Shifting into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE
Here at Load Last Save we specialize in talking about old, irrelevant games. Forget the shiny, new releases, or even games that others would find interesting. If anything is getting an overly-long 5,000 word essay, it’s going to be something no one cares about. If no one cares about the game, no one reads the article, and if no one reads this stuff, I can put as many weird jokes as I want without facing any repercussions. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because taxes are too high and they can’t pay for functioning roads.
Today, I’ll be telling you about Sunset Overdrive, a game so irrelevant that no one even cared about it when it was new. It was hyped as the next big thing for the Xbox One; a fun, new shooter from the guys who brought you Racthet and Clank. It was this bright, colorful, cool, edgy game, made for the youth of today, and not their boring parents who wear suits and are gainfully employed. Screw a 9 to 5, I wanna rawk, with a W.
The game sold enough to be branded a failure. There’s even a leaked document floating around showing how much money Insomniac, the game’s developer, made from each of their games. Sunset Overdrive managed to net them a whopping $567 in profits. I don’t trust the leaks much, apparently they’re real, but the number is just too funny, and no one really remembers this game.
The marketing made the game look like your typical quirky, quippy game that breaks the fourth wall and doesn’t take itself seriously. The kind of Borderlands-adjacent “humor” that’s dismissed by a lot of players (with good reason). It was pushed hard but didn’t go anywhere.
Which is a real shame, since this game is a ton of fun. Its gameplay is smooth and easy to learn, the open world actually works and, thanks to the game’s traversal, is actually fun to navigate instead of a huge, empty chore like most open worlds. It’s the opposite of most modern triple-A games. Those look fun in the trailers, but suck when you play them. Sunset Overdrive looked kinda stinky, but once you experience it, you’ll be hooked.
You should give Sunset Overdrive a try, and here’s why.
Gameplay
Sunset Overdrive is a third person shooter. You use a variety of weird, improvised weapons to take down hordes of monsters mutated by a tainted energy drink. It takes place in Sunset City, an open world that you can freely explore. In it you do the usual open world fare: do missions for talkative NPCs, find collectibles and do optional side content like races or weapon challenges.
This has all the ingredients for a run-of-the-mill open world game, but then you get to the traversal. Most open world games have you walking or driving to get around. That’s boring. I can do that whenever. In fact, I avoid doing either of those as much as possible, so why would I enjoy them in a game? Sunset Overdrive heard that question and answered “What if you could grind everywhere?”. I’m listening.
The game’s big selling point is its fancy traversal system where you can grind on rails, bounce off anything and even air dash. It often gets compared to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and I can see the resemblance. You don’t have to maintain balance while grinding, and there aren’t any tricks or a formal scoring system, but it captures that same feeling the Pro Skater games do, where you’re constantly looking for the next thing to trick off, and it’s just as satisfying.
All of the game’s aspects are pretty standard, but they shine when put together. It’s one of those where the sum is greater than the parts. The shooting is alright. It’s the typical third person shooting system where there isn’t any recoil and guns don’t have much impact. The traversal is fun. You get to grind on powerlines and wall run across buildings. There isn’t a scoring system or any real skill involved, but it flows well and feels nice. The open world isn’t anything to write home about, but when you’re grinding across the city while blasting zombies with a shotgun and bouncing off cars, it all clicks and it just works.
Shooting
This is a shooter, since what you’ll be doing 90% is shooting at things, and it’s okay. There’s nothing really mind-blowing about any of it. There are a lot of hitscan guns, and the ones that aren’t hitscan are easy to hit with, meaning your aim isn’t ever tested. It’s point and click shooting. It’s basic, but it’s functional.
The weapons you get are interesting, at least. You can carry ten weapons, in true shooter fashion, and you can switch between them freely when the situation calls for it. The game encourages frequent weapon switching by limiting your ammo and by giving weapons special attributes. There are weapons that deal fire damage, others deal electricity, some do acid and others freeze. They also have their own individual stats that affect how they interact with enemies. There are weapons that do more damage towards the zombies, and less towards the robots. These stats are hard-coded and there are a few ways of influencing them, such as with amps and other things.
These attribute bonuses don’t feel restrictive. In most games, when an enemy has an elemental resistance, they’ll take significantly reduced damage from anything other than their specific weakness. This leads to fights where you see a color and pick the color that deals the most damage. It’s like matching paint swatches at the hardware store. In Sunset Overdrive, if you shoot an enemy in the face with the flaming shotgun, they’ll get knocked on their ass even if they’re a two-ton flame resistant robot, and any enemy that’s electrocuted will still be stunned. The only thing that changes is how much damage they take when afflicted.
To give a quick overview of the weapons, you have your standard pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers and grenade launchers. Since this game is from the developers of Ratchet and Clank, they’re not just plain old guns. The shotgun looks like an old timey blunderbuss with two metal balls on each end (because dicks are hi-larious) and it shoots flaming shrapnel. There’s a firecracker gun that blasts firecrackers every which way and sets everything on fire, a gun that shoots vinyl records that deal a small amount of damage but ricochet and many more, including a bowling ball launcher.
Using the guns is pretty standard, as I mentioned earlier. You point at something, shoot and whatever you’re pointing at dies, or at least takes a lot of damage. There isn’t much in the way of precise aiming or fancy tech; no rocket jumping or quick-swapping, which is a bit of a shame. That’s not to say that the guns are bad or boring to use. They all feel effective, and there are a lot of quirky status-effect guns to keep you entertained. There’s a grenade launcher that fires ice grenades, which freeze enemies, and one that lets you put down sprinkler toys that cover an area with acid.
Each weapon has its use, and some even have functional effects other than killing things. The harpoon launcher, for example, shoots out a harpoon, as the name implies. When it hits, it leaves behind a puddle of Overcharge, the energy drink, which attracts nearby zombies, letting you set them up for a grenade blast or an acid trap.
The guns are fine, there’s something for every situation, and the fact that you can carry ten of them at once (as it should be) means you’ll never be left wanting for offensive options.
The thing you’ll use the guns on, the enemies, are also serviceable. They’re divided into three factions: the zombies (overcharge mutants), the humans (scabs) and the robots. They each have their own preferred ways of attacking, special units, weapons and specific resistances/weaknesses.
The zombies are fond of swarming. If there’s a problem, their solution is to throw bodies at it until it’s solved, and then throw a few more for good measure. They’re weak to fire and they’re attracted to Overcharge. They’re the most common enemy in the game, and the most interesting. They have different units with interesting tactics. They have an ice guy, for example, that throws ice crystals on whatever rail you’re grinding, interrupting your flow and making you avoid them. They also have Zerkers, which are giant, hulking mini-boss type enemies with a ton of health. They favor melee attacks, so staying in the air is a good choice against them, but some of them can climb.
The second faction, and the least interesting one, is the humans. They’re called Scabs, and they’re just post-apocalyptic raider guys. They have guns, and they fire them. They have melee guys that rush you, but they can never get close to you while you’re grinding or moving faster than a brisk jog, so they’re completely ineffective. Since they have guns, all they do is stand around and shoot. They don’t really do much. They’re practically filler.
Then there’s the Fizzco robots. Tanky murder machines that are resistant to most forms of damage and can pack a punch. They can also deploy turrets. There’s not much more to say about them.
Overall, the enemies in Sunset Overdrive are a mixed bag. The most interesting ones are the ones that put obstacles in your way. When they’re not doing that, they’re just targets to shoot at and mild inconveniences.
Traversal
What makes Sunset Overdrive stand out is its creative traversal system. You can grind on any rail, power line or any other straight edge. When you’re not grinding, you can bounce off anything else that isn’t the floor or a rail. Things like awnings, umbrellas, bushes and even cars, which are notorious for being bouncy. There’s also a wall run, where you stick to a wall and run across it, much like the term “wall run” would suggest.
These techniques, except for bouncing, are all done by pressing a button near an interactable. Press it near a rail, you latch on to it and start grinding. Press it when you’re approaching a horizontal bar, you grab it and swing off. Same with wall runs. This system is very easy to use and intuitive. It’s lenient, so you don’t have to be pixel-precise with where you press the button. If you’re close to the thing you want to interact with, you’ll interact with it. This does away with a lot of the guesswork. The button press is also precise enough to distinguish between multiple actions when you time the press correctly. This makes getting around the city by grinding and wallrunning an easy, intuitive experience where you smoothly transition between one stunt to another with no real friction. I never had any controller hiccups during my two playthroughs of the game.
There aren’t any tricks or skill-intensive things to do with the traversal system, but there is a combo meter. The combo meter doesn’t award you with points, it raises your style meter. The more stunts you do and the bigger your combo, the more style you get. Each level of your style meter gives you access to Amps, which are passive powerups, so the meter has practical applications, and there’s an in-game reason for you to style on your foes.
Moving around stylishly also protects you from damage. Zombies love to swarm around anything on the ground, so bouncing around and constantly grinding are your best bets for not getting injured. When you’re up against humans, their guns miss a lot more often when you’re moving, same with the robot’s shots. This dodge mechanic feels pre-programmed. When you’re moving around, you’re not really dodging the shots, it’s as if you suddenly get a massive boost to your passive dodge stat, and when you’re on the ground, it resets to zero and you get tagged by everything.
The thing with this system is that it isn’t very deep. You can chain together as many moves as you want, and it’s smooth, but there’s no more to the movement other than what you can do by pressing the interact button. There’s no real momentum. You don’t transfer speed from one move to the other, swinging off poles always sends you flying the same distance and with the same speed, regardless of how fast you were going beforehand, there’s a very hard speed cap and there aren’t any fancy tricks for you to pull off.
Amps
I finally get to the amps which I have been mentioning in passing. These are passive buffs you can use on your character or your guns. They do things like let you shoot lightning or cause explosions when you bounce off something. Character amps are activated when you reach a certain style level, and weapon amps are always active.
These give you some customization and let you make something close to a build. Tack on an electricity mod to the vinyl launcher and make a machine gun that fires ricocheting projectiles with a chance to stun. Give the acid sprayer a freeze amp, and make deployable freeze bombs that also cover enemies in acid. These are pretty fun and give players some nice choices to make when building a load out. Different combinations lead to interesting results, like giving the grenade launcher a mod that has a chance to spawn grenades when you kill an enemy, so you can grenade while you grenade.
These amps are unlocked through missions or by purchasing them with collectibles. Sunset City is littered with random collectibles; hundreds of shoes on power lines, toilet paper, cameras, balloons. Every corner has at least two collectible hiding in it. They’re all easy to find, but if you’re stuck at 99 out of 100 collectibles, you can buy a map from a vendor and see the location of each trinket. These are all laid out in ways that make you want to explore and go around the city. Whenever you collect one, you can usually see two or three more, so you plot a course to them, and find some more, rinse and repeat, and before you know it you’ve spent ten minutes just jumping around getting collectibles like you’re playing bootleg Banjo Kazooie. I mean that as a compliment.
I liked the amp system. It offers a good dose of variety and player expression by offering some minor tweaks here and there. They’re all strong and have their uses, even the niche ones like the one that gives you bonus experience or more overcharge.
The existence of these bonus resource amps leads me to one of the negatives about this game: It’s grindy. No, I don’t mean with the rails. You do a lot of that, but getting some of the stuff in the game requires a lot of monotonous collecting. Not the trinkets you find. Those are fine. I’m talking about weapon experience and overcharge/money.
Weapons level up when you use them, and you have to slaughter hundreds of enemies to get them to level up. Then there are the character amps, which are bought with badges. You get badges by doing anything. There’s a badge for killing scabs, for killing zombies, grinding, jumping there’s probably one for picking your nose. Any time you do a certain number of these actions, you get a badge that can be used to buy an amp of that nature. If you get badges for killing zombies, you can buy amps that let you do more damage against zombies. Stuff like that.
Getting them is a bit of a pain in the ass. You need a lot of badges to get them, so that means a lot of time spent goofing around. They’re not necessary, at least, which makes this system kind of pointless. The regular amps you get doing missions and other things are useful, don’t get me wrong, but these minor stat increase amps are not worth the trouble. The system is there, and it’s grindy, which is bad, but you don’t need to use it, so it’s okay, but then why is that system there in the first place?
If you’re a completionist, be prepared to spend hours grinding for nonsense.
Open World
I hate when games have open worlds. They were a neat novelty back in the PS2 era. As a kid, I’d spend a lot of time messing around in games trying to explore out of bounds areas and wondering what the outside of a stage would look like. I’d spend hours walking around Peach’s castle in Mario 64 just to see what I could find. Then every single game became an open world and it got boring. Huge, empty sand boxes with nothing to do and no real interesting ways of getting across them. This is why so many open world games have fast travel, and why everyone uses it instead of enjoying the open world as intended. Fast travel is the developer admitting defeat.
Sunset Overdrive’s open world, like most of its other parts, is serviceable. What makes it shine is the traversal. The city is littered with rails to grind and cars to jump off. You can wall run on any building, bounce off bushes then land on a power line and hop up onto an overpass, all while shooting zombies and snatching toilet paper off lamp posts to buy upgrades.
The city is large enough to feel like a proper city, but compact enough to not feel like a sprawling nightmare world. You don’t dread getting from one side to the other. It’s still big enough to feel expansive and give you a lot of room for different types of terrain and themes, with each area having its distinct visual flair. The game also has the proper sense to keep your missions within a specific area. It never sends you to do a story quest on the other side of the map and come back like some other open world games.
As is tradition in these kinds of games, you have a long list of side activities to do, all dotted throughout the map. There are traversal challenges where you go through a series of rings within a limited time, gun challenges where you try to get a high score using only one gun in a confined area, bomb runs where you deliver bombs and even a vehicle challenge with a glider. These are fun, videogamey challenges that give you rewards. They’re the only time the game ever asks anything of you. There are points challenges that really force you to develop a good route and execute it well and quickly, and the weapon challenges can get surprisingly tricky. All of these side challenges are fun, well-designed and a welcome addition to the game.
Difficulty
Sunset Overdrive is not a hard game by any measure. Dying doesn’t penalize you in any way. You respawn a few meters away and you don’t lose anything, even during challenges, where you just lose a little bit of time. Enemies aren’t very aggressive and they don’t deal much damage, there are plenty of healing items everywhere and your guns and amps can destroy entire hordes of enemies in seconds. This on its own isn’t a bad thing. The game is still a ton of fun even with its current easy difficulty, but I think the game could have benefited from being tougher.
In the Amps section, I mentioned how these upgrades aren’t very necessary. The reason is the game’s non-existent difficulty. Why spend so much time grinding for a minor increase in power when you can already decimate an entire army in your base state? Why bother trying to find cool amp/weapon combos when they can already kill everything without amps? Why bother with defensive powerups when enemies can barely touch you?
I didn’t have much of a reason to explore the game’s systems because the game never asked me to. Some of the challenges, like the score-based Buck National challenges or the Points challenges do require you to play at a higher level, but those challenges are few and far between. You can get a gold medal in most challenges on the first try. If they were a bit more strict, there’d be a real reason to experiment and get good at traversal, or make really efficient builds.
There are defense missions every now and then, and there is a whole tower defense mechanic with traps and different bases, but they’re few and far between. Only one defense per base. These are interesting, since they make you plan ahead and manage huge numbers of zombies and traps, paying attention to multiple entrances. It’s the best representation of what it’s like to play this game, but they’re too easy. I would have loved to get challenged with these. Coming up with different setups with the traps, finding cool synergies and interactions, learning the base and how to best play it. It would have been a great challenge, but the game sort of throws them there and you can get through them with minimal effort.
This lack of difficulty extends to the story missions. The missions themselves are varied and well thought out, for the most part, but a lot of times I found myself completing them and waiting around for the mission to progress. It’s like when you finish your work for the day and don’t have anything to do, so you kind of meander around trying to look busy. I’d mow down a horde of zombies and then stand in one spot waiting for an NPC to arrive, or for the next objective to unlock.
Presentation
Sunset Overdive looks great, even after a decade. The game runs on Insomniac’s in-house engine, and when compared to a lot of modern games that use the Unreal engine, it looks like a masterpiece. There’s no horrid Temporal Anti-aliasing making your screen look like it’s coated in vaseline, no terrible post-processing. Everything looks sharp and clean, and it still looks new, with crisp textures and a great draw distance.
The art direction is great, too. Lots of bright, saturated colors that give the game a cartoony feel without going too overboard. Every part of the city has its own aesthetic and charm. The factory district has a lot of grays and metallic tones contrasted with bright orange brick buildings. The more upscale area has huge, glass sky scrapers with bright blue glass, while the little Tokyo area is full of red accents and green shrubbery, giving it an asian garden look.
This same visual design dictates how the interactables look. Every bounce surface and every rail is clear and readable. You can easily tell what you can trick off and how from a long distance away, so you always have a path mapped out while you’re scurrying around the city. This visual clarity makes grinding through the city and keeping a combo going feel as intuitive as walking.
The enemy designs are also great. The zombies have bright orange spots that make them visible from anywhere. The regular grunt mutants have a nice silhouette and you can tell what they’re doing even when there’s 30 of them on screen. The specialized enemies all have distinct silhouettes and poses, making them easy to spot and take down.
The soundtrack is a matter of personal taste. It’s packed of low-fi, fuzzy garage punk. Lots of repetitive cords and shouty vocals. If you like that kind of thing, you’re in for a treat. I like how it sounds, and it fits the game’s tone and atmosphere perfectly, but a lot of the songs start to sound very similar, and there aren’t enough. After a few hours you’ve heard every song at least four times over. It could have used at least ten more tracks.
There’s one song that’s just a punk rock cover of the Pepto Bismol song. Nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea. That one. Then they keep chanting “DIARRHEA” over and over. The first time I heard it I thought I was hallucinating.
Overall, the presentation is fantastic. Excellent graphics that are both aesthetically pleasing and serve the gameplay well. The music fits the weird, chaotic but playful atmosphere, and it all comes together to give the game a strong sense of identity and personality.
Writing
I don’t usually talk about the story aspect of games, but Sunset Overdrive has unskippable cutscenes and tons of dialogue, so I have to mention it. The game goes for comedy, which means it’s constantly making terrible jokes, like one of my articles. It’s your typical snarky gen-x humor; tons of pop culture references, fourth wall breaks, calling attention to how silly the current situation is and a ton of swearing. Why did the chicken cross the road? Fuck. That sort of thing. It’s dumb, it’s cringey and it’s surprisingly not terrible.
Other games that go for this kind of humor, like Borderlands and Bulletstorm, are agonizing. Every time a character opens their mouth you know you’re going to be treated to some of the worst dialogue known to man. Every sentence tries and fails to be funny, and their idea of comedy is to shove in as many jokes as possible, even if they’re not related to anything that’s going on. Most of their jokes rely on sounding funny. Saying silly words like “badonkadonk” or “balls” and hoping that’s enough to get you to laugh.
If you don’t laugh at the first joke, then don’t worry. There’s fifty more lines of dialogue after that one. Anytime a character opens their mouth in Borderlands you know it’s the start of a five minute diatribe. They keep tacking on jokes on top of jokes and adding more words like when you’re trying to reach a wordcount on an essay. “As you can see” becomes “As one can clearly see, as has been demonstrated”, but with these other games you add balls in there. Maybe even poop.
Sunset Overdrive does fall into the cringe-core style of comedy. Constant quips, the main character always has a Gex-style thing to say, down to the context-free movie references every now and then, and lots and lots of self-referential humor pointing out that they’re in a videogame. The tone is very 2010’s. It’s amazeballs epic, with hints of rainbow unicorn awesomesauce and laser cats, but not so far that it goes into bacon moustaches. That last sentence was meant to convey an actual idea. I did not have a stroke. It’s kinda Reddit, is what I’m trying to say.
At least each exchange is mercifully short. I’d prefer if there were less of them, overall, but at least they get their points across in one or two relatively brief lines. If I had to rank it alongside Bulletstorm and Borderlands, I’d say Sunset Overdrive is the most tolerable. It managed to get a few chuckles out of me here and there. Borderlands and Bulletstorm are tied. Borderlands is better written in a technical sense; better characters and sometimes they can do one or to good things, such as with Handsome Jack in the second game, but it’s still garbage and every interaction is four sentences longer than it should be. Bulletstorm was written by and for people with the IQ of a garden snail. It has the length of a Borderlands exchange, but instead of being cringe in a variety of ways, it just says “balls” a lot. Man, Bulletstorm really is just terrible in every way. Read the full review here!
The best example I could give of the three styles would be with a hypothetical line from each game. Why did the chicken cross the road? In Sunset Overdrive, that line would be “Why did the chicken cross the road? Why the fuck is a chicken trying to cross the road like it’s Frogger?”. Bulletstorm would say something like “Fuck I bet that fucking chicken has a ton of balls to cross that fucking street it probably has a huge dick, too. Chicken dick.” and it would keep making combinations with the words dick, chicken and balls for the next 20 minutes. Borderlands… I don’t think I have enough space for the Borderlands version. Something like “Hey, buddy. Quick question, but why did the chicken cross the road? Hypothetically speaking, of course. It’s not like I have a bunch of chickens here waiting to cross a throroughfare. Chickens don’t necessarily do that sort of thing. Unless you ask them to- which I’m not, by the way- but you know, wouldn’t it be funny if I did…” and so on for around 30 minutes of pure agony. In comparison, Sunset Overdive isn’t so bad.
Even if the writing doesn’t make me want to vomit, it still has unskippable cutscenes, which is a big no-no.
Conclusion
That’s Sunset Overdive. A game that manages to combine okay mechanics and cringey humor into a surprisingly fun, engaging and entertaining game. While it’s not the most demanding or mechanically complex game out there, it’s a blast to play. It’s an open world game that’s actually enjoyable. I never used the fast travel option because grinding across the city was a lot more fun. Who would have seen that coming.
In terms of Triple-A games, it’s one of the best. It has a lot of the same shortcomings they usually have, such as the low difficulty, emphasis on story and lack of jank, but it’s still a good time. It’s a lot more videogamey than any other major release, and I like it for that. It does a lot with its simple mechanics.
It’s a very polished game, but I think that kind of detracts from it, as it does with these kinds of games. Sure, there are triple-a games released today that are barely functional and janky, and could use a few more months of polish, but that’s not exactly what I mean. These kinds of big, studio games tend to sand off any rough edges during production to make a safe product most can consume, which is ironic giving this game’s punk rock presentation and anti-authority tone.
Studios spend millions of dollars to make sure their games run like they want them to, which means removing a lot of unwanted interactions and forcing things to work in very specific ways. Take Quake as a counter-example. In Quake, you can rocket jump, where you shoot a rocket at your own feet and the explosion sends you flying. This is an unintended interaction, because no one at id software programmed the rocket launcher with the explicit purpose of it sending you flying like that. It was something that was discovered by the players, and then embraced by the developers.
These kinds of interactions are removed in most modern triple-A games. I mentioned this in my review for Rise of the Tomb Raider, where interactions are pre-scripted. The same happens in Sunset Overdrive to an extent. The traversal system is a lot of fun, but it lacks the depth that comes from natural mechanics and unintended jank.
There’s a speed boost you can use while grinding, and it makes you go faster, but it has a hard cap to how much speed it gives you. You can’t keep speed chaining speed boosts to go up to ludicrous speeds. That interaction was programmed out. The same goes for the horizontal pole swings. When you swing off a pole, you don’t inherit any speed or momentum. Every pole swing has a pre-determined speed and launch distance, meaning you can’t accrue a ton of speed and then swing off a pole to go flying off into the stratosphere.
I think Sunset Overdive is a great game, but the lack of real, natural interactions and slight jank like that rob it of real depth. There’s no momentum for you to play around with like in the old Sonic games, no neat tricks to discover, no jank tech to exploit. This extends to the rest of the gameplay. The guns work how they should, and they don’t offer anything other than the developer-intended function. You can’t rocket jump, you can’t manipulate enemies with them in fun ways, there are no bizarre interactions to find. The fun has been prepared for you, and all the corners have been rounded down, everything is covered in bubble wrap, the challenging content is optional and the mandatory content can be completed by anyone who can hold a controller.
Despite all my whining, I still recommend Sunset Overdrive. It’s a fantastic game, it’s tons of fun, and it’s my favorite triple-a game made after the PS2. I just think that, with a few tweaks and some more difficulty, this could go from one of my favorite triple-a games, to one of my favorite games period.
Quick note, if you’re going to get this game on PC, get the Xbox App version. The Steam version has some weird mismatch with how it saves files and the Steam Cloud Save, which makes the game very susceptible to crashing when it autosaves, which is often. This hasn’t been solved since the PC port came out in 2018. I played both the Xbox App version and the Steam version, and the crashes only seemed to happen in the Steam version. I would never advise anyone to use the Xbox App for anything, but this is an exception.
Sunset Overdrive... *extremely obi-wan face* Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.