Castle Super Beast - CSB 128: Occupy Sodom and Gomorrah

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

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Music Music Music Hello. Good morning. Well, that's actually good afternoon. Whatever. My day has started.

How are you doing today, Willie? Not too bad. How are you feeling? I'm all right. I got a crick in my neck. Oh, no. Yeah, it's when you like change beds, then you also have to like change pillows sometimes and things. And like, I have a bit of a very particular setup

because my hair makes it so that like to get my head comfortable, the pillow needs to have the right amount of give. And it's a whole to do, unfortunately. Now, I have a question to ask you, not just as a person who doesn't have dreads, but as a person who doesn't really have any hair to speak of whatsoever. You have a significant amount of hair like, you know, on the back end. Does that not function as like an emergency pillow?

It does. But the thing is, is that it moves around, obviously. And I mean, if I can bandana it up, but like, yeah, it can serve as a pillow. But like, it's not an, I used to be able to kind of just sleep anywhere under any conditions. I remember that. And I guess time and age have made that a bit harder to do. Like now the problem is like the padding of the hair is still nice, but sometimes it's like not enough on its own.

So you need something to kind of also push up enough. And I also, I'm a side sleeper. So I, so I need enough elevation off of the, you know, from my shoulder to my neck. Like there's not enough hair to really pack in my head laying down, you know, so I need to have something that's just strong enough to keep my spine straight. And the, the search for the proper configuration is, is tricky. I went to bed the other night and Paige had gone to bed earlier and stolen my pillow. And we have different pillows.

And it was a nightmare because I did not want to wake her, but and her pillow is fine. But it wasn't my pillow. Yeah. And so for like an hour, I was like, this is fucking, God damn it's the wrong, my head's at the wrong fuck. Yeah, I had, yeah, it's, it's, it's a fucking ordeal. Um, I ended up getting one that is like, like they have these like, these ones that have a dip in the middle.

So imagine a normal pillow, except you almost create a donut like the whole in the middle. But it's not a full hole. It's just like way flattened out and that basically your neck can like go into the fat part and then the rest of your head can sink into the center. And like that's doing all right, but still have it waking up with little neck cricks. You know, so, um, yeah, that's, that's currently my adventure. Well, Grick and the neck isn't the end of the world, but it is that constant annoyance. I feel like there's a really specific kind of chronic pain that is the worst, which is like it hurts,

but sometimes it hurts just a little enough that you forgot it was there. Yeah. So that you can surprise yourself with the, oh, right. Yeah. And it goes away, you know, and then it's like after a couple, like an hour or two, so you kind of forget about it. Um, I also have a thing where because of the way, I don't know, just because of the way, like my apartment is most of the time when punch mom comes to talk, she's always on my left

and she will constantly come from like, you know, what is basically like 10 o'clock, you know, and so I'm always turning my head that way to face her to talk to her for a bunch. And then I read and then after a long conversation, I go, fuck me. Like my head was locked to this way for so long. So like now I've kind of just gotten into like, I'm just going to turn away and like, please come stand over here or sit over here. If this conversation just passed a couple seconds, you know, just stare straight down and talk to the floor.

There's that too. There is that too. The benefits of looking away while you talk is that you can do cool anime lines. You know, well, not having eye contact. You can hold a fist up to emphasize. Do you do cool anime lines in your apartment? Well, I don't, but I wish I wish I did. I don't believe you.

I think you've done them. I've definitely think you've I've definitely explained what they were to her. And then like, did the walk away and stop with my back turned and then turn my head slightly to give the last final line. And then she's like, okay, I know, I know what this stupid shit is now that I've seen that, I know exactly what you're talking about. And you have to wonder to fly. I'm like looking at that going like, you know, I bet you that was just the product

of this is the easiest thing to animate. We can draw. Oh yeah. Right. People facing away from each other, having these conversations and anime is just because we can put the cell here and the cell there and have them slide and that's all it was. And now it's an actual conversational trope. I hate it.

I don't think there's any other medium that like has a completely different way of conversing that is like synonymous with the the the style. I'm trying to think musicals, I guess, because musicals just break into song and no one knows if they're diegetic or not. Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking of like the wrestling microphone discussion from a distance in which you can barely see the other person. Yeah. Does that count?

No, but that doesn't that doesn't strike me as weird because they everyone that's that's using a mic and wrestling is aware that there's an audience and they're putting on a show for them. Right. And they're aware that and like their beef is because they want to be strongest in the eyes of the crowd. So that that they're still within the realm of like what is what is normal, you know, there's no behavior where no one's around and then they're pulling their microphones

out and doing that. You know, that's the thing here is that like it's like why would you why would you talk to someone with your back turned in a way where they can't hear you? You know, I want to say Shazam at the in the climax fight did a really great job of making fun of one of those moments where they're having a flying conversation from super far away. And it's like here. God damn thing.

Yeah. Why and why would you, you know, and that's something that's huge too is just like distance meaning nothing in in stories or I think my favorite. I want to say Eli was the first person to point it out to me in one of his videos, but I've seen it elsewhere, which is like, OK, here's a quote from Gohan saying that Vegeta and whoever are throwing punches faster than the speed of light. Now let's cut to Vegeta talking to his opponent. Mm hmm.

Mm hmm. And what? Yeah. No, that's no. No, that's a lie. Yeah. That is a fucking lie. No time.

You can't you can't ever hold time accountable in these things. We've already discussed like Jojo thought time, you know, and like, yeah, mid fight time where someone's like got their hands up and they're in the middle of blocking and they're looking for an opening like Epo time, you know what I mean? And you're just like, yeah, like, no, you can't that that time is always broken forever in in these fights. But volume is one of those things that like never gets explained, but it's there. And I guess the idea is like, if you're just like a strong enough person, you have amazing hearing.

So like, if someone is standing on a cliffside watching as two other people are fighting below, like whatever that person on the cliffside says is totally can be heard, you know, by the people fighting below, or if there's a moment where one of them like even like has a I'm coming for you next, they can absolutely have a real conversation as Dio stands up there and Jonathan stands below. Makes no sense, but it's a thing. Time and space in the anime medium are suggestions. Yeah, implications.

Anyway, so to avoid neck crick, I usually start turning away. That's my move. Why don't you just like only use your eyes for like a day? Like refuse to turn your head for any reason. So it's either your whole torso like a robot or just your eyes. Can you do a modified robot all day? I mean, if I had a neck injury, I'd have to. So I can't imagine it being that hard.

For a second, I thought you meant have a conversation just using your eyes. And then I was like, what are you talking about? No, no, no, that's that's hard. That's difficult. No, no, I mean, like just just refuse to move your neck all day. How about we try having a conversation just using our fighting intent and seeing if we can, we can reach each other's words that way. By entering the alternate realm.

This is the guy that doesn't say anime lines around his house, everybody. Yeah, I totally believe you. So what have you been doing with your week aside from totally not saying anime lines inside your house? This week in particular was yeah, pretty fun. Got some got some disco in there working our way through to the to the what I would assume would be the finale. I clicked I clicked in one of your YouTube videos the other day and I saw you talking to the hardcore bunch. That's a huge side quest. That's a huge side that that side quest is so massive that it like I feel like both in universe and out of universe for the player.

It sidetracks the investigation into a completely new game. Yeah, for a couple hours. Yeah, no, it does. It does. We were locked in there for a while. The entire church is almost like an alternate campaign. Wild, but very cool, very, very cool. And yeah, I mean, you know, not much else to say until like we we get there.

So disco Elysium is is still amazing. Samurai gun to is out in early access and we had a salt party episode and popped that in. For a little bit. And man, that is a really fun game. And that's a really fun sequel to a fun game. And I don't know if you remember Samurai gun one, but it was. I barely do. I barely, barely, barely do.

So it was one of the platform fighters that we played for like this comes back in the day up right now. Yeah, pixel art. You have a slash button for your sword. You have a bullet button for your shooting and you can slash the bullets back at your opponents. Oh, I remember this now. Yeah, yeah. Jumping very fast, very like random stage select kind of just going on a quick roulette kind of thing. And it was just a yeah, it's just a really fun, simple game where you jumped off the walls and slashed each other and shit.

Really, really cool. Always had a good fun. And it was a game that was like you could play four people go kind of party mode on it or you could do duels. And if you had like two people that were like even scored at the end, then they would do like a showdown and like a bamboo field or something like that, you know. So Samurai gun super rad and it had like a nice music to now the second the sequel takes that keeps the art style expands on it by making a couple of different characters that have like. Unique traits to them adds a really cool graphic novel and like art style to the like full art and the menus and such adds an adventure mode and just builds on top of what was there. And the overwhelming feeling I got was, God damn, I wish this is what Nidhogg to was. Because it did for Samurai.

I have the look on my face. I don't know. It's like it's an expression. It's an expression of pain. It's what everyone hoped Nidhogg to would be, you know, and it just it takes what you love builds on top of it, adds a little more depth for like duels and just. Yeah, everything it does compliments what it was to begin with, you know. So so some of the the the important additions is before you used to have three bullets and then you'd slash you could slash them back to to return to sender and things like that. Now you also have a dash button that uses a bullet.

OK, and that dash are your bullets limited three. Yeah, OK. But that dash now modifies any actions that you do within it. So you can shoot a bullet. And then slash it immediately afterwards will like ultra kill style to create a wobbling bullet that moves slower. Or you can dash and while you're dashing you can shoot to get a super bullet that moves ultra fast. You know, and like goes through things and stuff. Then you can try to deflect a super bullet, but you'll get knocked over without dying.

You get staggered or you can dash slash to super deflect it back. You know, and like there's a whole little secondary thing happening there where by introducing the dash button and when you when you are dashing you are invulnerable for those those frames. You have I frames on them on that movement. So you have a nice little like, oh fuck, explosive move, explosive option. And it also allows you when you use the dash to shoot on diagonals. OK, so in the original game, what did you have? I feel like you had jump, shoot and slash. Correct.

This is a massive increase in complexity. And you had cardinal directions. You had you are rather you had four directions that you were operating with by using the dash button here. You create eight as an operator, but you it spends a limited resource, of course, to do it really cool. You know, if you you can't dash through a bullet, you still have to reflect it, but like you can dash through sword swipes and things like that. So this is a really simple and awesome addition to what was a, you know, three but three options before as you listed. Here's a fourth one. Yeah, the fourth one seems like it's not it's not additive.

It's multiplicative to the interaction base. Exactly, but it doesn't take away what was there before. And that is an it's a perfect example of like building a sequel, you know, expanding on what was there. Furthermore, unique characters. So you've got like Hayao, who's like a wolf man, and he's faster than most of the cast and he can climb walls. You've got a ghost, a girl that can she disappears when she does her dash for a couple seconds. So then you can like stealth up on people or you can do a ghost bull old spirit. Yeah, so her dash bullet is invisible, you know, you've got a golem who can create like a really strong wobble bullet.

And just all, you know, all these little just, again, tweaks and character specific things and all of that is. Yeah, it just comes together really, really well. So it's an early access right now. We tried it out for a bit and then on Salt Party. And then we did adventure mode, which is also not finished, but it's co-op, you know, three players on a map running around jumping into different stages and fighting off, you know, a room full of enemies. You know, with different challenges and configurations and items you can unlock and different weapon switching that you can get as well. So yeah, man, it's just a really, really solid sequel, it seems like so far. And I expect if they keep building what they got here, it's going to be a fucking hell of a party game.

Just a great sequel to something that was very solid and try not to think about Nidhogg too. So I was able to answer my own question because I had remembered Samurai Gun and I had remembered going home and been like, oh, it's only local play. And I went to the Samurai Gun 2 webpage and discovered an online PVP and shared split screen PVP options as well as online co-op. Yes. Oh man, thank God. I felt like that was a huge kneecap for a lot of these games. Well, do you remember a game? Oh God, I want to say it was called Stardust Crusaders, but that's not what it was.

It was a mecha game. I do. Yes, but it was similar to that. Stardust Vanguard. Yes. And I was like, wow, what a great game. I'm going to go home and play it with no one. Shit.

Like what a bummer. There are a lot of these really good indie games that are like these, I don't know what to call them, like screen fighters or something where you're a very tiny person. Yeah, platform fighter. You know, platform fighters and party games. Yeah. I mean, the thing is like the era of like the couch fun for these things has definitely changed, you know, when you're putting it out. Because this is also a Switch game, right, Samurai Gun 2. And like on Switch, it makes a ton of sense because it's like, yeah, it's a fucking switch.

You're going to grab a Joy-Con and play it, you know. But yeah, online is again really crucial nowadays for what's going on. And this fortunately does have it. Also, I didn't know this, but I see here designed by Bo Blythe, co-creator of Hyper Light Drifter. So the style is now... That makes perfect sense. Exactly. Hyper Light Drifter absolutely shares like feel with Samurai Gun.

Tons of style. I was just talking about Hyper Light Drifter like two days ago and was like, man, that game's fucking incredible. I feel like even though it was like one of the big Kickstarter, like look at this indie game. Wow, Hyper Light, right? When it came out, it didn't get the pop that it deserved, but man, that game's awesome. So I wonder, to me, that represents the visual style of the era it's from that will never age. Not all pixel art... Well, depends who you ask.

I guess, if it's someone who's like, fuck all sprites or whatever, but not counting silly strawman people. I feel like some pixel art ages. Not all pixel art is amazing and stands the forever test of time. Clearly, you see Sonic go through different games and looks better over time. Mario looks better over time through different games. But Hyper Light is just absolutely gorgeous. And I feel like that is pretty much like capping what you're doing with pixel art quality. When you're hitting that old PC style, insane amounts of almost fractal detail on every energy blast

and every little lighting, specular highlight in the background and things like that, it's really, really pretty. Yeah, Hyper Light also, it evokes a maybe Super Nintendo era, but it's one of those games that it's like, dude, your Super Nintendo would shoot you with a gun if you tried to put this in it. The color palette alone would melt that fucking thing. So to me, and I guess, you know what, to avoid having this come across like super insane or whatever, I'll say to me personally, that represents a thing that will never age. That's a fucking perfect quality of sprite art. I remember having what might be the pettiest argument I've ever had,

one that I just was so of disbelief that I couldn't believe it, was right after one of the old podcasts with one of you guys in which they described they didn't care for Hyper Light Drifter because it was just 2D animation and it wasn't doing anything new, so they didn't care about it at all. Wow. It looked like they didn't try very hard because all they did was use 2D sprites. Okay. And I was just like, but it looks good.

It looks good. So to me, this is a take that era, take that style, and you can freeze it forever with this level of glory and detail in your sprite animation. When you take it up to 3D, for me, that becomes something closer to the Daytona USA style 3D, the Jet Set Radio style 3D, you know, bomb rush cyber funk now capturing a lot of that energy. That style of 3D where you have a particularly cel-shaded kind of like bright flat texture, to me, is like a perfect encapsulation of low-poly era. Have you seen the Nocturne re-release on PC or Switch or whatever?

I'm pretty sure I have, but let's pull it up. Like, it is very, it's not bright because it's SMT, but it's flat. And as a result, like it stood the test of time pretty goddamn well. Like clean up the edges and like it looks like it's a dedicated style rather than a technical limitation. Right. Okay. Yeah, it still has the gradients on its texture work, but like that goes with the Kaneko art style. Heavy gradients. Yeah, but you know what I mean, right?

I see what you're talking about. If you made it flat and it is easier when you make it bright, like Mega Man Legends is a really good example where that looks great right now. Mega Man Legends is actually the right example. Thank you. That's what my brain wanted to really pull towards. I just, I wasn't, I wasn't saying that. Exactly. So flat and it's bright. So, so Hyper Light Drifter, Mega Man Legends, right? These are like fucking just like, like pinnacle style representation.

And I guess I'm like, what other generations moving forward have have that level of like forever permanent, perfect clarity? I'm probably not wording this as best as I can, but I want you to try and interpret my energy here. So two things. One, I'd like to mention to you, Woolly, that there is a buzz slash cable situation going on with your microphone. Give me a moment. Okay. So it's not fixed. I muted myself so I can fix it. So hold on a moment. You can still hear it, right? I can't hear it. Okay.

It was, I'm just looking at our chat going, ah, the buzz. Okay. Okay, we're good. Okay. And I don't know, man. So, like, was seventh generation the 360 PS3 era? Fourth was Super Nintendo. So, um, I feel like that's the seventh. Well, regardless, let's just, I'll just skip it. The 360 PS3 era, um, looking back on it, um, fucking sucked ass and was the worst era of video games ever and had like all the shittiest business shits ever in them.

And everything ran like shit. Okay. I remember having this debate with you now because I was like, that's nuts because of how much fun I got out of Xbox Live Arcade and how much fun I had with 360. Right. And I think it came down to, I was looking at different parts of the industry from you and a bunch of the trends that we have now that are made mainline industry shit that suck. I did not give a wholehearted fuck about in that era. I was playing my fun shit. So, I want to point out that, like, for example, the 360 era was the invention of the online pass, right?

That was terrible. That was god-awful. Shovelware started becoming a thing around then. The, um, the awful movie tie-in brash era as well of games that, movie tie-in games always came out and always sucked, but, like, they got, their power grew during that era and you're not wrong about that. Like, the, the, the, when I say everything like shit, I really mean it. Like, even, even the PS4, Xbox One era of games where games ran bad, like, it was to be assumed every single game you played was going to run like shit. And because of Call of Duty, that was, like, the brown-gray shooter era where games didn't have color.

Like, the average game I played was like, ugh, and Kinect was that generation. It was that generation as well. And here's the other thing, a lot of what I fondly enjoyed were, were high res ports of Dreamcast games. Yeah, of course you did. Soul Calibur and, and Virtua On and, like, all the res. Yeah, you made an XBLA and those were indie games and ports of old console games. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally, you know. Um, but the era of bald protagonist men was one that I definitely, you know, didn't pay attention to, or rather didn't care much for.

When I'm thinking of, like, I loved it, did its thing. When I, when I'm thinking of, like, the 360 era, I think of, like, games like Fracture and Quantum Theory. Like, I think of, like, poorly optimized Unreal Engine 3 store bought assets. Right. I don't think that is going to be a, I'll remember those times, kind of visual aesthetic. But what I'm, what my question is actually trying to, to, to find is within the era, there are peers to the, to, to Mega Man Legends and Hyper Light Drifter that are trash as well. What I'm thinking about is, like, what if anything can approach, like, a perfect representation of that era? Honestly, I have one example.

Um, I, I fell off it recently, but I had been playing a lot of Scarlet Nexus a few weeks ago. And that's a Vita game. Huh. That's a straight up, like, anime, specific brand of anime with colored lines. Um, visual novel aesthetic, specific action controls Vita game that would sit right next to, like, God Eater or, uh, Freedom Wars or something like that. But, and to me, when I think of the Vita era is, like, that style of anime game. But will it age? I don't know.

It looks pretty good now. Okay. Cause that's, that's, I guess what I'm, that's, that's another little quality in my head is, like, this represents this thing to, this era and I can freeze it here forever and look back at that and go, fuck. That little hallway that you run around with in Mega Man Legends 1 where you kick the can. Like, I'm like, yeah, the sound of that hallway and the can and the way he looks and everything and all the vehicle, like, the whole thing is just great. Um, anything approaching or attempting to capture realism immediately is going to age badly so that almost doesn't apply, you know? I can think of one, sorry, two old games off the top of my head right now that went for a realistic graphic style and still look absolutely stellar. Like, God, when did the first one come out?

Let me check before I make this point. I think I have an answer. It came out in 2009. Okay. I think I have an answer though. 2008 is the game I'm thinking of, which is the Dead Space games. Dead Space 1 and 2 look stellar today despite going for realism. Okay.

Interesting. Um, because I was going to say like, people are throwing out like Halo and Tony Hawk and I'm like, you're misunderstanding the question. A Halo game is stuck in time. It's attempting to be a sci-fi realistic thing that's not going. Every Halo game looks like the Xbox, if that makes any sense. Yeah. A Mass Effect is limited by what it was attempting to do at the time, but it's still, it's not to say they look bad. It's just that will it age is a different question from does it look good?

Yeah. You know? Um, I think I'm going to say something. Maybe how about like Journey? Right? That feels like that can probably stay as is and not necessarily age. I would agree with that. I'll put Journey as that generation's version of that then.

Yeah. The only issue there is the Journey is by no means indicative of the rest of that generation. The same way that say certain types of pixel arts were indicative of the Super Nintendo or Genesis has a slightly different look to the Super Nintendo. But you can always tell which, which one they're emulating when you get to the music. And if it's brown, brown, brown, brown. Is it? Yeah. Is the music like disgusting and grimy and sounds like the machine is broken?

Then yeah, you're playing a Genesis like classic. Though the fact that growing up past that and then later on finding out that like a whole generation of not me people that grew up with Genesis is Genesis. I whatever would Sega are nostalgic towards these objectively worse sounding soundtracks. Oh, I love. I love the I absolutely adore the way the Genesis sound engine is like whatever you got is what you got when you're younger. I'll tell you that the Super Nintendo sound chip was like clearly better. It could do way more channels. It could do different types of sound like way better.

But there are a couple soundtracks on on Genesis. Streets of Rage is obviously one. There's the cyborg justice thing that I made you look at. Yes. There's comic zone. And there's a couple others. The X-Men X-Men definitely in which they decided, OK, we have a really grimy soundtrack. A science chip.

Let's make grimy music. So there was a thing that works really well. There was a thread on like NeoGaff years ago after we had this discussion where going through that, I kind of like cemented. I was like, OK, you know what? Brilliant composers will take their tools and find a way. And there are examples of Genesis music that they posted in that thread that were like, this is the best you're going to get with this. They killed it. Absolutely some amazing sounding shit, even though the instrument was inferior.

You know, there are some amazing examples. Thunder Force is the best one. Thunder Force 4, I think, is the most unbelievable thing that I've heard off of like Genesis and Sega related shit. Crazy, crazy good sounding. And that's full credit to the sound designers and composers for working with what they have. To answer your question, like, is there a look for certain generations that won't like age? I don't know, because the seventh generation is a good example because its look was utterly defined by Unreal Engine 3. Yeah.

There are certain people who played the first two Bioshocks or Mass Effect or Gears of War will know exactly what I mean. There is a really, really specific shade of green that the Unreal Engine 3 does very well. There's also a really, really specific shade of dark blue that does really, really well and is totally overpowering for that generation. And if you made a game in that style or era, it would be that green and blue and the red also. And the game would have a lot of boxy waste high environments. Sure. Yeah, I think unfortunately like most good games that we think of that we like end up being disqualified simply because they do age, you know? Well, here's the thing, to people who are 20, if we're sitting here telling them, man, the Super Nintendo games didn't age at all, man, look at Chrono Trigger, that looks great.

And they're going to look at us and go, what are you crazy old man? No one said that. That looks like a baby toy. No one said that. The only thing said was Hyper Light Drifter represents like a peak quality sprite animation style. Anyone who heard that what you just said in their brains and blasted that internally literally did not listen to the conversation, turned it into their own and then started fighting with the shower brush. That that person is arguing with nobody because no one said what you just said about sprites. Okay.

We specifically just I specifically talked about Hyper Light Drifter. Okay. Anyway, I got carried away. That's all right. Right now, right now today, I wonder if Strive is in this discussion because I think, and I've said this before, when I saw the first trailer for Strive, I was like, we're not talking about best looking fighting game anymore. We're talking about like best looking games. I really, really think they're doing incredible things with that cell shading style. But I don't know what other comparisons are where we're going to make for this discussion.

I don't think that Strive specifically will be the thing to push forward. I think it should be more relegated to ArcSys of the past five years in general. Yeah. Because all of their 3D is it has a definite tone and style to it. And they're all different. I think Grand Blue looks better than Strive personally. Interesting. But that's because I just prefer the type of shading the Grand Blue characters.

Yeah, I disagree. But the main thing that like sells it for me is the quality of the animation in addition to the models. Exord looked incredible, but like and Grand Blue and Dragon Ball look incredible as well. And they each improved. But like the way the like any of the super startup animations, you know, show off a big old animation flex that they weren't doing in all those previous examples. So the way you can see Strive out doing their previous games is with those close up animations. I think if if you had to pick a single game that jumped out as like definitive of like ArcSys' era and holding up the best, it would probably be Dragon Ball. Because like it is going to sound this is going to sound weird and contradictory.

Dragon Ball doesn't look as good as Grand Blue and it definitely doesn't look as good as Strive. But it looks the best Toriyama style you can get. It looks perfect. Yeah, it looks exactly what it should be. It has a cap for what it's supposed to be. There's nothing like you know what Dragon Ball is based on Toriyama's artwork. So you know what it's going for. So there is a place that you are satisfied with it like achieving.

There's a there's a there's a level you're satisfied with it achieving. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyway, it's an interesting thing, you know, because like I feel as if no matter what the answers are to this question, if there are any, they become harder and harder to define the further out you go. You know, I feel like those those two examples are like really locked in. And then like as we get closer and closer to now, it just becomes more and more nebulous. Because as you said, like when games are based on an entire on sharing the same engine, for example,

you're just going to have a look that like, well, I mean, look, if we go back to like early N64, you're like, yeah, all of this looks like struggling to get polygons working. And when I think of the N64, I think of low polygons counts and Vaseline. But yeah, but like, but not even in it. But but but it ages poorly. You know, oh boy in the in a very, very like even if you emulate it and Crispin everything up, it still looks like shit. And in some cases, there's one.

There's something about that era when people do the look, it's like low poly 3D models like a PS one 64 era. It's always funny to me because there's two things that they always there's three things they always do, despite being not accurate and not even part of the nostalgia. Number one is the frame rate is like a real frame rate games of that era ran at like 15 frames a second like they just they just ran like that. They ran badly. Number two is they take the N64 Vaseline off the screen. Nobody tries to emulate that consoles video output like ever.

And for the PS one style games, nobody is going to be recreating the fact that the PlayStation one couldn't track pixels through depth and thus had that horrible texture warping on every single texture that the PS one ever had. Man, nobody's going to do that texture warp crap. There was a great Twitter account that was posting up side by side comparisons of like artwork from like pixel art from a lot of old games, usually like portraits where if you're looking at it crisp as fuck on a monitor, you're losing the blur from an old CRT and you're losing the glare that made the artwork look better. Yeah, I'm being told by now, by the way, that paratopic and ultra kill both do the texture warping that I'm referring to. So good for them.

Yeah, I follow that CRT account. That CRT account is incredible. It's so cool to see like, oh, like again, artists that fucking like know the medium they're working with, you're not just drawing the thing or creating the sprite art to, you know, convey whatever you're trying to convey with the grid you have to work with. You're also looking at the end result on a TV screen blurred and shining. And like they figured out like specifically like, yeah, like when you look at this crisp, it doesn't look as good with all that haze blur, Vaseline dithering and all the other bullshit you're looking at on a CRT, the portrait looks way better. This is the super cool account at CRT pixels CRT pixels. I'm going to retweet the the magnum opus of examples on my Twitter at Pat stairs that I'll be retweeting it right now at 352 p.m.

Eastern. It's the it's the comparison between a direct feed capture of Dracula's portrait in Symphony of the Night versus what it looks like on a high quality CRT TV. I'll actually send it to you. You can be reminded it's night and fucking day. Yeah, it is a child scribble. Yeah, versus a painting. It's insane. It is absolutely absurd. Like it it's the dip because the softening on all of his all of his hair, all of his like highlights and all of his low lights, everything like that.

Just like you when you go back and you pop this in in a modern port or modern emulated version, you're not even looking at the same fucking game. Yeah, the Dracula example is perfect because he has a single red pixel pixel for each eye that a CRT due to its curve and the way that the scan lines would go off would smear across into five pixels of various reds that would like create a different look that only works because he had like gray and white and their vicinity. It's it's incredible. And it's a bummer because like, you know, we'll get a digital version of Street Fighter 2. And, you know, you'll play Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo on, you know, a digital release on your Xbox or your PC. And it looks like shit compared to what it actually looked like in the arcade. And so some of these re-releases will include filters.

But I feel like none of those filters ever really actually capture what we're talking about here like perfectly. I think Street Fighter 3 Online Edition has a really good CRT filter, but it's it's pretty rare. Also, I'm going to die because I'm looking at people in this chat. I saw that. I don't think that's real. I don't think that's real. There are multiple. I saw I saw the one that I didn't acknowledge it because I didn't think it was real.

I didn't think it was that now. It's not real. All right. It is real. There are people out there. No, no, it's not real. And here's why it's not real because you know what a fucking eight track eight track is. You know what a laser disk is.

You know what, you know. Yeah, but I'm really smart. Okay. Hey. Okay. Destroyed there by how smart I am. Can't beat that. No, like not being born in the era of a meat of a particular thing.

Does it mean you you you like, you know, have not ever. Anyway, whatever. All TVs. Yes. I don't know what we were talking about to get here. We're talking about samurai gun. And then I talked about hyper light drifter samurai guns. Very good.

Um, I also played five force fighters, which is currently on Kickstarter right now. Indie fighting game being made by Kaizen Creed. I think two brothers working on this project. It is what I would describe as the homies in detention, making a fighting game and putting all your crew in it. Mm hmm. It's got a little bit of the black, the black Goku energy. It's got a little bit of.

Oh yeah, it totally does. I'm seeing it. It's got a little bit of Aaron Magruder energy. Right. Huey and Riley. It's it's great. It's absolutely, you know, at lunchtime, we're sitting around the table designing our OCs. And now one of our friends is making the game and we're all going to put our characters

in and it's going to be sick. But it's a yes, it's an indie fighting game. Right now, the two main characters are Coco and Pebbles. That's going to change. And no, it's not. Oh yeah. And it's pretty fucking, it's pretty wild. It feels the control controls wise.

They're going for a smash like control system. So there's a tilts. There is B button, a button kind of vibes, a block button, evasive maneuvers and things like that. Really early right now ran into some problems setting up the controller and shit like that with the demo that's available. So keep in mind if you go to the Kickstarter, which is currently hitting its stretch goals and you grab it like player one works fine.

But like the moment you start getting player two inch in there, you have to basically load it through steam and then do a steam reconfiguration of the controllers because it's yeah, it's it's fucking early. But with that, like Reggie and I got some games going and it's really fun. The characters, it's basically, yeah, just they you take a smash style control scheme, but like you make it insanely fast and you make it so that like your your your B button moves are way more over the top and extreme, but you have a limited usage of them because you have a meter that they rely on.

So imagine if you made all of the B button moves like huge ex attacks that were crazy good, but you only had a few of them and you had to and then you had to build back up to getting them, you know, really, really fun. And like, you know, obviously balance is kind of nuts right now to like I found the I found an infinite or what seems to be an infinite nice and early. And even with that infinite threat in the picture, Reggie still was able to like just like do some other crazy shit that did enough damage to avoid what I was doing. And yeah, overall, it seems like a promising project.

I would like to see the characters in the trailer kind of like come to life. There's a couple other like there's like a heavy heavy like like buff girl that's a character that's coming and then like a couple of other bosses have been teased. But the overall vibe of just like the high school back of the binder, you know, fighting game coming to life is a fun one. And I'm like, I'm super down for supporting that and pumping it. So five force fighters is what it's called. Check it out on Kickstarter.

Take a look. And yeah, check out the combo videos, especially this is another one that's been you might you might have seen it in the form of just like tweet Twitter combo videos, randomly flying around, you know, sometimes you go like, Hey, what the fuck is that? Is if you see one with like a couple of dudes with afros doing like some wild break dancing ex wall bounce Marvel type shit. You might have been looking at five force fighters. That was a lot of fun.

Yeah. And then, you know, I continued to play and strive and that's that's going well. I'm enjoying things with that. We'll have more to say on the docket. And then I was playing some teppen. And you were playing some teppen. I was playing some teppen. And currently it's interesting because in fighting games, I have a character I love.

Thus, I pick that character till death do us part and we ride or die and suffer together. But when it comes to card games like teppen, because I don't particularly like I'm just less invested overall, I fly around the cast as need be. And well, it's also more archetypal than your average fighting game. Fair enough. But like I've picked up and switched mains here and there as as I've, you know, like as anything has struck my fancy. And yeah, I was I was currently working on a I was work.

I was working within like a Jill meta deck that was currently like doing pretty good for a while. And then suddenly last night, I got hit with some wild X shit, some crazy new X fucking gimmick deck popped out of nowhere. And the way you know, like the way you know, like you're looking at a new viral gimmick deck in the game is when you get hit with it, then you go and try to test it out. You try to recreate it and test it out in in unranked. And then you come across someone else who's also testing it out at the same time. OK, you know, OK, yeah.

This new this new ridiculous shit. I can tell something was was wrong halfway through the match when like the person was down to like half their life and they weren't trying to do anything particularly aggressive. And I'm like, oh, you've got a dumb gimmick coming. What's it going to be? Yeah, either you're going to be a combo. You know, either you're asleep at the wheel or something stupid's coming and something stupid did come in this particular case.

There is a an ex super called Gaia armor where he makes all three of his cards untargetable. OK, and then he plays a card called Suruhime, which is a character who every time your hero's life heals, their damage increases. Right. And then you have cards that you play that are very low cost that heal you and heal your cards a little bit. And it just goes and goes. So you put three of these cards down, you make them untargetable and then you heal up

all that damage you took for the first half of the game. And then you create three cards that cannot be targeted with over 10 damage on each card, which means within two lines, that's the end of the game. You know, like, oh, I was playing a is playing a deck earlier today in Runeterra, which is the long and short of it is that you build up enough cards that you there. You throw down like five attack cards and then you load up. What's her name? Sivir.

I think her name is and her special ability once leveled up is that she gives all of her abilities to every card available. Oh, and she has ability called Quick Attack, which is if two cards are going to strike, but the other one will die, you take no damage. And so now you have an entire board of units that will kill the blocker before they take damage. OK, OK, just sweeps the board. Yeah.

So Teppin has something called crush. That's that's the sound similar. That's that's that's just really good when you have these like we don't trade. I win any of those moments are like, yeah, really good. Yeah, that would that would be the quick attack equivalent. So so. Yeah, that ship popped up and I was like, OK, time to figure out this new insane X fucking meta X factor and then also figure out how to kill it.

You know, and it feels as if like because speed matters in this game, unlike other card games, speed matters, which yeah, I know you kind of understand a bit now. I do. Right. We'll get to that in a moment. So it feels as if this deck that I just described, the weakness would be in the time between them quickly putting all three cards on the board and then actually casting their super to make them untargetable.

You have to like you have to kill the cards then. Yeah, you have a like two or three second window, you know, perhaps even like less if they have it or the super already stocked up. But and then the other thing they'll do sometimes is like there's a card that was like V from DMC five, right, the mysterious one. And I described him before he was incredibly strong because what he was is he was an eight point card out of your 10 possible action points and then you drop him and then any time you do like another action point card, he would create one of his three monsters on the board indefinitely.

So you could have 10 you could have your 10 action points stored up, you could then drop him for eight and then play two one point cards and have a full board right away. And then by the time they kill one of those, you'll have enough action to put another one down. It was it was incredible. The way they nerfed him was by making him cost all 10 points. So that creates a couple of seconds between when he goes down and when you can do anything else. And that's when you can kill him, you know. So it feels like that's kind of what you have to do here in this particular case.

But yeah, I'm going to I'm going to explore because this happened last night and I am in the middle of figuring out what's happening now. But it's it's it's every time something like this happens. It's kind of it's exciting in the sense that it's like it fucks the meta up in a way. I will see how strong this is, but it disrupts the entire like flow because it's like some. Yeah, because this feels unbeatable. So now you have to figure out some maybe you put in one or two cards in there that would be able to deal with this crowd. Exactly.

Everyone has to have a game plan in case you encounter this, you know. But yeah, so you took a look at Teppin. Did you not? I did. And how did that take a look at Teppin? So Gungho contacted me and they said, Hey, Pat, do you want a big bag of money to play Teppin? And I went, OK, and then I went back and forth with them for a couple emails because I couldn't figure out how to stream it because streaming Teppin is hard because it's only on your phone.

And then I streamed it off my phone, which is hard because streaming directly off your phone kind of sucks. Not for iOS, but I guess for Android. Yeah, for Android sucks because you got to use the Twitch app. And the Twitch app tells you to turn your sound up. We're going to use the games. You're going to use the game audio coming out of your speakers back into the speakers as the sound. So that. That stream is a little crunchier.

Yeah, I assume my usual. I assume that the official sponsor would not want you to use BlueStacks. BlueStacks does not play nice. OK, OK, it does. It emulates quite badly, actually. It's funny because I recently signed a different sponsor contract, not for a phone game. But in it, the company says, if you ever stream one of our phone games, you must stream it through BlueStacks. Interesting.

OK, OK. Which is why I was like, OK, that's really weird. So I played about two hours of tepid and got my feet properly wet and actually get it. I now finally understand the speed thing that you've been discussing in terms of like, let the dash line almost touch them before playing some bullshit so that maybe they react too slow. They used it up. The artwork is really nice. So it's only on the phones.

And I think that it only being on phones and tablets and, you know, what not, mobile devices is kind of a weird thing because you're looking at like a card like Hunk or Ada or whatever. And when they're sitting at the bottom of your screen, they're really small. Yes. Yes. They're really, really small. So the way... And the card artwork is really good. Yeah.

But it's like, I found that like, while the two characters doing their fight animations was really cool, particularly on the supers, I felt that like a huge amount of the screen real estate was used up by those animations where it's like, I would like to see more cards. Of the card, yeah. So the artwork of the cards in game, so out of game, when you're looking at your deck, you can pull them up full screen and enjoy the artwork. You just tap on the card and then you tap on the art and it'll full screen the art or like expand it at the very least. But the in game, when you're playing it, you only see it in the middle circle. You see a large version of it in the middle circle for like a couple seconds when you play it and then it goes away. But yeah, it's such nice artwork and it does end up getting like de-emphasized in that like, yeah, you don't see it as prominently as you probably could or should.

I agree with that. Yeah. I want Reused Design to officially be ripped shirt with the beard from the walk. Yeah, it's with the Rathalos gloves. So cool. I played through some of the story stuff and I appreciated them as tutorials, though like I would consistently burst out laughing as the game has little story missions that are like, I would call them the absolute bottom of the barrel of feasibility of crossover stuff. Sure.

Where Wesker was walking down the street and saw Morrican and Morrican went, I want to suck your dick and he was like, you, I'll fight you. Well, Ada whispers in everybody's ear and makes them get real, real angry and want to fight each other. Also, Nero is walking around one day and then he sees a palico. And then he's like, hey, Palico, get back here. Okay. I also, I don't have a lot of experience with gung-ho games, but loading the loading up my new account during, I think it's their second year anniversary. Oh.

Was I was absolutely. Did you do your least? I'm loading it up on. I'm loading it up on stream and like six currencies attack me and they tell me to go open up my free skin and then 89 challenges. Here's your missions. And the date has changed. The word, the word is bombarded. Yes, correct.

Like absolutely, absolutely bombarded. So that's mobile games, though. Is it not? Isn't that is that not just the mobile game experience these days? Not necessarily. Okay. I was under the impression that's how it would go. In the terms of card games, I've played Hearthstone.

I've played a lot more of Runeterra and I've played this Hearthstone did it a little like did it somewhat. Tepin was definitely the most and Runeterra has very little of it, which is funny because I loaded up League for the first time in a long time of the other day and League bombarded me. League just slammed me with there's these events and you got to get premium points for this shit. And I was like, fuck. No, it does feel calm down. It does feel like I especially if it's like if it's a free game in particular, I expect to be assaulted with that. Or if it's Street Fighter and I haven't played it in a few months or a half year, I expect to be assaulted with like eight pages of screen on the main menu. Yeah, I got to say, it's just in general, I like Tepin's a fun game.

It's definitely not my game. I would still definitely say like, for example, when that once I had finished my Tepin stream, I then want and bought a board in Runeterra and played Runeterra the rest of the night. I don't think it uses its phone real estate particularly well, but its action card thing is definitely unique. The problem is that's not what I'm looking for. I want a slow game. I want to stare at a board of cards for 90 seconds before making a decision, which is the complete goddamn opposite of Tepin, which is essentially the marvel of card game action card game. Yes. Did you click on all the different, like, did you look at all the menu options on the bottom of the screen, like missions, quests and all that stuff?

I clicked on a couple, but they, like, I was the last one to show it off and then I'm looking at this and I'm like, I don't know what this means. The last menu has a little surprise for you if you ever go check that out. Okay, I'm not, so just tell me what it is. It's the shopkeep from RE4 shows up. Oh, okay. And he's got Tepin Replace that he's selling you. It's funny because I look at Runeterra and I look at Tepin and it's like, man, I wish Tepin took its characters and made Runeterra because I much more enjoy playing one, but I don't care about any of those fucking League of Legends characters at all.

Oh man, do I not give a shit? I don't, you know, I don't have the comparison point, obviously, but I've come to like the active nature of the Tepin card game system. Like, I do like the timing of it. It is different. Did you encounter any dumb RE rejects that you couldn't recognize? Because who the fuck are these people? No, I only, I, the, the, the rarest character I got through, like, I think probably my biggest problem with the card animations is I did, I unlocked the cards, right? I spun, spun the thing and got some cards.

Yeah. And like, I'm squinting at my phone and I'm like, I can't tell what's in, I literally can't tell who that is. So you have to tap it again to get the full portrait. Yeah, I don't have to do that with other card games. The cards are really big on the screen. But the, was Manuela, I think her name is, which is the, the, the sick girl from the end of Dark Side Chronicles that is getting all the replacement tyrant organs. Okay. Okay.

That's a pretty weird poll. Don't really know what she's going to be doing as a card. But okay. Also, I feel as if, like, they have, whoever the scientists are that come in that know how to create the, um, get the adrenaline juices flowing as you open a card pack animation thing. They hired those people to come in and do the spin the thing. And then the thing lights up and then they all line up and then you tap them one by one. And then they, are you getting the serotonin? Like it's overdrive.

I would agree with you, except the cards don't even reach the top of the screen. Oh, other games have the big explosion that fills up the artwork. When I, when I grab a card in, in, say, Runeterra out of a pack, the, the, the card act, the cards length, you know, the height will be about 80% of the screen space. And you can look at it. Okay. Very clearly. And in the, in the like view cards to make a deck, I was also blown away at how small the cards were in Tepin. It's weird.

So they're kind of, The cards are your biggest thing. And the art is good. So they're like, honestly, they're kind of more like chips because when they're at the bottom of your screen, they're chip sized. And when you place them on their spots, they're chip sized. They're only really full sized cards when you examine them to look at the full artwork and read the, the, the flavor text. But they, they pretty much amount to like, like Majong tiles almost, you know. Yeah.

On that, I gotta say, you're completely right when you click on them to examine the flavor text, you can totally get the, see the good artwork. Problem is, is that Tepin really doesn't want you spending time looking at your card in your hand. Don't do that. Reading its flavor text, which was my number one issue when I was swapping around different characters, where I was like clicking on it to be like, okay, what does this guy do? And as I'm doing that, I'm losing valuable time. Right. Right. So the only time I got to really read them was I would place all of them at random.

And then I would click on them afterwards to go, okay, so what's this guy going to do? Yeah. So in theory, like when you're, when, when you have a bit more time, ironically, you would before starting the match, like look at the deck that like, I don't know, whatever Nero has and like you would click on each one and then go like, oh, okay, this does this, that does that. And then you just go through them and then kind of learn it a little bit. But um, So I'm like actually loading up, uh, like Lerunterra on my phone right now to like show off what I mean by like the card sizes. So I'll take a screenshot. Um, it's just, it was, it's out of all the stuff in Tepin, there's a lot of stuff there to like, but I just couldn't understand why, like, is the, the, the crossover stuff is like, look at all these characters, look at all these weird characters.

And because of the speed that I had to play them, I didn't get to appreciate them most of the time. Mm-hmm. Do, um, does Runeterra, for example, does each card that you put down have like an animation for like what that card does? Uh, depends. The ones that, the ones that do things, most of the time they'll have generic animations. Okay. Um, and the, but, uh, the champion cards, which are, I mean, unique to Runeterra, Tepin doesn't even have an equivalent. Uh, they have custom animations, even if they would overlap with something else.

So, so like, uh, there's, there's a card called, uh, that has a keyword called Challenger where you get to pick who blocks it. You just drag and drop. But if Thresh is the one that's doing it because that's a hero from League that has a grappling hook, he'll actually throw out a grappling hook and grab him. So high, high end, uh, and legendary cards in Tepin do have unique animations. Um, but the average random cards don't. Like it'll usually have the big expensive ones and the rarer ones. So for example, when like, um, uh, I don't know, when, um, Nightmare shows up, you actually see the Goop come out of the slot and form the Nightmare card. Oh, I love the Goop.

And then, and then it like sets into place or like Rathalos drops in and then like a big flame explosion shows up and shit like that. So, so well as I just set you two screenshots of what I'm talking about, that's off of my phone. Okay. So the cards are have the, the artwork is 90% of the frame of the card. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's, it's like I had readability problems. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So this is, and that's, and Gwent was, was similar with that too. Yeah. Okay. Right. And magic is similar as well. Yeah.

No. Tepin is a way. Yeah. They have them like tiles. They're much smaller than that. Fair enough. I, I understand what you mean. Um, I liked my time with it, but it's, it's just not for me.

They're also, of course, is a certain point too. You should all play it though. Hashtag. It's sponsored. There, there's also a point where, you know, um, like, I guess you get to the point where you're like, yeah, I've seen this artwork. I know the deal. I'm just also just playing my functions at this point.

Um, but, uh, I, I'm, I'm all in favor of them. Like, yeah, it would, a UI overhaul wouldn't be too bad though. It, it has increased. Um, it has, it has improved over like early on because I did see like, I remember like the, the, uh, first version of the, um, this, the battle screen itself with like the, the characters and the cage and the points, they were even smaller and the cards were smaller and then the, the, the tiles were smaller and the characters artwork was like everything was just more zoomed out and they, they, they did revise it and crop everything tighter

and zoom in a lot more. So like, yeah, I could see an overhaul happening at some point, but, uh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have, um, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have thought of that, that, that, that artwork issue in particular. But yeah, it's a fun game. Well, I would, I would mainly place that on the fact that you don't have much experience in any of these other ones. Uh, can I tweet the.

It's just a normal screenshot of, of, of Runeterra. Right. Just of what it looks like. Yeah. Just look on the, on the phone. But I mean, I'll pull them up. I'll pull them up. I don't give a shit.

Um, uh, I also, after playing, also I've been feeding all over Runeterra this week. The, they're doing an event now and, and I like, I like the game. Um, I think it's a good game to play. Uh, I also, how many people every time Teppen comes up, people, how many people are just like, yeah, but you should play this other game. I like though it seems very clear that card game people are not necessarily into what Teppen's doing and they also want me to not be into what Teppen is doing or they want me to be into what the other card games are doing.

Well, I think it's, I think it's a, a absolutely natural thing to do that if you were playing a lot of street fighter, somebody would go, Hey man, have you checked out guilty gear? Yeah. No, definitely that makes sense. But like the, but the difference, but I guess, I guess the, the, the, the sometimes it's just that, and then sometimes it's like, you know, I don't like this, but like I'm also saying that you can check this out and maybe make the switch, you know, I mean, I, I would personally recommend that you try Runeterra mainly because it's the easiest game to play

completely for free, but like if the characters mean that much to you, then obviously it's not going to have the same thing for you. For me personally, when I started playing Hearthstone, like, yeah, look, that's a character I know from Warcraft, but Warcraft War has turned to complete garbage. Even by the time Hearthstone came out and boy, we'll have more to talk about that later. But like, I, they're all there, you know what combo fiend was right, but it was only right about card games. Uh, yeah, I don't care if it's Magneto, I actually just want to play an aggro deck.

I actually just want to play a control deck or what have you. Like I said, I though I gave Gwent a shot and I did, I did enjoy it for a bit. I did enjoy it for a bit. I, I highly dislike Gwent in it's, uh, in it's like non, in it's multiplayer format, I think, uh, I think Gwent is just, uh, don't care for it. So anyway, I was playing a lot of Runeterra, yada yada, I'm putting up a comparison image so people know what I'm talking about on, uh, on my Twitter right now. And I also, when I was looking on the internet, I discovered something that I didn't quite

understand, which was, um, League of Legends Wild Rift, which I did, I was like, what is that? Is that some mobile baby version of League of Legends for your phone? And then I downloaded it and discovered that it is not a mobile baby version of League of Legends for your phone, it's just League of Legends on your phone. And more than that is that there are real, real improvements to League made to this game by stripping it down. Like the matches are half the length and they've rebuilt all of the assets from the

ground up and so now all the, everything has fancy animations. And it's also a game that you're playing with a digital joystick and buttons and will be a console version at the end of the year. And I'm playing it and I'm like, I don't like that I'm using digital buttons here. But I am having so much more fun playing it with digital buttons than a mouse. It is like night and day in terms of my enjoyment. And the timing on that was perfect because I was looking at everybody enjoying Pokemon Unite, which is actually very popular and quite good, which also controls with a controller.

The fucking, just a screenshot of shoutouts to Jamcrofts on Twitter who was just like, hey, FGC, y'all need to step your game up. And it's just a screenshot of like eight or nine videos that are like Pokemon Unite definitive tier list. This is the tier list boys get in here and like all the YouTube search results and it's like game released July 21st. And it's just like like like the most reactionary day six tier list you've ever seen get the fuck in like Jesus Christ.

What is what is letting the dust settle? You know, anyway, that's about right. So there's a faster controller based console targeted version of League of League coming and it's being put out on the phone. And I was like, what they do is it's really simple as when you get close to an enemy a little circle underneath it happens and it's like, that's what you will be attacking. If you hit the attack button and it will depend on where your character is pointing. And I can only imagine the console is going to use the right analog stick for like trick

shots and triggers for the four abilities and I'm looking at it and I'm like, okay. It's a different version of the game going to be like what people want though like isn't the thing just to get into League proper and that's your know, this is this is going to be a parallel. I guess it's all in how they market it or how much they invest in it or whatever. This is going to be the phone and console game. And when I talked about it on Twitter, I saw a few people that were like, I prefer regular League.

It's too dumbed down. But the overall majority is anything to make the game shorter, absolutely anything to make the game shorter and they've put way more work into this one like on a production level. It's way nicer than League is currently not even close. Not even close. I guess it's because it's super old at this point. So when you when you pick a character in this, there's a gigantic 3D animation of them swooping in and, you know, doing a gimmick and then all sorts of shit.

When you, you know, choose to unlock them in regular League, it's a fucking web page inside their own launcher. Okay. Like, like it's it's like it's almost like an overwatch, like a vacation of the League stuff. Well, how much has like League itself updated visually over the last decade? So if you go back and look at the original version of League, it's like hideous. I think they've had two complete reworks of the entire of every single graphics thing.

And there are occasionally some of the old heroes that didn't get upgraded yet. So I was playing the game when Fiddlesticks went from being the old graphics to the new graphics and was like dramatically improved for complete overhauls. People are saying, okay, but it's still it really feels like this will probably roll back in to the adult version of League as it were. But even beyond that, League, and I think Dota is a little bit the same, but I'm not I don't, I'm not familiar on it. League has a giant problem with its game time, and that is at the eight minute mark you can

determine that you have lost. And then you're stuck in for the rest of it. I remember it will take you another half hour to lose and a 20 minute loss is a lot easier to swallow than a 40 minute loss. This game cutting that, and I guess potentially, I don't know, having a console base of players to to play with and such. This is really ridiculously big, but you look at Fortnite and most of its players are on consoles.

So who knows, right? Who knows? It sounds interesting. It's an interesting proposition. It certainly is something that like as someone who has no fucking, you know, horse in this race, I'm like, okay, yeah, I would. Hey, Willie, when it comes out on consoles, you want to do a stream, I'll team up with you.

I'll play my Mordekaiser. I'll look at it sideways. I'll glance at it sideways and make a call when this officially invited. I'll see what's up. I've already gotten the list of of woolly characters that people have. Oh, whatever. The first one on that list is V. I know. I know.

But it was like, I think at the side cut in the punch arms, you don't like jungling. No, I'm saying, I'm saying people over the years have been like, okay, but look at this one, though, and look at that one, though. And then I think when we when we were looking at it, we were coming up with the theoretical fighting game roster. That's when it was like, um, pared down. But I also remember I went out to a local meetup, there was a couple of years ago and like talk to some of the FGC guys about like who of these hundreds of characters would

make the, um, the cut of a fighting game roster and, uh, a lot, a lot. Well, there was a solid. I forgot. I brought them up back then, but there was a solid 20 or so that were like, yeah, everyone's in agreement. Like, um, Illinois, yes, right. And Thresh and this and that. There's a certain list of ones that are like, oh yeah, these would make for good fighting

game characters. There's a lot that are like complete slam dunks. Jinx has to be in that game as the keep away character as well as being like the pseudo face of League of Legends. Um, did I? I want to say like, I saved a note, but maybe I didn't, but yeah, point being, uh, Wild Rift is like, I'm looking at it and it's like, I'm not going to spend time on my phone playing this because boy, I hate digital joysticks, but I might spend time on my blue stacks playing

it with a real controller that's pretending to be a digital joystick. Um, and then later on, you can't do a PlayStation. You can do, but you can do like X box pad to phone, can't you? Not this game. You can't. Uh, that sucks. Okay. Cause I got saying with the Apple Arcade shit, like they got that working like pretty well.

So yeah, Wild Rift is like, I look at it and I go, this is the league that I wanted to play originally. My old man brain does better with my controller than my mouse. I found the list. It was found the list besides Yasuo. Yeah. The title of the, what about his brother? His brother's the dark samurai.

Shadow. Yeah. Um, besides Yasuo, uh, which is the time of the list, there was, um, Riven, Uder, Blitzcrank, Volibear, V Lee Sin, Thresh, Master Yi, and Ilyoi. Yeah. Yeah. Take, uh, take Blitzcrank out and put Nautilus in. They're literally the same character with the same gimmick, but Blitzcrank is a shittier

looking version of Nautilus. Okay. Sure. Oh, what about Mordekaiser and Atrox? That list sucks. Okay. Where's Warwick? I don't know.

Did I even say them correctly? I don't fucking. Yeah. You said, you said most of them correctly. Okay. This is funny because people are arguing with me that Blitzcrank is better, but my love of Nautilus does not come from League. It comes from Rutera, where I love playing Nautilus decks, and that's the trick.

That's the trick they're doing because if they put that fighting game out and Nautilus is in it, I'll go, dude, I love Nautilus, even though I don't even like him in the fucking game that he is actually from. Yeah, no, I mean, look, like Cami with roller skates is cooler than Cami without roller skates. Yeah, that's true. I don't even know who that is. Canons by Cammies.

This is the fucking best, you know? Sometimes you want that version or the X in Teppin, who has the Angel Halo and shit. So by the way, I mentioned Pokemon Unite earlier. I'm going to stream it this week, and part of my stream is going to be telling people not to let their kids play it, as it's a free-to-play MOBA with the Pokemans in it, which seems like that would be, at worst, a gateway to little Jimmy's toxicity. Guess what? Pokemon Unite is unironically the most predatory MOBA in terms of monetization.

I was about to ask, how's the gacha gamble? It's the worst one by a country mile, because it's the only one that lets you roll, pay to roll on loot boxes that give you in-match advantages on your next match. What do you mean by in-match advantages? More health, more power. Oh, like buffs, straight up. Like straight buffs. Roll the dice, you can maybe win your next match.

It's actually pay to win. I was watching Charlie stream it the other day, and the name of his stream was called pay to win. Okay, so there's no game here then. There is, and apparently it's pretty good. But it doesn't matter. If what you just said is what you said it is, then it doesn't matter. There's no game here.

We got a quote from somebody named ChaosJoey in the chat, maxing out a stat giving item costs $40. And these items are permanent stat buffs? Yeah. Yeah, this is, that's, no, there's no game here. That's a joke. That makes, like, what's the, why even bother, like, no, that's okay. That is a disqualifier from entry for me, if it's literally by the way, like, that's

crazy, by life. That's nuts. Okay, well. That's the absolute, isn't that the wildest thing? So I'm going to stream it and, you know, I'll probably put it, you know, the original plan was to stream that for a whole stream. I'm probably going to stream it for like two hours and then switch over to a wild rift on an emulator or something like that.

Can you get, can you unlock with these things free? I assume the answer is eventually. Can you play for free and store up a bunch and then buy these things? Eventually. I think somebody actually just broke out the phrase $120 for a 3% movement buff. In the chat. Ah, people are talking about Charlie's stream. You played for eight hours and only upgraded one item, two levels.

But does it have all? It's the it's the question between $40 and dozens and dozens of hours, but does it have all the Pokemon? No, well, fuck no. Also also on top of that, paid like eight bucks for a Gengar, well, also buy Pokemon. I might actually change that out of my schedule to come to think of it. That game's dirty. That game's dirty, dude.

It didn't need to be. Yeah, you want to bet how much big money they've made. Oh, for sure. And they would have because it's the name is there. But holy shit, man. It somehow put the veil on, pretend there's a competitive angle to this. Mask it with mask it with Pokemans. How about that?

Pretend there's a game to be played here. That sounds really bad. It does sound really bad, doesn't it? You think it's because it's really bad? I mean, it sounds like if you can if you can play and get it for free, then I guess the idea it's almost like you're buying experience is kind of what it sounds like. I'm not sure if that's what it works out. It's the battlefield equivalent of give us $200 to unlock every gun.

Just purchase. Yeah, purchasing. I don't know if you remember that. I remember hearing about not was that no. What was the first game with battle passes? The first, I believe it was Fortnite. Was it Fortnite? Okay.

I believe it was. I don't know enough to know, but I remember there being like a really, really like angry moment of like this thing costs money, but like it's a rip off and there's a whole lot of. But I don't. I mean, some battle passes are like the Fortnite battle passes tend to be quite good. The Runeterra one that just came out that I did was also pretty good for its cost. The Apex one, I don't know if you remember that, but that was a joke.

That was like hilarious. I do remember. Hey, pay $20 and you can get some skins where we threw mud on some of the characters. It was unbelievable. Cool. Well, since we like moved over through Teppin with a baton pass there, yeah, over on my stream this week, like I said, possibly going to finish off Disco Elysium going to, I'm going to see if I have time for a special stream, but things are getting perder.

Bruiserie shows a bit rough, but yeah, that's coming up as well as getting to fighting games. And I also did a couple of like just really long strife sets that are going to be on the channel. So I did a Celestial. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, I just, I was hitting the Celestial Tower for a bit and then playing with some people that we're watching. And then me and Reggie did like some really long sets too.

So for those of you who have been tuning in recently that I've seen some pretty good feedback from people that are like, Hey, it's nice to see like regular check-ins on a game and see the improvement over time. Yeah. If you're enjoying that, there's some strife sets come into the channel that are just like couple hours grinding away at it, trying to figure out labbing, matchups, learning, etc. So you're watching the discovery process essentially as I try to get better at a game. So you can see what that is like and you know, hopefully have your own journey and enjoy

that over on the. You know, check out my crap on twitch.tv slash Pat stairs that we're going to be finished off the Mass Effect 2 DLC this week and maybe Pit lane Pokemon Unite and Great Ace Attorney. So there is one more thing I'd just like to mention before we get off my week. Watched Mao Mao, the cartoon, Mao Mao, I want to say it's called Heroes of Pure Heart, which I thought was going to be a lot more saccharine than it was. That's a great little adventure show. It's fantastic.

It's absolutely hilarious. I would put it not quite adjacent to adventure time in it's absurdity. It's a lot more structured. How do you spell that little M.A.O. M.A.O. OK, Mao. Not M.A. like meow meow. Not as in the huge black canyon uprising from the 1950s. No, I'm no talking about the black cat hero character from the cartoon show.

OK. Because the Mao Mao's is a big, big African thing. Yeah, I know the long and short of it, two cartoon hero types get stuck defending what is essentially a fucking country of care bears in that the care bears are all disgusting freaks and they're kind of horrible and I hate them. It's good. OK, very good. OK.

OK, but why the woolly? I don't know. I like fucking it's what comes to mind most deaf references in a bunch. It's a thing you hear about it in hip hop sometimes. And then it's also per his store. I don't know what the fuck it's this. Anyways, cool. All right.

Well, anyway. M.A.U. M.A.U. Is what I was referring to there. But OK, we can don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, I have zero idea. That's OK. That's OK.

It's a thing that happens. It's all right. Like the chairman from China. OK. All right, well, we're off sponsors then, but first I'd like to take a quick break because I need to use the washroom, not the washroom. Excuse me. I almost said that.

You know, believe it or not, sometimes. History. Yeah, sometimes. Mm hmm. Yes. That's what that's the sentence. What do you what do you what are you talking about? That's the sentence.

OK, bathroom. Is that history? It's about to be. Right. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our beloved sponsors. This week.

Love them. Castle Super Beast is sponsored by the Mao Mao uprising in which the Kenyan people decolonize themselves from British rule. They're sponsoring us. Apparently.

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thanks Hawthorne alright well I'd like to apologize for this timing but I got a crying dog upstairs that's gonna piss on the floor I have to go I'll be right back BRB uh

so it seems over that last little break right as it was happening we got rated from Adam from YMS oh cool that's nice thanks Adam

I feel as if there's a streak of getting the worst opportune times for raids that I've been going through recently it's been kind of wild uh like jam crops rated me like right at the end of a stream and uh Leffen as well

right during my stupid long credit sequence like thousands of people dropped in and I was like uh I think fuck so yeah bad street um the most consistent raid

misfortune that I've encountered is like doing a 5-6 hour stream and be like whoa I'm sweaty I'm gonna get out of here alright let's quit playing rated by 300p

ah hey butter buds actually butter buds I think she's rated me with like 6700 which like doubled the stream at that point so I was like hey so that's the thing I'm just I'm finishing up raiding is a really cool feature that like uh smart that twitch has

and like it's something that is like definitely more community productive than like uh youtube but like it does this thing where you sometimes land on someone who was just winding down and is desperately in need

of a break and then they go oh fuck me this is an opportunity I have to come back now I have to take this chance to sell you on clicking the follow button so you know now you get to watch someone like

kind of dead getting puppeted by like the the new potential audience and they're like okay I guess we'll go for another 10 minutes and that's like I rated somebody doing the same thing finishing up after like a 8-9 hour stream

and I rated them with a couple 100 people and they're like hey good stream guy oh hey we were about to call it exactly I guess we could do one more game yeah yeah there's great there's always there's always someone

you know much more massive that can drop in a number that bulges your eyes and you go fuck time extended gotta gotta dance gotta dance speaking of time extended I forgot to talk about

the other game I played this week super liminal oh yeah you finally hopped on to that did you did you see Paige's stream and then be like oh man that game looks cool like the timing was hilarious no not at all solidus had been pushing it for a long time and Reggie was out for the day

so I was like well I'm doing a solo stream let's jump on this game that has been pushed for a long time it's a good game I like it did she just go through it yeah she streamed last week she got

I want to say about halfway through okay yeah so we got through the whole thing and it's great it's fucking good it's real good I there was only one puzzle I think

where I kind of just rolled my eyes at the solution like it was like I it was like it was like I think it was like the first fan room where like what they were going for

and like what the solution was ended up being a little um not unclear because the perspective rule continues but I just I didn't I didn't like the clue to how it was

set up as much but the rest of it definitely and like everything else was fucking incredible the I know you said you got through half so I won't talk too much about like no no no Paige got through half oh you beat it I streamed it back on release sick

like the day it came out so and beat it in one go and I got into like I had a little trouble at the beginning and then I got into this like perfect state where once once the crescendo starts to happen I think you know what I'm talking about near the end I just

like walked through every puzzle just like it's like there there this this this oh it's so good it's fantastic that came so good I I definitely think the um like the way you

fuck with like the portaling section of it in particular is like it's a funner way like portaling is fun but this is like a funner aspect to it when you like just playing with scale and size you know and it gets really

unnerving when something becomes like crush you sized above your head yeah that's the one thing from the trailers I remember being like oh that is fucking terrifying like because perspective of something mundane becoming

kill you murder sized never feels good it is always like you know there's uh I talked about it well I talked about this a good deal when it came out but did you ever play anti chamber I played the first

like 10 minutes of it good enough anti chamber is a it's a very like white and black line kind of non euclidean space game and I love like portal has that a little bit where it's like perspective and things and visual illusion

and impossible space but the problem with anti chamber was the halfway through it became a block puzzle game okay and they had they had forgotten all they they hadn't forgotten but they had run out of cool perspective tricks okay uh super liminal is

short it's like four and a half hours I'd say three uh yeah about there and it doesn't run out of those things yeah it ends when they run out exactly short and sweet the other thing too is it's using

a concept that like is you know novel but the presentation is something that we've already done a couple times too because the clean sterile office or lab environment in which you then slowly

sneak off the grid like portal was that Stanley parable is that the beginners yeah guide is that to a degree it's not particularly a new thing so you don't want to overstay your welcome when you're kind of playing with a new idea

in a narrative that you've already experienced um so they yeah they definitely did good with that uh the what I'd say like besides the the dreaded scale of some of the things you drop sometimes there is also the um creating the paradox you know like

the moment there's a moment where you are holding a portal and like a portal house and you walk out of the door of that portal house while holding it that makes me super uncomfortable still like it feels like you're bug testing and it wants you to do

that and it then the end result is like I don't like it I did it's very uncomfortable so that I like the fact that this game like deliberately wants you to feel discomfort in these moments you know um plays with shadows really great moment plays with shadows and darkness

really well walk into the complete abyss and the only thing that lets you know where you're going is the light of where you once were looking behind you you know like shit like that's pretty great uh super liminal is uh yeah short and sweet really really really good

good um worth a shout out and now I see what all the all the shilling was about mm-hmm um okay so on to is there is there any news this week well

there there appears to be some news I'm not sure if there's news this week before we get into the news I just want to say you know Pat um you might not know this but I just want you to be aware might that your voice does

matter my voice matters every voice matters oh that's true every single voice even the ones we don't listen to and explicitly ignore and create a culture of ignoring uh no those voices matter

the most of all yeah uh that showing up on poorly aged things was uh who didn't see that comment but um no clever segue Blizzard is on fire

Activision Blizzard I should specify is on fire why are they on fire what possible reason could story developer Activision Blizzard be on fire for for the exact same story that Ubisoft was on fire for not too long ago actually

it's this it's that story plus one it's the upgraded version of that story plus lawsuit no that story plus death this is true so

um I mean this has been updating by the hour uh yeah it's it's it's a really it's uh I want to say four day old story five day old story and

it is really long now and there is all it's real real long a lot to it but so I have like the latest update here

going back to the the breaking story is that essentially the state of California is suing Activision Blizzard for what it's calling a pervasive frat boy workplace culture in which female staff

were often subject to harassment and the lawsuit includes descriptions of just lots of bad things happening including cube crawls and copious amounts of

booze where they crawl through the cubicles and inappropriate behavior towards female employees in general female employees feeling unsafe lots of I want to stop that for a second because the cubicle crawl part is bearing actual explanation because I was talking to somebody about this yesterday

and the description of cubicle crawl as it hit their head was walking around to people's cubicles drunk and getting people drunk as if it were a pub crawl right however

the cubicle crawl listed in the lawsuit from the government of California against Activision Blizzard is specifically a bunch of rowdy dudes getting wasted at the office and literally crawling on their hands and knees

underneath everyone's cubicle so as to grope and or ogle the female employees sitting at their desks so that's that's

your iceberg tip of sorts and then the level of shitty behavior towards female employees extends as far as a one employee who was

on a work trip with their boss who it would appear was I guess they were traveling together and the boss brought along side sex toys and things like that

and was bragging about how he was going to score basically and there were illicit pictures of this employee that were shared throughout the company and that employee then committed suicide on the work trip

it really reads like this poor lady killed herself in order to avoid being sexually assaulted by her boss the most blunt reading possible as this is apparently a boss who had been sexually harassing her in the past that they sent her on a trip with

so lots of this lots of discussion about looking at this and looking at other similar situations where you have a company where there's lots of people who are higher up that are known perpetrators, known people that are shitty and that

are being protected by the people who by the powers that be you have the jokes about this boss for example having the Crosby sweet which is a reference to Bill Crosby or I believe

it's a typo in the complaint okay so it's the Cosby sweets it's supposed to be Cosby sweets exactly so there you go then you know all of that goes down and it involves

like tons and tons and tons of employees all verifying and backing this up once again and similar to the Ubisoft story about this shit culture and the company which then leads to

their official response being effectively uh and they get a nice way what there were three official responses within hours

that's the best part okay so the official response from the Activision CEO and the Blizzard CEO was that these are very serious allegations that must be taken

seriously and to contact them if you want to snitch on your boss for being a creepy-toucher because we had no idea this was going on and then within minutes of those going out the chief compliance officer for Activision Blizzard parent company

put out a statement saying that the state of California is full of shit and that they made the whole thing up and then the official Activision Blizzard came out where they said that this is one of the reasons

why businesses are leaving California because this kind of overzealous government oversight and now two days ago Activision and Blizzard specifically

have said that we have this is a deep they didn't know what was happening and that they're very sorry for nothing because nothing happened and literally all three entities here are all playing

leapfrog as to nothing happened but if it did we're really sorry and come tell us about what happened so we can deal with the people that did this even though no one did anything and also fuck you California also fuck off California how dare you look at us

in particular on top of this there's the detail what is that guy's name there's one particular director named specifically the gentleman with the Cosby suite in which

he was described as like one of the worst at the company I forget his name let's start with an A I want to say but people talking about they finally found out about him

Blizzard employees talking on twitter and he left the company so suddenly that it was not known he did not work there until like three months after he left and in that twitter thread you have what might be my favorite part of this whole story

which is former story man of Blizzard entertainment Chris Medson who has not worked there for eight years accidentally name searching himself by tweeting at the thread just replying to people talking about abusers

with the phrase Chris Medson that's good that's always good Chris put out a statement earlier today in which he describes how sorry he is for not noticing only to be called out directly by former employees

going mother fucker you're the one who told me that I should stick to what I'm good at taking notes and organizing meetings and this is by a lady who is now like a senior developer like I forget what it was but it was a MMO developer

she's quite talented and has had a prolific career since then and also my favorite part about all this is that all the people who worked at Blizzard all the old hands of Blizzard did you remember they all left 18 months ago

like all of the senior staff just fucked off about six months into the government of California's investigation into the workplace suddenly they all quit so that's what I was about to bring up is that this investigation has been going on for two years

this has been a large full ass thing that the the DFEH was looking into and after

a two year investigation which all the people that have left within the timeframe of this investigation suddenly it makes a ton of sense it was so weird how all these classic Blizzard employees all just bailed all at the same time right away

and then the phrasing of the statement given in response directly from Activision was to call this irresponsible behavior from unaccountable state bureaucrats like I think Side note reminder that Bobby

Coddick was on Epstein's plane so just Bobby Coddick I mean that guy who killed himself oh yes that guy Side note that he was on the Epstein plane by the way in case that was so

I retweeted a gentleman who expressed the thought but I think it's the thought that everyone had which is the line from Jay Allen Brack and all the old Blizzard guard who would have been at the top of the company during the worst of this

have all come out and said guys we're really sorry we just never noticed we didn't listen and it's like there is explicit investigatory documentation

of groups of dudes showing up to work wasted and having a party crawling under people's desks groping each other a practice that must have been going on for years and years well you didn't notice I've seen game development

offices they're giant spaces you can look across the room when most of them you didn't what you didn't see that and the and the fact that this is a like at this point almost expected and continued narrative across

tons of large companies where these practices get again super shuffled to the fucking bottom of the of the priority list and the fact that like HR

is then set up to be explicitly anti victim and entirely human corporate defense human resources is not about being pro employee human resources is in order to

prevent the company from being sued exactly and you see this time and time again and this is just another exact replica of that situation in which you can follow along I was again talking I have a friend

who literally went through the ringer with that like had to deal with it first hand and had to have her complaint get completely ignored time and time again and then when forcing it and putting it to confrontation eventually it's the equivalent of

taking your taking your your molesting priest out of the parish and moving them over to another one or over to a different department or back to the Vatican they literally just shuffle employees around so that you won't be around

the person who was the abuser anymore and that's the end of that fucking insanity so that then of course progresses lots of things get involved I believe the

chief legal officer they hired working on this used to work for George you Bush so that was wild she was the one she was the compliance officer who came out and pulled a very typical political line of like the fucking

governments overstepping their bullshit big the biggest guns and yeah so what then obviously started to happen was the employees who were aware of this and then

seeing the story unfold then saw the response that they put out which was the company basically going fuck you and no great company good company no touch and the result

has been that over a thousand employees have been like fuck this have signed letters of condemnation against the company and work on for example World of Warcraft has entirely stopped

I can imagine it's not just wow that's the one we have confirmation on but I can imagine development across the board is just done right now until something happens so yeah that was coming from Jeff Hamilton on

Twitter who's saying no work is being done as this all plays out no one really knows what to do everyone is kind of just like completely dumbstruck at the fact that this kind of story

well mainly that like again the story is a slow bleed for anyone that has been in the company watching this whole investigation take place but the response has been baffling because they're just like nah fuck it none of this is important didn't happen doesn't line just the

complete deflection the complete lack of we're very sorry and you can talk to us about the thing that didn't happen and when you're a giant corporate beast of this size of course there's always going to be that initial like

confusing messaging period but like the first message coming out and being this completely dismissive of stories that are literally including as you mentioned death um I can see it's the instantaneous

reaction from anyone at that company expecting that this might have led to a massive overhaul in the company culture seeing that they're like now we're going to fight it fuck you all being like so this is why even when all the chips have

settled sorry and the dust is settled and whoever needs to get fired so there's no lawsuit gets fired still just going to go right back to what it was eventually because there's definitely people that you must imagine are

like look everyone is everyone's looking at their CV at all times you never never fucking know what's going on and a lot of people that are here following this again like must be going well here it is let's see how this goes and

at best this will lead to a overturn a cleansing a massive shift in things or fucking nothing and if fucking nothing has been the you know the response of the

the flavor of the response to date then like would Activision dollars not step in here to spend as much as they can on legal defense of all this shit will Activision dollars buy back the good will that's being burned away

like I'm not a lawyer but it is my impression that a gov a state government like employment body that spends the time to interview and investigate a company for multiple years

only to publicly blast them open with a lawsuit I'm pretty sure California has this in the bag it's wild that like that's the degree this is at because that's so much

further and more like that's so much further along than like oh yeah chronic dream with the shitting dickenballs and David cage yelling out some dumb shit and that was all press you know what's crazy that wasn't

even the government that was just the press and and stories of Ubi and like all and like all these like stories that have come out where they're just like yeah fucking dirt bags are out and about here and they're being shuffled and protected that's always just bring like stories

leaks you know former employees talking about what their experiences have been and whatnot but like this one is like straight up massive giant legal fucking uh like it's accusations more than more than just

hair say more than just words more than just stories like a literal lawsuit they're going to court and they're probably gonna lose to some degree and uh it's it's

it's kind of wild that all the former heads of the company that no longer they're all hitting twitter with their like novels saying man I just never noticed like chris medicines the one that pops to mind because it's his like the name

searching himself is just the funniest thing but um and it's just like this I couldn't believe any of it less you cannot tell me that you ran this company for decades and you just never

saw it that kind of allowance for behavior starts at the top that behavior starts at the top and it goes downward I think another way of looking at it too is um

to start from the top and look downward if someone dying as a result of what's happening doesn't change anything

then what will well I can tell you exactly what that is because the same people who are bowing their heads in false contriteness about how sorry it is look at somebody killing themselves

due to the stresses imparted upon them by their work and the relationships they're in inappropriate as they were and go wow that's so sad and that's the end of the thought no examination and if somebody asked them

hey man why do you think she did it guess they were just crazy the official response letter actually makes reference to it and uses it as a moment to be indignant we are sickened by the reprehensible

how dare you bring up this person's death of the DFEH to drag into the complaint of a tragic suicide of an employee who's passing has no bearing whatsoever on this case and no regard for her grieving family when it sounds like it had everything to do with this case I mean

my initial thing was like that kind of indignation better come along with the family also saying how dare you but somehow I don't think it is somehow I think a family who's family member kills themselves

due to this kind of scenario isn't going how could you possibly use this to fucking shit on the company they worked for everything was great there I don't think that's the reality I think when people die in these circumstances family members

are looking for any kind of closure or justice out of the situation so yeah all of that leads to thousands of employees not knowing what the fuck to do

because this is what are you going to do start taking orders on what to work on from somebody that you're pretty sure is going to get fired in three days because this is one of the worst possible ways this could have played out as far as response goes knowing the bomb is going to drop is one thing

but getting your response team ready and having the EMTs ready to go and then spraying oil I can only imagine there are a lot of people brushing up on those CVs

and resumes right now like the real story takes place on LinkedIn always remember in about two months in all of these cases the real story takes place on LinkedIn every single time

um um it's astonishing because Ubisoft long scummiest video game publisher that I'm aware of had a story this week and was set to be the scum of the week

and Activision Blizzard not to be outdone always got that Blizzard quality best of the best even in scandal just stole it away from them and I'd like to make a statement I talked about Rune Terror earlier today

and right before we came into this segment where I was shitting all over Blizzard deservedly somebody pointed out that Riot was also a frat boy shithole with sexist hiring practices and all sorts of stuff and

and I have to be blunt is that I have really really bad news for people that enjoy video games what's that bad news Pat? I remember when the Riot stuff came out and I said I bet a ton of companies are like

this and we either won't know but you can assume and then all the Ubisoft came out and then now the Activision Blizzard stuff comes out it's like I'm under the assumption that almost any game company over a certain size is housing

just a bunch of criminals just like most jobs I can tell you right now I know at least one company that has got a bunch of thieves in it just a ton of them so when

I sat down and recorded a podcast episode talking about the old QA days and the various companies that we worked for the last willy will figure it out when I sat down with James, a former person that I used to work with

and we just kind of reminisced on some of this shit and from day one there was always immediately identifiable creeps that would pass the test so to speak

make the cut, get it show up and within hours of them being at the company show you, oh yeah, you can't trust this person around like a woman you can't trust them

to their tasks, you can't trust this person at all this person is insanely dangerous and it was always a race of like, okay will anything happen here, will they do anything about it

or will they just let it rock and go like oh, we're not going to take it too seriously and once that person gets promoted, that's exactly what I was about to say and if you fail the race and the person then gets put into

a position of being in the click now, you're a group, you've gotten promoted you're now a manager, you're now a sub manager you're now a group leader, whatever the case is you're now in a position, they're indispensable man we got to ship this, we don't have time to get a new whatever and then you watch as the first

taste of immunity starts to show up and like, the severity of what the fuck they do doesn't go down, it always gets weirder and weirder and and eventually you get mighty number 9 um, yeah and like

I mean, there was like there was a point where I had like people that were like really just weird and like you had these stories about shit that was happening with them that you're like, that's fucked up and you know, I left the company

and then finding out like the trajectory of like how some of these people went where um, in this particular case, like creepy behavior went to like literal sexual assault into literal

like story and like rape accusations and like things where you're like, yeah, you need to like identify that and get it the fuck out of your company immediately because that is good because

we got a ship dude, we got time for this we got a ship because who knows where the fuck that goes over time especially when protected you know, it's insane um, so we literally talked about shit like that and we talked about like uh, just, and yeah, and just

the idea of like, yeah, like overall um, these, the larger the company, the moment they get past that promotion point, as you just mentioned you get into the game and then you get you eventually are in a a higher tier of really important people that are

you know, an accusation comes against you but you go for drinks with the people who make the decisions every time. Ah, it's not a big deal man so they go, hey, what's what's this about and then they get to hear uh, the one side of the story and then HR is also at the table

and they go, alright, yeah, we'll we'll, don't worry about it we got a ship, you know these types of people, I want to attribute this quote to Doc but I'm not super sure he might have just been one of his retweets or somebody else but these types of people have a real

strong habit to immediately make themselves quote unquote, indispensable to the task, by sabotaging other people's tasks and insinuating that everything would just fall apart without their management or expertise

uh, no one's ever indispensable, ever on anything, it's not a real thing everyone can be replaced but the the movers and the shakers, so to speak

um, quite literally are always not very good at hiding that ambition you're describing it's very, very it goes hand in hand that like people who come in and think that

that type of behavior is okay people who are gonna lock you in a broom closet and try to smell your hair people who are gonna, you know, like be like, yeah, that's just the way we roll and you know basically just go back to work and try and are also the same types

that are trying to get the power they're trying to get they're trying to get everything, right? it's that like slightly indicative of sociopathic behavior of just not giving a fuck about anything happening around you and you know, hitting up as high as you can

on the totem pole um, so all this is just to just reiterate that it's like the more you see that early on and let it slide you are 100% guaranteed going to be seeing worse and worse versions of it over time

because the person is being given essentially a freebie, a pass to say, hey, that wasn't a big deal and if the person who's the victim in this case is more disposable than the person who is higher up you know, well then

whatever, hopefully again HR can step in and either, you know shuffle things around, buy the silence do what they gotta do and usually there will be a contract or a document or a thing to sign

that comes out right away that completely absolves the company from any blame or whatever this plays out, however it plays out they get themselves nice and early absolved from all responsibility by handing those things out. Now how much those are actually legally binding?

I have no idea do you know that they have those things but they can look legally binding but I know that like HR will bring that type of letter out on meeting one when you say, hey, I have a complaint about somebody

the first thing, the first first thing is sign this okay, now what happened? so you want a really good example of the people at the top let's say let's imagine

that whoever the head person in charge of Blizzard's hiring practices senior staff actually didn't see anything they hid in their office every day

and they never talked to a single employee let's assume this completely unrealistic scenario people have described the hiring process at Blizzard and here's a perfect encapsulation

of how you help create the scenario what is one of the factors you absolutely need to work at Blizzard you have to be a die-hard fan of Blizzard games and love the company before you even

walk in the door it has to be a dream come true for you it means that once you're hired you A, won't be looking at your paycheck for them fucking you over at substandard rates

and B, you are incentivized to shut the fuck up about any problem you ever encounter because I work at Blizzard man I don't want to screw this up I can get another job

but it's Blizzard whatever I bet it's not that big of a deal this kind of practice hiring your fanatics creates this day-to-day is serving up dream jobs this is

what goes this is the day-to-day offering and that definitely brings in people that are much more I mean it's not to say that they are just immensely talented

that are just shifting from one studio to another with an opening that they can definitely crush a position on absolutely but it is a self-selection process to create an attitude of overvaluing

your work and the place in your work and not wanting to rock the boat I mean dude like you know this is all that age my earliest dreams of wanting to work for mainframe was because I liked to reboot

I wanted to work for Capcom because I liked Street Fighter it's just that simple it's like you if you were into RTS games it would have been Blizzard whatever the case there is a good period of time in which they made the absolute hands down best games in the world

with polish that would make Nintendo jealous but all of that I mean that's a thing but that's still a very separate issue from just like realizing that um this hiring process will let in people

who are fucking creeps that need to be fired oh yeah and like just not having the alarm bells system in place to identify that

within whatever days to weeks it takes to see that show up and then like oust that person and just don't even give it a second look you know is just not a thing at any of these major triple A companies

and you would think considering the fact that again if you want to not be in a shitty lawsuit about sexual harassment you would think the smartest move would be the person on day one of any of these infractions

to save the company in the end that's how you actually protect the company is you immediately get rid of that person because you can't trust that that's a fucking liability you know hey you know what's a really good example of what we're talking about

of how this hiring process can incentivize scumbags so the person whose name I could not remember the one who left and could not be discovered was a gentleman named

Alex Afrasiabi who came on as a quest designer after being the head of a gigantic wow guild so literally just hire guild leaders they're fanatics they might also be

alleged sex pervert rapists but he loves the game so much that's what's really important one in every how many will be please have a button in place to immediately eject seat or drop

into a trap hole someone who happens to slip by the fucking hiring process on instantaneously on frame one so then yeah there are tons of employees and like I believe

I was hearing that over on the various hmm so I typed this gentleman's name into Google and hilariously enough I got a Kotaku article from 2020 from 2010

the lady at Lizcon asked hey why does every female piece of armor in the game for wow have to step out of the Victoria's secret catalog at which point Jay Allen Brack the CEO and Alex Afrasiabi

continued to defensively joke about her question instead of giving a sincere answer even after the lady walked away from the mic the devs of the panel continued to joke about her question what catalog would you like us to pull from okay these people are obvious

that's just the piece we saw at a public convention 10 years ago inside the office this shit is so clear I don't

know if this aspect was true there was some reference to like the naked employee photos that were being passed around as being shared post-mortem and I don't

I didn't see that in the original complaint I don't know how verifiable that is but dear fucking god now what a great well we'll see how this goes

best of luck to blizzard in their lawsuit I'm sure it'll go great best of luck to the people who work at blizzard who are currently trying to figure out what the fuck is gonna happen here I mean I'm obviously being sarcastic each at blizzard

was the best of luck to people in their new job searches of which I'm certain there will be many so what was the real wow killer all along like not to get too businessy or video gamey but like the like wow

has had the worst month it has ever had in its life cycle because it went from groundswell to its competitor from a natural point of view to like people going

I cannot ethically play this game like I can very much imagine like hardcore wow found fans looking at their game with like disgust like it is object like it can be very easily said that it's tainted well I mean at bare minimum

this is one of those things where the game logo will pop up from now in the future and like everyone in the room will have you know still the funniest podcast question we ever got email

ever the 3b's Bioware, Bethesda and blizzard that was 2013 and it was hilarious then I mean the not that every fucking small studio is angelic and perfect or whatever but no look at lab zero

but at all right but the odds of the giant one having ridiculous skeleton dungeons are extraordinarily high it seems to grow linearly

there's a chance your small studio might have a problem it is guaranteed your large studio has a problem how did they deal with it any studio over a certain size you're going to find something

Capcom recently got caught plagiarizing a ton of shit right Sega is partially or completely owned and run by a literal Japanese crime syndicate pick one

EA's just evil like I'm sure we'll get shit like this out of EA in a short amount of time yeah although it does get brought into another category when you're talking about sex criminals like on the on the move

Amazon which is our technical partner company is trying to turn their workers into slaves shit oh and warcraft 3 reforged has been put on hold oh you mean

after they fired the team or something the whole team is gone that's what happened okay well there's there's some other things that happened this week oh yeah

oh well thank goodness we can get away from that dire news with all the misogyny and crimes and we can go to a nice place like Singapore where everything is good and nice well well yep you there

trying no trying no I'm gonna drop the the baton the baton is on the floor so this week Ubisoft was in the news

due to their deal with the Singaporean government because what's the name of the game it's their ship game uh fucking god damn it Nazi of thieves um

I want to skull and bones skull and bones has been in development for eight years has had no progress at all made on it it has been rebooted

multiple times a year the entire time they have spent 120 million dollars on it and there's literally no game there's nothing but because they took a tax credit

from the Singaporean government and made a studio there they have to finish it they have to and bonus despite most of the staff being Singaporean natives

if you're not French you don't get to be promoted so what they do is they send their French employees from the main studios to run the studio for a year or two somewhere nice and exotic before getting sent back home

and promoted the Singaporean employees have joked that there is a French ceiling at the studio okay okay it's literally

a neocolonialist game dev studio yeah so let's just let's cap this off the way I feel like a I capped off the the last time talking about this type of shit but

the end of that same podcast discussion I was describing of the old the old QA days and Willie will figure it out was about how unions can be a pretty good thing hey

you know all those problems you have with unions they're real I don't care they're not as bad as the problems you have right now there's a lot of shit that needs ironing out

but this though is currently like this is some wild shit I've been in a corrupt union I would take my corrupt union over dealing with the boss with nothing

any day of the week it's the easiest decision in the world yeah um it's if these stories don't like these types of things

if they don't provide the fucking push you know yeah a thousand employees write a letter saying their company is full of shit how about you guys write a letter saying you're unionizing and you won't take this crap or you'll all strike

and how about that and you definitely know that like the the corporate response to that is always like there's no cost that is uh there's no cost too high

to stop that from happening you know you do absolutely everything and you can and you shut it down open up business I have a bloody in mind who got fired from his movie job for trying to start a union sure

he was trying to start a union over at the fucking uh cineplex downtown the big theater dead center you know on St. Catherine and his girlfriend sorry his axe

ratted him out to the boss and a couple weeks before everything was ready to go he got fired yeah of course of course you know and and and just like when you're dealing with when this type of shit happens

laterally between two people that are like uh in the company at the relatively the same position you know and then a shuffling occurs like that is a a shit decision from someone who has the power that is effectively not

dealing with the situation properly and that happens you can see a bunch of times but most of these stories end up being one person way higher up and multiple victims involved and like this is where I imagine a union can really really help

I hey this bitch gotta go or strike hey this gotta happen or strike strikes rule I don't I don't know um you know like and that the the yeah the discussion with James is one that was kind of like hey like I don't know like what

the moves would be but there are places that have set up like the the initial steps to push for a game industry unionizing like um movement you know there are discussions there are places there are people trying to put those those those bricks into

place and essentially it feels as if like if there's ever enough people uh pushing for it that like an existing framework can be filled in and then launched but uh that's the that's the that's the takeaway I guess

on these types of stories let me say one thing if you're worried about a union and this is the most important thing you'll ever have to hear Mr. Everard is helping me find my he is

he is what else do you need to know I need to know about my right to work don't show me a picture though might hear some stories and I regret talking to him do you yeah on stream

it's awful little disco tangent there don't worry about it too if you're confused well and I mean there's there's there's like there's what you described and then there's the actual literal like

horror story um version of what you're describing which is in my opinion at the very least a police union which is the extreme opposite end of the of the spectrum where it's

the same problem where with those kinds of unions the accountability is being deflected right like yeah it's the same problem place unions are a different beast different breed different massive fucking crazy thing

it's great it's insane the more you find out about it you know but um but yeah in terms of how do you stop the fucking uh how do you stop the Vatican moving the

priests around like that's what this that's kind of what this is you know it's um you strike on God that works I'm pretty sure actually in particularly really the actual solution was a huge lawsuit

that's how you stopped it well you know big lawsuit Sodom and Gomorrah were really just worker strikes that lasted you think about it a while yeah those cities were

fed up with the rules and they decided to go on strike and and what are you gonna do when you're on strike you're gonna party you're gonna booze up and do a whole lot of

but fucking and um that's what striking is all about striking is all about it and you know putting it in the ass of the company well seems like God wasn't too happy with that so he shut down

the Walmart you know anyway well there's some other shit that Singapore's story is wild that's why I can't believe how not just it that you missed it because the activation lizard thing

is just so much more intense but yeah no that one's fucked up it just annihilated the the docket there I was gonna oh man hey I'm gonna need to take another break

I'm gonna piss myself I'm very sorry today alright okay so seeing as it is a shit week on the on the podcast this week that's correct it's shit week yes we uh let's let's keep on

seeing where the slide takes us you might be looking at all the shit news and thinking well that's horrible you know I should I'll cheer myself up by by playing a good old

game of the new world from Amazon the new world MMO oh yeah I saw people some people are streaming that I requested a code for myself yeah

looking forward to it give it a shot now I'm done with FF14 until and Walker so maybe we'll just mess around with that but you haven't booted it up yet have you no I didn't get the key yet I might not but I was looking forward to checking it out that's cool that's cool

that's an Amazon games production might be their first good one maybe let's find out what happens when you boot it up what happens uh apparently uh it bricks your $1500 and video GPU

the new world MMO cool is apparently responsible for killing a number of RTX 3090s and multiple players

are basically reporting that yeah their the game is destroying the closed beta specifically is destroying their cards um there's an issue that results

in 100% GPU usage after booting the game um the developer recommended overriding the driver settings by turning the max frame rate to off

um however I think the point at which your video card gets fried is one where you're not playing with settings anymore so

the specifically this is a double issue this is all I believe this is impacting EVGA cards explicitly uh as for some reason

something about their architecture is the only one um affected by this and it was caused by uh the menus in new world have no internal frame limit on them

so they would just run up thousands and thousands of frames a second uh and your GPU at like peak or past peak power draw at all times and kill it

there are some timings coming out telling people that you know you can hopefully prevent this you can prevent this by capping your FPS beforehand and locking it at 60

however the fact that software can kill your hardware is exactly why compliance exists you kind of get to circumvent that because

there's no standardization there's light steam standardization so EVGA made a card that can kill itself if it runs at weird frame rates for too long and amazon made a car

a game that can run weird frame rates at insane numbers for weird periods of time both of these are not the end of the world until you combine the two issues and then you end up with a dead card which EVGA to its credit

is sending out replacement cards that's the update on the story is they have they've basically updated to say that yes they will be sending out replacements to those who've had bricked 3090s so that's nice

because what the fuck also results probably in um it probably results in like some development hurdles for a lot of companies and a lot of people

but I think having some more aggressive compliance standards for um PC platforms would in the end protect the consumer like yeah you would think there's benefits to the

wild wild west of the PC world but these are the downsides and um I'm someone who would be in favor of like making sure it doesn't kill your hardware for example as a major requirement you know um yeah maybe maybe

well anyway uh we have that and the real bummer this week though is that after just one year of operation tom clancy's elite

squad will be shutting down I guess umbra one in the and bra one in the end I was hoping you'd remember which one that was I did remember fists in the air say it loud say it proud umbra

one let's go dead sec that's wild dude live service game shutting down in under a year even uh even fucking anthem ran for longer than that did you spend your money you see

fuck you they were like showing off like tom clancy's xd squad a bit of a fuck it's called did like right after they announced they were shutting this thing down like how fucking stupid do you have to be holy Christ and I also saw that and I saw like just

people going like what does tom clancy mean anymore it means that he's dead and they bought the license to his name what is it like the xd squad they just like what is it what does it mean who knows who knows

um yeah well guns I guess right yeah if it has guns it means it means modern military fetishism if it has shootbangs it counts

um anyway there is a couple of announcements for things moving moving along they announced the pubg animated show

from adi shankar aka castlevania showrunner what player unknowns battlegrounds will be getting an animated show is this the prequel to the callista protocol

I don't know according to their press release this animated project is coming to netflix it seems

and a lot of people thought the next thing he'd be working on was the devil may cry thing but seems like it's not and quite frankly I don't think we need to be in a rush I think we can

let that take its time a lot of people are like no but when's dmc though and I'm like never please never is good I don't know castlevania is pretty good man yeah I guess I guess I just but there's nothing wrong with never

you know what I mean that's true except it doesn't make anyone any money never is fine never has been fine up until now um anyway yeah I don't know pubg show

is a thing I guess it's gonna have the guy with the tie and the helmet on it you know it's you're making an animated show out of a property so bereft of original ideas

that it tried to sue people for including fucking frying pans in their game so I have to wonder I guess Mr. Shankar must have some ideas must

because why would you agree if you didn't have some ideas it I would I would flip my shit if they actually had a tie into Callista protocol which is the weirdest cross-contamination of any IP ever ever

do you even know what I'm talking about no Callista protocol is that game being made by the former devs of the dead space franchise the future space thing with the zombie monsters that look like necromorphs

that is in the pubg universe oh yes I remember that now I remember this yes the horror thing in the pubg universe that got announced correct take a second right pubg is trying to create a universe and I guess step one is

that and then step two is this yeah I don't get it step one probably should have been like the game itself you know step one should have been making unique assets from the game itself but anyway

that's announced the minecraft movie is coming March 4th 2022 will follow a teenage girl in her unlikely group of adventures and the malevolent ender dragon sets out on a path of destruction that's nice

what that's nice um the witcher nightmare of the wolf the animated series spin-off uh also trailer dropped for that and I as someone who has not experienced any witcher have questions

yeah this doesn't appear to contain a garalt in it that's fine there's lots of characters so is this the kind of thing that's got vesemir in it so that's my thing is like do the other things does the rest of the world set up in a really

strong way to like move the camera to other places oh yeah this should have it all the time cool there are other witchers okay dude I think yeah it's vesemir this time yeah okay just tag along with vesemir

dude with a short hair and a goatee and a beard and a thing yeah okay vesemir fucking kicks ass dude he's like your dad well um that and if anything

the castlevania energy is very similar on this trailer I guess that's just going to be the comparison point for all these Netflix animated projects from now on huh just going to be like okay well how much how much like Castlevania is it going to be like

and we'll just we'll start there and then figure it out it was good yeah it was good I like Malcolm McDowell's character a lot okay well how much like Castlevania will the live action

Pokemon TV show be like hopefully a lot because that's rumored to apparently be in the works um I really thought yeah we're on a roll today

we're on a roll today I really thought that they were going to do a bunch of live action movies actually I thought that like they did the the one and then they did the remake of the movie 2000 and I expected they would have been like

oh let's just make a big like cinematic universe out of live action Pokemon but it seems like they are currently rumored to be with Netflix for a show in development live action so

that's what cool I want to see Pikachu kill that fucking onyx kill it in 3D yeah

you you're a fan of um turn in butter on a stick aren't you you like spinning your stick around on occasion how much do you like spinning your stick

I like it okay why you like 360s you like 720s you feel okay about I do I can do a 1080 I can think of one character ever that I had to do a 1080 for and it was

iron taeger for his instant kill so I want to so I think you also have to do a 1080 for yada garasu and and the dawn valve in battle fantasia I'll believe that but now

you will also have to do it in this with behemoth typhoon in this behemoth typhoon in which behemoth typhoon this one which one is that

don't worry about it though I gotta hand it to archsys somebody told them archsys your characters have too many moves and they went okay here's a character with two moves except one move is 10 moves

actually it's 28 moves and it's actually 28 it's 28 moves but it's 5 moves and they each have different states gold dick louinson or gold dick louis gold

gold louis dickinson bruce dickinson is announced you know fuck that I have to say I want to fucking clap for archsys for coming up with probably my favorite nickname for a character in years

the secretary of absolute defense is a plus plus add one word and make the job title like the fucking sickest it's ever been oh it's so good so the big man from the guilty gear strive

story is showing up as the first DLC character and um he's playing around a coffin ala beyond the grave ala jango but he is holding area 51

area 51 is in his possession it is a coffin with a cryptid inside it's not an alien yes it's not an alien it's a cryptid that's crazy why would it be an alien that's ridiculous what's an alien I don't even know

he's got the yeah so he's got the five moves and they have the different states shoutouts to so obviously there's behemoth typhoon but super one is burn it down

which is a pretty fucking good name for a super where he just calls in the hammer of dawn and super two is down with the system which is my candidate for sickest super name of all time it's really good

it is one of the best I've ever read like it's super sick which requires you to do up to a 1080 to get extra hits so that's nice but I'm always a fan of when a character's inputs

are reflective of what you see them doing so guile does a flash kick because he crouches down and then he jumps and does a kick makes sense a hadoken less sense because you don't really have to crouch

down to really go then shoot the fireball out but whatever charge characters tend to have an easier time of this constant it makes more sense yes in this case swinging the coffin around requires you to

basically spin the stick from any direction 180 degrees into any other direction and then press a conceivable variation has and whichever way you go

as long as you start an end on north south east or west you will get a swing of the coffin in that direction that has a particular purpose it's awesome did it go high, did it go low, did it go back words

so the discussion over how to notate this has been great I know like for me my brain just went immediately to the clocks because before I knew it has to go to the numbers it has to do the numpad

because before I knew when I was first learning about like excellence I was trying to identify the way he does his chain his sickle moves and I was going yeah like 3 o'clock and then 12 o'clock

that one but now it's like let's take it from if you want to say 12 to 6 that doesn't work because you can go 12 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock

or you can go 12 o'clock, 9 o'clock, 6 o'clock and those are different moves those are different moves yeah but it's such a visual thing that makes a lot of sense unless you play hitbox in which case go fuck yourself

each shit hitbox users get on blast too bad yeah because if you're playing on a hitbox it sucks for anyone that does because you're like your jump button is where your thumb is and then you have

left, down, right and you don't fucking do the right combination of 3 by pianoing the 3 but you have to know which through the piano and it's just suffering

so I feel like anybody who plays hitbox is just going to have to throw it out for this character it needs to be or not play the character but yeah and it's exactly what you think it is in the sense that it's like if you swing your stick from

going forward then it's almost like a golf swing and if it hits you, it knocks you up in the air but if you swing it from up to down then it's an overhead that swings and hits you low because

that's the direction the coffin is swinging in you know and like where you start and where you end just like visually represent where the coffin is swinging that way and the move properties change accordingly it's a very

like logical way of designing things and I love that I fucking love the designs of the character balls out it's great there are 28 different versions no no no so

there are 8 different behemoth typhoons right those are the coffin swinging moves and then he has the other moves which are his the drone attack which can it can be short, mid or long range

or he has the gatling gun which can be short, mid or heavy fire and those are affected by the security level which is another meter that he has at the bottom this is the most arc system works character

he's playing his own game he has to be playing his own game so what you're doing is you're doing the different like low, mid and high security level versions of those moves and then you're doing all the behemoth typhoons in the air and then you're doing

his two supers but the giant punch super down with the system can be amplified to 1, 2, 3 extra hits

with the drones by doing extra stick rotations after inputting the initial input the initial one so he's just a big fucking boy and I love it he looks so fucking cool

I'm glad to have another heavy on the cast I haven't been playing as much guilty gear as I want but every time I go in a guilty gear I go to Potemkin I can't help it because I want to play somebody heavy but now there's a new heavy but it looks complicated oh my god

and he does a donkey kick he has one of those arms to the ground feet up in the air business boot hitbox so that looks cool he looks like the drones that he can set up

or rather that the alien can set up are going to be encrypted they're going to be a nuisance that's cool and I don't know if in the lore section if anyone's read the breakdown of his deal

but he's the secretary of defense he personally is responsible for protecting Area 51 he is on his own the equivalent of in strength of the entire White House special security

and he doesn't believe in aliens but the cryptid that's kept inside the coffin he's figured out something about it that's a weakness that forces it to do what he says so

so that's how he's controlling it but but he doesn't believe in it being an extraterrestrial at all so it's a slave alien in a coffin that has to do what he says no it's a cryptid it's a fucking cryptid stop saying it's an alien

and you know aliens don't exist and it's not just like attacking it's also things like pulling out a mirror so that he can fix his hair super great also someone caught a little stylish

design choice when you do down with the system level 4 his glasses break as he's like charging up and you see the veins bulging in his head when it does a close up on him and the shattered glass frames shoot

outside of the letter boxing borders that appear when you do a super oh nice super cool so yeah gold dick

come in this way and I think Obama tweeted out the like a thing of like this is where the move inspiration comes from and it's just like Tom Arnold in Big Lebowski

this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass scene where he's just taking it to the car this dude's great John Goodman not Tom Arnold I think they're starting too strong with the character

they're starting with their balls out and I respect it no cowardice you gotta come in with the like anyone that like you wanna come in with a heavy in or out style character cowards

and enthusiasts will part like the fucking rivers before Moses um yeah gold is gonna drop I think in two days

soon yeah and then the last thing is it seems to be out of nowhere no rumors of this in the time leading up to it but dead space remake wow

just like that wow just like that you were talking about how dead space holds up yeah that's why I talked about it so I don't know if anyone's played dead space one or two recently

those games still look immaculate they aged some of the best of anything from that generation and let me break you down what happened with dead space John Riccatello back in 2006 or 7

wanted EA to make good games so he commissioned Visceral to make dead space which was a new studio and he let some of the people on the battlefield team work on a pet project called Mirror's Edge and they both uh they both reviewed

extremely well it's a little bit better and dead space sold considerably better I think it sold like a million or a million and a half copies then Dead Space 2 uh they said well it's gotta sell way more copies it's gotta sell 5 million now and it's gonna have multiplayer

it's gotta have versus multiplayer so we can put the online pass in it of course um and so they put the shitty multiplayer in and it sucked uh but the game was excellent Dead Space 2 was absolutely fantastic and then

Dead Space 3 starts up and they go it's gotta sell 11 million copies and uh put the fucking co-op in it and make it make more shooting and then went oh okay and Dead Space 3 is kinda bad and it didn't sell

that good it sell like a couple million copies still and then uh they uh canceled plans for future Dead Spaces and then they uh closed down Visceral and then Glenn Shofield the creative guy behind the main thing

he decided to leave and took some people with him and they went and worked on Call of Duty for a little bit I had friends at Visceral they're our own thing and then they uh now they're gonna make Calista protocol which is not Dead Space and then EA saw people

getting excited for Calista protocol but they don't have anybody that can make a new Dead Space game cause they fired all of them so they went ahhhhhh uhhhh remake Dead Space 1

my friends are dead you had this ball you took you gave this ball away you took your ball and threw it from your yard as hard as you could and then you saw another kid playing

with your ball that you had thrown away and you went that's bullshit that's my ball and you got your friend Jimmy to paint a different ball to look like your original ball Pat I have a question

ask me your question let's say hypothetically I was interested at some point in the near future in playing Dead Space 1 what should I do honestly you should break out your 360

the Dead Space 1 port's controller support is weird Dead Space 2? no problem on PC but the Dead Space 1 port on PC has bizarre controller issues ok

that's a lot of trouble it kinda is Dead Space 2 is also really good is there any chance that the textures or lighting will get fucked up in this new thing well this is a remake so

I'm expecting much more than that to be fucked up hmm this really doesn't need a remake it just needs a re-release with slightly updated controller support

it can be more serious like I the feeling I get when that exact era of trying to revisit it but the newest incarnations

are terrible or have problems and there's no clear like anything older than that has been ported somewhere that's fine at some point but that exact problem of the only thing to do is plug in the ps3

the only thing to do is plug in the 360 and go get that fucking version of it going and it's just like oh my god what a fucking pain in the ass it's a massive pain ok well thanks for the tip

it's a good game I heard it's a good game I heard it's a good game why did you play it back when it first came out I still might not I still might never I don't know who cares whatever either way we'll see

or we won't I just didn't life goes on people are pointing out you can play it on the X-Sex for the old disc it's backwards compatible oh

I have one of those and it has a disc slot on it ok you can probably grab the digital version too well then there we go good to know yay let's take some letters

if you want to send in a letter about how your boss at your company is a fucking asshole send that to whatever governmental agency in your state would help you out with that but you can also pitch to us at castlesuperbeast

at gmail.com no that's not the email address at all that's the wrong one erase what he just said from your minds wait what it's not what is it it's castlesuperbeastmail.com oh you're right it's castlesuperbeastmail.com

that's what I said you can send me everyone anyways you can send us a letter you know why cause your voice matters every voice matters except for everyone who has shitty letters yeah those voices

those voices don't matter at all but hey the placard right here says every voice matters so what are you gonna argue with it yeah okay uh we got one over here

uh D'Jazzo says hey willy and pat would like to share a story of my sister who is a Griffith apologist was arguing with her about the moment Griffith sacrificed everybody and

told her how fucked up it was she told me he wasn't wrong at all and he was doing it for his dreams I said would you sacrifice me and your family for your dreams and she looked at me and just smiled and I still think about that this day and it scares me

sounds like you need a new sister ask your parents for a new one I don't know how the return policy works on that but um yeah there's there's everyone's got that friend who took the wrong thing the wrong who got the wrong takeaway

from the wrong from the scene or the wrong story usually I think the X was right um movement X did nothing wrong it might be the worst movement ever

X did nothing wrong is worse than X was right yes because sometimes usually if they're well written you're right if they're well written X was right but they were just crazy about how they were going about solving the problem or they were right but they did wrong thing yes

but X did nothing wrong is so much more inflammatory because everything every horrible atrocity committed was like no it was justified I don't care that was all good who died what your favorite character

is too bad it was worth it it was the morally correct thing to do oh yeah that's so that's way more inflammatory yeah that's an important distinction the geth did nothing wrong is a real statement I have actually said

out loud in my mass effect play through and I completely believe it uh we got one coming in from a frustrated VF fan says

dare willing pat oh man long-ranked quick question has there ever been a product launch more misguided than Virtua Fighter Ultimate showdown not just in gaming oh yeah tons but any kind of release to any market I've been a Virtua Fighter fan since final showdown been playing

for nearly a decade own a copy of yak as a sixth judgment and like a dragon in order to have a VF on modern hardware I will thought I'd be overjoyed by the re-release of the only fighting game design that I really really like after being completely confused

this year by the tweets about Virtua Fighter eSports I was a bit excited for some news coming in regards to a new VF definitely didn't expect to use the yak as a team who never made an online game that I know of to be asked to remake the PlayStation 3 VF with fewer cosmetic

options and no significant advancements easy to say that the netcode isn't up to standard it plays exactly as badly as the PS3 version did inputs are eaten your input delay can be 10 frames or worse on really bad connections it's also easy to say

they put an extra effort into absorption netcode just so that it ended up ineffective but more expensive it's easy to be confused why a legacy niche franchise thought it would be a good idea to release it within a week of launch of the most hyped fighting game of 2021

one which had already impressed people with a beta performance and netcode implementation skill to your strive I am confused as to why they released it as a PS Plus title free for a month which makes the game disposable in many people's eyes perhaps

even worthless after they play a game or two they don't find it if they don't find it that fun the streams lack are lucky to get triple digits currently as I type the twitch has 4 channels 176 viewers across total one high profile tech ins streamer

put YouTube videos up openly mocking Virtua Fighter for being ridiculously at a date and when this game was forgotten about it wasn't a huge laughing stock but now thanks to Ultimate Showdown it is so again has there ever been a launch

that has done more to punch itself in the face than this so before we continue yes there have been tons there's so many I actually can't think of one off the top but stadia fucking stadia but I can tell you with absolute

certainty from personal experience that Sega of Japan's marketing and planning divisions have no idea what they are doing

they are astonishingly incompetent at every level yeah I wonder when you see these games over the last couple of

Yakuza arcade machine inclusions you see them as like a really cool fun bonus game that was you know like exposed to people that never saw our Touch Virtua Fighter before that and it came across as like a curious novelty series that was like

oh this is a cool little old thing it would be nice if something happened with this at some point and there must have been someone internally that was you know very spirited and passionate about making a proper release for this project in some way shape or form

and I didn't realize that it was an RGG team I guess that was responsible for like how this shaped up until this person I guess mentioned it here but um the

zero dollars that this thing had to handle this entire port aside he is super right in that this has gone from a curiosity that people kind of enjoyed as a novelty arcade machine

to something that people are now negative in opinion about where there was no negative opinion before because of how botched of a release this was so one of the things he points out that most people probably don't even remember is that he describes

that as a PlayStation Plus game it gives the indication that the game is valueless especially when you play it and you have a terrible netcode experience the thing that most people don't remember is that the initial release of Final Showdown

was as the first PlayStation Plus free title so every aside from the two thousand five and six releases of VF5

version B it was a free game for like 12 13 years and it's a free series that you go to play online

and plays like shit wow I did not know that what fucking chance does it have like really it reads as free to play trash like all of that

the fact that it's free which you know again would allow lots of people that never touched it to touch it the fact that if it's good that kind of free thing works on word of mouth but if they get online and they play it

and it sucks they're not going to tell their friends to get it and buy it after the period has ended exactly I'm sure lots of people have gotten into it from enjoying it inside of Yakuza I'm sure there's a huge number of those people yeah sure

as a novelty as a free novelty inside their real game exactly and you know the fact that it's like the release window like one week or right right before strive or so like no like the announcement itself

just being a what is this product I don't know X Esports it's a remake how do we know because someone saw the rating board a leak and then from the rating board leak to it's here

and then one interview about how they just like yeah we heard about the netcode but we didn't want to do something it just the fact that it's gone from like positive novelty goodwill into negative it's a wild 180

that I when I saw that Esports announcement I couldn't have imagined that this is what was going to happen you know every single every single moment of talking about Virtua Fighter since the trailer of Virtua Fighter

Esports has had me being upset like I saw the Virtua Fighter Esports trailer which was nothing it was a cure doing a couple poses and the words Virtua Fighter Esports and do you remember me going on twitter and being like

irrationally furious at it and being like they're gonna fuck it up I'm watching them fuck it up right now based off of nothing other than the fact that I am used to playing Virtua Fighter and them fucking it up they fucked it up

the rollback wars are supposed to kill the new games and save the old ones it's not supposed to be like this yeah you're supposed to save the old games

by putting it in and the new ones come out and fucking die because they're too ignorant this is not what was meant to be man it's upsetting the time one anyway um yeah

lastly hate Virtua Fighter I hate you you you should you should uh Jared says and it hates me Virtua Fighter doesn't hate you just say go dare dred kong and baby bowser the other day I was listening to

episode 36 been working my way through on the commutes of the podcast was enjoying uh well he's laughing at Justin Trudeau's blackface photos that leaked during the 2019 election part of my commute was still got elected! sure did

uh takes me to a park near my house for reference I'm a white guy in his early 20s so imagine my horror when with my windows down woolly yells I love blackface and every family children in tow looks over at me and disgust

damn it woolly you got me good well Jared your 36 episodes in you knew what you signed up for and if you're listening in your car on your car speakers out loud with the

fucking windows down that is on you on you all your fault on you that being said luckily you were in your car thus enabling a quick escape that being said I still love blackface

he loves it he loves blackface it shows you what's what real quick it's really fast it's so obvious right away you don't have to you don't have to comb through the words and the deeds

no need for nuance no need for explanation no double speak no hidden fucking intonations no coded language it's so clear instantaneous understanding

it's the best everybody knows what's going on there's no confusion we love it it's great there's the one alternate to this that is also funny

you're gonna play an arab character but you still went with blackface yes correct you want you're playing a lad still went with hard blackface I think he browned

he got his knees I think he browned around a little bit he did his knees that's how you know he was dedicated and again and it just happened to be in an election cycle where

the opponent was seek and it was kind of wild in its timing and nature how many times Mr. Prime Minister would you say you've done blackface could you round it up to the nearest five

that wasn't the question that got me the question that got me that I couldn't believe Mr. Prime Minister how many of these photos are going to surface I don't know what can you round it

to the nearest five you know how many halloween's are there in a year you love it you love to see it you love to see it castle super beast supports blackface

I'm going to state that I'm not on that you are speaking unilateral for that you love to see it because it clears things up it clears

things up you get to understand immediately and who doesn't like clarity I like a world that's very clear you know I like when things you might call them are black and white

we'll see you next week