Hello, everybody, and welcome to the episode of the Midmax Show, a place about games, friends, and getting better. I am Ben Hansen, joined by Kyle Healyard.

Hey, hey, Janet Garcia. Hey, and special guest, Joe Juba. Yes, hello. Welcome to the podcaster. How you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we couldn't not have you on. We're talking about God of War, Ragnarok for Christ's sake. This whole thing is actually happening. We actually have things to talk about here because we're recording live because we just got done watching the big PlayStation Showcase, which if you didn't watch, you should go through and look at some trailers from

this thing because it was pretty fantastic. So we're going to recap. It was E3. It was E3 in September. I feel like that. I feel like that's right, though. I mean, not to not to get you far ahead of ourselves, but I don't know if it was like totally on the same level of an E3 press conference, but it's like, if you condense a press conference down to 40 minutes or so, like it was, it was pretty close to that caliber. It was, it was good stuff. It was fantastic. It's pretty close. I think they nailed it. I think Cotor, like that, you know, I mean, like,

yeah, I would have that would have been a huge E3 announcement, you know, instead Jason Shryer just has to talk about it and some interview at minmax and completely ruin the surprise for everybody. But look, we'll get into all that stuff. There's a lot to recap. We're going to talk about all that good stuff. Kyle, if there's time, we're going to talk about what's on the tip of everybody's tongue, the virtual boy. And then hopefully the artful escape a little bit time in there for that as well. And then back half of the show, we have some.

That on the pile. Okay, hang on fist. Only if you can tell me what is after the subtitle in that. Oh, no, shadows of this. Shadow for it. Shadow for torches. Anyways, we'll talk about. Shadow torch. I think that sounds right. We'll talk about all that good stuff on this episode of the podcast, but before we get to any of that stuff, we're going to kick things off with a little thing that we like to call the community kickoff. We're taking one

question and bringing it up to the top of the show. This Joe Juba is from Dorian Clier, who says, hey, fall is almost, hang on. Sorry, I was doing my Dorian impersonation and then stumbled over my words, fall is almost upon us. And summer is slowly coming to an end. What's y'all's favorite game in season? Is there one that tends to have games you enjoy more than others? Classic questions, Dorian. Joe, you're our guest of honor. Kick it off, dude. And then everybody else, feel free to jump.

Jump in and disagree with him as quickly as possible. Oh, yeah, just shoot me right down. But really, I think that there's a correct answer to that. Yeah, it's my answer. And the answer is fall.

Because I mean, like a person who thinks the mass effect trilogy is one game, so long history of being wrong about many things, Joe Juba, but the fall, you may, you may plead your case, sir. Well, no, okay. So like I have a lot of like personal experiences and like nostalgia connection and stuff to gaming in the

fall. But I think if you zoom out of from me specifically, fall is just when the biggest stuff always hits. Like I think, or most people, you're going to have the highest concentration of games that you're excited about in, you know, the pre holiday months.

That's the old standard. But I think for I think you should combine like win game and that it's best. And in my mind, that's like a good Minnesota winter. Janet, I'd imagine it's a lot like the Chicago winter, right? And like nothing better than playing a good

JRPG. Yeah, just sitting, huddled. I have a beautiful quilt on my couch back here that I can bundle myself up in and just play some long games when there's no pressure to go outside ever again. Like I know you can catch up on a lot of the fall games in the winter. Plus if I may have out even further for winter, this January is stupid packed for games. So I think specifically this January is going to be the best time for gaming.

I feel like taking even though January and February, I guess are part of winter in terms of like it's cold as hell. Yeah, it's like to me, that's like beginning of the year, like I've had the gaming seasons, like I mostly use human seasons, but I think of more of the waves, like there's all the regular seasons. But for me, January and February or like beginning of the year, like it's no longer winter. It's just like beginning of the year, which is normally very like slow and kind of like empty. Yeah, that's different this year.

That's some California talk Janet. So when you talk about human seasons, are there not four human seasons? There are five. I took, like I removed the part of winter and I replaced it with like blank beginning of year, where you're like cleaning up for me, like I think fall is the easy answer, but I'm going to zag and go with like time the time we're now, because I think this is like the ramp up season. It is like the, you know, the rising out, if you think of like conventional narrative structure, it is the rising action.

Through the fall, which is like the climax of games. Right.

The falling action, of course, is winter. Like everyone knows this, right? So I like this kind of time, because I still have the optimism of, oh, no, no, I'm going to be ready for a war season. I'm going to know a lot. I'm, you know, I still have fooled myself into thinking I can do it all.

And I'm trying to like quickly, you know, shove everything on my plate before like the fall massive dessert buffet comes and I just gorge myself and then pass out and then I wake up in March.

Honestly, I feel like today is the tipping point, because right now for me, it's like, I should play more return all and I'm only a little over halfway through Resident Evil 8. I feel bad about that.

And then today, it's just like game overdue. You're so screwed, because we have warrior wear get it together coming on Friday.

Tales of a rise is getting shockingly good reviews. So I'm looking forward to checking that out. Life is strange is apparently good. You have death loop coming next week.

Fist, shadows of the torch forged is out now. Like there's so many games that have really snuck up and bruh. Now it's just there's no escape. And now we all have to get swept away until the mad scramble ends when the new year begins, I guess.

Two quick things. Yeah, it's easy to remember fist Hansen because it's what the subtitle is the letters in order forged in shadow torches. F.I.S.T.

Smart smart guy.

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