651: Grow Goo

Somehow a conversation about the Grogu movie leads to the discovery that Neighbours made a zombie spin-off in 2014 and it’s available on YouTube. That’s the kind of episode this is. Along the way: William Shatner publicly calling his own Magic: The Gathering card AI-generated garbage, Matt’s genuine distress over not being able to enjoy Stardew Valley, Luke owning 12 boxes of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 board game expansions and having opened exactly one, and a surprisingly interesting breakdown of why Spotify’s new fan-verification ticket system might actually dent concert scalping. Plus GTA 6 is still November, Destiny 2 is winding down, and Matt is running a local AI agent that reads obituaries so we don’t miss Geek of the Week candidates. ‘Neighbours: Zombies on Ramsey Street’ review coming next week.

Luke slept 18 hours before this episode because he was up until 3 AM playing Forza Horizon 6. That’s the kind of dedication that costs nearly $200 when you factor in the premium upgrade. Meanwhile Matt was over here still playing Conan Exiles Enhanced on GeForce Now and trying to figure out mod management on a streaming service (spoiler: it’s a nightmare). We also talked about:

Nicolas Cage is playing Spider-Man in a black-and-white 1950s noir series that’s out at the end of this month, and somehow that’s not even the wildest thing discussed this week. Asha Sharma quietly killed Xbox’s Copilot integration, an AI assistant that was officially announced as recently as March. Luke is so relieved he can barely contain it. Between that, the price cuts, and the achievement system overhaul, we try to work out whether she’s the real deal or if Microsoft just had a drawer full of approved changes waiting for someone new to take credit. There’s also the question of what Peter Molyneux knew and when, as his new Fable-adjacent game Masters of Albion gets caught up in accusations that its predecessor Legacy was a crypto rug pull. We trace the full sorry arc from CryptoZoo to Hawk Tuah to Johnny Depp drinking his investment wine, and end up somewhere near ’nobody learns anything.’ On the genuinely good news side: Alien Isolation 2 is real, Conan Exiles got a surprise free Unreal Engine 5 rebuild that looks stunning, The Guild is crowdfunding a 20th anniversary reunion movie, and the new Resident Evil film from Zack Cregger looks considerably better than its early ‘road trip comedy’ reputation suggested. Plus Luke has opinions about every movie coming out for the rest of 2025, and the Terminator 2 35th anniversary theatrical run might actually be worth seeing in 70mm.