Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2023-01-15

Hello everybody, this is Shane Armen row, you’re in the passenger seat with me it’s passenger seat radio. It is what the hell is the date? It’s January 15 2023. And you are sitting back in my hot tub, I’m gonna flip my jets around here, I just realized that the ones I had on were probably pretty loud. There’s some ambiance to having the jets on. But I don’t want it to interfere with the show either. So how’s everybody doing? You’re probably saying, oh, Shane, you’re back in the hot tub, I thought you decided that the hot tub was causing some of your health issues? Well, unfortunately, it seems to have been a red herring, the i conditions that I was speaking about prior to, that could have been a result of the chemicals in my hot tub, unfortunately, came back without said hot tub. So whatever it is that’s causing that, which is probably a combination of things. It’s probably not the chemicals in my hot tub. So hence, I’m back in my hot tub, and I’m doing a show. So I’m going to try to keep this to a 30 minute show, as best I can. My wife is dying for a nap. And she can’t sleep when I’m essentially at the other side of the bedroom. Wall yelling at my phone. So what’s been going on? Well, let’s see here. I don’t have actually a ton to talk about. Everything has been pretty straightforward. I did have I did have my heart rate seemed to go up a little bit at one point. Now that wasn’t that’s not part of the AFib or anything. But I did call my doctor and say hey, listen, you know, I’m sitting here at my computer, like not doing anything. And my heart rates running at like 110. I don’t think it’s supposed to be doing that. And he’s like, Well, why don’t we go ahead and bring you in and we’ll just give you a quick once over, maybe we’ll up some of your medication. So I went in, they gave me the EKG, they listen to the heart, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he’s like, No, you’re good. You’re good. You know, probably just incidental. In the meantime, I am going to date your cardizem dose just a little bit. We’re going to I mean, I was on like the lowest dose possible, right? So he’s like, you know, I figured we were gonna have to dial this in at some point in time, but no, afib? And I’m like, Nope, he’s like, good. Well, as long as you’re off the testosterone jail, you’re probably not going to have a fib anymore. And so Wow, great. So that’s where that is. Let’s see, what else can I tell you health wise, that’s about it. Nothing else has been going on. Other than, you know, my, my Vegas trip nasty cold or whatever that I had. Overall, though, I’m still feeling completely drained all the time, which is probably partially due to a serious lack of exercise and, you know, the drugs, right? I mean, this. Everything that I’m taking has side effects of fatigue, right. So it’s gonna be one of those things where my body’s just gonna have to get used to it and hopefully everything will just sort of dial itself back up. But it’s it’s definitely crippling, to be honest with you not having that testosterone gel. I realize that. That, you know, listen, it’s the heart or the T and in this case, the heart wins, I suppose right? Low t is not going to kill me, but you never know about AFib right? Yeah, I know. I’m a druggie thanks, Travis. Travis is joining the show. It’s in the middle of the day now, so you can feel free to heckle me at your to your heart’s desire. Let’s see. So what else has been going on? So I just finished up the Call of Duty Modern Warfare two campaign. I’ve been sort of keeping it in my back pocket until I kind of gotten the mood for it. Because you know, Call of Duty campaigns range from men to Holy crap. That was like the greatest campaign ever. And I think my favorite campaign, believe it or not, is still Infinite Warfare. I know a lot of people have trouble buying into that, but Oh, you’re watching football. Wow. Not much can be done for you. But anyway, yeah, so I laid down some video. This afternoon, I laid down some video for a new steam deck video. You know, I tried to put out a couple of weeks keep the YouTube algorithm happy. But yeah, so I finished the campaign up it took me two days of play two good decent sessions a play. Hey, Brian, hold what’s up brother? So I guess I don’t know maybe eight hours total. You know how it is they don’t separate anything anymore. So you can’t really tell how much time you’ve played what in Call of Duty anymore. So I was probably about an eight hour campaign and I played on regular not, you know, easier veteran just straight and, you know, your skills will be challenged as they said, to be honest. Thanks, Brian. Appreciate That said, I’m glad I’m feeling better. Yeah, if I were to play the game, if I were to recommend anybody with any sort of Modern Warfare skill, I would probably play one step above normal, which I think is veteran, I would probably play it a bit harder, because honestly, there’s a couple of scenes that are overall challenging. All right, I mean, I think throughout the entire game, maybe I died 10 times, and it wasn’t so much dying, it’s a matter of missing a jump, or, you know, something frivolous like that, or, you know, getting stuck on geometry when you’re running away from a bad guy or whatever. So I think that it would have been beneficial to have played it on one level harder, didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. And for those of you who are thinking about maybe getting Modern Warfare two, since the damn price isn’t going down, you got to ask yourself, you know, am I going to get my money’s worth out of the campaign and eight hours, five bucks an hour for playtime? That still doesn’t equate to 70 bucks, right? So the ROI on Modern Warfare two would be, you know, how much multiplayer time are you going to get out of it, for the most part Call of Duty is almost always guaranteed to get my money back between zombies and the campaign. And then multiplayer is gravy, but in this case, no zombies. So you kind of have to deal with the multiplayer stuff. But I will say though, that despite all the free to play nonsense they’ve got going on, they’ve definitely made some attempts to add some variety to the game. So now you have things like DMZ and some other stuff, which is a it’s not just either multiplayer, or Battle Royale. Right. So now they’ve got more stuff for you to do, which is cool, I guess. But I mean, I missed the zombies. To be honest with you. I completely miss the frickin zombies. But anyway, I’d rather have no zombies than bad zombies, which is what we had last time. We had bad zombies last time. Hey, Yeti, what’s up? So the trick to getting people in the live chat is to do Sunday afternoon podcasts, I will commit this to memory. So yeah, the campaign is, you know, I really enjoyed it, I’d say it’s in my top three, with Infinite Warfare still being my favorite, because Infinite Warfare managed to elicit emotion from me. By the end of the game, I felt close to characters and I felt lost. And I felt all this. Not much of that going on in this campaign. But you know, what I really liked about this campaign, and no spoilers here is that it feels very grounded. And real, right? You’re not? They’re not overdoing the heroics. Right? You actually feel like you’re doing things that are going on right now with covert operations around the world, right? I mean, a lot. It’s all fictitious, blah, blah, blah. But you can tell there are nuances or hat nods that tips, head nods rather, to current events going on. And so no, no, the last bad Zombies was Vanguard, I think right? Wasn’t Vanguard, the one where they had all the portals that took you to different areas, and you fought the zombies and you came back to the central club. I played it, I just I didn’t love it. I really loved the dye machine ones which there was one in between dye machine and then what we you know, now so I don’t remember all these zombies run together in my head. I just remember not enjoying the last set of zombies very much. But anyway, so yeah, the Call of Duty Modern Warfare to campaign feels very real. It doesn’t feel like they overdid that they’re not going out of their way for heroics, for the sake of heroics is just what it is, right? Yeah, yeah, Travis, the black ether stuff is the stuff that I liked the one that came out after that one, I did not so there you go. I thought it was a complete waste of time, and apparently, everyone else thought so too, since they didn’t bother to include zombies in this edition. I’m still holding out for a full blown zombie compilation remastered collection including, of course Infinite Warfare zombies, which is my favorite zombies of all time. Give me remastered frickin zombies in Spaceland, Raven, the redwoods you know, radioactive thing blowout attack of the radioactive thing all of those things I would shaylen Shuffle, Give me high res remasters are those suckers and I meant I would I would pay 70 bucks right now, for nothing more than a remastered collection of all the Call of Duty zombie stuff up to this point. That’d be awesome. So yeah, what else have I been playing? I’m still playing Overwatch to a lot. The steam deck is leaked a perfect vessel for playing Overwatch too. And I can play wherever I feel like it. So that’s been really, really nice to have that. I have dug into deep rock galactic, which I did take a pirated copy for a spin when it first came out, because it was getting good press. And then a bunch of people that run around in my circles who are probably listening to this right now, or will be later. They, they seem to like the game. And it’s like, okay, well, you know, listen, I’ve misjudged games before, and went back and taken another look at him. And quite frankly, the steam deck opens up an interesting library of games. And I’ll get back to the I’ll get back to deep rock in a minute. But deep rock sort of sort of opened my eyes to something I thought was kind of interesting about the steam deck. So, over time, you guys know, I’ve been a proponent of the concept that graphics don’t make the game, right. If you can take your favorite game and you play it in wireframe rendering, if it’s still fun, then it’s a good game. And I cite orc attack right from the Amiga as my as my litmus test, because I actually did have a primitives version of orgatec. On the PC that the original developers from the Amiga version sent to me to try out. They just kind of wanted to get a feeling of did I feel like it was still the same games on the Amiga, and it was all primitives. There were no graphics, it was boxes, triangles, and circles for the entire game. And Goddamnit if it wasn’t fun as hell, so I tried to give the benefit of the doubt for games that are more Indian nature, but I will I will profess I have started to move away from indie game playing. And is it is it partially because I’m a graphic snob these days? Maybe. But to be to be honest with you, indie games have all decided to do the same thing. It used to be you went to indie games to find new shit to play, right? I mean, you went there to see different areas, ideas explored, risks being taken. New concepts, right, that just just aren’t gonna get made with main triple A titles, right? They can’t afford to try new stuff, they got to stick with the stuff that works. Get the loot boxes in there, get the monetization shit make the whale games. That’s what they’ve got to do to stay in business. But these indies, they tend to take more chances. And I’m not saying that that doesn’t happen anymore. I’m saying that. Based on my exposure of the indie market as it is today. It’s all the same shit. It’s all a vampire survivors knockoff. It’s all a to d Metroidvania roguelite. Game, if you look at these, you’re going Holy shit. This is literally a clone of so. And I was noticing this going through my discovery queue on Steam. And it’s like, wow, this game literally looks exactly like the last game that I just looked at in the queue. And they’re all these indie games that that feature the same shit. And it’s like, no, I don’t really care for that genre. Anyway, there’s only so many ways you can skin vampire survivors or skin, you know, dead cells, or hollow knight or any of these other critically acclaimed indie games, or Hades. It’s, it’s like, yeah, great. Yeah, the original ones broke some, some boundaries. Now, like half of the games that come out are clones of one of them. And I get it. You want to make money and feed their families too. But it’s like, so then you say, okay, so if there’s nothing new coming, I mean, if it’s not new, and the graphics all looked like they were done by, you know, Bob, who is also the CFO CIO, you know, and the lead programmer and sales manager in this indie company. It’s like, where’s my motivation, you know, so you’re looking at all the boxes, you could check and none of them get checked. So I’ve kind of gotten I don’t know, I guess I’d gotten snooty, whatever. Um, at least I’ll admit it you know, I want I want the sons of the force, which by the way comes on February 23. I want great looking first person deep rich games of things to do. I’m less interested now in you know, 15 minute you know, kerplunk games. So anyway, I was just noticing though that in between the two in between the same old you know, indie shit, and the same old honestly triple A shit right? Which listen, I’m willing to play the same old triple A shit as long as it looks good plays good. It makes me feel like I’m wasting a whole bunch of commies, right? But there’s something in them. It’ll, which are now dubbing as middle tier gaming. Now, here’s the problem with middle tier gaming. It’s what do I mean? First of all? What is middle tier gaming? middle tier gaming is better production than indie. But not as good as AAA. So think of them as a or double A, I don’t know. But my, my, yeah, you’re looking for the 15 minutes for plug games, plenty of them out there, brother. Just look for two D roguelite Metroidvania games, they’re a dime a dozen. And they’re designed to be played in 15 minutes or less, you’ll love it. So anyway, so these mid tier games are games that fit the bill that still have decent graphics that still had decent production values. But they also have one more characteristic. I would feel like I was wasting my time playing them on my PC. Deep rock galactic is a great example. And this is the game that put me on the path of understanding mid or middle tier gaming. So deep rock galactic nothing certainly nothing I would play on the PC when I played it originally my pirated copy just was like, Okay, this is all right. I mean, apparently the the fun of playing deep rock galactic is playing with other people. Well, we all know where I stand on that. And, frankly, the game mechanics of deep rock galactic, I don’t want anybody else in there, frankly, I mean, you get sent a drone in with you to help you out from a combat point of view. But my point is, I like multiplayer games, where everybody gets a niche. And everybody can sort of play to their strengths, right? Deep rock galactic is it with multiplayer would just be for solo players playing on the same map, if that makes sense to anybody. Alright, so that being the case, let’s say that everybody gets that right. Second so but but but but these middle tier games or these mid tier games, look and play great on Steam deck. So on the Steam Deck, there are games that my elitism would allow me to play and enjoy. Whereas I would never play it on my regular PC. If I’m going to be sitting on my PC, I’m playing a triple a title, I’m playing something to make the fans on my 20 AB super whirl, I’m looking for something to really take advantage of my 32 inch monitor. I’m looking for HDR, I want the experience like Call of Duty Modern Warfare two. I can’t imagine for a minute playing that campaign on a steam deck screen. What I can do is imagine playing shipment in multiplayer on the Steam deck screen, right. But there are certain things these triple A titles that demand a PC, a good PC, and a good gaming rig. For me personally to enjoy some of the forest. I’m not playing it on the Steam deck. Now. I may also play it on the Steam deck once I’ve played the crap out of it on the PC and understand how everything works. But that’s not that’s not what I’m looking for. I am looking for mid tier games, middle tier games, and they exist in quantity on the Steam deck. All you have to do is go back to your back catalogue and start digging through shit that you either put down because it didn’t see deep enough for your PC. Or you turn your nose up at it maybe for a minute and realize oh my God, son of a bitch shit. This. Yes, stay with me son of bitch ship. how great these things play, literally figuratively and literally on the Steam deck. So let me give you an example. And Travis take notes. So recently, I saw an article that the Friday the 13th puzzle game was going to be delisted on Steam soon, and it’s being given away for free right now along with a whole bunch of free DLC. Right now for a limited time before the game is no longer available. Now, I played this game before. I think on my phone. I don’t remember I played it somewhere before. And I turned my nose up at it. I did and I’m free to admit it. Did I give it a good enough chance when I played it before? I don’t know. What I do know is is that that’s not something I would play on my PC. When I played on my switch, maybe if I played my switch so I grabbed the game. I just told it to traverse I know you’re 15 seconds behind. Yeah, Friday the 13th There’s the puzzle game. It’s on Steam right now. It’s free and everybody I recommend getting it right now even if you don’t plan to play it right away. It is getting delisted. It’s like a perfect middle tier game. Okay, so maybe it’s a little closer to indie. But But But But what makes it middle tier is the IP. If this was some generic, you know, hacking slasher movie game made into a puzzle game wouldn’t be middle tier, it’d be an indie game. But the fact that you’ve got Jason and all the signatures shit all in there, the music and the in the, you know, kick. Right, you know, they got all that creepy shit in there. It, it moves it up to the middle tier gaming it by God, I sat for an hour playing that thing on the Steam deck. And it’s like, I turned my nose up at him. I saw it for the first time. Now it’s going to be like, What am I go to games on the Steam deck? So I think, interestingly enough, you can play triple A games on the Steam deck, it’s possible. It’s all a matter of what you’re willing to give up. If you’re willing to play low to medium resolution, which, by the way on a seven inch screen looks great. At 30 to 45 frames per second on a triple A game. Yeah. Great. You know, a lot of these a lot of these middle tier games, though, play like in Ultra, or high settings. And they play rock steady, 60 frames per second. I mean, damn, I mean, why do you? Why complain? So? Yeah, what am I 21 minutes, I told myself 30 minutes tops. So I’m gonna get the Jets back on. And we’ll do another eight minutes, eight and a half minutes here. So middle tier gaming. And what’s great is I have an ass load of middle tier games in my Steam library already. Where did I get in Humble Bundle fanatic bundles, all of these games that I got for free, or for, you know, 20, for six bucks, a lot of these games fit the middle tier game. And suddenly, I’ve got this incredible back library of Steam games, I’m willing to actually go back and entertain these titles, where I turn my nose up at it, and it says 14 minutes of play time on Steam. I’m going to go back and relook at these because they’re smaller titles. The you know, they don’t need shaders. They don’t suffer from triple A gaming stuff on the Steam deck. So I find it very interesting that the steam deck has been sort of laid out as an emulator Haven, along with the occasional triple A gaming and a lot of indie games. But really, nobody seems to be talking about middle tier gaming. And I think that I think that that’s something that’s that’s worthwhile is to go back and identify middle tier games. And let’s be honest, the forest is a middle tier game. It’s not an indie. And it’s not a triple A game. But it’s definitely solidly smacked down the middle tier, and the forest. Most of the time, I mean, it’s at 45 frames per second with I believe high detail. It plays great, and you can read and you can actually use the steam decks, additional controls, and great mapping tools to really improve the quality of playing the game and sort of a trade off for that 45 FPS. So yeah, so I’ve got I’ve sort of got this middle tier gaming mindset going on. But yeah, deep rock galactic. Back to that real quick, I wanted to give it its do. I play it solo, and you can’t actually play it solo. One of the things I thought when I first started playing it was, it was multiplayer only, or worse yet, it’s one of those four player games. And if you decide to play alone, you have to take four bots with you, because the game has always leveled for four players, and I’ve bitched about that exact thing on this show before. But frankly, you know, it doesn’t have that. And if you do, there’s actually a true solo option. So if you choose solo play, you get a drone that flies around with you and helps you mine and helps you kill bad guys. And it’s a great trade off. It doesn’t feel like it’s forced into a four player scenario where you’re playing by yourself, if that makes sense. And so the concept of the game is pretty simple. For those of you who don’t know about it, you are part of a mining company, you’re starting out as sort of a journeyman miner. And you play these rugged dwarves and have foul mouths, not super foul. You can play them around your kids, but they’re ill tempered dwarves, and you land on various planets. They bore you underground and you go in you you perform missions. Usually it’s mining some sort of materials or doing things in pursuit of mining materials. So you’ll mined gold, you’ll mined this type of or that type of ore. And in other missions, you’ll actually be setting up refineries and so you’ll find thermal pockets to hook up to your refinery to power it. And you have to connect the cave you know the the piping between your refinery and these other things. You’ll have to collect pieces of salvage drones, blah, blah. There’s all sorts of, of mission types on various locations with various types. Have anomalies within the environment itself, right gas pockets or things, electrical, electrical storm things going on underground that you can’t walk through. So there’s all sorts of different things to keep you going. And of course, there are, there’s a whole sort of RPG thing going on where you can improve each of your items, you can improve your drone, you can improve the equipment that you carry, make your gun better, make your axe better. So as you as you mine, as you get better, as you, you know, prove yourself as a great miner, you will gather enough resources to start unlocking better and better equipment, which then of course makes you better and better as a miner to take you on these additional missions. So yeah, it’s it’s a fun game. The missions last anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes, which is actually about right. And it sits there not multiplayer, unless you’re actually playing multiplayer, you can pause it, go take care of the kid go answer what the wife wants you to do. There’s always there’s always a way to stop and go back and pick it up later. Which is good. So that’s another sort of thing about mid tier gaming. Most of it is single player or optional multiplayer. And that gives you sort of the option to decide what your day looks like if you think the wife is going to badger you to do chores. You can play something a little on the more solo area and if you’re going to be you know if you got some good free time wife’s down for a two hour nap, you know that you’ve got some time to do some multiplayer stuff. So very exciting. Very fun. Worth listen, I think it’s a bit on sale for like 10 bucks. So listen for 10 bucks, it’s a no brainer, especially if you have a steam deck because it plays great on the Steam deck. Again, I might not have played it on the PC. I might not have played it on the gaming PC but it’s a great game for the steam deck. So middle tier gaming my my new catchphrase mid tier gaming. Currently it was anything else going on to finish up these last few minutes. That’s January holidays are over. Nothing really in the pipeline coming up. We back into Vegas in March. And I guess that’s about it. I don’t have anything else to talk about. Movie wise. Well, what am i What about movies? What have I seen lately that I thought was good. My daughter picked up Desperate Housewives when she I was watching it for the first time when she was a kid. And she never really got it. Well, she ended up picking it up and started watching it now see, she suddenly realizes what a great show it was. And so she’s been binging through Desperate Housewives. And so I’ve sort of been binging along with her watching it again so we can talk about the parts that she’s at because now it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. So I’ve been watching a lot of that. I want to watch that new Nicolas Cage Western that sounds pretty good. I want to see that. And but I haven’t seen it yet. I don’t think there’s anything else that’s been like, Whoa, I can’t believe this. I gotta recommend this to the guys but I don’t think so. Alright, well, a 28 minute show was better than a no minute show. So hopefully everybody enjoyed that I’m trying to think if I had one other thing to talk about, but I don’t think I do. Oh, I’m sure I’ll think of it for the next episode. Alright everybody, thanks so much for listening. This is Shane R Monroe passages C radio until next time, take it easy