Tag: might

The Contestant might be the year’s scariest documentary

Twenty years ago, Park Chan-wook’s revenge thriller Oldboy turned him into a worldwide star, setting off a new wave of Korean neo-noirs and helping break down barriers for international cinema. The movie’s memorable, irresistible hook: After a drunken bender, Korean businessman Oh Dae-su wakes up in a small, dilapidated hotel room, where he’s been imprisoned by unknown parties. As months pass with no contact from the outside apart from anonymous food deliveries, he begins to unravel, numbed by isolation and helplessness.

Watching Hulu’s mesmerizing documentary The Contestant, it’s hard to believe Park and Oldboy manga writer Garon Tsuchiya didn’t take some inspiration from its subject, Nasubi. Starting in 1998, Nasubi spent more than a year naked, starving, and cut off from the world in a similarly small suite as part of a Japanese game show, utterly unaware that he was eventually being watched by 17 million gawking fans. His real-world story was considerably less gory than Oldboy, but it’s even more startling, given its big, surprising twists — and given how complicit Nasubi was in his own captivity and worldwide exploitation.

Clair Titley’s documentary starts with a brief overview of the game show, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, and the environment that enabled it. In an era where reality TV was just starting to take off, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen specialized in luring participants into performing elaborate, dangerous stunts in the hopes of furthering their entertainment careers. A quick montage of footage from the show blitzes across a few of the show’s other most notorious moments, including an intercontinental hitchhiking trip that hospitalized one participant, and a stunt where two comedians were given a swan-shaped pedal boat and told to pedal from India to Indonesia.

But by far, the show’s most notorious project was “A Life in Prizes,” a segment where a would-be comedian was placed in a room, naked, with nothing but a rack of magazines and a pile of postcards, and ordered to live entirely off whatever he could win by entering magazine sweepstakes.

Producer Toshio Tsuchiya told Denpa Shōnen contestant Nasubi (born Hamatsu Tomoaki — the unusual shape of his face inspired his stage name, “Eggplant”) that he’d live in a room with one tripod-mounted camera, which he’d use to videotape short daily check-ins as he entered sweepstakes and slowly amassed 1 million yen worth of prizes. After the project finished, Toshio explained, the show would edit Nasubi’s footage and release it.

Instead, Toshio kept secret cameras in Nasubi’s room running 24 hours a day. Initially, the show’s producers edited the footage down into short segments for the show. Once millions of fans became obsessed with Nasubi, though, detractors denounced him as an actor faking the entire stunt. So Toshio began to livestream the cameras from Nasubi’s room, employing an around-the-clock staff to monitor the feed and hand-operate the mobile video effect that obscured Nasubi’s genitals with a CG eggplant.

The footage Titley assembles from Denpa Shōnen feels remarkably like a manically narrated version of Bo Burnham: Inside, with Nasubi’s naked dancing replacing the musical interludes. Hoping for a TV comedy career once the show actually aired, Nasubi played to his camera during the window where he knew it was on. He performs celebratory rituals whenever he wins a prize, pulls silly faces and tries out silly voices, and generally clowns for an imaginary audience. The goofy antics and the ridiculous extremes of the whole experiment edge toward making The Contestant feel comic and weightless, a light entertainment like so many other reality-TV gimmick shows.

Image: Hulu/Everett Collection

The hidden cameras tell another story. As months stretch by, Nasubi tries to survive with no source of nutrition but sparse, random prizes like fruit drinks and dog food. He grows increasingly gaunt and bony. He suffers bouts of lassitude, depression, confusion, and what seems like mania. And Toshio just keeps rolling.

Twenty-five years after the incredibly discomfiting end of the “Life in Prizes” experiment, Titley brought Nasubi and Toshio in for studio interviews to discuss their memories of this international exercise in voyeurism. Nasubi is calm and philosophical about his ordeal, explaining why he didn’t just walk away from the experiment when he began deteriorating, and taking a clear-eyed look at what it did to him mentally. Toshio, meanwhile, remains politely apologetic about how sadistically he pushed Nasubi to continue on the show, but offers few explanations or insights into his behind the scenes decisions. The movie is likely to leave viewers with more questions about the story than they went in with.

Part of that comes from Titley’s refusal to editorialize, or to shape the story in a way that suggests a larger context. It’s easy to take it as a frightening story about what people are willing to endure (or make other people endure) in exchange for fame or profit. And given how famous Nasubi became both inside and outside of Japan, it’s similarly easy to take “A Life in Prizes” as a milestone event in the growth of reality TV, and the fascination with watching people harm themselves on camera to entertain others. (Jackass started airing the year after “A Life in Prizes” ended. So did Survivor. Fear Factor came the year after that.)

But it’s just as easy to see as “A Life in Prizes” as a companion piece to the Stanford Prison Experiment, an example of how easily power can lure ordinary people into cruelty and abuse, and how easy it is to become obedient and accepting in the hands of power, and to accept even a ruinous status quo. As Nasubi points out in an interview with Titley, the door to his tiny apartment wasn’t locked, and he could have left at any time. Past a certain point, he says, he didn’t have the will to resist.

Image: Hulu/Everett Collection

The Contestant doesn’t draw out any of these larger ideas, and Titley’s handling of her subjects seems gentle and cautious rather than probing. There are a lot of unsettling revelations in The Contestant, including that Toshio encouraged Nasubi to keep a journal about his day-to-day life — which was then taken away and published, without Nasubi’s knowledge. (It became a four-volume national bestseller.) But the film doesn’t explore how that happened, or question the ethics behind it: It just notes the publication of Nasubi’s diary as a data point in establishing the scope of his fame in Japan.

It might be considered admirable how firmly Titley sticks to the facts, rather than trying to draw out a moral from the entire situation. But it leaves the story feeling more like a quirky, isolated human-interest story than a watershed moment in the development of exploitative, stunt-driven reality television. It plays like a feature-length version of the “Here’s a wacky story from Japan…” news items that Titley excerpts at the beginning of the film, more a curiosity than a bigger discussion-starter. And when Nasubi enters his post-Denpa Shōnen life and embarks on a radical personal project, the film morphs into something more like a slick, inspirational feel-good story. It’s certainly a relief to see Nasubi healthy and happy after the early going, but there’s a constant sense of a film skating across the surface of a remarkable story, rather than exploring its depths.

None of which makes The Contestant any less of a compelling watch. We seem to have moved past the peak of grim cautionary documentaries focused on the seemingly endless environmental, technological, and societal apocalypses looming in the near future, maybe because they’d piled up in such numbing profusion that audiences were turning away. In spite of the guilty voyeuristic lure of a naked guy who doesn’t know he’s being filmed, the “Wow, this guy’s so wacky!” framing of Toshio’s game show, and the big, bright uplift of the ending, this movie is as frightening as any of the doomsaying docs of the last few decades.

The Contestant is streaming on Hulu now.

Tasha Robinson

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May 4, 2024
10 great indie games you might have missed in 2023

It’s been one of those strange, busy years where any of Polygon’s top 10 games of the year could have made the No. 1 slot. Heck, you could expand that outward to include the top 20. There was a wealth of great games throughout the year, making it impossible to keep up with everything — even here at Polygon, where many of our jobs are to keep up with video games. That’s why we’ve created this list of 10 games you might have missed, all from indie studios. They cover a bunch of different genres, from a goofy multiplayer game to an inventory management roguelike.

Like with Polygon’s list of the top 50 games of the year, there are plenty of fantastic games that slipped through the cracks. Think we’ve missed any extra-special indies from the past year? Drop your favorites in the comments.

Bread & Fred

Image: SandCastles Studio/Apogee Entertainment

Developer: SandCastles Studio
Where to play: Windows PC

Bread & Fred is a game you’re going to want to play with a friend. (Only one of you needs a copy of the game, thanks to Steam’s Remote Play Together.) You’ll play as two penguins tied together on a short rope, tasked with climbing a snowy mountain. It’s hard! The rope is very short, meaning there’s little wiggle room. Communication is key to timing each jump precisely — or you might fall down the mountain once again with a splat. So yes, Bread & Fred is hard, but it’s not impossible. Better yet, its challenge is pretty hilarious when playing with a friend you’re comfortable shouting at — or with. The animations have a slapstick element, making the already silly premise even funnier. —Nicole Carpenter

American Arcadia

Image: Out of the Blue Games/Raw Fury

Developer: Out of the Blue Games
Where to play: Windows PC

Trevor, an office drone, wakes up one morning and learns his bosses are conspiring to kill him — and also that his entire life is built on a lie. American Arcadia is set in a ’70s-inspired metropolis called Arcadia, but something’s up with Arcadia: It’s a Truman Show-type widespread deception designed to trick thousands of people into living guilelessly for the entertainment of others. But that’s not American Arcadia’s only trick. One minute you’re bouncing across platforms like any other side-scrolling platformer. The next, you’re solving puzzles from a first-person perspective. Video games don’t often deploy multiple perspectives. Here, the shift is jarring but effective; it puts you on edge — kind of, one imagines, like learning the truth about Arcadia. —Ari Notis

El Paso, Elsewhere

Image: Strange Scaffold

Developer: Strange Scaffold
Where to play: Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X

If you can’t get enough of Max Payne, you won’t want to miss El Paso, Elsewhere. When vampires and werewolves arrive in a mysterious, supernatural motel, vampire hunter James Savage takes them head-on. What you get is a third-person shooter that revels in PlayStation-era graphics and explosive gameplay, with a narrative that sets the stakes especially high. You see, Savage’s ex is a vampire that’s about to perform a ritual — in that El Paso motel — to end the world. Within the mayhem of El Paso, Elsewhere, there’s a beautiful story about addiction and heartbreak that grounds the game’s physical demons within its metaphorical ones.

Yes, I made a Max Payne comparison — and you’ll see that a lot when reading about El Paso, Elsewhere — but the game is something wholly itself. It’s not to be missed. —NC

A Highland Song

Image: inkle

Developer: inkle
Where to play: Nintendo Switch, Windows PC

A Highland Song is one of those 2023 latecomers, sneaking into this year’s release calendar on Dec. 5. From the creators of 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault, it’s not a game to be missed. The stylized art style perfectly renders the Scottish Highlands, where Moira is exploring in order to get to the sea. It’s one of those games, like A Short Hike, where the journey is much more important than the destination. Set to music from Scottish folk artists TALISK and Fourth Moon, A Highland Song has so many lovely, warming moments, even when you’re sheltered up in a cave to escape the cold. —NC

MyHouse

Image: Veddge

Developer: Veddge
Where to play: Windows PC

MyHouse.wad is a pretty boring Doom mod. I’m no game designer, and I’m hesitant to repeat a tired line about modern art, but come on: I could have made this! The map is just a typical suburban split-level home. There’s nothing to do but scurry around polygonal furniture, look at tacky domestic art, and shoot some generic Doom enemies. I suspect — if I’m being honest — its elevated reputation stems from its tragic backstory.

A Doomworld user named Veddge released MyHouse.wad on the site’s forum back in March. Veddge was clear from the beginning that MyHouse wasn’t his mod; he’d just polished it up. The original version belonged to Veddge’s childhood friend Tom, who had recently passed away. To honor his pal, he decided to touch up the map into operable shape and share the file with some hardcore Doom nerds — the sort of folks who might appreciate this amateur but lovingly made map.

I appreciate the good intentions. I just can’t understand why anybody would find this normal house all that interesting. I mean sure, the rooms keep moving. And sometimes there’s no way out. And other times I wake up in an empty hospital. But this is just a normal, boring Doom mod. There’s nothing to see here.

Unless none of this is true. —Chris Plante

Videoverse

Image: Kinmoku

Developer: Kinmoku
Where to play: Mac, Linux, Windows PC

Videoverse is a game for those of us nostalgic for the early internet and its intimate communities. When I was a kid, I spent my free time digging into niches on Neopets and talking to strangers about shared interests in AOL chat rooms. I made friends in forums, creating an online world sometimes more enticing than my own real life. Videoverse is all of those things on a fictional forum dedicated to a dying MMO, and it perfectly captures the drama and sadness of letting go. All at once, Videoverse has recreated the frivolous, beautiful, dramatic, and profound ways technology has influenced my life, and maybe yours, too. —NC

A Space for the Unbound

Image: Mojiken/Toge Productions

Developer: Mojiken
Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X

Set in rural Indonesia, A Space for the Unbound is a slice-of-life story of high school sweethearts Atma and Raya, who have a bucket list to fulfill. While A Space for the Unbound is an intimate look into a teenage relationship in ’90s Indonesia, it’s also the backdrop for a larger supernatural power that’s threatening reality — the end of the world. That framing makes for an interesting dichotomy between the scope of the stories: everyday moments paired with otherworldly drama. It’s one of those games that’s so earnest that’s it’s easy to overlook any flaws or bugs while captured by the stakes of the world and its characters. A bonus for pixel art fans: The game is gorgeous! —NC

Tape to Tape

Image: Excellent Rectangle/Null Games

Developer: Excellent Rectangle
Where to play: Windows PC

A hockey game, but make it roguelite! Tape to Tape is in early access, so it hasn’t had its full release just yet. But what it is now is very fun: a game about building a hockey team by hiring players and managing the team. Play in games, of course, with different — not actual hockey-legal — abilities, upgrades, and bribes. Tape to Tape screams ’90s Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey, but a lot more wacky. As in other roguelites, losing is fine: It’s an opportunity to upgrade your tools of the trade and get further next time.

Grab some hockey fans in your life for online multiplayer (with Remote Play Together) or on split screen. —NC

Moonring

Image: Fluttermind

Developer: Fluttermind
Where to play: Windows PC

Don’t let the old-school visuals fool you: Moonring is one of 2023’s richest video game experiences. Created by Dene Carter, a co-creator of the iconic RPG Fable, the colorful adventure gives players the expansive freedom popularized by games of the 1980s — when graphics played second fiddle to creativity and scope. Trade with unsavory types. Partner with questionable cults. Converse with practically everyone.

Perhaps most importantly for our readers, this Ultima-inspired roguelike is free. Like, free free. At that price, Carter may get his wish of introducing the old ways of game design to new audiences. “I hope Moonring recaptures some of the spirit of those days for you,” Carter writes on the Moonring Steam page. “For those who did not, I hope that the more modern conveniences you find in this game allow you to catch a glimpse of what we did 40 years ago.” —CP

Backpack Hero

Image: Jaspel/Different Tales, IndieArk

Developer: Jaspel
Where to play: Nintendo Switch, Mac, Windows PC

When I can’t sleep, I consider the mysteries of the universe. Like, who came up with the whiskey sour? “Whiskey is amazing, but what if we added raw egg whites?” Backpack Hero’s creators took a similarly audacious approach with the classic dungeon crawler, splicing the genre with the Tetris-like inventory management popularized by Resident Evil 4. Much like the foamy cocktail, the results are delicious.

Generally, I’m hesitant to list back-of-the-box bullet points, but I’m tickled by how big the creators have made a game about backpack organization: There are over 800 items and 100 enemies, you can play as five different heroes, and the dungeons are procedurally generated within a overworld map the player constructs. Like its hero mouse, Backpack Hero punches way above its weight class. And it will keep you up at night, because there’s always time for one more run. —CP

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Nicole Carpenter

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December 26, 2023
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom devs on why we likely won’t get a Zelda Mario Maker game

In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, players didn’t just play through another story set in Hyrule. The sequel to Breath of the Wild took the previous game’s sandbox elements several steps further, allowing players to use a new set of powers to construct machines, weapons, and tools using items in the world. By introducing this, Tears of the Kingdom encouraged players to be truly creative and push the limits of building in the game.

Fans responded to this new level of freedom by devising awe-inspiring creations and sharing them online. In the time since Nintendo released the game, fans have made nifty items like skateboards to intricate machines like a mechanized kaiju that looks like Godzilla. Given the game’s emphasis on creativity, Polygon asked Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi about the possibility that fans would ever get a Zelda game that purely focused on building their own creations, like Super Mario Maker. From the sounds of their answers, it seems unlikely Nintendo will release a Zelda game that’s purely about creating levels or dungeons.

“When we’re creating games like Tears of the Kingdom, I think it’s important that we don’t make creativity a requirement. Instead, we put things into the game that encourage people to be creative, and give them the opportunity to be creative, without forcing them to,” Aonuma told Polygon through an interpreter in an in-person interview.

Image: Nintendo/Nintendo EDP

In Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2, players can design their own Mario levels from scratch using an in-game editor. This has allowed players to create custom levels of all sorts in Mario. Players can make ultra-difficult levels that challenge the most seasoned Mario players or zany creations where a Mario level becomes an homage to Splatoon. No matter the approach, a huge aspect of the Super Mario Maker games is that they rely on player creativity.

Now, it’s no secret that the developers of Tears of the Kingdom were inspired by fan responses to Breath of the Wild. Developers saw players stretch the creative limits of Breath of the Wild, and they later created a game that doubled down on these sandbox elements. Given this, Zelda fans have long wondered if a version of Zelda that works like Mario Maker — where players could create or design dungeons or worlds — could ever come out. But when asked directly about a Mario Maker-style game for Zelda, Aonuma had an interesting answer about the nature of Zelda games and what they offer to players.

Image: Nintendo

“There are people who want the ability to create from scratch, but that’s not everyone,” Aonuma said. “I think everyone delights in the discovery of finding your own way through a game, and that is something we tried to make sure was included in Tears of the Kingdom; there isn’t one right way to play. If you are a creative person, you have the ability to go down that path. But that’s not what you have to do; you’re also able to proceed to the game in many other different ways. And so I don’t think that it would be a good fit for The Legend of Zelda to necessarily require people to build things from scratch and force them to be creative.”

Given Aonuma’s response, it seems unlikely that Zelda will ever get its Mario Maker equivalent. If we did get more creative elements, it seems they would have to be nestled into a larger game where players could proceed in multiple ways. So those holding out hope for a Zelda builder might be better off finding other games that currently offer similar options — which, luckily for us, already exist.

Ana Diaz

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December 16, 2023
November games you might have missed

Welcome to November, the mild hangover after October’s proverbial keg stand of awesome games. Even for a quieter month, if you gave the November’s game release calendar a thwap with the ol’ broom, a few huge AAA-tier games would drop to the ground. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Super Mario RPG, and more will kick up a cloud that overshadows the arrival of smaller games — potentially great ones, even, from developers you might’ve heard of and new indie creators alike.

We don’t want to let these games slip by (and you’d probably like to know about them, right?), so as we do each month, we’ve rounded up a handful of notable game launches that you shouldn’t overlook. Stay tuned near the end of every month for our next batch of video game deep cuts.

RoboCop: Rogue City

Where to play: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Windows PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

A RoboCop game in the year 2023? And it’s half decent? Polygon’s review calls out that RoboCop: Rogue City is a solid first-person shooter that attempts (with decent success) to serve as the RoboCop 3 film that we should have gotten, and is filled with underdog charm and personality. It even has Peter Seller, who played the original RoboCop, voicing the titular action character in this game.

The Talos Principle 2

Where to play: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Windows PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Portal walked so 2014’s The Talos Principle could run. But now, after a long wait, The Talos Principle 2 is sprinting on a gorgeous, puzzle-filled path of its own. This sequel builds on its foundation, with fantastic, stop-you-in-your-tracks environments and visuals, a story that’s a stirring crash course in philosophy. Of course, it’s also packed with puzzles that’ll likely have you scratching your head before figuring out a clever solution.

Thirsty Suitors

Where to play: PlayStation consoles, Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch, Windows PC via Steam.

If you’ve only seen video clips of Thirsty Suitors, you might think it’s a game consisting entirely of the quirkiest quick-time events imaginable. Those scenes, where your character is prepping South Asian-inspired dishes, or petting a dog don’t represent all that you can do in the game. The game’s director Chandana Ekanayake describes the game as “a baby Yakuza,” in the sense that it’s filled with an eclectic variety of activities that’ll leave players guessing. You can skateboard, cook, and then hop into turn-based battles — all delivered in a maximalist package, as our review points out.

Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story

Where to play: PlayStation consoles, Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch, Windows PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

League of Legends’ most recent spinoff comes in the form of Song of Nunu, a game developed by Tequila Works that’s friendly for all ages. Between fun (if occasionally frustrating) platforming sections, the game expands into a third-person adventure that incorporates brawling as Willump, the big yeti, and solving environmental puzzles with Nunu’s magical flute. It’s a heartwarming game that succeeds in more closely examining characters from League of Legends’ MOBA experience. Read our full review to learn more.

Teardown (PS5, Series X)

Where to play: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X. The game was previously made available for Windows PC via Steam.

Teardown is a physics sandbox for pure destruction. Not since Red Faction: Guerilla have I had so much fun breaking, well, everything in sight. The game, which originally debuted on PC in 2022, includes a story more where you’re given missions that both expand your arsenal of weaponry and puts your expertise with explosions to the test. The fact that they’re time-based missions amps up the excitement. Beyond the missions, its free play mode never gets old, and can serve as some good ol’ stress relief when you want to blow everything up without the usual real-world repercussions.

Teardown

Prices taken at time of publishing.

The Invincible

Where to play: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Windows PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

It cannot be denied that The Invincible has some of the most stunning looks of any 2023 game. In addition to the graphical swagger of this adaptation of Polish author Stainisław Lem’s book of the same name, I’m taken by this title’s blend of calm-but-eerie atmosphere, the rad “atompunk” tech you’ll use to find missing crew members, and being stealthy to avoid facing down intimidating robots.

Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection

Where to play: PlayStation consoles, Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch, Windows PC via Steam.

Limited Run Games is cracking open the gates of Jurassic Park so that gamers with modern consoles have a chance at the handful of titles that debuted during the franchise’s heyday in the early to mid 1990s. The Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection includes multiple versions of the original game, made for 8-bit, 16-bit (both SNES and Sega Genesis), and portable systems. It also includes Jurassic Park Part 2: The Chaos Continues and Rampage Edition for the Genesis.

I want to give a special shoutout to how frightening Jurassic Park for the SNES (the 16-bit version in this collection) was for me to play as kid. The game’s first-person mode that switched on while indoors successfully captured the dread of the famous velociraptor kitchen scene.

Gangs of Sherwood

Where to play: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Windows PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Even though Gangs of Sherwood sounds like the name of a Netflix show that I would absolutely skip, a playable version sounds like fun. It’s a third-person action game set in a futuristic dystopia inspired by Robin Hood. Gameplay-wise, it looks like Dragon’s Dogma, with its multiple classe, each with different fighting styles and weaponry, mixed with Bayonetta-like action games, given that Gangs of Sherwood features a combo counter and a grading system. You can play this game alone, or with up to four players teaming up for some co-op.

FROM OUR SPONSOR: Aliens: Dark Descent

Prices taken at time of publishing.

Battle to keep your squad alive against the deadliest foe mankind has ever faced! In Aliens: Dark Descent, command a squad of hardened Colonial Marines to stop a terrifying Xenomorph outbreak on Moon Lethe. Lead your soldiers in real-time combat against iconic Xenomorphs, rogue operatives from the insatiable Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and a host of horrifying creatures new to the Alien franchise.

Cameron Faulkner

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November 20, 2023
The Death of Bellator, Tom Aspinall’s P4P Rankings Debut, and Why Jon Jones Vs. Francis Ngannou Might Still Happen!
Still buzzing from last weekend’s UFC 295, Ariel, Chuck, and Petesy have a lot to get into on today’s show. First, the guys discuss this weekend’s final Bellator card and why the energy (or lack thereof) surrounding Bellator 301 is symbolic of the promotion’s entire existence. Then, the guys break down their latest pound-for-pound rankings before taking Discord questions about Alex Pereira’s legendary run, Ian Garry’s beef with Team Renegade, how the Saudis could convince Dana White to make the fight of the century, and more. Plus, a classic game of Buy or Sell.

To enter into our lovely Discord community, click this link.

TOPICS:
- Intro (00:00)
- The end of Bellator (03:07)
- Why Bellator doesn’t invoke the same nostalgia Strikeforce does (08:49)
- Saturday’s Paul Craig vs. Brendan Allen card at The Apex (21:02)
- Ariel’s conundrum with getting Tom Aspinall into his November pound-for-pound rankings (24:19)
- UFC fighters we feel most emotionally connected to (37:38)
- How the Saudis could get Dana White to make Jon Jones vs. Francis Ngannou (57:30)
- Buy or Sell (01:05:09)
Hosts: Ariel Helwani, Petesy Carroll, and Chuck Mindenhall
Producer: Troy Farkas

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Ariel Helwani

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November 16, 2023