bite sized: 2026's patron pickses

Hey guys, it's Nate and it's time for another bite size. So this one's going to be fairly low hanging fruit. Not a lot of effort or thought on my part. I did have to do some tabulation but you don't care about that. So it's time to discuss, you know, the 2026 patron picks. And if you are watching video you will see that I am in dire need of a haircut. Like my hair is out of control. I had a haircut like three months. Not because of any particular. Well just because I couldn't get, get an appointment to stick. Anyways, so let's bring up some stuff here. You guys know this is the first year we've kind of introduced a new policy and essentially the six games with the most votes so patrons can make nominations and they vote on those nominations and the six games with the most votes win. Like those games will be locked in. Now this year we are sort of. We, we like our patrons did not vote for you know I would just assume that they, a lot of them would vote for their own topics or they were allowed to also nominate topics and the topics like will probably get covered in addition to the. And maybe next year we'll just sort of say like hey, don't vote for topics, vote for games. And we'll anyways. But yeah the topics because like that thins out the pool and all sorts of logistics stuff. But short version is patrons have the opportunity to nominate games and or topics for us to discuss this year instead of trying to kind of keep up with everything. Yeah, instead of trying to like play every patron nomination, what we decided was we were actually just going to do voting. And so the six games that get the most votes will be locked in. Now there is one exception because we weren't 100% sure how we were going to do this. And we have a patron who well he, he donates at. At a $10 a month level. And we had, we had basically told him that his game was going to be. And then we kind of like we changed it up a little bit but we decided to just. It's going to be locked in anyway. So this year will be seven games. Now not all of these games will require full playthroughs. Some of this is like revisiting old stuff. Like some of this stuff might go back and want to do a replay. Some of it may not play all of it at all. In fact there's, there's one in particular that will. Yeah, anyways, we'll get there. So we had a bunch of nominations from our patrons and we'll just kind of go through all of that and just, you know, so bravely Default Wesley Ray, the Hench and Dead himself nominated bravely Default hd. That's actually the lock. We will be doing an episode on that. I don't know that we'll play through the entirety of it. I mean, like, dude, I have like over 100 hours in the original. I'll definitely sink some hours into the remake because I like that game. It'll be interesting to see what kind of quality of life, you know, stuff they add back into it. But that's not one that I feel like I'm going to need to beat in order to have a conversation about it. So that one, that one is locked in. And so let's look at some of the others here. We got McKelvie, our patron. McKelvey actually nominated Lord of the Ring, Gollum. And I'm going to tell you, like, I was actually like, I'm kind of was kind of rooting for this, but at the same time low key. Not excited about this at all because that game looks horrendous. But I do think it'll be kind of interesting to know play a bad game. Like, I've. I've actually kind of been wanting to sort of incorporate maybe playing a bad game once a year and, and doing content on it. I actually have some stuff sort of like squirreled away. Yeah, yeah, I have some stuff squirreled away that's specifically just like bad game content. So. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of interesting. Our buddy Paul Lytle, the techno funk boy himself. Wow. He's not. He's the techno funk boy, but he's not the techno funk boy himself. I mean, technically he is, but. Yeah, I'm tired. That's Wesley Ray. It's Wesley Ray, the Henshin dad himself. That's like his, his affectation. And the techno funk boy is just Paul, but he nominated Link's Awakening. That would give me a really great reason to actually wrap up the Link's Awakening remake that I have been basically sitting on the. One of the last temples for like the last two and a half, three years. Anyways, moving on. Sojourner nominated Wind Waker. That's actually kind of rooting for that as well. Like, I'm going to like. Most of these are pretty cool and I don't think would. I'm not really mad about any like having, having to play any of these, but I don't think Josh is really either. But sojourner did Wind waker porcho nominated Hades 2 Spike aka the fake Nate. The Nate imposter nominated Tunic. Quick Mark, our buddy over at Quick Play Quick Mark, he nominated a game about digging a hole which I kind of want to do an episode about that as well if we can kind of squeeze it in. Mostly because there a handful of guys in in the Discord played it and thought it was really interesting. So it might be fun to to do an episode on that. But bergen nominated shimagami tensei 5 Vengeance or you know, DPT basement or your basement or belong to Us as I like to call him. Nominated Claire Obscure Expedition. Again, I would not be mad to go over. That's one that I kind of actually want to bully Josh into playing it this year anyway. So we might do an episode on that regardless. But we'll see again. And the six games that end up winning those are going to be like the locks. Like those will get. We will do content on them. We also technically have one sort of game that when we find some time and when the time is right we. We actually do want to go back and. And sort of it's. It's a bit of a carryover from last year but we'll talk about that when we talk about that. Trash Turkey nominated the topic of arts arcade style sports games. Gracious Josh nominated the top the topic of simulator games. And I think like the thing is like honestly I'd love to get to both of those at some point in time. Like one, I love having both those guys on the show. Be a lot of fun to get on there and yeah just chop it up with them and sort of talk through some of that stuff. So both of those are probably going to get like any good. Those are topics. And I think like next year with the voting I'm definitely going to be like hey, don't even bother like voting on topics. Like we will make topics happen to us, you know, to a certain extent. But like both of those I think I'm gonna. I would love to try and make those episodes happen. Akashia nominated Ghost of Tsushima which I like. I love that game. I would not be mad about doing an episode on Ghost of Tsushima. Big Chill dude. This is actually probably low key. One of my favorite like don't get me wrong, Hades2 is definitely like calling my name. But this Big Chill nominated Absalom. Absolum. I'm not sure how to say it. I want to say like absolute. So absolute. Absolute. Absolum. Absolum. I'M just gonna say Absolum because that like grammatically that's kind of how it would track me, but Absolam or Absalom. Yeah. Anyways, I picked that up last year anyways because it's a co op roguelike Brawler and I like Brawlers, I like co op games and I like Roguelites. And so I was like sick. So I'm kind of excited, you know. And we'll do the tabulations here in a couple minutes. So Micah, Micah Gear Solid, longtime friend of the show, you know, part of the brain trust, actually nominated a Plague Tale Innocence. And that's a game that I've also started a while ago and it would probably be behoove me to finish it. So like, like I'm saying like I'm looking at all this stuff and I'm like all this is actually fairly compelling to, to me personally, Josh is like I don't think there's a bad topic or game on this list. We kind of, we would, you know, given the time, we'd love to do all of that. And you know, it's not to say that that stuff might not happen or it might not happen this year, but it's not to say it will never happen at all. Period. But so let's kind of go through here and. Hold on one second here. And the, the, the rule is just like you know, for people who, who you know just to sort of like the, the patrons. We did separate it by like voting tiers and so less than $5 because we don't have actual. But for five less than $5. Those patrons got one vote. Patrons who support us between the levels of five to nine dollars got two votes and ten dollars and up gets three. Three votes. And like I said, we have, we have one ten dollar patron and he actually, he like we're going to just lock in his game. Um, pretty much. So this year, next year, you know again we might revisit some of this or tweak some of this. But Trash Turkey vote voted for Simulator games. Dorian voted for Expedition 33 and Wind Waker Bergen. He not he voted for his nomination of Shin Megami Tensei 5 Vengeance. Micah had a little bit of a tirade against like, like just the fact that Lord of the Ring Gollum was actually had a little bit of traction. So that's not a vote but that comment is excellent. I did love that. Big Chill voted for Absalom and a Plague Tale Innocence and Mark Erickson voted for arcade style sports games and Tunic Paul voted for Bravely Default and Tunic. Oh wait, hold on. I think I missed that second one. Okay, I'm gonna have to just. Because I actually counted all this stuff before. I'm gonna have to. Okay, where were we? And then I. Yeah, promptly forgot. Wesley Ray voted for Link's Awakening, Wind Waker and Lord of the Ring. Gollum imposter Nate Fake Nate Spike. He voted for Link's awakening and shimagami tensei 5. And I'm gonna tell you, he was real close to having his votes disqualified. He pulled some nonsense and yeah. Just ridiculous. Ridiculous. Sir. Yeah, I'm gonna have to double check my math here. Okay. So yeah, but McElvis voted for Hades 2, Micah voted for Absalom and Wind Waker. Ark voted for Link's Awakening. Acostia originally voted for Bravely Default and then changed his to go to Tsushima. Because I told everybody, I said you can actually vote for your own game if you want. You don't have to vote for somebody else's Sojourner. He is such an agent of chaos and I low key love it. But he's like Lord of the Ring Gollum. Mainly because I want to see the AI image that's generated for the. The episode that is so hateful. It does make me laugh though. Arcade Josh Ortiz. Gracious Josh said Arcade style sports games. Porcho voted for Lord of the Ring, Gollum and Tunic. Yeah. And so that is all the votes. And I'm just gonna like, I'm pretty sure, like yeah, I missed like yeah. And so a couple, like a couple of you patrons, like I'm like, can you do maths? I don't. You know, but whatever they, you know, they know what their votes were. So yeah, anyways, so that was all of that. And so we've got one for simulator games, one for Expedition 33, one for Wind Waker. Then we have Shimagami Tensei 5. With a vote. Okay. Then we have Absalom and Plague Tale Innocence. We've got Arcade sports games and Tunic. Okay. Bravely Default and Tunic, Link's Awakening, Wind Waker and Lord of the Ring, Gollum, Link's Awakening, Shimagami. All that. So the way that it worked out is like okay, I've. I've re tabulated and hopefully I did it right this time. And it's. We don't. Most games got more than one one vote. So again like Bravely Default is locked in. We've already talked about this so that we're. We're just going to pick six other games and next Year it'll just be we just want to commit to six. But I think like some of the thing is like we're going to be able to sort of like get away with some of this because we're not going to play through all of these all the way through and you'll see but Legend of Zelda Wind Waker was got three votes. So that's locked in and that will be interesting. Like it'll be a nice chance for me to revisit some of that again. I don't know how much I'm going to. I'm probably going to play it on my switch. Of course I might drag out my Wii U and play the, the HD version. If I play the HD version maybe I'll beat it. If I don't, I'm probably not going to. I'll just like it's one of my favorite win way like it's one of my favorite Legend of Zelda games and I'm really kind of excited to play through but I don't know that I need to beat it again especially there's a part. But anyways, Absalom got two. Plague Tale Innocence got one. Arcade style sports games as a topic got two votes. And again it kind of like in hindsight I think I'm just like next year I'm going to say like don't vote for topics we're going to like we'll cover them, you know, unless it's absolutely insane. But yeah, so that's definitely like pretty pressing. Tunic 3 got three votes. Bravely default again that's the lock. Link's Awakening got three votes. Lord of the Ring Gollum got three votes and SMT5 got two votes. Five Vengeance technically. So that means that and that's like if you take out the arcade style sports games which got two votes. Everything else. So Plague Tale got one. Augustus Tsushima got one. So if you take out the the topic and like I said we're planning on doing simulator games and arcade style sports games anyways. So if you take Those out and Expedition 33 only got one but again if we, if we can work that in, I'd love to do that episode. What you're left with is the, the six games besides bravely default that got locked in are Legend, Legend of Zelda, Wind Waker, Absalom, Tunic Link's Awakening, Lord of ring, Gollum and SMT5 Vengeance. So those are, you know, those, those seven games will be games that we target pretty intentionally. And like I said I think like I'm I'm gonna be honest. I'm. Unless, like, I become just, like, fueled by some, like, arcane Eldritch energies, I have zero intention of playing Lord of the Ring Gollum from start to finish. I will put in hours. I will probably hate every second of it. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna spend tons of time. It's gonna be fun. Like, to. To kind of like, fun is definitely not the right. It'll be interesting to play something that bad and maybe it'll sort of be like one of those things where it's like, yeah, we'll just kind of see, like we're gonna. And. And some of this stuff I don't like. Dude, again, like, I've got over a hundred hours in the original loop. Original. Bravely default. I'm definitely going to play the. The. The remake because, like, I love that game. I love the fact that it got brought to modern hardware, but I'm not. I don't know that I'm gonna be compelled to finish it all over again because it's beefy and. Yeah, so, yeah, we'll see. It's. It's kind of one of those things where, looking at this, I think the one that I'm most excited to. Out of, to really tackle, and this is just a personal thing, like Link's Awakening. I need to beat the Switch to remake port thing or the Switch remake port thing. Anyways, so. Yeah, that's our list. Yeah. And again, just. It's Wind Waker, Absalom, Absolum, Tunic, Bravely Default, Link's Awakening, Lord of the ring, Golem, and SMT5 Vengeance. I think SMT Vengeance is SMT5. Vengeance is probably going to be the biggest boy. And I want to talk to Bergen a little bit about that because I think we had just said, like, I don't own Vengeance, but I do own SMT5. And so maybe what I'll do is actually just play SMT5 now. But, yeah, I don't know. So, yeah, that's. Those are our nominations. Those are our picks. And yeah, it's going to be an interesting year. In addition to that, like, we're probably here in a few episodes where Josh and I actually have plans to talk about BioShock Infinite, our Spooktober game. I think this year we pretty much settled in on the Dead Space remake, so we have some other games in addition to that. So, yeah, it. It. It's going to be. I think there's a pretty solid lineup this year. I think it's going to be pretty interesting. Yeah. And all that. And like I said, we've got those topics, so we've. We've got some. Some good stuff. Cooking. Yeah. Anyways, that's it, guys. That's kind of what the. We're looking at for 2026. Or as I'm calling the 2026 Patron Pixes, or 2026 is Patreon Pixies. And that's stupid, and I know it is, but I'm tired. So, all that being said, you guys know the drill. Do the things, be good, and until next time, you know? Yeah, well, yeah, until next time, be good. But, like, do the things and I'll catch you. I'll catch you next time. Later, guys.