Voxels

Hi, I'm Sonic. And you know what? We're not talking about anime today. This is not the

anime episode. That's next week when the new season begins. But Free Run, we talked about it

prior, just ended on Friday. And my pitch to you, also I'm Christian, but my pitch to all of you

listening is just watch the fucking show. Watch the 28 episodes, live your life, enjoy the story

that you're going to just partake in and thrive. It is good. While they ended it at the end of an

arc in the manga, there's still a bunch more manga going on. There's probably enough for another

season or so. While that's still happening, the story you're given, it ended on a good place.

And frankly, it's just a fantastic show that everyone should watch. So yeah, please watch

Free Run. If you don't, I will add you on Signal and consistently spam you with notifications to

watch it. Yeah. So our first story, we do a lot of music, I guess, talk this week, but which is

fine by me. And a good opportunity, good time to talk about one of the most important hip hop

albums, just like of all time, right? Like, I don't think it's like an understatement to say

that this album influenced artists, like of all hip hop artists, and even just like not just hip

hop, but just like music, you know, like it's a big album. We're talking about Madlib. We're

talking about Madvillainy. It is the 20th anniversary of Madvillain. Yesterday was the

20th anniversary. It came out March 23rd, 2004. Yeah. Jesus. So yeah. So we have a Pitchfork

article, which is going to link the archive.org link as well, because, you know, just in case it

disappears. What's the over under? What's the over under? What goes to shit first? Old Pitchfork

links or Bandcamp? In the music sphere, which one's going to go to shit first? I would say

Pitchfork. Honestly, at the rate the media world is going, I think Pitchfork's articles disappear

first. So let's talk about, honestly, it's been a long time since I've listened to Madvillainy. I'll

be real with you. I don't remember the details of this album. So it's been a minute since I've

listened to this. Well, that's actually interesting if you do listen to it. And I think what you're

going to experience, not have recently putting into rotation, is how contemporary it sounds.

I'm stealing this from someone I saw on social media posted, so I'm sorry this is not an original

idea. But someone referred to this as an album that keeps de-aging as time goes on.

Interesting.

The more contemporary it sounds as time goes on, just because I think the joke has always been

that MF Doom and Madlib are your rapper's favorite rapper, right? But you can hear the influence on

it. I mean, outside the fact that like Most Odd Future sampled tracks off of this or other MF

Doom projects or Madlib projects. And there's a whole run of Madlib and Freddie Gibbs. Kanye

has had Madlib produced tracks. There is so much influence here where you can just draw straight

lines from things. It's in a similar vein of old Apex Twin, right? You listen to a lot of Apex Twin,

and you probably are like, "You can just draw straight lines to that, to some of the stuff

Porter Robinson, Skrillex, and other people ended up doing. Did it with Future Sound of London and

some of those other 90s groups." So it's one of those albums, and it's just the writing on it.

The writing on it is so fucking fantastic. It's weird and zany, but it's weird and zany in a time

where that shit wasn't the norm, right? Nowadays, if I wanted to get over 100 boosts on Mastodon,

I could just post a photo of a red panda hugging a tree going, "Beep," and people would just

reboost that shit all day, right? That's bomb, babe. And nowadays, weird stuff like that,

that's the norm, right? Random people just posting jorts because I don't know.

Something compelled them to post it. But in 2004, having that kind of weirdness just wasn't norm.

- Yeah. Can we contextualize this? 2004 was what? Era of-

- When the college dropout came out. - So was that still the era of 50 Cent and-

- No, it was before it. - Oh, okay. So I'm trying to-

- Wait, when did Get Rich or Die Trying? Let me see. Get Rich or Die Trying. Oh, it came out 2003.

So Get Rich or Die Trying came out a year beforehand. - I suppose that's the story.

So we're in peak gangster rap, right? We're in the, I would call it the golden age of gangster

rap, 50 Cent being at the height of his popularity, right? Get Rich or Die Trying.

- Okay, let me put contextually more. I have a list, all right? Here's music albums released

in 2004. The Carter One by Lil Wayne, The College Dropout, Encore by Eminem.

- Okay, that's a big one. Those are all big albums.

- Confessions by Usher, Medulla by Bjork. I don't listen to much Bjork, so I don't know.

- Oh, you don't listen to- I don't think Bjork is- Okay. So as far as hip hop goes, I think it's

probably the weirdest hip hop album. This is not an album that you'd expect to come out in that year.

It's not an album- - Avril Lavigne was still

releasing new music in 2004. - Yeah, I'm feeling old now,

so that's great. So yeah, it's not an album that's contemporary. When it came out, I don't

think it was- It stood out because it's not gangster rap. It's this weird zany shit. It's

not quite what the rest of the hip hop mainstream was producing or releasing.

- And for everyone who's probably listening to it nowadays, who maybe hasn't checked in,

if you've never listened to it before, you're going to listen to it and be like, "Oh, this

is just Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown, and Puduring." It fits so well into that modern,

that weird monotone loop sample stuff. Because you had a lot of boom bap stuff in that- or music

in that era, Operation Doomsday, earlier Madlib stuff. But it wasn't one minute of a super weird

loop with other just random samples playing, just a verse, then next track. Because I would even

argue too that a lot of Madvillainy actually ended up being the precursor to what most modern

albums are nowadays, for good and bad. - You mean the way the-

- 24 tracks, one minute, two minute songs at most.

- Like sample, the use of sampling. - No, no, I'm not talking about use of

sampling. I'm talking about how modern- how long was Culture 3? It was 30 tracks. How many hip hop

albums nowadays are just- - Too many tracks, honestly.

- Super long, super short tracks. The Uzi Vert one with the pinball sample, that was 28 songs.

- Yeah, that was massive. And it's sort of like artists, contemporary produces knowledge. I think

it's always I come back to knowledge because knowledge just releases these- all the time on

Bandcamp, he releases these, what do you call them, B tapes?

- Yeah, B tapes, yeah. - They're just B tapes. And it's just a

lot of samples. It's just short, very short tracks with samples on them. And sometimes it's very

funny samples, honestly. That's one sample. Sometimes I listen to, what was that sample?

I think you know which sample I'm talking about. It's a very funny sample. But anyway.

- There's the, what, the Damson, where'd you find this?

- No, it was sometimes, I like knowledge, but sometimes I'll listen to, you know? I forget

what the other said. - I feel like, you have to send me a link

of it. I'm trying to remember. - Yeah, I feel like it's at the tip of my

tongue, but I can't remember the whole sort of vocal on it. But-

- Holy shit. Beyonce wasn't even a solo artist when this album came out.

- Oh, Jesus Christ, man. So this was like- - Destiny's Child was still releasing music.

- Destiny's Child era. Yeah, okay. - Okay, actually, if you want to be feeling

them older, Jay-Z and Linkin Park released their collab album this year.

- That album slaps, by the way. I'm just putting it out there. That album goes really hard. It's

better than it's supposed to be, better than it feels like it should be. Yeah, this era of hip

hop, I feel like there's a lot of stuff I am not, I would have been, what, like 12? How old,

I was too young to really be paying attention to hip hop as a genre. So when this stuff all came

out, I wasn't paying attention to the hip hop subculture. So it's hard to get the context. I

feel like why this is so important as a historical reference and a historical object.

- Well, it just means the era it came out in, right? Green Day released American Idiot this

same year. You gotta, the reason we keep saying this is, this album sounds like it came out in

2020 or 2021. It sounds like some modern Earl Sweatshirt stuff. It sounds like this is before,

this is when The Alchemist was still rapping. This is before you had that style of beat production

on so many different artists. Griselda wasn't even making music then. And that's the influence

it carries on. And that's why it's such an important album to be talking about 20 years

later. 'Cause it also, it's aged so fucking gracefully. There are very few albums, I don't

think anyone from nowadays is like, you know what, American Idiot, I can listen to that any day of

the week. But you could just throw on Madvillainy whenever and it's a vibe.

- Yeah, it's like a timeless sort of vibe to it. That's-

- Also too, MF Doom's fucking run. He also released Mmm Food a few months later. Homeboy

released three albums in the same year that were all classics. I don't know if you ever listened

to Mmm Food. If you, it's really, you should, okay, so.

- I should just listen to all of, basically all of MF Doom's discography. Yeah, that is-

- MF Doom's discography. Yeah. Also the VOD villain stuff, King Ghidra, other acts. I would say-

- Yeah, MF Doom, we could do an entire podcast series on MF Doom. I feel like MF Doom himself

is this kind of like a legendary figure at this point in hip hop culture and history.

We could do an entire, more than an entire hour talking about MF Doom and his music

sort of career. It's just prolific. It's rest in peace, but prolific producer, prolific artist,

really just ahead of his time, so ahead of his time, it's kind of crazy. Just really honestly,

this is crazy. So I, do you, okay, this is my question to you. If anybody has not heard

MF Doom's work, do you think Mad Villainy is a good place to start or do you, is there another

album that people should- - No, you start with Mad Villainy. I mean,

honestly, if you're trying to give someone a hip hop starter pack, for as good, as bad as that

sentence sounds, you start with Mad Villainy because it explains so much of why people do

things the way they do, right? Like monotone flows, this kind of writing style, this kind

of production style. It fills in a lot of gaps that just by listening to the record, you'll get.

Fantastic album, RIP MF Doom, play Mad Villainy, buy it on vinyl, Stones Throw. Also, this is the

album that made Stones Throw the record label because Stones Throw didn't have any, it was just

Mad Libs record label. It did not have a bunch of artists, knowledge and all that beforehand.

- Yeah, yeah, that's true. Stones Throw is, I guess you would call it an underground label.

Not really. I don't know if it's, I would give you, these days you'd consider it an underground,

but it's like, back then it was definitely a very small label. It's just underground and

underground. So yeah, Stones Throw, which is still around. That's wild.

- Yeah. I think the last thing we can say, number one is, there's a really good Flying

Lotus tweet that I don't have a link to, but when MF Doom passed, all he said is,

"Mad Villainy, all you need in hip hop is this record. Sorted, done, give it to the fucking

aliens." - That's good. I love that. That's great. They should have put that on the golden record

that they sent out into space, honestly, for real. Flying Lotus also, I mean, side note,

Flying Lotus, if you've never listened to Flying Lotus, go listen to Flying Lotus as well. Good

shit. So we want to talk about video games for a bit. Dragons Dogma 2. First, before we get mad

about this, for the purposes of the discourse, I just want to link to Austin Walker's post on this

on Rebap Radio, because first of all, Austin Walker hasn't written anything like this in a

long time, and it is truly incredible to read Austin Walker again, but I'm just going to put

that. But I find it interesting, because the only reason I even know about Dragons Dogma as a video

game, as a cultural object, is because of Austin Walker. I don't think I would have ever heard

about Dragons Dogma. It's not a game that sort of was... The first game is a cult classic at this

point, but it would never have reached me otherwise. And Dragons Dogma 2, Capcom finally

was like, "All right, we're gonna make this game." I don't think when I first heard about Dragons

Dogma, I was like, "In no way are they gonna make a second game from this." It was not popular,

it's not a game that seemed like it would sell a lot of copies. But here we are in 2024,

Dragons Dogma 2 has been released as we speak, and it is... Well, it's very annoying, actually,

kind of, in a way, if you're like... Because a lot of the game's actual game bits have sort of been

taken over by discourse about microtransactions and bad performance, which is not great.

So let's talk about the microtransactions first, I think, because that is the most

important problem. The performance issues can be fixed easily, and I suppose they will be fixed

in a few months' time. But the microtransactions... So what's the gist of the microtransactions? So

you have microtransactions to buy fast travel objects, things that give you fast travel,

right? Am I understanding that right? There are other problems, like the ability to create a new

character. You can't delete your existing save and create a new character. You can't re-roll

your character without deleting the save. So that's an issue. So let's say right now I have

a character and I'm like, "You know what? I want to modify something on them." You have to delete

your entire save and redo a new playthrough. Yeah, that seems like an anachronism. I feel

like even older RPGs have sort of respeccing... I think a way to say this is, if Starfield lets

you do it, Dragons Dogma should let you do it. Yeah, I mean, Dark Souls lets you do it.

It's not a particularly new concept to have an RPG where you can respec. That's a concept that

has been around a long-ass time. It would make RPGs extremely inflexible if people couldn't

respec to a certain amount. So yeah, these microtransactions... I think the biggest point

of this that has been brought up is that these microtransactions are not present at all in

review bills of the game. So reviewers, when they played this game and reviewed the game,

and the reviews came out, there was no zero mention of these microtransactions. They were

not there because they weren't put in the review bills, which meant that the review bills are

misleading in that sense. The reviews are, in a way, misleading. It's not complete. You have to

like sort of go into the game. You look at Steam, it's sitting at mixed or negative. I don't think

Steam reviews are the end-all be-all of anything, really, honestly, because they're easily brigaded.

But there is a sort of vibe to this game where people are like, "Why would I play this game?"

This is a single-player game, first of all. This is a $70 title, by the way. This is a $70 US dollar

title. A single-player game with microtransactions, which were not present in the review bill. So I

think a lot of people are just like, "You know what? I'm not gonna play this game. It's not

worth it." Even though a lot of the actual game stuff in there is pretty funny if you're like,

"You did this kind of RPG." Honestly, I've been considering picking this game up, but not yet.

I was thinking of picking this game up in May after I play Horizon Forbidden West, which came

out on PC the same day. But right now I'm thinking I need to wait longer. I feel like there's also

the performance issues that I mentioned, which we can link to the Digital Foundry video on it,

I think, which goes into why it's bad on all the consoles as well, and the PC versions as well.

It's just the CPU multi-threading seems a little sketchy there. It doesn't take advantage of the

CPU problem. It seems surprisingly CPU-heavy, which, yeah, that's Dragon's Dogma. I don't know.

Have you played the original Dragon's Dogma? It feels like a game you might have played. Not me,

but... I have not played the original Dragon's Dogma. And honestly, when I look at games like

Dragon's Dogma and other games, all I think to myself is, "Hey, what if someone did this,

but in a first-person style, and it had the same combat as Destiny?" I would fuck with that.

I want first-person Souls-like games. So you want Destiny, but Skyrim? Is that what you want?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I want that Souls-like experience where you go and get rocked,

and then rock with it. But I would like it in a first-person way and not in a third-person

slow-moving combat way. I think there is something to be done with that. Bungie has

explored with it in some of the dungeons in Destiny, but I feel like there's a gap there,

and there's totally room to be able to make that into something that is interesting.

But this microtransaction surprise trend has actually happened in a few games recently.

I think Metacritic is bad. I think the reviews industry is weird because... Oh,

they talked about an aftermath a while ago. I think it was a Jason Schreier episode of the podcast.

But to me, it seems weird that we are reviewing art-like products. If you actually go back to

Pitchfork, you'll go back to the Pitchfork review of Madvillainy. It is not reviewed like a product.

And if games are art, it's... I feel like this is a semantics discussion,

but also a philosophical discussion. What is a review? Is it a critique of the art, or is it

a buyer's guide? I think there's two. There's a line of sand. When you're reviewing something

that's a little more... No, I'm talking about music. There's a technical aspect of it, and

once it meets the technical bar of quality, the rest of it is all subjective, and the rest of it

is all just a conversation on art and how it moved you or how you feel about that art. I think a good

example of the music is mixing and mastering. You have an album that is poorly mixed. It is

clipping. It is actually unlistenable because you cannot hear what is being said. That may be the

artist's intent, but if it's obviously not the artist's intent, then that would not be the

technical bar of quality for what you would expect from an album if everything's super loud or super

quiet, and it just makes it where you're not able to actually enjoy the intent of whatever the album

is supposed to be. I think the same thing goes for games where, yes, there's a technical bar

where is it crashing? Does it have de nuvo, microtransactions here? But then afterwards,

it should just be only a conversation about the art itself. I think that's where games reviews are

mostly like. A lot of games reviews tend to be copying what tech reviews do where it's like,

"Yes, here's this product." I mean, The Verge has done a lot of it where they do tend to talk about

what that product feels or what you feel like using it. But I think for a lot of people,

we understand that like, "Hey, if I'm going to read the latest iPhone or Pixel review,

I'm probably just wanting to know, do these new features work as advertised?

Is it competent? Battery life? I already know what I can do with it, so I don't need that much

explained to me for the basics." But that's not how we should be talking about games. A lot of it

is like, "This Quest system was neat. All right, I guess we went to the next point," whereas it

should be, I think, a lot more of a deeper conversation on the art. That's a harder skill,

though. I think that's why not enough people do that. That's a skill that's not...

I mean, games critique and game journalism has never paid well, but I would say the subsection

of games writing that could be called games critique is basically non-existent at this point

because nobody's paying for it. There are very few publications that are paying writers to write

what I would consider games critique. The stuff that Austin Walker wrote for Rebap Radio,

that kind of thing, that kind of writing, the more subjective, talking about the art for the sake of

the art and not the technical aspects of the creation of the art, in a sense, feels so rare

nowadays. I feel like there's only very few small magazines or websites. I don't know if Paste

magazine is still around, or there are some other smaller games magazines that did this kind of

more critique-level writing. It doesn't get views, it doesn't get clicks in an industry that is so

focused on ad revenue and page views that stuff like nuanced critique of a mechanic or a story,

a narrative from a video game is not going to get the same amount of views as a straight-up,

basically, technical review. I do agree that games shouldn't be reviewed entirely on the

merits of their technical ability because if we did that, it would be extremely boring.

Steven: That's true. I guess most game reviews, if we need to take the most cynical

view of it, given what's happening at Kotaku this week, the editor-in-chief leaving,

it's probably actually not that cynical, it's more accurate than not, but most game reviews

probably just exist at links to increase SEO ranking of the guides for that game.

Kyo: Okay, yes, but also, I don't think that's entirely true either. I think there are still

writers writing good reviews. I read reviews often, actually.

Steven: I'm not talking about from the writer's perspective. This is from the

game site's perspective. For most, like GeoMedia, Future, PLC, whatever, the ones that run the big

sites are, whoever the fuck, Tencent, whoever the fuck's behind Fandom, whatever company owns

Fandom right now, for all of their perspective, I'm pretty sure they'll take a game review and

they're like, "Well, this is a great way to silo on new people who want to access our guides' content,

because that's where we make a bunch of money." Kyo: Exactly. It's like a way to drive traffic to

the site to stuff that actually gets a lot of views, which is the most cynical way to look at

it. But yeah, the industry is like that, which is unfortunate. Dragon's Dogma, I'm on an RPG kick

really recently. I've played a lot more RPGs than I have recently. I do want to play Dragon's Dogma

2 at some point. I don't know when. Maybe I'll play later in the year, or maybe I'll play next

year, but I'm planning on eventually, at least when the technical problems are resolved, or

mitigated, I will pick it up. Is there anything else to say about Dragon's Dogma before we move?

Ben: Yeah. I'm happy that y'all got, it's genuinely a good time. People get sequels that

are called classics. But I am not going to be surprised if you see Capcom do some kind of BS

at an investor meeting, being like, "This is why we can't make games like this," because it doesn't

meet some asinine sales expectation. Kyo: Yeah. They're going to be like,

"Oh, sales fell below expectations, like Square Enix always does."

Ben: In Dragon's Dogma, I don't know what expectations were. There's probably a million.

Kyo: Yeah, what expectations? I'm surprised this game got made in the first place, honestly. I

wasn't expecting Dragon's Dogma 2 to be a thing that exists. So, I don't know. So, let's talk

about, this is one of your hobby horses, I think. I don't know why. Everybody has their thing, but

anti-cheat. We're talking about specifically anti-cheat on PC titles. There was a story

recently about Apex Legends finals, Apex Legends Esports final, sort of postponed after suffering

what is like a remote code execution exploit, RCE, that happened to players while they were

in match during the tournament, which I don't think I've ever actually seen happen. I think

this might be the first time this has happened in any significant kind of way, a significant game.

And that sort of brings us to our conversation about anti-cheat, which is that,

why is kernel anti-cheat a thing? This is your thing. So, I'll let you introduce this.

What's the deal? Yeah. So, I want to take even a bigger step back. So, I think it is safe to say

that on most gaming PCs, most regular PCs, a lot of people, for better or worse, won't install

software that they think will help them with their games, or that software that is able to access a

lot of parts of their system to help control their PC. It bases it from hardware stat info to other

GPU monitoring tools, the video driver, of course, AMD driver, and also RGB controllers.

And what I don't understand from Microsoft's perspective is, why do they let all of that

get just outsourced to third parties and not be integrated into the OS? And not in a control

every way, everything perspective, but in a, all of this stuff could be easily exposed by APIs at

the OS controls, and not drivers or things that you need kernel access for. It seems like a lot

of this gaming software is probably some pretty fucking big security holes, especially as most

gamers don't use much anti-malware software, because it does have an impact on gaming

performance. There's actual reasons where you don't want to have stuff standing in the background

when you're trying to play a game, especially if you don't have a baller 4090 system,

or you can't brute force stuff. You're on a more moderate 3060, 3070, Core i5, more mid-spec system.

And that's what's weird to me is that it's all outsourced. It's all just other...

Outsourcing is a bad word. It's all not done in-house. It's not Microsoft official stuff.

And they should just start, I think, implementing some of this because I think it's getting to the

point where it is a actual security vector for devices to be compromised. Because if you want

to go after an affluent market with ransomware or whatever, the gamers... Bro, gamer raids,

gamers will pay... Gamers pay so much money. Gamers pay three times the same amount for the

same quality microphone or headset just because it integrates with their RGB controller.

They don't know what the fuck they're doing. So this goes to a little more closer to Apex,

where if you look at macOS, you have the secure enclave and other stuff. And what Apple does

is for games through the App Store is they don't have necessarily anti-cheat built in per se,

but because it's a signed binary and it's running in the sandbox, it's a lot harder to do on macOS,

if that makes sense. You would have to turn off system integrity protection, and the game will

be able to know that. You can check if that's turned on or off and turn off specific features.

You have some features enabled, you can't record screens on macOS, that kind of stuff. So the

system will make that available if you're worried about the integrity of the environment it's

operating in. But on Windows, there's not a very similar feature. Microsoft does in Windows 11 have

some memory protection stuff with the TPM chip. But it's just weird to me that they do not have

a built-in anti-cheat system that also relies on hardware security chips, some kind of integrity

there. Because while there is a case to be made, but what if that hardware chip has an exploit in

it? I mean, the OS will probably have more. So I think there's a trade-off there. And you can

build it in a way where it's just checking if it's been tampered with. It's not like

scanning everything on your system, or checking for specific behaviors that would go against

whatever the expected output is of the game logic itself. Or more importantly, just use an actual

hardware TPM or whatever to validate the integrity of the operating environment or

sandbox the game in a way, since it's being offloaded hardware, it's not going to have a

huge impact on performance because it's not trying to do some software anti-cheat stuff,

and doesn't need to give random third parties access to your kernel. Because I just keep

repeating this every time people are like, "Yeah, I need anti-cheat installed. I have easy

anti-cheat. I have these 10. I have Ricochet. I have whatever they use in Call of Duty."

And do you trust Activision Blizzard of access to your kernel? Do you trust Riot Games of access to

all the memory on your computer? Yeah. Okay. So this is not a new thing.

I remember when Valorant first came out. This is not a new talking point. When Valorant first came

out, there was a lot of discourse about... I think Valorant was the first big game to implement

kernel-level anti-cheat. Before that, games did have anti-cheat, but they were not running in

kernel. They didn't have kernel-level privileges. They were running in user mode, which meant that

they didn't have as much access to various things as code running in kernel mode does, just by the

nature of where the kernel sits in the perspective of the operating system. Valorant was running this.

And I remember at the time, everybody was like, "Oh, we shouldn't give anti-cheats access to the

kernel. Why are we running stuff in kernel mode? Why are we running this particular bit of software

in kernel mode?" Especially software that's looking at processes, looking at memory. That

seems a little bit too much privilege for a piece of software to have. And I think the discourse

sort of died down after a while, as these things gamers can't pay attention to anything for more

than a week. So it didn't seem to affect Valorant's popularity or anything. So it's a discourse that

people don't like to think about it. It's like, "I'm going to install these video games, and they're

going to install these other pieces of software that I don't know exactly what it's doing, and

it's going to sit in kernel space doing whatever the fuck it wants." And yeah, I do agree that

software like this should not exist like this, because I think it's a massive surface area for

vulnerabilities. I think it's only a matter of time before... In the case of the current

Apex Legends hack, we don't know if it was caused by a vulnerability in EZ_AntiCheat,

which Apex Legends uses, or Apex Legends itself, like Apex Legends server or client-side code.

We don't know what the source of the vulnerability was. But it's only a matter of time before some

major game gets an RCE that is exploited because of code running in kernel space.

I don't trust any of these companies, honestly. DeNuvo, EZ_AntiCheat, Ricochet, Riot Games.

In a way, I trust video game programmers to make good AntiCheat, honestly.

The only reason I say trust Microsoft to do it is because they're the OS vendor,

and they have more of an incentive to make it not shit. The AntiCheat vendors are like,

"What's the incentive structure here? Welcome to the Vergecast. We're stealing what words they use."

But the incentive structure of the AntiCheat platforms or those vendors is preventing at all

costs, regardless of performance impact. That's nice to have, but the North Star there is always

going to be AntiCheat. Whereas Microsoft's like, "Hey, we would want to make one that makes using

Windows nice because we want people to do everything on Windows. We want them to game,

etc. We don't just want this game to work well. We have a more holistic approach because we're

the OS vendor." And more so, they also have the power to force some motherboard configurations

and stuff that might make it a little bit easier. EZ_AntiCheat is never going to get MSI,

Gigabyte, and Asus all on board with, "Hey, for gaming PCs, we really like it. If you have this

stock configuration on the motherboard, because it'll help AntiCheat better. It'll help this

AntiCheat that's built in work better." Which is coming to, they actually used to have an AntiCheat.

I knew it was off the top of my head because this is the person I am. The Windows 10 creator,

fall creators update, do you remember that? It brought Windows mixed reality and My People.

Morgan Housel (00:10:15): Oh my God. Jesus. We're not getting into My

People. This is the wrong podcast for that. Ez_AntiCheat (00:10:21):

But it did also bring a new AntiCheat system that was built into Windows,

similar to how I'm talking about. Only for UWP games though, called Trueplay. It never went live

and it randomly got removed. Morgan Housel (00:10:30):

Yeah. Probably because it didn't get any actual traction from developers.

Ez_AntiCheat (00:10:33): No game ever shipped using it,

is what I'm saying. Morgan Housel (00:10:35):

Because honestly, who wants to ship games in UWP? Windows 10, UWP is, I mean, we can't go

into UWP. Ez_AntiCheat (00:10:46):

It's over. UWP is dead. It's dead. It's dead. It's not even alive anymore.

Morgan Housel (00:10:50):

Whole other can of worms. But most game developers who are releasing games on Windows are

releasing them either on Steam or on the Epic Games Store or on itch.io, if you're in a small

indie title. You're not going to release on the Microsoft Store. Who the fuck releases on the

Microsoft Store except for games that go on Games Pass, I guess. You're not releasing-

Ez_AntiCheat (00:11:11):

Xbox Play Anywhere is a requirement for Game Pass. Yes, that's why.

Morgan Housel (00:11:14):

There's still this problem with the whole Windows ecosystem being extremely variable

in hardware and software. There's a lot of different kinds of hardware. There's a lot

of old hardware out here that still is fully capable of running video games.

Ez_AntiCheat (00:11:27):

Well, that's what I'm saying. It should be like an add-in card or something for this.

It's a Pluton chip. You can get that on, I think it's Enterprise only right now,

but something similar to that where it shipped on a lot of motherboards of Enterprise laptops,

the Pluton chip. I think it's also, they basically took the same security chip that's on an Xbox,

and they started shipping it in Windows PCs. Yeah, the Microsoft Pluton Security Processor

is what it's called. So something similar to that where, okay, so maybe it could be built

in the motherboards for laptops and all that. But if you have an older computer,

just run it via PCI or whatever, right? Or including if someone upgrades their motherboard.

Stig Brodersen (00:12:14):

Yeah, I think Microsoft just doesn't want to get involved in this business. It feels like

it doesn't seem like they particularly want to care about this at all. I think this is always

going to be a discourse point for you because it's not going to get resolved.

Ez_AntiCheat (00:12:30):

Yeah, I don't. I mean, and hey, is this the year I finally switched to Windows for gaming? Who

knows? But you know what would get me to switch a lot better? Listen, you have a nice easy cheese

solution. I'm buying a PC tomorrow. Stig Brodersen (00:12:45):

Oh, okay. All right, Microsoft, you heard it here first.

Ez_AntiCheat (00:12:48):

One new customer, one new fucking weirdo on your platform.

Stig Brodersen (00:12:52):

Yeah. All right, let's talk about another video game that I finished actually yesterday. I

finished it yesterday. I've been playing it throughout this month. Banisher's Ghosts of

You Eden, which is a hell of a title. So this game, this is not a game I had any,

I wasn't looking forward to it. I didn't know even it existed until I saw a review of it on

Drop Paper Shotgun. Shout out to Alice Bell over there who wrote the review. And it is like a

third-person, they call it like third-person goth tragedy action adventure RPG is what Drop

Paper Shotgun called it in their little sidebar. And there was enough of things that I liked,

third-person action adventure, kind of like the God of War game from 2018, kind of that vibe going

on. This is like, you ever play a game where it's like, this is good, everything it's doing is fine,

but it's not doing anything special, right? It's like a seven out of 10 game. I think the strongest

part of it is the narrative stuff that's going on. I think the voice acting is really, really good.

The visuals and the aesthetic of the game and the theme, the way that it sort of has a static

consistency with the theme is very, very good. Like there's some of the creepy New England in

winter vibes is very good. Mechanically, it's a little bit like, kind of try to do the whole

third-person combat thing like God of War does. And it sort of works. It's like, it gets very

repetitive, especially because it's like a 40-hour game. And by the time you get to the end game,

the last three chapters of the game, you're just sort of like, I don't want to do any more combat

because it's just like, it just becomes so simple. Like the combat doesn't have enough variety in it

for it to sustain like 40 hours of gameplay. And there's a lot of combat. And the thing is,

it is a lot of combat because enemies respawn when you rest or fast travel. So you could just be like

doing collectible stuff across the map and then you just, enemies just will randomly spawn and

you have to fight them. Like you can't, you can't avoid them and you just have to fight them. And

which made the, which made this a seven out of 10 game because I think it's kind of, I wish,

I wish it had, I wish it was shorter. And also I wish it didn't have as much combat as it did,

or the combat was better. It just kind of, that's how I'm feeling about this one. Banishers,

Ghost of New Eden developed by Endor Nod, who are also the developers of the Life is Strange games.

It's very weird. Very different game from Life is Strange. But yeah, so don't not publish my

Focus Entertainment. It's, I still think it's a decent game. If you're looking for like a sort of

like, I suggest people read the review, but like if you're looking for this kind of gameplay and

this sort of environment of like ghost haunted stuff, spooky stuff, like go play that, it's

pretty good. So that's Banishers, Ghost of New Eden. I don't think you played this. I would be

surprised if you played this. I don't know anybody else who has played this. - Yeah, I haven't played

it yet. I'm actually taking this time to currently spec out a Razor Blade 14. So continue. - Oh,

you're, hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay, okay. All right, sure. That's good. Finally, it's

happening, folks. It's happening. I told you to buy a gaming laptop. That's the best. - You know,

actually I'm going to take advantage of this. This game sounds great. I just genuinely have not. It's

just the first time I'm hearing of this game. - No, I don't, like it's hard to talk about this

game because literally nobody else has talked about this game. - So actually I'm going to call

upon the PC gamers. All right, PC gamers channeling your energy. I don't know what I'll

do. I'll just wave an RGB controller in the air a few times. But the Asus Zephyrus 14 or the Razor

Blade 14, sorry, Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. - Jesus Christ. - Which one's the better gaming PC?

My thing is, if we're going to, like, I don't- - I don't know. Actually, you know, hold on,

without you asking me this question, Rock Paper Shotgun actually does, like, I mean, they used

to, I don't know if they still do, but if you, like, look up those laptops on their site,

they might have reviews for it and their reviews are pretty good for gaming laptops.

So you might want to actually go to rockpapershotgun.com and search. - All right,

let's see, Zephyrus G14. All right, Rock Paper Shotgun. Okay, they have a 2022. Do we have a

2024 model? I mean, it's two years old, but I know a gaming computer is, you know, same model name,

but everything changes. Yeah, okay, so we have this one from here. What's the hardware review

that is recent? Because, you know, yeah, I love how this just turned into the "let's buy shit

during the podcast hour." - "During the podcast episode," yeah, yes, very good. - Yeah, I don't,

yeah, 2022 is when they stopped doing laptop reviews. Yeah, but I'll look into some reviews

there. - Yeah, there might be other reviews. I mean, that's not the only place that does hardware

reviews, but yeah, I'm really not familiar with, like, the market of gaming laptops as a whole,

so I can't. Personally, I wouldn't buy a Razer product. Like, I just don't trust Razer to make

good hardware, but that might not be the case with laptops, so I don't actually. - Yeah, I mean,

well, I've only ever had two Razer things. Oh, I had three. I had the microphone, which I don't

use because I don't, you know, I have a dynamic mic now. I don't need a desktop microphone. I had

the mechanical keyboard. I had the mouse. The mouse worked fine. The keyboard, the P-key stopped

working, but so that's only one out of three things, and that's a really small sample size.

So, I mean, I don't, I mean, this isn't a PC. Isn't it supposed to be repairable, right? - Not

with laptops, I don't think, but, you know, you can, I mean, some parts are probably replaceable,

but probably not the whole thing. So, do we, well, we have, I have some books and music to

talk about. I want to talk about the music first, so let's listen to it. - You want to talk about

the rap beef, I know. Go for it. Go for it. - Wait, wait, what, what, what rap beef? I don't,

like, I don't, I'm not aware of. - Future, Metro Boom, We Don't Trust You, The Kendrick Album.

- Oh, that, okay. I was like, is there something else I'm not aware of? - Yeah, Drake's Another

Beef. Listen, that, okay, so I will introduce this one. I will introduce this one. So, there's books

in there. Go read the books. They're good books. We're not talking about books right now. We're

talking about music, real stuff, real gamer hours. So, basically, Future and Metro Boomin,

there's a track called Like That, which has a very good Three 6 Mafia sample in it.

And Kendrick Lamar comes for Drake and J. Cole, and it's very funny, and people are freaking out

over it. - Yeah, so he's like, top three, it's just top me, right? Which is just like, oh boy.

I don't know where this is coming from, why this is happening, or like, I would, you know,

this is the most interesting thing that has happened in hip hop in a minute. So, I suppose,

like, we talk about it. I don't understand where the sentiment is coming from, though. I don't know

why Kendrick would be in this state of mind. I don't know if it is actually serious, or it's just

like him just kind of having fun. Like, you know, it's not being entirely serious, it's just kind

of, you know, the one thing rappers do where they talk shit about other rappers, but they don't

actually mean it, you know, they don't mean it in a serious way. Like, it's kind of just having fun

with bars. Like, I don't know. Do you think it's serious? Do you think it's actually, like,

it actually means something? No, no, I don't. I don't think it's serious at all. I think it's,

I think he's just memeing. I think he's just memeing. I think he's memeing. Like, it feels

weird to, like, put that thing in, like, a future form, like a future album. Like, it just doesn't

seem like the place Kendrick would do something like that, if he was serious about it. So,

I don't know. I feel like he would release a track of his own. So, yeah, we're Metro,

if you're Metro Moving, we don't trust you. Very good background music, I would call it. Like,

it's not particularly incredible. There's some good tracks on it, you know, like that is a pretty,

the good Sam. Metro Moving is a good producer. I mean, that's all, that's the thing that carries

this album, really, is not future. Really? I don't think future is the thing that carries any album.

I don't think future is good. Like, I don't think this is a hot thing. I don't think future is,

like, okay, let me rephrase that before, like, I don't know, future stans in our audience get

mad at me. They exist. Go to r/future on Reddit. It's not a great place. Yeah. Look, I'm not,

okay, look, I think future's music is just sort of, it's a sort of vibe. It's like the music of

Don Toliver to me, like, where it's just like, I'm not really listening to it for lyrics or,

or like, or like, you know, kind of like the, like, I'm not listening to it. I'm listening

to like, I don't know, like a no name album or like, I don't know, like, like, like a Griselda,

like Betty the Butcher album. I'm not going to come here for lyricism or anything. I'm just here

for like the vibes, you know, like the sort of the Metro Moving produced vibes here. So that's,

it's a good vibes album. It's not, it's not anything more than that. That's fine. So that's,

that's, that's, that's the hip hop. I have three other album recommendations. These are kind of,

very, all of these are different genres, I suppose. Four Tet released a new album by the day

of three this past week. Four Tet is like an electronic artist. And if you like electronic

music, sort of, we were talking, we mentioned Affects Twin earlier, Future Sounds of London.

I feel Four Tet's music very much feels that kind of era of sort of ambient, not quite ambient, but

electronic, sort of down tempo, electronic stuff. It's very good. It's a vibe. It's not a long

album. It's nice and short, eight tracks. It's a good time. I have another album. This one is,

is like, call it house album. It's by Sofia Cortez, called Madres. Very, very, sort of chill,

nice, sort of laid back house album. It's a good vibe. The last album I got is very different. It

is, okay, so, okay, this is my question. When I say the genre alternative, what do you think that

means? By the way? That's my question. What do you think alternative rock? I think, I think

alternative rock is normally the first thing that comes to mind. Yeah, that's the question. It's so

vague to me. Like, I know, like this, this album on Bandcamp is tagged as alternative and Kansas

City, but it is like, not rock. I don't think it's, I don't, I wouldn't classify as rock. And

I would classify it more as like, sort of folk music. It's very, a lot of acoustic guitars and

singing on it. So I don't know if it counts as, as rock, but whatever it is, whatever the genre

is, it's, it's very, it's a very sort of, it's a very lyric, lyrics focused album. I need to listen

to it more. Honestly, I've only listened to it once and I, I did enjoy what I listened, but I,

it's a, it's sort of nice vibe to it. Waxahachie's Tiger's Blood. Tiger's Blood is the name of the

album. It's good stuff. It released this, this Friday. So those are my music, music. Do you have

any music recommendations? I feel like I just, I just brought like four albums, but I mean, I don't,

three albums, but I don't know if you have any albums other than Madvillainy, I suppose.

Yeah, yeah. I have one music recommendation and that's, is the AMD Radeon RX 6800S better

than a 3060? I actually have recommendations. That is a question I haven't answered to,

as I'm speccing out these computers, but I do actually have recommendations before,

before we go into gaming talk. I was very confused. I was like, is that a name of a track?

First and foremost, Blue Lips, Schoolboy Q, fantastic album. It is a rap album.

Matt Champion, finally the first post-Brockhampton like solo album. The first good one,

because Kevin Aptek's album was trash. Wait, oh, I didn't, I didn't know he released,

I released it out of my- Mika's Laundry, Matt Champion just came out, fire. Beyonce is going

to drop her album in five days, important alert, her country album. Well, when is that? Is that

like- The 29th, Friday.

Oh shit, that's going to be, that's going to be a good Friday. I'm looking forward to that.

Mike dropped Pinball recently. That's another good one. We're going to throw out

Madvillainy influence all across Pinball. And I think for so far, for new albums I've been

fucking with, it's basically been those. The new Ariana Grande albums, like I actually kind

of been enjoying it. I haven't actually, I didn't even know Ariana Grande released,

released a new album. Yeah, it's called Internal Sunshine or something like that.

Also the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth soundtrack is out. So, you know.

Oh, is it good? I have not listened to it yet. I'm just looking at new releases and I saw that

there. Yeah, so, you know, we have some good, some good records out there. Most, first and foremost,

it really is going to be the Schoolboy Q one, but yeah, yeah. So back to the question, is a 6800

better than a 3060 or is it, or is it, is it, I don't, I don't know. Actually what I would do is

I would go look at a review of a 3060 and see if there are, remember it's a laptop though. Remember

laptop processors are so fucking confusing. I don't, because it's about the wattage too. I

really don't know. I don't know if it's better. All right. Portable gamers out there. I know,

I know y'all listening. Portable gamers rise up and please let me know what is the, what is,

what is a good gaming laptop that will play destiny, you know, at 1440 P ultra I think is,

you know, pretty, what would I aim for? 120 FPS, 1440 P, mid spec, like, I don't know.

I don't know what the gamers want. Yeah. Please, please help Christian get into PC gaming.

Finally, at long last. Don't do 4k screens, right? You want, you want with gaming laptops,

you don't want 4k? No, no, don't do 4k because you're not like this 4k is a fucking trap. Like,

do I have to run a native? So this is actual question. I'm not, this is like a genuine

question. I'm not meaning is it, why not 4k for desktop use and then just run the game at 1440 P

versus a 1440 P native monitor. What is the upsides and downsides for scaling like that?

Power usage, power usage of the screen. You're just driving more pixels. So I just got to,

like, if you're going to play the game, you got to, if you're going to use the laptop on battery,

you're just burning power for like, really, I don't, I don't think it's enough of a good reason

on a laptop to sort of spend that much power to, to generate that many pixels for what? So that's

my, I look at it from a power to like power budget to resolution perspective. Like it doesn't make

sense. If it's a desktop, you want to do 4k and you want to run games at 1440. That's okay. Sure.

Whatever. But like, if you a laptop, like I don't, I don't see like, unless you really need the 4k

resolution on the screen for reasons like, you know, that makes sense. And another question

here, AMD or Nvidia for the GPU, does it matter nowadays? I actually don't know these things.

Okay. So I, I, I actually, this is a question I can't answer. I did switch so I can answer

this question. Okay. So there is, Oh, you just switched. You actually just switched. So yeah.

Okay. Go off two factors. Really that sort of matter in this, in this case, I would say,

Oh yeah. Oh, I really wanted this at this sort of, okay. Two, two, it is sort of upscaling features

and ray tracing. So this is this. So if you, if you really care about ray tracing, like if you

really want ray tracing features, you have to go in video because nobody else like it videos

greater. But if a 30, 60 or anything below a 40, 70, it doesn't matter. Right. I ain't below like

a 40, 70. You would like, you'd be better off running, getting higher FPS for free chasing

off. I would assume that's probably true. I mean, it's really about our priorities. Like if you care

about, like you want to run games with ray trace 30 FPS, but like, it's really a matter of

perspective. It's really a matter of what you want to do with your gaze or rather what you usually do

with games. It's just like, do you want, do you want ray tracing? And you want to run like games

at 30 FPS. Like if you want that, you want to get an Nvidia GP, right. The second and second

is the thing is upscaling, which means that you want to look at sort of AMD's FSR technology

versus Nvidia's DLSS technology. Right. So DLSS and FSR are like the big ones here. So it's like,

personally, I, I, when I, when I bought the AMD Radeon, 7900 XTX, Jesus, it's a fucking,

these names. I, when I, when I, when I made a decision, I was like, you know, FSR is getting

better. Like FSR 3.3 is going to come out soon. Like, and more and more games are supporting FSR

like out of the box. So like, and it's, I think Nvidia's sort of dominance in the DLSS space is

kind of coming to an end. So personally, I would go with the AMD GPU because I don't care about

ray tracing. I've, I've found despite having one of the first cheap, one of the, one of the like

big GPUs that supported like, you know, hardware for ray tracing, the 2080 TI, I basically never

used that feature. So I would say go with an AMD card. Is now the right time to buy a gaming PC

then? Or should I wait until the fall refresh? Or back to school? Now is a decent time. Now,

I honestly, now is a good time to buy. Like it's, that's, that question is always like,

when you buy the hardware, what do you need the hardware? But if you like, I mean, I'm going to

sell the Mac book for it. That'd be the idea. Just sell the MacBook Air and then pick one up. Yeah.

Okay. Just get it. It's fine. Like all the hardware right now is in a pretty good state.

Like, I don't think there's any significant upgrades to be coming. Like, sure. If you wait

like a year or so, you probably get like the next generation of Nvidia or AMD chips, but like,

I don't think it's worth that award waiting that long personally.

Like, or if you wait, you wait a year, you end up getting AI features put on everything. Cause

everything's all these Intel ships, ships with the NPU stuff.

Exactly. So yeah, exactly. So just, you know, just good hardware out here right now.

Even the GPU prices are kind of out of whack, but they're better than, than they were. So that was

a good time before prices go up again for the new GPUs. So, right. Right. So yeah. Yeah. Okay. So

that's a PC corner, I guess. I don't know why we turned this into a PC corner episode, but.

I mean, listen, once you switch to Android, everything opens up in your world. You know

what I mean? Also too, actually, here's the real reason. You know what, this is, this is,

this is not a technical review. This is the emotions. This is critiquing art.

You know, I, I was looking at handhelds and then I'm like, these are all compromised. Right. I think

we talked about in our signal chat. They're just not there yet, but, but I do like, actually want

a better gaming setup because right now I'm on the series S and it doesn't make sense to me to

upgrade to a newer Xbox. Right. And as much as I mean about cloud gaming, because you've heard

snow is really good nowadays. There's just some games that don't run there. Like if I wanted to

get into final fantasy 14, I just can't. Right. And more importantly, paying for game pass and

G force now is, and PC game pass is really good now. Like PC game passes, X starting to get really

good. Yeah. I mean, I'm telling you, PC gaming is a really good place despite hardware prices

kind of questionable. But it isn't a really, I mean, listen, I, I come from Mack lad. I'm looking

at this $1,200 Jeff, Jeff, Jeff for risks. I can't speak laptop and it has 16 gigs of RAM and a

terabyte hard drive. That's unheard of in this part of town. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. That's

yeah. Welcome to the world of PCs. I suppose we will. I, I have a few books to recommend. I think

we'll just end it off sort of there. I'll do a quick, I don't want to lend them this podcast

any longer, but I have to, I have four books I read this past month. Only three of them I would

really recommend. I read the first one translation state by and lucky. I did not really like this one.

This is probably the first book this year. I did not enjoy reading all the way through. I felt it

kind of dragged on the concept was not executed well. But if you like, am lucky if you've read

and like his other, other sort of books, sci-fi that you might enjoy this one. I also read three

other sort of nonfiction titles this month. It's been a theme of getting, getting books from the

library and reading non-fiction between the world and me by Todd and Hasey coats, which is a nice

short sort of, it's very, it's hard to describe the book. I don't know how else you describe it.

It's like a letter. It's written in the form of a letter to his son. And it's, it's, it's,

it's really worth, well worth a read hood feminism by Mickey Kendall. Also, also extremely good.

And then the ratchet of the earth by France fan on which is an older text that's from 1960.

But still, if you're a leftist, you should probably read that one. So that's all I'm

going to say on those. That's wrap up. We can find the show notes on foxholes.fm. You can find me on

mass dot app packet kit at pin forward dot social at on my website. So they save.com. And Christian,

where do people find you on the internet? You can find me posting hot takes about web apps,

actually web apps on at lo-fi carrots at MSTDN dot plus. You can find me on website shows,

find our website. Yeah. All right. And with that, goodbye. Bye.