Castle Super Beast - CSB 074: Divorcee TikToks and The Ten Month Hustle

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Mixer died 5 seconds before we hit the record button. You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Get Honey for FREE at http://joinhoney.com/SUPERBEAST  Get 15% off your order at http://buyraycon.com/superbeast Get 20% off with free shipping with the code SUPERBEAST at http://manscaped.com Outro: Metroid Prime Title Screen Microsoft is shutting down Mixer and partnering with Facebook Gaming Titanfall 2 On Steam More Popular Than Every Battlefield Game Combined SMITE is teaming up with Avatar: The Last Airbender & The Legend of Korra Fans mod Smash Melee to feature Rollback netcode, matchmaking Min Min is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's next DLC character, releases June 29 Street Fighter 5 pros forfeit Capcom Pro Tour matches over lag

Lift the camera. Lift the camera. What's hurt it's illegal to be asleep on a live stream so I'll do my best. Is it? No. Oh. It's against the rules on Twitch though. Hmm.

Yeah. I wonder if it's against the rules on Mixer. Mixer is dead. Oh man. It's one of those weeks I guess where the slight bump in the podcast managed to line up. At the same time, if we started a little earlier, it would have come in hot off the presses. Whoa, breaking news. Oh Jesus.

Mixer died. Who gives a shit? It would have been, it would have been, you know, like crumpled piece of paper thrown at my head. I'm like, what the fuck is this? And you were like, open it up and she's like, oh. Yeah. That thing I forgot existed died.

Well, the weird part is that like, to be perfectly honest, like the first Mixer, I didn't even, when I saw the link with the logo, I assumed it was the first story I heard this week, which was about a black employee fucking having a really shitty story about a meeting where someone that they were speaking to described the partners and Mixer as a slave and slave master analogy. And that's pretty heavy. Yeah. And said a black person was like, all right, I think I'm going to leave now.

And it was super, super, just a weird exchange. You know, so I kind of thought it was like something about that, but turns out it's not, turns out it's this. But in that same thread, Phil Spencer actually responded and said, like, oh, what's this about? Can we hear more about it? Because it was like a person who went through the channels to like, you know, mention to HR what happened or whatever and like nothing came of it.

It was confusion, but I don't know if that contributed to this. I suspect it might have been a little push on a house of cards. I suspect that this was like somebody throwing another Molotov on the house that's already on fire. Perhaps. Yeah. So the question on everybody's mind with this announcement is you can you can auto complete that.

How much money to all those people who got paid to go to Mixer get to keep. And I bet it's the amount that they already got paid. There must have been some sort of clause. I don't you have to imagine you have to imagine and there was a ninja clause in there to be like, look, if this thing if the ship sinks while I'm on it, you're giving me the sickest life raft ever. Yeah, it has to be like, okay, we're going to pay you $800 million, but we're going to give it to you in like, you know, installments per month as long as the service continues

to exist. It definitely yeah, like likely when you hear like I would imagine a gigantic contract like that with a 20 year whatever the year lockdown permanent lockdown thing. There must have been some sort of like breakdown of time between, you know, like how it gets spread out. And yeah, when a company shuts down, I mean, it's not like Microsoft is shutting down though, right? So no, well, could you do me a small favor?

You turned me down prior to the stream. Could you turn me back up? Okay. I just checked my audio on the stream and I am quite low for some reason. All right. You have been dragged up. You were hitting a red line earlier. So I was trying to avoid that.

Yeah, but that's me, man. I'm a red line. Well, think think about it. No, I don't want to red line. It's an awesome anime. Hey, it sure is. So, um, yeah, that the the you have to imagine that people are refreshing, um, Ninja's Twitter like rapidly.

You're gonna go to Facebook, buddy. Feverishly. Oh, yeah, that's true. It's not a shutdown. It is merging with Facebook gaming. Correct. Isn't that it? It happened so quickly before we started.

I didn't even I skimmed, but I didn't get a chance to fully read the deal. Um, we're partnering with Facebook. Microsoft is closing the mixer service on July 22nd and plans to move existing partners over to Facebook gaming. Um, the surprise. Like dumbasses, remember how you were like, Oh, thank God, I'll go to mixer because I don't like Twitch and God forbid I ever go to fucking Facebook. Oh, shit.

So I guess then, yeah, everything probably does continue, but it continues with Facebook gaming. Um, I doubt it would be pretty fucked if they had to like sign different contracts with Facebook gaming, but I bet they probably are going to be like, Hey, I've got a signed different contracts with Facebook gaming and we might honor some of the stuff that you had, but then again, we might not. Okay. I'm being linked to some guy on Twitter saying that shroud and Ninja got approached to move

over to Facebook, uh, and then we're like, nah, and then kept the full payments and are free to go. So they made out like bandits, supposedly they kept the full payments and are now and are now free to go wherever they want. Yeah. Well, then that's fucking sick. Well, then well played. Well played, sir.

That's a good hustle. That's a good hustle. Yeah. That's a successful, a successful hustle has been completed. I wish somebody had told me to go to mixer and paid me money. I mean, what was it though? What was the, what was it? It was a three year for the four years was, I don't think we ever knew.

No, no, no, no. I mean, when did it happen? When did it like de facto like 10 months ago de facto? It was like, it was, was it less than a year ago? Oh yeah. I thought it was a while ago. No, the quarantine is messing with our sense of time. This was like easily less than a year ago.

That yo, the 10 month hustle. What a play. What a play. Now that's, he was, uh, Wow. Supposedly it was August of last year. Wow. And he was given somewhere between 20 and 30 million dollars to screen stream exclusively on mixer.

Yeah. That's a, that's a super bowl winner right there. That's a super, that's a, that's a super bowl winning kick. Yeah. That's what it is. Yeah. I was waiting. I was the second you said ninja.

I'm like, how, how is it going to get there first? And it was you. Congrats. Oh, you know, normally, normally I'd be the first kind of person. To jump up and start to criticize people that got to be rich because they were already rich, but this isn't exactly what happened. This is Microsoft just deciding to burn money and asking who wants to stand near the money pit while it burns.

And if you go, I want to stand next to that money pit and they're like, yeah, that's cool. I get good for you. I guess because the fuck Microsoft and Google have this fucking amazing ability to just burn cash and throw it in the ocean and drop it from a plane and just throw it away. They, they definitely had a staff that was really, really into the product. They, they had a group of people that believed in, in Mixer heavily as, as the alternative.

I remember going to the Mixer Mixer at one of the packs is some time ago. And yeah, I remember sort of just talking to someone and going like, okay, so like you're, you're, you know, you're with, you're with Mixer here. And hypothetically, if I was some sort of, you know, large audience individual, how would you sell me on this? For example, you know, and the, the, the core of the pitch really came down to the, the, the, the money from watching sort of schematic they had. Like the, the, it's kind of like, it's kind of like points that Twitch has now, right?

But like it was bits from watching and it was kind of like, okay, now, but like, is that based on sort of like how many ads are played or, and I wasn't too sure and I didn't quite understand, but in the end I remembered being like, yeah, the more people watch, they don't have to make a direct donation. They can just kind of contribute to you directly through eyeball time, you know, and like watch time, it's like, I, when it comes to the amount of ads you play, that does bring a value, but when there aren't, that doesn't, what does it come from? Microsoft, you know, and it's come from you and I couldn't quite figure out what

the start of the economic circle was based on. It was the same. How do I put this? I like the term use economic circle. I've never heard it before, but I like it. It's the same business model that Amazon is in and Microsoft is trying. Hey, Willie, did you update your Windows PC lately?

No, I've been hearing horrible nightmarish tales of what happens if I were to do that, so I'm dodging updates. So the most recent Windows update, the one I loaded up my PC, it said, hey, we've installed Edge for you, Microsoft Edge, and we've imported all your bookmarks and do you tell us how much you love Edge? And it's now your default browser, which I don't know if you're familiar, but this is like the same behavior that got like Microsoft sued by the European court and they lost like a shit zillion dollars.

Well, the anti-compete laws. The last time I talked about Edge, it was to describe how utterly sad that message was that popped up to say, hey, man, give Edge a chance. You don't even know if you don't like it yet, right? No, I don't care. And it was literally something that Google had to, they had to put a warning on the Google, on the Chrome download page to be like, ignore whatever messages pop up here and it shows you a blurred version of it.

And when you get ignore your ex calling you straight up and when you get to the message and it's so drunken and desperate and you can just smell the gin through the phone and it's like you guys have no dignity. You have no dignity left and you don't care anymore. And this is your, this is it. This is what you're getting. You're getting the drunk dial. And now you're telling me that, hey, the next update,

she just kicked the door down and moved her things in. She's in your house. And you woke up to the smell of breakfast being made and she just threw out all your girlfriend's shit and is just like, I'm here now. Hey, you forgot about me. Hey, look, I remember how you liked your eggs. I remember how you liked your eggs.

Say thank you. I brought you breakfast in bed. Look, I got all your bookmarks. And I'm like, that totally makes perfect sense for Edge considering how absolutely down and out it was not but a year ago. So you can't even uninstall it anymore, by the way. Oh, of course. It's part of like the Windows services.

Oh, no. She moved her official address. She went to City Hall and she actually had all of her registered mail directed to your place. So it's kind of a long aside. But the answer is that's the business model mixer wanted. The business model that the Epic Game Store wants, the business model that Netflix wanted,

is just like, well, what if we, okay, we don't have a competitive service and we have no idea how to defeat the inertia behind whatever is the service du jour that is the number one. What if we just threw money at it until we lose our jobs? Well, that's a really great way to convince a lot of creators who are looking for it to become viable to join but it doesn't quite bring the audience with them.

And what you end up with is a situation where a lot of creators are getting paid by other creators watching them and then when they go live, the circle of creators turns to look at that other person and it just becomes a little sub for sub situation. Sub for sub. It basically becomes sub for sub. Sub for sub.

That was what I am to understand was the state of affairs at Mixer. You ever dive into the metrics on Mixer after the ninja and the shroud deals? I didn't. But I did see an article. I did see an article. I think it's what you're about to say. Like, okay, ninjas on there, shrouds on there.

There were a dozen other people. They picked up people all over. I just say ninja and shroud because they're the biggest, right? And watch time on Mixer is like way up. Like way up. Watch time went from like 90 minutes a day to something like four hours a day per average user, right? And that makes sense.

Those guys stream a lot. The number of total viewers on the platform went down. Didn't even maintain. It went down. Not by a lot, but we're talking like 2%. So it's statistically insignificant. Right? That kind of thing.

But it's like, congrats, you spent hundreds of millions of dollars grabbing these people. And you have caused the people that already use your service to use it more for free. And have gotten no one new. And I was just scrolling through Twitter and I saw people making fun of the fact that apparently during quarantine, Mixer's numbers also failed to substantially improve in any way.

So that's what it was. I saw an episode of Inside Gaming where they were talking about like the number of watch time, the watch time increase across the board on all platforms is a very clear and consistent thing. Everyone sees a percentage jump from 300 to higher. You know, Netflix, Netflix being the top of the pile, Twitch coming in, I think second. Makes perfect sense.

There was just an increase in eyeballs and everybody, all boats rise. But for some reason, Mixer's boat turned into a submarine and stayed exactly where it was as the water rose around. It was quite strange. But hey, they spent the money to make their boat turn into a submarine convertible tech. So that's pretty cool, I guess. It's incredible.

Like this is probably the first time I can look at like one of these massive hyperflops and go, I can't even figure out why it bombs so bad. I can't point to anything about Mixer that is like, oh, that's terrible. Or, you know, oh, obviously people aren't going to use it. Like I literally and actually come to think of it. I don't think I know anything about Mixer at all. That's why I asked that question. That's why that's why I asked anything about that's why I asked the question.

I wanted to find out, you know, so sub for submarine. Oh, man, like. I literally never heard of Mixer until I saw Ninja going to it. I heard of it before that. I remember it showing up. I remember the logo appearing at events and things and it was like, what is that? E3 events.

Yeah, yeah, whatever. They said, hey, you can watch a higher quality on Mixer. Exactly. The first time I heard about it was actually, yeah, I was watching an E3 show that was the Microsoft show saying, by the way, you can check us out on Mixer too. And if I'm not mistaken, like, was it Mixer? Was Mixer was something else that the Microsoft acquired, wasn't it? Like, it was an existing stream alternative that they then acquired

and decided to build up as their own thing. But yeah, that E3, that E3 was the first time. Well, to all our Mixer pals who. Who? Indeed. Who? Indeed. I don't know.

But who went to Mixer because they thought it would be a cool new start or some shit and didn't get a big old Microsoft check. Best of luck to you in your streaming endeavors, either in Facebook gaming or Twitch or weird. Oh, YouTube. YouTube does it too. Jesus Christ, I forgot. There's that.

It's a real. And digital monopolies are fucking wild. I wonder how many people like Facebook is all old people that don't watch video games now, but that's correct. But like, I'm curious to see if like there's some sort of residual, you know, I don't know. I don't know. Like some sort of group in there that's going to keep it going because like, let's face it, all these large companies, as we can see, are willing to keep up the competitive platform

just in case, you know, just in case, just in case. And, you know, again, like the idea of there being streaming alternatives is not a bad idea. Like it, which is clearly dominating, but like choices are good, you know, but I'm wondering. Let it be known. I don't know if this is still. I don't know if this is still accurate, but I knew that it was accurate prior to the launch of the Xbox one.

But by the end of the Xbox 360 lifecycle, Microsoft had literally not made one red scent of profit off of the entire Xbox division. And they they kept they kept that shit going. And I doubt they made a lot of money off the Xbox one in those early in that early days either. They're willing to kick in fucking billions of dollars into like, but what if, though, huh? I'm trying to.

What if we become a Nintendo? I'm trying to practice fast forwarding my thoughts to the final sentence. And I'm going to do that right now and just say, in conclusion, I would rather have Facebook gaming than TikTok gaming. Well. Too bad. Because you'll have both. I suppose.

TikTok will partner with Facebook to use the clip system. They'll be the the the fucking integrated clip system. Create your your clips and automatically put them on your TikTok. Click one button. Yeah. And do those horrible gyrations and the dumb faces and then pretend you walked into the room. Yeah.

Yeah. You're not just my sister's best friend. Fucking. TikTok is a sewer, man. Holy shit. I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on on TikTok, but most importantly, China. So, you know. China is TikTok.

China owns TikTok. Oh, fuck it's sick. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's one of those gigantic platforms that, you know, like Huawei and stuff that Oh, man, they're trying to. Oh, no, I was just taught like I watched a mean page. Watch this guy on YouTube.

The was named Curtis Connor. I think it is. And he'll just fucking drag up like a hundred TikToks along a theme. And it's like, man, I thought. Like, do you remember? Do you remember when the we came out and you're like, Oh my God, look at this garbage. Oh my God, there's so much trash. There's so much shovel.

I mean, that's not that's that didn't happen immediately. When the we came out, we know, but I'm like the life cycle. There was just like a flood of it. There was there was shovelware towards the end. Yeah. Middle were like, it's it's it's not that bad because like people just don't remember the shovelware that lived on the PS2 and the shovelware that lived on the PS1 and all that, but the we was like a big jump forward in shovel.

TikTok is that to social media in which there are entire new subgenres of worthless garbage content that blow my mind. I think the most depressing thing I've ever seen is a breakdown of the formulas behind the divorce TikToks. And it's like, do you want to add music and like guy sad in the bed with candles and like the divorce papers in 15 seconds. Oh, you're looking. I didn't I didn't know about I didn't know about that.

Oh, it's a whole genre. Is that like, is that like an Elsa gate type weird thing where it's just like it's a corner of this social media that's being weird on its own. I feel like TikTok is all a corner of social media being weird on its own. Yeah. So you just saw something, didn't you? Look, dude, I don't know. I don't I can just we can, you know, explaining to your kids that

you're getting divorced on TikTok. I know all I know is is it's 15 seconds, man. All I can say is that like, you know, in addition to whatever comes of that, like the the there was there was I don't know how like the full details of it, but I had those articles and stuff that were popping up some time ago about like, like TikToks like direct ties to the Chinese government and like some stuff that was, you know, not good sounding. So listen, I think between the Chinese and the Americans, just somebody's looking at

your day. Yeah, they are. I think Vine kind of created a power vacuum for the for the ADHD crowd, you know, and the death of the vine. There was a no one. No one was taking up the mantle. It was it was an empty helmet, you know, like we have all these. Like Instagram stories that pop up and then Facebook made their own Instagram stories

and then multiple, you know, things started to like pop up to kind of be like, Hey, there's a little two second thing, but they overall wanted to focus on the live streaming stuff and the little five second, 10 second clips. There was no no one. No one came in to claim it really. So I guess it was, you know, the throne was vacant. I guess so. Well, interested to see what Facebook gaming makes of itself.

I guess I thought that would have shut down before. Oh yeah, me too. For sure. But I guess Facebook doesn't mind letting a division bleed out as long as it takes. I don't know. I'm just thinking about study right now. Just thinking about how the only news I've seen of Stadia since the last time we talked about it on the podcast was them apologizing that they accidentally released a game that

wasn't done. We're really sorry we released a game guys. All right. We're really sorry. I think, I think. Yeah, fuck it. Let's do it. Let's just do it.

Okay. Stadia will be dead before this podcast hits triple digits. What is that? Is it the end of the year? What is it? 79? 74, right? 75 right now.

Okay. So that's 25. That's half a year. That's six months. It is June 26. That'd be just where we're going to hit 100 in December or January. That's playing out the year. So 2020.

So we might as well just say Stadia will have died. I'm going to put it on the episode. You're going to put it on the episode? I'm going to tie it to the episode. I'm going to say before this hits three digits, we'll be done. Episode 99 at the latest. We will be talking about dead ass Stadia. Yep.

By the latest. This is, I'm going in this direction. I gave it 18 months on my original prediction. I'm now looking at that and thinking that was way too generous. I mean, it all comes down to who's backing it and how much they can afford to bleed. If you've got a ton of HP, you can stand there bleeding for a while. It came out in November. So you're predicting a total maximum life cycle of like 12 months, maybe 13 months.

Give or take a year. Give or take a year. Yeah. This is the thought. You know what? I don't feel, I have no reason to doubt you whatsoever. Because that thing just fucking went. Nothing.

Yep. I am shocked at how like nothing is going on. Nothing is even happening to mock. If I'm wrong, I'll activate the bloody account that I never activated. You need a Google phone. Oh, fuck that shit. Never. Fuck all of that.

You need like a pixel or like a different Google phone. There was a situation where I think I forget what it was. It was a hard and gadget or a hard OCP or some shit and they all had iPhones and they discovered that like they couldn't activate the fucking device because no one had an Android phone. So they had to get, I think one of their girlfriends to like come into the office and fucking activate the fucking thing with her phone. I just happened to have a spare Chromecast.

So it's like, oh, maybe, but fuck all that. Anyway, anyway, how was your week? Terrible. All right, let's talk about microphones. Hey, woolly, you were having some fun with the microphone right before this podcast. Yep. Do you know what would make your life easier? What?

I saw a brand new Elgato Wave Threes. Oh, the new Elgato microphone. Came out like today, basically. I managed to snag a couple. I saw the ad for it. These things are USB high quality microphones with built in compressors and come with a digital mixer app. So you don't need a real mixer, right?

Yeah. Plug this thing in. I have the, what do you call it, the fucking pop guard here. Sounds good. Tested it. The mixer app on it. Ironically, haha mixer, but works really well. You can assign all sorts of different sources and change the mix.

You put the headphone jack into the back of it and it's a fucking piece of shit. Damn. Hashtag ad hashtag sponsored. Because on their website for the fucking microphone, it has a bit on it that describes, let me get the actual ad up here, up to nine channels of audio, quote, game audio, voice chat, music, alerts, samples, multiple mics and more. Nine independent input channels that you blend audio sources in real time. Turns out when they say multiple microphones, they mean auxiliary, like cable in mics.

Because when you get two of these wave three microphones and plug them in, it doubles all the input sources and the app doesn't know what to fucking do freaks out and disables itself. Because it's a fucking USB mic. So the moment I saw the ad for this, it was like listing all the features and I was like, oh, wow, hey, look at that. Okay. And I was like, basically, ultimately, I was like, it makes sense.

Elgato is going to get in the game for the next step up from the service that there are. Elgato wasn't originally about video game stuff, by the way. They were originally about transferring, like you could do like VHS to data transfers type and things like that. They had all other things and then they got into the whole HDMI conversion game and then gaming popped up. So this microphone, I'm like, yeah, okay, that's a nice feature list. Is this an XLR mic?

And it's like, no, it's a fucking USB, of course it is. It's trying to stay within that realm. And I'm like, well, then we're done here. There's no reason to ever turn around and go back to that. You're at best, you're going to want a single USB mixer, which you can then plug your XLRs into, but what are you going to do? Plug in two of those things and expect it to understand what's going on? Of course not.

Definitely not. Considering the big advertising push behind this is a digital mixer that allows you to mix everything and then export that mix to OBS as a single audio source for everything on your PC. Yes, it is absolutely reasonable to assume you would be able to use multiple input sources. I mean to the point where they literally show you a photo of the mixer, the digital mixer and tell you that multiple microphones and nine sources can be input into it. Can you alternate output so that you can go line out from the microphone if you don't want to go USB?

No. Okay, so it has to take its power from the USB? Yeah. Okay, well, that's just... It contacted Elgato support and asked a very simple question. Hey, do these things work if you have two? And the lady goes, huh, what do you mean? I go, well, it says it has a digital mixer, yada, yada, yada.

But I plug in the second one and everything freaks out and she goes, well, that sounds wrong. It shouldn't work like that. That'd be stupid if you can't have two. I go, yeah, huh? She goes, well, I don't have the answer for that. So I'll pass you along to the tech support guys. They only work by email. So they'll get back to you as to whether or not it can use two mics in one to three days.

What a worthless piece of fucking shit. I mean, I've, like, years ago when I tested out having multiple USB mics and, you know, that experience, that experiment was a failure. You know, so, yeah, not giving options here, like, fuck that. A couple of headsets can go into a shared mixer if you wanted even like that's done. The fact that it's USB, I'm like, yeah, that's done. You're not getting anything decent off of that. Shame, but at the same time, like, I mean, I get why the product exists.

It's still going to serve anybody who needs a single microphone on their desk. Oh, totally. And when I was using that single microphone, it worked quite well. I can imagine this being a huge step up for anybody that is either using like, you know, like a webcam mic or maybe even better than the Yeti. Who knows, you know, the Yeti is the current king of USB mics. Oh, when I was using it to replace this condenser, it's better than this condenser. Wow.

Okay. Considerably. Wow. It's better than the Yeti 2020s. Yes. Okay. Because it has a built-in compressor. Okay.

It sounds identical, but it has a built-in compressor, which fuck, yeah, I would love a built-in compressor on this fucking thing. Right? But, um, but the part where they tell you it can literally do something that it can't for the one use case that I want it for, fuck. Um, that's straight up false advertising. Also, if you've got a Yeti, you've got the ability to make it, to angle its cone to be straight in front of you, half or full 360. Yeah, the Elgato's are cardioids. They're, uh, they are straightforward mics. Okay.

No other, uh, okay, well then. Yeah, you're boned. It has a single use case. And I'd love to return it, except I can't exactly go to the post office. Now can I? Well. How much were they? Like 300 bucks each.

Hmm. Yeah. Okay, so hold on. I feel like there's a misunderstanding about, like me saying that you can't go to the post office and return it. I live with someone who has an autoimmune disorder. I can't go anywhere where there would be lots of people because if I get sick, I will kill my girlfriend. Therefore, I cannot return this item because it would literally put Paige's life at risk, dumbasses. Is that clear?

Thank you. All right. What else do I do with my week? The CEO of Newblood and the lead dev on Dusk blew my asshole open for playing Dusk with a controller. That was weird. On Twitter? That was really weird. Yeah.

So Dusk is great. It is. It is a very good game. It's fucking A plus fantastic. Say, for those of you who aren't aware, it is a, I'm going to say it's like a Quake Blood homage game. Like Quake 1, maybe a little bit of Quake 2. Very retro. More hyper than the sum of its parts, though.

I would say, yeah, absolutely. It is a game that's living in the spirit of its image rather than like an actual, like it doesn't look like Quake. It looks like what you think. It looks like what you remember Quake to look like in your head. Yeah. It's not actually. It looks a million times nicer. Yeah.

And I also discovered that, like, there's a bunch of like graphics options in that game, like Bloom and Bilean you're filtering that are literally recommended to turn off there, there as meme jokes. Because like turning Bloom on in some stages, like blows out the image so hard you can't play it. That's pretty funny. And it's like, what the hell? So I'm playing it with a controller, which by the way, it has stellar controller support. And I was doing well only to discover that CEO of Newblood, the gentleman behind the PC gaming show demonstration of NotFortnite.com and Right.

Oh, God is a massive shit heel motherfucker and starts busting my balls about playing with a goddamn controller and hurt my feelings. And then I find out that all the fucking Newblood devs are all laughing at me in their discord. And it's like, God damn it. God damn it. Do you think maybe. And I'm like, oh, I'm looking forward to Gloomwood. And I get a reply of like, oh, why so you can play it with a controller like a bitch. That's great.

Like, but controller support is in Gloomwood right now. Why are you doing this? Is it a trap? Do you think perhaps this accessory could have saved you? Well, hold on. What am I looking at here? Well, I'm holding up. Oh, you finally went ahead and did it, huh?

I'm holding up an accessory here that is one half of a PlayStation controller and the other half is a mouse. This is the tactical assault commander from Horry. And I'd like to point out that even though I get as a reminder, I got this as a goof. I'm already I already have a solved situation, but I just I wanted to know. And something that the box doesn't show you actually is that on the PlayStation four half, there's a strap that you attach so that if you're having a hard time with the controller balancing, you can strap it to your hand and actually use it as a stabilizing point. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's wild. But not not.

I'll get into that when it switches over to my week. But go go go ahead. Or not fine. Hey, look, so I mean, it's it's onto the Lord. Here's what here's what you're dealing with, right? Again, to describe this as a shellfish destruction, take a PlayStation four controller and cut off the right half of it. Cut off the right half of it, right? And then you plug in a USB slot on the side that you've cut off and plug a mouse into that.

And this can be basically a mouse that serves as the right stick to to your controller. Now, I want to basically describe the feeling of this is the cheapest of cheap plastics. So right off the bat, you are not getting any of the rubber or like heft or weight or like, you know, that feeling of like that good, that good grip feeling. You this feels like a. Yeah, that's what you deserve. It feels like old old shitty knockoff controllers. So yeah, you deserve like a fucking Gravis feeling device. Again, I already have a working solution that doesn't involve this.

I'm buying this for the fun of it. So the mouse also feels like one of the cheaper mice that you'd get free with a keyboard. You know, really light. Oh man, that's. I think my favorite type of comparison is a non named, non proper noun description of an experience as a tactile sensation. You know exactly the kind of saying instead of saying this tastes really buttery. You say this kind of tastes like those last four good pieces of popcorn at the bottom before you get only the kernels. Correct.

Other because I know exactly what you mean with that shitty fucking came with keyboard mouse. Bad plastic, the bad plastic. Here's another thing that's interesting that's going on here is the shoulder buttons. I'm going to hold them so you know, you can get a look. There are five shoulder buttons happening actually. So only the bottom one is your R2 and above that are literally all your face buttons. So all four face buttons and then a function button basically are in the place of your triggers. It's kind of insane.

I expected them to put extra buttons on this somewhere. I did not expect them to be hidden here and you again, this is hidden on the box. So you think what you're getting when you look at this is a normal, you know, two two button set up and then everything else would be perhaps moved on to the mouse, it's a pretty standard mouse. It's got two side buttons. That looks normal to top. You know, nothing, nothing. Can you sort that in for a different you can slot it in for a different mouse because at the end the it is a USB spot.

It's a USB slot. See, that's actually cool. I like that. Right. So as long as it's, you know, you plug in your USB mouse here, you can plug whatever in. You can also switch the controller to PS4, PS3 and keyboard mode. You know, this is ultimately and again, if you want to get rid of those straps, you can. There's a little whatever it takes a second to pull out the strap thing and just hold it as regular.

But yeah, the cheap plastic feeling and the gigantic panel of shoulder buttons are not necessary. They could have just they could have put all that functionality over on the mouse and for some reason they chose not to in the. Let me ask you a question about the cheap plastic. Is it worse than the steam controllers? It is not worse than the steam controllers plastic. That's all I wanted. It's not. It's, you know, old mad cats, old Liang number one, old, old performance cheap plastic, but it's not that.

It's not steam controller level, certainly. But I will say that like and the the D pad to takes a hit. The D pad is not a good quality D pad. You know what you're you know what I mean? Like which is weird because Hori did make better D pads for like the Nintendo accessories. It's not an awful D pad. It's just not a great one. And in the end, yeah, in the end, I think and it does have a headphone jack at the bottom too.

So you can do that at least this is going to be inferior from whatever you're set up. Whatever version of this you're doing on a PC. This is this is massively inferior to it. However, yeah, this is probably superior to using a PS4 DualShock 4. Yeah, I can see straight up some some some Fort some Fortnance. Yeah, this is this is probably getting getting a aim advantage way. Oh, this is probably a massive improvement off of off of any console game. Whereas PC wise, not quite.

And, you know, the the the ability to add a mouse is going to improve people's aim that can aim with a mouse. Right. I have to say, though, like on the PlayStation 4, you can just add a mouse and keyboard. Like if you want to do mouse and keyboard on like Fortnet, you just will the PS4 like map the mouse sensitivity. Yes. To the stick. I don't know about that, but you can tell I mean, I got this mouse like this comes with like sensitivity. But doesn't it treat it doesn't it treat it like a cursor because you can have a cursor on your PS4.

Doesn't it treat it like a cursor for like the browser and things like that. But like you can actually move you play games with it. Oh, OK. I didn't know that yet. I didn't know that that that's been one of those things where like it it's why it was extra stupid that Fort. Remember the fortnight cross play shenanigans? Like the usual argument is like, did you can't put PC players with console players like come on. That's and that's like people already fucking put their fucking mouse keyboard into fortnight.

So people are playing low people. People play FF 14 on PS4 with mouse and keyboard. But like other FPS is as well like depends on the game. Because if so depends on the the game's level of support. If people have been playing with their mouse and keyboard like WASDA for on PlayStation for a while now, then yeah, this whole thing is worthless. It was completely useless accessory. It's not like global, but it is down to the the fucking game.

So like people are pointing out that warzone has it and fortnight definitely has it. But like what about like Call of Duty or Call of Duty warzone? Yeah. Right. And the thing with Call of Duty is that their solution to that was really ridiculous. But it's something that I love because warzone's cross play. And they're like, well, what do you do for the console players or the controller players? And what they did was is they made auto aim and aim like controller aim inertia and gravity just really strong.

Just really, really, really strong to the point where there is a weird tier list of ranges in which each control method is superior. And like how like off to the side is one person because the fucking controller players will in some case like magnetize to people in certain distances and certain angles. It's fucking I wonder if people are playing Titanfall with a mouse on console. Let's fucking find out. Because I didn't realize that the console controller FPS nerf problem had been completely eradicated while I wasn't paying attention. So the answer is no. Titanfall 2 does not support mouse and keyboard on.

So it's a game by game. OK. Yeah. Gotcha. All right. Cool. What else the fuck did I do with my weight? So the new Silent Hill is out.

It's called Dead by Daylight the Silent Hill chapter. Oh, geez. Is this kind of how it is? It's kind of how Virtua Fighter 6 is out. No, it's slightly different because you can go buy a copy of Virtua Fighter 6 right now. So the difference here is that Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown is great. Right. The last thing that said Virtua Fighter on it was fantastic.

That is not the case with Silent Hill. It is without irony that I tell you that depending on how much of a like a purist fan you are, this is the best Silent Hill content to have come out since either Silent Hill 3 or 4. It basically depends on how much you like Silent Hill 4. Are we just going to sleep on PT though? Yes, because that shit is a... Does it count? It was good. But does it count as a Silent Hill thing even?

It was a demo. Because it didn't come out. It was a demo. And it doesn't exist anymore. It was a demo. And it was... Okay, if you count PT then... No, then it goes PT.

It's Silent Hill content that you played. In fact, it would go Silent Hill 1, 2, 3 power gap PT and then this. The playable characters are Pyramid Head, obviously, who is hyper accurate and look. You've got the best most iconic location, which is the Midwich Elementary School from the first game. And you have Heather, who's actually named Cheryl in game, which I think is a nice detail from Silent Hill 3. So when people said, what the hell, why is Pyramid Head and Heather? And it's because it's like a tribute-like pack. It's like the stage from one, the villain from two, and the character from three.

Heather, as somebody who plays mainly killer, Pyramid Head is fantastic. He's not overpowered, but he's really, really, really good. And he brings a new type of mechanic to the game. You described to those of you... How he had drive, drive and overdrive and stuff like that before. Yeah. And now that he's been out for a while, there has become this bizarre... Playing against him or as him is completely different from everybody else,

because when he gets ready to do what is essentially a ground wave to hit people, he has to pull his knife out and jam it into the floor, which when you do that, it leads to bizarre survivor behavior, because they start wiggling around, constantly trying to juke you, because he has to lock in and then fire it, and it takes a second to go. So you broke down... Which... Sorry, you broke down Pyramid Head before in detail,

but the other stuff in that pack, you're calling it enough to be an entry? Oh yeah, totally. The map of... There's a secret on the Silent Hill map, and none of the other maps in the game have anything like this, but if you finish the generators in the music room and the chemistry room, and get to the end game collapse, which is the gates open, the fucking clock tower that those two puzzle rooms in Silent Hill 1 would have opened,

opens up and allows you to get extra items, and the fucking... What the fuck was I got? The Flouros item from Silent Hill 1 drops down, and you can see... It's ridiculous. I wonder how many games have guest content where you can pick the main character, play in a guest stage, and also fight a guest boss that basically framed the entire game as something from a different series.

Well, there's more too. There's more that got into that update that they didn't announce. So, one of the new cosmetic things that they added when they started doing their battle pass thing was the little charms that you hang off of the hooks, right? So the killer has a hook, and you can... Oh, look, it's a jack-o'-lantern, or it's like a little bunny head, or whatever the fuck. If you go onto the main menu of Silent Hill... Sorry, fuck.

Dead by Daylight, the Silent Hill chapter, which is now... It looks like Silent Hill, and there's an Icariyamaoka version of the Dead by Daylight theme. Nice. And you press W-W-S-S-A-D-A-D, right click, left click, enter. Of the fucking press start music from, I think, Gradius starts to play, and you unlock the Vic Viper as a charm. You put the fucking Konami code in there. That's pretty good. Yeah.

It's great. And pH is nice and good. He's not busted, which is the fear, because if he's too good, then everybody hates him, and that community is laughably toxic, and he's not terrible. I think I mentioned that when Freddy Kruger came out in Dead by Daylight, one of the biggest horror icons ever, he was so terrible that the existing tier list, which only went from S to B, was given an F for just Freddy.

He was that bad, right? The disappointment. But yeah, pH is great. He has an alternate costume, which is terrible. I don't know why it sucks so bad. It's not the movie version of like I expected. But Cheryl... I feel like you have to...

Gets her Silent Hill... Hold on. Gets her Silent Hill 3 look with the one you know. She also gets the ability to play as Lisa Garland and as Alessa from Silent Hill 1, and those are their total character swaps. They're not just a different... They're not the character wearing like a cosplay outfit. They are, you're playing as Lisa Garland, or you're playing as Alessa Gillespie. I feel like if you're putting in a guest character or anything,

you should probably like slant towards OP if you had to, and then bring it down just out of respect for the guest in some way. Like kind of like what Sakurai does. Yeah, there's a really bizarre situation. I don't know if I told you about it, but Dead by Daylight when it started clearly, they didn't think they would ever get any guest characters ever, right? They're this indie studio from Montreal.

This is a horror game, and horror franchises have been notoriously shitty about giving their characters out, so they made three characters to start. One was a Wraith that turns invisible, one was like a weird monster guy who lays bear traps, and the third one was a Hillbilly. He was this kind of deformed looking guy with a chainsaw, because we're never going to get Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Well, they totally got Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yeah, and he became a shittier version of it.

Much shittier. Way shittier. And then you have situations where I guess they figured out that they could try, and they failed, because then you have stuff like The Spirit, who even has a VHS rewind noise when she teleports. I remember you broke all this down before, yeah, yeah. That must be like we tried to get Sadako, and they were like, go fuck yourselves.

So that's The Spirit, because they're never going to make that mistake twice. They're never going to put a character called the Dream Master, and then put Freddy in later. Well, Konami could certainly use the fucking Silent Hill glow-up in terms of just brand appreciation. So, you know, good on them. Yeah, definitely. Use another game to make people kind of miss you a bit more.

You know? Sure would be nice to get a version of Silent Hill 2 and 3. Well, let's not push it. Let's not push it. Aw, man. Alright. So, middle of last week. How could you have your pudding if you don't eat your meat?

Middle of last week. I received an email. I think I might have talked about it, in which Sony Interactive Entertainment said that I was just the kind of streamer that they were looking for to review their games. And so sent me a copy of Last of Us 2. Sorry, Last of Us Part 2.

And then, very bizarrely, the day before, sorry, Wednesday morning? Wednesday morning, they sent an email out that said, hey man, remember how we said the embargo was like midnight Thursday? Fuck that, it's Thursday morning. So I streamed some Last of Us Part 2,

Thursday afternoon. And I have some thoughts. Before I say any of those thoughts, will they have you played the game at all? I haven't, I still want to. I intend to do so on my own time. I've been scrolling past Last of Us tweets all week. Again, my intention is to

play it, for my own opinions, and see how I feel about the game. Alright. So I'm not going to try and convince you of anything, but I do have some shit that I want to talk about, particularly since I played it for four, five hours, or actually I played it for exactly four hours and six minutes, somebody broke it down.

And I do have some thoughts at least about the early game. I don't have any about the late game, because I didn't fucking play it. It's fucking, right off the bat, boy, it's gorgeous, holy shit. Like, I remember even when I was in the middle of complaining about it, I'm like, wow, it's beautiful. Like, money and time went into this.

And then every time I said something like that, I'm like, oh right, yeah, the crunch, haha. But... So... I can't think of a game that has been... that is less possible to go in fairly one way or the other. So either you heard a bunch of shit, or heard about hearing a bunch of shit,

and you're like, oh that sounds terrible, or I don't know, or it gives you a pit in your stomach, or like, I'm sure it'll be great. You know, like, it was very difficult to go in with like, a clean slate, clean opinion. And every single word that came out of the director's mouth, which would be Neil Druckmann, kind of poisoned me personally against the game,

because he's an asshole. And the whole thing about the game... He was being too artsy about the product. Right? It was like, fucking, just the worst set of impressions to go in on. I... I don't think the story is from what I saw as good as the first one, even in its...

Well, you're familiar with the Call to Adventure, right? Like it's the start of the story, it's the inciting incident that makes the hero pick up the magic sword and go on the fucking hero's journey, right? So the Call to Adventure in Last of Us One is... fucking zombies, shit. This girl might be the cure-go, right? Here, it's...

I don't think it's too big of a spoiler to say, it's fairly darker and crueler and more revenge-based than that. But the circumstances around that seem really, really, really forced. And... I'm not sure if I think it's super-forced because I came in with negative expectations or because it's actually really, really forced. Okay. But I kept having the situation over and over and over

where I would almost like laugh and point at the screen and go, are you kidding me? Because they do something that shitty zombie fiction does, which is there needs to be tension. So let's spawn a thousand monsters next to the people so that there's tension and there's drama and there's like a big problem, even though it makes no sense for those thousand monsters to just appear. And then once their usefulness as a dramatic device is over,

they all just disappear and go away. And I'm sitting in a scene going like, wasn't there like 500 guys right there? Aren't they supposed to be there in this scene even? And just like little things that are like nitpicky, but like... Well, you live in Canada, so if you have not seen a moose, you know what a moose the fuck is. You know what a moose is.

Pretty familiar with the moose. There's a moose in Last of Us 2 that has been eaten by monsters, eaten by clickers, right? And you find this thing and it is torn open down to the rib cage. And when I saw it, I started to laugh my ass off because it is... how do I put this? You know what again gives you a crowbar and it says you can only hit somebody with a crowbar five times before it breaks.

And you go, that's the most ridiculous shit in the world. A crowbar is made out of like solid iron or solid steel. No human being would ever be able to smash a crowbar to pieces. This is the animal equivalent of that. A moose weighs 1500 pounds and is nothing but muscle. A human being would break every finger, tooth, and piece of their body off of their body attempting to claw into a moose. It is so absurd that they could even cut it with their hands

that I started to laugh. There is a bit... Are you familiar with the Fallout 4 fridge ghoul? No. So in Fallout 4, there is a ghoul kid that you find who's 10 years old. You know, he's a kid ghoul. They're the radioactive people that live forever but they go crazy eventually. And you find this kid in a fridge.

And he's been hiding in the fridge since before the bombs dropped. And Fallout 4 takes place 200 plus years after the bombs dropped. And you're like, wait, ghouls not only don't need... They live forever. But now they don't need to eat and they don't need to drink water and they don't need to breathe. And it's like, you know, one of those fixturing, shattering contrivances. There is a portion in Last of Us 2 that is very similar to this

in which you walk into a room and find some dudes who are going to rob a bank. This is even a little side area. It's not even part of the main plot. But some dudes who are going to rob a bank on infection day or outbreak day, right? Because they're like, society's crumbling, let's go rob a bank. And you find them and they're still wearing their vests and their clickers. And it's been 30 years since the outbreak. And they're still there in the bank.

They haven't died of old age. They haven't starved. They haven't turned into the mushroom colonies like they're supposed to. And it's just constantly like... What? Huh? Apparently it gets a lot better in the, let's say, after the first fifth of the game. But the first five hours gameplay-wise are a total slog.

I had, I joked about it and somebody did a fucking, like a minute counter on it. And I spent 13% of my stream doing stealth and fighting enemies and traditional gameplay stuff. Yeah, I saw that. I think it was Buttonsulhan. Yeah. No, it wasn't Buttons. He retweeted my tweet, but it was a different guy on the subreddit. He was the guy who did the boy statistics from God of War, that red-letter.

I forget his name, unfortunately. I can go dig the tweet back up, but he broke it down and it's like 87% of the game was a combination of cutscenes, walking through environments, reading pamphlets and stuff like that. Or something the game just loves when it feels that they've had too many cutscenes, which is the walk and talk. Which is, it's not a cutscene, you can move. And for the first four or five hours, it's literally like watch a cutscene, walk and talk, and then every half an hour maybe do one or two stealth rooms and fight zombies for like five minutes. And then go back to another half hour of cutscenes and walk and talk.

And now from what I remember of Last of Us One, you know, it's never really open per se. You're pretty much on that line the entire time. But I guess the combat was closer together because you fight a bunch of people. And then you get towards the... You played the first time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the DLC. So I went back to the old LP after, when I was finishing up the stream, I went back to the old LP.

I was like, okay, let's say I had been streaming the first game. Where would I have been? Right? What would have happened? And by the sequence that I finished the other night, I had done like 33 minutes of, you know, gameplay, big air quotes there, you know, like just like... I know some people count the cutscenes and stuff like that. But I had done that and I was in Seattle.

In Last of Us One, you would have had the opening section. You would have had Escape from the City. You would have had the whole skyscraper section. The whole Boston City section. And you would have been halfway through Bill's town. By the time I ended. Okay. And all the sequences that were present there.

And I was like, Jesus Christ. I went in with the expectation that I was probably going to not like the story and I don't think... I don't think had I gone in clean, I would have liked the story any better. But more than anything, I found it to be just dull. Like moment to moment, just dull. And you played one session, right? I played one session and I feel no desire to go back. I have heard nothing from anybody whose opinion that I trust.

Anything good about the sequence. Sorry, not the sequence, but the sequence of events. Somebody ran the numbers. The game is about 30, 40% cutscenes in terms of our count. And if the... Even if it evens out a little bit, it's like, let's say 30% cutscenes and let's give it another 20% of walk and talk and various shenanigans. The gameplay that I played felt pretty much identical to the first game. In terms of all the same abilities and moves and guns.

It's all pretty much exactly the same. So it's tied to a story that I was just not interested in at all. And I'm like, why would I continue to keep playing it so that I can like... I could spite play it if I wanted, but I was just bored. The one statement that I always keep in mind and remember is that upon announcement of this game, I was like, why? It's not a game that needs it. And then there was the interview where they said, yeah, we always thought like we'd never want to go back to this unless we had a really good reason to in terms of writing. And eventually years later, we stumbled across that reason and we thought, OK, that's worth pulling out these characters and revisiting them.

So I was like, OK, sounds like you're convinced there's a reason here. And based on the first one being a game that I really liked, I can put my trust in that reason being a good one. So that's weird to hear that it's so far... The editor that compiled that data was HyperionXV. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And I guess there's two more things I want to talk about it, but they're weird. So the game is about revenge, right?

The theme of Last of Us 2 is revenge. And the narrative takes you on what is essentially three different people are going cross continental journeys of the United States. We're talking like five to eight hundred mile plus journeys across the US in the state that Last of Us is in for revenge against singular individuals. And if you remember, there was an interview with IGN and the devs of Last of Us 1 in which they described the original ending of Last of Us 1 was actually Tess was going to be the primary antagonist. Did you ever read that? I feel like I did, but I forgot. Must have been a while ago. The basic idea was that Tess would be the primary antagonist and in leaving the city, Joel would have fucked her on a deal or something like that.

And she would hunt him down and she would be the, you know, the Virgil of the game, I guess. And they scrapped it because here's the quote. We also had a hard time buying that Tess would go on a vendetta. We could understand her pursuing Joel a little bit, but why would she go for a year around the country? That's the plot of the second game is multiple people taking months long journeys across the United States against single individuals. And it feels insane to me that the same team that said, oh, that's silly that somebody would go that far for revenge for a reason, then make a game in which that's the core plot. It's weird. The other thing is the, have you seen Metacritic about this?

Because it's really funny. Saw a screenshot of it doing not great. So the fact that it's not doing well on Metacritic is not what's funny. Games get review bombed all the time for all sorts of fucking stupid reasons, right? What's funny is that all the reviews are gone. And only the number remains because Metacritic is currently plastered with last of us two ads. I see. It feels very, very Gerstman gate.

Yeah, that's, that's pretty embarrassing. In which like you go to click on the user reviews and they're not available and underneath it is a big last of us two cinematic masterpiece. It's like, are you fucking kidding me? Come on. And the fact that Sony is DMCA just everybody. They DMCA the entirety of V the other night. Because they were talking shit and making their memes. And it's like, Jesus Christ doesn't do any favors.

That's so fucked. That's completely stupid and ridiculous. Let people talk shit about your video game. Mother fuckers Jesus. Lord. I don't know if I'm going to go back to it. My weirdest take on this is that if the game had multiplayer, I would have been thrilled to buy it. Because I don't know if you knew anybody who played it, but the multiplayer for last of us one was fucking great.

Yeah, I remember that. And none this time have any multiplayer. Nope. Apparently the people who made it were from like a satellite company or something. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That usually happens. Well, yeah, still going to wait to take a look at that on my own. But yeah, it continues to be the weirdest cold entry there's ever been to anything I can think of. I don't think it's possible to go in cold, right?

Like totally cold. No, unfortunately not. I mean, you kept that pretty vague ish. I suppose like I try. But yeah, like I didn't I didn't know about the I dodged enough to not know about the revenge plot or the the the destinations, so to speak. But well, I only know Seattle as one of them. But there's there's all this all this to say that like you played five hours of a 30 plus hour game. So like there's definitely going to be things that like we that are going to be a shock to both of us, you know, so.

Yeah. Well, not anymore. Oh, after I was done with that, I just started. Oh, you just went. Fuck yeah. Okay. Okay. And I was like, all right.

Well, never mind then. Fair enough. Okay. The checkout coming me up captain. Thank you. I guess. I mean, I get it in the sense that like the checkout comes with like, all right, just spoil me. I don't care.

It's free. But I would, you know what, there is one grand positive about the shit show around this game. What's that? And it is the creation of a new form of meme that I'm madly in love with because Sony used robots to DMCA takedown footage of the leaks, right? And of the ending and stuff like that. The solution to that would be to take the image of the leak or the cutscene that you want. And MS paint over it with characters of your choosing.

And this is one of my favorite, favorite new meme templates because people have made like fucking. There are stop motion animations of last of us cutscenes now made entirely. And it is the stupidest, shittiest looking. It is. It is the video game cutscene equivalent of our Robocop remake. Okay. And it's hilarious. The effort's real.

And it's like that is a direct result of like ridiculous copyright shenanigans. So I guess something good came of it after all. I don't like it. I don't think anyone should go buy that game. I think you would probably be better served buying multiple upcoming games on the Steam on the Steam sale or like you could get you. I got I played dusk and last of us two in the same week. And I would say you should play through dusk three, four times rather than play through

it. My curiosity is going to get the better of me. I need to know. I mean, I need to I need to know what happened here. So I'm kind of there to where I might play through it just to like just to be able to get more squeeze more poop. Just just to have it, you know, just to have it. And last but not least, the best game that I played this week is old and its return of

which I would recommend to everyone with any interest in games whatsoever. How familiar are you with not at all? I know, I know the premise of the game and I downloaded it and I saw the screenshots of it. And again, I know it's from the makers of papers, please. So I'm immensely interested as papers, please was fucking phenomenal. And that's another game where I would trust the creator based on their previous work. Absolutely.

So the game looks like so it got there before World of Horror where it's emulating like an old ass like almost 386 thing, but it's very smooth. It's a weird looking aesthetic. Like it's two tone. It's you can choose your monitor type. Like I went with Macintosh, but you could go LCD or like Turbografx or whatever the fuck. And it is a puzzle slash mystery game that I'm going to bet if I dug really deep into interviews, I could find that there would be a influence by a weird Russian horror game

called Cryostasis. But Oberden is you are an insurance man in the year 1807. And the Oberden is a ship that came into port after being lost at sea. And everyone is fucking dead. It's just a bunch of skeletons all over the deck. And they say, Hey, man, I need you to file the insurance claims on this ship. How did everyone die? What happened to everybody?

There it is. I was waiting to hear like, what's the paper's please flavor of this setting? It's your insurance adjuster. That's wonderful. That's that makes me so happy. It's like, OK, did. Oh, yeah, because it's because when you get to the when you get to the ending, there's stuff like, oh, you discovered this person died in meritorious service.

So the company will give his family a little bonus. So this guy was shot for treason. So the their insurance policy is thank God. I'm like, I'm like, I'm just like, I need to know that some level of mundane bureaucracy is involved in the main character's life here. Yeah. So I'm not going to talk anything at all. Please don't in terms of the interesting things that happen on the ship.

But I will have to talk about the game's core gameplay conceit, which is how you actually file out these fucking claims, because it's by far the most interesting thing in the game. You walk up to a corpse. Say you walk up to the very first corpse on the ship is just some jackass outside the captain's room. You pull out your magic pocket watch. And you point it at the body.

And you transport. Should I stop? Should I stop listening here? Should I stop listening here? No, no, you're you're good. It's the it's the it's the core gameplay of the thing. If you don't like, I like, I got to talk about it. If it's like.

Do you want me to talk about it? I don't want. Okay. Okay. All right. If it's you pop into a 3D modeled room of the last second. Of this guy's cool. So it's stuff like, did a barrel fall off the deck and hit this dumb bitch, or did

somebody stab them in the back and you go to a freeze frame of that moment. And you're given about 10, 15 seconds of audio that are like, you know, people playing cards in the back to really core mechanics out that leads up to it. And you're able to walk around and examine everything in the environment, examine the people, examine whatever you're given a book. And the book is a glossary of nautical terms, glossary of what everyone on a ship does. What's a boats one? What's a top one?

What, you know, why? What's the difference between the first mate, the second mate, the third mate, the fourth mate? What's a ship steward, et cetera, stuff like that. You're given three or four artists renditions of life at sea that include pretty much everybody on the boat. And your job is to go, okay, so this guy got shot, right? Who is he?

Right. Okay. And then you look over at the guy holding the gun and you go, who's that? So. So you watch the scene play out and it fills in a little thing in your book and it says mutiny or traitor on the sea or whatever. Right. And it goes unknown was blank by unknown.

And it is your job to go. Samuel Peters was stabbed to death by the captain. And you don't know if you got it right until you get three of these fates. Correct. So you're looking at a scene that has 28 people in it and someone is being shot and he's being shot by multiple guys and you're, you're tracing which bullet is the one that killed him to the guy and then you're looking at him and going, how do I know what guy this is? So you're going to another death flashback to discover them playing cards.

Who likes playing cards? Okay. Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. Which guys on the ship are from India.

Right. Right. Right. Everything gives you a little bit more of a clue to piece it all out. Okay. That sounds wonderful. And you get in the situation where you find out, oh, in this execution scene where they're killing a guy for murder, right?

You know, at sea. The victim's corpse is there. So you go up to the victim's corpse and travel back from the flashback into that flashback. Right. Right. Right. Right. And so, and you're doing this, you, you chart a year long journey to try and discover

the names and fates of the 60 people on the Oberden. That's a perfect excuse for like a murderception where it's like, oh no, they got the wrong guy because you were able to go back and see the truth about that guy. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Sounds a little bit like Moody Blues Cross. Remember me.

Absolutely. And it is really hard. And identities are listed as they have difficulty modifiers one, two or three. Apparently there is a definitive answer or there is a definitive piece of information to identify everyone on the ship. I am in that spot where I both believe it and I say, fuck you. You know, that kind of thing. Is this a short, is it a, is it a similarly short game or is this a longer experience?

Depends. I technically beat the game on stream after four and a half hours with 18 of 60 fates solved. Okay. Right. And those were the easy 18 ones. Gotcha. It is an incredible mystery game.

I decided not to stream it again because I went through most of the flashbacks available to me. And what remains is going through all of them again and looking at people's clothes and boots and tattoos, the actual puzzle where they sleep on the ship. And, you know, okay. So like one of the examples is every single topman, which is a guy who works at the top of the boat with the rigging is from China, except for one guy. And figuring out that that guy was a topman and he wasn't Chinese is like, oh, I can kind

of figure out and you're, you're, you're going through people's accents and flashbacks. What style of tattoo are they wearing for the era of the 1800s? Gotcha. Gotcha. Sounds really, really cool. It's fucking incredible. Cool. It is like, I, I, I give it the kind of recommendation that I would give like outer wilds just like

you're constantly just piecing together just a little bit and that ship was fucked. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that that ship was fucking doomed. And everything bad that could ever happen on a ship happened to them. That's, yeah. I mean, the classic, classic setting is, you know, ghost ship returns to shore. Fucking nobody on board. What are we doing here? You know, and the answers are usually the bad shit happened or a monkey with a stand showed

maybe a little bit of column B and a little call may cool. There might have been a monkey with a stand on that boat. I don't know. I didn't see one, but they're good. Who knows? Yeah. So pretend that's my week. A lot of good games and one game that I don't know if is terrible or I just don't like it.

If you want to see more of that crap, you can check me out at twitch.tv slash Pat stairs. I think I was planning to move to mixer, but I think you know how you feel, but you're doing a decent job sounding. I'm really balanced. I wasn't trying when I went on Twitter after playing the game and said, Hey, Sony, your game sucks. DMCA my balls. I appreciate because I I appreciate the fucking goblin mask you put on to pretend you're

coming at this as objectively as possible. But I caught I did catch a tweet or two. So I will say, and I obviously you can believe me or you don't. But I did make an attempt to sit down and give the game a legitimate shot, which is why I say that I'm so baffled that my biggest takeaway was not anger or disgust or whatever. It was boredom. It was the last emotion I expected to feel was just like, did you like the DLC for the first game?

I did. How do you feel about days gone? I've never played it. Because I remember when that came out and I was like, Oh, yeah. Last of us. Bikers. It looked like a low rent. Last of us.

It looked like last of us. It looked like the middle. It looked like the middle. What was that game? It looked like the middle ground between the biker game. The biker game. What was the name of that? Something right to hell.

It looked like the middle ground between ride to hell and ride to us. Dead center. Right to us, yeah. Right to hell, whatever. And apparently, according to some people I've talked to who've played it, apparently that was a fairly accurate take of like, there was good stuff in there and it was trying really hard. But there was...

Well, the Oberden is something I definitely wanted to play that. I wanted to stream it, move things around a little bit, but I intend very much to come back to that sometime soon. Because yeah, it's everything I like. It sounds super rad. But in terms of what I did, that is not what one of the new games I started is. We've started a new LP as of last week. We are playing Paper Mario, the Thousand Year Door.

That's right, Mario. Apathy is dead. Indeed. Now you joke. But I don't know if you know anything about Paper Mario or Paper Mario 64 or Super. I know just enough to have been waiting with Bated. So I saw that you guys were streaming and I was like, I hope Reggie's there. Because I am so excited from when you guys get to talk to that.

We got to the dragon. Yep. Yep. A man was defeated that day. And not a dragon. A man. The Thousand Year Door is fucking incredible so far. And my admiration for it is dwarfed only by my shock at its existence.

Because I have no idea how Nintendo lot check let this thing through the gates. It doesn't make sense to me. Not even the lot check. Fuck lot check. Not even lot check. How did like the approval, you know, coming from a company that used to be so, especially in the 90s, they were so concerned about how friendly their brand was to a game where like literally, I can say the word Princess Peach shower scene.

And that occurs in the script. Yeah. What the fuck happened? They kind of just let the whoever made it, they kind of just let them run with it and do whatever they wanted. And it seems like they just, they like, they said, yeah, go nuts, have fun. And they approved everything. And the end result is you get this really awesome world where every NPC has a name and

a story and a voice, you know, as the effort were put again. But you get, you know, this unique flavor to like everywhere you go because you're just talking to these people and they're all like, you know, they're all like a cast. And that includes not just like the, you know, oh, the old man that has a little problem with his store or like the little kid who's looking for his games, but it includes the broken family where the abandoned child is sad because his mom isn't home and the father is a failed writer who stands upstairs and cannot do any work because he's uninspired and he's not just, he's not great at his job.

And he's sad that his wife isn't around and his wife is not around because she's two buildings over in the fucking slot machine parlor playing Pachinko because she's addicted to gambling, like a fucking degenerate. And we just go on and like go, yeah, that's one house. I go talk to all three of these people and then walk out and you're like, Mario's a hero that jumps on enemies and kicks shells. He's not a divorce counselor. He's not a guidance counselor.

He's not a social worker. He can't fix these problems. And so you just get this weird like, you know, and then you leave the house and then it's like, yeah, there's no side quest there. There's nothing to fix. You just like, you just, you know, and then you go, let's go check out this house. And it's like, oh, it's a normal house. It's quite nice.

There's an upstairs and upstairs is a regular looking Koopa Troopa. And he's like, hey, look, it's a Koopa Troopa, you know, those turtles, you jump on them. And this Koopa Troopa is like, hey, I've come into a lot of money. In fact, I'm so rich that I don't need to ever work or leave the house again. So I just stay in bed all day. But now I'm depressed because I don't do anything because there's no meaning to my life. So yeah, that, I guess money can't buy happiness, huh? Can I help you?

Is there a quest here? No. No, I'm just a Koopa Troopa. I'm just a Koopa Troopa stuck in bed. And that's where I'm going to be for the rest of the game. Okay. And you just, you just meet these people and you're like, what the fuck is Nintendo doing? The first Goomba you hit up as you go into the main square is telling you about some guy

hitting him up for credit card fraud. I don't know what the fuck is happening in this game. It's wild. It's, it's fucking wild. And I'm talking around the fact that in the town square, the central item, the place where there would be a statue of, you know, whoever founded the town or something like that, the town square is just a noose. A hanging noose.

A noose is hanging in the town square and it is unavoidable. It is not off to the side. It is not in a back. It is dead center. First thing you see gallows. We murder people here. Also, you, how do you know how we murder people here? Well, and this was edited out of the American version.

There's a dingy back alley that leads to a fucking hobo hideout. And in that hobo hideout, apparently there was a drawing of a toad body outline on the ground. So this is Paper Mario, the thousand year door. Wild, unbelievably wild. There's something about coming to a game. So it's ironic because I've, I've never actually played thousand year door myself, right? But it's one of those things that I was into the superstar games on the GBA.

Those RPGs, they, those were great. We're nearly as good as thousand year door, apparently, but they're great. And there's something about the experience that you're having where you are many years late, this GameCube game, right? And you're playing this game, which is a beloved classic. And it's not the situation where you're like, oh, yeah, that's pretty good. Like, no, you are discovering that it is still a beloved classic. Like it's great, right?

And it is tinged likely with the fact that this is a game that makes people depressed because after it came out, Nintendo said no more apps. And as I see, I understand the reaction from Nintendo to violently swerve the car back onto the road makes perfect sense. It's it's fucking crazy how far it went the other way. And it was incredible. And Nintendo went, all of this needs to go. And they carried the fuck out.

And now I get it. Now I get it. It came down so hard that it wasn't just right. Whatever you want. It was no new characters. Nothing. Fucking obliterated. It obliterated the combat system, which if I could stop to say is wonderful.

Yeah, that's great. It is Mario RPG, which again, I only play like I think I didn't play much of Superstar Saga like I think I just started it out. So really, I can say my only experience prior to this is seven stars. And it really just takes, you know, the it's an RPG system. You have a jump, you have a hammer, you know, you have specials, all that stuff. And, you know, you and your partner can do your attacks. But then it adds these extra layers to it where for one, the entire thing is set on

a stage so you are performing for a crowd and the better you perform, the more stylish you are, the more people come to watch the play. So already there's a style system in place. It's a natural extension of the Mario 3 on stage. The curtains, right? The curtains, exactly. Second, there's stylish moments or stylish moves where you can add flourishes to your RPG attacks.

So, you know, you can go do your command jump and time it to keep jumping. Well, like now there's little things where you can flip off of it and do like a dismount or you can do like a body splash in midair and like all these little perfect moments of timing or on defense, you can dodge or parry attacks with perfect timing. And in fact, the parry is like a three frame thing. So I'm like, that's great. All of that is happening and the stage can sometimes the props on stage can collapse on you, like lights on the stage can fall on you in addition to the fight playing out

the way it is. It just has this really fun loop of like, there's a lot going on in combat and it seems like there's a, so there's a badge system where it's essentially the, I think it's badges in... I believe it is. No, but in Hollow Knight? Well, badges. Badges.

It's like that. Badges in Hollow Knight, right? Extremely similar here. I think it was also badges in the GBA. Okay. So yeah, you are putting the badge system into this game where you just add functionality to your character. You add a move list.

You add stuff. Everything is in the form of badges. And these charms, right, are things that you can choose to like increase how much capacity you have. So you can level up your life. You can level up your MP, or you can level up your equip load, essentially, you know. And the equip load for me is like the way to go because I want more abilities. I want more moves.

So yeah, it's so well done, you know. Your partners are these brand new characters unique to the Mario world that like, you know, they have backstories rooted. Die as soon as credits. I mean, this is... They're just shot with a gun in the back. It's crazy because, you know, you would think that like this game could add the longevity to the franchise that like by taking these risks, you can create a whole cast that could

show up in every sports game, you know, every future Mario event where you need a whole bunch of random characters to show up. You've got a giant roster of fun people to pick from in a thousand year door, you know. And one thing I will say is playing through it, doing all these voices with Reggie as well, like it's putting my throat to the test. I'm desperately in need of water more than ever before, and it kind of soars sometimes because, you know, you got to go into all these different voices as you play. It's one of those games.

It's almost like Undertale where it's like, what are you going to do? Not voice acted as you play it? Come on, you know. You kind of have to. It has been incredible so far, and it takes zero time to feel why this game is so beloved, and it takes about 10 minutes to realize, oh, this is never coming back. This is never, ever, ever coming back again. This is why the rest of the franchise turned out the way it did.

I imagine there's a there was a moment back in like 2000, whatever, where some young man was playing it, like, is this the future of, no, it's not, no, I better, I better hold on to this copy, because, because Nintendo will probably try and take it away from me. I mean, it's crazy because, like, that was, like, if they didn't cower it out, like, and I mean, they kept making them, clearly, I mean, there's a new one coming even, right? So, but it's like, this is a whole franchise that, like, you can just, you have a living you have a living RPG franchise, like, if you want it to be, I just took a look. I just took a look on a whim, and, like, they've never released it for anything.

Only the original. There's no DS version. There's no 3DS version. Well, I will say this. As far as GameCube games go, this game, once you hit the little, there's a little switch on the back of your GameCube, that's the HD switch, once you hit the HD switch on the back of your GameCube, this game looks fucking gorgeous, man, because it's a bunch of, a bunch of flat sprites, you know?

I'm going to go pull up Woolly Versus, a bunch of flat sprites running around, and, you know, they look sharp, they look great. You just got to make sure you play it with that HD button. It's important. Oh, it's not up yet. Yeah, it's going to, it's manga only for now, anime soon. As we wrap up with Kotor and Doom, both of which are just about reaching their conclusions. Scroll to a random part of your stream.

Well, that HD switch really kicked it off. It looks really pretty. Yeah, man. A lot of people don't know about the switch, but you should, you should really check it out. Well, anyway. Yeah, it's sprites and simple polygonal backgrounds, really HD up. They do.

They do. It's, it's, you know, it's, it's just art. It's just art. Um, lots of, lots of fun charm in that game, but also like weird, mature themes that should not be there. Mature implications, upsetting, you know, um, not, not even themes, but the implication of the theme, you know. So that, that's what's going on right now, um, and, uh, yeah, that, that will be starting

in the anime soon on woolly versus as well as, uh, another new LP will start this Wednesday seeing as, uh, Kotor is now complete. We will be starting out, uh, something brand new on Wednesday. So, uh, you know, surprise, surprise, whenever that happens, uh, bums the word for now. Um, and two other things, uh, I did this week. One was I decided I was curious. I wanted to know. So I started getting into Gwent, okay.

I've never played a Witcher game, but I played some Gwent. I did the, uh, did the, it's starting, did the little intro part and then I played some of the, uh, the basics of, uh, you know, how you get the system of the game going in the, you got two rows. The front row and the back row and all that stuff. And, uh, I, I only played as one race so far. I think, uh, the Highlanders or something like that or Northern land, Northlanders or anyway, Northern kingdom.

Excuse me. There we go. Um, Northern kingdom. See, I'm in a weird place because I never played the real Gwent. I only played Witcher Gwent. Well, um, I can say this, it's, it's a pretty fun card game. Uh, yeah, it's, it's to me, it's a little less, uh, fun than Tepin, but I need to learn more about its decks.

Um, because for me, part of Tepin's enjoyment is like knowing how it works on a lot of different levels, whereas I'm still trying to learn the ins and outs of how, how things go down in Gwent. But, um, it seems pretty, pretty straightforward. There's a, there's a, some, I'm looking at Gwent right now being streamed. And what I'm seeing looks way fucking different than the Gwent that I played in Witcher 3. Well, here's why I decided to take a look, right? Because so far my experience with card games baked into another larger game has been extremely

positive. Fair enough. Triple Triad and Pizzac are wonderful and need to be protected. What about caravan? I got nothing for you. Nobody gives a shit about caravan. Let me tell you that. So, um, I essentially want us thinking that, hey, Gwent is another one of these card games

inside of a card game, right? This is probably going to be, hopefully, as fun as those other two. And it's not, unfortunately, Pizzac and, and Triple Triad are more fun than Gwent. But it's all right, it's all right. The version that I'm looking at in, uh, being played in front of me right now, um, is so significantly different from the version that is in Witcher 3 that I would consider it a completely different card game, um, because Witcher 3, Gwent is based on the Triple Triad like progression of, this is a card game to assume you will never fight a human ever.

Okay. This is the way that it works is for CPUs and you are, you are leveling up your deck as you gain cards because every single person you beat gives you one card. And, um, I look back on me going through Witcher 3 and I vividly remember that one Blood and Wine came out, I fucking started it up and went and beat every single card player in Blood and Wine and finished the Gwent deck, like completed it and then put it on the shelf and did not come back to that expansion for over a year before I finally beat it because getting those final cards was more important.

Uh, how would you say Gwent in the original game stacks up compared to, let's say, Triple Triad and Pizzac? Extremely well. Okay. Uh, I don't care for Pizzac myself. Fair enough. I remember. I would compare it much more closely to Triple Triad, particularly since a big part of FF8's

Triple Triad was as you beat people, you would earn increasingly powerful cards and you would get to the end of FF8 and you were dealing with a bullshit like the Chaos Rule or, you know, whatever, and you needed your big ass tough cards to deal with it. Um, Witcher 3 does have a small advantage in that there are three or four storyline like main story areas in which if you have a rockin' Gwent deck, you can totally make things easier on yourself in the actual storyline by actually winning the tournament instead of just flushing the fuck out. Okay.

Well, with Pizzac, I'm a fan of Blackjack, so Blackjack 2 was fine by me. Sure. Um, Triple Triad, I had not played any game like that and that turned out to be like a really fun like, yeah, it's almost like a Solitaire. You're not wrong. Um, but in the case of Gwent, at least as far as, you know, the self-contained game goes, you're definitely playing a very PVP-oriented thing, you know, like you're playing each other's cards and you need to have a total by the end that's higher on your side than

the other. You have two rows. You have a front row and a back row and you can deploy soldiers or abilities and then you can actually give them action points to then do their attacks on other cards, which lose their value as they go and come out, you know. Yeah. Now, there is definitely, I could see, I could see how the game would be fun when you start mixing and matching abilities to when you, the way things work is like you can bring

out an attack card, which is like this card will attack a random card every time it gets a boost and then the ways you can set that card to get a boost are numerous, right? Other than you can build essentially a formation where you have this one card down that is basically like the cannon, you know, or the gun and then you set up a formation of batteries for the gun. Just feed it. And then it goes, and shoots all the cards on the opposite end. So I was able to do stuff like that and win some games that way and that was really fun.

My favorite card in Runeterra is very simple. It is a card that if any of your units dies, it drains one health from the enemy health pool and gives it to you. And so you just flood the deck with the garbage and just have your own units kill themselves and just bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, and they become afraid to attack you. Did cards in Gwent have like, were they all like characters with actions in the original? Very few were. In the original Gwent, you had situations where you had the front line, the mid line,

and the back line and cards could only very rarely go and live in one. Most cards were numbers. Most cards were a number between one of them because there were your spy cards, which you would give to the opponent and you'd get to draw more cards. You'd have cards that would heal others. You would have cards that would draw like you if you bought, if you played like a monster card, it would drag every one of those cards out of your deck. That happens.

Yeah, that still happens. But I'd say like half the cards were just like, this card does eight. So something that makes this game interesting enough on its own would be you're stacking up, you're playing each other to get to a total count that's higher. So almost like war, not war, I forgot what the most, it was one of those super basic card games where you're trying to just literally have a higher total. But the Geralt's card will kill anything that is above a nine or anything that gets buffed above a nine, right?

So like you can, and there's two, and you have to win two out of three rounds with the same deck. So it's really something that's interesting about this is that you can go heavy to make sure you win the first round and overplay to make your number as big as possible. And then in the second round, you're starving. By far Gwent's most interesting mechanic is its round system because there's this weird element of like, I have just enough cards to force you to play big, big motherfucking cards to barely win this round.

And then I'm going to stomp you the wrong way. What I noticed playing some PVP was that a lot of people that are, I guess, I mean, you know, we're all beginners at this phase, but like a lot of the beginners I'm fighting have no concept of like when to pass because passing in Gwent is the only way to, if we both pass the round ends, we move on with the cards we have and we can hopefully reset the situation. Doing so requires the player to admit that they lost the current round, which feels bad. So no one does it.

And as a beginner, no one's doing it. Everyone is using every single card they have to just try and get a biggest number possible, no matter what. I'm going to win this. And I'm like, I have, you have four. I have 30. You're not going to catch back up with your next two cards. And they're like, no, watch me, right?

So you get these moments of like, save it. So that's an interesting mechanic where like you got to go, you got to know when to call it, you know, and I like that in games. I like that a lot. It's because it's a moment of awareness. It's self-awareness about the game. It's strategic, you know, and it forces you to make a tactical decision to abandon a battle to win the war.

And that is one of my favorite aspects of go, which is my favorite board game. Go is it get, you know, like people make comparisons to things like chess and checkers, but go is so much different because it's, it's you engage in, imagine you're having these little fights and checkers or these fights and chess, but like each game of chess or checkers represents a specific area of the board that's a fight. And when you lose that fight, you have to internally make the decision to say, I'm out. If I keep putting units here, if I keep playing here and wasting my time here, I'm not going to win anything and I'm going to further distract from setting up elsewhere.

I can win the war by switching strategies. It's such a beautiful game and it forces you to make these concessions, you know. If you don't, if you try to bullhead your way through it, you will lead to your demise. And the more stubborn you are, the harder you will lose, you know. So I like that in games and Gwent having that aspect is a really fun thing to recognize. I wish more games had a two round system like that. So I don't think anything has anything very close to Gwent system. It's really definitive.

You have to give up to win. It's very weird. The only thing that I can compare it to in my personal experience is because I've been playing so much Runeterra is that I'm getting into this situation quite often because Runeterra has a very, like your big card games right now are Tepin, Gwent, Runeterra and Hearthstone. And they all have completely different flows throughout the match. Hearthstone is like throw cards at the board and then you put your hands out and then your opponent throws cards at the board and then you know, they clash sticks or whatever.

You just describe Gwent. You've described Tepin in the past. Tepin is like, there's no fucking rounds in Tepin. It's just go. Every card is going and fighting simultaneously at all times. And Runeterra is, with the arrow anyway, go on, Runeterra is somewhere in the middle of all that where it's like summon your cards. If you summon your cards, they get to summon their cards.

Now play your cards. If you play your cards, then they can play their cards or they could play a spell. If they do a spell, you can do a counterspell and it's so one, two, one, two, one, two back and forth. And instead of the situation where it's like, do I want to bust my shit to win this round of Gwent where it's the round is big, you only get to lose one. I'm in the situation where I'm staring at this fucking unit that I know is going to ruin my day if I leave it on the board.

Like I want it gone. And I have the spell to get it the fuck out of here, but they have four mana and they have 40 cards and they're from Ionia, which means there is a three in 40 chance that in the five cards I can see one of those is deny, which costs four mana, which just obliterates any spell you cast. And so I'm looking at that and going, do I want to risk it? Do I want to, because if I get, if he doesn't have deny, I could get this piece of shit off the board and I'll be in a really good position.

But if he does have deny, then I wasted my grasp and that's a higher value card than deny is and then he'll keep that piece of shit on the board. And now I won't be able to summon the guy that could block him and it's way more great. It's more like little victories that build up to the win. Probably I don't know if I mentioned it before with Runeterra, but something about Runeterra that is the total opposite of what you are describing in a Gwent where no one wants to pass. I can't get a match to actually end in Runeterra anymore.

I recently got to a gold rank and I'm stalled out in gold rank in Runeterra and I have not seen one real match ending since silk has in people just quit. You get to the point of the match. It's about 14 draws in and you both know who's going to win. Okay. And the loser surrenders like because Runeterra has because the way that the turns get confirmed the guy you load up your six dudes and they're going to go attack on when you hit okay and the other guy says okay, I don't have anything to defend that.

So instead of hitting pass to do nothing, they go into the upper right corner, hit the gear and hit surrender instead. Yeah. So, you know, in Teppen when you know what's going on, people will do that. But again, there's always, there's people that you can feel their arrogance in the style of play and they will just, they'll just bleed it out the whole time. In some cases, like there will be players where Teppen lets you fuck yourself over in such a way where it's possible for you to draw out such a bad poker hand that nothing

is, nothing can be played at the moment. Like let's say you draw five control cards, but no cards are down on the board. No units. Then you're stuck. You literally are stuck. There's nothing you can do. And some people will do that with a life discrepancy, you know, and it's like, well, if I don't play, you can't do anything.

So now we just sit and stare at each other until you quit. But the mind game is I've had maybe me, the winner will be so impatient that I'll just quit before you. So now we're just playing a stupid game of patience. And I'm like, I'm a patient fool. I can sit here all day, you know, there's a really awful sinking feeling in Runeterra that I can't admit to any other game that I can think of where the guys got two units on the board to say they're good units, right?

And he's got two cards and you've got one card, right? And he draws a card and puts it down and then you draw a card and you look at it and you look at the board and you like, there is no combination of cards in my deck that can beat what he has on the board right now. There is literally no fucking way to math out a win out of the situation. And you're looking at it and like the eventually the timer starts to go, it's like, make your turn and you're like, not surrender because like, I have seen the funniest one though by far is so when you load into action Runeterra, it gives you your four starting cards and

it goes, do you do you want to reroll these in case you get three Mulligan's in the Gwent? Yeah. So you get, you can mulligan all four of them and so you get four and it's like six, seven, nine, right? And you're like, no. And you mulligan them and you get five, eight, eight, eight. And you're like, I might as well just fucking surrender right now.

I've had that happen and I've I've turned those around, but it depends on how shit your opponent is. Yeah. And the reason why you don't is because the way that mana gets saved. So you get, you know, one mana, two mana, three mana to use it and you can stock up to three, you get into these really bizarre games where turn one, one one, nobody has any one one units. Turn two with one mana stocked.

Nobody has any two money. Turn three with three mana stocked. Nobody has a three value unit or a spell under six and then you hit turn four and then it's just an explosion onto the fucking because what you just described in teppen is just seconds, right? One second, one mana, one, a bit, one more point to play. You will wait 10 seconds and then fucking annihilation, just 80 things happening at the same time.

And I've done that because what you want to do in that particular instance is V, the mysterious one is an eight mana card, right? So you have to wait the eight seconds for that to build up or it's more slower than eight seconds, actually. But you have to wait till you have eight, you're almost fulled up mana bar and then you drop V, but the moment you drop him, you have to drop him like followed by a one mana card so that he can turn it into one of the summon boys. And in that moment where you're dropping him and the card in between him,

there's times when they can mash hard enough and fast enough to kill your V before you drop the one right behind him and you're and then you just blow and then you surrender and then you just quit, you know, because yeah, it's all in one. But no, that's that's Gwent and you know, yeah, I thought it was I thought it was all right. I just it wasn't it wasn't like incredible compared to, you know, it was it was not as addictive as I was hoping, I guess, but I have to learn more about it as is. So what was so it was it the literally your experience with like Pizzac and

FF eight that made you decide, yeah, Gwent. Yeah, because I know that like I basically in my head, I was always thinking, you know, I'm going to play the Witcher someday. And what I do, I can't wait to find out how good Gwent is, you know, and then and then at some point I kind of just went, well, fuck it, let's give it a shot right now. I don't personally have a lot of experience with the the version of Gwent that you're playing because it is very different. It has to be because it was not it was not the version in the Witcher three

is like unbalanced shit like it's the thought I had may have been prefaced by a particularly salty loss and tepid. Yeah, yeah, OK, I see that. I see that I would. If you are now dipping your toe into non capcom card games, I would legitimately recommend you try out Runeterra because it's fantastic. And it's the freest of all. Is it on only on PC?

It's on everything you would play a card game on. I play it here and I play it on my toilet. It may or may not have been one of the reasons I got a new phone. I wasn't actually looking for a big like PVP type game, though. I was looking for a Pazox slash triple triad experience, you know. Well, the problem with that is that those are I know, I know, I know, I know, yeah. I know people who, you know what, there is it's a lot longer.

It's a lot longer. But there is a mod that you might be interested in for Witcher three, the Gwent mod where every combat encounter is turned into a that sounds wonderful. The only problem is that it fucking takes forever. Fair, not balanced for that. You're talking combat encounters that would have taken five seconds are now full game. Oh, yeah. But turning the Witcher into a Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh-esque experience as as as

fucking whatever as you go on this adventure and fight bosses, but everything is done in the form of cards. That sounds pretty great. That sounds great. I remember people saying that it was like a really cool idea that they could no one could get very far through because there's just too much. I had one other thing I played and then I went back to a little bit more. We took a look at Power Rangers Battle for the Grid on get into fighting games.

Oh, finally. So we took a look at it last year, actually, but some new content dropped, including the Quantum Ranger, who needs more quantum power. Yeah, right, right. So they know what they're doing. He's got a rapid slash. He's got a he's got a round trip. He's got like a Starfall, you know, but he's also still his own ranger.

I mean, Eric Myers remains Eric Myers, but Battle for the Grid knew lots of characters for the second season of the game. And yeah, if anyone forgot, this is also the fighting game that has now the most potential crossplay partners because it's playable on five different things via crossplay. That's crazy, right? Including the Stadia. So Stadia, PC, Switch, Xbox and PlayStation, all crossplay compatible.

And it's it's, you know, like, I'm like, fuck, yeah, I'm so I'm that that needs to happen. That's one of those, like, if that happens for every small fighting game, then they can live, you know, they can live together and you can just buy it for whatever and the player base doesn't have to suffer. So like, I really, really hope that, like, other companies can figure that out because, I mean, shit, dude, the fucking Power Rangers game figured it out. This game is also combat designed by Clockwork and a couple of other FGC heads.

Oh, shit, I know that. So it plays no shit. It's like it the way it plays like Marvel with a little lower budget, but shit's wild shit, you know, very, very complex combo possibilities, very complex combo routes you can get into, you pick a team of three, you have two assists, you can switch to those assists as you call them out to do, you know, helping moves. It, yeah, it's, you know, it's a it's a four button, three, three attack buttons, one special button, two assist buttons, you know, type of fighter.

And just between that and the tag system, you're like, you bet your ass, like the FGC made this game full of like, like pretty impressive tech, you know, really dirty cross ups, really fun hyper moments. And I kind of was like, OK, let me learn enough about this game to say I have a team and to say I kind of know what we're doing. Complex equals shit all over the screen. Yeah, I mean, essentially. But, you know, if you're having a hard time just figuring out which way to block,

you can if you if you have the the fucking sharp if you have a sharp eye, you can see where you got it. You can you can read the setups, you know, but like there's there's things in there. You can you can, you know, call out someone to you can call out the mastodon mastodon sentry to like shoot as you're doing a an attack that like crosses over and then you can switch at any point and it's like, oh, shit, is it left? Is it right? You know, these little fun mix ups are always a blow up in like as soon as they

hit you're like, oh, my God, you know, so battle for the grid, lots of hype. Yeah. And then, you know, I saw I saw so Virgil was added to the game. I always liked the mastodon sentries or is a strong zoner. And then they added Trini in power armor, who is essentially just like, you know, the Yellow Ranger wearing a giant like Mecca armor suit. And she essentially plays like kind of like sentinel with a full. It's like she plays like I'm like like just big, heavy, slow startup,

but far reaching moves. So like she's got a beam that covers the whole screen, a charging psycho crusher that kind of flies across full screen and a command grab, which if you see her started up, will travel full screen and you better be jumping when it comes out. So I'm like, OK, I want to find out how to do things with this character. And yeah, so I went in my lab, then I had some fun with it. And yeah, it's just, you know, went back to that game.

And I was like, here's another game that deserves people's attention and respect. Fucking ton of fun, you know, played it, got some people to come on, some killers joined in, showed us what was what, got bodied all day and then kept playing it for the rest of the week. As you know, I kind of learned the ins and outs a little bit more. And yeah, I just want to reiterate that the Power Rangers fighting game is a good time. And if I'm not mistaken, it's it's one of those cheaper ones, too.

I think it was on sale or like one of the seasons were on sale or something like that. But yeah, they added, I think the characters of season two bring the roster up to you know, somewhere around 20 or so, perhaps representation of all the different eras of Power Rangers over the years. As somebody who is not familiar with Super Sentai and never watched anything other than the original Power Ranger series, that roster is the most confusing fucking show. OK, like I have no idea who fucking well, there's

there's a dog, yes, doggy Krueger is is playable and he has that's weird awesome I.O. slash style attacks. However, you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about the fucking Decker Ranger references or your SPD stuff. You can just take a look at the top three picks there. You got your Tommy, you got your Jason. You got you move over one.

You got your Lord Drake on and you've got. It's not Zach, but it's a mastodon sentry. He's got a similar to Zach, you know, and then you got Trini in the dragon armor. You know, so there's there's four. Why she and I don't know, but it's rad. OK, so yeah, you got four recognizable MMPR faces for you. Don't worry, Pikachu and Charizard are in the game. Hey, you want to hear some shitting news, Lord Zed and

and Gold are are also in the game. Did you know that for America, when they were introduced to Lord Zed, they didn't realize that they were being forced to speak Canadian? They thought that was just his name. Damn, everybody got got. You were speaking Canadian the whole time. Gotcha. This week, Castle Super Beast is sponsored by Honey.

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Mm hmm. Say you worked at mixer. Right. You were like an employee at mixer, the company. Mm hmm. When do you think you found out that mixer was being dissolved? Oh, my God, how many times, how many times does this have to happen? Are you fucking kidding me?

Is the answer three hours ago? Are you kidding me? There are people going to Twitter going like, I just lost my staff found out via a fucking on Twitter. Oh, my God, you pieces of shit. You absolute scum. You did it again. You did it again.

Silicon Valley is the worst with this. It's like it's like. Like there's so much like think about how many emails were sent out to all of those employees talking about how valuable they they are. And how much they matter and how much the team, the team is a family, as you said, and and we, you know, we are all in this together and we have values and and just think about how much stock time is spent on horse shit that absolutely, absolutely, it just the fog dissipates and you see the clarity in

the final moments of the company where they don't even have the decency to tell the people that fucking work there that they no longer work there. Okay, so I have a person who broke this particular news. Her name is Tara Volker Wake. She is an on camera host and a lead for Xbox's gaming and disability community stuff. So I'm going to go through some of her tweets because she goes into detail on this.

She describes this three hours ago. These are all direct quotes. We didn't know this was coming. We found out right before you. I am being told I still have a job. I don't know what the job is yet. We have not confirmed that all of the mixer employees will be relocated to other jobs.

I'm really glad they let me get a bunch of people NDA and form an accessibility committee just in time to make like one announcement. And now I have no guidance on how to close it down. Just so you know how much we didn't know this was coming. Last week, they asked me to send in my picture for our town hall to celebrate my three year mixer anniversary. And she has changed her profile to what even is my job. Yeah.

So I think that's probably a pretty good source on that. What the fuck? Now this is when this this practice, which has unfortunately way too much precedent is something that almost always comes last minute from the top down and like it release, it float like the people in the know that know for a while are oftentimes like the top of the fucking mountain, you know, and and and then they drop it and then everything falls. The thought process behind why they do it this way is because when you don't,

when you when you do it the decent way and you bring people in, you give them their their exit interview and then you do the escort or whatever the case is. Or you know, you or you put the internal memo out and all that jazz. Everybody has those moments of panic, which then lead to the like obviously the tweets and the releases of well, it's all fucked over here. It's on fire and disintegrates it immediately and press release incoming in three to one and then exactly right. And then the fire starts.

So this is all a preemptive thing to not have the fire start. But it's like, holy fuck, man. So your alternative is literally for people to find out alongside the public that they don't have their jobs anymore. Or they or maybe they do. But what is it all ability, all ability to to to plan, prepare and do what you got to do, you know, has to happen just after this announcement. It's it's it's gross every time.

So but but but like I said, you're looking at like this case where they're like we can we can mitigate the fires, mitigate the fires. And it's like, yeah, but those don't matter as much as the people you're hiring then what the fuck. So I'm not a lawyer. And I'm definitely not an American lawyer. But I am pretty sure that in at least a couple U.S. States and probably most provinces that there's some kind of labor law that

you're breaking by doing this shit, perhaps firing people perhaps no notice at all. And like, you know, whatever worry, whatever panic you're worried about in terms of like, oh, the parent company is going to take a hit. Well, it's going to take a hit when the announcement comes out anyway. Like it doesn't matter. Like that event is going to be that event, you know, but it's just the desire to not have disgruntled employees create the narrative as opposed to react to the narrative, you know, by being ahead of everything, you have more control over it.

And thus you can avoid the worst possible outcomes. And it's just it's such a fucking shitty attitude to manage a company with man in its closing moments, you know. Oh, oh, that's fucking gross. Anyway, yeah. Well, double extra kudos to Ninja for fucking running that hustle and getting the fuck out. That's he got it.

He bounced. I should mention that people are pointing out that while Ninja and the like made the fucking bank, there are actually a decent amount of streamers that we're building up small to moderate sized, of course, on Mixer. That fucking evaporated in. Of course. Absolutely. Absolutely. This is not to say that this is not to say that those people

and their platform being lost is not fucking awful. That sucks because you're not just the company. You're also a host platform for many companies. If you many small people are running their own businesses off of this platform, of course, don't even have the time to have the stream saying, hey, guys, we're going to Google or you were going to YouTube. Come on, follow this link like you better hope everybody that watches your mixer stream follows you on Twitter or Instagram, right?

Or else or else you might as well have died and just disappeared. If we get some sort of announcement from his team or him saying, yeah, I saw that shit coming. I decided to pull a Reggie. Feeza May, that is. And then skydive in while the plane is on fire and smoke is billowing out and he skydives in, loads up the backpack, loads up the two side packs and then skydives out before it hits the fucking ground.

You know, I mean, oh, boy, you know, that is. Yeah, I just I just it's an extra disgusting thing now, which, of course, if the employees working at mixer or find that via press release, then you can only imagine, you know, literally everyone beneath that just like, hey, your shit's gone, their job's gone one day, which is why, to be perfectly honest, this whole world, everything what we're doing right now, all of this,

you know, you really do have to keep in mind that, like, you don't, you're not you're not on a proprietary streaming platform that you own. You're on you're signing into an account on someone else's shit. You know, this is not the Tom Green show fucking broadcast. It's not the Tom show either. Sure, because sorry, that's the lyrics of the fucking Tom Green show. If you remember, OK, OK, Tom Green show. This isn't the Green Tom show.

This is my favorite show because it is my show. I love the fucking Tom Green show. Anyway, sorry, I got distracted. Yeah, this is not building it in your basement and dropping it on public access, you know, so this can all evaporate at any given moment. Likely, though, you can possibly see it coming a little bit when you're looking at a situation like mixer, of course, which you also have to be exclusive to either one

if you get to the partnership level. Yeah, right, like you don't get the ability to option select your situation. Yeah, like I'm deep in there with Twitch now. So they're like, hey, bitch, you're putting YouTube uploads up. I'm like, yeah, they're like, those are going to be two days late now. I'm like, OK. Right. And. OK, so this thing, this mixer just told everyone

that it was going to die at two forty five p.m. eastern time, right? Time of death. So what this means? Is there some poor mother fuckers? Who woke up on Monday morning? That's what I was saying. That's what I was in the middle of saying. It's like right.

They stream schedule start to stream. Hey, everybody. Fucking what? Like right in the middle, there's, you know, woke up, said, I'm going to work today. No, you're not. All right. And again, this was already dealing with the slim pickings that was your audience on Mixer, you know, I don't know what the largest

channels on Mixer were pulling in on a regular basis. But I mean, like five, ten people. That sentence ended a lot shorter than I thought it would be. Well, anyway, I look forward to. The clock resets as we find out more about how bad this went down, because quite frankly, like I said earlier in the podcast, my story started with someone at Mixer getting a slave analogy. And then the company shut down.

And then the company shut down. So this is the third, you know, this is a three. This is a three, two piece in a biscuit. I'm waiting for the I'm waiting for the the fucking. The shoe to drop. It's like, hey, did you know that if you didn't sign a big deal with Mixer, you accidentally also signed a non-complete con non-compete clause, which says you have to come to Facebook gaming.

Hmm. We've already made your account for you. Yeah, you have to. It's it's we decide where you go for three years. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I feel the need to reiterate that,

you know, there definitely should be like alternatives for these massive platforms. There should be a streaming alternative. There should be a YouTube alternative. There should, you know, like that's that's good business. That's a good idea. But wow, Microsoft was not doing it the right way. For example, invisible money, probably not the best business strategy,

but I don't know. I'm not, I'm not like if I if I'm going to get into a business venture an economics major as an adult business man, which I am now and so are you. And I go, OK, so you're going to give me this money. Cool. That's right. Where does that money come from? And if the answer is, I don't know, lol. Uh.

Hmm. When the question mark question mark question mark profit actually applies, it's on the business plan. It's like it's actually applicable here. You know, make mixer, stream games, question marks, profit, question mark, question mark, profit. Get it. Well, uh, rip mixer got mixed up.

The guy hit with the option select. What are you going to do? The option select was all the other streaming services. I mean, what Ninja did was an OS. Yeah, I was, you know, he OS them. They're like, we will give you 10 digits to come here. And he's looking, he will give you 10 digits to get in this car. And he's like, and he, and he looks at the car and he kicks the tires

and he sees the gas tank is right above E. He's like, yeah, I'll get in that car. Where are you going? So San Francisco to LA, San Francisco to New York. Yeah, I'll get in that car. There's a we're riding. There was this weird backlash that everybody got. All the streamers that went to mixer and got paid to do so.

And it was this thing. It's like, oh, you, you know, you saw everybody go, oh, you motherfuckers. You leave your community behind. You don't care. It's just about the money. And it's like, yeah. I remember I forget what her name was. I wasn't familiar with her, but she's a streamer that she took the deal

to go over to mixer. And she did this, this thing of like, yeah, so I bought my mom a house. Right. Yeah. Mm hmm. Anyone who's like, nah, man, you keep real for the community. They're like, shut up, you liar. You so what if you're a liar? So what if your mom now currently lives in Shadow Legends Manor?

Yeah, it's got to say raid Shadow Legends. Good morning. Every time you open the door, it's the doorbell noise. It's one of my favorite games to play on my mobile device. The free car in the driveway is as a stickered with the full ad wraparound all over it. Do you want the car mom or not? You know, what are we doing here?

Well, anyway, what a fucking mess. Oh, my God, it was the shoe was going to drop. You know, of course, everyone knew Mixer was going to die, but I thought we were going to get a little heads up. Stadia really is the miracle. But anyway, hey, you know what else is a miracle? What the most easily predictable miracle? Easily, easily seen coming.

Titanfall 2 on steam turns out it's a big hit. Turns out that game's really good. Turns out that it currently has more concurrent players than all battlefield games combined on steam. Yes. It's a shame that to play the the EA games, they force you to launch origin. This is the part that like always it's always the asterisk here, right? Is you can now buy it on steam and boot it,

but it's going to ask you to now basically it's steam is going to send you over to the thing you had to do anyway. It's now being on steam is an extra step of obfuscation from playing the game. But it doesn't matter as a marketplace. As a marketplace, it just gets that many more eyes on it. Yeah, so yeah, I've been getting updates. You know, I've been getting people letting me know. Skull God came and showed me the the stats.

The fucking servers are popping off. People are having a good time. Turns out 10 people like Monday morning, which is crazy. Yeah, 12, I think, actually. People people are like in the game, you know. And hey, all those dollar store copies. Well, you know, now on steam, at the very least, you can fucking jump in there and just see what all the fuss was about.

If you didn't already spend the bag of chips in a Coke, it costs you to get the game. Yeah. But yes, you still have to boot it through origin, you know. And you still have to match make your origin. I wonder, you think it's it really is just about like shelf space, right? Yeah. Like like digital shelf space, people browse steam and their work and the workshop, not the workshop, the steam storefront, they browse that to be like, I'll grab this, I'll grab that.

Oh, hey, look at that. OK, I'll do that. And no one's doing that on origin. No. You know why you're booting origin up. You know what you're getting into booting origin up because the game is coming out on origin. In fact, you're not even booting origin up.

You're clicking on the icon to the game and an origin happens to open up alongside it. You know, it's such a goddamn shame you still have to use origin. I have I have a good friend of mine. I've been friends of them for years. His name is Jim. Love you, Jim. And he bought Titanfall with everybody else in my little little cadre of a gang that play like FF 14 together. He was not able to play multiplayer with us one time

because origin just fucking refused to put him in a party with us. For weeks. And it was origin, too. We we had played a dozen different multiplayer games together that used every combination of servers. Bunch of shooters played overwatch together, right? Just fucking couldn't get into one match with his friends. And so he dropped it.

Of course he fucking did. Was he able to get to the servers and all he play random fucking games hit the playlist. Yeah. And you I know a lot of people were thinking. Oh, it must be a NAT setting, right? Like open NAT closed. Nope. It was just origin did not like him and would not pair him with the people on his friends list.

But other other games worked. Yep. No problem. That sucks. He was not the only person I ran into that issue with, but he was the only person that we could never get it to work once. You know, there'd be people like, I don't know why, man, but you're you're just not joining the party. I sent you the invite.

Did you get it? No, I didn't get it. Right that shit. But like you jam in particular was a cut. It was fucking horrible. Like, I want to say like a fourth of my time playing Titanfall 2 with friends was us trying to get people into the room. And it just saying, nah, I don't want to do it. Hmm.

Don't want to do it. Yeah. Friends that I had no trouble with playing games on consoles with or MMOs with or Blizzard games with or whatever the fuck. Fucking piece of shit. You know, when I was thinking, when I was a kid, thinking about what video games would be, I definitely didn't foresee like a good game surrounded by

a garbage platform and or like a bad publisher making the game worse via all. You know what I mean? Like a game was just in the cartridge in the box on the shelf. It's it's have these weird moments of just like, do you want the ultimate? I can't believe how much I have to think about this. What's the ultimate? So there's a lot of Mass Effect mods.

There's a lot of mods that, for example, on PC, you can play through those games with controller support. Like there's native controller support that you can enable. So I have the Mass Effect trilogy on origin just in case, right? I could I could just say, hey guys, it's Mass Effect Month. I never played three, so let's fucking do this, right? So I'm loading up the games and I'm installing them and getting them work and see, you know, what am I going to have to do?

I get to Mass Effect 2. A game that I know you played, right? I did not. I did not play to you. I played one. I only played one. So ME2 has a feature called the Cerberus Network. And what the Cerberus Network was,

your was your online pass that included extra content like a couple characters that could join you on your party and stuff like that. And the online pass Cerberus Network was associated with your Bioware social account. Fuck yeah. And the only way to buy DLC for Mass Effect 2 was through the Bioware store with Bioware points, even on Steam. Good shit. So I load it up and I download it and it goes,

you don't have your Bioware shit download. Okay. So I back out to Origin and I go, okay, most of the DLC is here and there's an extra pack that's all the DLC. But where's this one and this one and that one? They're like, oh, so you click on the help page and it sends you a thing. Well, it's like, you're going to have to go to the Bioware social account website to download the exes to install your DLC.

So you click on the link to go to the Bioware social page and that doesn't exist anymore. Hell yeah. And so you find the, you dig through the fucking side path to get to where they're hosted now on some EA random website and you download them and you install them. And then when you install them and you load the game up, it goes, hey, you haven't logged into your Cerberus account.

It can't validate these 22 DLCs. And I go, okay, I actually remember what my Bioware social account was for the Cerberus network. So I log in and it goes, can't connect to server. And you're like, oh, of course not because those servers don't exist. You ever boot up your favorite game and there's a corpse just bolted to the wall. Just a dead body attached to your game that was, it was alive, but now there's a corpse.

And then it's pretty, it's not coming back to life. So, I discovered the solution. I discovered that. So after, after going through every help article and support article I could find and even talking to customer support, which did not help me. I discovered the solution, which is so asinine that I couldn't believe it. Log in to the Cerberus network with your origin credentials. Oh, that is not, you know, the service that didn't exist

when the game came out, that you would have no reason to believe would ever be associated. At some point they transferred the licenses over in the background. Wow. Well, at least, at least they did that. And it's not just a case of this whole thing is dead, but that never would have occurred to me or anybody. And the game doesn't just did it as a goof.

No, wait, but the game doesn't like throw a warning message up when you boot it up to say, hey, this exists now. Like that seems like the kind of thing you want to throw in. No, it's a sign into your Bioware account. And then you sign into your Bioware account with your origin information. Log in and then it works. Okay. Which doesn't ask you for two-factor even if you have it available

because two-factor didn't exist back then. Of course it didn't. Of course it didn't. At least they even bothered. And like it's good that it's not a hopeless cause, but like wow, yeah. It's publishing bloat shit, man. You just can't escape it. Apparently it's even worse with Dragon Age Origins.

A game that upon release I bought every piece of DLC with and to this day have not played half of it because I could never get it to turn on. I could never get it to actually activate with my real account on Steam even back then because of how fucked up the Bioware social shit was. Dude, we're going to look back on the fucking 360 PS3 generation and be like, wow, that generation was terrible. I was about to say that like when we,

because I was talking about how we didn't have to think about all this back in the day with the older consoles with Generation 4, right? When we are in like two generations out from now, this shit is going to be trash and it's going to plague everything. There's going to be so many games that are just like anything AAA essentially, anything AAA cannot escape this garbage bloat, you know? Well, to be perfectly honest, there's a lot of AAA that passes me by.

There's a lot of AAA that I don't play. I happen to lean into other preferences. People keep saying they're going to boycott EA and it's like I have naturally boycotted EA because it's easy because they don't make anything I want to buy anymore. But yeah, a lot of these games are going to get fucked up and hard to access and it's a shame there's no solution to that problem. That there's absolutely no way that you could look at your copy of Mass Effect 2

that you bought with real money that you're somehow not able to access because it's fucked up. There's no way for you to acquire it otherwise. Definitely not an easy way. It's a shame. Obriden. Incredible. So, Smite just announced a crossover with Avatar and Korra.

What, really? Cool. There's a trailer for it. Basically, it looks like Aang, Zuko, and Korra are going to be playable characters in the Battle Pass that Smite is getting. It looks like them. It's skins, I guess. Seems like it's skins.

These are skins. Yeah. Pretty cool. These are for Scotty, Susanoo, and Merlin, it looks like. Okay. But these are detailed skins. Yeah, that's fun. They are doing their Avatar shit.

It seems like the voices are there, though I don't know if it's the original voices. Sounded a little... Maybe it might be off, I'm not sure. But unexpected, sure. Oh, the voices are accurate. Okay, cool. Good, good. I feel good for Smite for being one of the movers that has at least gotten a real actual identity

as being the over the shoulder one. It's the third person one. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I really dislike the tone and setting. I think the Gods thing is fucking lame, but I appreciate that it's actually doing something different, whereas League and Dota are fucking baseball and cricket, you know? Like there's so much cross contamination between those two.

Is this the voices are not correct? That was one guy. Okay, cool. So, right. I was definitely not certain by what I heard it didn't, and it didn't immediately go, that's that. It doesn't sound like it. Okay, great.

If I remember correctly, is this possibly the single instance of Avatar integration into a video game that might be fun? Yes, maybe, maybe. Well, good timing for, for like my shit, at least that's pretty funny. Smite was released in 2014. Wow. Oh, what fucking live longer than hots. Oh, man.

I haven't cracked them open yet. I'm waiting for an opportunity, but Min loaned me these two books, which are basically the next seasons that kind of take place after season three. So pretty solid look so far, the promise and the search. Gonna check them out once I get a shot. You want to? I hear good things. You want to hear something funny?

I want some fucking website looking at, I wanted to know the popularity of various MOBAs. And I'm looking like the 20 best MOBAs, and it's like you hit league, hots, smite and Dota, and then I'm scrolling down this list, and there's list of fucking dead games. Battleborn. No, that wasn't a, do you remember prime world? What? What about bloodline champions? What about dark eclipse and vein glory?

No, thanks. I'm good. Like the vein. I do recall vein glory. I do recall that title because that's a word I like. I remember being like, oh shit, that's cool. The coolest thing Smite ever did they did last week was they put Cthulhu in the game. That's good.

Like their own Cthulhu or like? No, it's Cthulhu. Did they have to talk to the Lovecraft estate? Probably. Although isn't that shit like super old, so they're allowed to do what they want. It's probably public domain. Yeah, I'd imagine. You think Aang could take Cthulhu?

Yes. Dude, I don't know. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Where I'm at right now actually brings that into question. Come to think of it. Yeah, okay, okay. I'm at that exact part in season two where I'm getting the origin stories and I'm actually finding out that that might not be a hard yes.

Yo, Aubrey Plaza's in that season. Yes. That's her, isn't it? Of course it is. Yeah, I thought so, I thought so. It definitely, definitely felt like it. Best part of that season, man. I didn't even check the credits, but I was like, that sounds like it could be her.

I disagree. She's looking at you and she's like, your fucking dick is disgusting. Get it away from me. That's not my favorite part of the season. My favorite part of the season was when they left the season behind and went somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, all right. So, usually, I say the word melee and you break out into uproarious laughter. I do, I giggle, I giggle, I'll have a giggle.

Today, I say the word melee, followed by rollback netcode integrated matchmaking, auto updates and replays. And I go, wow, you guys are putting the work in. Fans have edited rollback and matchmaking into a dolphin build for melee. So, I remember one of the things that I would laugh about melee the most was that the community had a, like, almost fanatical dedication to the CRT setup, right? Like, legit hardware, gotta do it legit. And so this is not the kind of thing that I would have expected for this game in particular.

But that being said, Smash is now in a fucking aroboros of fucking nonsense where the ancient game that is beloved by its community has been supported technically so much better than the current version that has been supported monetarily and content-wise. Right? Like, I assume, depending on the quality of this rollback, but even if it's shitty rollback, that the difference between playing this dolphin build of melee online and playing Smash Ultimate is a fucking joke. For those who might not be aware, which is nobody, we're talking about- But listen to this podcast tonight, why? We're talking about the best possible matchmaking setup versus forced Wi-Fi on a switch that then swaps in a CPU when shit gets bad.

It's a fucking- It's a joke. There's nothing to say. Here's the other thing, the Smash community, the Melee community being the- They're the Darth Scions of the video game industry. I'm so glad to hear that exact phrase from you. They are way too angry to die, and they will use whatever they can to stay the fuck alive. And, you know, you were just talking about Daughters of Ash last week.

This, excuse me, that's the type of shit where you're like, the community did what? This, this is the equivalent of that for a fighting game. And now it's extra ridiculous because I really have to give huge props to whoever the fuck did this. Slippy. Because that's a GameCube game running through emulation. There's a lot going on into implementing rollback into this as a fucking non-official source, right? Slippi.gg Incredible, right?

Hats off to you. What the fuck is the Tekken team or the real Smash team or whoever the fuck's excuse? When these fucking fans who don't have access to shit are able to jam this stuff in and make it work. Tekken is currently under the microscope right now because Harada had been online answering some of the some questions and, you know, talking about exactly a lot of that. Like the networking issues that Tekken's a really good fighting game, but like it is, it is, you know, like the pressure is finally cracking a little bit and they're going, hey, like, yeah, we need to fix online. We need to get rid of this problem. The whole pandemic thing has created a situation in which the reality is the only way to play fighting games in almost any context is now online, unless you want to, like, literally risk your life going down to locals. So the microscope doesn't, like, because the way it used to work is like microscope would come on for the online, but then the locals would happen and the microscope would go away, right?

Local. We're all crushing the tournaments local and evos happen. Microsoft doesn't. Sorry, the micro. The pressure doesn't come off now. Now it's just people going like the only way I can play Tekken is against people a thousand miles away and it sucks shit. Locals are dead. And, you know, instead of taking the obvious segue off of this story, talking about slippy smash stuff, we'll take the other option that has opened itself up and say that the importance of netcode being good, we're going to, well, very briefly, we're not going to beat the horse.

We're just going to take a little tour around it for a second as we move on out. But if you look to your left, you'll see the recent CPT event that took place where, since EVO is, you know, EVO Online is doing its own thing, but Street Fighter 5 is still having its own Capcom Cup and its own Capcom events. So the Capcom Pro Tour took place and during it, you know, training stages banned. That led to some complaints from some folks, but more than that, there were two players. Idom and El Chacote, who quit during their fights with Metro M, another player, over lag issues, basically. I saw the footage of that and it looks like hilarious. So there were some tweets out that during these drops where the players basically just went, I'm not fucking doing this. Like, if you could see it from my end, you know, this is ridiculous.

So they just kind of were like, this is stupid, we're piecing out. And, you know, like the details of like the drops aside and the stages and not like whatever that is, none of that matters. Because the most important thing here is this is all the results of the game having bad netcode. Straight up, like it's just, you know, the specifics of arguing about whether or not this stage should or should not be included. Or, you know, where and how these brackets have to be handled, you know, and like just everything that the players ran into, all the problems they ran into here. Like, ignore the details because you're looking at a fucking solved problem that Capcom's refused to fix. So like the sport or rather they did attempt to fix, but, you know, as we covered in the past, it was not, it was not great. The specific situation that I got the footage of was like, get who one player was playing, but it was Vega and he was bouncing off the wall and coming in for these fucking big throws and five throws in disconnect.

And if you tell me that's anything other than rage quit, like, I just won't believe you. And then I hear that that happened multiple to multiple people did that against this guy. And like you're saying, they're like, you would not believe what it looks like on my screen. I fucking bet that that dude was just standing there and then you were literally being thrown with nothing in between, right? Or like he would jump and then you would be in the throw animation and that would happen like four times in a row, right? But I almost can't even blame you for rage quitting at that point because the game is just fundamentally fucking broken. So we move along, leave it over there, you know, but just to say in a little interesting occurrence in the meantime, while the rollback Evo online games get their spotlight, we get to see an example of what's happening over there in Shelbyville, where for some reason still fucking still doing it the old way.

Okay, well, go marry your cousin. Twintel fans, I'm sorry. Sorry guys, it's Min Min. Noodle girl got in. She's cool. And that's that's fine. She's she's she's she's cool. Noodle girl is is is not Twintel, but she's she's an all right pick. It's fine.

You know, once Sakurai said that she's in because the director of arms said, put her the fuck in the game. What else are you going to say to that? Like, all right, that's he made his pick. We're done here. Did I ever tell you what happened with the the fucking Dragon Quest event in Final Fantasy 14? No. So there was a Dragon Quest event in FF 14 where you could grind out like a stupid little mountain and a bunch of weapons. And that happened because the not sorry, not Dragon Quest, Yokai Watch.

And that happened because Yoshi P and the guy who makes Yokai Watch our buddies. So they every now and then they go out for drinks, right? And that was a one time event. And did you grind your ass off to get that shiny mount? You're done. It's gone. Until six months or a year later, whatever it was where they're out drinking. And the Yokai Watch guy's like, oh, I never got all the weapons.

Just do it again. And they put the bet back in the game. For like, they just ran it again. It's great. Yep. So that's it. He wanted his Min Min. He got it.

You know, fun trailer. Mechanically, she's a huge departure from the way Smash characters play, which is really interesting. She's either going to be insanely broken or completely worthless. Oh, a little Mac. Got it. Hard to tell. Hard to tell right now. But there's some stuff that seems wild and some stuff that seems very not great.

But as you can imagine, she fights fucking full Dalsum distance on you, like actual zoning. Yeah, I find it. It's a really, it's a fun integration that, you know, does spirit to the source material more than it does to Smash. You know, they definitely took arms systems into account way more than they did trying to make it fit the Smash archetype, you know. And that's the beginning of the battle pass, right? They also showed off some costumes and fucking fall out for some reason.

Got in there. Got the Pip Boy head and outfit for your Mies in there. That makes sense. So yeah, they're just, they're going. Add Pip Boy and just cross out Doom Guy because that's Bethesda. Vault Boy, Vault Boy. Whatever. Fuck it.

I don't care anymore. Right. I used to care. I used to care. Todd got in. Is there a Skyrim stage? Todd's been banging on that door for probably 10 years now. But one day, he got in.

Cuphead's in, man. That's happy. Yeah, that's good. Cuphead and Sans Undertale get to hang out together. I think it's the funniest thing in the fucking world that that character's name is actually Sans Undertale now. It's the stupidest, stupidest naming convention ever. But then at the same time, it gives me the ability to say John Halo, which I also think

is the best. I love it. So we got five more characters coming and there's still no deconformation of Dante, Doom Slayer, or Gino. So. If Gino was ever going to get in, he would be the last one. So it'll be a long wait for you, Gino fans. I don't see Square or Nintendo particularly saying Gino is a good marketing push.

Oh, yeah. No, I can't see that. I could see Crash Bandicoot. Wonder Red is now relevant again. Is he? Not for Nintendo. All right. Actually, no, that's not true.

He's back. Yeah. No, no, no. It's relevant for Nintendo too. It's true. It's just now relevant for other platforms as well. It's all, we're playing the game again. We're all, we're all, we're playing the game again.

We'll see. We'll see. Let's take some emails. Hey, if you want to send in an email, you can send that to CastleSuperBeastMail at gmail.com. That's CastleSuperBeastMail at gmail.com. There will Zutou and Patron. My name is Adrian, longtime fan. First time asking shit questions.

Hey, man. Last podcast, you guys talked about the different player types when it comes to card games like Jimmy Spikes, Forthos and such. I was wondering if you knew about Bartle's taxonomy of player types. If you do, there's a TLDR down below. The Bartle taxonomy of player types establishes that there's four types of video game players, according to what aspects of games they enjoy. Achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers.

And they're on the axis of acting, interacting players versus world. This seems to be based on an extra credits video. It started as an MMO population study, but is now commonly extrapolated to games in general. Achievers enjoy fulfilling goals. This can mean completing missions, finishing games, getting 100% completion rates, et cetera. This is obviously where you would fit most achievement or trophy hunters. Explorers get a kick out of discovering new aspects of games, researching new areas. Exploring hard to reach places in the game world are the basics, but they're also curious about systems,

finding out how it works, its intricacies, and more obscure mechanics. Socializers are interested in the game as such. Sure, but community is the key word here. Interacting with other players, trading, discussing the game, and meta in forums is likely where they get most of their enjoyment. And killers are straightforward. They enjoy dominating the competition. Being able to face other players and emerging victorious is what draws them to games, and if they can get a taste of that salt, all the more delightful.

Of course, human beings are complex. They don't fit nicely into one type, so we exhibit a combination of all of the above to varying degrees. How would you categorize each other as players? Uh, Woolly lives in... I would say Woolly and I both live in a diagonal line across killers and explorers. That's correct. Um, and like, this format with the quadrants has weird issues. Like, 80% of MMO players that I know actually are a diagonal line on achievers and socializers.

Right? That's interesting. I want to beat you up, and if I can't beat you up because it's a single-player game, then I want to beat the game up. Yeah. Do you want to kill the game? Kill the game or kill the player? I always thought, um... I always thought the single-best definitive experience or whatever the fuck you want to talk about,

about why you play games, is from an ancient fucking penny arcade post from like, I want to say like 12 years ago, which was an argument between the two, between whether or not they wanted to beat a game or play it. Mm-hmm. And that distinction meaning kind of everything in almost any context. There was another penny arcade where I think Tycho described enjoying playing with the crabs in that one level in Mario Galaxy. That is the same post. Yeah, we're talking about the same post.

And Gabe was like, fuck that, there's stars to collect. Exactly. Yeah. What is your actual motivating factor here? Is it triumph or is it experience? I will stop and smell the roses if they seem interesting to me. But you want to kill. But I want to move, you know.

I want to master that stuff or at the very least come to understand what is being asked of me in terms of the challenge. And finding tech is a fucking, it's a euphoric experience. Finding sick tech is a high reward that doesn't happen often, especially in a lot of cases it's unintended stuff, you know. Like one of the biggest highs in Doom Eternal for me was finding the shotgun switch arbolist, you know. Like I was like, oh my God, that is, mmm, you know, like that shit's tasty. So yeah, definitely, definitely that diagonal. And yeah, I would say the same.

We got one here from Pepper says, Dear Dr. Will and Mr. Pat Tastic last night, our group watched Fan 4 Stick. Oh yeah. Because we were making, because we love making mistakes. One thing they tried doing is in the movie, they explained the F team as getting their powers, they exposed what gives them their powers. Ben Grimm covered in rocks, Reed Richards is stretched out,

and Johnny catches on fire while Sue Storm is exposed behind a layer of glass. So they gained their powers based on what was around them at the time. Quick, based on what is around you, what would your shitty powers be if you were exposed to cosmic rays right now? I would get the ability to fucking hold my shit forever and blend into couches. I've got an arcade behind me. I've got lots of screens and lights and cameras in front of me. I suppose my ability to, the one thing these things all have in common is,

I guess they project light. So there'd be some sort of tech, light-based shit. Wouldn't be great, but yeah. I've got four screens. I've got two lights, and I've got a fucking big cabinet there. That's about as much as I can imagine. Some shitty light thing. You want to hear something funny that's totally apropos shit all?

So I've been petting this cat next to me. We recently trimmed the cat's nails for the first time in a while. And one of the funniest fucking things in the world is a cat who had very sharp-ass claws, not having such sharp-ass claws anymore, and going to bat you and be like, you're human, and it's powerless, and it's pointless. And they try and bunny-kick the shit out of your arm, and you're like, oh, kitty, and they're like, ah, ah. If you got hit with cosmic rays, you would gain a pouch.

Oh yeah, like I need cosmic rays to get a pouch. Well, you know. It would become your power. Oh, oh, oh, I see. Yeah, okay. I could stretch it. Just be a pouch underneath this pouch. I could stretch out and envelop people.

Kind of like the testicles on a tanooki. And... I have a question. Yes? If you were given the ability to stretch your scrotum until it stopped, how far would you stretch it? Would you use it to carry things? Is it up to me?

Yeah, it's up to you. I wouldn't touch it. I don't want it stretched. It'll go back. It'll go back. Can they stay smooth as eggs? Yeah, sure. Because that's important.

You mentioned pouches, right? But I'm just thinking like, you know, like in an old movie or whatever, like the mother of the house would have her apron and she'd pull up the apron to carry something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Would you do that with your scrotum? I mean, as long as it gets back to being egg smooth,

I would definitely at least skate on them, like toboggan. Okay, so yeah, right? That'd be cool. You could give yourself a natural rain hood. From the front? No, from the back. You go all the way behind and then it comes up and then it covers your head.

I feel like it's a Naruto power. Right? It would cover you from the rain, but the problem is that if you farted, they would track the air all the way up and into your face. Oh, and shoot out next to your face. So you'd get it point blank.

You'd blast yourself point blank every time. That's not good. No, that's not a good. Good to know. Just curious. We worked it out. Yeah. That's a good cat.

Right here I got. Achievements that break games. They're castle beastie boys. I don't remember what game Pat brings up every now and then, but there was an achievement that broke the multiplayer by asking you to kill an enemy, a teammate, and a dinosaur in the same life. Turok remake.

Turok reboot. I've been getting back into Battlefront 2. I know they fixed it up and I really enjoy it now. I've always loved space battles in these games, but I noticed a particular occurrence that caused our team to lose every round. Whenever somebody got enough points to spawn as the hero ship on the enemy team, half my team would go after the ship

and abandon the objective. At first I didn't think much of it, but it kept happening, so I looked at the achievement list and saw a trophy for destroying 25 hero ships as a fighter class. These players were so desperate to get the achievement, they'd abandon the objective time and time again just to get one of the 25 kills towards that trophy. Here's the thing though, if you only got an assist

or the pilot of the ship crashed, it didn't count. You had to land the killing blow. That sounds terrible. There's a different game mode. I thought I'd try to see what the game had to offer. It's a space battle with only hero ships. Okay, hold on. It's going into another problem entirely.

That existing problem, as you described it, is fucking bad. There's a terrible design. There's a game mode in Destiny called Gambit where you kill enemies and they drop moats and you cash in the moats to send monsters to the other team's base. If you cash in 15, which is the max, you send a big old knight over there and it takes a lot of kill.

If you die, however, on respawn you will have lost all your moats. The instant you hit 5, 10, or 15, the character who's running the match will yell at you, hey, brother, bank those moats. And people will fucking hold on to 14 until they die and lose you the match over and over and over, ending banking nothing

because why you want to get the 15 one? It sucks. What do you get for 15? What do you get for 15? You get a much bigger enemy, instead of the smaller enemy at 5 and 10. The joke is that the 10-mote enemy is actually harder to kill than the other two.

Pro tip, if you're designing achievements for your video game, if your game is implementing achievements into a multiplayer mode, make certain that the objectives of those multiplayer achievements are not those that detract from the game that people have to play and detract from the team-based effort because people will stop what they're doing to go do the stupid thing 100% of the time and that will ruin your experience

because new players will always go off and fuck around when everybody's trying to play. Don't do that. Make it something that happens in the course of play. Destiny does it so bad, dude. They'll put out a thing that says, hey man, do you want to get this fusion rifle? Well, you need to get 500 PvP kills with a fusion rifle.

And you go into PvP and it's a shit-fest. It's an absolute fucking shit-fest because that is the only gun anyone is using. And wins are being decided based on how many of your team are trying to get this weapon versus the other team. I mean fuck, if you've got a single player mode, just put them all in that and save yourself a fucking stupid ass decision. But if your game is multiplayer only

or that's the bread and butter of the whole thing, it's fine, just make it something that a player naturally progressing can choose to aim towards. Maybe with slight, like, oh, hold on, like if you have a preference for this weapon, use this weapon effectively or whatever the case may be. But do fucking not make people go off and do stupid shit that'll lose your team the game.

Because that'll ruin the experience as long as new people are showing up, which will be the entire lifetime. What a dumb mistake to make. Anyway, there's a second example brought up here. It says, another game mode has space battles with only hero ships. It's an eight player elimination based. As soon as all the hero ships from one team dies,

the round is over. But if you die before the round is over, you can come back as a regular starcraft and people would kill themselves at the beginning of the round so they could work towards the achievement, but would often forfeit the round as a result. So this mode was all hero ships that could help build towards it as well,

but as a result it destroyed that entire mode. I had one match where three people on my team immediately killed themselves, and the four hero ships on the enemy team all targeted me and killed me. It was hilarious. Well, there you go. You want to hear an example of a situation

where it's not an achievement, it's just the design creates a situation that incentivizes fucking the game up. In Final Fantasy XIV, you have PvP seasons for a really shitty PvP mode called The Feast, and did you know that the top 100 players on each server get a special mount

available only to them specific to each season? So what does this mean? It means the killers, the real murderous fucking killers will fucking meet up, and they will match make at the same time, and they will grind out so many points

at the beginning of the season that no one else can catch up ever, and the way that they're going to do this is by one, getting the best teams possible, and two, if they do run into each other, to win trade against each other to make sure that their rankings don't suffer too bad. Also, there's a fucking game called

Lords of Verminion in fucking XIV that is literally nothing but win trading. Everyone who has ever won every tournament win traded their way to the top, because the rewards are static, so you go, well, I'll win this tournament, and then you win the next tournament, and then we'll help Johnny win the next tournament.

It's so fucking stupid. If you don't see that apparent in your design when it's on paper, sure. If you launch and that emerges, you have to course correct. If you don't, it remains broken forever because people will not stop getting the thing.

You have to think about every single reward in your video game. Who am I talking to here? I don't know, but it's like every time you make a reward in a video game, you have to think backwards about it. You have to work it from the angle of who is going to get this, under what circumstances will they get this,

and if somebody wanted to get this, not at a natural point when they just happened to cross whatever the lucky roll or the cost of it was, but if someone wanted to beeline for this, what would they do? How would they play, and would those decisions affect the experience around the game? You have to think about every single thing like that,

you know? I have the ultimate for you. The worst variation of this problem I have ever seen, and I don't even know how it ended, so I'll have to go talk to a friend of mine because it might not be over. It's a 14 problem. I discussed wind trading,

I discussed the season thing with PVP and how it's 100, and everybody knows how that works. Okay, that's clearly a problem. What do we do? Okay, we're going to have this cooperative thing where people are going to work together, they're going to craft items, and they're going to donate the items to an NPC kind of thing,

and then you get points for donating a bunch of items, right? So hey, here's something competitive for the crafters to do, right? Well, what's the reward? Am I going to be the, you know, there's a leaderboard, right? What's my reward for, you know, being the number one guy on the leaderboard on my server, right? You put out a statement, and the statement is,

we feel like the most dedicated players should receive a reward, and we will tell you what that is later. Okay, and then they just don't tell you what it is. So what happens? Well, I don't know, it might be super good, and people just go as hard as they possibly can

because it could be something crazy. It could be anything. It could be the first shot at buying a house in this new housing area, right? It could be a mount that's really crazy that no one will ever get to have ever again. Or it could be a title, which is what it totally was. Of course it was.

It could be a title for the top whatever on each server that blew weeks of just grinding out items for this fucking thing. Could it be fucking nothing? It... So titles do live over your name, but it might as well be fucking nothing. Did you see the reward for working at Canadian Tire for 50 years?

What is it? Let me see if I can pull this up real quick. You know when you work at a place... This cat place to me is fat. You know you work at somewhere for a really long time and they have big ass crazy celebrations. Hey, Johnson, you've been here for 30 years. Here's a watch.

Yeah, no I don't think... Got a fat ass cat here. I don't think I can pull it up. You get a pin. Oh sick. And the pin is decrepit and the sticker of the red part of the Canadian Tire strawberry.

Like the triangle. Oh nice. It's off. So the sticker is half off. It's a badly placed sticker. You know when someone's making a gunpla and they don't know what they're doing? So the sticker is just in the wrong place

and it's like the Veefin has half a yellow part and the other part is just a sticker floating. Yeah, I know what you mean. It's that of the Canadian Tire logo. And the guy who got it was there for half of his lifetime. And that was their reward. Hey man, I worked at that grocery store

for almost a decade. You know what I got? What'd you get? The fucked up attitude towards the way retail works. That's it. That's not physical. I also fucked my feet up. Not permanently, but man.

Did you collect a couple disorders while you're at it? Yeah, probably. Some were in there. Yeah, sure. Or just made the existing ones worse. Alright, let's hit the stop button. Alright, you all be safe out there. Don't get sick.

Don't get run over by the police. It's not always your choice. Don't look up to anyone because they might turn out to be fucking horrible. Just stay inside and play your video games. And oh, yeah, hey, no, no, no, no. If you are looking for couture two thoughts and things, you will get them as the credits are rolling in depth.

So believe you me, there's a lot to say there. There's a lot to say there. That is in the epilogue of my processing. Hold the fucking phone. We got a fucking banger of a news story from a guy in chat. A cure neck beard, long time watcher of everything we do just says that the front page of Mixer is a dude setting up his Twitch channel. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, don't switch it. Don't switch it. Don't switch it. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Don't switch it. Don't switch it.

Don't switch it. Oh, man. Well. Oh, that's fucking hilarious. That's a baseball. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.