COD Black Ops 6 Beta, Castlevania Memories, and Switch 2 Rumors | Game Junction Podcast 99

What if paying for early access to a video game turned you into an unpaid beta tester? In our 99th episode of The Game Junction Podcast, we tackle the frustrating trend of buggy game releases, using recent flops like Black Ops 6 and Outlaws as prime examples. Join us as we share our personal experiences with these game-breaking issues and debate the problematic monetization strategies plaguing the video game industry. 

Get ready for a nostalgia trip as we dive into the iconic Castlevania series, revisiting classic titles such as Castlevania 1, Simon's Quest, and Bloodlines. We reminisce about the series' evolution from the NES to handheld consoles like the GBA and DS. Tune in to find out, as we celebrate the enduring legacy of these beloved titles. We'll also reflect on gaming commercials from the Nintendo 64 and GameCube eras and discuss the ever-changing landscape of video game preservation.

As we build anticipation for our 100th episode, we explore rumors about the next Nintendo Switch, potential Pokemon game launches, and the anticipated PlayStation 5 Pro announcement. We have a sneak peek at our milestone 100th celebration. Stay tuned and join us next week for an even bigger celebration!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Video Game Podcast Discussion
• 10:17 Paid Beta Testing for Video Games
• 17:00 Video Game Preservation and Mobile Games
• 21:00 Monetization in Video Game Industry
• 40:00 Video Game Industry Integrity Concerns
• 57:49 Video Game Industry Issues and Controversies
• 1:06:00 Controversies Surrounding Video Game Development
• 1:19:09 Predictions for Pokemon Switch 2 Games
• 1:33:00 Top JRPGs on Nintendo Switch
• 1:47:56 PlayStation 5 Pro Release Prediction
• 2:05:00 Zelda Timeline and Mario Steelbook Bonus

Transcript

Brandon Hurles: 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Game Junction Podcast. We're here for episode 99, one episode away from 100. How's everybody doing tonight?

Mark Trobough: 0:09

I'm doing fantastic. I don't know what you're doing. The magnificent mustache man is doing.

ThunderStash Gaming: 0:15

I'm doing excellent. It's a bit of fun and busy. Busy week, it sounds like for everybody. A lot of stuff going on, busy time of year, a lot of video games coming out, sports, football, baseball, playoffs are coming. Everyone's watching to see if their team's probably getting in into the wild card. I know I am with the Diamondbacks. Yeah. And then basketball starting shortly thereafter, which is my main course. So yeah, super busy, Very exciting time.

Brandon Hurles: 0:44

I'm a basketball guy. I I like college football, I don't like professional football or any professional sports, but college, college is fun, um, and I think basketball as a sport in itself, I like, I enjoy playing basketball. You know I'm not good, I'm, I'm five, five, but I think it's fun. Yeah, it's all fun.

Mark Trobough: 1:10

I got family that's Red Sox fans for baseball. They've been trash for a few years now.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:15

But you guys did finally win one.

Mark Trobough: 1:18

Yeah, then they just nosedived.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:20

Oh, I was happy for you guys, though, even here in Arizona, because there's so much in common, I think, with the Red Sox and the Phoenix Suns, and it's actually pretty well documented the tragic stuff that's happened to each team.

Mark Trobough: 1:35

So I definitely sympathize with you guys. Yeah, I can simply know. You can say Brandon, sorry.

Brandon Hurles: 1:41

No, I was going to mention real quick. No, you can say brandon, sorry. No, I was going to mention real quick. I noticed you're wearing a shirt and you just recently did a video on castlevania, so I wanted to plug that for you yeah, thank you.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:55

Uh, I actually just posted about an hour ago my my fifth castlevania review in God, the last, I think, 10 days. Yeah, in the last 10 days. So I've reviewed Castlevania 1, 2, simon's Quest, which definitely one of my favorites Castlevania 3, dracula's Curse, super Castlevania 4, and then today I just posted the review for Castlevania Bloodlines on the sega genesis.

Brandon Hurles: 2:26

So I love blood yeah I think it's a great game, do you?

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:31

yeah, absolutely, uh, it's. I think it's very good. I I definitely enjoy the soundtrack, me too I I like the soundtrack a lot yeah, it's. It's got a obviously a unique sound to it because the sega genesis used the fm synthesizer. Yeah, so it sounds different than the super nintendo soundtrack of super castlevania 4, but it doesn't sound like worse or better, it's's just different. So it's pretty cool because you're you're getting two very high quality soundtracks there.

Brandon Hurles: 3:07

Yeah, yeah, I agree, castlevania is such an inch. I know we're going off topic here a little bit, but Castlevania is such an interesting series where I swear that it's had like so many different forms over the years. I mean, obviously we had those 3d Castlevanias on the 64, which is the first one, was technically a remake, correct yeah, it's not good it's not good, but I'm nostalgic for it because I had it as a kid.

Brandon Hurles: 3:35

I'm very nostalgic for it so am I but then there's the 3d castlevanias that were on, like ps2, that some people like some people hate and you had, like Lords of Shadows, wanted to, that Again, some people like some people hate. But I mean to me and this might be a hot take, I don't know if it is or not but you can't go wrong with a single one of the GBA or DS Castlevania games. I think every single one of them are good, yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 4:04

I wouldn't say one of them are good. Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a hot take. I 100% agree with that. Those are some of the best Castlevania games in the entire series. They nailed it. Those are some of the best Metroidvanias probably ever. Symphony of the Night, isvanias I would say ever.

Brandon Hurles: 4:26

Symphony of the Night is great, but I would beg to say that portrait. I like Dawn of Sorrow a lot too. I like all of them, but I would. I would beg to say that Portrait of Ruin is the best Castlevania game period. I've actually I've heard some people say that I love symphony, but I'm sorry, just portrait just does it for me in every aspect yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 4:51

I don't know that I have a favorite. You know, they're all kind of like your kids in a way, or or all the years I managed, I never had. I don't have a favorite employee, you don't. You don't play those games, man. That ain't right. I love them all. I really do. No, I don't. I don't do that. I love them all. And I get asked all the time like what my favorite mario is, what's my favorite zelda, this, this and that. It's like. You know, I've really, truly, I love them. They all have their qualities, they all have their pros and cons. I love them all. I get what you're saying, though, as far as the GBA, ds and Symphony of the Night, they're all just so damn good.

ThunderStash Gaming: 5:37

You can't go wrong.

Brandon Hurles: 5:39

I agree, I agree, I think they're all great, they all have something to offer and I just don't think any of those games, from GBA to DS, are anything below like an eight in my book. I just I agree, I think, I just think they're great. But that's going off topic. Little Castlevania talk. I'm a nerd, so you know I enjoy it, but can't get wrong there. So what do we got going on this week, Mark?

Mark Trobough: 6:09

I mean always a lot of news and stuff, important, fun stuff that's coming out. But I guess I have a question Are either of you too big into Kingdom Hearts at all?

ThunderStash Gaming: 6:18

Yes, I appreciate Kingdom Hearts a lot. I bought it when it came out at Toys R Us back in the day and I had it pre-ordered there. And it's interesting is that I bought the game and I was in high school guys. So if I recall Kingdom Hearts came out was it in 2001?

Brandon Hurles: 6:40

2001,.

ThunderStash Gaming: 6:41

Sounds right yeah, yeah, so 2001,. I'm, I'm in god. What was it? Sophomore junior year? No, sophomore year of high school, and I was working two jobs, going to school and playing basketball, and it was very, and I had a girlfriend that I liked to spend a lot of time with.

ThunderStash Gaming: 7:03

Oh you had a girlfriend before, of course, yeah, and she gamed as well. Oh, okay, and so you know, life was really busy and I bought it and I didn't get to play it. I remember I didn't have time until almost like after I graduated, and let's, I'd say I didn't have time. In that I want it a the perfect time.

ThunderStash Gaming: 7:28

You guys ever do that where you hold off on playing a game for a long time because you're just waiting for that like perfect, opportune moment to jump into a game where you have, like, no distractions and you can give it your full attention. And so it's like I played other games, of course, from that point that I bought it to after I graduated, but I wanted a special time for this game, so I didn't play it until after I graduated. I had my own apartment and I got to really take it all in and it was a special moment, and so I'm glad I waited. And so, yes, I love Kingdom Hearts, very excited for it and it better, they better. Let me just say that they better come to Switch 2 physically. Physically, no cloud, no cloud. Kingdom Hearts.

Mark Trobough: 8:21

I mean I assume some of the older ones, I mean they came out on PS2. It shouldn't be that hard to put them on a cartridge.

ThunderStash Gaming: 8:28

I agree they would have sold so well on any of the previous Nintendo consoles. But it's not too late to right the wrongs. Bring them out now, You'll make a ton of money. They need the money Because a lot of these games that are coming out lately aren't selling very well.

Mark Trobough: 8:49

At least the ones that seem to have controversy behind them from the get go.

Brandon Hurles: 8:53

Right, what did either of you guys I know, mark, you didn't Did you end up playing Star Wars Outlaws?

ThunderStash Gaming: 9:00

at all. Steve, no, I definitely have watched all the, all the discourse that has been interesting from Twitter, everything that's been on Twitter. I see all the different sides there. I've seen a lot of videos. I've watched some reviews. I watched some of the early play test and, of course, I know what happened, uh, with everyone who paid extra money to play the game early on ps5, only for their game save to be completely erased. In saying that, that happened.

Brandon Hurles: 9:46

That's inexcusable. That reminds me do you guys remember that Twilight Princess glitch and, I think, the Wii version where, like if you walked in a particular cave, your game, you just lost all your game data? I think it was a Wii version only but, like you, walked into a specific part and you lost all your game data.

ThunderStash Gaming: 10:07

I vaguely remember.

Brandon Hurles: 10:08

Yeah, you could never leave the cave again, so that was it.

ThunderStash Gaming: 10:12

Thankfully that didn't happen to me, but I do vaguely remember that. But my God, think about this, guys. You pay $130 for the gold version, okay, and you really don't get anything cool extra. All right, it's, uh, I would say, consumables. Basically, what are you getting? Some different outfits, maybe, stuff that does nothing for the gameplay, and I will say, from what I heard, you get a quest line, some sort of additional quest with Jabba the Hutt, ok, cool, ubisoft will probably eventually give that for free.

ThunderStash Gaming: 10:51

But the fact of the matter is you pay $130 to play the game early, right, and then they have a game breaking bug. And here's the thing that I've always said when it comes to these like paying early to play games, I get it and sure, there would probably be games that I would do that for. The unfortunate part is that you're basically paying the developer extra money to be their play tester and you're not getting paid a dime for it. But that's what, what it is, especially the last what? Five years, how many games come out broken? And everyone who plays them early. You're basically a beta tester. Yep.

ThunderStash Gaming: 11:34

And you don't get paid anything for it.

Mark Trobough: 11:36

If anything, you're paying them to beta test their game for them.

ThunderStash Gaming: 11:39

Exactly, exactly my point. So unbelievable, but believable because it keeps happening and it's just unfortunate and people don't care.

Brandon Hurles: 11:48

I mean, look at Black Ops 6, right Like people are pre-ordering that, getting the Ultimate Edition, so they can jump in and play that beta early, and all they're doing is beta testing. It's paid beta testing for the company and I've heard nothing but bad things about the Black Ops 6 beta. So far I haven't heard anything good personally.

Mark Trobough: 12:11

I think a lot of that's just the casuals that don't pay attention. This is going to be one of one to five games they're going to pick up all year and play. They're not in the community, where they're involved in a lot of the discourse and discussion. I mean, because you're talking about Outlaws, one involved in a lot of the discourse and discussion. I mean like because you're talking about outlaws, like like one of the infamous is I don't know if you watch the clip of uh asmongold when he's playing a game. He's like crouched in a bush and they're all just shooting at him and they're just missing.

Mark Trobough: 12:33

It's just like oh yeah, oh yeah like like this is just like the ai is terrible at times and it's a stealth game.

ThunderStash Gaming: 12:40

It's a stealth game, so they I've heard it's about 70 to 80 percent stealth.

Brandon Hurles: 12:48

It's what I've heard. That's too much for me, no thanks.

ThunderStash Gaming: 12:52

It's like hey, you know what? How about we just make Splinter Cell Ubisoft? Let's just do that, because we all want that and make Star Wars its own game with with action and blastersasters, Not just one blaster, I heard. There's basically one weapon, Like there's different versions of it, right, Like there's a cannon blaster. There's a few of them, but there's only a few and it's just blasters. What are we doing here? You got all these weapons in Star Wars lore to choose from and all we get is a blaster. What is going on this?

Brandon Hurles: 13:27

is absolutely crazy, but I did want to kind of backtrack a little bit just to mention that we do have some stuff going on with social media. We got, I think, three shorts up in the past couple of days. So TikTok, instagram, facebook, all that jazz there's stuff up on there, of course. Instagram, facebook, all that jazz there's stuff up on there, of course, posts on Facebook and all that jazz as well. But kind of going over today, there was quite a bit of news. I dug a lot from just today and if there's anything I missed, feel free to definitely let me know, because I'm sure that I missed something. But one of the big things is Astro Bot came out today, which I'm hearing raving things about. People are super excited about that game, so I did pick it up. I have not started it yet. You got it as well.

Mark Trobough: 14:15

He's got it too.

Brandon Hurles: 14:17

Yeah, this has the best. I could be wrong, but I believe this has the best like Metacritic score for a game this entire year.

ThunderStash Gaming: 14:26

So that is correct.

Brandon Hurles: 14:27

Yeah. So I mean, like people are saying this game is incredible, it's a throwback to like actual video games, which I'm excited for.

ThunderStash Gaming: 14:35

Me too, especially with all the retro games I've been playing. And it's like man, they're simple, but it's perfected. Yes, right, yeah, and that's, but it's perfected. Yes, right, yeah, and that's what it's all about, man.

Brandon Hurles: 14:46

Yeah, this game looks absolutely phenomenal. So I have a little quick story. I went over to. I called GameStop today. Obviously I knew the controller has been out of stock and when I tried to get it I just hadn't gotten paid yet, so I couldn't grab it, unfortunately. So I called GameStop and said hey, you guys haven't gotten any of the controllers in there, right? They said no, but we have one left online right now. I'm looking at it. It says available right now, just one. So I'm rushing to the store. I mean it must have been five minutes and they said it was gone.

Brandon Hurles: 15:23

I wanted that controller more than anything that I've bought in the past like four years. I just I love Astro Bot. Like I'm a big fan of Astro Bot, I wanted this controller so bad, like more than that, even the game itself. I just like wanted to be able to have this controller. I want, obviously, the game too, but like I'm a big fan of Astro Bot, so any merch that comes out of Astro Bot like I'm all over it and it feels like PlayStation's Mario and I like that. I miss the days of these companies having these larger than life mascots.

ThunderStash Gaming: 15:58

I do too. I mean, who doesn't miss catching one of the PlayStation commercials with Crash Bandicoot on a megaphone in front of Nintendo? Remember that when he was in front of Nintendo of America? It's like dude, this is brilliant, it was so good, like it would never happen today either, and that's what sucks, because it could.

Mark Trobough: 16:20

Everything's gotten so corporate and vanilla. They're not trying to go after each other and have fun at the same time?

ThunderStash Gaming: 16:24

Well, did you guys ever watch wrestling growing up? Yeah, yeah, 90s wrestling A little bit yeah same 90s, and it just reminds me of that period in life, of the Attitude Era right, where you did that kind of stuff and no one was going to try and cancel you over it. You know, nintendo's or sega's making commercials about things that nintendo don't right yeah, and vice versa, like taking jabs, and it was fun, man, like that's all in good fun.

ThunderStash Gaming: 16:57

And then it continued on for a while until well, I don't know until when, I don't know when.

Brandon Hurles: 17:03

The point was that it all changed, but I appreciated that I think that really started to change around the um gamecube era. I feel like we saw less of that around that era. Uh, because I still remember, like 64, you had that smash brothers commercial where they're all in the outfits like jumping around and yeah, oh yeah that's iconic. Um, in the hey Pikachu commercial with the dog. Yeah, classic yeah, I love that stuff awesome. But.

Mark Trobough: 17:32

I think so boring oh, go ahead more so boring CG. I love seeing trailers for gameplay, but not not the actual boisterous just out of left field craziness to really grab your attention. It's just gameplay story. And then, oh, here's a developer talking about a video that nobody's actually going to watch.

Brandon Hurles: 17:52

Yeah, I truly miss those days. But we also got some new gameplay info was shown on Mario and Luigi Brothership, which I'm super excited about. We got a new Dragon Ball Dyma trailer. I hadn't decided whether we wanted to cover that in this, like maybe just the trailer reaction and talk about it more in the anime podcast, or not. Uh, but playstation reveals 30th 30th year plans, so what they're going to be doing to celebrate the 30th anniversary? Uh, we got several games being delisted this week. That was announced, and then also, kind of just to promote, the anime podcast is up because we haven't talked about it a lot. But over on the Junction Network channel, we've got two episodes out now and those are dropping every Sunday, right, mark?

Mark Trobough: 18:40

Yes, every Sunday noon, Eastern is when those go live.

Brandon Hurles: 18:43

This is the anime Junction cast, so we've got two episodes out right now and that is on a separate channel, the Junction Network, and then I just wanted to plug that in there at the end. But yeah, we've got a good bit to talk about this week. So you started talking about Kingdom Hearts. What were you getting to?

Mark Trobough: 18:59

Yeah, and then we went all over the place.

ThunderStash Gaming: 19:02

Kingdom Hearts yeah, we went all over the place. Uh, kingdom hearts, yeah, I definitely enjoy the game. I I don't think that its novelty has worn off yet. When I say novelty, just novelty of the idea of this right, yeah, of this game even existing, these universes coming together, and I'm very excited for it. But again, we need to have this on Switch, specifically Switch 2.

Mark Trobough: 19:28

Yeah, at this point.

ThunderStash Gaming: 19:31

At least native versions, if you don't want to release it physically, if you don't want that money to Square Enix, if you don't want it, then at least have it native, right, because we can't be doing this cloud stuff. It's unnecessary. Don't take shortcuts. Make it natively for switch and you'll make a ton of money oh yeah, it's because it's crazy.

Brandon Hurles: 19:52

The only kingdom hearts game that we've gotten on the switch is, uh, was it melody of memories, I think it's called, which is a rhythm game. I like it, it's great but it's not. But it's not a Kingdom Hearts game.

ThunderStash Gaming: 20:06

It's a spinoff. It's getting Madden on Wii without franchise mode. It's just shortcuts, man. Stop. Just give us the damn full game.

Mark Trobough: 20:17

Speaking of one spinoff, have you ever played the? I'm pretty sure it's primarily a mobile game, but it's also on PC. Kingdom Hearts, Dark Road.

Brandon Hurles: 20:26

Union Cross, I think, is what that's from right Union X it's supposed to be Union Cross.

Mark Trobough: 20:32

Kingdom Hearts Union X Dark Kingdom Hearts, union X Dark Road, I guess whatever you want to call it.

Brandon Hurles: 20:38

Yeah, I played it. I spent a good bit of time with it.

Mark Trobough: 20:41

Oh, sorry, I slightly misread the title of the game.

Brandon Hurles: 20:44

You were reading the title. Oh, sorry, I slightly misread the title of the game. You're reading the title. Yeah, Union Cross. I did play a lot of it because I am a big Kingdom Hearts fan, but I fell off a while ago.

Mark Trobough: 20:54

Yeah, because I know I I guess I'll be straight up I was never a big Kingdom Hearts fan growing up, or even now I can appreciate the games for what they are. They've just never grabbed me personally. But I know kind of Brandon said some games getting delisted this mobile game that's been out since 2016 just got essentially pulled from all of its digital platforms, which is, you know, really unfortunate for a lot of these spinoff games. But I mean, when you get mobile games, regardless if it's like tied to a main franchise, there could be a story, it could be a gotcha. You spent you know a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars on. Eventually it's going to get pulled and then you know it's just gone forever.

Brandon Hurles: 21:34

Shout out to Slave of the Mind saying that you've got a great mustache.

Mark Trobough: 21:41

Yeah, it's fantastic.

Brandon Hurles: 21:44

Anyway.

Mark Trobough: 21:45

Yeah, yeah, it's fantastic anyway, yeah, but I mean it's unfortunate and I think it just goes into a bigger thing, because obviously most mobile games are just kind of trash, mind waster games. But there are some decent mobile games out there that have story and then when they get pulled there's no offline mode. The game's just kind of gone forever and you're just kind of like, well, if there's any story that ties this game to any other Kingdom Hearts game, you're just kind of gone forever. You're just kind of like, well, if there's any story that ties this game to any other Kingdom Hearts game, you're just kind of SOL moving forward, unless there's videos on the internet that kind of show the game player. Just talk about the story.

Brandon Hurles: 22:12

I will say this was one of those games with the story and like an actual game, like you could legitimately play this as a real game. It wasn't like a microtransaction infested game. It had it for cosmetics, but this was like a real game, like animal crossing, pocket cam. Two games I ever invested a bunch of time into were these two games and super mario run, but these were all like legitimate games. You know what I mean. So, yeah, yeah, it's a bummer, because I mean that game's been around for a long time. It made it a long time, but there's going to be some story that they're going to have to be able to put into other games, because this game does have story to it and it fits into the timeline.

ThunderStash Gaming: 22:58

Yeah, it's unfortunate.

Brandon Hurles: 22:59

Yeah, it is Especially that it's got story attached to it that people won't be able to play and like know what's going on.

ThunderStash Gaming: 23:06

So well, it all goes into video game preservation, and that's a whole issue in itself, right, because there's there's games that have come out that you can't get anymore at all, and then it also makes you question how serious they even take their source material. Yeah. You created the story for us to consume.

Mark Trobough: 23:32

Yeah, yeah, you just take it away.

ThunderStash Gaming: 23:35

You're just going to take it away, yeah, so why should? Why should we take you serious the next time we release the game? If you're just going to do something like that, I think it makes people question it a little bit. Now again, the masses don't know about this right. But if someone has to download it and they decide that, hey, you know what, I want to play this because I've been waiting for the perfect time to play this, and then they go on their phone and see that it's gone Right, and then they go on their phone and see that it's gone Right, and then they go to the App Store and they're like I could have sworn, I downloaded that, let me look. And they look oh, yeah, I did download it. Well, where is it? You know, no one's going to send them a letter in the mail. No, say hey, we noticed you downloaded this game a year ago. Well, we just want to let you know, we took it off.

Mark Trobough: 24:26

Took it off. Now, like, do people get their money back? Well, I understand now, whatever you spent, once the game gets pulled, that's, that's it, you're just that's horseshit.

Mark Trobough: 24:32

Yeah, that's a lot of the max that's like a lot of gotcha games on mobile that might be up for years. The ones that make money continue to stay up, but the ones that maybe don't make as much money, they get pulled. And if you put 500 into this uh gotcha game, you're when it gets pulled, you know you're just out of that money with nothing to show for it well, you think about it, they really live up to that name.

ThunderStash Gaming: 24:52

Then, yeah, they got you.

Mark Trobough: 24:54

They got you more than once and that's like a whole, whole genre that's the whole thing in japan.

Brandon Hurles: 25:00

Like gotcha is very, very, very popular in japan. Like you have gotcha machines, like actual, you know where you win a prize, put in some coins and win a prize. But the gotcha mechanics are just like all are rampant in japan and they love them. They eat it up like yeah well, I mean it.

Mark Trobough: 25:20

it's kind of a fine line between straight up gambling the the digital loot box and, I guess, the IRL loot box where you're like the crane machines. At least with that you have something physical that if you spent $10, $20 on you can keep it forever, but all this other digital stuff, once it's gone, nothing you can do.

ThunderStash Gaming: 25:39

Gambling's taken over everything. Taken over everything, ever since sports, ever since you didn't have to, uh, you know, go to your uh bookie and you could actually do this legit, online and and not have to open up a bank account another country, uh, in order in order to, you know, wire your funds. Because I remember those days, but it's like ever since it became legal, they went full on, like completely all in. And when you watch football games, when you watch basketball games, when you watch the pregame show, yeah, they're talking about the sports lines and the sports bets and it's just taken over everything. And it's in video games everywhere. Like you know, I play. I play nba 2k. I've been playing it since it came out on dreamcast in 99, but the last couple of years, last year especially, you know, we, a lot of us, play the game mode. My team, we call it my casino now because that's what it is. It's turned into a damn casino. Nobody wants this micro transaction, bs, nobody does. You buy the game, the companies do of course they do.

ThunderStash Gaming: 26:54

But you buy the game and then that should be it. Everything else should be optional, but still unlockable, right, like unlockable through gameplay, optional hey, if you don't want to do everything you got to do to unlock this, you can, you can buy it. Okay, I can, I can see a market for that. But to say, hey, only people that use real money can buy this overpowered card or this overpowered item and then they get to use it against you. It's like, oh man, this is so bad, this is just such a a bad road to go down and I think it's bad for the kids.

Brandon Hurles: 27:35

Man, personally, I think it's really bad for the kids that happened to get into definitely no, I mean it really is, as a parent, like it's a horrible thing because it's just becoming more and more prevalent, and I see it within the apps that my daughter plays on her phone. Where they want to spend money. She'll consistently ask me hey, can I get Robux? And you know Robux are just a gotcha mechanic, for instance.

ThunderStash Gaming: 28:02

I mean, that's what it is, it's real life money, but you're buying their currency to buy skins and different assets in the game and it's like kind of bullcrap man, because it's kids are not going to know anything other than that they're not going to know that a game doesn't have to have a gotcha mechanic to it true, but, as well you know, you kind of lose sight of like learning the value of a dollar and what it means to be able to like spend money to buy these things, because if you understood the value of a dollar, you wouldn't want to buy these things, you know, I mean, and it's like to teach these kids growing up that this is how video games are, that you buy items in the game and that once you buy the game it's not over, that's just the beginning of everything you're going to buy, and that there's so many random elements like buying packs of cards and 2K or Madden or FIFA.

ThunderStash Gaming: 29:01

It's like they're trying very hard to normalize it and that's not good, because you know what this country is in enough personal debt. I worked in finance before doing this for 10 years. Yeah, I know, I. I know the average debt to income ratio of the uh average S household average person. I know all that. I know all those numbers still, and it's only gotten worse the last four years, three, four years. So it's not good because we got a correct course and video games are not helping, nor is sports.

Mark Trobough: 29:42

Yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 29:42

Unfortunate.

Mark Trobough: 29:43

Yeah, especially like with the Roblox or all the other stuff. Normally you buy this, so you're not thinking about in terms of money, but like if you want to buy this one thing, you either have to buy it multiples of the under or you have to spend more money. So they've kind of manipulated that market as well to where you have to end up spending more. And then it's like well, I've just got this random amount sitting around, so I might as well buy another one, and it's just this perpetual cycle. It's you know.

ThunderStash Gaming: 30:07

It is and it's never going to stop. It's never going to stop Because we have proven to all these video game companies that we're willing to spend more money, even though I'm not, even though you guys aren't. The mass majority has proven that there's profit to be made there.

Mark Trobough: 30:24

Yeah, even if it's just the, what's it the same thing with gambling or drinking. You need to find that small percentage. That's going to be, I guess, what you say that's going to spend a lot of money be essentially your, your whales essentially on these games.

ThunderStash Gaming: 30:36

Yep exactly.

Brandon Hurles: 30:37

I think most people don't, but a small enough enough people will spend thousands of dollars to where it's. You know it's profitable and they got to put you know very little effort into it. I mean it's unfortunate. Yeah, it really is. I I hope, I hope things change. I mean I I feel like we are coming to the point where we're never going to have the, the, the video game crash like we did before. But I think we have to come to a point where the video game market does like quote-unquote crash, as in triple-a, developers crashing to realize, and turn course, that hey, we can't do this anymore. And it's already happening because, oh yeah, I mean we see like all these layoffs every single week. I mean, look, visions of Visions of Mana right, an excellent game. I can't recommend it enough. I started it. I love it. The day it came out, they announced the layoffs for the team.

ThunderStash Gaming: 31:31

Yeah, I saw that Horrible that is crazy.

Brandon Hurles: 31:34

That is crazy to me, horrible, heartless. And then you see the amount of money, that which we might get into this later I can't remember if we add it into the notes. If not, I'm sure we will the amount of money that was spent on Concord is unreal and unnecessary.

ThunderStash Gaming: 31:52

That would be a fun discussion.

Brandon Hurles: 31:54

That is ridiculous. We'll go ahead and move on.

Mark Trobough: 31:58

We've got some quick little stuff to run through as far as some free-ish games going on right now. So the for the month of September, the epics game store has football manager 2024, you know, football soccer here in the U S. That's what it actually is. If you want to, just if you love staring at you know numbers, I'll look at that game.

Mark Trobough: 32:21

I have no interest in it, but I'm not even a big FIFA fan, or I guess it's FC now you might as well play fantasy football or fantasy soccer in this, yeah might as well try and win something yeah, at least with fantasy football the option for money is there, depending on the league that you're in, but the other games it's Sniper, ghost, warrior, contracts, rugrats, adventure in Game Land that one I'm very excited for.

ThunderStash Gaming: 32:46

I'm actually hyped for that. And Sniper, ghost, warrior Contracts, rugrats, adventure in Game Land that one I'm very excited for. I'm actually hyped for that. And I will say I don't have that big game store on my computer up until yesterday because I saw, I think, wario64 on Twitter post it that the game is free on the 12th. I'm like no way, because I legit was planning on buying it. I have a physical copy coming. I hate to double dip, but you know sometimes I do and I want to keep that one sealed and also it's not going to be here for a while because it's limited run games, yeah, and I want to play it and review it. And then I saw that I'm like, hey, this is great. Like hey, this is great. So I downloaded it the Epic Games Store and I'm very excited to play that.

Brandon Hurles: 33:25

So that's a win. The only reason I have all these services is because of all the free games that constantly come in and, to be honest with you, I haven't played any of them. I haven't played anything on PC yet, but I just continue to build a catalog because they're free. So I'm like, why not?

ThunderStash Gaming: 33:42

One day yeah.

Mark Trobough: 33:48

Oh, sorry, it's taken some real quick. And then the last one on that one was super crazy Rhythm Castle. Another, you know, rhythm game, that's what you're into I got I'm a fan of rhythm games but I am terrible at them, so it's really hit or miss.

Brandon Hurles: 34:03

I like Tycho, guitar Hero and there's some other rhythm games I guess I definitely do like here. Do you guys remember elite b agents?

ThunderStash Gaming: 34:12

yes, yeah yeah I remember it. I'll tell you which one I really love the most. What's that? Donkey conga oh yeah, so I still have, I still have the uh peripheral excellent excellent game that and, uh, you know, I do have the, the, uh, final fantasy, the theory, them, oh yeah, theater, rhythm, yeah I.

Brandon Hurles: 34:31

Final Fantasy Theorhythm. Oh yeah, Theaterhythm. Yeah, I love those games too.

ThunderStash Gaming: 34:35

Yeah, I have that, still need to play it, but I have that and I'm willing to play it because I love the music in Final Fantasy, curtain Call, or the first one, curtain Call.

Brandon Hurles: 34:44

Okay, the first one's really good too, and it has different music tracks in the second one.

ThunderStash Gaming: 34:50

Nice yes.

Mark Trobough: 34:51

And then when it comes to for the month of September, for Amazon prime games. Obviously these are on a myriad of different stores. They've got a lot of games they're putting out. So, as of yesterday, on the fifth, the, the Epic game store, you can get a borderlands pre-sequel, borderlands to eternites, and then shadow of the tomb Raider Definitive Edition. Over on GOG you can get Greedfall, the Gold Edition, lego, lord of the Rings and Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor Game of the Year Edition, and then on the Amazon Game app, lego, indiana Jones, minabo, a Walk Through Life and then Whispered Secrets. So a lot of these are good games.

ThunderStash Gaming: 35:34

Unfortunately, I've got most of these games already on Steam, but if you don't take advantage of it, if you have an Amazon Prime subscription, I have most of these games, or I have the ones at least that I want to play, but I will say this is an excellent list. The Lego games are always fun. I think the Lego Lord of the Rings game actually got the worst review of all of the Lego games are one of the worst, but it's still gonna be fun. I think they both actually probably reviewed poorly, if I recall the Middle Earth game, shadow of Mordor excellent.

Brandon Hurles: 36:13

Excellent, oh yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 36:15

Yeah, and of course goes without saying, probably about the Shadow of the Tomb Raider, that Tomb Raider trilogy.

Mark Trobough: 36:23

Really good.

ThunderStash Gaming: 36:23

It came out phenomenal, yeah, phenomenal. So great games. If you haven't played them yet, and they're free, yes, definitely.

Mark Trobough: 36:31

And there are more coming out through the rest of the year. It's a really decent list. I'm not going to run through all of them. Some of the bigger ones, like if you haven't played Tales from the Borderlands, it's on the 12th via the Epic Games Store. I recommend that Do not recommend new Tales from the Borderlands. I was about to say yeah. At all. That's terrible at all.

ThunderStash Gaming: 36:50

That's terrible. There's a game on there that I recommend, and it's Nine Years of Shadows. Excellent, excellent Metroidvania game Excellent, yeah, check it out. Give it a Google search. Check out the review. It's a very cool game.

Mark Trobough: 37:07

No, definitely Over on the GOG. On the 12th you've got Hell, pie, moonlight, shogunners, all those games. Then on the 19th, if you've never played, kerbal Space Program, it's relatively fun, in-depth game for what it is Lego, the Hobbit, thronebreaker, the Witcher Tales very, very good game. And then on the 26th you've got black desert via pearl abyss. Uh, if you were into a korean mmo. Uh, go song via gog. Gianna sister's twisted dream on the 26th as well. Uh, with the mystery case files, black crown and englet, over on the amazon game app am.

Brandon Hurles: 37:49

am I the only person that, just whether I am going to play it or have interest or not, am I the only person that just claims every single game? I just claim it. I don't necessarily download it, I do that a lot.

Mark Trobough: 38:02

If it's free, it's free, I have it, and if I decide to play it or not, you know you've got a free game, so who cares?

Brandon Hurles: 38:07

Yeah, I just claim every game. Yeah, I just claim every game. I see no reason not to.

ThunderStash Gaming: 38:13

Right, because you can claim it and you don't have to download it, which is the beauty of it, because if you want to keep that space open on your hard drive or your SSD, then yeah, that's nice, the fact that you don't have to download it. Yes, claim away.

Brandon Hurles: 38:29

Mark, do you like the pre-sequel? Because I thought it was okay.

Mark Trobough: 38:35

I thought it was decent for what it is. Obviously it reuses the same assets. I'm not the biggest fan of the Zero-G, though it adds a layer of vertical movement. I'm blanking on the actual vertical word that I want to use, but it's shorter. I think there's some issues with the game, but overall it's decent. I like the backdrop or the backstory more into Handsome Jack as well, as I think it has one of the best DLCs of all of the Borderlands games and that's the Claptastic Voyage. I think it's a fantastic DLC. Even if you don't like Claptrap as a character, I think this is a really good, really interesting DLC. It's unfortunate that the rest of the DLC plan kind of got canned as well with 2K Australia. I would recommend it. I like it.

Brandon Hurles: 39:23

I wanted to shout out Slave to the Mind Dies for gifting the subs. It looks like he gifted subs on YouTube.

Mark Trobough: 39:32

YouTube and the Twitch. I know I kind of gave, I gave him a shout in the chat itself, but we were OK well discussing some stuff didn't break it up, much appreciated. Yeah, I know I haven't and I haven't really had much interest since after it released, but have either of you gotten the chance to play any of Starfield at all?

Brandon Hurles: 39:53

I mean, I played it when it launched.

ThunderStash Gaming: 39:56

Yeah, I played it when it came out, absolutely.

Mark Trobough: 40:00

A fan of it unimpressed, don't care for it hated, don't care for it.

ThunderStash Gaming: 40:05

You know, I think, probably like the both of you guys, you probably really wanted to like it, you hoped you'd like it, you'd hope that you'd take to it and but at the same time, you never want to force it, right. Right, it needs to be, it needs to be real, it needs to be a natural liking. And I definitely I found myself almost forcing it and I said you know what?

Brandon Hurles: 40:34

No, this ain't right, that's where.

ThunderStash Gaming: 40:35

I was this ain't right, I'm going to abort mission.

Mark Trobough: 40:39

Yeah, I mean hopefully, moving forward, they'll make the game better. It's kind of hard to tell what their roadmap is, but I know, coming up on the one-year anniversary, they're talking more about their upcoming expansion, shuttered Space, where they're adding from what they said, or at the very least they highlighted, 50 new locations across one of their planets, varun. Varun Kai Probably butchered that entire name, but I mean it's just one planet and a handful of locations. Hopefully the actual update there'll be a lot more to do on a lot of the planets, because I know from what a handful of locations. Hopefully the actual update there'll be a lot more to do on a lot of the planets. I know from a lot that I've seen in some other streamers. It seems that a lot of the game is very barren outside of some of the glitches you run into.

ThunderStash Gaming: 41:20

Yeah, it felt desolate, probably how space feels.

Mark Trobough: 41:26

It's great for reality, but it's not good for a game.

ThunderStash Gaming: 41:29

Exactly. It's great if you're trying to make it as realistic as possible, but that's not really what we're looking for in video games yeah, I've said this over and over, but they still have the opportunity to turn this game around.

Brandon Hurles: 41:46

I mean, look at cyberpunk, look at um, no man's sky there's no man's example where even Fallout 77, things have turned around and it can happen. I'm dogging the game now at the state it was when it launched, but it can improve, you know.

ThunderStash Gaming: 42:04

I agree, I agree, but it's like, look, you lost me. Ok, I'm not there anymore and I'm not going back. But I wish you the best and I I have seen the news about the dlc and I think it looks good, right, and I and I said to myself you know what, I'm happy for everybody who's still playing it, or anyone knew who's gonna play it. That's the same way I felt about fallout 76. I bought it at launch. It was a dumpster fire and they lost me there. And it was nothing personal. I just I had to move on, man. I had to move on with my life. I ain't gonna wait around for you guys to fix it.

ThunderStash Gaming: 42:45

There's other video games to play too many and I gotta go to them and you know what, maybe day, maybe one day I'll come back. I'm not closing the door on you completely, so again, it's not personal, but if I find the time one day, maybe I'll come back to it. That's how I look at a lot of these games that come out and are just horrible In a horrible state. It should never have been greenlit.

Mark Trobough: 43:14

Yep, but I think it's a bigger issue of like the more you games that come out terrible, like well, they're great one, two, three, four years later but like that's a really bad trend to release a full price game that you know is like not fully, not not close to being done and it's still going to take a year or two to really fully get that game to close to what it should have been at launch. I I think it's really bad practice. That feels like it gets worse and sometimes you're like at a principle I don't want to go back and support a game, even if it looks great. I don't want to support it because it should have never launched the way it did and I just fundamentally don't agree with your practices as a company.

ThunderStash Gaming: 43:46

Well, when the whole, obviously with the age of the internet, when patching became a thing, right, ugh, it was good at first because, hey, you know what, there was this really random thing that happens that it just wasn't caught at playtesting. Yeah, you know, it might have been one or two things here and there, right, and it would get patched and it would get fixed and that's great, right? Uh, you look at the time frame right before that, for instance uh, did you guys play? Was it a wwf?

Brandon Hurles: 44:26

no mercy on the nintendo 64, of course, I still have it yeah, I love it.

ThunderStash Gaming: 44:30

There's two, there's two versions of it. There's a version where there's a an issue, if I recall, with the saving with, with, with some sort of uh, doing some sort of save in the game. It's a big, it's a big bug, big enough that they put a halt to all the cartridges that were made and you guys know that's very expensive, yeah and they put out a revised version. I think there's something similar with the Castlevania games on the 64. I think Legacy of Darkness has two versions.

Brandon Hurles: 45:03

Yeah, and one's worth more money. I think I've heard that I have the revision version of no Mercy Castlevania. I'm going to have to look into that. I think I remember seeing that, but I'm not. I don't own it.

ThunderStash Gaming: 45:17

Right. So back in the day, when these games went gold, they meant it. The game's gold, it's golden man, everything's done. Everything's done, it's as good as we're ever going to get it. They were confident to give that green light.

ThunderStash Gaming: 45:35

Today, now it's like hey, let's just push this out the door, man, because we got these shareholders breathing down our neck. If we delay this, the stock's gonna go down. Yeah, and even though it's the right thing to do, we're gonna lose a ton of money. And and the developers might want to do that, and they developers might even say, hey, we need to delay this a little bit. Okay, they might say that to their managers, and the managers then have a discussion with the publisher and the publisher says I don't think we can do this, man, we're gonna have to just go with it. You know what I mean.

ThunderStash Gaming: 46:08

Like these things happen all the time now and it comes down to integrity, business integrity and really caring about your, your fans, man, your audience, and when you do, when you do stuff like this, you are taking advantage of them. No matter how you look at it, it's taking advantage of the consumer. I don't think it's a good business practice. I don't know anyone who would think it's a good business practice, but man, uh, I feel like it's becoming a crutch now and it has been and it's.

ThunderStash Gaming: 46:40

It's unfortunate because, again, just like the micro transactions and everything else, they've seen that we're willing to accept it, they've seen that the mass majority is willing to spend money and in this case, hey God, look at cyberpunk man, all the issues.

Mark Trobough: 46:58

Yet how much money it made. Yeah, but I guess I would say different from that in Starfield. That felt like a lot of the content was there, but the game just was too buggy. There's a lot of the, a lot of behind the scenes, you, but the game just was too buggy. There's a lot of the, a lot of behind the scenes you could. When I played the game at launch on PC it didn't run into as many issues. You could tell there was a good game there but it just it wasn't finished, like it needed a good another year to make, just to make the game run better.

Mark Trobough: 47:21

Essentially, where it felt like a game like Starfield was just fully empty. But I also know you brought up the idea of, like you know, for the shareholders and you know, trying to make money. But that can also backfire because I mean, look at Ubisoft, you know Star Wars kind of came out. Not only was it a game that people kind of felt like they were turned off just by the type of game it was, but it's buggy. People see it and their stock's taking a hit. And then they've got another big game Shadows.

Mark Trobough: 47:47

There's reports coming down. That obviously there's. You know, more people go digital but like even what you'd expect for the physical and the pre-orders, not where you're expecting it and it's, you know, a lot of people looking out. It's like, are you really going to rush out a game? Or put a game that's like, no, this is the game we know that you want, you know, we know better than you. And then it kind of you know, backfires, like it's a cascading issue of either rushing out games or making games that it's kind of obvious a lot of the fans don't care for gets immediate backlash. But maybe all that extra media doesn't, doesn't help. The whole concept of you know any, uh, any media, even it being bad, would be good I agree with you 100.

ThunderStash Gaming: 48:29

I'm watching the ubisoft discourse very closely and I did see that tweet that went out right and, if I recall the rumor came from Stuttering Craig I believe so who? Used to be on ScrewAttack right. Yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 48:47

It was interesting. They put out the tweet and it was listed as a rumor that Assassin's Creed Shadows pre-orders less than 800 from national chain with over 900 stores. And I actually put out a tweet about this because he said less than 900 stores, right or no, I'm sorry, with a little over 900 stores. And I looked it up and the first thing I thought of national chain Okay, I'm thinking. First one I want to check is Best Buy. Yeah, do a Google search. Total number of Best Buy stores in the US. Guess how many stores it has in the US right now? Five 600?

Mark Trobough: 49:26

901. Oh, he said a little over 900. A little 901.

ThunderStash Gaming: 49:31

He said a little over 900. A little 901. It's Best Buy. I would put money on it that it's Best Buy that has only 800 pre-orders between PS5 and Xbox. That is insane. This is going to be a massive, massive loss and there's a lot of reasons why. A lot of reasons why I'm sure you guys know a lot of them.

Mark Trobough: 49:59

With the advent of social media and stuff like that, a lot of these developers maybe not all of them, but there's a small vocal minority that come out and at times it feels like it's bad PR.

ThunderStash Gaming: 50:13

They come out and attack the fans or they say some really off the wall stuff yeah.

Brandon Hurles: 50:15

Concord.

Mark Trobough: 50:16

Yeah, that's yeah.

Brandon Hurles: 50:17

They blame their game failing on the fans. Are you kidding me?

Mark Trobough: 50:21

Like are you, not the one.

Brandon Hurles: 50:22

It's your fault for making a game that was a trend in 2016. It's no longer popular.

Mark Trobough: 50:30

Yeah, I mean, I guess, if you want to, we can roll right into that one, since it you know. Essentially the whole issue is with Concord, Essentially the game that was rumored to make anywhere from what $100 to $200 million and it came out what? Two weeks ago and the game's essentially shuttered. I believe, if not already, it was at least at the very least rumored, that today was the day the actual servers were getting shut down. So the game's only on for no, yeah, yeah, Sorry, that's a fact. Yeah, but like two weeks, and then the game's essentially dead and gone. This has bought the games. Getting refunded Like this game is just a mess.

Brandon Hurles: 51:01

That's a lot of money History the quickest in history to be pulled offline. Yeah.

Mark Trobough: 51:07

I don't know what was on the PlayStation, but I know on the Steam charts because the game came out on Steam. Yeah.

Mark Trobough: 51:13

It had like maybe like 100, 200 people the first day and then it was very quickly down to double digits. It's a game nobody asked for in an oversaturated market that didn't do it well. And then you could argue some of the DEI stuff that people attack, go after with some of the character designs Well, I think that played a factor. That's not like the biggest thing. The dei stuff that people attack, uh, go after, yeah, with some of the character designs, uh, well, I think that played a factor. That's not like the biggest thing. It's just yeah, it did. It's an oversaturated market.

ThunderStash Gaming: 51:38

It's like overwatch 2, but like discount, like there's other games that I can already play, like yeah, it's like the, the team, you version right, yeah, yeah, and it, you know, no shade on team. There's some cool stuff on there. But, um, you know, I, I agree with you on all that. I think the DEI plays a a very, actually small role with this game. It's small, yeah, it's still significant to some, um, and some more than others, for sure, but the the biggest issue, okay, and some more than others, for sure, but the biggest issue, okay, because if the game was good, that issue would be minimized a little bit more. The DEI, but the fact is, is that obviously, they started making this game eight years ago when everyone was trying to cash in on the same trend. And we know who else did this Warner Brothers with Suicide Squad. The same trend. And we, we know who else did this warner brothers with suicide squad. They, they, they are on the uh, they're on the same boat together right now, sailing off to another continent.

ThunderStash Gaming: 52:40

Because it ain't ever selling here again, and it's it's all predicated from one thing it's greed, greed. Oh yeah, it's all about making money. It's not because we have a great idea and we're passionate about it and we think we could make something really cool. That's not where it came from. It came from. Hey, let's come up with an idea on how we can make the most money possible with one of our IPs. That's the root, yes Of the idea. That's how it starts, and let's be real.

Brandon Hurles: 53:19

Money is the root of all evil, as they say.

ThunderStash Gaming: 53:22

It is. I mean it truly, is man Truly. Yeah.

Brandon Hurles: 53:27

It's just, it's disgusting, if you ask me. The whole situation is gross.

Mark Trobough: 53:32

All I can say is I wouldn't be. I don't know how this studio could not get shut and everybody lose their jobs, like with the amount of money this game lost. I think that's inevitable at this point and Sony's going to take a huge hit. Like, even if it's on the low end say, this game costs $100 million, you're out that money, essentially it 100 million dollars. Uh, you're, you're out that that money, that's, that's, that's essentially, it's just poof, it's gone, and that that's a whole lot, especially when it comes to, you know, a smaller studio with this game it's massive.

ThunderStash Gaming: 54:01

Okay, so you got the eight years of working on this game. So that's eight years of paying employees. Okay, you know, you know, paying the salary, paying the benefits, paying the PTO, paying for the building, turn the lights on, okay, you got all that cost. Then you got all the marketing cost. Okay, you put it out on PC. You don't just create a ps5 game and, yeah, it runs on pc. You got to optimize it and do everything. So you got a team that does that. Right, this is eight years worth of all this stuff. Sony also. They buy the studio, yeah, so there's a price to buy it. Then there's a price to pay them for all this time. Then there's a price for, obviously, all the advertising, all the promotions. You got a controller that you made and you charged $84.99 for that. It got pulled off the shelves. I don't know what they're doing with it. I don't know if it's going to with et the one good thing to come out.

ThunderStash Gaming: 55:16

Concord is that controller, because it's a pretty controller I agree, the controller is cool, but it's living with et now probably yeah in roswell in the desert.

ThunderStash Gaming: 55:25

They're probably gonna bury it next to atari's et game. It's pretty much. This is wild. I again, like I will say, when I saw the trailer, when they first announced it, my, my girlfriend was watching it with me too, or I wouldn't say she was watching it, right, she was present, she was doing her own thing. She doesn't get into it, of course, as much as I do, but I showed it to her again and I said babe, look at this game. I said how much you want to bet? This is going to be the next suicide squad, because I told her earlier in the year about suicide squad. Uh, actually, I think I told her in 2023. Oh, my god, this game's gonna bomb. I'm like watch, they're gonna lose so much money. This game looks like trash, so nobody wants to kill batman. And and she's like why is that the title? Suicide squad? You know what is it? Justice league. Is that what it is?

Brandon Hurles: 56:22

or suicide squad, kill the justice league yeah, yeah, like what.

ThunderStash Gaming: 56:29

It's wild. And then I showed her some previews where, like you killed batman in the game. She's like what? Why are we doing this? I thought we liked batman. I'm like we do.

Brandon Hurles: 56:40

We do like that that game is referenced exactly on a storyline from the comics. But I will say this like their execution was with it is stupid and I think it should. We talked about this on Twitter, steve. This should have never been connected to the Arkham games. It's disgusting. I don't claim it as an Arkham game, but regardless of whether I claim it as that, they claim it as that.

ThunderStash Gaming: 57:04

So right, it's unfortunate because, again, like we were talking on Twitter, it's like here's the here's the big problem, okay, sure. Because again, like we were talking on Twitter, it's like here's the big problem, okay, sure. If this game existed and meanwhile we've received a couple Arkham games in the last 10 years, great. But the fact is is that the last Arkham game we got, arkham Knight, came out in 2014. It's 2024. That's 10 years. That Was essentially thrown away For Suicide Squad. Yeah, I mean, that's suicide, literally. Yeah, that's horrible man. What are you thinking? But again, they're, they weren't thinking the right way.

Brandon Hurles: 57:52

That's the thing, man being great, it's all about the money yeah, and they thought people were gonna buy into it, and obviously not. I mean, look, consumers are getting tired of this live service uh motive that these companies have thinking they're going to bank on. They want the next fortnight, they want the next apex legends, they want the next pub g. That's what they want. Overwatch as well, like those are the big ones that these companies want to own something like one of those games, especially fortnight. You see, fortnight, you know whether you know I, you know. I don't know if you like it, steve, or not, but whether we like it or not, fortnite is super successful, I mean very successful. They're bringing in every property imaginable into that game and it's doing so well. So these other companies want a piece of that pie and they just can't do it. You can't replicate Fortnite when it's already so successful and Overwatch already has its community. This Marvel, whatever the Marvel game is called, that's like Overwatch. That's not going to be successful. Concord's not going to be successful. They already got Overwatch.

Mark Trobough: 59:06

Yeah, you have games like Valorant, but it's like a lot of these games are free to play and you want a $40 price tag to compete against a market where people already solidified you know their, their shooter, their their hero shooter kind of whatever genre you want to put this game into and it's just they set themselves up for failure. I feel like they, because of how much time and money they had to put a price tag, yeah, or over monetize a lot of the stuff, like a lot of these other games do. But it's just it came out too late. Maybe if this game out came out five years earlier, it would have had a chance to compete.

Brandon Hurles: 59:36

Right, but the development time on these games like you can't a trend is over. I mean, look, we see some trends die within a week.

Brandon Hurles: 59:45

Some die in a couple of days, sometimes with games. Sometimes with games you'll see the trend last like a month or maybe two. Um, there's been a lot of trendy games, like during covid, like fall guys was super trendy and animal crossing, new horizons was really trendy and you know games like that. But like it doesn't last that long and development cycles on average are what mark. We looked this up, what was it?

Mark Trobough: 1:00:10

five years, four to five years average yeah but some games we see take 10 years.

Brandon Hurles: 1:00:17

I mean some games are you know what I mean like if it takes 10 years, there is some trouble, development at that point well, speaking of like metroid and things like that, where it did get a restarted development but regardless it was announced and it took that long and it's still not out, so you know it's like a console life cycle, or at least the old console life cycle of four to five years, which was pretty standard.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:00:43

That's how long it's taking to make a game, in some cases in triple a cases, for sure, obviously not, not not so much with indie. But you know, you mentioned, yes, if I like, uh, that kind of game, right and no, you know, I, I don't play, I don't play that game, I don't play overwatch. And what was the other one again?

Mark Trobough: 1:01:07

or valorant yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:01:09

Okay. So have I followed these games? You know, read what they've done. Am I completely aware of the amount of fans they have? Yes, All of that. Of course I don't play it. It's just not something I'm interested in. Yeah, but I respect what they've done. I think that's great. It's great for gaming. It's growing gaming. It's bringing more people in. They get brought in as a casual and maybe they end up becoming a lifelong gamer and they play other stuff. That's great. This is all good for the industry. It's just not something that I'm interested in, but I have much respect for it. It's similar not something that I'm interested in, but I have much respect for it. It's. It's similar to that old cell phone game. What was it? Angry Birds, right?

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:01:58

Yeah that was a huge, huge hit. I mean, anywhere you go there's Angry Birds merchandise and yeah, it was a cultural phenomenon a little bit, and great for that I tried it out. I say I see I could see the draw here, uh, but is it for me? I played it a little bit and then that was it. Yeah, you know it's. It's not the experience I'm looking for, but I can appreciate it yeah, yeah, for sure, and I mean I feel the same way.

Brandon Hurles: 1:02:29

It's like I appreciate what they've done and I appreciate what, you know, fortnite does and brings in, you know, casual gamers and people are entertained by it, but it's just not my thing I mean personally, you know so yeah, I need it with concord.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:02:47

Just to get back at that, you had mentioned some of the developers, right? Yeah. Speaking out and I pulled up that tweet and I don't know if everyone's heard this or not, but I'll read it out. It says Concord developer projects own personal insecurity of being a talentless developer. Oh yeah, long story short. They they said that gamers are talentless freaks. Whoever thinks our game is garbage, right. Whatever gamers think this game is garbage, they're just a bunch of talentless freaks, literally. Oh, they labeled gamers talentless freaks. What is this like?

Brandon Hurles: 1:03:39

it's insane it feels like a like a joke, but it's not that's how they actually feel.

Mark Trobough: 1:03:47

Like pretty much coming up like no, we know what you want more. Like, first of all, it's just such a bad name for you if your name's ever attached to the game but like it's coming out and attacking people that didn't like your game for, or didn't bother to play your game. That's not going to bring people there. You're just, you know, publicly venting and you know people that have a grind axe to grind against some of some developers, for whatever reason. You're just giving them more fuel to be like oh see, this is why and we can attach you know you're just a bad developer or we can attach DEI to a bunch of these other things. Whether it's true or not, it just gives people more ammunition to go out and be like don't buy games from these developers or these studios.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:04:27

Yeah, horrible. Look, and I don't think we have it on our list, but it's the same week. The same week that Concord comes out, that piece of trash game, dustborne, comes out. It's the same Dude. Oh my gosh, that game was literally funded, if I recall, recall by the European Union. And it is horrible, man. It is horrible the things they talk about in this game again. This game giant flop, giant giant flop biggest in a while.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:05:10

It's not good for the world games like this, while and yeah, it's not good for the world games like this coming out, it's. It's not good no it's.

Mark Trobough: 1:05:18

And then I know, uh, this wasn't in the notes but I know there was reports that, uh, you know everyone talked about how alan lewitt 2 was good. Obviously, that game came out right before the whole sweet baby inc thing came out after the fact. But there were some reports, or people digging up reports, the fact that Island Week 2, the studio hasn't made any money from it. Essentially, they will receive 50% of the profits. After what's the actual studio that owns Firewalker no, it's not Firewalker. I can't remember off the top of my head and it's killing me what Remedy Whoever owns the studio that made Out and Walk 2.

Brandon Hurles: 1:05:54

Yeah, that's Remedy right, remedy right.

Mark Trobough: 1:05:57

Yeah, remedy has yet to make any money from it, because the studio that funded it will get 100% of the profits until they make their investment back. And then the studio makes essentially 50% of each sale. And then there was recently earlier this week one of the community managers from Remedy it's Vidya Starkovic, she's got a European name I can't properly pronounce Came out and was like no, calling certain types of gamers bigots, and says we need to remove these toxic fans from the games industry. But it's like a back and forth, I'm like you're not like I saw this.

Mark Trobough: 1:06:31

Just it's like a back and forth. I'm like you're not making this any better. It's just a back and forth, back and forth, like you coming out. It's just like the best thing you could do is just not say anything and a lot of this toxic hate that you don't like will eventually die out because it doesn't have the fuel. And it's just like I you're making this worse for you and the studio that you work for yeah, the world, dude.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:06:50

The world is upside down in so many ways and it's wild because I I read that as well and I feel like a few weeks before that I read the same thing from everyone involved in. You know, the star wars acolyte that. Because we don't like it, we're this, this and that it's like. What are you talking about? This is insane.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:07:14

You're talking like children, like yeah like you're like your brains haven't fully developed yet because you're still growing and that's okay, right. But it's like you're you're at school, at recess or something, and you say something you should have never have said, but you know, you said it and you you feel bad after, but you're still learning and you're still growing. These are adults saying stuff like this. Yeah, putting it out there, like to be consumed by everybody is.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:07:43

It is wild, like what's up with all these people? Just this would be career suicide, I think it's going to. The more you make games, people see your name, they see the.

Mark Trobough: 1:07:51

I think it's going to. The more you make games, people see your name, they see the studio and it's just. There are certain, at least a certain percentage of gamers that will never touch the games you make on. If it's Tattoo or a studio and I wanted to correct it Epic Games Publishing is the one who has yet to make back their full investment. So until they make back 100% of their investment, the Remedy Entertainment won't see a dime.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:08:15

Unfortunate. You know you might as well just go the Kickstarter route, because people have already played. They'd already played Alan Wake, the first one. You could have just went to Kickstarter.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:08:26

I've seen many many successful Kickstarter campaigns that I've been a part of, that I've helped fund, and it's I I've seen them be extremely successful and you already had one game, so they. It's just unfortunate because, man, in retrospect they would have made their money already if they had done that. It's just a bad choice there. But, yeah, you know the whole dei and video game stuff. Look, man, it's just like sports. We don't want politics with our sports. We don't want politics and dei stuff with our video games. We want an escape from reality. When we tune in to watch sports, we want an escape, okay, and the same goes for video games. It's been like that our whole life. That's what we want an escape, okay. And the same goes for video games. It's been like that our whole life. That's what we want an escape from.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:09:16

So the fact that it's in video games now, not only that, but these developers, man, they're, they're paying hefty ransoms. It seems like to these dei companies like millions of dollars, like black myth. Wukong, obviously, is a prime example of a company that said nah, we're not doing that. And how funny is it that it's company from China? Yeah, that's a whole nother conversation, but it's like whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. A company from China is basically being the most exemplary developer of them all by saying no.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:09:59

Yeah, and I applaud them because they said, no, we're not doing it Like we're not paying you. What was it? Six or seven million dollars to.

Mark Trobough: 1:10:08

To Sweet Baby Inc. Yeah, and the media came out and attacked them for months. Well, that's what they do.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:10:15

That's what I, from what I've gathered, from what I've seen in a lot of videos from people who do research on this. Let's just say that, and from what I've gathered is that if you don't pay them, they have people in the industry, journalists, which again journalists are. They are right on track to be just like mainstream media, where no one cares what you have to say. We don't believe you, we don't know.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:10:54

If you're telling us the truth half the time, you can't be trusted yeah and journalists are heading down that dark, dark path and it's a bad move, but they're already doing it and that's a big. That's a big, that's a big problem. It's also a big opportunity for other people who are willing to review games.

Mark Trobough: 1:11:16

Yeah, and be honest especially on the YouTube space Cause. I think you talk about it. Let me they this. This media doesn't have any power. It's like they attack this game, but they just came out and announced like after two weeks, black black myth Wu Kong has sold 18 million copies. That's a lot of money.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:11:32

It broke the records on Steam it broke the concurrent player record.

Mark Trobough: 1:11:38

It's still going strong. There's still consistently the concurrence of well over a million players.

Brandon Hurles: 1:11:43

It broke some kind of record on Steam for sure. I don't know what.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:11:50

It's wild. I was very happy for them. Uh, in a variety of ways, I I think it's great that they said no, and of course, this was the consequence of it okay, you don't want to pay us? Fine, we're gonna get you canceled. And then it backfired on them. I love it.

Mark Trobough: 1:12:12

A great dichotomy between Blackmuth, Wukong and Concord. Like, there's clearly, you know there's a game that gamers want and if you make the game gamers want, you'll make money. It's ultimately the same thing. Yeah, I know we got to move along, Brandon, but ultimately, like, if you don't want a game, nothing speaks louder than your wallet. Eventually, if a company keeps losing millions of dollars, they're going to stop doing what they're doing losing them money. This is all they care about Because ultimately, that's, at the end of the day All these companies care about.

Brandon Hurles: 1:12:40

That's it. They just care about money, they just want the Poke dollars, that's it.

Mark Trobough: 1:12:45

Definitely. But also, talking about Black Myth, wukong, we got reports that they have two separate DLCs that are currently in the works for this game. Oh, which is not surprising, considering they've more than likely probably made their money back, and then some of this point. But it's nice to know that this game, at least for the immediate future, is going to continue to get, you know, work or not work, but more content coming in the future?

Brandon Hurles: 1:13:10

I haven't, obviously we, I was just going to say or not work, but uh, more content coming in the future, obviously we. I'm just sorry we can say it up yet, but I'm very interested, especially after what you said about it, because I trust your opinion on games.

Mark Trobough: 1:13:20

So I played the game. I've only I only have a handful of hours in right now, but from what I've played, I absolutely love the game. I don't know, have you had the?

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:13:28

chance to play it. I have not played it yet, but I picked it up.

Mark Trobough: 1:13:32

Yeah, I would recommend it. It's not like a. I know the studio kind of came out and said we want to this to be like their own, its own genre of game. I wouldn't say it's like like a dark souls esque game. But it's not like a game you just run through hack and slash. But it has elements of like hack and slash, like you've got to you know preserve, like certain amounts of like you're you know healing and you know certain items and stuff like that. But it's like a type of game from I've seen the general ads fairly easy to take out. Obviously you can't rush in. You can obviously get poisoned and some fun stuff like that. But the bosses you can't just be mindless because you can't parry or block stuff like that. You have to roll, dodge out of the way. But essentially it's like you learn the movement to the bosses.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:14:16

You hit when you can and stuff like that exactly and it's great, like I literally was just, you know, reviewing all these Castlevania games and it's the same theme as far as the gameplay and that, hey, yeah, these are, these are really hard games, right. However, if, if you learn the enemy, as far as the gameplay and that, hey, yeah, these are, these are really hard games, right. However, if, if you learn the enemy attack patterns and memorize Right, you got to learn from them. When you die here, you got to learn that, hey, this is coming up, yeah, I need to make sure that I don't die here, or or hey, here, or hey, there's going to be a cheap death right here, and I need to change what I did, because the game's not going to change.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:14:55

Right, I have to change. I have to change in order to get past this part, and that's great. That's what's great about video games. And so when I had heard that that's how the game was, I'm like this is great.

Brandon Hurles: 1:15:05

Love it all in yeah, I'm super excited to play it looks awesome I just my backlog is ridiculous it's gonna get, continue to get worse.

Mark Trobough: 1:15:15

I know I feel like it's hit or miss right now, but have you all gotten a chance to watch the trailer for the Minecraft movie?

Brandon Hurles: 1:15:23

yes, I wanted to talk about that, if you have not watched it. Steve, watch it real time right now, because this is interesting.

Mark Trobough: 1:15:30

I was unimpressed with it. I I want to watch it it real time right now because this is interesting. I was unimpressed with it.

Brandon Hurles: 1:15:35

I want to watch it back real time for audio listeners. We're checking it out here, so if you want to pull up the trailer as we're talking, I want to sort of come up with it real time.

Mark Trobough: 1:15:44

Yeah, so it's kind of like they've got Jack Black, I believe, as Steve. The Moblins look kind of like weird hyper realistic. A lot of the stuff looks blocky, except for the actual characters. If you've ever played the game, there's no actual story to this. They've got Jason MO in this for some reason with too much hair. This felt like a game that's targeting like nine year old kids and younger for the most part.

Brandon Hurles: 1:16:13

But it also the film looks weird it looks it's too bright this makes that how bright it is the lighting's weird yeah, it's like.

Mark Trobough: 1:16:26

I don't know this, this. I got the film's. Like you know, a lot of people owe Minecraft story mode an apology, because that will make this movie is going to make Minecraft Story Mode look like a masterpiece.

Brandon Hurles: 1:16:37

This is giving me Borderlands movie vibes.

Mark Trobough: 1:16:41

Yeah, a little bit, except there's no source material, so you can kind of do whatever you want.

Brandon Hurles: 1:16:48

There's a little source material, but not a ton to work with. You pretty much can do whatever you want.

Mark Trobough: 1:16:52

Minecraft's essentially a sandbox.

Brandon Hurles: 1:16:53

There's a little source material, but not a ton to work with.

Mark Trobough: 1:16:54

You pretty much can do whatever you want. Minecraft's essentially a sandbox.

Brandon Hurles: 1:16:58

It's pretty much non-existent, that's pretty much what I would say. What I was thinking they were going to do was pull from story mode, because that would make most sense and that really does have a full story. That's happening. Yeah, if they would have did that, this may have been better, but instead they just did whatever and I don't know. I just watched the whole thing over again and I'm underwhelmed.

Mark Trobough: 1:17:22

Jack Black's the funny man.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:17:26

I just watched it. It does nothing for me. It looks like Jack black is playing himself and that's all he can do.

Mark Trobough: 1:17:38

It's like that's what he felt like in the borderlands movie, like he just played himself.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:17:42

It looks like clap trap it looks like he just rolled out of bed, though, and this is what he wore today in real life and he's, yeah, gonna go start his day, but it's good. Yeah, I'm not, I'm definitely not. I'm not interested in this, and Seeing something like this just feel like it's further proof that.

Brandon Hurles: 1:18:02

Steve, let me ask you a question. Hollywood's suffering. Would you be willing to go watch the movie with me and Mark all of us watch it separate and do a review on the movie?

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:18:14

oh, minecraft yeah, I would?

Mark Trobough: 1:18:20

I would watch and review, it, sure all right, all right, just to more than likely rip on it I mean, yeah, whatever it might end up being a masterpiece for all we know, like we, we could love it.

Brandon Hurles: 1:18:30

I I'll give it a fair, love it.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:18:31

I'll give it a fair shake. I'll give anything a fair shake and yes, I would watch it.

Brandon Hurles: 1:18:38

Yeah, I think it would be a fun one to review, because I mean we have, we're going in with absolutely zero expectations and zero rock bottom and, who knows, maybe we jump up a few levels and we're like, oh, it's actually like a three out of ten, not a one out of ten, you know, or something like that I don't know.

Mark Trobough: 1:18:58

Yeah, but the movie's slated to come out April 4th of next year, so you still have like six months or so before you have to worry about that.

Brandon Hurles: 1:19:06

Many more trailers.

Mark Trobough: 1:19:08

Yeah, I know we talked about this before, but there's rumors that the Pokemon Legends ZA will arrive the second half of 2025. Based off some of the trading card game remarks. That was kind of teased.

Brandon Hurles: 1:19:23

I was kind of hoping it would be a spring game.

Mark Trobough: 1:19:27

But I guess that leans into. Are we expecting the Switch to come out spring? Maybe it comes out fall. Regardless, at least for the Switch successor. It's probably going to be a first-year title for a Pokemon game.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:19:38

I think Pokemon Legends will be the big holiday title for Switch 2. I think Switch 2 still comes out in March. Yeah, At the latest April, but I'm still leaning with March. And yeah, this is going to be the big holiday title. I would expect it to come out probably around this time September.

Mark Trobough: 1:20:03

So you have your first big surge of essentially hardcore Nintendo fans going after it, first to some amount of sustained, and then you're just trying to ramp up some handful of games for the holiday season, where you're really expecting to get a massive push in its first year.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:20:18

Yeah, all the hardcore buy it. And then we all talk about it, all the reviews go up, everyone's on social media talking about it. It's free word of mouth advertising for Nintendo and for the Pokemon company. And you do a couple restocks. It sells out numerous times and then you hit black friday.

Brandon Hurles: 1:20:40

yeah, this is this would be perfect, perfect holiday title well, uh, I'm going to break up the news that we have right here in our small news section to answer a couple of community questions that we got sent in. These are ones that got sent in to us via text, so the first one is from Aaron Get, asking when do we think the first mainline Pokemon game is coming for the Nintendo Switch 2 and what do you think it will be titled around?

Mark Trobough: 1:21:10

I think they mean like collar or stone or like something like that, yeah, I mean, I think it's still probably a good three years away, at the very least Probably looking at 2028. If only we just got like was it last year For Scarlet and Violet? Scarlet and Violet yeah. That was two years ago, 2022 so maybe like 2026, 2025, I have no idea personally.

Brandon Hurles: 1:21:43

I'm thinking that we've got quarter to 2025 is what I'm thinking, because we normally get the mainline launches around October, somewhere around that time frame, something like that. And then now that we've got the Legends games, it seems like it's going to become a series. We've got alternating mainline Because technically, legends is a mainline game according to the timeline. So my guess is, for like a mainline, uh, regular game, I'm guessing quarter two, probably of 2025. That's what I'm guessing I. As for the name, I don't know, pokemon, I I have no idea. We've got Sun and Moon, we've got Collars, we've got Gems. You know, I really don't know what they could tie to it, but Do you have any thoughts?

Brandon Hurles: 1:22:46

Crash Can.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:22:48

You know, I'm looking at the most recent Pokemons right For Switch. I'm looking at the main line and I'm looking at the release dates here. So we got in 2018. So Switch came out March 3rd 2017. 2018, we got let's Go, pikachu and Eevee. 2019, we get sword and shield. So that's your first main line right, your main line pokemon, because we can't really consider let's go and mainline because we've only got one. So I'm talking about the mainline stuff yeah, sword and Shield 2019. 2020, we get the DLC. Yeah, 2021, we get a remake Diamond and Pearl. And then 2022, we get Scarlet and Violet. So we had three years go by Between the mainline releases. Yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:23:50

So of course it lines up that we would get the next mainline in 2025. But do we get the mainline and Legends in the same year?

Brandon Hurles: 1:24:05

I've been before. We got Legends and Scarlet in the same year. So Scarlet and Violet Legends came out early in the year and Scarlet and Violet came out later in the same year. So Scarlet and Violet Legends came out early in the year and Scarlet and Violet came out later in the year.

Mark Trobough: 1:24:15

I mean convention would say I guess it depends on when you're, when you're expecting, because obviously we haven't had an announcement yet. But convention would say probably about a year, because you don't want people potentially skipping one, you want to push them to the one and then give it some time for the next one plus it felt like scarlet and violet obviously felt super rushed when they came out and I wouldn't be surprised that they actually were.

Mark Trobough: 1:24:38

So I feel like you need a little bit more time for the next games to actually, you know, cook and develop essentially that was my thought.

Brandon Hurles: 1:24:45

Is that, because of the issues of scarlet and violet, it might take a little bit longer for these new games to come out, because they know they need that, or it could not be that way because they're now working with the Switch 2 hardware and they have more to work with Right, like that game. I mean Scarlet and Violet was a big attempt for the Switch, but we also got games like Breath of the Wild and it worked just fine. So I don't know.

Mark Trobough: 1:25:12

Oh it. It felt like Scruton by it weren't optimized. They were just rushed out the door to make money and it kind of succeeded.

Brandon Hurles: 1:25:18

Yeah, it's unfortunate.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:25:20

What if they do this? What if we do get legends in 2025 and I'm planning on that, I think we all are. Yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:25:35

What if they release Scarlet and Violet Complete Editions on Switch 2, fully optimized at 60 FPS at 4K when it's docked 1080p portable mode? They offer an upgrade path for people who own the game and that will also act as another apology for how poorly optimized this game was. This holds over everybody who's waiting for the mainline games. They say, okay, we're not getting a mainline game this year. That sucks, but I get it. But hey, at least we can play Scarlet and Viol violet the way it should have been played. Maybe nintendo throws in one more dlc and we get legends.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:26:22

I think pokemon fans would be like all right, you know what I'm good with that. I really wanted a new one this year, but you're giving me the a perfectly running version of Scarlet and Violet. It's got a couple extra things. I don't have to pay full price because I already own the game and Legends is coming out. Plus, I got a new Switch 2. There's other games I'm good with it coming out in 2026. I could see a scenario like that because I do think there are a lot of switch one games that personally were being developed for switch 2 and the plan was to release them on switch 2. But the plan also was to release switch 2 in 2024, until it was internally delayed. Of course, nintendo has not went out and said that, but that is the very frequent rumor and I believe it. I believe it because it's just logical that this should have came out this year.

Brandon Hurles: 1:27:25

Not eight years? Do you think that Nintendo goes the route that Xbox went, where playing older games optimizes that game better? You know, getting a full 60 frames per second, getting you know a resolution, patch, things like that Do you think that's possible?

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:27:48

I would say I don't just think it's possible, I think it's probable.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:27:52

I would say I don't just think it's possible, I think it's probable, and I think, actually, that is going to be one of the bigger selling points of the Switch 2 is that you will be able to play, obviously, all your Switch 1 games, but it's going to be, not only is it backwards compatible, but we're going to be taking advantage of the nvidia dlss technology to improve the frame rate and resolution on first party nintendo games, and they're going to say that third-party developers have all of these same tools that we have, and they've been given the green light to do the same thing for their games.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:28:37

What they need to do, though, if they're going to do this and I hope they do, and I really actually think this is going to be a selling point it may sound a little dark horse, but I really think it is, because you know from what we've known for all the rumors, right, is that switch 2 is going to be like nintendo to super nintendo. Right, it's going to be very similar. Uh, we're not introducing motion control or this or that. Right, it's going to be very similar, but a huge improvement right over the current switch and, historically speaking, that's not enough, even though that's what the fans want. That's what I want. A lot of people just want a better switch, but historically speaking, that's not enough because there's always a huge drop-off in sales from the nes to the super yeah seismoff Massive if you look at the numbers Right.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:29:34

So we gotta do something a little bit different here, and this Nvidia DLSS is the perfect opportunity. I've played games on PC with DLSS turned on. I've played Nintendo 64 games with DLSSss, like specifically both zelda games. It'sa game changer, game changer. It is insane how good ocarina of time and majora's mask looks with dlss running at 60 frames per second. I can play at 120 frames per second yeah, and it's crazy.

Brandon Hurles: 1:30:11

It's crazy what tech can do yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:30:14

So I think that's going to be a huge selling point, which again, this would lead into lead us all back to the pokemon question, and that I could see the, the next main line, slipping into 2026, because they're going to right the wrongs of scarlet and violet and give us legends in the same year yeah, I, I was looking some stuff up here because I was checking as far as pokemon releases.

Brandon Hurles: 1:30:41

What's interesting is this might be the first generation where we don't get and it can still happen, but it might be the first generation and several generations where we don't get a Pokemon game, a mainline game that comes out after the next successor is already out. So Black 2, white 2 came out when the 3DS was already out. Ultra Sun, ultra Moon came out when the Switch was already out. Pokemon Yellow came out when the Game Boy Color was already out. This might be one of the first. I can't think of any other generations where that maybe did. Firered and LeafGreen come out after the DS came out. I can't remember that that might be the only generation that wasn't the case.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:31:29

No, it didn't. That came out in 2004.

Brandon Hurles: 1:31:31

Okay, so that must be the only generation, because the past several the games have came out after the next console's out, and for good reason, because the install base is huge already.

Brandon Hurles: 1:31:44

Yeah, yeah so I I'm interested to see what the move is with the pokemon company on all this, because I don't think we're getting another mainline game after the Switch 2 is out for Switch 1. And I really don't know what they have up their sleeve. Because Scarlet and Violet the sales weren't great right compared to other Pokemon games. They were still good, but they weren't great compared to normal Pokemon sales. I think that's what we may have talked about before. Mark, I can't remember.

Mark Trobough: 1:32:16

I'd have to pull it up.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:32:20

I could see a scenario where, if they do release a Pokemon game outside of Legends in year one, that it could be another let's go or a remake. So maybe not scarlet and violet, but hey, maybe they do a let's go something else because that's how they started. That's how they started the switch generation.

Mark Trobough: 1:32:47

True yeah it can happen so I just want to say for that, scarlet and violet uh, have sold up just shy of 25 million copies, it's the third best-selling. Uh, okay, a pair of games behind sword and shield, and then red, blue and green oh, wow, okay yeah that's one of the better selling games.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:33:06

Uh, it'll probably pass it right. I would probably zoom. Yeah, I'm looking at the numbers. Those are as of March 2024. And I got to imagine after this holiday season it's going to be able to pass Sword and Shield.

Mark Trobough: 1:33:21

Yeah, sword and Shield should sit in at about just over 26 million roughly.

Brandon Hurles: 1:33:28

Interesting. Yeah, impressive, I was looking at that as well. Yeah, I'd be, interested to see what they do honestly, because I, yeah, I mean, I don't know it's hard to tell, but we'll move on to the other uh, community question then get to the other news. Uh, so we don't go run over a bunch on time.

Brandon Hurles: 1:33:47

So we've also got from. I think it's. Jeremy Stubb is asking us what are your top three JRPGs currently available on the Nintendo Switch? So that's a tough one. I'm definitely going to say Ys. Lacrimosa of Donna is going to be up there. For me probably Dragon Quest XII. What else? I almost want to say another Ys game, but I want to avoid that.

Mark Trobough: 1:34:27

I mean, if you classify it, the xenoblade chronicles games on the switch are pretty good yeah, but they're not top for me.

Brandon Hurles: 1:34:35

I'm I like the games, but they're not they're top. Yeah, they're top of at least the ones that I've played, for sure yeah I, if I, if xenoblade chronicles x brought came to Switch, I would have said that for number one but it didn't.

Mark Trobough: 1:34:49

You probably have to. At least it's not exclusive to it. But the Octopath Traveler games 1 and 2.

Brandon Hurles: 1:34:55

Those are great too. Excellent games Star Ocean, second Story R that would be my other answer. Those three games Absolutely love them. Lacrimosa of Donna is one of the best Ys games ever. I can't wait for the next one. I wish I could say Visions of Mana, but I haven't been able to play so I can't say. But I've heard great things. So I think that Dragon Quest XII, ys, lacrimosa of Donna and yeah, I'll just have to go with the other one, I think I mean it's hard because I love jrpgs, but yeah, those are

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:35:30

my choices yeah, this is tough because obviously there's been so many great jrpgs on the switch, oh yeah. And then, if you look at the exclusivity factor like is it exclusive to Switch or not? And yes, the Xenoblade games fantastic. I would say God, all the Paper Marios we've got, it was, and I know it's an old game, but playing back through the thousand-year door, getting Super Mario RPG, which one of my favorite RPGs of all time.

Brandon Hurles: 1:36:13

I probably would have put that up there yeah, so we got that.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:36:18

Star Ocean has had a good representation. Of course, the most recent Star Ocean remake, but that's also on PlayStation excellent games and again Octopath Traveler the most recent Star Ocean remake, but that's also on PlayStation Excellent games and again Octopath Traveler 1 and 2, excellent games, but also on other consoles. Yeah. You can even say games like the Grandia HD remasters, grandia 1 and 2, phenomenal games. Loved them back in the day At the Persona games. There's a lot of great games, all the E's. I have them as well.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:36:57

Even you can say even collection of mana and trials of mana yeah, those are good ones too yeah, those are excellent games to have in your collection uh, live Alive but again, that's also on Playstation. Those are excellent games to have in your collection Live Alive but again, that's also on PlayStation. There's so many great ones. Right, we have all the old school Final Fantasies, minus the loading times, which, god, anyone who lived and played these on PS1, the load times were insane, and to not have those anymore is great. Yeah, it's huge. It's just like playing like uh grand theft auto or uh red dead redemption games that are notorious for extremely long load times and just to be able to play those today with no load times on modern consoles yeah or virtually no load times is a game changer yeah, I mean, then some of that's just as simple as going from a hard drive to an ssd.

Mark Trobough: 1:37:55

it's just it's able to load a lot of that stuff faster. And then, as more time goes on, it's like oh, this is just easier, less memory to load compared to the hardware it was developed for, uh, really makes it good. The problem for me when it comes to the Switch is most of my JRPGs I tend to play on PC, so most of the ones that I have played the handful I played were kind of early on. Obviously, I mentioned Xenoblade Chronicles and the first Octopath Traveler that I actually did play on the Switch, and then I think one of the only other ones just by simple I just haven't played that many on the Switch is another game I got early on called I Am Setsuna. It's a pretty good game.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:38:34

Oh yeah, I remember that.

Mark Trobough: 1:38:36

There's a lot of them, and there's a lot of games that are on the Switch that I have played. I just haven't played them on the Switch, so it doesn't feel right to say that, because I probably played them on PlayStation or on PC.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:38:47

Yeah, I will give an honorable mention as well to Sea of Stars.

Brandon Hurles: 1:38:51

Yeah, I was going to say that one too.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:38:55

I played on PlayStation, though.

Brandon Hurles: 1:38:56

I had a couple honorable mentions that I just wanted to show For audio listeners. I'm showing Rune Factory 4 Special, really really fun game. It's hard to explain but it's a JRPG slash farming, sim game. They're really, really fun. The SMT3 Nocturne HD Remaster highly recommend An absolute gem of a classic Tales of Symphonia Remastered, beautiful game. And then most probably wouldn't say this one, but I think it flies way under the radar and that is Digimon Story, Cyber Sleuth Complete Edition and it's a fantastic JRPG. It just really is. Just disregard the Digimon name. I mean Digimon's not bad or anything, but people wouldn't normally take that as a jrpg.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:39:48

So it's, it's really really good so, yeah, I agree, I agree they wouldn't probably take that uh, jrpg. But yeah, all those and I also, again, I played this on ps5, but it is on Switch and you mentioned it, brandon, but I got the Platinum Trophy for this game. I did everything and that's Dragon Quest 12S.

Brandon Hurles: 1:40:14

Yes, 12s, so good. Freaking, freaking, phenomenal, wow, I mean it is, dare I say, the best Dragon Quest game ever.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:40:25

I think that's pretty safe to say. And again, Dragon dragon quest. Can't wait for dragon quest 3 hd later this year oh I'm so excited. I will show you one game I got here, and it is one that I mentioned, but it's the sea of stars, and I got the special kickstarter edition right here. Oh it's, it comes in this sick Super Nintendo box.

Brandon Hurles: 1:40:51

You are opening it, correct, no?

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:40:55

Yeah, this is the early backer, limited edition. No, I'm not opening this.

Brandon Hurles: 1:41:01

Games are meant to be played. Are you kidding me?

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:41:04

I played it and I beat it. Yeah, I played it on ps5. I have, uh, one trophy left to get to get the platinum, but it requires a second playthrough and I'm not gonna say anything else for for spoiler reasons. But I will be returning back to this when the dlc comes out, doesn't?

Brandon Hurles: 1:41:24

that dlc look so awesome next year.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:41:28

Yeah well, I've been getting updates on it for like a year because the game's been gold for a long time yeah and they on the kickstarter. They give you all that info, which is cool and, uh, it's from what I've heard from the developers it's going to be massive, yeah that's what I've massive size dlc. I've heard, too, the developers. It's going to be massive. Yeah, that's what I've heard Massive-sized DLC.

Brandon Hurles: 1:41:49

I've heard too, a friend of mine backed it as well and he said it was supposed to be a pretty big DLC. Mark, have you played Sea of Stars yet?

Mark Trobough: 1:41:57

No, it's on my list, but I've not got around to playing it.

Brandon Hurles: 1:42:00

Put it to the top of your list because I'm telling you the game is, it'll blow you away.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:42:10

It's absolutely amazing. It truly is like a gem of a game, like it's a love letter to the super nintendo era it really is.

Brandon Hurles: 1:42:13

And like you love the super nintendo mark, so like uh, rpg like yeah, I think we'll, we'll definitely. Uh you'll, you'll be in for a treat for sure they got a lot of inspiration from chrono trigger.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:42:24

They actually brought on one of the composers from Chrono Trigger.

Mark Trobough: 1:42:29

That game needs a remaster or remake.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:42:33

HD 2D treatment is perfect for that game.

Brandon Hurles: 1:42:36

Let's be fair. It got the DS game, but that's not enough.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:42:41

We need HD 2D. Give it the same treatment you're giving Dragon Quest right now. It would be perfect. There's all. There's a whole list of games that need that, but we're getting one next year. Uh, the sukkuden games or, as they say, suikoden. I like to call it sukkuden because that's what I've always called it. So yeah, you know not trying to act like I've called it, that I always called it wrong, I guess. But uh, also the final fantasy, pixel remasters, that line for switch. I mean, if you haven't played these games, that is the best way to play them. You can buy them digitally. But phenomenal games I mean final fantasy, six or three as we call it here.

Brandon Hurles: 1:43:26

Uh, in the states, that's one of the best rpgs I've ever played I will say I don't normally get like jealous about things or whatever, but I am very jealous that you got that collector's edition because I had I been awake like 20 minutes longer, I would have got that three in the morning tweet that came out.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:43:47

You want to hear how I got it.

Brandon Hurles: 1:43:48

How'd you get? It.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:43:49

I'll tell it quick. So we, Lady and I, were up in Sedona, Sedona, Arizona, not far from where I live. Yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:43:59

And when it's time to go home. Like you know, when you're on a trip and you're driving and you know you're leaving, yeah, that day, when I know I'm leaving, that day I like to get up really early, like I was up at, like I think, 3, 30. She's still sleeping. She's like what are you doing? I'm like getting loaded up, loading up the car. So don't worry, you can keep sleeping, I'll get everything done, because I want to go home, play video games. I got stuff I want to do right yeah, I want to get the laundry done.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:44:33

I want to get everything done, so I'm not behind on anything right and so, getting loaded up, we're heading home. It's nice and early, it's a nice, nice morning. Say you know what? Stop by Denny's. There's a. We forget we have a Denny's across the street right. Never, never go there. So good I worry, and we were so hungry, and so we 3am.

Brandon Hurles: 1:44:58

Nothing beats it.

Mark Trobough: 1:45:00

Right, A waffle house.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:45:01

but yeah, waffle house for sure, but uh, waffled for sure, but uh, we put the order in and god, it's so, it's so early, it's like four, something nice, and I get on twitter.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:45:15

I see wario 64 and I see a tweet from square enix about the pixel remaster. I'm like, oh, holy shit, like this just went up, I gotta, I gotta buy this right now. And I bought it immediately and I kid you not like two minutes later, as I'm sitting there in denny's, it's sold out. Yeah, like, oh, my god, I'm so happy I got what I was like. I hope I don't get an email like a day from now saying you know your order's canceled.

Brandon Hurles: 1:45:43

I I mean it makes no sense that it went live at like three o'clock in the morning and I was up late that night. Had I would I, I mean it makes no sense. It went live at like three o'clock in the morning and I was up late that night. Had I would I I swear it was like 20 minutes.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:45:53

If I would have stayed away 20 minutes longer, I'd have seen a tweet yeah, and it was on a sunday morning, you know it makes no sense people sleeping on sunday, typically right, yeah, or they, they get up early and maybe they do something, but for the most part, people are trying to relax on sunday. They're not waking up. Uh, at three in the morning when they posted it, and I agree that was insane and again, thank god, I was like I want to hurry up and get home. I'm going to load up the car and we're going to get home, because that would have never have happened. So, yeah, that's how I got it. That's the story. What's a good? I got, I got lucky.

Mark Trobough: 1:46:31

Yeah, it really is a little, a little bit of luck.

Brandon Hurles: 1:46:35

Yeah, a little luck added in there for sure, but I definitely love it. So what do we got next, mark?

Mark Trobough: 1:46:42

Oh, we got some PS5 Pro leaks as well as the next state of the play. Essentially, there was leaks around the PS5 Pro being announced sometime next week, around the 10th or the 11th, and then expected later in the month, around the 19th or the 20th, to get the next state of play, which I assume they announced it and the next state of play go a little bit more in-depth on it or to essentially say, hey, yep, this is what it is, is when it's coming out, price tag. Essentially, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how accurate these leaks are going to be, but it sounds like some people are fairly confident in it.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:47:16

I'm expecting it I'm expecting it too, yeah did you guys see the 30th anniversary logo yes, yeah the playstation put out notes about so in the background of the image right, it's like a light gray, like the light gray playstation uh, color, yeah. And in that background picture the ps5 pro is in it. It's literally in it I saw that.

Brandon Hurles: 1:47:44

Wait, I, I was listening to something about that right before the podcast.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:47:48

Actually, yeah, you're right, yeah, it broke a little bit before the podcast and yeah, it's right, there and there. And look, tokyo Game Show is at the end of the month. Okay, yeah, this is going to be announced before Tokyo Game Show. I think TGS is what on the 26th. Does that sound right? Yeah. I can't remember if that was the Gamecom's date or not, but I'm pulling.

Mark Trobough: 1:48:13

Yeah, it's the 26th through the 29th.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:48:15

There we go. It's gonna be announced before that. I would guarantee it. I would put money that it would be announced before that.

Brandon Hurles: 1:48:24

Yeah, I think so and it makes sense. The timing makes sense. They want to get the holiday sales. It needs to be announced a little bit of time before.

Brandon Hurles: 1:48:32

Also, here's one thing that I don't see a lot of people talk about with this. First of all, the PlayStation 5 Pro is going to be a very niche product. It's going to be for the very die hard and the tech enthusiasts, because if we look and don't quote me on this, but I know the numbers are closely accurate it was something like 70 30 for the ps4 versus the ps4 pro. So like 70 of people had the PS4. They never upgraded to the Pro, and for good reason. I mean, like, really, it's only for the enthusiast who wants that little boost from the system it does have. This has a significant boost because of the PSSR and the you know, the AI infrastructure and machine learning and things like that. So it's going to be a bigger boost than the PS4 Pro was. But at Alright, let me ask you this what do you guys think the price point of this is going to be?

Mark Trobough: 1:49:39

$500, $600 probably.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:49:42

I think it's going to be $600 for the digital edition and it's going to be. I think it's going to be 600 for the digital edition and it's going to be either 700 for the edition with the disk drive or there's only one model, one skew, and it's digital, and you can buy the disk drive add-on that they already have for sale right now. Any of the digital owners can go buy it. That would be the streamlined way to do it, yeah, and by the most cost effective, instead of kind of dividing your user base. Yeah, and you have to pay for that extra SKU.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:50:27

It takes up more space at retail so it does, you got to print different stuff on the box. Yep, like there's factors that go into it, and of course, you don't want to confuse the consumers either. Uh, so I'm expecting, yeah, a high price tag. So I'm expecting, yeah, a high price tag. But the thing with the PS4 Pro right guys, the selling point was that PS4 couldn't output in 4K, ps4 Pro could, yes, so Sony didn't anticipate the adoption yeah, they didn't yeah, checkerboard 4K, but they didn't anticipate the adoption, yeah, they didn't.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:51:07

And yeah, checkerboard 4K, but yeah, they didn't anticipate the adoption, the mass adoption of 4K TVs to happen so quickly, right. So they had to sort of scramble and say, hey, we're going to do this pro edition. So the PS4 Pro was born out of 4K TVs selling quicker than they would have have ever thought, because this is how you get 4k and this is how you get hdr, because hdr was not in the ps4. So now my question is what is the selling point? Now? People haven't mass adopted it. No one has 8k tv.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:51:46

So, even though you put 8K on the box for the original PS5, and I laughed at that when I saw it- as soon as I picked it up, I held it in my hands.

Brandon Hurles: 1:51:56

I was like 8K, what are you?

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:51:58

talking about Now. Look, I know we're going to get this PS5 Pro. I've seen the rumored specs and, yes, you would have to presume that games currently that are running at 30 frames per second could run at 60 if that developer chooses to optimize it like you. Look at a recent game, dragon's Dogma 2, that came out this year by Capcom. You know it's running at, I think, 30?

Brandon Hurles: 1:52:28

30 frames yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:52:31

I couldn't remember if sometimes it ran at 40. I know there's been a couple of games that have unlocked frame rates and they run between 30 and 40. But you'd presume it's going to run at 60, right, it's going to run. You can run quality mode right now yeah on the pro and get 4k at 60, true, yeah, is that enough? Is that?

Brandon Hurles: 1:52:58

enough for everyone. I it's not for the average consumer. Like I said, this is for a very, very small niche market and I actually see the split of this being a bigger split, of it being like an 80, 20, 80 sticking with, sticking with the ps5, 20 are grabbing the pro. Like I see it being a bigger, uh, bigger split. But I will say I and I told mark this before I think that the AI machine learning and infrastructure of what PSSR is doing, which is basically just DLSS, but the AI machine learning is the big part. That's what stands out to me because it's learning over time. So every time you play a game it's learning more and more, just like any other AI system. So I think that that is a Way bigger improvement To a console than most people Think.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:54:02

You're right.

Brandon Hurles: 1:54:03

Whether it justifies Upgrading from a PS5 to that. I can't say that. But if you don't have a PS5, then grab that model is what I would say.

Mark Trobough: 1:54:12

Yeah, I would say. With that said, it's not a selling point to upgrade. Plus, when the PS4 Pro came out, just the economic realities of the average cost of living is a very different reality. I think it's going to be a bigger skew because more people it's just harder to afford. Just go with the upper hand $700, even if you trade in, you might get half of the value of your current console. To upgrade it's a big upfront, especially if you're like well, what I have works just fine and I can continue to use this for a few more years to come.

Brandon Hurles: 1:54:48

And I don't want to be a hypocrite in saying anything, because I will 100% be grabbing it for the channel. No matter what, I'll be grabbing it. Even if Xbox did another console, I'd grab it for the channel and that's the only reason that I own a Series X honestly is for the channel and I've got my use out of it for the channel. And if you have your business, it's a tax write-off, so I really don't have to worry about it. At the end of the day, I think that there is more potential with the PS5 Pro than maybe we're thinking on the surface level. I just don't know that it's going to get taken advantage of this generation. That's the problem. I don't know that it's going to get taken advantage of this generation. That's the problem. I don't know if in the next, what do we got? Four years max.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:55:35

I mean max, because this November is four years for PS5. It's only the fourth year.

Brandon Hurles: 1:55:41

Four years max until PS6. So is that enough time for this AI machine learning and this PSSR to really take effect of games, when most people are still going to be playing on just a regular PS5? Probably not.

Mark Trobough: 1:55:55

Especially if the hardware has it. But are the developers really going to take advantage of it when they know they have to develop for hardware that doesn't have some of these advantages? You have to keep both in mind.

Brandon Hurles: 1:56:06

Yeah, you got to keep both in mind. So is the PS5 Pro really going to get fully taken advantage of?

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:56:12

I don't think so that's the thing and that that's what, uh, we need to. We need to know, and you know, sony should be coming clean and telling everyone what it's all about and it selling everyone on why we need to buy this, why we should upgrade. They have to come out with a good reason for everyone that everybody, including all the casual gamers, can understand, right, because, yeah, like we understand the ai stuff, a majority of the world does not exactly, yeah it's going to be adopted very slowly, slower, I think, than the internet when the internet came out.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:56:54

People are going to be slower to adopt ai than they were america online. So it'll be interesting to see how they they sell people on it, because I also think some people hear ai and they get scared. They get scared or they just they don't like it. They think it's going to take their job and in some cases it will so well, I mean it already is in the games industry. It's very oh, it is it's you know other countries are worse yeah

Brandon Hurles: 1:57:24

other countries are worse but I agree that's a great point. People are going to be scared of hearing that word AI. It's almost like a I don't know a better way to put it other than a trigger word for people to get upset or think, oh, that's bad, I don't want nothing to do with that. I want absolutely nothing to do with that. It's taking all the jobs here. I won't have a job anymore because that ps5 has ai machine learning like people just don't know, they don't get it. Um, but I think the adoption rate is going to be very, very small.

Brandon Hurles: 1:57:58

And, uh, the ps4 pro sony didn't make a lot of money on. They didn't sell a lot of them. I expect it to be the same thing for this and I expect their loss to be bigger for the PS5 Pro than it is for the PlayStation 5. Don't quote me on this, but I think that their loss was pretty significant at like $150 a loss of console. So they're making it all back in software sales and this one's going to be even worse. Like I said, I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but I think it's around that number. But the only person that doesn't lose money on console sales is nintendo, because they do it right and also they don't have like super high-end consoles as well, so they're not using like crazy you know architecture and stuff like that's always been their business model and they is they just not lose money on hardware yeah, and the one console they lost money on hardware was the wii.

Mark Trobough: 1:58:52

U right yeah, and it was a very small, very small amount compared to the competition all right so, yeah, actually no, I just want to say one thing, uh, because I pulled up an article back from august of 21 saying when the $500 PS5, they came out and said, yeah, we're no longer selling this at a loss.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:59:12

Oh, really Well that usually happens over time, usually at launch, for the first year or two, a couple of years, when components are still a higher price or when you're in a contract.

Brandon Hurles: 1:59:23

They change components to me. They find cheaper components and things like that, stuff like that, so that makes sense.

Mark Trobough: 1:59:30

I mean but I mean the, the pro could still obviously lose money, it's you know. I guess we'll find out in time.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:59:37

So and the thing is is that playstation hasn't come out with a lot of games.

Mark Trobough: 1:59:42

They haven't, yeah, no, yeah it's generation from the ps4, the ps5.

ThunderStash Gaming: 1:59:46

It's a huge drop off it is, and so I know everyone, we all know that you make the money on the software. But this is unlike anything we've seen before from sony as far as how many games we're getting and like, hey, I don't complain about, I know a lot on the internet complains about it and is upset they're not getting enough games. You know, I look no further than to all the games behind me. I don't, I don't need you to release tons of games.

Brandon Hurles: 2:00:17

Yeah, that's all Cause I have I have a backlog.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:00:19

Let's get real. Yeah, let's get real. We all got backlogs and if people just played some of their games from their backlog, they wouldn't hyper-focus on the fact that they haven't released a lot of games. So, yeah, it'll be interesting, because I just don't see that they'll be able to make as much money back from their software sales. And you do have to factor in all the losses. I mean you've got to factor in Concord. You've got to factor in these massive losses to the. You gotta factor in concord. Yeah, you gotta factor in these massive losses to the bottom line yeah, 100, I I agree.

Brandon Hurles: 2:00:53

So I I think that's kind of where we stand with that. Uh, next we gotta. There's a couple of quick things. One thing I wanted to mention was warhammer. Uh 40 000 space marine 2 launched today. So I don't know If you.

Mark Trobough: 2:01:07

It launches like in two or three days. It's the preorder, the early access essentially launches today. I just want to verify that.

Brandon Hurles: 2:01:14

OK, the early access launches today. Are any of you guys playing that?

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:01:19

No, ok, no, but I've heard great things and I wish it the best.

Mark Trobough: 2:01:23

I might get around to it eventually, but, yeah, not right now.

Brandon Hurles: 2:01:26

And then a small article that we had that I thought was kind of funny. Like a dragon deaf plans to keep making games about middle-aged men. So we kind of went into like a little sort of rant on why he liked the middle-aged protagonists, basically saying like the character has more character development, more life experience, and kind of dives into all of that with why he's picking middle-aged men who are experienced and it makes more sense than picking a younger person who has no experience and things like that. So it kind of goes into that it's a Japanese developer and I think it's pretty interesting.

Mark Trobough: 2:02:04

Your standard 14-year-old anime protag. Exactly I like it I, 14 year old anime protag.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:02:08

Exactly, I like it, I like, I like this direction.

Mark Trobough: 2:02:11

Yeah, I agree.

Brandon Hurles: 2:02:13

I like it, Especially as we get older, right, Like we don't really, we don't really want to play a game where we're playing as like an 18 year old kid anymore. I mean, there are games I play, but it's like I don't necessarily want to. But you know.

Mark Trobough: 2:02:27

He's never playing.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:02:27

Zelda again. I was just thinking Zelda as well.

Brandon Hurles: 2:02:31

Thanks a lot, so we got. What else do we got?

Mark Trobough: 2:02:36

here, I know we kind of mentioned it about the Tokyo Game Show stuff. Was that where you were going to head towards the next one?

Brandon Hurles: 2:02:45

I was trying to look over because we talked about some of this Go ahead.

Mark Trobough: 2:02:49

Tokyo Game Show. No, no, yeah, it's been officially announced. Xbox is doing their broadcast on the 26th of September during the Tokyo Game Show. Essentially they have confirmation on their next, you know, live stream. Essentially, yeah.

Mark Trobough: 2:03:04

It's been. Yeah, they're bringing in some of their studios. They said it was scheduled for 7 pm local time Japan Standard Time, that is about 6 am Eastern Standard Time. The next day, That'd be 3 am Pacific Standard Time. So either you're going to get up real early or you're going to be watching it back after the fact. I'm sure most people are not going to be watching that live.

Brandon Hurles: 2:03:26

Yeah, it's a weird time, but I hope that we get some good stuff from Xbox, because they need it. They've been under a lot of heat here lately.

Mark Trobough: 2:03:38

Yeah, I think some of the studios that are supposed to announce some stuff. They've got Xbox Game Studios, activision, blizzard, bethesda, and then obviously some more third-party partners from across Asia is what was listed. Who's he going to be announcing Games? Obviously?

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:03:57

It'd be interesting. Yeah, it'd be good to see.

Brandon Hurles: 2:04:01

I mean, I'm an Xbox fan so I want to see him do well, but the direction they've been in is not good.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:04:08

We need all of them to do well in order for the consumer to win, because we need the competition. So, no doubt there, but it'll be interesting. Xbox has really taken advantage of absences from Sony and Nintendo at these big shows Summer Game Fest, yeah, gamescom, and now this. They've taken advantage of it. So, uh, smart on their part. But it'll be interesting because, as you guys know, xbox does not sell in japan yeah, yeah and this is the to game show They've sold. Uh, apparently, as of June, july 2024, they're around 600,000 total.

Brandon Hurles: 2:04:56

Yeah, that's crazy.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:04:57

In Japan.

Brandon Hurles: 2:04:58

That's crazy. Yeah, it's unfortunate. I hope that they do. We'll kind of zoom through the rest of this because we're getting a little late on here and we got to record a podcast after. But, uh, I did want to mention the quick zelda timeline update. Did you see this, steve? I assume you saw this, yeah. So yeah, it kind of it kind of just solidified what we all thought that breath, the wild and tears of the kingdom are their own games and they're not connected to any other timeline. Um, I thought this was kind of hilarious because I saw a bunch of backlash all over twitter and I'm like you guys are idiots, like I.

Brandon Hurles: 2:05:34

I I kind of thought this from the beginning, to be honest with you, they were their own thing. And let's, let's be real here. I defend timelines for weird series like even like mario, because there's like a supposed timeline out there for Mario which makes no sense. But they did not design these original games with a timeline in mind. Ever Zelda 1 and 2. They did not design for there to be like an extended, you know 40 year old timeline that's going to go on forever and ever and ever. So some of these I feel like are very throwaway, like they threw away in the Imprisoning War. The last game in there, zelda Triforce Heroes, is in there. Come on, give me a break.

Mark Trobough: 2:06:19

That's the whole hero downfall timeline is just the games that were just kind of thrown somewhere. Pretty much it's the way I look at it.

Brandon Hurles: 2:06:27

It's just a puzzle multiplayer game. There's like there's nothing.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:06:31

Wow.

Brandon Hurles: 2:06:31

And I beat it over and over multiple times over online with people and I well, where's the CDI Zeldas and where's links?

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:06:38

crossbow training.

Brandon Hurles: 2:06:39

That's all I've been wondering. Links crossbow training definitely is super important, so this timeline.

Mark Trobough: 2:06:45

I don't get it. Well, excuse me, princess.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:06:48

Classic Love that cartoon. I actually pre-ordered the cartoon on DVD. I don't know if you guys saw it. It's great. No, I didn't see that. It just went up for pre-order, I think last week.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:06:58

They're reprinting it, but you know, here's the thing. I don't need a timeline in Zelda, like, it's not something that I need, it's not something that's missing in my life. Uh, do I? Do I appreciate and respect that they're trying to put one together, or that they're they're publishing one. Sure, I think that's great because our people that want this. Uh, I think there's one other factor, and that is the, the movie, and maybe they're trying to get their ducks in a row before they go tell the actual story in this movie. And I I personally, when I saw this, I was like, huh, interesting timing. And also I heard that our new zelda game, echoes of wisdom, is not part of this at all. There's some clarity on that issue, because I'm like, oh, where's that Must not be part of that. But I do think that they're getting all this online and putting it in front of us Because it will tie somehow into the movie.

Mark Trobough: 2:08:06

That'd be nice, at least the way.

Mark Trobough: 2:08:05

I see it somehow into the movie. That'd be nice, at least the way I see it. But I've always seen it as the Breath of the Wild was kind of what the series needed, like a soft reboot as far as you know, even away from the timeline itself, just the series itself. We're doing something different and you know we just want to kind of somewhat break away from what we've done in the past. You know, just soft reset. We are not tied to other games, we can just kind of do what we want, moving forward with a clear mind of what we want to do. That's kind of what Zelda's always been. You can retell the same story in a different way a thousand times.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:08:41

Yeah, and Breath of the Wild to me is Zelda on the NES. Yeah. Open world. Yeah, to me is zelda on the nes.

Brandon Hurles: 2:08:53

Yeah, yeah, fully realized open world.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:08:54

Yeah, fully realized, exactly. I'm glad I'm the only one that said that. That's why I love it. That's why I love it because the original zelda especially playing as a kid you have no direction, you don't know where you're going. You I mean you have to burn bushes and bomb rocks to find dungeons. In the game there's no hand-holding whatsoever and I love it and that's what I loved. About Breath of the Wild. I was like I don't know where to go. Well, you better figure it out. No one's going to tell you where to go. You better look at your map and figure out where to go.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:09:27

Yeah, start making markers on your map, get a game plan together. Do you want to go? Hit all the towers and open up the map so you can see where you can go and what you can do? First, it's up to you. Do whatever you want, love it.

Brandon Hurles: 2:09:44

I think it's cool Definitely a fan. I think the timelines cool, definitely a fan. I think the timelines kind of throw away. What else do we got, mark, I think we should get.

Mark Trobough: 2:09:56

One more technically small thing For Mario and Luigi Brothership if you are in France, from the game store Micromania in France, it was announced, when you pre-order the game, you get a steelbook as a uh, as a bonus essentially, which is cool. It just, you know, sucks. We're not getting that here, or maybe not yet uh, we probably won't yeah, unfortunately, lynx awakening got a really nice steelbook.

Mark Trobough: 2:10:30

Yeah, the ones they were showing us. It's kind of like a not a fully white background, but pretty much white, with just one with Mario or Luigi, or maybe it's kind of flip flower One side's Mario, one side's Luigi, but I mean steelbooks in general, pretty cool.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:10:41

Isn't the steelbook for Link's Awakening in Europe? It's a game boy and literally the back of it you can hear that it's embossed. It's raised. And then this is the inside showing the actual screens from the game.

Brandon Hurles: 2:10:57

I thought about buying that separate.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:10:59

Yeah, this is rad. It is so cool and it's like man people would have loved that here. They would have ate it up.

Brandon Hurles: 2:11:08

I'll tell you what I did get. I got the little box set for lynx awakening oh, the book, yeah, the dreamer, dreamer, edition I think yeah, yeah, I also got.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:11:19

I'll grab these real quick while you guys talk and show you yeah, it would be nice if, mario and luigi if, if the actual steelbook came to the us.

Mark Trobough: 2:11:30

But people would buy it. People love steelbooks, especially with neat you know unique designs on them.

Brandon Hurles: 2:11:35

Same thing, exactly.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:11:36

It comes with a book yeah, it reminds me of the breath of the wild. Uh, adventurer, I think it's the adventurer Edition.

Brandon Hurles: 2:11:46

Yeah, I've got that too.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:11:49

Yeah, I bought that for one of my friend's kids. He got a Switch for his birthday and I wanted to get him Zelda and I got him that edition. It's cool when they do that. What do?

Brandon Hurles: 2:12:01

you have in your background.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:12:04

Oh, definitely.

Brandon Hurles: 2:12:05

The Holy Grails is the Master Edition for Breath of the Wild. Oh, oh, yeah, that I would probably never own, unless I come over there and steal it yeah, probably I I've looked for years and it's just I. I gave up.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:12:18

When they reached 1500, I said nope, I'm out I had and I had no idea that they were that much. I looked maybe a year or two ago. I'm like, oh shoot.

Brandon Hurles: 2:12:28

I mean, I tried to get one when, when you could get them, when they were new, but I just couldn't get it. It was unfortunate I had to settle with the. Uh, the other one. Cause there's the weird thing is there's like multiple additions of breath of the wild. Cause there's a smaller edition box I've got too. That's a little bit smaller than the Master Edition and it's called the. I forget what it is.

Brandon Hurles: 2:12:51

Right behind me. That one, yeah. And then there's the one that comes with a book. There's two of those that come with books, two separate ones. So I don't have the second one of that, but I do want to get all of them, just because Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are my favorite games. Now, eventually I'll find that Master Edition, but I'm not paying those prices. That's crazy. I just think that's ludicrous for a game. It is.

Mark Trobough: 2:13:22

I guess the last major thing that we had was and I don't remember hearing anything about this but they came out and said don't expect any kind of announcement for the Switch successor in September, but they're still expecting it to get announced sometime later this year, pretty much.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:13:38

Yeah.

Mark Trobough: 2:13:39

I saw this and I was kind of weird because I thought the original exception was October was kind of what a lot of people were expecting or maybe some rumors were around that. But then the other thing is it was kind of, you know, essentially Nintendo kind of was you know, wanting to prioritize their stock, but they're not going to go full into production essentially for it until it's actually announced. So obviously you know probably at least a six-month window, you know for them to pile it up, but I guess there's a lot of consistence on it. It six month window you know for them to pile it up, but I guess there's a lot of consistence on it's coming out next year. It's just when is it actually going to get announced and what time next year is it actually going to come out?

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:14:14

I've heard a lot of stuff on this. I'm following up very closely. I I've heard the components are already in mass production. They went in last, last week, yeah, and usually once they go into mass production it's not very long until they're ready. And you guys know, like nintendo, they're logistics experts and they're bottom line experts. Yeah. They know how to squeeze every cent out of everything they do, and you don't mass produce a console and then let it sit in a warehouse for months while you're paying rent.

Mark Trobough: 2:15:02

Yeah, it's just, you know, storage costs money.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:15:05

Yeah, they. And what I'm saying is I'm not buying, I'm not buying it, that it's going to come out later because that costs money. Yeah, they, what? And what I'm saying is I'm not buying, I'm not buying it, that it's going to come out later, because that costs money and you don't do it unless you're ready and they know how to do it. Uh, so I, I expect it. I I do still expect an announcement. In september, they cleared the slate. They had back-to-back directs the same day to clear September. They put out the red carpet, in my opinion, for it. The only scenario that I could possibly see and I've said this on the Nintendbyte podcast as well is that the grand opening of the Nintendo Museum is October 2nd. What better way to have a grand opening than to announce and introduce the switch to at the museum?

Mark Trobough: 2:15:58

that's it. Yeah, it actually makes a lot of sense now that you think about it yeah, that does.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:16:01

Yeah, and they have the consoles up top at the museum. They have all the consoles like huge ones. There's an empty spot next to the Switch and there is a. I would say they have a spot that's covered by cloth. Okay, it's the Switch too. Because you don't build a museum, and especially with all the time Nintendo's put into building this museum they've had years to do it. Yeah, you don't build a museum and do a grand opening on october 2nd just to put it under construction in a month or two, so then you can put in the Switch 2 giant console. It's already there.

Brandon Hurles: 2:16:52

Oh yeah, for sure.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:16:54

You only have one grand opening. This isn't a restaurant where you sell it to someone and you put a grand opening sign up that says Now, under new ownership, this is Nintendo. Man, you have one grand opening to do something really special and the stars have aligned. Now. Me personally, I think that it's very strategic that they're opening it up on October 2nd. It was supposed to open I don't know if you guys know this it was supposed to open in March this year and it was delayed. It was delayed, okay, you delayed. It was delayed, okay, you delayed a museum being open. It was originally supposed to open a little bit before that as well. This is the third delay. Now let me ask you this If the Switch 2 was supposed to come out this year, in 2024, like we all planned, like apparently nintendo planned and developers you would have shown the switch 2 at the grand opening at the museum in march and the switch would have launched probably six months later.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:18:02

A six month lead up, pretty standard. So if you Do the grand opening and you show the Switch 2. October 2nd, six months later, we're like right at March 3rd, which was when the Switch came out Six months later would put us at the Nintendo Switch 2 release date. So I personally, if it's not September, I really do feel strongly about the october 2nd idea, because it's the perfect time. It was delayed three times. When you add everything together, it makes sense, because the six month lead up would be it would bring us to march 2025 yeah, yep, yeah, I mean, that mean, that makes sense, that makes sense, um, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Brandon Hurles: 2:18:54

Yeah, I guess that's going to be fun. We're at um. I guess we'll hit um one topic here real quick, cause a couple of these are kind of just fast uh topics. Basically Uh, do you, do you play games digitally or physically? More physically, physically for me physically.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:19:13

But if it's, but it's only available digitally, I'm not going to be like, oh, I'm not buying it. I'm still. I'm definitely buying it, you know. I mean, like I just so happen, I buy all my games physical, but I definitely own a lot of digital games. So, if you know, I prefer physical all day.

Mark Trobough: 2:19:33

Yeah, that's just the fact of the matter same here same here yeah, I'd say I prefer physical, but I primarily play on pc, so I get it. Obviously I'm gonna get a digital pc and then I usually at a cheaper price. I will then turn around and get a physical for another console, you know, down the road like weirdly, got sent five codes in the past, like two days.

Brandon Hurles: 2:19:53

So, like I do digital games all the time, especially for views or coverage or whatever, uh, it makes sense for me and it's easier for developers to give out codes than it is to send out like a physical copy and stuff like that. There's also cases where I buy sales $0.99 a game, a few dollars for a game that I want to play. Also, do you consider PlayStation Plus Premium a good service? I'm going to say no on this one. Yeah, I'd agree with you.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:20:25

Well, I was looking at this earlier because I'm locked in for a while. Premium or plus Premium. I stacked it. Oh, so I got locked in. I stacked it at a stupid deal. I took advantage, just like Game Pass. I got four years of game pass, I think, for 120 dollars oh, that's not bad for four years. Four years, thirty dollars a year that's really good yeah, so I, I did the uh xbox, uh gold yeah, I missed out on the xbox gold hack and I got to do something similar with play, so you know.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:21:10

I had to look up how much it costs again just to re-familiarize. So it's $17.99 a month or $160 a year.

Brandon Hurles: 2:21:19

That's a lot. That's more than Netflix.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:21:23

It is a lot, and I think it's great for a certain gamer Right. The problem with this is guys, and I think it's great for a certain gamer Right. The problem with this is guys. I own too many games on this list.

Mark Trobough: 2:21:34

So you can't take advantage of it.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:21:36

Yeah, I'm looking at a list of all the games, right, and it's like I own a lot of these, so sometimes I can, sometimes I can't, and other times they're just games I really don't care to play, and other times they're just games I really don't care to play. But for example this month Plucky Squire.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:21:55

Oh, yeah, I get that free. That was a game I was going to buy, so again, I was pretty happy about that. So it's had some good months. I know it's hit and miss. Yeah, like looking at august, they had lego, star wars, the skywalker saga that's great game. They had ender lily's quietest of the night, but I own both so I'm not gonna wait around right for these games to hit. I really got premium for the older games and that hasn't really panned out that well so far.

Brandon Hurles: 2:22:29

And they still don't know how to emulate ps3 I still gotta I still gotta play on the cloud and I'm like no, here's the thing, is ps2, because what they're doing is they're bringing the ps4 versions of ps2 games to the service, but no ps2 games. I know like, are you kidding me? You don't know how to emulate ps2. We can do it. The modding scene has done it. You know what I mean? Yeah, they have. No, they have. We did it a long time ago. Um, crazy, just crazy to me.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:22:59

I think it's insane it's like why don't you hire these people that have done this?

Brandon Hurles: 2:23:04

well like sega did sega hired for sonic mania that he did a uh, you know, sonic rom hack of the uh, I think, the original sonic the hedgehog, and they're like, wow, this is phenomenal, let's hire, uh, christian whitehead. And then he made sonic mania.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:23:20

So yeah, that's a great story too. Yeah, it really is.

Brandon Hurles: 2:23:24

I wish we had more like that. I wish we did too. Um, okay, before we got two quick questions. I did not mean for us to be going this long, but uh, we all grabbed things to show off that we picked up recently. Mine are super simple, super easy and kind of dumb. But one thing is in another room. But I I had like 15 wheeze during COVID and then I accidentally sold off my personal Wii. I picked up a new Wii, but it's in the other room. I also got Wii Sports Resort, the big box version, complete, which is really cool. Nice.

Brandon Hurles: 2:24:01

You might think this is dumb. I don't. I love it. I'm a big Sonic fan, but I got one of the Sonic 3 displays already. It was empty.

Mark Trobough: 2:24:10

Put all your Sonic stuff in there.

Brandon Hurles: 2:24:12

Well, I'm going to get all the plushies, so I'm going to store them in there.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:24:16

Fair enough.

Brandon Hurles: 2:24:17

That's all I got.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:24:20

Well, you know, I got the Sonic Mania right over there, right.

Brandon Hurles: 2:24:23

I got it over here too, but you can't see it.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:24:29

Just barely right there. Well, one pickup I got uh earlier this week, that's uh the oh god oh, that is cool this is the lego no, you did not the lego legend of zelda uh, great deku tree. So of course, this is the OOT, the OOT version.

Brandon Hurles: 2:24:50

I am so jealous.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:24:54

Oh my gosh, breath of the Wild there. And then here's a couple other pickups I got in. Have you guys played RoboCop? Absolutely.

Brandon Hurles: 2:25:03

It's freaking phenomenal.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:25:05

Yeah, I'm looking forward to playing this. This should be a fun one. Oh yeah, we got Doom Eternal for Switch Steelbook Edition. Oh, that's cool, is that limited run?

Brandon Hurles: 2:25:17

Yeah.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:25:19

Persona 4 Golden.

Brandon Hurles: 2:25:21

Nice. Classic.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:25:22

Limited run as well. This is a great game right here, astalon Tears of the Earth. I haven't heard of that one. Excellent Metroidvania. It's also on PlayStation. Reviews are excellent as well. I'm going to check that one out. Quake 2.

Brandon Hurles: 2:25:40

Classy.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:25:42

Then I got these just came in the mail today so I just figured I'd show them real quick. I haven't even looked at them. We got Cosmic Fantasy Collection.

Brandon Hurles: 2:25:54

That's awesome. I have that one on the way.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:25:57

Yeah, nice, and then Felix the Cat.

Brandon Hurles: 2:26:02

Yep got that on the way too.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:26:05

It's actually a really good game, and then it really is can you guys see that? Uh, tape right there all the arrows. What's? This yeah, this is from konami, okay so it's a left right ab.

Mark Trobough: 2:26:21

Yes, the konami code.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:26:22

Yeah, oh, okay, sorry their packing tape is Is the economy code.

Brandon Hurles: 2:26:28

That's that's rad.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:26:30

I'll show you what's in here, because I haven't opened it up yet and I'm pretty excited.

Brandon Hurles: 2:26:35

I want to get this is a Castlevania shirt.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:26:38

No, no, this is a. This is a game. Ok. And it's a very it's a very rare variant. Ok, that pretty expensive already on eBay. This is the Contra Operation Galuga Konami variant. This is not the limited run. This is not the one the limited run sells. You can only get this one from the Konami store directly.

Brandon Hurles: 2:27:02

That's really cool. The NES cover art. It's cool.

Mark Trobough: 2:27:07

That, that's dope, did you like?

Brandon Hurles: 2:27:10

operation gluga. I thought it was pretty good.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:27:13

I did, I reviewed it on my channel and, um, I definitely recommended it. You know, you got to know what you're getting into yeah with that game.

Brandon Hurles: 2:27:23

I got a game I gotta share with. I'll get you a code for two. That's just like Contra, but Contra on steroids Really good. It's not out yet, so it's not Iron Meat right. I cannot confirm or deny anything.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:27:39

Because I beat that and I'm reviewing that. I got the code for it and I already beat it. Oh, okay, cool. So if it is that, but I got one more that I was very lucky to get guys. Ok one more game.

Brandon Hurles: 2:27:53

OK. Let's see your lucky streak. Oh my God.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:28:04

Factory sealed baby. I know, maybe it'll be a collector because of the prices yeah, actually so I have it too, so I can't when it was announced that Concord was being removed from the store shelves. I people went nuts well, I thought to myself huh interesting. I wonder like if I could get it right now. This is like. This is never gonna happen again. I don't ever. I don't foresee this ever happening again where a game is taken it has completely off two weeks later.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:28:35

Oh well, not two weeks later, not two weeks but you know, that's a a huge first party title. Yeah, like this scenario where they spent, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. I just never see it happening again in this respect. So I checked ebay. There's two copies on there at the time. One was selling for 100, another one was selling for 300. I'm like, oh, I could see, I could see what direction this is going in. I'm not trying to flip it, I'm just going to hold on to it. This is a relic, this is is a a $40 turned multimillion dollar mistake. Yeah, I was happy to get one.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:29:16

Cause I know a lot of people tried to get it and wasn't able to, and I went on walmartcom. Yeah. And I was just? I was holding my breath, thinking I was going to get an email. Am I an?

Brandon Hurles: 2:29:27

idiot that I passed over the copies that were at my Walmart today.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:29:32

Yeah. I mean you're not an idiot, but you should go get them.

Brandon Hurles: 2:29:36

I guess I can see it through there tomorrow and just buy them all and give them out to friends for costs or something. I'm not going to flip them. I have no desire to.

Mark Trobough: 2:29:45

I think it's still valuable as coasters.

ThunderStash Gaming: 2:29:48

So that's true, I know, uh nate, uh nintendo prime was trying to find one and john, uh john evo was trying to find it and they couldn't I'll get with them and I'll get. They couldn't find them anywhere and I told him. I said I I ordered it on walmart. I said I'll let you know if I get an email a day or two later saying it's canceled, cause that's usually how it goes down.

Brandon Hurles: 2:30:10

Well, yeah, I'll let them know that I'll go look tomorrow and then, if I, if they're there, I'll get it for them. Yeah All right so. I guess, uh, just the final things I think that we had. Is that everything, mark? Did we already go over the? Uh, no, I'm pretty sure. Okay, all right. Well, I think that's everything for this episode. Appreciate you hanging out with us staying a little past what we wanted to. We wanted to stop at 10, but, um, you know, just keep going sometimes we had good convo.

Brandon Hurles: 2:30:40

We had good convo. Don't expect us to be the norm, though. When you're on, we just have good conversation when you're here, oh yeah man, I had a great time. Yeah, definitely appreciate having you on and obviously, based on the comments that we're getting on stuff, people want to continue to have you on, so that's really awesome. I'm definitely happy that you know people like you and that we're able to have you on and that I met you. We will be back again next Friday, of course, and next Friday is episode what Episode?

Mark Trobough: 2:31:12

100. The big 1-0-0.

Brandon Hurles: 2:31:14

And we don't know what we're doing yet, but we're doing something for it. So we'll be live, like I said, again Friday for episode 100. Don't know what we're doing yet. Be sure to follow on all the socials. Drop a sub, hit that bell, notification, likes, comments, all that stuff helps and we'll see you all later.

Mark Trobough: 2:31:33

See everybody later.

Brandon Hurles: 2:31:34

Have a good one.