Game Scoop! 843: Did an Extra $10 Kill a Franchise?

What's up everybody, welcome to IGN Game Scoop, I'm your host, Damon Hatfield, and joining me this week here in studio is Pierre Schneider. I'm your friend, Pierre Schneider. We are also joined by Sam Claiborne. I just want to point out this intro is completely unprompted. Unprompted. No prompter. And Justin Davis. Scoop. And we've got a great show for you this week. You've got unfortunate news that a couple of big games recently have underperformed, leaving their future up in the air. No, that's not true, actually. we know the future of one of them, and there's not much happening with that one. Also, a couple of them are both Metroid Prime 4, because this came out for Switch 1 and Switch 2. Yeah, that's true. I gotta believe. We also had this Nintendo Direct today, which is one of those that could have been an email, but there's still a couple interesting things to talk about. And also, I don't know if you guys heard, but PlayStation is coming for our jobs. So we'll see. We'll see. We'll see about that. I don't stand a chance. But first, Obsidian's the outer worlds two underperformed and there won't be a third which first of all if you remember i'm seeing our outer worlds two won a dami last year it was one of the top five dami games of the year okay so it didn't get the dami bump does the dami bump not mean anything it might it might cause the opposite it's possible that this was a financial decision that was made before the Damies and we always advise people not to do that. You can shift your fiscal year to actually be any quarter you want. You might as well just do it at the end of quarter one or quarter two. Safely accommodate the Damies. I guess I never understand why that team, if they're making games that are like Bethesda games, why don't they just make a Bethesda game? The ones that people buy because of their names. Good question. Like a new Vegas follow-up. Yeah. Like a little Fallout side story or little Elder Scrolls or something like that. If that's what it takes. If Microsoft owns Obsidian and Microsoft owns Fallout, there is nothing stopping them from making Fallout New Vegas 2. Nothing stopping them and also nothing stopping Xbox from just telling them to do it. Return to Vegas. You guys are on Fallout. Or, I have an idea, just slap the name on it. You already developed a Skyrim this year and a Fallout or Starfield type game. You have two games that you could just have retrofitted to be franchises and sold billions of copies. That said, I respect that they have their own artistic vision and these games are both really, really loved. This is a bar. That's the tough part. It's a really good game. I love this game. The world today is that people love franchises and it's hard for... It's hard to get people to try new things and name recognition counts for something. Now granted, this is the second game in the series already. So there is some name recognition, but the reality is some of our favorite games of all time are not the best-selling games of all time and so sure what do you do well you put mario in it right well so this is as part of a bloomberg interview obscenium revealed that last year's outer worlds 2 had underperformed a sequel is not in development which i think is a little bit strange to come out just three or four months after it was released and confirm you're not making a sequel why not just leave that up in the air because the sequel would be years and years down the road anyway yeah yeah maybe they're trying to get well i guess it's for investors right or yeah i guess so it's like you're taking your toys and going home a little bit for users it might be well you gotta better go back and play it now and show us yeah yeah but it's the opposite it's like don't like now maybe if it was backlogged people would be like i won't bother it feels like when you hear a tv show didn't isn't getting a second season you're like well i'm not gonna watch the first one you know yeah 100 yeah it's like that although if you think about obsidian they've now worked on this series for 10 years now and neither game has been a huge hit there doesn't seem to be a lot of like enthusiasm for this franchise so maybe they're just like okay whatever that's enough on to the next thing yeah that's fair yeah i it is a absolute miracle that they put this and avowed out in the same year and also and grounded to grounded to early access yeah i mean i didn't know and maybe this is public knowledge but i didn't know until the bloomberg reporting that avowed started life as a destiny like you know a multiplayer sort of you know we did it like we took one destiny like back for the single players and then it was it was stuck in development hell for years and years and got rebooted with a new director and then you know so it's like it came out and was like okay it's this reasonably scoped you know single player action rpg and not every game needs to be a million billion hours and it's like i didn't know that that game took like eight years to make and it's a miracle it came out at all um so that makes it even kind of all the more impressive sam what's the opposite of a miracle a shit show okay because i think that's more what last year was for obsidian i don't think they wanted to put three games out in one year in fact brandon adler who served as director in the outer worlds too it says i'm sorry it's um josh shawyer studio design director said it's not good to release three games in the same year it's the result of things going wrong no yeah yeah okay and then three marketing cycles for three different very like you know huge games but two kind of similar similar that's the issue too right true yeah yeah i also liked it bad uh and then brad brandon adler director on adler worlds 2 said i don't think anybody really likes five six seven year dev cycles nope no we don't like those well especially you think i mean we don't like it right because you have to wait a long time for a game but like it does it must be really tough to work on on a single project for that long that's a creative yeah like it's just horrible you know it's like movies you get to make one one movie a year basically if you're if you're involved and if you're an actor you can make a couple but you know directors they can cook out one a year well and the damage is exponentially higher when a game is takes that long to develop right and then that means you're not going to get another one you start making game today five years seems to be kind of the minimum for a triple a game so like you're like okay well i hope this franchise or this genre is popular in five years yeah i hope in five years time people have an appetite for what i'm starting to work on right now you know that's what we were just talking about for star wars outlaws right it's like you take this bet on like hey baby yoda's pretty popular star wars has another trilogy you know in the middle of it right now maybe that'll end good and it's like nope nobody likes star wars anymore all your money's gone i know and you're making it for playstation 5 and there's not going to be a playstation 5 when it when it comes out you'll be on ps6 and yeah it's um Yeah, it almost happened at GTA. And, of course, also, Xbox originally announced an $80 price tag for the Outerworld 2. Now, they eventually walked that back, but do you think it's a case where it did, or it soured people on the game already? I don't know. No? It was also on Game Pass, right? Yeah. I don't know. I think when they openly say it's a failure, that means people on Game Pass didn't play it either, right? I mean, there's this big subscriber audience there. it just didn't like people just maybe there was too much competition out there too many similar games and people just didn't have the time to play it as well I can't say this enough too like they got really lucky that there wasn't GTA at this time and everything and there was a kind of a quiet fall so it should have had good chances but man this would have made a great game to play in June you know just like everybody's home from school gotta play a single player big open game all the fall release windows is not helping games. They can hire some external company and port it to Switch 2 now. I'm surprised we didn't hear about it today. I wonder if also is there anything to the fact that Elder Worlds 1 was 2019 Elder Worlds 2 was 2025 and right in the middle was Baldur's Gate 3. Does that sort of like raise the bar for what people expect for an open world RPG where you have companions? Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. yeah yeah but look we got oblivion remastered and other things they're just there were a lot of things to play if you if you actually look back at last year right yeah yeah speaking of baldur's gate 3 sam do you have any updates yeah i started playing cairn okay well uh my update is that i played a little bit more baldur's gate i can continue to play it i have no problems with it um in fact i like it a lot but i did start playing cairn okay do you want me to talk about that uh Well, first, I want to share that I'm afraid my adventures in Balls of Gatty might have come to a premature end. I think I'm soft-locked in camp. I went to long rest, so I'm in camp. And to end the day and heal, you have to use your sleeping bag. But when I try to use the sleeping bag, it says, you can't fast travel right now. Uh-oh. And that's it. If I switch to another character and try to use the sleeping bag, no, you can't fast travel right now. So I don't know. If anyone in Scoop Nation has any tips, I'm not sure I can get out of my camp. I mean you can just blow on it I'll just blow on the data that's on my PS5 hard drive I'll fix it Did you try putting it in the refrigerator? Yeah, wrap a towel around it It sucks when there are these bugs that only you encounter in a video game and then there's no apparent solution I still cannot 100% Indiana Jones because there's that stupid bug with a wheel It's going to be out on Switch before you can beat it on Xbox Every time there's a patch, I'm like, nope. I cannot 100% it. But they acknowledge the bug that you had. Well, you could play it again. It's in all wiki. We describe how it happens. Maybe you could play it again on Switch 2 and finish it there. It's such a story-driven game. I don't feel like replaying it. Does that have cross-save? Just pick it up? Oh, okay. All right. So just pay for it again is what you're saying. That'll fix it. What and how is Cairn? okay so cairn is a climb everything and to be clear we're not saying cairn right no cairn yes but yes no it's c-a-i-r-n which means a pile of stones it's a so it's a climb everything um really difficult uh open world uh game about rocks did i sell anybody i got everybody there you got you got it so excited with the rocks i got it i got a nine out of ten on ign and you know other critics like it too. You know, you're climbing mountains. That's what it's about. It looks really fast. Well, you know, it has this kind of, you know, Dark Souls combat level of, like, movement where it's like you have to, like, find the seams and get the right stuff and everything. I actually turned on a little assist that tells you where your perfect hand grips are because once the game gets to a certain point and you want to do a bunch of extra stuff, that's been helpful. It's not like a... There's other options. Again, the game is very hard. So there's other options in there that will let you have more ways to save and stuff like that. But I didn't turn those on because they warn you in the game. This game is meant to be hard. If you turn these on, it kind of ruins it. So I didn't do that, but I turned it on. Anyway, so what you do in this game is you're exploring this cliff face and this mountain and cave system. It's shaky. Yeah. It's really bad when that happens. Is the leg shaking? It's jittery or because his muscles are exhausted? It's cramping. And so you can like press a button to like shake out one arm and breathe for a second and try again. But you have to be in a really good position to do that. Otherwise, you got to use these these anchor points, which you only have like a couple of. So if you run out of those cliff face, you're just never going to get there. Do you die in this game? You lose 15, 20 minutes. It's like it's like Dark Souls in that. Like you lose a long time. So you have to be really it gets really stressful. You know, when you're climbing. But what's cool is that the mountain's full of cool stuff. There's a backstory about, like, a troglodyte race that has, like, tombs and, like, you know, like, lore. It's, like, you know, in, like, some, you know, fake British or, sorry, fake European country. I don't know, Switzerland or France or something like that. You know, it's supposed to be, like, a cool lore thing. I know. So then they have all that. And then there's, like, secrets. And then there's, of course, what happens on Everest. Like, people die and they leave bodies everywhere. So you find these ghoulish scenes, and then you have to loot them and find cool stuff to use from a skeleton. It's fantastic. I love every minute of it. I've been helping make some guide pages for it because I found stuff so hard in it. But I don't know. Everybody on this show would love this game. It feels like the parts of Zelda that are like, I'm just going to get up this damn thing. And you just commit to it. And that's what the game is. with a lot of walking and running around segments that are not like that because you're exploring. But there's a great inventory management system. It's actually really good. Whatever you can cram into your bag, you can actually tamp it down by shaking your bag and cram more stuff into it organically. It's like if you feel like you can't get anything more, it's not because there's not a cube left. It's like you can squish stuff in there. It's so fun. What platforms? You need to carry and cook. What can I play this on? It's on PS5 and PC. Can you wear a hat in this? yeah you're wearing a hat the whole time it's like a knit hat but this you know Damon's going to cut this segment because as we all know I don't like any games and so whenever I talk about a game I like Metroid Prime 4 or something like we don't actually we cut it from the episode for this one I thought you guys might be interested I'm actually going to play it it's so good I have it downloaded I'm looking forward to starting I really do recommend turning on it's one thing all it does Right now, what you're looking for is corners and seams, and that's fine. But the game isn't perfect at that because if it's overhanging you a little bit, you can't really – unless you really spend a long time with each hand grip, then it's a little bit more annoying than just turning on this box that says, like, you got it. You got it. You need that. Also, rain, it sucked so bad that first time that happened. I was like, because I have Breath of the Wild in my mind, right? I'm like, everything's ruined. It's not so bad. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. You shouldn't climb like this, but it's funny if you do it. I was updating the IGN Playlist homepage, and I'm like, why is everybody playing this game? It was right at the top, so it must be popular. Are you playing on Steam Deck, Sam? No, I'm playing on PS5, and I would recommend playing on a controller because my hands are sweaty and cramping from how much I'm focusing on this game. I wouldn't want to do that on the Steam Deck, necessarily. Cool. That was not on my radar, but it looks good. Yep. I love it. I've also returned to Teardown. Anyone remember this one from a few years ago? Yes. Cool. This is the, like, Smash Everything Heist Minecraft graphics game. I guess I played it a couple years ago with Kingo because it was on PlayStation Plus. Then they removed it, which is super lame PlayStation. And Kingo was super bummed. So I've been waiting for a sale. And last week, the base game is $30. but last week the uh uh special edition whatever it's called was 20 i was like that doesn't make sense but whatever i'm sorry i got the this game is so goofy i got the special edition we've been playing that he lists it's like a perfect sandbox for kids because he doesn't even care about stealing the stuff he just wants to smash all the buildings he'll get in a van drive through a building and just laugh hysterically it's great oh that's great i'll let him play for a few minutes before bed and then after i put him to bed i come back and play a couple missions because it's a really fun clever game it's got a really satisfying gameplay loop because um you arrive on the scene and there's no time limit to start so you can just sort of you you find what it is you have to steal or destroy and then you have to work backwards to figure out how you're going to get to your getaway car because you only have one minute once you pick up the item that you're supposed to steal but it's really fun you might have to like you might have stand there and plan your route and then you have to think and run you plan your route you may have to destroy holes through walls to make you know you can run as fast as possible you can path it out yes that's that's what you're That's the whole game. And you have a can of spray paint that you can use to spray your path so you can just follow the path that you made. It's really, really fun and clever. Sometimes the thing you have to steal might be movable if it's in the bed of a truck or on a boat and you can drive it closer to your getaway car. It's a very clever game. Oh, awesome. That's Teardown. Perry, you've been playing Fire Emblem, the GameCube version on Nintendo Switch. That's right, Path of Radiance. notably one of the two-parter games in the Fire Emblem series. Radiant Dawn for the Wii follows up on it. There was actually connective tissue. You could transfer items from the GameCube game to the Wii game, which probably means that they wanted it to come out on GameCube. Yeah, with your saves, you collect these coins that can be used to forge stuff. No, I went through it already. I finished it and spent like 45 hours or something. I fixed up guide a little bit. It's so freaking good, man. I love this game. It's an SRPG, which stands for Shove RPG, because the game introduces the shove and the smite moves where when a character is just out of reach of an opponent, another character can shove them forward as long as they're lighter, and so you can get extra movement range. It makes it really strategic. It's really fun. It's great. And then it doesn't have... I feel like... I love Fire Emblem. I've played every game ever in the series, except for the mobile one. And I always feel like the later ones sometimes get a little bloated with the things that you do in between the strategy missions. This one has like the right amount of building support, recruitment and sort of conversational stuff. It's really good. The only downside is, and by the way, it runs at 60. It's up-res. The only downside, it's four by three. And it's still, Nintendo to this date It insists on having the hideous sidebar graphics that you can't turn off, even though modern displays, you actually get more burn in with these patterns than not having them, right? It's just like a subtle kind of grayscale. Yeah, yeah, but it's still, why on an OLED, why light? Why turn on the lights if you don't have to? You should be able to choose flying toasters or rat maze or something like that for you. Just don't need anything on modern screens. can you shove people off cliffs and stuff like enemies? no, no, it's not like that is there any verticality to it? is there any verticality to the levels? yeah, yeah, sometimes you go up a mountain pass and so the horses can't go as fast as somebody on foot are there pegasus riders? those are my favorite pegasus, wyverns, falcons love those, yeah, I love those and then most notably, one of the coolest things about this game is there's, in the last three missions I think second to last mission there is the Black Knight and like the game wants you to not be able to beat him and you can like you have to really plan how you spec out Ike the main character how you what skill you give him in order to even have a chance at beating the Black Knight Most people go through the game never beat the Black Knight It okay You can run away If you fight him and lose, you're dead and you have to redo like an hour of the last mission. It's really brutal. But yeah, most people just run away, don't fight him, and then they get a character recruit that's not as good as the one you would get if you beat him. Anyway, it's a fantastic game. It feels really, really modern in every way except for voice acting is cheesy, of course. You can just put on the Black Knight pinball soundtrack. There you go. Beat the Black Knight. Isn't this game like 80 hours long? Isn't it crazy? It's about 50. It's about 50 realistically. I mean, I haven't played it since it was new, and I just remember it just going on and on and on and on. You know what? Now, because you have save states on GameCube, on Switch 2, you can probably do it in like 30. I paused a lot to write down stuff and improve our guides, so it probably is in 40 hours. a huge boon. I mean, it's permadeath in this game, too. It is permadeath, and you can cheat now with safe states. You know, the stats upgrades and the main mode are randomized, and so if you don't get your speed boost on Ike when you wanted it, you can just put a safe state before you level up and then go back and try it again. What year did this come out? 2001? No. 2003? Oh, okay. So definitely Two Towers was out by now, and they should have called Shove Toss. Toss, man. Toss me. You're going to have to toss me. It's just great. It's polygonal. It still looks nice on today's screens. It's fairly fast, too. You can turn off combat animations and just do it in the field like here. It's great. I will have to revisit this one. Justin has been playing Watch the Bear, right? I did finish watching the bear. I'm in between video games right now, so I did start back up Lord of the Rings Online. Um, so boy, like we'll see if it sticks. Yeah, that's exactly like, I know it's like I have this reputation as a big low trope booster and super fan. And I've talked about it off and on over the show for the last decade, but I don't really like what happens is I go back to that game. And because it's an MMO, I don't remember where I am or what any of my abilities are anything that's in my inventory. And I have no idea what's going on. And so what I actually do is I start Lord of the Rings over and I do the Shire and Brie and the Lone Lands. and maybe if I really stick with it, I'll make it to Rivendell. And so I've played the first 40 or 50 hours of that game probably five times in my life. I've almost never made it farther than that, which in MMO terms, I barely made it out of the early game, and then I bounce off it and go do something else. But in non-MMO terms, it's like, well, 50 hours, that's like a whole video game's worth of game. But it's great. I'm playing a Hobbit Guardian. I also have a Hobbit Burglar. It's another fun class to play. Burglar. And the Shire is so good. I mean, it's early game MMO stuff. So it's all the garbage that you normally hate in a massively multiplayer game where it's like, ah, go deliver these flowers. I literally spent all morning just delivering pies to people, and that was it. And in other games, you would hate that. But in this game, it just feels very peaceful and homey and it's very hobbity and they're all really cute. And so it's a lot of I really like running around the Shire in that game. Nice. Data privacy is more important than ever in our online lives. And that's why we at GameScoop recommend Surfshark. With Surfshark, you can confidently browse the Internet securely from anywhere you are. It helps keep you safe online by blocking pesky ads and malware. You also get data leak alerts, so if a company drops the ball, you can catch it before the bad actors do. Even better, one Surfshark account lets you protect unlimited devices for your entire household, with over 4,500 servers across more than 100 locations worldwide. 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Nintendo's latest financial results are notably silent on the sales performance of Metroid Prime 4, which has not appeared in the company's list of million copy-selling games for either Switch 1 or Switch 2. Although, have you seen that Nintendo has since clarified that combined sales have exceeded a million? Yep. But even so, I mean, you know, we've been talking about Nintendo financials on this show. So they reveal them once a quarter, and we just marvel at 80 million copies of this and 4 million copies of that. And the part that always drove – that really hammered home to me how insane Nintendo's successful run is not necessarily the 50 million sellers and the 80 million sellers, but that every single random Nintendo game, 3 million of this and 4 million of that, it would be a mega hit for any other company. And so for Metroid to barely eke out a combined million in sales between the Switch and Switch 2 version, it's kind of a catastrophe. It's a bummer, but guys, it missed the big holiday shopping season. It was a December release, right? Yeah. And I mean, that's a choice. It means that we got less than a month of sales in there. I hope it picks up. And there was just a lot of negativity around the launch too. Thoroughly, we talked about this. Sam and I both really liked this game. We enjoyed it. Yeah, it has issues, but to constantly always lead with the issues when there's so much good stuff in this game feels like underselling all the cool moments you have in this game. It's just the atmosphere is fantastic. Look at it. It's such a tech demo, too. It really shows the Switch, too. Hopefully, people will pick it up. Maybe it'll go down in price someday and entice some people. Maybe Switch 2 owners are stingy. I don't know. Yeah. So I didn't play it. What? I didn't play it. You should play it. Well, maybe. Except here's the reason why is that Metroid Prime 1 is a 10 out of 10 game. Yeah. So an 8 out of 10 Metroid Prime is kind of like, oh, well, maybe. But see, it's an 8 out of 10 because it has like an annoying fetch quest thing. Yeah. But Wind Waker had that too. And if you think about the... But Wind Waker's 10 out of 10. Huh? But Wind Waker's 10 out of 10. Yeah, but if you go back to Wind Waker now, the original, not the HD version, you would be annoyed at the Triforce Shards quest. And, like, it would impact your history. I think Wind Waker is more annoying than this. Yeah, and then same with stuff like Skyward Sword and games like that. I feel like it's so funny because the things that are the worst in this game are the things that are the most Zelda. It's the horse riding around the overworld in Twilight Princess, you know, like that sort of stuff. You don't have to do that stuff either. We 100%ed this game. With crystals, you have to. Yeah, but that takes a long time, and I did it. No, I know, but that's not fun. The crystal collection is... Smashing into crystals is fun, but after doing it five minutes, you're like... I'm saying that just going... You don't do a lot of backtracking travel through the desert, and you're like, oh, this sucks. I need a radio. That's all nonsense. That's not how this game works. I think you'll play it, and for the first half of the game, you're like, what the hell are people talking about? It is honestly like the some of the stuff is just amazing. It's just wonderful. I would argue that the back half then picks up like there's maybe a middle. But like, you know, the ice part is amazing. The fire part's amazing. Those are all the, you know, later games. It's got a dumbass ending. So like it's like this story is not. It does have a dumbass ending. But if you like collecting everything and stuff, going back for a missile tank or something like that is generally fun in this game. They built these really cool puzzles around some of the extra stuff you don't have to get. We've been talking forever, for years on this show, about how video game review scores are more than just math. It's not like a game is 10 out of 10 and then, oops, now it's an 8 out of 10 because it has this fetch quest. And so that's part of, I think, in Metroid Prime 4's case that works to its detriment of like, you know, it's not just like, oh, let's make a list of like, I don't like these four things about it. But it just feels kind of old school. Like it feels like a game that could have been released on the GameCube, you know, just from a game design sense. And like that can be a pro for some people, like, you know, that there's a comfort in that and they're ready to go back to that kind of like style of, you know, game design. but I think for general audiences it's like tastes just feel like they've kind of moved on a little bit like Zelda evolved with the times and Mario evolved with the times Metroid kind of hasn't but like if we got Half-Life 3 and it was so much like Half-Life 2 and it was all gravity gun puzzles and really good story like who cares like that's a retro game now basically but it would be really cool and that's how I look at it I mean every time there's a 3D platformer that like really works like Astro Bot I don't like, you know, like it, there's points of innovation that game, but like, it's also pretty old school. Yeah. I want to believe that people will give this game a chance and go, go back and play it. It's, I was generally sad when it was over. And I think that to me is always a sign that ultimately for all the criticisms I have, I could talk for an hour and I actually did, Logan and I did a spoiler cast. We, we, we talked more about the things that annoyed us and then we kept stopping ourselves going like, but I really liked it. and I think when the game is over I go like I kind of want to play it again and I think that is a sign that it was a good experience and it's freaking gorgeous every time I see it I just can't believe this is a Nintendo Switch game and it lives up to that you can't show what you're actually seeing in this game when you're playing it and you're in these ice caves and everything is covered in frost and damage is looking really good it looks awesome, it looks so good It's like Doom or something. And you can have these visuals at 120 frames per second on Switch, too. Yeah. Yeah, I really do. I can't recommend it more. I think it's a total Damian game, and I think you should play it despite the score. You know what we can do? We can go in the archives and lower all the other scores. Yeah, I'll do that after this show. I'll just change all the scores. Here's what we do. Let's do an Is It Still Fun Today episode on it. That's great. It's just a review. Please play it. Honestly, it is a game in the vein of Wind Waker. And so if you like Wind Waker, and Skyward Sword has annoyed me in some parts, it's like if you enjoyed that, this game is good to play. Sticking with Nintendo, Pera, last week we were talking about Dispatch. It came to Switch 2. Have you played Dispatch yet? No, no, it's censored. Well, not on other platforms. I was actually going to play it, and then all the negative chatter, I'm like, I'm going to wait and see what happens. It's a fantastic game. I really love the game. I played it on. I'll play it on one of the other consoles. But it's unfortunately censored on Switch 2, which is really weird because there's other games that have nudity. And they ain't talking about it. But Sam, you said it's actually funnier when there's a big black bar dangling instead of a dangness. You know what's great about the black bar? I don't think it detracts from the game too much. But we keep using this image on IGN of a black bar, but it's kind of by her color. But that's real. That's actually a censored moment. Yeah, that's how they do it. That was their solution. It looks like we're trolling people. I mean, you probably wouldn't even notice there was nudity if that black box wasn't there. But now you know. That's the point of the game, too. That's actually a funny moment in it. That's a funny – Yeah. So, yeah, it's really weird. It seemed initially that Nintendo had forced the censorship. But then there was a theory that it was the Japanese ratings board, Cero, that just doesn't allow that stuff. And games like Cyberpunk 2, CD Projekt created a separate version for Japan, like an edited version of the game. And then they sold a different version elsewhere. And so the theory was that Adhok, the developer here, wouldn't or couldn't make a new version for Japan. So they just made one censored version for the world. However, that's not confirmed. That's just a theory. Neither Nintendo or Adhok has confirmed that. In fact, this week, Ad Hoc says it is legally unable to explain why it couldn't release a separate uncut version. What? It's legally unable to explain? No, it's not. But the confusing thing is like The Witcher 3 exists on Switch. Exactly. And like there's nudity in it. And so I'm not sure what happened. Like somebody just call each other. Just somebody call someone. What? what law would be broken if they explained why or who would sue them? Would Nintendo sue them? Because that would look really bad for Nintendo Yeah, they signed an NDA in censoring their game for Nintendo standards and then in that NDA it said you can't talk about what you censored or why or what our rules are, I don't know I'm legally not allowed to explain legal things And Nintendo probably doesn't want a list of the things that have to be censored in a game out there because a nipple is obvious, but there's probably shit that they once censored that's not obvious that is a little bit controversial. There's nipple in Mario Odyssey. That's true. Male nipple. Yeah. So they censor a middle finger. There's a sex scene. They censor some noises. Yeah, there's a lot of nipple in Mario Kart. It's the cow. Oh, the cow. Teats, Sam. Those are called teats. Okay, Jobert, let's get this ready. Jobert and I have something to share with the class. So I just want to point out the complete insanity that a fantastic game like Dispatch that has a boob and a middle finger and a hanging dong that's in shadow, that had to be censored. While at the same time, this is allowed on the eShop, no problemo, Call of Beauty. This is fine. This is fine. Call of Beauty, for our listeners, this is a new game on the eShop available right now. Call of Beauty, it's a jigsaw puzzle game where you make jigsaw puzzles of AI slop women wearing scantily clad military outfits. Well, at least, look, I appreciate that they went for a wholly original idea. And yes, Call of Beauty is the exact Call of Duty font, the old school Call of Duty font. Yes, amazing. Can I play this on my bar top monitor in 1992? When does this stuff get through? It's because there's a Nintendo seal of quantity. Yes, I know. I am familiar with the seal of quantity. There's nobody paying – well, apparently someone is paying attention because dispatch couldn't get through. Yeah, but this company can't legally say why they're allowed to put this in the store. Yeah. Well, I was curious. So this is made by a company – it's not made by any person. It is. It is. I am company. I create games. It's made by a developer called, where is it? 17 Studio. And they have a website. And I went to check a website. And all of their images didn't load. But they do have a slogan. So 17 Studio, the developer of Call of Beauty's slogan is, we don't make games. We make only good games. Oh, good. I like that the Nintendo seal of quantity. there's a related feature that's been developing over time where the Nintendo seal of quantity is also becoming Damon goes down the rabbit hole and we just see like you know look we're just digging do you remember the Wii age? did you go to Best Buy and stop at the cash register and look in the giant bucket of Wii games? it was amazing I don't think there's a complete catalog of all that stuff the Game Boy Advance version of that there was just like a tumble of dented cardboard boxes and a big bin at Costco. Half of them were episodes of Cartoon Network shows. GBA video. People are still discovering new Wii games to this day. Thank you to Super Fighting Robot on Twitter for pointing out Call of Beauty to me. How partial do you think the nudity is? In Call of Beauty? It says partial nudity, sexual themes. Only one way to find out. um so speaking of twitter this whole thing with dispatch and the developer ad hoc like it could have been the the part that's really crappy is that they didn't tell people ahead of time like uh ad hoc has a social following they have 140 000 twitter followers so i will look back through a feed there you know they were promoting the switch to launch of dispatch saying pre-order now at no point did they did they say hey heads up everyone everyone we just want to let you know that due to circumstances beyond our control, we had to censor dispatch on Switch 2. We're sorry if you're disappointed. We just wanted to let you know before you pre-order, it will be a censored version. They never did that. And that's the crappy part. They took people's money without telling them it was going to be censored. I still maintain that it's funnier with the black bars. Oh, it was you who said that. I'm not arguing against it, but the people who bought the game should make that choice. Sure. Agreed. And they should have the choice to turn it on or off. Yeah. Exactly. Okay, there was a Nintendo Partner Direct today. My biggest question coming out of it is, Pear, are you getting the Leon Amiibo? Yeah, and Claire Ray. Have you seen my new display in my office? I saw people building it for you. You got two people in there building it for you. I had some small shells put in that are just deeper enough for Amiibo. Yeah, we're going bankrupt because Pear got new shelves. No, no, I just had a couple of new shelves because I couldn't fit all the Amiibo anymore. Yeah, I will get those. Yeah? Yeah. Okay. It's stupid now. This thing is getting away from Nintendo a little bit where they making bigger characters I don like that stuff but many of them are still really nicely made Except for Leon. Does he look derpy? I don't really see that. He is super derpy. It does not look great. It's like a kid took a magnifying glass to him in the sun. His face is melting. For a while, if you remember Amiibo, I don't want to talk too much about Amiibo. people are like switching off and like leaving already and buying call of beauty but um in the very beginning they were sort of locked in to do the smash brothers poses and then they had to like come up with ways to actually make them stand up that's how you got like p stand p stand link and all of that with that yellow that was really stream coming out of his legs and like here they can do any pose they want and like this is the pose they chose for leon i'm like come on leon looks so good in the game too i don't know what they're doing should we have leon doing something interesting no he should just be standing there yeah same with claire okay got it do they do anything our our article didn't say if these amiibo do anything in game it's all bs yeah they unlock weapons right or weapon skins yeah and it's the usual amiibo stuff like which by the way like nintendo and i love nintendo but they absolutely get a pass for like cool costumes and stuff are just locked behind these you know 30 40 at this point make them half the price and take the tech out, right? Like, take the NFC stuff out. Because, like, in the beginning, remember the concept was you swipe your Amiibo and it can store data and you bring it to your friend's house and you load your Amiibo character or something. Like, that sort of stuff would be really fun. Like, you could use an Amiibo to, like, instantly create a custom, like, login or whatever on your friends like when you're playing Smash Bros to load your name and all of that, right? Yeah. There's actually a reason. Well, there was a good idea at one point and then they just turned into collectible. But when Breath of the Wild came out, I would bring my Switch into the office so I could use your Amiibo to get meat and gold and arrows and tons of actual useful stuff in the game. Well, you get something useful in Metroid Prime 4, which people really, really liked. What, the music? Yes. That was the biggest non-traversy of our generation. It does not change the game at all. I don't know about that. Although, Justin, biggest gaming non-traversies. It's a good feature there. That's a good feature. But if you have one, it's such nonsense. And you do need to listen to a podcast, as I keep mentioning, while you collect your green crystals. But having the techno bops doesn't help. Listening to a podcast while you play is something that Sony has a solution for, Sam, which we'll get to in just a moment. Oh, God. They're coming for us. Did you like the Nintendo Direct? It's fine. it was yeah uh logan on nvc uh was was reading from my path of radiance uh review from like 200 years ago and my final paragraph was all about how um it's great that there's a drought of nintendo games because it makes nintendo translate games to english that would have never seen the light of day i mean we got fire emblem because there weren't any other gamecube games coming out like that started this sort of western discovery gba games and gamecube games of fire emblem right and this Direct felt like that. It was like, here are all these Japanese games. There's literally a visual novel game in here that I don't think would be in an official Nintendo Direct if there was a lot of Western support. I mean, the console is getting real third-party support, not just kind of lip service support, but no big actual video games. So it's like, that's a big deal, and that's exciting to see as a Switch 2. I mean, the story goes that Switch 2 dev kits went out really late to some devs and especially smaller devs. And so there's this sort of, there's a little bit of a gap. And so if you watch this direct, like it is mostly, I don't want to say sloppy seconds because they're good seconds, right? Like Valheim, they're like quality games coming to, Indiana Jones coming to the Switch 2 now. So there's a lot of good stuff, but like there were some really funny Japanese games that, in the end, I'm happy that we're getting them and that they're getting translated to English. That's the game I was going to talk about, so it's perfectly timed. I remember that moment where Live Alive was announced, and then no one knew what was going on or cared except Pear, and you were losing your mind. Did you see that this game is like Live Alive that they showed? Elliot? Elliot, yeah. You can talk about that, too, but the moment in this direct for me that was that card game, Damon. It was Cold Sept. Yeah, Cold Sept came back. By the way, if you've never played it, that's what that card game was. It's absolutely a dainty game where, you know, the elevator pitches, it's kind of like half Monopoly where you're moving around a board game board and then you're taking over and like owning spaces on this board game. But then it's half like card battler where if you land on a board game square that someone else has like claimed and put a monster on, then you fight them with cards that you have in your own hand. And like I played it on the PS1 and was absolutely enamored. and sometimes I feel like I'm the only person on earth that cares about and knows about this game franchise. And so they announced not one, but two ColdSept games today of an updated re-release of the original with some quality of life features and then a brand new ColdSept as well. So I'm pumped. There was a pair game in the direct, but it was only in the Japanese direct and that was the Goemon collection. Konami finally woke up from its slumber since they released Goemon on the DS. that's the last game and they're releasing a 13 game collection so they got their i think it was four super nes games it have that crazy super nintendo one in it with all the amazing like mech stuff and everything yeah yeah going on too on the super nes yeah all four super nes games the the nes games and the game boy games are in this collection so anything in the 2d realm uh before we call that legend of the mystical ninja here before mystical ninja 64 and all that I can reveal to you all now that I swapped out our 20 questions game last minute, right before we recorded, because it was going to be Legend of the Mystical Ninja. Oh, man. I had a whole conversation about that with Pear this morning. I was like, it's too soon. Too soon. I have to switch it out. Oh, that's so mean. That game's so good. But I was waiting for an episode that Pear was on to do Mystical Ninja. Now you can never do it. Never. My cul-de-sac story real quick is I played a cul-de-sac game on 360. And Justin's right. It was like, this is so me, board game, card game. There's some sort of getting characters to marry, and then you play as their lineage. But then I realized after a long time put into it, the game was total BS. Because I was playing a level, and my dice rolls weren't going the way I wanted to. So I was like, I'm going to start over. I'm going to start over. And I did that a couple times. And then I was like, wait a minute. Every time I restart over, the dice rolls are exactly the same. It's not random at all. You're kidding me. So it was total BS. Really? The game, and I say this like, look, as I said, I might be one of the biggest Colts of fans in the United States, but that is 100% true. Like the game will hose you. Like you'll have – if I land on any single square, I'm fine except this square. If I land on this square, I'm hosed. And every single time, it'll – like the AI cheats like hell. And so hopefully that's something that can be addressed. That's funny. How did I never play this? Real quick. It's a pair game. He's basically playing Fortune Street on Wii. That's right. Real quick. Joe, I'm at 1% on my IFB. Are we good? Yeah, we wrapped this episode. Okay. We're done, Damon. Damon, we're done. Episode's over. Okay, well, that's all the scoops we have for this week. The other one I wanted to call out is Adventures of Elliot, The Millennium Tales, which, yeah, I guess was announced last summer, but I missed. Yeah. This is another 2D HD game from Square Enix, but this one is an action RPG. So what more Secret of Evermore? Secret of Mana, yeah. Yeah, Secret of Mana. The good Secret one? Then Final Fantasy. And this looks really cool. Like, I love this art style. This looks great. My one concern is that it seems super serious and melodramatic, and there's all this really, really dense lore building and weird names for everything. So that's my one concern. You can try out a demo. you can play it. Yeah, the demo is out on Switch. Yeah, I thought this was really exciting. I really love this approach to the art style because you can make very pretty games on hardware that is not super-duper powerful, and they keep getting better and better at it. Maybe someday they'll make a Chrono Trigger like that. That would be really nice. He's trying. He's got seven times. In keeping with Square Enix naming strategy, just come up with a cool name? Just once. Octopath Traveler? That's so bad. Live Alive is bad too. I love that game. Just call it Dragon Lancer or something and they'll sell 10 times as many copies. If your name is Elliot, I don't mean to insult you, but you're not Aerithorn or Aragorn. Pick a cool name out of the name. It ain't a legendary character name, really, is it? Yeah. Elliot. Look how cool that looks, that pullout, the establishing shot of that town. Yeah. It looks great. I just hope it's actually fun. The demo is fun. I enjoyed it. Cool. You already played the demo? Wow, you are fast. Does it have slimes? Hmm? Not a dragon quest. Not a dragon quest. But do you start at little dinky enemies and there's a lot of them, or is it pretty interesting? No, it's fun. It's also puzzly. Oh, interesting. Okay. the other uh thing to note is that the folks that do the arcade archives are now doing console archives so bringing back old console games i saw that which is cool they ran out of obscure shmups for you man like i know they haven't they haven't yeah there's no way they have every time a new one comes out i'm like man like we don't even have this one in our database it's like some obscure japan only arcade game and so now they're going to do it with console games like the first games that they're doing cool borders which okay that's known playstation like that was an early PlayStation game. Yeah, but then they're also doing Ninja Gaiden 2, which that's also very known. But then they go, and then, Doraemon. Doraemon. Any Famicom 1986. I mean, I love that they're, and this is my criticism with Konami, like, if Konami would translate some of the Super NES Goemon games, they would be, they're some of the best third-party platformers on the Super Famicom. Oh, would they have to be translated to Doraemon? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have city scenes where sometimes you have to show somebody a pass to get by. I thought that's what kept the Ninja mystical. Yeah, no, there's a lot of talent stuff in those. But yeah, they're apparently releasing Doraemon for the first time in the West. Oh, that's coming out here now? Yeah. I missed that. I thought it was just... This one is not coming out. But I thought it was just Ninja Gaiden 2 and Cool Borders. No, Doraemon is a TBA game. It's coming too. And for the first time in the West. So that can be a robot cat, everybody. let's be realistic too obviously messing with old code is not fun but fans have translated many of these games and it did not take them years and it would not be very costly to translate NES games with limited text they just don't have that much one of the difficulties Japanese is very compact and English is not isn't that the mother 3 thing that people fan translate it it's impossible to translate come on give me a break Like, seriously, call a fan and they'll do it for you in two weeks. That's why Reggie retired. Yeah, exactly. Reggie couldn't take it in. We're like one month away from AI being able to completely just code that game for free. You're right. And that would be a good use of AI because they're fantastic games that were never translated and released here. 13 going on games. well speaking of ai sony patent system to generate ai podcasts in the voices of your favorite playstation characters i think it'll be so natural it would have do you think kratos would have a manosphere podcast yeah that's like like you're gonna be listening to kratos hosting a podcast talking about politics so i have some stuff to read here this is from a patent submitted in mid 2024 and it claims the system dubbed llm based generative podcasts for gamers will generate a reading from the patent unique personalized podcasts of news that is a that a particular gamer would find interesting and could be presented in the voice of a video game character from a game already played by the respective gamer it appears this could be offered to players on the home screen when they power on their playstation console Video game platforms currently lack the ability to provide unique and targeted content to gamers to update the gamers about things that are happening on the platform. There are currently no adequate solutions to the foregoing computer-related technological problem. That's patent speak for, there's got to be another way. In some examples, if the gaming platform wants to highlight specific games for players to experiment with, the podcast can suggest different games to different players based on a cluster to which the relevant player is assigned. These game recommendations can also be provided in the generative AI podcasts in game-specific character voices, no less. Recommendations may be prioritized and jump out a little more to the listener to get the listener to note the recommendation. You know, a voice actor did the voices for those. It's kind of brutal. So this is not Aloy telling you about her day finding herbs, which she already does. Well, you play the game. That's all she talks about. So it's not that. It's that it will tell you all of the e-slop games you could be playing in the shop in the voice of Kratos. It'll be like, boy, did you play Call of Duty? Did you play Call of Duty? IGN Commenter, Wild360. I think some to the best. I can't think of a more soulless experience than an AI-generated podcast discussing my recent trophies. these it's good it's i it's it's always tough to judge stuff like this because if you go back in history it's things that seem stupid and impossible become commonplace over time right like i can't tell you how if you remember when the iphone was announced people said no i want buttons right it was as simple as that it's like don't get rid of the buttons i need the buttons you cannot use a phone without buttons you need to tap numbers and then now you will never think about it and like if you watch movies like Blade Runner where Harrison Ford or what's his name? Gosling. Who was in the second one? Ryan Gosling. Yeah, where Gosling talks to an AI character and she feels like a real person because she's played by a real person. The more natural it gets, it's just inevitable that we'll go down that road that these things will get better. It's too bad for you, Pear, because they patented it. I know, I know. I can't do it. But I imagine in In a future Witcher game, the NPC dialogue is generated on the fly. And what will make it interesting is that it's – That sucks, man. That's the worst. I know, but it's reacting to the things you already did. And so as long as there's good story structure and personalities and all that stuff, I'm just saying don't knock it. I hate the thought of voice actors being replaced and hopefully people get compensated when they turn Kratos' voice into now a podcast, right? But what empty calories? Empty calories is a good way to put it. I hear you. But I feel... It's... We don't need people consuming, you know, the thoughts and words that have never been thought before. Like, there's just no... There's no... Which, by the way, like, the Pope said that recently. I didn't... That's not my quote. Like, but it just... Like, so there's Radiant Quest and, like, Skyrim, right? Yeah. And, you know, and Fallout. And then in the beginning, like, you know, for the first week that those games are out, people are like, oh, man, this is amazing. Like they keep sending me on all these quests and like it just, you know, the game never ends. And then people figured out that it was this treadmill that never ends. Yeah. Bounced me off of Fallout 4. Yeah. And once you're out of sort of handcrafted content like this, this is kind of hoity-toity perspective of art is that it's like, you know, you having a conversation and engaging with the artists. It's you engaging with the creatives that created that. Right. And like, I don't ever really put that much thought into it. I'm just like, well, I'm, you know, I'm here to have a good time. I want to play the video game. But then I realized that there actually is some truth to that. And I do want my video games to kind of challenge me and say something and have a perspective. Because if it's just AI creating something that's tailored for me that no one has ever seen before, then I don't I'm not interested. You know, I want I want to experience something that someone else made. Otherwise, I otherwise there's no point. This is my argument against Mario Maker. I don't want to the levels are all made by creators yeah Mario Maker is a great example of things can go off the rails but like I don't want to be Sarah Connor here but like I think I fear eventually Justin you won't be able to tell the difference right like that's the point I think the issue is that like if you have an NPC like that's like recognizes that you're in a banana costume and they didn't need to write that because you designed the banana costume yourself that's pretty interesting but all they have to do is offhandedly say like wow you look like an idiot banana and then get on with a written dialogue like that's that's you know if it's indistinguishable but then also like we all played you know like games when there was text and stuff like that i'm interested if games can trick me into thinking that it's written the stuff but like it says we're not even close to that right i mean we're even close i don't necessarily want that anyway but that's not even what this is about this is about podcasts about information and that is a trend in the world right now where people study or or especially in you know for school where they they digest a textbook and then listen to people talk about it as a podcast that is what kids do now it's like this is getting ahead of like well how do i make a decision about something i want to hear it in podcast yeah personally i cannot i cannot free myself from the artifice of that when i when i see that right like there's it's this sort of uncanny valley thing but you know obviously younger audiences i'm very torn between you know you're right where like you know people didn't like it's the henry ford quote right like before the car was invented if you ask people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse so like there's an element of like you know you need to tell people and show people what they want but then but then i but then like i'm at war with myself because in the other half of my brain it's like they're solving a problem that no one no one is asking for this zero playstation owners are like this is what i want on my home screen well i don't believe this and i'll play devil's advocate here what you were all I just asked for was for game development time to not take five years and one way to do that is to fake all the audio so you know it is it is filling a problem unfortunately and i not saying that a good thing and it not a good solution well to be fair sony patents weird things all the time and you know sometimes you depend things so others don't do it right yeah yeah that's true so advertisements they want they say if we can get people listening to this 10 minute podcast about what's new in the eShop, then we can sell a spot in the middle of that to Activision when the new Call of Duty comes out. Bad example. Set's owned by Microsoft, but whatever. EA then. To be clear, Justin's point about this being something that nobody asked for, I totally get that he's talking about the podcast thing, but I was just doing a callback to the previous thing where unfortunately people are looking at game development times and saying, how are we going to shorten all this and make this easy on us? This stuff is not cut and dry. So there's a movement with gamers, and I'm painting with a broad brush. Gamers aren't a monolith. But generally speaking, they're anti-AI, right? They don't want it in their games. We see it in our comments. We see it on YouTube. But it's not – there's nuance here of like software has been putting trees in your open world games forever for 20 years. And like you click a button and it generates a thousand different versions of an oak tree that are non-identical and then plops them into your world for you. So like, you know, like, just like that's generative, like that's generative, you know, content creation. Right. So like, where does, where does, you know, people need to have a kind of reckoning with themselves or maybe they don't. You know how everything's a – you're totally right. Everything's a culture war too. And so you were just saying like all these people are like anti-AI probably, maybe not all of them. I can't wait for the pro-AI like political movement where it's like, no, I want everything to be AI. It's so much cooler than humans. And you've been fully fooled by the robots. So I think part of it is a narrative. Like that's where people get a little bit queasy feeling is like, yeah, use software to generate, you know, my trees and you know my biomes in minecraft but maybe maybe not to be creating sort of endless narrative experiences for me is where things start to feel a little bit icky yeah i mean it can't take five years to write a story for a video game i don't i don't believe it or i don't think it should can't take five years to design your characters they certainly are not that good yeah george r r martin's taking a lot longer yeah sure oh anyway i just think they're a i can george george r martin taking shots here randomly at the end of an episode of game scoop you think every day he's like what would what dear chat gpt what would sansa do next in this scenario i finished the book okay well on that note i am really really liking a knight of the seven kingdoms by the way It's good. It's really, really good. Okay. That brings us to video game 20 questions. First, we have a little anecdote from Charlie Gadsden in San Diego, who says to answer Sam's question at the end of last week's episode, yes, the team is on a winning streak. Four wins in a row to start the year. An average of 19 questions needed. that's your average so you you ask it you get any other 18 or 20 questions the average can't be higher than that oh because we know okay because wait we could get it in 20 yeah okay i think i played uh destiny with charlie gatson like 10 years ago and charlie says all four games picked this year have been from after the year 2000 so do with that information with that mystical ninja we're gonna get going on and then era to screw us all i said to daemon was the direct uh the Japanese direct had Goemon in it, and then he had a funny look on his face, and I thought I was boring him, but he was already calculating what to replace him. We know, Damon, this is so easy. He switched to Bomberman, so we can get this in one question. Yeah, it probably is Super Bomberman. There is a Bomberman collection coming. Let's find out. Our suggestion this week comes from Rodel, also in San Diego. My son and I listen to the show every week. Recently, he discovered Redacted and is in love with The redacted. He keeps bugging me to suggest redacted for 20 questions, so here's my shot. And with that, let the questioning begin. So if he's like, he'd recently discovered Pokemon, and he's obsessed with the Pokemon. Yeah. Because what would you be obsessed with? He's obsessed with the gritty, realistic reboot of Bomberman. Yeah. Okay, did this game come out in the 70s, 80s, or 90s? Yes. Does the game title have a number in it? Yes. That's a great question. I thought we weren't allowed to ask that question. Really? You don't ask, does the game start with the letter B? Start with an A. Wait, so it came out in the 70s, 80s, 90s. Let's wordle this one. So, Good Dad, letting his kid discover a classic. Thank you. Sonic 2. Mega Man, maybe? Yeah. Okay, did this game originally come out on the 16-bit console? No. It's not Sonic 2. Is this on the NES? Yes. Could be Mega Man's. You're right. Was this made by Capcom? Yes. That's five. Okay. Let's try to get this really quick. Everybody calm down. What, there's six Mega Men? It can't be Mega Man 1. But hold on. Capcom made more than just the Mega Men. It made ghosts and goblins. Games with sequels. We know. Yeah. There's not that many. There's like Chip and Ale, DuckTales. And not that many with two in the title from Capcom on the NES, two or more. I just named them. Yeah. Should we ask if it's 2D side squirreler? Why are we doing this? Oh, it is. It is good. It is good. Yeah. Ask if it's a Mega Man game. Is it a Mega Man game? Yes. You don't think his son was obsessed with Mickey Mousecapade? I was. I don't know. Does this game have an even number in the title? Yes. All right. I don't know where to... I don't have a clever way. It's not Mega Man 3 or 5. I'm not a Mega Man guy. It's Mega Man 2. Let's just end it into Mega Man 2. It's Mega Man 2, 4, or 6. Yeah. But, like, is there... Do you guys know NES Mega Man? Is there one that's notable? Because you wouldn't pick one that's... Yes, 2 is notable. It is absolutely two. I just don't have a clever way to like. Four and six have Rush in them, and two doesn't. Is that true? Yeah. Rush is in three, but we know it's not three. Three forward. Okay, got it. Yeah, yeah. Does this have Rush the dog in it? No. Is it Mega Man 2? Yep, Mega Man 2. Hey. You guys were so fast. That's ridiculous. You brought down your average now. An interesting thing that happened. Yeah, we did. We brought down the average. For many, many years, for like 20 years, Mega Man 2, it's like, oh, that's the best one. Mega Man 2 is the best one. And then there was this contingent of people that are like, I actually think Mega Man 3 might be better. Yeah, there's been an um-actually contingent for Mega Man 3. And now I swear if you were to chart like over the last decade, like Mega Man 3 is now getting its flowers and more people are like, maybe that's the best one. Consumer sentiment. You do get to fight the Mega Man 2 bosses in the end of Mega Man 3, which is an unbelievable feat for NES. I always had such a blind spot for Mega Man games because my first Mega Man game was on the Super Famicom not on the Famicom or NES Rockman 7 and I played it and I was like I kind of believe Sam Clayborne spoiled another game by telling us about the end of Mega Man 3 it starts with a joke that you wouldn't get then because Mega Man is not wearing his hat in the beginning and before he runs off to start the level his robot friend gives him one of the construction worker hats to put on and then he's like maybe try this hat instead. So you playing him must be like, what the heck's going on? Yeah, I had no idea what was going on. That hat looked a lot safer. Was the anecdote that his kid was... He discovered the Mega Man collection, and he's been in love with the kids. Oh, that's cool. So that's cool. That's great. I mean, I did this when my kids were little. We would go back to... We hooked up the Super NES and just would go back to older games. You know, kids need to be classically trained we pair and i on our team we have a co-worker mitchell whose kid is obsessed with megaman as well and i've seen him playing megaman the background during like meetings and stuff he's very very young like just a couple years old so this is a thing megaman can appeal to the young still that's funny just because my daughters have absolutely no like they just cry whenever they die in a game so like you know they're not interested in anything like that Yeah, I was like 19 or 20 when I stopped crying when I died in games. Yeah, they get it from their dad. I'm the one who is crying with hard games and make my son beat them. Dude, you could cry playing Cairn. It's so brutal if you die in that game. It's like I really just spent 20 minutes meticulously planning this thing and then die. I don't mind the games where it's hard and I die because I was being an idiot and not careful enough. As you get older, your reflexes get a little slower. I was very mad. Keep going. Well, these games, the Mega Man games, were harder in Japan. They made easier versions for Americans. I see. Well, that explains it all. Sad little thing. Because I was young when I played this. When Kingo is getting Nintendo Switch time, I often find him playing Pilotwink 64. or Star Fox 64. He likes playing those two games. Star Fox 64 is really good. Well, nicely job. Thank you for the suggestion, Rodel. Viewers, listeners, if you have your own suggestions for a video game 20 questions, email them to me at the email address gamescoop at IGN.com. And hey, listen. Right now you can get Humble Choice for just $14.99 and score a curated bundle of PC games for February, including Resident Evil Village, Date Everything Core Keeper Starvaders SteamWorld Build Squirrel with a Gun Bus Simulator 21 and Big Helmet Heroes This month's choice supports InPower a charity whose mission is to move people from poverty through tech skills training and quality job placement Head to HumbleBundle.com to start playing today and support a good cause And that's all the scoops that we have for you this week Thank you, Pear Thank you, Sam Thank you, Justin Thank you to Jobert working behind the scenes to make this episode possible My name is Damon This is IG Game Scoop And try to do that PlayStation AI podcasts. No promise. I don't think we want that heat by the way GameScope is like Game of Thrones now with all your spin-offs you brought back GameScope which I watched, it was awesome, that was really fun we're going to plan a version, Sam had the great idea to gamify it at IGN Live and have two teams where they work together so a mark of a good video is if my son actually is interested I was watching it and he just came over and then he stood there and he watched the entire GameScope and he was greatly amused. Did he guess any of the games? No, he was like, this is bullshit. How can you tell it from those bricks? Those bricks. The spirits of bricks. We're not going to talk about it on the show then, but did you see that game is loosely like a Chrono Trigger, Alive, Alive kind of knockoff? Which one? We'll talk about the HD2D game, the Elliot. Elliot, so just to be clear, Yeah, Elliot was already announced before. Save it for the show. I want to talk about that. Yeah, he wants to talk about it. No, Elliot was announced before, but I... Is that the one you're talking about? I wish... Yeah, it looks great. I wish Square would ever make a good name for a game. Yeah, it's a bad name. Save this stuff for the show, man. What else was in the direct? Like, that direct was so boring, I thought. I mean, they showed off that really cool 80s anime style. Oh, that one's good. Yeah, yeah. Oral. The anime one? Yeah. I try not to be too taken in by... It's like, yeah, the art style is incredible, but it's like... But it is what everybody wants right now, right? It's like the co-op, couch co-op. Yeah, the game looks cool. It looked really fun. The co-op action looked really fun to me. I'm surprised that somebody in Japan kind of looked at these Western, trendy games that are winning awards, right? And they're like, let's make one of those and make it our way. Okay. Smart. We good? Yes, they can. I was telling Joba that when my wife and I lived in Japan, it was like all of the TV shows were this nonsense. Yep. Jesus Christ. And like, it's just cannot, like, I think they all die and we just never hear about it. Yeah. Is there a point to this? Is something going to happen? or just doing it just to do it? It says challenge complete and now it says, oh no. Like, can you do it? Can you be wrapped up like a mummy? Like, of course you can. Yeah. Well, you don't understand what the goal is of this challenge. Yeah, I don't. That pharaoh is talking. I think she now needs to say things and they need to be able to understand what she says. Okay. That makes sense. Imagine you have to come up with these ideas. Have you all watched or started the new season of Shrinking, which I think is good. I haven't watched it yet, no. It is such a Ted Lasso successor. Oh, really? It's like feel-good but really funny. Oh, okay. That type of stuff. But doesn't veer as far into sentimentality than Ted Lasso? It doesn't. No, it does in maybe in a counseling session or whatever, but the main characters are all well done. It has fucking Brett. It has the co-creator of Ted Lasso, who's also co-created this, the big British guy that plays Roy Kent. Oh, yeah. He's on the show now? Yeah. He's been a main character since the first season. Oh, God. This is the shit where they blow cockroaches into each other's mouths. No, this is too gross, man. Oh, Jesus Christ. No way. No way. It's too gross. This is terrible. This is terrible. You think since this is all Japanese TV, like by the end, like every Japanese person ends up on two of these shows at some point in their life. Eventually. I think about that with Great British Bake Off. It's like that island's not that big. Like and they get 12 bakers every year. Like they must run through them eventually. Yeah. Well, you saw that problem with – have you ever watched Lego Masters? Yeah. They ran out of all the Lego Masters. Dude, first two seasons. That's so funny. amazing builds i tune into fifth season and they're like building shit my kids build i'm like what is this oh this is so bad so what you're saying is this show was good until they ran out of cockroach blowers that's i'm just saying every every japanese person inside joe bird no what the fuck man no take it off why is it a cockroach use like a cricket or something like sometimes they use i think it's like a jerusalem cricket it might be a cricket but it's a bug yeah it's a bug I hate this. I want to go back to the German cutting things in half show. Yeah, do the German shopping cart challenge. I 100% cut a banana that way this week and showed my wife, and she's like, what are you doing? I'm like, you're German, right? You understand? Too bad. Bring it to me. You've got to show them the German marble track making the marble land on a toy train challenge. Oh, what? That's excellent. It's like launching off of a little toy onto a train. Yeah, there's a really convoluted marble track and you have to time the marble so it falls onto a container on the back of a toy train. We've all played video games with that exact type of challenge. But you're not allowed to see it when the other team does it. You have to be blindfolded. and then, you know, so you're getting closer and closer. When I get really, really stressed out at work, I sometimes will watch Marble Track, like Rube Goldberg Marble Track videos on YouTube. You know what? That's been ruined, though, because they all fake. Is Germany anything more than model trains? That's like the height of German culture. Germany loves model trains, but yeah, board games would be better. Okay, here we go. It's called Eisenbahn. Did he time it right? No, it's way too fast. Oh no, it's slowing down. So cool. Well, remember there's different points for the different retainers too. Oh, I see, I see. Number one. If we are ready, I do need to... Kingo has his first baseball practice tonight. Oh, okay, cool. Well, you can watch this instead, right? Yeah, we'll just do this instead of Scoop. I'm saying it's in Kingo's practice. Maybe we should do react Scoop sometime we should now we can't use this clip well just cut that part out or i'll bleep it i could even bleep it that's even better