Crubcast

We're here today, gamers, to mourn the loss of a beloved...

Can we call it beloved?

Yeah.

No.

Beloved video game.

Hit game Concord.

Which, at the time of publish, has either been shut down or is going to be shut down today.

I'm here with three of my fellow wonderful cocrubbers in mourning today.

Sean, you've dressed for the occasion.

Co-Concords.

I came out with the Sanjiro look from Persona 5 to pay my respects.

I, too, would reference Persona at a funeral.

I'm here with Bat Trap.

Looking crown-soaker!

So I told everyone to wear black.

I didn't even listen.

Sean did, though.

I thought it was a joke.

I'm not gonna lie.

For our audio listeners.

I'll be honest.

I was going to wear black the entire...

I was literally wearing black as I read it.

I'm like, OK.

I'm already there.

Never mind.

Oh, that's so good.

And I'm here with Chris.

Hi, Chris.

You're the only one who's played Concord out of all of us, technically.

World's number one Concord fan.

I'm honored to be invited onto the podcast tonight to talk about it.

At the time of recording, you're currently playing Concord still.

I am in round four of a match right now.

Yeah, I just picked Red Guy.

Round four.

It's made it that far.

Rest in peace, Red Guy.

So we won one, but they keep winning.

Let's quickly run through what Concord is for those that maybe aren't familiar and why it's shutting down.

Concord was a game that's being published by Sony and made by a first-party studio, online multiplayer shooter.

The idea was that they wanted to release a $40 game that you pay for once and then would not have to pay for again as a counter to the free-to-play model.

It historically bombed.

It is probably the single biggest flop in gaming history.

It makes ET look good, currently.

If Concord starts the next video game crash, it will make ET look great.

It makes ET look good?

If someone wants to say it's hyperbole, maybe it is.

That's at least definitely the biggest PlayStation flop, for sure.

And so the estimate was that it sold maybe 35,000 copies of this multiplayer game across both PC and PS5.

And within two weeks of it, within 10 days of it coming out.

So usually for reference, our fellow crubbers here in the audience, when an episode of Crub is recorded, it's Tuesday, the following Friday, 10 days later, it comes out.

Concord came out 10 days ago at the time of recording.

So it didn't last one crub cycle.

Not one, which is insane to me.

Yeah, so we used to be a proper country.

So Chris, you didn't buy Concord just to be clear.

What?

Concord was given to you.

It was Bad Rats to me by a viewer called Studio Audity, and we argued for a bit about it, and the stipulation was, okay, I'll take it.

I'm going to try and apply the bit, and that's where we shook hands.

It has me being here approaching an account level 60 of 100, trying to get in before this shuts down.

You need to get to level 100 for the Platinum Trophy.

That's the last trophy you need.

That's the last thing I need to do.

The game has been refunded already for you.

I have an open dialogue window of Steam saying, hey, this person had it refunded, so hit accept and it will be pulled from your account, and I just moved it over and kept playing.

So if this closes, I think it might just force take away from me, so I have to keep Concord open until whatever day on Friday, or I get level 100.

Please tell me you have a power supply backup.

I don't know, maybe.

Should I unplug it and put one in?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're doing like the 90s, early 2000s method where you don't have a memory card, so you just keep the game on the entire time.

I just hope one of your parents doesn't show up to your house and just turn it off.

Concord is the real throwback.

I also happened to be a Sonic Adventure as a kid.

We got snowed in and I didn't have a VMU for the Dreamcast, so we couldn't go but get one, right?

So I played through the opening of that game maybe like 12 times over and over.

Wait, you had a Dreamcast as a kid?

Yeah.

Are you running for office?

I was going to make the same joke.

I might be.

I was, oh gosh.

Would you vote for me, Trav?

I would not vote for a single Concord player.

It's a huge character flaw.

If you play Red Guy, though.

The new.

I am almost the 69 hours on Steam.

The new.

That's what that helps.

No, the new metric.

You're about to have another 69.

The new metric for whom you would vote for is not the beer test.

It's the would you play Concord with this person test?

Oh God.

That's a good question, actually.

I'm kind of okay at the game.

I know people would play with me.

What is the wiki test?

The wiki test.

What?

What is it?

Wait, what did you say?

Beer test.

Yeah, beer test.

Where did I hear wiki?

It's going to the concord and wiki.

So anyway, Concord is dead.

And and we we did not kill it, but we killed it.

We Jeb Bush memed it very hard.

We prepared the grave and danced on it, thinking one that is funny.

But then it actually died.

No one no one on earth thought it would be this fast.

It is historic.

Like, that's why I said it's probably one of the biggest flops of all time.

I was surprised to read that, like, they didn't just immediately half ass it into a free to play model.

So so my theory is that because this game has been in development since essentially the moment Overwatch came out, like the moment Overwatch came out, this game got greenlit.

Essentially, it was let's make our own Overwatch.

By the time that Fortnite changed how we look at games and moved everything into a full free to play game as a service model, which already existed before, but Fortnite is its own beast.

It became more and more of a of a sunk cost fallacy to keep it going.

And I think by the time they realized that there's nothing to do with it, it was either delayed another six months to a year to work in all these free to play changes to the formula or release it in hope.

That's kind of my assumption.

The concerning part is I was looking into it because like the eight year quote, they had kind of struck me weird.

They didn't start like active development until 2020.

Oh, I didn't know that.

I thought.

Oh, interesting.

That's a post-Fortnite world.

So you look at this and go, okay, yeah, this is either a like rebellion against that model or a very like pigheaded, no, this will work model.

And yeah, because I know the number had changed around a bit in terms of like who said what where I heard 2016, 2018 was the general assumption of when it actually started production.

2020 is used to me because I don't care about this.

I think follow it.

Yeah, I think they said 2018 was like the pre-production period and then 2020 is when it went earnest.

I think 2021 is when PlayStation bought them, right?

Was that when it was?

They didn't.

Yeah, around that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Either way, it's been in development long enough that at a point, what do you do with it?

Either you delay it a year, you cancel it entirely, or you release it.

What do you do?

Or you release it and hope that it does well enough until like we all assumed it goes to PS Plus, it then goes free.

Like the usual cycle of these games.

It didn't even get an audience enough to do that.

Yeah, it's wild to me that it didn't even, first of all, apparently didn't even break 40,000 sales, but like it's insane to me that like they tried to, during I remember they had like this one say to play and they try to like buy you in like, oh, you get more episodes, blah, blah, blah.

But like, I won't lie, when they showed off like this kind of like generics Guardians of the Galaxy cut scene, I was like, okay, this is actually kind of, huh, this is interesting.

And then they showed off the gameplay.

I'm like, oh, this is everything I don't want to play.

Yeah, for me, it was as soon as I found out it was a hero shooter multiplayer.

I'm like, okay, you lost me.

Because the cut scene looked cool.

Yes, it's a weird thing to have done because everyone agrees it was a flawed premise from the start to to be clear, like as much as we're going to meme on the game and we're going to probably praise the gameplay a little bit throughout this podcast.

You know, they did a good job with the hair.

The hair is very good.

Characters have really good hair.

Yeah, we love hair in this house.

I think the thing to me was you make this hero shooter and you do what every other hero shooter does by giving it lore, cutscenes and all that as the from the start marketing thing.

But you have to make people care before you do that.

Otherwise, you just spend 15 minutes of a state of play showing cutscenes and then say, here's the other part.

It's the game plan.

It's oh, it's just.

Yeah.

So there's that.

Right.

And then there's the fact that they didn't ever try to go hard on the marketing of pay once and you have everything.

Yeah, now would have helped, I think, because I don't think anyone understood that.

I certainly didn't go into it.

I was just like, oh, it's probably free to play.

It's not how Overwatch is.

And, you know, everyone knows Overwatch is like, oh, I'm going to have to keep paying into this game.

Why?

I don't want to buy another battle.

I just spent forty dollars on this on a game that.

Why does it exist?

So I ask myself that a lot.

Yeah, it's it's such a it's such a fascinating situation to have gone into, because I jokingly said after we played the beta that I might want to make a video on the second channel, on my second channel, saying that Concord is too pure for this world, because a game that you pay for once is what everyone says they want.

Yeah, it's just a it's not this game for one.

Like, that's the problem here.

It's this game.

Right.

But B, people don't actually necessarily want what they say they want.

It's just easier to say that on Twitter than put your money where your mouth is.

Yeah, people just want their existing games to be better, essentially.

There's a lot of people trying to lock the failure of this down to like one thing.

People are saying it's the marketing, people are saying it's the characters.

I think a lot of people are missing that.

Whoa, trend-chasing.

Trace Tending.

And even Red Guy, by the way, hit Concord character.

Tim Tebow.

Alien.

And it's like, it's all of the above, but I think just the general, complete level of apathy, I'm getting killed, we've seen from people on this, like so many people didn't even curious by this.

It had 2200 players during the open beta on Steam when it was free.

You know, people either weren't aware of this game or they looked at it and at every turn went, eh, not for me, right?

And it's just such an astounding level of apathy that I think it's every reason people are saying, but all combined together when people are just looking for like the one thing, right?

Yeah, right.

Because I think if you put this game in a lot of people's hands, they would kind of get it.

And then I think some of those people would be like, oh, I like this.

You know, it takes a little more than a few hundred.

It takes a little while because we were at first just when we played the beta, it was very much, oh, this game is just kind of another one of these.

And I don't care for the hero shooter genre.

I like I, I just just not for me.

I would not have bought this game.

I did not buy this game.

And as somebody who Sony sends, you know, is in contact with as far as like PlayStation emails and stuff like that, they will send me games that I'm not even it's not my market.

It's not my my fan base.

It's not my interest.

But you want this.

And I'm like, I guess you've already sent the code.

So I can't say no.

Yeah, like they sent me Stellar Blade.

They sent me Rise of the Ronin games that I haven't talked about to this.

They were just like, hey, you want it?

And I'm like, sure.

They never once contacted me about Concord, which says probably everything.

So you think they didn't have faith about it?

Yeah.

Like there wasn't even one saying, hey, it's coming out, right?

Just nothing at all.

Like, no, it just came out.

So by the time this comes out, my my interview with Astrobots director will be out, assuming that that doesn't get rescheduled tomorrow at the time of recording.

They reached out to me about that, because I reached out about Astrobot a month prior, a month earlier, and I was like, hey, just want to make sure my name's on the list, you know, would love to cover this.

The usual email you send in the situation.

The person who responded is the same person who usually does.

She's really great.

She said, oh, you're going to love what it does with the controller and stuff like that.

You're already on the list, don't worry.

Week later, she emails me and says, hey, do you want to interview the director?

And of course I'm like, yeah, like, like that's a really cool opportunity.

She really, no.

And like that's sort of the the communication that most of these companies tend to have with creators or something like that.

Or if it's Ubisoft, for example, it's a little more formal in that they just send you a personless email and say, hey, here's your thing.

Anyway, I can vouch.

Yeah.

Anyway, point being, they didn't ever acknowledge Concord whatsoever.

So, yeah, there was that element of it.

But when we were playing the beta, it was very much.

OK, once you've put enough time into it, you kind of see that there's a lot more depth into it.

It's more of a Valorant kind of game than it is in Overwatch.

It's a little bit more methodical, I guess, would be the term.

I don't know that I'd really like that term for it, but for lack of a better term.

Yeah, like one thing that I...

I was going to say, I've seen a lot of Halo and Destiny heads compare it to those games.

Which makes sense, a lot of the team was the same as those old games.

I think Valorant is the good comparison, because I was going to say, just with how the rounds are set up and stuff, it almost feels like a little counter-strike inspired in some parts, which Valorant is definitely counter-strike but a hero shooter.

So, that part kind of writes itself.

And there's the element of, Chris, do you want to explain the round to round stacking abilities that each class has as briefly as...

You would be the best one to explain it, honestly.

Yeah, there's a neat thing where there's a certain class, it's like if you pick this character, when they die, your next character pick gets that bonus applied to them, right?

So, like, tacticians have better reload speed, some characters increase movement speed, and they stack throughout a single game, so that if you're jumping around the roster, you're basically souping up your next character up to a point, like it's like a one per thing, you can't just like keep increasing speed, right?

But it does make a thing where matches have an interesting push and pull due to that, and you can make a really slow character like the Suckbot into a really fast, fast reloading, like, weapon of destruction by the end of a game.

It feels really good.

It's like actually...

Is it Suckbot the trash can?

Yeah, yeah.

He sucks handballs.

It's almost a...

I hated that one.

It's almost a chess system at a point, because the main mode that you do this in, like, that works in every mode, but the main one is like the search and destroy type mode or counterstrike, where you die, your round is over.

If you win a round, you can't pick that character you picked again.

Yeah, that's a thing I really liked.

Yeah, it's a thing in Valorant.

The other element is you can have multiple variants of a character on your page so that if you want to specifically put a preference in on that character, you can have multiple of them.

And there's a push and pull of how you build out your character select screen.

And there's stuff like that that's really thought out and really neat.

And none of it matters now, of course, because this game is dead.

But there was thought put into it.

And that's the big shame to me of this, because if this were literally any other game, this would be pretty praised.

If any couple of things go differently, this would get a lot more love, but it's Concord, so there's no way it's getting loved.

Sean, go ahead, I cut you off last time, sorry.

It's all good.

It's like the character designs kind of...

The maps were like the biggest thing to me, that I was like, this is just all green and brown and...

Yeah, the maps are boring.

Like, I don't even...

And they were all the same, they all felt the same.

It was one of those scenarios where it was like, man, there's like good ideas, but then like the execution, the characters, I could tell you four characters.

There's Trashcan, Red Guy, Spike.

I don't even know if Spike's his real name, but the guy with the spiky beard, and Spike, which he shoots with the gun.

Well, I forgot about Uncle Tio.

Guy.

Oh, and...

And Cringe.

And Furry Alien, yeah, that one.

And that's it.

Nothing else I could tell you.

It's one of those situations.

Go ahead.

I was going to say, building off of that, visually, just presentation-wise, it feels like a game that was made in a lab to just be trendy.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's where I was going to say.

None of the characters besides Red Guy passed the silhouette test, and that's because Red Guy's iconic.

Oh, for God's sake.

Look at that.

Look at that.

But even then, he's just Overwatch Winston.

No, he's not.

He's Red Guy.

Yeah.

Overwatch.

You're not going to have six red guys at once fighting each other.

We said this during the pre-show, which we stream these live at Twitch.TV slash Crub underscore official.

If you want to watch live with the pre and post shows where we shoot the shit and all that fun stuff, make sure to do that.

Quick plug, by the way, for our like button on YouTube.

We made it.

Hit it.

Or else, like Concord, we will go away.

Abuse that like button.

Yeah.

Hit.

Yeah.

You spank that like button an odd number of times so that it comes out.

Thumbs up.

Leave a nice review.

Leave a comment.

All that stuff.

We we made a lot of a lot of jokes about this game because it was kind of clear where it was going.

And my favorite part of it was just was just Red Guy because I made a joke on Twitter where I was like, oh man, I found out he's not called Red Guy going offline for a little while.

And Chris said to me afterwards, yeah, I realized you tell your version of it.

For anyone who doesn't know Concord's characters, just Google Concord Star Trial for Red Guy.

But as I was sitting and waiting on yet another nine minute match queue, so, you know, Red Guy was like impatiently rolling his eyes around on the character select screen, right?

And I was looking at him like, wait, this guy's mostly blue.

Yeah, so he's Red Guy.

He's got a red face and a blue, like really jacked guy, red face, blue body.

Yeah.

I just called him Red Guy once while during the beta, and I thought it was really funny.

And then the more I thought about it, the funnier it got.

Yeah.

So the fact that Chris, like two weeks later, while playing the actual game, is sitting there like, wait a second, he's not that red attention for two entire weeks, just to be like, wait a second, this guy's blue.

Don't they call him Red Guy in the game?

Honestly, I always thought that was like a deliberate joke, just like, okay, yeah, blue, Red Guy, I get it.

I mean, it was a little bit, it's like a little bit, but it was mainly just like, how do you describe these characters that have no-

We should also say, like, this was, I want to say this was the original thought from Kevin to just call him Red Guy.

I'm pretty sure.

I haven't watched any content on this game, so I'm pretty sure it's cause just-

If you Google Concord Red Guy, he's the first result that comes up in the images.

I searched Concord Red Guy enough that Google knows what I'm talking about, so it's just proliferated that to everybody, I'm pretty sure.

I'm typing that out.

Oh Lord, help us.

Yeah, I'd want to make sure I shout it out like another positive, though, because due to going for all the trophies, there are two per character.

It's like get this character to level 10 and get 50 kills with them.

And I have to say, as someone who put like four digit hours in Apex and kind of whittled down to like, OK, I like playing like these three or four and I don't really want to touch the others.

I think every single character in this game is actually really fun once you put in the time to learn it, which I don't often have with games like this, right?

I usually find a couple I really like and I settle into them.

Yeah.

But in this game, like if someone picks like my favorite, I'm like, OK, yeah, I'll gladly pick any other character on a roster because I think they're all actually pretty fun.

Very weird.

I did not expect.

I did not expect to come into this game and enjoy it at all in the first place, but I also didn't expect to like literally think every character on the roster is basically equally viable once you like really get into the game.

But again, I think had more than like three dozen players.

Maybe some medas would emerge and ruin that.

But there was a nice balance while this game existed for the two weeks.

I like I said, I think there's a point to be made mostly jokingly, but a little bit genuinely that Concord was was too pure a game.

In terms of the pure gameplay, because it's not inspiring in any way.

It's just kind of a polished, a very polished, those polished one of those games.

You are again, the Concord expert both here and on Earth.

Do you want to throw out any other thoughts that you have about the game?

Just kind of springboard to you of just heave thoughts on the game, because none of us can really talk about it.

And this is kind of a historic moment for the rest of time, because you're the only one that can talk about it.

Gosh, that's a lot of pressure.

Well, it's good to know that every opinion I have on it is correct.

It's the right one.

No one can prove me wrong after Friday.

So I am an expert.

I really like it, and I would honestly probably keep playing it throughout the seasons, but it is kind of basic in that we kind of covered everything already.

It feels pretty good to play, in my opinion, the time to...

What?

The cutscenes.

The whole thing that they were trying to show off, like every week you got cutscenes.

How are the cutscenes, Chris?

Oh, I heard...

Okay, I just heard cutscenes and was like...

Yeah, yeah, I want the cutscenes.

What's the story?

I want the monkey.

Um, okay, well, um...

They're there, I don't know.

There's two of them.

I only need it if you haven't watched a single one.

What are the file names for them again that show up?

They're throwing me off my train of thought.

Sorry.

I'm sorry.

The thing is, the two of the three cutscenes we got are the two from the beta.

I didn't find them particularly interesting or inspiring.

Wait, they're the same ones?

They didn't, like...

They padded out the first two weeks.

So the third one came out today during the game.

It went offline for maintenance, and people were pretty excited to get some new updates to the game, right?

And then that's when they announced the closure as the game went in for maintenance.

But the new cutscene was on when it came back, and it hints at a romance between Uncle Teo and the sniper, and then just kind of ends after two minutes.

And I'm like, this works if I like these characters.

I don't know anything about these characters, and I'm not invested, and this isn't investing me into them.

Which, to be fair, there is also the lore screen, the lore menu, which could tell you all of this stuff that you're not going to read, because there's a whole ass massive page.

Supposedly, the lore is pretty thought out and interesting for those who have the attention span for it, but it's like, I'm here to play the game, you know, I can't make myself sit there and read like 10 paragraphs on the suck plot, right?

Well, how dare you for one?

Wow.

What?

Can't believe this.

And that's not to decry it, it's just like, I just don't want to do that, right?

I want to hear about the characters through other ways, if that's comics or whatever, like they're releasing animated shorts on YouTube.

I again, I'm going, I need to get this off my chest.

I was so disappointed with Suckbot.

He was the only character on the roster that I was like, I like this guy's design.

I want to play as him.

He looks cool.

And he's just like a sucking blow.

All you do, your Luigi's Mansion.

You take this like Monster's Ink Tube, the Scream Tube, and you go around and then sometimes you set it to suck and you set it to blow.

And you just like pull people around.

And I was so sad because this guy looks like a boss from Mega Man Legends.

And that's really it.

So Chris could talk more about it, but part of that character's appeal is that he sucks up bullets and hazards.

And so he just kind of absorbs all of the attacks you throw at him.

And wins.

Yeah, he's a good distraction.

You have to stick with your teammates, but if they're firing a bunch of stuff, it just swoops right in.

And then it fills up your trash bags, and you can throw exploding trash bags at people.

It's a dumb game.

I like that he stops littering.

He went from my least favorite character to one of my favorites once I realized and put myself in situations where he's good.

But until I got there, I didn't understand what you were supposed to do with that.

Never talk to me again.

Yeah, that's valid.

It again, it's one of those where I it's a shame that the game has turned out the way it is.

It's not a surprise except for the timing of it being a surprise because to again, not just go the we're just going to let it die slowly and then go free to play out route, but to actively refund every single player.

Yeah, that's a surprise.

That's insane.

I think we're in the pre-show.

You guys heard me surprised.

What do you mean they're refunding people?

Yeah.

I thought they were just going to take the money and bail so that they could cut their losses.

I'm guessing there's maybe a tax write-off implications, probably, which was a thought that I had had in the same vein as SEGA's Hyenas game, which was also $100 million game that didn't come out.

Isn't that also a chase trending game?

Kind of like an extraction shooter kind of thing.

Yeah.

Speaking of extraction shooter, it's a little cynical.

You ready for this?

It had Sonic Battleborn lasted longer than Concord.

Hawk 2A lasted longer than Concord.

I think in terms of games, suck on that thing.

In terms of games, I think that Concord didn't last longer than anything.

I can't think of anything that wasn't cancelled last minute.

Even Destruction All-Stars, the game that was supposed to be a full-priced game at launch for the PS5, that Sony then said, actually nah, it's going to come out in February on PS Plus, discs are $20, that is still alive, technically.

Isn't Foam Stars still getting update?

Yeah, Foam Stars is on its final season potentially, because it's like the last chance for it to get semi-profitable or whatever.

Yeah.

I was going to say they could have gotten away with doing the Destruction All-Stars thing again, because no one remembers Destruction All-Stars, so no one would have been like, oh, they're doing it again.

They could have been cars.

Yo, it's Red Guy with Cat, Trav's cat's on.

Cat.

Yo.

They could have done it immediately after the beta, which is what you would have assumed going by the numbers was like, OK, now is their chance to pull out because it's yes, it'd be annoying to have to temporarily refund people or whatever, but it's better than the alternative, which ended up actually being refunding people anyway.

So my current is the only reason I could think of is tax right off.

Sorry.

No, no, no, you're good.

My current assumption is just that this was a game that was very clearly greenlit by prior Sony brass, and it was just very much, well, it's too late now.

We have to make a choice and we're not going to delay it a year and put another $10 million into it because that's how much it probably would have cost just in terms of manpower.

So you either try and it fails and you get a tax right off, or you cancel it and get maybe also the same tax right off, but get shit on for not trying.

There's not really any win-win here.

Like this was a bad idea to have greenlit.

It got very clearly stuck in some sort of development struggle over the course of its production because it wouldn't have come out this polished but generic otherwise.

Right, it feels like there's some weird fundamental just mishmash of like the AAA PlayStation, high fidelity, high production with like very classic old school shooter design.

And I think those things can appeal to different people, but I don't think smushing them into a congealed product appeals to anyone, unfortunately, as we've seen.

Yeah, yeah.

Like if it was one or the other and they leaned really in, like if this was like a $20 classic hero shooter or whatever, it went for retro vibe and appealed to those people, maybe there would have been something here, right?

And the one thing I'll bounce off of that we haven't said yet that we probably should have said is there's also the element of the rest of the market that exists for this kind of shooter.

Valorant just came to console, so that immediately ate a lot of market share.

The Marvel Rivals game is in beta at the same time that Concord was coming out.

It's coming out later in the year.

Same state of play.

They just announced it's going free to play.

Which is by default, having anything Marvel was going to win out over this, and having it free to play was going to win out over this.

So you're asking people to pay for a game when every other version of the game is free.

Then Deadlock is finally allowed to be talked about publicly.

So then all the PC players are like, well, why would I play that one?

I can play Monday Night Combat over here.

And it's just there's so many of these games.

And I said on Twitter that the fact that this game, besides the point that you made, Chris, about it maybe being a 2018 active production, the fact this game started production before Fortnite in some capacity, even if it was pre-production.

Oh, God.

This is one of the final games that will have either come out or been canceled that started production before Fortnite changed how the market was seen.

And yeah, because there was Fortnite ballooning and then there was like Fortnite is just a fact of life.

Yeah.

And we're in that era for sure now.

And and there was a tweet thread that we've talked about earlier episodes of the podcast.

There was a former Square Enix, I think, marketing executive or employee, rather, not executive, who some financial guy.

Yeah.

Somebody who worked in like the in the back end of Square Enix, who was talking about the thing that we always hear about Square Enix saying the games were financial disappointments, even if they sell 20 million copies.

And the whole thing was, well, from their perspective, they're they could have invested all of that production money into just into into stocks, and it would have made more money.

And that is the metric by which they have to say, well, it didn't make more than just the base market.

And so that was one of the issues that a lot of these games are running into, which is why you see Final Fantasy and all the other games, all these other games being said to be, well, they didn't really perform as we want to do.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, they're still sending like so like in the millions upon millions.

And the other element is that we're talking about now an era of games where games like a Final Fantasy and also I'm not putting this in the same conversation or like a Concord games in that games that are paid games are not just competing for money anymore.

You're not competing with games that you're coming out around.

You're competing with established entrenched games and sleep.

So do you want to spend forty dollars on Concord or seventy dollars on Final Fantasy Rebirth?

Or do you want to just do your dailies in Fortnite?

Because that's easier and it's cheaper.

It sure is.

And there are some nights where I was like, I guess I'll load in a Zenla Zone Zero instead of playing more Concord, just to make myself even more of a degenerate.

It would have helped more if you had played Concord because you'd be closer to that platinum trophy.

My most played games these last couple of weeks has been Deadlock and Warframe, which are both free to play games.

And so it's one of those where it's going to be really tough to break out going forward.

There's always room for games like Helldivers, for example, that can just completely break the mold and do it.

There's always room for Nintendo games that are going to do what they do, no matter what.

You know, the first party Sony library is in the same same group, usually nowadays, because they're going to perform pretty reliably in the 10 million range at this point.

Concord excused.

And like these these companies have learned how to get their audiences to buy into the brand and not just the individual games, which is good for the era we're currently in.

Because if you don't do that, like Final Fantasy is not a prestige series anymore.

If you think about it, it used to be like when that came out, that was the video game.

That was all the press.

That was the big event of the season.

SE7EN Rebirth came out.

We talked about it.

A lot of people talked about it.

But it's not an event because there's other, A, more important things in the world going on.

And B, Fortnite exists.

And so it's going to be really interesting to see how AAA has to adapt going forward for this.

And I think from the Sony perspective, we've seen some of the Sony executives more recently say, like, yeah, you know, we're recalibrating a little bit on our games as a service strategy, which was kind of code for.

Yeah.

Like, oh, Congress coming out.

Better get ready.

Yeah, it's just an interesting world we're going to be going in the next couple of years because games are only going to get more expensive to make and they're only going to sell worse broadly.

I can't wait for Matthew McConaughey to be in another hero shooter.

Was he in a hero shooter?

Another?

Yeah.

Is he in Concord?

Yeah, he's in Overwatch.

Is he blue guy?

Oh, okay.

I'm kidding.

Okay, not only did you say Matthew McConaughey, but my mental image was of Matthew Broderick and I was like, why is he in a hero shooter?

I mean, that too.

Yeah, gosh.

I think he could be he could be a red guy.

Who's going to be a red guy in the Concord show on Amazon?

The secret level episode.

Gosh, someone's gotta be red guy.

I would say Batista.

Oh my God, I forgot they're they're doing a Concord episode.

I would say Batista.

I can see Batista.

The dude's just a rip off of Batista's character in Guardians.

What's his name?

He brought me to Christopher Judge.

Drex.

Not Drex.

Drex doesn't know the character that that's Yondu.

Yondu is the main guy.

Oh, he's he's beer.

Yeah, he's the spiky.

What's his name, Chris Lennox Lennox Lennox?

Why do I know that?

Why do you know?

Isn't that like a isn't that a printer?

Yeah, probably.

I think I know Lennox because I've said what's his name and then looked it up over and over again.

And Lenny, God, this is spelled with a Lennox or Lennox with an I.

Lennox.

Yeah.

OK.

Then I know that name from Transformers.

Oh, see there.

OK.

Lennox rollout.

Speaking of Transformers, all of the Transformers Activision games are on Game Pass soon or now.

I saw that recently.

What?

Hold on.

That's huge.

No, unless that was fake.

But I'm pretty sure Phil Spencer responded to that directly.

Those games have been delisted for years.

I guess they were able to relicense them because they're they own.

Because it's like a Microsoft thing now.

Dude, huge if true.

That's really funny from the perspective.

Oh my God.

Two days ago, are Microsoft bringing back the Transformers?

What are the answers?

Eight hours ago, Transformers games to be released by Microsoft, it says Concord died.

Dude, you just ruined my life.

Big F to Concord.

I'm dancing on that grave.

Chris, what were you saying?

The perspective I got this news from, the Order of Events was an interview where Phil Spencer was like, yeah, I've made some really bad game choices in my career.

You know, I passed on Genshin Impact and Spider-Man.

And then like it felt like three hours later, it was like the Transformers games are coming to Game Pass.

I'm like, bro, this guy's cooked.

I don't know.

So that's really funny.

Doubly so from the perspective of I've passed on some really, really bad mistakes in my time.

And then Concord comes out.

Oh, my gosh.

Like Concord, for the perspective of Console Wars, which none of us care about, but it's going to be really funny seeing all of the Xbox fans be like, oh, you made fun of Redfall.

Concord was even worse.

And it's like, yeah, we all lost.

Everyone, no one won in that situation.

I think one of the games he cited was Destiny as well.

Like he passed on the Destiny exclusivity, right?

So I'm like, well, there's your Halo Bungie developers, you know, you can go get them back now.

Maybe there's no, there's no way that they would have done exclusivity with Microsoft because they bought themselves out.

I mean, maybe, maybe it was like a Destiny 2 thing, who knows?

Maybe like a weird first write of passage or whatever he called those things.

I hope he was also like, yeah, I passed on the idea of adding a car to Starfield.

So now we have a car in Starfield.

Gosh.

Here's our big update.

It's a Honda.

Have you played the car in Starfield, Trav?

You'd be the only one, I think.

No, I did reinstall the game because so my guess is the reason they released this early and not with the DLC is because they wanted people to start playing the game again so that by the time the DLC is out, most people have met the prerequisites to actually play the game.

And also know how to play again.

Or actually play the DLC.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So I did reinstall.

They did win.

I have not started a game yet, though.

So no, I haven't touched it.

From what I've heard, immediately, the first thing I saw was people driving it into towns and running over police.

God, OK, that makes sense.

That's kind of ethical.

Yeah, man.

Grant, that thought of six is cool.

True.

We got concrete before GTA six, man.

Yeah, it came out in time.

Or she started development near the beginning of GTA six.

Wait, what am I saying?

I don't know.

You're right.

I don't.

I forgot to say if I was 2013 because the more I talked, I was like, wait a second.

No, that wasn't that close.

But it feels like it.

Everything hurts.

Everything hurts.

Everything hurts.

Man, I hate this.

I'm just looking at Etsy on my PC screen instead of you.

And I'm just hearing like your voice coming from her.

Did you press the buttons there, Sean?

Yes.

Oh, the buttons are gone.

Can I have one?

Wait, did you pop your shirt?

I'm mad.

Males presenting nipple.

For our audio listeners, Sean was dressed in a very allegedly demure and mindful way.

That lasted longer than Concord, too.

Jesus.

Dressed very, very for the occasion of the funeral in a nice black button down, which has he has now ripped it off.

And I didn't like that you said that he is shirtless underneath.

No, I'm not.

In fact, in fact, he is not only shirtless, he's wearing like a weird reflective, reflective happy trail.

Like there's like a set of hair.

There's a there's like a mirror going down his down his happy trail so we can see his junk on camera.

So if you want to go to the YouTube feed and see that youtube.com/atcrubofficial, and if you want to see the uncensored version, patreon.com/crub, you can join the Patreon, get a bunch of bonus content for as little as five dollars a month, such as video content like.

Chris, what are we?

What have we done lately?

What is it?

What's the thing?

What's the term you use?

Happy Trail.

Yeah, thank you.

It's a reflective, though.

It has to, you know, shine back at you.

Yeah.

What what what content have we done on the Patreon lately in video form, Chris?

I can't think of anything but Concord, like I'm sitting here trying to remember.

It's like Brody and I ranked some fish recently for three hours.

I forgot about that.

Oh, that's up there.

So seeing that is that is that that's oh my God, that comes out.

That's also the story is this Friday that you're doing the full fish bracket at the time of recording.

So this should be coming out first week.

We had some scheduling issues because Nico's overseas this week.

So so this Friday, the day you're listening to this, Concord will both be dead.

And to celebrate Concord's death, they're doing a fish bracket at twitch.tv/crubunderscoreofficial.

There's an underscore on Twitch where Chris, Brody, Sean, Guest, Raiden, and...

Was there a fifth one?

I don't know.

Maybe.

Keep me far away from this.

Maybe someone else.

They're doing a full bracket of fish like they did for horses.

They stream themselves deciding the single best insert gaming noun here.

So gaming horse, gaming dog, gaming wet dog, sorry.

And now gaming the fish.

I have it on good authority that Hydro Pak Clank did not make it.

Yeah, I specifically made sure he got the axe.

Yeah, which is fair.

Here's a robot, which is pretty cool.

Speaking of...

I'm interested and afraid to see what this list even looks like.

Speaking of cool robots, Astrobot comes out today at the time of publish as well.

Oh, yeah.

I guess I'll plug myself on that one.

I wasn't going to, but I have a video review of it.

I've already played it today at the time of recording.

So if you want to play that instead of Concord, you can you should do it.

I think you have to play that instead of Concord.

Yeah, yeah.

Someone listens to this.

I don't think Chris, give us a tease of what they can expect from us in the future.

Nothing good.

More podcasts.

Amen.

Yeah, podcast them on.

We have a podcast.

Yeah.

Oh, we do have a podcast at crud.org/join.

You can join the Discord server where we have book crud every month.

We go through a usually free game provided on one of the major platforms, Amazon, Epic Games, PlayStation's Game Pass, Real Game Pass, whatever it might be.

And we do a little book club about it every month with everyone who is in the server who wants to play it and talk about it with us.

It's a fun time.

Yeah, I don't know what we're doing this month.

What game is this month?

Concord.

Concord.

We're doing Concord this month, so it'll be a weird one.

Are you serious?

No.

No, it's the Callisto Protocol.

Callisto Protocol.

Not Dead Space.

PUBG Dead Space.

I was trying to see if you have answers to everything, but I'm literally playing Concord and can't think right now.

Sorry.

That's true.

You need to get them Concord trophies.

We need to question Chris's commitment to Concord.

No, when he saw the announcement today, he had a mental snap.

He's gone.

I said, it's now or never.

I'm in a lobby right now with devoted 2 trophies, so you know I'm out here.

Devoted 2 trophies.

Yeah, you gotta be first.

That's his user name too.

It's really a commitment.

That's great.

I just found out I ripped off every single button, actually, that was buttoned.

It sounded like a lot of them popped off.

Every single one.

I was like, oh, I have nothing to fidget.

You should bury red guy in that shirt.

I should.

Yeah, put him in my chest.

Very red guy.

Trav, what have you been up to lately?

What's your life been like?

Oh boy.

Not a lot.

Let's see.

What have I been up to?

I've been working on a couple projects for YouTube.

Cool.

Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2.

So I hope people look forward to that.

Are you going to put the same as V-Pix?

I've been playing.

Yeah, actually.

But I've been playing a lot of Deadlock.

That's really it.

Deadlock is one of those where you you sent me an invite for it.

And you two have both played it.

I don't know if you have, Sean.

I own it, but I haven't played it yet.

Yeah.

Trav sent me.

Well, let me know if you ever want to.

Trav sent me an invite.

And I look at that one in the same way I look at Concord, because like it's not a hero shooter necessarily, but it kind of is.

And I, again, I just don't have interest in those games.

The only one I ever liked was Monday Night Combat, and that came out before hero shooters were a genre.

And I, I just want Monday Night Combat.

And to be fair, Deadlock does seem like the closest one to one of those games.

For those that don't know what Deadlock is, it's Valve's new MOBA shooter combo.

Russian Clank.

It's been in beta for like a year secretly.

Yeah.

They've been slowly...

The way that it worked originally was a very select few people got access to it, and then they could invite people, and then they had to be vetted, and then they'd be approved to play.

And then it got turned into people could invite an infinite amount of people, and they just automatically get accepted, and then they just weed them out as they go on, which is why you can see now, I think it just crossed 100,000 concurrent players for a game that isn't even out.

Three Concord, three Concord.

Wow.

Yeah, pre Concord.

No, no, that was one thing I saw.

Like before you were even allowed to talk about this game publicly, they were like, yeah, it has more players than Concord did at peak, which is hilarious.

Yeah, that's it's not a not a huge surprise.

Valve's very good in that any of their games tend to have really, really long legs as far as concurrent players, because they're either so cheap or free and relatively supported forever.

So that's one thing I really like about a lot of Valve stuff.

And it's why, yeah, if there were any of these sorts of game that I would play, I think Deadlock by virtue of just it feels like Monday Night Combat to me from what I've seen you guys play.

That would be the one I would play.

But I'm kind of I'm going to wait a while because I know what those games do to me.

Like, they're not they're not good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's weird for me personally, because I don't care for MOBAs.

The only MOBA that I really liked was Awesome Nuts.

And I also don't care for Hero Shooters that much.

But for some reason, they just they made it work.

And it's been super fun playing it with like I got a bunch of people in my server into it.

And we've just been hopping on every night, play a couple of rounds, just like coordinating with the team is just a super like the way that they balanced it.

I'll shut up about this game in just a moment.

But the way that they balanced it like there's no like dedicated roles for people.

Like there's no dedicated medic.

There's no dedicated like DPS.

It's just here's your character and what they can do.

And then you have options to modify those moves like, all right, so this move now will heal you depending on how much damage you do with it.

Or this move will now make an AOE that will also give the move to everyone around you.

And it's like so like everyone in their own way is support.

And in that way, kind of like no one's support.

And so it really encourages people to work together in ways that other than just like giving you an XP boost if you help your teammates.

And it's like, it's, they.

It's interesting.

I did not, I was prepared to be this game's number one hater.

You know, I was just like, why isn't Valve making games?

I like, why aren't they fixing the bot problem in TF2?

Which they did end up fixing.

So everything you're telling them to do, they've done.

Well, they took all the bots from TF2 and they put them in deadlock.

Yeah, surprisingly not, but, you know, maybe give it time.

I'm at the lane bots.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah.

The little candle robots.

But yeah, no, it's just been a huge shock because I was fully prepared to just hit the game, but it's been awesome.

Yeah, no, it seems cool.

Like I said, those are the kind of like Apex was that way for me.

And I know you as well, Chris, that was a our comfort game for a long time for just let's not think, which is also why I don't think I'm going to be super as hooked on Deadlock as I would be other games in that vein, because it seems like it's a lot more like you do have to pay attention and coordinate, and I specifically avoid those games because if I'm playing multiplayer games, it's not the thing.

Yeah, it's definitely more involved.

Like with Apex, there's like a natural rhythm and like a peak in valley kind of vibe with the actions you had to take.

Deadlock is a lot more like I'm always looking at the map, I'm always seeing what I'm doing, whether people are doing.

It's very involved.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which that was the thing, like again, not to mention Monday Night Combat again, but for those that missed that game in its era, it lasted longer than Concord.

It was one of those Xbox Live arcade games that came out during the summer of arcade, I think 2010, and it was essentially a, like imagine like a, when I say an eSport, I literally mean a game that has a sports ESPN presentation, but it's about these characters going in this video game thing.

It's really cool.

But they made a sequel and then shut down as a company because the sequel wasn't nearly as good.

And that one was very much like, you didn't have to pay attention again.

It's that right level of halo level of attention paying, I think, is the way I would describe it.

Because, you know, in Call of Duty, you can get to a point where you tune out in halo.

You can tune out much more comfortably because there's a higher higher time to kill.

So you have more health, you survive longer and you can still wreck shit.

And that's the kind of multiplayer game I like is the one my brain is off and I'm just doing and I'm just shooting the shit with my friends.

And we're cracking jokes about probably Concord.

And we you know, we have fun.

And then you can still like hunker down and win if you want to, you know, on the on the topic of Halo, assuming anyone else has anything to build off of that.

No, I'm on the topic of Halo.

I've also found it interesting revisiting it because I just I had the itch to play Infinite's campaign again for some reason.

Don't know why.

Just wanted to attract.

I like the grapple hook.

It's fun.

But I played the new firefight mode, which is weird now because they made it capture.

Sorry, King of the Hill, rather than just kill everything.

That's weird.

Yeah.

So it's it's a imagine King of the Hill multiplayer, but the enemies like the grunts and brutes are trying to capture the point.

And if they hold the point for too long, they score a point.

That kind of makes sense, actually, because firefight was very of its time and that it was a horde mode and every horde mode was just survive.

This would at least give them something to change.

That's interesting.

Yeah, it's actually surprisingly fun.

I wasn't fond of it at first, but it grew on me.

Yeah.

But the point I was going with that is like Halo also did something really interesting that I'm I knew, but I'm acknowledging again and appreciating that building off of that, like just kind of turn my brain off and play thing.

You only really die in Halo if you get a lot of punishment at once, like you can go back, catch your breath, and you're not going to be sitting there at one HP and poke your head out and die instantly.

Like I know Call of Duty also had like regenerating health, but it's like, it made me kind of appreciate the concept of like regenerating health and armor, something that I used to just brush off.

I'm just like, OK, I kind of kind of get the loop that they're going for, just like, OK, you die when you take a lot of damage at once, a lot of punishment.

And I think that as I've gotten older and experienced more games, I just can appreciate that more.

That's what I really liked about Reach.

And at some point, Chris, you and I have gone through the campaign of Halo 1.

At some point, we're both going to have the time and we're going to sit down and we're going to do one, two, get four players to do three and do the whole series up till Reach when I stop.

Text me, text me.

Yeah.

And I also want to do multiplayer for those when we do sit down and finally have like the time to do that.

And the reason I say that is because A, like I miss Reach multiplayer and B, because like you said, Reach had something really interesting in that it went back to what kind of earlier Halo games had had mainly one where you have your shield, but you also do have health and your health doesn't regenerate, but your shield does.

And that was a really interesting compromise because you could find health packs on the map.

It meant that you had to change a little bit of your strategy.

You couldn't just camp necessarily.

And it didn't super affect you.

It just meant that if you don't have any armor at all, you got to be very, very careful until it recharges, versus you can take a hit, just not a headshot or whatever.

But like I said, I'll take you.

I misreach.

Infinite was still fun for what it was.

I haven't gone back to play it.

It's still downloadable.

I enjoyed the campaign from what I played.

It was very plain.

It was very plain.

It is pretty basic.

Like I was like, man, this is just like every Ubisoft game, but with Master Chief in it.

Huh?

Yeah.

I didn't have old Halo to compare it to, but I always had a good time when we would play Infinite for sure.

Yeah.

A lot of it was like me, not just me, but a lot of it was like us complaining mainly about the gravity because they changed a lot of like the super wonky, like you could jump super high.

And if you threw a grenade under a car, it go flip over and kill somebody.

They had changed all of that specifically by slider.

Like they turned down the gravity for the multiplayer, which was always frustrating.

But the gameplay still hit.

It was just that everything else sucked.

Yeah, just like the physics of what you're used to with like Halo multiplayer is just kind of gone.

And they even have it in the freaking campaign, but they took it out of the multiplayer because hey, we got to make sure that we're going to go ahead and make this very e-sports friendly.

I will...

What e-sports you say?

I'll piss in your shoes.

It's a fascinating one because like, as far as I know, Halo is mostly surviving from its competitive play now, because like it kind of lost all of its players and I don't think it's going to get them back.

I know they dropped all the season's structure, I think now.

I think that the old season still exists, but there's no more new seasons is the thing, which is really good sign for that game's future.

Yeah.

I'm curious how it would have looked if they would have actually had like physics that we're used to, you know, like would it have more people playing now?

I don't know.

I probably a little bit, but I don't think it's a lot of that wasn't the fundamental issue.

Oh, yeah.

Of the structure of the game was so greedy, like every one of these shooters tends to be now.

And that's the part that really stuck out and bothered me because it's, oh, you need a specific armor core to equip the armor.

Like it used to be you did a thing and you got armor and that was it.

You put it on.

Yeah.

But now it was like you have to have a specific...

I'm happy to say that they've rolled some of that back.

Which is good.

They also haven't marketed that is also part of the issue.

Yeah, I didn't know about it until I opened the game.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's the issue is that like, I didn't know about it until right this second.

So it was a strange one because it feels like Halo dipped right as like sharing of game clips and everything really started to take off.

So we had a weird thing where Halo probably should have ballooned on paper to be even more of a cultural thing somehow.

But instead it just dipped and here we are like 10 years later, still being like, man, Halo, huh?

It's an interesting, cool thing.

Like they it's a lot of that comes down to Microsoft historically fumbling the bag, not in terms of like historical sense, but over the course of history, fumbling the bag by way of pissing off Bungie, which in hindsight was probably a better move than it looked like at the time.

But pissing off Bungie leading to destiny, leading to 343, who hadn't actually made much of their games, getting credit for a lot of the Halo games they still weren't really making and being more of a co-publisher and all of that stuff.

But like, because Halo was like the start of game sharing too, in terms of like clip sharing, because like there were all those, like the red versus blue highlights of the week type stuff.

Like that was early YouTube, the top tens.

Yeah.

And the conversation kind of got me thinking about that, because I feel like if Infinite did have the crazy Halo physics, I would have seen a lot more random clips of that happening on my Twitter and stuff, right?

And it would have been like, oh, man, I should play that.

That looks fun.

That looks stupid, right?

Yeah.

That looks goofy as hell.

But instead, it's just like, oh, well, the campaign is kind of cool, but the multiplayer is weird.

And that's all I ever heard about Infinite.

You just made me think of something.

Yeah.

Sorry, Sean.

I want to go to you anyway, actually, because I know what Chris has been doing.

So I was going to ask what you've been doing lately.

OK.

But before I do, you just made me think about the fact that Halo is a good analog, fittingly, for Concord, because that game was delayed by a full year and nothing changed.

Right.

Yeah.

Like that game was supposed to come out at launch in 2020, and it got delayed by a full year because it wasn't ready.

And it came out in 2021 and it still was half baked.

They still didn't have Forge.

They still didn't have any of the basic Halo things that you expect from a launch of a Halo game.

Like it doesn't even have it might have Griffball now.

But like Griffball was the easiest thing in the world to add in, like not just to add into the game, but to have in the game to make really funny, cool clips.

For those that don't know what Griffball was and is, it's an in-universe red versus blue sport that they made up and then said, wait, we can put this into a game.

And it's one person has the bomb, which is the ball.

Everyone has swords and hammers and high gravity.

And the goal is just to plant the bomb on the other person's end zone to win.

Yeah.

And it is super fun, super chaotic, because you have the gravity hammer.

So when you hit somebody, they go flying.

And everyone has high health except for the person with the ball who has no health.

So it was very much like you try and manipulate the physics.

You try and have your teammates launch you because it was team killing.

Yeah.

Super, super fun thing that that carried a lot of Halo's like virality for a long, long time missing from from Infinite Launch.

Yeah, because I remember like even in Infinite, like I was always I remember like we would play like the big maps where they had like the warthogs and stuff.

And every time, instead of like, you know, going to get a different gun or whatever, I would always go for like the big explosives because it's just fun to throw that at people, you know, but it didn't have the same impact that I was still looking for, you know, I still gravitated towards it, but it just I'm not shooting people off into space now and it's upsetting.

Yeah.

And there's even more like there's more to go into with Halo.

We've talked about it before and we're not going to make the Concord podcast about Halo, but it is Halo's fault that Concord happened.

So, yeah, come on, Halo, Halo, Halo murdered Concord.

So Sean, what have you been up to?

Well, actually, hold on, before we go further, Trav, I have been fighting a piss.

I'm sorry.

Are you OK if we take five?

Yeah.

Like just from recording.

Cool.

Sorry.

Thank you.

So Sean, what have you been up to lately?

I know what Chris has been doing and we already asked Trav.

Well, what have you been gaming?

I've been playing a lot of Madden and I am almost done with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, even though that should have been done a long time ago.

We can finally do the spoiler cast that we meant to do.

Yeah, we can do the spoiler cast.

God.

That's not even-

That feels like a better pace for that game, honestly.

Just kind of taking your time with that one.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

That kind of sounds nice actually.

I tuned down for a second.

Are you doing a spoiler cast for Madden?

Yeah.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

That sounds disgusting.

I hate that.

They killed Patrick Mahomes.

You know, he was deserved.

It was crazy how they put two timelines in the Madden though.

I wasn't prepared for that one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, I didn't like it.

There's one where Madden is there and there's one where he's not.

John Madden is seeing players that aren't there in reality.

It's like, what's wrong, John?

He's like, it's nothing.

We need to get going.

You can't see him because there are two Madden 25.

That's true.

This is the year they could do it, actually.

You're right.

Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't go with Madden 2025 this year only.

I'm not surprised, but I'm a little surprised.

They probably forgot.

They probably honestly forgot.

No one who worked on that one is still alive.

So, no.

And if you are, I'm sorry.

For those unfamiliar, Madden 25 was the 25th anniversary Madden of 2014?

2013-2014.

It was the one that had Calvin Johnson.

No, I thought.

Yeah, it was.

It was that one.

And there was 25 that had, I think.

Larry Fitzgerald and Troy Palamalou's.

Yeah, there were multiple.

It doesn't matter.

There are multiple versions.

There was also one with one of the legendary running backs.

Anyway, Rebirth, a good game.

I'm enjoying it.

As time goes on, I'm more fond of it.

I still that's because I've forgotten all the critiques, like I've adjusted human wood.

Yeah, I'm like wanting to beat Rebirth so I can restart Persona 3 Reload, because playing two RPGs at the same time, not too...

No, can't do it.

I started on Reload way back in my mouth.

There is...

Actually, I'm stupid.

I forgot the other game that I'm playing, because I'm actually streaming this one.

It's Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door, and it's my first time ever playing it.

Remake, I'm assuming?

Yes, and I am so in love with this game.

It's so fun.

It's really good.

It's your first time playing it?

Yeah, I never played it when I was younger.

It's a good...

I actually look forward to hearing your final thoughts on it from a new perspective.

So fun.

Because I love that game, but just with how my brain works, it's so hard for me to like talk about what I love about it without getting nostalgic.

Yeah, it's one of those things that like I get because I'm very nostalgic for certain games as well.

So being able to play this game now, and also like Final Fantasy 7 in general, because I never played those games, the original, like being able to experience these things for the first time, whereas other people love these games, it's very cool to me to like experience these, I've said it like seven times, but experience these with like a fresh set of eyes, that it's one of those that like I'm upset that I didn't play these games sooner, but at the same time, because I'm doing them when I'm older, I can really appreciate a lot of like nuances that I probably wouldn't have noticed when I was younger.

That's kind of what I've been doing with, because I've been on the podcast in a while, besides last week.

In the time I'd been off, I did a lot of the rest of the God of War recording for the Greek saga for videos, just mainly as I'm stubborn, I'm going to get these done no matter how they do algorithmically, you know, just because that was part of the plan.

I'm going to do them.

And I've really enjoyed playing the Greek saga because I didn't play them because I didn't really like the idea of Kratos, because very quickly he already was bastardized into angry.

Yeah.

And to be fair, in a lot of the games, he is just angry.

But yeah, like it was a warranted needless stereotyping of the character.

But I've enjoyed going back with the with the stuff I already knew from like, you know, just osmosis from from culture.

And then also knowing that he does grow and seeing like what these moments that you can pinpoint later on in the series that are like, oh, they definitely were calling back to that because they were artsy about it.

Did you play the Valhalla DLC by chance?

I know stuff about it.

I haven't played it mainly because it came out when I was like, I don't feel like playing that one.

Yeah, that's fair.

I was going to ask like correlations and whatnot, but that makes sense.

Because I know that one is very specifically like if you thought Ragnarok mentioned a lot of Kratos' Greek past.

Oh, yeah, this is Valhalla is like entirely Kratos being like, oh, yeah, I remember this character like it's very fan service, which is really cool.

It's like an infinite wealth, but for Kratos in that way.

Kind of it.

So like Valhalla is very much like Kratos, like looking at things from like a different standpoint because it's like, oh, I did all this terrible stuff.

It's like, yes, but we're not excusing what you did, but like we're understanding your viewpoint at the time.

It's like a closure in a way.

Him coming to accept himself.

Accepting.

Yeah, it's not excusing, but it's accepting it.

And then playing on the theme that even as far back as God of War 3, they talk about Kratos being the god of hope in God of War 3.

Because of the way that that game's plot goes, he like Pandora's Box was filled with fear and also hope as the counter to fear as like the mythos side of it.

I should really play these.

And everyone, everyone always assumed that in one, when Kratos opens it, he's able to kill gods now because he has that fear in him that was locked away.

But no, it's that he is hope.

And so the idea of him not just being the god of war, but being a god of hope is something that they carried through the Greek Saga and him coming to terms with all that stuff.

And finally, it's kind of just therapy for Kratos.

Like finally, just kind of going through rogue therapy.

Yeah, which very much it pretty much is.

But it's very well done.

I I really liked all the stuff that he did and the boss fights.

But I've heard it's very, very fun.

And that's also why I didn't want to go back to it, because I was like, I haven't played it in a year.

So I'm going to have to start fresh and I'd rather.

I already knew I was going to do this.

So I was like, I'd rather just wait, you know, because you have to play it like five or six times in a row to get all the stories if you want to get the ending.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

Like even like.

And that's if you beat the boss.

Yeah.

And the bosses change, too.

It's not just like the same.

It's very it's a road.

And what's really cool sidebar is that the director, one of the two directors of that DLC is like, he's been working on the series since God of War.

I think one, maybe two.

I think they've been there the whole time, which is really cool, because there's always that weird that weird David Jaffe push of, well, they changed the character.

And it's like, yeah, but mother mother effort.

You already said that you liked where Corey Barlog was going with it.

And it turns out that all the people that are directing and working on these games are people that he brought back because he's like, let's get the gang back together.

Yeah.

You just weren't a part of it.

You're upset now.

Yeah, it's just that you haven't changed as a person.

What a funny little man.

I think as an outsider, I just hear all the stuff they do in a new game.

So I'm like, oh, that makes me actually want to play it and see what's up, though.

Right.

It actually sounds interesting.

I think before I perceived Kratos as the guy who was angry like you were getting at.

Yeah.

Like he still has no interest in it.

Sorry, Sean, go ahead.

Oh, I just say he still is.

But like, it's interesting to see like how he has grown.

And I will say that you don't even have to play the original trilogy to start with the 2018 God of War.

You just need to know, hey, like I hate everybody.

And it's one of the masterful things they did with God of War for what was them saying, no matter what, just on cultural osmosis of the character, just on the robot chicken spoofs of the character, you know what Kratos is in God of War for.

And there's some cool stuff they did with like I've had to read some of the comics they did just to like get, you know, like they did an Egyptian comic and it's really bad.

But they did a Greek prelude comic, which was like right before the fourth game starts, right before 2018.

And it shows like the whole thing is like Atreus doesn't really know his dad throughout the whole game.

And even in this comic, it's like, I don't really like you just keep abandoning abandoning us.

And then Kratos' perspective, it's him going into the forest to fight a bunch of shit because he's trying to temper his rage and be calm while fighting.

Yeah.

And so it's him just actively holding back until he snaps.

Which, again, really cool stuff.

Also, like a thousand or two thousand years passed between three and four.

Yeah.

So if you're angry for two thousand years, you kind of kind of a you thing.

Yeah.

God, so good.

I love it.

So good.

Yeah.

Doom Guy.

Yeah.

I think Doom Guy and Kratos would make good parents.

They would definitely kiss.

Mm hmm.

That's how Kratos gets another threesome, right?

With Doom Guy and Red Guy.

You got a red guy.

OK, who's in the middle, though?

Like, he's getting powered.

Yeah, yeah, I think Red Guy deserves it.

He's he needs some love.

He's put where he doesn't pick me up right about now, probably.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

They pick him up as well instead of like just having him on his hands.

Yeah, they hold him like the cradle.

I'm like, oh, never mind the cradle.

I'm like, oh, so here.

Yeah, I want to ask.

I don't like I want up his as he's getting just Eiffel Tower.

Oh, how do you get up his wall being a tower?

I told you is it like really windy in that day?

Like, you know, how you like wheelbarrow somebody spit roast, Chris.

Do you know how you wheelbarrow somebody?

No, I don't.

What?

Yeah, you wheelbarrow, like, you could pick your legs up, right?

Yeah, you pick your legs up.

Is this like when I pick up people and make them eat my lawn?

Sure.

Yeah.

OK.

No, that's lawn mowering, dumbass.

Yeah.

What?

Uncultured.

So wheelbarrow is like the it's like a unicycle, but with for dirt.

Yeah.

Speaking of receptacles for trash and dirt, it's time for the Crub next segment.

Patreon question.

I didn't want to call the Patreon question the thing that's holding dirt.

I meant our channel is holding dirt.

The question of the week on the dirt receptacle of the Crubcast here, the question was from TK Hubworld, which was perfectly fit for today.

So Akimbot is out.

Akimbot is a game that it's very commonly compared to Ratchet and Clank.

It's like a little, little rat tree like.

Yeah.

He continues.

It seems like its comparison to Ratchet and Clank has left it with poor reviews.

He's usually saying it wasn't as good as Ratchet and Clank.

I personally like the game.

It's not bland like many other games out today.

I guess this month's question is, when have you enjoyed something that received poor reviews?

Chris, you go first.

Ah, Concord has a 62, 63 on Metacritic.

And I think it's like an 80 plus kind of game, if I'm honest.

I don't really, though.

It was actually a perfect timing, because I'm like, you know what?

Concord, I'll be the guy.

I'll be the guy who likes this game.

I'll say it.

Sean, I feel like you like bad games.

Yeah, there's quite a few.

There's two of them that came to mind.

The first one was Star Fox Adventures.

When that came out, it was heavily panned, but I loved it.

And I fell into that role of like, hey, I'm watching JonTron and JonTron doesn't like it.

So I don't like it either.

It's my.

Yeah, you're right.

I'll make fun of it now.

Stairfax temperatures, guys.

Stairfax temperature.

And then I grew up and realized.

Yes, YouTube, social YouTube experience.

Yeah, which happens to everybody.

That's the problem.

We do it again.

That's fair.

I just I hold Sean to a higher standard.

Are we going to have them on the podcast?

You have me on the podcast yet.

Don't you?

Yeah, Sean.

Yeah, no, you shouldn't do that.

We should have a two person podcast.

It's JonTron and SeanTron.

And then you start asking about his views.

Never mind.

I hate it.

It's Sean.

I was, gosh.

And the other one was The Last Guardian.

A lot of people didn't like that game, but man, I love that game.

I don't care what anyone says.

People didn't like The Last Guardian.

Yeah, it's one of those like, hey, it's a game that was PS2, but we're on PS4.

What are you doing?

Like it feels janky, but it feels like if it resonates with you, like it really resonates with you kind of vibe.

Yeah, weird.

I think I'm in a bubble because everyone that I talk to really liked it.

It's kind of got the death stranding effect of if you are already into that, creators games and holds a holds a better legacy to it in a way.

I'm also biased.

My my family got the collector's edition, so I see that statue like every day.

Oh, that's cute.

Yeah, I like that.

Trav, what about you?

What's a game that that you enjoyed or a movie or show or anything?

They got really bad reception.

Well, the easiest one I mentioned it a million times, Mighty No.

Nine.

I just didn't follow its development.

I didn't know any of the drama.

I didn't have any expectations for it.

Like I just I don't even think it was on purpose.

I was just I was in high school when a lot of it was happening.

I was not in high school when it came out.

And I think that as a result, it just sort of like I just went in with no expectations and came out.

Well, no expectations other than this is a Mega Man like game and ended up really like I liked it enough to platinum it.

But not out of obligation.

Like I wanted to do everything in the game.

That's not an easy platinum either.

That's like a no play the one hit death mode.

Right.

Yeah.

So the one hit death mode wasn't required.

But the the marathon challenge was which is it has like fifty one challenges and the marathon challenge was the last one where you had to complete the whole game in a single life in one sitting.

You can't pause it or you can't turn it off.

Not single life.

Just one sitting.

No, single life and one sitting.

Oh, so even if you die, period.

Can you get one up still period?

You have to start the whole game over.

Awful.

And it's a challenge.

It says it's a challenge.

It's not part of the main game.

It's just for achievement.

Yeah, yeah, I did it and I.

Didn't regret it.

And I I've considered streaming the one hit mode because that was a preorder bonus that eventually became not a preorder bonus.

I'll I'll do some on admin.

You should save a stream like that for the charity room.

Oh, that could be fun.

I didn't even think of that.

Yes, that's one that we should do for charity.

Whether it's the one hit, the one the one life or not.

Yeah, that's a good one.

Absolutely, that's a good one.

That would probably be a 10 hour stream, maybe.

That's true.

It would be a long one.

That's not a short game.

I have played Money No.

I didn't hate it either.

There are parts that are like excessive, but I think I played that after I played all of the other Mega Men.

I'm pretty sure.

That's exactly the mindset I came into it with.

My mouth is really dry, which is related.

I basically came in with the perspective of like, it's a Mega Man game and there are Mega Man games, both in the classic and X series that I think are worse than Mighty Number Nine.

And so like I was like, yeah, this is a fine game.

I think I'd play Mighty Number Nine over Mega Man and base without save states.

Yeah, yeah, 100 percent.

I probably I'd probably played over Mega Man eight as well, but that's because I had a bad experience with eight from the PS2 collection.

And I don't agree on, but I, oh yeah, the PS2 collection was...

When you played jumps in, like, I get it, I get it.

The only time I have ever damaged a controller in my life, in my life, the only time, actually no, there were two.

One was my shitty old DS, because I had another DS at the time, and I was playing on my old one, because I was playing Hokey Athelon in HeartGold, and I was doing the sliding, and I shook the controller, I was holding with one hand, and I'm doing the swiping to do the fast Pokemon Dash thing, and somehow I went too far and went up, and it snapped the two little laptop holders that are on the DS, keep it in place, back.

I don't know how I did that.

That wasn't intentional, but I did damage that controller.

The other time was Mega Man 8 on PS2.

I have two PS2 controllers that are from launch, from 2000, from a launch model PS2.

I gripped one so firmly out of anger that it cracked.

Which is probably not a good sign for the durability of those controllers long term.

But I was playing Mega Man 8 on the Anniversary Collection, and for those that don't know, the jumping and sliding, snowboarding sections are very...

The audio is delayed, so you have to get used to the delay.

It is not a consistent delay.

So...

And also, on top of that, there's input delay.

And there's input delay on top of the audio delay that's offset the opposite way.

So you can't really get used to it easily.

And I was on the Wily stage, which has one of these.

And it's like, I think Wily 2?

It's so hard.

It's a really hard one.

No, it's the first Wily stage.

Okay, that's not as bad then.

But I remember gaming over on that many, many, many, many times because this didn't have save states because this is a PS2 game.

And I just was out of pure rage, gripped my controller and it cracked.

So that one, I beat seven before I beat eight.

I went back and beat.

No, actually, no, I didn't.

I think I beat eight before I beat seven.

One of the two, the seventh boss is bullshit.

The final boss anyway.

Yeah, a game that game or show or whatever that I didn't was received.

Well, that I can't let me pass it over to you.

What's a game or show that you hate, that you would that you would marry?

Yeah.

I mean, if you want to, if you want to get technical, I could say Ratchet and Clank PS4, but that got pretty OK.

Reviews is just that retroactively people decided it was bad.

I heard that game was fine, honestly.

Yeah, it literally it was it was fine.

And then it had the JonTron effect of the YouTuber got mad.

So so that one's up there technically now because I was like, don't make me defend this game.

Come on.

What other game?

I like a lot of bad games.

PlayStation All-Stars is up there.

I will still defend that game.

I think it's very flawed, but that game was still really fun.

Yeah, I shoot.

I'm looking at my games now and I can't.

Sonic, Sonic, Sonic Generations is that game got like 75 on Metacritic.

So that counts.

Seventy five is everyone knows a seven out of ten is bad.

My favorite, my favorite thing about Sonic games is that right before colors came out, they were like, we're going to delist all the Sonic games below an 80 because it damages our reputation, so only 80s and above are going to stay.

And then colors didn't get an 80.

I remember because it wasn't a thing in like leaked, it might have been Square Enix.

It was like a leaked document or something that was like people would get bonuses if their game got a certain amount over.

That was obsidian with the square also had that.

But New Vegas was famous for being one point below what was necessary.

That's right.

And not getting the payout, which is a whole, a whole thing.

That's so screwed up.

Games are dumb.

They got dumb.

It's always pretty dumb.

It's gotten real dumb lately.

I'm struggling to think of another one.

I was kind of buying, you could say Croc, I guess.

I see my Saturn copy of Croc.

Croc, baby.

Croc's getting that remake.

The progenitor of all games.

Croc is getting PS4.

I do have one more if you can't think of anything.

All right.

This one I'm defending to the grave.

Marvel versus Capcom Infinite.

That's what you said before, actually.

I believe that's a spicy one.

I agree that it does not look great.

The graphic fidelity on some of the characters.

Well, really all across the board, it's just inconsistent.

Mega Man, Zero, Sigma, and some of the Marvel characters like Iron Man, Sigma, they all look great.

I'll even defend the story mode because it was like tool made for me in a lab.

You have the main villain of Mega Man X, combining with one of my favorite Marvel villains, Ultron, into Ultron suggma.

And it's like this was made for me.

At the end of the campaign, they build Mega Man an Infinity Gauntlet Buster.

Yes.

Oh, okay.

And it's like that's the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.

And keep in mind, this was also during that Mega Man drought where we haven't had a game in like 11 years.

So that was the first big Mega Man thing we got for so long.

And I was just like, this is my favorite thing.

It's pretty cool.

That's a good one.

And then go ahead.

No, no, I was just going to Donkey Kong 64.

And then the gameplay, like people were mad that they went back to 2v2 rather than 3v3.

But the way that they did the tag mechanic, I think makes it my favorite gameplay in the Marvel versus Capcom series.

The tag mechanic is done so well.

I love it.

I took that time to scroll through my very out of date list of games that I own to see if I could think of another one.

And I'm still struggling, so I think I'm going to stick with the ones that I said.

Kevin only likes good games.

I don't know.

I don't play games.

Opposite of me.

I don't play games.

I'm over here saying Donkey Kong 64.

Oh, Final Fantasy 15 Fishing.

That's one.

That's one.

Was that a standalone game?

Wasn't that a VR game?

That's a VR game.

Oh my God.

Forgot that.

That's one that I want to talk about a dumbass stream.

I want to stream that one day.

I'm going to get the platinum in this game and fish.

Sorry.

Water's great.

Come on in.

There's some platinum's baby.

Chris, do you have any others besides Concord you want to mention?

I'll give you a genuine one.

It's just so easy for me to point to Sonic.

But Sonic Unleashed, people are right about that game, but I love that game to death.

Like it just hits the right vibes for me.

I just like it a lot.

Should I get a 410 for my GN?

I don't know, but I'm still mad about it, so I don't care.

Did you play the Wii version of Sonic Unleashed?

I did, and I bought an Xbox 360 to play the 360 version.

OK, because I've only played on leash on like the Wii and it was.

I'm sorry.

I hate it.

Yeah, it's not my favorite.

Yeah, I didn't know that there were actual characters you could talk to instead of just their JPEGs being there with words.

I played the Wii version first too.

I didn't know there are differences back then.

I'll give you two that I just thought of when I was looking at this list still.

One is, I don't remember if it scored well or not, Killzone Mercenary.

That was a Vita first-person shooter.

I think that was the only Vita shooter that did score pretty OK, because the rest of them were historically bad.

But that one is really fun, because you're playing as a mercenary, kind of, in the middle of the Cold War part of, I think Cold War part.

Maybe it's between two and three.

All of Killzone is a World War Two allegory.

So you're playing both sides of the field, kind of.

And it's a really fun game for Vita, really enjoyable.

The other one, I was going to say, was State of Decay 1, because that game didn't get super high scores.

But I remember really, really enjoying that.

When it came out, when I played it, really excited for 2 at the time, which then came out 7 years later and was the same game.

With somehow still bad multiplayer integration, despite having had 4 years to do it right.

Excited for State of Decay 3.

Mark those two prequels to Days Gone.

Yeah.

Chris, Days Gone is a game you liked, right?

What's your favorite game?

I gave it Honest Chance, I gave it 6 or 7 hours, and I was just like, man, I don't care.

Yeah, that's too much.

Poor thing.

It was when I was shooting at a bear from a gas station roof and it clawed through the roof and killed me or whatever, that I was like, you know, I think I'm good.

That's fair.

Yeah, that's fair.

I didn't expect a serious answer, I was gonna hit the bumper, I'm not gonna lie.

Oh, well, let me give my honest opinion.

Thanks for tuning in to the Crubcast, let us know what your thoughts are on Concord in the comments.

No, I'm not gonna cut you off there.

Let us know your thoughts on Concord, make sure to throw up your 1s for Red Guy in the chat.

Use the upward point emoji for Red Guy.

And in the YouTube comments if you watch this part.

Sorry, I thought I said YouTube chat.

Yeah, leave us a review.

Rest in peace, Red Guy.

We'll see you next week for another episode of the Crubcast.

We'll see you Tuesdays if you want to join us for the streams.

Nothing else coming out on the YouTube feed, I think, between episodes.

Live at 7 p.m.

Eastern, sometimes.

If you guys see Borderlands spoiler cast for the movie, is that going to go up?

Oh, probably not.

Did you guys do that?

No.

OK, cool.

I was going to say I forgot.

Trav, you weren't here.

You forgot them.

We've got the most important part.

We had to take a break in the middle of the episode for Trav to pee.

And during that, we found out that Borderlands lasted less time in theaters than Concord lasted on shelves.

So, Concord wins again.

Concord sweep, baby!

Join us next week.

We'll speculate on Concord 2.