Latest / The Year Of Shame Challenge / S14E01 - Decade of Shame

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S14E01 - Decade of Shame · The Year Of Shame Challenge

• 0:13
  In the not too distant present, a challenge unlike any other
• 0:17
  begins. Three men, One year 0 game
• 0:22
  purchases. They stand against temptation,
• 0:26
  towering backlogs and the endless lure of digital sales.
• 0:32
  This is the year of Shame challenge.
• 0:36
  A test of willpower. A battle against impulse.
• 0:40
  A journey into the heart of unplayed games where only
• 0:45
  discipline survives. Hello and welcome to season 14
• 0:54
  of Euro Shame. No, it's not Groundhog Day.
• 0:57
  Yes, I am back again. It's me, Brian.
• 1:00
  And with me we have on my left Rich.
• 1:04
  Say hello, Rich. Hello everyone.
• 1:08
  On my right we have Stuart. I have we.
• 1:14
  Hopefully everybody's good. Should we go for what you've
• 1:18
  been up to? Should I go first?
• 1:20
  Because I had. I was in Ireland last time.
• 1:22
  A week. Yeah.
• 1:23
  Last time I was here, we were on this.
• 1:25
  I was in Ireland. I was back.
• 1:28
  My mother's not well. So we, she was home from
• 1:31
  hospital for the week. A week I was back.
• 1:35
  She's back in hospital now again.
• 1:37
  Still there, but that's distracted me quite a bit from
• 1:40
  my gaming this month. That's not an excuse, but it's
• 1:43
  just the way it is. I had, I flew back from Ireland,
• 1:50
  supposed to go through Amsterdam to Japan and well, you know, sit
• 1:56
  on the plane leaving Dublin airport and the plane gets
• 1:59
  cancelled. So we didn't six hours sat in
• 2:02
  Dublin Airport waiting for the next flight.
• 2:04
  Schiphol Airport apparently had a big snowstorm.
• 2:07
  There was something in Europe, don't know what's going on, but
• 2:10
  the massive snowstorm loads, they run out of De Icer or
• 2:15
  whatever it is that goes into the fuel.
• 2:16
  I don't think it's just the windscreen wipers they were
• 2:18
  stuck with, but Schiphol was more or less closed and they
• 2:23
  had. I then was moved like to fly
• 2:25
  from with very little notice. Like to fly from Dublin Airport
• 2:29
  to Heathrow. I was given an hour and a half
• 2:33
  to get from one side of Heathrow to the other to catch a new
• 2:36
  flight, get my bags onto that flight and move on.
• 2:40
  So didn't work out. Flew from Dublin to London
• 2:45
  Terminal 4 and had to pick up my bags go run across like a
• 2:50
  minibus was put on for us. It was myself in the old
• 2:55
  Japanese couple. We got to the gates and at the
• 2:58
  gates we got to the desk. We took your bags in and
• 3:03
  registered for the next flight and they closed.
• 3:05
  So by the way, this is KLM, never fly KLM.
• 3:10
  This will be the moral of this story.
• 3:13
  They don't put me on another flight to go from Terminal 2
• 3:15
  back to Terminal 4, run for that flight.
• 3:19
  And luckily the desk was still open for business customers.
• 3:24
  They closed for normal customers, but they put us on so
• 3:27
  we don't. Flew with Air Asiana.
• 3:31
  Asiana, I don't know how it's pronounced.
• 3:33
  Flew from there to Korea and then had to run across the
• 3:36
  airport in Korea to get the next gate and then fly back to Tokyo.
• 3:42
  It took, I don't know it. I was 10 hours, 10 hours
• 3:47
  delayed. It was a nightmare.
• 3:50
  Running from running across Heathrow was just fucking nuts.
• 3:54
  Absolutely. Oh my.
• 3:56
  I was going to try and not use a language in case of the kids and
• 3:58
  work. OK listen, don't listen to this
• 4:02
  bit. Anyway, he throws a nightmare
• 4:06
  that deserves the language. But the staff and Heathrow were
• 4:09
  excellent. They when we're waiting for a
• 4:12
  bikes to come out, two guys came over, they got a trolley for us.
• 4:15
  They organised A minibus to bring us across from Terminal 4
• 4:17
  to Terminal 2. We still missed the flight.
• 4:19
  There was no way of getting there.
• 4:20
  And then when we got next one, we just went by the train back
• 4:25
  on the Elizabeth line and that worked out well.
• 4:27
  But absolute nightmare it was just it was it left me totally
• 4:34
  jet lagged for for he just went back.
• 4:36
  Oh, we do. Yeah.
• 4:38
  So with, with all the travel that I tend to do for work, I
• 4:43
  have spent more hours of my life running through airports than
• 4:46
  I'd care to ever have to do. And I've now decided recently
• 4:50
  that I would rather leave home a day early if I'm travelling and
• 4:55
  anytime there's a connecting flight, I book into our hotel
• 4:58
  and I sleep over that night. And so I've always got a night
• 5:02
  between connecting flights. And that just means that you're
• 5:04
  not having to worry about missing things because you know,
• 5:07
  if you, if this flight is late is delayed and you get into the
• 5:10
  hotel late, that's all it is, just getting into the hotel
• 5:14
  late, you're still guaranteed you can get up the next morning.
• 5:16
  Most of the time the hotel is at the airport terminal, you just
• 5:19
  walk across, check in and go on with the next leg.
• 5:22
  And that worked really great. You know that one of my recent
• 5:24
  flights to, to France, when I've done that in the past, it's been
• 5:28
  40 hours travelling, which it just, it doesn't matter how used
• 5:32
  to travel you are or how young you are, that is going to kill
• 5:35
  you from, from where I am in the world here to where they, they
• 5:38
  are there. And, and So what we ended up
• 5:41
  doing was flying from here to Perth.
• 5:43
  We stayed over the night in Perth and then the next morning
• 5:46
  I caught a 16 hour flight from Perth direct to, to, to Paris.
• 5:50
  Much more pleasant experience, less stressful.
• 5:53
  And you get there on time. You know, as long as you, you
• 5:56
  cater for the, the time upfront and you build that into your
• 6:00
  travel plans, it's, it's a much more enjoyable experience for
• 6:04
  everyone. So that's certainly my, my
• 6:08
  travel tip is don't, don't try and run for planes if you can
• 6:12
  possibly help. And on your case, that was
• 6:14
  outside of your control. But yeah, I'll just, I'd rather
• 6:19
  take my time and and wander through airports at my place,
• 6:22
  you know? It was really annoying because
• 6:25
  KLM booked booked all these flights but the the airline's
• 6:28
  working groups. So they booked flights with
• 6:30
  companies that they're part of their group, but there was a
• 6:33
  direct flight they could have thought they flew me to Heathrow
• 6:36
  and then I had to go from Heathrow to Korea, South Korea,
• 6:40
  and then from South Korea to Japan.
• 6:42
  But there was, there were direct flights from Heathrow to Tokyo,
• 6:45
  but didn't put me on those because it's not part of their
• 6:47
  group. But like as as bad as it was for
• 6:50
  me, there was two other people on my plane.
• 6:53
  One guy, he was trying to get to Lagos, I think it's Nigeria.
• 6:57
  He tried to fly the previous day and the flight had got cancelled
• 7:00
  because he was supposed to go through Antwerp, Antwerp,
• 7:02
  Skipple, maybe in Antwerp though, but he was supposed to
• 7:06
  go through skippable, but everything was closed and
• 7:07
  skippable. So he he came to his next next
• 7:12
  day, they're going to fly him back to Schiphol and the flight
• 7:16
  got cancelled because it plane was a fault on the plane and he
• 7:20
  just broke down. He he was trying to fly back to
• 7:23
  Lagos for his mother's funeral. Two flights cancelled and he's
• 7:28
  just so the captain came down and spoke to him and said, look,
• 7:30
  come at me and I'll put you have you put through without your
• 7:32
  family on the and get you on the a flight going that way.
• 7:35
  And then there was another guy I met in the airport.
• 7:40
  He'd been put, he was flying to India, and they put him on a
• 7:44
  flight to Dubai and told me that 14 hour layover in Dubai during
• 7:49
  the day. So they wouldn't put him into a
• 7:50
  hotel Dubai for 14 hours. I want to cancel.
• 7:56
  I want to cancel. I can get a flight myself and go
• 7:59
  cheaper than this. And this is just my hassle.
• 8:01
  So absolutely crazy. But yeah, so I was 10 hours
• 8:05
  late, but then I got home a lot of running.
• 8:08
  So I've done my exercise for the year.
• 8:10
  Yeah, but it was fun. I met this old couple, old
• 8:14
  Japanese couple in the airport in Heathrow.
• 8:17
  We were collecting our bags. They were the same and the same
• 8:19
  thing as me. And the whole way along, we just
• 8:21
  kept each other going. We were looking for signs.
• 8:25
  The three was like three sets of eyes looking for the sign so we
• 8:27
  could get there quickly. It's quite good, really helpful,
• 8:31
  really nice couple. But they had minimal English and
• 8:34
  they have minimal Japanese. But between that and Google,
• 8:38
  we're ready to get through. So that was that was that was my
• 8:43
  biggest event of the start of this month.
• 8:48
  Do you guys, have you ever heard of something else?
• 8:50
  Then I went to Skiji. Have you ever heard of Skiji in
• 8:54
  Tokyo? No, it was the fish market, the
• 8:58
  old fish market in Tokyo. It's pretty, if you hear of the
• 9:01
  each year there's an auction for tuna that start the year and
• 9:05
  they go for millions of millions of yen.
• 9:07
  So the 10s of thousands of sterling, sterling.
• 9:12
  I was going to say dollars, but so Skiji closed down and they
• 9:17
  moved it to a new place called Toyo SU and we went there
• 9:21
  recently. So we spent the day there.
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  There was loads of sushi restaurants if you're into sushi
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  or fish restaurants of cooked fish.
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  But we went there nice food and then went to an onsen because
• 9:34
  there's natural spring there for the water coming up out of the
• 9:37
  ground. They've piped it up to the 5th
• 9:39
  between the 5th and 10th floor. So they've just got loads of
• 9:42
  baths at different places long, you know, 2 spent there and it's
• 9:46
  you have some of the baths are inside the building, but some of
• 9:50
  them are outside. So you go outside and you've
• 9:52
  just got Tokyo right in front of you while we were there for
• 9:56
  sunsets and right into the night.
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  So you get to see Tokyo all light up and it's a really good
• 10:00
  view. You sit, you're sitting there at
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  the bath absolutely naked with loads of other men all around
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  you because they separate the sexes.
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  But it's I, it was really good. I'm not a huge fan of these.
• 10:12
  I like private huntsons, but the view from this was amazing.
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  So I would recommend anybody coming to Japan try to go to
• 10:18
  Toyasu Toyosu. I tried to go there, go to the
• 10:22
  onsen, enjoy, enjoy it. This place Japanese love onsens.
• 10:27
  So you go into it you'll have just you can pay extra for top
• 10:31
  massages done. But you have relaxation areas so
• 10:34
  you can witness a chair that'll lie back flat.
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  They have ATV there. You can listen to music, the
• 10:39
  PowerPoints knowledge here, so you can charge your phone if you
• 10:42
  wanted that. They also have walls and walls
• 10:44
  of manga that if you want to read that means like they want
• 10:49
  like 7 walls, 7 walls, all different sections, all just
• 10:52
  full of different manga and the Japanese love reading them.
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  It's quite good. And they hit like 2 restaurants
• 11:00
  then as well. So you you can eat a place of
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  Japanese people go and spend the whole day.
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  It is really weird that you see like groups of friends because I
• 11:09
  would never have thought about doing that with my friends, but
• 11:12
  they all meet up and go or you get families in there.
• 11:15
  It's quite cool building and obviously the only other news I
• 11:22
  have a meeting up with somebody called GH rocker or Antonio from
• 11:26
  veteran. Well, he's a contributor on
• 11:28
  veteran gamers meeting up in tomorrow for dinner.
• 11:30
  All going well, provided we can both find each other.
• 11:34
  So he's a he has a YouTube channel G Ham GH AM.
• 11:39
  That's what GHAMM he does lots of YouTube videos about
• 11:45
  amusement parks. Nice book.
• 11:48
  Hopefully attaching a lot over during the covert lockdown year
• 11:52
  year. And so hopefully first time we
• 11:54
  meet each other tomorrow and that's about all my views about
• 11:57
  what I've been doing. Who wants to go next?
• 12:01
  Rich, I can talk about talk about my January.
• 12:04
  So I've I've put down a few bullets of highlights.
• 12:07
  So they they include recording the first podcast with the year
• 12:12
  of shame 13 crew. So that was that was really,
• 12:15
  really exciting to do that. And I think we did that was that
• 12:17
  January 3? We did that so super early in
• 12:22
  the year and we've had a little bit of fun just doing a few kind
• 12:26
  of voice overs and things with audacity to get ready for this
• 12:29
  podcast. So a little bit of kind of
• 12:31
  technical learning has been happening.
• 12:34
  My, my life's been dominated a little bit by I'm in the middle
• 12:37
  of house sale and purchase. So you can imagine it's super
• 12:42
  busy that's getting to the front end of things.
• 12:44
  You know, perfect thing to do when you're trying to cram in
• 12:46
  podcasts and all of that kind of stuff.
• 12:48
  Busy printing off forms and getting getting to contract
• 12:53
  stage at the moment, so lots of signing things, just tapping up
• 12:57
  random neighbours, asking them to witness signatures and
• 13:00
  sorting out removals crews. I've got no idea how complicated
• 13:05
  it all is. So I've, I've only ever moved
• 13:08
  house when it's just been me or me and the missus where you can
• 13:12
  pretty much just get, get a, what you know, white van man man
• 13:16
  with a van to come and help you and you just sling it all in and
• 13:18
  do it. But now that there's a now that
• 13:20
  there's a family and there's loads of beds and furniture,
• 13:25
  it's all a logistical thing. So that's quite likely to happen
• 13:29
  in February. Touch wood.
• 13:31
  So that's been, that's been super busy.
• 13:33
  I've been pretty much been kind of working by day and then doing
• 13:37
  paperwork and answering solicitors questions by night.
• 13:42
  I've done a little bit of, yeah, well, this is the only stress
• 13:46
  really has been the waiting, just waiting and waiting because
• 13:49
  there's a whole chain and waiting for every everybody else
• 13:52
  and all the solicitors to do their things.
• 13:55
  They, they only seem to work on a Friday afternoon.
• 13:57
  So I just wait the entire week and I'm just, no, inevitably I'm
• 14:02
  going to get a phone call about 3:30 or 4:00 on a Friday asking
• 14:07
  me a question that if I answer it immediately isn't going to
• 14:11
  get dealt until the next Friday. So, so that's been, you know,
• 14:15
  that is what it is. I've been doing a little bit of
• 14:19
  fitness stuff. I've learnt a new word,
• 14:23
  callisthenics. So I don't know whether this is
• 14:26
  one of these made-up words to make just standard exercise
• 14:30
  sounds more fancy or more appealing, but it's, it's quite
• 14:34
  a handy thing because you can just, it's basically just
• 14:36
  exercises you can do with no weights, no equipment, all of
• 14:40
  that kind of stuff. So I'd, I'd put on a bit of
• 14:43
  weight during last year. So I was, I had a bit of a like
• 14:47
  a mystery illness last year that this time last year actually,
• 14:51
  where I literally had like super mega headaches consistently and
• 14:56
  not just like annoying, Oh, I've got a headache, but like lying
• 14:59
  down thinking, Oh my God, I need a hospital type headaches.
• 15:04
  And I've got put on some medication for that.
• 15:06
  And that made me put on a bit of weight.
• 15:08
  So that plus all of the Christmas eating and drinking,
• 15:12
  January the first, it was like, right, I've got to sort
• 15:14
  something out. So I've managed to do some
• 15:17
  exercise, eat more healthily. I've been able to cut down the
• 15:21
  meds that I'm taking because I am feeling a lot better this
• 15:24
  year. And the combination of those
• 15:26
  three things has meant I've lost the best part of 1112 lbs since
• 15:31
  January the 1st. I'm kind of feeling feeling
• 15:33
  pretty sprightly. And what else have I been been
• 15:37
  doing? So one of the reasons I've got
• 15:39
  to leave this recording at our stage in a couple of hours time
• 15:43
  is to take my son to a football match.
• 15:46
  So he's he's just kind of gotten old enough to get into that sort
• 15:50
  of thing. So we have quite nice father and
• 15:52
  son time. I take him to see Bristol City,
• 15:55
  which is my local, local team. I'm not really a supporter, but
• 16:00
  I thought it'd be really good just on a Saturday to be able to
• 16:03
  just spend the afternoons with him.
• 16:04
  And he's, you know, he's getting old enough now that that kind of
• 16:07
  thing might be the chance where he's, you know, he's got any
• 16:09
  kind of worries at school and stuff.
• 16:11
  He can reach out in a bit of kind of dad time.
• 16:14
  So we'll be doing that this afternoon.
• 16:17
  And then my only other kind of life highlight is actually
• 16:20
  through this podcast. I can't remember, I think
• 16:23
  whether it's one of you or somebody else or somebody
• 16:25
  somewhere ended up getting in touch with Chinny, who is also
• 16:29
  veteran gamers. And then we found this
• 16:32
  connection where Chinny, I did a road trip about a decade ago and
• 16:37
  Chinny was working as he did. He did some work for Aston Villa
• 16:41
  and was doing like video editing and stuff.
• 16:44
  And he, he, he put together a video of this road trip I did.
• 16:47
  It's like a charity road trip across the Andes and the Amazon.
• 16:52
  And he'd made this video a decade ago and put it on a
• 16:54
  private YouTube link, which has long since kind of expired.
• 16:58
  And he popped into one of my streams last week and said
• 17:03
  hello. And we got talking about it.
• 17:04
  And I said, oh, the link to the, to the video's gone.
• 17:08
  I can't, I can't watch it anymore.
• 17:10
  And off he went and said, oh, I'll, I'll get that back for
• 17:13
  you. So he sent that through to me
• 17:14
  last last week. So I've just spent spent a
• 17:18
  little bit of time reminiscing on fantastic Rd trips.
• 17:21
  Nice one. So yeah, that's been my, my, my
• 17:24
  January. How about you, Stuart?
• 17:26
  What you been up to? Well, so the, the end of last
• 17:29
  year, beginning of this year, we had a bit of holiday in SA.
• 17:33
  My son was went to Japan for, for the Christmas break.
• 17:36
  And so he was over there touring around Brian's part of the world
• 17:40
  around Tokyo. And so we had, you know, a
• 17:43
  family Christmas of just myself and my wife.
• 17:45
  And we thought, no, we'll go to South Australia and visit some
• 17:49
  friends that have got a farm out there.
• 17:51
  And it was a really good place to go.
• 17:52
  You know, they got this, the water sort of goes out from,
• 17:56
  from the, the coastline for like a kilometre before it gets even
• 18:01
  deep enough to, to run a boat on.
• 18:03
  And so at the end, every single shack, as they call these little
• 18:08
  holiday houses, has got a tractor parked outside of it.
• 18:11
  And first thing in the morning, the tractors loaded into the
• 18:14
  waterfront and they take the boats out that kilometre out.
• 18:18
  And then the the tractor just spent his whole life in the
• 18:20
  water. And then when they finished ship
• 18:22
  fishing at the end of the day, they bend the back, the boat
• 18:24
  back into the tractor and then the tractor drives it back up
• 18:27
  onto the land. So you go out during the day and
• 18:29
  you just see all these tractors all parked out in the water,
• 18:31
  like abandoned. But it was, I mean, the water
• 18:34
  was crystal clear and the weather was just fantastic.
• 18:37
  So it was a really good, really good little brick.
• 18:40
  And then beginning of the year started back up at work again
• 18:44
  and, and very quickly we've got back into the usual, usual
• 18:47
  pattern of things, you know, so trips to Melbourne, trips all
• 18:51
  over the shore, nothing international yet.
• 18:53
  So we'll see how long that lasts.
• 18:55
  But I know there's a couple of big trips that are coming up,
• 18:59
  some of them not quite to Europe, but certainly to Canada
• 19:02
  and places like that. So they're going to be long haul
• 19:05
  flights, you know, that's going to be sort of Ryan type travel.
• 19:09
  So I'm not looking forward to that at all, you know.
• 19:11
  But yeah, other than that, it's just been doing things around
• 19:14
  the house. I mean, the grass never stops
• 19:16
  growing, for God's sake. It's always growing.
• 19:18
  It always needs cut and and the garden always needs a bit of
• 19:21
  care, you know? So between that it worked,
• 19:24
  there's not a lot of hours left. Ask it do you like do you guys
• 19:28
  like gardening? God no staying in my existence.
• 19:37
  I used to live just outside Colchester on the House that was
• 19:40
  on the corner and with so much fucking grass.
• 19:43
  Oh my God. Language, language, Brian, We
• 19:46
  had so much grass. It take me 3 hours just going up
• 19:49
  and down with a lawnmower and Oh my God, I hate.
• 19:53
  And then it was like reading and I don't like jobs you can't
• 19:57
  finish. And gardening.
• 20:01
  Living an apartment is brilliant.
• 20:02
  No gardening, no gardening at all.
• 20:04
  It's just. There's a lot to be said for
• 20:06
  astroturf. Yeah, or fire.
• 20:12
  Just just get rid of all. I can't.
• 20:17
  The big problem we have around here though, is if the glass
• 20:19
  gets too long, we get snakes. And, and so we've had our, our
• 20:24
  neighbour next door, he had an Alsatian dog that just one
• 20:27
  morning he was having his cup of tea and he looked out the window
• 20:30
  and then he turned around and looked again and the dog was
• 20:32
  lying there dead because of Snicket digger.
• 20:34
  And it's, I mean, the snakes here, you don't mess around.
• 20:36
  Well, you know, there are, there are serious stuff.
• 20:38
  We've had one of our cats was was taken with a snake and yeah,
• 20:43
  she was tiny. And our neighbour over the back
• 20:46
  shouted and said, hey, your cat's lying in a driveway, Come
• 20:48
  on, look her. And it was too late, you know?
• 20:50
  So yeah, you don't want to keep it.
• 20:52
  You don't want to have them around.
• 20:53
  You want to get rid of any, any space that they would find
• 20:56
  attractive. So keeping your grass short is
• 20:58
  mandatory. I was.
• 20:59
  Going to say, I bet you're just mowing the lawns like the whole
• 21:01
  time. I'd either I'd either number one
• 21:04
  move or #2 just be mowing a lawn.
• 21:07
  Get a set of tweezers out. Be pulling the grass out.
• 21:10
  You need like armour to wear just in your legs just to get
• 21:13
  poke around. No, it's, it's Australia.
• 21:16
  Everything's trying to kill you. So, you know, you got to make
• 21:18
  sure that you keep yourself safe.
• 21:20
  Is it any safer in Tasmania? Are you?
• 21:22
  No, no, no. No, we, we have, you know, we
• 21:26
  have funnel web spiders here, we have snakes here, we have all
• 21:29
  sorts that would, that would take you out very quickly.
• 21:31
  So, yeah, kids are taught not to put the fingers and holes in the
• 21:35
  ground because you don't know what's in there.
• 21:37
  And if you're if you're wandering on your garden on bare
• 21:39
  feet, you need to keep your eyes open.
• 21:41
  You know you're. Going to keep keep an eye on the
• 21:43
  background behind you just in case we see something moving.
• 21:45
  Exactly, Yeah. Crazy you guys over in different
• 21:51
  bits of the world. Do you have the the blue Monday
• 21:54
  thing? So Uki think it was the the I
• 21:57
  think it's Monday this week. So whatever date that was, 19th
• 22:01
  is Blue Monday. Like the most depressing day of
• 22:03
  the year where everyone's been back at work for two weeks.
• 22:06
  I wondered whether it's a just Auk concept or whether the world
• 22:10
  also suffers this. No, I thought you were talking
• 22:12
  about my ringtone. It's been Blue Monday for about
• 22:14
  20 years now. The The New Order song though.
• 22:19
  Nothing to do with mental health.
• 22:22
  No, no, I don't think they're just so don't say mechanical,
• 22:27
  but that these accept work like most people here work.
• 22:33
  I, I started this, the teachers are there before me from 7.
• 22:36
  They leave maybe 9:00 in the evening.
• 22:39
  So they all work long hours. You know, it's, they just accept
• 22:43
  that that's just normal for them.
• 22:45
  They don't, I don't say they don't know any better, but they
• 22:48
  don't know any alternative. If you're smart or try to get
• 22:52
  working for a European company who will bring their work ethos
• 22:56
  with them. Number of holidays and stuff.
• 23:00
  Minimums be 10, which is what I started on.
• 23:02
  I think the maximum, maximum I've ever heard anybody on this
• 23:05
  20 like in Europe, you're on 25 upping up more, especially if
• 23:10
  you're like in Germany or the 30s here.
• 23:14
  That's no, they don't. They just accept this and it's
• 23:17
  normal. We do have a day in September
• 23:20
  which probably equates to the middle of our winter sort of
• 23:23
  dark. Period.
• 23:24
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Called are you OK day
• 23:26
  where you're encouraged to, to reach out to every, you know,
• 23:29
  around you and you know, somebody that might be a remote
• 23:32
  worker, just check in with them and just make sure that they're
• 23:34
  doing all right. And, and at the north too, too
• 23:36
  down. It's a it's a suicide prevention
• 23:38
  day. But, but as I say, that's in
• 23:40
  September. Yeah.
• 23:41
  So it's nothing to do with going back to work.
• 23:43
  No, but that's probably a season seasonal thing, isn't it?
• 23:46
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a really good idea, all.
• 23:50
  Have you been watching Rich? Do you want to go first again?
• 23:53
  Yeah, sure. So I've been watching a few
• 23:55
  things actually. That's, that's one of the things
• 23:58
  me and me and the misses do on an evening, you know, because
• 24:03
  we've got kids clubs and, you know, school and both of us
• 24:06
  working and stuff. So just flopping down from the
• 24:08
  telly is, is something that we both enjoy.
• 24:11
  So a few things on the list already in January.
• 24:14
  So Pluribus, I won't spoil it because I know that you've been
• 24:19
  watching it as well, Brian. Thank you.
• 24:21
  Really good. It's a it's a very slow burn.
• 24:25
  So I'm going to give away no plot here, but it's it's a slow
• 24:28
  burn. So it's made by the same people
• 24:29
  as Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
• 24:33
  I think it's is it Vince Gilligan?
• 24:36
  That's it. Yeah, Yeah.
• 24:37
  So it's it's got that kind of Netflix production values and
• 24:42
  the same. Yeah, just all the
• 24:43
  cinematography is just absolutely beautiful, really
• 24:45
  kind of crisp and clean, very slow burn, mysterious plot and
• 24:50
  an incredible acting job. Because I think pretty much, I
• 24:55
  don't know about 50% plus of the whole thing is just one
• 25:00
  character in a kind of solitary, solitary state.
• 25:04
  And it is something to behold. Actually, she's, she's very
• 25:08
  intense and it's, it's kind of captivating, but, but it is such
• 25:13
  a slow burner because you spend most of the series, if not all
• 25:17
  of the series. I won't spoil one.
• 25:20
  Just sort of kind of wondering what's what's going to happen.
• 25:22
  So it, it, it rewards, I think it rewards patients.
• 25:26
  And I can see that some people, especially if, if they've
• 25:28
  enjoyed the rough and tumble of Breaking Bad, might, might find
• 25:32
  it a bit dull. But I, I quite like a kind of
• 25:35
  slow meandering movie or series. So I've been enjoying that.
• 25:41
  On the other end of the scale, I've watched 9 bodies in a
• 25:43
  Mexican morgue. Don't know whether you whether
• 25:47
  you've heard of that one. No.
• 25:49
  It's, it's, again, it's a short series.
• 25:52
  I think it's maybe 6 episodes or so.
• 25:55
  It's the, it's the classic kind of plane comes down.
• 25:58
  And then how did how did the passengers respond?
• 26:01
  There's a lot of murdering, there's a lot of mystery.
• 26:05
  It's terribly acted. It's really bad acting.
• 26:09
  But it, but I found it, I think probably because it was quite a
• 26:11
  short series, very, very addictive.
• 26:14
  Just trying to get a bit of a who done it really.
• 26:17
  So very addictive plot wise so I enjoyed that.
• 26:20
  Another thing I won't be spoiling is the traitors.
• 26:22
  So I don't know whether you guys take in UK traitors.
• 26:27
  No Paul was big into that last year.
• 26:29
  I haven't watched. I'm not into reality shows at
• 26:32
  all. I should probably.
• 26:33
  It looks like he mentioned the Irish one was quite good as
• 26:35
  well. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's top
• 26:38
  notch social deduction game where there's, you know, 20 odd
• 26:41
  people put into a house and X number of them are, are deemed
• 26:46
  to be traitors. And every day they vote to get
• 26:49
  rid of somebody and then they reveal whether they were a
• 26:51
  faithful or a traitor. And they do tasks during the day
• 26:55
  and, you know, that earns the money in the pot and that the,
• 27:00
  yeah, there's a chance to gain yourself a shield so that you're
• 27:03
  immune to the traitors doing a murder overnight.
• 27:06
  So there's all sorts of little sub levels of things going on.
• 27:10
  But it's, it's, I mean, the main thing to enjoy about it is, is I
• 27:14
  think because as a viewer, you know exactly what's going on,
• 27:18
  but all the people in the game haven't got a clue what's going
• 27:20
  on. And you just watch these people
• 27:23
  either trying to manipulate situations or just generally
• 27:27
  like melting down, just having an absolute nightmare coming up
• 27:30
  with theories that everybody latches on to that is completely
• 27:33
  wrong. So they end up, you know, kind
• 27:35
  of ostracising somebody because they looked in the wrong
• 27:38
  direction at some stage of the day.
• 27:40
  So that's super addictive. And that came to a finale last
• 27:43
  night. I've watched season 4 of Slow
• 27:46
  Horses. I've been busy watching telly.
• 27:48
  I kind of just tend to kind of munch through seasons of stuff.
• 27:53
  So Slow Horses, it's kind of like MI 6 type or MI5 type
• 27:58
  thing, kind of silly, but again, beautifully shot.
• 28:02
  And that's, that's kind of full of action.
• 28:04
  It's, it's kind of good, good trash.
• 28:06
  And then alongside that I've been, I've been reading Wolf
• 28:11
  Hall. So I've never been a a good
• 28:14
  reader. I typically kind of read one or
• 28:16
  two books a year. And then when the Game of
• 28:19
  Thrones books came out and they were massive chunky books, I got
• 28:23
  into those and actually, you know, start well, it loved the
• 28:27
  story, but also getting through thousand page books because I
• 28:31
  wanted to. So I helped with the reading
• 28:33
  thing and then last year, or I know it just been the year
• 28:36
  before, I got myself AE reader, which I've always been antsy.
• 28:40
  I've always liked to kind of, you know, the physical book, but
• 28:44
  I've got myself an e-reader partly because quite often I
• 28:47
  pick up a book and you kind of open it to start reading it.
• 28:50
  And if the if the fonts really small or if the font is not a
• 28:54
  agreeable font straight away on Page 1 you like.
• 28:57
  I don't I don't like this book. I'm not going to, I'm not going
• 29:00
  to find it reading this book. So with the E read, you can
• 29:03
  obviously put the font, whatever size you'd like.
• 29:05
  You can make it whatever font you like.
• 29:07
  So you can have a nice agreeable font.
• 29:09
  But the biggest thing for me is that it's changed the way I
• 29:12
  read. So I previously it would always
• 29:13
  be like, I need, I need a slot of time to do my reading.
• 29:17
  I'll pick up a book and I need a good kind of 20 minute, half an
• 29:20
  hour chunk to go on it. And then I'd start that and
• 29:23
  reading generally makes me tired.
• 29:25
  So just fall asleep and read 2 pages a day.
• 29:28
  But with the, with the e-reader, what I've found is it's, it's
• 29:32
  substituted in for scrolling time on the phone.
• 29:36
  So if I'm just sitting down on the sofa and the kids are like
• 29:38
  watching telly or whatever, I can just pick up my e-reader,
• 29:41
  read 5 or 6 pages, then some distraction will happen.
• 29:44
  I can just knock it off and then 10 minutes later pick it back
• 29:48
  up. And I never thought I'd be able
• 29:50
  to read like that, but now I can.
• 29:52
  So I'm, I've got through like 25 books last year.
• 29:56
  So I've taken on Wolf Hall, which is it's all like Henry the
• 30:00
  Eighth stuff and again, big old chunky book and obviously doing
• 30:05
  year of Shame stuff as well. I haven't got massively far
• 30:08
  through it, but it's it's pretty good so far.
• 30:10
  So I've been enjoying all of that.
• 30:13
  So that's me using. Kindle.
• 30:16
  Is it Kindle or? It's a, it's a thing called a
• 30:19
  Kobo. So, Oh yeah, I went into, I went
• 30:22
  into a Currys store and I asked them about Kindles when I was
• 30:26
  going to make my purchase. And actually the member of staff
• 30:29
  was really good because they were like, Oh yeah, we've got
• 30:31
  all the Kindles here. But he said, but actually I use
• 30:35
  a Kobo. We don't have any in stock, but
• 30:37
  you can get them from this other shop down the road.
• 30:38
  And he showed me it and I was taken with it.
• 30:42
  So I've gone for something a bit different there.
• 30:45
  Yeah, I don't. I've been looking at it's not
• 30:51
  outlawing. It's a tea called TCL Note next
• 30:56
  paper. It's like a tablet crossed with
• 30:58
  AE reader. If I had £400 spare I would do
• 31:03
  it, but it's on Kickstarter at the moment.
• 31:06
  But I it looks like a cross. So you've got it's got an LCD
• 31:11
  screens rather than the E Ink screen, but you can watch, you
• 31:14
  can watch videos on it as well. It's not a high spec tablet, but
• 31:17
  it's quite good. It's supposed to be quite good.
• 31:21
  Somebody gives me £400 that beyond this because you can make
• 31:24
  notes. You were saying when we recorded
• 31:27
  the last show that you you collected to read manga on?
• 31:32
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 31:32
  And I was thinking actually, because the E Ink, I mean the,
• 31:35
  the Kobo that I've got is colour.
• 31:37
  So it's meant to be good for that kind of stuff.
• 31:39
  But you've got 2 problems. The screen, the screen is quite
• 31:41
  small and also the resolution isn't great.
• 31:43
  Sort of thought for stuff like manga that that what you're
• 31:46
  talking about would probably be a little bit better.
• 31:48
  You'd get a better kind of DPI or whatever.
• 31:51
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 31:52
  Oh, I. Thought so.
• 31:53
  Yeah. Go on, Sir.
• 31:56
  Yeah, I was. I was going to say, yeah, I
• 31:57
  thought so as well. Certainly the the Amazon Kindles
• 32:00
  we've had. I think I'm on my 4th Kindle now
• 32:02
  because we've had them for years and years and years and those
• 32:07
  they've sounded great for reading books on as as Rich
• 32:10
  said, you know, you can change the font and you can change the
• 32:12
  size, which I find very useful. And it's also nice that you can
• 32:14
  turn it on in the middle of the night without waking your
• 32:16
  partner up because it because it's, you know, fairly
• 32:18
  self-contained light. So you can read without having
• 32:22
  other light available to you. But I would have thought that
• 32:24
  certainly for something like manga where, you know, it needs
• 32:28
  a bit more detail, it wouldn't be ideal.
• 32:30
  So I would, I would be looking for something in the bigger
• 32:33
  like, as you say, Brian, you know, something that's more
• 32:34
  tablet size I think would be a better fit for you.
• 32:38
  Yeah. Just another getting £400
• 32:39
  together. Yeah, exactly.
• 32:41
  Yeah, just keep buying those lottery tickets.
• 32:44
  That's yeah, when you're working minimum wage and it's not, it's
• 32:47
  not good, but. Yeah.
• 32:49
  Keep looking at this. I keep opening Kickstarter and
• 32:52
  looking. I go well, but yeah, anyway,
• 32:56
  yeah, yeah, but we'll see. But then I could afford it to
• 33:01
  have a better one that. Possibly.
• 33:04
  There's always a new shiny coming, you know?
• 33:07
  Yeah, yeah, when I was working in the UK was I was earning
• 33:11
  more. So it was that was great could
• 33:13
  look at Kickstarter. I like that, like that.
• 33:15
  What I go farewell. But now I agree.
• 33:18
  Different, different. But yeah, anyways, sure.
• 33:21
  What will you be? What have you been up to or what
• 33:23
  you've been watching? So my my viewing tends to be,
• 33:26
  you know, compared to last year where you guys were always
• 33:29
  watching some weird horror movie that's only been watched by 4
• 33:32
  individuals worldwide. My intend to be a lot more being
• 33:35
  mainstream, right? So the usual things.
• 33:38
  I watch the final season of Stranger Things.
• 33:41
  It was, you know, it's a show, you know, people are losing
• 33:44
  their minds about it, but it's a show like any other, you know,
• 33:47
  you take it as it comes. Fallout season 2 is still
• 33:51
  ongoing and I'm really enjoying that.
• 33:53
  It's it's really been true to the to the game so far.
• 33:57
  You know, I'm, I'm really impressed by how close of
• 34:00
  sticking to things. We watched a movie.
• 34:03
  We had a in our family movie night one night watched one
• 34:07
  called wake up dead man, which is a knives out mystery.
• 34:10
  I don't know if you've seen. Oh wonderful.
• 34:12
  I love the Knives Out stuff. Yeah, so they had Knives Out and
• 34:14
  they had the Glass Onion. This is a third one in the
• 34:17
  series and it was it was really good fun, you know, and then I I
• 34:22
  made a terrible mistake and I decided to spend time sitting
• 34:25
  watching Tron Aries. Yeah, that is time I'm never
• 34:29
  getting back in my life. I should have I should have
• 34:33
  ended the minute that, you know, the the main act of decides
• 34:37
  they're going to hack the system with a quick basic programme.
• 34:41
  It was like, that's it. You should be out right now.
• 34:43
  Just close your laptop and walk away because it's not going to
• 34:46
  get any better. And then other than that, yeah,
• 34:54
  I've I've mentioned to a couple of you guys, I've got hooked
• 34:56
  watching this series on on YouTube or jet lag to the game.
• 35:01
  Yes. And there's, there's fifteen
• 35:03
  seasons of the damn thing and each season is only, you know,
• 35:06
  between 4:00 and 7:00 episodes long.
• 35:08
  But they they they play like real world games.
• 35:11
  So they'll do, you know, connect four across the States of
• 35:15
  America and they have to they have to travel to each state and
• 35:18
  do a task to clean that state and then get four of them in a
• 35:21
  row to win the game more. Or they do chase the flag across
• 35:25
  Japan, you know, or one of the episodes was watching those
• 35:29
  playing, you know, the old Nokia game snake with a playing snake
• 35:33
  on the rail lines in in Europe somewhere.
• 35:36
  And it's like just, you know, different, different watching.
• 35:40
  So I've been really enjoying that.
• 35:41
  I've managed to turn my way through all 15 seasons in one
• 35:45
  month. And then alongside that, it's
• 35:49
  really just been a couple of episodes of Taskmaster here and
• 35:52
  there. I really enjoy watching
• 35:53
  Taskmaster UK and we get on one of our streaming services here,
• 35:58
  so I tend to watch that on a Saturday morning.
• 35:59
  And then outside of that, I started reading the Wheel of
• 36:04
  Time series. There's like 14 books in the in
• 36:08
  in the entire set and really not my Kindle.
• 36:12
  And I'm the same as you guys. You know, I've tend to read one
• 36:15
  page and then fall asleep. And then that's me for the day.
• 36:18
  I'm on a tunnel on the next night I'll have to go back half
• 36:21
  a page and then read the page and then fall asleep again.
• 36:23
  And so it takes me a long time to get through these books.
• 36:26
  I'm on book 7 of 14 at the moment, but I, I think if I do
• 36:30
  another status update for the next 12 months, I'll, I'll
• 36:32
  probably still be on book 7. You know, it's, it's an instant
• 36:36
  knockout for me. As soon as I climb on the bed.
• 36:37
  I opened the Kindle up and it's like, that's it, I'm gone.
• 36:40
  You know 1 pigeon. He's very slow.
• 36:44
  He's yeah, it feels like in his books he decided he needed to
• 36:47
  extend because he needs more money.
• 36:49
  And he's definitely pages and pages just describing a saddle
• 36:53
  or a tree or something. It's just like fuck get stick.
• 36:58
  I was under the impression they released newer versions.
• 37:02
  I would say abridged but they've already cut out a lot of the
• 37:05
  faff. But OK.
• 37:07
  I don't know if that's true or not, but no, there's still a
• 37:10
  slog. Yeah, it's yeah.
• 37:13
  I read through them while the TV show was on.
• 37:15
  But fortunate TV show is not going to finish off.
• 37:20
  But yeah, it's good books. And so other than that, the only
• 37:24
  other things, yeah, I doubt they are definitely long books.
• 37:27
  The only other things I've been doing is I'm still building
• 37:29
  this, this computer from the 1970s.
• 37:31
  I'm still getting bits and pieces coming in from various
• 37:34
  parts of the Internet that I've ordered things from.
• 37:37
  It's a science of Cambridge Mark 14 computer, which predates
• 37:42
  Sinclair, that made the ZX Spectrums and the ZX City ones.
• 37:45
  This was the company they were before they came Sinclair.
• 37:49
  And and so one of the bits I needed to get was a little, it
• 37:52
  was like a little 9 character screen that used to get on like
• 37:57
  old calculators. And so I found somebody that had
• 38:00
  one of these these screens for sale and they sent it to me and
• 38:03
  I arrived and I got everything set up, got the soldering iron
• 38:06
  now and I started soldering on the little connectors for it.
• 38:09
  And as the soldering iron touched the PC board connectors,
• 38:13
  they just went dust and I just disintegrated.
• 38:18
  So I've now got another three of them coming from some place in
• 38:20
  the Ukraine, which should arrive this week.
• 38:24
  Let's hope one of the three I can actually end up using and it
• 38:27
  doesn't turn to dust in my hands.
• 38:29
  This year, oh wow and. Then the final thing I'm doing
• 38:34
  is I'm, I think I might have mentioned to you on a on a
• 38:37
  previous chat, Brian, I'm watching this guy on YouTube 3D
• 38:40
  printing a Porsche GT3. Yes.
• 38:43
  So he, he went out and he bought himself a Porsche Boxster and he
• 38:47
  got the body, the body mould for a Porsche GT3.
• 38:52
  And he's now printing out all these little panels for it and
• 38:55
  then glueing them all together and building them onto this
• 38:58
  Porsche to turn it from a Boxster into AGT 3, which is,
• 39:02
  you know, the like a vastly different quality of car.
• 39:06
  And he's now got on the road. He was fitting the turbo on the
• 39:09
  last episode. And I mean, it looks the part,
• 39:12
  you know, this is the same guy who who bought a whole bunch of
• 39:16
  of various bits and pieces and built himself a Lamborghini out
• 39:20
  of nothing. And now he takes it to all these
• 39:23
  all these car shows and just drifts around the track in this
• 39:27
  fake Lamborghini, you know? Yeah.
• 39:32
  Oh God. Yeah, So that's me.
• 39:34
  That's that's been my month so far.
• 39:37
  How about yourself, Brian? What did I watch when I was on
• 39:40
  the the planes? I watched the many planes.
• 39:44
  I watched weapons. Have you seen this?
• 39:48
  Paul mentioned it last time you've seen.
• 39:50
  It's a sort of horror movie, I think, or thriller.
• 39:53
  But I thought the first 2/3 or so were brilliant, really good,
• 39:58
  really tense. And at the end it really dropped
• 40:01
  really that it's like it didn't hit the market basically.
• 40:04
  It wasn't like good. It became a bit silly.
• 40:06
  So I. Ultimately I wouldn't recommend
• 40:09
  it, but the first 2/3 were really good and then I didn't
• 40:12
  like the way it went to the very end.
• 40:14
  I watched the final Mission Impossible final paycheck,
• 40:19
  probably the worst of the entire season to get lost.
• 40:23
  It's not good. It's maybe, maybe it's suffered
• 40:27
  because it was on a small screen in the on the aeroplane, you
• 40:31
  know? But it looked like the actors
• 40:33
  were phoning in. To be honest.
• 40:34
  It was good to see Luther it's what's named Ving Ving Rhames
• 40:40
  back because he's quite I'll I believe and Tom Cruise has
• 40:43
  actually arranged his part specifically because he he was
• 40:47
  ill they so he doesn't move much, but it was the show
• 40:51
  itself. It's not good.
• 40:52
  The movie was not good, yeah, but it's.
• 40:56
  Very silly, isn't it? You know the fights on the
• 40:59
  biplane and that's what was toughestly to come on.
• 41:02
  Yeah, he really was, you know, I don't know it amazing stunts,
• 41:09
  but the story was just absolutely silly and it was the
• 41:11
  big, the big bad AI going to take over the world.
• 41:14
  It just really wasn't good. I think if you're watching it on
• 41:17
  a plane, I mean, essentially you're missing all of the the
• 41:22
  set piece, glorious action goodness, which is 99% of the
• 41:26
  film. And and pretty much what you're
• 41:28
  left with is the plot, which under focus is probably a
• 41:32
  disaster in all of them. That's probably true.
• 41:35
  That's probably true. I want to create sponsorship to
• 41:38
  watch the entire lot of them, the papers, to watch them on the
• 41:41
  plane, just to focus on the plot.
• 41:44
  But yeah, probably come back saying they're all crap.
• 41:47
  But yeah, it was. It just was not good.
• 41:49
  It was not good. Maybe I'll watch it later on the
• 41:52
  big TV or something. I remember watching World War Z,
• 41:56
  is that what was that media? Glad.
• 41:59
  Pitts and I watched that on a plane and it made absolutely no
• 42:03
  sense because they cut the tide of it.
• 42:05
  So there's a scene where they're all on this plane, spoiler
• 42:08
  alert, coming in, right? They're all on the plane and
• 42:10
  there's zombies are all on the back of it and and they go into
• 42:14
  the back to go and battle everybody, but it crashes the
• 42:17
  plane. They cut that entire bit out.
• 42:20
  So you see a door opening and then suddenly they're
• 42:22
  effectively walking out of the plane going.
• 42:25
  So I'm dusting himself off and you think what just happened?
• 42:30
  This mean massive, like, you know, critical part of the plot
• 42:33
  just wasn't there anymore because I was watching it on the
• 42:35
  wrong format. Oh, no, I always wonder because
• 42:40
  like some of the movie, the movies you can watch on there
• 42:44
  were quite graphic or quite they're quite gruesome.
• 42:47
  Do they cut? They must cut most that out
• 42:49
  because you could have a kid in the next just over and behind
• 42:53
  watching the movie over your shoulder.
• 42:54
  I don't know. Should do.
• 42:57
  I seem to remember watching those American Gods was a series
• 43:01
  that was quite big a couple of months ago, and I'm probably
• 43:05
  going to find it was a couple of years ago now.
• 43:07
  But I remember watching a couple of episodes of that when I was
• 43:10
  on one of the planes and there was a lot of graphic nudity in
• 43:14
  it. And you're like, jeez, I might
• 43:16
  have to stop this because I don't know who's sitting behind
• 43:18
  me, you know? Yeah, that's because I watched a
• 43:22
  lot of Pluribus on up the episode I watched.
• 43:26
  Yeah, I watched episode 6 of Pluribus.
• 43:28
  I think there's nine. So there's three more episodes
• 43:30
  left. But there's one scene in that I
• 43:32
  was watching it on the plane and the guys in the in the bath and
• 43:37
  there's lots of people walking around that side and it looked
• 43:40
  like they were naked. I thought I've got close my
• 43:42
  laptop because I'm not watching this in front of kids.
• 43:44
  So I was fast, fast portrayal. But yeah, I don't know.
• 43:48
  I don't know what they do on the movies.
• 43:51
  Yeah, it's very odd. Service is very, very, very
• 43:56
  slow, which is OK, but I hope it's going someplace.
• 44:00
  I really want something to happen at the end.
• 44:02
  Something to go is very interesting watching people
• 44:06
  exploit the situation and others getting freaked out by it.
• 44:09
  But it's interesting. But wait till I've finished the
• 44:12
  whole thing before I give a full a full declaration how on how
• 44:15
  good it is. The only other thing I've
• 44:18
  watched is Man on Fire, really Vint, really old movie, Denzel
• 44:23
  Washington, very vintage movie. He's he's an alcoholic CIA
• 44:28
  agent, CIA agent, officer or whatever.
• 44:31
  He's basically looking for redemption or whatever stuff
• 44:35
  he's done in the past. Probably invading Venezuela or
• 44:38
  something, I don't know. But that's going to get us
• 44:40
  picked up extra viewers on the CIA.
• 44:46
  But the movie itself wasn't great.
• 44:50
  I have to admit. It wasn't that great.
• 44:51
  I look I like do like him, think he's a good actor.
• 44:55
  I love the Equaliser movies, which are far better movies.
• 44:59
  Probably not. Probably haven't got great
• 45:00
  stories. I've watched them on a small
• 45:02
  screen, but I liked those movies.
• 45:04
  But this movie, Man on Fire, I didn't think it was that good,
• 45:07
  to be honest. That's basically all I've
• 45:10
  watched. If we move on to what you've
• 45:12
  been playing Rich, do you want to go first?
• 45:15
  Because I reckon you do you have most most games I.
• 45:19
  Don't know. I I do tend to kind of flip it
• 45:21
  in and out of games. So there's, there's quite a long
• 45:24
  list, but I don't have tonnes to say about all of them.
• 45:27
  So let's have a little look here.
• 45:29
  So there's a couple of games I've completed, couple of games
• 45:32
  I've had a little dabble with and a couple of games that are
• 45:36
  Evergreen games that I'm always playing.
• 45:39
  So I'll start with the ones that I've just just dabbled with.
• 45:44
  So just after just after new Year, I picked up and I put this
• 45:49
  on on a handheld. It's a game called Skald SKALD
• 45:55
  against the The Black Priory and it's a super old school RPGI.
• 46:00
  Think this was one of the epic 12 Days of Christmas giveaway
• 46:04
  games. Yes, yeah.
• 46:06
  And I, I really enjoyed playing it on a handheld.
• 46:09
  I mean, it's super low res graphics and you can choose, you
• 46:12
  can choose options to make it look like an old CRT monitor and
• 46:16
  all of that kind of stuff. So I mean, the graphics are bad
• 46:19
  and you've, you've got options to make them even worse.
• 46:22
  If, if that's your, if that's your bag and it's, it's quite
• 46:27
  interesting. I've only played it for a couple
• 46:29
  of hours and then I put it down and got distracted by other
• 46:31
  things. But, but that's for me, this is
• 46:34
  exactly what Year of Shame is about is picking up and trying
• 46:36
  games you probably wouldn't otherwise have done.
• 46:39
  So I quite enjoyed it. I got through what I think was
• 46:42
  was the prologue of it and then I did try it on the PC and then
• 46:46
  I had two problems. The cross save didn't work.
• 46:48
  So I don't know whether that's an epic thing or a just a this
• 46:52
  game thing, but it didn't pick up my progress.
• 46:55
  And then I'd faffed about and managed to copy and paste files
• 46:58
  from 1 device to the other and get it get it back to the stage
• 47:02
  I was at. And then I put it on the big
• 47:03
  monitor and it looked horrendous because you've on a, on a
• 47:07
  handheld. I don't know, the, the kind of
• 47:08
  low res graphics seem to kind of work.
• 47:11
  And then on the big screen I was like, I can't, I can't play this
• 47:14
  on this screen. So a couple of hours into that,
• 47:18
  I've put a couple more hours into like a Dragon Infinite
• 47:21
  Wealth, which is just an absolute monster, epic, silly
• 47:25
  game. And it's one of my, one of my
• 47:28
  aims for the year is to actually get through that.
• 47:30
  I've probably been playing it for two years.
• 47:32
  It's, it's a, it's probably a 6070 hour RPG thing.
• 47:38
  And then a bit like Grand Theft Auto and stuff.
• 47:40
  There's, there's millions of side quests, there's side games.
• 47:44
  And when, when you first encounter them, you don't know
• 47:46
  whether they're things that you're supposed to be doing or
• 47:49
  whether they're literally just entertainment on the side.
• 47:52
  So you plough a load of time into it.
• 47:53
  Then you realise it's of no consequence whatsoever.
• 47:56
  So off going down rabbit holes and I'm trying to just get
• 48:00
  through the the plot. I've not played any of the other
• 48:03
  Yakuza games or the first like a Dragon game.
• 48:06
  So I don't know any of the characters, but they're all,
• 48:08
  they're all good fun. And but there's this sprawling
• 48:11
  story and back story and people double crossing each other from
• 48:15
  three games prior and stuff like that.
• 48:17
  It looks stunning. And I've just got to an area
• 48:21
  where I've hit a boss fight and it's really hard.
• 48:24
  So I've I've got to go back out and do a bit of grinding and
• 48:28
  levelling before I kind of carry that one on.
• 48:31
  I've played a bit of Rocket League, so Rocket League's my
• 48:33
  kind of go to game through the year.
• 48:36
  I think I've set myself a little bit of a challenge for the year
• 48:39
  to get myself up to champ rank. I'm currently diamond, so it
• 48:43
  goes bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond champ, grand
• 48:50
  champ, supersonic legend. But they kind of it's like a
• 48:53
  pyramid always. So you've only got a couple of
• 48:56
  people who are supersonic legend, a few more are the next
• 48:58
  rank down and so on. So you.
• 49:00
  Know. I mean, I've been at this rank
• 49:02
  for, I don't know, probably the best part of 18 months.
• 49:06
  So it's a, it's a long slog to get out, but it's a good game to
• 49:09
  pick up and play for for half an hour that turns into two hours.
• 49:14
  Played a bit of Arc Raiders. So I had a game game of heart
• 49:17
  Raiders with, with Ben last week, which was good fun.
• 49:20
  I think it was one of his kind of first few raids that he'd
• 49:23
  done. So I, I went in and started
• 49:26
  aggroing all of the big monster beasts, giving him a heart
• 49:29
  attack. So that was good fun.
• 49:32
  And I, I, I enjoy that. And that's going to be, we'll
• 49:34
  talk about that when we get to the questions a bit.
• 49:36
  I think that's going to be a bit of a fixture for me this year.
• 49:40
  And then three more, so two that I've completed.
• 49:43
  I finished off a game called Trooper Brook, which I'd got on
• 49:46
  the Nintendo Switch and I'd picked up and done what I do
• 49:50
  with a lot of games, which is, you know, play the first 3 or 4
• 49:53
  hours, think it's great and then forget it even exists.
• 49:57
  So I picked that back up with a with a view to finishing it.
• 50:00
  It's a bit of a point and click adventure type thing set in
• 50:04
  Germany, so lots of amazing German accents, completely
• 50:07
  bonkers like science, space travel kind of theme, but just a
• 50:12
  kind of funny dialogue, peaceful game.
• 50:14
  The controls are a bit infuriating and actually the
• 50:17
  game started a lot better than it finished.
• 50:19
  So towards the end I was struggling because I needed an
• 50:23
  item off a tree and it, you know, it was a, a pixel that I
• 50:26
  hadn't found and I kind of got hard stuck and you know, it, it,
• 50:30
  it was funny. I, I, it's one of those games
• 50:33
  that I, I was probably right to pick it up, try it, enjoy it and
• 50:36
  put it down, but got it finished.
• 50:38
  And that's a tick. And then viewfinder, which I, I
• 50:42
  won't talk too much about because, because I think both of
• 50:45
  you will get onto it, but I had a good time with viewfinder
• 50:48
  again. It was a epic free giveaway just
• 50:51
  this side of the new year. So it's nice to go in there.
• 50:54
  I'd heard a lot of good things about it and I had a lot of fun
• 50:57
  with it. Quite a quite a short game,
• 50:59
  which I like, you know, kind of for me, probably 5 or 6 hours.
• 51:02
  It might be less for you in particular, Stuart, but I
• 51:06
  cracked through that. And then last one.
• 51:09
  So I found myself last week and then this is the way that I game
• 51:12
  is that I'm, I'll be playing two or three things kind of
• 51:16
  seriously and then I'll decide that I don't want to play any of
• 51:20
  those things and I need to try something new.
• 51:22
  So I had, it was almost like my first wobble.
• 51:25
  I was like, I need a new game. But of course I, I went to the
• 51:28
  backlog and I was looking down it.
• 51:30
  And, and because I've looked down the backlog so many times
• 51:34
  in, in, in the past that what I wanted was a game that I didn't
• 51:38
  know I had. So I found a game called Astraya
• 51:41
  ASTRE, A6 sided Oracles, picked it up, had a little look at the
• 51:47
  Steam video for it, and basically it's Slayed the Spire
• 51:51
  but with dice instead of cards. Total clone.
• 51:56
  So you've got your same thing, you've got your different kind
• 51:58
  of builds, your different characters that lends to a
• 52:01
  particular type of build. You work your way up a little
• 52:04
  map where you've got a choice of whether you have a, an easy
• 52:08
  battle, a hard battle, or there's places where you can
• 52:10
  pick up coins or augment your card slash dice.
• 52:14
  And you work your way up the screen.
• 52:15
  There's a boss at the top. And then if you beat the boss,
• 52:18
  you start again on an, on a second level and then a third
• 52:21
  level. And then when you beat the third
• 52:23
  boss, you've kind of completed that character and move on to
• 52:26
  the next one. So there's, there's 6 characters
• 52:28
  in it as per sides of the dice. And I had a brilliant time with
• 52:34
  it. I just thought it was one of
• 52:35
  those I'd try it for an hour, but I played it a couple of days
• 52:38
  consecutively, completed off the first the first character and
• 52:44
  had a great time. Because you can rather than just
• 52:47
  getting new cards and trashing cards, it it's dice for a start.
• 52:52
  So you've got dice, you can sometimes get new dice, but
• 52:55
  you've always got a choice between low, medium and high
• 52:57
  risk ones. So you get a a low risk dice and
• 53:00
  it would give you lots of kind of small buffs.
• 53:02
  You get high risk one. On two sides of the six it would
• 53:06
  have an enormous buff, but on four sides of of the six it
• 53:09
  would have a massive debuff. So so really interesting kind of
• 53:13
  mechanics there. And then you can also walk at
• 53:16
  certain stages. You can augment the dice where
• 53:18
  you can change one side of the dice be something different.
• 53:23
  So you can you end up with these great builds where you pick a
• 53:26
  high risk die that is rubbish at the beginning of your run, but
• 53:28
  you can augment it so that actually four or five sides out
• 53:31
  of six are pretty solid. So I had a great, great time
• 53:36
  with that. And that was that was kind of
• 53:38
  perfect year of shame stuff. Pick up a random game you didn't
• 53:41
  even know existed and love every minute of it.
• 53:45
  That's good, and you're streaming most of this as well.
• 53:49
  I'm streaming most of it, yeah, yeah, I try.
• 53:51
  I mean, most of the time that I'm playing games, I do it on
• 53:53
  stream now just just because of the kind of limited amount of
• 53:56
  time. It's like if if I didn't stream
• 53:58
  it and then I I wouldn't be playing many games or wouldn't
• 54:01
  be streaming much. So I generally sling on whatever
• 54:04
  I'm playing and, and I find that I do get a bit of help.
• 54:08
  So certainly with Viewfinder, which is a puzzle game, yeah,
• 54:11
  I'd have, I'd have taken, well, I've got, I'd have got hard
• 54:14
  stuck. So essentially somebody,
• 54:16
  somebody in my chat managed to finish the game for me.
• 54:20
  That's going to be like the was the Playstation's bringing out
• 54:23
  the an AI thing for the to give people a hint or help.
• 54:28
  It'll be a ghost character. It'll show you where to go, how
• 54:31
  to the next move or even take on the next battle for you.
• 54:34
  That's like you're basically getting that on Twitch, so it's
• 54:36
  quite cool. That's quite cool.
• 54:38
  Yeah. All right, if anybody here at
• 54:41
  motorbikes going past, we have a thing in Japan called Bozozok.
• 54:47
  They are typically teenagers who are bored, who have loud mic,
• 54:52
  loud motorbikes and like to pull up outside people's houses and
• 54:55
  just start revving. It's OK during the day, usually
• 54:59
  not when you're recording, but the worst when it's about 2:00
• 55:02
  AM and they're doing it. But yeah, sorry about that.
• 55:06
  If anybody here at the motorbike go all good, rich pass, pass it
• 55:12
  back to rich no. That's me.
• 55:14
  That's me. Finished How?
• 55:15
  You want to goes to and then we'll keep viewfinder to the end
• 55:17
  and we'll both we'll. Yeah, sure.
• 55:20
  But there's a game that I started playing in December
• 55:22
  called Skiggle. And it's, it's a weird one
• 55:24
  because it's, it's like a Vampire Survivors game.
• 55:26
  I don't know if anybody else has heard of it, but the map is
• 55:30
  actually just full of like power ups.
• 55:33
  And so you end up playing the map to, to progress your game
• 55:38
  and it's got me hooked. You know, that's my, that's my
• 55:40
  go to it. I need to just turn my brain off
• 55:42
  and just, you know, play something without thinking about
• 55:45
  it. So that's, that's been pretty
• 55:47
  good. Rec fest is my my weekly game
• 55:50
  that I try and play with some local buddies down here.
• 55:53
  And that's been, we've been playing that for years and years
• 55:56
  now. And so that still gets played
• 55:58
  regularly when I, when I'm at home on a, on a Thursday night.
• 56:02
  I managed to play and finish Horace at the beginning of the
• 56:07
  of the month. And, and that was one that had
• 56:09
  been on my list forever and never got any love.
• 56:12
  And then when, when I decided I was going to do the, the year of
• 56:15
  shame and I started looking through my list in December, I
• 56:18
  noticed it, but I managed to finish that this month.
• 56:20
  So, so that was nice to finish that off.
• 56:23
  There's a game called Redacted and square brackets that I've
• 56:26
  been playing this month as well, which is it's like a, you know,
• 56:29
  play, die, rinse, repeat type thing where you're gradually
• 56:32
  building up your skill based and getting better and better as you
• 56:35
  go. But you're, you're, you're
• 56:36
  dumped onto the space station with up to four or five other
• 56:39
  characters and you're all racing to get to the last skateboard
• 56:43
  and having to go through different rooms to to get to the
• 56:45
  end. So you're not only trying to get
• 56:48
  as far through the map as possible, but you're also racing
• 56:51
  against the clock and trying to to build up the skills that's
• 56:54
  required to penalise the other sort of non playable characters
• 56:59
  to delay them. So you get to the the thing
• 57:01
  before them. Haven't got anywhere near
• 57:04
  beating them yet, but that looks like it could be quite
• 57:07
  interesting. So I'll, I'll keep hammering
• 57:09
  through that one. It's got a great art style.
• 57:11
  I'm just looking at it now. Yeah, I know.
• 57:12
  It's pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good.
• 57:15
  Satellite Rain is another one I played this month again and
• 57:17
  that's one that I've been playing for months and months
• 57:19
  and months. It's like a a spiritual
• 57:21
  successor to what was the the Syndicate and Syndicate Wars.
• 57:27
  So it's it's made by some of the same team that made those games
• 57:32
  and that you can certainly see that when you look at the art
• 57:34
  style. It's very, very cyberpunky, very
• 57:36
  future state. Again, you're controlling 4
• 57:40
  little operatives and you get to go through the map and and try
• 57:42
  and take over these corporations.
• 57:44
  I think I'm at the end of that if I haven't finished already.
• 57:48
  I'm very close to the end. It's difficult to tell because
• 57:51
  you end up cycling back and going through the map and try to
• 57:54
  do other bits and pieces here and there.
• 57:56
  So that was, that was what one of the next games of and then
• 57:59
  view Finder as well. View Finder was not even on my
• 58:02
  radar and I saw rich playing it at the start of the month and
• 58:08
  thought, well, I wonder what that is?
• 58:10
  Let's go and have a look. And and yeah, I I really enjoyed
• 58:14
  it. We can have a chat once Brian's
• 58:16
  had a a chance to see his but on it.
• 58:18
  But I really enjoyed playing through that.
• 58:20
  Smashed through that world very quickly and finished that this
• 58:25
  month. And then Zombie Driver HD.
• 58:29
  I mean, the name just screams quality, doesn't it?
• 58:33
  Your class. I think this is one of these
• 58:36
  little sort of mobile apps that managed to transition over to
• 58:40
  the PC at some point and and gained an HD in the in in the
• 58:45
  the activity of moving. But it's a fun game.
• 58:48
  You know, it's a top down mass shooter.
• 58:51
  Try and do all the missions, try and save the whatever the target
• 58:54
  the mission is and then get back home again.
• 58:57
  So yeah, another one that I turned turn on when I want to
• 58:59
  turn off my breathe Clear obscure.
• 59:02
  I mentioned in the last episode that I was really enjoying that.
• 59:05
  I've had a hard wall there, man. I just cannot get past this damn
• 59:09
  boss battle. So I've had to go back and do a
• 59:12
  bit of grinding to try and power up.
• 59:13
  And I might have to do some more investigation as to how I should
• 59:16
  be setting my characters up for, for best outcomes, because it's
• 59:20
  just, it should give me a hiding every time I try and get there,
• 59:24
  you know, So I'll keep pushing through that.
• 59:26
  But I've, I've put that on the back burner because it was
• 59:28
  frustrating me a little bit. And I thought, you know what,
• 59:31
  let's switch over to something that's a wee bit easier on the
• 59:33
  brain. Let's do Baldwin's Gate 3.
• 59:40
  And so I'm getting, yeah, apologies for the language thing
• 59:43
  here, Brian, but I'm getting my ass handed to me on that as
• 59:46
  well. And so last night, last night, I
• 59:51
  got tired of the frustration of trying to get through some of
• 59:54
  these boss battles on boss grade three.
• 59:56
  I thought, what can I play if it's just a complete change?
• 1:00:01
  And then thanks to Ben from last season and his his sowing the
• 1:00:07
  seeds of potential. You know, going all the way back
• 1:00:10
  to the start of gaming, I decided to dig out Massive
• 1:00:13
  Spectrum and play Highway Encounter, and I managed to
• 1:00:15
  finish that last night. So that's a game that's been on
• 1:00:18
  my list possibly for 40 years. That's got the longest many
• 1:00:26
  games been on anybody's list. I remember I'm the guy that did
• 1:00:29
  every single level of Sentinel returns as well.
• 1:00:32
  Yes, yeah. All 1000 of them.
• 1:00:35
  Oh wow. So, yeah, so that's my my
• 1:00:40
  completion list so far. Being stubborn, maybe it
• 1:00:44
  possibly is yet. So we've definitely got Horace.
• 1:00:46
  We've definitely got viewfinder and hardware encounter and
• 1:00:48
  possibly satellite rain once I get a chance to go and check
• 1:00:51
  that later on today. Yeah.
• 1:00:54
  And so moving forward, I can still see myself going back to
• 1:00:56
  clear obscure and boulders gate, but just to get into that
• 1:01:00
  grinding phase and and get through some of those bits that
• 1:01:03
  are that are holding me up. Now the clear obscure boss on
• 1:01:06
  battling now is it's a it's a three first or she's got her own
• 1:01:10
  her own boss battle. But there's two sort of what
• 1:01:13
  would you call them Chieftains, the supporter and I managed to
• 1:01:17
  take them out. I'm just struggling with the
• 1:01:20
  with what's her name? Is it Serene, the siren?
• 1:01:23
  So I got to go. I got to go back and figure out
• 1:01:25
  how to do that. And that will be for the plan
• 1:01:28
  for next month. You know, how about yourself,
• 1:01:31
  Brian? So I mentioned earlier that I've
• 1:01:33
  my mum isn't well, so this port of minds me a bit distracted.
• 1:01:37
  So my gaming is a bit erratic at the moment.
• 1:01:41
  Let me see. I played, I'm finished.
• 1:01:45
  I'm still playing Guild of War Ragnarok.
• 1:01:48
  I love God of War eight 20/18/2018.
• 1:01:51
  I think it was 2018 but the first one in the reboot it was
• 1:01:56
  that was brilliant game. I loved it so much.
• 1:01:57
  I wasn't platinum that it was the first one I had ever
• 1:02:00
  platinumed. It was a really good game.
• 1:02:03
  I started playing Ragnarok and let me see in the start of God
• 1:02:08
  of War 2018, you're at home and I got some God comes and attacks
• 1:02:13
  you that you can't kill. In the start of Guild War
• 1:02:17
  Ragnarok, you're at home and some God comes, attacks you and
• 1:02:21
  you can't kill him. So you send again the exact same
• 1:02:23
  thing. And then both of them, you end
• 1:02:25
  up in the journey to go off and do some do something else.
• 1:02:28
  But Ragnarok until today, I've been maybe four or five hours
• 1:02:34
  today. Until today, I was thinking this
• 1:02:36
  is like it's basically could rerun just slightly different
• 1:02:38
  locations. But today the the mood slightly
• 1:02:42
  changed in that if you start doing some of the side missions,
• 1:02:45
  you start to see more depth in the characters.
• 1:02:47
  I think Mamir is the head he carries on his and then he was a
• 1:02:54
  God or is a God, I don't know. But he did some stuff in the
• 1:02:57
  past that he wasn't proud of and it all come up and he tried to
• 1:03:00
  fix it and it didn't fix. And it's all about the fact you
• 1:03:02
  know you can't fix. Think your mistakes, can't
• 1:03:05
  always fix your mistakes. Like a slight bit more depth to
• 1:03:08
  character, which was good. So progression and hope.
• 1:03:11
  I'm really getting into the combat and this as well.
• 1:03:14
  So it's quite good. I'm enjoying that game.
• 1:03:16
  I'm not too far into the reckon I'll be most next month.
• 1:03:19
  I'll be playing that. I am going to.
• 1:03:22
  I did play viewfinder and before we got that I also played arc
• 1:03:25
  Raiders and arc Raiders is very good.
• 1:03:29
  It is very good. I've only done solo, but every
• 1:03:32
  time you go out you're nervous. I'm scared.
• 1:03:34
  I've only once got out with a proper my own loadout and I
• 1:03:37
  died. So I've been going out with free
• 1:03:39
  loadouts from now from demo. I'm saving my stuff, but it's
• 1:03:43
  yeah, it's good. Really, really tense.
• 1:03:47
  I don't know why, I know you've only got.
• 1:03:49
  I think a run is 15 minutes at the longest or something like
• 1:03:51
  that. Well, it's 30 minutes, thirty
• 1:03:53
  minutes, but, but when you're new, it's, you're trying to get
• 1:03:56
  out as soon as you can. Yeah, I just go pick stuff up,
• 1:04:00
  fill my my bag up and then run to get out.
• 1:04:04
  And it's like you shouldn't run in the game because things chase
• 1:04:08
  you. They hear you and it's.
• 1:04:10
  But yeah, it's it's good. It's very, very good.
• 1:04:12
  I enjoy it. Oh.
• 1:04:13
  Thanks a lot Brian. That makes me feel better about
• 1:04:15
  not getting that. Well, wait till we get to the
• 1:04:19
  end. You'll just we've got questions
• 1:04:22
  coming in at the end. But then aside from that, I
• 1:04:25
  played viewfinder. OK, so we'll start the
• 1:04:27
  viewfinder. Both of you Did you like
• 1:04:30
  viewfinder? Yes, 2 yeses.
• 1:04:33
  I, I love the world. Yeah, I, I really enjoyed it.
• 1:04:35
  I, I love the whole feel of the game.
• 1:04:37
  I love the, I love the puzzles. I thought it was, I thought it
• 1:04:40
  was nice that we had it slowly built on top of every level.
• 1:04:43
  You know, every level was just a wee bit more just pushing,
• 1:04:45
  pushing, pushing. And then you get to the last
• 1:04:47
  episode and it throws A curveball and you in and says,
• 1:04:50
  hey, by the way, this is now a timed event go.
• 1:04:53
  And that was a wee bit of a that was a wee bit of a sucker
• 1:04:55
  puncher made it much harder to finish that last level.
• 1:04:58
  But getting up to that point, I really enjoyed the progression
• 1:05:01
  all the way through that game. Totally progressions, brilliant.
• 1:05:04
  You have like small problems and they keep building and building
• 1:05:08
  giving you new ways, ways of doing it.
• 1:05:10
  I thought there was there was an instruction of time things at
• 1:05:12
  the start we could like build up a capacitor, hold the energy and
• 1:05:16
  then you could go and run while that was started counting down
• 1:05:20
  and that thought was really good, really well done always I
• 1:05:23
  thought, but that cat, I'm sorry, the cat really annoyed
• 1:05:27
  me. He just oh, the whole way
• 1:05:31
  through he just annoyed me and then he starts pulling the sad
• 1:05:34
  eyes that you're saying no, you spoilers the game.
• 1:05:39
  But you know, if you do this, I might die and I don't care.
• 1:05:42
  I don't care. You've annoyed me the whole way
• 1:05:45
  through this. It's just, oh, wait, the game.
• 1:05:50
  Play the game for puzzles. The puzzles are very, very good.
• 1:05:53
  I thought brilliant. Even the last level of the
• 1:05:56
  timed, there's no way you can complete it the first, the first
• 1:05:59
  couple of attempts because you've got to get to each step,
• 1:06:01
  each thing, figure out how to to get on how to pass that puzzle
• 1:06:05
  and get on to the next one all within the time.
• 1:06:08
  And you have a rewind mechanic in the game.
• 1:06:10
  The last level, even if you hit rewind, the countdown doesn't go
• 1:06:13
  back. Yeah, that shocked me because it
• 1:06:16
  took me a couple of times to doing it.
• 1:06:18
  Why is it come up? The time's going down.
• 1:06:19
  The whole time puzzles are brilliant.
• 1:06:22
  If the cat had only shut up, then yeah, I would have liked it
• 1:06:26
  a lot more. The world itself, the
• 1:06:28
  realisation, it was really well done.
• 1:06:30
  The graphics very good. But they can't annoyed me.
• 1:06:34
  Other than that I thought was good.
• 1:06:36
  Rich, what about yourself? Yeah, I, I really, really
• 1:06:39
  enjoyed it. I mean, I guess to give a quick
• 1:06:41
  kind of overview of what it is, it's, it's a puzzle game.
• 1:06:44
  So typically you're, you're trying to reach a portal at the
• 1:06:47
  end of your level. And sometimes you need batteries
• 1:06:50
  to, to power the portal and that kind of thing.
• 1:06:52
  And the mechanic to do it as you've, you've got a camera
• 1:06:56
  either in your hand or sometimes there's kind of a fixed camera
• 1:06:59
  and you take pictures of the environment.
• 1:07:02
  And then when you, when you take the picture, you can then place
• 1:07:05
  it, you can rotate it. And when you place it, it
• 1:07:09
  essentially creates like a new section of world as per the
• 1:07:13
  picture. And so it did some just really,
• 1:07:16
  really clever things with that. And you could also put philtres
• 1:07:20
  on your camera. So you'd have this kind of would
• 1:07:24
  you describe it as cartoon like kind of graphics generally, But
• 1:07:29
  then but then when you take a picture, you could put you could
• 1:07:32
  put a philtre on it and you could make it cell shaded, or
• 1:07:34
  you can make it black and white or that that kind of thing.
• 1:07:37
  So you'd create worlds within worlds and steps seamlessly
• 1:07:41
  between them from what you know, a world that looks like one
• 1:07:44
  thing into a world that looks like another thing and back.
• 1:07:47
  So I found that really good and there was lots of playing with
• 1:07:50
  gravity and, and sound and lots of different styles of puzzles,
• 1:07:56
  which I found really, really good.
• 1:07:58
  I didn't care a job for the story.
• 1:08:01
  It's one of those normally I'd get really engrossed in the
• 1:08:03
  story, but I found it and maybe because I was kind of so focused
• 1:08:06
  on the puzzles that the story almost didn't matter.
• 1:08:09
  All I cared about was getting to the end and, you know, to hell
• 1:08:12
  with a cat, whatever. But I found it really, really
• 1:08:16
  good. It it was one of those where for
• 1:08:19
  me it was actually a touch too long.
• 1:08:21
  So once I was 2/3 the way through, I was like, I just want
• 1:08:24
  to finish this. So I had been religiously
• 1:08:27
  collecting all the little items that are bonus items and doing
• 1:08:31
  all the bonus extra levels that are optional.
• 1:08:34
  And then by the end, I was just like, let's just get this done.
• 1:08:39
  Can't believe those philtres and you keep saying you've got
• 1:08:41
  knocked philtres you've got knocked, but I never saw where
• 1:08:44
  to use them so I never tried them.
• 1:08:46
  They didn't change the, the, the, the game at all, Brian.
• 1:08:49
  So all the Philtres did was make make that distinction between
• 1:08:52
  what was generated from a photo versus what was in the level to
• 1:08:56
  start with. So you didn't miss anything by
• 1:08:58
  not using the Philtres. And we just made it clear to you
• 1:09:00
  what that that distinction was between the, the photo and the,
• 1:09:04
  and the real world. Oddly enough, the, the cat
• 1:09:06
  didn't annoy me that much. It was those little robot vacuum
• 1:09:10
  cleaners that I just, I developed some weird hatred for
• 1:09:14
  and I took great pleasure in just dropping them off the map.
• 1:09:16
  You know, I just nudged them off the map every time I saw them.
• 1:09:22
  I know I picked up blueprints for them as well.
• 1:09:24
  I didn't know what to do with the blueprints when you held
• 1:09:28
  them up. You could get them to work with
• 1:09:29
  the committed life again. But I thought I was playing true
• 1:09:33
  1. You got 3 blueprints.
• 1:09:36
  So I let one brought them to life.
• 1:09:38
  And then I thought, is this what I'm supposed to do?
• 1:09:41
  So I thought I rewind and then kept the three blueprints.
• 1:09:43
  So I thought maybe something happened when I go to the next
• 1:09:45
  level and nothing ever happened. Oh, well, that was.
• 1:09:48
  I made a mistake there, but yeah, I did kill the first one I
• 1:09:52
  came across because you get an award when you.
• 1:09:55
  Yeah. Yeah, you do.
• 1:09:57
  An award, whatever thing popped up on the screen saying that he
• 1:10:00
  died. So, yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:04
  Yeah, similar, similar one. If you drop the only battery
• 1:10:06
  that you got in the level off the edge of the map as well, it
• 1:10:09
  gives you another. Is that right?
• 1:10:11
  Yeah, that's good. That's good.
• 1:10:14
  I thought the puzzles were very good.
• 1:10:17
  Yeah, they were. It was a bit like, what's that
• 1:10:21
  soup? Is it super liminal?
• 1:10:23
  Is it super liminal the game? Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
• 1:10:25
  So if you think at a certain angle you can see things and
• 1:10:28
  those. It was really good.
• 1:10:30
  I thought, I love the puzzles. I just got annoyed with the cat,
• 1:10:34
  the story about the world dying and whatnot.
• 1:10:37
  That that was OK It's probably appropriate to the world, our
• 1:10:41
  environment now, but it's. And I won't get into the end,
• 1:10:46
  but it was done quite well. But the cat just annoyed me.
• 1:10:50
  Even the girl who write that you get a phone calls from another
• 1:10:53
  character off screen all the time.
• 1:10:55
  Her voice acting was quite, quite good.
• 1:10:57
  She was like really enthusiastic and stuff at the start.
• 1:11:00
  And I suppose you progress deeper and deeper.
• 1:11:03
  She gets more and more worried. But the cat just I don't know
• 1:11:07
  other than that was that was it. The cat was not for me.
• 1:11:13
  I like dogs. Maybe there's maybe there's a
• 1:11:17
  mod? Yeah, possibly.
• 1:11:20
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it.
• 1:11:22
  That's sum up all we've played and we got.
• 1:11:25
  Yeah. No, I think that's about it.
• 1:11:28
  OK, news any? Yeah, this what's been happening
• 1:11:34
  since the last episode was recorded?
• 1:11:36
  Nah, Well, I know right after the last episode was recorded, I
• 1:11:41
  think the PlayStation 5 boot room keys were hacked and so
• 1:11:44
  it'll be interesting to see if there's going to be new
• 1:11:46
  PlayStation 5 hardware variant coming out to try and resolve
• 1:11:50
  that. Oddly enough, seems to be gone
• 1:11:52
  quite quiet after that story was published.
• 1:11:54
  So whether it was whether it was real news or not, who knows, but
• 1:12:00
  but that was certainly one of the top stories early in
• 1:12:02
  January. I know that the Anthem shut down
• 1:12:05
  on January the 12th for anybody that still cares.
• 1:12:07
  I don't know that anybody was still playing Anthem.
• 1:12:10
  People do, I've been watching people watching people streaming
• 1:12:13
  it like furiously, just trying to rinse every last ounce of fun
• 1:12:18
  of the game. And actually I'd not really seen
• 1:12:20
  much. I remember being really excited
• 1:12:22
  about the game and then obviously it hard flopped.
• 1:12:25
  But there's there's a loyal following out there and people
• 1:12:29
  people were trying to give it the beans before it disappeared.
• 1:12:33
  All right, too. Too little too late though, you
• 1:12:35
  know. Yeah.
• 1:12:38
  I know that we've just had a whole bunch of news coming out
• 1:12:41
  now about, you know, what's coming for, for Xbox and, and
• 1:12:45
  Fable is one of the games that that sort of I, my ears picked
• 1:12:49
  up when I heard they were doing a Fable reboot because I seem to
• 1:12:52
  recall really enjoying the first Fable when it came out.
• 1:12:55
  I missed all the ones in between.
• 1:12:57
  I believe there were other ones that came out after the original
• 1:13:00
  1. But yeah, the new Fable looks
• 1:13:02
  like just more of the same. Although apparently there's 1000
• 1:13:06
  NPCS you can marry, but I don't know if that's marrying one of
• 1:13:10
  the thousand or all 1000 ones. We'll have to wait until the
• 1:13:14
  game comes out to find out for sure, you know?
• 1:13:16
  Yeah, a game setting maybe. Maybe get a a platinum?
• 1:13:21
  Get a platinum if you marry all 1000.
• 1:13:24
  Yeah, yeah. The rings.
• 1:13:28
  Yeah, yeah. One of the things I did see you
• 1:13:31
  as well on the hardware front is NVIDIA have just released a new,
• 1:13:36
  a new monitor. It's AG sync pulsar monitor.
• 1:13:39
  I don't know if you've seen anything about this.
• 1:13:41
  And they reckon it's it's going to be doing a higher such a high
• 1:13:44
  refresh rate. It's like 1000 heritage refresh
• 1:13:47
  rate or or higher that will target motion blur and match the
• 1:13:54
  the blurry to the human retina's capacity.
• 1:13:57
  So, you know, again, whether that ever ends up coming out at
• 1:14:00
  a price that normal humans and mortal beings can afford, I
• 1:14:03
  don't know, But it'd be pretty impressive if it does come out,
• 1:14:07
  you know? Yeah, yeah, that'd be really
• 1:14:10
  good. They they keep looking at the
• 1:14:13
  panels like the old heads and whatever and you, you get
• 1:14:15
  worried about burning and stuff. But yeah, no.
• 1:14:20
  Would that refresh rate make any difference?
• 1:14:21
  Don't know. Yeah, not to burn rate, I don't
• 1:14:24
  think. Yeah, especially as a like APC,
• 1:14:27
  you've always got the if you're not just gaming on us, you've
• 1:14:30
  got your Windows or your Linux up, you've got your toolbar down
• 1:14:34
  the bottom on the side of the screen or whatever.
• 1:14:37
  That's their static the whole time.
• 1:14:39
  So you'll start to see burning and that quite quick.
• 1:14:42
  No, but I don't know we'll see. Hopefully there's a new
• 1:14:45
  technology, whether you who was using it TCLI think we're using
• 1:14:49
  it on their screens, but they're putting on that talk my stuff.
• 1:14:54
  I don't really know. Not unusual, but I know less
• 1:14:58
  about this. But they've got a new technology
• 1:14:59
  they're trying to push where they're getting rid of the the
• 1:15:04
  burn insurance on the screens. I can't remember what it was.
• 1:15:07
  Yeah, he would go go look up news on TCLI think it was TCL,
• 1:15:11
  wasn't it? Yeah.
• 1:15:13
  I did hear a story during the during the month now that I
• 1:15:16
  reported from one of the other podcasts to listen to another
• 1:15:19
  gaming podcast. And the guy was saying that he
• 1:15:21
  started the year he had a Steam Deck and he had a switch to and
• 1:15:25
  he loved both of them. And he was looking at his switch
• 1:15:28
  to and he thought, you know, got a slightly bigger screen than
• 1:15:32
  the steam deck. Wouldn't it be cool if I could
• 1:15:35
  get a a seam deck equivalent that had the same size screen as
• 1:15:39
  the switch to? So he sold the steam deck and he
• 1:15:42
  went and he bought himself one of these legion go portable
• 1:15:47
  devices, same size screen and he played on those and he thought
• 1:15:51
  this is all right, but the UI is clunky and it's you know, it's a
• 1:15:55
  nice big screen, but everything else about it is pretty shit.
• 1:15:58
  So we he sold his Legion too. He's letting go and he bought
• 1:16:02
  himself another steam day, burnt all this money and he's ended
• 1:16:06
  the month at exactly the same point he started that, you know?
• 1:16:10
  Well, I think steam have they've released their OS now, so I've
• 1:16:14
  I've got. Legion go.
• 1:16:15
  And yeah, kind of. One of my gamer friends has been
• 1:16:18
  encouraging me to get the install of the of the Steam OS
• 1:16:22
  on my Legion Go. Yeah, which apparently kind of
• 1:16:26
  it will boost your frame rate just because the operating
• 1:16:28
  system's not not hammering it and also you get less annoyance.
• 1:16:33
  But the downside for me is the whole reason I bought the Legion
• 1:16:36
  Go was the ease of being able to get all my game launchers on
• 1:16:39
  there and just launch any of the games you know, and play them
• 1:16:43
  natively and all of that kind of stuff.
• 1:16:45
  Which I know you can do via Steam, but having had a Steam
• 1:16:48
  Deck previously, it is a faff to try and like to get your Epic
• 1:16:53
  Games in there. It's totally doable, but it's a
• 1:16:56
  faff and then you've got a faff getting all the like the game
• 1:16:59
  images for for your loading screens and stuff.
• 1:17:01
  So it is doable. But you end up with another
• 1:17:05
  clunky interface that you would have probably had less of
• 1:17:09
  hassles with if you just stuck with a default OS, you know?
• 1:17:12
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Welcome to Linux.
• 1:17:17
  Everything's cool. Well, well, I used to use Linux
• 1:17:20
  years back. It almost felt like extra
• 1:17:22
  trouble to do anything. I love the operating systems.
• 1:17:26
  They were more fluid. Everything moved on the screens
• 1:17:28
  easier and CRISPR, and it was primarily the exact same, except
• 1:17:33
  for gaming. But nowadays you can now game on
• 1:17:35
  them. I keep looking at doing it
• 1:17:37
  because I'm still on Windows 10 on this laptop.
• 1:17:39
  I can move to 11, but I hate having to move the Yeah, I
• 1:17:44
  thought, what's the bar? Your Starfire, the taskbar.
• 1:17:46
  I hate to move that down the bottom screen so I'm not on the
• 1:17:50
  side because the screen is white.
• 1:17:51
  I don't have a huge amount of space on Windows, will not let
• 1:17:55
  me do no. No, it's, it's a lot there,
• 1:17:58
  yeah. Yeah, so I'm thinking about
• 1:18:01
  pulling down a few and put just running them off the memory card
• 1:18:05
  to see how they go, to see what they like.
• 1:18:07
  Have you? Do you?
• 1:18:09
  Do you use both? Use Windows now primarily on
• 1:18:11
  your gaming PCs? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:16
  Yeah, workers all Linux. You know, I live in Linux land,
• 1:18:20
  but but certainly for for desktop home use it's all
• 1:18:24
  Windows. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:26
  Love to see, but we'll see. Yeah, I keep saying this.
• 1:18:31
  Oh, the Have you got any other news?
• 1:18:34
  That was it. That's all I had.
• 1:18:36
  What about you guys? I saw Samsung, Samsung and SK
• 1:18:40
  Hynix are now going to stop NAND production and focus on DRAM
• 1:18:46
  which will mean more expensive SSDs and huge profits for those
• 1:18:51
  companies as they're producing more RAM.
• 1:18:53
  So yeah, for them we're screwed. So PCs are building, APC is
• 1:18:57
  going to get more and more expensive.
• 1:18:59
  As if it's bad enough already. You mentioned NVIDIA earlier,
• 1:19:03
  was did I hear they're pushing the 30 series and the 4040
• 1:19:08
  series rather than the 50? Yeah, there's been a hold up
• 1:19:11
  with the certainly the fifty 90s.
• 1:19:13
  I think they're they're having a hold up with producing those to
• 1:19:15
  the the volume of the need. And so I think in the interim,
• 1:19:18
  they're trying, trying to convince people just to go for
• 1:19:20
  the older generations and, and start to make those prices a bit
• 1:19:23
  more affordable in the hope that they can keep people on their
• 1:19:27
  side and not glory to the enemy, you know?
• 1:19:30
  Yeah, it's crazy. And then the best news the whole
• 1:19:35
  month was the fact that Blake 7 is coming back or will hopefully
• 1:19:39
  come back. So huge fan of that from back in
• 1:19:43
  the 70s. That was on probably.
• 1:19:46
  I'll take it. New actors, yeah.
• 1:19:49
  Yeah, I don't know. Amazing.
• 1:19:51
  Still alive is that? Yeah, I know.
• 1:19:54
  Yeah, I want to put support behind the the walls of this
• 1:19:58
  little wobble, but looking forward to that.
• 1:20:00
  Hopefully I'll come back. Yeah, that's it.
• 1:20:04
  That's that's meet on the news. Any of you see games that you
• 1:20:08
  coming out this next month that you were interested in or I
• 1:20:11
  don't know. Can make you cry because they're
• 1:20:14
  coming out. So there's a few, aren't there?
• 1:20:16
  So on my little list, somebody's mentioned to me a game called
• 1:20:20
  Wanderberg, which again is is kind of Vampire Survivors style
• 1:20:26
  a little bit. But you're you're essentially
• 1:20:28
  driving like this kind of like mediaeval turret around and then
• 1:20:32
  there's all bunches of enemies that come at you and you can
• 1:20:34
  kind of upgrade your turret. That looks like a lot of fun.
• 1:20:38
  There's Cairn, which is the climbing game.
• 1:20:41
  I've I've, there's been a lot of kind of hype and excitement
• 1:20:44
  about that. I've watched some trailers and I
• 1:20:46
  couldn't from the trailers, I couldn't get a sense of what the
• 1:20:49
  gameplay is going to be like. But I know for sure that in a
• 1:20:53
  normal year, that's the kind of game that I'd have bought and
• 1:20:56
  tried and found out, whereas obviously I can't.
• 1:20:59
  So I'll watch that one with interest.
• 1:21:01
  Because it Karen, you, you control your hands and your
• 1:21:04
  feet. So you've got 4 points to be
• 1:21:06
  trying to grab onto something. You're using 4 controlling all
• 1:21:09
  four appendages to try to climb. But it looks interesting and
• 1:21:14
  punishing. Let's see that.
• 1:21:17
  Yeah, you're. Saying that, yeah, potentially a
• 1:21:19
  lot of fun. Yeah, Double O 7 first light got
• 1:21:22
  moved, didn't it? I think it was due out next
• 1:21:24
  month but it's not coming out till May now.
• 1:21:26
  But that looks interesting. Oh wow, I hadn't heard that.
• 1:21:31
  And then what else? There's Mario Tennis Fever,
• 1:21:34
  which is the kind of game that I'd have found the excuse to buy
• 1:21:39
  just because family, but secretly it would have been for
• 1:21:42
  me. So that's, that's what I'm
• 1:21:43
  actually really glad that I'm doing a year of shame, because
• 1:21:45
  that would have been however much Nintendo games on.
• 1:21:48
  I probably £70 for a game that I'd probably play for five
• 1:21:52
  hours. So there we go.
• 1:21:54
  I can. I can bank that money.
• 1:21:56
  Good, what days are we? We are 24th today.
• 1:21:59
  We're recording 24th. So 2 days ago a game called came
• 1:22:02
  out called Blade Song, who was I think it was trying not to
• 1:22:08
  remember who was playing. That's I think it's somebody on
• 1:22:12
  joysticks and chill and they were saying it's a really good
• 1:22:14
  game. It's basically you're a
• 1:22:16
  blacksmith. I'm just trying to create more
• 1:22:20
  and more swords and stuff. But he I reckoned it was quite
• 1:22:26
  good. Well, I think they played a demo
• 1:22:29
  and I would say it was quite good.
• 1:22:31
  I hate this place which has got a really good title, but I'm not
• 1:22:36
  sure how good the game is going to be.
• 1:22:38
  It's like a isometric survival horror game.
• 1:22:42
  I watch some videos of it. It does look good.
• 1:22:44
  I'm not sure if I would get if I would play it the whole way
• 1:22:47
  through. And I think that was got Neo
• 1:22:50
  three out on us next month. But yeah, that's all for this
• 1:22:53
  month. That's what we're at the end of
• 1:22:55
  the month, aren't we? Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:22:58
  Oh, Romeo is a dead man. If you've seen right as well.
• 1:23:04
  Is. No, Sorry.
• 1:23:05
  Yeah. That looks quite good.
• 1:23:07
  It looks really bizarre, really weird.
• 1:23:09
  But I would like I would like to see more of us.
• 1:23:13
  But. And there's a game called
• 1:23:18
  Reanimal. Wasn't that a movie?
• 1:23:21
  Were they movies, Reanimal or? It was reanimator.
• 1:23:24
  Yeah, yeah. So I don't know.
• 1:23:27
  From the people who made little nightmares.
• 1:23:30
  Accurate. Interesting.
• 1:23:32
  That was a sleeper hit that I encountered from last year for
• 1:23:35
  that based on you guys with the with the last year's series.
• 1:23:39
  Oh, I might have to have a look at that one.
• 1:23:41
  Re animal looks quite good. People made the original little
• 1:23:45
  nightmares and little nightmares too, right?
• 1:23:47
  Oh, that looks. Oh yay.
• 1:23:51
  No, it'll be crap. Don't worry.
• 1:23:55
  It's going to be crap. It's going to be crap.
• 1:23:58
  Oh, wait. I can't wait to hear the reviews
• 1:24:01
  of this. Yeah, interesting.
• 1:24:04
  Interesting. That's.
• 1:24:05
  But it's coming out well in the near future.
• 1:24:09
  A slate Spire tooth coming out. Not for me.
• 1:24:12
  Oddly enough, looking at the list of upcoming games, nothing.
• 1:24:17
  Nothing's grabbing me, you know, I, I might be in that sort of
• 1:24:20
  jaded period where there's just too much on my backlog to play,
• 1:24:23
  but there's nothing that I'm looking at here going, oh damn,
• 1:24:27
  what have I done this year? So fingers crossed the last.
• 1:24:32
  I can make it for another month. Yeah.
• 1:24:35
  Yeah. Other than you guys of the
• 1:24:38
  Arcader stories and I must admit, rich watching watching
• 1:24:41
  you and and the guys playing it on on your on your your
• 1:24:45
  recording that you shared. There's a scene where was a Ben
• 1:24:50
  decided to attack one of the massive robots with these with
• 1:24:53
  these baseball bat or something that just made me laugh out
• 1:24:57
  loud. You know, everybody else is
• 1:24:59
  lobbling grenades and he's just whacking away with these.
• 1:25:01
  Drinking away, yeah. Every bit of damage guys.
• 1:25:09
  So yes, I am, I am feeling a bit left out there, but you know,
• 1:25:13
  the year is but young. That's it.
• 1:25:16
  We'll. See how we go.
• 1:25:19
  Yeah, that's marathons out in March.
• 1:25:23
  Yeah. And again, that just looks the
• 1:25:27
  art style that chosen to that just looks odd to me.
• 1:25:31
  I don't know what it is about it, but it just looks different.
• 1:25:34
  Yeah, it does, isn't it? I'm just looking at pictures of
• 1:25:37
  it now, not to see how it goes. Forza Horizon, is that as well?
• 1:25:42
  Is it? Oh, it's in May.
• 1:25:44
  Ford's Horizons got announced recently.
• 1:25:46
  That would be Ben. They'll be all over that.
• 1:25:49
  Yeah. So it'll be quite interesting.
• 1:25:52
  As I mentioned to you guys earlier, there's a SEC, if you
• 1:25:54
  only watches the video, there's a section where they're driving
• 1:25:57
  through the snowy area. So you can see like, really, the
• 1:26:01
  road is maybe 20 feet below the level of the snow.
• 1:26:05
  And that's an area of Japan called Amori.
• 1:26:07
  And I'm hoping to go there in two weeks time.
• 1:26:09
  I think it's two weeks, what we got there.
• 1:26:11
  It is crazy. They get regularly get around 23
• 1:26:15
  feet of snow build up. The snow doesn't freeze, it just
• 1:26:17
  keeps snowing. It's really powdery snow.
• 1:26:19
  It's lovely. But I'm hoping to go that way in
• 1:26:23
  two weeks time. Should be.
• 1:26:25
  Will they still have snow in two weeks?
• 1:26:27
  Oh, yeah, it just, yeah, it's OK.
• 1:26:29
  I saw pictures from the other day and the snow, it's like
• 1:26:33
  white, just white outside because it's snow would just
• 1:26:35
  keep flowing the whole time. But it's, yeah, they would get a
• 1:26:38
  metre of snow overnight. Yeah, it's crazy.
• 1:26:43
  I was in a place not quite snowy but similar.
• 1:26:46
  Everybody instead of having a lawnmower, they have personal
• 1:26:49
  snow ploughs. Like it's quite like a different
• 1:26:52
  thing. So you could go around your car
• 1:26:53
  to try and get to your car so you can then get your car out to
• 1:26:56
  the main road. It's just nuts.
• 1:26:58
  That's nuts. But yeah, it'll be interesting.
• 1:27:01
  Yeah. Got the questions from the
• 1:27:03
  community. Yeah, we've got, we've had five
• 1:27:06
  questions come through. So the first is from let's do
• 1:27:10
  them in reverse already. So we've got Ben from last year.
• 1:27:14
  So it's best of luck with the first shows guys, can't wait.
• 1:27:16
  Question, how are you getting settled in?
• 1:27:18
  Sorry, now you are getting settled in.
• 1:27:20
  Have your plans from day one changed and how you will handle
• 1:27:22
  the year ahead? Rich?
• 1:27:24
  Yeah, I'd say they have changed actually from from day one.
• 1:27:27
  So before the before the year started, I'd made a big long
• 1:27:31
  list of games from A-Z and I was kind of like, I'm going to focus
• 1:27:34
  on these. And within about two or three
• 1:27:37
  days I realised I'd left Cyberpunk off that list, which
• 1:27:41
  is a game that is sitting in my backlog and I'd, I'd love to
• 1:27:44
  play it. So straight away, you know,
• 1:27:46
  whatever plans you make just fall apart as soon as as soon as
• 1:27:49
  things start. And I think the other thing is
• 1:27:52
  that I've, the way that I play games, I do like to finish a
• 1:27:54
  game, but actually I get my main joy out of trying games.
• 1:27:59
  So rather than having that hard and fast list of I'm going to
• 1:28:02
  get through all of these, I'll still pick off ones that I do do
• 1:28:06
  want to finish, but I'm going to really enjoy.
• 1:28:08
  Like like I was saying earlier with Australia, I'm going to
• 1:28:12
  just go through that big long backlog and pick out things and
• 1:28:15
  give them a try. So there might be quite a lot of
• 1:28:17
  games that I talk about having only played an hour or two of
• 1:28:20
  them, but but that's what I like.
• 1:28:22
  So that's what I'm going to do. How about you, Stuart?
• 1:28:25
  Yeah, so I, I initially went in with a very open-ended approach
• 1:28:29
  to it. You know, I had this list and I
• 1:28:30
  was going to work through it magically selecting games as, as
• 1:28:34
  the wind took me. And I quickly realised that that
• 1:28:36
  was probably not the best thing to do.
• 1:28:39
  And so I, I followed your example and I went through and
• 1:28:41
  I, I picked out for each letter of the alphabet, a group of
• 1:28:45
  them. It wasn't just one game each,
• 1:28:46
  there was, might have been 3 or 4 in each letter of the
• 1:28:49
  alphabet. And then at the start of of
• 1:28:52
  January, I thought, OK, I'm going to pick one for me and one
• 1:28:55
  from Z and I'll work my way through the list meeting in the
• 1:28:59
  middle. And that way, you know, and, and
• 1:29:01
  hence why we had the the zombie driver game on the list for what
• 1:29:05
  was played this year, this this month rather as, as well as
• 1:29:08
  something from the start of the, the alphabet in, in redacted,
• 1:29:12
  which is sort of pre A because it's got the square brackets
• 1:29:14
  around it. And so I think I'll start
• 1:29:17
  following that that same pattern and I'll, I'll pick two or three
• 1:29:21
  from either end of the of the the queue and hopefully work my
• 1:29:26
  way through a large chunk of those games that are on the list
• 1:29:30
  that I'd have pre selected as being something of interest.
• 1:29:33
  Now, granted, there's going to be stuff there that has never
• 1:29:36
  ever been considered. And so I'll be keeping an eye on
• 1:29:38
  what you guys are playing and seeing whether there's any
• 1:29:41
  overlap in our list there that I might be able to to pick up
• 1:29:44
  something that's completely left field for me as well.
• 1:29:48
  Brian, what about yourself? Like from day one, which was a
• 1:29:52
  year and a half ago, a year and a half ago, a year and a couple
• 1:29:54
  days ago. I see a change.
• 1:29:57
  Yeah, I recently I started to become a bit more active on a,
• 1:30:02
  as you mentioned, there are other gaming podcasts.
• 1:30:05
  One from I listened to it's Tales from the backlog and they
• 1:30:09
  do a thing where you have a like games resolution.
• 1:30:14
  So they run this massive Google Sheets thing.
• 1:30:17
  You put down the games you want to play and you take them off as
• 1:30:20
  you go throughout throughout the year.
• 1:30:22
  And they have it like at the HLTHLTB, the home to beat list
• 1:30:26
  of the hours beside each game as well.
• 1:30:28
  So I think there's maybe 50 or 60 people doing this at the
• 1:30:32
  moment. There were gamers resolutions.
• 1:30:33
  It was 40 last year. I'm not, I haven't counted the
• 1:30:35
  number of people this year, but I'm on.
• 1:30:37
  So that's in. And like if you find there was
• 1:30:41
  the first one I've knocked off, I'm working on the others.
• 1:30:44
  But I've set this to games I want to complete, whereas last
• 1:30:48
  year there were games I wanted to complete, but I didn't have a
• 1:30:50
  list, I didn't have a set down. And just, I guess a touch of
• 1:30:53
  ADHD, I sort of just got distracted by whatever games
• 1:30:56
  were going round popping up on my screen.
• 1:30:58
  I'll play this, I'll play that. So yeah, so now the list of
• 1:31:02
  games I want to play, and I'm going to stick to it.
• 1:31:05
  I swear I'm going to stick to it.
• 1:31:06
  Cyberpunk is one of them. Nice.
• 1:31:09
  Interesting if we start playing along together.
• 1:31:12
  But yeah, we'll see, see how it goes.
• 1:31:15
  And they even on the the Discord for Tales from the backlog, they
• 1:31:20
  have won for Boulder Skate 3 and they, they've tried to set up a
• 1:31:24
  group of people playing the game at the same time so they can
• 1:31:27
  keep each other going through the long game.
• 1:31:30
  So I may join in along with that as well, along with you
• 1:31:34
  students, see if we can hopefully get through this game.
• 1:31:37
  It'd be interesting to see whether you follow the same game
• 1:31:39
  patterns me where you're taking one step and fast saving another
• 1:31:42
  step, fast another step. I've got about 1000 fast saves
• 1:31:46
  on the go here. That's it, F7F7.
• 1:31:53
  Yeah, yeah, F5 and this one F5 is fast save, yeah.
• 1:31:56
  F5 that's I'm probably just doing that the whole time, but
• 1:32:00
  so I've set down the list games I'm going to complete.
• 1:32:05
  If we pick games between us, I may add them in, but it's mainly
• 1:32:10
  these set of games that game. So they are all long games, a
• 1:32:14
  majority of my long games, but I it's like a sense of dread
• 1:32:19
  because of the backlog. These long games are sitting
• 1:32:21
  there. I feel like they're weighing
• 1:32:23
  over me. I want to get them cleared so
• 1:32:24
  that I can start on a fresh next year.
• 1:32:27
  So yeah, that's where I'm going. Or what plan is for this year?
• 1:32:32
  Is there a danger without Brian that you end up not enjoying the
• 1:32:35
  game as much as you should get? You should enjoy, I guess.
• 1:32:37
  I mean games like the Witcher and and Cyberpunk and and
• 1:32:39
  Bulbsgate are really, really good games.
• 1:32:44
  But I'm, I'm worried that by pushing yourself to get through
• 1:32:48
  it, you're not going to enjoy it as much as you really should,
• 1:32:51
  You know? I mean, some of these games do
• 1:32:54
  require that you take the time. So is it worthwhile maybe
• 1:32:56
  looking at only doing 1? Maybe, but then I got the next
• 1:33:01
  10 years lined up. I'm doing this for the next 10
• 1:33:03
  years. Do a whole decade decade of
• 1:33:08
  shame. What?
• 1:33:11
  Let me see. I've got the games on this.
• 1:33:13
  They're on that page. You heard it here first, people.
• 1:33:17
  Yeah, no, no, because boulders get 3.
• 1:33:22
  Cyberpunk, Witcher 3, they are all large games.
• 1:33:27
  I'm part way through Witcher 3 Cyberpunk.
• 1:33:30
  I only did the demo, so I've never really played this.
• 1:33:32
  For this case, again, I did the demos, I've never really played
• 1:33:35
  this. I've got those two full games to
• 1:33:37
  play. I know which a tree.
• 1:33:39
  The problem with with them, it's the exact same.
• 1:33:41
  I play Alden Ring, I see a mountain, let's go there, let's
• 1:33:44
  see what's over there, let's explore.
• 1:33:46
  I you don't progress. I don't progress because I just
• 1:33:50
  keep it and distracted the whole time.
• 1:33:52
  So we'll see if I get to the point where I'm not enjoying the
• 1:33:55
  game, I will stop it and put it on side and move on to another
• 1:33:58
  one. But I don't know.
• 1:34:00
  I don't know. I'm making this up as I go
• 1:34:01
  along. We all are.
• 1:34:04
  Advice from anybody, OK. Yeah.
• 1:34:09
  Last year, last year didn't work out so that I didn't complete
• 1:34:12
  any of these long games. This year, I'm going to complete
• 1:34:14
  some of them. I hope maybe, maybe, maybe I'll
• 1:34:18
  be doing Witcher 3 for the rest of the year.
• 1:34:21
  Yeah, that we'll see. All right, let's.
• 1:34:24
  Have a look at the next question from Adam Adams.
• 1:34:27
  What was the last game you each bought?
• 1:34:28
  And are you already regretting your choices?
• 1:34:31
  Oh, that's, that's quite easy for me because the last game I
• 1:34:34
  thought was was clear, obscure. And no, I'm definitely not
• 1:34:38
  regretting my choices. I'm, I'm enjoying it.
• 1:34:41
  I've hit that wall, as I said earlier, but I'll keep battering
• 1:34:45
  away at it and eventually we'll get through it and and carry on
• 1:34:47
  doing the game itself is still very much something I want to
• 1:34:51
  keep playing. So no regrets so far.
• 1:34:55
  Brian, what about yourself? The last game I bought was Arc
• 1:34:59
  Raiders. Am I regretting this?
• 1:35:02
  Very very very possibly. The game is brilliant, the game
• 1:35:05
  is awesome. I could just see myself spending
• 1:35:07
  the next year playing that game alone and it's I don't like.
• 1:35:11
  I so far only played solo and God knows what's good.
• 1:35:14
  If I start to get in on groups the poll will be just even more
• 1:35:18
  even worse. But it's just the tension builds
• 1:35:21
  up. It is really good game and I
• 1:35:24
  could see it ruining this entire year.
• 1:35:26
  I made I may have made a mistake.
• 1:35:28
  I made a mistake because he's like I thought Paul was saying
• 1:35:33
  he's going to buy it. Venice borders Rich is playing
• 1:35:36
  it and then there's so many people from the log box group
• 1:35:39
  playing it and just on the Facebook MLG playing it.
• 1:35:44
  I'm just like, hey, I don't know.
• 1:35:47
  When you look at my I look at the the friends list, bloody
• 1:35:50
  everybody has got this game. I'm just, I don't know.
• 1:35:53
  We'll see. I'm going to try to play it only
• 1:35:55
  at weekends and then play the game, my dedicated game, through
• 1:35:58
  the week. So I limit the amount of time I
• 1:36:01
  play. But yeah, we'll see.
• 1:36:05
  Yeah, thanks. Possibly.
• 1:36:06
  Thanks again. That still makes me feel better
• 1:36:08
  about not having it. OK, Rich.
• 1:36:12
  Patreon money, yeah. Yeah, for, for me, I think I've
• 1:36:18
  got 2 answers. I mean, the, the honest answer
• 1:36:21
  is I don't actually know. And that's, and that is part of
• 1:36:24
  the problem, isn't it? Because if you subscribe to all
• 1:36:27
  the humble choice and all of that kind of stuff, I don't, I
• 1:36:30
  can't necessarily put my finger on what, what the last game was
• 1:36:34
  that that took my money. But the last game that I kind of
• 1:36:37
  consciously bought was also Arc Raiders.
• 1:36:41
  And I very much don't regret it. It's it's what Brian said.
• 1:36:45
  It's one of those there's a risk I could end up playing it for
• 1:36:48
  the whole year. But I don't think none of us end
• 1:36:50
  up on here because we only play one game because we're all
• 1:36:53
  sitting on a massive backlog of games.
• 1:36:55
  But what what I'll find with it, just like Rocket League is it's,
• 1:36:58
  it's the kind of game that it's always an option and I'll always
• 1:37:03
  get a couple of play sessions on it over over whatever period of
• 1:37:06
  time. So I totally don't regret it.
• 1:37:08
  And I'd go as far as to say that it's probably the reason why I
• 1:37:13
  took the plunge to to do this year of shame because I was that
• 1:37:19
  taken with it on launch that I was kind of like can survive a
• 1:37:24
  year without buying new stuff because I've got my arc Raiders.
• 1:37:29
  A pre joker. This that's Yeah, I just can see
• 1:37:37
  somebody's asked when we do the edits, like nobody has ever done
• 1:37:42
  one game for the whole year. And then his voice popping in at
• 1:37:45
  the end, saying. And little did he know that.
• 1:37:51
  Yeah, not a good stuff. See how it goes.
• 1:37:55
  Cool. So sure, White House had the
• 1:37:58
  next question, which was apart from not buying any games, did
• 1:38:01
  you have any New Year's resolutions, and if so, what
• 1:38:03
  were they? Let's start with you, Rich.
• 1:38:05
  OK, yeah. So I, I do this thing where I
• 1:38:08
  always do write down New Year's resolution.
• 1:38:10
  So I think it's in the time off between Christmas and New Year,
• 1:38:13
  I always find myself in front of a fireplace full of food and
• 1:38:17
  thinking of things that I'm that I need to do better or more.
• 1:38:21
  So on my list, I'm reading it off my phone now.
• 1:38:23
  So I've got a fitness goal and I won't go into all of the details
• 1:38:27
  of this, but I break down different bits of fitness into
• 1:38:31
  like points. So for instance, if I run a
• 1:38:35
  kilometre, that is one point. And if I swim 10 lengths of a
• 1:38:38
  pool, that is a point. And for all the various
• 1:38:40
  different types of exercise, I've got these points values.
• 1:38:42
  So I've got to do 250 points worth of exercise each quarter
• 1:38:46
  of the year. And then I think that I did with
• 1:38:48
  this house was over a period of time, I'd choose like a room
• 1:38:52
  each month to be like the focus. This is this is when like I've
• 1:38:57
  been living here for a decade and it was starting to look a
• 1:38:59
  bit tired. So choose a room of the month
• 1:39:01
  and then focus that month on thinking about things that will
• 1:39:03
  make it better. So like a paint or moving
• 1:39:06
  furniture around or just giving it a clean up.
• 1:39:08
  So I vowed to do that with the new house that I move into.
• 1:39:10
  I'm hoping to move next month. So I'm going to do room of the
• 1:39:13
  month with the new house. I've got a year of shame written
• 1:39:16
  on there. Do the year of shame.
• 1:39:18
  I've got read 12 books, watch 12 movies, play 12 different board
• 1:39:22
  games and I haven't done dry January but it's just not quite
• 1:39:28
  as wet. Moist.
• 1:39:32
  Moist to January. Yeah.
• 1:39:35
  So there's a good list there. It feels like.
• 1:39:37
  It feels like that one's achievable.
• 1:39:39
  Don't spend the entirety of January drinking.
• 1:39:44
  That's me. Excellent.
• 1:39:46
  How about you, Brian? I've got to try and read more.
• 1:39:52
  I mentioned this last last episode that I have a new book
• 1:39:56
  I'm going to. Be.
• 1:39:57
  Well my big thing I'll do is I'm turning the subtitles on in
• 1:40:02
  games, so a lot more reading on Netflix.
• 1:40:07
  But I would like to get fitter and I've been toying with an
• 1:40:12
  idea for the last while as I work for a couple days a week in
• 1:40:18
  junior high school and the kids. Are always racing around, doing
• 1:40:21
  exercise after school, they joint, they have club
• 1:40:22
  activities. I was, I have an idea that I
• 1:40:25
  might join them and go running around the school.
• 1:40:29
  They're all FIF 1415. So I'll be having a heart attack
• 1:40:33
  like you were saying. If you do 10 lengths of a swim,
• 1:40:36
  swimming pool, you get one point.
• 1:40:37
  I do 10 lengths of a swimming pool.
• 1:40:39
  I'll end up in the morgue at the moment it's not going to happen.
• 1:40:43
  I am extremely unfit. You know, like going upstate,
• 1:40:48
  Well, it was the asthma from COVID and stuff.
• 1:40:50
  But going upstairs, if I go, I do four flights of stairs and
• 1:40:55
  work and by the time I get the top, I'm out of breath.
• 1:40:57
  So I need to get aerobic fitness.
• 1:40:59
  So I'm thinking about maybe I'll join.
• 1:41:02
  It's just when going into summer try and these kids are running
• 1:41:05
  and racing around in somewhere. It doesn't kill me or ruin me
• 1:41:09
  altogether. So we'll see.
• 1:41:11
  We'll see. It also depends on the school
• 1:41:13
  whether they'll let me join in. But yeah, it'd be interesting to
• 1:41:16
  do this, try to speak English breathless.
• 1:41:21
  Yeah. But yeah, they'll be lapping me
• 1:41:23
  a lot anyway. But yeah, we'll see how it goes.
• 1:41:27
  OK, Yeah. So what was the next question?
• 1:41:31
  Oh, I I don't make. Any I don't make any
• 1:41:35
  resolutions. At all.
• 1:41:36
  Oh. Good.
• 1:41:36
  Yeah, sorry. No, it's all right.
• 1:41:39
  I'm so. I I don't tend to make any.
• 1:41:42
  Yeah, don't worry about it. I don't tend to make any
• 1:41:45
  resolutions year and year. I mean, I'm the same as you.
• 1:41:48
  I could probably do with, with increase my, my fitness level.
• 1:41:52
  I am an extremely unfit 56 year old, but I'm also I've been type
• 1:41:58
  1 diabetic since 1986 and, and on an insulin pump, which should
• 1:42:02
  have made things easier, but just makes things a lot more
• 1:42:05
  sort of difficult because any time I do anything outside of
• 1:42:08
  the normal pattern, the the diabetic pancreas sort of
• 1:42:12
  feedback loop says at this point in the day, you should be
• 1:42:16
  getting this much insulin. And so if I go and hang the
• 1:42:19
  washer up or take the dog for a walk, suddenly my blood sugars
• 1:42:22
  plummet and I end up having to eat my own body weight and Jelly
• 1:42:24
  beans, which doesn't help with weight control, unfortunately,
• 1:42:27
  but it does keep me alive. So you know, I'm, I'm sort of
• 1:42:30
  limited in what I can and can't do.
• 1:42:33
  And that's my excuse, damn it. Do you have the patch on as
• 1:42:37
  well? Yeah, so I've got one on my own
• 1:42:39
  here. So it's got the little thing up
• 1:42:40
  there and then you've got the pump in your body down, down
• 1:42:43
  below and. Feed into each other.
• 1:42:46
  They they they form a feedback loop via your mobile phone so
• 1:42:49
  the mobile phone app is basically telling it how much to
• 1:42:51
  inject every second of the day type thing you know yeah
• 1:42:55
  amazing. So it does make it harder to to
• 1:42:58
  do anything outside of the norm. You have to ease into any change
• 1:43:01
  just so the algorithm can keep up with what the the anticipated
• 1:43:04
  plan is, you know? Yeah.
• 1:43:06
  It also makes international travel different and difficult
• 1:43:09
  because if it's expecting you to be asleep at the point in the
• 1:43:12
  day that it thinks it's at, and suddenly you're getting up to
• 1:43:15
  have your breakfast, you have a few days where you go out of
• 1:43:18
  whack a little bit. So you need to cater for all
• 1:43:20
  that stuff, you know, but, but I do need to do something.
• 1:43:24
  I am very conscious the fact that I don't do any exercise
• 1:43:27
  whatsoever other than walking the dog and, and I need to be
• 1:43:30
  doing more. Yeah.
• 1:43:31
  So it's not a resolution, but it's certainly a plan.
• 1:43:35
  Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put this for more is just.
• 1:43:38
  A manufactured concept and that a hobby that's essentially
• 1:43:41
  designed to never end. What does enough look like to
• 1:43:44
  you in terms of the games you own?
• 1:43:46
  With that in mind, would you say doing the you're a shame is more
• 1:43:49
  an act of self-care or a quiet rebellion against the system in
• 1:43:52
  courts? Oh, this is a deep question for
• 1:43:59
  me. It's definitely self-care.
• 1:44:00
  I think, you know, it's, it's, it's recognising that there is
• 1:44:03
  there is an activity of unnecessary spending and there
• 1:44:07
  is a building up of a backlog that is wasteful and to a
• 1:44:12
  degree. And so do I have enough games?
• 1:44:15
  Yeah. I mean, if you speak to my wife,
• 1:44:17
  she'd say yes, I do. If you speak to me, I'd say, I
• 1:44:20
  mean, I'd probably do. Will I ever go back to buying
• 1:44:24
  games year one when they come out?
• 1:44:26
  I probably will as well post this.
• 1:44:29
  But I I think I'll be a lot more selective in what I tend to
• 1:44:32
  focus on and what I tend to buy moving forward.
• 1:44:35
  Definitely. How about yourself, Brian?
• 1:44:38
  Ben The year before he did well, you're shame, 13, he said.
• 1:44:43
  He spent most of the previous year basically doing this, doing
• 1:44:47
  the whole challenge of not buying games.
• 1:44:50
  I had done pretty much the same and fret that the year before
• 1:44:53
  doing your shame. I had absolutely no formal
• 1:44:56
  games. All came on.
• 1:44:57
  I thought there were good games on the year, but I felt no urge
• 1:45:01
  that I need to put latest. There's no no hotness that was
• 1:45:04
  attracting me. Last year Arc Raiders hit and
• 1:45:08
  that's that really hit me. I don't play online an awful lot
• 1:45:12
  of people because the time difference is difficult, but
• 1:45:15
  listening to everybody playing the game, I've never really had
• 1:45:17
  that experience. So the FOMO really hit me.
• 1:45:19
  We just the reason I picked up the game in the 1st place.
• 1:45:22
  So I do think FOMO exists. It may be purely self
• 1:45:25
  manufactured and it's not by the gaming, the gaming, advertising,
• 1:45:30
  whatever trying to push you, but I did feel that from what does
• 1:45:33
  exist. So yeah, I did for me anyway.
• 1:45:38
  What does enough look like? Enough looks like your backlog
• 1:45:41
  plus the game that has just come out and there's everybody's
• 1:45:45
  talking about. That's enough.
• 1:45:47
  So when blueprints came out the started last year, I was oh, I
• 1:45:51
  wouldn't want to play in that game.
• 1:45:52
  I don't know if I like the game. I have it on the list for this
• 1:45:55
  year, but if we're like listening to veteran gamers and
• 1:46:00
  Chinny kept talking about how good this game is, so I want to
• 1:46:03
  get into a triumph. So you're enough is your backlog
• 1:46:07
  plus whatever the hotness for next year.
• 1:46:10
  Yeah, this is self-care. I've been, if you use Reddit as
• 1:46:15
  a subreddit called patient gamer.
• 1:46:16
  I've been a patient gamer for years.
• 1:46:19
  So I rarely buy games as they come out.
• 1:46:22
  Day one. Our creators was probably taught
• 1:46:26
  three months after we came out or two months after we came out.
• 1:46:28
  I haven't bought day one in years, but it's the steam sales.
• 1:46:33
  They come out and you know, tenor I can get three games that
• 1:46:35
  I really wanted to play. So that's where I fall down.
• 1:46:38
  And so this is self-care. I'm I want 1000 X resistor to
• 1:46:44
  see the PlayStation app keeps telling me all these games that
• 1:46:47
  just come out Steam pops up. All these must be like 20 games
• 1:46:51
  have been on sale in the past week.
• 1:46:53
  One of them saw today was 9090% off 90%.
• 1:46:57
  You you can't like you're saving money by this.
• 1:47:02
  Yeah, this is it's self-care. When the notifications pop up in
• 1:47:07
  the app and just swipe, swipe. I'm not looking at the sales
• 1:47:10
  anymore. I'm trying not to look at the
• 1:47:11
  sales. It's self-care, not rebellion,
• 1:47:15
  not rebellion, because it's the right.
• 1:47:18
  Rich, how about you? So for me, I mean FOMO, it's a
• 1:47:22
  weird one. I think it depends, doesn't it?
• 1:47:24
  So you've. You've got your, your game devs
• 1:47:26
  and your platforms trying to create FOMO and doing doing the
• 1:47:31
  doing all their marketing and doing their job, trying to sell
• 1:47:33
  their games and get people excited about the games.
• 1:47:36
  I tend not to massively get FOMO.
• 1:47:39
  I don't play a huge amount of multiplayer games, but there's,
• 1:47:42
  there's certain games and because you know, because I'm,
• 1:47:45
  because I'm on Twitch and watching other people on Twitch,
• 1:47:48
  quite often people will be streaming a day one release and
• 1:47:51
  that that does generate a bit of FOMO around my car.
• 1:47:55
  Yeah, I could, I could do with a bit of this.
• 1:47:58
  But what I find I'm kind of like Brian Steam's Steam sales is is
• 1:48:02
  the thing. So I maintain a big long wish
• 1:48:04
  list of stuff and when the steam sale comes up, it's like
• 1:48:07
  perfect, let's, you know, don't have to spend much here and get
• 1:48:09
  loads of new stuff. So you know, they'll only get
• 1:48:12
  cheaper over this year. So I'm not too worried about
• 1:48:14
  those. But then there's the there's the
• 1:48:16
  odd game where it's not even FOMO.
• 1:48:19
  It's just I, I I need this. So arc Raiders, I'd pre-ordered
• 1:48:23
  it and they created a bit of FOMO by if you buy the, you
• 1:48:27
  know, the deluxe edition as a pre-order, then you get these
• 1:48:30
  extra outfits and this many in game coins and all of that
• 1:48:33
  stuff, which I don't normally fall into, but there's like a
• 1:48:37
  it's like the above a grade games for me, where it's like
• 1:48:40
  I'm I'm all in, I'm sold, take my money and take more.
• 1:48:44
  So there's a little bit of that in terms of what there's enough
• 1:48:47
  look like I've got enough. That's why I'm doing this.
• 1:48:50
  There's there's plenty in there. And when there's things like
• 1:48:53
  Cyberpunk that didn't even for whatever reason, didn't even
• 1:48:56
  make my short to medium list, there's the, there's, there's
• 1:49:01
  plenty of beauty in the backlog to be played.
• 1:49:04
  And I think the third part of that question is totally
• 1:49:06
  self-care. I'm not, I'm not fighting the
• 1:49:08
  system. I, I, I like the system.
• 1:49:09
  Part of my game and hobby, rightly or wrongly, is not just
• 1:49:13
  playing games, but it is browsing those stores.
• 1:49:15
  That's one of the things I found hardest.
• 1:49:17
  It's not the it's not really the not buying stuff, but I found
• 1:49:20
  myself browsing the stores less because obviously that is an act
• 1:49:25
  of self of torture this year. So but I I would always enjoy
• 1:49:29
  that and and whether I'm wasting my time by doing that instead of
• 1:49:32
  playing games, I don't know. We'll find out as the year plays
• 1:49:35
  out whether I truly miss that or whether that was just a weird
• 1:49:38
  habit. I like the system.
• 1:49:40
  I love that. Yes, yeah, I.
• 1:49:44
  Guess I you know I've been burnt too often with buying.
• 1:49:47
  Something day one and. Then it ends up having.
• 1:49:49
  To have four months of patches to get it to a point where you
• 1:49:52
  can actually enjoy it. You know, I think the last game
• 1:49:55
  that I was really excited about would have been No Man's Sky.
• 1:49:58
  And we all know how that turned out.
• 1:50:02
  You know, if you if you look back and you look at what The
• 1:50:04
  Witcher 3 was like when it came out and Cyberpunk, there were
• 1:50:08
  there were train flashes, you know, so going in day one and
• 1:50:11
  getting caught up in all the all the fervour about the new shiny
• 1:50:14
  coming out doesn't always work in it.
• 1:50:16
  And it can actually put you off the game to the point where you
• 1:50:18
  never go back to it. And I wonder, Rich, whether
• 1:50:21
  that's why Cyberpunk is up on your pile and not being looked
• 1:50:23
  at because it would have obviously got it, tried it and
• 1:50:26
  gone. Well, this is a pile of garbage
• 1:50:28
  and and you move on. You know, I bought it first on
• 1:50:31
  an Xbox disc and I remember I think I I was probably working.
• 1:50:35
  On the day it came out, so I'd come in the post, it was there
• 1:50:37
  in the cellophane and I watched a stream of friends streaming it
• 1:50:41
  day one and I could see the absolute dogs dinner that it
• 1:50:45
  was. And I left it in the cellophane
• 1:50:48
  for two years and then I think I sold it in the cellophane and
• 1:50:53
  bought it back for less than I'd sold it for on PC like a couple
• 1:50:57
  of years later once it was fixed.
• 1:50:59
  Crazy. That's a difficult one because
• 1:51:01
  you want to you want to encourage companies.
• 1:51:04
  To only. Publish games once.
• 1:51:06
  They're fit to be published and not rush things to market, but
• 1:51:09
  at the same time, they're obviously having to do that to,
• 1:51:13
  to motivate the amount of development effort that's gone
• 1:51:15
  into it and start to recover their costs.
• 1:51:17
  So, so how do you find that that careful balance of putting
• 1:51:21
  something out there that's in a playable state and, and get
• 1:51:24
  people excited, but doesn't cause your entire company to go
• 1:51:27
  bust in the act of producing this thing?
• 1:51:28
  You know, because it does usually need a lot more testing
• 1:51:32
  out in the wild than you can possibly ever pay for yourself
• 1:51:36
  internally in the company. So I don't know what the answer
• 1:51:39
  is, but but yes, I I agree. We're not rebelling against the
• 1:51:43
  system. It's all about self-care.
• 1:51:45
  Yeah, I'm not a fan of generative AII, don't like the
• 1:51:50
  same people. Put out jobs but QA work is like
• 1:51:54
  I almost applied to the QA work over here.
• 1:51:57
  It is boring, it's repetitive. If you can get QA helping with
• 1:52:01
  things to make sure things. Well, I suppose even if you did
• 1:52:04
  flag all the errors and problems beforehand, it still delays the
• 1:52:07
  game and effects everything. So I think, you know, I don't
• 1:52:10
  even know if it's a just highlighting the issue even more
• 1:52:13
  before it's released. Don't think it'll delay the
• 1:52:15
  release. Yeah, I don't know about the
• 1:52:18
  answer because I don't know the answer stuff.
• 1:52:20
  No, none of us do. We just know why we're doing it
• 1:52:24
  anyway. There we go.
• 1:52:26
  So the last question is from Blair Ferguson.
• 1:52:28
  Sorry. Didn't everyone get a chance to
• 1:52:29
  answer that? I think we did, yeah.
• 1:52:31
  Yeah, we did. Yeah.
• 1:52:32
  All right. Cool.
• 1:52:32
  So Blair Ferguson's question is out of the games on your pile,
• 1:52:36
  What are you? Most looking forward to playing.
• 1:52:37
  Is there anything due for release this year that you're
• 1:52:39
  worried may break you? All the best and good luck for
• 1:52:41
  the year ahead. So that's an easy one for me
• 1:52:44
  because the games on my pile that most looking forward to
• 1:52:46
  playing are the ones that I'm playing right now, Claire Obscur
• 1:52:50
  and Baldur's Gate 3. Anything due for release this
• 1:52:54
  year that you're worried may break you?
• 1:52:56
  No, not right now. I'm not seeing anything that I
• 1:52:58
  want to go and splash cash down on and, and either have as a
• 1:53:02
  gift or as a as a joker right now other than our graders.
• 1:53:07
  So that's the one that I might potentially have to, to cave on,
• 1:53:10
  you know, depending on how much of a strong arm I get from you
• 1:53:13
  guys here about how much I'm missing out.
• 1:53:16
  But that's all I've got on mine, Rich.
• 1:53:18
  So yeah, for me, there's, I mean, there's so many things on
• 1:53:21
  that list that that I would look forward to playing.
• 1:53:24
  I mean, we've just been talking about Cyberpunk that that kind
• 1:53:26
  of stands out. So I've played I've I've played
• 1:53:30
  up to the bit where Keanu appears in it.
• 1:53:33
  I think if I, if I go again this year, I'll probably start again
• 1:53:36
  from scratch. And it's like it's, it's a
• 1:53:38
  wonderful game. So I'm really looking forward to
• 1:53:40
  that. I mean, Arc Raiders, obviously,
• 1:53:42
  I almost don't count that as a backlog game.
• 1:53:45
  And and Brian, I think you mentioned it before 1000 times
• 1:53:48
  resist yes, which I which I picked up.
• 1:53:51
  I don't know, summer last year. And I've again, it's what I keep
• 1:53:54
  doing this with games play the first couple of hours and it was
• 1:53:57
  intriguing. I didn't find it brilliant, but
• 1:54:00
  so many people have like rave reviewed that game that again, I
• 1:54:05
  think I'll just rewind, go back to the start and and play that.
• 1:54:09
  But I think that the most exciting, the most exciting
• 1:54:11
  thing is that that backlog is there.
• 1:54:13
  And all those hundreds of games that have been essentially
• 1:54:17
  shelved like forever really. You know, they haven't seen our
• 1:54:20
  time of day and they were doomed.
• 1:54:23
  They're they're all back out there.
• 1:54:25
  So it's not this big long list of, of shit that I don't want to
• 1:54:27
  play. It's now a big long list of
• 1:54:29
  stuff that could be, could be great.
• 1:54:31
  And then finally, just in terms of stuff that's going to break
• 1:54:33
  me. So the Forza Horizon 6 reveals
• 1:54:37
  this week have, have already kind of broken me.
• 1:54:39
  I've got friends sending me WhatsApp messages saying, oh,
• 1:54:42
  have you seen it? Have you seen it?
• 1:54:43
  And I'm kind of like La La Reyes, No, And then they were
• 1:54:47
  sending me YouTube videos. It's so I've always just dived
• 1:54:52
  in deep on those. So that's that's tough.
• 1:54:55
  And but it's Grand Theft Auto. It's it's not till November, but
• 1:54:59
  the tradition of a lifetime of, of absolute day one purchase day
• 1:55:03
  off work, get into the campaign. That's going to have to That's
• 1:55:07
  going to have to wait. How about you, Brian?
• 1:55:11
  Yeah, English, like you said. The games on my list, they're
• 1:55:14
  all games I want to play. I've got God.
• 1:55:16
  Of war disco Elysium, clabber, punk boulders gate 3, Witcher 3,
• 1:55:20
  Death stranding, Kentucky Route 0 blueprints, Claire obscure,
• 1:55:25
  Elton ring return eternal. Just so I get bored.
• 1:55:29
  Park Rangers, you know, they're all I think they were all
• 1:55:33
  supposed to be pretty good games.
• 1:55:34
  Yeah, so I really, really want to play them, but after like I'm
• 1:55:38
  playing the only reason I'm playing Guild War Ragnar,
• 1:55:40
  because there was a theory going out that it might get pulled
• 1:55:43
  from the PlayStation because I haven't bought it.
• 1:55:45
  It's on the PlayStation Plus Extreme or whatever it's called.
• 1:55:50
  Yeah, this. I don't know, I think I'll
• 1:55:55
  finish Eldon Ring. But the game.
• 1:55:57
  I'm probably looking forward to going back to our starting is
• 1:56:01
  Boulders Gate 3. I've never never played.
• 1:56:04
  I've done a bit of DND. Not what, not a lot.
• 1:56:07
  A couple of what they call them single runs.
• 1:56:11
  Are you just you don't play like a whole campaign.
• 1:56:13
  It's just a one off type thing. So this would be interesting to
• 1:56:16
  get get into the world of DND. I know it's on a game on a
• 1:56:21
  computer game, but yeah, it'll be interesting to get in and
• 1:56:24
  play and see how it all works out.
• 1:56:26
  But yeah, I think Boulders get 3.
• 1:56:29
  It's also the game that may out of all these, I am not so sure I
• 1:56:32
  will like. So I made ditches if I don't
• 1:56:36
  like the whole way it works. But it's the game I'm really
• 1:56:39
  looking forward to trying out because it's totally different.
• 1:56:41
  While I normally play. The whole dice play thing is
• 1:56:43
  different. It's intriguing.
• 1:56:45
  But yeah, we'll see, see how it goes.
• 1:56:47
  I think that's the game I'm looking forward to most.
• 1:56:49
  Am I worried I'll break those two?
• 1:56:52
  Saros, Saros, Saros, which is the new Eternal?
• 1:56:56
  That's the new Eternal. Yeah, Yeah, I keep looking at
• 1:56:59
  this it I've been asked. PlayStation keeps out saying you
• 1:57:02
  want to pre-order. There is no real benefit to
• 1:57:05
  doing it, but I'm so tempted. Returnal was eye opening for me.
• 1:57:10
  I'd never played anything like it before.
• 1:57:11
  It was just amazing. We'll try and hold off.
• 1:57:15
  We'll try and hold off. Yeah, we'll try and hold off.
• 1:57:18
  It's so good. Like Returnal was punishing, so
• 1:57:23
  damn punishing. But getting through it was so
• 1:57:25
  good. Which Sarah looks the exact
• 1:57:27
  same. So maybe they just like
• 1:57:29
  punishment. Maybe that's what it is.
• 1:57:32
  Evidently. Yeah, maybe.
• 1:57:35
  Yeah. You bad boy.
• 1:57:37
  Yeah. But yeah, I don't know.
• 1:57:39
  Obviously Soros is going to be my will be the time I get weak.
• 1:57:43
  I feel weakest throughout this whole year.
• 1:57:45
  GTA. I've never played the GTA game
• 1:57:47
  so I don't know. I never really.
• 1:57:49
  I think it was a advice city. My brother gave me his disc, I
• 1:57:53
  believe that once and didn't like it.
• 1:57:55
  So I don't know. I sort of don't care even like
• 1:57:59
  it puts puts on for another year and if it doesn't make doesn't
• 1:58:01
  bother me at all. I know that the Internet is
• 1:58:04
  going to come to a halt when that comes out, but I'll watch
• 1:58:07
  the videos. But I don't know, don't really.
• 1:58:10
  I don't see the appeal, but maybe that's just me.
• 1:58:12
  I haven't looked at it properly. So sorrows is my weakness.
• 1:58:15
  But then I said ghost. The other was the.
• 1:58:17
  Yeah, of course. The other was my weakness last
• 1:58:18
  time and I still got through it and I didn't buy it when I had a
• 1:58:20
  chance. Side.
• 1:58:22
  Yeah. I don't know.
• 1:58:23
  We'll see. We'll see.
• 1:58:24
  I talk a lot of nonsense and maybe it won't affect me at all.
• 1:58:29
  No. Yeah, that's it.
• 1:58:31
  OK All right. That was it on the question
• 1:58:33
  front, we should say. Yeah.
• 1:58:34
  Thanks. Thanks everyone, for sending
• 1:58:36
  those questions in. And.
• 1:58:37
  Keep them coming through the. Year, yeah, I took that.
• 1:58:41
  There's a huge number of questions and a lot of depth I.
• 1:58:44
  Mean don't like thinking? Make the questions easy.
• 1:58:48
  Yeah. Where was the what's your
• 1:58:50
  favourite kind of cheese questions, you know?
• 1:58:52
  Yes, yeah. Yeah, exactly, Exactly.
• 1:58:56
  But that's yeah. Thank you all that was.
• 1:58:58
  That was good, really good. Thank you.
• 1:59:00
  Thank you. That was good.
• 1:59:02
  Yeah. Anyway, so I assume we'll we
• 1:59:06
  will put in some really fancy, it's me doing it, so probably
• 1:59:10
  won't be fancy meeting socials this month.
• 1:59:12
  So we'll try and do a fresh social for you.
• 1:59:15
  You can get in touch us on any of them.
• 1:59:17
  They will follow. Now time for the socials so you
• 1:59:22
  can get us on Spotify Podcasts. Or on Apple Podcasts or YouTube
• 1:59:29
  at the Year of Shame Challenge. You can also get hold of us on
• 1:59:34
  Facebook Year of Shame Challenge group or indirectly through
• 1:59:38
  Midlife Gamer Group. And there's an e-mail which I
• 1:59:42
  don't think is ever used ever, which is yearofshame@gmail.com.
• 1:59:47
  And OK, thank you for listening to Your Shame 14.
• 1:59:52
  Season 14, the very first episode, or at least our first
• 1:59:56
  episode together. And thank you for like going
• 2:00:00
  this this well. Oh my God, I can't speak the
• 2:00:02
  whole way through this podcast. I've made it well, I can't speak
• 2:00:05
  at the end. Thank you for making it this
• 2:00:07
  far. Thank you and I'll see you next
• 2:00:10
  month. Whichever you want to say thank
• 2:00:12
  you next or Rich thanks and see you next month.
• 2:00:17
  Professionalism this is this will get better as we.
• 2:00:19
  Go along. Yeah, I must admit, I've been,
• 2:00:22
  I've been dreading this first, first episode, so I'm glad we've
• 2:00:25
  got that under the belt. It was nowhere near as painful
• 2:00:28
  as I thought it was going to be. So my, my thanks to to both of
• 2:00:31
  you guys for what's been a very enjoyable first episode and
• 2:00:36
  looking forward to another eleven of them in the future.
• 2:00:41
  Yeah, next month I won't be hosting.
• 2:00:44
  So it'll be far more professional.
• 2:00:47
  OK, we'll pass. With that, we'll pass.
• 2:00:49
  Take goodbye and catch you next month.
• 2:00:52
  See you, bye. See you.
• 2:00:55
  Bye.