Just In Case You Want To Relive The Glory!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:51)
Hey, what's happening, everybody? Welcome to the show. Hi, it's The Jeff Gerstmann Show. It's a podcast, it's about video games. My name is Jeff Gerstmann. I'll be hosting this week's edition of the show. And what a positive, amazing morning it's been for video games, huh? Anyway, hi. It's, we'll get into the news, of course, later on. Um, man, it has been kind of a fucking wild week in video games. I just want to remind you here as we get going. You want to get an ad-free version of this program? You want to add free show? You want a bonus podcast every week? Head over to jeff.zone to check out the Patreon. Back the, brought back the broadcast. Just keep the nightmare train rolling through your neck of the woods by hitting up the Patreon. You get on the Discord, you get, you know, the bonus show and more to come every week, baby. All right. Hi. So video games are still happening somehow in the, man. Yeah, I don't know. There's a bunch of layoffs this morning. And again, we'll get into it in the news, but it's one of those things that kind of like just happened. It's like, oh, jeez, that's not, it's real, that's real bad. That's real bad. It was an interesting weekend for Marathon, which is Bungie's multiplayer shooter, which has been out for a couple of weeks now. This was the weekend where they debuted their new kind of, I guess you could maybe call it an end game kind of mode. It's kind of a big boss fight. They basically they added a new level to the game that has a crazy, a much more difficult challenge for teams to encounter as they kind of make their way through it. It is, you know, people were kind of comparing it before it was released to something sort of like a Destiny raid, which if you did not play Destiny, the raids in Destiny were like they took a first person shooter and tried to insert like MMO style raid mechanics into it. Now, if you've never played an MMO, rabbit, no, I'm not going to go that far back. You can just look it up, man. But they, the Cryo Archive, which was added to Marathon, which I'm still not high enough level to even attempt, but I ended up watching quite a bit of it, quite a bit of it over the weekend. And seeing how it is structured, it's kind of like, you know, it's an area of the game that has broken up into seven different vaults. And each one of the vaults will have like a key code in it as you, you know, that you piece together this key that will let you into the final vault where you fight a boss fight against the monitor, which, you know, if you are familiar with Marathon lore from the 90s, because who isn't, right? That's, that's, I don't know, it's a very big deal. There's like a lot of cool, very big deal things throughout Marathon that are kind of, you know, it's, it's one of the things that I think helps set Marathon apart from other similar shooters is that it has this kind of grounded lore, this grounded kind of, you know, world that has been around for decades. And, you know, normally that'd be kind of a whatever sort of thing, but the way it's leveraged in a multiplayer game, as well as like how it is in a lot of ways true to the way that story was leveraged in the original Marathon games, meaning they were things you walked up to terminals and often read because it was the 90s. Like it's actually kind of fucking awesome to see that stuff pay off in a, in a really weird way. It definitely gives the game an additional dimension. Anyway, they're doing something interesting with the Cryo Archive. So people beat the boss, they found a cool gun, this stuff, right? Like it took, I think, the team that beat it first, they ran it for like 12 hours or something, and to finally figure out what they needed to do to get through it. One of my favorite things to do, so at the end of your time in a marathon level, you need to get out. It is all about escape, and they have extraction zones that are around all of the maps. Normally, it's a little tower you walk up to, it takes 50 seconds to charge up and then you worry about getting out. In Cryo Archive, it's a button you push, and then the point where you actually extract is somewhere else. And people didn't realize this. And so there's a bunch of videos of people hitting this button and then standing there at this terminal going like, all right, we're going to make it, we're going to make it. And then the time expires and they all die. Each shit, man, it's very good. But they're doing something interesting with this that I think, you know, some people are not super thrilled about, but I think it makes sense in the context of the game, is that it's Monday and now that level is not in the game anymore. It will open back up on the weekends. And that's something that they are like, you know, with everything with this game, they're being very like, this is how we're doing it now. We are open to changing that, but that is something that we, that is how we're going to run that now. Cryo Archive will be open on most weekends. And I think like logically, it makes a lot of sense. So you think about it as like, okay, you have your gear. You go out into all of the levels and you go out there and you gear up, you get good guns, you get good shields, you get whatever it is you need to get. You get credits to buy the shields you need or you go steal them off the corpses of the people you've murdered, whatever.