Welcome to the Zeldin former podcast. I'm your host, Alfred Tabax, and joining me today is our usual co-host, Nate. Say hi. How's it going? I am very nervous for today. Me too. And then our special guest of the week, Bethany. Hi. Awesome. So before we start with the news, as some of you know, we are doing, Nate and I are eating a habanero pepper and we're setting a monologue tonight. Nervous. Like my throat's like closing up thinking about it. It's like, don't do it. But yeah, so that's gonna be at the very, very end. So if you don't care about any of this stuff and just wanna see us suffer, it's gonna be the end of the video. And the nice thing is that, see, he's done this before. I haven't, so I'm nervous, but my throat's not closing up looking at the pepper because I honestly have no idea what I just got myself into. He's going first, by the way, too, so it's so excited. His monologue's also significantly shorter than mine. But yeah, I kind of lost out because it's my first time. But we'll get to that much later. Right now we're gonna start with some of the news and we have some pretty cool news. Well, cool depending on who you are and what you're thinking about in terms of Breath of the Wild. So Target listed Breath of the Wild for a June release date after rumors of an eternal delay surfaced. So you know how sometimes you'll see placeholder dates for December 31st or June 1st in terms of when a game's going to come out for a certain console? Well, they put June 13th on their website for when Breath of the Wild was gonna come out for the Wii U and maybe the NX. It's just the pictures for the Wii U. So that kind of lines up with what we've heard in terms of it not being a launch title and kind of a summer release. And this comes after the information that we talked about. I think it was last week that Laura Kate Dale and Emily Rogers both corroborated each other on about the delay for the game. So this isn't necessarily something new, but it's also, if this rumor's true, then it's confirming that it's not a launch title, which is looking more and more like it won't be. So what do you guys think about that? Disappointed, excited, ambivalent? As I told Alfred before we started recording, I do talk about the Summer Nintendo Prime podcast, which actually goes up before the Zelda for one. So I'll kind of keep my comments a little brief on it. I am, as a fan, as someone who's played this game already, I am really disappointed that it probably won't be there at launch. I'm not gonna say it was the reason I was buying the console because I like other Nintendo games as well, like Mario Switch really looks exciting to me, but it is the primary reason that I was planning on getting the Switch Day one. So now I have other obligations and reasons to want to get the Switch Day one, but Zelda's what I was really looking forward to. And it was also probably my only legit excuse to request for Nintendo to send me a Nintendo Switch early so I could review Breath of the Wild, but that's not obviously probably happening. So I'm okay at the end, like if this comes out in June, I'm okay with that, especially if the Switch already has a strong library at launch, you know, it's got Mario Switch or Splatoon and I know Splatoon support, so maybe you don't count it. I know there's supposedly a Rabbids and Mario RPG. We'll get to that later. So like as long as that launch is solid and then they have another game come out a couple months later and then like the next month after that Bam! Breath of the Wild hits, I'm okay with that. I worry Breath of the Wild might get pushed back to holiday and in that case, I would be pretty upset because that would clearly be to try to be the big holiday title rather than the game not being ready, which apparently is the reason that it won't be at launch anyways. So I'm okay with like waiting till the game is done. I just hope they don't delay the release even longer than that just so they can have a quote unquote better launch period. Ask Watch Dogs 2 if launching in the holiday season worked out for that, or Titanfall 2. Like these are two games that are actually reviewing very, very, very well, but the sales aren't there because there's so many big titles that pack into the holiday season. You're asking gamers to extend their wallets an awful lot. And I think releasing a big game like Zelda in June when there's usually nothing is actually a rather smart move. At least in terms of keeping momentum for the switch going forward. Got anything to add to that? For me, as a fan, obviously I'm a little bit disappointed that it won't be a launch title because like Nate, you know, I was looking to get the switch day one, and it's probably still gonna happen because I'm a Nintendo fan. I like what they do with their technology and how they incorporate it into game systems, but you know, I was kind of doing it for the Zelda. That said, I would rather have a finished game instead of a rushed one. So it's kind of a toss up as to how I'm feeling right now, but I'm hoping for good things. If they do push it back into holiday, I will be mad because this is basically Twilight Princess all over again. Yeah. So. Let's see, that worked out for Twilight Princess. And Twilight Princess's delay was so it could launch with the Wii. This would almost be like the opposite of that. Like they're missing the launch. Yeah. It's weird though because does that mean, like I think you said this at some point, does that mean that the Wii U version will be the definitive edition? Like people will say that the GameCube version of Twilight Princess is the definitive canon edition for Zelda. Well, a lot of the had to do with like flipped over worlds and stuff, like if they don't do that kind of thing and it's basically the same game with prettier visuals, then I don't really see that kind of debate spurning. I mean, there's always going to be a, which version's better? That's just going to happen because it's the same game on two systems. Whether or not it was two Nintendo systems or it was a multi-platform game across, you know, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. That's just what happens. You're going to compare them. But I think unlike with Twilight Princess and other games I've done this with before, I don't think the differences are going to be as pronounced in terms of like how good the game is or the differences. It's just going to be graphical. It's just going to be like maybe graphical, maybe better frame rate, which that stuff matters. But it doesn't necessarily say, oh, this is like a definitive version. Like both versions I think are going to be extremely viable and offer you the exact same experience. So yeah, I agree with all that. Like I'm, as a fan of disappointed, but I understand where they're coming from.  Like that downside of being a PC gamer is half the time big name games come out completely broken. So I'd really rather have a complete working Zelda game with maybe like one or two things that need to be patched other than like, oh, well, this game, like I get to the starting screen and then the opening dialogue and then it cuts to black and then it freezes and crashes my system. No. Yeah. So it's a bit of a downer, but who knows? Again, this is also just a rumor. It's a very viable rumor, but it's still a rumor. And Nate touched on this too. If the console lineup for the NX, gosh dang it, the Switch is good, then that deficit won't matter. And so here's a rumored leaked lineup for the Switch in 2017. Also it was rumored that there will be a Breath of the Wild demo and then it's in development and we might get it at some point. But the lineup is the day one. So day one, it says that we're gonna get the 3D Mario, a Mario Rabbids RPG, like the bunnies, Mario and the bunnies from Ubisoft, Splatoon port, which might be a pack in, so that might be like, we talked about either last week or the week before where you get the standard edition and then the other edition with more space on it and maybe it has Splatoon packed in. Some people say Skyrim, some people say not the source for this specific rumor set says Skyrim will be a launch title for the Switch. Just Dance 2017, that's not even a question, we knew that that was coming, we knew that that was gonna be a launch game. In the first six months, we should see a Smash port with Banetta and Cloud Amiibo being released on the same day. Breath of the Wild, both Switch and Wii U, Telltale Guardians of the Galaxy. Heck yeah. And then it's, yeah, and that's rumored to be very, very close to launch day and release weekly leading to the movie. So that's exciting, because that gives us some information on Guardians of the Galaxy, Telltale. There's also a Mario Kart 8 port with the editions that we saw, a Xenoblade X port late in the summer, and then a Mario Kart port. Also, there's an addendum that says the Silver Case, which is a game done by the same people that did Flow, Flower, all of those other, like, I don't really know how to describe those games. You have to go find them for yourself. Pretty games. Yeah, it's a visual novel that's been remastered. It's very, it's like 8-bit. It's been put into English. It's coming out, or it's already out for PC and PlayStation 4. Then later in 2017 that we're not 100% sure about, there's been rumors about the Pokemon Star Game, which is Sun and Moon, but like the Emerald version of it. And then Sonic 2017, Pikmin 4, which is being rumored as a Pikmin reboot, I don't really know how you'd reboot that. And then in 2018, we have Beyond Good and Evil, which is not a direct sequel, it's a semi-reboot and a Switch exclusive. So that's a lot of good games. One of the things that I noticed is that there's not a lot of third-party support in there just yet, that being said, this is just a rumor. And most of these are, maybe this is just a list of first-party releases. So, except for Telltale and Skr, and Just Dance and... Yeah. What do you guys think about this? In the... See, I don't worry about the lack of major third-party games listed on every side, like Skyrim and the Telltale game, because to me, that just means that the person who reported this, which is Laura Catedale, does not, just doesn't have sources inside those companies. Maybe, I mean, pretty plain and simple. Yeah. She's not gonna absolutely know everything there is for launch unless one of her sources happens to know everything. And the chance of any single source outside of an extreme higher-up at Nintendo knowing every single game that's gonna be on the Switch in year one is pretty rare. Like, if you take that as this is all the games the Switch is getting in 2017, that's not good. That's bringing back the gaps that the Wii U and 3DS have where if you actually look at the Wii U's first year, the sheer number of games that came out is probably comparable to this list. Now, the sheer number of quality games might not be, but just in terms of numbers of games, and it still felt like there was no games to play. So, I doubt that this is it. This is just what she knows based on the sources that she has, and all the other sources out there seem to have sources within the same companies because no one seems to be confirming any other games besides what's on this list. So, I'm really excited, especially the fact that the telltale game's gonna be on there. That's awesome. Obviously, all rumors we don't know for sure, but I really want that to happen. And again, I saw this on the Nintendo Prime podcast. What's really cool about this happening is that on that podcast where we talk about everything to do with Nintendo, I get a chance to talk about Guardians of the Galaxy and a video game podcast if it comes to the Nintendo platform. That is amazing to me. I wanna talk about that so bad, but it just doesn't fit the demographic. But if the game is there, that gives me kind of an excuse to have a 20 minute segment or so on Guardians of the Galaxy, how awesome it is. But beyond that, it's just, it's a really nice lineup. Some people might say there's a lot of reboots or a lot of porting of Wii U games.  It's not necessarily a bad thing if they're like definitive edition ports. Yeah, I mean, it's not bad because we have to face facts. Not a lot of people like us played the Wii U. It's just the way it is. So many people missed out on these games. It makes sense for them to come over. It also makes sense for Nintendo not to rely upon those games because if you want to get the Wii U audience over, they're not gonna care that these games are on that platform and they already own them. And already bought all the DLC. They'll want them to be there. We're probably still gonna end up buying them, you know. Like, I'm probably still gonna get the Smash. And there's that one rumor still floating out there that no one's confirmed yet about like Nintendo might, if you own like digital copies of this game on Wii U, you can get them for free. Like that would be amazing.  I guess it would be the temperament there. But again, don't get your hopes up too much. There's very few sources that are claiming that that's even gonna be a thing. And if it is, that'll be like a massive surprise. I would be shocked if Nintendo was like, yeah, we're just gonna give you that game if you already own it. Because even the virtual console games, like if you wanted to, once they released them on the Wii U, like if you had them on your Wii U already through the Wii and you wanted to up them to the Wii U so you could use it on your game pad, you still had to pay like a dollar or two to do that. So it's like really hard for me to believe they're gonna be like, yeah, we just re-released this game at 60 bucks. You can just have it. Like, but again, I don't know. I don't know if we're getting good guy Nintendo here. We haven't seen good guy Nintendo in a while, so really the 3DS ambassador to program was maybe the last time there was a quote unquote good guy Nintendo. Giving.   So here's some free stuff. So I don't know. I'm pretty excited. You didn't mention a particular game yet that I'm thinking of, right? We can talk about that later. Which one? The third game in a current series that just released. Dark Snow. That comes out, that's also on that list. That comes out later next year. I don't want to say it specifically because you might be planning to talk about it later. Am I missing? I might be missing it. What game? Pokemon Stars, baby. Yeah, I put that on. I said that. Okay, I wanted to make sure you said that because that's a huge announcement in that of itself. Yeah, because that means, and here's my hope for that. I was gonna kind of hit on this. This is probably asking a lot. Probably. From them. Is something with better graphics, and not that the graphics in Sun and Moon are terrible. Horrible, just horrible. They're 3DS graphics. You're not gonna get spectacular HD 4K graphics on 3DS. I'd love to see upscale, everything's fine tuned. Nintendo can finally make a round object. That would be wonderful. You mean Pokemons would be round? Or Pokeballs, I mean? Every, yeah, all the edges on the Pokeballs. There would be no edges to be completely round objects. Things that I've always wanted from Nintendo. Just like something that looks really good. It can play exactly the same. I'm already loving Sun. I'd pay for like an HD version that looks like Colosseum or something, but had the exact same like, catch all these Pokemon, like all this stuff. I'd love to see that as like an HD Pokemon game on a main console, or on a home console. Again, that might be asking too much. You might just get a port that's like a little bit better, but not like too much better. But we'll see. What are your guys? Bethany, what are your thoughts on all of this first? I feel like the initial lineup does not look too bad to me. There are things that I would play on there. I know for me, it's not as much of a problem because I don't have Smash 4 for Wii U. So I'll be able to pick it up on the Switch if I want. And something I was thinking of while Nate was giving his opinion was, even if people had to buy games again, part of the Switch's advertising is it's portable. We don't know to what extent, but I feel like for me at least, some wounds would be partially patched up. If I were able to go, yeah, I have to buy Skyrim again, but I can take it with me. It's always interesting when I see people excited about that portability because I'm not one of those, I don't live in an area where I commute a lot. I'm not using, we don't really even have public transportation.  So I've never gotten the appeal of something like the 3DS on the go kind of thing, except for when I was a kid and I was all in a Game Boy and everything. So the situations that I play on the go are situations where I could easily just have a laptop and be playing the game anyways. So Skyrim, I guess, on the go, it's like Skyrim's always been on the go for me. I've never not been able to play it on the go, but I understand the convenience. Yeah, it's not just like on the go, like thinking what would I use it for? Oh, I'm dog sitting and I'm letting the dog outside to go to the bathroom. Hey, I could just bring the game with me and just play with it while I wait for him to do his thing. That's something I can't do really right now. I mean, yeah, you can bring your laptop out there, but it's a pretty big hassle because you're gonna have to find an outlet to plug it in if you really want that laptop to run at full power. And the switch, in theory, should be running at what it's supposed to run at on battery, which to me is really exciting as someone who has done a lot of portable gaming on a laptop. So yeah, I'm kind of excited to see where that goes. I'm also excited for my town to maybe install some public transportation so I can use it more like, I got on an airplane last year to go to E3. That was my first time on an airplane in a long time and the switch would have been great for that trip, but that's a rarity for me. So I guess we'll see. I'm pretty pumped in general for, at least what's in this lineup. I think there needs to be more and I think there will be more because that was a huge list of third parties. That's confirmed. That's real. Everything we're talking about now is rumors. The list of third party support is real. So there has to be more than what we've already seen. Yeah, and I could see if things go, if they do end up, because that does end up giving Skyrim onto the switch, maybe we'll see Dishonored 2 Definitive Edition put out for it. Because there was another report also that said ports from the PS4, Xbox One and PC would be really, really easy to push over to the switch because of the Tegra chip. So I don't think we're gonna be worrying about third party or even third party ports. I hope that sounds like good news to me. But yeah, like you said, this looks like a very good list of games. I'd like to see more as long as these aren't like the only games coming out in 2017 that I'm fine with this list. It's a good start. Because this is, yeah, it's a great start. And it makes me excited to see Pokemon, or Pokemon Pikmin 4 on there, that we're not just stuck with the side scrolling Pikmin games, but it's coming to the 3DS. Although I am a little disappointed that there's no Luigi's Mansion HD, but that was a point. And I heard you before speaking to Pikmin, you're like, however you can reboot that. I think the idea is kind of like what they're doing with Mass Effect. They're not rebooting Mass Effect. It's just a new story and a new part of the world. And I think that's what they're maybe trying to get across by not calling this Pikmin 4 and being like it's kind of sort of a reboot. It's not that they're rebooting with Olimar. It's that they are basically trying to take a new look at the series from a different aspect. Isn't that what they did in three though? Kind of, it references Olimar a lot. It references the prior games a lot. It's very much connected to one and two. Well, the new Mass Effect spoiler alert is connected to the one and two years. It's one universe. Like whatever they do with the next Pikmin game, it's still gonna be within the same Pikmin universe. But I think detaching itself so they can kind of reintroduce it as an IP to people who didn't play the prior ones, I think is a very smart way to approach it. Considering that three didn't really sell that well. It must have sold well enough for another one to be made or two more games to be made. But I question whether or not the general gaming populace really even knows what Pikmin is. And I think coming into it during its fourth game when there's already a back history is really hard for some people. So kind of disconnecting from that a bit to start off somewhere where you don't need to know a history to understand everything, I think is a smart way to go about it. If that's what they're doing, of course. We don't know. Still probably don't, I mean, she even still listed as Pikmin 4 so it still might just be Pikmin 4. But we'll see. Yeah, sorry, my video died because I didn't have my Wi-Fi on to record the iCloud. So it's gonna be a dead space. Yeah, there's gonna be a dead space right here. A dead space.  Okay, so let's move on then. I'm probably not gonna get my video back, am I? Oh, well, we'll see. Better get it back in time for the peppers. Yeah, I know, at least that. At least we'll even take a pause so you can do it. Yeah, so what, here we go. Please excuse our technical difficulties. There's my video. Awesome, it's back. Okay, so this isn't really a discussion topic. This is just a little bit of news in case you haven't been reading the site or any site.  Then on another side note, Aonuma was awarded the Golden Joystick Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on video games, which is really cool. And it's not really a discussion topic, but it's really interesting. It's great that he got some recognition for his work. There is one topic that I really wanted to hit on and Nate and I have somewhat different opinions on this whole genre and how it's been handled by Nintendo. But the little background, the Game Awards are partly sponsored by and hosted, Reggie has a big hand in it so Nintendo has a big hand in it and so they funnel money into it. And so they have a say in what goes on in the Game Awards. Well, in the Game Awards of 2016, there's an award for best fan game and two games that were in the running have since been removed and those were Pokemon Uranium and another Metroid 2 remake. Both of which were fantastic games but there are also games that were hit with Nintendo takedown notices because they use Nintendo property, they use Nintendo assets in the games, even though for the most part some of them are built from, not from the ground up, but they're made kind of from scratch using, you know, with the Pokemon game, is made from the ground up pretty much using the same type of engine, I guess, but it was also made with, you know, they built their own towns, they built characters and battling and then the Metroid 2 remake was built kind of on the Super Metroid engine. And in my opinion, I think, you know, I'm a little mixed on that because at one point I'm like, yeah, those games deserve to get some recognition, but also I don't know if they legally could be awarded for being a fan game since they use official assets. So I don't know what that one, what do you guys think about that? All right, so for the Pokemon Uranium and the Pokemon, or the AM2R, another Metroid 2 remake, there's a bit of irony in them being eliminated because one of the other games is a fan Doom game. Yeah. That uses Doom assets and remakes, basically an old Doom game. It makes it better and is actually being promoted by the original company who created Doom. So like, it's gotten like official support to try to win this award. So, you know, like you're like, oh, I don't know if it legally can, well it can if Nintendo allows it. Yeah. Then the fat these games were originally included and now are taken away is because Nintendo stopped it. There's no other explanation. Nintendo has Reggie Fiesemay on the board for the game awards. And Nintendo is the one saying, if you look, you can't give an award to a game that we did a legal strike against to get it taken offline. Like you just can't do that. It doesn't look good for us, which in reality it would have looked better for Nintendo if they would take away those legal strikes let those games exist. Yeah. And you know, because they're there, Nintendo's always been kind of backwards thinking on this. And now I understand, you know, the side of Nintendo, where they need to protect their IP. They need to make it so no one can just do anything they want with their assets. And they need to make it so like, I think there was some legal, we talked about this a while back. There's some legal jargon out there where Nintendo almost has to take down these things. Yeah. And the fact that like Doom wouldn't care about it per se because they don't really sell copies of that game anymore. So they're also, aren't they also an American company? Yes, they're also an American company. So there's also different laws there. So part of me understands that Nintendo's viewpoint and standpoint on this. And I think even the people who made these games, like another Metroid 2 remake and Pokemon Uranium, they understood what was happening. Like they had to have known that Nintendo was probably gonna take their games down before they even released them. The only nice thing is the games got completed before they released. Yeah. It wasn't like, here's a demo and here's another demo and here's another demo and here's another demo and then Nintendo shuts you down. They waited until the games were done, threw them out there. And you know, once it's on the internet, it's always on the internet. So like you can still go find these games. I won't tell you where, but it's very easy to still find these games out there. People have download links for them like on every download site out there. So by the way, don't go to the official sites for them. Nintendo is allowing Pokemon Uranium's site to stay up and their forum community and they're still allowed to update to the game, which is really weird. Like Nintendo is like, especially with Pokemon Uranium, like look, you just have to take down the download link. Anyone who already has the game, you can continue to support them. It's really weird. Like really weird. It's like, yeah, you should have did that. But since it's out there, you can support whoever already has it, but just don't let anyone else get it. It's weird. But don't go to that site to get the link because no one there is allowed, like they can't even private message you a link like for to download it. It's done if you don't have it. Don't go there. But Pokemon Uranium is so good. So good. I almost have it being, it's amazing. So I am really, really torn on all of this because part of me is like, what was the Game Awards thinking in nominating two games that got banned anyways? There's no other fan creations out there that could have made it in. What about all the various mods that are out there for all the new games? It's really weird that they selected two games that weren't already taken down by a company that the Game Awards work with. On top of that, this whole category confuses me because it seems to be favoring fan creations which are basically modifications or new versions of games that already exist, which again, you already said that's kind of like a legal thing. Like, should you be awarding awards for encouraging people to do that? So it's really weird. It's just a really strange place for me. Like I get Nintendo's point of view but I also think Nintendo probably should have let it go because I think ultimately it actually helps them get positive marketing to let it go just like they, I think they should change their YouTube policies. Oh yeah, definitely. What they do with YouTube, I think negatively impacts Nintendo. They could get a more positive gain if they would open up their doors more to the YouTube verse and not have to just feel like they need a piece of everyone's pie because they're using game footage like okay, like you don't have to do that. So many of these big third party companies out there don't do that. You know, Nintendo doesn't have to be like this company that does but that's the way Nintendo is. They're a Japanese company which I don't want to say that means they don't understand the way the world works but they don't necessarily understand it as well to the way the world works outside of Japan. Yeah.  A lot of the moves are very Japanese and inconsiderate of the Western world. Their YouTube policies are a prime example of there are some laws apparently in Japan like where they have to do something but they don't have to implement those same policies worldwide. And that's what they do. So it's just really tricky. I'm upset that the games are not included but I'm also kind of upset that they were included in the first place. So it's kind of, I mean, you know, we had this talk before where I was kind of taking Nintendo side on all this. Like I get it and I still get it. I just, I'm kind of just questioning what the point of this award is now. Cause what are fan creations going to be? Cause if they're original games and they're indie games now, they're not fan creations. So it's like, it's like a fan creation category is going to be people doing something illegal. So yeah, I don't, I don't know. I almost felt the category should either be eliminated or it should be like games that are approved by companies to be part of the list. Like if they went to Nintendo and been like, Hey, can we include, you know, we can't include Pokemon Uranium or whatever. Maybe we can include, Oh, there's a Slinks Awakening 3D mod out there. Can we include that?  And you know, maybe they ends up getting that thing shut down anyways, but I don't know. It just feels like a weird award category to me because it does promote illegal activity. And some companies are cool with that. Like I said, the people behind Doom are totally fine that that thing exists. But that doesn't necessarily make them legal. Just means you're not going to get in trouble cause the people who have the rights aren't going to do anything about it. So I don't know. That's really all I have to say. I'm really confused. Yes, it's a confusing mess. It's that it always is with Nintendo strikes. Do you have anything to add, Bethany? Well, something that came to mind is maybe they could redefine the category, not necessarily get rid of it entirely, but maybe get permission from certain companies to kind of hold a contest to make a fan game. And then it's the contestees. You know, you could also change the category instead of it being based around fan game creations. What about fan music creations? You know, re-orchestrations of stuff, like stuff that's legal cause you are allowed to do that. But it's clearly inspired by video games. Yeah. We post a ton of them at Zeldad, former. So it's like, I know it might be really hard to narrow it down, but that's the whole point of the award, you're trying to find the best ones. I think if they expanded it to that, it may be limited to game stuff. I think that might be a way to keep this award and keep it legal, keep it cool. But best fan films, stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, even then you gotta be careful. Maybe like, you know, because, I don't know, like part of me wants two categories. It's only the problem, it's really only a problem with Nintendo. Well, it's not because you could argue that even with fan films, there's parodies that exist and are totally legal and Nintendo can't do anything about. No, I know, but like with regular fan films and with, you know, the fan games, like you said, the id software isn't doing anything about the Doom game, it's being like touted by them. But it's just Nintendo's insistence on like their IP and we don't know why they haven't come out and said, this is why we're doing this. And I mean, they've been vague about it. Like, well, we take very good pride or a lot of pride in our games and our IPs and we wanna make sure that they're the best. Yeah, and that's what I brought up last time. There's some legalese that might make them have to do it, but like, Nintendo's not gonna come out and say that. They're gonna try to sugarcoat it and the sugarcoating hasn't worked. Yeah. Like no one's buying it. You could kind of tell it's a bunch of BS. It's because they're not being 100%, like they're not being truthful with it or they're not being completely open and transparent. Yeah, and you could just tell and hop on what they're saying. I don't know, this whole situation's weird. I like the award. I think it should be expanded to include like music and all that kind of stuff. Whether or not that would ever get in over a fan game, I have no idea. But I don't know. It feels like a very personal topic to me because a majority of what we cover at Self-Informed is fan stuff. Yeah. So it's hard because there's so much great fan material out there, but you just know deep down if it ever gets good enough, it's not gonna be around anymore. As I just mentioned, there's a Link's Awakening 3D modification thing happening. If that ever gets completed and gets good enough, I know Nintendo's gonna be like, no, you need to get rid of that. Now, so I don't know, it's just very, it's a personal thing to me because I've been covering this fan stuff for so long, but I'm trying to understand their viewpoint because I don't think Nintendo actually means any harm, but it feels weird that Nintendo would try to damage themselves and knock it out of their own way with this kind of stuff. When there's already so much evidence that it does not negatively impact other companies. But I don't know. That's it, I got nothing else to say. So I kind of just jacked it back from Beth. It's okay. Yeah, just so you guys know, I've been having trouble with my video and that's why I'm using the crappy OBS, open broadcast software now. Hey, as long as you get that hot pepper, baby. Yeah. That's all I care about. If you're not on camera for it, I'm gonna punch you in the face.  That's what it's gonna be. Audio only. Okay. So now I have this really low frame rate video. Oh, I'm back to the basics. Okay. That's all the news. We're kicking it old school. Welcome to Zilla for a podcast, episode one. Yep. At least I have a better mic. I know, pick my battles here. Yeah, right. Okay. He's getting nervous. No, we're moving on to fan topics. I'm getting nervous because everything's stopping working for me. It's like, come on. Okay.  It's taunting me. Yeah. So we're gonna hit a few fan topics and then we're gonna have some fun.  Okay. So first fan topic. All of these come from Facebook. First one is from Morgan Jod. It says, how does spinoff games like Hyrule Warriors affect the gameplay and reception of games to follow? Do expectations change with main series titles because of these games? What do you guys think? I'm gonna toss that one to you guys. Beth, do you wanna go first on this one? I feel like it can in certain aspects. Like, for example, Breath of the Wild, it seemed to adapt some of the Hyrule Warriors fighting style. Like, obviously not hordes of enemies from what we could see, but I could definitely see that being a possibility because there's wide open spaces. Yeah, I don't really know that Hyrule Warriors has anything to do with wide open spaces in Breath of the Wild because that's existed in Zelda before. Like the original Zelda was literally, the entire game was a wide open space outside of Dungeons. And there was many, many enemies on the screen and not hordes of enemies like in Hyrule Warriors. But I don't think they've done hordes of enemies in Zelda before, technically. Skyward Sword, which came out before Hyrule Warriors, did the hordes of enemies towards the end. Spoiler warning. That was my favorite part, one of my favorite parts of that game. It was awesome. Still, I love Hyrule Warriors, but that moment in Skyward Sword felt better to me than most of the hordes of enemies in Hyrule Warriors. But there are some things like, Eji Nobuu said that the production value of the cutscenes in Hyrule Warriors felt like something that was beyond anything he's personally done. And I think stuff like that is where you can see it impact future Zelda games where it's like, we can't let this side game outdo something we do. Like, okay, this is an HD, like, Hyrule Warriors, HD cutscenes, all this original stuff. Look how good those character models look. Look how good their movements are. Look how fluid everything is. We don't have anything like that. We can't let this game outdo our next HD Zelda game, or our first HD Zelda game. It can't happen. So I think they kind of take inspiration from that. It almost is a challenge to be like, look, this game did it fantastically. This shows us that we can do what we do better. So I think in that kind of way, it can help push the Zelda team to do more than maybe they had been doing in the past. And I think that's one way to get inspiration. I also think if there's anything they might have taken from Hyrule Warriors like the actual gameplay, because having played the demo, like the gameplay feels nothing like Hyrule Warriors. Yeah. But, Hyrule Warriors has overworld bosses. Breath of the Wild has overworld bosses. And I think that might be an idea that Nintendo got from Hyrule Warriors. Where you have this big sprawling lamb, but here's a boss that can just chase you all over the place. That happens in Breath of the Wild. From what we can infer, it happens pretty often in Breath of the Wild. So it's one of those things that I think there are aspects of Hyrule Warriors that have affected Breath of the Wild specifically. And there's aspects that had nothing to do with Breath of the Wild. Like that's a big wide open space, open world. I think that's been happening anyways, because Agent O was talking about that with Skyward Sword. That's what he wanted Skyward Sword to be and they just couldn't do it. They didn't have the power to do it the way that they wanted to. And how they feel like they have a powerful enough system with the Wii U and the Switch to do what they wanna do. Which I know a lot of people can say, well, that's BS, that's an excuse. I mean, it's not like Morrowind didn't exist how many eons ago. But yeah, it's, I think that side games can affect futures out of the games. I do think it is possible. I think that Hyrule Warriors is the first example where it's actually happened. Cause there's been other side games. You don't forget the CDI games for a moment. Cause I don't think anybody considers those to have any influence on the series.  Has that had any influence on anything? The Tingle games. Have those had any influence on the Man Night games. I think it'd be hard press to say yeah. So Hyrule Warriors I think has impacted Breath of the Wild but impacted it in ways that are actually ways that the series should have already been doing in the first place. Especially like when you talked about cut scenes, like not that the story was great for Hyrule Warriors but it was better than what we've gotten. Yeah, it's not even the story. It's the quality of those cut scenes is amazing. It was like CGI but not CGI. And you didn't feel like you were taken out of the game. Well, it flowed with the game. And what we got in terms of- A lot of cut scenes on Zelda are abrupt. Like with Skyward Sword, like they'd fade to black or something fade to white and then you'd see a cut scene and then it would fade and then it would put you back into the action. Those were more kind of like, you know, you get to this point and then here's the cut scene. It just, it felt more like there was a cohesive movie playing along with the game in terms of cut scenes. Which is something- I think Hyrule Warriors cut scenes pushed the story forward better than most Zelda cut scenes. Not to say that the story for Hyrule Warriors game was fantastic, it was good, but plot twists like, oh, who's Sheik? Well, I don't know. Maybe it's Zelda. Yeah, I like a lot of it. It's like everybody's acting like that. It wasn't fleshed out in that way. I don't think Hyrule's story is necessarily like the best Zelda tale I've ever told. It's not. But like the approach to the progression of the story through the cut scenes I think was overall better than what we had seen in the past. And that's saying something because Zelda's done some fantastic, some of our favorite moments from Zelda are some of the cut scenes, you know? Link has that moment in Skyward Sword where you really feel for him and you can almost cry as a player when he finds out certain things about Zelda. And there are these emotional moments, but those are the few and far between and Hyrule Warriors, it just felt like everything flowed nicely with the gameplay and the cut scenes and the story in a way that Zelda games traditionally don't do very well. So at least, that's one thing that Aegean almost said himself he's taken inspiration from. So we know for sure at least cut scenes are something that he looked to improve on in Breath of the Wild because of Hyrule Warriors. So we do have some statement from the man behind Zelda on some impact from Hyrule Warriors. But we'll see, we've only seen what? One cut scene? Kind of, yeah. I mean you could argue multiple, if you count the little conversations you have at the end of every shrine, but I don't really count those cut scenes. Those are just conversation trees. So, I agree with what you said, like that those are, you know, he's come out and said, or I don't know, Moses said that that's where they want to improve. And that they can take things from like Hyrule Warriors and think, well, this was a great asset to that game. Let's add it here in a little bit of a different way. But moving on then, Josh Gardner asks, well, poses the idea of Smash Bros being taken on by a director other than Sakurai. I mean, this is something that, you know, I've talked about before with, I don't think it was on this podcast. I might have just been with some friends. But it'd be interesting to see because Smash Bros is like Sakurai's like baby. And he goes through painstaking detail to make sure that that game is fantastic. Like he- Lots of balance. Yeah. Lots of balancing, lots of care into the characters. I mean, the amount of effort that Sakurai puts into a game puts a lot of people to shame. Even with the condition he has. Yeah, well, even with like taking into account Kid Icarus Uprising, okay? Oh, God. That game took a lot out of him. Doesn't he have like arthritis now because of that game or something? It's some condition. It sounds like arthritis, but apparently it's even more serious than that where when it flares up, he can't use his hand at all for like long periods of time. And he tries to like play test the games with one hand or he tries to claw it. And it's extremely, extremely painful. And there was a report, you know, after Smash Bros came out that he was basically taking a really prolonged break because of how much the game affected his health. But it also said that he knew what his next game was going to be. Yeah, he did. And you know, at this point Sakurai could pretty much do anything he wants. I'm sure he's made plenty of money in his career. At least I imagine he has. I don't really know, but I guess not even the CEO of Nintendo really makes, you know, big, big bucks. And here's the thing then. Do we think that a Smash Bros game could be done without Sakurai? Like, do you think without his heart and effort being put into the game, do you think it would be good? I mean, other fighting games exist, so yeah. That's true, but none really like Smash Bros. Well, unless you want to say PlayStation also. I mean, there's fighting games that are pretty balanced. I think, I mean, even Smash Bros isn't that bad. I mean, look at the professional Smash team, like there's tears for the characters. Like, it's not perfectly balanced. But I think, I think I can, I'm sorry, excuse me. And I think part of me feels like it needs to. I don't know if we're going to get that this next generation, because if we were, why are they supposedly porting this game over? Well, like you said earlier, they missed out. A lot of people missed out on Wii U games, so I can see them porting it and making another one. But yeah, I don't see them making another. I think if they're porting it over, there isn't going to be another, because they only do one per generation. Yeah, but this might be different. And I'm just holding on to the bad idea. See, I think this might be different in that Sakurai said he's done with Smash and Nintendo doesn't know what to do. So they're just going to port what they already have. Melee for- And maybe they begged Sakurai to be like, look, can you just do one or two more characters that we can add to the Switch version, please? Because all the rumors say they'll be new content, so it'd have to be new characters.  Just please do two more characters. And he's like, fine, but I get to choose who they are. Please be Ice Climbers. More Fire Emblem characters. Please be Ice Climbers. I need to come back. But yeah, so, I have more fire. Oh my God. But yeah, I think a good Smash game can exist without Sakurai. I think it's going to be very, very hard to trust the game until we play it. Because he is so heavily involved, especially with the balancing of the game and how each character feels. It's going to be hard to be like, I feel like anyone else can do that. But I have to believe somebody can. It just hasn't been attempted yet. So I'm kind of willing to give a chance. I think a lot of it's going to depend on, if Sakurai doesn't do it, does that mean Sakurai's team isn't involved? Because it's very possible Sakurai's team could be involved. Just Sakurai isn't there anymore running that. He's working on his own projects. I don't know. Because I don't know how much of Smash Bros. is Sakurai's team and how much of it is people at Nintendo. I don't really know. So it's going to be hard to believe it until we see it. I personally just don't think we're going to have to worry about it for another eight years. And then that's when they'll finally do a brand new Smash, especially now that, as an example, if they're doing new characters, you figure there's got to be a squid from Splatoon. I mean, especially if Splatoon's a pack-in launch game. Like, let's just be real. There obviously has to be a Splatoon DLC add to the game. But I don't know.  Yeah, like I have to believe that Sakurai is probably done with Smash because he's wanted to be done for a while. For people who don't know, the only reason Sakurai was still doing Smash to this day was because of his relationship with Iwata. Him and Iwata, if you go through the history of Iwata's career, which is easy to find now with all the tributes that have been done for him, him and Sakurai were very close. And Iwata actually helped save Sakurai's career at several points. So there was a lot of friendship and deep admiration and dedication there. Without Iwata around, Sakurai doesn't necessarily, maybe he doesn't feel like he owes Nintendo to keep doing Smash. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. I think things are going to be in murky waters for Smash Bros. Whatever happens next after the support. But I think as fans, we have to be willing to give it a chance because how many people still to this day, even with how fantastic the Wii U Smash Bros. is, just keep saying Melee is the best. And nothing can beat it. Well, if nothing can beat it, then clearly we need somebody else running Smash Bros. They can do a new direction. They can provide something that maybe Melee did for some reason.  And as much as I appreciate that Melee Smash community and all the things that are behind it, you know, you got Project M out there, which by the way, another fan project that Nintendo didn't do anything about. A very popular one at that. I don't know. I'm just, I'm torn. And I think I'm going to be torn until a new Smash game comes out. And I can just eat for myself. By the way, I really hope Sakurai gets to make whatever game he wants to make cause he deserves it. Even if it's not for Nintendo, by the way, Sakurai's company is as a full third party company. They aren't actually part of Nintendo. How labs? Yeah. So he could do anything he wants. So if he wants to go off and, you know, make a game for PlayStation 4, be my guest, man. Do whatever you want to do. It's about time that, and I kind of feel this way, even about someone Nintendo's big directors, like even EJN, I feel like if they have a passion to want to do something else, let them.  But they can be like, look, if you want to make a different, a new IP, like go do that. We have plenty of people here that want to run Zelda. Yeah. It goes, Miyamoto did that, you know? Miyamoto stopped, you know, running Mario, he stopped running Zelda, started working on different things, you know? That's how we got to dig for a surprising. Also came up with Wii music. But yeah, so I don't know. That's kind of my take on all that. I think Smash is going to end up being okay because we're not going to have to worry about it for a long time. You have anything to add, Bethany? As a Smash fan, not really because Smash was one of the very few games that I just didn't really get into. Oh. But as a writer, I can definitely say that when your heart goes into something, it's kind of in there. And if somebody else tries to, like for example, create a sequel to a story that they really love, will it be good? Of course. Will it be the same? No, not really. And so I can understand if, you know, Sakurai did say, I'm done with Smash.  Yeah, kind of you are like a Star Wars. Like you have the Star Wars, A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, we're hearing about the Jedi, the trilogy, and George Lucas did a great job on those. And we were like, well, who can replace him to make a Star Wars film? And then we get JJ Abrams with Star Wars 4, which is A Force Awakens because the other ones don't count. We have A Force Awakens and it wasn't, okay, it was kind of the same movie, but it wasn't like the same in terms of the same magic. It was different, it had its differences in terms of how it was made, what was done. So kind of view it like that. Like, you know, these are great games, but it can be done by someone else just maybe not the exact same way. And we shouldn't expect that.  You don't want someone to come and try to be Sakurai. Yeah, that's not gonna happen.  It's not gonna happen. Just like, you know, just look even at the Zelda series. It has fundamentally changed when it went from Miyamoto's hands to Eiji Ando's hands. And that's fine, it should. You can't expect whoever taking over to do what the last person did in the same way or at the same quality. You need to let creator freedom exist for games to be as good as they can be. All right, well. Within reason, of course. Those are our fan topics because we're hitting that hour mark. And they, so, you know, we're heading into the holidays, we're heading into Thanksgiving. It's a time of giving thanks for you. Am I gonna be able to taste Thanksgiving in a few days? Well, just think, like I want you to think back to the first Thanksgiving feast where they had turkey and whatever else they had. Corn. The corn they had. They also probably maybe more than not likely had habanero peppers, so. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure. So they spiced all of their food with it. In the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday, we're going to do monologues. Both of ours are from the Wind Waker after having eaten a habanero pepper. And you might be thinking, wow, this sounds kind of like hot pepper gaming. It's like, you're probably right because that's where I got the idea from. But they do reviews of games. Well, I'll put a link to one of their videos where my hands are shaking. Yeah, they do some cool stuff. We almost got invited to actually do a review, but we just couldn't make the trip. Is there all California located? Oh, well, I go. Yeah, right, right. Well, yeah, you weren't part of the site back then. It was where a review was covered, so. So, that being said, Nate, my main man, you are up first, my friend. So, like, I'm rotating this pepper in the camera right now. Take it. I'm looking at it, and I'm like, why did I buy such a big one? Because when I was at the store, I was holding like this little dinky one, and I was like, yeah, that's the one, baby. And of course, knowing my like the little dinky one will end up being at the hotter end of the scale. But I'm just like, no, I can't be a, you know, I can't wuss out. I need to go with the big, bad one. So, of course, I picked the biggest one they had at the store, which, by the way, isn't actually that big. I didn't realize how small habanero peppers were, so I went shopping for them. Yeah. They're like giant bell peppers. So, like, I look at them and I'm like, well, yeah, of course they're not, because if they're really giant bell peppers, they're probably not that hot. Yeah. But I'm looking at it like, oh, how can this little thing take me out? Like, I'm just gonna put it in my mouth, swallow it whole, no big whoop, no spice. That's not what's gonna happen. You have to chew it, Nate. I know. Because I look at it and I'm like, I don't think, I think if I try to swallow it, like take one bite and try to swallow the whole thing whole, I'm gonna choke it, because I got a big one. I could have pulled it off with a little one. Oh, God. All right. I'm just delaying this as much as I can. Okay, at least you have a short monologue, okay? Yeah, so, so, so people know, the monologue I chose is the speech that Ganondorf gives at the end of The Windmaker. So, if you haven't been at The Windmaker, I do apologize for spoilers. Although, it's gonna probably be so incoherent. I don't know what I'm gonna spoil. If I could just get the word ocean out, that might be good. Oh, God. All right, you ready? See, you've done this before. Yeah, it doesn't make it any better. I know how much it's gonna hurt. That's what I'm saying. You know, I don't. I'm already crying. Hold on. Here we go. See, and I was the one that was gonna go do the hot pepper game one way back when. Of course, they take it a little easier. It didn't go straight to habanero. It was your first time, but. All right. They will now. Yeah, they will. Yeah, maybe they do. I don't know. I haven't kept up with them. No, because we've done it here. Because we've done it, right, we. Oh, God. I'm sweating. I haven't even put it, okay. You know what? The more I delay it, the worse it's gonna be. So, oh my God. I apologize, Yulia, for the gas I'm passing tonight. I hope it's just gas. All right. Damn it. I'm so nervous right now. I've been hoping for so long. Oh, my internet's out. Sorry. Oh, on the bright side, the Milwaukee Bucks are probably gonna win. Just think of the bright side, Nate. Here we go. Do you sleep still? Wait. Do not be so hasty, boy. I can see this girl's dreams. Oceans, oceans, oceans, oceans. Oceans as far as I can see. They are vassies. Nunkets from across them. They yield no fish to catch. What did the king of Hyrule say? That the gods steal Hyrule away and they'll have behind people who'd one day awaken Hyrule.  Oh, my God.  What could they possibly hope to achieve? Do you see all of you?  They got your turn. Wow. Such an eloquent speech.  Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Chocolate not helping. Oh, my God. I can't make it stop. It's getting worse. You can't.  No, I'm going to mute my mic then. All right. OK, I'm already crying because of the peppers because that was freaking hysterical. Um, now I am nervous. OK, so my monologue, more like essay, has the entire introduction to the Wind Waker. Um, there's really no spoilers needed.  It's about that big. It's like my ear size. Yeah, you can unmute now so you can laugh at my pain. No, how long does this last? 10 hours? OK, ready? I'm ready. Yeah, I don't need to ask myself. This is but one of the legends of which do people speak longer ago. There existed a kingdom where gold power, gold power lay hidden in the Triforce. Oh, my gosh. Breathing makes it worse. It's a project for us. Bless him. Grin for us. Don't mind the peace. Oh, my gosh. Number one day, a man with great evil found the gold power to niggle for himself. Restricted his command, he spread the darkness. Christ the kingdom. We all hope he died in the hour. A dupesy in the hand. A young boy closing. Great, apparently from nowhere. Oh, we only have a sort of, it was a pain. OK. Reeling the blade of evil's bane. Received away the dark one. Keep the land light. This boy who traveled through time to save the land was known as the hero of time. The boy still was passed through the generations when became a legend. Oh, it didn't help at all. But then a day came when a fel wind began to blow across the kingdom. The great wind, the evil. Sorry. That all thought a bit sealed away forever, but the hero is one square fourth of the dup... Just take it. The depths of birth, eager to resume and start designs. Choking. The people believe that the hero of time will once again come to save him. Oh, need more. Need more.  I think I'm finally getting called down a little. I think that's as far as I can go.  That's what she said. It's killing me. Oh my gosh, it's definitely hitting you harder, man. Yeah. I just think I thought you were going to be pro at it. Yeah, I do. Time number three. No. Every second of that, oh my gosh, it doesn't go away. No, it doesn't. It gets worse. You might start to finally get a little better. I think it's almost getting out of the roof of my mouth. Still on the bottom, but. I got it on my lips, so it hurts even worse. Now I was lucky. I got it off my lips. I got the whole thing in without touching my lips. Mine burst apart. Oh man, welcome to the Zeldirf Homer podcast, AKA the hot pepper gaming 2.0. We survived. Only one monologue finished, but I give all for credit for trying to go for the long haul. Oh boy, I can finish. You can finish? Yeah. OK, come on. Do it. The great evil that all thought had been forever shielded away by the hero once again, crept forth from the depths of the earth. Now it's just it's coming back. You're going to resume its dark designs that people believe. Oh my gosh, the more I talk, the hotter my mouth gets. That the hero tie would again come to save him, but the hero did not appear. No, he didn't. Face by an onslaught of evil people. So crying that people could do nothing but appeal to the gods in the last hour. Oh, it's good. It's coming back. As a dream drew nigh, they left their future in the hands of fate and became the kingdom none. I mean, who know? The memory of the kingdom vanished. His leg just survived on the wind's breath. How does it not only became customary to garb boys of green when they came of age, clothing the green it feels made and inspired by heroic blades cast out evil. Oh my gosh, I'm almost done. Listen, the elders wished only for the use to no courage like the hero of legend. Oh my gosh, I'm done. I have a question for you, Alfred. What? Do you like spicy food? Well, yes, not that spicy though. See, I think that's why I'm having an easier time with it. Like I've had habanero, like not like a straight pepper, but like habanero chili is like my favorite, man. No, no, no. So like, I like, I like spicy. So it hit me really, there was a moment there. I thought I was going to throw up. Yeah, no, I hit that twice, but I pushed through. I'm like, if I can just push through, I have a short one. I push through, I can get to my food. You should see how quickly I get to my food when I'm done.  My nose was fine. Now it's just like running and I have no phoenix. I'm trying not to let it show on camera, but it's so hard. I can only sniff it up so much. Oh my gosh, Beth, were you not entertained? Yes, it was. I should wait till you see the camera. Seriously, it's getting worse. Oh my God.  I'm almost out of breath. Oh man, my whole iron rolls. No. Like the chocolate wasn't helping and then I shoved like four in it once. Then it kinda helped. The milk, I realized, I meant to give myself whole milk. I did 1%, so it's like water. So it didn't help. The bread's helping a lot though. Awesome. Well, that is one heck of a happy Thanksgiving pie cast. We're never doing that again.  Of course, of course. It's the third time's the end for you, huh? Yeah, probably. Remember everyone, this was this idea. Fun Alfred story. When I first got to college, my freshman year, I was like my second, third week of college. I had never been to Buffalo Wild Wings before. And so we went to Buffalo Wild Wings. Did you get the hottest one? You just wait. So I was like, I've never been here before. And so I was like, I'll try the medium. So I got the medium and I was like, I'm not that bad. So I got five of those. And then I went up to five hot. The hot's really not like that. It's not that hot. Oh, it's really not. So I was like, that's not that bad. Like that's pretty easy. It burns a little, but it's not that bad. And so I was like, you know what? Give me five of the blazing. Everybody looked at me like I was just insane. And I was like, the hot wasn't that bad. So how bad can this be? Did you get them dry or wet? It was the wet rub. Oh, that's the worst. And so I took a bite of one. And then like I sat there for a second. And tears started falling from my eyes. And like everything started to hurt. But I had to finish them because I bought them. I'm not gonna let food I bought go to waste. So I ate five of them. Sure, five of them, yeah. This part is 100% sure I'm not lying. My mouth had gotten so hot. And I was in so much pain that I tried taking like a tablet of Advil and it melted in my mouth, okay? Nothing helps. I drank like five people's cokes and it just got worse. No, yeah, you can't drink soda. So I purposely, like I have a thing, I have like a cup from Arby's here because that was my dinner.  This is, I'm done, I'm gonna puke.  But yeah, I had root beer and I was like saving it up for like the aftermath, like what I'm going through right now, but I drink all of it right before the show. And I was like, dang it.  Oh my gosh, this is the best podcast episode I've ever been on. Okay, so that was the song. I'm just glad that it wasn't me. Like I don't, I feel bad though. I feel like I should do the longer speeches. I'm handling this a lot better. Yeah, no. I'm not saying this is something I want to do regularly but I know I can survive it. My, oh boy. I'm gonna try to match up the theme music with what I'm saying and so I hope you're gonna hear it, like what's gonna be bad. Editing this is gonna be a pain, just in general because of my video. But yeah, so that was the Zell Informer podcast. Everything works. Episode, I don't even, what episode is this? 26, it was the last week, 26. This is episode somewhere between 20 and 30. The last episode I think was 25.2. Oh, our order. If you didn't catch 25.2 everyone, go check it out. We have it up on YouTube. If you listen to our audio version, you already have it. We have the whole thing together. A lot of people didn't like our choices for who to play Link and other characters. That's no surprise. Yeah. People have different tastes and people think certain actors really, really, really suck. And that's okay. Yeah. Welcome to having an opinion on the internet.  So it just hurts. I know, I'm actually doing okay. Yeah, my eyes. I think I'll be okay. It's gonna take me probably an hour to get it all settled down, but. Yeah, I got a little pain in my chest right now. I don't know if that's any good. Oh, man. I hope something go in my lung.  Okay, so thank you guys for joining us on this wonderful, wonderful podcast. This wonderful, wonderful podcast. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving. Eat a hub and arrow pepper on us and enjoy it. Exactly. And if anyone wants to help the game and like go to a ghost pepper, you better record that on video and send it to us. We will feature it on our site if you. I will guarantee you. You download ghost pepper and talk about something from Zella for like two minutes. I will guarantee we post that on Zella Farmer. It'll be front page for like a month. Well, I don't know what a month. Okay, for like a week. I'll give you a week. Yeah. That's what you get. That's what you get. That's all you're worth. You're really worth a week for that break. For your pain. Oh God. It's coming back up. I lost a little clip for my bread, so. Yeah. Life's neat. Life's as well, guys. All right. Thank you for joining us and our pain. Thank you for having me. Don't you want to join in on the fun next time, Beth? Um, I think I'll pass. Oh, come on. I might even do a jalapeno. That's not that bad. That's not even hot. Jalapenos aren't as bad as what we just did. What? Jalapenos aren't as bad as what we just did. Jalapenos are not as bad as what we just did. No, they're not. Jalapenos are like 140 times hotter than a jalapeno. So, that'll about do it for us tonight. We're not gonna edit any of this till tomorrow. You have a good one, everyone. Yeah, thanks.


So, let's talk about TurboLinks, because everyone loves TurboLinks. You don't, so that's why I'm here to talk about it. My name's Nate Berkepeck. I'm a freelance Rails consultant, and a lot of the progress I work on are really slow. And no business owner likes having their website slow. And I'd like to show you how you can use Rails to have a website that has a less than 100 millisecond time from key press, or click, or whatever, to glass, to final rendering. And there we go.  I'm not a huge fan of that. It happens I don't really like these languages. I love Ruby, and I like to write Ruby, and not JavaScript, and not all these other languages. And so let's start with some definitions. To glass. Well, that is sort of an informal term. I'm going to define it here as the time from the user interaction, the key press registering, the click registering to the final paint being finished for whatever interaction you were doing. So not DOM content loaded, not load, but when is the page stable? When is that interaction completed? Which sometimes is after the document is ready, because you could have tons of document ready handlers. The great thing about how fast this needs to happen is that while computers have gotten faster in the last 50 years, human beings have not. So back in the 60s, these guys at Xerox or whatever studied how fast computer interactions have to be for humans to have different feelings about them. And if your interaction is less than 100 milliseconds, it's perceived as instantaneous. If it's between 100 milliseconds and a second, the user perceives the delay, but they still have a feeling that they're working directly on the data. And if it's more than a second, but less than 10 seconds, you have their attention, but they feel the delay. And if it's more than 10 seconds, you've lost their attention to checking Twitter or whatever. This is a readout from Chrome Timeline of a typical Rails website that will remain nameless. But Chrome Timeline shows you between the time I hit refresh and the final paint, exactly where all my time went. There's a big timeline thing that I'm not going to show you or get into how to use today, but basically check it out if you haven't already. Most of the time in a typical Rails app page load is not actually in the server response time, which shows up here as idle time because the server's just waiting for a response. And this is slow, which I'm going to get to in a minute.  I got to, you know, fire up optimizely and then change all the fonts on the page or whatever the guy in BizDev told you to do. And a lot of that time is spent in re-rendering because of all the scripts that get executed at document ready, change all the stuff in the render tree and the render tree is like, oh, fine, OK, I'll re-render everything again.  It's a pain interact with. It's very slow. So that breakdown, again, is you have the network latency going to and from the server. A typical Rails app is 250 to 500 milliseconds in the server response time. And then, so you're already five times past 100 milliseconds. And then you've got to parse the HTML. You've got to create the render tree, the CSS object model. You've got to evaluate all the JavaScript. And then you've actually got to paint the result. So let's talk really quickly about server response time. I'm just going to have to say, if your app is slow, 250 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds, like, sorry, it doesn't have to be that way. It's not Rails. It's you. There are lots of other large websites that have achieved these very fast times. And the way that they do it is caching.  It's totally possible. So we figured out your server response time. It's now 50 milliseconds. You spent 10 milliseconds going to the server, 50 milliseconds at the server, 10 milliseconds on the way back. We're at 70 milliseconds. We have 30 milliseconds left to do all this stuff that took two seconds. How are we going to do that? Well, what if I told you that you just didn't have to do all those things? What if we just didn't do all that stuff on every page load? That's what TurboLynx lets us do. So traditionally, when you come up to this problem of, well, the client needs to attach all these event listeners and do all this stuff, well, you want to avoid the page load. We reach for JSON. We say, all right, we're going to bring the logic into the client. The client's going to decide with the JSON data over the wire how to update the view. It's going to say, OK, well, that means that this list element needs to be updated over here. And that moves all this logic into the client JavaScript. I don't like that, because I don't like writing JavaScript. And the really tough part about this is in a team people perspective is that you had one code base. Now you have two code bases. Now you have a JavaScript app that requires an entirely different set of knowledge, experience, skills, tooling. And that splits your team. And I mostly work with small companies of engineering teams of five, six people. That's a big team. And they just don't have the resources to make that split. It's kind of like adding another service to your architecture. And that can be tough. That can be very tough for smaller teams. So what view over the wire, really all it does is it says, OK, I'm going to go to the server. I'm going to get an HTML document. And then I'm just going to replace the document I have with the document I just got. This is not actually TurboLynx code, but that's basically all it does. And what that lets us not do is all the stuff on my previous slide. We don't have to throw away our entire JavaScript runtime. We don't have to throw away the entire DOM. We get to keep the JS global scope. And we don't have to reparse, re-evaluate the scripts from the head. Even though you don't have to re-download them, you still have to re-evaluate them to rebuild the JavaScript VM if you're not doing this. So just like your fancy pants JavaScript framework, you get all the benefits without all the client logic living in your JavaScript. So as an experiment, I rebuilt a very, the TodoMVC project, which is a sort of project where you build a TodoList in different client-side JavaScript frameworks. I did it with TurboLynx instead of client-side JS. That is available here at this URL, which is going to pop up at the end of this talk again. So this is what a Chrome timeline page load on this do app looks like when you're not using TurboLynx. I just want you to pay attention to the time spent in loading, rendering, and painting. With the TurboLynx page load, that's greatly reduced. Because the head section of the page is exactly the same. It hasn't been touched. And we're just replacing, especially with partial replacement, which I'm going to get to in a second, the parts of the page that actually need to be changed. And all the event listeners that we're on the page to start with are still there. There was only one DOM ready event, which tends to be a source of a lot of your script slowness. So you have to get a lot smarter about the way you write your JavaScript, unfortunately. If you are that kind of developer that throws everything in document.ready, you can't do that anymore. It's difficult. Yes, it's a little teething pain. But it gives you this incredible experience of having an almost instantaneous user interface. It feels pretty awesome. As an interesting comparison, on the left here is my TurboLynx implementation of TodoMVC. And on the right here is a Chrome timeline view of an Ember app. And doing the exact same interaction. I think this was clicking on a Todo item complete. And what's really crazy is the Ember app and the TurboLynx app have very similar amounts of time spent, except for the waiting for the server part. Because all the TodoMVC apps that use JavaScript just use local storage. So you can see that the idle time is quite a bit different. But other than that, they both take about 35 milliseconds in scripting and rendering. And the only difference is how much time they spent waiting for the data to be updated. Which is pretty incredible. And I got that from basically writing 10 lines of JavaScript and dropping in TurboLynx, which is awesome from a development perspective. Hopefully this will work on here. Yes. One of these videos is my TodoMVC implementation in TurboLynx. And one of them is an Ember app. I don't know if you can figure out which one is which just from looking at it, because I can't. So that's pretty cool. It really does feel instantaneous. It's kind of incredible to realize that this is going to a server on Heroku, updating an active record model, and coming back in the same amount of time or feeling like a similar amount of time the Ember app is taking just to go to my local storage, which is pretty incredible. So TurboLynx 3 coming up with Rails 5, although you can use TurboLynx 3 today if you go to GitHub and point your gem source at GitHub. Mostly it's just Shopify's incredible production experience being merged into TurboLynx core. Tbo's doing a lot of incredible work. We have partial replacement, which replaces not the entire body, like you saw in my example, but just parts of the page. Or if there's a list of models, it will replace just the models instances that have changed, which is incredible. And you now get a progress bar at the top of the page, which has a public API on how you can control it. It's really cool. And there's a couple other things you have to do to stay under 100 milliseconds to glass. Caching, mentioned that. Don't forget. Rack mini profiler, an incredible gem by the incredible Sam Saffron. I would use this in any Rails project I've ever put on. It puts this really cool little badge at the top left that lets you look at the current, how fast everything on your page loaded. It breaks it down by how many queries you ran. There's even a flame graph extension that lets you see the stack profile from the entire page load. It's incredible for breaking down slow page loads and figure out exactly where you went. Chrome Timeline, like I've been showing you the graphs from. It's an awesome tool for everything except the server response time. So breaking down, it's basically just flame graphs of where your JavaScript execution time goes. Very valuable for getting that down. For if you're living in this magical world of sub 200 milliseconds to glass, I've found that the new TurboLynx progress bar, or spinners or whatever, is actually sort of, it makes the site feel slower. I don't know what it is about our minds. We're like, we're just, now that we see progress bar, we think, oh, it's slow. I got to sit here and wait. If your app is actually that fast, I think disabling these things can actually make it, you can perceive a little bit more speed, which is kind of weird. And when you're living in this world of 100 milliseconds, the network actually becomes a big problem. So your typical Rails controller, when you go to the create action for a post, you say, OK, you succeeded at doing that. Here's your 301 redirect. Come back to me later for your get request. But that, you just double the amount of back and forths. And with network latency, that can actually add up, but now all of a sudden you're outside of 100 milliseconds. So experimenting with not using redirects in 100 millisecond UIs is interesting. You can see examples in my get repo here at the end. So your two options for view over the wire technology, sending HTML over the wire instead of JSON right now is TurboLynx, which is awesome for new projects, but it's very difficult to use on existing projects. If you have a big existing project and you want to use this technology, I would recommend PJAX. You do need to have jQuery installed, unfortunately. But PJAX lets you take this a little bit more piecemeal. It's more in an opt-in API rather than opt-out like TurboLynx is. So definitely give that a shot. In conclusion, view over the wire is fast. It lets you write less JavaScript. And it's been battle-tested by really big companies that have millions and millions of users and are in the top 1,000 websites in the world. I've been Nate Berkepeck, and that is TurboLynx in view over the wire. Awesome. Thank you.