Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2023-02-18

Hello everybody, this is Shane R. Monroe and you’re in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio. It is February 18. It’s a Saturday here in 2023. And instead of being on my 13 mile commute to work, you are in deed in the hot tub, as you can hear, by the soothing sounds of bubbles. I am here doing a show. And I’ll tell you, I recently got a very nasty email from a chat bot telling me that they’re the he’s very disappointed this chat bot with the infrequency of the shows and that other than my highly produced content, which he finds extremely informative and inspiring. Other than that, the only problem is I don’t do enough shows. So we can’t disappoint the chat bot. No actually had something decent to talk about, which is why I decided to come out here and flip on the old show and do a little chat. Hopefully somebody will actually show up in said chat. We don’t we seem to get a couple of live folks here on the weekends. But let’s talk about this Hogwarts legacy, shall we? I know that we’ve had long discussions about it already. And I’ve been telling you about it from a gaming point of view. And I would like to say that I did finish the game, I completed the main all the main quests, I’ve got like 10 side quests left. But all the main quests are done. And the final story has revealed itself. And the game is essentially over. And I gotta tell you, it’s the first game, the first full blown game, I think I’ve played front and back on the Steam deck. And I think that’s kind of important to talk about, I think that’s an important metric. Because a lot of times we think of something like the steam deck or the switch as being sort of a complimentary system. And in this case, I mean outside of loading it up on the PC and kicking around maybe an hour or so just to see what the ray tracing look like and this and that. But, you know, I’d say like 98.9% of the game, I played on the Steam deck, I started on the steam that I finished it on the Steam deck. And I think that there’s something something to be said good for that. In terms of you know what the steam deck might mean as a suitable gaming PC type replacement. So, anyway, I thought that was sort of an interesting side note, I did finish the game, somewhere. Now I did remember, I’ve still got 10 side quests to go. And I still have plenty of field guide pages to find and demigod moons and other stuff on the side quest type scenario. But I took my time I explored the map. I did all sorts of things out of order, I took down goblin villages. So I didn’t, I wasn’t racing through the game. I took my time and I enjoyed it. And that ended up being about 42 to 45 hours, I think. And I think a good hour and a half of that was gearing up for the final battle. And I’m not going to give you any spoilers or anything. But I will tell you that the final battle does not reveal itself. It doesn’t reveal itself up front, you know, like in Witcher or cyberpunk or any of these other games. Once you hit a certain once you hit a certain point in the game, it warns you you know you can’t go back or you know, once you cross here, this happens, you know, you get a sort of a sense of impending doom right like this is it I’m about to go in. And this is it. This is the big battle. This is what I’ve been I’ve been working 40 hours for but unfortunately, the the final battle does not reveal itself that way. So what can happen if you’re not prepared is you can begin the final mission. Not well armed. In other words, just before the final mission, you have these huge battles, lots of battles, you’ve used lots of potions, you’ve depleted everything, you know, and you’re kind of you’re okay, but you know, if you if you knew something big was going to come up, you’d go get more potions, you’d go get more healing potions, you’d go get more you know, you’d upgrade your armor maybe a little bit you know your your wearables, but in most of the missions, you can abandon the quest and then go and do stuff and then come back in their small quests. Unfortunately, the last quest is like in four parts. And once you’re in there, you can’t really leave. So even if you save between each part, if you go into the first part, not properly armed with everything that you need, you will find that you have to do a full abandonment of the of all four pieces of the quest, you’re gonna get to the very end, you’re going to realize you can’t survive. And then you’re going to have to quit and then do all of the pre quest pieces again. So be warned. It does not reveal itself. And so what happened was is I got done with these huge battles, I went and did what they told me to do. And then they said, Okay, now go here. And so I went there, I didn’t realize I was finally I was starting the final mission. And since I was so battle weary, I wasn’t ready. And so I got all the way to the end, only to find out that no matter what combinations of spells or, or how I use the potions and items that I had left, it wasn’t, it wasn’t enough. So I born you with peace and love, peace and love. Make sure that you are armed well before the end, and I can’t really tell you what the end is because that might be a spoiler right? So hey, Yeti, perfect time for the UK people good. Good. You know, my, my background in Commodore leads me to feel a certain kinship with my UK brother. And I always thought maybe I was born in the wrong country. And then maybe I should have been born in the UK, it might have been a better place for me overall. But that is neither here nor there. Welcome, Yeti to the show. If you’re listening to the show, and you’re not in the chat room, you just grab the Spreaker application from your favorite app store. Or you can do it on the web by going to spreaker.com Searching for passenger seat radio and joining this show in progress. If you want to join in, and text live with the group, okay, enough of that. So back to Hogwarts, so I finished the game, easily the contender for Game of the Year for me for 2023 I realize it’s only February, and Sons of the forest is right around the corner. So game of the year so far for me. But time will have to tell if it gets to hold its merit. So I’m really disappointed about what’s going on with the quote game journalist unquote community. So okay, we just to bring you up to speed in case you’ve been living under a rock. The basis of the issue is that Hogwarts legacy takes place in the world built by JK Rowling, who apparently has not pleasant things to say about transgender people. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, right? I guess. I don’t know. That’s the C 64 demos. I have not seen any Commodore 64 demos from the last couple of years. Here’s my thing. If you’ve got one, let me know what it is. But understand, I don’t want to see one that requires a ram expansion unit, or any sort of weird hardware. I want to see stuff that runs on native Commodore 64 hardware. Otherwise, it’s just it’s kind of bullshit, right? It’s like running in a demo on a an RTX 4080 graphics card. Right and using everything that’s possible from it. That’s not really you’re using additional powers to grant the machine more more, more stuff. Like watching like a one megabyte Amiga demo, that’s fine. But if you have an Amiga demo that requires I don’t know, Centaur graphics, Opal board or something, then starting to lose me on those. But every time I look at a cool Commodore 64 demo, it’s always you know, it always uses a flash, you know, an easy flash system, so it has fast access. It uses all sorts of tricks and nonsense. It simulates a ram expansion unit. Now, it’s like yeah, I don’t want that. I don’t like that. Alright, so back to the Hogwarts thing. So. So essentially, essentially the, shall we say, more left leaning community expects us not to play this game. gaming journalists are told by their editor presumably, don’t review this game. And if they are going to talk about the game, they talk about it in riddles with a completely different name, although they’re happy to include screenshots. So there’s this weird I don’t buy the concept. You always know I hate talking about politics here. But this is in the realm of gaming, which is definitely within the passenger seat radio area. I don’t believe that the media is in full force against, shall we say gay rights, LGBTQ rights? No, I don’t think that the media is personally sideways with these sorts of things. I do think, though that I do think that there has become How do I put this? I think social media has fucked up the planet. That’s what I think. I think if you argue with me, if you will, and I’ve said this before, and I don’t, I don’t exclude anybody. You know, Facebook, you know, I love to talk about how much I hate Facebook. But we’ve got to be honest, the social media in general, his voice to a lot of people that used to remain voiceless. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Everybody can say, anybody can say that, you know, absolute freedom of speech is necessary, right? Everybody should be able to say whatever the hell they want to say, I don’t believe that. That’s true. And, and frankly, I don’t believe that it’s allowed, honestly, outside of social media. Because in social media, you say, whatever the hell you want. You know, with Musk running Twitter, it’s become even more so open in that direction. Honestly, we’re supposed to be free of discrimination in general, right? I mean, that’s sort of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, right? I mean, discriminatory shit, be it against a person of color, being against a gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, whatever it is, as long as you know, as long as you’re not hurting anybody, I just don’t care. You know, and I don’t think you know, a trans person. Being a teacher, for example, is something that should never happen. Listen, if they keep their agenda to themselves, and they teach, they’re really good teachers, and who gives a shit, I don’t care if my teachers black, I don’t care if my teachers white, I don’t care if the teacher is trans. I don’t care if the teacher is a lesbian or a gay guy. I care about him being a good teacher. And that shouldn’t be dictated by they shouldn’t be dictated by a label, I guess. So the concept now is if you play Hogwarts legacy, if you say anything good about Hogwarts legacy, you are, you are discriminatory against LGBTQ, because you’re not banning something that’s two steps removed and what you’re playing. So it’s not just the Harry Potter books, right? It’s actually the Harry Potter movies, right? Anything that this woman does this JK Rowling who I just I wish I could give a shit about her. But I don’t. Anything that this woman does says or has any six degrees of separation from if you’re not banning it outright, if you’re not saying terrible things about it. If you’re not discriminating it with a label, right, then then you’re evil. You’re the evil person. Now listen, every everybody’s allowed to be evil. I’m allowed to be evil. I cannot like Facebook, right? You can love Facebook, I can hate it. And we just have to agree to disagree. Unfortunately, representatives of communities where people gain knowledge and information, right? Yes, there’s always been op ed. There’s always been editorials. There’s always been opinion pieces. But we’re starting to break into the realm where things that are supposed to be neutral game reviews, right? You should not have to worry about somebody’s politics, sexual orientation, preferences, anything like that when we’re talking about a game review, right? Forget your politics. Leave them at the door if you’re going to read if you’re going to review Hogwarts legacy. I don’t care what your stances on trans people. I don’t care if you love or hate JK Rowling’s. I want to review of the game. I don’t want to hear your nonsense. I don’t. Just like if I’m reading information. I’m reading about the Ohio train derailment. I don’t want someone pointing fingers and saying it’s a democratic smokescreen, the CIA. I don’t care about your politics or conspiracy theories. Just give me the goddamn news. What happened? How many people were killed? What was the affected range? What does this mean for the future of railroad safety? What are we going to do as a country to stop it from happening again? That’s what I’m interested in. Leave the politics and your own personal viewpoints about the author of the series that the game was based on. Right? What What if? What if? What if I’m just gonna make this I’m gonna just go hog wild here? What if? What if people who hated Polish people to make Polish jokes right? Remember the 80s? We still pull up jokes all the time terrible, horrible thing we did, but it happened. Right? What if? What if the Witcher three game was condemned by journalists? Because the guy that wrote the books that the games were loosely based on was Polish, there’ll be an uprising, P There will be blood in the streets. None of that shit would fly. But somehow it’s okay. For them to change their reviews based on two degrees of separation with JK Rowling. I don’t like it. It bothers me. I don’t want that in my mainstream media. Yeah. Hey, Brian, hold What’s up, brother? So anyway, I’m, I’m livid because, honestly, hogs word legacy, by the way, first of all, I hate Harry Potter. I have no interest in Harry Potter. I have no interest in JK Rowling’s I have no interest in Harry Potter is an intellectual property. I do love me a good sandbox open world game though, which is what drove me to look at this game to begin with. And I’m here to tell you, it’s my Game of the Year for 2023. So far, how do you like that? And that comes that says a lot. That would be like, me giving website of the Year from something that that was that was owned and operated by Facebook. All right. I mean, that’s that’s kind of what we’re talking about here. Right? I mean, I think I hate Facebook more than Harry Potter, but I’m more indifferent. Every part of the meeting at Facebook, I just ate. But you know, let’s, let’s, let’s be honest here. It’s a good game. Everybody, even when they’re striving to get to get realistic. nitpicks about this game. All I see is their hatred. All I see is the vitriol. I don’t see reasonable assessments of the game. And and and its mechanics, and the story and and, you know, there’s there’s some things to bitch about, for Hogwarts legacy, absolutely. But when, when you read the headlines of these articles, and you get to the meat, where essentially you realize that this is some sort of a personal vendetta against JK Rowling, I just exit review. You don’t need to be reading that you should just leave anything, and then leave a nasty comment, and maybe stop going to that website. Stop supporting those journalists. That’s not journalism, that’s op ed. If I want op ed, you better label it as Op Ed. Or better yet editorial, because it’s really just an editorial. It’s a commentary on it’s not what I’m interested in, I want to see realistic game reviews, leave your politics out of my game reviews. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you. But yes, so I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed that the trickle down effect from the social media nastiness that’s going on, in all four corners of the box is trickling its way into gaming. You know, there’s one hope that you can get away from all of this sometime. Right gaming is escapism, the last thing you want to do is have gaming be involved with the, you know, fight does, you’re on social media, it makes me crazy, social media will be the end of us, the anthropologist will. They’ll they’ll drag out our bones and 200 years ago, Jesus Christ, the fuck was wrong with these people? They should have seen this coming. Anyway. So that’s all I’ve got to say about that. So I’m done with Hogwarts legacy. What am I moving on to next? I don’t know, sons of the forest is out in like a week. So I’m guessing I’m going to play Overwatch and maybe a little of that returnable. Maybe I’ll try a little bit of that. But honestly, you know, I don’t, I don’t need a long term game now because I got sons of force coming up. And quite frankly, I think that’s gonna take pretty much all of my free time moving forward after this. I just drove a place while on the deck. So let’s see, what else do I have to talk about? What are we 20 minutes in? Alright. Let’s see. So for those of you who do have steam decks, or actually this benefits, kind of everybody, right, sort of maybe I just threw in a video together about STEAM, local network copying. And so this feature promises to allow you to install a game from another device from another device on your land. So let’s say I’ve downloaded Hogwarts legacy on my PC. My son picks it up. And instead of downloading it from the internet, steam can reach out to my computer and say, hey, you’ve got a copy. Let’s not download it. Let’s just download it from your machine. mean over the land? Now, that seems like sort of a revolutionary thing. I mean, think about it, you’ve got a gaming PC and you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got a gaming PC and a steam deck, you’ve got a gaming PC, and so does your wife or so does your son or so does your daughter. Everybody’s got a gaming PC, and everybody’s gonna play the same game. One download to rule them all. Right, and so why would you? Why would you want that? Why would you even give a shit? I mean, a lot of us, most of us, I would think, in the sound of my voice are probably on uncapped, unfiltered. No quota internet, right? So it doesn’t matter how much you download a month. It doesn’t matter, you can download 100 gig or 200 gig or a terabyte a month? Nobody cares. But there are people who are on data caps, right one terabyte data caps for the month, which is that sounds like a lot, but it sure the hell is not. Right. I mean, look at it, Hogwarts is like, what, 100 gigabytes, have four people in the household download it, you just went through 40% of your data cap for the month, the whole month, just downloading one game for four people. And forget about the updates. And you know, browsing the internet, and watching Netflix and all that other shit, right? I mean, you can blow through a terabyte really, really fast. So I can understand why people on a quota would want to do that. There’s also of course, the idea that, like, let’s say you’re a teenager, and you bring your steam back over to your friend’s house, and your friend has Hogwarts and you share the Steam library, you’d like to try it. So instead of downloading yourself and getting on his Wi Fi or getting on your mobile hotspot, which almost certainly be metered, you just get on his land, right. And you can get it from him. So I see that there are benefits to it. But if you watch my recent video, you’ll find out that in my case where everything is hardwired across the board, it’s actually slower. If you can believe this, it’s slower to copy the game over the land than it is to download it from the internet. I don’t know why that is, I have no clue. But numbers don’t lie. And I’ve got it on video. So you know, 18 minutes to download a game versus 3437 minutes, whatever it was to copy from another machine, and everybody’s wired up. So it’s not like you have a Wi Fi leg in there. So it’s like, unless you’re on a metered connection, there’s really, there’s really no point to it. I mean, honestly, the use cases for this are almost nil, right? So and it’s also it’s also faster than writing directly to say esteem decks SD card, what I really need to do at some point is to try to copy the files, not through Steam, but across the land proper. You know, just do a file copy and see if it’s any faster, but it’s not looking like it 15 minutes difference is 15 minutes difference. So something to think about. But anyway, I thought that was kind of interesting. I also found out that the big P m u which is a Jaguar emulator, now listen, I’m not a Jaguar person. But I know people in my listening audience are so big P M, mu came out a while back. And it is sort of a joint it’s a joint venture between the folks over a digitally Eclipse, which are responsible for the Jaguar emulation found in the Atari 50th anniversary, a guy named Rich White House with written white mouse I don’t have the name in front of me sorry. But they put he put together a free you know, with the source code version of the of a Jaguar emulator that runs absolutely fantastic. But one of the things missing from the initial video that I shot for it was Jaguar CD ROM support, which is now in the package. So I’m going to put together a video showing it running some Jaguar CD stuff in the future. Again, not because I’m big into the Jaguar, but you know, listen, emulation and read tour sort of my bag right so I’ve got to talk about it when I see it. Plus, it’s really fun to see Jaguar CD games running on my Steam deck. I won’t lie pretty damn cool. Let’s see what else has been going on. Health wise nothing really to report things are in stasis at the moment everything is maintaining homeostasis. nothing new to report. I’m still tired a lot. And I think that has to do with the combination of the the antidepressant that I was put on along with the lack of testosterone gel that I’m no longer using. And I think that that’s just that’s just a double whammy my friends. Sometimes it’s just hard to get my ass out of bed, because I’m just so exhausted. So anyway. Whoo hoo hoo firstworldproblems I’m sitting in my hot tub. complaining about him not getting enough sleep, right? Let’s see, we’re expecting the arcade replicate version of spaces to be shipped pretty soon. It looks like all of the issues are clear on that. We’re just waiting for them to get shipped over from China. And hopefully, they’ll be sending out those units soon. So I’ll be able to take a look at that I’m really excited to have a Space Ace replicate sitting up next to my Dragon Slayer, which by the way, they have a limited supply of the Dragons layers back. So if you missed out, and you want to get in on that they may be gone by now. But last I saw they still had some so you might want to get in on that. They’re also offering food fight. I believe it’s food fight, available as a new miniature cabinet from replicated. Again, another game that I don’t need to own you give me Robotron I am so there. I can’t even imagine how cool it would be to have a little Robotron cabinet. I’m hoping that’s coming. But time will tell now. And for my last story today, we’ll try to keep this about a half hour show. I have been desperately trying to get my hands on the night writer 40th anniversary edition from Germany. But I cannot seem to get that package into my hands. No matter I’ve done this twice. Now, each time it has come and been returned. And it looks like for some reason they have my zip code wrong even though I’m 100% positive that my zip code was entered correctly on the order form. So I guess I don’t know if I’m going to try for a third time because the second one is on its way back to Germany right now. I’d love to get my hands on it. It’s got the original music. It’s got some of the stuff that was cut tons and tons of swag in the box. I want I want it now. But it’s not looking like I’m going to get it now. Because for some reason, we just can’t We can’t get that shipment to come over. So I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try it again. Maybe I won’t. I’m hoping eventually it works its way over to a US release. And we can enjoy it proper. Let’s see three minutes or so. Huh? Yeah. So going I’ve been going through my old TV shows going through. I need background noise, right. We’ve talked about this on the show. Sometimes you don’t want to watch new stuff. You want to watch stuff you’ve seen so that it’s the part of your mind that wanders gets latched on to the TV, and the part that you need to work with is available. Right. So I’ve recently been through the last half of Desperate Housewives my daughter Christina recently discovered that dad wasn’t fucking crazy. The Desperate Housewives is an amazing show. And so she picked up the show and started watching it. And so when she told me about it, she had just started season three or season four. And so I started watching it at the same time so that we could, you know, talk shop. And she just finished that up. And so I told her she needs to move to Devious Maids, which is made by the same guy. It’s another one of those Telemundo crossover shows which Desperate Housewives was as well. Done by Mark cherry, same kind of writers same sort of stories and stuff. Really good show. It didn’t it didn’t get a finale like it should have. Unfortunately, it got canceled after three seasons. But I watched that, that I went through Prison Break all five seasons of bad again. And now I am going through Spartacus and I’m watching it in the correct order. Which means I’m watching season two first, then going to season one, then season three and then that’s it. And the reason for those of you who are not smart is first of all Spartacus. Listen, the CGI is terrible. It’s in some cases, it’s really, really bad. And you guys know I’m a huge anti CGI person. The only thing that lets them get away with it, in my opinion, one amazing writing two amazing story, three insane plot development and character development. And four, there’s a stylistic approach to the way that that show was shot. That it’s almost, it’s almost like comic book or cartoony style. And when you do that, when you’re not trying to pass CGI off as realistic, there’s something to be said for that. And I find this really hard to explain. It’s like I should be banding Spartacus because of the horrible CGI but at the same time, I think it’s one of my top five shows of all time. And the only reason I can I can say that is because you put up with it because everything else is so great. And it’s so fantastic. And it’s just it’s a show for grownups I said this the last time I watched it, but it’s actually a show for adults to watch. It’s not watered down. There’s no There’s no message There’s no wokeness going on, there’s nothing that would piss you off. You know, everything in there is like, gritty. And I don’t know. I just love it. I love it. So I’m going back through that. I’m in the second season or Season One technically, because I watched the preseason first. So that’s what’s new on the TV front for me. My watching anything new new. I’m not I had a few things going on. I’m behind on curse of Oak Island. I’m behind on Skinwalker Ranch. I’m supposed to watch the White Lotus supposedly that will appeal to me. I don’t know. I don’t know. So much. There’s almost too much peace and love, peace and love. I have too much to watch. All right, everybody. I’m going to get my butt back in the house. My wife is feeling poorly. She’s probably going to need to go back to bed soon. And like you already know. She can’t go to bed. Well, I’m back here yapping at you guys. So I guess that’ll do it. I hope you enjoy the extra show. Thank your local chat bot for shaming me into producing more content. This is Shane Armand row passenger seat radio. We’ll see you next time. Take care.