Castle Super Beast - CSB 105: Cornhub: VR Milkers (feat. Gene Park)

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Gamestop Lives, Stadia Dies, and Bayo 3 is somewhere inbetween. You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Outro: Liberation Maiden (3DS SUDA51) - Stage 1 BOSS Theme Visit http://expressvpn.com/SUPERBEAST to get an extra 3 months FREE! -- Go to http://imperfectfoods.com and use code SUPERBEAST to get 20% off PLUS free shipping! Google Stadia Shuts Down Internal Studios, Changing Business Focus Nintendo replacing the multiplayer server system that it has been using for almost two decades Project DT New Skullgirls characters incoming 'Forget About Bayonetta 3' For Now Maximilian Dood’s Twitch Rivals #BringBackKI tournament Monday Feb. 1st Godzilla vs. Kong – Official Trailer #PacificRimTheBlack streams March 4th. Netflix officially announces Sonic Prime 3D animated series Rare developer shares old Nintendo email, new Stop ‘n’ Swop details for Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/

Press右, press hilarious, and set the targets correct! Press right or you're used to it! Some say Stadia, some say Stadia, some say Mortice. Take your pick. Anyway, hello. Hello, everyone. Hey, everyone. Hi.

We're joined today on the Castle Super Beast podcast by one Gene Park of the Washington Post. Hope you'd be nice to him, audio listeners that can't interact with him at all. Right? I don't know what I'm doing. Hey, welcome to the show. Glad to have you. You're actually in Washington, where the post is, right?

Yes, I am posted in DC, where all the good stuff is happening these days. Oh, I heard it's very nice there, full of friendly people all of the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our tourist market has been booming lately. Okay. I'm sorry, I didn't even mean to say any of that crap. Hello. Hey, you know what you signed up for.

That's true. Welcome aboard. Important first question. Would you consider yourself a sigma male? Oh my God. Are you familiar with the new and the new results? The ultimate male type? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Isn't that just like Chad? Isn't it just a different version of Chad? It's not just a Chad. The sigma male is new. It's new tech, you see. It's the lone wolf variation of the alpha male. What's the social structure? The true rare male type is the alpha male that is a lone wolf on his own,

wearing suits and chasing after money and his own pace. And he's the coolest and strongest and doesn't scared of nothing. And he could be an alpha if he wanted. That's the biggest, most important point. He could be an alpha if he wanted to be, but he chooses to be sigma. I think the most important part of the sigma male is that it's a male type that just happens to be going their own way. Happens.

It just, look, there's many ways the sigma could have wandered. And it just happens to decide to go its own way. Yes. When I hear sigma, all I think about is making my necks. That's it. I'm sorry. That's not wrong. I'm probably not when I immediately think about making my next villain. I think the saddest thing is that I was, there was like a single day

where that sigma male shit just was poisoning my timeline. And every single photo I saw was of Keanu Reeves as John Wick. Yes. It's always a picture of John Wick and that face and that look of like, fuck the world. I'm going to do whatever it takes. I'm going to choose my own path and do my own thing and get my money. And I could be an alpha with all the other girls as I wanted,

but I choose to be the lone wolf. Yeah. He got a wife. But he did get his money though. He did get his money and his wife and he just got up in the game, right? That was the whole thing. He was an alpha, but then his wife died and he didn't get a new wife. Then he became the sigma.

He became the sigma after his wife died. After his wife and his dog died and then he decided, okay, I'm going to choose my own way, but he's not choosing money though, right? Well, after the Magma Dragoon betrayed everybody and Chill Penguin showed up on the scene, then the day of sigma occurred and John Wick made his choice. It was a quick man. It was a quick man that did it.

I can't handle the idea of like X and zero arguing which one of them is a beta or which one is fucking red-pilled as shit. Okay, well, first of all, Axel is clearly beta. He's built to be a beta body. Oh my God. So don't even question that. Yeah, two of them. Axel was built to be beta.

You don't even have to question it. And I think zero, again, is he's built on Chad properties because it's all about one-upping Mega Man. Well, but you saw the cutscenes from X4. He's the original sigma type. Well, yes, yes, but hmm, okay. But then also, again, he's built to out Chad X, right? Out of spite.

So that makes him like, you know, alpha because he's doing the funky hand pose, right? But then the next question is like, but then he's like crying over Iris, you know? So what part of crying over Iris is alpha there? It's hard. Yeah, zero always came off as like shadow the hedgehog-y to me, you know, crying over Maria also. And it's like built to out Chad, the Sonic, the blue bomber, you know? Does that mean the Doctor Life intentionally built the first Trad Wife robot in role? Yeah, I think so.

I think it was meant to be that way, rock and roll, right? Play at home and do the cleaning. She's got a fucking vacuum arm. Doctor Light's book was called The Game, a guide to pickup artists, pickup artist life. Little did we know that before Proto Man, he built Mystery Man, the robot with the fuzzy top hat and an eyeliner that could intrigue all the ladies with his mystery, you know? His powers of confusion and negging. So, all right, down the hole we go.

Someone in the chat asked, what is a Trad Wife? Trad Wife is basically what the robot in Detroit become human. The girl robot in Detroit become human was supposed to be. Kara. Basically. Kara. Traditional wife. Traditional wife.

Yeah, she was the first role. It's the woe jack that's blushing with the blonde hair and the old school dress. Yes, with the blue dress with the shoulders and everything and the blush. And the complexion that needs to be defended and protected with these 14 words we say. The shield. Yeah, the shield. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, indeed. Okay, that's a good start.

Yep, that's fine. That's fine. Ain't none wrong with that. Sir, as a Kirby connoisseur and fan, I appreciate your avatar online. I appreciate your bayonetta Kirby. It's a good portrait. It's a good Twitter photo. Shaped like a friend.

Shaped like a friend and he's got glasses like me. So, it's just been my look, you know? Willie, I appreciate your Kirby lore series over the years. Thank you. I've been watching them for many times and they have informed my appreciation of Kirby. Cheers. Over the years. And of course, bayonetta Kirby is shaped like a friend, but if you try to touch them,

they will not stand for it and will leave you. So, good times. I genuinely thought you were going to say if you try and touch bayonetta Kirby, it will fade away into the ether to deny you any sense of satisfaction or closure ever and disappear from your memory. We will get there. Hold that. Hold that thought while you hold the line.

I have been holding that thought for 650 days. Hold that thought while you hold the line. How about that? All right. All right. So, let's go. Positions are banned. What's up?

Is everybody up to date on the latest of this Game Stonk's debacle? I woke up from a nap, so no. Well, the narrative has, it's evolved quite a bit in the last seven days since we talked about it. When we last talked about it, it was a matter of like, wow, this wild, crazy ass story. And I was like, yeah, I was following. I decided to get, I wanted to get into investing like a month ago, so I decided to start following a bunch of different places.

And Wall Street Bets was one of the places I was keeping my eye on. And then they started working on this thing and memeing about it. But it turned out to be so right that it became mainstream news because effectively they had landed on what was the hidden minesweeper mine with Melvin Capital and then everything that's connected to that, finding out that billions had been invested into shorting Game Stop. And yeah, since we last talked about it, it has gone through a ridiculous series of like, okay, high publicity, everyone gets involved.

Then news stories come out with people going on, trying to basically create a narrative describing why the hedge funds are the good guys in this situation. People, dudes that show up and start crying about the market are on TV. And in the meantime, there's literal, like, there's literal movements that involve like, what was it, like a couple places stopped selling the Game Stop stock at some point, and then actually Robin Hood stopped it, but you could still sell it, of course. And then in some cases they sold it for you. They sold it for you, some people, yeah.

And then there was also, I think now it's, they allowed it again, but they limited it to one per person. And then I think now it's that possibly like eight or so per person, and just going through all kinds of incredible fucking twists and turns. And it's been wild to see the level of like, mask off, blatant, we will pull out all the stops to effectively deflate this any way we can in any shape or form. Disinformation campaigns like firing at 110%, and people effectively seeing that, calling it out, and just continuing to hold.

It's going to be incredible to see where this goes in the history books, I think. So I got to say from a personal level, I have always maintained that I don't understand the stock market, and because I'm very smart, anything I don't understand must be fake, therefore the stock market must be fake. This has not helped that perception. Like the idea, every time I talk about stocks, the economy, people go, Pat, you don't know what you're talking about, you're a moron. I'm like, this shit makes me feel like everybody talking about the economy is a dumb ass,

because it seems very arbitrary. More than that? I'm sorry after you. No, I was going to say, it turns out that you're right in that it is all fake, but the difference is that the point of a hedge fund is that they know that it's fake, so they can capitalize on the fact that it's fake by making it extra fake, and deliberately hoping that nobody really catches on for a long time, because we're in the business of making this seem complicated,

not telling anybody what's going on, because of course the whole thing about it too is if you find a good opportunity, you don't want other people to necessarily know what you're trying to do, so it's just the confusion you have is intentional and by design. I'm also not a stock person, I'm super confused by the whole thing. To me, the funniest thing about the last week were all the people who kept saying, this GameStop thing is not funny, it's not funny. Why are you laughing about this GameStop thing? And the more they said that, the harder I kept laughing,

because you're saying the GameStop thing isn't funny, but you're saying the word GameStop, which is inherently funny. One of the worst companies I've ever personally dealt with in the world is being used as a knife to stab a bunch of rich people. The last we left off, they were the ones that were sending their employees to fucking death COVID lineups for releases of new games and shit like that. It was in a ridiculous state, and yeah, to have this kind of come back now and be this thing that's like, actually, so it doesn't even matter that it's GameStop,

it's more just like this happened to be the one, this happened to be the place, and the only reason it happened to GameStop is because somebody noticed that it was highly shorted. Exactly, it could have been any other place, but it's becoming a stand of the average person or the proletariat, if you would. The GameStop stand. So, I don't understand the stock market. I think this is a pretty honest truth that no one will fight me on, that I don't understand the stock market.

However, over the past week, I can tell you what I do understand is being poor and being spiteful. So, from a, you know, mechanic stock perspective, I don't really have much to say, I don't really get it. I've looked it up, I've read it up, I kind of get short selling now, it seems like a scam, but, right, but I understand being spiteful, very, very strongly, and the emotional journey from exactly one week ago has been fascinating. You know that meme image of a guy setting up like a tiny little domino, and it's going to knock over like a giant gray domino?

Yeah. Like, the first one is, some guy on Wall Street bets notices that the GameStop stock is short, is being shorted. And the big one is, I have to end my stream before 8pm tonight, because AOC is going to dominate Twitch airwaves again, and I need to get the fuck out of the way of that shit. Because it, like, you described, Willie, how it started off as like an economic, you know, series of shenanigans, and outcome the corruption stops, like, no, you can't trade that. Oh, we're looking into ways to stop that, we're going to sell shit for you.

And it turned, like, the, the meaning of stocks, right, and everybody hold the line and all that shit, it turned the funsiness of that to what I can only imagine is the crowdsourced version of Joker burning that big pile of money in the dark night, and that, why are you burning this big pile of money, Joker? Oh, for laughs. Because it's funny to burn your money. I, I got a text message. I got a text message from a friend who was like, look, probably too late for me to jump in and make anything, but it's, but it's definitely not too late to jump in and hurt a hedge fund.

You know, that's that, that was literally the, the, the conclusion there. I mean, I think we've all gotten a better understanding of, like, at the very least how short squeezes work over the last week. And I remember I had a very basic understanding of it prior to, you know, this week and kind of describe the best I could last time. But in case anybody is looking for more specifics on it, effectively, it's when you are trying to, is when you will borrow stock from a company and sell it immediately, and then you will owe that stock back to the person you borrowed it from, and you're hoping to buy it back later at a cheaper price, and then return it and keep the difference that you've already sold. Hey, look, it's, it's free money. Yeah, that's, that's, that's the short version.

And if in the meantime, between when you borrow and when you pay it back, it's in your interest to do things like go on TV and use any access you have anywhere to push things as low as possible, drop confidence and drop in confidence leads to, you know, lowering of the stock price and lowering of the stock price means you buy it back at the lowest possible for the best profit. And what this obviously means is people that actually are like business owners and entrepreneurs for these respective businesses hate short sellers and hate these, you know, hedge funds that bet against the market effectively because their interest is in you or your business failing as hard as possible. So you'll find a lot of like hyper capitalist people coming in to be like, yeah, fuck hedge funds and the short selling as well. It's interesting.

Pat, I think you touched on something interesting too about like how it's easier to understand the emotion of being pissed off and poor because that's most of us, right? So it's like, and then like Willy on the other end, like it's in their interest to keep shit as confusing as possible. So it's like, you can't like, well, what else is the narrative, the public narrative going to go other than more people are going to be pissed off and poor because they're just they're just going to understand a lot more versus I don't know what the fuck they're doing, but it sounds like a scam to me. You know, they're going to understand. And here's the thing is that that story, that narrative, as you described, as they flail harder and harder and do things that are more and more transparent, it's just going to incite everyone harder and harder to be like, wow, super fuck you because like we're not even pretending this is a fair game anymore.

It's never been fair, but the illusion of fairness existed in a way where you went, well, we know what we're doing and we do it this way. But like when you see the level that it gets to when they start losing, it it becomes again, mask off is the best way to describe it. And that just incites the rage even harder and everyone gets like triple spite, you know, for every moment that happens. So Sterling, we put out a video today earlier today in which they describe that a lot of the emotional drive behind this behind the people holding for so long is that it's people who started off spiteful and poor, so spiteful and poor that if they lose everything that they put into the stocks, they will be just as fucked as they were immediately before getting into this whole mess. Yes. So why not try and take down some of the people who, for example, never got punished during the housing market crisis. Exactly.

There was a fantastic post from somebody who, I mean, people have been sharing a lot of posts that have been going up on Wall Street bets, but one of them was somebody basically describing. I've had, the person described like the most I've ever had in my bank account at any point in my life has been like $9,000 and on a regular basis, I'm used to having a grand to being broke. I don't ever have any any comfort to catch me. I'm used to this level. And if I go in on this and nothing happens and I lose it all, I'll just be back to the same place. I always was at, you know, but like the absolute opportunity to fuck these people over for once after their infinite loading on the situation and like their manipulation of everything is like they have nothing to lose. There's no reason to not ride this all the way out in the hopes that, you know, you can at the very least like it's interesting because it's like it effectively amounts to a like a window of time in which like there can be a redistribution of wealth according to market rules, you know, if you get if you want to get into like that sort of thing.

But but ultimately like a lot of this like is going down based on how long they can hold on and how much they can trick people into jumping out before they have to commit to rebuying everything they own. You know, so the mind game is like we don't know how long this part is going to last. But like the more they can get people to effectively like just lose faith in it or be like I'll just cash out now or whatever the case is like the more they can save their skin. I was going to say something, but I forgot. Oh, well, I got something. Don't worry, Gene, you find that in your brain and tag me out. What I've been thinking is like so much of this is powered by spite and spite is like unlimited spite works away. It like if you're if you're spiteful because of the situation you are in your life and you're just spiteful at somebody in a situation that you don't believe that they deserve it.

It's not going to go away until that person either loses their status or you gain a different one. So if they're hoping to ride that emotion out, fucking good luck. But to I would never advocate for any possible crime ever. But all I can think of is if if the these these rich Wall Street people are upset at losing all of their money. Imagine how upset they would be if they were being literally physically eaten in a street by an angry crowd hungry for Wall Street. Num num flesh. I'm surprised it took you twenty six to get there. It would be they'd be very upset.

Took you longer than usual to get to the to get there. But you got imagine at them crying out to the invisible hand of the free market to put their legs back on. I'm just saying. Yeah. OK, here's what I remember. Everyone keeps comparing this to gambling, right? Like, but like, you know, like I've been in Vegas many times. I've lost a lot of money there.

You gamble in Vegas and you don't you never know really what you're going to get in return. But if I gamble at the right time during this whole GameStop thing, I know, like you said, Pat, that I will be able to ride. Some kind of emotion out, right? Like I'm paying in to to feel like I'm screwing over to man. And that at least is some kind of return on investment for me. You know, if I was that spiteful. Yeah. If you could imagine if you could go to a casino and play Blackjack with the knowledge that if you put down enough of a Blackjack bet, the casino would lose money somehow.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, now, do you think, Jean, this is going to result in like a change to like Wall Street regulation to stop this from happening? Or do you think it's really going to result in risk assessment being that, hey, shorting is now dangerous and we're just not going to do that anymore in the same. I think probably the latter. I've only been in DC for six years now, but it, you know, just seeing how hard things happen here. You know, the phrase, it takes an act of Congress to do anything just doesn't come out of nowhere. They just won't do anything a lot, you know.

So I don't know. I don't know. We're going to have hearings on the GameStop thing. We're definitely going to have that. But almost nothing ever comes out of these hearings. So, you know, a lot of it is also political theater too. But I don't know who knows. We're talking about money here, you know.

Yeah. So this is why this is unprecedented, you know. And you've also seen like every, like again, like the entire political spectrum weighing in on it. And it seems, and it seems like almost bipartisan in that people are like, hey, this is a suspicious situation where Robin Hood is shutting down the ability to buy, you know, a stock simply because it's like compromising a traditional. Compromising their primary clients. Yeah. So it feels as if like the fact that like so many people are weighing in on it that are otherwise on opposite sides of the aisle, like might lend it some more, you know, boost towards something. But yeah, you're right.

Like we'll have to see, you know. But it's not going to be the same after this. I do very much agree with Eugene in that regardless of any kind of political oversight. Once I saw that the situation was as simple as a bunch of people noticed that GameStop was really short sold and then bought it on mass. It feels like a genie that can't go back in the bottle. Like people are going to be scanning for highly short sold stocks on mass forever now. Yes. Yeah.

Because it's a great idea. And it's a great idea. Why not do it all the time? The potential to for losses on behalf of whoever is short selling is infinite. It's yeah. That's a that's a concept that's hard to understand. Your losses can go to the moon to use the term. Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, we'll see what happens after this, but that is now going to be looked at possibly as like one of the crazier, riskier things to ever go heavy on in case people find out. So now that that being the biggest story aside, Gene, why don't you, I guess, let us know how you got started and how you became the person with great tweets that how you became the waifu workforce. You know, the waifu workforce. Oh boy. Where do I start? I'm so I'm Gene Park. I'm a Friday one in China.

Who doesn't know I'm Gene Park. I'm a reporter for the Washington Post. I cover video games for our section called the launcher. We've been around for a year, about a year now. Before that, I was the social media editor, not be I was a social media editor at the Washington Post. I was in charge of our Reddit strategy. I played with live streaming for a bid. Although it was on Facebook live.

I also managed and moderated our Twitch community and channel when we had that for a bit. You know, I was, I've been interning in newspapers since I was 16. I'm 39 years old. I think Pat called me a boomer the other day, which I'm almost there. You were talking about how underrated RE6 was, dude. Yeah, we could talk about that. We could talk about that. You know what?

Okay. Before we get distracted, I did watch play through as a RE6 and I was like, oh, I do remember all that part. Okay. I get it. I get it. I don't want to do that again. So that's fine. You're getting no, if you are getting into that conversation, I'll let you know.

Yeah. I'm like, look at Willie. I'm like, actually, Willie, I don't know your opinions about Resident Evil 6. I thought Jake looked cool. I don't know anything about him. End of opinion. I forgot his name. I did.

I forgot his name. I was like, whatever Wesker's son's name was. The RE was. That's what I wanted. Yeah. Yeah. He had a lot of cool melee skills. It was awesome.

Anyways. But I've been interning since I was 16, you know, studying journalism. I never really wanted to be a game journalist. I really wanted to be a music journalist, like a rock and roll journalist. Like a reporter groupie just hanging out and going on tour. Nobody ever does that anymore. Music is just dead now. Nobody really listens to music that much these days anymore.

So, you know, that's why I switched to games. But I've been playing games for all my life. You know, I had Atari 2600, NES, Super Nintendo. I lived in Guam. So I had a nice exposure to the import market because it was really easy to get just import games, even though they were still really, really expensive. And I wrote for a small website called gamecritics.com back in college in the early 2000s. Gamecritics.com.

And they're still around. They're still small. And then I just went into regular journalism and then started working at the Washington Post. I switched from like a regular reporting. I was reporting on like crimes and like business and like mostly crimes, like local police stuff. And I switched to trying to do more on social media because I got laid off in 2009. So I was like, I need to have more skills. I can't just be reporting in anything.

So I trained myself to do more social media stuff. And eventually I got hired at the Washington Post as a social media guy. Now you write about game crimes. Now I write about game crimes, yes. I gotta say, I would like a slightly more context on one part of your work history, Jean, because I've been meaning to. Sure. I saw this tweet you made and I've been meaning to ask you ever since I could get a hold of you in the podcast.

You posted a tweet with a photo of yourself being laid off, wearing a shirt going, I'm going to get laid off or. Yeah, you're going to get laid off. Like how, like did you go home and get that? Or did you happen to be wearing that that day? I had the shirt already because I had fully expected that I would get laid off someday. And then so when I got laid off, I was like, well, kind of wear the shirt now. And then so I went to the bars and said, hey, I just got laid off.

Someone gave me a drink, you know, and that was it. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah, you're also one of the early PS5 folks that was. That's right. That's right. I got into the gaming scene just in time to get a PS5 early because Lord knows you can't get one now. Yeah, I get like I, I managed to score the two and gave one to a friend of mine.

And as the days go on, I look at how absurdly lucky I was to score those two as you still can't get them. I was expecting us to hit like Christmas and then things would get to a point where like regular stocks would, shipments would occur and people could then at least acquire it perhaps, you know, a couple months later. It's still impossible. It's actually still a problem. Yeah. Yeah. The New York Times report said two days ago, Microsoft said that they sold every single Series X console

and they probably won't be able to restock until like June or something, which sucks because I like that. Like I feel this pain because I'm trying to, I've been trying to get a Series S myself because like I have a Series S, but I don't really own it because I don't get to keep it. I have to give it to someone. So I'm like, I would love a Series S, but I can't even find one. I've been trying to get my best friend a PS5 too and just not, just not happening. So I'm kind of, I'm in there. I'm in there swimming with you all too.

I'm trying to find stuff too. I mean, the plague endures. It's not that crazy that they're popular. No, but there's something about that. And, you know, we've seen a lot of consoles launch, right? Like we were no fucking rookies to this game, but when you have a successful product launch, but like people cannot acquire it till like you said June, like that, that's still a failure of some kind. It's not a failure of demand, but a failure of supply.

It's not, it's not hurting you in the same way that like, you know, like a financial bust would, but it's still a failure on behalf of like planning and then actual delivery of the product. Like I think that, yeah, I think, I think that, I think some of the articles, you know, I know those articles got like shamed on when they came out or like we should just delay the next gen launches. I think they're kind of right, you know, because what do we got right now for next gen launch really? Demon's Souls, which was awesome. It's pretty good. And Miles Morales was brilliant.

Yeah, Miles Morales, which is great. But, you know, that's about it though. It's just nothing else, you know. The disco Elysium new versions going to come to the PS5? I mean, Ghost of Sushi would look great on PS5, but like I already finished it and applied them already. So it's like, you know, fucking cyberpunk doesn't even work, you know, the next gen update isn't even here.

So it's like, if we were going to wait for cyberpunk, then we don't even really have a PS5 version of cyberpunk yet. So do we need a PS5 now? I don't know. Virgil, Virgil's there too, you know. Yeah, the ray tracing was nice. Yeah. And Virgil's good. The option of no series X's until June actually legit answers a question I've had for a little bit,

because when demand is so high on this, all I could think of is why are you not just doing buy orders where you go to Sony or Microsoft and you go, listen, I will put $8,500 down payment, right? Put me on a list. If you get to my name on the list, please send me one whenever that happens to be, because I figured that has to be better than spamming Amazon and New Egg and Walmart over and over, except if you hit that button and it said your console is estimated to arrive in fucking June. Yeah. You're going to take your money back.

You're going to immediately cancel it. And also it doesn't work. But the problem is they have to give a shit about the scalping situation, right? As long as they don't care, none of this gets fixed. That's step one, you know? Same thing with... Yeah, I don't understand why, because Microsoft has been trying to go for the more iPhone type route of the business model with Game Pass and the different series consoles, whatever.

But yeah, like you said, Pat, I don't understand why there's no hard infrastructure in place to be able to just deliver and be on a wait list for these things, as opposed to being in the masses with retailers, you know? I bought a 3080, right? And I fought scalpers day and night for like three weeks to get a 3080. And what I discovered was that, like, it's funny because the only time I got the 3080 is when NVIDIA themselves put, like, very substantial anti-bots shit on their website to, like, scalpers would have to actually physically human being scalp them

instead of just having the robots do it. But, like, NVIDIA had to do, like, a significant investment into their own proprietary website, right? Walmart's not going to fucking do... Amazon doesn't give a shit. Amazon doesn't give a fuck who buys the shit. The only people that would would be, like, the original manufacturer. And then I see the Sony shit. I follow Wario64, I assume you guys do as well.

And, like, every two or three days, I see a tweet that goes, Oh, they're going to be sold in 30 minutes. They're gone. Yeah, I kept the now in stock, like, updates on my phone and stuff just to see what's going on, you know? And, like, yeah, like, those things are still getting... You're getting an alert and, like, within 10, 15, they're like, Yeah, if you missed it, it's gone. Sorry. Try next time. For months now.

Yeah. I had mine bought from Walmart, like, months ago, but that's because I put it down, like, the day of it was announced that the pre-orders went live. Like, if you weren't in on that first round, then, yeah, it's going to be real hard now. The only reason I got my PS5 was I was streaming, and I looked over and someone in the chat said Amazon.ca just went up. Wow. And I said, guys, hold on a second.

I didn't even bother to go to the Be Right Back screen. Like, I did not even take the time to switch to that. And I went to Amazon and click, click, click, and luckily the site didn't crash. And that was that. And I feel like if I had seen the same text prompt in my chat, like, a couple lines below and two seconds later, I would not have gotten it. It's ridiculous. I saw people compare this to the Wii.

Like, the Wii was ridiculous. Like, the Wii was crazy, right? That was bad. But that was really bad. The Wii was also bad. Like a weird console. And I can understand Nintendo didn't expect that it would be nearly as popular as it was because it was like a weird, like, Blue Ocean strategy shit. But also, the Wii selling out, like, I remember people talking about it.

That was like overtly, definitively, people going to the store and standing in a big line to get the 10 that there were there, right? It was all, it was like retail. It was just physical based. Because we're all stuck here due to the plague. That's by de facto all online, which has opened up the nightmare of the robots. The nightmare of the internet, basically. And I think, like, again, like on the, you know, talking about the Wii,

the unfortunate side of things is that upon the surprise and shock at the, like, fervor that we had to get Wii Sports for the Christmas and, you know, to have a perfect holiday console, it led to a, like, word of mouth, sort of, like, tickle me Elmo fiasco, where, like, you know, like, it just wasn't the hype commodity, you know? So every time there's, like, a shortage like this, like, a lot of times, you know, the manufacturer's probably thinking, well, being the hype commodity is not a bad thing, you know? So, like, the incentive is not necessarily super high to make sure that this goes away, you know?

Anyway. Yeah, I was there on day one for the Wii, because I was like, like, this shit is going to sell out like crazy. I better just get one right now and get my Twilight Princess right now. So, like, sleeping outside on fucking the corner of Atwater and St. Catherine to get that Wii. Yeah, I was there at 3 AM. I still remember my favorite part of that was when 8.30 AM rolled around, half an hour before they opened, the parents started to show up.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Like, a hundred, like, 45, you know, 45-year-old people showed up going, are you guys in line for the Nintendo? Yeah. And like, a really grimy, pissed-off crowd of fucking dorks turned going, there aren't enough for you. Yeah. Yeah, I was in line in Burlington, Vermont with Min,

and just, like, you know, people were camped up with the fucking covering and just pulling up tents and watching AdVid Children and creating a bond, you know? And exactly. And then, eventually, before the store opened, someone showed up, an employee showed up and handed out numbers to everybody. So, once you had the numbers, anyone that came after that, like, there was no need for hostility because we just go, you got to get a number, and if you don't get a number, that's it too bad, you know?

I forget exactly what the number was, but I hung out at that Future Shop all the time because it was right next to my safe. And I knew one of the guys, I'm like, how many are in the back right now, like the day before? And I think he told me 120. Well, whatever the number was, I had the exact number when that happened. So, I took the time, I had a friend guard my spot, and I went up and down the line.

Yeah. Until I found person number 120, and I told all of them, there are enough for you if you do not move from this fucking spot. Do not go anywhere. Right. Like, you will get one, it will be worth it, don't worry. And then at like 6.30 a.m., somebody tried to like sneak in, like said, oh, my friend was holding my spot, but like they just showed up,

and it almost escalated very poorly. Like, it got real rowdy until that person gave up, as they probably have been beaten down. Yeah, there's always someone. But this is why you make friends within your local GameStop. Maybe screw GameStop the company, but you want to know your local GameStop, you want to know your local plug,

because they can tell you what exactly stock they got. This is why I've been flirting with my pharmacist nearby, because once we get that vaccine, baby, remember all those good feelings I gave you over the past year, you know? Hey, you got a shot for me, I got a shot for you, huh? Yeah, bup-po. Yeah. Yeah, take the little buzzer thing and walk around with it for a while.

Hey, I've been creating a barter and trade economy for myself the past year, because who knows, you know? Like, the stocks are fake, everything seems to be going to shit, so it's like, you know, if I have good will among my little barter and trade, like coins and rock economy going, then I'll be selling it for the next 50 years, I think. I mean, surely there's going to be, if not already, an app that is like, hey, I have a couple of boxes of corn to sell.

Would you like to trade me some fucking, I don't know, seeds? And then it's like, yes, I will give you a pound of seeds for that box of corn, and the app will facilitate the exchange details, and then you just go barter, then go back to the fucking, you know, the olden days with it. Yeah, that's why I still have my PS4 Pro with PT on it, because I'm like, hey, I got this PS4 Pro, it's a PT file, it's only halfway done, you can just delete the cloud, say, you know, just give me the medicine.

Someone says corn hub. There it is. Done. Done. We created a new form of economy, a more honest economy. Yep. Silicon Valley, get on that, and then get the fuck out. Silicon Valley.

So what have you been playing, Gene? Yeah, what's up with you, man? I have been obsessed with River City Girls, because I slept on it when it came out, and I was like, oh, Scott Pilgrim came up, right? And I was like, oh, I reviewed Scott Pilgrim, I enjoyed that, I never really beat it back in the day, because I didn't understand the Cuneo leveling up system. But I was like, yeah, I'm not done with this, I want more.

So I went back to River City Girls, you know, and it's cool to hear Eagle Rapper and Danny and Jacksepticeye in there, but it's an awesome game, everyone's almost level 30 now. Ricky is level 27, and I'm getting kind of a little bored, but that's because I've already played it through four times. Favorite song? I love the boss song for noise. That's like a boss song, Bohemian Rhapsody,

where it just goes to different genres and different melodies and everything, as it's going through the different phases of the boss. It rocks the whole DDR, like guitar hero type of setup that they had there, it was so cool, and Bully is good too, you know, the first song. Okay, I guess. But yeah, Megan McDuffie did an amazing job on the soundtrack, so yeah, I've just been listening to River City Girls' soundtrack too. I feel fascinated by the immediate direction that you went with,

that you went from Scott Pilgrim over to River City Girls, because when I was playing River City Girls, I couldn't quite put my finger on why I enjoyed it so much, and now that you mention it, I'm like, oh, this is the game that I thought the Scott Pilgrim game was going to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Yeah. Scott Pilgrim was...

You thought it was going to be Open World or...? No, it's just, Bully has described the Scott Pilgrim video game as somehow less than some of its parts. Yeah, it's got Adam and a Gucci, Paul Robertson, and Scott Pilgrim, but mechanically, it didn't come together in something that I felt was better than those individual components, you know? I agree. Even when it comes to the combat, it feels very soft, you know?

There's just no crunchiness to the brawler-ness of it, whereas River City Girls, it's like when you kill somebody, and it feels good, and there's a little vibration in the animation. The animation is a little bit more robust. All of that kind of comes together to make River City Girls feel like a real brawler experience. Scott Pilgrim, it still is. It's still a good game, but yeah, it's just like missing just a little bit there.

So there's an exact thing, I think, of in Scott Pilgrim that I can tell you what I felt was missing was there's moments where in River City Girls, you buy a move and you use it on someone for the first time, and your brain immediately starts going, oh, I know how to work this into a combo. You see a ground bounce or some sort of launch or something that staggers, and you go,

I have an idea, let's try this out right away, and you want to play with it. And you don't really get that moment in Scott Pilgrim too often, if ever, you don't really get that like, ooh, I see a function to this move that can make a really cool combo happen, you know? Yeah, because the blowback from some of the attacks in Scott Pilgrim kind of go a little too far.

There's not a lot of good follow-ups. The launchers don't really work. Where's River City Girl with Ricky, for example, which I'm just using, he has a great launcher, and you just jump and you knock him back down with the down heavy. It's good combo mechanics, and you don't really see that. Even in Streets of Rage 4, which I love, and I think it's perfect, but Streets of Rage 4

is a lot more strict than that, whereas River City Girls really feels like a good fighting mechanic game. And it almost feels like they could have gone a little bit more with that, but I'm kind of glad they didn't. But you can see some great combo videos that people put together that stretch the limits of how this tech works and how good the combat system is. So yeah, that's a fantastic game.

And I'm going to say personally, The Hunt is the best track to me. That's what I think of every time. I don't know if it's my favorite, but it is the song I think of when I think of River City Girl. Rent-free. It's rent-free in my head every time. Is that a slower one, the slower jam? One moment and you're gone.

Yeah, yeah, that one. That's the only song that I have in my head. I don't know if it's even my favorite, but that's the one that's just in my head. And it's a great song. You know, I feel bad. I wanted to, like, adore Streets of Rage 4 because it's excellent,

but it turns out that if I can't run in a brawler, like, I have a problem with it. But that's Streets of Rage though. Yeah, I know. That's faithfulness. Lizard Cube could have done it, but they chose not to for accuracy. Adam is my favorite character in that game by far, just because he has, like, an on-demand dash.

Yeah. And the girl with the guitar. She also has a dash. Yeah. Cherry had a dash too, yeah. Yeah, I don't want to play it. And the Legacy Streets of Rage characters, Axl, S-O-R-1, 2, 3,

or I think just 3 had the run too, so. Yeah, that is... Yeah, I just used the Legacy characters for Streets of Rage 4 because I just ultimately just want to play the whole Streets of Rage games too. Exactly. And making sure that they feel the right way for people that are longtime fans.

I respect that. You can't go turning it up on its head if that's not your goal here. You can have new characters that can do wild shit though, you know? But River City was special for me because I grew up on Kunio-kun games. River City Ransom, Super Dodgeball, all those games. Kunio-kun games were the games that me and my dad played together

because my dad understood Kunio-kun games. He understood growing up in high school in Asia and fighting kids. Okay. So it was... Because he read a lot of sports manga, you know? So Kunio-kun games were a lot like sports manga. So he was like, oh, I'm totally into this. So we would just play two player River City Ransom, which was awesome.

Were you playing River City Ransom with your dad and him going like, oh yeah, I remember when I had to go down to high school and make them kids with a stupid pun. Oh yeah. I remember when I beat kids up with their fucking lunch money. That's exactly what he did, you know? He was like, oh yeah, this is totally accurate to me growing up. I was like, all right, dad.

But yeah, I love Kunio-kun games and that's why I was like, River City girls, that's just my jam. I need to be in it. Yeah. I think the fact too that there's always been such a close relationship with Double Dragon and stuff is rad as well. I like that we can look at a lot of classic beat them up series and kind of go like, they made a new one that's really cool

that kind of revitalized the franchise, you know? I mean, there's been Kunio games and collections that have been dropping for a while, but yeah, this is like a fantastic new one. Double Dragon Neon is still incredible. I'm playing that now too. I'm playing that now too. It's a completely different flavor, you know?

I would love, it's like a lot of these classics made a comeback. Final Fight, yeah. It's just one day. When you're on your Final Fight, come on. Come on, Final Fight. So the lore has been built up in Street Fighter V already for the pieces are set. Cody's the mayor, Abigail is there, Poison's there.

We already know, Lucia, like everything is in place for what the world would be. They just need to make it. I do have, I don't know if you, well, I feel like I talked to you about this at some point, but I do have a piece of historical trivia that may make you feel better or worse about Final Fight. And that is, there is a game that is Final Fight in all but name

that you have played, Woolly, at the very least, and you probably played it as well, Gene. Actually, no, you did play it because we were talking about it the other day. Shinji Mikami looked across the ocean to see Final Fight Streetwise and said, wow, that's a pile of shit. I'm gonna make a fucking way better Final Fight game,

but I can't get the Final Fight clearance or whatever, and so he made God Hand. God Hand is explicitly Shinji Mikami's Final Fight game. I actually didn't know that. I did not know that God Hand was inspired by Final Fight. That's crazy. That's the end of that series. But it is just putting the camera in a different place

and changing the way the combat works. It kind of becomes a different beast on its own that I believe also needs to exist, but it's not, to me, it doesn't replace it. I'm in Final Fight for the characters at this point, for the attachment to Hagar and Cody and Guy, and even Carlos Miyamoto, all of them, Mackie. And wall chicken.

Get them all in there. I mean, Final Fight has great character design. It's kind of more distinctiveness for Rage, honestly. I always liked... But Andre the Giant, Andre the Giant guy. Yeah, I know. I always thought Final Fight had the grabbing system down a lot better than other beat-em-ups did early on.

The ability with Hagar to pick dudes up and choose how to go about your next action was something that they did better than most earlier on. And yeah, no, that's exactly it. And I think we haven't seen Sodom in a hot minute. You know what I mean? It would be great to see Sodom in his modern weeaboo sense. What was the last time Sodom was in a game?

Alpha 3. Alpha 3, right? He was in the background of Cross Tekken. Was he not in...? No, he wasn't. He was in the background of Cross Tekken. And that was it. Wow.

The fact that you can remember that he was in the background of Street Fighter Cross Tekken. That's incredible. Cross Tekken has my career. This is my career. Mad Gear guys in the background. Well, that's right. Yes, Willie, I forget that this is your career.

You write about game crimes. I memorize fighting game facts. This is what we do. Did you know Athena has a different costume in every single King of Fighters game? Who cares? That character is terrible. Except for Neoway.

Anyway. Except for Neoway. And howling blood. You fucking dweeb. Listen. Yeah, no. River City Girls is a great way to spend your time. That's good shit.

That's good shit. Are you doing it mostly solo? Or are you playing with any? Are you doing co-op? Just solo. Just doing solo. Just grinding through. And pretty much done with it.

I've unlocked everything except for Wiggy level 30. That's it. OK. I hope something else comes out. I hope they, you know, we get a sequel. I hope we get, they keep the momentum going. I heard some kind of rumor about a River City sequel, which I'm all in for.

You know what also got me into the River City Girls was the fact that you can play as Kunio as a unlockable character after you beat it. I was like, that's just amazing. I'm so glad I did not know about that until, I think, until I unlocked him. Like, I was like, oh man, this game is great. Oh, the two girls are really different.

I prefer the redhead, but oh man. Oh, shit! Ricky and Kunio, fuck, yeah! Yeah. Fire powers and dark arts powers, amazing. Oh, and my favorite girl is Misako. I do like Hyoko a lot, but I like the way Misako is always just really pissed off.

I like the way she says, just tell me the name of the dog in that one part, which is really funny. Agreed. Agreed. Big same. My favorite was Kyoko, but of course it is. Like, beat him up, beat him up, girl, protagonist. You need, you need that angry Makoto energy, you know?

You need it. Nah, man. It can be light. But you have both. But you notice that Misako starts all the fights in the games, in the games, so I'm just like, oh, she's the one who's just like going around saying, where's my boyfriend? And just like, just kicking everyone's asses, which is awesome.

Are you looking at, have you played anything else? Anything noteworthy? I have gone back to Resident Evil 7 because I never finished it. And with all the village hype right now, I'm like, I should finish 7, which I liked, but it was honestly really, really stressful and it still is. So I've been playing like an hour a day, basically. VR?

Which is weird because it's weird to be stressed out with a Resident Evil game because I play like a shit ton of Resident Evil all the time. Like I'm not a speedrunner of Resident Evil, but I basically, you know, I play to get to unlock everything. And I basically, every time I play, we meet two, I'm basically playing to beat it under two hours. And I always do, which is fun.

And so it's strange for me to go into a Resident Evil game and just like being like, I don't want to go there. I don't want to do this right now. I have a really similar feeling where the very first time I play any of them, I'm very stressed out. And then once I know every item location, the game turns into just relaxing chill time. It's like, ah, are you playing in VR?

All the numbers go away. Not playing in VR, no. Yeah, because that would scare the shit out of me. Like fucking Half-Life Alley is scared to shit out of me already. So like, I'm good on Resident Evil 7 and VR. It's funny because I feel like when that came out and you guys were all talking about it and stuff,

and it's like, oh shit, that makes it scary. It's like, yeah, Resident Evil stopped being scary a while ago, right? It just became an action game franchise. Yeah, it's supposed to be a game that goes basically whoo-ooh-ooh, just to kind of freak out for a little bit. What the shit's chasing Leon? In six, yes.

That was very scary. Yeah, even before that last game. Boulder punching, right? Boulder punching, exactly. Exactly. Did, um... Okay, well, I mean, I guess with... I don't know if you've seen any of the mods,

but just as you mentioned 7, the last thing I saw was someone edited... I don't know 7, so I don't know what the thing chasing you is, but they edited it to be Sitting Bernie Sanders with the gloves just sliding around chasing after you in, like, perfect detail. With a telekinetic shovel floating over him?

Like, what the fuck is happening? Yeah, they replaced Jack with the Sitting Bernie meme. Anyway. Oh yeah, Jack. Jack is the dad of the Resident Evil 7 family. I forget. He's great. He's a great character.

And, uh, Hitman. He just runs of Hitman 3. You know, there's that too. That just came out. What have you been playing on that, on PC? I was playing on PC, yeah. Are you having that? Because I've seen, like, wide variances

in people's experience of people going, wow, it's amazing. And some people, when I talked about Hitman 3, some people reached out to me on Twitter going, oh, yeah, yeah, it kept disconnecting. I haven't played it in the last week, but, like, within that first launch week, it just kept disconnecting over and over again,

which sucks because all your upgrades are tied to your online account. So even during the review process, I was offline the whole time. So I was unlocking nothing the entire time I'm playing Hitman 3. So, yeah. So, yeah, yeah.

It kept disconnecting. I haven't played it in the last week, but, like, within that first launch week, it just kept disconnecting over and over again, so I'm just, like, experiencing the story. We're just fine, but, like, that's not really why I'm playing Man of War, so. Yeah.

So that's why, like, I'm enjoying Hitman 3 like it should be, but I keep getting kicked off, so that's why I went to River City Girls. I have a very important question. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Was Ari Village announced for VR as well? No.

No, it wasn't. No. No, it actually wasn't. No, it actually wasn't. 3D in VR. No. No. No VR.

Big. Nope. Nope. Okay. They also, they also, they said that it was going to be PS5, a PS4 VR exclusive for 7 for a while, like an undetermined amount of time,

and the undetermined amount of time appears to be fucking forever. Okay. Okay. Because, like, that didn't, that super never came to PC. Okay. So.

Yeah, but no, no, no Lady D in VR, which I think would have been too powerful. Missed opportunity on the VR milkers. Missed opportunity. Mm-hmm. It would have been very, very powerful. It would have been a powerful game indeed. It almost, like, you put that on the same

genre and buying chart as summer lesson. You know? It would be an RE game, and it would be other things at the same time. So. Alright. Look, I wasn't on the big vampire later train until I watched, like, a whole clip of her,

and then I heard her say, go, well, well, Ethan Winters, and I was like, okay, well, that's doing it for me right there. Like, Jesus Christ. I mean, it's still... It's pretty hard not to resist. It's still in first person.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a missed opportunity. Alright. So the VR thing was a one and done because it was hot at the time. Yeah, and the VR support, even from Sony, seems really weird. Like, the fucking,

the VR headset is being updated to work on PS5, but the VR, like, oh god, I forget what game it is, but there's a game that came out as a re-release for PS5, but if you use the VR headset to play it, it plays the PS4 version of the game, because that's the only version that has VR support.

Like, it's... Yeah, I actually interviewed Jim Ryan for the Washington Post, and he was basically like, uh, VR, I'm not sure about that. So, yeah, even Jim Ryan doesn't sound all that induced about VR. You know, he didn't sound excited about it all.

So he said, definitely not this year or next year, probably. See, what's interesting is, like, if they were to, if it were not exclusive, and they were to be, and they were free to make Oculus and Vive-supported versions, then it wouldn't be as weird

of a, you know, something to invest time and development into, because, like, those things are, you know, Oculus is quite healthy right now. Oculus 2 is doing well. Like, if they had other opportunities, then they could have went like, yeah, and then it'll also be on PSVR,

but since it's exclusive, they don't really have that option, but still a missed opportunity. All right, so let's pass the baton over then. Pat, what's going on with you? Okay, cool. I played Cyber Shadow this week. It's not made by WayForward,

but it is published by WayForward. Yes. And do you guys like Ninja Gaiden? I love Ninja Gaiden. I never beat one. You should probably play Cyber Shadow. I have Cyber Shadow. I tried it, I started it,

and I'm going to keep going at it. It's hard. It's real good. I said WayForward. I meant Yacht Club. Yacht Club. Oops, Yacht Club. Yacht Club, yeah.

I am still, like, routinely making that mistake. Also, Hagane. If you like Hagane, I would pull that in, too. SNES game, side sword. Yeah, similar deal, anyway. It's fucking good. It's a really, really, like, straightforward,

high-quality retro throwback, like Ninja Gaiden tribute game that has, like, a lot of unlockable moves, like, almost Mega Man. It's a lot of story. A lot of story, too, it seems like. Yeah. But all I can feel, like, all I can tell anyone

is that I was playing the first level, and I think it was actually a robot bird, like, flew at me as I did a jump, and it hit me, and your knockback animation is a uncontrollable arc jump backwards and knocked me directly into a pit. Yeah.

They have the same fucking eagles in this game that they did in Ninja Gaiden that they do with the same pattern that they go back and forth. Like, that's that. The boomerang pattern. It's like, you will slash it as you jump or die, and that is it. You recognize that, like, fuck that bird.

You see it immediately, and you know exactly what they're going for. Yeah. So, played Cyber Shadow, great. You know what's not great? The Medium. The Medium is made by a Bloober team out in Poland,

and this is the developers that did Layers of Fear 1 and 2. They did Observer, and they did the Blair Witch game, the recent Blair Witch game. The Medium is being portrayed as dude. No one's going to make a Silent Hill game ever again.

We got a Kariyamaoka to score our adventure horror game about wandering around talking to ghosts. Everybody get excited, and then I played it, and... the short way, I'll give you the long version, but the short version is almost every single Silent Hill game was worse than the one before it after a while.

Like, 3 was not as good as 2, 4 was not as good as 3. Shadow Memory was alright, but then Homecoming was terrible. That Homecoming was terrible. Yeah. And then Downpour was fucking terrible, and then that got...

God, what was it? It was a way forward game. It was like a PSP dungeon crawler. God, I don't even remember the fucking name of it. Oh my God. And this continues that trend of the studio got further out into more Eastern Europe,

and feels just as emblematic of the downfall of that series. It's a Book of Memories Silent Hill game. Yeah, Book of Memories, that's what it was called. It is a horror game that has no exploration, no ability to fight enemies, one enemy that is terrible and often just forces you into

invisible enemy stealth sequences, a character that never... Wait, the medium does have no exploration? No exploration. Wow. So it tells you that there's exploration, like they put you in like a hotel lobby, right? And then they go,

oh, how do I get up to the second floor? And the answer is go to the elevator, and then you go to the elevator, and the elevator puts you out onto the second floor, but that floor only has one door. And then that... Okay, you keep going, okay. A mirror that will transport you to the other world,

which only has a corridor, which only has one door. And like the most of the experience, like by far most of the experience is me walking around in a like linear circle, if that makes any sense, listening to what are essentially audio logs of ghosts that don't have anything interesting to say.

Somebody in my chat, a guy named Sir Goose, put out this perfect phrase that I didn't, like I wish I had thought of it myself, but thank you Sir Goose, where the puzzles are not puzzles, because the only thing you can do to the puzzles is solve them, so they're not puzzles.

The most involved puzzle I got in the entire game, from the part that I played it, was you walk up to a like a little conference table, and you need to figure out the name of somebody who sat in one of the chairs, because you need a ghost's name to like send them to the afterlife, right? And you look at a sheet,

and it has the seating order. Okay, and then you go to like a phone call record, and it's a guy complaining that he has to sit across from so-and-so. And I go, okay, I figure I have to go back to the paper, look at it, and then intuit what it would be, right? No, because when you go back to the paper, the character speaks aloud what you should do for the puzzle. And then when you go examine each chair,

the character goes, no, not this one, no, not this one. Oh, this must be the one that is across from the person I listen to. And then you go to the other side, and she goes, ah, this must be it. Number four, I should go back to the seating arrangement. And then you go back to the seating arrangement, and she reads, goes, ah, number four, that's Jimmy, Jimmy, whoever. Now I know, and that's the solution to the puzzle.

The solution to the puzzle is go in a series of steps to like examine each thing in a row. Like that's not gameplay. I could have just walked into the room, and the character could have done it in a cutscene. Yeah, that sounds like a last of us part two safe mini puzzle, but like for like the best puzzle in the entire game, seems like. On top of that, the game runs astonishingly poorly,

like really, really crazy poorly. It is the only PC game I have ever played in my life that when you start it up, it asks you if you want to limit it to 30 frames a second. That is the first settings option it asks of you. It says, do you want to put it? Did you say no? I did, and then I went into the options later

and turned that 30 FPS limit on. Oh boy. Because the game can't handle. I'm hitting it with a 3080, and it just can't do 60. And I was playing it, and I'm like, what? Because the game doesn't look particularly good. And even horribly optimized, I can't understand why it's so bad. And I have like an armchair theory.

You constantly switch between like a nightmare world and like a real world. And they do, the one cool aesthetic thing it does is it does a split screen of like cutscenes where the cutscene is playing in the top and bottom in the nightmare and real world. And so you'll see where characters should be or where a ghost is holding an object but it's just floating in the real world. And the game will do that, you know when you like change a camera angle in certain games, like the game will go kuchunk as it's loading in all the new assets just because it wasn't loaded into the camera view.

It doesn't do that when you switch between the two worlds, and it doesn't do that when those cutscenes load in, which makes me think that both versions of all areas are loaded in at all times. Are always loaded in, yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah. And one of the cool visual tricks that made me think this was possible was you have a flashlight in the real world but not in the fake world, sorry, in the nightmare world.

And if you stand in front of a mirror where you can see both, you can see that the real world version of you on the other side of the mirror is still casting shadows and reflections through the mirror. Like it's not a fake mirror, it's a real mirror, it's like a duplicated area. Okay. And it is like, it is choking. But that stuff would all be fine if the character shut their fucking mouth. The character talks more than Nathan Drake does in terms of environmental traversal,

but it's a horror game. It's a horror game in which you're supposed to be scared of ghosts. And ghosts only attack you in ghost attack sequences, which half the time are you running towards the camera like a crash- Oh, there's chase sequences. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's towards the camera.

Like, figure out which way to turn. Indiana Jones, like run. But like the character is talking to the degree that I feel like they are afraid the player will get bored because they're just walking through kind of boring environments. So what? Yeah, my question, whatever, like I kind of hear about like a game like this that's so specific and it's what it's trying to do, but it fails at that, is like, is there anything that it does successfully?

Like if the narrative isn't that compelling, then what is it? There's one thing it does successfully. It does have an Akira Yamaoka soundtrack. Okay. Which means that when music does play, it's good. Okay. It's good music. Also, the main character looks cool.

Main character looks cool. Yeah, sure. But yeah. Do you know what? This will make you laugh fully. And Jean, I hope you can appreciate this, but you don't have the testing background, right? So the lip syncing in the game is terrible. Like the facial animation in the game is awful.

It's really bad. But you know what? It's a limited, you know, it's an indie studio out in Eastern Europe. Maybe it's, you know, it's limited resources. So most of the people you're talking to in the game are ghosts. And that's fine, right? You're a medium. You're going to talk to ghosts.

So the first ghost that you talk to is your dad. The game starts with your dad's funeral and you help your dad pass on. And your dad zooms in and he's like a normal looking business dude. And he's got like a porcelain white mask on his face. And that's his visual ghost motif, right? And nothing about it animates it. He just moves his head to talk, right? And I'm sitting there watching it and I go, I bet that they didn't want to do more facial animation.

So I bet every ghost in the game is going to wear a featureless porcelain mask. And sure enough, every ghost in the game wears a featureless non-face animating porcelain mask. Brilliant. And it's just like, mmm, yep. On a design level. Last but not least, the enemy that chases you. If it chases you in the nightmare world, you can see it. If it chases you in the real world, it's invisible.

But it's got that predator invisibility thing, you know, the shimmer. But the shimmer is not strong enough. So it's invisible. Like it's just, it's just invisible. You can't see it. And so at some point, the devs must have realized that like sequences were really, really difficult because you just can't see the enemy at all. And it insta kills you. So when you hold down like the spirit vision button, it points an arrow off your character's head towards where the monster is.

Like, like an arrow. Oh, no. Is it at least an immersive arrow? Is it like a spooky arrow? Is it made of bones, maybe, you know? Is it got an arrow stand? It is. I believe it's supposed to be a VHS pause sign and a play sign.

Oh, no. Next to each other. But it's just an arrow that points to the enemy. And when you get closer, it turns more red. Oh, yeah. A crazy taxi arrow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally.

Like I'm staring at this and I'm like, dude, they put this in like last month. Like this is a last second solution to this problem. Damn. So the funniest thing is that it's called the medium. And I have all these complaints, but it's not like it's not running so poorly that it's funny. It's not bugging out in goofy ways. The dialogue isn't so bad that I'm laughing. It's it's medium.

It's mid. It's it's it's dull. It's pain. Just mid the game. Yeah, absolutely. Like I cannot recommend it to anyone. And I was talking to a DK. The other day and he started running into progression blockers.

He started running into having to load like two, three saves back in order to get past invisible walls because he can't climb up on mandatory ledges. Like, mm, damn. Okay, it feels like that the regular road and nightmare world split screen dynamic would be cool and like a Zelda puzzle like type of fashion, you know, like a like a light world, dark world type of thing, which is elder. I think would never do it because the idea is so flimsy. But if another game was able to run with it, then that that might be kind of fun. So they use it like they do in Silent Hill Zero where they're just locations. Yeah. So all like like multiple worlds and like, you know, there's I mean, different games have tried to tackle that.

But like if you're doing that, you have to kind of have the experience to know how to properly load that in how to properly handle, you know, the asset. Spawning and when and how and where and like and putting mirrors as well into the equation. If you don't really know what you're doing or how to optimize it. That's a that's a strange thing to to design if you don't have the experience for it. You know, I would rather play the Titanfall to time travel level 10 times. And continue playing the medium. So I'm looking this is Bloober team who made layers of fear Blair Witch observer. Okay.

So my view of the Skyward Sword Desert Temple scene where you constantly switching back and forth in time to like that was like that's like the good part of Skyward Sword. Right. There's there's there's there's there's. Yeah. Like, you know, Zelda games have done it a lot. Pretty much. I want to say like probably half of Zelda games have some sort of a moment of switching between realities at some point. There's a lot of that doesn't a legacy of Kane as well.

Have that. Yes, he has the light world and the spectral world. Right. So yeah, that's that's an established thing that, you know, you people have figured out a long time ago, but also. Willie, you'll you'll as a as a occasional artist. Do you like it when people just steal art? Oh, no. So not in this game, but in the layers of fear series, they totally stole some of those paintings and just put them in their game with that permission.

But no. Willie, I'm going to send you a screenshot in the discord call of the games release trailer and tell me if this looks like a certain hellboy. Monster. Oh. Huh. I don't. I don't. I don't remember.

It's the it looks. It's the. Yeah, that's the best screenshot I could get from the monster. It looks terrible. It is a low rent version of the hellboy to angel of death from the end of that movie, which I posted for you in that discord chat as well. Oh, there you go. Yeah. It is.

It is just a shitty looking version of that monster. Oh, that that sucks, man, because like people are going to immediately know like if it's an homage, that's that's an homage. It's intended, but if it's just a rip and they've already been. It's not good, man. Come on. It's just a rip. It's a bad rip. It's like a worse version.

Are the paintings not worth? Are the paintings like classical paintings from hundreds of years ago? No. No. Okay. I believe there are like more modern ones. Yes. They're like deviant art crap.

Yeah. So don't waste your time with them with the medium. I do have good news though. I watched The Void and I watched Psycho Gorman. They're great. Particularly Psycho Gorman, which just came out. Yeah, I saw a bunch of trailers for it. I can only describe Psycho Gorman's storytelling as manic.

The plot makes no sense. It has no theme. The special effects range from incredible to some of the cheapest I've ever seen. It's hilarious and it features a surprise guest appearance by Rich Evans, which I was watching it with Paige. What? I was like, is that Rich Evans? Yes, it is.

Holy shit. The Void is like a real movie. Like it's a real movie about cultists and Cthulhu shit and it's pretty good. Psycho Gorman is something that you would have convinced me to go see at Fantasia. Okay. It's a Fantasia movie. Perfect. Got it.

It's a Fantasia movie. Got it. Got it. It is trash and it's one of my favorite movies that I've watched in a long time. Yeah, I see a screenshot of a brain with eyeballs on it. Yeah, that character just hangs out. So we're into it already. Yeah.

We're good. We're good to go. I'm into it. My Rich Evans is there being there for some reason. It sounds like a pretty good story. Rich Evans is like a secret cameo, like genuinely. It's weird. The character he plays does not look like Rich Evans.

But yeah, you should all watch The Void and Psycho Gorman. They're great. They're great. See, you know it's a Fantasia movie because the name alone is what people are like. Yeah, give me tickets to that. What is it? Who cares? We're going.

Just on title alone. Sounds like a good law firm too. Yeah, come to the law office of Psycho Gorman. Yeah, all you got to do is take the E out. Just soften the E a little bit. Gorman. Gorman. Yep.

Perfect. But yeah, that's been my week. Great week aside from the medium, which wasted my fucking time. Okay. Fucking bullshit. All right. So I don't have much to say because I have been doing one thing and one thing only, and that is guilty gear, lore.

However, I guess I can say that technically I've been playing a lot of guilty gear to overture. Oh my God. No, I don't want to talk about this. So in the process of doing this project, you know, I have to go back and do my research. So I've been playing a whole lot of overture and man, man, it is interesting because it's gotten re-released on Steam, right? So they did port it so that you can experience it in its full glory in the modern era.

Have you ever seen, do you know anything about guilty gear overture by any chance? I'll be back, I'm taking a piss. I do. I played the guilty gear games early on, but I don't think I played overture. I don't think I played overture. Okay. Because he's at it. I think I stopped at like guilty gear XX or something and I don't even know if this

is before or after. So this takes place after and all of that and more will be detailed exactly in the upcoming guilty gear lore video, part three. However, this is basically a game that was made as the guilty gear series, like the main storyline in a way, like the creator has wanted the main storyline to be like a separate thing from like the X and XX series in games because those games are a lot of like non-canon events and non-canon characters and things happening in a way. So this was an attempt to put a number on it to say like, no, like the X games are spin-offs

in a way, but this is the next entry officially. And well, I'm going to break down what happens in the lore of it and stuff, which, you know, all continues onwards to the next series. But just mechanically, it was so weird at the time because the franchise was a fighting game series and overture was a complete change in genre, right? It turned from a fighting game into a new hybrid arena pseudo action brawler, pseudo MOBA or like RTS in a way. So you have a main character that's on the map in a 3D area.

There's lanes and you have a spawn base that generates, you know, workers or attackers of different classes and you send them to different rally points to work their way across the map to the enemies based. And in the meantime, you're running around playing, you know, a third person action game on the map and you can attack the other commander or their, their ghosts, you know? Yeah. I 100% never even heard this game. It's crazy.

Wow. It's nuts. Looks like like a single player smite. So the thing with it is that it is not good and it is very, very like out there with what it's trying to do. But I feel as if I can see a functioning version of that with like nowadays you could make a game like that, that could work if you just streamlined a whole lot of it, you know? It like it was aiming to do RTS at the same time as third person action and like it ends

up kind of like failing to deliver a compelling version of either. But it would not be impossible to marry those two genres together into a successful game if both of them felt really good. And if it didn't feel as if you had to kind of stop playing to manage one or the other. I've talked about how when I played World of Warcraft, so God damn it. Wait, what? I'm sorry. Warcraft 3.

I do this every time. Every time. I hate it. Every time. Every time. Every time. Oh man. It's too, it's too late.

It's too late. It's wired in my brain. When I think of Warcraft, it's the words World of are going to proceed it. It's just going to happen. I'm sorry. Damn it. Okay. I talk often about when I played Warcraft 3 and the hero system was overwhelming to

me personally, but it was too much to deal with at the same time. This is a lot of that feeling. But I didn't feel as if in Warcraft 3 it wasn't going to be fun to do those things. Whereas here, both sides are just under delivering. The thing is, of course, is when you're playing it and it's a guilty year game and you're like, man, I like these characters. I like this world. I want to plow through it for the lower purposes.

At the time, it was immensely upsetting to fans of the series that were really looking forward to a new fighting game. Thankfully, it didn't land and then they went back to fighting games, which is the forte of the franchise. But the revisit has been really weird because, like I said, it's just as bad as you remember. But now with hindsight, you can see where they could have tightened up some things. For example, just the way you pull up your units and control them is you press D-pad to the left and it pulls up a map and then you have to move a cursor around and do what

you would want to do with a mouse except you're doing it with sticks in a way. While you're doing that, the game is active. You can put on easier options to slow to pause the time when you pull up that map. But if you're playing multiplayer in the way this is intended to be, you're pulling that up and sending those commands and doing all of that. You're still vulnerable. But it's a necessary part of the game to occasionally stand still and manage that side of the screen while things are happening around you in a way.

I'm sure there could have been a more intuitive version of it that was based on using shortcuts or quick selection of every point of interest on the map when you pull it up instead of having to necessarily cursor over it, for example. The idea of a base that could be a bit more automated in what it does. There's things to do. You could approach this where you have a fun action game and at the same time there's other things to worry about on the map and stuff. It was aiming a bit too high.

I feel as if the idea was if this landed, it could have been an e-sport. I think they might have anticipated that a successful version of this game could pick up and become an e-sport. I'm just cracking up at the chat. I feel that someone in the chat says, Willie filibusters congress explaining the plot of guilty gear. It's like, man, that would totally fucking work. That would totally fucking work.

So you're going to get Willie in office right now. And then Dr. Paradigm shows up and you see Dizzy. Now at the time that it was made, Dizzy was technically still owned not by Arc System work, so they couldn't use the word Dizzy. They couldn't say the character's name. So they just called her the maiden of the grove because the maiden of the grove is not going to get them in legal trouble, but the name Dizzy is copyrighted. No bad guy and Kai Kisk are in fact owned by Arc System works.

However, the other characters were not and that's why they had to refer to them in indirect ways. You see, eventually they got the license back and they were able to pull it back together. I really only have one thought that I always come back to when I think about guilty gear overture other than that game is trash. I feel legitimately, genuinely terrible for Daisuke, the director and the creator of the guilty gear series because the way that he pitched it was I made a fighting game because I couldn't, I did the tech and the resources weren't there to make my dream game.

And here it is, guys, my dream game, my magnum opus, the game that will define my career, the one I've always wanted to make, and it's garbage. Dude, it's fucking terrible and it flopped super hard. Like I said, man, I can feel the part of it where it's like, yo, we're inventing a genre here, this is going to be so addictive at the core that people are just going to play it a lot and we're going to have different maps and we can expand on it with new units and this is going to be the next level of competitive half fighting game, half RTS because we're going to bring those worlds together and this is an e-sport in the making.

You can kind of feel it, you can kind of feel that energy a little bit. Anyway, yeah, it just flopped on all those fronts and it was what it was, you know, but they did, I'm glad that they did port it. I'm glad that I didn't have to dig up a 360 to go plug that in and find out more. I remember to Kizzy Kay, who's a known really good anime player, had him on for an episode of Guilty Gear, Accent Core, Get Into Fighting Games, and he was explaining how that was his introduction to the franchise. That was the first game he played and I was like, oh my God, that is the weirdest way

to come in the back door on this franchise and find out what it actually is about. In fact, it's probably best if you started on a weird one, right, because it's only uphill from there. If you start on Devil May Cry 2 and you don't know any better, you're probably going to go like, well, that was kind of boring, game, but it was interesting how he juggled things with his guns, you know, and then you go, oh, that's what I've been playing. I played Devil May Cry 2 over a weekend for some reason too, so there's that. Oh wow, okay, well, I can't understand why, but yeah, if you're coming in, if you're

coming in from that side of things, it's all uphill from there, so it's actually not the worst idea, but in any case, yeah, it is something that, and I've mentioned this a couple times before too, but there's a game called Sacrifice back in the day that was also third-person RTS, where you can run alongside your units and command them on the field, you know, and it was a bit much, but again, the idea was there, Brutal Legend comes to mind as well, and another bad game. But Brutal Legend, yeah, and the thing about that, the funny part is that Brutal Legend, like, got it, did it better, even though it failed at what it was trying to do.

It did it better than Overture did, you know, so I say, you know, there's something here maybe, but you have to take both components and make them really, really fun on their own and find a way to marry them without overbearing the player, you know, unless there's other examples that I just don't know of where it's a third-person action game with an RTS at the same time, and you control both and it doesn't feel like shit. I can't think of any third-person action games, but I can think of some first-person action games that do work really well as RTS games, but the core of it is that it has to be multiplayer and the RTS units have to be human beings, and the commander has to be a completely separate

role that just oversees the map, and they're the only one that gets to play RTS. Like, natural selection is pretty good, for example. So folks are saying Overlord and Pikmin. Overlord is not good. Pikmin's okay. Pikmin's pretty good. Although Pikmin, though, like, I've never, I don't know how it works multiplayer, does Pikmin ever get to a point where, like, you have, like, bases and buildings and units

and you're sending out the Pikmin in different areas of the map? They just follow you, right? It's just you and your Pikmin. Yeah, so that's not quite the same, because Wonderful 101 is you and a big group as well, but that's not quite the same as, like, RTS. You're right. Wonderful 101 is a third-person strategy game. It's RTS, yes.

Wonderful 101 was an RTS. Yeah, no. If all your units are following you all around at the same time, then that doesn't count, I would say. It tends to be a map where people are doing different objectives far away from you at the same time as you're playing the action. Honestly, the closest I can genuinely think of to this is Dynasty Warriors, where you, or like Hyrule Warriors, where you send individual heroes to different parts of the map to handle

it. Fire Emblem Warriors. Fire Emblem Warriors is that. Okay. Fire Emblem Warriors is a game that's very, very dynamic for different troop types that you would send. Oh, okay. Is that game good?

Is it? Yeah. It's not bad. It's kind of like a strategy game, except that you've got to control the different Emblem characters. Like, if they're on horses, then you've got to send them over to the sword guys. So it's a little bit more involved than your regular Muso, which can be annoying, you know, if you just want to play Muso.

So there's that. I mean, you know, all right, 15 years and we got one. That's not bad. It's a start. Well, look, here's, honestly, here's the real conclusion. Um, MOBAs, they just, they figured it out. They realized how to do it, you know, games like League and Dota realize how to do it. You make a hero, you have lanes, you have creep, you have, you know, three areas that that

the, the, um, whatever the, the, your, your, your, you know, slaves are going to walk down or whatever. And you pick one and then you engage with the other player and they figured it out. That's exactly what it needed to be. And you control the one unit and then the RTS stuff is automatic. Exactly. Exactly. And I think, um, and it's, it matters enough that you have to pay attention to it and like

make decisions on where to go and why, you know, but you don't have to micromanage, uh, the RTS aspect of it. Well, you should get into MOBAs. I'm, I'm okay. I'm okay. Thank you. But try a MOBA. I, as someone who is not in, I can say of like standing out here looking at guilty gear

to overture and, uh, these other games that like the idea, they kind of, this is what they were kind of aiming for, but just didn't quite successfully stick the landing on, you know, What if guilty gear overture was the legal, was the esport of today? Man. No, that would be kind of world we would be living in a world where guilty gear was no longer a fighting game and that would suck. So I hate that reality.

While I do think you're absolutely out of your God damn mind that you think that, um, it could have been a, like a popular esport. I don't think that I'm saying, I think if it was a better game, no, no, no, no, no, no, stop, stop, stop. That's not what I said. Okay. I said, I feel like they thought it could be that Oh, that's, that's very different. Yes.

I think the intention was that I don't think that I'm saying I feel like they thought it could have been that and you feel in the design that they were thinking about it on that level with the map variations they put out in the rule variations that you can, you can play with in multiplayer. I don't know. That's different. I mean, I don't think esports actually even existed in its state for that at the time, but I do get what you mean more now like that.

I can see that I can, but I do want to say there are superficially at least enough similarities to smite that like it, if it were released at a different time and it were better. There could be some people that played it because people do play smite. If it is kind of, you know, if it looks as good as excerpt, it would get people's attention and eyeballs on that alone, you know. It's the name that you're already familiar with. So then you're going to take a look and see what's going on. And if MOBAs and league already existed, then they could have just kind of taken some cues

and more or less copied some of the, yeah, so instead of KDA, we would have the guilty girl guilty of your girls as the K-pop. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I have a question for you, woolly. Now that you're the guilty gear lore master, oh boy, who do you think in the cast of guilty gear would be the most busted jungler?

Um, well, I'm going to, uh, I'm going to go ahead and just guess what the definition of a jungler is. And I picked the specifically weirdest term. I'm going to say Jack O Valentine because Jack O has spawn points. She puts down on the fighting game stage that generate enemies that follow her commands and come and attack you at a certain interval. So she is kind of like a MOBA-ish character in a fighting game already. I can see that.

I can see that. Yeah. Actually, you, you defeated my trap. Congrats. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Um, so that, but that's it, you know, just, I'm fucking, I'm doing, I'm working over

here and, uh, oh, that's it, woolly. Yeah. I'm working over here and I'm guilty gear overture, you know, in every one. The woolly buster has ended. The woolly buster. Yes. Hey man, Patton Oswald can do it. I can do it.

Exactly. Watch. Uh, yeah, so that, that's pretty much my week, but, um, well, let's, uh, this is where we will do the plugs if you want to tune in because, um, I still have not, but we are, uh, pretty much seconds away from beating 13 Sentinels. I've, I've legitimately never been more annoyed. Yeah. By the, uh, Montreal curfew.

Yeah. Then when I went to your stream VOD and scrolled all the way to the end because that's the only part of your play through I want to watch, right? I want to see the final conversation and you're like, Oh shit, you got to get out of here. And I'm like, you are an hour from the end of the game. Yep. You were there. Yes.

Exactly. There. But it's the end of the game and the conversation. And I would rather not have that while the police are kicking in the doors and dropping through the windows, uh, as Reggie is, is, you know, out doing the curfew. So we couldn't risk it. Um, it's just more important to fucking not, you know, get in trouble there. So, uh, we left off with about an hour to go, I guess, and then a conversation to finish

it out on. And it was pretty interesting too, because, um, um, uh, punch mom in the other room was basically caught up and watching us live stream at the same time. So like she, she was just sitting there like, like on a delay, watching what we were doing in the living room right over a couple of feet. Oh, that's very much so. And I called her out for being a weirdo on it, so, but no, for the, um, for the finale stream, since she's caught up to like, I'm sure, uh, we can have an interesting discussion

about what's going on and stuff. So the end of 13 sentinels will be this week for sure, um, as well as, uh, return to Yakuza zero. Uh, I'm getting some strats for shakedown handling shakedowns. Mr. shakedowns getting a lot less scary, uh, so yeah, oh, he becomes like a money tree after a certain like mental progression, starting to, starting to see that and, uh, getting some tips from captain Carl. So cheers on that, um, that's going to resume.

And then of course, Reggie versus demon souls as well. So, uh, we're going to be coming back this week. I still need time, of course, to finish off what I'm working on, but, um, yeah, we're going to be looking at, um, the end of 13 sentinels. And then what I'm thinking immediately is, uh, before we jump right into the next thing, um, cause I, I, I, you know, I ran a poll, I got some feedback. Some people have been, uh, giving some really cool suggestions. Uh, I'm going to just double up on Reggie versus demon souls to get some further progress

in that for a while. And then we're going to bring in the next LP. So that's over on woolly versus, um, on Twitch and on YouTube, um, and, uh, if you want, this is where you can jump in with, uh, any directional plugs, uh, Gene, for where people can check. Oh, uh, if I can follow me on gene park on Twitter, uh, we do have a, a launcher channel and I don't know the, the URL, so let me just look at it right now, but we are a lot of launcher watching the posts on YouTube launcher.

Uh. Wappos. Gene, you gotta got your plugs ready, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, we are launcher at YouTube.

We just follow us on launcher. You have to watch it. Yeah. You too. I don't think we even have a custom URL yet. So there's that too, but, uh, we're, we're going to start streaming on, on, on YouTube more too. Um, I was starting to do that on Twitch a little bit more.

I'm also on, on Twitch too, and I hope to stream more someday, but only when I get the energy for it. I don't know how you guys do it. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I kind of want to, but it's not really my thing though. Right. So, so, so I don't know if I'll like it.

It's not real. Like I think I will like it. Hmm. It's not really what you could out there. It's not really my thing. I think like, like, yeah, yeah. So I don't know. Uh, okay.

I still have to finish, uh, like a dragon. I'm still not done with that one either. Dude, what are you doing? That's the most like bizarrely on point story of the gear in video games. Yeah. No, I got to fit. I take forever on Yakuza games. Like I'm just like, like, like, like judgment took me like six months to finish, you know?

Yeah. I, um, like last month. Yeah. See, are you, are you looking for content ideas for the Washington Post YouTube channel? Because sure. I've considered that. Check this. You want to hear your lore?

Wapo, right? So sounds a lot like WAP. Yeah. Washington Post. And what? And pussy. And you put it, there you go. You put them together.

I think, I think, I think we, I think we talked about that idea and, uh, it was, it was tanked. Oh, okay. Yeah. There was Wapo and Waluigi, that thing, because I wrote the Waluigi post, uh, about two years ago when, when, uh, we found out that Waluigi was going to be, uh, uh, a golem, a totem character or whatever, whatever they are in Smash. So, um, there was a cross Waluigi, Washington Post, uh, thing and Reggie, if he's a, if he's a me, actually read that piece too, which was really nice.

So that was cool. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to, we're going to talk about him a little bit later because he's really in an interesting place in this whole, uh, current affair. What's up? Yeah. Have, have some class for fuck's sake.

Hey man, get, hey man, get your goddamn pussy jokes out of this podcast. Wap. Try and run it clean. Wap parodies are still ripe. Okay. If, if, if you, if you, if you haven't been paying attention, that's still premium meme currency. All right.

Just putting it out there. All right. Well, it's time for me to plug my stuff. Hey, gang, ignore what Woolie's talking about. Just don't listen to him at all. Uh, if you want to see some streams, go down to twitch.tv slash pat stairs at, it's a fucking mess this week, schedule some mess because medium was, I was supposed to play medium. I was supposed to beat medium and I don't want to play that shit.

So I'm going to be checking out bug fables hit man one cause I'm not buying that on the epic store. I'm not, I'm not doing it because my, I don't even know if my progress will carry over. You know, they still haven't fixed that shit. I said like a week before hit man three came out guys, don't worry. We're going to fix it. You guys won't have to, you know, do, you don't want to have to rebuy anything. It's like, well, okay.

When is that going to anyway? Yeah. That's why I got the hit man three on xbox too, because all my hit man one, two progress is on xbox. I'm just like, whatever. Uh, speaking of progress, I heard some shit about cotor. Oh dude, uh, I ran into a fun bug where I would hit a load screen and it would just die.

So, uh, and I had to do a total reinstall and redo all the mods in order to find like the conflict. Yeah. Like we were warned about like progression blocking issues, possibilities at a couple places I remember now. And, um, I don't know if this is possible, but, um, save editing can be done. You might be able to salvage it with someone that can help you with save editing. Oh, I fixed it.

Oh, I canceled the LP. And then stayed up late, fixed it, and then uncancelled it. Oh, okay. Um, there's, there's, there's two load screens, that's the load screen into Dantooine and there's a load screen into the Duxon, which are notorious, how the save will get corrupted and it will just load in like the wrong value and it'll load you into fucking nowhere and it'll be broken forever. I got really lucky in that by installing and reinstalling everything, I, I fixed it.

But I did look into that save editing and the save editing that is required for that is not the same save editing that you would go to cheat yourself up to a higher level. Okay. It is for real ass code shit. Gotcha. Okay. That is terrifying that I would never be able to do. But yeah, no, I totally fixed that.

Yeah. Cause I was back, I'm a genius. Sure. I was backing up the, the saves every session, you know, just in case cause there was enough warnings about progression blockers and luckily we just never hit one. So fun fact, Willie, you got lucky, but that wouldn't have helped you because the bug that causes that is early and becomes baked into the background of the save file. Okay.

So you, you would have run into a situation where you're like, ah, well, we have a backup from last week and you'd go back to last week and recreate all your steps and run into the same fucking problem. Okay. So that's, that's super. That game is still falling apart even after all these years. Well, just play the mobile version and then you can, you know, if you ever need to. No, don't do that.

Cause that doesn't have the restore content. Well, you know, hey, all right. We tried. All right. So before I forget, bug fables, hit man, Neo two and more cotor, Neo two is coming out on the PC. Finally I can give that game a shot. I feel bad.

I streamed that when it came out and I had a horrible migraine and I fought the unkillable asylum demon equivalent and then went great and then never beat it and never play it again. You can get restored content on your phone apparently. Oh shit. Oh really? There you go. But most importantly, Friday night around eight o'clock, I'll be streaming Neo in the early afternoon, but around eight o'clock, come down to twitch.tv, Pat stairs that because

Square Enix is going to be announcing something for Final Fantasy 14. It's the expansion and no one knows what it'll be called. It's going to be called for spoken. So this is their replacement event where they kept saying, well, we're going to check to see if we can do a fan fest. If the COVID haha and then no, not going to happen. So that's probably going to be like a eight, nine hour stream. I'm going to be tired.

Come hang out. Maybe it'll be chemist. Yeah. Hopefully it'll be chemist. Please put a fucking chemist job in that game. I'm going to be doing some off stream homework in Neo 2 as well actually just to keep what's going on there for future consideration. Yeah.

Good shit. Is that because you could punch things in that game now? I mean that certainly helps. It certainly helps, but the announcement of like the full collection and package and everything that they've been talking about recently is just, I've been looking at it forever now just going like, I only stopped playing this because of time. Like I loved every second of the time I did put in, you know, so yeah, cool. All right.

Let's take a quick word from our sponsors before we get into the news. This week, the podcast is sponsored by ExpressVPN. You know the deal. Oh, I love ExpressVPN. You want to watch cool things, but the powers that be say no. Why let them know you dirty Canadian, get off my delicious American Netflix. We can smell the maple on you. Get out.

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Don't worry about it. Also this week, we've got a new sponsor here. Castle super beast is sponsored by Manly Bands. So here's a new one. And of course he walks away right during the introduction of the new sponsor. But hey, uh, folks, uh, we've got, I got stuff going on in my life here, man. Well, what is more important in your life than the possibility of a wedding ring? I don't know.

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Um, I like how they just assume that your audience will be, or just a bunch of potential divorces. I mean, half your audience are probably going to get a divorce for all potential divorces. Yeah. Exactly. Unless you're the Sigma male. That's true. That's true.

Where does the Sigma male fit into the manly band, uh, model? That's the question. Yeah. The Sigma manly band. Yeah. In any case, I just, I, I'm, I'm really excited for the eventual manly band, uh, uh, collab with Toei to release the Vegeta. Okay.

Sure. Sure. It's a, it's blue with lightning on it and it goes well with your, with your dress shirt. I've, uh, I haven't spent a lot of my life wearing too much, uh, uh, hand jewelry things. So I've, I've become the kind of person that constantly plays with it while it's on. I've noticed. Um, I'm just not used to the feeling.

Anyway, um, let's, let's get into what's going on. So mere seconds before clicking the play button, Google Stadia has shut down its internal studios changing its business focus. Uh, I was getting worried after they continued to survive way longer than I thought. And the last time I brought this up, I was like, okay, what the fuck? Why won't you die? I got money writing on this and, uh, it turns out that, uh, I was, but a week or two early. Common sense has finally hit Google.

Um, yeah, I honestly like, I continue to say this. So the, the, the, uh, let's get to the announcement basically, um, looking at this Kotaku article on it. And, uh, there's a studio in Montreal, there's a studio in Los Angeles, neither has released any games yet. Uh, there's around 150 developers, uh, that have been, uh, involved and they're going to try to find those developers new roles at Google. Uh, Jade Raymond, uh, was, uh, actually there.

Oh, interesting. I didn't, I didn't realize Jade Raymond that was, was working over there too. You did. Did I talk about this already? That's my favorite part of the story. Did I talk about that? You did know that Jade Raymond. Did I forget?

I must have forgot. You forgot because we covered a story one year ago where they describe opening up the Montreal studio headed by Jade Raymond. Oh my God. And we had a discussion about what it must feel like to work on a game that you 100% know will never come out. Okay. Yeah, that's gone.

It's that, that I put that save on the cloud. So that memory has been completely erased. I met her, uh, she was like one of the last people I met before this whole lockdown thing happened too. Really? Um, I met her at the dice, at the dice of it and she was still with Google. We were both on the panel together. She was, she was representing Google.

Okay. So she had to go up there and talk about the, you know, talk about the great future of Google and everything in state, in Stadia. So it looks like a very nice woman. Very cool. I was super glad to meet her because, you know, Jade is, was part of the, the, the, the initial run of Assassin's Creed, you know, so. So it looks like, um, uh, yeah, most of the, the, the team is going to move into other

places at Google. Uh, she's going to exit the company. So, uh, she'll be going elsewhere and, uh, Google will continue to operate. The gaming service and it's $10 monthly pro service, uh, so it will continue to exist in some sort of zombie form. Uh, but I guess the, uh, new developments and actual like push of the, the brand are over quote unquote push push. Um, so I, I, I said this a couple of times now and I, and I'm going to say it one more

time here, if this project existed as a simple Google lab thing where it was sitting in a place with no expectations, uh, not really looking to get into the commercial space at this point because they're still figuring out the ins and outs of it. And it was like, Hey, Google's checking out this idea and possibly considering like, um, you know, making tech that like could be useful in the future for whatever purposes. It wouldn't have had this stigma around it. The energy around it comes from coming into this space and kind of looking at it and going, yeah, consoles are over.

The cloud is the future. Um, and that really weird last second announcement of like, we're going to introduce the brand and the name and some of the features, but we're not going to actually tell you what it is. Like the fact that the initial announcement was what is Stadia? You know, really, what is it for at least, I want to say a week or two, you know, before we started finding out what the details were added to a very confusing, uh, lifetime for this entire project that didn't have to be this way really.

I don't know. That's how I feel about it. It could have just been a lie. I think you're right. I think, uh, Facebook, uh, you know, uh, we all hate Facebook for many reasons, but I do think that Facebook has actually taken that approach in terms of what they're doing with cloud gaming. Uh, none of what they're offering is, is charged.

It's all free. It's all native to their feed where you can just play the games within your Facebook app or whatever. And they're all low latency games that don't require a lot of low latency. Um, a lot of them are mobile games or a lot of them are just point and click games. Um, so that seems like a, like, like what you were talking about, Willie, about like, we're just testing the ground. We're trying to see what works and what doesn't versus what stadium did, which you're right.

They came in not just as like, we're going to replace the console, but then they, the way they messaged it was like a console launch. They had a press conference and everything, you know, they looked at what Microsoft and Sony does with, with E3 and they just tried to do the same thing. And it just, we're just like, well, so what though? You know, I can almost imagine, um, a timeline of events, you know, behind the scenes where maybe while this wasn't its experimental phases and they were kind of, you know, putting it together,

there was a discussion point where they decided we could either be middleware or we can go our own route, you know, and, um, a lot of companies these days are developing their own solutions. So, you know, if you're going to be middleware, you have to like stand out, like leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else that could develop similar tech, but putting it, positioning yourself as a, a challenger in the generation with something that is just way too premature for people. And again, doesn't get around the ma, massive, uh, uncomfortable issue of like digital is

still digital, but like digital on the cloud where you only actually get your metadata and you really don't own any part of it whatsoever, especially if something gets delisted is not something you can hand wave and ignore. It's a massive uncomfortable problem for asking people to spend their money, you know, and they seem to just be like, no, it'll be fine. Perhaps thinking that as we go forward into the future, ownership over things that are digital will be less and less common. So people will just get used to that.

And right now we're certainly not Yeah, it's almost like they wanted to do what Apple does. And it's like, we don't, we know that you don't know that you need this, but we think you might do. And then everyone's like, no, we actually don't need this right now. So, yeah, I mean, there's a part of this where like, even though, you know, digital, I remember when digital games first became a much bigger deal and, you know, PSP downloaded only games were a thing.

I remember being like, well, I like having the physical thing because I always want to be able to go back to it years down the line. And then eventually, you know, space and other things made it so that digital became much more common and expected. And Steam is just what it is. It's the way we play games now. But the fact that PT came out on PS4 and then got delisted, but I still have it on my console and I can still go boot it up if I wanted to in a world where if you have it on, if you

update or if you get it, if there's any opportunity to, Sony would take it off your console if they were allowed to do what they wanted. But you still have it there, means you can still preserve things, whether you're offline or not. And the cloud being, you know, that mandatory extra step that keeps you away from actually having the offline game is just way too, it's too far for me, you know? Even if the latency was half decent, which it fucking wasn't as you proved, you know? Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. In case people don't know, I was the guy in the GIF that when Stadia came out, pressing jump on Destiny 2 and going, because it took forever. And I was on the work Wi-Fi, which, you know, to be fair, it's a very crowded network. But, you know, the same thing happened at home too. So it's like, if I can't do it at home, then it's where I work. Fuck it.

You know? I don't want to play Destiny 2 this way. Yeah. So I've been spending my time trying to find a photo of an old Stadia PR stunt, and I finally found it. And I will put it in the Discord chat for y'all if you want to take a goddamn look at it. And it perfectly sums up everything going on with Stadia from top to bottom. It is an outdoor exhibition of everything you dream can be built.

And it is the Dreamcast, the Power Glove, and a cartridge for ET for the Atari in glass. And then a sign that says, Coming Soon. And then a little blurb about the Stadia. And eventually the person who built that exhibit came out and said that they had a really good idea, and then Google changed their mind like three times about what the message of the piece was supposed to be, and ended up with like a bunch of bullshit that accidentally said that their console was going to be a fucking disaster. And that level of management nonsense, I feel like it was a perfect microcosm of everything

that we ever saw at the Stadia. Oh gosh, this is a good meme template too. It's pretty good. It's a good meme template. I remember when, with the interviewing Phil Harrison, when somebody asked him, it's like, OK, so the games cost the same amount as a regular game, but what do you do when the servers go offline? And he just kind of just said, we think we're providing a great value with the online.

It's like he didn't answer the question. Nope. And it's like, all right, shit's over. Everybody give up. This thing's going to die. And a game got delisted the other day, and then anyone who owned it no longer owned it. And that was that. Right?

Like we had that. That was the thing that came up. I remember, and then like Samurai Showdown was being brought up, and it was kind of like, oh my god, like really the netcode is bad enough as it is. Now we've got to add an extra layer of input delay to me playing the game itself. Then it has to go through the netcode. Like, oh yeah, it's already rough on PS4 when I was trying to play Sam's show. Locally.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Now you're going to play online and go through an input lag on your, you know, to the game system server directly and then through the netcode after that. It's ridiculous, you know, if you can't even find a match for that matter. So, yeah, it sucks because again, it's just like, you had ideas here, and I guarantee that we're going to be revisiting them in the future.

Right? Cloud is absolutely going to become more and more of a thing going forward. This was just the worst way to roll it out and implement it. It feels like they must have spent the money to hire people to be there and advise on what the industry is doing and how the reception would be, but kind of choose to just brute force through those reports and decide, no, we're just going to do it anyway. It'll be fine. We'll just, we'll make heads, we'll get out there and anyone who owns a Chromecast will

have access to it or if you own any device, you can do it and it'll be fine. I got a code to load it up and I never even bothered. Like I straight up, I started the process once by downloading the app and then I got to the like, the fucking login screen or whatever and I just went, what the fuck am I doing? Like I have literally better things to do with my time right now and I just stopped halfway through the registration, like to play the same games that you already have for, or you're already tired of. That's the thing, you know, it's like Fortnite should have been on Stadia, Fortnite would

have been perfect for Stadia, you know, there you go, great. It should have been free to play games on Stadia. I'm surprised that they didn't put, they didn't go, go harder on that, you know, and we've got contemporaries and like you've got other things that are kind of approaching this kind of thing. We talked about the Game Pass and how Microsoft is doing that for people, which is just money for selection, Netflix of games as it were. It isn't come up often, but Apple Arcade is legit.

Apple Arcade is a collection of games. You can play them on your phone and you can get a real controller and play them, you know? Like stuff like that is still happening here in the background and, you know, it's not as much of a waste of time in a way, so it's... It's not. I use XCloud pretty regularly actually, you know, it's kind of, it's like having a mobile Xbox in my couch or in bed, it's kind of nice. So this comes together and I mentioned just before we started because like I'm sure, I

said I'm like, I'm sure you've forgotten it by now, but just in case you guys don't remember, never forget that the Amazon Luma has been announced and that's Amazon's cloud gaming service that's on its way. So right before the podcast started, Woollie said something similar to this, but he did not say the word Amazon, he just said the word Luma. And until you just said Amazon, I for the life of me could not remember what that is. The Amazon Luma is the new cloud thing that they're going to be rolling out and the main difference here was, well, they showed the controller and then they introduced that there

would be gaming channels that had their own rates. So the Luma Plus channel is going to have, you know, their collection of games, but there's a Ubisoft channel that has a collection of Ubisoft games specifically. And I'm just looking at it, for example, because I kept this page open because I'm like, we're going to come back to this, you know, the story because this is a different attempt. The Luma Plus channel is six a month, $5.99 a month, and they have their list of games with 1080p, 60fps, 4K coming soon, it says. But then the Ubisoft channel was $14.99 a month to get Ubisoft games on the platforms.

So depending on what games you want to buy for what companies, you're going to end up with multiple parallel subscriptions on the same service. It's really funny to me that no matter what medium you're talking about, whether it be TV, music, internet, and now game internet, I don't know how to describe this new one. The universal nightmare scenario that everyone turns into a photo is what if they took your thing that you liked and priced it like your old cable plan? The universally reviled worst business model that everyone hates ever of pick this channel and this channel and this channel, and it always comes back like no matter how far you

get away from cutting the cord, they're trying to bring it to us like online streaming for like Netflix style shit has become that now again. And now they're trying to do the online Amazon wants to do it to games. Oh my God. However, 14.99 for Ubisoft games, those games take forever to finish. That would be terrible. Climbing the fucking map tower to see where all the missions are and just thinking I have to do this by Friday or it's going to be another $15 like, yeah, yeah, like that's terrible.

I mean, so the thing with this is you're every time an idea like this comes out, individual major companies are going to be doing what they can to secure their bag, right? Like it's not surprising to see that this is what the the model they came up with is, but you're talking about bringing back the cable after it's been cut. I guarantee you that if I were in the boardroom or if I were someone in the boardroom that were trying to push it, it wouldn't be the cable cutting analogy. It would be twitch subs, multiple people subscribe to multiple channels that they like. So why wouldn't multiple people subscribe to multiple game channels that they like?

That's probably what Amazon is thinking. Yeah. And if a developer goes in harder on their library for this platform, then there's more value because they're like, we're investing a lot of games into this channel. There's going to be more bang for your buck. So you're going to pay that $15, but look how many games we've already put on it. You know? Yeah.

I mean, I can answer that question right now because despite being called a subscription, a tip jar is not a transaction. It's a tip jar. Like people people sub to my channel because they go, hey, Pat's cool. I'd like Pat to get a couple bucks. People aren't gonna fucking subscribe to the Ubisoft channel to go, man, Ubisoft's doing a really great job of these games. I think I think they deserve some of my money.

I think they did a great job with the rape and the sexual shit. Oh, it's a good Ubisoft. If the games were free to play, it would be a more like the Twitch analogy. If they were like, if you could, you know, but like, yeah, the, the, the paywall idea is different from the tip jar. That is correct. Yeah. And Amazon did have that shooting game, which I covered and I even call it was pretty good.

And now I forgot its name already, but that closed down, but that was supposed to be free to play. Crucible? Crucible. Yes. They're completely forgettable. Huh? Yeah.

The game that got released and then unreleased because it was so bad and boring, you know, but I played like an hour of it and I was like, this is fine. This could be fine. So, you know, and it was fine, but like there's nothing to separate it from. And so it's like, but if you got a lot of those and maybe, but then they can't make those games, you know, and I realized that, yes, I work for the Washington Post and Jeff Bezos owns us, but I can just say whatever I want. I can say whatever I want about Amazon's games, which it's like that there's nothing.

And so it goes back to what Google is trying to do and what Amazon is trying to do, um, that making games is really, really hard. Yeah. And it requires a lot of time and a lot of investment, a lot of creative creativity that, that, that they don't seem to be able to invest in. Um, they're just getting names, you know, they're just hiring big names like Jade Raymond or, or Clint Hawking, you know, in Amazon, hoping that's why Ubisoft ship. Yeah.

So last week we talked about a story, which I think is now even more relevant because you're talking about Amazon and Google. It's gone. We're going to get into games. How do you get into games? Just buy everything. Microsoft tried that. They tried to buy Nintendo.

We talked about it last week ended with Nintendo guys just laughing at them in a meeting for an hour and just laughing them out of the country pretty much. And then Microsoft spent all the money in the world and then all the money in the world again and then all the money in the world again. And if I remember correctly, they still haven't made any of that money back on Xbox. Like Xbox has never turned a dime of profit overall. And it's like, they've been at it for like 15 fucking years and Amazon and Google think that they could just go, ah, we can just buy a company, we're going to crush it.

Nintendo, I don't know what they're doing. Like you guys crazy. I remember, dude, I remember when they got double, not double helix, Iron Galaxy, when they acquired them back in the day after the K.I. stuff. And you know, it's like, okay, so we're losing them and we're losing K.I.'s development because Amazon wants to get in. And they were during the fire era of like, you know, their, their development and nothing ever happened ultimately.

So we still don't know what they were kind of up to from that acquisition. But the timing of this is quite interesting because Jason Schreyer just put up an article why Amazon failed to break into video games, interviews with 30 plus current and former employees point to one root problem. The guy in charge never made a game before. He hired veteran devs and then ignored them. So this just popped up. I've heard that story before.

Yeah. I mean, that happens so often in like industries, even like even in the newspaper industry, you know, like my old employer, like we hired somebody from the New York Times to come and fix her digital shit. And then once she came in and then made this whole list of like, this is what you need to do. We just told her, no, fuck you, we're not going to listen to anything you say. And they say, why the fuck did you hire me away from the New York Times for that?

So like, I don't I don't understand why like, like, like, like decisions like that are always being made where you're like, you're you're you're you want to value that person and you hire them. And then once they're in your system, you're like, no, you're going to do things our way. And it's like, well, what the fuck am I here for then? You know, yeah, I don't understand why it keeps happening. It happens at Amazon. It happens in the companies that I've been in for clouds.

I don't get it for the ability to say that you got the right people in the room and, you know, so that when you're doing exactly what that is, when you're doing the autopsy, you know, you can say that, like, yeah, like the the people that know their stuff were here and they did assess the situation. But if you're not willing to actually take what they have to say into into your plans and actually change the, you know, your strategy, your business plan, whatever the case might be, when you're getting into a market that you know, fucking shit all about, it's just going to be endless failure, you know, one after the other

for like, yeah, practically a decade now. And as you mentioned earlier, yes, we are work like we're using the same servers. These games will be hosted on to criticize the Amazon product. We're all owned by Amazon and this fucking broadcast right now is on the same servers. I know exactly why you hire people and then ignore them because you're not hiring people for their expertise. You're hiring people because, you know, you need experts and you expect them to come in and tell you that the way you're doing it is the right way.

You're hiring them so they can come and tell you and go, you know what, you're actually a genius and you're running this as best as you can and there's nothing that can be done and all your critics are assholes. But when they come in and go, oh yeah, your shit sucks and you need to change literally everything and every idea you had is terrible. A lot of these guys don't know what they're talking about. I should never have hired them in the first place. Yeah, just fucking book a cameo then if you want people to say things,

whatever you want them to say to, you know, consulting. Yeah. Well, they don't have the level of insurrection to know that that's what they actually and I mean, you guys are doing great on cameo, you know, and here's the thing too, like, uh, internally inside of studios when you kind of headhunt or snipe superstars, um, it definitely doesn't hurt when you can announce that someone with this credibility has joined the studio and you let investors know that, you know, everybody knows like a project has some

credibility behind it now because we brought in a name or a resume that is, you know, respectable. So it lends early confidence despite whatever a management's intentions are. And in many cases, um, industries can be, uh, I think there's a lot of times where that sort of like, uh, bullet like that arrogance of like not listening to what your team is saying about a market will work out in that manager's favor in the past, you know, so there's no real reason to think that games are going to be any different when it couldn't be more different and it's

also super, um, it's one of the craziest dynamic markets out there. It's constantly evolving because new tech coming out changes the entire landscape in one or two years, you know, um, even though like generations of consoles have been rolling out, uh, slower and slower, the amount of things uh, that have been changing about the industry in between those generations has never been faster, you know, so yeah, I think it just, it's, it's about getting in that, that, uh, uh, early confidence because you have someone that is, you know, should, should be able to say, Hey, this person's here.

We're not going to fail, but it doesn't, it doesn't. And if you're a public, you can move to markets that way to, to, to, to be in your favor, right? Going back to, to the stops conversation. Of course. Yeah. Um, yeah, I, I, I wonder when let's take, for example, J. Rayman, right?

She's been in the industry for a long time. She gets the meeting with Amazon. Sorry. No, Google Christ. They can't even keep track. It doesn't, it doesn't even matter. But she gets the, the meeting with that, uh, with, uh, Google and they, they do their pitch and I wonder at what point she realized, Oh yeah, this shit's

never going to ship. This is not going to ship for real. Like this is a gig and I'm going to get paid and then I'm going to get the fuck out of here. Honestly, man. And I wonder how many people in that studio knew that. Honestly, uh, a lot of people in these circumstances are working to their hardest, to the fullest with faith, hoping the thing is going to do what it

does, you know, um, people like in situ, like when you know, management is incompetent, it feels awful, but a lot of people are like, well, I'm going to still do what I can to save this. And hopefully, you know, it can become a story of how it turned around, despite the odds, if anything, you know, it's not always the mental checkout. Yeah. If you ever see me working at Facebook, like no matter what comes out of my mouth, no, no, that I'm absolutely just selling out and I'm just trying to get

that first year salary and like whatever investments I can make, whatever comes out of my mouth, do not believe me. Just I am selling out right now. I'm just telling you right now. So right. All right. So I have a, I have a low tech version of this. I remember being the lowly employee I was at the grocery store.

Yeah. Telling my boss, you got to replace these fucking freezers, dude. Like they'd break like an overflow, like every two weeks. And we, and you got a guy on staff cleaning it, like mopping the floor, literally an entire fucking shift. And like you, you bring in a guy like in the evening when the, when the employees are gone and those guys are charging you like 300 bucks an hour to fucking tighten some bolts, right?

This thing's going to die. Ah, okay. Fine. Well, I'm going to punch out and then day after day and then the day comes when like half of the goddamn grocery store, every single freezer, just simultaneously dies and like 15 grand's worth of fucking food, just gone like that, cause there's nowhere to put it. Man, oh, Pat, you got to help us.

We got to get this down stoned. Oh, it's like, I'm, it's, it's 10 01. So I'm already late to punch out. Excuse me. Goodbye. Right. There's a satisfaction in watching management ignore you and then watching them burn because they just refuse to listen to anyone's good advice.

I, and it feels great. I have a prediction again, it's powered by spite and being poor, right? Right. It's a powerful, it's a powerful fuel. I have a prediction. I think that, um, because clouding cloud is inevitable and we're going to go through a couple iterations of it before it actually lands. I think that when it does work and, uh, when we're seeing it at its best, it

will not be in North America where internet still sucks. Oh, fuck no, I'll be in Korea. It'll be in Korea or Japan. Exactly. It'll be, it'll be over in Asia where they have actual fucking real internet and you're going to see it working there first and foremost, and it'll be a reliable thing. And from that, it'll be like, oh, that's what it's supposed to look like. It's not going to fucking work out here in Comcast country.

You know, it feels like they're just trying to copy whatever is going on in Korea without like, like copying Korea's homework without even realizing that we don't even have the paper to write on here. You know, um, you know, and it was like, like, it's, it's like, I think to think about how Korea is recovered from COVID. My fucking dad is just going to billiards bars all like every day because it's like, it's shit so chill there because like every, everyone there uses apps all the time, you know, everyone there is really, really internet literate and everyone

there is really connected. My grandmother rest her soul was ordering food like, like 10 years ago, you know, like on apps. And I'm like, this is amazing. I can't believe you guys have that here. You know, yeah, we're just North America. It's just really, really behind, you know, someone says Japan has exclusive streaming versions of games on switch.

Yep. You can play RE seven on the, on the switch, even though it's just a cloud version. And I've never heard anyone complain about it. It just came out and it's fine. You know, I mean, like we're talking about, we're, you know, you're trying to switch the type of fuel in your car to another, to something else when the wheels are still busted, you know, like internet still fucking just is garbage out, out, out here for, for services to, to compare your specific example.

It's like, Hey, you know, they drive this fancy auto car in Japan with the, the made by BNW and you go, wow, cool. You want to put her out in the States or Canada? It's like, well, they have fancy roads with like magnets in it that helps guide the car or something. What do we got? Right. We got dirt.

Yeah. Got puddles. Fucking dirt. Yeah. It's the same, right? It'll totally work. No, no, it won't. I mean, I, I hang out with an occasionally co-stream, but like we'll watch,

you know, we watched, for example, me and Paige, we watched Psycho Gorman with our friend Eli Plague of Grypes, who was a fantastic artist, YouTuber, genuinely cool guy. You should check out his page. And goat. But like sometimes, and yeah, he got goats, but some, no, wait, that was a sheet. That was a sheet.

Anyway, sometimes his internet just fucking fails. It's just dead because he lives out in rural, in the States, right? And he's using satellite internet. That's the best he can get. Yeah. And there are days when it's like the ISP just goes, no, I know your job is the internet, but go to hell. Yeah.

So, and, and so like here, let's hear, hear the Stadia pitch for, for him, you know, like, what's the sales rep going to say? You know, like, no, it's fine. There might be some interruptions, but, but, you know, like it's just, it's not fucking ready, you know, the, the, the, the, like dudes, roboting out in a discord call, which is the least latency sensitive app I have. Discord actually is really well under crazy latency conditions. That's like, if you can't even handle a discord call, you're going to be

streaming what? Mm-hmm. Um, so that happened and, uh, you know, ripping peace in zombie form. Now we, now we get to, now we get to play the game between when they stop development, that's real, and when they actually just quietly kill it and pretend it didn't exist at all. It never existed at all. It was just, just on my infrastructure.

And every dollar you spent means nothing. All you have to show for it is a controller. In the future, you'll have this rare controller and be like, you know, I was, I was, I was there for Stadia once and now, now this is it. You know, I was, I, I spoke with some people and I did some reading and one of the persistent like narratives behind Stadia. There it is. She's a controller.

Controller. Yep. Oh, look at that. That'll be the only evidence that it was ever here. Yeah. As long as you keep your hands on that and don't let them take it from you. Again, the barter and trade economy, this is going to be part of it. It's going to be part of my barter, my barter and trade economy.

Once it all goes to shit for it. Hmm. One of the narratives that I kept thinking about, because I never got a direct confirmation, but it was that one of the reasons why Google will start up and kill so many projects. Like it's astonishing, you know, that spreadsheet that's like all the projects that Google's killed over the years is because the fastest way to get promoted in the company is to ship some.

Right. Right. Right. Sure. Sure. Yeah. And it doesn't matter what happens. Exploit it.

All that matters is that you can get into a meeting and go, you know, he shipped the number next to your name goes up Google music or whatever, dead ass shit. Hey, Gene, when the Luma comes out, Luna, excuse me, I'd like to, I'd like to, which is it? You keep switching him. It's free. I have no, I couldn't even tell you which one it is. And Luna, Luna, yeah, Luna, when the Luna comes out,

uh, do a controller comparison between the two and let us know how it is. Yeah, you know, the only one will have both. They might start glowing when you put them together. Like some, some ancient fucking relic has been unlocked. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It's, it feels okay. The controller feels okay, but I don't know.

Like here we like just create the pantheon of like the Luna controller, the steam controller, the Stadia controller, the Ooya controller by their powers combined. Ooya is legit the worst piece of shit I've ever held my life. There's no comparison. It's crazy. It's still, it's still above the, uh, third party and 64 and Gamecube controllers. Oh, well that, no, come on, that's not, come on.

Those are like, like the, the, yeah, I mean official. Huh, is it the bottom of the list of official controllers? Cause the only controller I've ever touched in my life, that if you press the, uh, button, it can get caught underneath the plastic shell. If you press like the A button or the O button, sorry, the O button or the U button, it can get permanently stuck underneath the plastic shell. Nope. The Panasonic 3DO gave me blisters, blisters on my fingers straight up.

I appreciate you not calling it the three dough Panasonic fucking 3DO with a whole, with a donut button has a hole in it that gives you blisters. And I was playing, uh, whatever we were playing at the, at the, uh, fucking rental center and yeah, it might've been like way of the warrior or Daedalus encounter. Why are you with a warrior? Yeah. Amazing. Yep.

Um, uh, the Jaguar controller has to be the worst, right? The Jaguar, it's got like 64 buttons. Yeah. It would match its bits. It was awful. The Jaguar controller was awful, but it didn't leave you battle damaged for using it. I never saw that. Oh yeah.

The bottom of the controller looked like the, the keyboard that you put on the 360, right? When you added keyboards to the bottom of the controller later, like that was just the default, the way it shipped. It was madness. Oh yeah. God, that's awful. Nevermind.

Oh yeah. It does feel like that. It would actually just cut into your, your flesh actually. Yeah. The fact about way of the warrior, it was made by Naughty Dog. Yeah. Straight up one of their first games. Anyway, I forgot.

That's right. Wild. Uh, Well, you know, what's, you know, it's a great segue that I just thought up because I'm so smart. We've been talking about Google and tangentially Amazon using their big brains and their fantastic online technology to horribly, horribly fail. Meanwhile, what might be the most internet illiterate tech company to ever

exist, Nintendo is crushing it and was even more illiterate than we prior imagined, like way more illiterate. Do you have the Nintendo server story? Nintendo is replacing its multiplayer server system that is almost two decades old. Since the Wii U and 3ds days, Nintendo has been using something called any X for its multiplayer server system. Almost all games have been tied to it for online functionality. Now they're finally making a change.

Rest in peace. Any X monster hunter rise will be the first Nintendo game to use their new server infrastructure, which makes sense. That's going to be a big game, but it is 18 years old. And Splatoon 2 had an unused function to check to see if it was running on Windows 98. That's incredible. Oh, my God.

So update clarification. Any X is actually about 20 years old. Nintendo has been using it for about 10. The tech was created by an older company, Quasal. It was once called to rendezvous and Ubisoft bought them in 2010 and then Nintendo licensed it out and renamed it any any X soon after. OK, so it's it was it was a couple of hands changed there. So now they're going to be switching to NPLN for Monster Hunter.

It is one of my favorite stories ever about Nintendo talking about. I want to say the Wii U online system where they brought in a consultant every time. It's it's actually very similar to the story you described earlier, Gene, where somebody brings in an expert and says, what do we do? And in this particular case, they said, well, make it like PlayStation Network or Xbox Live and the phrase that came back was, please do not use those terms. No one in this building knows what those are. They don't play the other systems.

They don't know what you're talking about. It's not helpful. You're making them very uncomfortable. Don't make them uncomfortable. Shittimately, they're like you're confusing the staff. OK, I thought that was as embarrassing and stupid as it could get. And now it's like, wow, no wonder the smash net code is terrible. It's running on like pipes.

Literal tubes, the literal tubes. Yeah, like it's it's it's a it's a child's string and cup. Like, holy Christ. The exposed Xbox Live made the Nintendo exec uncomfortable. Yeah, man, this is just another fucking, you know, another knock in the same old fucking tree we've been we've been hitting at where it's like they don't understand what Internet and they continue to not and they occasionally partner up with someone

who does know what Internet, but then they don't actually change anything internally, they just kind of say, good, now you handle that and leave us leave us out of it. We don't want to learn. But here to your original point, Pat, Nintendo's fucking killing it. You know, they're they're crushing the game, you know, still. Because they make good games because because they know how because they're a game maker because they're their their their their priority is making games

and making the fun. They're always about expanding, expanding the audience. That's why you see Spencer always always talking about, you know, Microsoft has to diversify our first party suite because we got nothing, you know, and it's like the Nintendo's over there with Mario Party and Animal Crossing, you know, but at the same time that they're doing that, you're you have these things where they take years to get an account system

going and everyone is ripping their hair out in the meantime, because this is just basic quality of life we've solved years ago. Yeah. It's. You know, it's it's interesting because. The the this this server news came alongside it and Monster Hunter Rise will be the first game to use it. And it makes me think that Capcom's historical influence on

the Nintendo way of doing things and Monster Hunter, specifically, is enormous. Yeah, because it was it was for Monster Hunter. Try for the Wii Wii. Was it the Wii? I think so. Yeah, it was for the Wii. Yeah. Where it came out that the reason why that pro controller got made for the Wii at all and it got bundled in with is because a developer at Capcom went mother fuckers, make a controller.

Yes, make a real controller for this game. And then the 3DS, the new 3DS got the analog nub and the very first game that came out with to use that analog nub was Monster Hunter for you or was it generations? I think it was generations, but yeah, and had a bundle. And it was the same exact thing with the analog number, the new 3DS and the the the add on bolted Frankenstein shit for the old 3DS where it was a Monster Hunter game.

They're like this game place like shit without this. Guys, guys, years make it earlier. Someone at Capcom said to Nintendo during the Super Ness's development, make a controller, make a goddamn controller for Street Fighter 2. It's a six button game. We can't do it with four, much less three Genesis make six buttons. So this game will work and they did. They put shoulder buttons on it.

Two buttons more was a step up above the Ness. They went for I've just been corrected. The first game to use the Circle Pad Pro was Resident Evil Revelations, which was the big 3DS for the Capcom always pushing Nintendo to do better. Wow. I totally didn't even think about that. A history of like kicking Nintendo's ass into making better controllers and things for their games. Who is it? Who is it at Capcom?

Who what individual or series of individuals is able to walk over to the Nintendo offices and just like start screaming? So and just like or God damn it. I'm making this fucking game and I'm having a bug. You walk over and you have a 3DS in your hand and you just hand it to them. You go here, play this. And then they go, oh, this is yeah, yeah. Is it is are you seeing a problem, you know?

Or here, play Street Fighter, map your buttons. Go ahead. You're like, oh, but these last two, I can't. Yeah, can you not map them? Hmm. Do you need two extra buttons, maybe? You know, it's great. That's it. That's it. I can. That's a fun history. For the the the rise thing, because the but the the controller thing is like the other games can benefit from that.

And the servers obviously other games can benefit from that. But I imagine with Rise, I can see a conversation being, listen, Monster Hunter World, it like immediately did call of duty, fucking biggest game in the world. Fuck your shit numbers. And we're putting this new game on your platform and it runs like shit because your servers are garbage. Like one of the things that came out in the Monster Hunter Rise demo now,

oh, man, this is totally connected, is that if you had too many friends on your friends list, the frame rate just tanks in that demo. And like, do you want this game to be the biggest game in Japan for like a year and a half? Well, do it. Do something. You're getting what, 30% kickback on every sold, every unit sold, like you just down payment your servers and then still roll in it. And reminder, Monster Hunter World is the best selling Capcom game of all time.

Bard all all all time ever. All time. Yeah. OK. OK. All time. Number two is Resident Evil 5. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to fuck number three is Resident Evil 6, baby. Hey, man, if this is this is what it takes. If, you know, if Capcom can bully Nintendo into moving into the future, this is how it has to happen, you know, so be it. Never forget, they turned down Skylanders.

They were. Oh, that was a mistake. They were pitched Skylanders potentially as a Pokemon thing, and they turned it down. It's so much money. You know, it's so lucrative. Holy shit. So, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. So that's interesting.

There goes the stadium, Nintendo servers. Yeah, a couple other announcements for some stuff. So one. We got this game called Project DT, which is coming out of China. And there's nothing much for it, except for the official website. And one tweet by buttons. Basically, on this game that looks pretty cool.

All that Chinese Chinese action game. It basically reminds me of, do you remember a couple months ago, we were looking at a Wukong Black something. Yes, I forgot what the full name of it was. Black something Wukong. It's like that super, super high polish and high fidelity action game. But now the setting is a bit more tech and basically a

a 2B-esque cyber punch girl is fighting metal gears. Black myth. Thank you. Punching them. And yeah, you have to go to it's not on YouTube. It hasn't really published itself out anywhere. It just got announced. It's pretty hot off the press. But you got to pretty much go to the website for it. DT.digysky.com for the trailer.

Or just go to buttons Twitter and you can check the video. I found it here on YouTube in 990 views. OK, so it's a Chinese channel. It got uploaded. It's on YouTube. I don't know which channel this is, but it's got 21 subscribers, but it's on you. I see a YouTube. It looks sick. Looks really pretty.

Yeah, looks very cool. Yeah. By the way, as we say, go check buttons is Twitter. His Twitter's not even named a button. No, he changed it. That just happened to be his screen name at the time that we discovered him. His Twitter is at hbjonzandau. I don't know how to pronounce that.

Hbjohnxuandou to go check out that. Or yeah, if Gene says it's on YouTube now, too. Project DT. But yeah, I think this is like, it really gives me all the same vibes as watching the Black Isle Kong trailer, you know, of just like a really, really, really high polish on the visual end. Tons of English to enjoy.

And yeah, it switches between these highly these cinematic modes and then back to action pretty seamlessly. So looking looking super stylish. He seemed to be there seemed to be a lot of character action fans in China with Mihayo previous game with Hong Kong impact the third and then with this one is just straight up like this is Vanquish slash Bayonetta slash to be. Yeah, it's great earlier.

There was a lot of there's 2D games as well. What was that one? There was a 2D character action game. You play as a girl with a sword and lots of like again, heavy juggling and a combo system that came out of China as well a couple years back. I see, I see. There you go.

That's the one. Yeah, I think there's a I think there's fans there that are like starting to kind of take the high octane. I want to call it the Platinum Games model because even though character action existed prior to Platinum Games, like they brought speed and a level of, yeah, a level of like over the topness to what was already over the top. So anyway, I just understood what you said when you meant the

Platinum Games model and thought you meant make cool game, make no money. No, not quite that, not quite that. Yeah, not their business model. The other one is lost soul aside, which is being made by I think one guy. It's another Chinese character action game coming. That thing looks cool.

Yes, meanwhile, as we discuss the Platinum Games model and character action, let's check in with our old friend Hideki Kamiya. He says forget about Bayonetta 3 for now. It's not really our position to say, but it's January. We've got something, something has to come out, right? I guess it's safe to expect that something will come out. There's still a lot of the year left is what I'm saying.

I understand it's driving fans crazy. In light of that, my suggestion would be maybe we should all reset and forget about Bayonetta 3 when something finally does happen. It'll be a nice surprise, won't it? I'm going to take this. I'm going to take this as we announced it too early. Yeah, sorry.

That's how I'm going to take this as Hideki Kamiya is telling me personally that he's willing to fight me in the street because that is bullshit. He has gone on Twitter. He has said like, oh yeah, something's coming soon. Oh, it's going really well. Don't worry about it for like fucking, what, 700 days? And now it goes, oh, you guys should just forget about it.

Like shut the fuck up. That's terrible. You should not have shown it. Yeah, I think. If you don't want us to annoy you, don't show it. Whether or not it's going well, it actually doesn't matter as much as like the marketing plan was botched by announcing this like three years before it should have been, you know, the when was

it announced like three years ago? All right. Okay. On September 2nd, it was a thousand days. Wow. That's more than three years. No, it's not. We're up to like, it's getting there, 1200 days.

I honestly, yeah, there's no real way to put the genie back in the bottle on that and they're platinum, so they know what it's like to be constantly hounded for sequels to things. A world where there was no news and we just lived asking for more Bayo would have been better in this instance. And again, it sucks knowing how marketing has to figure things out. And oftentimes when a trailer drops after a long wait like this, it does it kind of resets or evaporates the mist in a way like

people really excited for a thing. Once they have a thing to look at, it'll it'll it'll fix that, you know, it does go a long way. But yeah, dropping cyberpunk this whole time. Yep. Yep. We're learning lessons. Part of announcing things too early now.

I think we have a couple of major bad examples of how that hurts you. But if the end product comes out and doesn't deliver, it hurts you more. You know, if it ends up being fine or better than it, you kind of get to like, it all goes out in the wash. You know, hey, a cool came is out and it's good and that's all that matters. We've been waiting for it for a while, but hey, it's here. Death Stranding, we've been waiting for it for a while. We found out what the fuck it was, but then not really.

And then we played it and it was good. And now everyone just thinks back on it and goes, hey, yeah, Death Stranding. That was cool. All right. But the weight and the journey there has been all but washed away, you know, I will, I will bring it up every time we talk about games. Get an answer to early. The best thing that Bethesda ever did in the entire history of that company was

announced fallout four and then put it out six months later. Absolutely. I was thinking about just that exact same instance where it's like, oh, we just have fallout four now. Amazing. Yeah. Apex, even though they did it for completely different reasons, if that was wonderful, that was cool.

Yeah. Hey, we didn't want Epic to copy us. So here's the game. It's out. Do you guys want to come with me on a fan fictiony journey about what's happening in the three's development? I saw somebody put forth this theory and it's so compelling that until somebody tells me otherwise, I'm just going to believe it

because it's more fun this way. Bayo three was announced in December 2017, right? Holy shit, that's so long ago. And then a little bit in that following year in 2018, I think we got the news that they're working on a new platinum engine and they're moving it over. That explains they're moving it over. This will be the new engine for Bayo. So there's going to be a lot more work in that.

And then Devil May Cry five came out in March of 2019. And Devil May Cry five is the hottest shit to ever drop. And the. The I've seen people talking about, like, do you think they saw that game came out? And it was like, because their prior contemporary was all of their own games. Devil May Cry three and four and DMC Devil May Cry. And I fully believe that platinum could easily have made in any time period. I gained the compete with that that realm, right?

But five came out and was so hot that I can imagine a team like the platinum guys going like, oh, OK, we got a really. So we got to do some shit if you're if you're doing your your fanfiction. Well, you want to just keep in mind. So in 2017 is when, well, near dropped. But like, obviously, the announcement here means they'd been put working on it beforehand. What they had come out since then was, you know, Astral, Astral chain, wonderful one on one. We mastered Babylon's fall is still in the works.

Grand Blue Fantasy Relink is still in the works and Scale Biond got canceled in 2017. Big Kansas. So there is a lot happening behind the scenes for a company that has always said it's not that big. They're guns for hire. There's only a couple of them, and they've clearly gotten bigger. But are they five, six teams big? I don't know.

You know, also the rumor that Nintendo was going to save Scale Biond never happened. And that kind of just fell by the wayside. But yeah, Bayo is it might have been a GDD at the time of its announcement for all we know, you know, it might have just been and a trailer. It might have just been a let's get it out there. We'll get a hype pop at the award show and then we'll figure it out.

You know, who knows? He's not really elaborating, but yep, that's it. That's all there is to say. I mean, when Devil May Cry 5 5 came out, I was like, I don't know how Bayonetta could compete with this anymore. Like Devil May Cry 5 was so good, just so good. I was like, this is this is this is the character action game. I don't know what I want more from any other game.

All of our expectations were exceeded. They were. Yeah. Make sure you announce your game right after Gears of War Funko Pop. That's how you. Oh, wow. That's how you that's how you really cleanse the palette. Yeah, didn't that also die? Oh, I don't fucking did that. All I know is that happened right before it's, you know, walked out

and and stole our hearts. So, yeah, not much to it, but Godspeed, Bayo, I'll be happy when you exist. Oh, it didn't. It didn't die. It will die. OK. Because it's an online service game. OK. Fucking shit.

Couple other things. New Skullgirls character announced Annie from Skullgirls Mobile coming to the full game. And another character is being developed as we speak. So some new content coming to Skullgirls. Thanks to Autumn Games and Hidden Variable. And not Mike, so Skullgirls might be seeing. I don't know if they're going to call it like, you know, Third Encore or something,

but either way, it's kind of coming back and they're getting new stuff. And that's awesome, because it's a good game that deserves it. So, yeah. We got a. Hey, it's a visual. I gotta tell you, yeah, we got Kitty on Cam. Jack's a beautiful boy. Thank you. Yeah, he's a good cat.

You got a miniature little Garfield there. He's a little Garfield heat cliff orange, orange boy. He's a good cat. Can he create some good content for the MP3? Yeah, he's too quiet. Just squeeze him. Or it doesn't make any noise, even when I squeeze him. He just he only makes noise when he when he's hungry.

That's it. That's fine. That's fine. It's it's a visual. That's OK. I mean, like I didn't talk about it this week because it's not behind me, but there's like a seven and a half foot cat tree next to me that I built over the weekend. Yeah, I saw looking down on me from a high perch, which I'm actually going to once I get some stuff out from behind me,

is going to sit directly behind me so that the cat can lord over the podcast. And look at that. Look at down at you like a peasant. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, that's that's what that's what can't do. I got I got a pet I can squeeze to make noise. Uh-huh. What do you got? So when he said that, like the camera for me switched to Jean, so I don't know what.

Oh, that's that's great, buddy. Yeah, it's a whole whole wrestling buddy. Yeah, there you go. I had I had those, man. Now he's going to keep talking for the rest of your shot. And your cousins will never get to this one. It's also not made of plastic, so it can survive being thrown and tossed and everything.

It's great. It's it's a plushie. Anyway. So yeah, new Skullgirls content coming out also heads up just in case you didn't know happening later happening tonight is Maximilian's twitch rivals bring back K.I. tournament. So just like the success, the Marvel event that he had not long ago, they're doing a killer instinct one and it's the same idea. Invitational.

So check them out. Max is fucking doing amazing things. And as has rightly been stated, the FGC is lucky that we have Max, you know, Jeff, Jeff said that and he's totally right. Like Max is amazing. And like, yeah, fuck, yeah, killer instinct is getting an awesome tournament. That's awesome. Max is awesome. OK, so we got a weird ass one that came in here from Nintendo Wire.

And this is the type of shit I love when it comes out like so many years later because like it's sold far past the actual event occurring that everyone involved doesn't give a shit about just literally scanning documents and showing it to you. Rare developer shares old Nintendo email. Stop and swap details for Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64. So. Back in the day. When they were making Banjo-Kazooie and planning Banjo-Tui and DK 64, there was there was discussions internally that Rare wanted to implement

something called a stop and swap feature that involved literally having you pull the cartridge out and while the games continue to have the while the game was still loaded into the N64 is Ram, you'd swap to another game cartridge and unlock things before swapping back to the cartridge you are currently playing. That's fucking ridiculous. They wanted to do the Monster Hunter and Monster Hunter Monster Rancher style. Insert CD generate content, swap back to swap back to other CD

disk, but they wanted to do it with cartridges. Yeah, carts aren't CDs. No, they're not. But this was a feature. Yeah, I remember you could do that with the original PlayStation one games where you can just kind of load in the level, take the CD out and the game is still playing. Exactly. Exactly. Some games encouraged it for like, again, like loading up a Monster Rancher character or if it was a multi-disk game, you know, it would put the console in a suspend state

and it would successfully let you swap. So in this particular case, yeah, Paul Machacheck said that he found and he basically found an email or rather he found a letter from back in the day when they were pitching Banjo-Kazooie's swap and stop and swap feature where they were going to have some keys that you could unlock to get to an extra area in the IC cave. And they found the actual email that Nintendo sent them rejecting the proposal for this, even though they had already put

they'd already started on the the the first games implementation of it and then they wanted it for the rest. So yeah, Nintendo wrote, we're writing you in regards to the stop and swap feature in Donkey Kong 64. We respect the creativity of the feature, but after testing and discussing it, discussing it with the R&D three and research plant, we must ask you remove the feature as it has a number of issues which may be caused by supplementation.

There's no way we can guarantee that the RDRAM will retain the data long enough in all the current and future versions of the N64 console for this feature to work. There's also a risk of damage to both the console and the game pack should the swap be made while the power is still on. And however unlikely there's a chance of a consumer who has exchanged the game packs with the power on will experience a latch up condition in the chip which could cause overheating and potential consumer safety problems. They then go on to suggest perhaps putting in a quiz about

like what they did in the previous game that they could answer in a later game and the quiz would unlock the bonus instead and or some other safer version of it. And like, yeah, anyone who knows that tilting a cartridge produces wild crazy results can tell you this is not safe. This is insane. What the fuck were you thinking? Crazy. I mean, I remember when like, I know that the N64 in certain cases could keep a game going when it came out.

But in most cases it couldn't. And previous console cartridge consoles definitely couldn't. You know, I'm sure everyone's experienced seeing their Game Boy with their game getting slid out accidentally at some point, you know, wild. But yeah, they proposed it. N64 games did not take well to being fucked with cartridge style. Like, in fact, there's speedrunning techniques that you can use tilting and doing all that stupid shit.

And again, the part where it's like it can cause an overheating of the console and potential safety issues basically implying like burning up smoking and possibly catching fire. You know? Yeah, but dude, you stopped and swapped. Anyway. And what? I just, I just, I have breaking news for Woolly and Jean.

Hey, do you, oh god, you know what, I'll set it to, Jean, do you plan on playing the medium at all? No, not at all, especially after what you said. Great, okay, check out a friend of mine just beat the game. And started laughing when they hit. Oh my god, that's awful. What? It's just the ending of the Order AG86 again.

I'm just going to spoil it. I'm just going to spoil it. If you are concerned about the medium, the game, then stop listening and skip ahead because we're just going to spoil the ending. So the message says, yo, Pat, would you, you would be happy to know that the medium ends with spectacular gunshot cut to black. Oh man. By the way, thanks, shy.

Appreciate it. Check out quite shy at quite shallow on Twitter and on YouTube and whatnot. It's good. Very good. Oh my god. Strong. The trashiest like college filmmaker ending to every fucking horrible movie.

Oh my god. I love it. It's fantastic. It's just an order 1886 over again, all over again. If you guys ever beat that game. Hey, at least I did beat that game and I started laughing super hard because they thought they were going to get a sequel. At least the order had a creative design for a gun type.

That's true. Still one of the coolest gun ideas. Anyway, a couple of announcements from the world of not video games. One, have you seen the trailer for Godzilla vs. Kong? Yeah. It's all I want to think about. I watched it again today just to feel something. The only thing I want to think about is this Godzilla vs. Kong and the

I think they really I'm not going to lie. I feel like like the stinger of him catching the laser and dunking it back at the end of the trailer is the same feeling I get from when I saw cloud on the motorcycle. It flying through the air at the end of Advent Children that never happened. It's the same energy. I have some feelings about that trailer. One is man, you can tell this is made by Americans. Fucking Kong is just punking Godzilla left and right like he's not like holy shit.

Also big human relatable. The second one. The second one, which was an emotion that I felt what must have been simultaneous to you, Jean, which was that's not Godzilla. Yeah. Are you kidding me? You think Toho would sign off on their boy getting like disrespected like that? Yeah.

Yeah. My first impression. My first three was Godzilla is disrespected so much here that I did. That's a false flag right there. You know, this is legendary. That's a false flag. Right. And then you look at the trailer a little more carefully and you can see a couple frames

of Kiryu in it. And you're like, oh, OK, it's Mechagodzilla. Mechagodzilla. So here's what I'm proposing. Oh, the Mechagodzilla toy is already out. Oops. So yeah, the toys will be our spoilers. The toys will be our spoilers.

It's always a thing. Yeah. So it's the best spoilers. It's like like my friend was working on Nightmare Batman for Batman versus Superman. I was like, oh, it's a fucking dream. Then I get it. So so I here's here's where I'm going with this is if this does what it's supposed to, then the deal will be just like Capcom versus SNK in which Japan will get to answer

with a Godzilla versus Kong, like except the reverse. And it'll they'll get to make Kong versus Godzilla where it'll be Shin Godzilla this time. And the whole trailer will just and I'll turn out to be Robocon. Yeah. And and the movie will be the movie will be about five minutes long. And it'll be Shin Godzilla beaching and doing what Shin Godzilla does. And then there's a charred monkey husk at some point somewhere. And you and you don't see it.

It just it's never on camera. Yeah. Like no, no. You see Shin Godzilla powering down like going from like red to purple or whatever. Yeah. It'll be Shin Godzilla too. And then there'll be a scene where you see Godzilla powering down and then it'll move and the camera will pan past a big monkey skeleton all the way up to a unit one.

That'll be it. And then the Ava and then the music will start a lot of life. Yep. And then now we go back in for round two of Ava versus Godzilla. And the Kong thing was just to fucking punk out Americans each shit. They did that already with Godzilla final. Exactly. Which is why I'm bringing this up.

Yeah. Because Zilla shows up in that movie the American Godzilla and proper Godzilla ices it in sub 30 seconds. That's it. Like alternative music play. Yeah. It's it's some 41 crush 40 or something or some 41. Yeah. They play it's like some super American music place.

Oh fuck. Yeah. Yep. Like he kills it instantly. Like no problem. It's great. Yeah. We need we need I watched King of the Monsters recently with them because of that trailer.

And I like that movie. It was it was all right. It was the humans weren't as bad as I thought they were going to be. I have no idea what Millie Bobby Brown was doing the whole movie and why she was doing anything. I didn't see it. But all I know she was in it. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. If they didn't see it. Wow. Yeah, I didn't. But if the humans are being it's not bad. That's good. We'll take it. Yeah.

There's a line in that trailer that like is such it's like a parody of an American action movie where the guys running around in like a fucking tent going Godzilla's hurting people and I just don't know why. Yeah. It's fucking Godzilla King of the Monsters. What are you crazy because we forgot about Hiroshima. Obviously. He gives cancer when he's not even like doing anything.

Like he literally he will literally give you cancer when he's around. So like he you know and nobody knows what you know why because he's radiated as fuck. You know like he's he got Japan to remember the tragedy but now the rest of the world forgot. So now he's got to go on a world tour to remind everyone. Yeah. He has area area of effect cancer. Cancerous area of effect.

You know, there you go. So that's that's coming down the pipeline in a couple months speaking of Kaiju. They also dropped and this is good timing on their part. The trailer a new trailer for Pacific Rim the black the anime coming to Netflix where Australia has been abandoned because too many Kaiju fuck it. So the the the Yagers that are left are going to save the day. It's wait what abandoned Australia with the Yagers fighting the Kaiju. That's what the trailer makes it sound like Australia is lost to the Kaiju and then a

couple of people with no backup in their Yagers are going to fight. And that's the that's that's Pacific Rim the black. That's fucking hilarious. That's fucked because after all Australia has done to like combat coven and then they just get they just get lost in Kaiju after all that. Well that sucks. I mean after we all like notice how everyone forgot about the fires. Right.

Yeah. Oh yeah. That's right. A billion animals man. So hey right around the corner comes. Yeah this no one no one helps them out. So yeah looks interesting. I remember a story somebody told me many years ago that ended the same way.

That's that's really that's coming March 4th. And I'm any new Pacific Rim like material is just a miracle in and of itself. That franchise absolutely should have or I expected it to die many times before now but we got a good movie a less good movie an anime now and a comic book series out of it. So I'll take it. And yeah and then last Netflix officially announces something called Sonic Prime 3D animated series.

Not featuring Sonic the Hedgehog. Yeah. Not featuring Roger Craig Smith. Yeah. I mean I feel as if like Sonic Boom landed and did what it did and was quite successful at being funny. So that was good. Yeah.

That worked out. And then the movie came and was also fun. So they're like hey hey we can it's it can be done. Good Sonic content. When I saw that Roger Craig Smith wasn't going to be Sonic anymore that that meant that Sega had finally learned to never make another Sonic game or the return of Jaleel White. Ooh. Ooh.

Is he alive? I mean. Can he still do the voice? Probably. The fuck. He is alive. Heracles not that old. I don't know.

You never know who's alive anymore. Yeah. Bring back Jaleel White. Fuck it. Uh. I think with Sonic like they realize that. I don't know. It's just like yeah we don't need to make any games anymore.

It's just like people just love the character. So we'll just make whatever and not have to worry about the games anymore. I mean if it makes money, right? And here's the thing. If you just took all the fans of the newer fans of the 3D Sonic like world, the kids we want to appease there, and you just redirect their attention to cartoons, and then for the games you just make more mania.

And then you just slowly divide Sonic into classic video games and good 3D animation. Then everybody wins. Except Sonic Team. Because they have nothing to do with it. Oh and Valin, Valin Wonderworld is out. And that's apparently terrible too. I don't know.

It seems so boring. I watched footage of it from multiple people. I was excited about Valin Wonderworld and now it looks like such a yawn. That sucks. Yeah. I got to see the Twitter equivalent of like societal disappointment in real time with that. Because I had not been on Twitter for a bit so I was scrolling up.

I was like five people on my timeline. I was like five people on my timeline. Because I had not been on Twitter for a bit so I was scrolling up. I was like five people on my timeline. I was like downloading the Valin Wonderworld demo. Yeah. And then just person after person in a row just going, oh I'm not going to buy this.

Yeah. Oh this is trash. Burying from like, oof, this is kind of nothing to just the very polite, it's not for me. You know? But yeah man, that's such a bummer. Like on premise and character designs, you know, it looked strong. It looked like it had potential.

And then apparently just isn't delivering so far. And it looked like a great, yeah. Again, like Yuji Naka seems to knock it out of the park when it comes to character designs. You know? Like that's the strongest strength of Sonic, the hedgehog. Is that he's such a good character, you know? It's obviously too. And yeah, it's just too bad that all of this creativity was wasted on a game that just

doesn't really look like it's doing anything. I saw someone say it, it felt like a dream cascade. But like one of the ones that you never really bothered with, you know, not like Billy Hatcher, which was good. Yeah. Yeah. Man, that's a huge bummer. Like I want Yuji Naka to get a win on that.

Rodea the Sky Soldier still looks cool, you know? Anyway. Yeah. They also restructured a bunch of shit over at Sega. Ivy the Kiwi, man. And then. So we're just going to get a lot more Yakuza games now. Is that pretty much what it is?

Maybe. A fun fact that is known only to me. A lot of people don't know this, but when the restructuring happened, I felt a stab in my heart as somehow the restructuring killed whatever fucking virtual fighter project they were working on. Oh, man. And caused them to delete all work and fire everyone involved. Really?

I didn't catch that. Wow. Yeah, I felt it. I felt it in my heart. Oh, you just felt it. You just felt it. Okay. You just.

Yeah, no, that was, I set that up. I set that up. You just know. You didn't grab that part. Got you. That was like, uh, like, uh, like a Star Wars thing where they did the restructure and then. Yes.

I just sitting there going, oh, virtual fighter just died again. Yeah. Okay. It didn't. But that's true. I mean, to be fair, uh, someone tweeted out, um, someone tweeted out like just, so, hey, 2021, uh, and virtual fighter is not any closer to eSports than it was last year.

Yeah. Whatever the fuck that announcement was. Yeah. Anyway. I guess I'm surprised our virtual fighter is in the eSports. I don't know. I used to be a really good virtual fighter three player. So that's, I guess that's why I'm like, because I invested all that time into training.

Oh yeah. You're in there. Okay. Who'd you play? Yeah. I was, it was, it was, it was a two sisters. Jackie and Sarah. Whatever.

Definitely Jackie though. And, uh, yeah, it was definitely Jackie though that I was, that I was fucking with. This is a man that likes his flash kicks. Yeah. Yeah. It was a lot of flash kicks and double, double kicks. They never nerfed that. Buff yourself.

It's like 90. Buff yourself. It's never been nerfed. It's correct. It's wild. Buff yourself in real life. Absolutely fucking wild. Too bad.

Um, yeah. So I was going to look, I was looking into it and it seems, um, Ballon Wonder World was made by Ballon Company, which is a new studio. Um, alongside, uh, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, our zest, who worked on Mario Luigi, Bowser's Inside Story, uh, Hey Pikmin, Pucci Yoshi's Woolly World, uh, Mario Sonic Olympic Games. Okay. So they did a bunch of, um, Nintendo first party things and then Ballon Wonder World.

Although, uh, I believe most of the work was done by Ballon Company. So, yeah. Cause like in Ballon, you get different costumes, but then your character isn't able to jump once you have another costume on. You can only do whatever power the costume lets you. Right. Like the, the where, the where, the, um, Whirlwind or yeah, the little helicopter one, you know. Yeah.

I watched, uh, buttons like softlock himself by having the character that could jump, die, and then it reloaded him with a character that couldn't jump behind a series of obstacles that you had to jump over in the demo. And I was like, well, there, there was a time and place for, uh, those early 3D platformer games without, you know, much else to them. Uh, and I would say that that time and place ended around Earthworm Jim 3D. Yep. Hmm.

And there's no business making that these days without more going on. I would say. Yeah. That's why I was super lucky tail any good. I never played that one. Didn't I? The Xbox exclusive. Yeah.

It looked like one of those platforms. It just looked like a platformer. And I'm like, okay, I don't know what, what else is there? You know what was really fun? That was just a basic platformer is, um, the, the one that came with the, um, your PS VR, the playroom that was just controlling the robots and running around in the VR like world was so much fun, especially cause the perspective made it look like you were just controlling a toy in front of you in real life.

You know, like that alone adds a lot to it. The feeling of looking at a map and just controlling a little thing that's jumping around on it. You know, it's, it's, uh, and you can like lean from different angles and, you know, platform with your head is the floating camera. It was, it was, it was very cool. Yeah. Yeah. No, I love, I love the Astro VR games.

Like that was like, I was like, this is like, I haven't played a platformer this good since like Super Mario 64, you know, like that kind of feeling. Yeah. Yeah. It was very, very creative and innovative. Yeah. So it can be done. All right.

Let's take some letters and Mosey on out of here. Uh, you've been hanging in there and I appreciate that. It's been a couple of hours. Usually again, this show runs much longer than we want it to. So thank you. I gotta say, Gene, I hope I can speak for woolly as well as myself, but you are absolutely the best guest. The Castle Super Beast podcast has ever had.

Ever. Number one. Ever. Thank you. The bullet. Number one with a bullet. So, well, thanks for having me on guys. You know, just to be honest, I've been watching you guys for a long time.

So it's, you know, like when I interviewed woolly two years ago, I think for my let's play piece. I guess that was a while ago. Yeah. Yeah. Um, however, uh, it unfortunately, um, I have to inform you that you're also the worst guest. Um, I know.

It's just the way it works. Yeah. So step your shit up. I gotta say, we're kind of opening up like the most toxic conceivable thing for our podcast possible, because now any guest that ever comes on afterwards will be like, well, are they the worst one or the best? Oh, that's right. That's right.

And we can get a, we can get a tier ranking. So if you've got a little bit of, would you do a tier stream of all the, all the best CSB guests? There you go. Uh, if you've got a letter, you can send it over to castle super beast mail at gmail.com. That's castle super beast mail. That's castle. That.

Who's on first? You send it to the castle. Who? Who? Yeah. Who's on first? What are we talking about? We're, I don't know.

We're talking about, uh, a question coming in from dull says, dear cyber funk lily and Zankiew's dad, why fly when you can jump good? Recently, uh, one Patrick Boyvin has claimed that some games are terrible based solely on how it feels to jump. Normally I think Pat's crazy. Uh, like normal, except one of my friends told me that he can't stand playing Rayman legends or origins because he turned the game off after jumping, saying it felt awful. It's pretty interesting since the two of us played little big planet three and that game

has a ridiculous floaty jump, uh, on top of just being bad in general. Oh, your friend's crazy. Your friend's like the, the, the premise of this is fine, but your friend being cool with little big planets jumping and hates Raymans like he's fucking nuts. They're the same thing. He feels like. So the question is, they feel pretty similar. What's the criteria for a bad jump in a game?

Uh, what makes a jump so bad that the game's unplayable from dull? To me, to me, it's D.I. It's directional influence. Like if I cannot move while I'm airborne and to correct after a neutral jump or anything else, then that sucks. The floatiness is, is a secondary like behind the, the, the ability to D.I. You know, D.I. is important because like you go back to something like fucking God, Castlevania, Castlevania.

Yeah. And like that has the shittiest jump known to man. Like it's fun. It's unbelievable how fucking bad the original Castlevania jump is. You should try the one and like you hit that button. You should try the one and you're like, I'm dead. So yeah, but any. So like at the absolute lowest baseline, if you can hit a jump button and be like, I

just died before your character's feet even leave the ground, that's a bad jump. That's really, really bad. Um, if your character is so heavy, they don't leave the ground and you wonder why the game even has a jump button at all, such as last of us two has a jump button that I legit have no idea why it's in the game because your character comes one foot off the ground and you never actually jump anywhere. It's it's just actually the action prompt, which would be fine. Terrible job.

And then there's a whole course like a university course in between. You can get you got your your Blanca style jumps, which are high fast falling and Dante does them. Devil May Cry Jumping is a style jump. And then you have my personal top of the list of best jumps of all time in video games. Legend of Kage. Done and done. Whoa, that's a deep cut, man.

Holy shit. Legend of Kage. Best jumping in the history of video games. Wrap it up. Because you you jump for like 50 stories. Yeah, it's a Yuan Wu paint movie. You you jump as if you're on fucking strings doing an old kung fu action flick. It's incredible.

Wow, that's a deep cut. It's funny because when me and Gene were in DMs arguing about his terrible taste with Resident Evil 6, he did mention a different game, which despite having trash elements, I can absolutely understand why people like because the crackdown games are completely carried by their incredible jumps. Yeah. Otogi has a similar jump to crackdown as well. Otogi.

Yes. You fucking fly. You just fly. It's so. Otogi is no one ever talks about Otogi. You know what game has a terrible jump and might be like the gold standard for terrible like what are you doing jumps for is. No, it's going to be a game you don't even think about jumping in.

Jedi Outcast or Jedi Academy. Oh my God. Because the jump has no acceleration. It has no acceleration. You just go straight up. It's a float. Yeah. And you're moving the camera around to orient yourself in the battle.

That's how the DI works. You move the entire camera around, I guess. I guess. I don't know. It's terrible. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, when they ported it to switch, like I went back in and popped it in, you

know, and then tried it out for a bit and I had fun, but it is true. That jump was always rough, you know, and and they wanted to make it like force jumping. Right. Like that's what it is. So yeah. But like force jumping still have acceleration. And yeah. Yep.

Yep. We barely know what the force jump even looks like because they changed how it looks like like every fucking movie, you know, so. But like people know what it feels like to jump. It's a normal human action that every single person over the age of three has done. So you know that you accelerate. So when you don't accelerate at all or you accelerate too fast, you just go, ah, ah, there you go.

I hope that answers. Metroid, Metroid Prime had a great jump for being a first person game. Metroid Prime invented the good first person. Metroid games in general always have the best jumps. Like they're they're just the tightest fuck on that. Like it's it's kind of wild because Metroid Prime was the very first first person game that had a jump that went, you know what, this is really hard. What if we force the camera to look just a little bit down on the down slope of the

jump so that you actually see where you're going to land? Yep. Genius design decision. Done. Absolutely. Yep. There you go. And like again, this year's weekend.

You can wax poetic on jumps for a while. You could you could literally do an entire like 100 episode podcast series on the the the acceleration and inertial drift of a jump. Is it to hop? Can you, you know, get extra height by holding it down? Do you get a floaty feel like Michael Jordan Chaos in Windy City? Because that game is all about the jump man. You know, you can go you can go a million places.

All right. But I think that answers the question. We got one coming in here from Nick who says, dear alien and predator, while the other NFL teams like Philly and Cleveland will put D batteries and snowballs and throw them at glass and glass bottles at refs. The bills will throw themselves through flaming tables. They've had a 17 year playoff drought and they haven't won a playoff game in 25 years. So the fans turn up every game.

And for the past few years, they've developed the name bills mafia. So they started hurling themselves and each other off of RVs into flaming tables. And it's gotten so popular that even elected officials are doing it. So that's like a fucking death call, man. That's that's get RKO through a flaming table to support your team. Yeah, that will lose. Like you got to admire the dedication at the very least to support them. They're real.

They're real as fuck about it. You know, say what you will. At this point, it's practically better if they keep losing to see how far we can escalate it. It's always wild to me to think about the pieces of sports, like, you know, popular regular ass human being sports, the parts of that culture that somehow like reach out to me and somehow latch into my brain, even though I'm actively not paying attention. Like when you're describing the bills and the bills mafia being insane, my brain goes to like what else do I know about other football teams?

And the only thing I come up with is apparently the Oakland Raiders fans are like all psychotic criminals. Raiders fans are fucking criminals. Absolutely. Like that's the only thing that comes up and I'm like, I don't even know where I got that. I don't know where I picked that up. People wearing people wearing Raiders jerseys are dangerous and not to be trifled with. That's a that's a random battle waiting to happen. Absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I used to play and follow football back in the day. So, you know, I can tell you a thing or two, but that is that's that's correct. That is not a bad takeaway. You've nailed it. And you would think that that would be something that like I don't know the XFL teams would have associated with them. As that's making a comeback. Yeah, you think apparently next year. 22.

Again, the NFL is making a comeback. And I believe this time it's been purchased by Dwayne The Rock Johnson. Anyway, sure. Correct. That's right. You're totally right. You're totally right. That's it.

Sure. Yeah. All right. All right. Troy says I'm going to keep sending this until it gets read. I'm goddamn committed. I want to talk about how fucking rad anamorphosis. I feel like no one talks about it.

And besides the morphing transitional images, I always thought it was cool in the sense that it was teenagers turning into animals that get to fight aliens and save the world. But I was only when I got older that I realized how crazy it actually was. Teenagers committed guerrilla warfare against an empire constantly losing limbs or watching people get viciously murdered. One of the alien species are described as giant millipedes that devour anything thrown in their path with the thousands of teeth they have. The time they killed those genetically engineered hunter killer creatures with a giant cosmetic eye that had the minds of children. The whole David DeBackel where a new initiate tried to kill them just to get his family back from the alien empire. And that time to bias the dude stuck as a hawk for the rest of his life spent a whole book being tortured. Anamorphosis fucking rad.

It needs to be appreciated. That's all I'm saying. That sounds brutal. What about the Photoshop when you take your friend and then slowly turn them into a rat on the cover of a fake anamorphosis. Done. And then you send it to them and you're like haha you're a rat man and that's it. It's over. I hear all that but also here's this Photoshop though.

Shout out to Troy I didn't realize anamorphosis was so brutal it sounds like fucking berserk or some shit you know. I actually did know that anamorphosis was fucking brutal because I would make fun of anamorphosis and then people go anamorphosis has genocide in it. Okay but then what then where is the where's the quadrilogy in this post hunger games Harry Potter world. Where's the big movie adaptation too dark for the kids starring a number of. Yeah I wish we lived in a world where people were just referencing anamorphosis all the time as opposed to Harry Potter you know. Now we've been a lot more funny. And then we'd have animated gifs and we'd have animated gifs of celebrities turning into animals. Exactly instead of you know the arguments about which house of Hogwarts or whatever are we in or whatever you know.

Or literally anything that comes out of J.K. is fucking stupid. Facts about the anamorphosis series that you don't want to know that happened way later after the book series is finished. I was about to say something short-sighted which was I would rather listen to anything the anamorphosis writers had to say than anything J.K. has to say but I don't know. You don't know it's true you don't know you don't know you never know what are those writers. Might have looked at the transformation sequence and one of those middle ones they might have went I like that one. Let's write about that one for a while the fifth step in the series of seven. That's the right step. Maybe.

All right well hey he got it he got it done good job you got your anamorphosis on the on the podcast. Hey Applegate is cool and based. All right then I would rather hit listen to anything K. Applegate would have to say than literally anything J.K. Wait what. There you go. Anamorphosis based in red pills. What do you say. No it's just based.

It's just boy. Oh no. All right. And last one here coming in. Black art says hey castle smooth balls. Just wondering what is Reggie's role in all of the Game Stonk news is he still on the board. Do you think he somehow has suspended gravity using dark Nintendo art so that he can get more money in art with time on the clock. Feels like we probably got paid in some capacity with the stocks.

So I was talking to my Reggie about this last week and I'm thinking like the plan was for Reggie to dive in to the burning plane. Fill the bag up with money and dive out with the parachute before it blew up in midair and hit the ground. However what if the plane gets a midair pit stop crew to fix it up like like like after burner or any of those other things and code it with dive and then turn it into a rocket ship that goes to the moon while he's still on it. Was Reggie prepared for this. Of course he was. He's got a fucking space suit in his backpack and he puts it on and prepares Reggie's a genius. I believe he saw all of this coming and if he didn't he's more than ready to roll with the punches.

If I was Reggie Fesame what I would do is immediately quit quit today get the fuck out of there and then start shopping myself around to different bigger companies going I'm the guy did that increased the stock value. Yeah. I was last at by 8000 on a high note. Leave on a high note. That's it. Yeah people have been asking like why is Reggie quiet and all this but like you got to remember Reggie's quite pretty often. He is.

He doesn't want to see a lot. Also what's he supposed to say thanks for the money. Yeah exactly. I don't know what he's supposed to say anyways you know. Look he didn't say he didn't come out and say anything when the fucking covid stories were coming out. He what's one of these is not going to say anything now. Certainly. No.

No yeah. And I talked to him when the covid stories came out and he was like no I don't have anything to say and it's like yeah. I don't know what can you say. Was Reggie Fesame behind the discovery of the short sell. Oh my god. Reggie Fesame is secretly deep fucking value the whole time. Never mind that we saw who he was. Yeah sure.

No I mean his Twitter like a day or two ago was just talking about like hey what was your favorite classic Nintendo console. So you know he's he's just whatever he's doing he's he's doing it behind the scenes. So who knows. Reggie has a real talent. I remember when Jeff Keely interviewed him at E3 like four years ago. And I forget the series of questions but Jeff was actually quite like vicious. And it was it was that old Penny Arcade comic of hey Reggie why is your company a bunch of stupid bullshit. And then Reggie would get like a big smile and go man I'm so excited for the new Metroid game coming out.

Like it would just it would just slide off of his fucking body. It's like even if you were able to physically corner him and go how many people do you think died as a result of your retail bullshit. Oh man that stock price is going real up how are we really happy with what we've done lately. It's like it's taking ass and taking names Pat. Two things. Just ask you what your Animal Crossing Island is like. Yeah it's like there's not much you can do with somebody who just completely refuses to answer your question at all. Yeah and then he's good at that.

He's good. He's good at dodging the question. He knows he knows which question dodge and he will very obviously dodge it. And that's that's all he can do. Yeah and I want to say he comes from the school of Perrin Kaplan back in the day who was the ultimate Jedi master of this is not the question you want to ask me. And we're bringing the conversation somewhere else and you won't even get a chance to follow up. Like Jean you're a professional. I imagine you've done interviews in which whoever you were talking to just didn't want to tell you anything that you wanted to know.

And as a professional I assume that it is frowned upon to grab them by their lapel and go answer my fucking question. Do you tell me something. No you don't do that. You don't really do that now. Yeah. I haven't really done that. So it's like what are you what are you going to do. Yeah.

I'm sure I'm sure. Reggie is like Vampire Lady tall. So first of all. Yeah. Like what the fuck am I going to do to Reggie. You know. It's gigantic. Yeah.

You're right. He's he's he is real life Mr. X. You know. So honestly though I mean I'm sure you know Jean can tell you but like the tactic of whenever you see it when someone's doing an interview and it's clearly not going in the direction of like the person actually answering anything where you just kind of you wait longer after the silence to just go like anything anything else to add without actually saying it. You just you're going to add to that. No. And just going like OK but are we going to answer the question.

And then they kind of have to play the line. And if they go back to the same line two or three times the reader knows that you dug you did your your diligence you tried. You know they're not going to go anywhere. The conversation is not going to not going to produce any results going further down this line. And the person clearly you know what they're what they their refusal to move is is obvious. You know you're right though. I think Simon's does play a role in getting people to speak up because people if it's too quiet for too long especially if you're on air then they might feel like they feel obligated to fill some time so they might say end up saying some stupid shit afterwards. So you know there's that too.

I think it was a written interview. I want to say game informer but I'm not super sure where they're interviewing some leads behind the division to when that was being shown at some show. And the question was like are you really telling me there's no politics in this game. And I know no no we're just asking it's just a fun little fantasy about what could happen in Washington. And the interviewer goes like this is about a civil war in the United States and it takes place in downtown Washington D.C. amongst the total dissolution of the U.S. government. And you're telling me it's not political. It's like no it's just a fun video game. It's like OK.

The bad guy was the vice president for fuck's sake you know. Well they also did that shit to me. Activision when I went when they were putting out Call of Duty Cold War and I was like you know. Sorry you just Ronald Reagan. Oh sorry. Can you all hear me. Yep. Go ahead.

You're just cutting out a little bit. Yeah. No that's what they did. That's what they did. Activision when I interviewed them for Call of Duty Cold War and they showed Ronald Reagan and I was like wow Ronald Reagan in really really super high death. Do you realize that a lot of people are talking about Ronald Reagan these days. What kind of what kind of choices did you make for Ronald Reagan. And then they just completely switched up that question to the devs and saying what kind of research did you do in Reagan and other historical factor figures.

And it's like that was not my question. So you know I remember giggling when I saw Reagan come out onto the screen and like all the jokes about like Reagan's going to send Mason in to drop crack into the inner cities. Or deploy the AIDS virus. Or like whatever. Yeah. I mean what's upon a time there was the you know George Washington was a character in an Assassin's Creed game and there was a crazy what if campaign the tyranny of Washington. What if he became the. I loved it.

It was great. Yeah. Actually. Great. I did a piece last week about the five best presidents in video games. Number one of course was. Michael Wilson. Michael Wilson.

Of course. I remember free. The timing was so perfect because you had put that article out and then I announced that you were coming on the podcast and some people didn't know who you were. So they went and found your Twitter and then that was the article you were pimping. Yeah. And then they got to the end and saw Michael Wilson's number one. OK. No this guy's cool.

He gets it. Yeah. It's my gamer credit. Like yes I have played middle wolf chaos many times. I'm a from soft OG. So please do not front. God what was that game. I did not know that George Sears's fucking swords were named Democrat.

Yeah. I did not know that. Yeah they were. I did not know that. Yeah they were. Yeah. Sterling put that out of all the things I know and just to I'm surprised I never figured it out either. That's amazing.

God fuck something is there's a game. And I don't remember what it's called Liberation Maiden for the 3DS. I'll fight for my people. The anime girl is the president of the United States. And she gets in her ship robot and she shoots and fucking schmups to save the day. Oh I missed it. That sounds perfect. Wow.

Yeah. Damn. Yeah. Fuck it. Just waves of that. Yeah. Anyway. Um.

That that that thing deserved that that that franchise deserved a bit more from grasshopper. And we do need an anime girl president though. Mm hmm. Someday. Well you know the Tuber as president in the future of guilty gear lore there is. In the filibuster continuing the president of the United States. Erica Martholomew is an anime girl that leads the nation of America before Vernon takes over. You see.

This is going to be a good series. I can tell already. We're going to get into it baby. The ship side story where he where he hangs out with the president. You know since he wants to be a president himself. So. Yeah. Look forward to more guilty gear lore.

We'll crack that note and discuss the butterfly the butterfly and her gale. Coming soon to woolly versus. That's what you signed up for. Guilty gear lore seems as impenetrable impenetrable to me as like fate grand order lore. Just the fate. It's about the same. They seem like the same thing. And I'm sure they're probably in the same universe.

It's just more rock. Well. But it's the same thing. But I'm doing my best. And so far people have been happy with the results. And I've been hired to explain the shit to you. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to fuck.

There's something about a franchise that even though they put like an encyclopedia in their games about the lore, they're like we need to hire somebody to explain this to people. Can't be internal. No one in here in the company can do it. We have to go get somebody else. Like you're not going to go fucking listen to an audio drama in the back of an HMV somewhere in Japan to find out the truth about Slayer founding the assassins guilds. What the fuck?

You know, you're not going to do that. Let me do it for you. Help me help you. All right. Oh fuck everything. Capcom literally just put out a fucking statement about Lady Dimitrescu. Okay. Go on.

Hi everyone. I'm Tomonori Takano, art director on Resident Evil Village. I wanted to use this opportunity to publicly reflect on the outpouring of positivity we've received from the fans on our latest announcement. As a rep of the development team, thank you to all the fans who continue to follow us. Most recently, Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters have received a fair amount of attention, far more than we anticipated. It's great that they're able to take the spotlight as icons of Resident Evil Village.

Lady Dimitrescu especially has received much fanfare both domestically and overseas, which has made all of us in the development team extremely happy. I hear her height is something of interest and the following is in bold. To include her hat and high heels, she is 2.9 meters, approximately 9 feet 6 inches tall. These bewitching vampiric characters are relentless in their pursuit of Ethan, and I can't wait for you to meet them yourselves when you enter Castle Dimitrescu in May. They absolutely fucking made a press statement to let all the thirsty big mommy milker people know exactly how many inches that big woman is.

Let's clarify how much woman she is. I love it. Yes, in a sub tweet. P.S., please send us all of your ponds, zip them up in a folder and send them. We are very interested and we would like to collect them. Thank you. Yoko Taro has balls and no one can say he doesn't. God bless that man.

Yeah. Oh yeah, that's right. He did do that. Yoko Taro came out and said, I love this team. Hentai, keep making it and please send them to me. There's like a fucking hero champion. We now have a full spectrum of how to deal with the community thirsting over your bullshit. You have the Yoko Taro all the way on one side going, send me that shit.

You've got Capcom going, hey everybody, here's some stats you might want to know about just in case. And then on the far ass side, you have the Bowsette Nintendo shit. Yeah. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? I don't know what you're talking about. No, the hat only works on Toadette. It only works on Toadette.

Oh man. Don't know what you're talking about. Bowsette. Now to be fair, Bowsette was never real, right? That was not a character that people got after because it existed, like it never existed. But it is the same idea though. But if Nintendo did go either route of Capcom or Yoko Taro, then we would get at least a Bowsette render, right? Yeah, if Nintendo had a Yoko Taro, at least one Yoko Taro-esque person working there,

you would have seen a Bowsette fucking downloadable game in like six months. Or at the, yeah, like you said, like a render, you know, at the bare minimum, like something. That's how you just capitalizing on the hype train, but... I mean, Resident Evil's always been pretty sexy though, you know, Ada Wong and... It's always been pretty sexy and hilariously sexless. Yeah. Because Leon never gets laid. Yeah, I think Nintendo is content to completely, like, you know, keep their games as child-friendly as possible.

But every once in a while, slip in a Peach in a motorcycle outfit for Mario Kart, you know? Or other little things here and there where it's like, you didn't expect it, but here's Zero Suit Samus. Anyway, don't worry about that. Nintendo, you know, and you're like, okay, but you did it. Yeah. So, straight up, a friend of mine just got emailed by fucking Robin Hood, telling them, no, we totally, we quote, we didn't want to stop people from buying stocks and we certainly weren't trying to help the hedge funds. No, sir.

And it's like this big, like, begging apology letter. Yeah. It's fucking embarrassing. You can go see some wonderful CEO interviews with them too, with the dude getting on there and being like, nah, promise, swear. I'll say this as we go. In Canada, we don't have Robin Hood, but there's another major app called Wealth Simple. And in their credit, they came out and put a statement out that basically said, hey, lots of crazy stuff going on with the stock market recently.

Just so you guys know, well, we're not going to restrict anything or stop anything from going through. But if you've never done this before, you should know this and this and this. And here's some info about how to, you know, do more secure investments. And here's some info about what this means. And there's a place you can call. We can help you figure out all of this stuff if you're getting into it for the first time. Make your own decisions. But here's some resources if you don't know too much.

And then that was it. That's a, that's appropriate because 100% it's like you look at this and you go to data and you're like, let's not go crazy. You can totally broken like and broken yourself doing this shit. Yeah, you're doing just they respond. That's a very responsible message that just was like, yeah, this is nuts. We know here, if it's your first time, we can help you out with that. And that was about it.

You know, so cheers to that with, with Canada, which we're otherwise pretty rough on that whole thing. Because Canada is like hyper regulated in a lot of ways where like, like some banks literally will not let you even go crypto. For example, like you, there are banks in Canada that are like, you cannot transfer your money over to crypto directly through us. You have to find some other person to do it because fuck you, you know, so sometimes it's great. Sometimes it sucks, but that's what it is. Anyway, we'll leave it there, folks. Again, thank you for hanging in there. It's, it's quite the, the, the accomplishment to hit that four hour mark with us and still doing it.

So sorry that these things can go along and exhausting, but it was a great time. I'm in. Jean does like real work. I know. I know it's not today, apparently. But hey, I appreciate it being part of the, the woolly buster today. No problem. No problem.

No problem. Thank you for listening while Pat walked away during my guilty gear overture segment. You know, I, I can still hear you in the headphones no matter where I am in the house, but I want to, I want to point out that when you were about 15 seconds in your guilty gear shit, I was pissing. Okay. All right. It helped me go. Cause when I think about guilty gear overture, I'm like, I just gets the, gets the. Zoom some of the quids out of my, out of this body.

The fight or flight response kicks in. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Take care, everybody. We'll see you next week. Peace out. Thanks for watching chat.

Take care, guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.