Castle Super Beast - CSB 039: Must Yell Racist Slurs to Fight Tyranny

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps The Ghost of Bobby Kotick is in this place. The State of Stadia. Leaderboards in Hell. You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Outro: Koji Kondo - Dire Dire Docks PS5 launches holiday 2020, controller innovations detailed Stadia’s Negative Latency Blizzard bans Hearthstone player for supporting Hong Kong because China's money is more important Blizzard halves banned Hearthstone player's suspension, gives back prize money New Street Fighter 5 reveals slated for CPT North American Finals and Capcom Cup; Ono mentions 'new content and new characters' in his address Test out new characters, guns, and mods with Apex Legend's upcoming firing range

Music Music Fortnite is over. Fortnite is over everybody. What do we do? Um... Videotape our spoiled rotten little kids punching TVs. Call, support, help lines and scream at them because Fortnite is over.

So two weeks ago... Two weeks? This is what... There was like a... You remember Destiny came out and had like server problems? Yeah. Like one of the first replies to like the official... Hey we're undergoing emergency maintenance.

We'll fix it soon. As a guy just taking a photo of his television that was like smashed to shit. Hey Bungie you guys owe me a new TV. This maintenance is outrageous. And then as is always the case people try and like roll that back. It's like no that was just a picture of an old TV that I took for a funny meme. So it doesn't look like you were making a funny meme. It looked like you were angry because the video game.

The problem with becoming like all-encompassing like Fortnite is while you're drowning in money and you can't breathe because there's so much money. I got money in my nostrils. Filling your lungs. It's bad. Your lungs are filled with cash. Don't care for it. There's a humongous, humongous portion of that audience are people that just...

It's a miracle that they're breathing. Oh yeah. And it's a modern... So the first reaction to turning on the game and getting the troll message and then seeing the black hole is to call up your help support line because what is going on? How dare you? Yeah. I paid for it.

No you didn't. No well there are people... No you can't spend money. You can't buy the game. You can't buy the game but you can spend money on stuff in the game. That's correct. They're like there's no transaction. So they're definitely...

Definitely is that initial thought of like oh no is my money gone forever? Yeah. If they want to. Yeah. They could. It's just a cursory... Just if you have the ability to jump on an internet... Jump on one internet.

It takes about two minutes tops to jump on one internet and realize that it's a promotional campaign. What is your experience with this... I'm going to call it personality defect of... Ah! It's down! Ah! Right?

What is your personal experience as in like me having that? No, no, no, no. I know you wouldn't be like that. I'm saying like being around the aura of... I can't fucking believe or like seeing people or like being in a community with such... It's a miracle you made it this far. Like because the inner... I have to shit so I'm going to cry thing that a baby has as an infant...

Yes, a infant. Has managed to somehow stay within you despite the fact that you've grown into a person that can understand language. So the reason that I ask is because this is a really great, funny Shed and Friday like kind of emotion you get to have. And I have been like the games that I tend to play a lot lately over the decade like so World of Warcraft established way back in 2004. If a other games had done it, it wasn't like set in stone Tuesday is maintenance day.

Maintenance for the game happens on Tuesday. Why? They set it up on Monday. They implemented on Tuesday. Therefore if anything goes wrong, you have Wednesday, Thursday, Friday to fix it. Don't push patches on Fridays, right? Every single fucking Tuesday that I played, wow, you would have when you go to the official Blizzard forum in the three hour or four hour window in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon

that the game would be unavailable. And the whole thing would just be nothing but I can't fucking believe this. I pay for my sub. This is the only time during the week I get to play, which is in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. No, it's not. Fuck you. You're lying.

This is an outrage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When maintenance goes a little long for 14 and that maintenance always happens at four a.m. Eastern time to like seven a.m. Eastern time when destiny goes down. Whenever the anything it's always the same. This is the only time during the week that I have available to play because my horrible children take up my life or whatever. And that's not true. I paid for this.

How dare you? And the follow up is I destroyed something and or am calling emergency hotlines and or the better business bureau to report you because this is this is an outrage. Yeah, it is. It is. You are a ridiculous clown person for sure. This very podcast prior to starting the stream, you can watch in the chat as people are like, I guess it's canceled today.

It's 1150. It's it's 1259 and nothing's happening. It's just turned on. Oh, no. And or, you know, or the the preemptive late boys forever and you have to assume that's just knowing, of course, and, you know, playing along with the gag. The the the switch in people that the difference between that and like what you're describing is just it is the moment that something establishes itself in your brain as I don't know, I guess

like a part of your routine. It becomes a thing that you think the word entitled is accurate, but I don't know if it's the right word here because it really feels like like it's like when it's when something is changing, when something's happening, when servers may go under undergoing maintenance at no point do the those people treat the game as again, it's a piece of entertainment you're loading up to try and have some fun. It is a thing that you deserve and that it belongs to you and it is being stolen from you is the feeling.

And so they're treating it as if someone came into their house and took their game out of their console and walked away with it. And that person was the developers. So that's where we can point the finger. It's it's a miracle you're breathing. Yeah, you know, because it's it's you are the exact same as the baby crying next to you. It is it is that needs to change its diaper. It's the same place.

It's the same idea. It's the same instinct and it's the same like refusal or at least not a refusal. It is like you're the first place you go after feeling that slight is to eleven instead of to try and understand the slide. And it's a way of interfacing with the world. It's just unfortunate. I'm reminded of a story that you told on this very podcast. I want to say two or three months ago about a man who was giving free swimming lessons.

And that story, it has a mother lady. Yes, yes, that goes. Not only should you not give those other kids free swimming lessons, you should charge for it and then give it to me. Why? Because me, that's what it always boils down to. It goes, but my thing. And in most cases for stuff like this, it's like, listen, guys, whoever's there. I'm not talking about catastrophic launch day, which is now a norm

and I still don't think is OK. But I'm talking like, yeah, shit went down for maintenance servers are busted. Like there's a bunch of guys and ladies that are like. Oh, it's really broken. I don't know how to fix it. There's one pull it down. There's one upside to the existence of these people. Yeah. And it is the complete lack of guilt in.

Overt hatred. Oh, yeah, it's great in their direction. That's super. I like, I cannot tell you how much I love to hate. Oh, it's good. It's it's super good. It's like, oh, you are the most justified. You as a as a. You're so selfish as a. You're so incredibly. As a certified professional baby man.

No, who makes his living off of being a big baby. Yeah, I will look at these people and go, wow, you are actually small, tiny, helpless baby. Yeah, in your impotent rage. But it's the edits. And it's something like I've talked a couple of times about the like fucking caveman brain, you know, thing, like that same thing that they're going through,

which is like, no, me, Mer, right? Yeah, you're the same reaction you're having is like, you're endangering the tribe. Fuck you. You go die now. It's it's the exact opposite version of it. But you can absolutely just be like, oh, I don't feel bad at all because you just don't care. You don't even care to stop and think even a little bit.

You know, you know, so, yeah, screenshot and make fun of those those those people because that's just it's it's absurd. You're beyond absurd. But the fortnight don't turn on. No, I'd still as you have to turn on. Now, I'm noticing that allowing other video games to thrive in its essence. Noticing that there's some people out here

saying some things about the status of Hong Kong. And I really just in the chat, I don't think we should really get into that topic today, guys. I really think you should not. I think you're thinking your free Hong Kong chat messages. You need to stop those because we need to focus on inclusive inclusiveness, inclusivity, yeah, inclusivity, yeah. And the complex nature of ongoing political things

should not come into Castle Superbeast because this is a very fun listening experience that everyone should be able to enjoy. So please stop with your free Hong Kong in the chat. Please stop it. Our core values are not about free Hong Kong. No. So we need everybody has a voice here. We need you to stop a quiet, quiet voice.

Not OK. OK, good. So. How was your week? My week was OK. I I wasted most of it. I basically just lazed about and overslept and played a bunch of Destiny,

which is exactly what I needed to fucking. I don't know, recharge my batteries is the phrase I'm using because like I was doing a couple of streams last week in which I was like just falling asleep in the middle of the stream, despite being well rested, because the weight of eyes is exhausting. It's not the biggest selling point

to tell people that you were falling asleep while you were playing the game. Yeah. No, you were you weren't you weren't listening. I said last week I was doing streams in which I was falling asleep, not destiny streams. Oh, I assumed you meant no, no, no, just in general. OK, because I was sleepy from the weight of the eyes. But now I am fully rested and your eyes may rest upon me

comfortably again and or ears. But I guess you don't really feel the weight of ears, right? That's a different thing. What? Yeah, I'm going for a metaphor thing. It's not working. So I play a shit ton of destiny. I do have a couple of things to say about it, which I will hopefully be able to contextualize

for you via fighting games. Ha ha. No, seriously. So I beat all the the the story campaign and, you know, I got into the the the power grind, which is just item level. Shadowkeep is fantastic. The story is really short. And it is the kind of

it is they're doing a new thing now where they're doing this season shit where there's a storyline and would they be doing that for a while? That they've been doing seasons, but they haven't been doing seasons that have things that go away and have story relevance. It used to be like, here's a season. New game mode in the game modes forever. Right.

Here's a season. New game mode and maybe a little story. That's there forever. Right. Now they're doing a thing where it's a cross between a battle pass and like a like a seasonal story kind of thing for like 90 days. This enemy faction is invading this location and there is a game mode associated with it after 90 days. That shit will be gone.

And the story will have moved on, assuming, you know, that that situation was dealt with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The the plot ends with like a really cool location, like the coolest location in the game. And then like a ghost talks to you and says some cryptic shit. And then and then you just kick back to the menu and you're like, huh? What?

Is it because since I saw the one thing about Destiny that I guess they advertised well from the get go was that it was very story driven or supposed to be. There is a story. But when these ongoing expansions and things come out, you have to wonder, I guess, if it's continuing that or if it's just little self-contained chapters. So they have. I think I remember the ads you're talking about where it's like

Kate and Zavala and those guys like Kate. Sorry, Nathan Fillion and and Cedric Daniels. Big plot marketing going like, hey, we got to do. Yeah. So you ever play Halo game? A little bit. Yeah. You ever beat it or get like a couple of levels in? I mean, yeah. There was a story there, right? Yeah.

Was there? Hmm. Hmm. It's it's like that. OK, it's they tell you that the story is like a thing. And then the story is like fucking stupid. Like it is it is it is made by a Western company at Bungie. And it is the kind of storyline that would feel right at home in like a third rate anime. Hmm. They even did an interview a little bit ago,

where in the very first cut scene of Destiny One, the light traveler, the sphere is attacked by the darkness and you're like the darkness. Really? That's our antagonist. And it's never explained once in that entire game. And it's never explained once in Destiny Two until two weeks ago. And then in an interview, they were asked like, hey, what was up with that? And they were like, we didn't know what to put. So as a long term main antagonist.

So we literally just said the darkness to figure it out later. No, because that name is already taken by comic book symbiote thing and in second place and in first place, I believe in a thing called love. Yeah, well, you don't get to say the darkness. Well, that's the darkness. You don't know. And then third place probably goes to Chappelle. Like there are cool set pieces.

There is cool like item lore. There are cool guns, etc. There are occasionally a cool character here or there. But the story in Destiny is like hilariously terrible. And it's even worse told. There's a there's a YouTuber, a British guy does good work. His name is my name is Bife, but Bife is by Y F. He's Vati for Destiny.

And as far as I'm concerned, the Destiny storyline exists pretty much solely on his YouTube channel and not in game. Oh, that sucks. Yeah. That sucks. Imagine Dark Souls, right? But Dark Souls had cut scenes with characters talking to you. And it's still required a four hour video to get caught up because you don't know what's going on.

Well, that's really not what I thought it was. It's it seems really advertised itself is like, no, you're you're following it does narrative. Yeah, there and there is a through line narrative. But like key details are literally. And I mean, key stuff are never ever because missions are dealt with the the the business of the exposition of why you were going here to shoot the gun. There is an enemy faction in that game called the Hive.

I played about halfway through Destiny one vanilla and all of Destiny two and all the expansions. And it wasn't until the second expansion of Destiny two that one character marked remarked once that the Hive get their powers from worm gods. You would think that the primary like daddy thing going on with a whole enemy faction that are basically Matt there, the wizard fucking like demon race. I was like, oh, that's why they're like that. That's like I had played the game for hundreds and hundreds of hours.

I'm sure deep in some weapons background item thing. You know, it was there and the only reason they mention it is because the boss at the end of that DLC is a giant worm. But like just appears a question. Is the story good? No, it's terrible. It's hilariously terrible. It's so stupid.

That's unfortunate. The story is a weak ass justification for really cool areas. So, for example, the the the story hook on Shadowkeep is a long standing edge lord character, Aris E RIS, not a E RIS was fucking a boot and woke up some some shit and now the moon's super haunted, right? So you go in there and you fight a bunch of old bosses from Destiny one that have been rescan into, you know, nightmare ghost versions. Sure.

And that's a way to get old content from the first game back in here. Yeah. Destiny one is the one where the location came from. So they've remixed it. So it's got that kind of thing going on. There's fucking ghosts everywhere. There's cool black pyramids and shit like that. The actual storyline of the whole expansion is that thing looks really evil.

We got to figure out a way to gear up and get inside it. And then you do so and you get a fucking thing and you go, what is this fucking thing? And Aris goes, I don't know, man. And that's that's the that's the whole plot. So the entire appeal is just based on the shlooting. The the whole I'm sure there the aesthetic is also really. Yes, the aesthetic is very strong.

The aesthetic like the story has always been the strongest. Just like it's just like Halo in which the story is an excuse for the aesthetic. Right. Like it like it's the aesthetic is like, hey, here's this long back story in a single item as to why the Warmind is a gigantic double sided pyramid in an open chasm with millions of rows of servers. Yeah, no, that's not why it's because that's a really cool image of a giant diamond supercomputer.

Also, I feel as if Halo's like entire frame is like military world. It is. And I feel like Destiny's is not. It's not. It's it's it is. It is if you were to be cynical, like really cynical, it is their attempt to cater to both sci-fi and fantasy audiences simultaneously because the overall overall it's sci-fi, right? It's in space, you're in spaceships, you're shooting guns.

Yeah. But you have Titans, which are just paladins. Yeah, you have Warlocks, which are just mages. You have hunters, which are just rogues. They're, you know, the armor looks is sci-fi like wizardry with like magic non-essential bits hanging off of it, which is not military. Yeah. So like, you know, guns are all named associated. Guns are named as if they were swords.

OK, there is a there's a like a PVP gun that brings to mind called Redrix's Claymore. It's a pulse rifle. I like there's a there's a there's a gun called Isanagi's Burden, which is a sniper rifle with a fat sword on the side. Like it is that Romeo plus Juliet naming convention. Yeah, it is. Oh, the the names for shit in the in the series is fantastic. It's probably the best thing.

It's also really funny to see that Bungie has a couple storyline tricks that they love to use like that they to make their world seem bigger because they did the same thing in Halo. So in Halo, too, remember, they're all their attack on Earth and you saw that in all the commercials, you find out, oh, no, that was actually just a tiny little bit scouting party. They didn't even know Earth was the homeworld because the the the Covenant is so big.

It's so infinite. We'll never defeat them. But, you know, that kind of thing, they do that in this game as well, where it's like this giant expeditionary force. Oh, that's just the advanced people. Oh, the the the robot race that is bending time and all that. Those are actually just all construction workers that you don't even know with the combat unit, like they just. Yeah. Yeah.

Like and it's every time it happens, you're like, oh, cool. So these are actually just the real one one trillionth of the enemy force. Oh, I wonder what's out there. And the answer is nothing until they put out an expansion that expands the enemy roster by some degree. I mean, it's it's a trick that works, especially well in shonen manga. I am only using one tenth of my power. It's it's the instant like, yeah, it's the mind blow based on scale.

Yeah. You know, the telescope, you've been looking inside of a telescope the entire time. Yeah, I'll pull the telescope off and look at the sky. They did that. They did that once with Destiny one, where they say the the hive race, which is the the demons, they're like, this is the tiniest fraction of their giant, like trillions upon trillions army. You don't even know what's out there. And then they put out an expansion that included a completely new enemy faction of the really, really bad ones that are pseudo ghosts.

I feel like the moment someone in a story did that a second time, I would immediately just like it bounce off. So they they you can't pull that on me twice in the same story. Three of the four, three of the five enemy enemy types. Enemy types is like, oh, man, these are just the these are just the pussy variants. You don't even know you don't even know. So that's all good fun. So you bet.

So the story is something to be banged out, and it is an excuse for a cool mission. Right. So part of a good example in Shadowkeep is most of that plot is you got to gear up and get a suit of armor that lets you walk through a nightmare wall or whatever the fuck, a fog gate, essentially. But in the middle of that, you got to go, hey, man, we need to study. Oh, man, the delivery on the lines is so hammy, but I love it. It's like, you need to go down into the circle of bones and get the hive crypto glyphs that we may use its ruins to make objects.

It's fucking wizards and shit. I swear to God. And that's all nonsense. But what it does have is a cool mission where you're going down a long bridge with a giant evil pyramid with glowing green light so that you can get like a self rotating like cipher magic item and escape like once all the lights go out kind of thing. And that's that's why that mission exists.

It's not because of the the fucking dank secret history of the crypto glyph because fucking whatever, it's the item that you slot into the work table to make new guns. It's OK. We came up with this cool idea for this mission, throw it in there, and then we'll work off of it later. So yeah, the story is like laughable nonsense. My favorite, my favorite fucking thing about Destiny's plot is Lance Reddick plays Zavala, the bald guy, which is the the main character

of the Titan class faction, which is warriors, paladins, etc. And it's Lance Reddick just posts like the day Shadowkeep comes out. He's going, hey, guys, what's up? And he's just playing Destiny with his dog. Because sure, but he's playing a warlock. So he's not playing. He's not playing his and I'm like, that's so fucking dumb. Like, of course, you shouldn't.

Nobody. Nobody told him what to do. Yeah, they just sent him the game and said, please boot this up for five minutes. Oh, apparently he plays it. Oh, if you remember the game awards a while back when he went up to present something, he's just, yo, what's up, Guardian? OK, you remember that moment? So we it turns out like we have no idea what is up with this dude because we're all judging it based on the wire.

Yeah. And that's the biggest mistake in the world, because when you see him coming out on Eric Andre, it's like. Oh, he's a very serious man. What the fuck is this about? What is what is happening right now? Who are you? I think that's my favorite Eric Andre bit because Eric looks like he didn't know it was going to happen.

It looks like it was a bit that it might even might even Hannibal was in on. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So OK, so he plays. He's a big gamer. Yeah. All right. He rose up. So after all that, blah, blah, blah, you do the story. Moon's haunted. Moon's super haunted. It's not going to get on haunted.

Those ghosts are baked into the environment. They're not going anywhere. You start actually playing the real game, which is like, hey, I want a shiny gun. That's that's destiny. Destiny might as well be called. Hey, I want a really shiny gun. Yeah. And I got some shiny guns. They did something good with the there's a there's a there's a distinction

in that game between guns that you just happen to come across and guns you can farm for because there's this was it called? There's, you know, a couple of handguns that everybody wants, but there's no reliable way to actually get them. You can play the activity they're associated with and they could drop or nothing could drop or a piece of legs could drop. And there's no way to make it happen. Right. So there's a distinction between that and one's tied to activities

like the forger menagerie or this new thing, which is going, I want this fucking gun. Give me that one at the end of this activity. It takes a little longer because you're and then you go, OK, that role is garbage into the trash it goes. Let's go for another one. And crafting is not a thing. Crafting is a thing because what I'm describing is essentially crafting.

OK, it is either black black armory where you just give me the material. Let me do it. Yeah. You pick a weapon type and then you will roll the weapon type or menagerie in which you can pick specific guns or this new one in which you essentially earn bounties for the shotgun. Do you want the shotgun? Go ahead and do this activity. You will get the shotgun in a game in a game.

Sorry, I have to you in a game. So no, after you in a game in a game where you craft based on having certain materials and then the thing you get at the end has a chance of being a shit version of the thing. Is there a way to like is there a cost to it again disassembling it and reassembling? Oh, yeah. So here's a really good example. So there's a or can you just like press a re-roll button until you see what you like? So that's that is the question

because that that that answer has been different at different times. So it used to be in Destiny One that a gun's role, what I want to say, roles. I mean, every gun has two perks that can come with it. Yeah, that perk can be increased damage on kill, faster reload when surrounded by enemies, blah, blah, blah. There's good ones and then there's trash ones. And there are good ones that are good for certain guns, blah, blah, blah. So say you want to get the shotgun, the new shotgun, it's called

I fucking forget. I have it. I fucking forget what it's called. The shotgun is notable because it is the only shotgun in the game you can farm for that has a really specific perk that's really, really good. It's called one to punch. If you hit every pellet with your shotgun and melee, your melee does five times the damage it usually does. Everybody loves this perk, but before that, there was no way to reliably actually get it.

There was only a single shotgun in the game that would drop with the role and there was no way to farm it. So you go, hey, I want this shotgun with auto holster, which reloads when it's stored and one to punch. Well, what I can do is cash in a weekly bounty, which gets me a currency, which then I buy the essentially recipe. It's not a recipe, but for ease of confusion, to make the shotgun, go do a bullshit for 10 minutes.

OK, come back, make the shotgun. OK, I got one to punch on mine. Yay, the secondary perk was complete trash. And so I had to decide, do I do I do it again to try and get one to and a better one, or do I just say, I'm not going to bother. This is good enough. So it would cost you extra. It would cost me time, mostly.

Well, time is everything. Yeah. But it would cost you extra resources to disassemble and reassemble. So the way it works is to essentially up that recipe to grab it. You need to either use an item that you get from weekly bounties in which there are only two, use 20 of an item that you get from normally playing the game in which that could take like a couple hours to get. So it's like, you're going to make two a week easy. Do you really want to go really hard on it?

You can make as many as you want in a week, but it will take you fucking forever. So Neo, again, I don't know if you got to this point. But like at a certain point when you're doing the item management folding, crafting, upgrade shit, you lock in the ability you want to keep and let everything else change. And it gives you that as a like sanity anchor. Yeah. And they use so they used to have something.

They have something called Masterworks, which is you can just straight up buff the weapon, but you can only buff the weapon with one stat and that stat is set when it drops. So you can get perfect, perfect everything, but you're like, oh, no, I wanted handling on this gun, but the Masterwork is range. You used to be able to re-roll those because the perks used to be set. Like there was a gun that was very famous for this problem called Better Devils. It had really, really good stats and fantastic perks.

And it was the icon of the problem of non random rolls because it was called the second Better Devils problem. You would get a second one playing PvP and then you would immediately dismantle it because who gives a shit? I don't need a second one. OK, like having having all of them set made it so that in this gear game, you didn't care about anything to drop because you actually only wanted four guns in the game total instead of, hey, this isn't the best shotgun,

but I got the best rolls on it. So it's way better than the best shotgun that I do have that has crap rolls. I think the thing that would frustrate me the least would be a combination of what I just described with Neo and probably like P3 where like you can look at what your output is going to be and you can re-randomize to see the the the spells you want to keep on the persona. Oh, man. Because obviously the best is letting you pick it yourself.

But the point of this game is that it needs you to not have control over that in order for you to spend time with it. So allowing you to just prioritize the thing you care about the most, you know, and then let the rest go through that randomizer until you see something you like and go, all right, now commit to this. So they they've they've fucked around with this for a while. There's a bunch of different activities that that will give you more or less control based on this. Yeah.

Too much control and you stop playing the game. Too much control and you get it. Oh, I got the drop. I want it done. Yeah. And you're that little control and you keep playing the game, but you fucking hate it. So there are there are three things that currently exist in the game. So for I think there's playing activity, shit, just fucking drops. The most random of the random, right?

You can't actively farm for this. You just got to get lucky. Yeah. There is then. I would like to make this specific weapon, but everything on it is completely randomized. Big improvement over the former, but still a little frustrating, much less punishing. There is the third one, which is something called menagerie,

in which you essentially level up the ability to pick what goes on the weapon. You will you will go, I want to make this combination of runes on this fucking chart. And I will get this shotgun and it will be this type of like masterwork. And then there's a little bit of randomization on that enough to keep you doing it. And then the final one is something that they're calling. They used to call them pinnacle, and now they call them. Revelation, which are weapons that still drop with completely fixed everything. So there is a submachine gun called the recluse that you get for getting a really

high ranking in competitive PVP. It is set in stone. It will have always the same stats. It will always have the same masterwork. It will always have the same perks. These things had to get all horribly nerfed recently, except for recluse for some reason. It's like it's like if Sagat went into fucking Super Street Fighter 4 Unchained. Sure, if that that gun is busted, but these things are at the end of giant

grinds because they're all fantastic and there's no variability whatsoever. There's like, hey, man, do you want recluse? Do this. You got recluse. So there's no random rollable shit. There's no nothing. So as a result, they're all tied to, OK, you got to get a good rank in PVP. You got to get like 100 wins and then you can have it. I'm going to assume that all the abilities are like the one you described

where it has to do with the weapon and it's not like a thing that makes your character overall better at something completely unrelated. Guns have perks related to shooting their own guns and then with some very rare exceptions and then armor has perks that are related to your character. OK, because that would be a very different problem if like this random shitty gun overall has something that is like there is like zero cool down. There is there is actually one exception and you actually just said what it was. There is a shitty gun that gives you there are new guns.

They established that every time you kill will reduce your grenade cool down by a percentage. So it's like you could you can't do that. I mean, you can do that. But that that's so, for example, that is a highway. I have the hand cannon, which rolled with like a fast reload and demolitionist, which is the perk every time I kill somebody. My grenade cool down is reduced by like I want to say like 15 percent.

Now, grenades in Destiny are super powerful. So they're on like minute and a half long cool downs. So the ability to get the grenade back and like four kills of like bullshit shit enemy is fucking incredible. Yeah, it's way, way better than the version of the gun that has like oh, just increased damage on kill or whatever. Yeah, shitty pistol with a double jump. That is that is that is the one that I could think of that is totally like that.

That's that's that's way more fun. The other thing that they did was they added a new armor system in which people are gnashing their teeth, min-maxers are going crazy, as you would expect. And it it's. I have a suspicion that the way the armor system works now ties into the monetization of the game. So they have struggled a long time with that ever verse shit into how to monetize Destiny 2 properly.

And now they are moving fully onto a free to start by to play model, which stuff like Guild Wars tried and failed at. And they have made it so that all armor in the game can run with completely random stats across like they either have 48 to 61, sorry, 48 to 62 stat points. So obviously you want the one with more and they can roll among six different stats and you're going to want to mix and match and get all the blah, blah, blah. Right. The thing is, is that this creates a weird issue in that it's like, well,

I want my character to look like this, but all the pieces of that gear. Have terrible stats. Oh, geez. OK. Right. So follow me here. Well, no, no, I'm going somewhere familiar with you. I know where this is going and it's the place that I hate. Yeah. And then you go, well, I have this gear, which has fantastic stats, but it's from five different armor sets and it's cobbled together a bunch of bullshit.

Yeah. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to glamour on a specific look? Yeah. And there is and that is called ornaments in this system, which is you just go and go, I want my helmet to look like this. And those ornaments are only or nearly only associated with the outfits you would buy off the store. So it has been portrayed as you can wear anything you want and stat your character however you want, if you're willing to grind.

But if you actually just want to control what your character looks like, no matter what fucking garbage gear you're wearing, go by the go by the look off the store and look however you want. And I'm really torn on it. I think what's there to be torn about. Because giving players freedom to choose how they want to look is really it is the warframe. It is the warframe business model that I put a lot of money into with skin.

It's essentially skins. The thing that I am frustrated with is that. There are so many. Looks like there are so many armor sets in that game. Yeah. There's got to be like 200 and some of them are really radical. And the fact that if I want to make my character statistically strong, I have to completely ignore the way all those look and focus entirely on the ornament sets of which they're only like six and most of them

can't be purchased. Well, the problem is that the transmog in that situation is incomplete. Yeah, that's why that's bad. They have said that, hey, we're going to have us. We're going to do it. So first of all, they're saying we're going to put the old ones back up on the store to buy good. It's a start.

But the second thing is like there really needs to be a way to grind out a look for like to turn something into an or at least a new line of G.I. Joe's that are the same proportion as the rest. But these special ones are all interchangeable with special items and weapons and clothing that you can switch off on them, but they can't do that with the rest of them. You have to do it across the board. It would be very nice if they added a way to ornamentize existing stuff

because there's a lot of really cool looking shit in that game that no one's ever going to see ever again because people are just going to like the battle pass thing comes with one of these ornament sets. It is easily the best looking gear in the game. It is cool, slick, gold plated robot shit. It looks fucking incredible. Everybody who got Shadowkeep, it has access to this like battle pass thing right now. It's easy to gain ranks.

Pretty much everyone is going to have it. And in about two months, almost every single character is going to look the same because that's going to be the gear you're able to control what it actually looks like. I really, really think they need. It's the same thing I said about Monster Hunter. I was going to say, you remember how I played that. It's the same. It's like I pissed everybody off because I wanted to look the way I wanted to look. Give give fucking make it a big grind to turn a weapon into a sorry,

a weapon or an armor into a look. Right. And have that be a reward. But put it the fuck in there. And with Iceborn, I don't know if you saw it's news, but they totally did that. They added every single low rank armor as layered armor for for Iceborn just in a patch. If you want to run through again to bring it up, if you, you know, because it's just it does this as well. If you want to run through Neo using a big dump, totally Western night outfit, the whole game,

you can be a big dumb night. And the difference is the worst is not a multiplayer gas. No, no, desperate need for extra monetization. But but like giving that level of control can still be something you can do in a like an online gas. The only thing is, right, man, if you just make it as elusive as you want it to be, even if you make it so that it's like by a fucking, I don't know, a fucking glamour core off the off the store for cash.

Give me the ability to buy a two dollar item that will turn the helmet into a look. I don't even care. Yeah. And here's the other thing as well. It's I've talked about a little bit about this. I I don't play the games enough that I encounter this feeling. But when I do play a game and I run into myself. Yes, like I'm like, oh, like literally everything top to bottom. Another player is just me.

I don't like that. No, I don't enjoy that. Well, congratulations, you're right. Nobody likes that. So that sucks. So when that is statistically the best way to play, yeah, that's garbage. And I don't enjoy that feeling of being pushed towards a thing that I can't express myself. I don't know if you saw furthermore.

If you have a game that has all these assets in it, it's a wonderful way to like allow players to show off, you know, their their combinations of your assets that are already there to make the game. So I had this exact scenario happen to me in which I was like, I'm doing a quest line called the Black Armoury and the Black Armoury is all really slick kind of special forces like metallic plate armor stuff. Looks really great. And I got a full set of it and my character looked fantastic.

And I dyed it with a special shader look great. And then I picked up a bunch of trash doing random bullshit that cobbled together. And that trash was made me like a 20 percent better character. And I went, well, shit, enjoy that feeling. Yeah. And luckily I had some old ornaments, so I replaced the helmet and I replaced the gloves and then I made and I dyed it a certain color. So now my character looks fine, but it's just like, well, fuck, man.

That armor might as well not even drop and the and the final part to this. And this is the part where it gets really zany. You remember, I said that gear drops with a random percentage of either 48 to 62 stats. The stuff that drops 60 and above is only from certain activities. And when you upgrade stuff, they get more stats. So, for example, the raid is where most of this good armor drops, which makes perfect sense, but it's like, imagine getting like.

Oh, I finally got a perfect like rolled character that all my stats from this raid and that raid and this raid. And now my character is wearing raid armor, which looks like a cobbled together pile of shit that you did from beating the all the hardest content in the game. That's fine. Throw an ornament on it. That sucks. They like people have been asking for this for everything. At least for the people who beat the raid

and got every piece of that armor set, let them glamour that so that they can go, hey, look, guys, I beat I beat the raid. I'm I'm cool. Like again, make it as rare and as much of a high elusive as you need it to be. But don't make it not exist. Yeah. It it it sucks because it was painted as so the problem with everything before this was that

like way before it when Destiny 2 came out was that certain armors had certain stats period, which meant that there were good armor sets and bad armor sets. And you had the same problem in which like for Warlock, which is the character I ran. It's like, do you want the armor set from this planet, this planet or this planet? Because those are the ones that have the stat spreads that are good. Mm hmm. So every single fucking good Warlock looked like one of three looks.

Now, we've replaced that with complete randomness, but the complete randomness means you're never going to get an an optimal or even probably decent set of roles out of something that all matches consistently. And correct me if I'm wrong, but Destiny also doesn't have like color tweaking. It has exhaustive, like laughably complex color tweaking. OK. So you can't you can't tweak individual color palettes.

But instead of dies, you have something called shaders. Yeah, well, well, well, well, 3D shaders like yeah, but they are 3D shaders. So it applies different materials. So for example, there's a there's a color that there's a shader I like called Golden Trace, which isn't just black and gold, but the black is like cross hatched like fiberglass looking shit. Or there's a different ones that will turn like it will turn a cloak from either metal, thin metal to actual fluffy cloak or whatever.

So it's it's materials as well. The shit that we talked about with Anthem. Yeah. And the best thing that they did, like I'm complaining about all this cosmetic shit is they it used to be that. Hey, did you get a did you get a color from the microtransaction store? Well, you can only they're consumable and you can only get more of it by going to your collections and paying the microtransaction currency fucking horseshit. That was that is so you look at that and you go, that was Activision 100 percent

because now that they're free of Activision, you buy, let's say you get you say you pay a 40. It's called Bright Dust for your microtransaction shader. It goes in your collection and you just pull it out using what is essentially cash in the in in game cash, right? So they're consumable, but they're infinite and they're cheap. Right. As soon as they moved away from Activision, all of a sudden,

you know, money was removed from that process. Well, here's how you have to look at things, right? On a macro level. And if we can zoom out from destiny, let's zoom out from this and and look at that approach to things. It's really interesting, right? Because what you do there is you find someone like me who would compare and like enjoy the aesthetic of my character a lot compared to

like what other game things are happening and in some ways you almost go like, hold on a second, is that a type of player that's satisfied with what they have? That shouldn't be the case. You should have a little bit more of that you want. You want should be almost satisfied, but you want a little bit more. Right. Yes. So the idea of your look being complete and you being something that like you're actually happy with the way that armor looks completely.

It's like, yeah, but but what if you could only do it to that one piece and then the moment you get a better piece, you have to go and get that that material again, you know, it's actually kind of genius. And it is to take away that satiated that that that satiated satiated from the player who is totally about the look as opposed to the number. So the the weird part of it is that that emotion that in between state you're describing is the actual core of this entire genre is and that's usually associated with with power, right?

This is a pretty good shotgun, but that's a much better shotgun. I'm going to grind for an entire day so that I can get a sniper rifle with this one perk on it, you know, that kind of thing. But when it comes to look, it just feels like the distance. But like they say, you can, you know, you can get anything, but you can't really farm for specific armor, right? Armor just drops unlike guns, which you can go, I want this fucking gun armor outside of, I think one or two sets, you can't.

So it's like, yeah, you're going to get like constant, constant. Drops, and they're all going to slot in better or worse and sleep. And unless it's the raid armor, don't you dare upgrade it to maximum because the upgrade cost to max out your armor is laughable. It's so gigantic. Are are there any other games that do consumable cosmetic pieces like MMOs, almost all cosmetic transactions, the dies or the prisms or whatever.

They're all consumable. OK, you just you don't lock that. Colors of those are not associated with paying cash. But it's still something you have to go out. Yeah, so they changed it. But in 14 for like four and a half years, you would have to like a crafter would have to manufacture a glamour prism and then they would sell it on the market and then you would buy it and go, I want to make you didn't.

You didn't unlock pink for all pieces of it. No, you you found a pink die and then you would use it on the helmet and then pink would be used on that one thing. Like, oh, no, the way the way bugs be the way games get around that is by making these things laughably cheap. Destiny one is the only game I can think of. Sorry, Destiny and Warframe, Destiny one and Warframe,

which do you have this color palette or shader? Apply it. It's just it's just in the menu forever. I wish they would go back to that system in Destiny one. But the system we have now is technically better because in Destiny one, it would apply to every single thing on your every piece from the top down. And this consumable shit, while slightly more annoying now, because you have to just pull like five copies out, you can apply to different pieces as you so desired.

Yeah, but like overall, the cosmetic stuff and the new armor stuff. It's like, wow, you have all this control over how your character is stated that is totally at odds with the way your character looks. They have absolutely turned the current status of Destiny's like cosmetic stuff into Monster Hunter. It works exactly the same as Monster Hunter now in which all the best sets are going to be cobbled together, ugly ass looking pieces of shit. So everybody ends up using the one or two layered armor.

Like you remember people got that samurai armor from the collector's edition for Monster Hunter, tons of people were running around with that. I don't. But anyway, because it was a look you could control. OK. Played anything else? Honestly, I played a bunch of Smash last night, but not much to say because I'm trash other than this is the first time I got to play Joker in Hero and Banjo because I just didn't. Joker's nuts.

Joker's fucking good. Joker's fucking nuts. Joker's fucking good. I was so it was me and very fun. Me and three of my buddies just fucking around. And every time our send came out in the four player battle, it went from, you know, there's a melee. Hi, everybody's fighting to everybody's now fighting on this side of the screen

away from me, as far away from me as they can get. Yeah, like he's he's crazy. No, I just I when we took a look at it on getting to fighting games, I was like, OK, I, you know, I haven't the characters that I like. But I like persona. I like Joker. I want to see what this is about. And it's like, oh, yeah, really got a lot. All of his tools are handy.

Yeah, I couldn't believe how easy it was to get back on the stage with the chain. And then you add like our send into the mix. And it just your track, your chance of winning drastic go down. It's really, really, yeah, he's quite strong. He's quite strong. And again, like I feel as if the DLC approach saccharized taking here is like all the DLC is the fucking strong. All right. Yeah.

And everything coming in is going to be a threat that you have to adjust to. Hero getting free saves for after playing against hero, a couple matches. I now go, yeah, of course, that character is banned, not because he's good, but because in order to figure out what was happening, I was looking down and reading his item list item list. And it's like if I was if I was like Brazilian and didn't speak French and I was at a French tournament, fuck, no, like no chance. Is he banned?

He is banned from a bunch of tournaments, tournaments primarily that have international competition because the Japanese players don't know what the English players are going to do. And vice versa. I don't think most smashed communities have him banned. I think there might be some select places, but I think in most smash tournaments, he's I saw a bunch of kerfuffle about him getting banned over language problems back when he came out.

Then again, I'm not super into smash. So it might have been some local regional shit. I just remember the blow up for people were like, how the fuck do we deal with this? And it was just like right after Joker, how do we deal with this? You know, like, yeah. And you know, if you remember like Bayo from the last time and all the way forward. Yeah, I it definitely feels like they want DLC to come in and just rock the entire cast.

And that's an interesting way to approach things. And then I guess tone them down later or do something. Hey, here's a good way to get everybody to buy your fighting game character, make the character really good. But don't forget about. Street Fighter AE 2012, a.k.a. Hong Kong Edition, because the Yen and Yang just took over and fucking ran the town.

And we shouldn't we know we can't don't. That's I'm sorry. That's I'm sorry. What are you doing? No, that's not OK. Although that's that's legit. Yeah, that's what they called it. That's not OK. You mean Chinese regional division off the coast area edition? Of course. Yes.

Well, anyway. That was that was so that was too much. That was the day 2012 was like, yeah, make new characters strong because it's fun. Gods. Yeah. Hey, you fucked up horribly because now you've turned a roster of what was it? Like 45 at the top of approaching. It was approaching it. No, it wasn't. It was two, maybe three or four.

Well, you're a fool if you don't play this character. Yeah, is what it turned into. You're a damn fool idiot. Yeah. E.X. Lunge Punch. Never forget. Never forget. I remember those days was so good about it. I'm not familiar.

E.X. Yon's E.X. Lunge Punch was. OK, it it was a full screen, a full screen knockdown. OK. That was like, I don't know what the start up was, but it was like it was it was almost reversal level. Right. OK. Insanely fast start up right across the screen, knocked down, safe on block.

Oh, come on. And there's nothing you can do. So you you you eat it and he takes advantage of the situation. Yeah. Or you block it and he runs his train on you. And now he's right next to you and he's safe on block. And yeah. And then the moment he is able to run a string into an agent, you just got to hold it. Just die. You just got to hold it.

Guess I'll just die. It was it was. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Not safe. Plus. Oh, shut up. Not safe. You're on advantage. You're plus. Oh, my God. That's disgusting. Yeah. No, no, no. It's not unpunishable.

It is your advantage. If if you if I block if I block. Jokes on you, I wanted you to block it. Yeah. And I'm in and now I get to decide what to do. So plus that's that's a huge nonsense to. And I remember like the big thing. And any time you have a move like that is just like, OK, cool. How do you stop it?

And the answer is you don't. It's it's funny because you describe that and you describe like the roster. You would be a fool not to use this weapon. The destiny has a problem with that right now. The weapon I mentioned earlier, the recluse that you get from PVP. There's a design issue they tried to fix. And they said, OK, so all the weapons you get from PVP because of the way stats work and perks and shit are actually the best weapons

for PVP, which is a problem because it means that people who fucking hate PVP but want to be the best have to fucking grind their ass through PVP. So like, oh, we're going to tone this down. The recluse is a little submachine gun that for some reason they didn't tone down at all. It is so good that you would be a fucking stupid idiot to not have it in every single activity in the game. Yeah. And it's this weird thing where you're like, I'm watching like Dotto. He's like a YouTuber and he's like, yeah, they should totally nerve this.

Yeah, because it invalidates an entire slot in your your kit of there are no choices. It's use this because it's the best. Why would you not use this? It's the best. Everyone did switch back, of course, once that version came and went. Oh, totally. But at that point in time, it just did not make sense. Here's where it gets complicated in a game like Destiny or anything else. You know what? They totally should nerf that gun.

Here's the problem. I got that gun three days ago. I busted my ass to get it. So they better not nerf it. No, you don't get to feel that way. I do get to feel that way. No, it's in a game in which you grind for gear. You absolutely do get to feel that way. But they they made a mistake from the get go with how that guy should have been played as somebody who does not play these games.

I am telling you once you once you offer a transaction of time. Yes, yes. Taking that power away later is outrageous. OK, obviously, what I mean when I say you don't get to feel that way is it doesn't matter that you feel that way. Yeah, the greater good is that they fix the situation. Right. So you can you can write in and tell them you don't pay my sub as much as you want. But I'm telling you it like nerves to your character in a fighting game feel bad

nerves to something that you earned feel way, way worse. I can understand everybody would rather have. But did you earn it alongside the rest of the game because it was the best thing in the world? What do you mean, sir? Like like something you earned. But like if this is clearly like the whole beta is based on having this gun. Yeah. That overwhelms the feeling of I want to get my special gun. So what I did is I grinded for two weeks to get that gun and now I have it.

And now you want it to stay as strong as it is. Yeah, because I worked to get it. Yeah, OK, well, fuck your game, then. No, that attitude, the usual thing is. Yeah, thank God, you can't you can't balance according to that thought, you know, because that attitude is garbage. You can't fix your game if everyone feels that way. No, you can't. But you can tone it down a little.

The danger is is nerfing like there's a auto rifle called breakneck that was not the best, but it was really good. And they nerfed it into the ground. And I had to literally just acquired it right before they nerfed it into the ground and it bums me the fuck out like that sucks. It's an extra variable into the equation where this is how it objectively should be. But because you worked for it, you feel like imagine extra attachment. Imagine buying Alex.

Oh, no, you don't have to. I get it before I get it. Right. Believe me. I understand the frustration of where that's that comes from. But in the end, the long run, you have to fix the bottom line. Yeah, so that's what it be. That's pretty much it for me, though. OK, let's take a quick look at it.

Hey, destiny, people, if you're listening to this, fix the fucking Isenagis burden quest line. I want that gun. It's broken. You're in there, huh? Yeah, you're way back in there. Oh, yeah, I'm more in there now than I ever was. I can tell. Yeah, very clearly. It's good. Is it? Yeah, it is. OK.

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because I was like, I don't want to plug this in. That's dumb. And of course, wireless, you know, is the new way to be. But a lot of it's very expensive. In this case, the Raycons are half the price of any other premium wireless earbud and sound just as amazing. But today they just released their well, not today, but recently they just released their best model, the E 25s. They've got six hours of playtime, seamless Bluetooth pairing, more base,

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All right. So. Yeah, what did I do? Tell me about Indivisible. OK. It's fucking good. Yeah. Is it fucking good? I played it for like five minutes to figure out

because I'm streaming it this week, right? So oh, yeah, by the way, if you want to see me streaming Indivisible, check out twitch.tv slash angry's pad. That's this week at eight o'clock for five minutes. And I was like, oh, tell me how you feel about Valkyrie profile. I don't know. OK. I don't know how I feel about Valkyrie profile.

It's not engraved upon your soul. No, I mean, I literally don't know how I feel about Valkyrie profile. I don't know anything about Valkyrie profile other than it exists. OK. Well. Then allow Indivisible to introduce you to this genre. Yeah. That is like this is what excuse me. This is what action RPG actually should mean.

The word action RPG literally has no it can be anything. Once upon a time, there was an old IGN review or no. It was called action. Zelda and that's the worst one. It was it was not Zelda. Sorry, it was not. And it was before Internet.

It was a magazine that referred to Zelda as an action. And it's like, no, Dark Souls is an action RPG. But like Zelda, get the fuck out of here. No, but you have a magic bar. Just shut up. Yeah, you know. So you have this like really tight system that basically is a game where you're doing one of three things at all times.

Right. I fucking fell in love with this thing because I realized after putting a couple of hours in and then, well, a bit that like you're there's so far, there's been no downtime. The times have been spent doing map traversal, which I really like, right? Apparently that's platforming, platforming, wall jumping, lots of wall climbing and like in world.

You have in world attacks, right? Like each items you pick up like axes. You hang on the wall with it. Get like a bow and arrow. You can shoot at things to get the advantage. You can like open up little pathways. Just it's really satisfying to run and jump around the world. That feels fun to do, right?

And you can run and I hear my whispers that there might be some sort of shine spark type ability later on. So that's very cool. I mean, I've seen the the the Herika run, but like I want to see what else can come from that. Um, there is combat, which is OK. You run into an enemy on the map while you're traversing. You get into the fight.

The fight splits your party into four of the active members. You have for each button, I believe one for each button. And when you are when you have an active time based time battle system where when you have an attack, you press the button and then you can tilt up, neutral or down to do one of three attacks. And then you can press the next one to continue that sequence with the character when you're out of attacks.

And when someone is coming at you, you press that button to perfect block, which is you basically parry it or you can hold it to do a non perfect walk that drains your super meter. Yeah. So as you build that meter, you then get the ability to spend it on whichever character you want by holding down a shoulder button and then pressing them to get their super. That's it.

And then you just combo and juggle. Yeah, sounds like a like Namco S Capcom and and and the Mario RPG series. And yeah, and Project Cross Zone. Yeah. And to some degree, Tales games. Yeah. Right. You just you juggle the enemy to your heart's content and then you get used to their strings and learn how to time them properly. And then there's a team block button where you make everybody block.

And this works because you're swapping in party members, but the party members have different like juggles or states associated with their attacks. Yeah. Some of them are casters. Some of them are all up in your face. Some of them are healers. You know, you have different roles that you're using, of course. They all the one of the nicest things about this. And when I say like you're spending your time doing three things,

you're doing like those two I mentioned. And then you're just chilling with these cool characters. Well, that would be downtime you mentioned. It is. But they're like so far, the cast has been great. So like I've I've enjoyed the quote unquote downtime downtime. I never understood it to me like boring time. I just I just understood it to always being like a period of lower intensity.

OK, that's not my definition of downtime. What is your definition of mine is is managing my materia. OK, you mean like act management? That to me is downtime. OK. If I'm talking to characters and getting dialogue that matters or shit that I'm learning things about them that, you know, I didn't know. That's delicious content. That's yeah.

That's that's active. Yeah. To me, downtime is that right. And in this case, you really have none of that. So when you are. When you are getting these new characters, for example, a character joins the party and there's tons of them. I mean, you can tell from that intro.

There's so many in this game. Are they all in that intro? There's a whole I don't know if they're all. No, they're not all in that intro because there's some that I know are here that are not there. OK, for sure. Right. But because there's guests as well. But in the introduction to a character, you get a screen. You get a like a little like how to play almost of that character.

Like here's their up, here's their special, here's their down. And then when you pause, there's no extra layers of menus to go into. It's just who do you want on your team? And then how do I play them again? OK, that's it. One screen explanation for the character and then where they go. So there really isn't any menuing, yeah, in this action RPG.

I like that. Are there stats there? Are you level up? You level up. OK. But you're not choosing. You're just getting stronger. You're just getting stronger, you know. So, you know, some people are like love menu management and whatnot. I could go for some menu management from time to time.

This is a game without that. So take your pick, though, you you definitely get different. There's different effects to having the characters in different placements. And you can learn how to interact with each other, with their moves differently. So in some sequences, someone has a really good launcher. Someone else has a really good stabilize them in place. And then you have time to come in with a big super, you know, and like timing of where the character, the enemy is, is like important.

Because if you just come in, mashing, you will whiff buttons. And oh, really, that much, huh? Yeah, if someone is really high up and they're coming back down and you just mash the next attack out with the character, they'll run in and completely whiff and not hit anything. And then you waste that attack. What is the downside to just using one character patiently one in a row? Say again, what is then the downside to going?

OK, I will have this character run for an attack and then they'll come back and then I use the next one and just using them sequentially with not no juggles with no combo. Yeah. Well, you gain shit from the if you if you take if you do it that way, you're going to get attacked more often than if you were to kill them faster, killing the enemy faster. Because it's it's a timeline before the enemy acts. It's not they have their own time as well, right? So they're going to come at you more frequently.

Some of their attacks, depending on who you're fighting or depending on how many enemies you're fighting, can, you know, get a get really tricky on like how to block to see which line to parry. So you want to, in general, deal with the enemy as fast as possible. Two, after a certain number of hits in a combo, you get a damage. There you go. There you go. So your your damage goes to combo after you do combo. Yeah, of course you do. Yeah. All right.

And there you go. And one of the one of the and this game, you can tell right off the bat that like it's not going easy on you. Like it's it starts pretty simple. But as you start to get your full team and as your full team gets more than one move, like in their like active time slots, you know, like you get the up attack and then you get the well, no, you have all of them, for example, for this.

So there's a character that has a down install on their on their next swing. So you press down attack and it's just like he stabs his sword in the ground and he installs it and makes it stronger. OK, he has an upswing, which is a nice big hit, and then a regular button. Right. OK, pretty normal. So you're so one of his attacks is dedicated to making the others better and you can stock charges of it. So you have to choose when you want to do that. Right.

You you have characters that like some of their one of their three attacks are like a state change for them. OK. So it's not always just going to be about like three random normals that are coming out or whatever. There's a nice test of how well you understand the system. Early on in, you get a boss that functions as a living combo educator. All right. So, you know, in DMC, oh, I do have to combo the

shit out of that statue to get your juicy reward and a free triple S ranking. This is a boss that needs you to style on it and break it open with a certain level of combo or else you just don't win. Otherwise, you can't get the good damage in. OK. And like that's a nice initial challenge. Show it. You will learn this. You're going to learn it. You're going to learn it, you know. And you do and like you can send all your party in at the same time

and just go with with a big old like, you know, crazy rush down. But the ability to take it in sentences almost to like in phrases. Yeah. You like someone goes in, does a little bit, jumps back. Someone else launches up. Someone else comes in, continues a little that pays off. Teaching the magic of fighting games to the nerds who play the RPG. If you want to, if you want to put it like a perfect game being made by Lab Zero. I didn't say anything about five. I said it.

But combo. And here's what's what's nice now, too, is like in that fight, for example, I went at it from like with the party I had and kind of I was having some hard times because one of the characters I was using was doing big single hits. And I then had a hard time. And so I switched to a character that was doing many hits quickly and that made things a lot easier. So the big single hit would be great

if you got the really specific timing to like hit somebody on the way down or something like that. Well, the big single hit would be, yeah, it'd be great for that. It would be great as a combo ender. Yeah. But in this case, this particular enemy wanted quantity over quality. OK. So you have to adjust to fight that, right? You switch party members in battle.

No. OK. Do is your level for what's the main character's name? Ajna Ajna. Is her level the only level or do all everyone has a level? OK. And everyone has a how much Ajna cares about you level. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Is there a way to increase characters level or like you can redo fights? Play the game. Play the game. I know that you play the game and you level up.

No, but like, sorry. Well, I'm asking, yeah. OK, so say I don't use any characters other than the first three that I get. Yeah. If I want to switch them out halfway through the game, are the remainder of the characters going to be complete track? Oh, I have no idea. You've never you've you've never switched a character. I've one's been lower level.

I have, but I don't know if there is a like experience share system that you can get later on. OK, but as of your knowledge right now, so far, I haven't seen anything. So if I want to switch to a character that you haven't touched in a long time, I will have to grind them up possibly, probably, unless there's something else I haven't seen. All right. Mobs do not. OK, mobs do not respond. Sorry, I'm looking at the chat.

OK, people are saying grinding is very limited because enemies do not respond. OK, I know that like so far, I've been on a pathway where I haven't been able to revisit previous areas. But I did hear from someone that like you do get to revisit areas. But yeah, again, I've, you know, I put in a long session on it, but I'm not like super duper far in. So I love that I asked a question and then our helpful chat gave me every variation of the answer.

Perfect. Mobs do respond. They don't respond. Only Ajna has a level. The party levels with you. No, wait, the care about you as a modifier. No, wait, they actually start low level, but they level up to you fast. Like, I'm thank you. Thank you, crowd sourcing. Yeah, my my answer is I don't know.

I don't know so far. If you had a real answer, I would not have embarked on this. That is not your fault. But I'm just saying crowd sourcing is your second solution. Well, in any case, to continue. The variety that you're given right off the bat as well, like so prior to, for example, that that boss that I mentioned, you are running with like

six or seven characters to choose from. OK, you have a lot right off the bat that you can like work with. What's the time limit to like a full party? Like just three to four. Yeah. Twenty minutes. OK, so it's just like maybe, maybe, maybe. You do your little baby 40. You do your little baby thing with just right away and then right away, right away. Twenty minutes might be an exaggeration, maybe closer to forty five.

But it doesn't take very long. That's still pretty fucking fast compared to nearly every other RPG that's ever existed. Certainly. And again, and you you just it's the system you're going to be playing. So let's get you used to that as quickly as possible, you know. And yeah, and then so far, it's just been those three things, three things that I really like happening and over and over again. You know, there's also her inner palace where, again,

you can call that the downtime I've seen screenshots of that place and those backer like portraits are really funny. OK, because they don't fit at all. You could so you go in and like as you get new characters, they kind of like expand this your inner inner palace. So, you know, it's and and like you can go talk to them. And there's also your little like level up monk in your other thing. And I'm just this is because there's a cool like like stone monk

that's kind of like a Tibetan monk, which is a censored word that we should not be saying. Don't there's no Tibet. Don't worry about that. What are you talking about? A non-existent a non-existent nation. Hold on while I hide my face for no reason. Hitman button. And what I realized at a certain point was that your inner palace,

which you can just go into at any time, is like, you know how you have to loop back around to your village in certain games in order to get to that shop or in order to go pick up that one. This is the village coming with you. Yeah, it's in your head, right? And it's always there. And if you can go to it right, why are they always there?

Because they're in your head. Oh, come on. I gave you like a like a because you're indivisible. Isn't that the reason? Because you can't be defied. They're all with you. That's how the game was explained to me. Come on. I mean, maybe that might be funny.

We had a thing that might. No, that might that term might become something else later. But my I was like, yeah, you know, what else is indivisible? Zero lab, zero. I mean, you can divide by zero. If you're doing basic mathematics, you can't. If you're doing that crazy shit, I don't understand. Then yes, you can.

I think dividing by zero equals one is one of those math proofs that every time I look at it, I go, fuck you, that's stupid. That's dumb. That makes no sense. Should be some other than that. Yeah. And and yeah, the town comes with you, which is again, just like it's a it's a cool concept, but it's also just thank God.

Yeah, the time saver, the good just like I don't have to quick travel back somewhere. You know what I mean? Like it's right here. Like it's it's in the same way that Skullgirls is full of quality of life. Yeah, this is designed quality of life from the get go. How quality you ask so quality that one, every save profile has over 200 save slots on it and two, they auto rotate for you.

Get out the save system auto rotates your save. I appreciate this. This is something that Pat appreciate. Hashtag Game Changer. It's incredible. That's pretty good. It's so good that I didn't understand what was happening for like the entire first session and I was like, what my save keep?

I don't and it's like you're going to you're going to see like upcoming foibles. Where you actually save over your saving and like not understanding that the game is trying to help me by default because I just didn't get it. I was so shocked. That's sad and it's not your fault either. It's like we have learned wrong because game save should auto rotate. You know, because you're just you're seeing this this like loop of saves and then like eventually it starts going into the the last one that you did

and then he goes to the next. And it's an incredible system that I was not understanding and eventually and kind of doubting it first. And yeah, that was a mistake. But like now I'm telling you now and everybody that don't even worry about it. Just hit that button, save it, keep moving. You know, I'm fucking in love with it so far. Feels really great.

And I'm so happy that after all this time we waited in, you know, I mean, until years, right? Twenty four, 14, 15, five, then, Jesus. Might have been later than that might be mistaken. But I'm really happy. And like, yeah, this is another one that I feel like, you know, we'll we'll we'll let you know. I'll let you know as it goes further.

But this is on the good list now. This is on the good list, man. Well, if it's really good from what you've played, it would have to shit itself to come off the good list. Yeah, indivisible with the enemy and, you know, they took their time. But like, God, does it show in the art and the, you know, the amazing, like just the character designs are fucking through the roof. Like I loved that giant character sheet that we saw for like potential

Skullgirls characters. Yeah. So much. There are so many winning fun ideas on that. And it looks like they just grabbed a lot of the really good ones and continued that thought process. Don't tell me Blitz tanks in the game. Blitz tank is not in the game.

That's not from. No, no, the guy that had the tank is the arm. Yes. Is his name Panzer fist or Panzer Faust? I think it I think I think it was Panzer Faust. OK, I got him confused with the other the other tank, man. No, no. Blitz tank is a literal tank with a skull on it.

That's so stupid. Panzer Faust was fucking giant. Awesome. Yeah. And there's like all kinds of just like in that style, you know, of like here's a giant variety to pick from. Choose your favorites. You know, you got a Nakaruru type.

You have to have one. And when I say that, I don't just mean like like shrine, he may. I mean, girl with bird. Oh, bird. Mama Ha. OK, bird also there. Bird there. Big bird. Yeah, that's that's Nakaruru. Big bird, the strong.

OK, Willie, I don't care about any of this shit. What I want you to say is that I watched the intro and in the intro, there was Kamen Rider. Yes, he's there. What is his name? I haven't encountered him yet. OK, because he's Kamen Rider. Yeah, he's Kamen Rider. OK, when you get to him, I want you to text me and tell me how cool he is.

His name is Kamen Rider. Nagar Rider. Sure. His name's Rider. They actually just named him Rider. Look at him. He doesn't have a motorcycle. Look at him. It's so obvious. It's like it's like laughably obvious.

It's the best. It's the best. So, yes, you're going to have to and like there's these moments where you when you land a nice combo and then you end it on a super and like just impact is good, you know? Yeah, a lot of a lot of the stuff I love about the Skull Girls approach to quality of life and attention to detail applied to other genres makes me happy. Indivisible is fantastic. And you can check out more of that over on the Willie versus.

Oh, my goodness, it's plugged. Putting putting some time in. A bit a bit nutty to just pick that up in the middle of a full on Astral Chain LP. It's the timing, man. It's the fucking October, but it's like, fuck you. Yeah, and fuck you. I'm like, I want to play Indivisible more than anything I need to know. I need to play it.

So this is this has to happen, you know, logistics like the week that I took off to be lazy and play Destiny was the only week in like a four month span that I could because shit's coming out and and I'm a week late to Indivisible. But even then, like, there's just millions of shit coming. Yeah. So I'm one of them. Shit Cummings, right? Someone were somewhere in one of my buried emails.

I there's the the the backer coat or the whatever. But like, I just I just bought it anyway. Because well, doesn't that mean you miss out on all the backer shit? I think I can just go grab that later or whatever. But like, yeah, for I think I'm missing out on the little your little following. Well, give give your your coat away to somebody. I'll have to go digging.

I mean, you bought it. You might as well have somebody out of use out of it. Don't even know. Yeah, I'll go. I'll go look and see, you know, give it to a friend. I will figure it out. Oh, my God. He'd use the line. You guys see what he did there?

He said the name of the thing. Um, so, yeah, that's fantastic. I I'll wait to talk about that later. Hmm. No, no, no, I just I'm like, started watching a thing and I'm just like, might as well just wait till I'm further. Yeah, I get it. What's the point of even bringing it up?

You know, so whatever. Because you'll make you'll you'll say, I hope they do this and then everyone's like, they don't do this and you'll be like, well, shit. Or or any any discussion is pointless at this point in time until you at least do a season. Exactly. So did hero I could come back? I heard it might have.

Did it come back this week, guys? But I don't know. I don't know if it's. I mean, I think they moved it over to their other streaming service, right? So it's not on Crunchyroll anymore. Oh, really? Dude, I don't know. I haven't kept up. OK, it's back. OK, well, have you kept up?

Oh, yeah, I'm all I'm all up. OK, I'm super. I'm like a season behind. Oh, wow, dude, there's good stuff. I know, but there's really good stuff. I just like when they when they moved it off for Crunchyroll, I kind of like, OK, I'll go figure this out later and then I never did.

Yeah. So, you know, it's good. Cool. All might punch the guy. Yeah, it's back on Crunchyroll. That's good to know. Lovely. The highlight of the last season was all might punching a guy. Yep. I like that. He's a character that can punch people really hard.

I mean, I saw the first time he punched a guy. You think he punched a guy another time? Yeah. OK, cool. I like that. Played a lot of Sam's show. Is Sam's show good? I like Sam's show. OK.

That's an interesting answer to that question. There's. Well, it's it's because I like I would find that interesting regardless of the game or item or topic that I brought up. Well, yeah, the reason why I say that is because the stuff that I like that other people would hate. Yeah. So I'm just going to give an answer that is more accurate.

I can talk about what I like. I can't talk about what's objective. I would actually advise you to do that. I would actually advise other people to use this metric when somebody asks, is this good? Go, I like it. Yeah, because that's way more accurate. I wouldn't be playing it as much if I didn't.

But there's really funny things that like, you know, there's an art like there's arguments to be made against, like, for example, like when you get disarmed, that someone successfully gets you away from your weapon, depending on your character, you're just dead. So, you know, there's a good counter argument for just like, why not just kill you at that point? Like why even bother wasting the rest of the maybe because maybe. And there is a maybe if you can disarm them and then get yours back.

And then you play a really shitty fighting game with no weapons. You know, well, some characters can do fine without their weapons. You know, others can't. So who can do who can do fine without Galford? Really? Poppy, fireballs, command grab. Oh, he keeps all of them. Yeah. Oh, then doesn't need a sword for any of that. He's fantastic without his weapon.

That's fucking goofy. Yeah. So the, you know, the ninjas in general are just good without it. Good old Poppy, whereas, you know, your Jubey or your Yoshitora can't do shit. You can't fucking disarm my dog. No, can't disarm a dog. It's impossible. Good boy, Poppy, you can actually hit Poppy on the way in. I'm like, he goes, that's fucked up.

I like that. It's a weapon attack. It's an attack. It's a form of attack. You have to neutralize it. I like it. Hmm. Excuse me. So, yeah, obviously, you know, I'm going to be going into the tournaments. ECT is coming up in Stanford, going to be going on there. And then a Canada couple later talked about that. So this weekend was Ronan Rumble.

Shout outs to Jeff, the hero running these really cool online tournaments that are basically keeping the community connected. You know, it's a game that is like a smaller. It's got a much tighter group of people playing it. And it needs these things to really help keep the hype and help keep people playing and whatnot, because a lot of the time, you don't have the opportunity to get a big set of locals going on unless you live in New York or California.

Yeah. Shout outs to Jimmy Bones for winning this week and having a super cool set. I got to do some commentary for top eight. That was a fun time. And overall, yeah, I'm just I'm in there, you know, I had some real like so the foibles that come with like,

you know, trying to get competitively good at a thing mean like you start hitting that wall and then you look for that answer and then you can't see it. And in a game where you don't have enough people around you to fight, like it takes a while to find the answer. And like I have a really good sparring partner, the guy who fucking won obviously to that. And we play regularly every week.

But like there's a limit to like what I can get from that with his with the characters he plays, for example, versus like the the rest of the cast, you know, there was a Corrie gaming recently did a video that was explicitly about getting good in a small scene. Yeah. And it was talking about Thai Tekken players in which they described there's I forget his name, but there's the guy who is God of Thailand and Tekken.

And he just his friend described him as like he is so far above everybody else in the entire country that Thailand or Pakistan, Thailand. OK, that like the training part sparring partners is a joke. And so the only solution there was for everybody in the local scene to just start playing almost every character to just start. So he would go, OK, well, listen, the example used in the video is didn't know what to do about geese. So he picked up a pocket geese just to figure out what feels bad when playing as geese.

And that seems to be the primary solution. Yeah, I because I know like Arslan Ash is like another is a good look of that amazing player from Pakistan that like similar thing. Pocket scene of just like killers, you know. I actually turned to a local online warrior that we had and I kind of just asked him about his training regimen and stuff because the Flux Waves is a really strong player in Street Fighter that's from here that he mainly just plays online and studies, you know,

like he manages to do amazing things from his couch, you know. And I kind of like, you know, I got some some useful tips from that. And, you know, I've been doing a bunch of like every time I take like a bunch of losses hard, I save the replay, got to go watch it back, got to see what happened, what mistakes that I was getting bodied. And it's like, oh, I got blown up every time this situation happened. Exactly. So don't focus too much on the the the macro level of this matchup. Think about one exchange where you took a lot of damage and try to fix that.

Yeah. And work on that one thing and win or lose in the next couple of matches. Try to not have that thing. Well, what happens when you look at the replay and you go, oh, yeah, I was fucked. Right. Like every decision was wrong. Some kind of, no, but there was like some kind of setup or jump in and you're like, this situation got fucked super early. And once I was in the bad situation, there was no helping it. Oh, then you you identify that and go, I got vortexed.

Yeah. Right. Like certainly, like you definitely have to be able to go like to see the point where you're like, you know what, I didn't play wrong there. I just had no clear answer. Yeah. Or realized that sometimes the answer means don't be there. Yeah. Don't don't be in that. Because that's one of those things that I remember back when I played fighting games more often is the feeling. I had happened a lot when I played DBZ, where I would hit a button

and not end in that one frame between me hitting the button and anything happening. I just go, I just died. I just died. That was wrong. And then it would start. So there's I was talking to Reggie about this not too long ago, but like there's a specific long set in Street Fighter 4 that I remember that I played against PTS one.

He plays Gief, a strong, strong Gief here in Montreal. And I was playing Blanca and I remember the I think we played like 50 games or something like that, like it was a really long set. And I remember it was over that length is what it took for me to understand that match up, right? And the data that I collected there was pretty much like, OK, trying to play your game doesn't work. No, right? You cannot do it. All right.

Then what can you do? Right. And I basically, over the course of the match, just tried wild variations of things until eventually none of them worked. And then I stripped it down to what does work? What do I land every once in a while? And then what do I never land? What do I never land? And then let's delete those from my entire vocabulary

and only look at the things I land and where and how I land them. And let's just try to recreate those situations as much as possible. It was a very like like super. So you're playing the time in this. So you're doing your block of tricks and then like nine out of ten times. No tricks, just nothing. Get grabbed. Get fucking get boofed, get doofed. Right. Get roofed, whatever it is.

He literally did Siberian Blizzard, the Air 720 to an up ball. And I fucking went, OK, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. You were going to do that. Right. He knew I was going to do the up ball. He grabbed it out of the air and fucked my world up. And I went to take low. We're going back to the basics. What works, right?

Turns out what works there is Blanka's really far crouching hard punch. Yeah, his slide when Geef is walking forward. And if he happens to jump at me, up ball it when he doesn't have the meter to stop it. So fundamentals, right? Those three things and then. Hold that, right?

Eventually, he's going to start getting a little impatient coming forward. At that point, hop throw. You set the situation, you have four things, right? And that is how I learned how to fight that match, right? That actually translated later on down the line to the same. In fact, it turns out a lot of characters have to fight Geef like that. Yeah, they do. Right. I know this exact opposite of

Dalsim, who is going to be throwing out big long limbs and you're going to be taking a bunch of those hits because you just can't guess perfectly every time. And all you're looking to do is you take damage and at first you're like, fuck, I'm getting hit. I'm getting hit. I'm getting hit. Did you walk one foot forward? Did you get any closer than you were before?

As long as you did, the damage is worth it. Because once you get in there, yes, you have to stay in. Right. And then you keep them. So it's a it's you have to it's characters that have that reinvent what you're supposed to be doing. And in that, you don't realize until you play a really long set that you're like, oh, space on the screen against Dalsim is life. Right. It costs life to approach him.

Now, take as much as you lost, if not more, when you're there. But if you keep getting distracted by the fact that you're getting hit and eating these annoying buttons the whole time, you're not going to be focused enough on the fact that you actually are better off in this exchange, you know? So, yeah, that's something that's definitely not explained at all, at all and anywhere in the in a lot of fighting games is when a character like changes the way you have to play the whole thing.

And Sam was full of that, especially in the case of using a character like Darley, a lot of people have the ability to just stay the fuck away from you and refuse to even engage in footsies. Yeah, you know, it's all the way out. And yeah, so I just I kind of had to like really, really figure out a lot. And like I was staring at this long wall for a while where I'm just like I was fighting against people online that I'm like, you don't ever want to make that judgment call of just being like, man, I'm fucking.

Oh, man, I'm better than them. So how come they won? You don't want to do that, right? But I'm better. But there are times when you do you fight somebody who's like, OK, here's a guy, he's an earthquake, and he's going to spend the whole match doing jump back hard. Yeah, because it's great.

Yeah. And he's not going to do anything else. Right. And you're like, OK, so that's the best thing he has. So this guy is not going to stop doing that. And I should be able to beat anybody who keeps doing the same thing. But I'm fucking I'm getting bopped here. What's happening? Why am I this garbage? Right. And then you get stuck in your head over that shit. What actually is that move is incredible?

It is incredible. It is amazing. All right. And you and like you basically have to. There's a really great there's a great YouTube channel called FGC translated that translates a bunch of Japanese player streams. And high tiny did a video where he basically talked about how you will lose to players that you can tell you're more skilled than them. And you're just used to fighting stronger people.

But you don't know how to beat these people that are not that good, but they have one thing they keep doing. This is one weird trick, one weird trick. Top players hate it. Yeah. So you're like, why am I so garbage? What's happening? And the answer is you're you're being too complex. Right. You need to find the thing that the fact that they have that one thing

means they don't have anything else. Means you just need to abuse what they're not doing over and over and over again. And if they keep getting hit by the same thing, then don't stop doing it. I remember because people will like, for example, if someone keeps doing a wake up show, you can in any game in this case, whether it's a ginger old jump or can doing show, you can. Right. You block it and then you hit them hard. And then you try to resume play because no one's going to just do it again.

Except this person will not stop doing it. Yeah. So literally just wait until they keep doing it. And if they wake up and throw you at some point, you go, OK, they're trying to. I'm going to take that damage because they're trying to mix it up a little bit. But ultimately, they don't really have a game plan. I remember back in high school, there was a guy named. Gabriel, Gabriel, no, it was his brother, Gabriel's brother, whatever Gabriel's brother's name was, Ryan, I don't know,

who was like, oh, man, I'm the best at rival schools. I know all the combos and know I'm so good at it. I'm like, OK, cool. I like to play rival schools as play. And he had talked mad shit for an entire week at school. Went over to their house. Hey, guys, sit down. And he was good at rival schools like he played a match with his brother

before I fought him and he was like doing all sorts of fancy shit. Right. And then we started to play. And for the love of God, he did not block one maximum range launcher from Shoma. And he would rush, he would rush in to get into comma range, do fancy shit. And he would eat that pop up every time. And I got a double perfect as of just just doing that. Yeah, just that. Yeah. And it's like that's laughably simple

because the answer is just fucking block it. But he just didn't know whenever did that shit to focus on trying to get on big shit and jump in and and just like double perfect on him. And I literally just I literally just did pop up a B knock down and then throw the ball. Yeah. And that was the whole match. And he was so furious. I don't think he ever spoke to me again.

And it was super worth it. These are these are these are exams, right? These are tests of like, OK, so yeah, you've gotten a lot of this shit down. But do you have the answer to this very simple problem? Oh, no, I don't. And and then sometimes the questions get more complicated. And so in the case recently, like one thing that really helped me out because I was able to do decently yesterday, as opposed to like previous

things where I was just like not fucking getting anywhere by kind of realizing that I'm like, OK, this character that I have is not the best in the game. There's better characters in her. But she's gotten buffed to be decent enough. So what I can do is like, basically, you know, you can use what's strong with your character and you can you can try to abuse that as much as possible. But at a certain point, you have to take risks to do that.

Sometimes they pay off and sometimes they don't. When they do pay off, realize that you have the lead and hold that shit. Right. And instead of continuing to take risks, because I watch I go back and I watch an old match and I'll be like, here I took the lead. And then I continue taking risks to continue doing damage because that's what she has to do. And the person who's really good at standing still and not needing to take risks just chipped my life away until I died.

I was winning and then I lost. Right. What happened? And it's like, well, because you kept taking those risks. Right. So in this situation, take what you want, which is the lead, and then make them do what they're uncomfortable doing, which is walking up to you now and playing in close quarters, because the person who's jumping back and just blaming it out and throwing their buttons and has no actual. What if I can't take the lead?

Who are you? Oh, no, I mean, like. But you're describing it. And so I know that exact game plan and it's like I like to use it occasionally with a grappler and it's like get one early hit and then force them to come to you. In some situations, because they hate it, they hate doing because they have no they have no up close. But that relies on getting an early life lead. It does, which in some cases is just not going to have.

No, but depending on. So that's and that now you want to work on your fundamentals to get good at getting that that good at exchange in there. Right. And then, of course, once the person is out of their comfort zone, is when you can start fucking with them. So again, the gief that is looking at my Blanca, like tapping you from a distance, the whole match is look focused on that so intensely that when I dash up and throw them there, it's like, ah, fuck, you know.

So you can open up other things by making you focus on two or three little things, you know, and that was able to kind of help me out. So all of this is just fighting games at that fucking large. But it's what it's what I've been spending my time with. And it's what I mean, you fucking you you accommodated me on my destiny nonsense. I appreciate it. You talk about your fighting games all day, all much you want. I'm done. Oh, OK.

I watched Joker. Yeah, I liked it. Yeah. I think everyone in the theater alongside me also enjoyed it, but was also simultaneously fucking head on a swivel for the entire movie because of the obvious. And I have never seen a public outcry from news media. Yeah, so desperate for something bad to happen. It's almost like they wanted it. It's almost like it's an easy way to make money by reporting on.

It's almost like you you can will it into existence if you push it hard enough in your articles. Yeah, it's. It's really depressing. It's almost like we live in a society. Oh, yeah. It's funny because I read the initial article that painted the the movie as like incel fantasy or whatever. And then I read a different review by somebody who was just like,

oh, here's what's actually going on. And it's like there's none of that in that movie. Yeah, it's about a dude. It's about mental illness. It's also and also the thing that happens is closer to like communism. Then oh, there's a bunch like it's like the opposite themes. There's yeah, it does not go anywhere near. That's like it's any of that. So all I can see is like, oh,

a bunch of people manufactured a bunch of outrage in the hopes that a bunch of people will get horribly murdered so they could report on it. It's despicable, despicable. Well, anyway, everyone in the theater was watching the movie and each other. Yeah. And. It was a good movie. Yeah. And apparently Joaquin's performance is incredible. Joaquin Joaquin Phoenix did a really good job.

It's almost like Joaquin Phoenix. Am I? Oh, it's almost like that really, that really awkward interview he did with Letterman all those years ago. Oh, yeah. It's almost like he just captured the spirit of that and and distilled it. Yeah, you know, distilled it and boiled it in the and the beaker and then poured it out and did it again. And you got this fucking super weirdo.

What do you say to the people who are like, this doesn't need to have anything to do with Batman or the Joker. This could have been a fine movie by DC. DC DC stands the best shot. I mean, it should they shouldn't be fighting or comparing themselves to MCU. But as comic book movies go, they're they're in that world so too bad. They the best shot they have seems to be what they're going to be doing, which is every movie self contained, who cares?

But they aren't there. They're still related. Right. But too bad. It's so fucking confusing. But the reason why it has to be this way is because the quality of each movie will vary. It's too very, too varying. It's too uncontrollable. There is no overall quality control.

And therefore the thinkers being associated with the good ones is not worth it. So everything else, everything is isolated. The end, I saw people talking about how this this thing about the Joker of every era reflects the the fears of the age, almost like how the the the zombies of every era represent their cause. So it's like zombies went from unknowable space to magic is our magic to space, to bioterrorism, right?

Joker goes from fucking random wanton violence and Caesar Romero, right, to fucking yuppie businessman. Joker, it would Jack Nicholson. He's all about getting the big corner office and all that shit that he was ranting about. And then you have Ledger being a fucking just random terrorist, essentially. And then you have Jared Leto, who's just dumb. And then you have this guy who is about mental illness.

Where does Mark Hamill fit into this? Everywhere, all of it. He's the best because they're all about anarchy. Yeah, in the end. And I think that's the strong. I think that's a string that you have to ignore for that theory to make sense. I can see the idea of it is Jared Leto about anarchy. I feel bad for Jared.

The script that we didn't see. Fuck off, Jared. That's the worst. The best, the worst, the filmed bits that we didn't actually the parts that were deemed so bad that they couldn't be put into Suicide Squad. Those are the bits that are really slash the parts that he was sold on that they bought. They got him to film the movie to begin with or the parts they cut.

On the one hand, I feel bad for him because he's going to go down in history as the the terrible, almost every portrayal of the Joker has been good to some degree. You can. A lot of them have been fantastic. You almost can't fuck it up, except he did it. It was it's horrible. It's legitimately terrible. But on the other hand, I don't feel bad because it is a horrible portrayal and it's legitimately terrible.

And also, he thought that the Joker was about sending people dead rats in the mail. Yeah, I know. I was listening to a show where they were talking about how like, they're like, you know, is it just that the Joker is in such an easy role that you can't fuck it up? But and then it's like, no exception to the rule. God damn it. Totally fuck it up. You know, you know what the worst part about those cranks were like sending used condoms and sending dead rats and stuff like that.

They're not funny. They're not even jokes. They're like, if he had been, you know, but that means you just don't get it. If he had been sending like packages that would explode in a confetti or like pying people or like harassing his coworkers in ways that are like laughable, stupid fucking jokes that actually got super annoying. And got them mad. That would totally be the Joker.

No, but the but the Joker answer to that of what you're saying is you just don't get it. Oh, shut up. The Joker would literally never say you just don't get it. Of course, he does. Yeah. And what we really need is our Terry McGinnis. Yeah, we actually just need Terry McGinnis to fucking step in and do what's right. But anyway, Batman doesn't get it because Batman got no sense of humor.

We have to go beyond to a Batman with the actual sense of humor. To what? Who doesn't give a fuck? I like I like Bruce Wayne being old mentor Bruce Wayne more than I like him being Batman. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. He's so tired. So ready, so ready, so ready for Batman beyond that. We're not going to get it. It's got to be Michael Keaton. Yep, he's there.

He's ready. He's old man. Did ready to do it. And you already cast Pattinson. Yeah, don't put him. Don't make him Bruce. Make him Terry. God, it's so good. It was so good there.

Michael Keaton's there. It's right there. And he's please do it. Please. You just have to make him just make him Terry. He's so young. He's got the dumb hair. He's got the look.

You got the old guy. It's you fuck me. It's so ready. One of those 30 year old man that could play a teenager his whole life. Like, if you want to talk about not understanding what the time like, like, like it's this is my voice trying to tell people to get Miles Morales in front of everybody before fucking. Yeah, that happened eventually.

Eventually, right? If anyone out there involved with any of this shit has an ounce of awareness, they would make this new thing we're hearing casting for just to be Terry. Anyway, that's a whole other thing. Back on topic, a very important part of what's also unexpected and interesting about Joe Joker is. That it is a massive overt, undeniable send up to De Niro's old movies, specifically King of Comedy and Taxi Driver.

Yeah, Taxi Driver, you can see it from the outset. So you you you're getting those feelings of as as Arthur is just the weirdo. Yeah. Um, but King of Comedy is a huge part of where it goes. And I'm not familiar. I haven't seen it. Yeah. So like a lot, I've noticed that a lot of people are pulling or comparing it

to Taxi Driver more because I think I think more people are just familiar with Taxi Driver. Yeah, I'm more familiar with King of Comedy, you know. So like I was like absolutely calling those out as I saw it. Like and the fact that like De Niro's in the movie. Yeah. Like and it's all and it's it's really cool because in King of Comedy. De Niro is Rupert Pumpkin, who is this loser living in his mom's basement

and he's obsessed with The Tonight Show, basically. OK. And he wants to he wants to he wants Jerry to have him on, right? And like he goes through the motions and whatnot and you get to see that whole thing. And in this case, his dream is to basically be on the show, right? So when we get in the Joker, it's really cool that De Niro is cast as the host of The Tonight Show. The Tonight Show, yeah.

So it's almost like his character became that in a way. It's almost like the full on spiritual successor and it plays out so. Whatever, like the homage is overt. Like even the curtains behind him are almost like the same curtains. You know, like so. Yeah, oh, it's no wonder De Niro is in this because it's like, dude, this movie is an homage to your old work 100 percent, you know. And yeah, beyond that, like it does like there's times when it's predictable.

There's times when it's like, yeah, OK, I pretty much saw that coming. There's times when like there's I guess it's like there's things that are are are metaphors in it that are like not that it's not that deep. It's just pretty surf. It's like you get, you know what I mean? For example, like the first like one of the first things I heard on the radio is that there's a garbage strike in the movie and the garbage is not being taken out. So it's piling up.

Yeah, you know what I mean? And that as the move, that's a nice little as the movie goes on, the garbage is piling up. Yeah, it's just it's just there, right? It's not you don't have to read too far into that. But the execution of the predictable is good. Yeah. And the performance really does a lot of the the the carrying, you know. And it's it's yeah, go check it out, man. So would you say this is a dramatic improvement

from the guy who directed the hangover movies? I would say so. I would say so. That's crazy to me. Yeah, this is, you know, I forgot what else he directed. So there was another thing on that list I saw, but. But yeah, it's super, super worth it. Go catch that one because before you know it, they're going to go back to being shit again.

Does Joker look at the at the screen and say rise up gamers? He not only does not do that. OK, he expressly says the opposite. He tells the gamers to sit down. Oh, damn. So really, nothing, none of the ringing of hands about this movie was on point at all. He's telling all gamers to sit down. Sit down.

Yeah. Yeah. Catch it because, again, it might it might go bad after this. Oh, it certainly will. And these there's other things about it, too. Where I'll last thing I'll say is just that, like, it has these bits where you're like. Would the public actually be like this? No, act this way. No, absolutely not.

I can tell you right away, but the Gotham City City, though. And that's you go and you take you have that double take you go, wait, well. Mm, you have to remember that Gotham City is the shittiest city in America. One hundred and fifty years running garbage, right? And it needs cleaning up. Yeah. Right. So that's where you have that moment. If any city is going to get fed up and do a bunch of stupid shit, it's going to be Gothamites. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Or Philly. Yeah, alternatively, Philly. Boston's kind of down there, too. OK. But I was always under the impression that Gotham City was supposed to be a pantomime of Chicago, whereas Metropolis is supposed to be New York. But Gotham was a word describing New York at a point or something. Oh, yeah, that's right. New York used to be pretty crimey in the 80s, apparently.

I mean, even before that, right? You know, the Giuliani cleanup is a big, it's a no point. Yeah. On the timeline. But just sweeping under the rug. But yeah, Gotham absolutely was just like not your average city, not your average public. Yeah. You know, and like that's that's like prior to Batman, it wasn't exactly drowning in supervillainy, but just below

supervillainy was quite common. The grime was more than a film. It was it was the entire coding. Yeah. Yeah. It was a sheen. Did you paint the city with grime? Yes. Yes, I did. Yeah. Oh, anyway, I don't want to say much else because it's a pretty simple movie. Yeah. So man goes crazy. The more I say, do bad, you know.

But like, yeah, and it has definitely, again, like it's commentary is not veiled. It's very straightforward and simple. So good stuff. I'm satisfied with that. OK. Me, too. I should go check that out. Probably be a couple of weeks, though. I think I'll probably ask Paige to go see it. OK.

So check the news out. Luckily, this week is going to be really short as there was no news of import this week. Nothing happened of any importance to any of you at all. Holiday next year, PS5. Holiday next year, PS5. That is news, though apparently it may have been news put out on a tweet by SEA to cover up the fact that they fired a bunch of people at SEA. The controllers will have shoulder buttons with different varying degrees of setting

so that you can get more responsive analog or less. Precision for simulating. Yeah, other types of firing mechanics. I hate that. I legitimately hate that. I want the loosest triggers possible. But if you're driving a car, then it can sometimes feel like a gas pedal. It's the worst. It's the worst.

It's so the worst that I literally bought like so shout outs to Hayate, the M.K. player who told me about this like this kind of this company that does custom controllers where they take the shoulder buttons and make them real buttons and click right away and not do this soft fucking garbage thing. Now, that'll work with some things. Yes, other things that won't. Well, in Sam's show's case, I need not a giant soft button for my inputs.

So I'm going to be trying those out as soon as I get them sometime this week. This seems like a good way to give your your fingers cramps and carpal tunnel. This is awful. Yeah, I will report back once I get them and find out. But here we are with the PS5 controller, which apparently fixes this problem. Also, yay, USB type C. Yeah, good. Moving it forward and it's a good connector. You know, other talk about how the UI and layout will change and all that shit.

Yeah, we don't pay attention to the people that got laid off. So I was originally like, oh, that's crazy that they would announce PS5 just to like cover up like a couple dozen layoffs. And then I realized that at state of play or at state of play in the state of play, a little video reel that they did, you know, the Nintendo Direct for Sony. They a big advertising point was, hey, we're going to cut the cost of PlayStation plus and half, woo. And then PS5 gets announced by a tweet.

No video package, no statement, just a fucking tweet. And I'm like, yeah, they totally announced it that day to cover up a bunch of layoffs. Now, the history of announcements has always been a bunch of talking points first, but it's never real until you see the box. Yeah. And then it's never fully real until you see the controller. Yeah. Right. So remember when we had the Wii, but we didn't know what the fuck the controller was.

And that was a whole experience, wasn't it? So we were just staring at this white block box with a blue light on it. You're like, OK, so that's the console. But what is it? Yeah, so that in this case, it's like we're at the talking point part of this generation announcement. We're still very far from the actual one year away, in fact.

Yeah, we probably one year and one month away. We can see text as much as we want to. But until the visual is there, it doesn't feel like an announcement. And that's that's that's how it goes every time. There was. And then we use the worst name. There was. Oh, yeah. OK.

Well, finally, in Apex, you're going to be able to do a training mode where you can A, change characters, good, B, try out hop ups and different types of attachments on the weapons, good, and C, play with two other team members so that you can have a party of three in training mode. Also good practice shit. So, yeah, says it's coming out on the 11th of October. So wait, what? Oh, no, that was when the announcement was made.

OK, that's coming soon. So, yeah, fucking finally, a real training mode. How nice. Then we had. Oh, no, saying that they're not done. There's more characters and content coming to Street Fighter Five. I don't know if I even believe that. That's weird.

Technically, we're too short of a full season compared to the previous ones. I know, but the last couple, the way they came out, they just feel like they're running, they're running dry. We'll see what happens. But he's saying there's more stuff coming this year. OK. So maybe by dividing the the the season or the releases into these phases, leaks can only hit a part of the the season and not I don't think they'll ever

change development based on leaks. I don't imagine so. Actually, that's not true. They already did in a couple of ways. Really? Yeah. Off mic stuff. OK.

And anyway, so that continues. All right. So it's two places we can go. OK. What places can we go? We can go to the past or we can go to the future. I'm torn. You take your pick. Let's go to the past. All right. Let's go to the past.

What's happening in the past, Willie? Well, let's roll back to the past. All right. Negative latency. Negative latency. That sounds like a made up term. It's not. It's what Stadia announced is going to be

their way of having faster and more responsive controls than local gaming hardware. That sounds like a made up term. Now. Now, it's important to understand this in its full context, because one thing I noticed from this announcement, which is Google Stadia, VP of Engineering,

claims that Stadia will be faster and more responsive than local gaming hardware in a year or two. Negative latency will allow Stadia to predict your next button press movement action and do the input for you. The reaction to this was predictably hilarious as everyone was like, what the fuck are you talking about? Right? Yes. But here's the problem, right?

The problem is that that just kind of shows, actually, that a lot of people are not familiar with what GGPO actually is. He's describing rollback, right? Netcode. So as hilarious as it is to say, I hope the AI plays the game better than I do. LOL. It is actually what makes good netcode work in certain types of games. Games in which you can have a right

locked down scenario with a certain number of possible inputs. The reason why GGPO works so well for fighting games is because there are both players are sending their inputs, but there is a simulated version of the match between both players that is based on what your last input was and what it anticipates you will be either doing or not doing. And also in a fighting game, 2D fighting game, let's say, there are states in which there are only so many outcomes that could occur from this state, right? There's a flowchart of possible things.

Let's say you jump and you jump straight up. There's a flowchart of things at every frame that could happen. And there's only so many. And even the fact that you're playing a single, like you're looking at a screen where you're moving this aspect of the game, I'm moving this aspect of the game, like a fixed state game was what there was being described as like, this is really good for that. Yeah, when a mouse movement is going to make

the difference between me looking at you and looking at the wall behind me. That's not. Yeah, it's nonsense. It's like that's not what there is an infinite degree of being able to look. How is it going to predict where I'm going to look? So so take away points are one, the idea of there being a a simulated input based on what is anticipated to have been the moment where that like that packet dropped, yeah, right, is not nonsense technology. That that's like technology that does that's real.

That does exist and that legitimately makes matches better in this case. However, but bad rollback is once people don't implement when devs don't implement the like rollback code thoroughly and properly because it takes a lot of work, it's the hardest kind of net code to implement to your game, right? It really takes like planning from the ground up. It's harder to retrofit it into something than it is to obviously don't worry. Wally, they're going to retrofit it at the system level into every single game on the console.

And when it doesn't work properly, you get things like Street Fighter 5 where you're seeing the desync. Oh, you're seeing teleports and all. And then you minimize and reopen the thing. And now you're fine and they're seeing teleports, right? This is bad implementation. But this but when it's done right, it actually works really, really well. So with that being said, Stadia is basically taking their version of that tech and implementing it into theoretically what would be every game on the console.

And this is super questionable based on the fact that, well, one, the games are not built with that in mind. And two, these are not fixed state games anymore. You know what's interesting, Wally? I think you and I view like I want to pull out the way that you look at this statement and the way that you broke it down was the total opposite of how I broke down this statement.

So you are much more knowledgeable about net code and rollback than I am. So you did what I would call a bottom up or like a building your argument against it, which like, I know how this works and then this is the claim. So this is how they are saying it would apply. I did the opposite. I went all the way to the end, which is the total claim. And the total claim is that it will be faster than local. It won't just be as good.

In a year or two, Stadia's input responsiveness due to this rollback stuff will be faster than your local device. Faster. And that is fucking nonsense. That is absolute complete bullshit. And then I worked back from that in which I go, oh, they're taking a technology that does exist. They're adding a buzzword to it that we don't know.

We call it negative latency and they're using this thing that does exist to try and sell you on a concept that assuredly doesn't and then are giving themselves a laughably short timeline on it. Because well, this is where and now I'm getting into raw conjecture is where I almost can see the programmer's approach to how we got to this statement. Yeah, because it was like we announced Stadia, OK, the response is based on a lot of people being mad sketch about the fact that they can't buy anything.

Yeah, that's fine. Data will always be the cloud was resisted at first. It then took over. People will always be resistant. We can brute force that society. We'll just get it. Yeah, right. Shit.

My Photoshop is so successful. That's I mean, like never mind. I roll. I mean, do you remember mobile me? No. OK. Well, it was the first attempt at the cloud or one of the first attempts at the cloud. I literally have no idea what that is. Absolute garbage.

It was one of the famous things that jobs like exploded at his team over for just doing a terrible job. OK. Right. It would like copy your shit to the cloud and then delete it locally. But then it turns out the copy transfer failed. Oops. So then your shit's gone. Like it was off. Thanks. Thanks for deleting my shit.

Took a while for them to figure that out. So in this case, looks like it was like, yeah, we'll have to get used to that side of things. And then the other complaint is, well, there's latency, even if they didn't care about not having a physical, the the input delay is a big concern. And people are looking at the fact that there's going to be Internet with data caps and all kinds of shit in the way of streaming being a thing they can really do. How do we fix that?

And it's like the macro level brain on this is to go, well, then we can. We'll just you simulate. We'll just turn latency to zero. You close. Yeah. You close the gap in latency by anticipating and using existing tech, which it works in this case. So just put it so we need a version of it that can work in this case. So I think that I think I'm going to translate some business speak for all of you.

This is based on my pure assumption and my arm chairing. But I believe I have gotten an ear for it occasionally. When the person being interviewed here said that in about a year or two, it'll be faster than local. That translates into the week before this interview was done. He went to the development team of the product infrastructure and said, hey, people are complaining about the latency. Turn it around in 18 months and make it faster.

OK, bye. I'm going to go do some interviews. Now, here's the thing. There is certainly always the possibility that behind closed doors, we don't know what version of rollback they're working with and that their new experimental thing is actually capable of running enough simulated versions of your inputs that it would then seamlessly switch to the one that you. Oh, totally. I that's possible, sure. Except it's not because the speed of light is a constant.

The speed of light is a constant. So it's no no amount of prediction. And it's too slow for us because here's the thing. Rollback is still going to depend on a button press to change to a simulated thing version of the state. It can't be faster than the local because the local would just do it. It can't switch faster than it could just do it. They're both running at the speed of light at best.

They would be negligibly different. Yes, they can't be fast. No, the only literally can't unless we entered minority report. Yeah, in which it is predicting the actual future of your gameplay inputs. And then you don't have to worry about the difficulty of doing a pretzel motion. Just think about it. Yes, like the statement itself. Yeah, right, right, right.

The tech, of course, I mean, look, like. Again, I know this, I know that rollback works for this type of game, for this type of a fixed state. And I know that it works for. I know that it works when programming, when the developers take it into account, right? None of these games are going to do that. It sounds like nonsense, but it might be magic in summary.

Yeah, but it is nonsense and it is all. So also, the other thing you have to come is come at this is like, let's let's like, let's say the claim was very reasonable, right? You still have to go. Well, why are they saying this right now? And why is it in a year or two? Oh, so that when all the reviews for study are hit and go, this thing's a fucking piece of shit, they can go, well, it's going to be really good in a year.

It won't be really good in a year. It'll be dead in a year. I doubt this thing will be able to be purchased within six months from now. Who knows? What I will say is at the very least go like if you're interested slash if you are like forming strong opinions, go look up the nature of rollback and go look up the nature of that code and go look at some of the discussion that like happened in like the thread underneath that post and stuff like that to get to get some

perspective from people who are like working on games, implementing this kind of code in there and what they're doing and to see what it what it means when it's like being predictive, you know, the the the Schrodinger's input type of situation, the Minority Report situation and a lot of that is it's definitely more of a situational based on a drop noticed in a constant stream of data type of simulated simulated input as opposed to like the entire thing. But like, yeah, learn a bit more about that so that you can just be a bit more informed about it.

So I have I have the opposite suggestion. OK. And that is that if you are feeling like you really do believe that this will happen, I advise you to go back and read the interview in which when latency concerns were brought up, Google rep just said, oh, internet service providers will just lay down fiber in the entire country. They'll change to which brings the question, well, fiber is going to be everywhere and latency won't exist.

Then why would you need negative latency? Yeah. Yeah. That seems odd that there is all about simultaneously. There's a clear there's a like there's what is representing a misunderstanding of your landscape and the promise of technology that we are not sure how it's going to fully implement. So it's like I feel very anchorman about this in which Google were to look at me

and go, we're going to we're going to do a technology to make it feel real good. And my genuine total emotion is just I don't believe you. Yeah. So and I don't think almost anybody does. I think that's the problem they're running into is that just laughter is the first response to most of this. Well, as where I'm like, that's probably not true, but it is based on existing technology.

So good, good, good shot getting so let's see where this goes. Good shot getting like a kernel of truth in there to sell your lie. Let's see where this goes. You know, and yeah, that that's ultimately it because let's be real. Well, you know what? No, I don't think we can. But like personally, I fucking hate to just be caught bandwagoning something stupid and then ultimately is the wrongest you could have

been when reality turns out to be the opposite. Fair enough, you bandwagon. Absolutely. So I think everybody hates being on the wrong bandwagon. For sure. For sure. So that's why I'm like, let me understand what I can more about this. Totally.

And I appreciate it and I did my own looking up at the time and came to the conclusion that it's like, yeah, a lot of the stuff you're talking about is super legit and some of the stuff they're talking about is based on real shit. But what they're actually saying is total nonsense. They are using the reality of the situation to obfuscate the flat lies. Press X to doubt, not to fuck off the edge of my dick. Yeah. Still very prepared to laugh.

Yes, that's a circle button. And also, it's the kind of thing it's like, well, how many times every every lie or boast makes the next one equally incredulous or more so. Yeah. And you use that data to assess the next statement. Yeah, of course. That's the last one was total nonsense. That's the way even if this one sounds kind of OK,

I'm just going to assume it's bullshit. This is this is how the brain should operate. This is how we fucking move. Oh, Google, you think it's going to fucking no, shut up. You think it's going to my phone just turned on. You think it's going to exist in a year. That's cute. OK, so that was the past.

That was the past. Now, meanwhile, in the future, in the future, which if you get on a plane, you have to fly into the future. That's right. To get. Somewhere. Where? Where do we get?

Where did the plane land? I'm. I thought it was Hong Kong, but it turns out it might be China. Oh, yes. Yeah. No, I mean, it's China. It's China. It's China, right? It's China, right? Of course, it's China. Are you implying that it's not China?

I may be. Not actually all that informed. But Pat. This is a complex evolving issue. So I want to go somewhere. I want to go somewhere else with that. OK, I want to go on a different bit. OK, because I was I had a bit.

I want to hear you just go monks or cool. Yeah, free to bat. Shallow monks are cool. But what I what I actually think about about the future of where that plane will land, that plane is going to land at Blizzcon because Blizzcon tickets are non-refundable, which means that everybody that was going to go to Blizzcon

is still going to go to Blizzcon and Blizzcon this year is going to be sick. It's going to be fucking awesome. Slasher is pretty hyped. And I think he's right. Did you see how the NBA stuff went down recently where they were handing out t-shirts and signs to people walking in and a couple of people got ejected, but ultimately people were still rockin their shirts and I mean, at the end of the day, it's my shirt.

Fuck you, I'm going to wear it. Yeah. Yeah. Blizzcon has a motherfucking shoe and a period every year. No, it doesn't. Woolly, not anymore. Woolly, did you did you see? Blizzcon Game of Thrones fucking approach to the situation.

Anyway, announces everything of the year on a stage in front of a crowd. All right, let's who are audible. OK, all right. All right, let's break it down. What are we talking about? We're talking about, you know what we're actually talking about? What's that? If you really, really, really want to break it down, what's that?

We're talking about 10 cent. No, we're not. To a degree. No, we're not. OK, we're not. But we kind of are in the sense that. How are we talking about that? Because they actually own up.

They own 5 percent, is it? Yeah, but that's not controlling. It's definitely not controlling far from. Yeah, but also 10 cent hates the Chinese government. 10 cent fucking hates the Chinese government. OK, I don't know anything about what you're talking about right now, because everything I was following with this entire Chinese money and is going to control our ability to let you say what you want.

Yeah, and even South Park episodes dropping and everything like that, like, has been about the fact that 10 cent, the Chinese company that has 5 percent of that as 48 percent of epic of epic and a bunch of other hands in major, major business, has been a huge part of people being concerned about how much China has a grip on what people can or cannot do. Because the reason I Chinese own, so I don't know what you're talking about with China and 10 cent,

because that's what I'm talking about is when 10 cent had a bunch of their fucking game business license like fucked over about a year and a half ago, OK, over a new Chinese classification of games, which cost them a shit billion dollars. OK, that's it. OK, yeah, I don't. And also 10 cent is a private company. It is not owned by the Chinese government.

It's not Huawei, which is like Huawei. Actually, I'm not the Chinese part. It is all it's not. But there's people that are like huge. There's people that are private, that are huge members of the party. Oh, well, and it's it might as well be. Yeah, type of thing. Yeah, all right.

That's weird, which is when you catch an FBI warnings on buying their phones and shit like that. So that's bizarre. I think that it might be super I might be super wrong. Pretty sure it is, but luckily earlier on in the podcast, I said that I was not all that well informed. OK, well, then you're immune. I'm immune to criticism now.

You you you you poured the the shield, the pre-johns. Yeah, put it all over. So, um, Blizzard is owned by Activision Blizzard, which is partially owned by 10 cents. Yes, OK, Activision, you have to say the whole thing. Yeah, you totally have this. Yeah, because you have to you have to summon the ghost of Bobby Coddick.

He's alive. He works there. He's still there. The ghost of Bobby Coddick needs to be present in the room. Did you see that interview with him where he said was he ever alive? Did you see the interview with him in which he complained that media coverage of him by game pundits is unfair because when women look up his name, when he asked them on a date, they see an article titled Why is Bobby Coddick the devil and all these photoshopped with him with devil horns?

And it has significantly impacted his life. That's hilarious. The spirit of Bobby needs to be in the room every time. So we're invented moneyball. So Activision Blizzard basically reacted to a Hearthstone player Blitzchunk, the winner of their Hearthstone tournament, who basically put out when he was doing his post game interview, said Free Hong Kong, put out, put a mask on like the protesters,

said Free Hong Kong Revolution in our time. Yes, while the streamers attempted to die and hide, hide under the table. Hide their faces because they immediately knew felt what was about to happen. And it happened anyway. The slingshot reaction from Blizzard was to take away his winnings to suspend him from the tournament for a year. Is it a year? No, it was wasn't it initially permanently?

Oh, I didn't hear that, but it's possible. Yeah, I thought he was permanently suspended from the tournament. They took his winnings and they were rather just never paid him his winnings, I guess. They suspended the the casters. Castors are gone. Right. Collateral damage. Everyone gets shot and they denounced very, very strongly.

How strongly was one year? It was one year. I was wrong. I'm wrong. It was one year. It's a year. It was one year. OK. How strongly did they denounce this? Very strongly. What kind of language do they use? The pride of our nation, the national pride must be respected. So there are two translations of the state. And I'm not using the the aggressive one.

I'm using the more passive. Yeah, so I want to point that out. There are two ways you could translate the end of Blizzard statement. The the aggressive inflammatory one is that we will protect the pride of China. The pride of Chinese nationalism at all costs. And then the second one is that we will always we will respect national dignity as we always have or something like that. Plague pointed out something really funny in that when they put out that statement,

it was labeled as October 12th, despite it being October 11th in the Eastern time zone and the Western time zone. It was only October 12th in China. And that statement went out. Oh, yeah, it's the Chinese language statement. It's a different statement. Yeah, I know. You don't have to fucking. No, I'm talking about the English one they put out later.

Oh, the English one came out on the 12th. The one that's complete nonsense. The one that's it's a different one entirely. Yeah, you're talking about the Hearthstone account. Yeah, I'm talking about the statement. Blizzard put out a few days later that's like, listen, we believe every voice matters except for this one. We're not even at the happy horse.

That one's fucking. Oh, that did. Oh, OK, so so step one is they do this, right? Everybody die every streamers buddy. The streamers is so insane. They don't say a word. They don't say anything because that's what fear looks like, dude. Oh, my God. So follow that up with a

Hearthstone collegiate tournament where one of the winning teams. Oh, we're about to lose. Goes to the little sign of the sign. They cut away. They cut away after the end before the match is over. And we continue with this this entire thing, which is continuing the NBA narrative, what they had with the Houston Rockets problem of like having someone say support Hong Kong and whatnot.

And then we do a bit more digging. And then there's actually a giant collection. There was a huge list I read of like, here's the shit that major companies and a lot of tech companies, in fact, have been involved with in terms of like China bullying people into removing skeletons like their way of the no, no, no, no, not the removing skeleton. That's just fun. Into removing flags from the list of emojis.

Yeah. And removing the ability to select certain countries. Changing clothing on certain website. Like the the the level of slow pettiness that's been very very much so to the point where and it's interesting watching the juggling act because you're kind of seeing effectively someone describing that like this is yeah, it's very sensitive and a lot of people have feelings about this policy that and things that are going on. The regional dispute, the regional dispute, so to speak. And it's like, so we need to keep everyone's feelings in mind,

especially since there's a billion of them, especially not the people that are in the place who are describing what their feelings are. Think of it's a doughnut. Make sure that you care about the doughnuts feelings, but not the center. Yeah, where the Timbit goes. Yeah, because that doesn't matter. So anyway, after the probably the worst PR nightmare they've ever had. I would before we continue, I want to say that there's a rule in the Blizzard

provisions for that tournament that is being used as justification for these axes, says if you conduct yourself on becoming a Blizzard or make Blizzard look bad or make the tournament look bad, yeah, it is written so vague as to be nonsense. Yeah, they could use it for anything. Of course. They're like, we'll see. Which is smart on their part. He made the he made the tournament look bad by caused by rabble rousing.

He was a roused about. So yeah, and everyone goes, that's bullshit. Right. So this is already in the in the news because of again, the NBA and also because South Park had banned in China. I don't know if you saw it, but that was the episode that was then subsequently banned in China, of course, because that was basically them nuking themselves going. Like, yeah, we know.

Here's how we handle this. This this sucks, right? They don't give a fuck. So I remember when I like my I talked about how Black Panther did really poorly in China. What? And really? And not too long ago, I also talked about how. The edited version of the Force Awakens poster.

Yeah. In which somebody's very, very dark face is nowhere to be seen. That's right. And about how like it was like, oh, these changes are made for audiences. And it's super fucked up, but that's just a regular thing to try and capitalize on a huge movie going audience and one of the Iron Man movies. There's an extra scene in the Chinese theatrical cut that is Chinese doctors repairing Tony's heart.

Exactly. And in which is pretty innocuous. And the entirety of Pacific Rim, too. So, you know, we've been talking a little bit about that. And it's like, yeah, this is a notable thing where like the pandering is very clear. Money. The pandering is fucking if not a yikes for me, bro. It's because the pandering exists because unlike almost anything else where you go,

oh, nobody's going to boycott this, the government can make people boycott. Yes. But but but like what I wasn't seeing was the overall slow narrative in a lot of these other things besides the movies. So all that to say that boy does Blizzard get Activision Blizzard, get a fucking trouncing from everyone going, are you out of your goddamn mind? What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you right?

I'm of the belief that if they suspended him but allowed him to keep the winnings, this would be a minor blip because they would say, don't bring politics into the show. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it was the moment that they took. He's the winner of the tournament. He's the winner of the tournament. Yeah, if he was top eight or top 32, this wouldn't be any bigger either. That was the winner.

That's that's interesting. And like, yeah, I can. It's the difference between the perspective of, hey, don't do that. Yeah, right? Like literally like somebody comes to you and say, dude, fuck off. Don't come on, right? And how dare you stop and like and the people in charge or have vested interests on the opposite side, as opposed to being completely impartial.

Yeah. So the idea that we were completely impartial in our decision on current affairs. Oh, has nothing to do with it. Is beyond laughable in this entire nonsense statement that they put out at five thirty p.m. on Friday, the the statement that they put out because Blizzard has a little mural that says all voices matter outside of their campus, which a bunch of Blizzard employees then left to protest.

They did a walk out. And they can't get it uncovered because somebody covers it up every day. But also they put out a statement. I'm not going to bother quoting anything from it. It is legitimately nonsensical and impossible to follow. It makes there's no part of it that leads from one point to another. They talk about how much they value individual viewpoints. It's while simultaneously saying that none of those viewpoints can be expressed.

It's the definition of doublespeak. It is absolute nonsense. It's the definition of doublespeak. So they would have been better off literally saying nothing. Right. Because like and in the for those who keep track, the second paragraph is where the term core values are actively used, by the way. So someone wasn't paying attention. They also don't apologize.

They all they say that the only thing approaching an apology is we may have moved to hastily and not examine the situation well enough. Well, here's what's important. If you don't want to go into it, that's fine. I'm going to touch a little. Oh, I'm just saying I'm not going to quote it because it's fucking. I'm going to quote it because it's important to point out here that think globally, lead responsibly and every voice matters everywhere in all caps,

by the way, all caps. So those are not actual, like, you know, rules you're going to apply. Montrose, those are not. They're not but they're but there are they really because you might as well add a trademark after each one, you know, right, right. Because capital every capital V voice, capital M matters is the slogan you can print on the thing outside and because you put it there, it doesn't mean you

actually have to apply this, but it does mean people will expect you to. And it sounds good when you say it, right? Um, I mean, look, so when when it comes down to it, they have to now own up to the fact that the thing you say is not at all. What you are doing because you are very clearly just going, we want Chinese money and it's important to not piss them off. That's a new market. It's our fastest growing market.

Yeah, it's everyone's fastest. Would it because yeah, because I believe the background behind that was a lot of people were lifted out of poverty in China recently and now have spending money. Yeah, the entire country of China is essentially Nouveau Reiche. So it's crazy how much the bottom line matters to everyone trying to get some of that and the idea of upsetting them in any way, shape or form is the loss of giant, giant, giant money. So now you simply have to allow like an entire country to bully you into not

saying like your mind on social issues or political issues based on the fact that they're threatening to not spend money. I want to I want to macro out just a little bit to get a little bit behind because normally, whenever people talk about politics and games, the discussion is laughable and hilarious. It's usually Ubisoft making a game about the American Civil War in modern times in Washington and you're traipsing through the fucking White House and they're going, oh, it has nothing to do politics.

And you're like, are you fucking are you for real, motherfucker? Right. But usually it's not about, you know, competitors, politics or whatever. Blizzard would say there's no place for regional politics in our games and they don't take a stance on it. But by shutting this person down, they are taking a stance because I'm sure that there's a lot of Chinese competitors that were at that show that wore flags or, you know, wore a shirt or whatever.

Deciding what to shut down is more important than what the company even says. There's a team called that was called, I think it was like the Hong Kong Ultimate or the Hong Kong Ultra. Yeah. And they just had an overwatch team, right? They were not allowed to say the full name. They had to just say the HKU. Yeah, that was a decision that was made.

You are saying something by not saying something. Now, the double speak here is by saying we appreciate these values and we celebrate them and we celebrate the inclusivity. And that means that we have to think about other people's opinions who might not like this inclusivity, which means we need to respect those other people's opinions. And it's like, wait, hold on. How did you just get from freedom to not saying what you think in the same sentence? So my favorite part about this is something that you touched on,

which is posters and such in which people are somewhat absent. Let's change the situation to really show off just how fucked Blizzard is in this situation. Let's assume, Willie, that you play Hearthstone and you get really good at Hearthstone and you go out there to the Pacific tournament and you won that goddamn Hearthstone tournament and they go to interview you and your appearance as a winner, etc.

is offensive to the national values. Do they do the same thing? What do they say? What if you were Sonic Fox and you were openly gay as well? Right? Like you've seen him recently in tournament. He's wearing a trans flag as a cape. Yeah, let's let's fuck it. Let's not use it. Sonic Fox.

What if Sonic Fox got really good at Hearthstone? Yeah, his his physical appearance and way that he carries himself and everything about his lifestyle, his existence, is overtly political and an antithesis to many traditionally conservative values, particularly in China. Does that mean him literally being on screen at all is unfair? Like, hey, man, I don't know if you're familiar with the pornography, but there's a little thing called a mosaic blur that you can drop on a screen at any time. I would. I would.

That would be the funniest thing that had ever happened. You just what is that? Don't worry about it. The funniest thing to ever worry about it. Who is that? That's the pixel man. Leave it alone. So it's like just fucking blizzards. Going to say a lot of things over the next I'm going to say a couple of years

about how it has nothing to do with whatever. No one believes them because it's so obvious that hammer came down harder than people who fucking beat their wives and kill people. If you want, like if you want to actually look to like like examples of similar things, there have been. Tournaments where they show like like. Last Evo. There was a highlight reel showing all the people that won all the tournaments

that were played, except for one of them, because one of the tournaments was won by someone who they did not want to have on camera. So the cutting around things is absolutely a possibility way of, you know, handling the situation. So. Blizzard has been like like after radio silence for I don't know how many days it was. Because what are they supposed to say? No one's going to believe anything.

No one's going to believe anything. No one. So then they come out with the most nonsense statement. And now everyone's just like extra outrage. We're giving him back his money. He's no longer suspended for a year. Are they are they in fact giving him back his money? They're giving him back his money and he's suspended for six months along with the casters and their punishments is based on their job is to keep things focused on the tournament and the game.

So instead of hiding, they should have been like, hey, dude, shut up. You need to focus and bring things back to the game, right? And they didn't do that. And that's their punishment. So you know what, if this was the initial decision, we probably would have talked about this for one or two minutes, but it doesn't matter. You can't undo it because it's the version of it where it's like Blizzard, that China stuff, I bet that turbo had some kind of national backing

and China didn't want to single one of their dimes going to this guy. And now Blizzard's paying them out of pocket or some shit, right? Just to make this go away, like a half a million dollar make this new story go away. But it's not going to. So what is it? What's very interesting is when you think about this again, zooming out, right? On a level that is like the global stage, so to speak, you know, we're a bunch of dumbasses.

We play video games and don't know too much about fucking politics. That much I also live in Canada. That's far away. Yeah, we're French, we're French, Canadian, dude. But like I do have to wonder, like. You kind of look at it and you go, how or in what way would you ever get? Like people in a country that are in a I should say a continent that is all about individuality and freedom of expression.

How do you get those people to completely stomp on that and not give a fuck about those things? Blizzard is is dramatically harmed PR wise because their audience is primarily members of the United States of America. So what's the next best thing? Well, you can through business and through capitalism, you can actually money away the problem, money, the problem away to the people with the power to make the decisions, despite the fact that everyone they're broadcasting

to completely and utterly disagrees with them. Yeah, but you can money the problem into onto being on your in your side. And it's like, oh, that's how China is going to do it. Like you just. So here's the thing, get in and you become undeniable. I don't think that this is going to go away. I think they changed that because do you know when BlizzCon is, dude, what the date is?

For BlizzCon every year, when is it? It's November 1st. It is in two weeks. The only reason they gave that guy his money back that he is rightly deserved is because BlizzCon is in two fucking weeks in which they are going to all be out in front of thousands of people who are planning to ruin that fucking show. I am very excited to see the new May Cosplay.

I am. I don't. It's one of the only like overtly political things I've ever retweeted. But that that may concept art people are throwing around is pretty fucking hilarious. There is going to be so much May Cosplay at BlizzCon. Oh, man. Can't wait. Can't wait. Oh, man.

Yeah. And if there's no Q&A. Boy, is there going to be a shit show? Yeah, because because it'll be like, oh, man. Also, I heard that. Oh, what was it that like didn't was it epic that came out and said, hey, guys, say what you want. We don't care. I don't remember something along those lines. Or like it was one of the like some I think it was them

or someone else came out and just kind of was like, yeah, we don't have any. We don't give a fuck about what you say. Go go nuts. We're in League of Legends had a statement going like now, guys, we things are going on. Let's all try to keep stuff focused on the game or whatever. And it's just all these other companies like preemptively either doing these reactionary things for brownie points or trying to

like head it off at the past. Oh, yeah, it's hilarious. Like, hey, I'll be really clear. I don't think it was actually particularly appropriate of the guy to start making a big political statement on the fucking video game stream myself personally, but stomping him out. Come on, man. Get the fuck out of here. What the? What are you?

He's going to stomp him. You're going to rob them. Listen, do you do it? Tons of people say all sorts of stupid shit when they get up on the podium like the fucking racetrack or whatever. Or like, yeah. And like, a lot of people had. I hear that, but I'm very, very aware of the fact that

a lot of people had a lot of questions when some guy. That won first place in an Olympic event and a third place guy in an Olympic event, put a fucking glove on and held their fists up. Yeah. And it was in front of the world at the Olympics. Yeah. And a lot of people went, what's that about? Yeah, what is that? I don't really don't have a question what that was about if it didn't happen on the podium at the Olympics.

Yeah, I agree. You know what I mean? I simultaneously agreed both with myself, obviously, but also that point. Never forget that it is mattered in that. It is a place in which I am not involved in this problem. So my perspective is not tainted, but it's different, right? But like, you know, what my favorite part is, my favorite, favorite part is that people have noticed that overwatch is not just a vehicle for pornography.

There's also a vehicle for Blizzard PR. Did Blizzard do a bad get ready? Somebody in the overwatch cast is going to come out as gay or neuro atypical. Oh, you think that's because it shows off how inclusive they are. They absolutely use those characters to gain brownie points when they're in trouble. And the meme of like wonder what overwatch is going to characters going to come out of the closet this week. I bet that was on the table until that became a meme.

You just reminded me of somewhere I wanted to something I want to bring up and I forgot in the middle of talking about this. The part of this that I think no matter where this goes, no matter whether or not we're talking about this in a couple of months or not, the nature of Hong Kong means we're probably going to because this is all that seems like you'll be ongoing. Yeah. And this is all this. This is not going to blow over, right?

The the. Yeah. That's all the guy over at Blizzard just just wait a couple of months and it'll blow over. And it's like, what are you talking about? This is not going to blow over China's anger at all of this. And the trying to to money the situation is going to continue. It's going to be a thing. There is an I there's a thing that happens nowadays,

and it's almost tied to the like the cute corporate brand accounts having in these fun interactions and stuff where effectively like if you can like put yourself as a corporate entity, as if they were a person. If you if you can if you can personalize them and make that corporate entity like an ally to your cause, then you can definitely get people to feel good about your brand. Yeah. And that's wonderful in the short term.

But then you do things like this. And oh, being spurned creates way more hatred than being denied. And the ability or the thought almost that like the company is going to then sort of have to please all sides. Yeah. In a situation like this is like it becomes hilarious because it's like you're exposing how full of shit you were from the beginning. Well, it's always that you're you're you're pretending to be like righteous and righteous in the situation, pretending to care about the cause,

pretending that these values matter and that it's not just something that you're trying to use to it is. But but it's and it's and it's so important that like you understand that it's PR because it's very easy to think that it's not. So I have two things to bring up about that. Sorry, three things. One, there's a joke in a hat in time where you find a book in Hat Girls Room, which is titled Ethical Consumption in Capitalism and Other Fairy Tales,

which I think is hilarious and is the funniest thing that that thing. Number two is the ESA leaked memos about E3 talking about how what they really should do. And they're trying to advertise this developers is we should have spaces that glorify the positive impact that games have in the social sphere so that they can be cashed in as dividends against future wrong doing. Wrong doing. And it's like it's written right.

And you're like, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we build up, build up brownie points so that we can spend it against. It's like everybody knows that's what it is. But seeing it written down like that just makes your stomach turn, right? But number three, my all time favorite. And I will give a shout out to my pal Fuggins for pointing this out to me because I don't follow wrestling Twitter, right? He doesn't either, but he'll dabble occasionally.

You know about the WWE gives a lot to charity and has a lot of charitable stuff. OK, did you know that everyone stopped caring about that a couple of years ago? Like everybody like WWE is like, oh, we do this for charity. And everybody like, yeah, good for you. And then all of a sudden one day everyone was like, fuck off, WWE. You have any idea what that is? No, Stephanie McMahon went on Twitter and retweeted an article about a business article about how to use charity to get the public on your side.

And and then went and said, see, this is this is good future businessmaking that you can that you can use charities to really bring when people over. And everyone went the first reply. And the number one is why would you tweet this? Yeah. Yeah. That's that's amazing. And all of a sudden, that's amazing. All of a sudden, nothing WWE ever does of good ever again.

Will they ever get any credit? So here's the fucked up part is that there's always going to be the genuine version of this, where there is somebody who is either in charge of something or running a company or making or in charge of the part of the company that deals with the or the well, but there's always going to be someone that will be there that genuinely is like, oh, shit, we can do something cool here. Or I can like represent something or, you know what I mean? I can like I just described with the Olympics, I can treat this podium

as that moment. You can do that where the person genuinely believes what they're saying. And they're actually like following through on this. Right. What happens is that when that occurs and is successful, there will be an analyst that comes along and crunches that entire scenario into what you just described and hands that out to other companies to basically go like, guys, we don't need to spend any money.

We can just start posting things and build up goodwill. Yeah. And it becomes a consumable strategy that you apply to your entire infrastructure to, to, yeah, to then again, like when you fuck up later down the line, but you built up all this goodwill, you know, and listen, I know that Wendy's Twitter account is really funny, but Wendy is not your friend, right? So that's the part of this, that like when you really break it down is that you is what you need to be aware of and concerned about it is that like it's not

to say that any time a company of some kind or someone involved with some product or whatever is saying something or making a statement that that's going to be automatically a lie, it's that we're now in an age where these huge state companies like Blizzard are going to come out and spout some bullshit, like every voice matters, think globally, lead responsibly. But then when push comes to shove, it's utter nonsense. Yeah, because the only reason they do anything nice is because an analyst comes in and says, Hey, did you know if you guys give like a million bucks to

like cancer research or some shit, people tend to buy a bunch of games? It's crazy. Makes you look good. Yeah. Yeah. I really overtly find it distasteful the way they have treated the Overwatch gang and like sexual orientation as fucking cash in chips. I find it to be offensive.

It's awful. It's not always that sometimes it is don't believe that it's not. It's not always that, but when it is, it's not great with Tracer. I'll believe that was actually planned with anybody else. I don't believe that for a second. It's really a Symmetra being on the spectrum as well. I'm like, that came out of nowhere that was you're talking about like 76. Yeah, yeah, 76 was like timed.

I think that there's a term that was used in in like movies called like gay baiting where they basically would have like two characters imply to maybe have, but just not able enough, but just not able enough that it's not there. Instead of cousins. Yeah. Right. But but not. Yeah.

But but it's there's enough. There's it's implied, but there's enough distance so that you don't actually upset anybody who might get mad about that. And it's like, I was I like, that's one of those things. Or I didn't even catch that that was a thing until it's like, oh, fuck, you're super right. There's a lot of instances of that. Or it's just like, hey, man, you can let you can be happy about this result. But like, if you're someone that doesn't want to see it, you can pretend it's not there.

Yeah, you know, so yeah, uh, like this is not going away. This is not going to go away. Bible is con if they don't have cute. First of all, if they have Q and A, they will try and filter those questions. The questions will then all go sideways because no one's going to ask the filtered question. Right. If they don't do that and attempt to have Q and A by preselected questions, everyone's just going to scream over them.

If they don't have Q and A at all, everyone's going to start going nuts when they realize that Q and A isn't going to happen. There are going to be cosplays up and down. There are going to be more Winnie the Pooh cosplayers at Blizzard this year than at any furry con of all time. Winnie the Pooh is very important, very important to the story. The funniest part about Winnie the Pooh is this might be wrong. But what I understood from the censorship of Winnie the Pooh was that the people

using it were not doing it in a derogatory manner. It was almost like a fun, amicable comparison. Well, it wasn't taken that way. Yeah, but it just wasn't. But even that was. Don't you wait. Who's Winnie the Pooh? Do you mean Void of Light, who is friends with Christopher Robin in Kingdom Hearts 3?

That's correct. That's that's the fuck. Money is how you do it. So how do you take it over? How do you make people? Of course. Well, it's always been money. It's always been money.

Money is just the power made into a piece of paper. But I guess I guess you what what you wouldn't think is that the people beholden to that money would not be so stupid as to think they could like everybody on their side. Well, that is that is a very famous causal and a causal logic trap. And that is if you have lots of money, you must be smart. People who have money are often just as dumb as you or I.

And in some cases, dumber because money makes life easy so they don't got a struggle. Yeah, but we're talking about a corporation. We are as opposed to a person. But corporations are people. They are. People can be dumb. They have rights, apparently.

But no, but listen, the people who run any particular company are all fuck and filthy, stink and rich and are so disassociated with what life is that. Yeah, they make stupid, stupid, fucked mistakes all the time. You have to wonder if they had a discussion going, what if we just said nothing? What are what's the cost of saying nothing versus putting out complete diarrhea as a statement? I don't know, but it got really bad.

Did you see what they did to their authentication stuff in the wake of this? Yeah, they disabled your ability to delete your account. Yeah. Yeah, I did see which if they're going to go to the system level, that means a lot of people were deleting their accounts. Well, in any case, as we saw, like League of Legends already already worried about it, everyone else is shuddering up. But like, take heed that there is a fucking support ticket going around of a guy who all the delete options were disabled and all the two factor was disabled.

And the guy really wanted to delete an account. So he put out a fucking support ticket. It's like, listen, I'm going to delete this account so you can either let me delete it or I'm going to log in to WoW and StarCraft in every game that I own and just start dropping n bombs everywhere. Until until until you do it for me. Suicide by cop. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like this account's going to go away whether you whether you do it or I do it. So just save us some time and delete the accounts. That's hilarious. Some people are saying that was fake. Some people are saying it wasn't fake. I don't care if it's fake or not. Yeah, it's hilarious. So.

Even if it's even if it is 100 percent fake, that is a legitimate. Well, no, that's not a legit. That is a situation to use the N word. In. Listen, listen, listen, listen. Go ahead. Listen. Go ahead in protests for the right cause. I'm saying that that is a way to get your account killed. OK, all right. All right.

Just flame on, you know, you know, really in this, in that particular, in that particular instance, it would actually be really woke to start dropping I care so much about no longer using this platform and you won't let me leave. So I have no choice. There's no other option available to me. I have no other avenue. I have to say it. It's for the greater good server to server.

Everywhere, all the time. Yep. Yep. It's the only way. Racism to save society. Yeah. For the good of everyone. I dig it. I understand. All right, look, it reminds me of an old there. This is a real old trick.

You remember back when you couldn't change your PlayStation name? Yeah, you know what the trick to change it was? Yeah, you would have your friends report it as racist. Wow, and PSN would force a name change automatically. Yeah. OK, OK. That's that was a real trick. If enough reports come in and it's like Coolman 420, this doesn't seem racist. And you write enough reports in that say this is a term that's not

in the state, this is a term that is new or whatever. PSN would force the change and you could get a changed. It's like, oh, you can let people change their PSN names, huh? The only way to defend freedom is with slurs. The only way. What are you going to do? Not. Let's take some quick emails here. Hey, guys, hey, if you, you know what? I was going to ask a question that I'm not going to ask

because I don't want to see it in our emails. If you want to send an email in, send it to Castle Superbeast Mail at gmail.com. Hey, guys, hey, man, I'll read it. OK. You know, it's Castle Superbeast Mail at gmail.com. Uh, let's take this one over here from Brad says their asshole poop released. Kids can be pretty stupid. Yeah. When I was a kid, I had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which is a pretty weird thing to make kids do in retrospect.

It really is. We did the national anthem in my elementary school for like one year. And then we stopped. We did the national anthem in my elementary school for like one year. And then we stopped. We didn't do that in Grenada. We sang the national anthem. But yeah, up in Canada, like we just remember looking up the American Pledge

of Allegiance, and it's like it's pretty hardcore to have kids. Yeah, Pledge. Yeah. And like again, like I saw I in Grenada, there was the singing of a song ultimately, which you don't really internalize. But then like here now in Canada, where we just don't do shit seeing places where they're like, no, everyone has to stand up and like recite this thing. Put your hand over your heart. It's it's it's it's pretty intense.

Yeah, it's a pretty intense thing to make people do. And it's like I just I actually like our national anthem a lot. I think it's it's good sounding. Yeah, I mean, even good values or you know, or bad, like it's a it's a. Anyway, I don't know. I don't have the right way to describe the weird part of observing that. Yeah, from a distance, you know. But anyway, I figured that OK, so when I was a kid, I had to recite

the Pledge of Allegiance, which is where I think to make kids do in retrospect. And I figured that criminals and evildoers all got together to recite the pledge of anti allegiance. That's great, where they don't pledge allegiance to the flag. That's fucking sick. I love that. I love it. I don't pledge allegiance to the flag of United States of America.

That'd be a great society to live in, because you could just go and you pledge allegiance to the flag and the guy would be like, oh, oh, I can't do it. And like, all right, to the to the jail with you. The pledge of anti allegiance. That wouldn't be a very good society. What a pretty fucking strong. Oops. Shit, um.

Sex, Simper, Tyrannus or whatever the fuck. Sure. Wouldn't that be it? Yeah. It's like that. That's the tyrants. It's like that fucking white kids, you know, sketch that I'm not even going to say the name of.

Oh, you mean race war? No, not race war. Oh, OK. The other one. The race war bit is so funny because you can hear the cameraman losing it in the background because there was no plan for the skit. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's on a real street at their real house. And people are walking by. And it's all in the body language. Yeah. It's all that's the whole skit. Race war. Come on. Let's go.

Let's go. Come on. Come too. What is she? Italian? No. Don't play her. Did we always talk about wanting to do that?

No. Yeah. What? Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate that. Strong. It's good.

Sebastian says there are Lords of House Super Beast. I really loved the rant. Well, they went on when he got to Season 8 of Game of Thrones. Yeah. And you introduced me to Mahler as an awesome content creator. Thanks. What are topics that you can rant for for hours on end? Honestly, it's always the same thing for me, at least.

It's when good fiction goes bad. Yeah. When something that I liked that was established that was very strong, then just takes a shit. I think a lot of people can rant on that because it is painful and it is deep. Yeah. Because the chasm is not just from standing on the ground.

It's from the mountaintop to the chasm. Yeah. You know? It's the same place that my Gundam sea shit comes from. It's because I love other Gundam that is extra far from what this should be, you know, when anything good goes bad. I think probably my favorite. It's such a far place to fall from when you expect something good to go bad.

You expect that it'll just fall back on the surface. I'm trying to think. I think the thing that I rant the most about over time is things that people say are bad, but they actually serve a important purpose for the tone. So I remember back in the day, I had a friend who just would not play Resident Evil because it had a limited inventory. Period. Right.

And I remember like arguing with them for like two hours. Like, no, it needs to have a limited inventory because you have to be able and scare stuff so that you feel like like pressure. You can't and just like, nope. It's like, fuck, come on, man. But it's and it's. Anyway, when you can properly articulate exactly why and what the thing is not why and how it's nonsense.

You know, so. Yeah, like if if Westworld started on season two, I wouldn't have a fucking talk about what would have a shit to fucking give about that. It's because it came off of one. It was was great. You know, that's the importance. That's the important difference there. So.

Um. And. Let's grab a random one from. Jeff says, dear Holy Center, woolly and unholy Pat. I can live with this. Can you permanently die in hell? If yes, why wouldn't you just rage quit? I kill yourself to escape.

No, why wouldn't you just become really, really shitty version of the doomslayer? The canonical answer for most things is no. You become essentially immortal because it's your soul, which is perfect instead of your corporeal body, which is okay. So according to. The big hat man, you know, vicarious feel a day according to the Pope and the Catholicism and a lot of actual Christianity based stuff.

No, you burn and suffer forever, right? That's what hell is about. But according to Seventh Day Adventists and a few others that were in that Protestant category, it is. Evil to think that there could be an all loving God that would create beings that would have to suffer forever. I mean, that is logically consistent, right? To think that infinity trillion years from now, there would still be a place

that people would be infinitely suffering cannot therefore be compatible with an all loving God. Sure, fair enough. Therefore, based on that and other scripture, the thought is that you burn as long as there is sin within you and the amount of sin within you is kindling to the fire. So there is a little bit of sin, you burn into nothing and you stop existing very quickly.

And if you're super duper sinful, you last a long time. And the idea is that no one is as sinful as good old Lucifer and that after everyone burns away completely and all their sin is gone, he's going to be the last one left. He'll be he'll be going for a while. He'll be the last one left. And then that's when the next part of Revelation, there's not just the second coming.

There's the part where he comes back after that and everyone burns the fuck away and he makes the new earth. And then there's no more sadness or tears. You don't remember anyone that was full of sin. As far as the phrase saying, you go to hell, you go to hell and you die is hilarious because it makes no sense. It's not logically consistent. Yeah.

Also, you in this, why wouldn't you just become a shitty doomslayer? If hell's real, it's probably pretty tough. There's other fucking badasses down there trying to do the same thing, but they're probably not on your team. And again, you have to do all of this while you're on fire. Yeah. The permanent fires. It's a strong debuff.

Huge, huge hurdle to get over is, you know, you ever touch a stove? Yeah. Okay. All over for a long time. Well, I did that once. Times 100. I wouldn't want to do it again. There you go.

Because it has to be, the fire has to be hot enough to burn sin. Yeah. So, you know, doesn't that mean it only has to be metaphorically hot? So it doesn't actually need to have real heat. Yeah, but metaphorical fire that burns you metaphorically. I'm sure it hurts. Sure. It doesn't feel good.

Does it hurt? Like hurt? Or does it hurt? Like, I think it not. I think it really hurts. I think it's supposed to actually really, really hurt you, you know. And again, so like, even in hell, as everyone is dying forever, there's going to be a leaderboard. And only the highest level, biggest, toughest, strongest, like big sinners get to last longer.

I would be like, fucking blown away. If like, I died and I went to hell and like, I'm rolling down and I'm like, oh my God, Brutus. Yeah. You're still here. It's like, it was a pretty raw thing that I did to my boy Caesar. They're really pissed down here. You think there'll be like a group and like, they're all the big tough dudes that are like

the toughest, biggest sinners. And then like, when one of them just like, roasts into dust, everyone goes, what a fucking bitch. Oh man. He's not loaded enough on sin. Way too low level. Yeah. And then Genghis is like, shut up, you pussies.

I mean, Genghis is doing his thing. But like, who knows, man? Like the worst poker game in history by the end of it. Elizabeth Bathory is just fucking yucking it up. This pie messes with my complexion. Yeah. See, everyone's looking at Hitler to be the big champ, but humanity's been around way too long for Hitler to be the, he's only recent memory.

Yeah. There's some proper heinous shit that you don't even know about. That's tough because if you're going sin by the number, like Hitler existed in a world in which like Genghis, if he could have gotten away with it in the modern age would have been worse than Hitler, but Hitler had a larger world population. But that's what I'm getting at, right? So back in the day. It's in percentage based.

Well, that's what I'm saying, right? Because back in the day, there was someone that just went on a rampage and killed that entire other tribe, but that meant killing 10% of the entire population of the planet. Yeah. So like, so like the, my favorite way to contextualize this. It's per capita. Is you look at the black death, which was 25 million people ish. Yeah, sure.

Maybe a hundred million total. Yeah. Like a third of the world population gone. Yeah. And you're like, oh, 25 million is bad. Oh, wait, a third of the planet? Yeah. Whoa.

So if you were BC and you just, and you club a dude and then you're in 2019 and you club a dude, you have less sin. I disagree. Because of the population difference. I think that sin grows logarithmically and not exponentially. Okay. So it's not based on the planet being at 100% sin. No.

Okay. Sin is a logarithmic scale. I mean, it also doesn't exist, but that's masturbate once by yourself in a, in a planet with five billion people, you're in, it's you're in. Okay. Just as bad as somebody jerking off a hundred million years ago. Okay. But can you like, uh, if someone jerked off like a million years ago.

Yeah. Uh, yeah. Is that like betting $1 on the price is right. Yeah. Where you're coming in and you're covering the entire low bet. Yeah. The whole low spectrum. The whole low spectrum.

Yeah. One jerk off. Yeah. In the caveman era. Okay. You know what? If you're doing, if you're doing it versus a big murder now, if you're doing it per capita and loose sin, loose seed is a sin, then that per capita sperm is like, oh, the

sperm counts. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. Because that's like the whole human population. No, no, no, no, no. It doesn't. It doesn't. There's no, there's no egg near where I know where in sight.

No, no, no. It doesn't count. It's just, it's just rude and lewd. Okay. And he just, God doesn't like to see it. Oh, yeah. So dude, come on. One caveman jerk off is worse than a 2019 murder.

Did you know that the real reason why God hates all this shit is because he thinks dicks are gross and he can't see inside your wife? Oh, that makes sense. So if you hide it inside your wife, no problem. Yeah. But then why does it have to feel good? Did that to fuck with us? Because if it didn't feel like anything, then, you know, why even bother?

I don't know. Probably because of that animal shit. Yeah. Yeah. You ever hear about how like primates have sex and you laugh at them because they're all one pump chumps except for us. Yeah. Sure.

Isn't that hilarious? And then you hear about like pigs and it's like they nut for a half hour. Yeah. They have 45 minute orgasms. Whatever the fuck. And you're like, you know what? I'm good. I don't need that.

Seems bad. You say that. Meanwhile, Sting is out there. I don't know, man. Sting is out there doing his thing. You ever watched a documentary about those women who have orgasm disease? I don't. It's bad.

It's a disease that any stimulus to their entire body will trigger an orgasm and they look miserable. Do you remember that time in Dragonlands that there was a race of proto orcs that were actually very beautiful and smart and intelligent? I do. And they were so smart and intelligent and awesome and good at magic that they couldn't stand being around each other. And they fucking were super loners and they had no ability to have a sex drive.

So they just never reproduced. So then they had to they had to cast a spell on them called the Valin that made them want to fuck, but like only temporarily for like one really intense moment. And then they get the fuck away from each other. You know, I just realized the only way to keep the race going, you know, I just realized that is 100% a stolen concept from Star Trek. Really? It's called the pond far.

And it's what Vulcans have. No shit. Yeah. Oh, I thought it was from Dragonlands. Every every seven years, Vulcans will go crazy and super violent if they don't mate. Wow. And that was a that was engineered into them at some point in their history because the logic shit made they meant they were never going to have any kids.

So they had this crazy bloodlust thing that happens. So they either have to fight someone to near death or fuck desperately and they get all crazy and psycho. Margaret. Do you know the Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hittman, Hickman, let me tell you know that episode in the original Star Trek where Spock and Kirk fight each other with the things. Yeah. They're doing that so that Spock can get over his pond far.

So that's Spock jerking off. Yeah. A little. A little. That's what that was. A little bit. The theme of of Vulcan jerk offs. Cool.

See you next week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.