Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of the episode?
Meet Mina. She's a mouse. She's a hollower. She's an inventor. She's an adventurer and warrior. But to her friends, she's just memes. Welcome to TripleClick, where we bring the games to you. This week, we're talking about Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club's fantastic new retro-style action game that our own Jason Schreier found to be so nice, he played it twice. Let's get into it. I'm Kirk Hamilton.
I'm Maddie Myers.
And I'm Jason Schreier. Hello.
Hello, it's us again.
Here we are.
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Chapter 2: How does Mina the Hollower compare to classic games like Zelda?
Here we are. Rained out Memorial Day weekend. What a bummer.
Totally.
Plans in place to do a barbecue.
I know. Had to spend all of it inside playing the game we're going to talk about today. Terrible, terrible news for me. What a bummer.
The weather in Portland was beautiful for most of the weekend, so I had a lot of lovely barbecues and hangs. And then it kind of rained on Monday, but that was okay because we were all ready for it by then, so.
It rained almost the whole time for us.
I can't quite relate. It was very nice here. We love to talk about the weather here on TripleClick.
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Chapter 3: What unique gameplay mechanics does Mina the Hollower introduce?
And if you would like to support our weather discussions, if you'd like to hear more about what the weather on the coast is like, you can become a member and support the creation of TripleClick. Become a member at MaximumFun.org slash join. That is the network of which we are a part, a proud part. We love Maximum Fun.
And yeah, we love all of our Maximum Fun members who support our show and make it possible for us to keep doing this thing. If you join, you get a lot of bonus episodes of TripleClick. Like, years worth. So many bonus episodes. We hear from people pretty regularly who will just go back and listen to old bonus episodes because they joined recently. And those are a lot of fun.
A lot of them are spoiler casts about games that we played or movies that we watched. Though we cover a lot of other stuff in the bonus feed as well. We kind of do fewer games regularly. beans cast, as we call them, spoiler episodes now than we used to and just talk about all kinds of things.
Lately, we've been covering The Sopranos, an amazing TV show that we just sort of kind of started watching and talking about. And we're up through season three of that show, recapping it sporadically in the bonus feed. And we've also been watching a lot of documentaries about video games, which have been really cool. Indie Game the Movie, The King of Kong.
You can hear our thoughts on those in the bonus feed, too. And this month, we're going to be doing something kind of like that. We're going to be watching a documentary that is, in fact, a mockumentary called Players, which is a fictional documentary about a fictional esports team focusing really on a And it is a lot of fun. It's very funny.
It's made by the people who made, oh wait, what's the Netflix show called? American Vandal. Thank you. It's made by the team who made American Vandal, the two-season mockumentary for Netflix, which is pretty tremendous. And it's really just as good. It was a little under-watched when it came out, and it's kind of hard to find.
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Chapter 4: How do the difficulty modifiers enhance the gaming experience?
But you don't have to have seen it to enjoy this bonus episode that we're about to record. I think it'll be cool for anyone who's interested in esports, League of Legends, just a lot of this stuff. It's a great story. It'll be really fun to talk about. Anyways, lots of good stuff in the feed.
Become a member, MaximumFun.org, slash join, support our show, and thank you so much to everyone who already does so.
Bing!
One more thing that I wanted to add here that came in after we recorded. Last week I talked about mixtape and my complex reactions to it. I generally liked it, but there was this one creative decision I didn't really like, which is that there are songs presented in the game as real songs that are actually fictional songs, and it's not clear where those songs came from.
So just this morning on Wednesday, I finally heard back from the game's PR about those mystery songs that I'd been unable to identify. They clarified that they were all composed in-house by the game's composers at Beethoven and Dinosaur, the studio that made the game.
I had allowed for that possibility, though my uncertainty about it, the fact that it's not clear when you're playing the game, was definitely a big part of my problem with how they approached the whole thing. So now we know where the music is all from, though I'm still unclear on why the songs aren't accounted for in the game's credits, given the way that they're presented in-game.
I followed up to ask about that, we'll see what they say, but in the meantime, just wanted to provide an update, since I just talked about the game last week. Alright, on with the episode. All right. Well, we're going to talk about a really good video game today.
But first, we're going to talk about another really good and maybe sometimes not so good video game that I think we just kind of have to talk about. Jason, why don't you take us away on both topics?
I saw you losing yourself in the construction. I was holding onto it for dear life. Well, it is a video game. That's for sure. Last week, the folks at the game studio Bungie announced that Destiny 2 is coming to an end. And this marks the stopping of new updates for the Destiny franchise after 12 years. years.
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Chapter 5: What are the standout features of the music in Mina the Hollower?
Not really, but that's all Kirk and I would play.
Not so jokingly.
It was a Destiny podcast. I believe episode three was us having then-director Luke Smith come on to talk about The Taken King, which was the first big fall Destiny expansion. Not the first Destiny expansion, but the big one. And the one that kind of improved the game and made it go from... Zero to hero? Polarizing to pretty good. So anyway, I thought we would commemorate a little bit.
A little bit more context here is stuff that I reported at Bloomberg last week, which is that not only is Destiny 2 coming to an end, there is no Destiny 3 in development right now. A lot of people had assumed that there was. I can report that there was not. Marathon is the big bet that Bungie has at the moment.
And then there's also teams that are incubating and prototyping new things, including Destiny things and including other things. And none of those have been greenlit yet. So...
expect them a ways from now if they ever come to fruition and also they're going to be some big layoffs at bungie um in in the near future as a result of all these big changes so yeah let's pour one out for destiny it's the end of an era uh and yeah should we have a moment of silence
It is sad. I mean, I know we're kind of laughing about it, but I was surprisingly sad about this when I heard about it. For somebody who hasn't played Destiny 2 in a really long time, I was like, wow, I just kind of thought it'd be around forever, like World of Warcraft or something.
I know that's not feasible and probably isn't even feasible for World of Warcraft while we're here, but it did feel like... It's extremely feasible for World of Warcraft.
It makes a shitload of money.
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Chapter 6: How does the game’s narrative unfold through exploration?
know it just didn't occur to me i i oh and also um when i was playing destiny 2 and talking about it a lot on this show that was what became the inception of what is now my weekly thursday gamer night that began because of destiny so i was also kind of emotionally thinking to myself like wow like the reason why i really make regular time for multiplayer gaming in my life as an adult
which is something that was so easy to do when I was a kid and a teenager. You just kind of fall into it. But as an adult, you really have to organize it. And Destiny 2 was the reason why that even happened. So I feel like I have an eternal soft spot for it because of that.
Yeah, I have a similar relationship. The group of guys that I play video games with still were initially sort of my destiny friends and the people that Jason, you and I played a lot of Destiny with. And we kind of bonded through our time with the game.
And of course, at times complaining about the game, the many missteps that Bungie made along the way, but also the really high highs, especially of those first few years. And it was, you know, so it was a big deal for me as well, socially.
And yeah, I think the comparisons to WoW are interesting because when Destiny launched, it really wasn't trying to be World of Warcraft, or at least it was trying to set itself apart, even though Luke Smith, I remember talking to him about how much he loved World of Warcraft and how...
I almost got the sense that there was one faction within Bungie who wanted it to be more like an MMO and more like World of Warcraft. And then another faction, Bungie, of course, a famously factional studio, another faction who were more the Halo, you know, we want this to be a console first-person shooter.
And in hybridizing the two things, they created something that was kind of neither fish nor fowl, for a few years and then gradually, especially in Destiny 2, became much more like World of Warcraft and more just an MMO that got kind of MMO style upgrades or updates. And, you know, they handled loot a little more like an MMO, but it still wasn't really quite World of Warcraft.
Like it had that kind of awkward console shooter that gets sequels. You know, it was just like the fact that there was a Destiny and a Destiny 2.
Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What are the developers' intentions behind Mina the Hollower?
So this plan leaked out, and you could see in it that there was this content plan for Destiny 1, then an expansion that was codenamed Comet a year later, and then Destiny 2 a year after that, and then Comet 2 after that, and Destiny 3, and so on and so forth. Call of Duty-style cadence of just kind of yearly updates. And it's really interesting because what happened was...
for a variety of reasons, including Bungie's engine and tools just being unwieldy and taking a lot of time to work with, they found that that kind of content schedule was just untenable. And in 2016, at the beginning of 2016, they had to delay Destiny 2. Their CEO was ousted as a result of that, some heads rolled because they had to slip a whole year for that.
And then Destiny 2 wound up coming in 2017. And then a couple years after that, there was this expectation from Activision, hey, you guys have to come out with Destiny 3. And the people at Emoji were like, no.
this doesn't really work we want a service game that is continually updating and that doesn't really kind of fit with this plan for releasing uh continual sequels over and over again especially because from destiny 1 to destiny 2 came a player reset and you lost all your stuff and had to start from scratch and that was something that players of this kind of world of warcraft style service game were not amenable to and so as a result of those conversations destiny and activision wound up splitting up
bungee or sorry bungee and activision wound up splitting up bungee kept destiny and wound up turning destiny 2 into a service game a couple years later they got bought by sony and destiny 2 just became this ongoing um ongoing thing with the awkward title of destiny 2 that it was just like oh yeah we wound up with destiny 2 as a service game and they made a lot of mistakes notably destiny 2 also became free to play i think which is
It did in 2019. Yeah.
Later in 2019 with Beyond Light. And I think one of the mistakes they made, there were a lot of mistakes along the way, but one of them was that they can never really figure out how to make the game approachable to new players. If you're a new player and you're logging into Destiny 2, it is really not approachable in any.
any possible way and a lot of the content that has been released for the game has been taken offline because they've cycled out of old stuff i believe they said because of storage issues and whatnot and there were a lot of just mistakes made along the way but the thought of a destiny 3 i think for sony's bean counters was a little a little out of hand the idea of spending like
uh, $500 million on this game before marketing, I think was not something that Sony had the appetite for. And so that never got off the ground. There was a project that Luke Smith, who we mentioned before was working on called payback was the code name. And that was kind of this weird spinoff thing.
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Chapter 8: What are the hosts' final thoughts on Mina the Hollower?
And I'm actually curious to hear about both of your experiences with the mods and how you've used them, because I think some people might come into this game and hit a wall right away, because it's really tough right away, until you, A, get a feel for how the combat works and how you should be finding enemies and decide which weapon is your best, like which one you're optimal for, and get some more trinkets and get abilities, etc., etc.,
Um, but B because, uh, the, the, like when you are low health, it is very difficult to like, even know what's going on. Um, and you're, you're like still mastering the 2d, like the space of it all and the verticality of it all and the platforming of it all. So yeah. Tell me about the, the difficulty modifiers you guys are using.
Yeah, the healing system in particular can be challenging because you have to hit enemies in order to build up the amount that you can heal, which I don't need to explain in granular detail, but can be very punishing if you're way, way on the ropes trying to score a hit on a boss or a tough mob that you're fighting.
Yeah, I've experimented with a number of different difficulty modifiers, and I'm still using plenty of them just because I find it really enjoyable. Honestly, this is something that we talked about with Silksong, and I installed my own mods on that game to play around with that. What would this experience be like if it was just a little bit easier and I could tweak my experience?
And I had made the argument at the time that I don't think Silksong would have lost anything by including difficulty mods like Mina. Mina just further underlines my belief that that is the case. Like this game is fantastic. I love it. And I think it's so much more accessible than it would have been because of these mods. Like you said, it's hard, Jason.
It is like freaking hard at first, especially was for me. I didn't have a Super Nintendo. I didn't have a Game Boy Advance. I did not play games like this. There are just certain things about it. The platforming is a little hard to gauge if you're not used to reading a kind of strange isometric but also theoretical sort of 3D world.
You have to land aerial attacks, but it's not always clear unless you learn how to read shadows, where an aerial enemy is. The platforming can just be punishing in general. You get shot back pretty far into the room that you're in if you fall. You take a lot of damage. Like I said, the healing system is very punishing at first.
And as you've already said, Jason, you're at your weakest at the beginning. You don't have a lot of good items and a lot of healing. So It's really hard. Oh, also movement. Like it's a four-way, four cardinal direction movement. And I find, for example, you can't redirect in midair.
Like there are just like things that I keep trying to do or I kept trying for many hours and just finding myself swinging in the wrong direction and constantly missing attacks and then just dying over and over and over. And I was like, dude, I can't do this. So that was my early experience was basically after kind of clearing the town out and getting to the first level,
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