Castle Super Beast - CSB 020: Grabble's Got Nooch

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps We finslly begin to know Death Stranding. Cash Rules Everything Around Cygames. The Lootbox Defense Force has arrived. You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Outro: Apocalyptica - Death Stranding Trailer - Path Ladies and Gentlemen…Death Stranding Barkley 2 is dead These modes, if they don’t directly pay for the games we enjoy, at least justify the workforces and development costs that make them worth playing. Darli Dagger, coming soon to the Woolie’s brain platform. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic film reportedly in the works Hilarious Street fighter 6 “leaks” Sony vs Australia - ‘faulty’ game refunds Shang Tsung Mortal Kombat 11 trailer released, Nightwolf, Sindel, Spawn, and two more guest characters confirmed Pokemon Go Plus + and Pokemon Sleep announced Cuphead is getting ported to... Teslas Anthem’ players already underwhelmed by its first Cataclysm event Someone is using machine learning to remaster old ass Mega Man anime cutscenes  

MUSIC So that's Death Stranding. That is Death Stranding. It looks a lot like Metal Gear Solid 5 with Ghost. Surprisingly. It was shockingly Metal Gear. Yeah, you look at it and I felt so dumb looking at it going, oh yeah, you're sneaking around. Of course. You're creating pathways across America. You're putting shit on your backpack and you're dropping ladders, but ultimately you're walking through Afghanistan and you're near sneaking and you're going to run into caravans of open world triggers doing their thing. And then occasionally there will be areas where floating ghosts hang out, but for the most part you're just going to be open

worlding and Norman Reedus and his funky fetus are actually just solid snake. The PlayStation Store page lists asynchronous multiplayer and it actually describes what that asynchronous multiplayer is. And it's going to be, hey, you'll find little camps that people have made that they've left supplies at and kind of like a everyone come together kind of thing. I guess. And the other thing is that I really feel like, you know, the trailer ends like just reconnecting isn't going to get rid of the BTs and then you can go anywhere. I have a feeling this game is going to try and expand on what Metal Gear Solid 5 was supposed to have, which was the anti-nuke stuff. Remember, everyone comes together. Okay. Like beating the game isn't going to just solve

the problem. Oh, you think this is going to be him working on a proper multiplayer suite? I don't think so. But I think I think it will all be asynchronous. I don't think you're ever going to see other people. But I think it's going to be, I think it's going to be Kojima's no be no be boy. Okay. If that makes any sense, sandboxing it a little bit, right? Okay. And the reason I say that is because the trailer ends with don't worry, you'll be able to go anywhere, even the moon, which seems like a really specific line to end the trailer on. I mean, in on Twitter, he pointed out that you can climb that mountain. Yeah. We were going back to that, that, what you call it, game design, fucking school. But I have a feeling that the world map

is actually totally as big as it appears and that those strands are other player camps. Like, you know, the way off in the distance, you see strands and that's keeping connected, man. Because we all kind of come together, bro. I think, I think this trailer definitely satisfied a lot of what I wanted to see. There's video game in it. Please show me the video game, right? There's, there's, there's going to be a lot of traversal elements. There's going to be stealth elements. You can shoot a gun and Hideo, he, you know, he started like chronicling his timeline of KGP on Twitter, basically making his list of like ever since 2016. Here's what I've been up to. And yeah, I think finally seeing this trailer goes, okay, thank you for showing me

the video game trailer. Now I have a very understandable approach towards what this is going to be a Foxhound stand in. We have a mysterious, possibly villainous figure. Yeah, you got all sorts of shit. Now, I also feel that with what we're seeing, like, first of all, I saw a lot of cool shit. Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of cool shit. There's a lot of rad ass ghost shit on that trailer. And firing the gun was very, very brief, but clearly a part of what was happening. I feel like that's there to be like, because you see for like three seconds, yeah, it's like, listen, just to let you know, sometimes you can shoot a gun, but we need you to run from these scientists and their sticks and hijack their bikes and wheelie out of there.

So the punch them around a little bit. Assassin's Creed style page has an interesting caveat, not caveat, has an interesting point on it, where it says, deal with your foes wisely, blah, blah, blah. Killing people is almost never the answer. Interesting. So he's probably under tailing it or some shit. I mean, if the world is fucked. Well, I like, I think I think, I think it's fairly clear what happened to the planet. The death are just the dead are everywhere. Ghosts don't leave. Right. So I imagine shooting people to death would cause bad things. Well, it's probably why the technology is not traditional. Yeah. But also, not only are they hanging around and the other side is crossing over with our side.

But if they happen to run across you, then they pull you over. Yeah. Right. So and and babies unborn are the only pure. No, those babies are different. Those are the only pure things. I went back and looked at it. So you know, they they hook into the baby and this is they're connecting to the other side and the baby's eyes are pure dark. They're pure black. In the part where he's sneaking through the forest. Normans footprints are in blue to denote like friendly. And then the monster giant hand prints are in orange. But during that sequence, the baby is glowing the exact same bright, bright orange. So it's not just a baby. So it's yeah. It's a it's a fucking thing. I mean, weird fucking thing. Mads Mickelson is literally

coddling it. It's at a point indicating that he's got some sort of feelings about it. But I think it would be cool if it was based on the idea that like an unborn pure baby is your closest connection to purgatory slash like there isn't you're not you're not a lot. You haven't made decisions yet. You're not therefore inherently sinful, even though certain religion will tell you otherwise. But the idea being that like, okay, the place where babies would go because they they never get a chance to have life, they just they're not judged evil or good, allows you to therefore maybe connect to this afterlife or something along those lines. I don't I don't know. But what I will say, the world seems like disastrously ruined. Yeah,

like way worse than usual apocalypse is. Yeah, no, like the rainfall killing all wildlife in this radius is just like that's America is fucked. And the president is on her cancer bed. And basically going America matters. And Norman's like, does it though? It's it's, you know, the Thor face like, is he though? You know, it's like, yeah, does it though, you know, connect those bridges? Okay, and now the bridges logo makes sense because they're expanding out from Washington. Why do why does it matter? Well, anyway, um, you know what? Fuck that. We got dead man. We got heart man. And we got die hard man. We got Baker man. And we got I forgot the fragile woman. Yeah, all these mans. Now, one thing I definitely like, I feel it hard now the more of this game we see,

I feel it hard. It's the thing I was talking about last time where this is clearly going to be a not Peace Walker, I keep saying that, but I mean to say Phantom Pain style game. And the thing I like the most about what I have what I've seen of Death Stranding has been those narrative trailers. Yeah, quote unquote narrative trailers, right? Yeah. Mads and his soldiers doing weird shit. Yeah, just being weird, right? Guillermo running around and a soldier who gets taken in by the unknown and decides into time and decides that killing himself is a better solution than dealing with whatever is about to happen to him. That's the kind of like brain candy that makes you go Oh my God, I want to know more about this world, right? Yeah, to get that type of

the content delivered to you. Yeah, it should probably be in a hallway. Yeah. Yeah. Everything about this footage is the least hallway ever. Okay, so there is a solution to that. And the solution is that the hallway can be really, really, really wide, really wide hallway. And what if you don't get to point B though? I imagine the way that this is going to work is it's going to be get to point a now get to point B. Yeah, like basically perhaps go go west. Perhaps the hallway will in fact just be whenever you're ready, go to the next room in the hallway or don't but alternatively, if you don't go to the next room in the hallway, you will not be physically able to progress. Yeah, like you won't have cold weather gear. Yeah. And that's

yeah. And that's basically I mean, there's some of those those shots in the video have like cartoonish levels of weight on Norman's back. Yeah, like he has a body and like eight fucking tons of just pretty ridiculous. And you're like, why are we why are we like, what's the what am I thinking of? Have you ever seen the the parody video of the ultimate backpack for runners? I have not. And it's like, it's like a backpack that is like giraffe neck height, sticking off of this guy's back and he's going jogging with it and it's bouncing around the place and it's super goofy. It feels like it's one of those things, you know, like how you actually carry around that much shit. And more importantly, when you get punched and one of them falls off,

how important it is that you pick it back up. It's very important. Well, the weirdest thing about when those goons attacks Norman Reedus is that they attack the backpack. Yeah, they they and they're all and the reason why I think that you you're not supposed to kill people while that thing happens. None of them are carrying lethal weaponry at all. They're all carrying stun batons. Also, the backpack creates the moment the the sonar point creates the pulse. They're looking for the back. They don't care about you. They care about the backpack. Yeah. So I guess I just the more of this I see the more I want to make sure that we get this this I want more of that narrative, you know, please don't don't metal your solid five me

man. Please don't make it so that we get sprinkled cutscenes in between massive open world figure out how you want to get there. I would be baffled that if they did not use a similar storytelling presentation for at least some of it as the tapes. Yeah, because like even the, you know, the spot where he hides in the tall grass from the dudes. Yeah. That's a big wide space that you can see for long distances. Just walking in pure silence might be a little dull. Man, I really like the like the fact that almost all technology is almost as unrecognizable. It's all weird with the exception of metal briefcases wrapped with caution tape. Yeah, everything else is completely foreign and like way hard future, but not so hard that it looks

like you don't know how we got there. I really, really like the design so far. You know what actually made me really excited about this game in terms of like its structure and because my big fear isn't even that we're not going to get enough cutscenes. My big fear is that like some of this technological shenanigans is just going to be like, yeah, it works like no, I want someone to explain to me the bullshit that led to this nonsense baby powered future. Sure. Right. And it might not be a satisfying explanation. And the number one thing that made me excited is seeing Norman and dead man and fucking die hard man and mama chilling in a big techno base that he parks his motorcycle in. Oh, you mean the plot base? Yeah, the plot base. Right. Right.

And it's like read that computer. Yeah. The baby base. Yeah. So to speak, because it's like, okay, thank God, there's going to be some place, some area that I can go for information is concentrated. Yes. I that is true. Possibly you'll come back and then go to different spots. Yeah. You know, maybe step one is go to Chicago. Step two is go to Austin, Texas, you know, but I just maybe maybe it's just me, you know, but like I feel like I've had my fill for a while of go let the legend come back to life. Like I really am okay with like the open world is not impressive anymore to me. We've done it. We've gotten island sized just cause lands like you can make a Google Earth at this point. We get it. I think the I don't think that's impressive anymore. Genuinely

impressive open world was breath of the wild because it was I mean, they thought about it. It wasn't because it was super big. Yeah, it was because it you had to deal with it. You had to interact with the world part and it was it was well placed and well thought out. What I the other thing I want to say is that when it comes to like controlling the environment to make sure that you can still have a lot of fun routes in to a place or out of a place and they're not it's not so wide that you can have a like you could possibly have like five great experiences and like 12 shitty ones is to make something ground zero sized. Yeah. Right. The ground zero base represents while it was wild while it was massive when we first took a look at it. Now that represents

a small to mid sized area. Yeah. Right. That you could actually go. All right. This is one level. This is one area. This is a controlled spot and you can you can make the pathways whether they choose to go left or right straight. You can make the pathways clear and make them as engaging as you would a hallway, you know, but it doesn't have to be infinite desert left and infinite desert going right either. So I hope we kind of get at least control. It's interesting because like areas of that size look at this is because like I am I am super thirsty for a fucking big ass spot space to wander. Like I very much enjoy literally just wandering about. Yeah, I don't want that. I don't even want that. I want to know more about invisible Titan gods floating around. Sure. Of course I do,

but I want those five imposing five imposing figures in the distance. What are you about just because they were opposed in five doesn't mean that they were that that was a like design compromise that always felt like a I don't know. I don't know what happened with five story. There's just so little of it. It's just if you think about what Metal Gear Solid one and two were three to a degree, but because I'm worried about four. I'm worried about like an actual hallway because because yes, right. Four is an actual hallway. Right. And I suppose and I suppose that does represent going too far the other direction with it, which let me dial it back then because that is a fair point. One and and two, you came out into your smaller base, your ground zeros base.

Yeah. And then when you get to Chico, you then enter ground zeros base two. Right. And then you kind of move into next large interior or exterior and you and you infiltrate new tactical and you espionage and you action your way to the boss. So I I just I like what the other the other thing to is like what is going to be Sam's suite of actions? Oh, like crawl, hang from ledge, roll, punch, shoot, dig through the dirt, knock on wood, throw item, throw rock, ladder, rope. Did you notice that he ties his hair back like like V in the in the trailer? He does. Isn't that like yeah, he's got a little little ponytail going. It's true. It's true. Is he secretly no, I fucking I just I saw that tweet there. I saw that tweet and it made me very upset.

What's that? That tweet where the guy was like Death Stranding is metal gear and it's like, can we just stop? No, we can't because Kojima built up this legacy of big weird Illuminati level lies. And also the pregnant lady with the blurred face is totally the lady from PT. Sure. Like actually, he probably wanted to continue working with the people he wanted to work with. So we're going to get to a point where it's gonna be like PT. Konami fucked him and then he decided to continue working with the people he liked. What's what's so wild about that? Find out grab any one of these metal gear like conspiracy people and ask them how they feel about the dome. How high the dome is the dome over this flat earth? Well, ask them you don't know

the Death Stranding doesn't have a dome. It's not it's not what I'm saying. No, it's what I'm saying. Okay, well, this this conspiracy, this level of conspiracy where the poor guy is like publicly ousted from his company. And like, there is a very, very embarrassing almost like fall out with how things go down. And then the idea that it's like, no, that was all for sure. No, no, no, no, no, no, slash slash they fixed it in the background and now he's back working for Konami. That's not what anyone thinks. Well, that's not the that's not the path anyone is on. So what is hashtag metal gear? What people people believe or at least reasonable people believe is that there is going to be vague enough but legally distinct ties in a couple directions to go look

to say that this is this is where it could have gone. This is this is tangentially related to I wanted there to be a connection here. I'm fine with that. Right. Okay, that's fine because I have a I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be a PT style dream sequence in this game. I'm fine with that. I think that's too reasonable for the people making you know what, you're probably right. That is probably too reasonable. People these people making these conspiracies legitimately think that Konami and Kojima are working together secretly behind the scenes. Okay, well, that's crazy. That's what I'm saying. It's that's bananas. You just need to it's like that you need to stop. What doesn't need to stop? What kind of is the Kojima listening to my high

school music choices? Oh, you heard you heard about you heard about you heard about me. You heard about me. What? You heard about me talking about that. What are you talking about? Come on, you must have heard about me. No, what are you talking about? Bro, because I used to listen to Apocalypse Go when I was like 15. The moment that trailer played and I was like, why does this sound like me back in college? Why does this sound like I'm back in fucking Seijep right now? Dude, I used to and I'm listening and I'm like, this is what is this? This is like I'm getting huge Apocalypse Go vibe because it's Apocalypse Go. And my fucking friend is like, yeah, that's that's the name. The song is path by Apocalypse Go. And I'm like,

and I just lost my weight. I used to listen to these guys back when all I used to do was orchestral Metallica covers. And that's how they started as a Metallica quartet. And after two albums of doing and crushing it, I went, yo, we can do our own music. And they're like, okay, this is that great moment where you're like, Kojima likes the thing that I like. I 100% got blasted back to 2002 with that fucking song. And and as soon as I realized that's what was like, I was digging it. And the moment that happened, I'm like, Oh, fuck, what a choice. What a what an amazing choice. I love Apocalypse Go. They have such a distinct sound sound. It's metal orchestra. I don't know. Like, yeah, exactly. So you're getting the very smooth violin

is going and I've talked on many occasions were huge violin marks. Yep. With the grit with the grungy like distortion of the guitar. You know, it's fucking strong. Um, and I had no, I never, I never would have thought that's the type of music we'd be getting on out of this. Like I was hard expecting soft piano ballads. Right. I was expecting soft, sad piano. If we got in hindsight now would have been like really disappointing because I mean, it's fine if you show a bunch of soldiers walking through a fiery oil field that they ignited themselves. What's the weirdest thing about Mads and all his Zombo soldiers? They look like they're from right now. They don't look like they're from the weird baby future. They look like

soldiers that you would see right now. Yeah. Yeah. Mads is dead. Oh, probably. I think he's a ghost. Probably. In fact, I think he represents, I wouldn't be surprised if Mads was maybe the first of the stranded dead that is like conscious and aware and interacting and not just in a state of, uh, do you think we'll be playing as Mads? No, okay. But I think Mads will pursue the fuck out of you on the open world. Cool. Yeah. The Mads everywhere system. The soldiers. Oh yeah, absolutely. Also, um, yeah, and it's unclear as to whether or not the soldiers like coming along. Like, is it one of those things where it's like anyone you kill might then become a problem for you if you return to that area? The implication that I'm looking at this and the tone and the rain and all

that. I'm like, I feel like this is the sorrow turned into a game. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah, I could see that. The again, going back to that, the most what the fuck trailer of all of the what the fuck trailers. Yeah, as the guy stabbing himself, the guy stabbing himself as he floats up into the air explodes and then later on in two trailers, that's that situation is described as a void out and the invisible and the invisible God looking down upon them. It implies that death causes you to violently explode like a nuke or some shit. Like it's all sorts of weird shit. I will say there's one part about this trailer that, uh, kind of like it, it, there's an aspect about this trailer that kind of like took something away and it is the when I was watching that

initial trailer and the footsteps and like the panic of like what the fuck are these things coming after us, right? It was so terrifying, right? It was massively terrifying because you're like, you can't see it. You can't detect it. This baby and this flapping little chuchuchuchuchuchuchuchu is your best. I know you see that there's a pulse that you can see them and not only is there a pulse that you can see them, but it kind of looks like a bunch of undead guck sort of sticks in and you get your feet get stuck and then start yanking you down. And I'm like, that's not the threat. I want that. Did you see the Japanese version of the trailer with the extra footage? I saw the extra footage of a shark with infinite tentacle. I did see that. I did see that. What I find terrifying

is invisalikers. Yeah, right. And the idea of invisalikers creating footsteps and then occasionally you get rocked and well, luckily enough, they will assuredly take the baby away from you at points during this game. Yeah. I don't want the little flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker to just represent all the goop is over there. If it sees you, I don't want it to be that. That's not scary. That trailer put fear of possibility that they tried that and it was like untenable, like gameplay wise, the power of the idea of you don't know what this is that's going to fuck you up is so much stronger than just the goop. You know, for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, the Japanese trailer that has like an extra minute has an

extra 35 seconds or so of gameplay shows two cool shots. One is a boss fight, a boss fight with a giant snake, a shark bloodborne, some beast and a cool ass shot of Troy Baker's gold mask on Omelie. Yeah, some reason. So check that out. I think Kojima has finally done it. Uh, he has talked about like the digital actor thing and wanting like, like proper actors and movie stars in his games and all that shit for ages and ages and ages. And remember when we always talked about snake being played as Kiefer and we'd use we call him Kiefer to, you know, to denote that he's not hater or whatever. We're not using these characters fucking names. Yeah, we're calling him Norman. We're calling them Norman and Mads and Troy.

But it is that is Guillermo. Right. And that is actually Guillermo. That's intended. You know, now the the the question I would like to find out is what is the star power budget versus the actual game budget? And what's the ratio there? I don't know because it seems like everyone was like fucking chomping at the bit to be a part of it. But but what if it's 50 50? Right? What if we what if we're going towards that? Well, you see that fucking dork ass photo of Kojima hanging out with Mads and Norman, where those two guys are looking grungy as fuck and smoking and Kojima's pretending to smoke a cigarette for the photo. It's yeah. Yeah. Oh my, what a dork. Such a fucking nerd. Yeah, let me I'm gonna see if I can grab that extra footage for for people that haven't

seen it yet. But there was posted on or on the subreddit. So while you do that, I would like to talk about language. So we have clearly hit a point where no one's around to tell Kojima that that sounds stupid, because shut up. So you have a trailer that literally goes dead man, heart man, die hard man, and everyone cheers, because that is some fucking 1980s Japanese boss video game, blank name convention bullshit. And everyone's like clapping. Yay. However, there is one part of the trailer that I'm like, someone should have probably walked up to Kojima and been like, you might need you might want to change this, because it sounds silly, and hilarious, and is causing the complete opposite reaction you're intending for every

single person who speaks English as a first language. So first of all, happy Pride month, everyone. And second of all, having the main enemy faction called the homo demons is like so absurd. It's so dumb. And I find it very difficult to take seriously. It is so stupid. I might have missed that. When they asked what the terrorist hold on a second, hold on a second, I might have not paid enough attention there. Sam is Norman Reedus. It's it's the part where they have fragile fragile is Lea Sidhu. Yeah, no, it's not it's not in this bit. It's in the bit where they're talking about the terrorists that engineer void outs die hard right when Troy Baker shoots the lightning bolt in the sky. Okay, they just talk about it. And then the the

fucking closed captioning correctly labels it as the homo demons. And it's like, no one walked up to him and was like, dude, not a single yeah, you'd have to at least start the word sapien a little bit to throw it off the scent. You'd have to you'd have to go like that's obviously what it's supposed to be. Yeah. Yeah. Or you'd have to go demo sapiens. It's supposed to be the Latin equivalent of instead of homo sapiens demo sapiens. But you'd have to yeah, it literally it is literally just a character saying they're called the homo demons. And it's yep, I can't. Yeah, I can't. I can't. It's not too late. I can't. It is so too late. It has never been too late. All the dialogue is done. It's not too late for you to get used to it. Oh my god,

because it's happening. Get it out of your system now says. Get used to the we say it. I get all your jokes out feel like you're going to be seeing the we everywhere like Kojima is like my classmate in ninth grade holding up a fucking homogenized carton of milk going homo milk. So in third birthday later in one of the later sessions, me and men get into it at a point because it really we have a discussion about language in fiction. Yeah. And in particular, pseudoscience jargon, right? Yeah. And like part of the reason I could tell this game is so shit and like the way it's being written is terrible. And it's and it's just also like through the lens of someone very, very like very Japanese. Yeah, going into into the science part of it is that the monsters in

Parasite Eve rather in third birthday are labeled the twisted. Oh, that's the name of them, right? And there's no further explanation so far as to what or why that's what they're called except for they're the twisted, right? And I'm trying to explain to there's a red flag right there. It is right. And so I'm trying to explain to him because I'm like, so men, you see that that sucks, right? And he's like, I don't get why that's a problem. I thought it was a pretty cool name, right? And I'm like, okay, but here's the thing, right? That you would maybe call them the twisted if you lived in a world where you had no information. Yeah. For example, in The Walking Dead, they don't know what they're dealing with. They call them walkers. Walk around. If a big science

lab comes down and officially decrees that these things are called walkers, that would be stupid. Well, especially in Parasite Eve, because in Parasite Eve, one, they're mitochondrial, whatever. Neo mitochondrial. That's two, right? That's the Neo mitochondrial. But NMCs. Yeah, right. And then in the first one, they're usually just called victims, because they're people that burst. So that's the thing, right? And I literally get into that just part of the discussion because it's like, there's a certain point where you go, look, the world here has established that someone smarter than me has assessed this problem in a lab, walked out and wrote a report and decided this is what we're going with. And the fact that they wouldn't use scientific terminology

or Latin jargon to define anything, and they would just literally arrive on the twisted. And then we from there, because that's the official name, you get into the Pentagon or the FBI creating things like the CTI, which is the Counter Twisted Investigation Team. And literally official terminology working with the word twisted, which is really just some dumb high school kids' edgy name for their monsters. So it's funny that you mentioned that because you go back to Death Stranding and they have a name for those things, and it's beached things. BTs. Yeah. And they abbreviate it to BTs. And just abbreviating it alone makes it sound better. Even slightly. And beached things makes me think that that's the first name

that got said on the news. And nobody knows what the fuck it is. And they are 0% understood. Yes. So that's what we're going with. And that's that's as long as you can establish like that it's like, like who what name and convention are we going with? Is it the farmer Hick that stumbled upon the thing and went, or is it what the science lab man came down with and wrote up in the report? Yeah. And they might even have separate names for each other. They're like, yeah, those big old science people call it the, but I call it that thing I shoot. And that's it. You know, and as long as you can work that out, that makes sense. But when you're trying to tell me that well, they're both the same. Parasite Eve has it really bad because it already establishes

that it's a world that uses the threats are scientific. Yes. The threats are biological. So that's exactly it. So I'm like based on the fact that we're coming off of two games where they already went into science. Yeah. And used it properly where like you look at Death Stranding and you're like, you know what a beached thing as a name for this creature is fine because that's a magic ghost from hell. Right? Like that's I can easily believe that nobody knows what that is. And at some point they might get more a couple years down the line when they maybe can figure out what the fuck's happening. But right now we're in this confusion zone of who the fuck knows. So I want a couple things from this game. And there's one thing that I want that I might not

get but I don't care. And the game story has already established a way to do this. I want this post apocalyptic destruction of the United States to have been recent like a couple months. Oh, it just happened like it is like a year tops. I'm going to go with the idea that like the crazy levels of elevator and glowing blue tech that we have on everything and the bikes and the is I think that implies a little bit longer than that. No, no, no, no, I don't mean I don't mean that the story takes place, you know, one year from now. Whenever the disaster happened, I mean that they had all their fancy bullshit. Yeah. And then Oh, yeah. And then a year passed. And the reason I say that is because you've established that

rainfall accelerates time by a factor of like a million. So you can change the whole landscape United States as much as you fucking want. Right. You can you can disappear mountains. You can raise like beds that shouldn't be there because you just say oh it rained there a lot and now the time has changed. How many building structures were in this trailer? Like there's none there like there's two areas of surrounded metal and like abandoned factory looking sort of zones. Everything else is just the only locations in the in this trailer that show any sign of like usable livingness or the Oval Office, which okay, sure. Yeah, I can assume that whatever they would do to protect the physical like structure of the White House would be whatever

and an underground area. Yeah. Maybe the idea of that whole recent tragedy thing and the tech of that world are connected in the port of the point where we advanced our tech so far that we scraped up against the demons. Sure. The event horizon. And then now the hell is here. You know, I just realized there's a third standing structure in in the trailer. It's the it's a little batch of tents that the the goons come out of in their truck. And I just love the idea that okay, if the if it rains and the water hits you, time will advance 1000 10,000 times faster. Whatever the fuck crazy. So everyone is wrapped head to toe in fucking plastic. Because thank you plastic. Don't you totally saved us don't get wet biodegrade my ass. Don't get wet. Yeah. Why the only standing

structures that could last for any length of time would be plastic structures. President cancer is really, really. That's something that's exactly the same as BSG. Oh, is it? She even looks as she even looks the same. Oh, well, that's the first time I'm encountering that. I have a sneaking suspicion. It's the same actress. Okay. She looks very similar. That's that's brand new to me. Yeah, man. So it's a bit on the nose as a metaphor. America's dying. Yeah, yeah, like, like literally, of course. And and and Norman's attitude towards her being like, is kind of almost another like furthering of that. Yeah, Norman's like, I just want to go back to Alaska and and mush my sled dogs. There you go. So so I there's that shot of the fucking soldiers coming out of the water

and then it's not water. It's fucking tar or gas or lighten it up in the middle gear. It's a super middle gear moment. Absolutely. And you can tell this trailer was directed by Kojima because the moment the credits pop up and then you hear another voice start talking. That's a signature in every single trailer trailer. Someone is going to come up at the end of the trailer and say some weird shit. And you're going to be like, huh? I've recently that this is unrelated. But I've recently I saw somewhere there was a Reddit post about how it's like sorry to ruin like half a fiction for you. But lit cigarettes don't ignite gas. No, they don't. And like this guy and he just do pours a bunch of liquid puts it out instantly. Yeah, he pours it all on a table and

then like lights it up with a normal lighter and then puts a lit cigarette into it and it does nothing and you know, it fills us out. Fuck me. The liquid part extinguishes the sparks instantly before that it can catch flame. The flick cigarette for dramatic purposes is dead. Yeah, but he gets around this. He gets around this because the cigarette fucking lights itself. Yeah, he holds it up to the air and which reality explains that guess what that's a magic cigarette. That's true. That's true. That's a magic ghost cigarette. Ghosts that smoke. Yeah. Yeah. Smoke ghosts. I like it. I like it. And yeah, it's cool as fuck. And it's anime as fuck. And it's movies as fuck. You know that reminds me. But every time you see someone flick a

cigarette in a movie and light up a big a big fire trail, recognize that that's that's a dumb now reminds me of like five, six years ago when Dan Riker once again, possibly the stupidest man in the world was on the giant bomb cast describing how much he loved Metal Gear and hated anime to which everyone exclaimed Metal Gear is the most anime shit that has ever existed. What are you talking about? He goes, No, it's got spies and you know, it's about military and the guns. It's like, yeah, and psychics and magic and evil clones. What are you? Isn't isn't is all systems Goku not about them discovering that they love anime because that conversation it was what led Dan down the path to go. Oh, wait, maybe I do like anime, right, which then led down

the path to all systems Goku, right? Seeing people mark out about Dragon Ball like 25 years after the fact devoid of context is fucking crazy or or Eva for that matter. Did that come out? No, not yet. Not yet. Redubbed it to can't wait. I would like to see what I really want to see is the if you could get a fucking not even a commentary track just an interview with Anno years later now to see what he thinks. Yeah, you know, to see where he's at at this point in the midst of the reboot, by the way. Anyway, so yeah, I'm looking forward to death stranding. I am I am still looking forward to death stranding. I have feel I now feel a bit better about it. And no, I feel a lot better about it.

I feel really, really good about Apocalyptica and listening to them again. Did you preorder your game to get your gold skeleton bike? I don't. That's just weird. No, no, I'm good. But I wish I want to see that E3 stage demo. By the way, E3 is next week. We should probably schedule our lives around that. Okay, there's we so podcast is going to be concurrent with the Microsoft show next week. Okay, well, so I want to see the that that live stage demo of him walking into the forest swamp and dealing with the problem in whatever way and then getting a sense for all the different gameplay things or he hangs from the tree, or he drops a ladder or he swings a briefcase at a ghost and the ghost gets hurt by the briefcase. Whatever briefcases can pass

into the death stranding. Yeah, and then just kind of show me that's what you do. And now you open world that and I'll go okay, fine, I guess. I mentioned anime earlier. I have I have an anime alert for all of you anime people will lead Have you seen an anime? Do you enjoy anime? I do. You have six days to catch up on attack. That is what I forgot to tell punch mom. Punch mom. Are you listening? I forgot I was going to tell you right before we started. Absolutely, everyone has come at me extremely aggressively and said, Listen, whether you like it or not, you have one week to catch up. And do you know why? Because while everyone has been very considerate next week's episode, someone someone literally showed me a screenshot that just says next week,

basement. It's next week. So here's the deal, right? I we've been very chill, right? We'll catch up to JoJo when you got time. We'll go see John Wick when you got time. We'll maybe go see Godzilla if you feel like it when you've got time. We are not fucking waiting on attack on Titan. And this is public for everyone to see. Yeah, can I get a verbal confirmation please? Yes. I love you. Thank you. Good. The marriage is still on. Fucking play this game. All right. What? Because my favorite thing about part five, we haven't watched it yet. Okay, it's the next episode we got to watch. So we can get around to it. No pressure. It's cool. But this is bad. Well, like, I need you to come at me real hard about

really polite and good about it. Okay, kind of shocking. So I am I am publicly forcing a deal here. I was totally about I yeah, so I forgot to bring it up right before this. It came up before. And now it's been like the fire has been lit. Yeah, right. Yeah. And everyone and in the same way that it did last time, right, like the I think it was like three or four episodes into the last season, everyone was like, yo, do now. Look at this thing. You got to go do the now. Right. And like this is happening. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, for sure, for sure. But it's also based on like the Well, anyway, we've been watching things according to what everyone can watch as opposed to what no one's going to like how do I put this? Remember when Game of Thrones, big

things happen and everyone was like, okay, we can all talk about it. Yeah. And anime manga rules, it seems like the manga people are pretty happy to stay quiet right up until the minute that episode airs. And then they go, we waited years and years and years to talk about this. The anime episode is out. Shut up. We're going to talk about or the preview for it even happens. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, yeah, no, no, no, the pressure has been felt. It has been the world, the weight of the world has been put on my shoulders. I feel it. I know and the catch up has to happen because I didn't watch the new the last batch of the season. Okay, yeah, there's there's just no choice. Yeah, you know, and I mean, hey, if this is how anime has to be watched, then I guess so be it right.

I would like to ask you a small favor. Can you with six days to go release me from our agreement? Your deathbed agreement? Do you remember? Because I remember. Yeah, yeah. So if people who paid attention to our stuff for a long time, and I actually remember when we made this this agreement, but woolly made me promise that if he is on his deathbed, that I will run to his side and tell him what's in the basement. As you seem to be in fine health currently with will anything can happen in six days? Anything can happen in six days. Yeah. But yeah, yeah, I will soon be released from our pact by natural time carrying its own course. Yeah. So that's fine. That's that's totally okay. You

are you are released. I am excited for everyone because I was talking to a friend of mine about it. And he also got impatient, right? Because it was taking forever and looked it up and we both had identical reactions of the basement is super worth it. Okay, well, that's it. That's all it's just like we waited a really long time. You waited longer. So speaking of super worth it and the the the echo from it because I want to get away as far away from this as possible right now. Right. Um, I'm going to jump high speed back to something you brought up two weeks ago or so. And I caught a lot of people going, yeah, so after Pat brought up the mist, I went and dove in on that. And I'm now like, fuck you, fuck you, how could you do this to me? And I'm so intrigued by that

sentence that I'm like, I have to go watch this now. Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to like and this is like, I saw it was three people that it was me, it was me talking about for anybody who doesn't remember, I talked about how the missed the Stephen King novel adaptation in a movie with Thomas Jane has the most brutal, depressing ending of anything, any work of fiction I've ever seen. And here's the thing with that is kind of like, I almost like knowing that it's like, well, you already know what I'm going, you already know what you're heading towards in the sense that you know, it's not going to be great. Right. So that didn't, that didn't tip you over. But what did tip you over was people reacting as if they watched it by just reading about it. Yeah. So now I have

to go. Well, you got it. There's just no choice. So that's that. That's that's got to happen now. I've never seen such a strong reaction to people wiki diving out wiki diving. Yeah, something, you know, like God, imagine what it's like actually seeing it. So yeah, we'll find out, we'll find out. And yay for emotes only in the chat because because chat can't be trusted can't be trusted. That's a good call. I don't mind that one. Anyways. Yeah, so this is this is this is there's a time limit. There's a whole this is all weird, isn't it? Time limit burning, right? There's there's both ends of the candle going. And there's there's content to be found somewhere deep within. Um, but weeks. Hey, speaking of John Wick, I can help you and punch mom out.

John Wick is not a must see in theaters right now. It's a really fun. I saw it last night. My pal Dan, aka Fuggins. It's a really fun murder movie where many, many murders occur. There's a lot. Is there murder innovation? Yes, there is. That's what we're actually looking for. There's a higher ninja component this time. Okay. There's more globe trotting. Now I'm I'm inclined to think one might be like, but Pat, there are only so many ways that a bullet can enter a body. That's true. That is true. However, there are different types of bodies that you can shoot at that have different armaments, let's just say. Okay. It is very fun to see what celebrity will show up as that old assassin pal.

They spend most of the plot diving into the weird universe that that movie exists in of apparently assassination is highly lucrative because everybody does everybody. Yeah. Um, and the, the, the foil villain, like the, the, the assassin that is going to spend like common in the, in the second movie that's going to spend most of the time chasing after John leads the raid, the entire cast of raid one and two as the murder crew with the two biggest murder crew man's being mad dog and the final fight from two. So the raid, the literally just walks into the cast of John Wick. That's correct. Okay. There's a round. I have no problems hanging out. That's great. Um, and the, the, the big murder foil man, you know,

evil assassin is a trope that I want to see more of, which is he's a John Wick fan boy. Fantastic. And he's smart. He's, you know, trying to stab him and he's marking out over. Oh, that's a good, that's a good one, John. Like a kind of a happy Bennett from commando. Sure. Yeah. This movie is the most pointless movie I have ever seen ever literally nothing happened to the point where you could finish watching the second movie and start watching the fourth movie. And aside from a slight continuity error, you could just, you could just pretend you could just pretend they are planning to run this shit into the ground. Okay. There was like zero development of John's character or what's going on. There was no problems with it whatsoever. Yeah, they,

they are going to have piano continue to shoot every motherfucker on the planet. Action movie action man is really what we're watching now. Yeah. However, when you watch the action parts, which is like, I want to say like 45% to like exactly half of the movie is action scene. Yeah. Like it's, it's it's a lot of guns. And now apparently that's the problem that critics problem that critics are having with Godzilla. Yes, I have, which is a stupid problem seems like a dumb problem to have when your monster fight movie has a lot of monster fighting. Yeah, I haven't seen Godzilla, but I can't. I think the big one that everyone latched on to is you can't just have these monsters fight like it's a wrestling match. And everyone's like,

that's, that's what I'm paying my money to go. I want to see, really? I want to see a ring come out. What are you talking about? Like, can we not go over the history of every other movie where the major complaint was, can we enough with the humans already? Every Transformers movie, every single one, we're like, can we stop giving a fuck about these humans and start getting the robot movie to see the humans? Well, maybe that one human, she's pretty cute, but mainly the robot just enough. We want, we're here for the, yeah, no, let them fight. I'm not here for the buffs. Let them fight. Yeah. And take any emotional like development and put it on another smaller monster and maybe let that monster be the human component. And hey, do you need people to

talk eventually? Because, you know, there has to be fucking dialogue in your movie. Have Ken Watanabe and the guy who plays Taiwan Lannister just be old and just just just say things with a lot of gravitas. And yeah, and then the monster fight, and they're like, Oh, it's a big fight. Yeah, that's, you know, again, haven't seen the movie, but I hear good things, but I hear bad things, but I hear good things. Yep. So soon can I go check out what's up with that? Let's see, aside from John Wick, I do anything special. Not really. I guess I'll just sub when my weeks are boring. I'll just sub in for the fucking FF 14 report, which is that game is exploding right now in a good or bad way. The sir, the a third data center is full.

It can't, you can't make a new character on it because it's fucking full. And everywhere you go, everywhere is fucking full. There's a, there's a bonus that you get if you run a dungeon with somebody for the first time, like if they're a newbie and you get a substantial experience bonus, every single time I run anything, I'm getting a new person bonus, which means like, like tens of thousands of people are just flooding in on mass and it's fascinating. What's extra fascinating and wolves, you will never encounter this in any of the games that you play because the types of genres you play don't have this social mechanic, I guess I would call it, which is more than ever, you can tell at a glance who boosted or who jumped. So if you want to buy Final Fantasy 14,

there's a big ass main quest you got to go through and you obviously have to go through the leveling process to one to 70, but say you don't want to do that. Say you want to go play with your friends at endgame right away. Well, why you could buy what's known as a jump potion for 20 bucks or 40 bucks for the story equivalent, and you could just skip most of the way to the level cap right now, like that. And boy is it easy to just fucking see like physically at a distance. Who did that? Do people call it out? Not if you're polite, you're not supposed to. If you're polite, you're supposed to go on your discord server and go these fucking jump potion motherfuckers don't know how to do mechanics, these fucking pieces of shit. But

I think three or four times last week, I would be running something and the person would just be like fucking the dog on every single thing, despite having a bunch of really high end gear, and I would go, Hey, you from Wow? And they go, Yeah, how'd you know? I go, Okay, this mechanic doesn't work like that. You got you got to stand in the thing or don't move or whatever. And they go, Okay, cool. Thanks. Which is the ideal form of that, of that, like interaction. But it is it is just it is fucking fascinating to be playing a game that you spend thousands of hours getting all these things to cap. And then you look over there at that guy. And you're like, Oh, that motherfucker bought his way here and just doesn't doesn't

know shit. And if they're real assholes, they make your life a living hell because all of a sudden you can't clear anything. It's it's like, it's like the people you know what, actually, you do have experience with this with people who boost and smurf their accounts. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. My brother who's actually really good at fighting games, he got my account up here. And now I'm just gonna rage quit all day. Every time. And it's, it's fucking fat all these little weird social construct. Oh, it's fascinating. But yeah, no, that game is is popping. Like, I've never seen it. And I mean, like, I've never seen it. So if you were to be able to do that in a God fully the fucking one trick pony has one thing you were going to do that in the fighting

game. I really just bore myself. I bore myself. I saw I saw an interesting comment a while ago, which is woolly tends not to try and empathize with other people's weird positions. He has to put them into his own frame of reference. Right. So instead of you going, Hmm, what would it be like if I played the MMO you go, but what if everything that we're talking about is actually a fighting game? That's true. And I mean, it should be obvious why I do that because you like fighting games. No, because you have little experience in the thing that I'm talking about. And the thing that you're talking about is active poison to me. Yes, it is. So I can't envision liking it or having fun with it because my only questions in that train of thought would be,

but why is that fun? Yeah. So instead, that's a tough place to start from. Exactly. So instead the conversation should become, okay, let me translate it into fun. Yeah. First, first, we have to go to a fun thing. Converter. Right. And then I'll go, okay, I understand how that works now. Right. So it'd be the equivalent of you going into a fucking ranked game and overwatch and the guy next to you is clearly boosted. Yeah. And and you going and watching them fuck up your game, like watching them lose the match for you. And you go, hey, did you boost? And they go, yeah. And you go, well, actually, Genji can only do this and that. And they go, oh, okay, thanks. So that's that's all I was going to say, as I fucking yawn at my own repetition is that in a game like

in a fighting game, if you were to do that artificially, you would very you'd be at the top ranking fighting against all the EVO top 16. Yeah. And then there's Jimmy, that would be the end of it. Yeah. Like you you're there. Great. And what do you accomplish? Absolutely nothing, because you're not meant to be up here. So there's a really weird out of this. There's a whole social argument around this, which is carrying, right? Yeah. So team based games allow some allow carry to carry you. Yeah. And the problem with a game like 14 is that when you allow a carry, you carry a bad player into the future to bother others, right? It's not like it's so when you carry somebody, they had a situation with Stormblood

where the final boss of the main story was somewhat difficult. It wasn't tough for decent players, but for newbies or for people that didn't know what they were doing, it was really tough to clear. And that was met with cheers and booze, booze from the average player who was like, dude, I'm getting shitty parties and I'm not good enough to carry the shitty party through and cheers from assholes like myself going good, keeping the bads out of the end game. So I don't have to deal with them, right? And the jump potion makes that really, really like lasered on where it's like people freak out like I don't want people who don't know how to play the game. Yeah. At the end of the game with me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And vice versa, people going, listen, I don't care about

this story. I don't care about this world. I play MMOs to raid with my friends, right? So fuck you, I'm going to, I'm going to jump for it. And if an MMO doesn't do this, they have a hard time getting new players because it takes longer and longer to get to the shit that people are actually doing, right? It's complicated because you see a lot of people, they get jumped up and God, they're the worst motherfuckers in the world. But on the other hand, I'd say about half the people that I see get jumped up are people that are like hardcore into end game stuff at MMOs. So they just pick it up and learn real quick. It's just, you don't notice those people because they do fine. It's this, it's this problem of like, if you do well, no one notices because everything just goes

off without a hitch. If you do badly, everyone sees, right? So it creates this inflated perspective of what is causing these problems. It's super interesting to me. If there was not enough, though, if people were constantly doing this and then encountering players going, you know, it's really annoying that you don't know what you're doing, but you're up here, wouldn't that discourage people from doing it and eventually kind of create a social faux pas where people would kind of be like, you know, it's not really worth it. Or is the number going up part of the good feeling where you just go, I'm going to do it anyway. That is correct. But there's a problem. The problem is that the Final Fantasy 14 community

does not exist in isolation. The active player count is somewhere between 250 to 350,000 people, right? WoW's player count, despite all of its shit, still probably hovering around 6 to 7 million. So the WoW culture does affect that. And WoW, how do I put this? WoW has taught people that the only thing that matters in your MMO is the absolute last shit at the game. The leveling process doesn't matter. And in fact, I saw somebody talking the other day, hey, when I buy 14, do I get a free boost to level cap? Because WoW does that when the new expansion is coming. Because why would you play 1 to 100? Because everything that matters is 100. And with games like 14, that's a good way to completely ruin that game for yourself. Because they actually kind

of spread all the good bits out. And if you jump all the way to the end, you're going to find there's actually relatively little for you there. Also, I imagine there's like learning that has to occur. Yes, also, the way that fights work in 14 are much more complex than they would be in WoW, where in WoW, your rotation is spanned this button until this button becomes activated. And 14 is like, I'll show you a video once about what a rotation is. It's, I'm not going to say it's fighting gamey, but it's more complex than you would expect. So it's a really good way to completely ruin the like the game for yourself. So let me give you a good, so people out there who are interested in getting in really seriously consider maybe not getting a jump. So here's a

good reason, right? The big expansion that everyone's getting really excited about is called Shadowbringers, right? The whole idea is that they established really early on in this game's life that there are parallel universes, shut up, there's 14, haha, because for whatever, right? So you can go to 14 different planets, essentially, right? One of them is completely eaten up by darkness and it's literally a void. It's the abyss. It's gone, right? That's the shitty one. Turns out the opposite end of that is light. It's too much light. So it's basically being eaten to death by SMT style angels, which guys are dicks, which is a cool like look, it's a really cool aesthetic. And the thing is, is that going to the first shard, which is the

location we're going to, was set up three years ago in one of the patch quest lines added during Heaven's Word, the expansion before last one. So this has been an ongoing problem that people have been hearing about for years and dealing with certain aspects of tangentially for years. And if you skip all of that, you get to the point where we're going to the first, you know, what's the first? Do you even care? Is the idea of that location even cool anymore without knowing like how it got that way? Like, right? Whereas in WoW, it's like, the orcs are bad. And we're going to go get them. And we're going to go to the ocean place now. And the orcs got there too. And you know, like context, I'm sure if there was an RPG where you could Oh, well, there was an RPG where

you could buy levels. A lot of the shitty Bandai Namco ones actually back on the 360. I want to say Eternal Sonata. Yeah, you could. Right. So there definitely were folks that just sat there and went, All right, level up, level up, level up, level up, level up. Here's my my next spell, level up, level up, level up fantasy 10. Yeah. Did you ever play the international version? No. So the international version has the dark aeons, right? It's a bunch of super bosses. It's like 15, 20 super bosses that you do the end game, you fill out the whole sphere grid, you min max your characters. This is the equivalent of paying $20 extra to get to the 10. Yeah, to literally skip to that post main game completion. It's like, I can't possibly recommend that to

anybody. It sucks. And other people will look down on you, even if you're a good player. There are people who spent years. Oh, the LP was the international version. Okay, I didn't know. Oh, oh, wow. Okay. The the like people who spent years of their life interacting with a story and interacting with a place and interacting and grinding up their characters are pretty much all just going to have this tiny little thing in the back of their head where they look down on people who just skipped all that. Personally, I don't get it. I don't understand why you would pay a monthly fee and then an extra charge to skip the game. It's baffling to me. But I do understand that other people don't give a shit about any of this shit that I care about, right?

I just I have to chalk it up to the the the invisible thing that's over there that I don't understand, but I accept its existence, which is number go up feel good. No, that's not it at all. It's I want to there. There is a subsection of MMO fans that literally just hop around to every MMO to complete all the hardest shit. Okay, because they like MMO style group dynamic combat stuff. Is there like a like I feel like there's to be a snazzy anime name for those people? I don't know. We call them beaters. Well, right now they're right now. They beat the MMOs. Right now they're called wow refugees. Okay. And there's a there's a guy out there forget his name, but the heat there is a the final

fantasy 14 guide for wow refugees. And it is a tutorial on how to play 14 if you are coming from wow. It's weird. Every aspect of every social aspect of an MMO is fascinating, because all these little rules and clicks and social social expectations arise. It's it's totally fascinating me. But yeah, the game's popping and it's filled with it's fucking filled with shitty wow players. But I guess that's good for the game overall. A population is a population. Usually the the usually the solution to this is to you make a you make Hey, do you want to get you want to get in the last part of the story? You know what you do? You make a really, really difficult combat encounter that you can only do by yourself.

Because then no one can carry you up, you have to actually learn how to do it. At which point, though, you can still just go look up what you need to. Yeah, but the fact that you even tried it all and are capable. It is difficult for me to explain how wide the skill gap can be in a team game like this. How lazy people can be. Well, why would you pay $30 to be placed in top eight, but you played no matches to get. I bought my way into top eight. Let's go. Imagine it. Imagine it's top eight. But it's but it's a SBO style. Oh, three people signal in full team. Right. Yeah. Hey, guess what? Yeah, you just you just lost the game for them. And yeah, you ruin their journey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's it's a whole thing. It's so fucking weird. Oh my god. Okay. But that's

pretty much it for me. Okay. I'm I beat Plague's tail. Fucking amazing play it. It's amazing. It takes some Hey, now it's about the rats in the plague in the in the France. I'm going to say it takes some historical liberties with the nature of rats in that in that game. Okay, so be aware that it may not be 100% historically accurate. But that game is stellar. And it has a fan and it ends really well. It has a really fantastic ending. And then like a couple days after the game came out there, they just came out. Yeah, we're totally doing a sequel right away. I don't know if it's what you're implying, but I like the idea of an otherwise indistinguishable from real life world setting that very suddenly

and abruptly at the last second is like, wait, what? So I'll use a there. I think I forget who it was. It might have been skill upper G man's review. But they described elements of the game's tone as reminiscent of aliens. Okay. Okay. And I feel that's highly accurate. I was having a conversation last night about Shenmue and how I dropped the fuck off of it. Yeah. And how I played all of one and I played almost all of two when I got to disc four and I just bored. I fell asleep. I just couldn't do it. Yeah, couldn't fucking do it. I couldn't drag myself through China to meet the girl that's on the box of all of those games who I've never met up to this point. I couldn't fucking do it. And I was told that apparently what I missed out on was the moment

that Rio pulls out a fucking lightsaber glowing ass sword. I was like, what? What? Apparently, why? Apparently, I missed out on the moment that the blade of legend is revealed and it blew my fucking mind because I'm like, I went through God like fucking hours upon hours speak the language of Chinese of hard reality facing the fact that I don't want to go to work today. But I got to lift trailers. Otherwise, I'm not going to make that 80 yen. And now I got a fucking like face to face with the fact that a lightsaber was waiting at the end of this journey. So I don't know, man. Oh, also, I should mention, I've been playing Yakuza six for a long time now. That game is the zaniest of them all. It is it is the least believable, most ridiculous.

Does that make it the most Yakuza? Yes. Done. It's done. Also, shockingly enough, minor spoilers for the gist of the plot. The game that shockingly enough the triads are back and so are the Koreans with the gene one, right? The plot will eventually devolve into I shit you not an actual goddamn race war. Okay. And it gets fucking heavy. Okay, which I was not ready for. But then stupid shit. Like, oh my god, that came in. That series is so fucking weird. It is so fucking weird. And you always have to remember every second that you're playing it, this was made by a very Japanese team who are pals with the Yakuza. Mm hmm. You have to remember that context. Yes. Yes. The lead director of this game

is friends with the Yakuza being depicted in this game. And however they feel about those other people, how those other people are being sneaky. Okay. And stealing our women signed off approved. Yes. Big Sega Sega stamp on it. At the end of end game, they had big dramatic credits were real life Yakuza bosses had a massive signature to say that they approve of the depiction. Oh, man. And last but not least, okay, I have good news for all of you warframe slash Jojo fans due to some incessant nagging by yours truly and many others. Space Mom has now fully bought the fuck in to Jojo's bizarre adventure and has been diving through episodes at a rate of like 20 a day.

Who's Space Mom? Space Mom is Ms. Rebecca Ford. Okay, digital extremes. Cool. She's the voice and face of the Lotus as well as the long time super awesome community manager over a digital extremes for Warframe. Okay, she is Space Mom. She is her and Steve are essentially the faces of Warframe. I like that naming convention. Yeah. And I have on good authority that quote, I will get Jojo shit into Warframe if it's the or die trying. So have fun everybody with that shit. Tenno con will probably be very stupid this year. Even if it's tangentially, I'd like to say that if the legacy of the podcast's influence on that game ends up is getting stands in the warframe fighter and then stands. Yeah,

that's not so bad. That's all right. Okay, well, there's something about something about like Space Mom from the future walking around the office yelling Joseph Joestar at people. I propose of shit all that is hilarious. And I feel very proud to have paved even a small part of that of that fucking future. If you tell me that there's a frame that can control a minuscule amount of water in a mile long radius and use it to fight. Well, here's the thing. I hope I hope Rebecca isn't listening to this right now. But there is a stand that they they so apparently nobody at digital extremes really knows about Jojo because this is unknown. But they created the world as a frame. There is a frame that has the world's entire power set. Okay, down to being

able to throw knives and stop them in a time bubble. That's not real. That is so real. You can go look it up. Type in limbo the world. No, what I mean is it's not real that nobody knew what it was. That's a that's a deadly premonition moment of what is David Lynch. I don't understand who that is. I don't want to tell you. But does it re it does not. They do is there a road roller warframes don't talk? Is there a moment? Does there a gesture where it leans back and shakes? Yeah, I think. Okay, that's a that's a lie. You've been lied to maybe. No, this one has a top hat. You've been you've been lied to. You've been lied to someone is I'm just I'm just saying. All right. I don't think Steve has seen it either. So interesting.

Um, I will transition off of your not I just got a feared for a second, because you know, we're like, oh, you know, we brought something positive to the Mike. What if this somehow ruins warframe? Does that make it my fault 100% stand on that stand on that right now, declare it openly and in advance? Oh, no, this gamble might actually ruin the game. Oh, what if what if it? Oh, no, it's it's an online game. They can roll it back. Well, if you want to see me ruin more things, you can check me out at twitch.tv slash angriest pet. I got I patch wolf at the house tomorrow night. Who is refusing to play third strike? I swear to God. It's got to be at magfest. It's got to be a big event. It's a good man. It's a good man. It's a coward bitch is what he is. It's

handsome. He's so handsome. Oh, it was very funny talking to him yesterday. He was scared by all the prostitutes. So he was telling me yesterday. So what he does when he touches down in a this is going to be a lot funnier for Montrealers, but he touches down in a new city and he gets like tensed up after doing a flight. So what he does whenever he gets off a flight is he looks up local massage places to get a back rub to feel better. And he did that here only to discover. Oh, there's all horse. Yes. Well, we had oops, all horse. I helped I helped to clarify that by explaining that here we have masseuse and masseur. Yeah. And there it's the it's there are signs basically advertising massagers and massage therapists. Yes, you want to go for the one that

says massage therapist therapist, therapist, whatever, you know, if you go for the one that says massager, you might find yourself getting a little tingle and he was he was like of a happy ending. He was like straight up like kind of nervous and scared talking to me about it. Yeah, because he is so so Irish. Yes, yes. And we don't have those in Ireland. Yes, big, big shame. He's like I believe the line was strip clubs in Ireland are ashamed of their existence. Yeah. And like here we couldn't be more loud and proud about it because fuck the church. It still kind of bums me out the club. Supersex is gone. Not because I want to go there, but because it was a nice fixture. The sign was pretty. Quebec is a really, really interesting at dive into fuck the church

as not as country, but as a a world within another country that's also like church is fine. Yeah, but here in this part here in this part, fuck the church aggressively so what is the church not like let's do it. Yeah, to the point where it's like you want to not get married and have a bunch of kids fuck yeah, screw you father to the point where it's almost like what about human rights a little bit. Ah, fuck the church. Yeah, they're aggressive with it. So anyway, I'll take the the the baton and segue not from your last two topics, but from the one before that where in John Wick speaking of fanboys of badass murderers that you are looking at as the protagonist revisited Katana zero. Yeah, that guy kills a lot of people sure does. And remember, remember that

guy the other guy. Remember that fanboy? Yeah. Yeah, that guy's sure sounded very similar to what you kind of described a little bit. Playing that on stream got to experience how uncomfortable that game can make people. That game has a lot of uncomfortable scenes. And I remember watching them and kind of going Oh, yeah. Oh, there's a lot of people that don't know how brutal this game gets. It was really interesting because I popped it in and I had already beaten it. So I was like, yeah, just going to do another run through see how it goes fun game to play. There's a really great speed run mode that lets you turn on and off all kinds of things so that you can if you want to go from gameplay to gameplay to gameplay uninterrupted. I think even better than that is

that in the main game, characters will animate during cutscenes. And so when you load into the level, they'll be in slightly different positions. Speed run modes like no, they're going to start at this spot and this spot and this spot 100% of the time. We are consistent and set. Yes. So going back through it, but I didn't do speed run mode because I asked the chat. I was like, how many of you guys saw this touch or seen this game already to which an overwhelming majority were like, I've never seen this before. That game is cool. You should get it. And I went, oh, fuck no, not like this. So I'm like, all right, we're going to go in. I'm going to do some of the story, but I'm going to do this differently. Don't talk to him. I decided to do the make decisions

I didn't make on my own. And in some cases that led to major scenes of plot being completely avoided and not seen. And it's like, guess what? Go purchase this video game. It's good. It's really good. If you want to see the conversation I skipped, go buy it. It's worth it. It's really good. Let me ask you a question in the first time through the game. Did you talk to that guy? That guy that you're not sure did. That was a pretty interesting fallout from that. Yeah, it was. It's almost as if I was supposed to talk to that guy because he had something that I should have heard, but I didn't do that on stream. No. So the thing that you probably want to see, you should go purchase the game and find out because that guy starts saying it's really

fascinating because even if I had never intended to listen to him, I'm going to be a big bird work. He starts saying some crazy shit. The instant you talk, you see, I'm like going into shillow for time on this. Like, like Dev showed up in the chat and I was like, Hey, what's up, dude? But like, it really is like, this is a hard on my game of games of the year list. Yeah, it's fantastic. Easily one of the best games I've played all fucking year. And that's up there with Devil May Cry 5 and think about it. Other great things. Yes. So yes, do it. So anyway, that was fun. And I'm really going back through that. And yeah, there's a secret boss, which the conditions I was kind of following following through were almost perfect for getting to that secret boss.

So is it a storyline conditions to reach the secret boss? Yes. So things that you do can create the ultimate perfect moment. So there's that. I took a look at Baba is you. I heard about you taking a look at that. If you're only you turned into page for a while. Well, I mean, it's the kind of game that I imagine does that to anybody because that's the nature of how it work. And it also brings out minute speak. Is it the kind of game where you're looking at it and everyone can see the solution but you? I mean, sometimes other times other times everyone is making terrible suggestions for solutions because they don't

understand what the game is, right? Like people are going like, pull the block. And you're like, what? What the fuck are you talking? You don't understand what you're looking at. Like, oh, yeah, you think that watching a block look, it looks like it's getting pulled, but that's undue. There's only a put, you know, so anyway, all that to say that I very quickly realized, of course, like in order to do this fairly, I had to just ignore chat like entirely. So it was a really good thing to do. Say you're ignoring chat struggle for a little bit and then well, yeah, I totally figured it out. No, I am bad. There's a little trick. Well, I didn't take that advice because I did it legit. And you can tell because I blitzed through and

crushed a bunch of those levels. And then I hit like absolute walls and was stuck on them for embarrassing amounts of time and eventually brute forced it and got my way and that's satisfying. But no, brute forced it as in like, I had to, I had to, people watched me walk through my logic path in my brain. And it was really interesting because I basically had to go like after trying everything that I could come up with in this type of puzzle game. Let's break it down to the total basics. Let's undo all assumptions I have about this video game, right? And take it back to step one. And then I would go through each one of them and go, I assumed that this, because I saw that is this true? If not, then and then eventually you hit the one you hit the one

that your assumption is wrong and you go, Oh, yeah, you're like, I never thought about trying this because I assumed a based on seeing a in previous levels. It turns out that it's actually B and like you have to take it to that granular level because the game mechanic is fucking brilliant. And I don't want to spoil it on this podcast. If you haven't played Baba is the trailer makes a pretty clear, I didn't watch a trailer. Oh, the trailer is just him pushing a block from one statement to another. Okay. Well, I didn't watch any trailers. I just downloaded and booted. And I'm happy I did it that way because playing cold was really satisfying to how you have that moment when you play a puzzle game where you're like, whatever your mechanic is, I better in one second,

not in one second in the moment that it clicks, feel the infinite potential oozing off of it. And it happened right here. You know, I did it and I went, Oh, yeah, yep, yep, this can become something incredible and frustrating and beautiful and hard and pulling out your hair like insane fucking grinding against the wall difficult. So had a really good time. Highly recommended. Go play Baba as you and it gets pretty hard in pretty short order. At least. Yeah. Yeah. I I ended the stream on a puzzle that took almost as much time as it took to get there, you know, and eventually did solve it and went, I have to stop. I have to stop. My brain is now mush. I remember, I remember back when I played the portal games and back when I saw a page go

through the portal games, it's like, it really does feel like your brain has like a finite number of like puzzle solving juice in it. And you hit you hit a point after a couple hours in which your thought process is not what it was when you started. Yeah, it's not clean. It's not logical in some cases. The it's flat. You fizzed out. The fizz is gone. Yeah, you're so does now flat. And you're trying to use it and it's just not. And you hit the point where you've done so many puzzles in a row and you're like, yeah. And then you take the square peg and you try and put it in the round hole and it doesn't work and you go, but what if it did though? Yeah. And that's usually when you should probably stop. And it especially sounds great because this is a game where, like I

said, language devolves into minute speak. Yes. So coin keep, coin keep, no coin, no big go left. No, left is Oh, and like that starts becoming your actual train of thought on things, which sometimes helps and sometimes doesn't. But you have to basically no one to call it quits. Fantastic puzzle game. Definitely going back to it. But considering the place I stopped at, the next stream might be one room. It might be one fucking room. And then and then we move on from there. So a really, really great game. I grabbed it on switch. I'm not sure what else it's on. It's on a PC at least. I know I've seen it show up on my wishlist. Yeah, Baba is you. So I took a look at that. I also got some time in on that Grand Blue fantasy versus there's been

a shit ton of Japanese games just throwing beta codes out to the wild at the same time. Neo Code Vane and Grand Blue all just like, yeah, fuck it at the same time. And the consensus seems to be, yeah, Neo, nah, Code Vane and yeah, Grand Blue. Grand Blue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I basically got about an hour and a half, two hours of game of game in and enough matches and I recorded them. So I'm going to put out a video on it with some more thoughts. But there was enough matches to go from literally what does what in and you have to fight live. There's no offline. There's no training back in the old days. Yeah. This is the only way to play a match is against the human being. Oh, that's good. So like trial by fire, learn. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Life or

live fire exercise, if you would toss that son off that cliff, get your get your move list practice in while the match is going. Yeah. See what it does. See what happens. And I did and like basically formulated the the seed of a game plan with the character that I picked in the span of that video and went from getting nowhere to getting somewhere. And it's it's it's interesting to see that process. So I by the end ended up really liking what I was feeling from the matches I played the world is very pretty. The cast is very pretty. The money is very pretty. The arxist art style continues to evolve with the addition of cash money, man. Yep. Yep. Every time I saw that game, I went, wow, that looks immaculate. Yes. The arxist sort of gameplay first design brand

crossing over with the side games, cash rules, everything around me philosophy come together for some very, very pretty fantasy anime. So I knew there was going to be this is going to be slightly inside and it's going to refer to a tweet that I don't remember, but it was an artist's tweet, obviously, because they would know better about this than me. But it the girl with the whip. Yes, she has bare arms. She's a ghost, right? She's a ghost. She's a ghost. That's cool. She looks like friend. It says a lot about the game's art style and attention to money. I'm not going to say detail attention to money. There's a shot where she like holds her arm over her head. And you can actually see like the pec minor stretch over like part of the armpit to the

shoulder girdle. And it's like with the anime shading. And it's like no one bothers to show inter shoulder musculature on anime. Yeah, who gives a shit about details like that? Apparently the money does. Yeah, you didn't think you were going to get into those armpits, but there they are. Well, you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, there they are. You're not the only one. Do you not follow artists that show like, Hey, when somebody shrinks their shoulders, their lats should be dipped and not, you know, I absolutely do. But you're also accidentally touching on a subject that people got really into. No, I'm not. Okay. No, no. Okay. They like those pits, man. I don't like this. They dug them. You know what's inside those pits?

Money. Tell you what, though. You know what I'm saying? Like the attention to an amy on anime characters is crazy. So the level of Geniro, like anime fantasy. Yeah, that's the only thing about it is excessive to high. I don't know who the main character's name is. His name is Gran. His name is Gran. Yes. Because that is an anime boy. So I thought that the most you could, the most like Geniro fantasy you could get was the cast of what was it called with Deathbringer? Battle Fantasia. Battle Fantasia. And even that game had some fun wild cards thrown in like face and God, you know how generic the cast of

fucking Battle Fantasia is? We were hanging out with the other Pat and he saw Deathbringer and said, what's his name? Deathbringer. And you went, yeah, his name is Deathbringer. Yeah, exactly. So and it like you have, we have wild characters like in it, like the little Pope boy and the big pirate and then face the gunman, but you generally have the most generic fantasy things you could ever imagine. And in this case now, Gran Blue Fantasy versus is anime boy, anime girl, anime ghost, anime potato, anime bishi. Yeah. And anime lolly. No, that's the potato. Okay. She's a law the fell from 14. I'm dead serious. Yeah. Yeah. And she's a law a law LaFelle, right? And then yes, but she also is is I have actually gone the whole

time playing that game and never put it together. And now I hate you. There you go. And she soon soon is all over the place. Of course. So what was really fun was playing that alongside someone who's hard addicted to that gacha shit, who was explaining, Oh yeah, that's that's going on over here. I need to grab one of these people. I have one in mind who I know is real deep into the gacha shit. Yeah. And just be like, I don't get it, man. Yeah, what is the deal? Yeah, what's with the grand? What's going on here? Why? Mm hmm. But it's just it's just it's your your fucking it's cash fantasy, man. It's like, it's the cleanest. Your armor is never stained. Your capes are always billowing. It is it is what I think adventure calls to you. It is what I

think of when I think of anime fantasy. Yeah, like, like what I would mean is I would think of anime fantasy and open my eyes and see Granblue and we go, that's close enough because take a fantasy right, take an anime fantasy adventure, then you send your characters on it and they go and they do their questing and whatever. But at all times they need to appear datable. Yes. This is the lens you have to frame the whole world in. Everyone may they must all be potential waifu candidates. Everyone has to go on that that adventure to save the world and slay the monsters, but also be extremely datable at all times. Yeah, the worst you can see is a scuff and a sweat. That being said, as a fighting game. Shit's fucking is doing it. You tell me it's an arxist

fighting game. Here's what it is, dude. It's an arxist fighting game, but it's footsie based. And what? They don't do that. It's literally about normals and it is not fast. It's quite deliberate. That sounds awesome. I love footsies. Yeah, and it's slow and you've got a lot of neutral. You've got neutral. You've got neutral. Anime fighting games don't have neutral. You've got some real neutral going. Oh, it's got nooch. Yeah, it's got nooch. It's got some nooch. It's got nooch, big nooch and footsie in the nooch. Yep. And I happen to pick a character and you get that meaty nooch. I happen to pick a character that's based on blowing up your bad nooch. So I really, really liked what I felt about it. I liked the fact that the answer to

like certain special moves, like eventually I got some good games in against like my friend who's like fucking crushes these anime games. Yeah. And you basically, the answer to some situations where like you're like fighting a really oppressive character was a well placed normal, right? A well placed button crushed the game. Crouching strong really blew up your offense. It literally did. What is this? This is not an arxist game. So I don't know what you're talking about. They're putting and like, and I mean, and it's got focus attacks in it, right? It's like there's and there's universal overheads. This is street fighter. Arxist make a fucking gacha street fighter. I think they're taking a crack at a non anime playing anime game. I think the most anime thing they've ever

animate. You know what? They just did DBZ fighters. They're taking a crack at something more street each more street fighter. But the most non street fighter and interesting thing you'll notice right away is how meter works. Okay. Meter builds and you build up to get a super or a level three super if you're about to die. Fail of fury ish moves and ex moves do not cost any of that bar whatsoever. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Well, then what's the difference between that move and ex move? I mean, you do a move and you do it. Yeah. And ex move is a better version of that move. Okay. But those are on their own cool down timers. Oh, they're doing the cool down stuff. So you got four cool downs next to your character's life bar. You know what gotcha games have cool downs makes them

comfy big cool downs for your moves. And now you can't do it. I am fascinated to see things from rising thunder rising fucking thunder dude being incorporated into this because I do like the one thing I really, really liked about rising thunder's cool down system was that if you were in a situation where what guy was jumping in on you and keeping you in the corner and use what was your what was your name Dauntless dust breaker to you know, power through it. And the guy got you right back into that corner instantly and kept doing that pressure. Yeah, you shouldn't be able to get out for free every time because you fucked up by not actually escaping. Now you got a block. Yeah, yeah, you got your get out of jail free card and you used it and you fucking wasted it. Yeah.

Yeah. So pretty interesting to see what effect what amounts to in my brain riot going League of Fighters. I don't want it. And then arxist being like we'll take it it dusting it off and putting it in their system and then also injecting cash money. All right, so if we're going to get Grand Bluffa, the fighting game, give money to the fighting game, I want it to give so much money that like Evo becomes uncomfortable. Like yeah, like the whole event is sponsored by Grand Blue Fantasy. Oh yeah, like the commentators are wearing Grand Blue Fantasy ties during other commentating event like just push Street Fighter out of its yes. Yeah. Fuck all y'all when's gravel is gravel time and it's like they're

interviewing like Mr. Wizard about like, why did you push Grand Blue Fantasy versus to the top out of Street Fighter Street Fighter is an ancient game and Mr. Wizard standing there and head to toe in Grand Blue Fantasy March and holding a big cartoon bag of money going. We really thought it was time for Street Fighter to move to spot number two. You know, we're really looking forward and we're very excited to work with side games. We're looking forward to this partnership and committing to what it and then a guy comes over and gives him a second big bag of money and he remembers. Yep. Yeah. He goes looking forward to a wonderful and long term relationship. Prosperous Grand Blue Fantasy versus as the mainstay of Evo which has always been about Grand Blue Fantasy

versus. Yep. Yep. The history of Evo is the history of Grand Blue battle by the bay. You know what's blue the ocean the bay is in the ocean. Evo's about Grand Blue. Gravel up motherfuckers gravel. That's gravel. Oh, that's terrible. Good. So, here, let me let me break it down for you. Good and blue. Got it. Got there. As long as we're not saying play blue anymore. Yeah, yeah, gravel, we're grappling up. Good. Good. Good game. Good game. Good game. Good game. The important thing is that it's good because the shit that we're talking about is actually going to happen to some degree, whether the game is bad or not. So hopefully it better be good. It better be good because if because if not, it's going to get really awkward. Yeah. That samurai showdown

factor we talked about. It's like, yeah, no, no, now it's coming way harder and the money's behind it. And whether you like it or not, it's going to take the spot. Hey, I want to ask you about samurai showdown. Who's dick did you suck over at SNK to get Darley to have a galactic phantom? That's news. We'll get there. Oh, that's news. We'll get there. Okay. About who's about which penis. Yeah, which penis was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We'll cover that. We'll cover that on the docket. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so Grand Blue Fantasy versus was fantastic. Quite a fun game. And it's great to know that quite frankly, I can now welcome my Psygames overlords. Yes. With open arms because the game is Chinese company. They're everything. Okay. Part Korean part everything.

Because I'm just saying like Asia's getting in there. Like Tencent and Psygames and all them, they're getting in there. They're spreading that money around. Oh, yeah. And so far hasn't been that disastrous. So far it's actually been kind of cool. Yeah. The hostile takeover of the FGC by Psygames was destined to happen. Yeah. At least we can feel good about it because mechanically, it's we're solid. Can we get my cross to speak on the takeover of the FGC by Psygames? I mean, he recently appeared on the eSports podcast with Slasher and Gutex and he's still pretty like, I'm, I'm, I'm out. He's still pretty out. You know, I'm torn because I fucking love my cross. Everyone does. I fucking love my every one does my cross once and he was such a nice man.

He's great. He's pleasant and he's the people. And I just want him to come back and be my cross again. Well, that's kind of the problem because he's not my cross anymore. He's trying to find my cross. I don't know what that means. Yeah. I really don't know what that means. I just think I feel like he was in a situation where outside expectations of what he was supposed to do with his FGC presence kind of led to him being like, I'm not having fun here and I need to go do me. That's unfortunate. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's still future Gutex. Well, no, because the present has caught up. Oh, the present caught up to future. So now he's back to being Gutex. Does that mean he's going to leave to go to the past soon? No, it means that

when the future comes and the present becomes the future, he will stay and he will then become past Gutex. Okay. Until he's a man outside of time until the new future Gutex arrives from the new future. That's the that's the problem with being future Gutex is that you get locked into that frame. And as the present comes and passes, you become past Gutex. That's unfortunate. A man searching for a way back back to the past. Samurai Jack. Yeah. All right. That became nonsense. Sam's show has like a shit ton of input lag in its current form. We were playing has like eight plus frames. We were input lag. We were playing on on pack setups that were not on great TVs. Yeah. And I chalked up just about all of it to the TVs we

were on. Yeah, I can't say for sure. There's someone some latency nerds running tests on it. And apparently it's right now it's at like eight frames. I can't say for sure. I mean, the game is slow and precise. So it's not Marvel. But I will say that like I felt it, but I really thought it was on we was because we're on bad terms. There's something they turn it down because with counter hits that do 90% of your life. I don't want to have to deal with latency. I on and I would say that as a rule of thumb for anybody going to trade shows or playing fighting games at like New York Comic Con or something like that majority of the time they're on the wrong TV. Guess what? You're on a TV that's probably not even on game mode. Yeah. Right.

It's a bummer. The people setting up might not have taken that into account. It was fascinating. I remember when we played dive kick at E3 and I played a game of dive kick against Dave Lang. I vividly remember it being hyper responsive because it was on the right type of TV for fucking dive kick. But that needs that was because Oh God, why am I name blanking out? Not Dave Lang. Keats. Keats. Yeah. Keats was probably running that. Yeah. And making sure. Oh, yeah. Where's Keats at now? Keats is. I don't know because he should be making fighting games. Yeah, I think I think he's he's up to stuff. I'm not sure. Keats, if you can hear us, where are you at? I know doing something cool. I know that he he stepped away from UFGT in order to focus on games.

So I'm not too sure. But he's out there. He's tweeting. Do you think Dave Lang's ghost is going to host a Volvo show this year? I think they're going to bind his ghost to the show that it may not leave. And he will be forced into subservience. And I've been watching E3 stuff for a long time. I probably think that is the funniest I have ever. Sorry, the hardest I've ever laughed at anything to do with E3, which is live from the Dave Lang Memorial Center. Rest in peace, Dave Lang. No. So yeah, that's that's pretty much the deal. I mean, I had there were other topics like I've been fucking, as you might have overheard, like the deep dive into Terras house. Yeah, it has been a terrorist house has begun and the cynical watch with arms crossed going, all right, let's

find about what passive small Japanese drama and inconvenience. Yeah, the lowest stakes ever. Let's find out what the deal is and let's see these commentators tell us how to feel about it. And I'm now I'm now I'm in I'm in and I am like, all right, there's something to be said for something that's good enough that when you're sitting there with your arms crossed, getting ready for the spite watch, yep, that you come off going, that's pretty good. Yep. The spite watch completely turned around to the point where the thing that I hated the most was the cut to the reaction commentary. Yeah, because that's the most Japanese thing ever. I got to see how the celebrities reacting to the fucking whatever. And I and like the way it's not picture in picture, it's just like, it's like

interstitials in between the segments. And I'm like, God damn it. Some of these fuckers are making me laugh. I'm actually like, okay, with it. I don't know. The spite watch turned around on me. So I got in and have been enjoying that. And it's definitely in that sort of like, you yeah, you're like, Oh, fuck, now I have to know who left the dishes out. How are we going to salt? Like, I can't wait till next episode. I have to know now. Then the next time I was like, wait, we start who knocked over the trash bin and then didn't pick it up. And we start with the recap over like the entire dish fiasco, because we all know that whoever makes the food is not going to Oh, wind is blowing very strong. It's okay. All right, wind. Whoever makes sounded like somebody

had climbed up to your window and was like breaking in. It did, which is hence the alarm, but no, it's just wind blowing. It's okay. Until you find out who makes the food, you can't quite discern who's not guilty because the person who makes the food is not responsible for the dishes after all. That's just common courtesy, as we all know. Anyway, and then it turns into a death game. No, no. All right. Anyway, so that's fun. And yeah, also went out to MK 11 local and the spirit crushing has already begun. Yeah, I'm quite proud to announce that my pick as much as it's a roll of the dice, my pick in this game has turned out to be low tier garbage. Once again. Yep. So you luck with this. Yeah, I have sometimes I have good luck. So you never know. You never know, right?

It's CVS two time. You had some good. That was the best luck. Um, in Tekken, it turned out all right. Yeah, I did. It turned out all right. Uh, it was pretty moderate and street fighter for the most part. Third strike, it turned out great. Um, but in this context, Kotal Khan is not doing me any favors. Well, you know what, I have to ask you, did you play through that story mode? No, because I'm going to be doing that on my channel with Reggie soon. Okay. Because Kotal Khan doesn't do himself any favors. I know, I know, we're going to be going into that soon. Um, anyway, so yeah, that was a thing. And, uh, yeah, exactly. So I'll use that as the lead in and say that, um, to check out more of this type of content and such. If you want to hear more about

Baba is you and, uh, Granblue versus and, uh, gravel, as we say, and, uh, that feels nice. I like this way. It's a nice little breeze. Um, and, uh, uh, but, uh, what did I just bring up? Mortal Kombat 11? Yeah. Um, then yeah, check out Willie versus on Twitch and on YouTube. Going to be doing those games. And, uh, of course, as one handsome Irish motherfucker happens to be in town, uh, you best believe we will be sitting down and, uh, making out, recording. Okay. So there's a game playing on the B roll demo and it's just 22 minutes beer rustling. Oh, that's awful. I'm bad at MK 11 and I don't particularly like MK 11, but boy howdy that Shang Tsung trailer is the hottest shit I have ever seen. Well,

I'm glad to hear that because let me take a relevant word from a sponsor. Let's do it. Uh, I would like to bring up for those who are not in the know. There's a, as, as we've talked about RTX, we're going to be there. Austin, I hang out doing our thing and it just so happens that at RTX, there is going to be the E League cross Mortal Kombat 11 arena at RTX Austin presented by AT&T fiber online qualifiers this June. Really? Yeah. So there is an event going down right now. Uh, it's an online tournament. Registrations now open on E League.com slash battle fi where you can compete for your chance to win cash prizes, a trip to RTX Austin. Uh, and your first chance to win, uh, the first chance to win your way over to RTX is June 1st. So you

can head on over to E League.com slash battle fi to register now. Uh, so the way they're doing this grand prize winner get to take the souls of the loser. Uh, that is still to be determined. All right. All right. But in the meantime, uh, there will be a series of online tournaments, uh, happening on, uh, set dates. Now, in particular, the fun thing about some of these tournaments is that they're more or less kind of being hosted slash sponsored by people. And, uh, yours truly over at woolly versus, uh, has agreed. I'm going to be, uh, hosting the tournament taking place for Mortal Kombat 11 for the E League, battle fight tournament on the 16th of this month. That's the 16th of June 16th. Exactly. So if you head on over to E League.com slash battle

fi and you sign up to enter in the online Mortal Kombat tournament, uh, the woolly versus bracket will be the, that's weird. The 16th of June. And, uh, the winner of that, well, of course, coming down to the big grand finals at RTX is going to be more or less, I'm going to be your personal hype man. Oh, that's fantastic. So if you win, I will be at RTX with you. I'm going to tense those shoulders up and you're representing your bracket. Yep. You better win. That's it. Right. If you are in and if you do well and if you make it out, I'm going to be your personal MK 11 hype man. I'm right there with you. That's a really good way to organize that right thing. And, uh, you'll be going up against the other winners of the brackets and we're, I'll, I'll

give you my strategies. I'll give you my best coaching tips and frame data to, uh, from this man who plays low tier garbage. Yes. Yes. Renowned champion woolly of woolly versus will be giving you all the information you need to take on, uh, who knows what kind of other gods of Netherrealm might be present. Oh, you tell me Sonic Fox has a bracket, but, uh, but we will find out, we will find out more shortly, but this is, this is, this is some fun stuff going down. And, uh, I'm, I'm super happy to be checking it out. So yeah, the tournament's free to enter open to anybody who meets the eligibility requirements. So, um, if you're over 18 and from the, uh, like regions where it applies, then, uh, you can enter cash prizes as well as the RTX trip.

That's what you're going to be winning. Um, there's also prizes via raffles for all participants who compete. So even if you don't win your matches, there's other types of prizes as well. And, uh, yeah, like again, if you want woolly as your personal fucking, I'm, I'm a there to enter and you have to win. I will be behind you. Uh, if you would like, I can, I can scream at your opponents and make all kinds of a ruckus or within the rules, within the rules, or I can just silently lend you my energy and do whatever it takes to get you through this tournament variations in between. There you go. And yeah. And of course this tournament is brought to you by AT&T. Uh, get fiber fast internet and stay ahead of the competition. Uh, so

battle fi, E league, MK 11, RTX, woolly versus June 16th. Check it out. I'm a be around. And, uh, if you're interested, sign up and show me what you got. Um, and who knows, I'll might even be, uh, down for a few sets might even be down for a few sets. I might change characters stuff. Yeah. Change characters. I might pick Geras. I really like Geras. He's a cool guy. He's cool. He's a cool big guy. Yeah. He's thought he is time stop. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. But yeah, thank you to, uh, Rooster Teeth, E League, AT&T, Mortal Kombat, battle fi, all of y'all Ed Boone. Cheers personally. That's yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um, so, uh, yeah, that's it. Thanks guys. So if you want to springboard off of that,

yeah, that's showing some trailers. Unbelievable. One getting the actor from the movie. Fucking A plus thumbs up. Perfect. Dude looks great. Your soul is mine. That has always been the image of Shang Tsung in my head ever since that movie came out. I love the full on lock at a hard acknowledgement that, uh, this is now Shang Tsung. We're not doing the young, we're not doing, like there's the old man version in the crypt, but it is 100 percent confirmed that like, no, we're doing movie Shang Tsung. Yeah. Which is, yeah, that's the best version of Shang Tsung. Your soul is mine. And now a taste of things to come. Dude, so all the classic ninjas being gone, except for sub and Scorpi, right? That sucked, but

they finally did it. They finally figured out a way to make Shang Tsung use his transformation powers in a 3D match. And it's so simple. Just make them all pallet swaps of each other. Of course. He's changing into Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Reptile, Ermac, Rain. Yeah. Fucking Rain. Of course the swerve on the, on him being the old man from the crypt and then turning into movie Shang Tsung is, is fantastic as well. Cause you expected like, oh, we already have the model. It's right there. The old man Shang Tsung is the way to go. That's not what you're getting. So that's all fun. That's all fine and dandy. And you get to see him. Yeah. Turn into all the old, the old, uh, fucking Shodokan, not Shodokan. The old ninjas. Um, Lin, uh, not Lin Kuei. Anyway,

the old ninjas, the MK one versions of each of the ninjas. Really? No, MK two. Sorry. With the goofy shoulder blades. Yeah, I love it. Fantastic. Uh, so you have that. But then the trailer also, of course, confirms that this is the first character of the season of DLC. We're getting from Mortal Kombat, which means that those leaks about what characters are coming is the super realist. Uh, yeah. And there, and I mean, is it really considered a leak when people are fucking tweeting? Yeah, it's, it got weird. It got super weird. But get ready for Terminator and spawn. Well, here's what we can confirm that you can get ready for. Cause end of the trailer, they, uh, they, they drop it. They go Shang Tsung. He's coming. Nightwolf. He's cool. He's got

axes. Sindel. She, what? People care. Spawn. Spawn's the most appropriate character they've ever had as a guest. He's going to have his move set from Soul Calibur and two more, which is Terminator and someone else. I forget who. Well, it's funny because as two more guests were teased and then suddenly, uh, one Bruce Campbell just retweets the twit, the, the fucking trailer and goes, wow, what a mighty hot off his appearance and dead by daylight. I should add. I should check this game out. Says Bruce Campbell out of nowhere. Dude, come on. Like ash. Ash is so perfect. Such a good pick. Such a good pick. I got it. Like I never, I mentioned it before, but I never would have considered in all the villains and monsters that they pulled in.

I thought about, I never thought about the monster killer. Yeah. You know, the other way around because you don't often get that. Like you'd never think of, um, of, uh, God, what's her name? Uh, you're doing it, man. Uh, FGC. Awesome. Uh, God damn. You're doing it. It's a Halloween. Jamie Curtis. Jamie Curtis. You'd never think of pulling Jamie Lee Curtis as Jamie Lee Curtis in the fucking in a fighting game. You know what I mean? You never think of putting in like the protagonist from many of these horror movies. Yeah. Except for ash. But fucking ash is the one you do stick in a chainsaw. Yeah. Yeah. And his move set writes itself. I really want Terminator to be Terminator one. Terminator. That'd be fun. Because Terminator

one, Terminator one looks like kind of a jackass now. And two is scary and evil. It's probably not going to be that. It's probably going to be T2. T2 with the face ripped open. Yeah, probably. But, uh, ash might have little mini ashes that come out and attack you. And that might be good as a variant. Oh man, that's cool. How about that? Oh man. So variant one, like is that and variant two is just like the tree branches fucking trying to grab you and shit. This confirms that Jamie Lee Curtis does in fact exist in the Mortal Kombat universe in theory. Yeah. Yep. Mortal Kombat's guest characters have really linked up a bunch of shit. Like, and if you really want to bring over Scorpion as the branch to injustice, then you got a whole other set. Yeah, you got,

yeah, got Ninja Turtles DC. Well, you had more combat versus DC, right? Yeah. So MK and DC are all the same universe, including all the universes that connect to them even tangentially. We can't have this conversation. We can have it every day. We can have it every day. It's exhausting. It's exhausting. It's getting, well, you know what? It's all owned by Disney anyway. So that's true. Yeah. Uh, so that's fun. And, uh, yeah, I actually, uh, popped, I like, I hadn't been touching it at all. I jumped into the crypt very briefly just to see what the mode even was. And I'm definitely just like, Oh, I do not have the patience to deal with this. There's a lot in there. This currency nonsense is the least interesting thing in the world to me. I have no desire

to go fucking deal with that. So I won't. And I shan't be returning. He shan't. That is done. Uh, I don't know if that, those things have been a fixed fixed yet. If the tower is, I don't know what the state of that is. So since I follow max on Twitter, I do know that they have been improved somewhat at least. Okay. I don't know if they kept working on sounds pretty abysmal, not a fan of that, but I am absolutely just, I am ignoring the fuck out of that. Right. Doesn't seem good. What seems to be nice about tournament mode in the versus play is costumes for your characters. Every time you enter that mode are random. Cool. So you have two set tournament tournament variants and you, and they're going to change up the costumes every time. So

it'll be fresh refreshing going in and getting whatever. So you have human codal or purple codal or regular codal and whatever. I'm like, Oh yeah. Okay. They thought they're all going to lose. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, he really should have just replaced Shao Khan, man. Why couldn't there be a goddamn warrior that showed up that was like, I'm Shao Khan was a bitch. I'm the new one. That's what he was supposed to do. He actually done. And when they wrote the comics, codal kicks ass up and down those comics. It's so dumb tears Goros arms off. Think how crazy that is. Like if you bring about the bison replacement, but then bison just shows up and goes lol. No. Then you're like, okay, well, okay. But then why do we even do this dance? Why do we even make this

character really job just to suffer just to track Ryu around and yell devour our hour. That's right. Oh, Nicole. He got a bet. Wow. South American like, like more guys got it real bad this generation. I happen to attach my horse to the wrong fucking carriage on that ever since ogre because ogre got it good. Ogre was the fucking be all end all bad ass. But then it got it bad because true ogre sucks. True ogre does sucks. So ogre got it good until it got a bet. It's never gone good. War God is probably the best. It's gone because it didn't go anywhere. Yeah. And then you're stuck playing war gods. Can I just get a like ink in slash? No. I just God, what's the fucking other? What am I fine? Mayan ink and slash Mayan fighting war God cool type character

design. No, that doesn't just bite it and or suck. No. Aztec. It's so cool. It's so cool looking. Yeah, well. Ancient ogre is fucking great. Anyway, he does a hunting hawk, bro. Speaking of hunting hawks, did you see that really dumb random thing? I heard it tweeted. He's like, by the way, there's an arcade cabinet for Tekken tag tournament turbo that a game that never came out or existed, but we have a one cabinet and we're bringing it to Evo. And what is it? And then he shows you footage of Tekken tag tournament turbo. What is it? It's exactly what it sounds like. It's tagged, but it's hyper. And I put that out. Hoaring does like eight hunting hawks on a dude and just juggles the shit out of them. And it's out. Fucking wild. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's kind of nuts. It's kind of nuts that they're just doing that. Is that four T's TTT. I mean, Tekken tag tournament two was already TTTT. So this tech, this is about Tekken tag tournament two turbo. Well, if we ever get there, then we're at fucking five T and that's five T pushing it real hard. We're going extreme on that. Who knows TTTTTT. That's ridiculous. T six. No, that's a wait. But that's how the games are named. Yes, it is. What if you add the to the beginning of it? Shut up. The Tekken. No, that doesn't help because that's a T word to turbo. It doesn't work. Let me see if I can grab it real quick. Grab them TTs. It's really just the game running really fast. That's it. Right. But it's not just running really

fast. Like the rules are stupid. The rule like the like it's running really fast, but also allows you to do things that you couldn't do. So like shit just gets wild and fucking that's stupid nonsensical because everything's running fast except for the physics. So you float. No, you float up and down faster too. Then what? But it just it just doesn't the game is like I don't I don't know. Man, let's do it. The rules are bent in some way and it's up to you to figure out how and if you want to actually play this, it's going to be at Evo. I love jank fucking official turbo stupid fighting games stuff like this. It's really dumb. It's great. It's great. So anyway, that's going down. So we talked about Death Stranding. We talked about that, I guess. So your calendars for was it

November 8th or September 8th? I'll say September. November 8th. November 8th. Right in the middle of the dead center of the holiday season. Someone pointed out to me that when you zoom in on the baby inside the womb, it starts on its head, but it didn't always start on the head. And apparently it looked really gross when it didn't start on the head. Got it. Anyway, babies are gross. But they'll save your life when the fucking dead are hanging out. Yeah, well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Speaking of bridges and perhaps the burning of them, let's talk about burning bridges. One of my favorite topics. Whose bridge got burned by what? Well, a very sad bridge got burnt.

All right. The bridge that leads us to Hoops Barclay. Yeah. Barclay, too, has been dead for a while. It's just been officially confirmed as of now. Turns out Barclay, too, was kind of like a huge scam. So my account's coming out. I use the word scam, by the way, because one of the lead developers calls it a scam. The account of the story is coming out. Essentially, Josh Bossy has posted on Twitter that Barclay, too, has been officially confirmed dead. I feel compelled to tell as many people as possible. Rip Hoops. And we're watching screenshots of forum posts where insiders and people that worked on the game describing every single part of the game's development as fucked. Capital F fucked. So I mean, I can't go into all of it, but I'll say things such as it

opens on the idea that chief chef, sorry. Chef Boyardy. Chef vanished from the project two and a half years ago, tried contacting him multiple times, haven't received a response. Bort left around the same time to be a family man. The Kickstarter was not necessary in hindsight. A majority of the work on this game was unpaid. Myself, Bort and Chef, this is Horatio, Horatio talking, were originally the Barclay one creators. I didn't join the Kickstarter with them because I was aware of the many problems that could and did arise. I asked to join the project three years after the Kickstarter had little money and was in shambles. They were committed to trying to finish the game, set back by horrible management. I ended up quitting. The person who owns TOG, which is Tales of Games,

is running it now, has nothing to do with Barclay one and zero game dev experience. He's a PR guy for Tales of Games. When I quit, LazRule also quit. We were the only two remaining who understood the technical inner workings of this game. Laz worked on the project from the start pro bono and was tired of the nonsense as well. There's no incentive for Tales of Games, or anyone attached to the Kickstarter to talk about this tobacco. They basically talked about how the Kickstarter was pointless because everyone who came on the project was promised shares of future profits, which if you're being promised shares of future profits, usually you don't need a salary or you'll work a second job, whatever, because you're kicking in work to potentially

big money later. But as he describes, there's only so many fucking shares you can possibly give out to people as they come on the project. Eventually you hit an obvious wall, but there's no more money to promise in the future. Yeah, the sad part about every time something like this goes down, like a Kickstarter goes up and people are like, God damn it, there goes another one. It was from the era of hot kickstarters or where they were at least cooling off. But there aren't colds. This is I want to say the third one that I've been burned on. And if I remember correctly, Liam got burned on all three as well, which is this one unsung story and Project Phoenix. The ghost song ever come out? You'll have to check your pledge on that because I didn't back that one.

Well, yeah, right. So like, yeah, no, just these things are dead. So here's the thing, what you just did is exactly what I was about to say is there's always a list that people go, God damn it, add it to the list. This one's going down just like that and that and that. And then at some point, their own little list now too. Yeah. And I saw one where someone went like, God damn it, this is now dead. We'll probably never see the light of day just like drift stage. And I'm like, what the fuck happened to drift stage? I didn't hear anything about that. Right. So then you're just like, wait, what am I going and then you're probably checking on drift stage. Yeah. You know, and then I'm like, I have my drift stage t-shirt. I love it. I really

do that record behind me is great. So I'm like, well, I didn't hear anything about what. And then you know, you're just kind of like now on this fucking thing of going like, God damn it, man. So Barkley apparently going through Dev hell, I can confirm to all of you. I was talking to Wolf yesterday or John, whichever. And he was like, when's I can't do an Irish accent. It's not even remotely. Oh, one's bloodstained coming out. I'm like next week, bro. And he's like, oh, wow. Pip nailed it. The point of whatever you're trying to say was lost blood stains coming out next week. So we can at least it'd be tough to cancel now. Yes, it would be tough to have that go away now. So yeah, it really does suck as you're looking at a case of what is being considered mismanagement.

And funds getting fucking kickstarted as as it happens. And then there was another threat. There's a reason why a lot of people felt way more comfortable kicking in money to kick starters from companies that already existed. Like, you know, a lot of people were disappointed with broken age, but that game did ship. Those pillars games came out. And so meanwhile, the actual Tales of Games Twitter basically is kind of coming out and apologizing and kind of saying, yeah, it's dead. It's really dead. Yeah, that's true. Basically, the the schism is the great the it says, yep, the project's dead. And the great TOG schism is pretty accurate. What have what you've read about it, basically. So it's like, yep, everyone kind of split in

what their own ways, money might have been taken. All right, or at the very least burnt. Now give the money back. That's the question, right? It's like, was the money and then what they basically said is like, the people that backed it are owed at the very least a proof that proof that the game exists, whether that's a demo or every every time the build every time this happens, it gets more and more complex as to whether or not you are paying for a product. Kickstarter says you totally have the right to sue people to not if they did not deliver the promised goods after taking your money, that you can totally sue them. And the Kickstarter TOS does not indemnify people from you demanding your money back. Someone shot out

some stats and said of the 10% that fail, 13% get a refund. Yeah. So most of the time they fail because they ran out of money. Yeah. So there's no money to give back to you. You're not you're exactly right. So that leads me to believe that it's like, okay, I feel I feel like a compromise perhaps is release everything you've worked on. I have a different compromise for you. What's that? The stocks. As in like put them in the stock in the middle of town, you don't mean the stock market. No, I mean put them in a stock or a pillory in the middle of town. So the towns people may boo them. Fresh to mates fresh to mates provided.

It would make people way more excited to donate to Kickstarter. Someone says go song is 90% done updated in March. Good to know. Good. Still waiting on it. So this sucks for a number of reasons. And I'm going to take my my connects. Oh, sorry. Can I guess the number one? What's that? Because apparently that live action create a character moment at Pax was one of the wildest most fun things ever. Yeah. And that character sheet is now a collector's item. Yeah, the character sheet I have. Unfortunately, they were using like receipt paper. By the time I got home, it was a blank piece of Jesus Christ. So you don't even have that. Yeah, it became just a updated. Well, now it's a memory. Yeah. But the number one thing that I'm going to take my

shit ass consumer hat off for a second, for some compassion for good developers. And that is, let's take ghost song, for example. Let's assume that that is the truth that they have been diligently working on ghost song for many years now. This stuff, despite having literally nothing to do with ghost song at all, made you think that ghost song had been canceled or in trouble somewhere. Right. Just because it took a while. Yep. Through no fault of those guys is own. Yep. Kick kick kick starters are tethered. Emotion other kick starters emotionally. Yeah. Because your commitments remind you of your other commitments and that sucks. Yes. Yes. You are attached. If you put out a kick starter, you are attached to the successes

and failures of all kick of all kick starters. Hat in time comes out. Hey, good for you. Yeah. Pillars comes out and it's pretty good, but it's not the best. Yeah, great. This shit happens. People start to doubt whether or not your game is going to come out at all. I would probably say that Patreon is similar. Yeah, right. Where when patriots start to not deliver on their weak, their promises or whatever puts out a video and you're like, this video is even worse than the last one, you're even less likely to donate to Clamps. And you want to go check up on your rewards for like anybody that you've signed up for. So yeah, there should check out I patch Wolves and Mr. Clamps's patrons. They're both fantastic content creators. I just like to bust

their balls in person live now. So but the idea is definitely that there is there's an emotional tether there. Yeah. And it reminds you of the other things. And I don't know how about you. I haven't been back to look at my backed projects list in a very long time. I went back and looked at that and saw games. I forgot existed. They are dead. They are so dead. I feel like there's nothing waiting for that waiting back there, but sadness and I backed underworld ascendancy. There's nothing but sadness and sorrow back there. Yeah. Right? Or or oh man, shovel nights on there and blood stains, you know, and you like, you know, the ones that came out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shall we? Shall we? Shall we? Shall I hurt myself live on stream?

Just make sure there's no payment details. I'm certainly making sure there's no payment details available there. Let's see if I get let's see. Let me let me let me hurt myself live on stream. I backed a lot of kick starters. Yeah, me too. Me too. You know what, maybe I have at least three dead ones. You probably just log in to kick start on your phone. Well, I can just look at it without dragging it up to the screen. Okay, God, let me see if I can log in to mine and do this as well. Yeah. Okay. Bushiden. Bushiden, the ninja action platformer. The good life. Fight night. Fight night still coming along. Narita boy. Kingdom death monster. Code hardcore. Uh, Nello. Battle chasers night. Nello and battle chasers. Those happened. Those happened. Yeah.

Those happened. I can confirm. I can confirm that fight night is still being being being made. Yeah, I remember playing a build with it on the channel. Um, yeah, saved. Okay, backed projects. Here we go. Here we go. Here are my current back projects. Let's take a look at this. Oh, fire tetris at burning man. Yeah, that happened. Oh my God. I just checked out the good life pledge. Yeah, it was in yen, but I didn't realize it was in yen. Like I gave how much money? Oh, like $30. Yeah, 33,000 yen. Yeah. Okay, let's see. Good life. Yeah. Continuing on as normal. Divinity original sin two that came out. And then again, battle chasers. Um, I never followed up with Richie Branson on that goddamn album. Uh, ukulele should probably

contact Richie. Yeah, about from underground to the stars. He's around ukulele combat core power drive 2000 bloodstained slain. Shenmue. Well, who knows at this point, bloodstained underworld ascendant. I don't know what's going on with that. The Miskatonic strength of the sword ultimate project scissors came out children of morta. I've never heard of most of these fucking games. You strafe. I played a trade for packs and it was really it was good. Uh, shadow wrong. Hong Kong came out and I fucking star maser star maser. Oh, thimbleweed park drift stage crossing souls. Oh, canon busters the animated series. The last drift stage update was on April 9th of two 2018. The air umbrella. It is an umbrella that blows the

wind out of your way. Shut up, dude, by using air to push the water away. On song story, totally fucking dead kingdom come that came out. Urbants. Hyperlight Trifter came out under the dog. The anime mighty number nine and heart and slash ghost song mighty number nine came out project shovel night project Phoenix is dead as could ever be shovel night came out torment came out project attorney came out shadow run returns came out and wasteland two came out. Yeah. And then there are four that I pledged and then failed or rescinded my pledge. I had pledged a higher amount to the unsung story before going what am I doing and pledging going back to pledge like 20. Yeah. I pledged 10 bucks to dive kick, which got canceled. Yep. I pledged 30 bucks to cradle,

which look cool, but got canceled. And I put in an order for the ouya and then later that day went what the fuck am I doing? Yeah, and canceled it. Yeah. So I seem to have had a slightly better track record than you have. I go song is the second thing I ever backed, right? It's way first thing is shovel night. Second thing is go song. So that has been around since 2014, dude. 2014 is that fucking date on that. And then in the unsuccessful column. Yeah, we're going down the list here. We got the unholy night SNES fighting game, which was unsuccessful. We got blubber busters, a sci-fi combat platformer got canceled. Don't even remember what that was. Some of these are going to be exposed. Yeah, right. Well, all that porno shit.

I'm some that I'm back. No, worse, worse, red ash. You back red ash really. I think I think when I think did we still believe around the time? Oh, no, that was very after the belief was was it? Yes. Because that was like the biggest, big sign of like, what the fuck are you doing? My number nine isn't out yet. That was the rant that I did was what are you doing having another Kickstarter before the first Kickstarter? There was debt. I don't remember. I know. Sorry. I know what you're talking about. And I remember I was going like, what the fuck are you doing? Is this like another version of that? Did I actually because I remember being like, what the fuck are you doing? Why is this on this list? Was there one for the anime and then one for the

game later or something like that? Does that make any sense? Yeah, there was. And the one that we were talking about was the initial one. And then later there was something. I yeah, I think that's what it was. I think there was two. And then there was the anime and then the game and then we went what the fuck by the time that second one came around. I think that's how that went. Oh, the subverse Kickstarter period is over. Shenmue three, they hit 1.7 million out of 100,000 override, tetropolis pocket rumble, project awakened. And of course, mighty number nine. Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah, this list is going. This list is fucking going. And you know what's funny? At the top of that,

there's a Kickstarter 10 year anniversary thing floating around like 10 long fucking awesome years. So I'll have to say that Kickstarter kind of panned out exactly as it was reasonable to expect. There was a bunch of good stuff, some real gems and some scams or some tragedies. Let's say it was scams, scams, jities. Yeah, but it's like a d 20. It was the best of times. It was the worst of 10. One to 10 are like fail. Yeah, like 11 to 15 are fine. And like 16 to 20 are you're going to get something you might not like what you get, but you're getting it. You're going to get it unless the sun stops you. That's a 20. That's a 20. That's a d 20. That's a net. That's a wouldn't that be a one? That'd be a critical miss. No, that's a that's nailing

it harder than ever. 20 nailing it hard comes down from the heavens. Tell you not to release your Kickstarter product. The gaseous ball in the sky is stopping you from making this game. All right. Anyway, Barclay two is dead. It's fucking dead. And so is a bunch of other Kickstarter should apparently and if we keep on living the way we're living our egregious lives soon sports games will be dead too because we're killing them. So I retweeted this article earlier yesterday, making fun of it as many did. And there were a couple people that were like a level of rage that would associate with baby kicking. I heard name calling was and I was called the name that is not applicable, but hilarious to be called. Oh, is it applicable to me? Sure is, but not to

you, though, not to me. Okay. And when you use it against me, I'm like, wow, that's your go to, isn't it? That's that's what that's when it's just somebody's go to for bad feelings. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, which says something about them. Yeah, they're probably not enjoying life. Um, so polygon.com put up a opinion piece that I will summarize. I thought it was polygon. Yeah, sure. I'll summarize thusly. Mm, EA's cock tastes so good in my mouth. Now now. Sorry. Mm, the shoe polish off EA's boot tastes real good in my mouth. Well, it's a little bit more family friendly, a little bit. This is this is so outrageous. It looks like it was paid for. This is the kind of shit you see show up in magazines where the fucking tobacco companies

pay a doctor to say that smoking is good for you. Like it is so ridiculous to be more specific. It basically describes, listen, if you ban loot boxes with the proposed American legislation, then kids won't be able to waste all their parents' monies on sports games. And that's going to kill sports games, because where else does sports games get the money to pay for these really expensive licenses? But Pat, before you say that, you might not be considering the following. What's that? These expensive pay to win modes. And when they're with their loot boxes, if they don't directly pay for the games we enjoy, they at least justify the workforce and development costs that make them worth playing.

But they don't. But that's what this article says. But that's never been true. And that's what I'm quoting right here. In fact, it's been found and reported on by a number of sources, but I found out about it from one of Jim's videos. Hey, you know, EA and Activision and these companies, the ones that put out the sports games, they don't actually pay any taxes at all. And they fire their staff to hit profit numbers. And I was also contacted by a lot of people who are Madden and FIFA fans, describing that there are features that are still missing from those games from the fucking PS2 games that were never re implemented alongside the new engine that was made for the 360. And the fact that sports games are the all time best selling games ever, ever.

But hold on. Now, now, what about the fact that take two paid $1.1 billion to the NBA for a seven year guarantee on their exclusive license? How are they supposed to make that money back on the deal they made? Those games sell a million copies in a day. $1.1 billion is a lot of money, though. And it's a seven year it's they have seven years to make it. Now, listen, I get it, right? You're just thinking, what's the wrong with making a sports game that doesn't have that stuff? Well, it's expensive. It is. You got to make players faces look super detailed. Then that's really expensive. Well, no one has to pay rights for, you know, shoes and licensing and no one has to that story modes. Right. You got it. The story mode and NBA games

are really high production. It is something that sports fans who have been playing over the years have come. It's like quality of life. They've come accustomed to the quality of life of a very expensive looking game with a lot of money in it that has by to win or pay to win features. They pay $1.1 billion for a seven year monopoly on the most popular genre in the world. Now, the idea that you can't make money off of that means that you don't deserve to be in business. It's very similar to the argument of the Star, remember Star Wars Battlefront, they're like, well, we need to put the loot boxes into, you know, because the Star Wars license, it's like, oh, you're telling me that you're unable to make a Star Wars game that will sell enough money

with the exclusive Star Wars license. I guess you guys are incompetent, Fox, huh? Are you suggesting we go back to the days of teams like Chicago just being represented by red and black? No, I'm not actually. And that just says Chicago on it with no actual logo? I vividly remember that was NHL, NHL PA 93 Madden 64. It was called PA 93 because it was the players association license they got instead of the real license. Exactly. All the players, but none of the teams. Exactly. NHL PA 93, 94, 95, 96 are the best hockey games ever made. There was a time. Still, there was a time when Madden didn't have that NFL license, but quarterback club did. And those games weren't as good. NBA and Madden just had to

fucking put the put the colors next to the city names. NBA Street volume two is the best basketball game ever made and has shit. Nothing to do with the NBA. Okay, but Pat, you're not a sports fan. You don't care about these rosters, right? Someone who cares about these rosters wants to make sure that these games can continue to afford. See, you know what? Exorbitant prices to keep these licenses exclusive so that my simulated sports season, but can go off the way I wanted to. Fine. I need a source of income. Hey, listen, if loot boxes aren't going to pay for it, then what? Well, listen, here's the thing. So let's be really clear. There is one thing that EA and all those guys are not at fault at, which is the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, they were the ones

who said we're sick of licensing out to all these different developers. Somebody bid, right? Similar to the way wrestling games are done, right? So EA had the biggest pockets, so they got the fucking thing. Everything except for baseball, which I think Sony got, right? I'll get into that in a second, right? So yes, let's take NBA because you mentioned it's a $1.7 billion. 1.1 1.1 1.1 years. Let's take NBA, whatever. Let's assume it. You know what? Let's say the fucking NFL thing is $2 billion, right? Madden sells for 60 bucks, right? Sure. Just 70. Well, I mean, to our American audience. Sorry. Yes. Yes. Correct. So let's say 60. Madden sold 790,000 copies last year within like five days of release. So let's round that up to 800,000, right? 800,000. All right. So that's

$48 million in the first week, plus, right? Sorry, minus shipping costs. It's a big dev team. Lot of salaries to pay. Let's cut it in half. Lot of salaries to pay. Let's say, but what about our higher ups? Let's just, they deserve the bonuses. Let's say they only made $25 million in the first week for a game they literally sell all year and sells all year and the same people are going to be those repeat customers the following year. It almost feels like that license is worth it for the monopoly. And we know they actually don't pay the dev team all that much because if they did, the games would actually improve. I don't think anyone is happy with the state of sports games. Everyone that I know that loves sports who will play an NHL game or if Madden

constantly complains that the games are literally getting worse every year because nothing ever changes, but the whole other rest of the industry changes and they become more loot boxy. They become more FIFA ultimate team. They become whatever. And the idea that you can't make money on a sports game, like I'll be blunt. Do you know the only argument that I could even believe for a second is that you can't make money on sports games unless you do all this loot box shit because license is so expensive is because you have made sports games so terrible that only people that are already weighing the sports will play them. I'm not into football. I'm not in the hockey. I'm not in the basketball. I used to buy and play those games every year because they were

fucking awesome. But no, I don't do that anymore because they're terrible. Hey, listen, Diamond Dynasty, the pay to win mode in MLB the show is like it exists and you might feel how you feel about it. But MLB the show is the last full service baseball title period. There are no competitors. If you want your baseball, you're going to be buying MLB the show and that's all there is to it as far as a full service title goes. Yeah. Can I suggest a compromise because I'm a man of compromise? Oh, yes, fine. All right. I'm going to be pointed out. I'm getting real heated. It's not at you. It's at the character you are portraying. I'm a man of compromise. I like to come to the table. I like to bring things to the table. I don't come to the table empty handed.

That's insulting. I hate that you are just emulating people you have met. Here's what we do. All right. So take your loot box and everything that comes in it. Right. You don't want it in the game. How about this? Fuck you. It stays in the game. All right. But you got me. You really did get me there. But we call it the CEO bonus box. Fuck off. And if you buy it, you know exactly where the money is going. How about that? You still get the goods. You still get all the stat. You still get everything that helps you win. You still get everything that makes you feel great. You still get all the rewards that you were going to get out of that loot box, but it's the CEO bonus box. And now you know exactly where the money is going.

Sports games have like, this is going to be a broad statement, but sports games. Meet me halfway buddy. Sports games have been straight up ruined by capitalism. I don't usually say that the capitalism is a boogeyman because capitalism is the increase of wealth and it's been a pretty good system for us so far, I think. But like the actual issues with long term greedy capitalism have ruined the sports game genre. They have destroyed it. The box has a picture of the CEO on it smiling. And every time you purchase one, you hear a little chitching and then a little bit of shaking animation honest. It would at least be more honest. You get it. You get a good hearty like like laugh and or a thanks son as you put the money in the bonus box. I feel and then it shakes

and then it pops open and all the rewards come out. So I'm let's who wrote this? What's the what's this guy's name? This is polygon dot com. Okay, the writer. I don't know the writer's name. Oh, and it's good. Okay, Owen. I'm going to give Owen the benefit of the doubt morally and assume that he was not actually paid to write this or that he is attempting to sidle up for a cushy job in EAPR in a few years once he leaves Polygon, which is fairly common. I'm just going to assume that he's a fucking dumb ass. All right, I'm going to say I was going to say that yeah, like quite like you read through that and it doesn't sound like that someone who's got necessarily an ulterior motive as much as it sounds like somebody who's a dumb ass who's saying,

like it or hate it, this is the state of sports games and and the and it is these legislations are killing them. The overall thing of please think of the sports games. And I am very happy to see that whatever Owen's intention writing this article is to provide a counterpoint against this kind of thing to protect sports games, it is having a bombastic opposite effect in that the overwhelming majority of sentiment has read this and gone, oh gross box sports games. The interesting actual takes I find are in the defense. There are certain appeals to, I guess, different like ideologies that come into place. So it talks about how the the bills that we're discussing have carve outs for things that we

widely accept like MMO subscription fees, premium cosmetics provided they aren't awarded at in a random loot box, I guess, is what he wrote quote unquote. And it even protects things like charging for extra difficulty modes. Right. So I don't know. I like that's the one I was like, has that ever happened in a game that I think I think of? I don't know. Not right. But it points those out. And then it says like it has these protections. But the problem is, is that this loot box thing is just it just seems so like prejudiced against the idea of these loot boxes. But really, if you look at the people making these, the legislation, they're actually complaining about their kids using their credit cards. So it seems like the real issue is just that they

don't want their kids using credit card, their credit card, but that doesn't just that that don't allow that to distract from the fact that this is essentially a way that these companies have found to point unrestricted gambling at children. Like on like completely unregulated gambling. And you know what, fuck it, I'll throw myself under the bus, not even children. When I went on a fucking Overwatch and heroes of the storm fucking $500 $600 fucking loot box tirade, I felt high on crack. Not actual crack, but I felt and I look back on that and go, you know what, maybe I shouldn't gamble. Luckily, gambling is somewhat regulated. And I as a baby pat would not have been given a chance to interact with loot box systems and think that they were fucking normal.

So it brings up those things I mentioned and like, yeah, there's that. And then there's a sentence that drops in there where it says, I'd be interested to know how Ron Paul, for example, feels about this regulation of a free market. And I fucking roll my eyes out of my head. Because it's like, okay, like now we're getting into the invisible hand, like guide the market. And now we're getting into just the idea of like, I understand you don't want your loot boxes on the kids. But do you really want the government stepping in and controlling a free market? Is this actually the world you want to support? Well, I have bad news for the writer of this article because as a Canadian, the answer is,

yeah, I do. It works out okay up here. The free market does stupid shit sometimes. It helps to have people go, maybe don't do that. Maybe. Well, stay in your goddamn Kami Canada state will do. It's this it's it feels like an appeal to religion. Like the invisible hand feels like the invisible hand of the market will provide all feels like like a religious doctrine. And it's like, just don't let the kids gamble. It's not even that's the it's like, it's not even about the debate of whether you trust in the markets or you don't, right? If you are a libertarian and you believe that like taxation is theft, you know, and that like the markets can control themselves, we don't

need to regulate them and so on. That's fine. And then there's a place and a time and a literal forum for that discussion to happen in a sophisticated manner. This is not that. This is a video game article talking about my poor sports games might get damaged by the gambling children by the being being blocked from the being like when you want to. So this is the stretch is so absurd. So I want to point out something that people all of you were listening to a video game podcast. We talk about movies, talk about an AMA, we talk about our weeks. This video game podcast talking about video games here, right? There's a lot of people out there that when you talk about video games, I want to grab them by the shoulder and be like,

listen, bro, my profession, hobby and general interests are pretty all along video games. I have kind of devoted my life to this hobby. Does that make me a huge dork? Absolutely. But I want to take you by the shoulder, hypothetical person, shake you a little and go, it's fucking video games, bro. It doesn't matter. It's not important. If sports games die as a result of a legislation that keeps kids from becoming gambling addicts or wasting all their parents money. Oh, fucking well. Oh, no. Boo hoo. Bro, I put my fantasy season together already and my boys are already putting money in the pool pot. He's shutting down my fun, bro. He's shutting down my fun. You know what this made me laugh

really hard about? And I'm sure our American audience is going to get a real kick out of this of how weird it is. We legalized the weed here in Canada very recently. And since the week of legalizing the weed, every time I go to theater, there are anti vaping ads. Yeah. Which is the funniest thing in the world. Sorry, you just say and let it die trademark, bro. Is that what you're saying? Just let it die. Because quite frankly, here's the fun. The funny part about that is so you take that extreme stance on it, right? You're just like, who cares? You're stopping kids from gambling, right? Sure. I hear that. Again, I bring things to the table this time for real. Okay. And I say, if you are concerned about the removal of loot boxes, potentially hurting

your games top or bottom dollar, sure, so much that they can't afford to keep making them, then perhaps your game should join the likes of MMOs and become a subscription service so that those who care can keep paying for them to keep them afloat. You know what? Fine. I think everyone would be cool with that. Perhaps if you care that much, you can find another way to tap into the resource of the money you need to bilk from your crowd without putting children in the crossfire. I have a new one. Maybe. And granted, we are now. But that's just me. We are proper in our 30s that we are talking about our hobby of choice and actually no joke for real going think of the children. But let me take another stance on this. If you can't make a product

for a correct amount of money and sell that product for a profit without inserting gambling into it, you don't deserve to be in business because it means you're not good at business. Gambling is just free money. If you run a gambling service, it's just free money. People will just literally just give you money. So it's a good way to make money, an easy way to make money. But it also screws people up and like screws their lives up, which is why it's regulated in almost everywhere that anyone listening to this lives. I would even go as far as to say that gambling is a regulated vice in the same way that we have tons of regulated vices. Alcohol, smoking, whatever. Smoking. Yep. Smoking. Yep.

You know, and depending on where you live and or if you're a fucking Puritan or not, like sex work. Yeah. Right. It's all up in the air and you can you can classify it as you would. But the idea of like, okay, therefore, there should be no casinos ever is like, no, that's extreme. I wouldn't even say there needs to be no loot boxes ever. But I do actually believe that if you do have loot boxes in your game, you should probably have some kind of check to make sure that like miners aren't able to do it. Also, my crusade against loot boxes now comes from a place of like, I blew like $1300 on loot boxes only to realize that they fucked up the games that I like. They are a corrosive and damaging influence on things that used to be better

without them. Sports games used to be really good and they started getting shitty way before loot boxes happen. But it sure didn't help. And what about the argument that the parental check should serve as the thing that keeps the kids away from the gambling and keeping them away from your credit card should serve as the thing that stops them from being able to get that didn't work for the fucking porn companies, I suppose it didn't. It didn't work for the real gambling websites. Hey, hey, hey, hey, see those age gates. Those are suggestions. No, did you ever have you ever hit an age gate and went, damn it. I guess I'm too young. I'm guessing I'm going to close this one. What are you talking about? Oh, yeah, okay, I've now I would never ever

can't watch that trailer can't look at it. I am too young. Luckily enough, despite looking how I do, I've actually always been 140 years old. Good thing I was born in 1901. 1905, January 1st. Yeah, you know, it's crazy. Oh, and you know what, let's let's roll it back even further. This is an intellectually dishonest argument that that looks at the current culture of crunch and you and possible unionization and developer workplace abuse and goes think of the poor developers who might go hungry because you banned little Jimmy's loot box, which is disgusting. It's as a as a portrayal. It's just it's the byline that makes me laugh, because the article is called anti loot box bill poses a real threat to sports video games. No, it doesn't actually.

And the byline is how well sir those billion dollar licenses paid. So with the profits of the game, and possibly the lack of bonus. Anyway, so you say that you get you I I pull it back and I just say Owen, come on, it's come on. I don't know, I find it vile. I think it's taking advantage of real problems to pad the bottoms of rich dudes. Could be or you know, so I'm going to give Owen the benefit of the doubt. I don't think he was paid. And I don't think he's trying to set up a cushy job and PR was there. He's a fucking idiot. I think he's a fucking stupid moron. Was there a thought that at some point, the discussion of this topic, despite being a hot take and controversial, might inspire some people to click and read to see what's going on over here.

Mayhaps, mayhaps sometimes a person says, I'm not writing clickbait, but I have an opinion and it's an unpopular one. So I'm just going to put this out there and see what happens. That's right. You've just described the thought process of a dumb ass. Is it intellectually dishonest? This one is yes. Absolutely. This is only Owen can answer. You know what? Either Owen's a dumb ass and intellectually dishonest or this motherfucker is the dumbest idiot to ever be a dumb idiot. And he's being intellectually honest. You get to pick one of these two, right? Because like in this article's world, the fact that like EA fires people to make profit margins and the people at the top are making like 100,

200, 300 times the average developer and have all their golden parachutes is not a factor that enters in. So either he doesn't actually even know that, which I find hard to believe or he's being intellectually dishonest. You know, like there's only so dumb you can expect people to be. I get that. And here, look, woolly, not everything deserves the benefit of the doubt. If someone's advocating for harmful things, just call them a dumb ass and move on. That's fair. I hear that, but I'm not. I'm the kind of, I operate in a way where I like to assume that you like to assume the best of people. I like to assume the best of people or at the very least that like, I believe the term is mistake theory, right? That there's a

possibility that it's not that you're sinister. There's a possibility that it's not that, because there is sinister out there, but in many opportunities, a lot of the time it's actually that you are convinced that this makes sense or is the right thing. And there's a mistake we can identify. That's why I want to be very careful and make sure that everybody knows exactly what I'm saying. I am not saying this O1 fellow is a bad person. Right. I'm saying he's a dumb ass. Because if he is in fact actually of this belief, he's an idiot. And that idiocy might hurt people, but maybe that's not his fault, but it doesn't make him not an idiot. There is a difference though in how you ultimately treat people once you're able

to determine whether or not you're looking at stupidity or malice. Yeah, malice. You got to do whatever you got to do with whatever the fucking situation is. Now we got to get rid of the cancer. We got to operate and remove it. Idiocy, you can either deal with a single, hey, that person's dumb or ignorance. Just ignore them. But yes, so I feel bad for the what I'm going to assume are people at Polygon who are not dumbasses who share the page with people like this. Because like when I see a story from Polygon, I usually kind of chuckle because of shit like this. Though I'm sure there's always at every one of these like trash rags, there's always people that do good work. But they get it's like the Kickstarter thing. You all you all sink and swim together. Right.

Right. That article went through an editor, Willie. It did. Wow. I'm missing this. I'm missing it. Nothing hits the front page without an editor taking a look at it and says that's good to go. Yeah, it's it's it's it's it but it's an opinion piece. So what's the editor going to do? Say your opinion shit. Yeah, no, that's no, your editor, your editor in chief's job is to say this article is shit and it reflects badly upon the publication. That is their number one job. As opposed to this part of the article doesn't add up, you're missing facts here. Yes, because an error. So here's the thing. Source this. So here's the thing. That is a poorly written article in which the editor in chief's job is absolutely to go.

Your article is actually poorly made is more as a moral judgment, usually as a part of the job description as well depends on the content. It depends. I would assume it wasn't it. I could be. I definitely don't know. It depends on the paper. It depends on the format. It depends on the nature of the publication. National Enquirer doesn't give a shit. Yeah. New York Times probably gives a little bit of a fuck that they're not advocating certain things or they they adhere to certain values, right? This polygon is supposed to be a consumer facing video game website. Right. It is not like you're reading fucking business weekly or some shit. Right. This is supposed to be for you and me and everyone listening to here. So it should

be advocating the values that those people likely share and I'll be on their team, so to speak. I guess I always thought of it as like if it's if it's not a report on a news item, but it's an opinion piece. Yeah, I tend to usually give it just carte blanche like whatever. No, not even the carte blanche because there's definitely things like if someone comes out and says, yo, let's start kicking babies. Yeah. Everybody rally together. We're meeting up here at this time. Go through the quad streaking and then we're going to kick some babies, right? Then it's like, okay, your editor. Yeah. Right. No, I don't know. Yeah, take that down. We're not publishing that. But like my the description I've always heard has always sounded like the editor

besides making. Yes, one there are like people go, oh, glorified spell checker. It's like, yeah, that's a joke. But yeah, no, they read through it. They like actually structurally make sure that what you're saying is backed up, makes sense and references itself in the right ways. But then also they act as a sounding board for the ideas and bounce back something that might not be a clear thought. But they might not necessarily go, my opinion is not your opinion therefore. Let me play, let me play pretend editor here. Yeah. Okay. Well, we're going to assume you wrote this article. Well, who is this article for? This is for people that are not sports fans looking at this legislation as a good thing, not understanding that it's going to hurt

sports games for sports fans. Okay. So the but what about sports fans? How do you think they're going to feel about it? I think they continue to buy the games because they already understand that this is part of the transaction that keeps these games going. They might not have thought about or considered this on a deeper level. But the money that funds these loot boxes are the money that goes into these loot boxes is going back into these games that are very expensive. Do you not worry that this looks like a blatant appeal to corporate apology and that even though things are bad, we should just let them stay bad? Well, it depends on whether you think they're bad or not because if you happen to be of the opinion that. All right, Owen, you're being a dumbass,

answer my questions or just get in the poll. See, this is how it should have gone. Like quit dancing around the bullshit. Hey, tell you what, though, that's a really interesting experiment because it is very beneficial in a lot of arguments cases. Yeah, to literally argue on this pretend argue on behalf of the person who is whose opinion you don't understand in order to free the work down. One, you're really good at this. Yeah. Two, I doubt he is. And I doubt his editor gave a shit. And especially polygon as a website has been mired in this crap since the day they showed up. It has been. And like day of and like in this entire discussion, I've like, I didn't even want to bring up the part where it's like, yeah, but

we're on polygon because it's like, let's like, because that's a whole other aspect. Right. But if I'm the editor who's hitting this, yeah, it is of actual importance that I take how it makes the paper. I'm using work paper, but how it looks, it makes it look because polygon is for anybody who doesn't know polygon was supposed to be we're going to fix games journalism. It's going to be a new thing. And they got a grant or some shit. It was I think was like 20 grand or 30 grand. And Microsoft did this big video series on them about polygon is going to be the next wave of the future. And right away, questions about their bias started to show up because it appeared that a lot of people on staff really like their X boxes and possibly didn't like their playstations,

in particular, Arthur Geese, if you remember that guy. And the comment that came back out was, of course, just because Microsoft gave us all that money, do you really think that would affect how we cover things or that we're, you know, they're paying us to do it? And the answer is, yeah, most people are friendly with people that give them tens of thousands of dollars. That's a pretty favorable impression. And they've never gotten out from under that. The factor of like once we start talking about the grander thing, which is the website itself, now the discussion is forced to be reframed because you're bringing in a history of if you want to call it unpopular opinion article pieces, you can say that. If you want to call it

clickbait, you can say that, but multiple examples of what the fuck are you doing over the years? I think the most frustrating thing about when that was going down is that there were a couple people that were interviewed and they acted fairly indignant. It was like, do you really think that $20, $100,000 would change my artistic integrity? And I find that I find that type of question offensive because you're asking a question that you know the person is in their heart going to say yes, but it's impolite to say yes, because that's an accusation. So you're putting it out there in a way so that they can't answer it because that would be rude, right? But yeah, I do think if you got $100,000 and your whole website was funded by a company,

you'd be thankful to that company. Do I think that you got emails down from Microsoft going, hey, make sure to give the hit? No, that's fucking ridiculous. Nothing works like that. But are you thankful? Fucking duh. And you remember Arthur Gees with that SimCity shit? If you want to talk about EA specifically or Arthur Gees when the SimCity always online stuff, you remember that, I assume. And he was like, fuck off. None of you know what you're talking about. The game has to be online because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the guy just went, yeah, I turned it offline. I just flipped like three values in the code. And Arthur stopped arguing that point. You ever hear about pharmaceutical companies having

conferences for doctors? I have. You ever hear about the treatment the doctors get when they come out to just hang out and hear a little bit more about the medication? They might not be up to date on. Yeah. And the like five course meals and glorious and they're held at resorts. Rooftop fucking just rooftop resorts and yeah, all of it. Ultimately, just to sort of keep you up to date and informed on how the product is going listen and at no point ever are they ever going to recommend that you prescribe this medication more frequently or for anything that it wouldn't be right to prescribe it cannot be overstated. It's an endorsement, but it can be overstated how most people think bribery works and how influence actually works.

A bribe is if I were to say, hey, woolly, I want you to talk about how much you love this hamburger and I gave you 50 bucks and then I told you not to tell anyone, right? That's a bribe. An endorsement would be, hey, woolly, I'm going to give you 50 bucks and you're going to tell people how much you love this burger. And then you're going to tell everyone that I gave you 50 bucks, right? But influence is what you're describing. Nobody at a pharmaceutical company or EA or Sony or whoever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever called up somebody and said that halo review better be nine out of 10, right? They might call them up afterwards to complain, but that's usually people getting fucking pissed. Usually it's like, hey, or tweeting about it,

saying, why'd you fuck us? Yeah, why'd you fuck us? That happens and that's people getting possessive and mad. And you know what? I understand that even. But you know what is what it really is about? Microsoft holds Forza events. Do you know what these Forza events are? You're going to go to Germany or you're going to go to Monaco. All expenses paid. You're going to play the Forza for an hour or two. And then let's go race some race cars. Pretty good weekend, huh? And there's two parts of that. One, yeah, I had a great time and Forza is pretty great too. And two is boy, I should would like to go to the next Forza event. I hope they still like me next year. Right? It's like, that's how it works. And how do you call someone's integrity into question

at that point? You want and you know, it's been a thing for the game business forever. Some people doesn't affect them. Other people absolutely colors all of their expectations. And most people are somewhere in the middle in which they're aware that it does color their expectations and they may try and adjust for that. But it's hard. It's actually it's not hard. It's an undetectable subtlety. Yeah. And it's and it's within you to do because whether or not you do it or not. And on top of that, the way games are played for game industry purposes, warps people's perceptions of those games. When you are blowing through a game pre release ahead of everyone else, of course, and you're doing it in like two days, and you're doing nothing but with a PDF

next to you telling you how to how to dodge all what what the critical path choices. If you don't do this in Sekiro, right? It's going to inflate your opinion by its very nature. And then you see the consumer version of this, the consumer version of this is the honeymoon period, where a game comes out and everybody loves it. And then a month goes by and everyone realizes it was shit. Do you saw people go into bat for fucking anthem, man, which I think is on this news stocking again. Yep, you saw people going about forever. And you're just a hater. You just hate EA and you're taking it out and have them look like it's so literally, literally in the article for the the fuck EA children and their and their complex arguments. Yeah, if you think

this kind of behavior is limited to the people in the games business, you're crazy because everybody knew their pal who was so hyped for something. And then it came out and it was shit. But he was still so hyped that they tell you all the time how great it is. But hey, man, Game of Thrones writing is hard. And then one day you wake up bottled spill like still in hand crossed on the mouth. And before you know it, you're defending loot boxes and you look in the mirror and you don't even have enough recognition of what you see to understand the action that you're you're in the middle to understand what you're defending. Yeah, you don't even you don't even realize that you're defending loot boxes. You don't you don't like that term doesn't quite

do you want loot boxes in the game? No, of course not. Then why are you defending it? Like you you might at some point have a distant voice in your memory of what video games were before loot boxes exist existed by existed, right? You might be someone who I don't know, maybe you're really young and like loot boxes have always they've always they've always been there and like the games without them are just like all those relics of the past like black exploitation movies. Yeah, you know, you just but but at what point, you know, at what point do you I am I did I just write an article defending like hoodwinking kids out of and non cosmetic, you know, actual game influencing items. So we've come all the way back to it and there's part of

this that we absolutely need to make clear. Willie and I may have sounded but think of the children Ms. Revlin lovejoy today about protecting the kids from gambling, which might sound a little moral panicky about protecting kids from video games. There is a reason for that. And the reason for that is because this article specifically calls out that the developer he is interviewing says that the children through loot boxes control these games futures and economies. And what are we going to do if the children stop buying loot boxes? So they the the article that is the end of the end of the article. Go look at the end. Yeah, he says what you know, they're the ones who control the industry and I'm not talking about the bosses. Yeah,

there's a parent who had his kid that spent a bunch of money on virtual crap and trying to be a good dad. But it was a game that the he himself made he was a developer. Yeah. And he was trying to be a good parent and also trying to do a good job knowing how much it depended on the bean counters happiness and the bottom line that NBA 2k generated. And he was basically deciding between his kids spending the money on the gambling and his job and his job and his game being successful. And then the quote was given that they control the money and they spend a lot of it. You think we can change the medium? They didn't meet his bosses. They meant the kids. So that's so it is the context. The context is this defense of loot boxes is explicitly the right to have

children gamble. Children gamble money that even the developers of the game itself are going, I don't know, this feels gross. And this is a defense of this as a status quo because my football, it's almost as if the reason stands strong enough to simply say because loot boxes suck it or gross and shouldn't somehow isn't good enough anymore. So introducing the child aspect somehow reinforces the point and doubles it down. Yes, but actually it does the opposite. It's like, no, we need to let the children engage in the gross behavior so that I don't even know what this is going on. This thing is warped. Did you not read to the end of your so that so that Tom Brady is there and I see his face and I see his logo and I feel good about

drafting him to my team. It's what I like. If that kid makes it so that that family can't eat because they gave him a credit card and the game tricked him into you know what the best one was? You know that Harry Potter game that would strangle Ronald Weasley until you fucking paid like $1.50? I forget about that. You forgot huh? I don't remember. I don't remember. There was a mobile game that every scene would have timers on it and there was one where Ronald was getting strangled to death and it would say you have to wait five minutes or pay like a buck 50. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. That is only manipulative to children. Like it is so fucking dark, man. Oh boy. Wow. That was a thing, huh? Well, anyway.

Okay. Once again, we move on. I say I learned a new term during this debacle through my through people tweeting at me, which was wow, you can really smell the boot polish on their breath on this one, which I've never heard that sentence before, but I like it fucking sniveling corporate oh my god. EA is not your friend, guys. In fact, EA doesn't like you. In fact, they probably hate you. But they want to buy the company you do like. Yeah. Well, anyway, just consume product, don't ask questions, then get excited for next product. It's disturbing how applicable that always is. Every time, every single week I could bring that up. To the point that it actually oversimplifies complex arguments that could be made the opposite way. Yeah. But it's always applicable.

Well, anyway, shall we talk about Kotor rumors? Let's talk about Kotor. I like Kotor. Apparently, there's a film reportedly in the works. This has been I've been seeing this like bubble up for about a month, maybe a bit more now. Apparently, the person who worked on Shutter Island, Lacia Calo-Gritis and Battle Angel Alita and Altered Carbon is penning a script for a Kotor movie. Now, where's this going to go? I'll tell you what, that's a pretty good resume. Yeah, it is. I'll tell you right there. Especially for this type of thing. Yeah. God damn, I fucking love Shutter Island. Shutter Island is great, man. I love the concept more than the movie. Yeah, and I like Leo a lot. But that's great. So it helps.

But yeah, so they're talking about a potential Kotor trilogy. It's came from BuzzFeed. But where does it go? Does it go to theaters? I don't think so. Well, I mean, here's the thing. We know that Disney got scared away from the oversaturation of Star Wars in the public eye. Oh my god. We know that everybody freaked out over when Whatchamacallit came out. Solo came out and everyone and then Disney was like, wait, hold on, you don't want more Star Wars? What happened? I'd like this Star Wars. But would you like it in theaters broken up between this and the Game of Thrones writers trilogy coming out? I don't know, man. Kotor is near and dear to a lot of people's hearts. And if you don't get the people that made those games what they are on

staff, then I don't care. I think it's a bit of a pipe dream to think they're going to make a movie based on the Old Republic and go reach the game writers and get them involved because Disney's just like, yo, this is Star Wars. We're going to do our thing. We're going to hand it to you. No one cared about the Old Republic until those games came out. Exactly. And they did a really good job with them. They changed them dramatically, too. There's very little actual overlap between the original Old Republic comics and the Knights of the Old Republic that the games projected. Getting as far away as possible from the current Star Wars timeline to make something interesting is a brilliant idea. It could have worked really well for for Mass Effect Andromeda.

Well, fuck what I was going to say. So yeah, exactly. Yeah, I don't I don't think they're going to go digging up anybody from the Bioware days and handing them a fucking a pass to work on the set. Yeah, but it's you know, together. Do you have this squash games news in there, by the way? No. This is a bit of a tidbit, but it was just brought to my attention. Squanch Games, Justin Roiland's video game studio acquired the trademarks formerly known as Squanch Tendo. Yeah, two radical heights. Oh, a few days ago. Yeah, I did see Fred actually make that box mock up and I didn't know why he made it. But all I can think of is literally just so they can dunk on it somewhere. I laughed super hard and I don't know what

why it exists. Like I'm just not sure. All I can think of is they want to use the name to like officially dunk on it. Like, but is that even like a what precedent is if I ran a fucking game studio and could do it, I do it. That's hilarious. Fucking wild, dude. Okay, well, hey, it's radical heights here with Bliffy Klee. I can't fucking find it. But anyway, yeah, that that's amazing. That's really, really funny. Even I'm sitting here, even though I'm going like, yeah, but like, but why? But I mean, dude, like, here's what I will say. Of Squanch Tendo, aka Squanch Games, I did play that one VR demo game they had of a trover in the universe. Rover saves the universe. That came out, by the way. That shit's fucking hilarious, man. You see the Hard Times article

about it? No, this is Justin Roiland releases new insufferable fan base. Yeah. So that was pretty funny. I feel bad for Justin Roiland. He's working more. He's a great show that I don't want to even admit that I watch anymore. It got undertailed faster than Undertale. Hell yeah, dude. I think it was right around the time that kid was screaming Pickle Rick in the McDonald's. That's the one flopping around. That's the instant. That's where everyone gets up and walks away. Yeah, I got up and walked away from Rick. You walk you walk. I have actually not watched that show since I saw that. That's the moment because I don't want to be associated with him at all. It just it cuts deep and you go, Oh, no. Oh, no. This is this is the club. Is that us? We're here. This is I would

like to get the tattoo removed, please. Yeah. Yeah, that was that was bad. That was bad. That cut deep. That cut deep. It made me really embarrassed. Really embarrassed because there's because a lot of the time when when cringe happens, you appreciate it from some distance cringe is best when it's far away. You know, I mean, hey, I love the parking lot because I have no attachment to the actual content. The parking lot makes me really uncomfortable because I know people that were like way in not that way in, but way in, right? You know, right? And I have no attachment to foam personally. So I'm oh my, I've never made it through. I've never made it. I have no, I have no, I can't do it. I'm not,

I'm not attached to that in any way, shape or form. I get to monies that we don't has and just die and then the YouTube tab closes. I can't. I'm not somebody who has ever been interested in being a ventriloquist. That one like hurts. That's the worst one for you, right? I have that's far away. But like, I remember you describing like, that's the one that gets you the hardest. It's just it's so painful. If you have a heart, you kind of want to cry right now. It's intolerable. If you have a heart, because, because you, you, you know that you know that girl. I do. You know them, you know them inside out. And even though you don't know obviously what it's like to be there, you have had to stand up on a stage at one point in your life and you

know the fear that goes with it. And you just extrapolate in your mind what the emotional state must be. And it's so painful just to look at that it hurts you physically. Yeah. So, and at the point where when this happened, I had not seen any of the references to Szechuan sauce. So I didn't get the jokes because I wasn't that far. Yeah, me too. Didn't get it. All I knew was as far as my brain was concerned, Pickle Rick was that really funny episode where it was all action packed, but actually hilarious because it was massively dark and about him avoiding his actual responsibilities and not wanting to deal with the shit that his family is going through. Yes. And it was a fucking weird commentary that worked out being like, oh my God, yeah. And,

and, and that's all it was in my brain. It was like, oh, that was hilarious. Right. And then you see that video and you just, you have to get up and walk away from the table. There's just nothing left to do here. You leave, you quit, you leave your things behind. Rick and Morty is over. And you changed the discussion from on a big fan of Rick and Morty to yeah, I've watched some Rick and Morty. I think it's really funny. That slight change in language. And if, and if a season comes out, you secretly watch it and never talk about it. And you chuckle to yourself and you hold it in. And that's that. And that's what all of you people watching fate should do. I saw a product for an actual Pickle. Yeah. Wrapped in plastic. Uh-huh.

That was a Pickle, Rick Pickle. I got it. Officially branded. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. All right. Well, every once in a while, real quick, every once in a while, real quick, I let people know that the Woolies brain platform continues development. That's right. It is an ongoing source of content. It is, it is simultaneously a creator of content, but also a receptacle for content. That's right. And you know, every once in a while, surprise, you didn't think this was coming out for the Woolies brain platform. Yeah. But it turns out that not Samurai Showdown, but Darlie Dagger specifically is being released directly to the Woolies brain

platform. So I don't know if you saw when you posted that, hey, by the way, Darlie Dagger has a galactica phantom and she's a punch girl. But you saw the tweet that I wrote to you, which is it is becoming increasingly unbelievable that you have nothing to do with this. This is genuinely really weird now. This is a character that looks like your OC is from your part of the world, has your own fucking name, has the one move from SNK games you won't shut up about. And a great sword and it turns into a drill. What is happening? I need to give a big shout out to dope Danny, aka Danny Smith, who said, okay, I finally understand what this is. Your automatic standability is to procedurally generate more woolly bait in reality,

to which doomslayer man, the struggler said stand name, bring me to life. Oh, that's good. The idea of you getting an FNSN stand is so good. They're coming out with a new album. You see that? Oh my God, they're coming back. The heroes of return save us. Just woolly bait. Wake me up inside. Coming out of the ground. Woolly bait coming out of the walls. Can't stop it. It's Oh my God, ladies and gentlemen. So like it's weird because if we did this in a different order, they'd have less like pop, but still the one that's actually the craziest is this character shares your name. That is out of control. I was sitting in the audience right there in that front,

not front row, but front section when she was revealed to the world. I was there when the character was revealed to me. Yes. To you, to the woolly's brain platform. We saw no gameplay yet. We just saw the art and the tease was she's got some special surprises when she's disarmed. And that's all it was. And every single piece of information we've gotten since this moment. It's something that you would have made. It's just. And also the galactic phantom in the clip you showed does like 70% of a life bar. And it's not the grossest Sam show has ever been. And it's not just a galactic phantom. It's a galactic galactic phantom in effect. But the actual animation is your your fucking

slow walk, wind up. Hold on. Bam. It's like it's the character from cross codes. Yeah. Like that does the same thing that I lost my shit on. It's super weird with the armored walk up an arm twist into the unload. I can. It's just everything. It's everything. The only thing that I can think of is there's two chaos code. There's two things possible here. One, whoever is responsible for the primary design elements of this character is a fan of yours. Or the person who is the responsible for the primary design. This text of this character is a fan of it just happens to be a fan of all the same things that you are a fan of. Hey, guess what the coolest move in Tekken is? If you thought it was

anything that Steve Fox did, you're fucking mistaken because it's Miguel. Because you know what Miguel does? What does Miguel do? He walks forward with an armored fucking twist of the fucking arm into an unblockable full life kill punch. It's not armored, rather, but it takes a fucking long time for him to do it. But it's that same idea. It's absurd and it's rad. Oh, boy. It's getting real weird. Oh, boy. All this time, I can't believe I couldn't see trapped in the dock when you would never follow me. I've been sleeping a thousand years, it seems. Got to open my eyes to everything. I think Evanescence is my favorite trash band. I think they're my favorite garbage band to listen

to ironically because it's always a good time. It always cracks me up. It's coming from somewhere pure. Yeah. It's coming from somewhere teenaged. Yeah. They're all in their forties now. Like Lincoln Park. Yeah, it came from somewhere pure and teenaged. That's all. Ah, Darlie Dagger, soon. Soon. I have never dropped Galford as hard. You have never seen Poppy dropped on his head harder. Goodbye, Poppy. Then the moment that this fucking clip goes out. You know, back in the day, for those of you who are like real inside, we're going to play some inside baseball. But for those of you intimately familiar with the samurai shutout franchise and for you could pick between bust and slash. I remember that.

And the bust and the slash, the bust version was kind of like the good guy. The slash was like the bad version in a way. And if you picked slash Galford, he'd be dark. He'd have different moves. And in his intro, he'd tell Poppy to scram and Poppy would fucking high tail it out of there. And then the point that you need to go just you and me, right? That's cool. Yeah. That's so so because that's that's that's that's I always fucking love that. And this is one of those moments. Scram, Poppy, get out of here. You're done. It's me and Darlie now. Friendship. Go back to hang out with the other poorly named dogs like Frender. Oh, man. I might have twisted that a bust might be evil and slash might be good. Whatever you get the point.

We got some places to go. We can go. We can go legal or we can go hilarious. Let's go hilarious. No, let's go legal. Let's leave hilarious because I think I know what hilarious is and I want to save it. Sony to face court in Australia for allegedly refusing to refund faulty PlayStation games. Oops, it's almost like the European and Australian fucking trade commissions are going to fuck you on your refund shit. Australia does shit its own way has established that they're not willing to play ball for a long time. The UK, I guess they're very consumer friendly with refunds digital or not. And Sony does not like to give you fucking refunds. Yes. So here's the thing, right? The major thing the major point in this article appears to be we don't care what you

say or how you run your business. If you sell someone a faulty product, they're entitled to a refund or a replacement. The end here's here's the here's the fun fact that applies to I'm going to assume every nation any of you are listening in. TOS is are not legally binding. Just because you have to agree to it to use the product doesn't mean that you're bound by its actual terms. Every court ever has held up the TOS is are not legally binding. So saying no refunds does not suddenly preclude actual refund law. Regardless of shit. Interesting. Here's my question though. And I legitimately do want to know what is a faulty product that is actually a lot more fun to talk about than this because video games have the greatest line for that of anything ever

because I read this article top to bottom twice and it seems to be basically talking about how Australia will go to court with Sony if they don't abide by these laws. They don't care because they're about consumer protection faulty products cannot be abided. However, at no point does it define what a faulty product is probably because the people who are running this law don't actually know what that means in the context of video games and they will become very complex very quickly. I quote it even goes into the point of saying well you could argue how do you know the good is faulty until you download it said Mr. Sims right if the good has a major fault you're entitled to a refund or replacement and it's your choice of which of those two you get. That's broad.

That is a broad definition. There is no specific very broad. There is no specificity within this under that language. I'm not a lawyer. Remember I'm not a lawyer but under that language it would appear that things like Fallout 76 and Anthem would absolutely qualify instantaneously as faulty products like is a bug a faulty product how bad of a bug must it be. Yeah well if you download a game and it doesn't boot that's pretty clear. Yes you deserve a refund right but everything after that is up in the air. Software is fucking weird it's not these are laws not made to for software. These are laws made for that chair leg is broken or the lawnmower won't start. Give me my replacement or my money back. Yeah software is weird but Australia is using these laws to apply to software.

Now if you guys remember the steam refund stuff Valve tried to position it as we've been working on refunds for a while and here we got your refunds. That's not why they gave us our refunds. They gave us our refunds because the European Trade Commission slapped their shit off and said if you don't offer refunds we're going to ban your fucking product in this in this like what is it 12 countries in the world like whatever steam's gone and steam went okay and then there's no way to possibly run the optics on an international store like well if you live in these countries you can get a refund but you live in Canada the United States Mexico or Australia you can go fuck yourself no that's not going to play right. It would be pretty hilarious to imagine the Australian board

calling in a bunch of QA and basically saying that something that a C class is acceptable, B class is a fine and A class is a serious concern that absolutely forces a refund. So this is good for everyone because what's good for Australia will probably be good for the EU which is probably good for us. But I don't like the fact that you can't exactly describe what a faulty product is. I don't like that. Well here's what you should do. That is way too vague and laws are not great when they're... Steam's way around it was actually vaguely worded. How many problems do we have nowadays based on vague wording in law? Fair enough. Steam's way around it was fairly simple which is the product's quality didn't actually matter or the product's ability to

start didn't matter. They just gave a blanket time window. Time window. Origin does the same thing, Epic Store does the same thing. Two hours once you download it and like two hours of play 14 days since you install it I think. Is Australia going to take that into consideration? Very likely they usually look at other types of things. Also, Steam is in Australia so that already exists as a framework. Sony and Microsoft do not want this kind of refund thing to go. Like imagine the chaos that would happen if real refunds came to digital storefronts. I haven't been able to return a retail game in decades. You know why? Because I abused the shit out of it. But is it possible that old man Koala didgeridoo will simply decide that no no a chair leg broken means a refunded chair and that's

all I need to know about it? Anything's possible. And someone says but wait Steam does what's a Steam? Is that some type of new boomerang? I like what you're doing here. I like it. Pass me my fosters. So I recently actually out of nowhere just watched the Australian episode of The Simpsons. Making fun of Australia is the best. Especially without doing the accent. It is. Yeah. Yeah, just fuck it. Hey, I would like fosters for my didgeridoo boomerang. Yep. Yep. You know koalas are like the stupidest fucking things in the world. They're pretty not like they're they're fucking dumb. So I hear because eucalyptus is a is a fucking it's not hallucinogenic. It's a it makes them high. So they're all there. The reason they only eat eucalyptus

is so they can be cracked out all the time. Wow. Didn't know that. So that's why when you see videos of people just walking up to a koala and just picking it up and it does nothing. It's because it's high off its balls. Yeah. So anyway, I think it's possible that they might not pay attention to Steam as a reference point for this law and choose to keep it vague possible the same way they chose to keep the aboriginal people. There's no refunds in the bush software land or otherwise. That's their term. Let's move on to areas. Why do you do this every week? What do I do? You bring it in. You bring in the awkward thing. They brought the awkward. That's pretty. That's all right. Luckily, we live in Canada, a country that's always treated its

native citizens with the utmost respect in class. Don't research that. Don't remove half of that word and start saying the first part. Oh, no. The story is gone. What story? Well, I guess that's the end of that adventure. What story? It was going to be about this hilarious, hilarious list of leaks for Street Fighter 6. Oh, yeah. But we're all stupid. Gone. So I guess that's the end of that. Oh, well, you want to talk about the Anthem roadmap? We sure can. Hey, Forbes put out an article on this, which was the best named article ever. Anthem's new roadmap is to delete Anthem's roadmap. Let me see here, because the article I found was on Engadget called...

You want the Forbes one for sure. It's fucking hilarious. Yeah, the Engadget article was called Anthem Player is already underwhelmed by Cataclysm, but let's find that. So in the past couple weeks, when you would log in in the month of May, Anthem's new roadmap is to delete its roadmap, which is probably for the best. Isn't that not the best article name? So Anthem, when you would log in to Anthem in the month of May, it would say Cataclysm here, despite that shit not existing. And they finally, after like a month and a half, did a live stream where they're like, hey, the Cataclysm is coming in July as a timed event. And also, we're going to work on that other stuff. Here's the new roadmap. And the roadmap is one, has no dates.

Two, has no line of progress, no priority system. Three, the first part of the roadmap is all stuff that's in the game right now, and then acts two and act three with blank boxes. Okay, I got to say full on shock at the fact that we're still talking about Anthem, because the last piece of news was zero people are playing it on Steam, all its top players. No, no one could ever play it on Steam. Rather, or whatever. Yeah, origin and everyone, all of the players that cared have all left. Someone in chat go, ooh, nothing. Everyone has left. And that was the end of that. As a bonus, if you went down to the Anthem subreddit while they were hosting that live stream, it came out that anyone that was asking questions in the chat about loot or saying things like,

please add more loot to the game, we're getting banned from the Twitch broadcast. So don't, don't do that, I guess. Yeah, so this roadmap website is here. This is the first time I've ever seen it. This is a game that the publisher has looked at it and went, we're never going to make the money back. Ever. There's like, there's no way to save this. And this has been seen once before ever with FF14 version one. And the only reason they put the money in to save that is because it said the fucking words Final Fantasy on it. And if they didn't fix it, they would have killed the, one of the strongest brands in the world. Okay, but how does, how do you apply sunk cost fallacy to a product that people have purchased

and own? Fuck them. Because that's how. Then why even try here? They're not, people are getting, most of Bioware has been transferred off the project to other stuff. This is a skeleton team working. This, we're going to see bug fixes and maybe one event a year for two years. And then they'll fit, they'll, they'll shut it down. This is what happens when your live service game launches and immediately fails super hard. And you want to have a real fun, juicy piece that doesn't actually have anything to do with Anthem, but it does have some applicability. Todd Howard was in a recent interview in which he described, we knew before it launched that fallout 76 was not a quote high Metacritic game,

but it's not about what ships, it's about what the game will eventually become, which is a lie. I mean, for one thing, that's fully embracing what game development is nowadays, which is you, you don't sell the thing that people, they should have put that on the box. It's not about selling the final experience. It's about what'll, what'll eventually be there. That is a cowardly way of saying it, Mr. Todd. The article Speds mentions that the page still says it's a roadmap to avoid of any actual dates or even months. And it does not list any specific future content on the way, not even Cataclysm's new loot or any of the things that were discussed on steam, on stream. But that's probably for the best.

Yeah. Okay. Well, Anthem will not be at E3 in any way. EA put out their, their revised stream schedule, which does not have Anthem in it. So they dropped it from their presentation. E3 presentation. Anthem won't be at E3 or E3 won't be at Anthem. Whatever, man. I think when the next time EA tries to do a live service game, I advise all of you to think real long and hard about what happened here. You know what? Fuck it. The next time any large, and you know what? The next time any live service game comes out, I advise you to think real long and hard about it. Because this shit can happen. What if you could level up your characters in Anthem and progress in the game while you were sleeping? It'd be more fun. It would, wouldn't it?

It would. Introducing Pokemon Sleep. I don't understand. I actually don't understand what this is. Well, you know, Pokemon Go is now. Sure. Doing stuff. But you're unconscious while you're asleep. Sleep tracking is, yeah, I don't. Pokemon Home. Am I not allowed to play this because I use a CPAP machine? Yeah, you're banned. Like, what? Like, is that hacking? You're cheating. Am I cheating? You're cheating. Well, fuck. You're sleeping too hard. Or the noise will keep it from thinking you're sleeping, so you're not allowed to. Pokemon Go Plus will use an embedded accelerometer to track a user's time sleeping and send this information via smartphone. And the new device will have the same functions as Pokemon Go Plus. Trainers can use it during the day and with Pokemon

Sleep at night. There's a screenshot of a bunch of snorlaxes on the map. Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know. I feel like this name was created for meme purposes, and then they realized that they had to put a product behind it at some point. Get the fuck out. Square Enix has announced their competitor to Pokemon Go and Sleep with Dragon Quest Walk. Yes. Yes, I did see that logo. I saw someone making a comparison. We'll launch on close beta June 11th. Yeah. There was someone at a post that was like Super Mario Run, Sonic Jump, Dragon Quest Walk. Pokemon Sleep. Yeah. Yep. Yep. This is getting really stupid. They went for the Dragon Quest route, huh? DQ's way bigger in Japan. I thought

you were going to say something related to Chocobos, but yeah. Now, that's the horse racing game that's coming. Well, while all these fucking lame apps can spend their time running and jumping and sleeping and walking, if you're driving... When's Digimon fuck? If you're driving in your Tesla, you can also play Cuphead because Cuphead... This seems bad. ...is getting ported to the Tesla. Apparently, it's only the first level. Yeah, and it's because it's not a fucking platform. It's not. How do you control it? You spin the wheel? There's a controller. Yeah. I mean, one time I was in an Uber that was a Tesla and I saw the size of that crazy huge screen where your radio usually would be. Yeah. Just a massive tablet. It's fucking wild.

So, yeah, I could see that running a game. Cuphead while driving. Let's do it. Well, I mean... Don't do that. The fact that they picked the hardest possible thing... The most difficult possible game to fucking get in there. It feels like, hey, we're announcing a new beer. You can only drink while riding your bike. Like, just designed to cause accidents. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of like, the game will not run while the car is moving. It's better fucking not. Right. Well, kind of like Waze has a thing that says you can't type while the car is moving. Maybe. I can't. Maybe. It's so bad. Because it's like even as... I think the screen is so big.

And it's like, even if you were just giving the controller to your kids in the back so they could play Cuphead while you were driving, you can't not pay attention to it. Because it's also gorgeous. And really fun. And you want to be like, no, you're fucking up. You're doing it wrong. Anyway. Everything is really stupid. Studio MDHR getting Cuphead out there. We thought the switch was the end of that transaction, turns out. Cars. And then we got just some, some feel good. Feel good. Oh, something feel good. Some feel a little feel good story to end out on.

Hey, we will feel good. Someone is using machine learning to remaster old ass Mega Man anime cutscenes. Oh, yeah. So I've been seeing a bunch of these types of cutscenes for a while, but I haven't seen any Mega Man anime ones. So you can now go back and watch the opening of Mega Man X4 in 1080p full HD, because it has been frame by frame remastered via machine learning. I like those robots. Edges and lines and colors are as crisp as they could ever possibly be without the cells

themselves sitting in front of you. Yay. And I wouldn't be surprised if these original cells were fucking like destroyed in some lab fire, lost in an archive folder somewhere because they just never cared. And the guy I quit who put them away or the guy quit and they're sitting on his bookshelf at home. Yeah, because he took them. Yeah. So that's fun. And if you want to go watch some old like HD Mega Man X4, those cuts could still cool. Still pretty.

This machine learning shit. Super cool. It's kind of what kind of read kind of read. I thought that the KOF rebound like sprite blurring was going to be the extent. Oh, no. Of it. And it looks like it might not be hopeless yet. You can clean up all sorts of shit. Yeah, it's just that area of like that and then Mega Man X mobile and, you know, like there's just that there's all there's a that bad shitty sprite filter was my fear for the future.

But this looks like it might be an awesome way. A lot of the first videos that this machine stuff was tested on were like the anime cutscenes from 3DS games because they're running it like the shittiest possible resolution. Turns out they clean up real well most of the time. I mean, what's really exciting besides like these games and old ass cutscenes would be the possibility to go back to old anime that no one's going to fucking touch and put that out. Yeah. You know, anime.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, let's take some letters. Hey, if you want to send a little you want to send a little letter in. To Castle Super Beast, you're going to send that to castlesuperbeastmale at gmail.com. That's castlesuperbeastmale at gmail.com. I ran into a fan who sent in a letter to this very email this week. Fairly hilarious instance where I was running a new dungeon in FF14 and the guy's like, oh, I'm new.

I'm excited for Shadowbringers. I'm like, oh, really? How'd you hear about it? Oh, this internet thing. This is the best friends you ever hear about it. Like, nah, I heard about that pack guy. He sounds like a jerk. And then he goes, wait a second.

Hey, I sent an email in. Will you read it? I probably not. First one coming in. Fun fact about FF14. Get out. Shut up. I was listening to the podcast at the beginning while working a few months ago.

Pat mentioned an FF14 player on a server named Avatar Korra who is famous for buying weapon drops for other players, even if they didn't win the role. Oh, it was it was Mount Drops. He said he was a guy over at Easy Allies, actually. That player is actually Michael Damiani from Easy Allies. He frequently streams the game on their Twitch channel with that character. Just thought it was a cool coincidence. Yeah, that dude's a Mount Fiend and he has a shit ton of cash.

So what he does is he loads into the into the instance and he goes, I'm going to get the first roll and I'm going to pay you like 10 million each and you're going to let me have it. And they're like, okay, it's 10 millions of shit ton. And then he gets it and he's always the first one on the server to have all the all the birds or all the dogs or whatever. There you go. First email.

No, it was not that guy. Probably. No, the guy asked me, hey, what do you think about names getting banned from servers? This is my third name that I've that I've I've used in 14. They keep getting changed by the admins and I'm like, and I can only imagine what the prior ones were. Like, hey, don't don't name yourself Dick, but the fornicator. You ever been a whale?

What? So that is the allies situation. Yeah, it's like someone that basically wailed the game. I don't know what that means when you're actually when you're a whale, you're you're like you spend a lot of money on yeah, I've been a whale. Yeah, okay. What's your problem? No, I'm just asking if you're okay.

It's in game money, dude. I use the word Gil. Okay. Got it. Which you don't buy by spending real money. No, okay. That would actually get you banned. Oh, if you offered players real money, doesn't every MMO have farmers and

doesn't every farmer sell Gil for gold? Yeah, and every time you see one of those guys in a town, you right click on them and hit the RMT activity report function. And they get banned probably by the end of the week. All MMOs have the ability to buy gold outside of the game for real money. Yeah, no or very few MMOs actually support that. And it will in fact ban you if they ever find out that you have like bought gold. But as long as you do it off the premises.

What premises? The game itself. Somebody has to give your character the funds. Yeah. Well, that's what I mean. So I'm saying as long as you figure out what you need to off and then someone basically logs in and hands you a bunch of money and that's all that happens. Yeah, and when that person gets banned for real money transactions and they look at

the person who they gave millions and millions of Gil to, they go and ban you too. So if someone really rich suddenly starts giving out money to random people in personal encounters, they just assume that's what's going down. No, most of the most of the accounts that do this are obviously robots and are mass bought out of countries that are running gold farming thing. Like, well, they come on, it's a whole business. I know, which is why I'm surprised it's banned because I just thought it was a part of the landscape.

It is a part of the landscape. And like under the table. And all I'd ever seen when my roommate was playing. Wow. Or that when I was playing Ragnarok was just a bunch of people standing around fucking advertising shit in the town square. Yeah. And I was like, wow, that's a fucking crack down on it pretty hard.

Some cracked on it less hard. But in most games, it's totally banable to buy real money transaction. I think Guild Wars isn't because they have an actual in game shop where you buy the currency from the developer. And Eve is the same way where you buy Plex. Gotcha. Or isk. One came in about came in about Polygon and hot takes, but like we already talked about

that. We talked about that. Yeah. So that's fine. Brad wants to know Der Woolli and the other guy. Hey, what up, man? Sometimes on the podcast, you brought up subjects like putting your brain in a robot and other forms of transferring your one's consciousness.

Yeah, that's right. We certainly have been thinking about teleporters and how they're generally presented to media. Oh, man. Usually not explained well. And if they are, it's usually boils down to it atomizes you and rebuilds you at the other end. Yeah, we've talked about this. Yeah, Star Trek teleporters, there's a reason why it's a long standing trope in Star Trek that doctors don't like to use the teleporters because it implies that you're dying.

And there's that one episode where there's two Rikers. Yeah. And that's a nightmare. What does that mean? What does that mean if the bubble just dropped the old Riker where he was and then the new Riker was there, which is the real one, the first one? The way I see it, it sounds an awful lot like kill yourself and send the clone to the other end. That's totally what it is.

Rather than a teleporter. Does that distinction matter? Would you use a teleporter or feel weird about your loved ones using them? On a similar note, transferring my consciousness into a robot to theoretically exist as long as I want sounds cool. But I wonder if it would really be me or just a machine that acts like me and thinks it's me. The reason this hangs in my mind so much is because even if we invent such technology, actually testing these queries seems basically impossible.

So this is the rub. There's a reason why I talk about putting my brain in a robot. Yes. Because the copy transfers shit. Yeah. No, that's a new thing. That's a new creature. If you're talking ghost in the shell, right, which guess what?

You have to talk ghost in the shell when you have this conversation. A cyber brain, right? The transfer at the moment you transfer that actual data that is your brain into something that is purely digital, that is just a copy of you. It's a new thing. It is not you. You're still you back wherever you were. If you take the gooey organism that is your brain and stick it in a big steel box.

That's you. That's still you because you didn't copy it. You didn't move it. You just you just moved from spot to the next. And the continuity of your perception will maintain even if you're unconscious. Yep. There is a game called Soma, which I would highly recommend anyone interested on this topic to check out.

Yeah. In addition, this is going to be a weird poll. But did you ever see the sixth day with Arnold Schwarzenegger? No. So it's about cloning. It's about cloning people against their will. And like the way you clone an athlete and then you kill the injured athlete and you replace them with the new clone.

Yeah, Black Mirror. Right. Near the end of the movie, it's so it's established that you take a snapshot of your brain and then you just snapshot it on the clone and now the clone is you. Right. Near the end of the movie, the villain gets killed and a new clone of his is coming out of the chamber, but it comes out too early and it's like a horrific goo monster. So he hits the cloning process again, but the new perfect clone comes out before he dies.

And the new perfect clone walks up to his old gooey clone that made him and starts like ripping his clothes off and steals his glasses back and essentially pushes him down the stairs as he's going, no, but, but I mean, I mean, you're me. And it's like, don't kill me. Don't, don't, don't do that. Please me. Don't kill me. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or also fucking the prestige if you want to take a look at it. Sure. This is a nightmare fuel conversation. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Duplicating your consciousness. But it's not though. And here's why the answer is simple.

Don't do it. Yeah, don't do it. The end. The reason why I can have this conversation till I'm fucking blue in the face is that you're not going to do it because I will never do it. Yeah. Like at no point will like I ever go full on transfer to the hard drive. Yeah.

You can't not the whole way. Nope. Got to keep the goo. Yeah. Get to keep the goo. Keep like you. And also if you're going to run teleportation to if you're going to run teleportation experiments for fuck's sake, make sure that that pod is clean.

You don't want any flies in there. All right. Brundle. Yeah. Tell you what though, the in the meantime, the other simpler idea of not even the machine body, not even the shell, but just quite simply the teleportation for the convenience of things. Never. They write, they explain it fairly early in Star Trek.

And the way they explain it is they kill you and then they rebuild you elsewhere. Yeah. There are episodes in which people just straight up die or get disintegrated and they go and fix them with their pattern from the buffer. Yeah. And it's like, dude, what are you doing? I had a friend who I have a friend who says like, he's like, yeah, I'd have no problem with that. Simply knowing that like I would continue and want some shape or form.

Okay. Is comfort enough for me. You know what, for some people that's fine. And I'm like, and for me, I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm way too selfish. I need the continuity of my consciousness. Yeah. No, absolutely not. So, uh, I like, and here's the thing.

If you had to go one way with it, if it was either the kill teleport copy paste machine, yeah, or the stand in the chamber, it makes a copy of you. That thing comes alive at the other end. You step out of the chamber and that thing stays alive for 24 hours to do whatever the job is that needs doing. And then fucking dies, then so be it. You know what the problem with that is, right? If you were to put the version of me that I am now into that machine,

the version they want to send down to do whatever isn't going to do it. Well, yeah, because you got one day to live. Because it's me. Yeah. And in fact, it might be filled with so much hatred for its own existence that I'll try and kill me. You'll try to find you in a second, which is why the teleporter better be on Mars. Yeah.

Because if that thing can make its way, I wake up in a fucking teleporter cube looking at myself and myself says, OK, Pat, go do it. And by the way, you're going to die. I'm going to kill me so hard because I'm an asshole. Be pretty. You'd be pretty salty about the whole thing. Yep.

Yep. Watch movies. They're good. These are the kinds of actual horrors about space travel. Not getting sucked out the airlock. But what if your clown attacks you with a rock? I mean, here's the thing. Somewhere deep down, if you can make it all the way back from Mars to Earth within 24 hours.

You get to be the new real person. Like, I have to respect it. I've got to respect that hustle. At some point, you made it all the way back despite all the odds. Maybe you froze yourself on the journey. Shit was crazy. Right. Maybe I don't know what you did, but you figured out a way to hate journey

back to Earth so that you could kill me with 24 hours of life. Fuck it. You get the crown. You get, hey, you get whatever DNA juice you got to do. Make this one the new real one. That's cool. And now we're getting into fucking never play the swapper. No, the swapper is this this argument.

So the swapper's power is to make a copy of himself and then you can swap between. But you have to swap to a new one and then leave the last one to get like killed by a trap. And it's the whole game. And the whole game is like, wait, what are you? What are you doing? You ever play near? I have good game. A good game is pretty okay.

So. Kachow. Okay. Kachow. What up, man? No. Kachow was the sound effect that what up, fellow weirdos. It's your boy, Loco here with a question.

It's been on my head spinning disco style, like a beastly disco full of goblins and suckling pigs. Trying too hard, Loco. Trying too hard, Loco. Hit stop and fighting games is delightful. What about in reality? Would it be a satisfying? Would you enjoy a brisk tempoed walk? And then suddenly Samu gets his insides banged around like a pinata.

He gets hit by a truck, but there's a big hit stop before he ragdolls in his shoes fall from his feet. Is that fucked up or cool? Would you like some instances of hit stop in real life? Okay. Trying a little too hard, Loco, but I got. I got. So I'll give you, I'll give you a thing. I got a feeling.

If you've never been like punched super hard in the head, you experience hit stop in real life. Time is not continuous. Yeah. When you take a big old pop to the head. It is for everyone else, however. Yeah, but not for you. You get to experience the joy of hit stop. There is no hit stop in real life, but there are hit sparks in real life.

There are. And I can demonstrate this. Oh, are you thinking of the boxer who hits that guy smoking a cigarette? No, because that's actual hit sparks. No, I'm going to say I have, I have a pretty good example. There's a clip you can look up. It's called the brutal, brutal roundhouse kick knockout. It's 42 second video of a kickboxing match and a dude eats it so fucking hard.

Brutal roundhouse kick knockout. Kick knockout. A dude takes it so fucking hard that you see the hit sparks come off in the form of the sweat and whatever else from his body. He does a fake spin and just lays it in and it is fucking incredible. And I'm calling that a hit spark. So it's. Oh, yeah, I've seen that.

It is why. I'm thinking of a fight outside of Russian nightclub where some some guy in a tracksuit smoking a cigarette catches one across the face and the cigarette explodes into sparks. Sure. And it's like, wow. Yeah. Holy fuck, that clip, man. And yeah, the guy ragdolls.

Yeah. Because his brain turns off. Yep. Yeah. Retired. You're done. You're off. You're off now.

You see the fucking thing come from his face, his nose and he just like the shutting down. OK, real quick here. Does metagaming ruin games such as fighting games and MMOs? No. Happiest Woolly and Patrick the Honest of Fortress Ultra Fiend. Here's a lot of preamble to skip. Here's a short story relevant to the question. I was playing World of Warcraft since vanilla in 2006 and I've been seeing many changes that

it's gone through over the years. Usually I've led a casual heroic raiding guild with my friends over the past five years or so until recently when everyone quit. Vanilla WoW is like climbing a big ass mountain you see in the distance. The journey is hard long and you'll pass by a bunch of dead people on the way who quit. But once you reach the peak of the mountain, there's a vast sense of accomplishment. Current WoW is like a car being driven by your dad as you go across the country to reach your Aunt Gertrude.

Dude, this is exactly what I was talking about earlier. The drive is long, it's boring and it's not particularly challenging. There's some pit stops along the roadside and some attractions along the way. But if you ever finish the journey, there's no sense of accomplishment at the end. So why not just skip it? A classic WoW's release just on the horizon. I think many people have been mountain driving or have been mountain climbing journey that they went.

They believe the mountain climbing journey they went that years ago will still be there. I don't believe this will be the case at all. With all the available information, stats, guilds, guides and damage simulations, people will quickly find the game will not be as fulfilling when it was released in 2006. Players are already discussing broken builds and so on. The average player doesn't do any of that stuff. Who doesn't do any of that stuff will be doomed from the start and realize this as they level up.

Only in PvP. I predict the game will burn hard and fast. The sharp kind of players are on level 30-ish. Does meta gaming ruin games such as fighting games with frame data, tier list hitboxes and MMRs with tier list DP charts and gear charts etc? These are a few examples I can think of off the top of my head. So the answer to that question is does it ruin gaming? Maybe, probably not, not usually.

Are regular players going to be doomed in PvP because of meta builds? Yes, but they were doomed back in the day too man! If you think people playing competitive shit weren't using every possible advantage to their advantage, you're fucking crazy. The problem with meta gaming happens when decisively best solutions to problems arise. So, well you're somewhat familiar with the term composition, your comp for like overwatch, right?

In an MMO, say you have eight guys. Say there's a comp that's the best. Let's say it's warrior, paladin, machinist, dragoon, barred, summoner, astro, scholar, whatever, right? If that combination is like substantially better than all the other combinations, yeah that sucks, right? I mean like 10-20% better just because they all line up all perfect, right? Tears, essentially, right?

Is the existence of advanced strategies and builds and whatnot bad? No, of course not. You need to have people have things to aspire to. Fighting games have tears, they don't have tears because the characters are inherently good or bad or sometimes they have tears because people figure out crazy shit to do with them. The only way to not have meta gaming is to make the the fucking 5-5 utopia as described by Correa Gaming in Street Fighter 1. In fighting games, the question of does meta ruin the game?

Well, let's break it down a little bit, very briefly and simplify the thing. You're asking do hitboxes and frame data and tears ruin the game? Well, let's rename those three things together, let's bundle them all together and rename it as information. Alternatively, you would call it experience depending on where you got it. Whatever it is, right? Does information and experience ruin the game? Does information and experience ruin the game?

Well, only if the type of game you want to play is one where you... You shouldn't need those things. Or if the type of game you use or what I was going to say is a game that you probably don't intend to play very often, you occasionally just want to kind of gamble with your friends and you want a wacky wild outcome. There's a real thing in... For someone that is probably going to play the game more than a handful of times for the purpose of enjoying getting better at it, information is the game.

There is a thing about this that he's talking about, which I'm going to use for Tina's example because I know it well, in which this kind of thing does damage the game. So I describe, I think I was wrong about summoner, but I was pretty close on the margin for what is the current meta composition? What is the best group you can run to beat the toughest raids, right? The problem is the same thing as fighting games and tiers. So I'll put it into something a little more clear. Hey, Woolly, who's top tier in Third Strike?

Who's absolutely top tier? Yen's pretty fucking good. Yen's good. Chan's good. Urian's up there, right? Dudley and Makoto, Urian, Dudley and Makoto. So if I picked them, I'll win, right? No.

Well, but I mean, so I'm setting up a party to go do this raid, right? So I'm only going to accept people who play Makoto and Dudley because I don't want a Q player in here because Q is bad, right? That's what starts to happen. And that is a problem in MMOs specifically, right? Where do you go? I spent hours playing Q. Ninja, right.

Yeah. So for example, there was a period in which Paladin, in Heaven's Word, in the old expansion, Paladin was not as good as Dark Knight and it was not as good as Warrior. How much less good? Maybe 5% total, right? But what do you see? You see party finder parties that say we want a Dark Knight and a Warrior. Well, I have Paladin and I'm really good.

I can do top shelf, I don't care. That class is bad. I want a Paladin, sorry, I want a Warrior and a Dark Knight. You don't have one, get out. From people who, by the way, aren't good enough to have that matter. Like I'm not good enough to have my choice of tank matter, right? Hanzo mains, please go. Exactly.

You get this when the medic is established and you get people who go and you see it in fighting games a lot. You go, well Chunli's top tier and I lost. That means you must have cheated because I picked a better character. No, dumbass. Player skill is the number one determiner of victory. And seeing that. God bless games where you stand on your own two feet and you win by your own two feet

and you lose by your own two feet. Yeah, it is fun to play as a team. Now, if you said I have something like Overwatch or Rainbow Six or something like that where you change characters, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, no problem. The problem is this is an MMO like WoW or Final Fantasy. It's like, dude, I only have a Paladin to cap because I want to play Paladin. And it took me four months to get this Paladin geared up and like this. I can't just go and just get another one of these.

Hey, who on Tekken World Tournament again? Uh, fucking Kuma? Panda. Panda. Right, panda. You know what the best part about this is? During the period in which everyone's like Dark Knight is shit. It's bad for the meta.

It's all Paladin and Warrior like for the tanks. The world first clear of, I shit you not, the raid is called Uwu. Ultimate weapon, ultimate weapon, ultimate Uwu. Japan, they don't care. Which is the hardest thing that game has ever made. Had a Dark Knight in it. And everyone but how it's not meta. Because that dude's good.

Yeah. Single percentile differences aren't going to matter if you're shit. And adhering to metas that don't actually apply to you is damaging to a game social scene. I do want to say that if you are somebody that does want to play a game without information and experience factoring in the results of the game. You may have a hard time. Mario Party is very fun. Yeah.

See, it's, it's fine when other people aren't involved, but you can't tell other people not to care more. You know? Yeah, I can't tell you woolly to stop caring more about Street Fighter 5 than me. So don't look at stuff to find out cool shit because I want to have a relaxing game. I can't do that. And you don't have to listen to me even if I did. I'm out here for fun. You're out here for glory.

Yeah. What are we supposed to do? Well, I mean, I can't say, but what we should do is end the podcast. Yeah, let's do that. So I want to say, yeah, look forward to upcoming what's going on. There is. Wolfie days. Wolfie days are happening in particular.

Well, I mean, I mean, it's going to take a second for something to come up for you. They're happening. Tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow night. It's the timing is perfect. I'm near the end of Yakuza 6 and I patch Wolf is a huge Yakuza fan. There you go.

And for Willy versus stuff, it's going to go through the editing process, but they'll be up shortly. And then as well at the end of this week, I'm going to be at Combo Con in Michigan. Are you going to do a combo? Yes. All right. In fact, possibly in real life because HD Max challenged me to a sparring match in boxing. Oh, don't don't hurt him.

I don't think that's the way it's going to go. Willy, we all know that you're the best boxer. His family owns a gym. Willy, don't hurt him. He has a record. Take it easy on him. All right. Can I study my frame?

HD Max. Listen. If you try your absolute hardest, you might be able to hit him once or twice. So you go for broke because we all know that Willy is the badass around here. Yeah. It'd be nice if I actually got to, um, you know, like spar, but like take those out. If you're going to get a sparring match, take those out. Oh, this me.

Yeah. Yeah. Me. Yeah. Take the me out. Yeah. Yeah. The me has to go.

Yeah. The the piercings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't even know what like some of them are okay, but the eyebrow one scares me. Some of them. Oh, yeah. Hey, so, uh, sometimes when, yeah, no, my coach, when I fucking went in one time and I just didn't, and he was, and he like, we were doing pad work and he just fucking

straight jab right to the lip ring. And he's like, you should take that out when you come to practice. And I was like, ah, he fucking got me. You know? And it was like, yeah, yeah. What do you give me? Give me a target, bro. You know, like it was, it was real, but either way, um, yeah.

Oh, that makes me uncomfortable. That's bad. Yeah. But I know I am, I am certainly concerned because as someone who is, you know, been at this boxing thing for a minute, sparring isn't exactly what's going on in my training regimen, because like they have, they're fucking training Olympians. Like they're not wasting time on people who are not going as far as they can. Woolly.

So have more confidence. I know you watched all the Epos. Okay. Just do that. Okay. So what I'll do is when the bell rings, I'll do a little fucking arm crack and I'll go like, hold up and walk forward and do my best swing. That's right.

And then he'll go down in one. Yeah. That's right. And I'll have armor so that he, I can stop all of it. Just feel the hyper armor in your heart. Anyway, combo con is this weekend. And, uh, wolf stuff is happening and, uh, that's pretty much it. That's pretty much it.

All right. Well, we'll see you guys next week and on our respective channels. So goodbye.