Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2019-10-10

Be this it Hello everybody. Hello Hello this is Shane Armin row you're in the passenger seat with me passenger seed radio. It is October 10 2019 you're on my 13 mile commute home Welcome to the show Travis in within 14 seconds of the show beginning that might be an only record. Travis has been jumping for show apparently they keep getting nagged about how I'm embarrassing and and and or I'm inconveniencing them and disappointing everybody. So welcome to the only show the last show of the week I should say. Because I am heading for Washington tomorrow visit my parents. The prodigal son returns to his hometown which after 20 years doesn't look anything at all like his hometown. So my son and I are going up my wife is staying behind. She's going to be watching my mother in law's dogs. So Usually I bag my son with my wife to go on vacation. So this time I get to hold the bag. So he and I will be heading up at 3am we wake up tomorrow to get down park the car, get on the shuttle hit the plane, leave at six. Get there like nine. My parents will pick us up from the airport and it's another like three and a half hour trip back to when he by car. So yeah, tomorrow is going to be just more fun than mortal man deserves. And then of course, I'm there for like a week. So getting rid of the rest of my vacation hours. Hey, Justin, what's up man just amazes in. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let me grab my list here and see what I've got on the keep list. I've got anything to talk about. I figured if I didn't get on here I would get hollered at by Travis and company. So the only thing I actually have on my list I've got a couple of other interesting things to talk about but so the on the Nintendo Switch this game came out there was all like Geometry Wars called debris infinity. I talked a lot about that game when it came out sort of a spiritual successor sort of a spiritual successor to Geometry Wars, really clean game and had this sort of 90s arcade style feel to it. Lots of vector bright vector graphics, lots of explosions, a lot of fun, a lot of fun, that debris infinity. And I talked about the game itself a lot. Well, the game hits x box, I believe on the 11th tomorrow, I believe it hits Xbox tomorrow. And I'm precluded by NDA to talk about it at great length, but I was allowed I am allowed to give a little teaser and talk about my initial impressions of the game and things like that. So I had a real busy week. It's been long I've been working long hours to and things like that. So I didn't really get a chance to dive into it much until night before last. And then I didn't do a show yesterday. So I didn't want to talk about it. So this is in in glorious 4k. It's not. It's not HDR. Right? And I talked to the developer about x. I'm friendly with the developer, SVG games, or SVG SVG games. And he said that they actually did some testing of HDR he said it kind of muted the vector the brightness and glow of the vectors. I totally going by that. HDR. isn't the one the bullet the single bullet solution for everything, I guess. So HDR is not included, but 4k looks great. The game itself, you know, it's still the same game. There's no new modes that I can see there's nothing extra added to it. But if you didn't have a Nintendo Switch, then you didn't get a chance to play. It does. Still a lot of my listeners that are on Xbox but don't have a switch and so I'm happy to report the game the game runs silky smooth it looks fantastic. I believe there was a bunch of enhancements in terms of you know raw CPU power that they were able to add more more graphical type effects and more particles and all that other stuff which of course for a game like this which is you know, bullet you know, bullet hell from hell itself turned out to be turned out to look great. So I'm very excited about it. There's, you know, full leaderboards. What else can I say? There's several, there's several different modes of play. Let's go back and listen to the old shows. I talking great detail on the older shows about the game. And it's the same game same game play, but it is. It's definitely taking a nice a good resolution upscaling. So very, very cool. Very, very cool. Yeah, I know, calm down. So what else has been going on? So apparently I've got a theory here so Blizzard Entertainment has been in the news they're the makers of they got acquired by Activision. You know, they make Diablo they make Hearthstone they make you know they're the they're the the conduit for Call of Duty. Overwatch of course is a blizzard game. So as I understand it, Blizzard had so they have an Esports division, right? That seems to be the big thing, lots of Esports stuff going on. And so they had some sort of a Hearthstone tournament. And one of the was it was it a Chinese guy, you know, I haven't had a chance to like dig into this in depth, but essentially one of their Esports players made a pseudo political comment while he was engaged in eSports event for Blizzard they decided that that violated the terms of their Esports services and they he won the game apparently so he was entitled to a cash prize and you know, the crown and the the bouquet and the whole bit but they decided that instead of that they were going to ban him from eSports they were going to withhold his prize they said he doesn't get his prize and essentially for making a sort of political statement publicly while representing Blizzard they screwed him over and so listen the Internet has lost their fucking minds as they tend to do it so now it is that Blizzard does not want to offend because the is liberate Hong Kong right liberate Hong Kong was the was the political statement that was made? Well, this has been interpreted that Blizzard is so deep in bed with China that they don't want to offend the Chinese government. So they took this immediate swift action against somebody who was in Hong Kong. Now they are in perpetual torment twitter facebook you name it. They're getting based in alive they have they have memes of blizzards sucking some Chinese guys cock they've got that they got the whole bit they got everything they've got the blizzard logo man out of the Chinese flag. It's it's great it's one of those things where you just you know it's like how you know cuz Blizzard is one of those companies that is like super beloved now in the recent the last couple of years they've had some some issues pissing off their fans. Oddly enough China was involved with those as well. Because the Chinese company Tenzin made the Diablo mobile game right. As you as you recall from the last Blizz con which was almost a year ago they announced their headliner event the headliner event at Blizzard was a mobile version of Diablo and of course as you remember, we talked about it here. The people lost their mind. One guy actually stood up during the panel at bliss con and said, Is this some sort of an April Fool's joke? Where's you know, where's Diablo four. And so there was a whole big controversy and listen, everybody got spanked. Everybody got spanked so the developers got spanked for being insensitive to their fans. The fans got spanked because they were being insensitive pitch to the developers. Everybody got spanked. So everything kind of quieted down. And I personally think that they've been waiting for Blizzard to trip over anything so that they can, you know, basically abuse the shit out of them. Well, guess what, they now have a new venue, a new vehicle to fuel the hatred of Blizzard and they are using it as much to their advantage as humanly possible. So it's all over the place. Blizzard Chinese South Park, South Park had done some sort of an episode where they made fun of Chinese censored or something of that nature. I haven't seen the episode yet. So anyway, so China banned the show, right? It's great. Listen, this whole thing is fantastic. And of course, there's the ongoing, you know, trade war with China and Trump and the whole bit. So it's it's just it's bad shape crazy how everything gets sucked in to this, you know, this Chinese centric thing. That turns out Who was it that posted something about? China owns like a big portion of Epic Games. That was another thing that came up. You know, it's funny, it takes it takes something and knock you up, more or less innocuous to make everybody start paying attention to this stupid stuff. Oh, it's a great episode of South Park. Travis wants to let us know it's a great episode. I haven't seen it yet. So I'm dying to I'm dying to check that out. Maybe I'll sync that up to my tablet along with Mr. Robot Creek show, and maybe a couple of episodes of Goldbergs to take up my flight tomorrow. But yeah anyway so so that's that's sort of the the headline or news I did discuss a great depth Been a while Hey, oh my god snarky here. How long has it been? It's been a long time since snarky of Oz showed up. It only seems to happen when the show turn comes on a little bit later so how's it going? So anyhow, let me see what else is going on me think trying to think of what's going on that as God's wrath or whatever it is that new VR game that's been under development for like three years supposed to be like the the new definition of great VR gaming that dropped I think today, was it yesterday $40 which is still cheaper than a triple A console Tyler PC title. And so that's out. Its rift only rift Rift, US So I don't think I'll be picking up right away. But I think when I get back from my vacation I'll probably look into picking it up. I'm excited about I mean, listen, any sort of a triple A type VR experience, we need two Dead by Daylight. You know, I played I don't remember if I played that one or not star he was asking about her play Dead by Daylight. I'm pretty sure I did play that one I believe is that the one that is a four player like Co Op game. Like some of these get I get mixed up between some of these. There's one where it was sort of like an open world. Zombie Apocalypse type game. If that's that one. I liked that one. The four player cooperative one I didn't like and I'll tell you why. I typically do not like any game that forces a party of people. So like left for dead. didn't really care for left Dead past pretty much on left for dead to same with Gears of War. Right so Gears of War five, the campaign requires four players. I don't like that because one I don't necessarily want to play with other people. I don't necessarily want to be forced to play with bots. I don't I don't like I don't like I don't like forced Co Op experiences. If I want to play Co Op great, but if I if let's say let's say for example, me and Travis want to get on a game no not that I don't care about using friends. If Travis and I want to play a game of left for dead we have to play with two random I don't want to do that. I don't want that. I don't want I don't want any game where I'm required to play cooperatively with random if I don't have to team based objective games like Overwatch or call of duty. I mean I let that go. But these these typical and they all have That sort of, they'll have that sort of pattern. The game cannot be played by just one person or two people, right? So, yeah, because the chances are likely I'm not going to get a full team and I don't want to play with random and Co Op games really require that inner communication. I know I give a pass to call of duty and Overwatch but these other types of zombie games or cooperative games I don't want to play with a force for personal perspective. I just don't so answers that question. So anyway, this as God's wrath looks frickin awesome. I mean, I can't wait to get into it. But listen, I'm I'm leaving town for a weekend. And I can't play it on my quest. Not yet anyway, in November when the quest link drops is probably when I'll buy the game, because then I can play it in my quest. I don't have to have the rift setup all the time. Speaking of quest, oh shit, I gotta tell you guys about this game I found out. I learned just learned about. So here's the funny thing. I love it when There's a hidden gem that some people know about, but not everybody knows about. It's not front and center. It's not you know, it's not on the Greatest Hits or the top releases of the store and question so I was looking through Reddit looking around on the on the the Oculus quest subreddit and people are constantly constantly caught I just got a quest. What do I which game should I get? I can't you know, I just got a quest. I like this sort of game. What game should I get? I'm going to take my quest to a family event what games should I bring? Blah, blah, blah, right? So people are always looking for experiences. And you know, the same old ones always show up. Well, you need super hot you need beat saber. You need that. You need that? Space Pirate trainer. You need to drop dead you need this. You need that. But somebody mentioned a game that I never heard of called t on God. TA like you drink tea, coffee, tea or nothing, tea of God, and I've never I've never heard of it. I have no idea what it is it doesn't exist on the Oculus store. And so I started doing some research. And it turns out this is a, an indie game that's only available on side quest side quest is the tool that you use to side load unofficial products on your quest. And they have this whole sort of store of their own. And they've tied it to some sort of like HIO or something where people can actually sell product through this side loaded store. It's kind of complicated. But anyway, so I looked this thing up, and I got a chance to play it last night. Let me tell you what this is. I've never seen anything like it for me to be able to say that alone makes it great. But let me tell you so here's what the game is a man In a science fiction haunted house. So what do I mean by that? So first off, the game is a room scale, a true room scale experience, you don't get many of those in VR, okay? So when I say room scale for those of you are not VR people room scale means that you're playing in a large player. Most VR experiences try to limit your mobility because they assume you're playing in a small living room or you're playing in a small location. So anything above like five feet by five feet might be considered a room scale experience. More likely, though, something about six six and a half feet by six and a half feet is considered true room scale. This game this tea by TT for God, T by God t by God is the first time I felt like it was actually in a room scale experience. You start Often this little tiny room, and there's one exit out of this little tiny room. So you walk through the exit, right, and you make a left or right, or whatever, and you make another left or right. So essentially like a haunted house, you know, haunted houses are built to where you're constantly backtracking and turning back amongst yourself, and it weaves it around. So even though there's 1000 square feet of space, the way that they constantly wrap you back and forth amongst yourselves in little tight locations, it gives you the feeling of kind of being lost, but at the same time, it feels like you're walking a great distance, when in reality, they're just making really good use of 1000 by 1000 square feet, right? That's the that's what this game is able to do. There's a realm of possibility to it whereas so you're in a in a room, right? There's one exit. If you go out that exit, make a left and then make another left. There shouldn't be a door on your left, right because that should be the room you were just in. But it plays loose with the physics in terms of, if you if you if you go out the door and you make a left and then another left, there's a door on the left or an entry when the left, but it doesn't take you back into the room and takes you into a new room. That new room now has another exit. That exit takes you out, you make a right and then another right and then you're turning back into yourself again. It's almost impossible to explain other than it feels like a haunted house. You're constantly making these turns back in and it uses the room scale to decide how intricate I think to make these these turns and these doorways and the the methodology and it's not just going from room to room to room. Sometimes you'll step out onto a ledge. Sometimes the new room is an elevator that takes you to another set of rooms, but they managed to keep you inside. This little six foot by, you know, seven foot by seven foot area that make you feel like you're you're literally walking forever. It's really hard to explain, but it's fucking magic. It's, it's one of the more magical moments I've had in VR. I mean, there's a lot of magic moments right the first time you play space pirate trainer and you're shooting into the distance or you're playing What's the name of that? What's that one? Were you playing the saloon? Drop not drop dead. The other one. Yeah. So there's a couple of defining moments in VR where it's like, Whoa, the first time you actually feel like you're flying or the first time you feel vertigo. This was the first time and it came from some no name game on some no name side store. That you know it was written by one dude. And it's crazy that that in this day and age of high tech and VR and all of these crazy experiences that that can still happen. That one guy working on some, you know, side loaded project, create something that that can be named as a staple of VR, something that makes a difference in VR. But it's cool. So the rest of the game other than the fact that it feels like you're endlessly walking, there are sort of little like light puzzles to solve. There are little out there robots that are wandering around. Some of them are benign, some of them want to kill your ass. You've got a couple of guns, you can pick up high powered guns. You can pick up like proxy grenades that you find periodically. Like I said, there's elevators, there's lifts, there's that when I lift but like, like, like forklifts, but like lifts not elevator lyst but other types of lyst there's ledges there's all it's great if you have if Listen, if you have quest, then you get side quest because you're probably already have it anyway. Go and look under the Look under side quests under games and look for TT for God. You will not be disappointed. I wasn't. And I'm excited to get back in and do play it some more. So yeah, that's, that's my big VR update. I'm trying to think I do have some other VR stuff to talk about but it relates to beat saber Travis always gives me shit when I talk about beat saber. So trying to get was anything else I want to talk about. OO, abducted in plain sight. I think I talked about that documentary. I'm still not done with it. Because it's my elliptical documentary. And it's an hour and a half. You must watch this documentary. It is awesome. I can't tell you why it's awesome. And listen, listen, listen right now listen, if you see if you're nothing else that I say, Do not go to Wikipedia. Do not look up the event. Just watch it watch it cold. Do not watch it understanding the full story because what makes this documentary so great. rate is that it gets more and more crazy. More and more shit you just can't believe happened. I can't believe that happened. Oh, my god, did they really fall for that? Is that really true could that have possibly have happened? And just when you think that the story's over, it gets more bacha crazy. Listen If you if it even remotely sounds interesting, abducted in plain sight, it came out in 2017. Do not look up the story. Do not look up the event. Watch it cold. I guarantee you. You will. You'll sit there with your mouth open half the time. And like I said, it's salacious. It's filthy. It's creepy. It's everything it elicits, like every possible emotion out of you. Awesome. And listen, even if I stopped watching it right now, no matter how the end turns out It's going to be a recommended watch so check it out. Let's see. Where am I with other shows? Mr. Robot first episode I'm behind I think one episode of American Horror Story which I plan to watch on the plane tomorrow. I'm behind on what else am I behind on VM behind on a lot of shit. So I've got a lot of shows I need to sink over to my tablet for tomorrow to TV movies. I talk about my son My watching independence that Yeah, I did because I was talking about the summer blockbuster. We think what else is there? Getting off the freeway? So I'm talking about maybe 10 more minutes of show anyway, so I might just kick Travis off and talk about this other beat saver thing that I had something else was one other thing I forgot to write down. It's not coming to me. It's not coming to me. Alright, well, so I'll talk about this last item. And once I get through it, Travis king, king go piss off. So I discussed about the concept of what was going on with beat on the thing that you side load custom songs onto your quest. Well, being open source, somebody picked up the open source, they rescanned it, and they've released it as BMBF. And there's something kind of interesting about this. So this is kind of fun. The developers, these new developers, the people who picked up the source code for the project, and RF now released a new version that works with the latest version of beat saber. They keep changing what those four values mean. It's like they want to keep people guessing as to what it means. So I think they're trying to do it to keep like searching and they're keeping really quiet about it. There's not a big release page. You can read about it on Reddit. You can read about it on discord, but like if you go to the GitHub, where it's being housed that there's no source code. yet. There's binaries for you to download, but there's no instructions. There's no Welcome to you know, welcome to BLBMBF blah, blah, blah. You know, here's what you do. Everything is being kept on the DL, which is really bizarre. Oh, so of course, the second this thing gets released, somebody wanders into my discord and says, Hey, so when is your beat mapper tool is going to support this other thing. And I'm like, God damn it. I don't even know if it's going to support it. I don't know how much of it they ripped out. I don't know what they did. I don't know how much work it's going to be for me to support this thing. So I recommend for now, continue using bead on plus an older version of beat saber if you want to continue to use custom songs, and as part of your mapping process, right. So of course, you know, I got a bug on my ass last night and I decided well, let's I can always put the other stuff back on. Let's just go see. Let's go just see where we're at. So it turns out I needed to change two lines of code to support this new version of essentially what has been on now BMBF which is literally like the worst possible name ever. And I think they picked it that way to keep it ambiguous and whatever. So, so yeah, so now it works if you go to a be mapper tools.com and you'll see that there's a tab for BMBF I'll tell you exactly what you need to do how to take off your old stuff how to put the new stuff on this works with the latest version of beat saber you know the panic At The Disco release. So yeah, so everyone's up to date. Now everyone can calm down we can all go back to complaining about other stuff. So I guess I didn't talk about that one nearly as long as I needed to. So if you want to know more information about it, join the discord or or check out be mapper tools calm and you'll see you'll see what it takes to upgrade that thing. Not too hard. I got done in like 15 minutes and I was documenting as I went. You should agree single your song is, but whatever. Yeah, Travis doesn't care now, but he he'll care when he gets a quest. He'll care about this stuff. He'll be happy that somebody doing it. He'll care about T for God he'll care about or care about hack versions of beat saber. Because Monique ain't playing no hundred dollar bills. She ain't playing no overkill. She wants to play her stuff, right? She ain't gonna want to play that built in crap. Which, you know, it's so funny. There's so many schools of there's so many camps around beat Saber, right? So you've got me, I am I am leaning on the direction of beat saber is pretty much useless without custom songs, right? Then you've got people that say they won't buy the game without you know, there are people that are more radical about the concept of custom songs than I am if you can believe it. And then there are people that basically say, you know, shut the fuck up custom maps. The built in maps are the best and you know you are promised anything so shut up. Play $100 bills again, you know, so you got those people that are completely the opposite side they will defend beat saber. They will defend every shitty map pack that comes out. You know, even though panic At The Disco may not be your thing you should kiss the developers assets for bringing you even that and you should buy to support the developers and maybe you like some of the songs even if you don't like panic At The Disco so shut the fuck up. It is crazy how overtly toxic both sides of the community are now me I take the approach where it's like so at least three times a week somebody posts on Reddit will know that you can have custom song has been sabor worth it. And so you know I've got like a cut and paste version of by my part of the discussion. If you like EDM, if you like the types of music if you like the bands, like Imagine Dragons and panic at the Disco, then yeah, you can get value out of owning beats a birth, no custom songs. And then I go into my tirade about beats a rhythm game. And no matter how good the map is, if I don't like the song, I won't play it. I would rather have a mediocre map and a really good song than a great map and a shitty song. I don't typically like these groups that they're able to actually get songs from. And then I get shot upon Of course because you you know if you don't ever play any songs you don't like how do you know if you're going to like these new songs and it's like, did I know I don't like Windows 95 startup sound. I know. I don't care about panic at the disco. I know I don't care about Cowboy Bebop or whatever the hell it's called. I know I don't care about that shit. So I'm pretty sure I'm not going to like those maps. Job. It has great flow. Yeah, but it's still a shitty son. Right? I don't care how great the flow is. I can't groove I can't groove to the Shrek movie. I don't care how good your map is fuck you here man. I would rather play you know, Tony Bazell Mickey and have what I think is a good map because it's a major pickle map but I would rather have that than to get the idea so it's just crazy the the the variation you think that we can all be this one big loving community but you know the internet makes people toxic. It really does. The social media, Reddit, Twitter everyone gets all toxic anyway, so I've got like five minutes left till I get home I'm trying to get I got anything else to talk about today but a 30 minute show must have made better time than I thought it was going on what do I got? What do I got? What do I got? Who's texting me? Anybody I need to care about I don't want to talk about the impeachment crap. Act I want is I'd like to I like do I do like reading about Blizzard people Blizzard employees starting to, you know for protests and lockouts. It's great. Yeah, let let Rome burn for a little while talking about TV movies. I got the Batman 4k in the mail. I ripped it. I put it on my plaque. I don't think I put on my Plex yet, so I haven't had a chance to look at it. I heard that they're really good releases, though, so I'm excited to take a peek at that. I just haven't quite gotten around to it yet. Sure, sure. Tomorrow already tired. I still have to get up at three o'clock. So I get up in 11 hours. I don't have much time. Let's see what else I have to talk about. Something I'm looking forward to. Yeah, well, you know, we've got we've got Witcher three coming to switch. We've got Overwatch coming to switch. We've got the Call of Duty Modern Warfare coming out of this can be a great month I mean I'm all I'm all excited we've got plenty of shit going on. I got I got Witcher three pre orders that'll be here when I get back. Man you a lot of fun. Lots of fun so I'm looking forward to all of that stuff. Well, folks, I might run a passenger seat radio while I'm actually in Washington. Hey, you know what? Where's Mike more drunk? Are you said Mike listens to the show? I can't seem to get him on discord though. Mike. I actually had somebody on discord asked me to invite formerly invite Mike Murdock to come join us on discord because he's a good dude. And we like to chat. And he's the one I took that picture with in Hastings and when he that's the sort of the book mins of when he so maybe it maybe Mike will be in when he buy that that weekend. I'm there so maybe we can hook up and take another picture. I'll be A lot thinner for this one, so I'll feel better about the pic All right, well listen, I think I'm getting close to the house. I guess I'll sign off here. Like I said, maybe maybe I'll do something while I'm up there if I can come up with anything clever worthwhile. So we'll end it here. Hope everyone had a great week. It's been crazy at work so it was not the greatest week for me but you know, say lucky. rigors of the job. All right, well, listen up, guys. I'm gonna let you guys go. This is Shane Harmon road pass UC radio. We'll see you next time. Take care, everybody.