Hello, everybody and welcome to a new episode of the Midmax show, we'll play about games, everybody, and welcome to a new episode of The Midmax Show,

a place about games, friends, getting better.

I'm Ben Hansen back and rested from vacation.

You can hear the chill ocean waves coming through my voice box.

I'm joined by Haley McLean.

Hi, sisters. Hey, welcome. We're also joined by Sarah Podorski. Hello, I'm unrested, clinging to my last straw. Well, I would think you'd be arrested. You haven't been on the show. You mentioned in 2026 yet, so we're delighted to have you. Oh, yeah, this is my first time on the podcast in 202026, and it only took me playing three games to get invited. For the record, I beg you to come on this show every week. I'm true. He doesn't. Don't listen to that. It's outrageous. It's a cover up. We're also joined by Kelsey Lewin. Hi. Hi. Also joined by Jeff Murkiy of Fivy. That's me, I guess. He wanted that nickname. I didn't want to give it to him, but he's like, you got to spice up my name somehow, you got it. Berkiafivi, he said he wanted me to pronounce it as. Yeah, say it exactly. You nailed it. Great, thanks. What I wanted. Haley, thanks for hosting the show the last couple weeks. It's super fun to listen to. I feel like I know so much more.

I know I hosted before, but doing it repeatedly over multiple weeks. It's a lot of mental load. Snaps for Ben. It's hard. It's a lot of work. I'm convinced that's why you take vacation. It's like, you guys want to see how hard my life is. Fine. I'll leave for a week. And you can see what I deal with every day. And I sit on the Puerto Rican beaches with my arms crossed. I hope they kiss my butt. Listening to the podcast going, meh. This seems like she's doing a bad job. I told her the windows should be on the left, not the white. What is she understanding about this? I always forget that. It doesn't matter. It's always the thing I forget. It truly does not matter, but it's fun listening to bonus pod. Like, you and the new production assistant, Nick, kind of running through, like, communicating with me and how particular I can be, which I totally get. And it's like, I hope it's not too particular, just a matter of like, I don't know, we've just been doing things for six years a certain way now. And so it's, it's a lot to offload. It's just like this weight, this, this, I don't know, just big old, I don't know, things you don't even think of. Yeah, just bag of technical history.

You're dragging with you like Santa's bag behind you as you lug it along for all these years.

Is this analogy working in any way?

Does it help the chat says they've never noticed?

That's even a thing.

Yeah, no, it definitely does.

It's a very important thing. So all that worrying you're doing is actually not resulting.

Yeah, Bun's going to break something after this.

They don't even care.

They have to abbreviated.

But welcome to the show, everybody.

We're here to talk about some good games.

We're talking about Pokemon, Pocopia.

Questionable name.

Great game. Then we're talking about esoteric ebb. Questionable name? Great game. Then we have a ton more that we're going to be talking about as well. We are going to be talking about Big Walk. Kelsey got to play the new game from the developers of Untitled the Goose game. Very exciting. We're going to do a quick check-in with Jeffham on Slay the Spider 2, but we'll get more to that next week, of course. We're going to be talking about deadlock, some other surprises in there, and we're going to be talking about the future of Xbox with the announcement of Project Helix, which is their next console, more of a fusion of PC architecture than ever before.

And what they've revealed about it at GDC this week and all that stuff.

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