Gaming hot takes night finally happened. Break, Jack Burton, Jess, Logan, and Darria each brought their spiciest opinions to The Game Show and defended them live. Some of them landed with the whole crew nodding along. A couple of them set the chat on fire. That was the plan.
This episode also marks 24 years since the very first Game Show aired in September 2002. Break dug up the original audio, and it turns out one of his hot takes from that first night holds up better than anyone expected.
The 2002 Microsoft prediction
On the first episode, five days after Microsoft bought Rare, Break went on a long rant about where Xbox was headed. The short version: Microsoft would buy up studios to get players hooked on Xbox, then push everything onto Windows and squeeze consoles out of the picture.
We played the clip on air. Here’s what has happened since. Rare now reports to Activision. The next Halo is an Activision project. Microsoft bought the biggest publisher on Earth for $69 billion and laid off 268 more people last week. Every first party game ships on PC day one. Project Helix, the next Xbox, is built to play Xbox and PC games on one box. And Microsoft just patented ads after boss fights.
Break gave himself a B+. He got the buying spree, the PC migration, and the squeeze. What he missed was that Microsoft would do all of it and still lose the console war. Jack’s response: “From a certain point of view.”
Microsoft being bad for gaming was a contested opinion in 2002. After 14,000 industry layoffs this year, it isn’t anymore.
The takes that got the most heat
GameCube was the best console of its generation. Metroid Prime, Wind Waker, Resident Evil 4, Melee, Eternal Darkness, F-Zero GX. Cheapest console of the gen, most durable, and Melee is still played competitively 25 years later. Jack took the PS2 side on library size. Jess sided with Break. Darria never played one, so she abstained.
Beating Souls games isn’t a flex. Jess combined two takes into one and it was the most controversial of the night. Her argument: toggleable accessibility options should be in every AAA game. An easy mode doesn’t ruin the hard mode. You can still brag about beating it on the hardest setting. Chat split hard on this one, and Break pointed out that Control Resonant already has a toggleable immortality option, so the industry is getting there.
Very few games benefit from open world. Jess again. Open world has become a buzzword that pads games with dead space and kills story momentum. Break followed it up by saying he’s ready for a linear Zelda again. One Breath of the Wild was enough.
Piracy helped the gaming industry. Break’s argument, with a caveat that piracy of current games hurts developers. The 2017 European Commission study found no evidence that piracy displaced game sales. Entire regions got Nintendo and Sega culture through bootlegs. Pokémon’s China fanbase was built on bootleg carts before an official release. The ROM scene preserved thousands of games the industry abandoned, and Nintendo sells those ROMs now. Jack admitted he’s changed his mind on this one over the years.
Takes everyone agreed on
Not every hot take was a fight. Jess said super long games are overrated and the whole crew agreed. Logan said console makers should publish repair schematics and 3D printing files for replacement parts. Darria wants more single player style campaigns you can play with friends, in the vein of It Takes Two and Split Fiction.
Logan also made the case that digital games should be transferable, and Break followed with his own: if a store button says “buy,” the thing you bought should not be able to disappear. If it can, call it a rental and price it like one. Break’s informal classroom polls say about 1 percent of people know their digital purchases can be revoked. Sony’s legal argument that the average consumer understands this did not go over well.
Lightning round
Jack: the Wii U would have been fine if Nintendo had called it the Wii 2 or the Super Wii. Also, NFL 2K would have overtaken Madden by 2006 if EA hadn’t bought the NFL license outright, and Konami should make a Metal Gear game without Kojima just to see what happens.
Logan: phone VR headsets were ahead of their time, and Bad Piggies is the best Angry Birds game.
Darria: platinum trophies shouldn’t require beating the game on the hardest difficulty, and online play shouldn’t be hidden behind a paid membership.
Break: the original Xbox was the best Xbox and it was all downhill from there. The 360 ran at 55 decibels, which is louder than a loud air conditioner and, by Break’s math, a tropical storm. And Jack Burton is the greatest Halo player in history. Master Chief should be renamed accordingly.
This week’s news
Suda51 and Grasshopper Manufacture went independent from NetEase. Mario Kart Tour shut down after making over $270 million. Konami released the original NES Castlevania free on iOS. Rockstar confirmed the GTA 6 map is twice the size of GTA 5. Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic premieres in 2027 and two new Last of Us games are in early development. Microsoft patented ads after boss fights. The Witcher 3 Remastered launched free for existing owners with a 94 on Metacritic. And the Ikea Skyrim mod, voiced by Matt Berry, is funnier than it has any right to be.
Spooky October
All of October is spooky month on The Game Show. Jess is going ghost hunting this weekend, Darria is streaming horror games, and Break is going to tell the ghost stories from the original Game Show studio, which was haunted from 2002 to 2008. There’s also a new Castlevania out this month.
If you want more of our console arguments, start with the GameCube retrospective and the NES restoration episode.
Drop your own gaming hot take in the comments on YouTube and we’ll read the best ones on a future show. The Game Show airs live every Wednesday at 9 PM Central on the BreakmanX YouTube channel.
