Mailbag: Microsoft-Activision, Sims, And Zelda Sax

This just in over the wire, there's saxophone featured prominently in the Tears of the Kingdom trailer. We need a comment on the record from Kirk. Welcome to TripleClick, where we bring the games to you. This week we open up the listener mailbag to answer questions about the Activision Blizzard acquisition, feeling like a superhero in a game, and that sweet, sweet, Hyrulean saxophone. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Shrier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello. Hello. It's us again. We're back again. We're back. Kirk, you want to hear a funny story? I have a funny story for you. I do. I always want to hear a funny story. I went to go after you talked about the book Last House on Needless Street on your one more thing. I go buy it at my local indie book shop because I like to buy books from an indie store. Because you're a man of the people. And the guy there, the guy was like, this is like the third or fourth copy of this random book that we sold. Oh, man. Like, in the eyes. I was like, oh, that TripleClick bump. Sounds like a bump to me. That TripleClick bump is like, why are people buying this book? I was like, I don't know. A friend recommended it to me. I didn't tell them that our popular podcast recommended it. So if you out there, if you listeners, if you went and bought a copy of this book at Bronx River Books, let me know if you go to my indie book shop. Yeah, let us know. And one of the places that you could let us know is actually in person because all three of us. Oh, good segue by Maddy. We're going to be in the same place next week with Brooklyn, New York home with a Mario brothers. We're going to be at the Bell House. We're going to be performing live on May 18th. That's a Thursday night. And it's also an online live stream for those of you who don't want to travel to Brooklyn and don't live there. So yeah, get a ticket. Come check us out. Come see us talk about Zelda live. I can. Is that spoilers? We're going to talk about Zelda. People know it will just come out. What else are we going to talk about for the next like six to eight weeks? My excitement for tears of the kingdom has totally mixed in with my excitement for the live show and I'm just so excited about everything. I'm like, muppet excited at all. You get a, you get a like a six hour plane ride to play. Oh, yeah. That's exciting. That is true. Maddy is the drive here. I'm just playing. Yeah, you're trying to see you can play. Yeah, totally. That seems fair. I think that's only fair. That's what partners are for. And you know, while I'm talking, I don't have a segue for this, but just something, something interesting I've discovered is that we're on a podcast network called maximum fun. And because we're on that network, people can actually become members of max fun. And then when they do that, which by the way, you go to maximumfun.org slash join, once they do that, they would get bonus episodes that we've been recording every month. I just found this out. I thought those were just something we were doing for fun, but it turns out that people can pay five dollars and listen to every single one of those once a month. And we did one recently. That's like a spoiler cast beans cast bill and the beans about persona five royal. And we've got other fun stuff coming up, but there's a huge backlog of times we talked about the last TV show and all kinds of other video games. And yeah, there's one every month. So maximum fun dot org slash join become a member support the show. All right, Jason. What are we doing today? Onwards today. We are opening up the mail bag. Oh, it's hot, hot, hot, hot. We're picking up some burning questions. They are on fire. Chatezel. Sizzling. Was that Kirk talking or sound effects? I can't even tell. We got some burning questions for you today. We heard a fully artist from the top of the show. Professional quality gap in here. As always, these are real questions from our listeners. These are real questions. These are real questions. I just want to ask them to have real listeners. Guys, we have listeners. People, it has been real. We've just been. No, I think I got that from, I think the sports journalist, Bill Simmons, used to do like a mail bag. And I think he always put that like as always, these are real questions. So I just got stuck in my head. I'm so curious. Questions from real listeners. If you would like to send us questions, send them in at tripleclick at maximumphonephone.org. And yeah, we got some good ones this week. So onwards. On with the show, we will read them. Maddie, why don't you start us off with a question from Ben? Sure. Ben writes, I've been hearing lots of news lately that the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard is getting approval from various governments around the world. Good for them. But since they're both American companies, why do places like the UK and Japan get a say on this? It's not something I've heard of in other tech giant acquisitions. What makes this deal so special? Thanks. Your show is a delight. So I actually, we haven't actually talked about the fact that like this deal might actually not go through. So I thought this would be a good kind of way to talk about that for a couple of minutes as well. But to answer the question, so my understanding is that because these companies do business in all of these countries, they need to get approval. And so like what happened recently, I think after Ben said in this question was the UK's CMA, which is their kind of regulatory board, blocked the deal. They said, nope, can't happen here. Activision or Microsoft is appealing. But it seems like their path to actually making this acquisition happen is getting much, much slimmer, much too Kirk's delight since that was one of his predictions that the deal would not go through by the end of the year. But what that means is that they would effectively, if this deal happened, my understanding is that it effectively means they'd be blocked from doing business in the UK, which is just not practical by any means. Also what will happen is the US's FTC will, which is already suing over this to block the deal, is suddenly newly empowered. They have a lot more kind of, they can point to the UK deal and say, hey, this, look at this thing too. It'll probably be a domino effect where it gets blocked here as well, or at least gets caught up in litigation for a while here. But to the basic question I understand is that like, essentially if you're going to do business in a country, or if you are actively doing business in a country, your merger needs to go through whatever antitrust legislation they have in place in the same way that like if you were doing business in a country, you would need to follow all the rest of their laws. And the whole idea of antitrust lawsuits and blocks and stuff is that you are breaking a law. And if you break a law in a country, you can't exactly do business there, right? That's true. And I also think that it can sometimes be confusing to people to even fathom how international video games actually are. And this deal is a great example of that. I mean, Americans are sort of stereotypically myopic about this sort of thing. I'm not trying to say that Ben is because I do think this is a great question. But I certainly know. And a lot of people have this question. Yeah, a lot of people have this question. And like over the course of my lifetime and also in this industry, I've really realized how international these companies are and how companies all around the world make games and people all around the world play them and how fascinating that is. Like it's kind of incredible. I know I've got Zelda on the brain, but it's kind of incredible that we have like a Zelda game coming out that is not necessarily based in Western storytelling tropes with like refuse the call and like all these other familiarities. It has its own specific tropes that are based in like Japanese folklore and like, no, it's an international game. It's going to be played all around the world. It's it's a cultural phenomenon that stretches everywhere. So when you think about that phenomenon, it might help make make it make sense that something like this acquisition is so massive that it affects consumers everywhere and the laws that pertain to those consumers everywhere because it's huge. Yeah, this is also a good example of the sort of broader context of European regulators doing what American regulators won't especially with tax attack. With privacy, this is something we've seen a bunch right with European privacy regulations being imposed on Facebook and you know, whatever Google major tech companies. So it's yeah, it's just like this sort of zoomed out version of this is the global economy at work. Yeah, well, so real quick, what do you guys make of the UK blocking the deal and potentially preventing it from actually happening? Like it does seem we're gonna we're about to hit some other key deadlines. I believe in late May, there's a EU deadline. They get to make their decision. And at some point, Microsoft has to decide like are we gonna really just like spend the next two years fighting this in appeals or are we just gonna like pull out pay activation the the kill fee of like whatever couple billion dollars or whatever it was. The journalists that it is. Really? It's still the same term. I don't know. I don't know if that's the actual term. That's essentially what it is. It's like, Hey, we're not doing this. So we're gonna pay you off. Yeah. All the whole thing off and I think that like that is I mean, that seems like the most likely outcome to me. It could very well happen. What do you guys what do you guys think of all this? I mean, I think it's fascinating from a journalistic standpoint in terms of just how wild the story has been, but it does make me think like what is going to happen to Blizzard after this? Because it seems like they were really counting on this and who else would buy them? I don't know. That'll be interesting to cover, but I look at like how Overwatch 2 is doing and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, Blizzard kind of seems like they need Microsoft's help with some of these strategy questions and these big picker questions and not to mention all the cultural issues they've been going through that they don't seem equipped to handle internally. And I'm not saying Microsoft would like do a great job, but there's something to be said for morale, getting a huge influx of cash from a new buyer and like Phil Spencer has a lot of public goodwill. People had kind of been attached to the idea of Phil Spencer making Blizzard clean up their act. I don't know if any of that is true. This is just kind of like the public narrative, you know, like Overwatch 2 failed. Phil Spencer is going to fix Blizzard. They're never going to have a sexism problem again. So like I do feel like even if all of that is just messaging and a lie, Blizzard will still have to navigate that if they no longer have that acquisition and we'll have to be like, we're good. We didn't want to be acquired. We're actually doing amazingly and we're going to fix ourselves on our own and influx of cash who gives a shit. Like that is going to be kind of a tough pivot for them from a company business standpoint. Well, okay, a couple of things there. Financially Blizzard, I mean, it's hard to extricate the Blizzard unit from the entirety of the UK because they don't really. I mean, they have a little bit of a breakdown in their finances every quarter, but it's not a huge one. Blizzard still prints money with World of Warcraft. That's the thing to always remember. And they, they're kind of operational decisions. I don't really think Microsoft's precedent so far is to leave companies alone and let them do what they want. As we saw just now with Redfall, which was made by Zenimax and pretty, Microsoft was pretty admittedly hands off on the whole thing. Maybe they have a different strategy in mind for Activision Blizzard, but I doubt it. I think what's more pressing for people who work at Blizzard is that like what the sequence of events was essentially summer of 2021. There's a big California lawsuit. The scandal erupts their walkouts. People are pissed November of that year. There's a big Wall Street Journal article about Bobby Codic, CEO of Activision Blizzard kind of implicating him in a bunch of things. At that point, there's a big petition, 2000 people sign all across ABK calling for Bobby to step down. That fizzles because two months later, Microsoft swoops in. They said, we're going to buy ABK. Bobby's going to go and he went. It's reported that Bobby's going to go when the acquisition completes, which is awesome. The entire C suite will be gone if the acquisition completes. As a result of that, we've spent the past couple of years not really confronting the question of is Bobby capable of winning people's trust in running this company? Because everyone's just like, Microsoft's going to come in. That to me is the real big question. I don't think they need another kind of savior in terms of another acquirer for financial reasons or anything like that. The question is, what is Bobby going to do? Is someone else going to take over the company? Is the board still going to have trust in him? Probably because the board's a bunch of his buddies. That's the kind of the game of Thrones of it all is wondering what the new plan is there. That's a good way to think about it. The game of Thrones of it all, it does feel that way, especially since these companies are effectively monarchy in terms of how much they own and how much power they have. Yeah, my main question is just sort of how big of a merger is too big. And that seems to be maybe what we're about to get an answer to is, okay, they kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. One massive corporation bought another one. Yeah, Lucasfilm being acquired by Disney, etc. Yeah. Finally, we get to this one that is the biggest of all time. And maybe, finally, it's just too big because it had to happen at some point, right? So maybe this is the one or maybe it's not. Well, the question is, is Gojo going to be allowed to buy a waste of that? Yeah, I know. Everyone's wondering about it. Actually, do you think I think there's no way that Gojo is going to buy a waste of that? But I haven't seen this week's successions, so I don't know. Oh, well, they mentioned regulatory stuff. That's what the joke was. So you'll enjoy it. That's part of the story. Let's move on to the next question. Kirk, you want to read this next one? Sure, this comes from Kyle. This is a paraphrased rendition of Kyle's question. Kyle writes, over the past few years, I've noticed an incredibly sharp spike in the amount of simulator games being made. I'm amazed how many areas of interest they can cover. You have business management sims, think Planet Coaster, two-point hospital and campus. There are numerous vehicle sims like flight sim, bus sim, train sim, truck sim. Then you have the novelty sims like House Flipper, Powerwash sim, lawn mowing sim, brewmaster, beer sim, and many others. What would be your perfect topic for a simulator? Oh, man. All right. So you have to be a journalist simulator. Of course. Yes, of course. You have to balance not being able to pay your rent with working 14 hours a day. Being laid off like every few cycles you get laid off. Being laid off every week. Yeah. And you have to avoid getting trapped by alcoholism and suppression. Oh my God. You join a union. Join a union, yeah. It's a good story line. And then the company fires everybody as a result. You try to start a union and you get pegged as an agitator and can't get promoted. No, I don't know. Do you guys have simulator games that you would love to see? We're not going to do podcasters, Sam. I mean, we're just going to continue the jokes here. You got to balance the levels. I mean, Kirk plays that one every week. That's the level. Trying to interrupt your co-hosts fail. Yeah, I think sort of related to that, looking at some of the things that I do that would be fun for a simulator. There's a game called, I'm trying to think it's called like, it's not PC building simulator, but it's something like that. There is, there is that. It's on Steam. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm starting from there. So this exists. You build a PC. There's also, it is called PC, PC building simulator. You got that right. Okay. So this is one Kyle didn't mention, but this is another one where you build, you know, your perfect dream PC. I've also seen a simulator where you can design your perfect office like game space, like cool apartment or something, which is really cool. If you're kind of, I don't know, you're like a college student and you're dreaming about your first apartment, you can just play this game where you kind of perfectly lay everything out kind of like the, I guess it's, it's like unpacking that game with the pleasure of that game was putting together these lovely spaces. Yeah, or like a house flipper with all the mods installed. There's a whole lot of like mods available for house flipper where you can just design gamer stuff. I mean, there's many other mods, but I am very familiar with this. But that's kind of pleasing and having done a lot of home studio creation and optimization, I think that would be really fun. It sort of ties in with it where you go beyond just the sort of animal crossing where do you want your TV, where do you want your couch and into like IO routing, like really getting into like putting cables in the wall and like setting up sound reinforcement and acoustics. Like I think that could actually be really fun. It's a whole discipline that people really get good at can dedicate their lives to doing it, just building recording studios and music spaces. Yeah. And I could actually see a game where you're just designing those being, being really fun. Like herbal space program, but like you're like, there's a wine somewhere in these cables and I have to have a lot of work. Right, right, right. You just like keep trying random stuff. We're getting some room ring at like 120 hertz. That's a, not to be spoiling or anything, but that's basically chairs of the kingdom is yeah. Yeah. And it's like, yeah. Right. We just got to cut a record in his sick recording. Link gets into podcasting. I mean, I really, if I were making a game, I would make a parenting simulator, but you have to just make decisions about how to ethically raise your child and not screw them up too much. The Sims 4 has included a lot more about it. And it's very funny. Interesting. Like the child raising content is new. I can't remember what it's called, but it's like the most recent expansion. And I've been watching friends played on Discord and it's like, it's incredible how that is fun. I think I would want to see something that's a little bit more visual novel. Yeah. Like more like papers, please. Yes. Papers, please style where you have to just constantly be making decisions. Yeah. Like negotiate with a preschool teacher or whatever about your kid. Exactly. Exactly. More like your team, your team comes home drunk and you have to decide what to do about it. Like that sort of thing. I think that would be fascinating. Like gone home, but from the parents perspective, more and more people are asking for this. Exactly. The people want it. Yeah. All right. Let's keep going. This next question is from Alex. Alex says the term makes me feel like a superhero gets thrown around a lot when talking about the power fantasy of being a video game protagonist. When people talk about this, a lot of them ignore the themes of restraint in heroic media and how that distinguishes the hero from the villain. Do you have any game recommendations to focus on self restraint as a theme? I find the games I want you to unleash. All you have is a player or more fun in the moment. Well, games that give you terrible power quote TM, but ask you to hold back. Stick with me a lot more. For example, Deathloop was incredibly fun to play, but Dishonored wanted to have sat with me much more and Dishonored in particular asks you to use your superpowers responsibly. Unlike the recent Spider-Man games where you can web people to exploding cars and playing them off buildings, but Spider-Man quote unquote never kills. To be fair, this is me interjecting. When you fling someone off a building in Spider-Man, he always attaches them to the builder. Like you could see them attached. Oh, it's a similar to Chris. So then they just spend the next six hours hanging upside down stuck on a wall and they're traumatized. Yeah, that's true. He's just traumatizing. Yeah, like Peter Parker is a mass burner. We all know that that's the case. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. And I'm sorry the question ended up being so long when they're being listening since the split screen days. And I'm so thrilled to hear y'all every Thursday. What do you guys think? Any games with restraint that you guys can think of? Yeah, I mean, Hitman also comes to mind. I think the stealth games tend to kind of swim in these waters in a way that a lot of other games aren't able to. I think this question really brings to the front a super interesting tension in video games, just in general, that there is this narrative tension and with superhero games in particular where they're not allowed to explore so many of the most interesting superhero scenarios, like the scene where Superman goes and talks to a normal person and it's not actually about him being really strong. It's about him having a human connection with someone even though he's not human. You know, those things that make Superman meaningful. It's not that he's so strong. It's not that he can whatever catch a building. That's cool and everything. But the problem is that's more fun for a video game unless you're doing the like telltale Batman, you know, that kind of thing where it's a more narrative game. So it's a real challenge. Dishonored is such a good example of this. But Dishonored kind of from one to two played with it in different ways and I think solved the problem differently. And Dishonored one, if you kill a bunch of people, like you use your powers and you play super dark, it makes like the game harder, right? There's more rats everywhere and you get a dark ending. It's like a chaos mode. It goes from chaos, like the chaos increases and yes, it makes the game harder, adds more rats, yeah, and different ending. Yeah, you're right. Right. Where I'm trying to remember the specifics of Dishonored two, but it works differently. They made it so that I think you can play that way, but it's more about the choices you make and the way that you play the game. I know they've like, they've made a few changes. I might bing my way in here later to explain the specifics because I can't remember them off the top of my head. But I know they like, they kind of played with that idea and then bing, no, no, no, Kirk, I'm going to cut you off here. You can't invoke the bing past Kirk and not think that future Kirk is going to make a bing and interject while he's editing the episode. That's just not possible. So you have invoked the bing and here I am to explain that actually you were remembering incorrectly Dishonored one and two both had a chaos system that affected the ending depending on how violently you played. It was Death of the Outsider, the standalone expansion for Dishonored two, otherwise it was an expand alone that did away with the chaos system and actually made that a really strong entry in my mind just because you had already worried about chaos so much in the first two games, it was nice not to have to worry about it. Though Dishonored two did introduce something new that passed me as about to talk about in a minute here and that is replayability because you could play as either Corvo or Elizabeth. It kind of encouraged you to play a low chaos and a high chaos playthrough so it made it a little bit more narratively easy to relax the second time through and just play high chaos and get to see all that extra stuff and do all those cool extra moves. Okay, the bing has been satisfied. I am now leaving back to the show. Take it away past Kirk. Bing. It is interesting Death Loop when we talked about Death Loop. I think we were like, man, it's really cool that it doesn't matter how you play because it's very freeing. You can just do whatever you can kill whoever the loop resets every time. It's just not a big deal. Alex's point is a good point that it doesn't really stick with you narratively in the same way because your actions don't really have weight. But then I think a lot of people would say that the Death Loop approach is more fun. That tension again is just sort of there. I don't know. Mm-hmm. Yeah, my first thought on reading this question was about Star Wars Jedi Survivor in part because we've all just been playing it but also because that is the theme of every Jedi story is restraint and not using your powers for evil or giving into the temptation to use them to achieve your own ends. And of course there's a lot of that tension just baked into Star Wars stories whereby I can look at a new hope and be like, Obi-Wan is mind controlling people. How is this guy not evil? The situation doesn't fully add up and never has. But that's also why I think Star Wars is great because there isn't any way to define what evil is other than just looking at a situation as a person and being like, that's evil. I'm going to choose not to do that. And the more often you do that, the more you tend toward the light side and that's just kind of how it goes and like all those little individual actions add up to be something meaningful and complicated at the same time. And I wish that the Star Wars games could include that tension more but they also kind of can't because I also feel like I'm just straight up murdering dudes as Calcastus and I'm like, I guess this is fine. It's like they're all space nazis but it does have like a little something to it. I haven't played the game enough. I'm sure there's a storyline where Cal is tempted to the dark side. I've seen Star Wars movies and games and I know what happens but it is kind of too bad that that isn't like baked into the way that you play and the way that it is in something more narrative focused like Mass Effect or a games where your choices impact how other characters interact with you just based on dialogue choices but it's not really quite that kind of game. To the theme of restraint, I think it's really interesting to look at like narratives about for example, superheroes as opposed to video games about superheroes and in a narrative and when you're watching a movie about a superhero, you're watching a story about a character who has powers and has to reckon with them and keep himself restrained by not using them every chance he gets. Whereas in a video game because you, the player are getting to experience being the super hero for a temporary amount of time, part of the appeal in the first place is getting to use those powers and getting to live out this fantasy of actually being able to do them. So there's something kind of like a little bit, it's a little bit less fun, certainly less fun and I think even less interesting in some ways to be like, hey, we're going to give you a bunch of powers but you can't actually use them because you know though, there is the sort of power of making you wait and then unleashing your powers. Like I'm thinking of I'm always angry, that's my secret cap, I'm always angry. Like, should you get like that Hulk is kind of the ultimate example of a hero who has to restrain himself and then gets to like finally unleash and release and rest. When was the last time you played a good incredible Hulk game? I'm like, when, when. But that's why it's so hard to have an incredible Hulk game. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not disagreeing with that at all. But I think when you, I think when the player like picks up the controller and is like, I'm going to spend an hour tonight playing this game. Right. Why not to get like it's not quite it. Yeah, right. It's like what a good game. It's like quite a cathartic when you're trying to restrain yourself. Yeah. It actually sounds like a great game. It's like that. No, it does. I can't remember the name of where you're just like a huge bull. You're trying not to knock anything over. I remember that. Yeah. Well, yes, there are all sorts of like creative things you can. So speaking personally, like power fantasies are not my favorite types of game. My favorite types of games are like mysteries and narratives and like cerebral stuff. But that said, if I'm going to play a power fantasy, I want it to be a power fantasy and not like, Hey, we're dangling this power. You can't actually use it type of story. So. Or making you feel bad for using it. Yeah, well, with it, I think this is a good example because like Dishonored has so many creative powers. They're like, I would never want to play that game without playing around with them and getting to use them. Like you don't want to just have to friggin blink everywhere. Although I will say those games do a good job of giving you not not lethal creative powers as well. But even that like says that we don't want you to be restrained. We want you to actually use the stuff we're giving you. Like we don't want to give you stuff and then make you not use it. So yeah. It's like a thing where you need to design a second layer on top of it thinking of Dishonored or Hitman is another example where in Hitman, there is a reward for you if you play very, very restrained. Nobody sees you. You just kill your target. You get out totally clean. But that's not restrained. I would argue that that's not what the story is here. Like restrained would be if Hitman gives you a dozen different like supernatural powers but says you can't use them, you have to play with like thinking around those. Well, but they do. I mean, what I'm saying is like Hitman also gives you a level full of explosives in a million different ways that you can like super violently and ridiculously and comedically kill your target. The upper level thing that I'm talking about, like the second layer is that Hitman then also rewards you for doing all that stuff. And the real goal of that game is to play every level a bunch of times and do all of the things from the restraint to the complete lack of respect. Got it. Yeah. That's a good point. Which Dishonored like arguably does as well though it's not quite as like built with repetition in mind. I think a lot of people just wound up playing it kind of more restrained than they wanted to especially the first game because they felt like they were being kind of narratively punished for playing unrestrained which is sort of a problem or something that the game did need to figure out how to solve. So I guess the problem with Hitman in regards to what Alex is writing about here is that like the story is not really like does not support that like restrained is more like a mechanical thing. But it's not like a story about a guy who I guess gets multiple chances to finish a level and do it one way or three. One way or three. Yeah. Anyway let's move on. Maddie you want to read the next one from Colin? Sure Colin writes, Hi long time listener from the split screen days first time writing in. After all these years of being an avid listener what possibly could have made me grab my keyboard and compose this email. Well I want to hear Kirk's take on that oh so jazzy sax line halfway through the frankly incredible tears of the kingdom trailer sounds like the Hamilton hype must be real. Love you guys. People be awesome work. Well. Okay so I have been asked about this a non-zero number of times. Yeah I just re-watched this trailer and re-listened to this music because of this question. The Hamilton hype is definitely real. Man what a trailer. Yeah I love that saxophone part. I'm going to play it right now for everyone. Link. And that's not the only saxophone part it plays during this part of the middle of the trailer but then toward the end they're building up they're building up and then what happens but the saxophone comes back in. But you are not alone. Link. You are our final hope. So that makes me think there's going to be a lot of saxophone in the actual soundtrack which is the thing that makes me excited. There was also this sort of other track that was kind of released and it also has some saxophone in it. And yeah I mean I love hearing saxophone and things. There wasn't really any saxophone that I can think of in Breath of the Wild. And I guess the thing I'll say the take that I'll offer about this sax playing is that I really like this use of saxophone. This is an alto saxophone and it's not the cliched like oh it's time for kind of loungy you know like subtony sound that a lot of you know games do is the kind of go to like a tenor sax down low. This is like strident super pop alto sax like it kicks ass and it's supposed to kick ass like it sounds like a laser beam and I think that's a really cool way to use the saxophone. And that style of sax playing so I hope that it has that bold of a presence throughout the whole soundtrack because it rules it's like an epic sound. It is jazzy I guess but it doesn't sound like jazz it just is like another texture in this epic orchestral soundtrack and it fits perfectly. So I love it I'm super psyched I'm really excited for the music for this game I'm definitely going to do a strong song something about it. And yeah the main theme is so good I spent like an act writing today and just listening to it on a leaf. There's a YouTube video of course. It's like exclamation points in every sentence that you're writing. I use my ultra hand ability to use words together. Really good. Beautiful. Alright that's a good answer Kirk you want to read the next question to. Sure this comes from Max Max writes there was a great question of the day on the triple click discord shout out to the triple click discord about Dead Rising 2 off the record which took the protagonist of the first Dead Rising game Frank something right the photographer and placed him into a modified version of the second game. People discussed what characters they would love to see moved into the drivers seat or into a different drivers seat. The obvious answer for many is Zelda but there were other good ones like Melania and Elden Ring or the other gods in Hades. Do you all have any characters that you would love to see become playable for the first time or in a different game than usual love the podcast can I answer this one first with the easiest one. I want to see Hornet be playable in a hollow night sequel. What? How did you come up with that? I do imagine. It's funny this has become like the Sony first party trope like last of us. You play as Ellie last of us too. You play zombie like got a more Ragnarok. He plays the chase like it's become this whole this whole shtick of sending games. It's cool. It works. I mean I guess it is a Sony cliche but honestly every example you just listed I thought was cool. No it's really cool. I don't play as a character I didn't expect and learning more about the main characters as a result. Cliche can be a very good thing. Oh yeah for sure. Or tropes I guess we should say. Cliche has a negative connotation. Yeah so since the you have a sidekick triple A thing is such an established trope that works very well does that mean we'd love to play a Marin Star Wars video game because I would definitely play that game. I would and I feel like I said that on our Star Wars spoiler cast about the first game to the point where I was like surely they're going to give us a playable Marin. Yeah I remember we all kind of thought yeah and I mean again not a must have beaten it but I feel like I would have heard by now if that was so there. But yeah who knows maybe it's somewhere but yeah I would love that and also it could still happen certainly. They're certainly doing well with those games and they could do even a whole Marin spinoff series. I would love that. I love the other gods and Hades suggestion and I'm I've also already been furious whether Hades too is going to have an element of that because it already the premise is like Zagreus is long lost sister or whatever and it's like wait was she here all along and like what's what's her vantage point on Zag trying to escape the underworld this whole time and like does she have her own comedic version of that. I mean it's a very story forward game so I feel like we might actually get a version of that with Hades which would be really bad. You know it would be fun would be playing we've gotten to play as the prosecutor as Miles Edgeworth in the Phoenix right games which is fun but it'd be fun to play as the judge. How would that work? You just watch a series of bizarre things happening and you're like well you're like I'm like oh guilty. You just have like each of the buttons makes a different bit fuddled expressions. Okay maybe it wouldn't be fun. You're like in the front of Judge and you have to make like tough calls. I mean talk about a game with like moral decisions you have to decide but if it gets really serious. Yeah like you have to pull Miles Edgeworth in Phoenix into the side room and be like guys you gotta cut it out in there. We know that's what would happen right? There'd be some conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. Judge simulator. Yeah that's actually the answer to the previous question. This is what simulations do we want. Judge simulator obviously perfect. I like Malini and Elden Reed. Yeah that's a cool idea. Zelda is the big one. I mean I guess we still don't know if Zelda's gonna be playable. It's true. In Tears of the Kingdom. But I mean it's crazy that they never did a chic spin off game after Ocarina. Yeah that's true. It's been so many spin off games. Retro Studios was working our pitched one or was working a little bit. But it didn't happen. But it never happened. Yeah. Yeah she could have been a great one because that's such a good mechanic of like being able to transform. You could do like some self stuff in Zelda. Or just do puzzles. You could still just have a be a Zelda game. You're just playing a chic and that's your explanation. Well but I mean as part of that yeah well when you're walking through a town you have to go back to Zelda and you can't be chic or else. Yeah. But I'll get mad at you and like she's gonna die. Yeah yeah yeah. Sure. Could be like an Assassin's Creed style style back and forth. Yeah like the Aveline Assassin's Creed game where you have to put on these different outfits and sort of adhere to different social norms and that could be fun. Yeah. So that's cool. Alright let's do the last question. James asks and this is paraphrase. This is actually an older email but I brought it up because it's a really a newly relevant question. It is. Hi Jason, Maddie and Kirk just became a Max Fund member. Thank you James. Love your podcast and I've been listening since your Kentucky days. That's a big theme today. Yeah. Everybody's listening since the split screen days. Yeah but it's great nice. Like question is this. Have we hit peak saturation with regard to games as a service. Games as a service being of course games that are continually updated and full of micro transactions and such. This is a newly relevant question because Red Folges came out and even though that isn't technically like a micro transaction our game is serviced because it doesn't have any micro transactions in it. It is yet another multiplayer game meant to be played over and over with your friends and missions and stuff. And Suicide Squad which we've talked about extensively. Yes. Although it's been delayed. Yes. It's got delayed to next February but that game also has been talked about because it has yet another game as a service that is like a lot of people are wondering who are these for. Who is asking for these games. I think the answer was executives in 2017. Yeah. It seems like a safe guess. Yeah. That is who was asking for them. But do you guys think we've hit peak saturation or did we hear it? Did we hit it years ago? Where are we at in the games as a service world? I think we definitely have at this point. I feel like Marvel's Avengers was the beginning of this being the beginning of the end for these games. Not even Anthem. Not an Anthem. Good poll. Yeah. I see. I feel like Marvel's Avengers. So we've been there even earlier. Yeah. Because Marvel's Avengers is also like an IP licensed game and that it doesn't, a game as a service doesn't have to be that but it feels like it was like two different trends merging to create a thing that everyone was like, this needs to be really good and original and interesting in order for me to want to engage with it. And that is like a licensed game or a game as a service. And it was both and it didn't work. And that's tragic. But I mean, now we're just looking at Suicide Squad where the response to that has been such that the team has been like reacting to that, that pushback against that trailer that we all clowned on this very podcast and that affected the delay of the game. And even at this point, I'm like, I don't know if people are going to want it even then. And I feel like a jerk saying that but it's just, it's people don't want that. People don't want that. I don't know. So, I mean, things might have happened behind the scenes. My understanding is that at least it was conveyed to the makers of that game that the delay has nothing to do with the trailer. So the delay was to fix bugs and a lot of people are like, oh my God, why is it a delay for so long? The answer to that is because like when you delay a game, you can't just be like, like, all right, we're going to release in October, especially when you have a marketing deal with PlayStation, you have to be like, hey, PlayStation, when is a good time to release? And I'm imagining there were many, many conversations about that. And they landed on February maybe because Spider-Man 2 is coming in September and they don't want to be so close to that. Maybe because there's other stuff, maybe because it doesn't work strategically. So, I mean, there are many reasons why a game could be delayed just for bug fixing and slip that long. True. Point being, the reason I say all this is because that game is not changing at all in response to the trailer as far as I know. Mostly make some other drastic decision and push it back to more years. But fundamentally, that game is going to come out. It's going to be the same. Maybe they'll decide, hey, we're going to strip all the microtransactions out, which would be crazy at this point. But it's still going to be a co-op shooter game, suicide squad game where you're playing as like these characters that shark man, whatever their names are. King shark. King shark. Yeah, get all the suicide. Great. I mean, I don't take issue with the suicide squad members. It's more the actual structure of a game like that. It is not, it's really hard to get a co-op group together for something like that. Like it just, it doesn't, I don't know, not everything's Destiny 2 and Destiny 2 had such a long road to get to being Destiny 2, you know? And we've talked about it. And there are different kinds of service game, right? I mean, suicide squad just looked like such a AAA service game from five or six years ago. It just totally turned people off. I think that's kind of what some of that reaction was coming from where you can think of a game like Wertle as a service game. I mean, the idea of an online game that a lot of people play that's always being updated that can kind of continually generate revenue doesn't have to be what suicide squad looked like or what I gather Redfall kind of feels like. Multiplayer mission based loot. Right. It can be a lot of different things. And then there's also kind of Dying Light 2 as an example of a game that, you know, Tech Land, they just update that game forever. And it's not, they sell some stuff, they don't sell some other stuff. And it kind of falls under games as a service, but it's different, right? It's the same thing they did with the first game where it's pretty different now. They've added a lot. Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Awesome. Very similar. True. I think these kind of other categories, I don't think we've hit a saturation with that. Like, I think that's just broadband internet is widespread enough and everyone's online and the games are all digital and it's easy to update them and add stuff and that keeps people engaged with them and that can be cool. That's not going anywhere. And I don't think anyone's sick of that. People are sick of the game coming out and feeling unfinished and then having to wait a while and then get patches. That's kind of the sort of flip side of that same thing. But that happens in non-service games too. It does. Right. I think the harder part is like the multiplayer aspect. And it needs to be your whole life, which is kind of the destiny of it all. Right. It winds up being like, it's a kind of narrow category of games as a service, which I do think is what James is talking about. And that, yes, I think, at least in terms of like, here's a new one of these. It's a big one. Are you so excited? People are going to be like, no, no, we're not because I think Suicide Squad is a good example of that. Counterpoints to all of that is that the album of the four is coming out of the three. I was thinking that dude, Jason, I was like, I'm so bad. I think all three of us are pretty excited for it. We're all going to play them. And I think that, like, really, I think what we're getting at here maybe, I don't know, here's a thesis that I'll throw out here. Maybe the real over saturation point is just that specific type of game that feels like every other game we've played before. And Diablo 4 is coming. And even though that's a service game, that's a multiplayer game, that's a game designed for you to play for hundreds of hours, it just feels so different than everything else that's on the market because there aren't a ton of like action RPGs from an isometric perspective that are also item collections. Like there are a few Path of Exile has been running forever and that game's really good. Obviously, previous Diablo games, but there aren't like a bazillion others the way there are lootershooters. So you see a side squad game and you're like, it's not the game is a service part that really turns people off so much as the, oh, this looks like a billion other like anthem and destiny and the division and warframe and whatever else. What was that game called? Out Out Fielders? Out Landers? Yeah, Out Riders? Out Riders? Yeah, it's an aesthetic thing too. I mean, it's partly the service game pitch that it looks exhausting all the loot and everything but yeah, it's definitely an aesthetic complaint. I think that people are lodging. Yeah, like why does the loot look exhausting and suicide squad and yet Diablo 4 I will collect it endlessly? Who knows? It's aesthetic, right? It's the menus. It's the third person. It's the gameplay. It's the way you're just like, nah, no thanks. The kid is in Diablo 4. I mean, we all play the beta. It's just super fun to play it and don't get me wrong. Suicide Squad game, it's still made by Rocksteady. Still made by good designers. Maybe we're all wrong. Could be super fun. Yeah, it could be very fun. Maybe, yeah. That'd be crazy. But so is Destiny 2 and like the thought of playing that again is exhausting. Well, yeah, I mean, it's been a while since I tried reinstalling that. I don't know if I'm ever going to get back. I think maybe one of the fundamental problems here is that like we already hit the apex of like the looter shooter genre and you really can't like, you can't get much better than that as opposed to action RPGs where it can still be iterated upon and it can still get better and better. I don't know. Maybe there's a lot going on here. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I'm going to say it just because it's a thought I'm having. But I think that for me, it's that everything is small in Diablo 4 and so it feels like it can fit into my life more than I've ever loved. Everything is bigger in those other games and it feels like it takes up more space. I can't fit it. If you play it on the Steam Deck, then it'll look much more. I think that's why I like playing some of those games on Steam Deck more than I've been screaming. I give it though because you can carry the Steam Deck around and that just feels like it fits in your life better. Like it doesn't make sense, but there's a lot of things to do. It's smaller. Guys, it's any smaller game. Yeah, we can throw it. We literally just zoom the camera out. Jason, you mean you want shorter games? No, we need smaller games. Smaller. Just smaller. I like tiny characters. This is what I say. Once again, we have to play the Minish Cap, Blood of Zelda and the Minish Cap because that is the smallest game that you'll get. I will play it. That sounds wonderful. Once again, thank you to everybody who sent in questions. Once again, you can reach us at tripleclick at maximumfund.org. Now let's take a break and then come back for one more thing. Hi, I'm Travis McElroy. And I'm Teresa McElroy. And we're the host of Schmaners. We don't believe that etiquette should be used to judge other people. No, on Schmaners, we see etiquette as a way to navigate social situations with confidence. So if that sounds like something you're into, join us every Friday on Maximum Fun, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's John Mo inviting you to listen to Depresh Mode with John Mo, where I talk about mental health and the lives we live with all kinds of people. Famous writers. David Sedaris, welcome to Depresh Mode. Thanks so much for having me. Movie stars. Jamie Lee Curtis, welcome to Depresh Mode. I am happy to be here. Musicians. I am in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm talking to AVM. Great to talk to you. And song exploters. Wish you case here, we're welcome to Depresh Mode. Thanks so much for having me. Everyone's opening up on Depresh Mode on Maximum Fun. And we are back, Kirk, Maddie. It is time for one more thing. Maddie, start us off with some Zelda. Sure. I'm still playing Breath of the Wild. I'm not playing anything else or really doing anything else. So I felt like I was destined to pick this as my one more thing this week. I love this video game. I also just wanted to know. I feel like a lot has changed in my gaming appetite or intake since the first time I tried playing it. Not just because now I'm not playing Street Fighter every single day, although that's about to change, but also because I have since played Fromsoft games and have really gotten used to difficult combat. And I remember thinking when I first played Breath of the Wild, like some of those guardian fights and the amount of strafing you have to do and just careful calculating and like, oh, is there a column nearby that I can hide behind while it's lasering me? All that stuff didn't think it was that fun back when I was playing it the first time. And I just was like, I don't want Zelda to be this hard, but compared to Dark Souls, this game is cake. You can just pause it. You can just breathe. You can just walk down as some steak. Yeah, you're so much more. You can literally pause it anytime. You can make a billion meals. I love cooking in Zelda. I love it then. Still love it now. It's so great. I'm so excited to cook more in Tears of the Kingdom. It's going to be amazing. You can make a bunch of specialty meals and then head into a fight that you know everything about already because maybe you've already died there and go back to it and be like, here's all my meals and you just freaking pause it. I don't know. It's crazy. You can pause it. That's so easy. So yeah, Breath of the Wild, great game. I remember when I played the preview of Tears of the Kingdom a couple of weeks ago in this one. So in Breath of the Wild you have to kind of pull out, like have Link hold each item individually if the selective individually. And this one you could select a group like based on a recipe all at once which just seems like a game changer. Beautiful. I love that. I love that. I'm so excited for recipes. Oh, you also, there was like a portable pot, zonai, portable pot. Yes, that's the other thing I'm really excited for is cooking anywhere because in Breath of the Wild I've already been thinking about those two things a lot. These and wishing I could cook anywhere and having to like remember where pots are that I can cook at because I'm really revolving my play not just around trying to actually do the challenging fights that I never bothered to do the first time and enjoying them. I won't beat the game in time for Tears of the Kingdom but it doesn't matter. I'm having a great time. But I'm really revolving everything around my cooking. It's a great strategy. I love it. I love this video game. Oh man, so good. So I hope you're not burning yourself out for Tears of the Kingdom. I'm not. Because I want to do it again. I don't think it's possible. It's possible. When I am. After I marathon that game I was like, I didn't need to be. We'll see. I don't know. I played Elden Ring for like 150 hours and I was like, I just want to play more Elden Ring. So I think I'm going to be fine. I can feel it. Well, I also cannot wait. By the time people hear this, we will be one day away from the Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. Kirk, what's your one more thing? My one more thing is Party Down Season 3. I got a lot of this. And I just watched. And it's amazing. It's so funny. Oh nice. I laughed so hard at this show that I just wanted to remind people that it exists. Because it came out. People talked about it. But it was like a sort of return to a kind of niche show from a little while back that didn't ever do that well, but it's kind of grown to be a cult classic. So I think some people might have forgotten that it came out. It's just six episodes. Each episode is a half an hour long. You can watch the thing in the length of a star's free trial. Take it from me because that's what I did. I just am not subscribing to another streaming service. And it's time well spent. Man, a couple of things I will say about this, especially for anyone who has watched it one. It features the character Roman, who's played by Martin Starr, saying the funniest thing I've heard on a show in a long time. I'm not going to say what it is, but it involves his car. I'll just say that. Anyone who's seen it knows what I'm talking about. It's something that I just say out loud regularly and just start laughing. That's the first thing. Second, Ken Marino, who plays Ron Donald on this show. One of the funniest people in the world, I think I would rather watch him uncomfortably sweating and looking like anguished while kind of looming over someone. I think he's better at that than anyone else. I've been thinking about what makes someone funny while watching this show. Two other actors, Bashir Salahuddin, who plays Officer Goodnight on Southside. Oh my god. And Tim Robinson from I think you should leave. Of course. There are two more comedians who are both so good at being uncomfortable on camera and looking uncomfortable and just making you uncomfortable but in a way that's hilarious. Yeah, we have been watching some Southside and I am obsessed with Sandy. His character is unreal. There is a scene in season three. There's a scene involving a police car on that show. Yes, we, oh my god. I'm getting owned by a teenager. But that episode, I mean we can say it because it's the beginning but a teenager steals his police car and he is trying and she is slowly driving it away from him as he is trying to be cool to get the car back and that is the entire episode essentially so good. His character is this cop who is the ultimate chump and is always getting chumped by everybody at all times and it's made a man. So Ken Marino on Party Down, very similar. If you've seen the show anytime he's like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, something horrible has happened and that's kind of his catchphrase. And in this season, he is so on fire. Everyone in it is so on fire. It's just absolutely great. I can't recommend it enough. I laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed at it. So yeah, Party Down season three. You know, watch it. If you haven't seen Party Down, watch Party Down from the beginning. Yeah, I mean, that's my stopping point is that I'm like, well, I need to rewatch all of Party Down before I watch season three because it's been way too long and I don't really remember it all. And that's going to be just such a big chore but I'm going to have to get through it. Yeah, Emily had never seen it so I re-watched it and yeah, it takes like no time. Yeah, it's not that long and very watchable. So yeah, great. Rob Thomas, also the creator of Veronica Mars, the showrunner of Party Down every all time. Yeah, that's true though. There's a different guy. Rob Thomas is a producer on this but I'm forgetting his name but there's another guy who was like the director and writer of Party Down. Actually, hang on, I'll look it up. John Enbaum is the, he wrote a lot of it is, he's kind of the showrunner of the season three in particular. He's apparently hilarious. And the first two seasons have a lot of Veronica Mars like characters coming in which is very fun. Yeah, yeah. Which is hilarious. A lot of great cameos in season three as well of course. Excellent. Cannot wait. My one more thing is a book called Magic for Liars by Sarah Galey and it is about a wizard school. Wow. And the book opens up with a guy, a teenager who thinks that he is, who believes that he is the chosen one wearing an invisibility cloak and sneaking around the library and there's a line about the welcome back dinner downstairs where people are joking about house elves and pumpkin juice. And you read this first chapter and you're like, hmm, interesting. And then it ends with the guy screaming in ours. He discovers a corpse that has been split into and is lying in the middle of the library. And then we meet the real protagonist who is this lady who has no magical powers, who has no magical powers at all and is actually a private detective. And her twin sister does have magical powers and she is a teacher at this magical school. And over the course of the next few chapters you start to realize that the protagonist of this book is actually not like a wizard but a kind of like nails tough private eye with who has seen some shit. And that the school in question is no Hogwarts but in fact like an actual high school where people like have to worry about getting pregnant and abortions and like break each other and call each other. Yeah, that's cool. And it is very much inspired by the magicians. There's a lot of that in there. That's sort of kind of like a realistic high school slash wizardry stuff. But it's also just a good detective story. The mystery, the fundamental mystery at the core of it is who killed this person. And the answer is a little bit kind of obvious and unsatisfying. But the story is just a good read and it's really fun to get through the main characters just really good and probably the main reason that I would recommend this book is because the main character is just really interesting. A lot of gay characters in this book, a lot of queerness which another, another contrast from Harry Potter which I don't think is a single page with the single gay. Not until after all the books were done. None at all post, at least. And yeah, and it's just a solid read. It wasn't my favorite book I read this year but I enjoyed it and read through it in a couple of nights. It's a very easy read. And yeah, I recommend it. It's called Magic for Liars by Sarah Galey. If you, like many people out there are a lapsed Hogwarts fan and you're kind of craving some good wizard actions and good wizard school content. This is a good book to check out. Cool. Nice. All right. So this week's episode by the time we all convene again, we will have played the legend of Zelda to the kingdom for like an entire week. So excited. So excited. So excited. We're forward to that. Freaking out. Also by the time people hear this again, it will be time for the triple click live show in Brooklyn, New York. So don't miss it. If you can come out. Get it together. I think, I think we're still, we still have like a few seats left. We didn't sell out yet but I think we're kind of close. I'm not sure. I'll find out. But if you want to go, get your ticket now. See what happens. See if you can get in advance. See if you can get one. Maybe you'll be there. Maybe you won't. I can't make any promises. And Kirk, Mandy, I will see you about next week. See you next week. Bye. Triple click is produced by Jason Shrier, Mandy Myers and me, Kirk Hamilton. I had it in next the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple click is a proud member of the Maximum Fund podcast network and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfund.org. Find us on Twitter at TripleClickPods and email the tripleclick at maximumfund.org and find a link to our discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ♪♪♪♪. ♪♪♪♪.