there's that. I can't ask. There's a scene in that I was going to ask about and make a comparison. I can't because you haven't seen it. So we'll move on from that. I don't know if I want to. I mean, some of the ending, you were, we were talking about the endings, whether we liked some of the endings or not.

A few of the endings that I got in my playthrough, actually mainly for just one character, that I was retelling the story to Barret about, my roommate about, retelling what happened with this character because he told me what happened with his and telling him I got goosebumps. I got kind of like this is sort of teary-eyed almost but not really. One of the endings that I got just blew me away and I thought it was so well done.

But in my opinion, that doesn't really make up for some of the other how we got there. Yeah, I don't know. I do think I agree with you, Greg. I think like you have to play this game. I at the end of the day still really enjoyed it. I do think that it is a very imperfect game. How long is it?

In terms of time, how long has this been going on? That's a great question. It's really hard for me to tell. I'd say maybe around 10 hours. Yeah, that sounds about right. I'm trying to think of how I broke it up with Saturday. A little bit Friday, a lot Saturday, a little bit on Sunday. And then I think it came back and it was just when we're sitting. So that's long for a narrative game. Yeah. But it's... I mean... It...

It goes too fast, if anything. And that's the thing. And I enjoyed the scenes. I enjoyed the breakout. I think the interface on the game is brilliant in terms of, hey, you know, think about Heavy Rain, right? You'd finish it, and then you'd get somebody's face as a loading screen while trophies popped.

and you're like oh man I wonder how different that scene could have gone and the fact that they embrace being a game and you end now and you see this tree this giant like skill tree kind of but it goes through and it shows your choices connecting to your ending but it shows all the question mark ones shooting off yeah do you get like that wonderful I bring this up

scenes every show tactics ogre ability to go back to those nodes and follow it straight from there instead of playing all the way through not from the node i think you just have to restart the scene there's checkpoints there's checkpoints that's still pretty good yeah i'll take so that's the thing is like you have this giant tree branching out showing you what you did where you did clearly like you know you asked this question which had this new path shoot off of it right and then even there there's things you didn't light up when you go and you

want to jump back in, which I was doing right at the end. It asks you if you want to just do it and not save anything, but it won't affect your tree or do you want to jump in and save and it'll fill out your tree. So you go in there and then now you have your original playthrough up there, but then you now have another the other one in there as well. So you can see what happened there. I really like that. Yeah, and I mean like they're huge and that's why I was like waiting for the trophy list to pop because it was like

wow, like that's crazy gargantuan. Like I can't visualize playing through each one of these things and not knowing if that's what I need to do. I feel like after every scene, there was a conversation between my girlfriend and I looking at the web and being like,

I chose to do this. If I would have done that, look at that shit. Look what that sort of branches off into. I wonder what that could be. So some of the biggest appeal of what both of you are sharing, you just said, Andy, you said with my girlfriend, you said with Jen, both of you played this with people you love side by side. And it's an awesome experience to spend with anybody. Like if it's just a friend of yours or whoever, like it's...

It's going to be something that you both watch and you both will sort of challenge each other on the decisions that you may have made. There was a few times where she was like, shouldn't have done that. You fucked that. I was like, yeah, I know. And I do think there are moments because you mentioned you messed up a QTE where a character died. Yeah. I mean, there are definitely QTEs that don't affect anything that are very much...

Sort of the crumbling wall and uncharted where it doesn't keep crumbling unless you keep moving up that sort of thing It's all very visual sort of just to kind of to add adrenaline and and you know to sort of get your blood pumping But there were a few moments where I'm in I'm towards the end of the game and I am really hoping not to fuck up and I do mess up a QTE and That didn't change anything. You know there are moments where you mess up, and it's very forgiving of you and

Or there are moments where, as Greg mentioned earlier, a character died. I don't think I... The only reason I had characters die was because I chose not to go back for them. That sort of thing. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I'll explain it to you off the air. Before we move to reader mail, this is cool because that's why I love doing this show. It's celebratory and it's informative and interesting and I work with really smart people that love games, but

before we sat down on camera, I could not have cared less about Detroit. And right now I'm like, nah, I think I want to go play this now. I feel like it's a fascinating game. And that's the thing is I think it just got really close to being like, holy shit, I can't. Okay, now we're coming back down. I think if it could have maintained this, it would have just been like, wow, I can't get over it.

It is a game that I've thought about since then. You know what I mean? I'm happy with the endings I got on my first one, but I want to go do this. I do want to go make choices. There are a lot of inconsequential choices, as you're saying, but I think...

even when you make those it's just it's what i talk about the telltale book right of like shading in your version of the character you know like this is not a spoiler but marcus right it does he he plays chess against his uh owner or whatever his helper or whatever you want to call him no i played piano oh you played piano i played chess and so like for me it was like do you want to win do you want to lose you want to draw you know what i mean and like yeah they're like i chose to uh

lose, I think, right? And it was like, no, I chose to win. I don't have the trophy for the other one, but it was like, for me at the time, there was a justification for that, and then there was a conversation about, alright, why did you do that? I know you just did that. I think some of the characters are super well written, and then we run into some that are like, just really stereotyped, um,

characters in a movie that you'd watch that maybe aren't very good movies like i don't know like super super overdone i feel at some at some moments and then it's just in like we were talking earlier with i always make fun of the origami figure and uh heavy rain or a game killer uh who just shows up in his hands there's like there's the leaps i have with marcus's story logic but then just the logic of the world yeah just doesn't make sense sometimes we're just like

All right. Like, I don't... This wouldn't solve the problem or what's... How does that... But it's like, whatever. You're watching...

and not like, you know, not a Schindler's List or something. You're watching a... You're watching a DC Universe movie. All right, you can suck. All right, this is better than a DC Universe movie. All right, don't insult Detroit by putting it in any bucket with Suicide Squad. I'm very, very happy to hear that, actually. You want to hear some reader mail? I'd love to. I want to start with this one right here because we were just talking about it kind of. Therbisio writes in and says, I don't like quick time events. Is this game for me?

I think so. I didn't... As somebody who loved Heavy Rain and hated the Heavy Rain, drive a car, and oncoming traffic thing, it wasn't, for the most part, quick time. Like, oh, I was all over it. It was like, hold R2, hold L2, hold circle, you're moving. I didn't feel like there was that many that were like, make or break, I can't believe I screwed this up and now everything's ruined. I only hated the motion control ones. Oh, yeah. I always sort of forgot...

what the icon was. And it's also just awkward to be sitting there and maybe I'm leaning back and I have the controller on my lap and I'm hitting the buttons and then it requires me to jerk it to the right or left. And it's like, oh, that's not a natural thing whatsoever. And then they do have the ones that are flick the sticks, but they kind of look like move the controller. Yes, exactly. Is there any move support? Can I awkwardly undress Heavy Rain style? No, there's no move support on this one. That's good. No nudity either, right?

Not in any of the stuff I saw. Yeah, in terms of when I play. Whoa, whoa. Yeah, I was wondering about that because obviously Madison Page getting it on with Ethan in Heavy Rain. Yeah, I didn't see that come around here. And not to mention too, like relationships is the one thing they also don't handle. There's one in particular relationship I really think is so terrible.

that they force on you, which I found really interesting where I had made a decision early on. Like now that character and I are not aligned in anything. I'm not going to do anything to get on her good side, but they kind of force you to be lovers or whatever. It's like, well, I'm not like love, like no sexy.

But like, they want you to have a romantic thing. Same thing happened to Barrett, and I chose not to do that. I chose not, but I mean, I tried not to. It was an active thing where that person didn't like me. But then all of a sudden, it was like, no, no, no, you guys share something. Now, that's a fatal flaw in a game where you're given agency. Well, he just said it didn't happen for you at all. At all. The game never forced that person to soften you? Yeah, I don't know. Um...

there was never a relationship formed or anything like that. Now I will say as far as relationships go, there are a lot of moments where you get the telltale thing where you go one way and two of the people on your side say, Hey, good job. And one of the people says like, I don't like that decision. Like people like in your party, you know? Um,

And that's another part where things really contradict each other because there'd be a moment where I'd make a decision and these two people would say, we don't like that. And then the next cut scene, they're like, hey, awesome job. And that happens quite a bit. And it's just like kind of bothersome. Just once I want to play a narrative game where you're trying to please people around you all the time only to discover that they're going to throw whoever they love the most into the volcano at the end. Like where you're punished for trying to be a crowd pleaser. Oh, that'd be cool. Sometime. Yeah.

That's hard to say. I don't know. I mean, I've... If you love narrative-driven games, I think you can play this. This is what... This is... This is what this is. And early on, Jen and me were having conversations, and it was like, man...

I wish Telltale would have kept evolving and become this. And granted, I don't think by the end it's like 10 out of 10 or anything, but it is. There were some really interesting choices to be made, and there were interesting wrinkles to it. And the way it all branches out and the way that you can end one scene in one of three different spots, and then you start the next scene in one of three different spots, that's cool. Yeah, I think this is a game to show people who aren't necessarily even into games, just to show them what games can do nowadays where...

Like yes, you can watch a movie or you can watch me play this and have totally different Things happen right and I think it's just sort of really impressive and I do think you should buy it Yeah, I totally I do recommend buying this game. Would you call this a good game? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah Yeah, I mean like right when we you know Metacritic's 880 right now like that sounds right to me. Mm-hmm

If I was still at IGN and I was reviewing, I could totally see a flat eight and be like, all right, yeah, it's great. It's close to being good. It's not close to being amazing. It's right in that section, right? Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. Jake writes in and says, with the game having the possibility of different endings, how many times do you see yourself playing through? I personally want to see it through twice, but didn't know if it would have more than two to three endings. Thanks. Always stay kind of funny.

Are you going to play it again? Yes, absolutely. I think it's like the cool game to play on stream where I want to see these different endings and I think it'd be cool to experience that with people and have people make the decisions for me and stuff like that. But also, I did the same thing with Heavy Rain. Like when I beat Heavy Rain, I didn't play the whole thing again, but I played that final sequence to see like... Sure. I think there were seven outcomes where three of them were super similar, but they all had a...

Like little tendrils that were tiny, a little bit different here and there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I want to platinum it, so I want to sit down and do it. But the thing is, I don't know...

with this checkpoint system and the flow chart system. If you need to go back and how far like is in heavy rain, there was a very specific part for trophies where it was like hey have a save here because from here on out you have to make all these different decisions with this thing. I'm not sure if you need to because I feel like it's just filling in the flow chart for each scene to get where you really want to be because at the end I feel like I got the complicated ending right where I already had enough of the

evidence or whatever i'd gone through enough of the optional things because i was scouring enough of the optional things that you know i could piece together what i imagine is the hard one but i need to look through it so this conversation is really cool i do have to admit for about half of it my mind drifted away because i was trying to remember the three different endings of clue and just who was guilty in each one of them i'm gonna go home and have sex with my wife exactly mr green that was mr green when everybody else was guilty uh andy

What's up? Cozy Bear writes in and says, which of the androids in the game would you have as your personal assistant? Um, not Connor. No? Definitely not Connor. I liked Connor a lot. No. He's a bro. My Connor was a bro by the end. And not like a bro pop collar, but like, hey, you're cool, Connor. I'd say either Connor or I'd say either Marcus or Kara mostly because they have that sort of...

That's sort of like, I don't know, almost like a guardian. Yeah, like a loving parent sort of vibe. Yeah, they definitely give off that loving companion. I mean, Marcus being the companion to his person and Kara being the companion to her person. You're both like, man, there's a lot of cool...

Family human traits a lot of like there's a lot of like touching moments between them and people that they're caring for yeah We're Connor. You know is obviously you know he's way more robotic than either of them Well, he's like in an advanced model right yeah experimental model that they put out to try to help do all these Liquid metal I'm not gonna ruin that for you. I'm gonna ruin it. I'm gonna ruin that for you. Does he have a visor? I can ruin that Ryan writes in it says does this game deserved to be a game of the year contender I

I'd say no. My knee-jerk reaction based on playing it, no. I'd say no. Just compare to God of War. For me, I think it's God of War. I think it's Celeste. I think that there's a bunch of games that I could see in it before just because I think it's good and even great by the hygiene scale. But I just don't think it's like... I think it deserves to be somewhere on the best narrative game or whatever. I don't see it as a game of the year just because I think there are...

far more flaws than there are in the other Game of the Year candidates. Well, I mean, there's this... I don't know if we get so hyperbolic in this industry that we forget that there does exist a space between worth playing... Oh, yeah. It's not this or this. ...masterpiece, where it's just like, no, good. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Some flaws, totally enjoyable and fun and interesting. And you'll be done with it, like, in, like, you know, if you play it as...

as quickly as we did in a weekend or maybe two weekends. It's not this big, giant open world game where it's like, if it's bad, I'm going to lose 40 hours to it. No, you just... This was my thing too, playing through it. And this, even though I'm now the guy saying that, you know, it went, they did too much too fast. Mm-hmm.

playing it, I was like, man, I hope this is short. Like, I like the story and the choices I'm making that I... I think the checkpoints, you know, change it, but I would like to go back and play it all the way through again. I think it's just long enough where I don't want to do that multiple times to get all these things, but, like, in a different world, yeah. I just feel like even they could have...

Jen and I were talking about it right of no spoilers or anything, but I feel like you could have done Connor and Kara story and had the Marcus thing happening just in the background of news reports of this in like it's affecting their lives what's happening, but I don't need to play through it because that's where they lost. Maybe even drop me into the market stuff.

way later when I wouldn't be like, this is a weird thing that we're already here, but okay, cool. Again, that's that old Chris Culler quote where he said he truly believes that in the heart of every good 20-hour video game is a great 10-hour video game. Yeah. Think there's some truth to that. Hey, Kevin, I forgot. So I'm going to tell you now to make a note. Will you do the thing? Because of course, PlayStation sent us this game for review. Can you put the FTC thing in the very front and the very back of this video? Thanks. So there you go, FTC. Don't come after Aram Jabari. Don't you dare. All right.

Here we go. Simar Beer says better than Heavy Rain. Yes. But there's just something about there's something about the murder mystery that I just love. I love that true crime shit. Yeah. But I think this game in every way in terms of acting in terms of character development and stuff like that I feel like this game is overall far better than

Heavy Rain. And that's what gets interesting about it is I agree. I think it's better than Heavy Rain, but I don't remember being as critical of Heavy Rain as I am of this game. But then I guess that Heavy Rain, I didn't have the expectations of it. And maybe I was just blown away by the fact that there are these different endings in Heavy Rain. And it was a different time, you know what I mean? Because Heavy Rain, I think, was...

If not PlayStation 3 game of the year that year, it was a contender when we were working on it. So without spoiling anything, if you can answer this without doing that, I think about Heavy Rain and I think one of that wonderful atmosphere, a killer that murders people by drowning them in the rain. It's amazing. It's a great conceit to build a story around. And then that, I don't know if twist is the right word, but the turn, the revelations that take place in that, there's...

They're really startling if you don't know they're coming. They were for me. I didn't see it coming. Sure. In Heavy Rain. Are there moments as dramatically compelling as that in this?

I'd say there are action-packed dramatic moments that really had my blood pumping. I guess there are a few twists here and there, but I don't remember feeling the same way that I did during Heavy Rain. But Heavy Rain was such a long time ago for me. Here's my thing. It's hard for me to speak to it. And this is me looking back now on Heavy Rain, years and years, reviewing it or playing it and reviewing it.

I'm not reviewed it. I don't remember, but liking it, look it up. Do we have that technology? Somebody did. You know what I mean? We don't heavy rain. I felt so many plates for spinning that I

The story got convoluted for me, whereas like you say, oh, he murdered him in the rain, right? And it's like, yeah, I remember him being a murder to eat. Okay, yeah. And it was just like the reveal of who the killer was. There was so ham fisted. I thought, you know what I mean? It's so weird and so many leaps of lodge. It was like, all right, like it. This one is so much more digestible, which I appreciate.

Now, the moments, you know, there is a big in quotes moment that if you're paying attention, I think you piece together before you get there. Yeah. Because for me, it was very much like there's now Chris Roper. If you have a rain, okay, go. The Roper report. What up?

There was this reveal in Detroit, the big one I can think of, similar to the killer in Heavy Rain, right? And there had been enough comments already about it that I was like, I think I was, hey, Jen, this is what's going to happen. And then when it happens, it's like, okay, well, I kind of saw that happen. I don't know why I didn't see it coming at all. Did it get you then? Oh, yeah. So you were like, oh. Well, when it happened, I was like...

I should have suspected something like this was going to happen, but I don't know why I had... And neither did Barrett. We both talked about it. We were like, yeah, did not take up... Okay. So there, it does exist. Okay. But then when we talk about that and whenever you want to hear about it, that is also just one of the logic things again, though. Just like, wait a second, really? Like, I don't know.

Yeah, whatever. But it's fun. This is more nonsensical. I think it's better than Heavy Rain, but I think it also has the benefit of being right now where I'm playing right now. But I do think overall acting, performances, visuals, the game's beautiful. The game's stunningly beautiful. Water effects are awesome. Well, it's also hard to get over the fact that like,

Most of the voice actors in heavy rain were not American, but they're speaking trying to speak like an American and it kind of threw you off a bit. There's a couple new news addresses one from I don't this isn't a spoiler, but I want to say there's a woman on the TV making a presentation at one point and we were watching long enough for I'm like and Jen's like what and I'm like this woman is clearly French and she's trying to play the most American American. They did the thing. Yeah, I was like, why didn't you just cast someone?

Overall game of the year that year, Heavy Rain was in the running. Yeah. Well, there we go. But I think it didn't only look. Oh, wow. What a year. It was Halo Reach, Heavy Rain, Mass Effect 2. Oh, yeah. Red Dead. Oh, no, no. So then, yeah. But I think it might have won PS3 game of the year. I don't know. Galaxy 2, Mass Effect 2, and Red Dead. Mass Effect 2 is my pick. Wow. Out of those? Really? Yeah. Oh, man. Galaxy 1 won. Yeah. Yeah. Oh.

Kai says, does the game have a narrative structure such as in a telltale game where all branches eventually fold together in the end or does it spread out from beginning to end? Now, if I can jump in, I think he means what I was talking about, right? Where you started in one place with the telltale game, you bow out and then you always come back to the same ending, right? Spoilers for fucking Walking Dead season one. Lee is always going to die or be a zombie, but he's dead at the end of it, right? Uh,

I would say this doesn't do that. This does not do that. This does the flow chart and you pick up and keep going and at no point does it say, all right, everybody come back. This is how it's going to end. Your endings can be more. My ending was far different than what my roommate's ending was. I can't wait to hear your ending. And like the three different characters all had very different things happen to them. Yeah. It was cool. Impressive, man. I wonder if we should do...

Just a spoiler part at the end of this. You can leave if you don't have a room for you because I want to know, but I'd also know what was the embargo. We ought to talk about endings. You have to. The PlayStation trophies are totally willing to hang her. I don't mind. We're not going to do it right now. We won't do it on an ounce, so we'll make a big deal if we do it, but I'm going to pull a Getty's up here back. Oh, you got a P too many LaCroix's. Steven says

Yeah, okay. So he says, Stephen says, did you feel like you compared the subject matter and themes to other media tackling similar stuff? For instance, did you think about Westworld or Blade Runner when playing through and go, oh, they handled this better than Westworld or vice versa? No, I didn't really think I... I mean, obviously, Westworld is on the mind, right? Yeah. Because it's just kind of... Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're watching it right now. Everybody's talking about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do think Westworld handles probably everything better, I feel. Like, just in terms of how the... I don't know. That's a tough question. It is a weird one. I did think about Westworld, I think, just in terms of hosts and these androids. But I really thought they did an awesome job in this game of...

a world where cool. This is what it is. And these are the real ramifications. And these are the unemployed people because of androids. And here's why people are mad at androids. Here's where it's set up. Here's what is happening is if you know Marcus is going to rebel. Here's what it means for everything. Here's how there's a realistic response. I feel to what would happen. Yeah, I guess with Westworld there, you know, they serve one purpose and it's to entertain. It's to play a role to push them guts to

Yeah, punch them guts. But in this world, they're everybody. They are employees. They are housekeepers. They are whatever. They're not just...

a theme park entertainer, you know, sort of thing. So I do think, and I think that's another interesting, uh, wrinkle to how they use them is as I'm watching these androids, uh, populate the earth and what they do with it. It was a very thing of like, wow, this really is the next step of Alexa, uh,

Whereas if they did put out, obviously not this advance of a model right away, but gen one model of this, they'd be like, yeah, okay, cool. Clean the house. Walk Portillo. Do the... You know what I mean? Give it remedial jobs around the house. Not send it off for paint and all this stuff. We're not going to get there right away, but that is an actually cool idea. Yeah, I think they did a great job with just crafting the city of Detroit and what it looks like and what poverty looks like and what...

Being without a job looks like. All that stuff, I think they... You could tell they put a lot of thought into it. And I think that's one of the better parts of the game. And you're talking about that Alexa. I feel like almost like a puritanical minister on the prairie from Western. Yeah. Because Angie and I have talked about it. I'm like, I won't have it in my house. And it's not because I'm biased against artificial intelligence, although I do think we don't give that nearly the gravity of thought we probably should.

But I don't like it being there listening to me. Are you an Alexa guy? Oh, I love it. Yeah, I got the Amazon Echo in the kitchen and then we have a dot in the bathroom. I can't do it, man. I don't want it in there. It's not listening. It's not doing that. It is listening. No. It's absolutely listening. No, no, no, no, no. There's a great Reddit thread I'll send to you where it's an actual smart person who develops technology totally tearing it apart.

Of like, no, it is not listening to you all the time. You have to say the key word because it only has this many megabytes, so it can't do this, so it can't store that, so it can't be listening. It listens for the key phrase. Here's a crazy moment. Last night on, or last week on Gamescast, we were talking about some fucking game. Kevin gets an ad for it on his phone. And Kevin has never looked up for, it wasn't,

Yeah, he's never once tried to look for an Atlas game, and it popped up on his phone as an ad. Okay, that was not Alexa being creepy. That was the Lord God bringing you the good news, my friends. No, that was Instagram listening. Atlas makes great, great, great video games, and they're there to bring us all happiness. Have we all heard Tim's story about the coffee table, the light-up coffee table, where he was like, oh, man, that sounds really cool, and then he got an ad?

It's like, take all my information. I don't care. No, no. I'm more annoyed that I went to look at a trophy shop online a couple weeks ago, didn't buy anything, and now every one of those widget ads is that trophy shop. I'm like, motherfucker, I'm not buying your trophy. Beyond paranoia, I talked about it. Listen, the real reason for me is I want more of a buffer in my life between my consumerism and my day-to-day living because I feel like my phone is already stripped of

a layer of the way I think about the world, a way that I'm not comfortable with. Sure. And I don't, I think Alexa is another step in that direction that as long as I'm able, I don't want to take. See, for me, it's interesting because I think it actually does the opposite where it keeps me off my phone.

For me, it's a superpower, super shortcut. I use Amazon for just about everything anyway. So it is like, fuck, last roll of paper towels. I'm in the middle of cooking a meal. I'm not going to break out my phone or get to my laptop or do anything. It is just, oh, Alexa, reorder paper towels. I think it will take me away from my phone, but I think it will take me even deeper. That's another layer closer to my life being...

absolutely absorbed in my consumerism. But you need paper towels. I'm not using it to be like, Alexa, look up Funko Pops. Find me. You need paper towels. But the act of going and getting paper towels or even sitting down and purposefully ordering paper towels...

It forces me to do things that I won't otherwise do. It forces me to think about how I'm spending the money, who I'm getting them from, who I'm going to meet on the way, where I'm going to go, what the weather is like that day. Get out of here. You have a car. Sir, I don't. I want my 24 paper towels and I don't want to get an Uber or a bus. Yeah, I've had enough of you. Good day. I order plenty of stuff. Good day, Jared. Yeah.

Good day, I said. Good day, sir. What is that? Why is that ringing in my head and I can't remember it now? It gets used a lot, but I was thinking when Stephen Colbert did it, when he called somebody and was like giving them a hard time or whatever, and he was asking the guy to say he was sorry, and he's like, I'm not going to say sorry. Well, you just did, so thank you. Good day. And the guy's like, I didn't say sorry. He's like, good day, sir. Final question comes from Paul.

Who says, we often talk of a Nintendo Halo that may cause their games to receive more favorable ratings than other studios due to nostalgia or other factors. Stopping you right there. If you put Halo on Nintendo, that would totally get good ratings. Do you think the reverse may be true for David Cage, especially in light of more recent allegations against him in Quantic Dream? I do, Mr. Jared Petty taking shots of David Cage before he even played the game. Yeah. Well, for me, I'm not going to get...

here caught up in the metatextual narrative around that because I am not deeply enough informed to speak intelligently about it here. Yeah. I'm talking purely about the storytelling chops in the past where his way of making games is David Cage is not subtle. He's not a subtle storyteller, not consistently. He is very much a,

is kind of what would happen if like Sherlock Holmes and Jerry Bruckheimer had a baby. It would come out looking like a David Cage game. And that's, it's weird and funny and strange. The stuff outside of that, I'm not afraid to talk about. I'm just not as well researched as I should be here to answer that question. So when I make fun of Cage, I am talking about his video game making legacy, which is

Really weird. I do think this exists. I was talking to somebody else who I haven't mentioned the show because I know I've named a lot of names here. I was talking to somebody else who was playing Detroit for review and the conversation was man. I'm really enjoying it and I really didn't want to because I don't like David Cage and

Huh? And it's like, damn, like, yeah, that's and I don't I should say playing. I don't think they were reviewing and they definitely want to let that influence their review if they did, but it was the thing of like that's a real thing that like, you know, for how do you separate the art from the artist? Can you should you all these different arguments questions? No, I do think that

based on the way David Cage has acted in an interview, the allegations, the past games. There's baggage that comes with him. The power of creators can affect how we consume our product. It doesn't always. We give some people passes. We do that individually. And we don't just get passes. We make judgments. We sit and go, no, I'm willing to trade this for this.

I used to love watching football. I think I'm done with it after yesterday. Pro football. I think I'm just finished. And I'm not making a large political statement there. It's just I don't want to buy what those owners are selling.

Even though it's a quality product. It's the news. They put out a statement basically saying that you can no longer not kneel during the anthem. Yeah, and they're free to make that decision, but I don't have to buy it. And I don't like that decision enough that it's affecting the way I think about it. So I don't want to rant about that. But I think that when it comes to any product, when we know a lot about the creator or the creators...

it can absolutely and legitimately affect the way we perceive the art. I mean, I think about every time I read a Norse and Scott Card story, I go, wow, this guy's a really good storyteller. And wow, he sure is not someone I feel very comfortable enjoying his work. H.P. Lovecraft, who was absolutely a maniacal, horrible racist and wrote amazing horror.

And he did both. Both those things are true about him. He did both of them really well. That's how I want to put it. But I mean, it's like that guy was really racist and it made it into his writing a lot. And yet his horror defined a generation of storytelling. Both those things are true about him. If somebody says to me, I'm never reading Lovecraft again because he's a racist. I'm not going to sit there and go, well, you should know. Yeah, I get that.

And there are certain people I won't touch because of... I can't really speak to it just because I haven't been in the games industry like you guys have. Although in the one year I murdered the number one game journalist. It's hard. It was just a wide open field. You came and took it over. Rocket ship to the top of the ice cap. Yeah, I can't really speak to it. I know that...

When I was in high school, I thought that Indigo Prophecy was one of the coolest games I'd ever played. Yeah. Just because it was this new idea, right? This new sort of...

um, 24 TV show style, like multiple cameras showing you what's happening at the same time. And it's just weird. Starts off very weird where you, you wake up and you just killed a guy and you don't know how that happened, right? Like this is really, really intriguing sort of thread. Um, and, and then heavy rain happened and I really enjoyed that game, right? Um,

Didn't mess with Beyond Two Souls or whatever. But I just never really looked into David Cage as a person. So I don't really... I can't speak to if he's been rude to people in interviews or the work environment stuff that's been going on recently. Yeah, I mean, to dial it back, I mean, even before toxic workplace shit, I think there was just... There was definitely rumors and definitely people in the industry shit-talking the fact that he was just pompous.

that he just acted like his shit didn't stink. And I'm talking about other developers I would talk to who are like, oh, that guy. Like, I don't mean it to be like, he was fucking pushing old ladies in the street or something. Kevin's over here pointing at my phone. I forgot that Andy's back in a few. Oh. We're putting a Shaq interview in this? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, awesome. Well, you know, speaking of number one games journalist.

We have an interview with the one and only Shaquille O'Neal. Of course, Detroit Become Human. Thumbs up. Everybody should go play it. Yeah, I recommend you play it. I think what we might do is when we come back, when we take this break here to insert the Shaq thing, I want to look at the review embargo and see if we can do spoilers because I would love just to talk to you about what actually happened. Yeah, yeah. We'll tag that. Again, if you're a listener or something, don't panic yet. There will be a very clear, hey, we're going to spoil things. But for right now, let's check in with number one.

Sports journalist number one twitch streamer number one video game journalist Yeah, Andy Cortez and the one and only Shaquille O'Neal. Hey, what's up guys? It's me Andy Cortez the number one games journalist in the whole world We're here with the big Shaq this big Aristotle. I knew you were number one. You knew your old number one, right? No, I just know you are the diesel Superman

Shaq Fu the Legend Reborn. We're here with Shaquille O'Neal everybody. We're really excited about this. We're here to talk about Shaq Fu the Legend Reborn, the new video game. But first I'd like to go back to 1994. Shaq Fu had just come out. You are dominating the NBA in your second year, averaging 21, 29 and 11 actually. 29 and 11? 29 and 11, yeah. 2.4 blocks. Pretty good for your second year, right? Yeah, pretty good.

And it's 1994. Is that the height of celebrity where you are not only killing it in the NBA but you also have your own video game? It wasn't the height but it was me starting to learn how to maximize my potential. And the crucial mistake I made with the first video game is I haven't heard of the word digital yet. Everything I was still doing was analog.

because I used to play Sega games in college and there were the block figures and this and that so I figured that was still the norm and then I created Shaq Fu on the death of analog and the birth of digital and I didn't know what digital was and then that same year it came out with all these different games and different graphics and Shaq Fu got kind of lost in the rubble but he's back now. He's back. Just broke my sternum. How was this game pitched to you?

The new game or the old game? The new game. Shaq Fu, the legendary boy. A couple of friends of mine said, hey, we need to redo Shaq Fu. One of the designers and gamers played it when he was a youngster. He thought it was a cool game. And he said, we want to bring it back. And for years I was like, nah, nah, nah. I don't want to do it because having kids, you see...

You see different graphics, you see different technology. Every time a new game comes out, I'm just amazed at what's going on. I didn't want to go through the same mistake, but he finally convinced me, and it's been a couple years in the making, and I think people would like the finished product. Fantastic. So 1994 obviously was a pretty big moment of celebrity for you, but now in 2018, not only do you have this new game coming out, you're also in this new Uncle Drew movie, and you are also...

one of the stars of probably my favorite basketball analysis shows, NBA on TNT. What sort of, how do you compare those levels of stardom? I don't compare them. I've never considered myself a superstar. Just a regular guy that works hard. I listen to the powers around him. I have a Cynthia, I have a Lucille, I have an Uncle Jerome, I have an Uncle Mike. They keep me out of trouble. They guide me down the right path.

And, you know, everything is great. And we always live by the simple slogan of it could be worse. Sure, sure. So there's a lot of guys in my position that when they get done playing, they don't have anything to do. So, you know, the fact that I'm still working and I still own things, I'm smart enough to do the right thing most of the time, it's very refreshing. But again, I have a panel that always makes me look good. But I've never considered myself one of those big-time superstars. Just a guy that listened.

and people recognize me. What character would you rather play as? Or what character do you think is the best gaming athlete? Shaq in Shaq Fu: Legend Reborn, Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl, Michael Vick in Madden 2004.

Or Michael Jordan in the 1994 Super Nintendo Classic, Chaos in the Windy City. Well, Shaq Fu was a better game. Shaq Fu, clearly, right? Clearly, by far. Did you think that .4 second shot was going to go in against the Spurs? I'm a big Spurs fan, and you really kind of broke my heart that game. No, I was kind of upset because Duncan was killing us all night, but I wasn't guarding him. So I told Phil, I got him.

I was all over him. He hit that fall away shot. It was incredible. It was a bullshit shot, but he hit it. I mean, I was all over him. I was saying to myself, he's not going to score on me. I was right in his face, and he threw it, and it went in. I was like, damn. Yeah. I ran around my house. I thought the game was over. Yeah, I did too. And then Phil called a play for Kobe. I was the second option for Spoonflop. They doubled him, right? Yeah, they doubled him. And I wasn't open, and then they left Fish open. He got it and threw it in.

And then that's when I say one lucky shot begets another lucky shot. Yeah, exactly. I love the back and forth that you and Charles Barkley have on NBA, on TNT. One thing, you're always sort of jabbing him, hey, I have rings, you don't. It's not a jab, it's a fact. It is a fact, correct. Yeah, absolutely. But one thing that you don't bring up enough and I think is good ammo for your arsenal is that

Shaq Fu is still talked about today right now because of the new game but because of how it just has a sort of this this resonance amongst gamers, but Nobody talks about Charles Barkley's shut up and jam on the 1994 in 1994 on the Sega Genesis Nobody talks about that video game. Yeah, he had again. I didn't know that it's like Google. It's crazy Yeah, so I think the call shut up and jam shut up and jam Charles Barkley shut up and jam. I

Nobody played it. And so I think you killed it because we're still talking about Shaq Fu and he's not. Shut up and jam. Yeah. You're also a spokesperson for the General. What's he like? The General is very... Is he a cool guy? Cool guy. He's not that small. He has a lot of muscles. That's what I thought. He's a nice guy. Really nice guy. Fantastic.

You know what's crazy? Sometimes when I'm out, people ask me, where's the general? But I have no idea where the general is at. You know, like he's a real guy. Oh, I thought... Yeah, hey, where's the general? Well, I don't know. I thought it was just based off a real person. Okay, do you have any words of advice for me? Well, I just hit 30 years old, Shaq.

But I still feel like I could come off a bench and play meaningful minutes in a playoff game I still have this NBA fever dream, you know, I'm only like six foot one Maybe maybe some people might say five six just tell you if you're dreaming about making an NBA you need to wake up right now Okay, wake up

Aw, man. All right, well. Wake up. Thank you, Shaq. I appreciate it, guys. It's not that easy. I appreciate your words of advice. I'm still going to keep trying, though, because I still feel like I got hustle. Thanks for watching, guys. Tune in. He's the number one guy. Number one games journalist, Greg Miller. Tim Getty's back to you, man.

Wow, what a great interview. Whoa. The funny thing is that the interview is great, obviously, but you did a morning show where you talked about all the shenanigans surrounding it. Yeah. So you go to youtube.com slash kind of funny. Check all that out. All right. Also, while we were cut away, we read the thing for what we are allowed to spoil. We cannot. We cannot talk. Yeah, it's very clear. Like, please don't talk about all the endings at the end. Oh, sure. Okay. We shouldn't talk about all the endings of the end. We won't do that. We don't know. Spoiler cast for that. Not yet. Yeah, exactly. One day, though, we'll get to there. Sure. Maybe.

When are we allowed to? It just says, please don't spoil that for your viewers. They say readers, of course, because they're old people. They're old fogies like Kevin. I like reading. I'm young. It's your birthday. Kevin, you turn 38 tomorrow. 38. And you look 44, Kevin, to be honest. Oh, y'all shut up. Here we go. Because you

Yeah. I mean, honestly, here's the thing. I feel like we could do it because it'll be out. Oh,

Oh, that's the hitch probably because it's Thursday still. The review embargo. Everyone doesn't have the game. That's right. We should just say Games Daily next week. We'll do a Games Daily where you just come in and we cap it off that way. All right. Is that okay? Look how cool this looks. Look how cool this looks because I spin it and when I push it down and I could. Oh, wow. That is actually cool. That is really cool. I do like that. While Andy spins his phone, let me tell you this episode.

What the kind of funny games cast is brought to you by Blue Apron. Ladies and gentlemen, I don't even need the sheet to talk about it at all. You know why? I love Blue Apron. Andy, do I love Blue Apron? He loves it. Kevin, I need you to go to Google and I need you to open Instagram.com slash GameOverGreggy and bring up last night's meal I cooked with Blue Apron last night. When are you going to make me some shrimps, huh? Whenever you want to come back over. You don't talk to me at work anymore. I did this seared steak.

with roasted potatoes and caper aioli. For some reason, it didn't talk about the kale in there, but I put it in my Instagram post here. Here it is. Kevin's gonna show the people watching. - Ooh, yummy. - I love Blue Apron. You know I have a cooking show, Cooking with Greggie, youtube.com/kindoffunny. I do a bunch of different recipes. What I love about Blue Apron is it just makes it simple for me, that I get to come home, I got step-by-step instructions,

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Good, really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it did it in a very interesting way that I wasn't, that I've never done it before. And when Jen was eating it, we always like to eat our food and then immediately critique it as we go. Okay. And so she was trying to guess what I did. She's like, oh, you blanched this and you did this. I'm like, no, what they have you do is right. Do the steak in the frying pan, sear both sides, pop the steak off, let it cool on the cutting board. You got the fond of the steak still on the pan.

toss in the kale toss in the garlic toss in a little bit of this sherry vinegar okay then toss in a fourth cup of water then cover it with aluminum foil then toss it around every few seconds not seconds but a minute or so or whatever and for four minutes to get to the consistency like salt pepper it's amazing blue apron is amazing learn how to cook everybody get out there blue apron

Offers 12. I already said that part. Go check out this week's menu. Get your first three meals free with blueapron.com slash gamescast. That's blueapron.com slash gamescast. Blue Apron, a better way to cook. Tell them Greg sent you. There's no way to say that, but you can do it.

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Jared. Yes, sir. I feel like we've let the show run away with our Detroit stuff. Yeah, that's okay. That's all right. No, it's not. I want to know what have you been playing? Well, I really missed you last week. Had a lot of fun with Andy and Kevin hearing about their 2018 games of the year so far. We talked about a couple of games we were playing then. I really enjoyed Walden, which I think is very interesting. And Walden kind of- What book is it based on? That's based on Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Okay. Life in the Pond, or Life in the Woods, pardon me. It's a really interesting experience. Talked about that.

And that's what led into my next one I've been playing this week. So I discovered Walden through each and every weekday on Kind of Funny Games Daily. We do a list of the games that are coming out today. There's a very long name for that that I can't recite from memory. I bet you probably can't. Oh, no. That's why I have you guys say it. Yeah, so we have this list every day. And I encountered Walden the game through that while talking with him. I'm like, that's an odd name. And the developer reached out and suddenly was like, whoa, this is a really cool thing.

We also have noted several times on Games Daily, I'm always there when the Switch releases come out on Thursdays, that Johnny Turbo's arcade. Yeah.

Keeps releasing titles on Switch that we kind of mention and then move on. And I started to wonder just who is Johnny Turbo? Thank you for asking that question because I've been wondering myself. Well, I found out who Johnny Turbo is. Okay. Johnny Turbo, not just the mascot for marketing the TurboGrafx-16 in America in the early 1990s, but also a completely different entity, a human being person who has created a number of

emulated releases of old Data East arcade games on Switch. So these Johnny's Turbo arcade games are actually old arcade machines with very good emulation done on the Switch handheld in a format. And some of these are games that haven't gotten too many wide releases in other packages before, at least not in a long time, and certainly not portably. So I played two Johnny's Turbo arcade games this week. One of those you may know as Bad Dudes. Oh!

Oh, Bad Dudes. That's right. Bad Dudes versus Dragon Ninja. Distinct for being, to my knowledge, the only...

Major video game mentioned by Steve Martin in a motion picture. Which motion picture? That would be Parenthood, where he mentions his boys playing bad dudes. It's like, well, I guess that's why they call them bad dudes. Is that the one where he has like 12 kids? No, that's Cheap Brother Doesn't. No, that's Cheap Brother Doesn't. Parenthood's the one where they throw away the retainer and they gotta dig it out of the Chuck E. Cheese and stuff. Yeah, Parenthood's actually a pretty good movie, if I remember right. It's been a long time since I've watched it. It's got Bill S. Preston, I believe, in it.

Does it? Let's see. That's Bill is. Which one's Keanu? No, Ted. Ted Theodore Logan. I'm sorry I got mixed up. Okay. It's got Keanu in it. Oh. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's like the deadbeat boyfriend. He's like, we can record our love. Yeah. How old is it? It's old. Oh, shit. Never mind. But it mentions Bad Dudes versus Dragon Ninja, which is a late 80s arcade brawler.

Uh, and it is exactly as you remember it. It's walking to the right and punching ninjas for many, many stages. Okay. Uh, it's a good emulation. It's interesting. I had a lot of fun. I played it on a train ride. You could, you know, you can pump as many quarters in as you want, which is kind of how bad dudes is made to be played anyway. Cause there are parts that are absolutely designed to eat your quarters. Um,

But it was fun. It's a good implementation of an old game. He's not remaking the wheel here, but it looks good. It controls well. It's fun. It sounds good. I had a lot of fun with it. So if you liked Bad Dudes and you want to team up with a friend or play it on the go, good way to do it. What if I've never played Bad Dudes? Should I have to go play Bad Dudes? Bad Dudes is not a lost classic. No, it really is kind of a derivative brawler. It's kind of like if Double Dragon and Shinobi had a baby.

It's a must play if you want to understand memes on the internet. Yeah. Like if you want to play that, exactly. The Ronald Reagan. Have you played it, Andy? No, I have not. Okay. Yeah. The only video game I can think of off the top of my head also that has Ronald Reagan at the end, uh, going out to have a hamburger with some bad dudes.

Yeah. Let's go get a burger, dudes. You got to rescue Ronnie. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue Ronnie? No, I guarantee I'm not. The Japanese name Bad Dudes versus Dragon Ninja. Definitely my favorite. I think in Japan it's just Dragon Ninja. The other game from Johnny Turbo's arcade that I sampled is Super Burger Time, a very rare...

arcade game. The sequel to or one of the many sequels because BurgerTime has a weird, strangely convoluted family tree. It's like Detroit where it's just exactly like that. Yeah, because you have Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory and they have the weird Intellivision exclusive sequel and then you have Super BurgerTime. David Cage is not proud of this one.

You guys ever play BurgerTime? Never. BurgerTime's fun. The original BurgerTime is a ridiculously difficult but very good precision arcade game. It's one of those games that, like, if you die, it's your fault and you're angry and you throw your controller and then you go back and you play again because if you can really master BurgerTime, you've accomplished something. You'll be like, whoa, I have...

poured way too many hours into being chased around a map by little eggs and wieners. Yeah, there's dancing wieners. If I had a nickel. I get chased around by dancing wieners all the time. Well, I don't remember exactly the context, but I remember there was a video at IGN somebody made once. I was in it where they were talking about the nightmarishness of BurgerTime, describing what they thought of the horror, the nightmare of being chased around by giant wieners.

to what somebody wrote in the comments, not to be ironic, but for some of us, being chased by giant wieners is actually a good dream. Fair point. Yeah. So BurgerTime's really good. Super BurgerTime's interesting. Had you played it before? Yeah, but only through emulation and ages ago.

Are they going to say it's interesting? There's some deep lore? No, because it's sort of a remake of BurgerTime. It gives you way more weapon agency. There's a lot more enemies, but you also have the ability to hurt them more. It scrolls, which the original BurgerTime didn't do. BurgerTime's about making giant hamburgers, and it's all about chaining.

That's what makes it fun. To be bad at BurgerTime, you die quickly. To be mediocre at BurgerTime, you can survive. To be good at BurgerTime, you learn to chain combos and crush enemies and build multipliers, and you can build these insane scores. So it's the kind of game you can get. It's like pinball. You can get really, really good at it if you practice a lot. Super BurgerTime has a lot of that in it, but it's a little more forgiving and has continues. You can pump quarters in. Oh, okay. Sounds good.

It's fun. Again, it's not like a lost classic, but it is a game that has not been widely available before. And I like that Johnny Turbo is bringing this out. I say Johnny Turbo, well done. There's some other games in that arcade. Those are the two I played this week from that. Sly Spy, which is kind of a neat little spy arcade games on there. They're eight bucks each. That's... That seems steep. Right. That's the hard part for...

That's how much it costs, I believe, to make these games and have a chance of making money on them. You buy a big compilation disc, a video game, 20 things from some publisher, they're very in quality. But these are games that folks were not putting a lot of time into or effort into before necessarily. And to have them on the go like this, that sounds like a boutique price, but I think it's about what it costs.

Okay. Costs make this happen. Okay. And so I say go Johnny Turbo. I'm looking forward to see what he has available next. Super Burger Time or Taco Master? Super Burger Time doesn't have platinum. Taco Master got platinum. Yeah, there's that too. Super Burger Time's fun. I think I prefer original Burger Time still because it's so difficult, but Super Burger Time you can certainly play longer.

Now you're thinking about Sushi Strikers. Yeah, come on. I don't know anything about that. What's that? Sushi Strikers? Don't know anything about it. I'll show it to you when we get it. Sushi Strikers is cool. Demo's up, I think, right now, actually. Yeah, Sushi Strikers is neat looking. I really think that's radical.

So I hope I didn't rant too long about that. You didn't. I invited you to. I'm glad you did. Invited the rant. You got one final game, right? Yeah. I mean, as always, there's been Red Dead because I play the Red Dead Radio every week and I am a slave of desert golfing. Yeah, of course. So I must continue on through that. Rapidly approaching 2,000 holes. Jesus Christ. So getting on my way there.

But the other game I've really enjoyed is Indie Creates Bloodstained. You just got this last night. You've already played a lot. Yeah, I played quite a bit. I mean, not like hours and hours, but I got as much in as I could before I realized I need to sleep. Yeah. It's really fun. Have either of you guys pre-ordered Bloodstained?

I haven't pre-ordered it, but I told you I got a code. I played the first level last night. And I was like, okay, I see what you're doing here. It seems for me, someone who doesn't have that affinity for 8-bit games and remembers trying Castlevania people's houses and just being like, man, this is too heavy and I'm dying all the time. It seems like it reminds me of kind of Axiom Verge and the thing of like, oh, wow, this is clearly inspired by, you know, obviously Super Metroid for Axiom Verge.

It's inspired by Castlevania and it's approachable for me. Same thing of a Shovel Knight, right? This is approachable in a way that has modern tendencies to a classic idea. It does. It feels like it has that learning curve built in a little bit. The earlier Castlevanias didn't as much. Later Castlevanias got easier. But the 8-bit Castlevanias are just viciously difficult. The first and third, especially 2, is not too bad.

And this one kind of eases you in more, which I really like. It's a really smart, you know, people hear me talk about old games a lot. Most old games are bad. Thank you for finally saying it. Yeah, tons of old games are awful. The ones I talk about are the good ones. The Castlevania 1 and Castlevania 3 are both bona fide masterpieces. This one draws from the best parts of those and then adds to it modern game design, which is what they did. Inti Creates did Mega Man 9. That's what it did.

It's like they're doing. They're a talented group. They did great stuff in Mega Man 9. My favorite Mega Man. That's right. I like it more than two. Okay. I like it more than X. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I like X, but I like 2, 3, 9, and 10 more than I'm dying of thirst. I'm going to go get some LaCroix. You should get some LaCroix. Can we bring me another place? I'm going to bring it for the group. All right. Group LaCroix coming.

Do you have any interest in this thing, Andy? Have you seen it yet? I did see that. I saw them when they were here, actually. And they were showing us the very limited NES color palette. Yeah. Which is really cool. Similar to what Shovel Knight did, where it's like, we're trying to be as authentic with this as possible. Yeah. Shovel Knight created, like, they cheated a lot, but they gave you that vibe. They gave you that feel. IndieCreates really does seem to have kind of doubled down. Is it 4-3 ratio? No, it's widescreen.

And, I mean, it does a lot of flubs. There's some stuff in there that's definitely cheated on, but it creates that vibe of a legitimate game. And it feels very specifically like a game crafted around Konami's proprietary VRC6 chip, the one that was used in Castlevania III in Japan. It's got this kind of neat color palette, this cool parallax scrolling effects and background things. It feels like just right there at the end when NES games and Famicom games were just...

blurring the line to 16-bit, but still had these kind of glaring things they just couldn't do. They embrace that, and they make the game feel that way. There's not a lot of enemies on screen at once most of the time, but what's there looks really good. The art direction's superb. The weapon design is great. Multiple characters, and...

As soon as you start playing through, you see stuff, you're like, I can't get in there. I can't get up there. I can't go through this thing. I just burst a wall, but I can't go under. Well, it's because there's multiple characters. As you play through the game, you pick them up, then you go back and play through earlier levels, and suddenly there's new pathways available and new stuff to find, and

I'm not done with it by a long shot, but my initial impressions are very cool. It is, obviously, there's been some talk about the fact that it didn't get out on all platforms as quickly as they wanted for people who had ordered it already on Kickstarter. I was a backer like that. They did the best they could by releasing Steam keys for those people to give them time to play until it came out across all platforms. I was playing on Steam right now. Sounds like that Mighty No. 9 problem. Yeah, and I'm not going to touch out on the 10-foot fall.

Alright, so that's me talking about an old game for a long time. I don't know, Greg, are you going to play it anymore, do you think? Eventually. There's so much stuff coming and stacking up on Switch right now for me that I'm excited about. West of Loathing's right there. Sushi Strikers is right around the corner. Everything will stop for Mario Tennis Aces. The demo's out right now, right, for Tennis Aces? Oh, is it? I thought I saw some people in the morning show chat telling us about it.

I have not turned on my switch in a long time. Really? Yeah. I'm missing out, man. Because, you know, Kevin, I don't know if you've been keeping up on the thing. We're dancing around here on what we've been playing. The names are there, obviously, but we've been dancing around. I've been taking notes for you. I can update you after the fact. I'm being better than Tim is what I'm saying. I'm coining out that I'm better than Tim, all right, Kevin? Kevin, do you hear me saying I'm better than Tim?

Yeah, I think I'm keeping up, but thank you for keeping notes. I got notes for you, baby. What I want to say then is that for me, I want to jump around and throw to the front garage. I talked about that when I got it. The zombie game or zombie fight humans hotline Miami mixed up with survival horror or whatever. Oh, right. You saw this at a GDC. Yeah, and it came out and I started playing. I got it and started it like the night before the last games cast was on then went away. It's the first switch game in a while and this is not

meant to be a knock against switch all because everybody knows i love my switch but it's the first game in a while where i've been like man i'm so into this pop in the dock and actually play it on the tv rather than get home and be like well i need i want to play whatever else on my playstation so or like i want to do this on xbox so i'll do get this later it's been like oh fuck i actually want to play this it's fun it's it is hotline mammy zombies you know what i mean which is like good for and it's like it's

incredibly indie you know i mean it's from it's published by tiny build there's a different developer working i forget their name off the top of my head but like i was at this one tough part trying to figure out what to do and jen was in the other room she's like the sound effects are awful because it's like it's like the same like can dying and noise but like it's charming in that respect and it's small and it's easy and not easy it's small and it's simple

That's everything I need in life is what you're describing. Yeah, get a shotgun and go shoot some fucking zombies. And like the checkpoints are plentiful enough that I feel like encouraged to fuck around when I play it rather than like, oh, I want to save my ammo. I want to do this. I'll go do this. And they do a couple weird things like drugs that are like, you know, you can see through walls at certain... How's the music? It's all right. It's fine. It's not like... It's not like Hotline Miami or that or anything. It's very much a... It...

is trying to do a lot of those things not doing them as well but doing it in a way that i keep wanting to play it but i keep coming back to it right and i've jumped around i have a whole bunch of things on the switch that i've been jumping between but like that's the one i actually put time into in do but i just downloaded a couple other things i keep carrying the switch with me because i feel like every day some other game that i wanted on the switch has finally come to the switch and i got to get there

However, I was gone at judges week those embargoes of course for games I saw before e3 most of them lift the week of e3 So I'll probably do another videos like the five best things I saw before even through e3 even started But the PlayStation bar goes are all up from the PlayStation event there. So first and foremost played days gone I'm super in like it. I think I wouldn't say I never would have told you I had no excitement for days gone But it was that thing of is

Is it just another million zombies running at me? I mean, I know it's Sony Bend, who I like. I know that it's Sam Witwer, who's friend of the show. There's a million reasons on paper you should like it. It's weird. I just feel like this game has been set up with so many things opposing it for no real reason. No, the real reason is the fact that, oh man, it kind of looks like Last of Us, right? Oh, there's zombies. You know what I mean? That's the reason I think people are...

Can Sony have two zombie games? What's going on with this? I think that's been the biggest thing. I think it hasn't. Even playing it was my big thing. And when we talked about it, Andrea and I on Games Daily, somebody wrote in and was like, well, do you agree with the people who are saying it's the people who haven't played it? The audience is saying, hey, man, this reminds us so much The Last of Us. And then people are playing it and saying it doesn't remind us The Last of Us. Yes, that's how me and Andrea both felt.

And for me, and I think this is the biggest compliment I can pay the game. For me, the game it reminds me of is Red Dead Redemption. Because for me, it was like, all right, start the game. Dropped into beautiful Oregon. And it's like dark and like, but I'm in the woods and all this stuff. I'm at a camp. It's like somebody else's camp. I talked to this woman who wants me to go get zombie ears, whatever. But then I did a thing where I just wandered around camp and looked at other people. I mean, freakers. Sorry, my apologies. Freakers.

Thanks. And saw their names pop up and saw... And it was that thing of... I think I was expecting NPCs on the level of an infamous game where they start repeating and like no one repeated in this camp. Everyone looked like they were there with a purpose. They were there with a reason. They were there with a backstory. And then to get on the bike and ride out into the open world and be like, wow, this

so much cool shit is happening here that isn't the story, right? I went and I did the story mission, which was go over here, do this thing, bring up the thing for this guy. But then, you know, I got the gas for my motorcycle and you know what? I'm going to ride in this direction. Like I didn't read that the first time I read that I'm going to ride in this direction. Just took off the opposite direction of the objective.

Was going and as I'm driving, I see something. I stop and it was a trip wire across the road. And so I went over there and like it pops up like you want to cut the wire and I cut the wire. And sure enough, two dudes run out with guns and I get into a gunfight with them, right? Kill them, loot their supplies, get on my bike. And then I was like, well, now I want to go up that hill.

Just went up that hill and got up there. And there was two other guys up there with their backs to me when I got up there. I was like, oh, fuck. And I started shooting them. They started shooting me. But what they were doing was they were spying on the horde down there. And so the horde heard the gunshots. And now they were all running up here to get me. And they started getting there. I shot them for a while. And there was too many. Jumped on my motorcycle. And then I was like, you know what? Let's just fuck around with their logic.

drove around them kind of hurting the horde and like going a little bit and having them chase me and seeing and i sure enough yeah i could totally lead these guys do an enemy encampment if i wanted like you just give them a little bit time and go and it was just like

The thing I keep saying about it is the world feels so lived in. The world feels like it's telling me stories and that it doesn't revolve around me, which is what I want. When I stopped in a, I was trying to find more gas. So I, which I, this is my one thing is I don't know it. I'll put a pin in that one. I was trying to find more gas and I drove through a tunnel, got out and I went into like, you know, this door when another door open this thing and I'm just going in random places looking around for stuff. Open one like door that's in this tunnel or this office in a tunnel and there's a guy who hanged himself.

And it was just like, oh, there's no reason, and maybe there will be later on, but there's no reason for me to come in here so far. The game would tell me. It's just something they put there to be like, hey, this guy's story ended here. There was a game that happened here. Environmental storytelling. That's one of my favorite things in video games. There's an old NES game called Gimmick. There's this boat you're supposed to get on. And if you run past this 8-bit platform, or if you run past the boat, it scrolls over, and there's this beautiful seashore.

with birds flying off the distance. And all the art there is pretty much just drawn for that one little moment because somebody thought maybe you'd want to stand here and watch the birds. And that in an era when that didn't happen, that jumps out so much. The fact that somebody's just like, this closet shouldn't be empty.

So what would be in it that makes sense and is going to speak to somebody? That's really, really cool. I couldn't – I was not particularly interested in it. You made the Red Dead comparison, and I turned into a GM soldier and went like bleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exclamation point over my head now. I like this. Maybe it won't be founded by then, or it will be an unfounded opinion. But yeah, it's just – what it did, pulling the pin back out of the thing from a while ago, right, is that for me, I think it's one of the reasons I'm not feeling stated to K2.

And State of Decay 2 is so much just State of Decay 1 again. And Days Gone is borrowing the elements I really like from State of Decay, but putting it into an open world, beautiful, you know, story driven game. Whereas like, yeah, I don't mind getting gas for my bike or like, yeah, my bike's going to break down. I'm going to need to go get supplies to fix it. That's cool. Right. And then like State of Decay is all the time. These motherfuckers ate food or they stole my supplies. And it's like, how's that motion blur?

On Days Gone? Yeah. It's there. Cool. There's motion happening. But I don't know. I was more impressed with Days Gone than I thought I'd be. I feel like the way that you're describing sort of herding this zombie horde and having all these systems with the environment, it seems like sort of a Breath of the Wild-ish playground where in Breath of the Wild you could play with the weather. Is there anything like that where...

you can sort of just craft your own thing with you know and we see all these crazy videos with people doing hilarious shit with bokoblins and sure sure sure like it seems like there might be something like that maybe i didn't i mean i didn't get that deep into it to know if that's an actual possibility you know i mean it was pretty clear like shotgun i'm using on these guys with that yeah you know the bike you know they stopped they didn't stop my demo but the guys from bend over there know me obviously so they came over like in case it's not clear like

You're on the worst bike. This is the starter bike. This is, you know, you'll get a better because it was like not going super fast, but I was still taking it off. Sweet jump. I'm just hoping they embrace the opportunity to have you get the best bike climb on and then Bon Jovi's like Steel Horse starts playing. I'm picturing you like taking zombie hordes to any enemy encampment similar to

In Breath of the Wild where you have like the... You see those clips of the big Moblin fighting...

the guardians, right? Yeah. Like you sort of leave them together. Then you just sort of watch this fight and see when you see what, what the AI does to each other. Totally. Yeah. I totally see myself doing that with, yeah, there's a bunch of bad guys over there. Why not go kick this bees nest and bring them over? Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. I think bees live in the hive too, by the way. Um, played a bunch of other stuff there. Uh, I've talked about it here and there. I play that Astro bot rescue mission. This is, they had a bunch of PlayStation VR stuff. These are the little robots from the play link, uh,

VR demo kit or whatever. Remember the guys who came in your controller and you threw them around? Playroom. That's what I'm talking about. Not just VR. It's a platformer with them. It's very cute. Gave me the Moss vibe in terms of like, cool, it's a platformer with traditional controls that I'm controlling the little guy with a cape, but then also like lean your head and look left. You're the fly on the wall sort of observing. Well, not even that. Just like having to lean into a regular video game level and look around to figure out where to go and how to get stuff like that. It seemed fun. It seems like it'd be a good Platinum.

Played more Firewall Zero Hour, our game from PSX. Hell yeah. It was a new build. It looked way better. Like, I mean, graphically it looked way better. It had a way better interface. And I think the biggest, or not even, the coolest thing for us, I think to people at PSX saw, this is, of course, is the PlayStation VR 4V4 Rainbow Six thing where you're all in it with guns.

When we got there, a bunch of the other judges were like, you're a PlayStation guy. What should we see? And I was like, this, that, and that's cool. And so people came back from that one and were like, holy shit, that was awesome. And people who I don't think usually play PlayStation VR. Like, man, Firewall actually was really rad. So that's exciting. I want to see more of that. That's good. That's awesome. Blood and Truth was there. It was a new level as well. That's the one I always talk about where I threw back the grenade in VR. It was like a Guy Ritchie film, like Snatch or whatever. This was a less impressive demo. This was more of just shooting and stuff, but it was fun.

They had Creed there. Boxing game looked not good. Oh, yeah. I heard about that. Yeah, it's out now. It just looked like the latest Mike Tyson boxing one for Wii U or whatever. Like that kind of graphic style. But then in VR, I was like... So you can't have Creed fight Rocky? Not that I could see. Maybe eventually. You know what I mean? Dreams was there, but it was the PSX demo. We got to use our hands. We got to play it. We can't use our hands. We got to play it hands-on, but... It's like a game for a baby. It was...

You got to use your hands. That's a baby's toy. But it was more dreams and I'm still interested and excited to see where that one ends up. Thanks for correcting the quote. No problem. I know where you're at. Elijah Wood. Back to the Future 2. That's right. That went over my head. The weakest point in the trilogy. I'm sorry. Remember we went to go see it?

What's that? You say Back to the Future 2 is the weakest part of the trilogy? Yeah. Dude, Back to the Future 3 is not a good movie. Back to the Future 3 is hardly stalwart. Hardly a stalwart motion picture, but Back to the Future 2 is worse. Never seen it? Never seen any of them, Kev. You've seen the first half. You've definitely seen the first half. We left, remember that? You've seen the first half of Back to the Future. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been the Kind of Funny Gamescast episode 172. Thank you so much for joining us. Ah...

By the time you get this, this will be old information, but it is breaking for us right now. While we were recording this, TotalBiscuit passed away. Oh.

I know a polarizing figure in the game's landscape, but was always very, very good to kind of funny. Was in our Twitch chat quite a bit. Had me on the show more than once. It was just a good friend. So, of course, rest in peace to him. And everybody be better to each other, obviously. I know that's a tired Greg Miller saying, but it plays on every side of it right here. So until next time, no, we love you.