Castle Super Beast - CSB 139: The WAP-ing System

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Bed of Chaos SUCKS Darkest Dungeon 2 is Super Different Ghosts Affect The Wetness Meter The Worst Morality Systems You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://expressvpn.com/superbeast to get an extra 3 months FREE. -- Go to http://hellofresh.com/superbeast14 and use code superbeast14 for up to 14 free meals and 3 free gifts! -- Go to http://calm.com/superbeast to get a 40% discount on a Calm premium subscription. Rage of the Dragons Gets a Modern Re-Release Deathverse: Let It Die announced for PS5, PS4 due out in spring 2022 Composer Shoji Meguro leaves Atlus, developing indie game Bloodborne PSX demake hits PC 31st January 2022 Gundam Cafes Will Begin Closing in Early 2022 Sega is Entering a Strategic Partnership With Microsoft The Book of Boba Fett | Official Trailer Capcom's Integrated Report mentions 'free additional DLC' for both Rise and Village

Whose Are These? And there we are. Okay. Where are we? Rolling. Live. Good. So, where are we really, Woolly? Are we on a planet in which most of the ancient trees that were cut down are visible as the types of Mesa mountains because the trees tried to reach heaven

and the man's trying to keep you down? What's the reference? So, Flat Earth, there's a Spider-Man just sent me a message with some Flat Earth Facebook shit and their new thing is that, you know those, you know those like kind of like Mesa type mountain stuff that looks like a, you know, like a stump? No. That's an ancient tree. Here, I sent you a link.

That's a tree stump from the mega trees. Oh, just reached heaven. Just like the, like the, what is it? The Devil's Platform or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the rocks that stick out of the ground that look round. Yeah, okay. Yeah, those are the arch trees of the former civilization.

Speaking of arch trees, former civilizations and all the lore associated there within. See, there was a, you see what I did there? There was a link. Yeah. I'm coming in hot. The Earth and Dark Souls is flat. That's exactly where I'm going, but that's not where I'm going. But I'm coming in right next to that.

Speaking of the Flat Earth and Dark Souls. Yeah, speaking of, as we're want to do. You're actually zeroing in on my, my, my mood right now. Oh, please don't tell me during the last Dark Souls, like Reggie's like, oh yeah, the Earth's flat. Totally. Has, no, no, no, no, nothing to do with that. Is that, is that where that's going? Has nothing to do with that and has everything to do with me on my own.

Holy shit. Fuck the bed of chaos. Oh man. Oh my God. Oh my God. It even fits my fucking bed of chaos as a tree. Oh boy, did I forget how. How did you forget?

It's the worst thing they've ever done in the company's history. I know it was the worst thing. And I remembered that it was the worst thing, but I forgot how bad. Like, I thought it was bad, but I forgot how bad, you know? It's, I remembered it being like the lame follow-up to Dragon God, but I forgot how unbelievably annoying that entire sequences. So here's a fun thing about bed of chaos, and I can already see some of it scrolling past me in a chat window. And I'm sure some people at home feel this emotion, which is bed of chaos isn't that bad. And there's a reason for that.

The reason is every, you know, two years, three years or whatever, I go through Dark Souls one, you know, fly through it. And there have been times where I get to bed of chaos and I run to the right. Sorry, run to the left. I run to the right. I run to the middle. Boss takes 400 seconds total, right? And I'm like, oh, that was, that was kind of pain. That was kind of a cool event thing.

And I'm like, oh, it seemed worse last time. I don't get what that's, huh. And then the next time I do it, it's like 100 straight attempts of the boss swatting me out of midair with an invisible hitbox. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I see, I haven't done it since the last time, which was the first time, and now doing it again just on my own. And I didn't get that, oh, perfect RNG. Everything's great run.

I got the, you're going to be here for like possibly 15, 20 attempts. And each one requires your fastest run through Izalith is at best you're taking like the detour past the golem. And that's going to be about four minutes each time. So from software as an interesting developer, you know, there's people that have been digging through their cut content for years, right? And there's, there's development stories and stuff like that about like what happened to Dark Souls 2. And it's like, these guys like push it to the absolute last possible second in terms of development. Like the final, the actual final build ready to be gold master is actually like 15 builds to go from the end. Because they're like, well, we technically don't have to send it off until Thursday.

Maybe we, so with Demon Souls, you had a whole archstone had to get cut, right? That whole fucking thing. And then Dark Souls 1, you get Izalith, which is just patently unfinished. It's just, it's, it's obviously like the, it's gone now in the current versions of the game. But in the first version, there was just a million dragon asses. Dragon asses. They had an infinite, they had an infinite agrarange for some reason. Yeah.

Yeah. They toned that down. So it's a little better now. Yeah. And with Bloodborne, you have all those areas that got cut that people like found a part of and like just they, they push it to the absolute deadline. And then whatever is just so broken, it can't ship. They just cut that part out. And I was, I was like, I mean, the whole thing is a, um, I think there's room for a fight that has a puzzle element to it.

And every once in a while, you see them implement things where there's like, ah, did you get the sniper, you know, outside the room? Ah, well, you might have to deal with some bullshit or, you know, even like, like literally like Taurus, like first thing. It's like, did you get the sniper behind you? Cause that's a big old trick that's going to come back like 12 times. Um, No, the question is, did you see the sniper behind you? Yes, exactly. Correct.

Oh boy. Yeah. That was a fun one. Um, But yeah, I mean, But with chaos, Relatively recently, right? Sorry.

You played through desk relatively. Yes, remake. Yeah, exactly. Like Fool's Idol with the, the, with the, the sorcerer that she gets resurrected by the dude. That's the first time they ever did that. Yeah, exactly. And that game also has Dragon God. And then they were like, what do we do one or two per game?

And some of them are like the worst crimes they've ever committed. Yeah. Um, Game set. I saw people talking about Mika Lash. Mika Lash works correctly and sucks ass. Yeah. But at least Mika Lash, you corner him and then beat his ass.

Right. And there's, there's like a fight there. Um, storm ruler is again, it's a cinematic thing, but it's cool. It feels cool to do, you know, even though there's less of a fight there. This thing also, the, the, the, the storm ruler or the king of store, whatever that demon's name is. Yeah. That fight functions correctly the whole way through. It's a little rote, but it's a cool thing and it works.

Yeah. The chaos doesn't fucking work. That's it. So like if you're going to do the set piece, right, like please for the love of God, like make it work. And if you're going to, if it's going to be the one boss that is like, we didn't have time, we kind of, you know, we kind of rushed this through. Then like they're one, I read, yeah, they're one, um, like the, the thought that there

was a version of that boss where the persistent orbs on the left and right didn't stay across death is maddening, right? Because that was their one like thing that made it easier was like, okay, when you smash a left orb or a right orb, it stays smashed and then the arms come out. Um, and then the last time they're all out to begin with and then they have all the attacks. So at the very least it's like, yeah, we know, and we're sorry, we're going to let you keep the final phase the next time you die and run in here. But also while you're sliding down into the room, the fire eruptions might start on the

slide. I've gotten hit by them near the bottom of the slide. Like, like, it's just like, it's so fucking, you know, and I was like, what are, what are people saying? And some people were like, oh yeah, just run, land on the branch in the pit and then wait at the bottom of the branch. The fire will never hit you instantly hit me instantly die. You know, just like, yeah, man.

And also when you're standing at the boss door, if you turn your camera, you can just see straight through the goddamn floor of the world. Of course. Like they didn't finish the, they didn't finish the collision box. Yeah. Guys, I could fix, I could literally fix fucking, uh, what do you call it, uh, bed of chaos right now. Is everyone ready?

Okay. The whole boss, the boss doesn't attack you and the part with the arms coming out. That doesn't happen. Okay. It's just arms out. It's evil. Look in the whole time. Right.

Here's the boss. It summons a slightly more powerful Capra demon. Then it summons a slightly more powerful tourist demon. Then it summons a slightly more powerful asylum demon. And then after you kill them, it falls over tired and then you run over and it turns out the bed of chaos itself is actually a pathetic little bug and you smack and get once in a day. Sure.

Done. Problem solved. I mean, there's points where like rolling through the branches to the final, to the final hallway to get the bug, like the floor lava patterns pop up and I'm looking at the floor patterns and I'm, and it's like, there's actually nowhere to stand because you're doing the open area floor pattern in a closed hallway. So it just, there was no open spots that I'm like, man, what is up, you know? And so going back to look and I wanted to just be like a certain about like the, like

what happened on the development of this boss and I saw someone that had like showed off the hit boxes and how unbelievably bullshit they are. And it's so hilarious because you see the hand smashing down and then like the hit boxes are um, pill shapes that are extending around the hand and they shoot out make sense. So let's say your hand is like, is like the hitbox is like, you know, like the left hand is smacking you on the ground. The pill boxes are all shooting out to the right side beyond the pinky. So if you look at which direction you would expect it to hit you from all the invisible

kill zone is in, in the area outside the pinky, as if there were invisible thumbs sticking out that way. So it just visibly is misplaced and wrong, you know, um, and then I saw, I remember I like hearing and yeah, all the stories about like Miyazaki, you know, did admit and, uh, an apologize for it and I was like, let me go read the source on that. So I found the exact interview and the exact source and it's more than just an apology. He straight up says the bed of chaos is like my greatest regret with the things that we couldn't get done in time.

And I bet the version of that fight that they invented in their head was really cool. Yeah. Where you run around and then like it gets more and more treacherous. At first it's just a little thing swinging at you. Then the stabby start happening and then the fire starts happening and then the ground starts breaking and a set piece if you would, you know, um, but it just, you know, and then also we want to make it so that like, yeah, you all, you probably can't really tank the hits unless you're, you know, like, uh, crushing it in, in, in your NG run with like defense

or whatever. Or fire resistance. It's not even because of the math on it, but because the, the, the way the, the bosses arm swing, it's never clear what direction you're supposed to block and the, the hit box on it kind of wraps on the, on the swing. So it can hit you on your side if even if you're pointing straight at it. Also my first, uh, my first attempt at it, uh, this time around was like, I got slammed and survived, um, so then I drank and then the timing of the drink is enough time for

the slam to come down a second time. Then I drank again and then it did a third one and I was like, Oh, okay. All right. I think I see the yes, you know, and it was just like, no, you, you have exactly enough time to either do that or the slams coming back down again and you're going to, you're done, you know? So, um, wow, wow, was that a just, and it was, and it was right to when like, um, uh, punch wife was just like, Hey, let me just go and come over and chill and watch you play this

game and like just, she saw lost eyes, eyes, but like walked away right as that was happening. And now I'm just like, okay, I have to, I have to basically, um, keep in mind when we get to this part that like after Reggie gets through it, it's like, by the way, the director of the franchise says he's sorry. Yeah, there's that one. And then the other one that though this is a bit of a joking apology, almost Lucas asked of, I may have gone too far in a few places was the archers. Oh, Orlando.

Yeah. Yeah, which apparently at some point got moved. Like I did not notice over the years, but I saw people talking that like the archers were just slightly moved a little bit over so that they're like less insane. I, I, I thought they were fine, but I thought that like it was hilarious how you can have a completely different experience. If one of them gets finicky and decides to fall off on its own, then it just becomes a nothing, it becomes a completely different experience, you know?

Um, and, and, uh, didn't the remade version, not the remaster, but didn't like the, the three version have like an extra platform? Yeah. Yeah. So they, they added an area to fight. Well, you're going up, you're going up a different side of the building and it's much, it's much wider and there's a lot more room, but they added way more archers. Right.

Okay. Yeah. I don't, I wouldn't even say that's that bad in the sense that like, um, you know, it's a nice little spike of difficulty in, uh, a wide open zone that, you know, has a lot of space for you to fight and you're very comfortable up to that point. So I, I, you know, no real issues with that. Um, you know, come to think of it, I remember there was another interview where

they described that they wanted Gwynn to be a boss that every play style would have a unique challenge fighting or something along those lines because they were well aware that some bosses were like chunked by, you know, tank bills or other ones were dealt with by sorcery builds and they didn't like think the average player could like parry his swings that easily and turns out, yeah, no, they're a joke. And so the, the boss is like a fucking cakewalk. Like you just, if you're willing to sit there for an hour, you just learn to parry

every single swing Gwynn does and for Dark Souls three, they did that boss again straight up, but they made it change phases constantly so that it was always going to be a different experience for whatever build you had. Oh, that's cool. How they were like, we're not happy with how that worked out. We're literally just going to do it again, but good this time. And when you were talking about bed of chaos and how shit it is in the apology and their big regret, and you start talking about how the place is falling

apart, I saw somebody say, Oh, like the cursed rod of great wood. And I'm like, wait a second, the curse, right? A great wood is a monster that you fight in a big wide open arena that you have to hit its weak points that are to the sides of its body. And then the floor falls apart and then it breaks open out of its tree with the big arms to grab you. That is totally a do over. Yeah, yeah, chaos.

And you and you like, well, I mean, but when you drop through the floor, it's solid ground at the very least. It's even a tree. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is. Yeah. No, I the fact that again, going from like, it's funny because Dragon God, you know, when when Reggie got there and it was just like, oh, yeah, this thing

does it doesn't go the way they think it's going to go. You're not assuming that like line of sight is a mechanic suddenly. You know what I mean? There's just so many things that works like that. There's just so many things that you just would not assume at all. And then this time around, it's another one of these cases of, you know, like even if you you could, I guess you can call in reinforcements and have your have them do the left and the right and then you run up the middle.

But yeah, it's funny to see this, the games are the franchise's biggest failings in these revisits while appreciating everything. You know, there's something very interesting. So you're like on your on your personal replay, you're at least 90% through. Yeah, I'm about to wrap it up. You know, and there's something wild about Dark Souls one and I think part of the reason why it's so beloved is that a huge proportion of people never got to the part where the game starts to get way worse.

Who like once you beat O and S, every area after that is way worse than the first, like two thirds of the game. Lost Izalith and the Grave of Giants and the fucking the invisible crystal. Well, I was going to say, Dukes is fine, but Crystal Cave is where you go. All right, guys, Dukes archives is fine. Dukes is fine. Caves is caves just like got like this is what we're down to. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that that last third of the game is like kind of awful compared to everything that happens before it. And I'm wondering why is one of the reasons why it's so beloved is that people didn't beat O and S. Hmm. And we're just like, man, what an incredible game. I'll go beat it one day. Is there is there a like achievement percentage breakdown for like the trophies to see how many people got that and what percentage of players didn't know

whatever. I'm sure it exists somewhere. But we live in a we live in a world in which like when I'm playing a game like two or three days after release and there's an achievement that you get by default in the tutorial, it'll say like 70 percent of players have gotten this and like what wait, they booted the fucking game and they fucking what like because people don't play or finish games. Yeah, we we did find that out with the percentage exactly. Um, I feel I feel as if, you know, every every wall that that people would

have hit on their first time around where it's like, OK, did you get to Capra and then go fuck this? All right, sure. You know, like you like it's it's it's annoying, but you can push past. And like you have that for ONS and you have that for what's your name? Kellogg and, you know, yeah, you can you can have these these like annoying, but ultimately you you can you can do this.

If someone decided to quit on bed of chaos on their first run through, I can't even blame them. I can't even be that mad. Oh, I would not. I can't not but crutch them. I would be like, yeah. And this is the first time this is the only time I can say like I feel that in this franchise in all of the games.

Hey, we got a statistic. Only 30 percent of players have beaten ONS on steam. Whoa. OK. OK. All right. There you go. And this is original or remastered. Don't know remastered, I assume. But yeah, that is exactly it is. Is like that's the one where I'm like, I can't even blame you, you know.

Anyway, going going back through that is is is a lot of a lot of fun. And it's interesting seeing things that like, yeah, like stuff I didn't really pay attention to the first time around and realizing like, OK, so I'm going on, I had like a faith build. And if I'm not mistaken, like great magic barrier that that like have all fuck magic shit, like it's super effective in this compared to stuff in the future. Right. Magic got magic is wild in Dark Souls,

because after Dark Souls one, it's weaker in every single game they put out. And it actually took until Dark Souls three till people were like, oh, the magic is kind of weak in this. I should just use a sword, I guess. Dark Souls one magic is completely busted. Yeah, like seeing seeing little things like that. Or even like doing some some like number crunching on stuff

and being like I was I was so I was so focused on like the scaling of weapons. And then at some point kind of realizing that like scaling is actually not as big of a deal as like just like top speed, so to speak. Well, it's also a lie. The scaling system in all the from soft games are straight up lies. The the letters on each weapon don't mean the same thing as they do on other weapons. Oh, OK.

So the the increase and decrease is relative. It's relative to the weapon you're using. Not even to its class. Yeah, OK. Because you get people saying, wait, I don't understand. This only has a B in dexterity scaling, but it gives me more damage based on my decks than this weapon that has an A. And the answer is because it's bullshit. Yeah, I was just thinking because of like, oh, that's a minus, not a,

you know, or that's B minus, not B or whatever with the with the like gradients not being shown to you and shit like that. But like, yeah, there are times where I'm like, hold on, I went out of my way to get this thing that scales A with faith or scales B with faith. And it's just that scaling doesn't add anywhere near as much as I was hoping it would, you know. So like I was I basically was planning to be see like, oh, what would be? What would it be like to have like to do a play through where let's say I'm

using like a high scale, a high faith scale weapon. So Crescent axe or Ornstein spear or something like that, you know. And and I started building out towards it. And then you're like, man, like pumping it all into faith is not making anywhere near the difference I expected it to. So then I was just saying it means you can do the catacombs early. Yeah, but it was just like at the end. But ultimately I was just like, fuck this lightning Lucerne, you know.

And and that and that's it. Like it just I kind of for first time player, I could not possibly recommend anything other than fire or lightning scaling. Hmm. Well, yeah, because everything's weak to lightning, right? So or can or chaos is taught highest top end. It's actually an understandable number. Hey, adds to under fire damage. That that's more than one hundred and seventy nine

based on my current strength value divided by B. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or like when you're scrolling, the other thing that's like wild, too, is like, you know, when you pull up your stats and you're scrolling through weapons to see how it affects it, like a quick load or whatever, like damaged right hand weapon, you know, one. And like sometimes you go through things that have a higher, like raw number, but like you see the number decrease on the side.

And I'm like, I never understood what that represented or why. Because if you get out of calculator and add up all the normal damage, magic damage, scaling, scaling, you get a total number that makes sense. But then sometimes it just drops down to nothing and you're like, what? What are you trying to say in the enemy's particular resistances, which all appear to be totally random? Now, it makes me wonder, like, is there a benefit, right? When games decide to use large numbers for things or when they decide

to use like decimal points or however they decide to break something down, right? Is there a benefit to like having an equation go through all of these calculations and multiplications to a final result that, like, is there a benefit to that as opposed to just a simple this versus that equals this leftover? And that's how we decide damage. Yeah, it depends. It depends how complicated you want people to be able to affect the numbers

and how you want skeletons to be resistant to lightning and edge, but not blunt. But is the complexity in and of itself? What makes people go, yeah, I like complexity. I mean, are you asking me from like a player perspective or from a dev perspective? Because the dev perspective, these guys love obfuscation. It's very obvious that they absolutely love it. There is a hidden equip load stat in Bloodborne that wasn't found for months. Do you remember that when I'm doing the LP where it turns out to give

your lantern on your stamina regenerates more slowly? Because there's a hidden statistical equip load stat that factors in if you have more or less weapons equipped and the lantern equipped. God, like you don't even know about that. Like that's that's so that's exactly the question is like obfuscation for obfuscation's sake or because each one of these calculations makes a difference was removed. They patched it out.

OK, good. Um, that that's what I want to know. Because if it if every step actually has a reason and or has an enemy type that is like, well, this has to factor in here. So there's a reason why we do this, then I'm fine with that. But if it's just for obfuscation's sake, then that sucks. Congratulations, you have unironically for real given me the excuse to talk to you about everyone's most hated topic.

And that is the damaged calculation system of attacks in Monster Hunter. OK, you're in here. You're in here with me now. OK, because if you want to talk about reasons to obscure, this might be the stupidest series of decisions that have ever been made in the game. How far beyond FACO are we going here? Not very, because we're just talking about lies.

OK, it's not complicated. It's just a lie. OK, so there are two completely different ways Monster Hunter games show their damage numbers and it depends from game to game. Depends whoever's with what part of the team is in charge of what. And they have changed their mind back to back. Like Rise and Monster Hunter World, I want to say,

don't use the same damage numbers. So get this. All right, you have you're using a great sword, right? The great sword says it does 200 damage, right? And you're playing an older Monster Hunter game before they showed you the damage numbers. OK, OK, OK, you hit the monster with an attack. Does that do 200 damage?

No, it doesn't. Because you have different attacks, right? So what it does is every great sword attack has what's called a motion value, which is how much of a percentage of your total attack counts for that strike. So great sorts of good example, the regular swing, let's say it's 30 percent. So it'd be 200 times 30 is equal to 60.

That's the attack damage. Say you charge it up to the maximum, though, right? You know, the three level charge, that's a 70 percent motion value. So it'd be 70.7 times 200 is equal to 140, right? OK, fine. Here's where it gets fucking extra dumb. The motion value can only be data mined. It's nowhere. It's nowhere.

You can't get it. It's a lot like it's invisible. OK, and on top of that, some games go well. The great swords 200 and the daggers are also 200. And the only thing that's different is the motion value. Oh, my God, their thing. So then you get the situation where, wait, if my great sword does 200 damage and the daggers do 200 damage, then how come I have to hit the monster

five more times with the daggers than with the great sword? So they go, OK, OK, those numbers are the same because those weapons are the same relative strength. They're like the same tier of weapon. And so in the next game, they do well, the great sword is 1000 and the daggers are 200, except now there's a second fake number, which is their true damage, which is their damage in the old system, which is the damage the motion value is being calculated against.

Is it ever 100 percent? No. Never. And this is why this is why, man, when Monster Hunter World came out, you saw all these dorks losing their minds over the fact that damage numbers would pop off hits. Because now you can actually understand what's happening. All of this nonsense just boils down to, OK, well, if you have this,

you built this, you can see it, the monster with this stat. Oh, it did 1200 auto sleeping base of Goose, right? And they have flipped back and forth and back and forth over and over and over. There's the games with the true values where all the weapons of the same type are the same damage, and then there's the games with the bloat values in which weapons of the same grade will all have different values that you then have to get. And it's a fucking mess. And I can't understand why they don't just tell you the fucking tip.

Oh, yeah, an elemental and physical damage are calculated differently per hit. Sure, that's fine. In that in what was just described in the first iteration of it, if you just if you said what that percentage was, you could even like then you then you'd have something to look at and you could even have something to compare and go like, oh, well, these are two great swords, but this one has a higher percentage. So in the end, this is going to do whatever.

They also had a system where a fucking element damage, sorry, a stat damage poison would be like the same amount of like status uptick per hit. So the faster your weapon by far the faster you could proc the status because they never made any changes to how it's how many times. So every hit would add like 25 poison and you needed to get like a hundred poison to poison the monster and a great sort that would take like a one. And then the fucking like the faster weapons would take like five seconds. Yeah, OK.

And you'd be like, but the poison number on both weapons is the same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. And that's fine because they are the same, but the damage number. So the others aren't the same. I just I just I'd love to know them in meeting reasons. Like what is obscuring that data from the player going to improve? You know, like what is it going to do? Because people will still do their do their calculations.

Anyways, I can I can tell you why for Monster Hunter. By the guy. Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, there's a there's a you go to buy Monster Hunter and then right next to Monster Hunter in the Yotabashi camera is a fucking encyclopedia sized guide that contains all the monster drop rates, break rates, capture rewards, elemental damages, etc. And that info is not in the game and it is deliberately obscured

so that it can be in the end when that guy comes out. A guy grabs a hold of it and translates all of it and puts it into Kieran Eko dot com. Right. And then Monster Hunter actually attempts to be sold in the West with Monster Hunter World. And Monster Hunter World is the first game that includes data on break rates, drop rates, capture rates, etc. In the game, in addition to damage numbers,

because they know they're not going to be able to sell those guides to Western players and then Western players are going to get frustrated and pissed off that they can't understand anything in the game. It's a racket. It's literally a racket. Jesus fucking Christ, man, because like, you know, to go to go back to the shit I obviously for Willie to take it back to fighting games here. What's the move list?

It was a separate purchase for ten dollars. Well, I mean, not even not even that or the frame data for that matter. What's up? No, frame data DLC in Tekken. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was making reference to. That's that's that's the joke. That's the exact same fucking thing. That's what I was. That's what I was exactly making reference to. But in terms of damage calculation, right?

This attack. OK, so you get hit with this attack. It's a whatever. It's a standing fierce and it's going to do 200 damage and sure. Now you go this. That's what this does and it's going to do that every time. OK, great. Now, what do we factor in after this? Well, you're doing it at the end of a combo. So actually, there is a scaling that kicks in after each hit

that reduces that number, right? Yeah. And and the character you're hitting has a vagina, so you're going to have to run a 10 percent damage boost on that as well. Not quite, but the but like so each hit after like say whatever the game might say, like after the third hit will start to scale down 90 percent, 80 percent, 70 percent, and then it'll stop at 50 so that, you know, whatever you're doing, you can't infinite somebody into oblivion, right? That'll be their protection system.

OK, but also Q taunted before that, so then he has a higher reduction on the incoming number as well. But like but these are three separate elements of the game that then factor into each other and create an end result where you go, all right, I know why those three things happened. You know, it's confusing and it's obtuse, but the end and then you also know that like supers always scale to a maximum of 50 percent

damage so that they don't do less than that if you do it at the end of a long combo. So that's how you finish off something really long and fancy. So, you know, like these are all systems that are like they're not obtuse for the sake of obtuseness. They're obtuse because there's like three factors going into the final number. But you know, you can see what they are. You know what the three things are exactly. That's what I want to find out about this the Dark Soul scaling here

or what the fucking monster hunter like. Well, you know, shut up, just give me the reasons and I won't feel bad about the three calculations that have to happen. The reason the reasons is because these symptoms of these systems were slapped together. Right, right. You know, guilty. It's why each game gets like less obtuse, but is still obtuse. Yeah, the like even the guilty gear guts system,

which is like different characters have different damage reduction as they get closer to death. Where it's like, what's the point of this? Why this complicated thing where damage looks so weird at first? It looks insane at first and then nothing later. Because the guy who made it did it that way and looked at it and said, this is good. Well, so actually it's because it'll make it makes the tension feel high because if you're if you see big damage at first and you're like, oh, shit,

oh, my God, oh, wow, what a big combo in the beginning of the round. But towards the end, it feels like the fight is a lot closer than it really is. You know, so it's just like, oh, it's just it's an illusion to make the feeling different. It's an illusion of a closer fight. You know, like, OK, that's dumb, but fine. You know, I think a life bar should be a life bar. I can't wait to find out what kind of numerical

like crime Elden Ring commits during its stat screen, where people find out, hey, you know, that's dark, you're playing Dark Souls one right now. The resistance stat in your character sheet doesn't do anything. Yeah. And it's a place for you to put your to dump your your souls and you get nothing for it. It doesn't do anything. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that that just anyway, like that's one of these things that like I'm hoping, you know, you know, like you press the you look at your stat screen and then you press select and you can like highlight and get a little text thing. That's like a help button, right? I think Elden might need like every time you select something, you might need a little video where Miyazaki sitting there just going, hi, you've selected endurance. Let's talk about the endurance stat.

I don't I don't five minutes each time is like. There are some of those descriptions in the Souls series are lies or poorly worded enough to be like understandably incorrect. And on top of that, like sometimes they're just they're just like broken and they don't do anything. Or like, oh God, in one of them, it says the dexterity increases your cast speed for spells and like. It does. By maybe one or two frames per five points,

like, like, like it by the letter of the law, it does increase it. Um, there are dark souls. One came out, endurance did this. And the next game, it was like endurance and a quick load and vitality. Right. But then vitality is what you would think is called for health. Yeah, it's called health and one of it.

It's like you you're doing it on purpose. Like I like creating a system where just lying to the player is OK. You know, it just I mean, at the end of the day, for all the like, OK, so the complexity of Neo is equally high, but at least lie to you. But that's it. So when you look at your weapon and it'll it'll be like, what is the number on this thing? OK, this thing, this Kusari gamma does 906. And what does it have alongside that?

Close combat plus 15 percent, right? Plus eight on the break abilities and fire damage plus 44 percent. So you just it's just that number. And then you add those things and then you you get it. And that's it. You know, and you as the opposite problem where it's it's demanding to be so honest with you that you're like, fucking stop. Oh, my God.

Get goddamn. That's too many numbers. I don't want that many right now. Please hide them one menu deeper, please, God. But at least it's honest. At least it's honest. You know, anyway, um, yeah, man, fuck better chaos, dude. It's bad going back, seeing all this. It's like, what a piece of shit, but it's great, you know.

You know, a lot. So you haven't done the DLC yet for Dark Souls one AOTA, right? You haven't. I haven't done AOTA. I mean, I'm saving it for last. I really like I want to bring it up every time people talk about Dark Souls one about the absolute madness that it was to access it. Release a DLC that people spent days trying to figure out how to access. It's so because because you know what happened?

I was like, I was thinking about it. I was like, when should I do it? And I was like, you know what? I'll do it last, right? And then I get to I get to to the Dukes and I kill the thing, the the golem. And he doesn't get a pendant. No, he didn't drop anything. What? And I was like, hold on, hold on.

Stop, stop, stop, stop, hold on. What? And he didn't draw. And I was like, what? And I'm like, oh, my God, am I misremembering it? And it's like, oh, God, I forgot the entire first step of like going behind the dragon, the waterfall and then, you know, you free dusk and all that shit. Because I just remembered you pick up the pendant and then you go back down there. And then there's the summon sign to do it in an order.

Yeah, I forgot. So I killed the thing, the golem, and it dropped nothing. And I stopped ran back to the bonfire and went, what the fuck are you doing? Dark Souls and then realized that it's like, no, no, no, you have to first go down behind the golem, behind the dry, the hydra and then get the golem, kill it, drops dusk, she talks to you, she disappears. Then her summon sign appears on the on the beach. Once you do that, then you go kill it, then it drops the pendant.

Then you take the pendant, come back down to mentally go. Oh, yeah, I have to go back to that spot that has nothing because the forest, because when it talked about Oolacile, the description of the pendant, that was meant to be your clue to run back down where that lady was and just run in random directions and just literally run in random directions. And then maybe something will happen and you know what? Eventually you walk in the randomest direction and then a portal opens up and pulls you in.

Yeah, you got the DLC that you paid for. So that game has two sections like that. One is the one with the DLC we were talking about. And the other is the painted world requires you to make a jump that looks like you're breaking the platforming and then sit in a crow's nest for, you know, X number of seconds. Yeah, yeah, like 20 seconds. Do another like very tough dungeon to get an item

that you have no reason to believe would work on a painting, yada, yada, right? That's fine because it's in the game and it's like a super secret, right? People are the game facts boards when Artorias of the Abyss came out was the absolute most insane thing. Every single topic was I bought the DLC. Where is it? Why can't why I did it not download? I don't understand.

Man, man, you know, yeah. And I'm thinking like you mentioned the painted world and it's like the painted world is actually do the first time I went in. I of Ariamis, the first time I went in, that was my first question to you was, oh, is this the DLC? And he went, no. I was like, oh, what? Because it seems like it is.

Yeah, because it's like and I'm looking. I'm like, you had the perfect like way to implement something like DLC, which is a giant painting and then you can't access it unless you have a special item. And then you walk up to it when you do and then it sucks you in. Like that feels like an obvious thing that you're like, I don't know how to open this door, but clearly there's content behind it, you know? You know what they're going to do? They're going to do something similar to Elden Ring

and it's going to be like a zone. It's going to be like one of the open world zones. And it's going to be some nonsense. You got to talk to this person in this order and then give her the pile of shit that you found in this hidden area behind the thing. And then you go through and, oh, my God, it's Lordran. And you get to the top of Anor Londo and red is there with his Pikachu. And he's level 80.

Yeah. Oh, punch wife also got to see the as like, oh, you're like right on time to see the climax of Siegmeyer, you know, where it's just like, yeah. All right, you get one shot. How do you want this to go? If you go down and do it all for him, that's one ending to it.

But you might not want that or you go on, you go down there and then you keep him above 50. And then that's another or you let or he's below it or he just dies. And either way, it's all going down in one shot. And hope you put the right ring on beforehand. Hope you know that you have the hope you have the right weapons and resistances to deal with four or five of those things in the pit. You can you could deal with them on their own by running them around.

But when he's there, you can't leave him. And best way to do that thing is to not talk to Siegmeyer. And in fact, stay back and shoot most of them to death with bows and arrows so that when you like. Also, people bring it up in chat like Bloodborne was just as bad. They give you a goddamn item at some point in the game. And there's nothing like there's no description at all.

The umbilical cords and the and the solution. No, I'm talking to the DLC. OK, they just give you a goddamn item in the Hunter's Dream. And it's like some weirdly vague shit. And the answer is go to this spot that's completely that has nothing and an invisible hand that would have killed you. If you didn't have the DLC, we'll just teleport you to the DLC area. So I feel as if there's one like escape

that from soft can rely on every time for these types of decisions. And that is the fact that the internet exists. That's true. And the development can rely on the fact that we're having this conversation right now, you know, and it's bullshit because games shouldn't be developed with like the idea of that discussion in mind or the reliance of it. But it is a thing where they're like, people will not know

and they will go on on the internet and they will ask and other people will tell them. Therefore, it's fine. The interviews that I remember reading about them talking about that was that that's why the messaging system is in the game in Demon's Souls, because they want to players to talk to each other. But they also wanted the messaging system to be vague enough that you couldn't just tell people exactly what to do. And like it feels like the internet is like not

like talking with your friends is intended. Looking up the wiki, maybe not. And it makes me like I'm going to be streaming Elden Ring when it comes out. And I fear for the. Hey, did you not ride all the way across the map? The instant you started to the game to get to the upper left corner to get this item that actually is a is a sprout of an of the elder tree that dies in six games hour on New Game Start so that you could plant it

with the Kokiris to get the giant sword to show like. Yep, there was a time limit and it's over now. You fucked up. It's gone. Yeah. Um, dude, fucking like the the just that this is pure absent mindedness. But it's like you kill La Trek, you get the Firekeeper soul back, and then you run back to the bonfire. And there's a Firekeeper right there.

She's the outer law of the night test, you know? And you're just like, oh, yeah, I'll upgrade my flask. Fuck. Oh, you know, like and then and then they're all listed hour later. The the the black soul starts going. Oh, boy, oh, you could do it or whatever the fucking. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I got the order other other way around. Yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, like, yeah, when you kill him, you go in, you kill him, he you get the Firekeeper soul and it's not it doesn't say Anastasia soul. All the Firekeeper souls are just generic Firekeeper soul and the description will change, but they're all the same fucking name. And you just fucking you just absentmindedly go like, oh, yeah, cool. I'll pop that in. I'll plus five my estus fly. Shit. And now it's gone forever.

You've lost fire like forever. One of the things is like I'm telling you now with an absolute air of certainty that Elden Ring is going to drive people absolutely insane with this shit because we basically still only have that one trailer and like the leak trailer. You know that dude that's got like a million arms. So I think it was watching Vati and he was like looking over the cut scenes and it's like the boss.

It's not it doesn't look like him having the dragon arm or the acts are phases. It looks like that's the boss cut scenes start depending on how you got to him. He will be Dragon Man or Axe Man. Because there there's like there's like you described in the footage that you saw that like there you could just go in straight through the front of the gate or you could go around like the back essentially and that there would be events. So it's going to be like, hey, did you know you could fight just Ornstein in this boss fight if you had gone and pissed in the river because smoke drinks

from the river and he hates piss and he would get sick and not show up to the boss fight and that's how you get the real final boss. I still remember sitting there with you trying to figure out the Lord of Hollows ending the LP and the absolute absurdity that is involved in that fucking thing. Or just some of the stupidness of like, I mean, I know it got patched eventually, but like the like, OK, so if you want to get the Dragon Slayer spear, you got to kill Smoke first and let Ornstein get powered up and then you get his soul. But if you want to get Smoke's hammer, then you got to let Ornstein die first

and then you get the hammer. But also if you want to get the ring that improves the stabbing that you do with the spear, you have to let Ornstein die Ornstein die first and kill Smoke. And then you get Ornstein's ring alongside Smoke's hammer. But now you let him die. So you got the wrong and then they patched in one. Oops, wrong one. And then you got it the other way around afterwards.

But initially you got the stabby ring with the wrong boss dead, you know. Don't worry about it. Yeah, Elden, Elden's going to be great. Can't wait for all these. I hope the messaging system like does improve. But there are moments where it works like perfectly. And to me, in this experience, I would say the perfect version of it of the messaging system working was right outside of Seath's door.

The first time. A couple of messages just going, try ring, try ring, you know. And you got to stop and think and like now I know, obviously, but you have to stop and go like, what do you mean? Resistance, magic, what? And it's like, no, no, no, ring of sacrifice. You're about to die for sure, you know. And and it's like, you can't possibly know that you're about to die for sure.

You did you have to die, but it's it's putting an idea out there. The absolute height of the messaging system is the Dark Souls three iron keep. Don't give up skeleton. Sure, sure. And as dumb as it is with the crystal caves, the messaging being used to show you the safe path. Oh, you can do it for yourself. Yeah. Yeah.

Leave messages for you. The message is showing you the safe path in of the first of which is a dev message in game. It's not a not a user message. I not. Did I say Dark Souls two? I think I did. Yeah.

I want to see what they improve it to. But like, yeah, there's a level of of of success that comes with the right scenario and the right combination of words. Anyway, that's it's it's been a fun trip down memory lane with this fucking thing, man. Can't wait for the for the Reggie version. It's wild how big those games have gotten and they're still Jank. Mm hmm. Like Sekiro.

Is like, because every game I'm like, maybe they'll tone it down. Sekiro's is unbelievable in its obfuscation. Mm hmm. Annoyingly so. Like it's it's like a problem. But and it's like, oh, it's only going to get worse from here because people figure it out every time. But you know something that Sekiro got rid of that I didn't that I I didn't

miss at all is what's that? Walk along this bullshit ledge in a way where the animation has your foot halfway off and that's intended, right? Walk to walking around to go see Donald on the underneath the bridge type of thing or walking around the the underside of the the drake. Oh, man. And you're like, you tell they just threw that in there. The game design wants you to stand on an invisible platform. Um, and I think the worst one, the absolute worst one in the game by far

is coming back from Ash Lake. You go back up through the garden, through the the great wood and you climb up the ladder and then there is a sim a stupid bump on the fucking roots that you can't run over or jump over or roll over. And that's it's a pump, dude. And the only way up properly is to run off the edge, stand on nothing and then use the momentum of that to get back up around the the the collision that's blocking you, you know, or by the anyway.

So Sekiro at the bare minimum, it didn't have any of that shit in it because you were still tiptoeing on rooftops on purpose. I 100% agree with you, except the my favorite part of Dark Souls one right now, as I'm thinking of it, is the trip into Anor Londo. When every single step of the way, you're like, am I supposed to be able to fucking climb on this or run on this? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's yeah. And then you get in and you're like, you absolute motherfuckers

have got to be kidding me with tightrope walking like 200 feet while being have daggers thrown at me. But if they just made like the first one that walks into the giant painting guardian area, if they made the rooftop you're walking on not look like a point, like it's like a triangle. It's a triangle. So you're standing on the nothing. And it's like you think you could stand on that.

Yeah, just make it a slightly flat roof shingle and you'd go, oh, that's narrow. But yeah, OK, you could tiptoe up that. But you're standing on nothing. All right, I'm going to hold up my hand. I foresee in Elden Ring. An item that exists way out in a pure chasm. And there just happens to be a completely invisible path to get it. Yep. Yep. And it is not a straight line.

Yep. And there is no positional indicator as to where the fucking thing starts. That was last night in the Crystal Cave. I was throwing glowy rocks at the ground to find out where the turns were on the invisible path towards the blue chunk, you know, or I'm thinking you're climbing up that rooftop in Orlando on Orlando or the, you know, and the archers and shit. But now you're doing that on a horse.

So the horse is galloping up the rooftop on nothing. Yeah. Good luck. People who people who looked at the footage like real close, the one trailer they put out, there's like a chest or like an item. You know that, you know that? That big rock with legs that has like a bell for testicles that's like moving around and I don't shine on top. I don't remember.

There's it looks like there's something in the shrine on top of it as this thing is moving around the arena. And there's no visible way to get onto it, except there's like a jump pad at the far right of the scene. And it looks like you're going to have to hit the jump pad with your horse. Things in the right spot in order to get into it. Are you guys ready for horse ledging? Are you ready to walk with the the the hind legs on the ground?

Put the front legs standing on invisible earth and just walking around the side of a fucking canyon. Oh, man, it's going to be so much dumber with a giant horse on your back underneath you at the end of this conversation. Yeah, I would not get that upset when Elden Ring got delayed because man, these games always need like a full extra year. Like they always come out a little actually not not Securo. Securo came out like clean.

There's no part of Securo that I was standing there going, man, this part is fucked up or a lie. Yeah, when they when they patched it over time, they just added in replays. Bloodstains, features that messages and bloodstains. But it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's coming, it's coming. And it's and it's like, where everyone's going to be, everyone's going to simultaneously be like, it's been 20 years. How have they not fixed this yet?

And Elden Ring is going to be like, hello, well, I can't I can't wait to be streaming Elden Ring. And I'm going to be like beating the final boss and the ending's kind of like of lackluster and somebody in the chat is going to go, I can't believe you never got the scrim blow bandana. You didn't you didn't equip the bimbo. Yeah, I didn't know about the scrim blow bandana. Where do you get that?

And they go, oh, you get it from the Fragils. My what the fuck is a Fragil? I was like, oh, it's under the rock. And I'm like, are you lying? I can't even tell. I can't even tell if this is a lie. Did you start talking to Fragil or did you kill him right away? Because if you kill him right away, that's how you get it.

But if you start talking to him at all, it's too late. You should have just swung. But but I had somebody else tell me that the only way to get the bath mode ads was to talk to him and do his side quest. The more if you start talking about the optional boss, if you start talking and then you swing, it's too late. The only way is to swing immediately right away.

Oh, man. Anyways, in other in other things, did you watch Dune? I didn't. I've been busy this week. OK, Dune's great. Dune's great. And and it's one of these. Well, it's it's one of these things where, like, I, you know, I haven't seen or read it before, but I just know it's critically acclaimed.

And I remember all the the constant trailers and stuff when there's the space channel run of it, you know, of like Frank Herbert's Dune and seeing the the Lynchian things and all that stuff. And I heard about it forever. But like comic book girl would like go into it a bunch as well. So you know that this is one of those things where the source material is going to be good and also there's going to be too much of it for the movie to ever possibly get it all in.

So whatever you're seeing is a highlight reel of how in depth this this story is going to get. So I went into the fur from I've seen a lot of talk that like the book is like inherently unadaptable. Do you know anything about that? I don't, unfortunately. But just because there's just way too much shit in the book, it feels as if over the years, it's been a case of things.

There's too much of everything, right? But then again, people used to say that about Tolkien, right? I did say that. And, you know, depending on the budget, you give a movie. If it's if it's generous enough in theory, you can shoot. You know, you can do like Peter Jackson did and shoot like a bunch of shit. And then it'll get cut out for the theatrical release. What if I made 12 movies?

So apparently Vilnev's like part of his deal was he's going to do this in two. Which seems nuts, because again, like considering, you know, fucking six hour Lynchian one and I mean, I guess two and a half to. Yeah, I guess two and a half, two and a half. But anyway, all that considered. You know, it's fucking great. It's really good as something that, you know, I'm like expecting

to be introduced to a world where I'm not going to get what's going on. I really enjoyed what was happening. I liked one aspect, especially, which is that like there is no time for exposition whatsoever. Holy shit, is there no time? You're just joining the story in the middle of it. And keep up or don't, but it's moving without you if you're not paying attention or not keeping up.

That's the solution. How just figure it out, fuckers. That's it. You know, you see characters, you get, they say their names and then you're just you're moving. You either caught them or you didn't and it's going. And I didn't mind that at all because it doesn't go through the glacial pace that a lot of movies would have to take to establish a setting

and to establish things and whatnot. Like in this case, it just kind of it respects that you'll catch on eventually. And yeah, I feel like you you you can, you know. You know, it's it makes me think about Lord of the Rings and like obviously they cut a bunch of shit, but like they had to like the beginning of that movie is like a hammer in its bluntness. This is the ring. That's Sauron.

That dude's golem Bilbo. Done. Movie starts now. Yeah. No, it was it was it was really it was pretty solid. And I mean, you know, I I I'd say like if you, you know, if you know, if you if you, you know, um, which McCulloch arrival, right? He directed a rival.

He directed Blade Runner to like 2049 or was it 2049? Am I getting the year wrong? Anyway, like, you know, he was yeah, they were like super solid. So this is just another one like in the books, like you fucking you crushed it. I've heard about this Hollywood star, Timothy Chalamet. I've heard the name before, but well, he's he's he's the new it kid.

He's doing man. He's doing man. He's the new it kid. And he was the it kid before Dune. But now it's like he's also the it kid after Dune. The the yeah, he's got the he's got the the whatever the baby blues and the the the wave like hair. And you think we could go hang out this afternoon?

It's just. Anyway, um, so he's he's he's he's in the titular role. And you're right. I'm great. OK, but then you're like, oh, yeah, the rest of this cast is also people who are there, they were asked like, hey, do you want to be attached to like a huge sci-fi Hollywood vehicle? And like Jason Momoa is like, yes.

And yeah, what's his name? Better than working on Stargate, Atlantis. Get me the fuck out of here. Yeah. And and and Poe was like, get me in there. And then what's his name? Sarsgard, the bad guy from Dragon Tattoo. Is like fuck, yeah, you can sign me up.

And yeah, Zendaya or whatever. Like everyone, they just they just rolled through. They wrote everyone rolled through. But yeah, I feel I feel like it's it's it's just it's paced really well. It's done in such a manner where you feel like there's a ton of back story that is missing, but like they're doing their best to bring you what they can in the time frame that is limited. And, you know, you also as long as you know that, like,

this story is not going to wrap up here, that it's going to need some time to get through everything, you enjoy the journey, you know, the other. And then, of course, you know, the things about doing that everybody hears about, there's the sandworms and fear is the mind killer. And, you know, as a part where they play that level in res. Exactly. Yeah, it's it's I like what they did with the sandworms. I like how they they like interpret them in this.

This style. There's a couple other things, but, you know, I'll say just wait to see it. And, you know, maybe I'll get maybe we can discuss more later. But yeah, it's it's solid. It's it's really I thought it was cool. Now that being said, I can't compare anything to the originals. And I can't be someone who's saying like, oh, yeah, like it fucked up this or that. I wouldn't know what it fucked up, but I enjoyed it.

Vildo fucking kicks ass, man. What a what a great director. Is there is there. I'm about to ask a stupid question, so get ready. Is there. So they got worms, right? Mm hmm. Is the worm and the reaction of the characters to the worm.

As good as when Jake, the dog, started to scream that the locust were sinking cities with a giant worm in the Gears of War two. Well, you see, I've only played Gears of War one. Yeah, but that sounds like high competition. It's it's it's a great. Line read. Let me tell you, it's just just full on. It's a worm.

They're sinking the city with the giant worm. Oh, come on. It's oh, man. Oh, that's the Gears of War. It's like. Gears of War. Congratulations. By the way, you I stupidest thing that ever got popular.

You've deleted the main character's name in my head, because it's just Jake, the dog. It's just DiMaggio doing. Jake. Yeah, it's just. Man, I don't think anything sums up like the Dude Bro era more than Gears of War. That shit was aggressively stupid. I fucking love that shit. Rody runs and chainsaw bayonets, man.

That's all you needed to do. You introduced that into video games and you got a winner. Oh, man. I was there for it. I fucking loved it. I thought it was great stuff. Third person great. Rody run to cover and then like, yeah, we went we went to some shithole.

The convention, the convention and we were there and we saw the chainsaw for the first time together. And that was like, oh, it was super cool. They kept trying to get people to play the maps and any all anyone did was just hold down the B button and run towards each other. It was just jousting. Yeah. Yeah, doing good, doing good. Check it out. No, they have Timothy Chalamet.

All right, we're real far away. I want to I want an opinion was Peter Jackson. Right to cut Tom Bombadil. I say yes. You're going to need to inform me on this one. Oh, you don't know about Tom Bombadil? What's up? OK, so it fell a ship of the ring after they leave the Shire.

But before they run into the ring race, they hang out with some asshole. Like Tree Man for like 60 pages. Oh, um, is it or is it when they're with the ants and they're and they have no no, it's way before that. OK, it's it's just like I'm Tom Bombadil. I'm fucking trees and like it's it's. It's fucking OK, it's wild. I'm going to say he was wrong for cutting the mouth of Sauron. Yeah, especially since they filmed it.

Damn, that was cool shit. They they shot it. They cast it. They shot it. They did the whole thing. He showed up and I was like, that's a fucking sick character. And then they just cut that. That's it's, you know, I genuinely think I'm sure there's an interview out

there that would confirm it, but I genuinely think that. The reason why they shot so much footage like for like three hours and 45 minutes to four hours and 15 minute long movies is that the one the studio was like, you motherfuckers, we have to show this in a theater X amount of times a day. You're going to cut this. They're like jokes on them. Even if we cut 40 minutes, it's still three hours and 20 minutes.

Oh, fuck you idiots. All three of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I remember there was I don't know if it ever happened or not, but there was a there was a big like event plan to have one theater rent out the that did happen, the theater and do the full all three extended cuts back to back to back with like 15 minute intervention in the intermission.

Yeah, the full ass experience. Oh, anyway, yeah, that's that's it. That's it. Um, it's good doing good. Dark soul bad. No, but anyway, you can you can come check us out. I was going to ask a stupid question and I realized that stupid question was is actually the real theme of Dark Souls, which is you said Dark Soul bad.

I was like, but what if good, though? Oh, that's actually the plot. Sure, sure. Yeah, also, we we we had some fun checking out some some poverty ass fighting games, including we played and just coincidentally, we played two fighting games, one called Dark Edge and the other one called Dual Souls. So just, you know, that sounds poverty is shit.

Yeah, so we had the dark and the souls as well in our fighting game choices, Dark Edge, good shit, check it out. That's a one of the first attempts Sega ever made of before Virtua Fighter and around the time of Holiseum, they made a 3D fighting game, but it was not 3D. It was actually with all sprites. So it's kind of wild. You can walk in circles around each other and it feels cool.

And when you when you're seeing it, but you cannot tell how far you're going to jump at any given point when you jump towards your opponent. So it's extremely confusing, you know, it's almost like mode seven 3D fighting, you know, so check that shit out. And then we played the Dual Souls trilogy in which we went through. There is a game on steam that you can buy called Dual Souls like collection or whatever. And it's the full set of it's a fighting game called Dual Souls.

And then there's it has the first iteration of itself, which was a fighting game back in the two thousand and three for the Game Boy Advance. And now you're like, OK, they ported their Game Boy Advance game over to steam. No, they did not. When you buy the game on steam and then you boot it and you say play the first game from GBA, it boots up Visual Boy Advance. The emulator and runs the ROM. And then you just play it.

And like that's about as poverty as it gets the most. And I don't know if that's OK. I don't know if I know. I don't think you're allowed to just pack in an emulator and sell it as part of your games trilogy package licensed by Nintendo. But they end which the logos are all there, but they just fucking did it anyway. And I don't know. I ain't going to snitch, but I paid for a game.

And when I clicked play on steam, it just booted up Visual Boy Advance and said, yeah, here you go. Like fucking wild, right? So that's the decisions that that, you know, this team is making. And then second, am I snitching right now? Well, I'm snitching for podcast content. Shut up snitching snitching has a gradient. I'm talking to you.

I'm not talking to the authorities right now. If I'm if I if I go talk to the authorities, that's different. At least one person listening to this is a cop. Also shut up. You'd rather I told you this story than I didn't. Oh, yeah, totally. Every one of you shut up. You're you want to hear what I'm saying.

What are you a narc, dude? So then when you're done playing this, this fucking emulated game that you just bought, that you click the second game in the trilogy. Slashers, whatever it's called. And it boots up a game that is running fine for PC. But actually is the second iteration of the franchise that was exclusive to the Ooya. So you want to talk about your Kingdom Hearts level of like one game over here,

one game over there, Game Boy Advance, Ooya sequel. Amazing, the journey is a beautiful thing. And then you finally get to the new release where they've gone from just basically drawing over Samurai showdown sprites into their own thing. And they've come a long way and you've seen the characters grow and you get to see like, oh, shit, it's Brandon, that random dude with a sword named Brandon from that first game.

We see the end of the journey and it's an amazing time. I highly encourage you all come check out on Woolly Versus, get into fighting games, the Dual Souls trilogy. It's fantastic. It's a fucking journey through the whole thing, the whole thing. And I have to I like I pull the Steam desktop up and show you the boot process because I'm like, I assure you, I am not booting up anything on the side.

It is launching an emulator. So all that coming up on Woolly Versus, we got wild, man. We got we got that. We got Dark Souls, Reggie versus Dark Souls continues. The plan is currently to have that every day at 6 p.m. So please tune in and enjoy. Dokapon as well is going on and, you know, it's taking its toll. How many of you have been stabbed yet?

No stabbings, but right. Well, that's a that's a victory in and of itself. But actual like after recording anger. OK, let me ask you a question. The the the angriest you and I ever got on camera by a fair margin is like me trying to take that strategy guide away from you during Omicron. I think so. Where we're we're like screaming at each other

and you did not want to give it to me, right? What are we at in comparison to that in your average Dokapon session? It's not it's it's that energy, but holding back because if you scream, you look weak. So you have to feel that inside, but means you're just you're just balling your fists and maintain the smugness. You because if you show weakness, you lose. This is like this is like how to learn to like hate your children.

Yeah, no, for sure. Kind of stuff like yeah, because like Omicron was not a default antagonistic scenario. It just became one. It sure did. Whereas this is actually starting that way. So. So please tune in and enjoy. That being said, like we have we have too much

Dokapon store stored up, honestly, so we do have to like, you know, paste things out as well with the releases. Got to figure it out. But yeah, Dark Souls Dokapon going to be going down poverty, ass fighting games that's going down. We got one more. I hope everyone enjoyed God in 60 seconds. That was you got your Halloween drop.

We got one more coming out to wrap up the season. And yeah, I think we're going to be just writing out the the dark dark upon dark upon on the channel. Someone called it the age of fire, and I think that's pretty dope. So I'm a good one. I'm going to just adopt that. If you want to tune into the age of fire, check out Willie versus. It's going on part.

So there's a game that you didn't mention that I am absolutely astonished, the words Darkest Dungeon Two did not come out of your mouth. Yes. Did you not take a hold of it? Too busy. All right. So I'm going to talk about Darkest Dungeon Two. Fuck yeah.

It is a very different game than Darkest Dungeon One. Oh, it is. It is the combat is more or less the same with additions, minuses, etc. The number one thing that has changed is its entire structure is completely different. So it seems like the Hamlet is now replaced with your carriage journey. Yeah. So you are definitely an expert at Darkest Dungeon One, especially compared

to me because I never beat it. I never got much far into it. But you always described as, you know, you're building up your Hamlet. You're building up your teams of dudes. You're trying to keep them decent enough and leveled up to hit this and hit this and hit this and you're building them up and you're using characters as throwaway consumables because that one's busted. But I used him to get this to build up the team to take on to the assault

against the Darkest Dungeon, right? And how long would you say a full run through would take? I mean, it's like it's like a game, right? It's like a real ass fucking. It can you can spend long. You like you can spend extra long making yourself stronger, making your team better and trying to secure your run. And also, like, I know that, like, by the end,

like people were able to do really solid runs within like 15 to 20. Yeah, so I'm looking at how long to beat. The main story is listed as 54 and main plus extras is 77. Like it is a full ass game, right? It's a it's a proper fucking thing. Hmm. Darkest Dungeon to the goal is for your entire run to take five hours. It is a much so Darkest Dungeon one.

The battles and dungeon crawling was rogue like ish, right? But the actual management of your guys and your Hamlet, that was more like a like a, I don't know, like a management thing. I guess you would call it. OK, Darkest Dungeon two is no, you're going to start. You're going to pick your four guys and they are the four guys. The man at arms is Barristan. The highwaymen is Dismas, who, by the way,

canonically survived Darkest Dungeon one. OK. The the the the plague doctor is Paracelsus, etc. And you're going to be going through the path over five acts, right? Maybe two or three little trips each. OK, road. And if Dismas dies, your highwayman is gone. For your run.

You don't hire new. No more highwayman. Oh, you will have to switch to something else when you get to the end. OK, you can recruit. Yeah, you can recruit and you can switch out. And I I did I think three runs, two of which were complete disasters and the third of which was a lot better.

And the stress system has also changed. So you're basically you're going down a carriage, right? And the carriage functions very similarly to a dungeon crawl, right? You hit a split in the path, you'll left, you'll right, you go forward. And then at the end of that path, they'll be like, oh, this has a watchtower. So they'll show you what's ahead or oh, this is OK. So there's no more base. You're the whole thing is a moving like pathway.

OK, got it. And you will run into battles along the way, right? So the idea is to get to the end of your run with everybody alive and not too stressed out. And once you get to the end, which is your end of run end of a sequence checkpoint, you can use stress reducing items and do that. It's like a campfire. Yeah, OK.

Yeah, the focus of the game has changed from keeping your dudes sane to keeping your party synergized. So everybody starts out with their quirks and their pluses and their minuses, right? And that's still there. If your stress hits 10, by the way, it's a one to 10 system instead of a one to one hundred system. OK, so when a monster does stress and it does one. Yeah, exactly what that means.

And it shows a little blip. Well, damage numbers are always extraordinarily low. And I wanted to bring this up in our previous discussion because something hits you for four and you go, fuck, oh, it hit for four. So, yeah, OK, you know, I'm getting stressed out. And you can get like a situation where, oh, I became super stressed. And now I'm reckless or, you know, all the usuals, right? Paranoid, but much, much, much, much, much more often

is that good events and bad events won't necessarily always give you stress. They will also affect the relationship to the characters in your party because the characters are going to be staying with you for huge stretches of time. You're not men max. You're not mixing and matching. So on my first run. Audrey, the corpse, not corpse dealer. Corpse robber, the grave robber, grave robber, yeah.

Was consistently upset that she had damage on her character. And I would not heal her because she was not getting damaged a lot. The front liners were getting damaged, right? And she would kick up not a stress point, but a a stress point between her and Barristan, the man at arms or her and Paracelsus. And when that stress gets to the maximum, they gain not a negative mental trait. They gain a negative relationship with that character. Oh, interesting.

So I think the first one was envious. And what happened was is whenever Paracelsus did like a good hit, Audrey would appear behind her and talk shit. Oh, and Paracelsus's stress would go up by one. OK, OK. Now, so that would happen in DD one, but in a much more generic way, where if someone cracks, they go over the edge on their stress. And then they're like, you know, yeah, like whatever, paranoid or whatever.

Then every time something happens, they'll just say Doomer shit in battle or at campfire. And that doomer shit that they say will stress everyone else out. Yeah. Yeah. No, this time it's specific. I discovered that when Paracelsus poisons somebody, they hate it when somebody kills them before the poison damages run its course. Wow. And they'll they'll talk shit. Wow. On the plus side, when two characters get along very well,

they get the one that I saw the most often was hopeful. So Dismiss and Barristan, who were the front liners, became hopeful in my last run and hopeful is the shit. Because on any crit, hey, man, you did a good job. Stress go down by one. Nice, nice, nice. OK. On on certain hits, the second character would jump in to also get a hit on the thing that we're fighting.

OK, OK. And in one situation, that would happen. And then somebody in the back got jealous and talked shit at one of them. So like managing. Wow. The party is now much more important than managing relationships. OK. And that's why you want to buy up like cards so that oh, now everyone played cards. So the stress went up.

So what stress went down. But more importantly, the negative relationship went down. Is it a third meter is going to be. Is there a third meter? No. Oh, yes. But it's not. So on the character health bar, there's health, there's stress. And then when it changes, you'll see the character's relationship. Blue is bad. Yeah. Yellow is good. OK.

So yeah, bars are good. You're going to you're going to need to fucking play music and chill everyone the fuck out like that. I can see that being huge. The game is also like because the intention is that you're going to be going through multiple full runs, right? It's. Wild how tough it is right now. Like I I like just barely scraped myself

to the end of like one section of track. And the way that they have it working now, I don't think it's going to be that way in the game. But the way they have it working now is that the distance you get on your on your carriage is going to give you a certain amount of hope and hope will unlock new features. So I was going to say, what carries over when your run fails? Yeah, if anything, what carries over is

is your your hope slash profile level. And when every level, you will unlock more items to add to the pool or more characters to choose from. So like when you start the game, beating the game on a completely pure like round one attempt is probably impossible. Because like in the current version of the game, I think you know, unlock like four or five extra characters.

And that means that when your characters inevitably die, if you don't have anyone to swap them in for, you're just going to keep going with three people. What is the effect like when you bring in a new party member and you don't have any synergy with them? Like what? How does that? I never got that far. I literally never even got to a point.

OK, I had dead party members that I could swap people in because that's what I'm wondering now is if this is so important and you bring someone new in that's like joining the group but hasn't established any rapport, I feel like late game. That would be horrible. They're going to be clean. They're not going to be. They're not going to have a negative relationship with anybody because there are bosses in DD one that like rely on synergy

that you implement, right? So you would do things like have your you know, you'd have your your your man at arms, use an ability to shift positions of whatever he hits in the first two rows. And then your jester is going to play a finale and slide himself to the back. And your rearrangement of your positions is optimal damage for the enemy and for where you want to be on the next round.

And like there are bosses that like fuck with putting enemies in front of itself to retreat constantly towards the back. And like you have to do that stuff manually. So I feel like that synergy stuff you're talking about is like sounds pretty fucking crucial. And if someone new comes in and they don't have that, like how can you catch up? Well, well, because not having negative relationships

is more important than having positive relationships, OK, at least currently, in addition, one of the coolest new features is a unique event where you find I forget what it's called. It's like some thing of reflection. And what you do is you go into a flashback for your character that describes the events that we're leading up to either with them joining the caravan or them going to Darkest Dungeon One.

OK, and so shrine of reflection. Thank you guys. And for example, the first one I picked was Dismas and Dismas's flashback starts with a battle and it is him breaking out of jail and it is him in fucking prisoner garb with his fists and a rock. And you have to beat four guards without getting the alarm off. And then once you do that, you learn point blank shot.

Cool. Oh, nice. Yeah, OK, which is fucking amazing, by the way. Yes, it sure is. Point blank shot is that that's the shit. OK, now. You you said the full run is probably going to be about a five hour thing. That's what the devs say. How far did you see up to?

Not far. A boss. It's I saw a boss and the boss was, I believe it was the antiquarian. OK, means there are Darkest Dungeon characters that will be returning. That will be returning. Yeah. Also, the visuals are absolutely unbelievable. Yep, that trailer was godlike. It is it is the best version of this kind of two deification I've ever seen because what they do is they still keep the.

They still keep what do you call it? The the iconic pose for every type of attack. And that's a still frame. Right, that's that's a still frame. But the way they get around like wanting to animate it is that when you select the attack on your bar before you select an enemy, they'll do a anticipatory animation. OK, so like they'll ready their knife or they'll ready their gun and it looks great.

Yeah, then you click on it and you get the still frame with the with the number pop as a bam, bam. Yeah, you see their cool down animation as they put the sword back on the shoulder. Yeah, right. Yeah, it looks great. Yes, it looks really good. I saw the so what I saw them doing in the in the trailer is like it is taking a similar effect to Exord when it revealed itself or it's like you're getting what could be 2D here, but when it wants to, it'll remind you it's 3D and then go back to being solid shapes and silhouettes.

You know, there's a weird thing that happened, which is I originally termed it as like a I did it during my mind goblin series, right? Because Darkest Dungeon One is the game that was the most toxic to my OCD that I've ever even heard of. Like there's no question a party members as consumables is cancerous to the mind. And then I'm playing it. I'm like, oh, no, the change in structure to a much purer rogue like where you're dealing with discrete runs means that the game

is actually a lot less stressful to play. It's it's like stressful in the oh, no, it's going bad, but it's not stressful in the way that in a Darkest Dungeon series of events go bad. You actually feel yourself being pushed into a hole that you might not be able to get out of because you go, I'll just start a new run. And it's not 22 hours to get up to where you're at. OK, so a massive part of part of D.D. One, of course, is stress management through the church, through the bar,

through the fucking hooker, then through the, you know, what like do you and you lose them for one or two weeks sometimes depending on the activity. So the current status of that is actually pretty simple. It is you get to the end of this stretch of road. So you'll be like, this is the evil forest. And at the end of the evil forest, you get to the end. And in the end, you can upgrade your character skills. And you can also use leisure items, be they booze, boxing,

gloves, playing cards, religious ornaments, whatever. OK, and that will both de-stress and increase synergy between the party. OK, those are bought or found items, but you no longer lose that party member for a period of time to an activity. No, you lose the cash you spent on that item. OK, how many currencies are there? There's a bunch. There's a there's a currency that's just for trinkets.

You treat. Yes, there's some trinkets and baubles that is there's supplies that is when I say trinkets in this, I mean, accessories for that. You know, yes. Yeah, for sure. You equip them. There's supplies. There's the the trinket currency. There's one. Antiques vendor, I think. OK. And I can't quite remember.

Because they say there's at least three because there used to be four and you could exchange between them at different exchange rates. And then you you'd need combinations of them to, you know, upgrade abilities or teach new things or whatever the fuck, you know. So so I know this is a bit more about the presentation, I guess. Is that. Darkest Dungeon One has a like, I do know what happens in that game. And it's a very bizarre ending.

But it's like even the best you can do is still kind of ass. All things considered. Dismas is alive. So the events of Darkest Dungeon probably were like a victory in that game's context. But upon leaving the Hamlet, like the the world is over. Like it's it's it's it's the Hamlet's problems as far as the eye can see in every direction. And OK. So Darkest Dungeon One, I remember fighting cultists in the early game

and they were cultists, they were assholes, right? And apparently near the end of the game, they can start to float and get tentacle shit and stuff like that. In Darkest Dungeon Two, they are starting out floating, crackling with evil energy, tentacle mutated out. Apparently some of the bosses, some of the cultist bosses from the first game are now just regular enemies. OK, it is it is a problem.

It is it is way worse as as a state of the world than it was in the first game, which is like more contained. Mm hmm. Are you still seeing the the like enemy types that are like that certain units are effective against like the rats and zombies, undead, fishmen and and Lovecraftian types?

So I'll tell you what, I saw more enemy types in the three or four hours I played of Darkest Dungeon Two that I did in like the 20 that I spent trying to play the first game. Whoa, OK, like every single and every single area has like an entire different enemy pool to draw from. Oh, and here's one final mechanical detail that'll probably worry you, which is enemies have access to the death store mechanic now.

Oh, shit, that's that's hard. Oh, boy. OK. So there's no clean kills then. There are. But sometimes they just don't die. Sometimes they stay standing. OK. Oh, man. Yeah, that's difficult.

Interesting. That's that is the single biggest change in difficulty you could possibly implement of all the things you said. That is yeah, huge. I had like I had like generic zombies like death store like three or four times. So death's door is your magic pixel, and it's effectively also a feature in the fighting game.

Dual souls, mind you, last chance. It's when you do enough damage to kill the to kill the person, no matter what, there's always a final magic pixel moment of them surviving. So persona, you survive on one hit after a mortal blow, right? That type of thing. It's same idea here is the killing blow gives you puts you down to one HP. Interesting. OK. Yeah, so you're going to love it, definitely.

I only really have two complaints. You have a lot of options to change how the wagon steers because you're you're literally steering the wagon left and right to hit things on the road, because sometimes they might have items in them. Right. I could not find a way to make the wagon not control like complete garbage. Like it controls. Well, it's the first active controlling aspect of a game

that is super turned based. Yeah, it feels bad. The second is that the game's interface is like. Like it's not quite as bad as Darkest Dungeon One, but like so much of it is like dragging and dropping items on from like boxes to other boxes. I don't like I looking on an attack to click on an I have. I don't like.

My problem right now is that they say use one, two, three, four to use your regular attacks, right, and then click on the enemy. Five and six don't work, even though those are buttons that would correspond to real attacks on your character's bar. OK, like, yeah, I want more. I want more shortcuts on my keypad, at least. So that's stuff that's early access, sounding, you know what I mean? But I I don't mind the Darkest Dungeon UI,

but it is cluttered as fuck. It's it's very cluttered. And and it but but the fact that it's mace mostly touch based made me like wonder, I was like, oh, oh, they're porting this to switch or to console how the fuck you get to select things with a D pad and a controller and it's like eventually, you know, I was like, OK, I figured out how they did it. And there's no way to get it super duper smooth.

By the time I was playing like, you know, my my daily runs with it back when I was fully involved, I was just using the mouse for almost everything. I forget there was one thing that needed the keyboard. I forgot what it was, but there's one button that needed a keyboard. But otherwise, I was playing the entire game with the mouse, which is nice for just being lazy. Yeah, I can I can see that it's it's a little improved, like it'll be a little easier for a controller.

But like there's still some work to go. But early access again. Yeah. Was walking around the actual dungeons and fighting the same. What are you talking about? Like when you get into a dungeon, which you don't ever. Oh, oh, it's not wagon into dungeon into wagon wagon is the dungeon. So the fights happen how on the road, you jump out and fight it? Just just imagine the entire home period is just gone.

And when you get to an end, it goes. What dungeon do you want to go to? But it's a path. OK, and so instead of instead of going like a square dungeon and moving yourself away around, it is a sleigh of the spire style, like series of branching paths all the way. Oh, OK, OK, OK, OK. Right. OK, sleigh of the spire, got it.

Yeah, I missed the part where I thought you were. I thought with the sleigh of the spire reference, I thought it was like the wagon gets to a cave. We get out and we walk into the cave and then there's a room that is the wagon. Movement stuff is like a direct replacement to the dungeon. The only thing that even approximates that is that you'll find what the game calls a dungeon and it'll be like a keep or something. And all that is is two fights followed by a boss fight that are all optional.

You can just leave it. OK, so no more like you find a weird abattoir. Do you put an eye? Do you cleanse it? Do you touch it? OK, that is there. But instead, it's the path to your left goes to help some people. The path to your forward gets a shrine of recollection. The path to your right has a little mini boss area. Which one do you want to pick? OK. And then the the path will branch from those and then you have to look ahead

and all that stuff. The most interesting thing about that by far is that on on most road branches, your party will tell you which ones they want to go down. Yeah. And the ones that you go down that they like, they'll be happy about. And the ones that you go down that they don't like, they'll be unhappy about. But like, there are things where you'll you'll find an object and it's like a cursed fountain. And like, if you have someone on your on your team that's like compulsive

before you get a chance to choose not to interact with it, they'll be like me first and they'll just touch it. That doesn't that doesn't have that much of a I didn't see anything. And it'll curse you or leave you fucked up in some way or something. OK, I know. Yeah. Instead, instead, what they do is the torch is no longer a consumable that you buy. The torch is literally hope.

Like, it's the last bit of hope in the world is the torch on the back of your wagon. Oh, OK. It has it has the same kinds of effects where if it's high, your party's better, like light effects, certain classes better, better, exactly like the pallet, the pallet types. Only way to get more is to help people out on the road. Oh, OK. Are there still attacks that add to the torch?

Not that I can see right now. I might have missed them, but I didn't think so. Because some classes, especially the religious types, have attacks that when they land, it increases the the the the the brightness, you know, and so that there there might be, but I did not see them. OK, interesting. Or if you choose to, for example, use the the occultist style healers instead of your your your vestals, then they're going to they're

going to create instant darkness. I'm seeing people in the chat say that all of the religious characters died in the course of Darkest Dungeon. So there there are definitely classes that are not going to come back. And there's going to be a bunch of new ones as well. Are you serious? And the way that they're treating the characters is the implications that the characters that you have with you

are probably the same ones from D.D. One that. Oh, man. The lepers are gone. The vestals are gone. Lepers there. OK. Lepers definitely unlockable there. Werewolf like in. I did. I don't see that.

OK. Damn. Well, shit, that's that's nuts. I mean, sometimes it's awesome to go out with a fully religious cast. You know, I I foresee Raynode becoming a boss. Hmm. That just feels. I see I foresee all characters that don't come back as part of the party to be boss fights. Because that would be sick.

So so then some classes are currently not implemented because it's early. Are there. Yeah, there's there's a bunch of classes that aren't implemented. OK, OK, unknown as to what they are. But it definitely doesn't have everything in there. You really need to play it to get like because this is a lot of change. Yeah, one of the things that's a wild amount. The the devs was that like it's a very different game. And it does not replace D.D.

One doesn't sound like it, especially when you said like that, that Slay the Spire comparison, where you're no longer walking around a dungeon like that on its own is humongously different or like a regular ass roguelike. Like, oh, well, this run like this runs a disaster. I'm going to just try and keep it going as far as I can to get enough points to possibly have a better run next time. And it also sounds like, yeah, the by changing the stress system in the ways you described, especially the like the lack of

downtime, because, you know, you would have weeks where you're like, my best party is so fucked up after that last dungeon, they need to be gone for the next two weeks. Time has to pass. I have to pick in a whole expansion team squad and run with the bench, you know, for a week just to get time to pass. So my starters can come back in this game. The bench is just dudes that are fine.

Huh. OK, yeah, this is one of those. What's another game where like I'm thinking there's an example. I can think of like a game where the sequel just went completely different genre on it. Oh, I'm sure there's a million, but I can't think of any right now that would fit this. This. Yeah, OK, but that's a huge change up. All right. I don't hate it. I don't hate what you're describing.

It's it's so much goddamn fun. It's real hard. And I do wish that the keybinds were a little more forgiving, but it's faster runs would be a more friend, not friendly, but like a more satisfying thing, though, for sure. Because, yeah, like I said, like my first save file is just a billion hours, you know, only one of the earliest versions of the game. And, you know, like I'm like, I think I can do it.

I think I can, you know, and then you run through like one of the you run through the darkest dungeon and you're just wipe out the team that you've been building up for the last while. And you're like, God damn it, my hamlet's down to scrubs again. This is going to take a while, you know, interesting. OK, all right, we'll talk about that more next week. Well, we'll talk about more this week very briefly is a fatal frame. I want to say five, but I'm not sure.

Maiden of Blackwater just got re-released for pretty much everything. Got sent to code by a Koei Tecmo gentleman. Thank you, Koei Tecmo guy. It was very nice. That game is not like other fatal frame games. Does it still break your immersion with big combo flashy? Yeah, good shot. Yes, it absolutely does.

However, that's not what shattered my immersion. So I don't know if you remember, Woolly, but this was the fatal frame game that came out on the Wii U that people got mad that they had cut some of the gravure costumes from it in its Western Wii U release. I'm vaguely recalling a story like this, vaguely recalling. So I think we we took a look at it for Shitstorm for like maybe an hour back in the day, and it was like,

didn't remember much about it. This game is less about being spooky, scared of ghosts. And it's a lot more about what if in a scary situation some Japanese girls that you dressed up to look cute fell into the water and got real wet. Are they scary anime titties? The girls or the ghosts? Yes.

Yes. OK, so the tutorial has a girl stand up after falling into water for no reason in a white shirt that you can now see through and I made an offhanded. Haha, it's like we're having a ghost wet T-shirt contest only for big teddy ghosts to also rise out of the water in white robes. Yeah.

And like all the cut scenes and all the all the framing is like, what if this cute girl fell into the water and got all wet? Well, Willie, let me ask you a question. What do you think happens when your scared anime girl falls into the water and gets all wet? Fear boners. Close. No, it'll increase your wetness meter.

Oh, which hangs out in the bottom of the screen. Yes, and the and and your girls wetness determine how dangerous ghosts are. The wetter you are, the scarier the ghosts get the ghosts are. Yes. And then you finish your your your mission where you shoot the you take pictures of the of the ghosts and your ghost shots. And that's that's the same as it's always been.

It's a lot of fun. And then you use your points and you can use your points on upgrading your camera or. You could buy a cute outfit for your girl. You could. Do the can you get outfits that are more wet resistant? No, but you could put them in a bikini. Feels like I'd get them even wetter.

It does. And the part that threw me wasn't even that it was like, OK, this game is clearly somebody somebody like seeing cute girls getting splashed with water. That's like over it's like watching a Tarantino movie and you're like, OK, we get it about the fucking feet. All right. The part that got me was that when I discovered that you're

constantly picking up notes and, you know, read and ghost spooky stuff and it's about a cursed mountain in which people get spirited away. It's true. Ritual sacrifice. Yeah. And I discovered that, like. With the exception of maybe five out of the 6070 notes I

picked up. All of them were. Oh, man, I'm feeling weird. I wonder if that ghost is affecting me. I'm thinking about committing suicide. And then you'd pick up the next note. It's like, I'm going to go to that next part of town where the sunrise is really nice and I'm going to commit suicide.

And then you find the third note. You're like, I'm at the spot where I'm going to commit suicide. I sure do want to commit suicide. And then the ghost will commit suicide in front of you and then you'll fight a boss fight against the ghost and then you'll pick up a note going, I can't believe I'm going to commit suicide, but it'll be much better now after I've

committed suicide with the ghost commit suicide. Yes. The ghost commit suicide. And then you're hanging out and there's the one male player character that you can play with, but don't worry. He's hanging out with the cute girl that wears the tie so that you're not gay for playing the section. It's okay.

The girl's there. Okay. And the, and the ghost looks at her and says, you should commit suicide. And she goes, I can't believe I'm going to commit suicide. I'm going to commit suicide. And then you have to fight a boss fight against the ghost so that she doesn't commit suicide.

And then right when I was at the limit of my, I can't believe you committed suicide levels of notes, I loaded into a cut scene in which the first two words were suicide. Huh? And then I turned it off because I couldn't handle it anymore. It's just like the only way for ghosts to kill people in the setting is that they force themselves to commit suicide. So every note you read is, you know, I suddenly feel like I'm

going to commit, like that's it. There's no secret. There's no history of the cult. There's no, it's like, boy. So once I would like to commit suicide right about now, once the wet ghosts commit suicide, the wet, once the wet t-shirt goes to commit suicide, does a big you get wet and commit suicide, but then does a big text prompt pop up flowery that

says nice shot. No, that's, that's when they are coming at you and the cursor turns red because they're in the middle of their attack and you hit them and it goes fatal frame because you hit a counter shot and then you get the points because you got the fatal pad. I have a serious question. Ask me your serious question.

Dead serious. Ask me your dead serious question. Why is anyone still talking about this franchise? Fatal frame two is one of the best horror games that ever came out. Really? Okay. Fatal frame, fatal frame two is terrifying.

Okay, it is, it is wild that it's terrifying because it still has like you shoot a ghost with a camera like a fucking like a game and it says ghost shot a hundred points. Okay, it's that good. Okay, has anything since that one been good? No, no, no. Well, three was like, okay, and four was like, okay, and this one seems like bad, but if you're horny for wet ghosts, then

I mean, that'll do it for you for real because the only because the last time fatal frame came up in my periphery was when the movie came out and all I heard was how annoyed everyone was with the movie. Yeah. There was a movie, right? Yeah, I don't know. Some twins jumping in a well.

Two is good. That's that's the answer. Two is really quite excellent. That's why people talk about fatal frames. Okay. And I guess it made it sold enough because it was good to keep everything else going. Yeah, also, I got to say a shout out to a noise filter.

You can't turn off that makes my stream look like absolute garbage when I stream that came because twitch and YouTube compression just hate it a lot a lot. All right. So, so fatal frame fatal frame two fatal frame three the tormented fatal frame mask of lunar eclipse spirit camera cursed memoir project zero two we addition and then maiden of black water.

Yeah. Okay. That one's about getting wet. Did did you get wet? The meter said I got wet. Is the wetness like is the detail on the wetness well done? Oh, yeah. All the clothes have a dry version and there's a yeah, it's

an impressively done. Okay. All right, all right. Well, can't say that they didn't, you know, deliver what they promised to if you want to think about shooting ghosts with an admittedly very fun camera system and see a bunch of cute girls get wet. You you can check out fatal frame made of black water.

That's what that game's about. That's what's up with that shit. Wetness play back for blood. Do you ever play Left 4 Dead back in the day? Yeah, the first one. Yeah, well, you know exactly what Left 4 Dead is because Left 4 Dead was the same thing forever and it was great. Back for blood is by the same devs who made Left 4 Dead and it

looks like Left 4 Dead and it is not Left 4 Dead. Left 4 Dead. It is significantly different because like you're going through what you let what you laughing about the wetness meter. You laughing about the wetness meter. The Wapping System. Wet ass photos, dude. You got to make sure your camera is skewer.

It doesn't fall into the water. Yeah, all right. Okay, all right. So back for blood, right? You you hey guess what your bunch of zombies are going to attack you and there's the director that tells the game whether or not they should attack you in a big hoard here or there or whatever that door has an alarm on it that car would explode.

You get attacked by a special infected. It's like a big ogre. It's like a tank yada yada yada similarities, right? The biggest differences are that Left 4 Dead had the feeling of like an arcade game where like in terms of your character it was cosmetic in terms of your weapon. There was really only two shotguns and two machine guns. That kind of thing, right?

This game goes. No, there's like 40 weapons and you can throw a million attachments on them and the reason why you would do that is because you are earning like copper as you go through the as you go through the area like you'll go. Oh, look, there's copper over there and you'll go pick it up, right? And you are buying in like Counter Strike once you get to a

safe room to upgrade your shit. Is it for PvE? Yeah, okay. There's also a PvP mode. So, for example, weapons have rarity, tears, strength, etc. So, oh, look, I got 1500 copper. That means I can buy an upgrade to the party to increase the team's health for the next stage.

And oh, I have a little extra leftover. So I'll upgrade my shotgun to this better shotgun. So by the end of your run, you are super powered compared to the beginning of your run, just in terms of your gear on top of that, they also do like a card system, which looked really complicated. It's actually really simple. Every single like little piece of level, you get to pick a

card which will buff your character in some way. So something like if you're critical health, a kill will increase your health or you have more stamina or, you know, something statistical or something like that and you make a deck and you just pick them in order. Like the first card that you place will be yours for free. The second through sixth cards, you get to pick it and it will just cycle through as you go, right?

And the difference starts to show itself off the more levels you play because in Left 4 Dead, when you are at the end of no mercy on top of the hospital, yeah, you had med kits and yeah, you had the good shotguns, right? But you were functionally the same character that you were at the beginning, right? If you have earned a lot of powerful melee decks and stacked your cards, right?

And got a good machete. By the end of the act, you are holding down the trigger and your character is swinging five times a second and killing a zombie will regenerate their stamina and they have extra damage on their melee. Jesus Christ, okay. So you become a blender. Yeah, okay.

Or headshots will cause monsters to just drop ammo. So just grab the highest powered weapon you have and just roll right through them. Is back for blood part of Left 4 Dead? No. Okay, it's its own thing. It is not related. It's it's Turtle Rock though, right?

Yes. Yes, Turtle Rock. Okay, they're not associated with steam or valve on this. It's their own thing. Okay. Okay, got it. It's their own IP. It's it's great on the downside.

The story is like like serious and it's like come on stupid. Aside from that. Yeah, it's a ton of fun. I play with some friends. I play with the page and my friend Vell. Uh, we had a great time. It's tons of fun. Good multiplayer game.

So they just, um, I guess we're just leaving Evolve behind. Yes, just leave that. Leave that over there. I like it on paper. I still like it on paper. That's fun game, but, uh, I mean, it's not your thing. Yeah, that's fine. Oh, you mean, you mean Evolve.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, yeah, Evolve. I mean, I like that to those two matches I played at that event. That's what I liked. And last but not least, remember, I talked shit about little hope last week. Yeah, gave us that incredible photo. Yeah, shout out Striden for making that great scorpion frog meme.

I love it. Me and Paige played a house of ashes. Yes, because it was Halloween and that's the new one. Hey, guess what? That's the best one since until dawn, full stop. No question. Fantastic. I saw a review that was titled, um, it takes itself too seriously, but I

didn't actually read it. It's a horror property. But yeah, it takes it exactly as seriously as the others. Yeah, I was just a headline on something. I didn't click. It's just way better. Okay. It's which means thus the default better than the rest of the dark pictures

to trilogy. Yeah. There's definitely until dawn, then house of ashes, then a little bit of a gap, man of Medan, and then a huge power gap, little hope. Okay. I also found out that they were all directed by different people within the same team, which is why they all kind of turned out a little bit different. Writing though, what about the writer?

That's what you got to figure out. I don't know about that, but the writing's way better and it's a much more interesting setup. Finding out who wrote each episode as well as who directed is, is yeah, that's the key. That's the key. It's, it's really good. I don't, unlike last week, I have nothing to say about house of ashes

other than it's really good. So you should go check it out. If you are interested in that kind of game at all at some point, they're going to put out a bundle. Yeah, that, that point was like last week. Okay. Uh, but there's more games coming after this. Like I thought there's one more game coming out.

They announced the four. Yeah. So yeah, cool. And last, but not least remember last week when I was like, I'm worried about Tim Rogers. I don't think Tim Rogers is okay. How's cyberpunk? Um, so, uh, Paige can vouch for me.

I correctly guessed the format that the 10 hour and six minute cyberpunk review would take in that it is a seven part choose your own adventure review in which Tim only wants you to watch two of the parts two through six and then go to the finale. Um, he live streamed the first part of it, uh, where he started with a fake apology for stealing everyone's money and not making the cyberpunk review, uh, which went on for like 15 minutes about how terrible he felt that he didn't in fact make the cyberpunk review at all.

And he felt so bad about it that he just whipped up a little 10 hour video just that morning to show to everyone. Um, and it's great. Hey, guess what? It's a good ass pieces of Tim Rogers content. Um, though Tim is a really smart and talented guy. He is also the poster child for crunch because he talks at length during one of the parts about how he cannot help but crunch himself.

He does not know how to work other than crunch and much like the last couple reviews, he came very close to killing himself with work on this one and somehow gave himself a viral or bacterial infection of his jugular that like almost gave him a brain aneurysm, uh, which required like weeks and weeks of medical rehabilitation. So when I went to action button and took a look and saw a cyberpunk video went up and it was about an hour long and I went, oh good. I guess everything's okay then.

No, that's because parts two through seven are unlisted because he wants you to use the playlist and link to them or parts. Oh boy. Yeah. No, he, um, he had strep throat for over a month and instead of going to the doctor would just eat lozenges to make it feel better. And then that infected his tonsils, which then infected his jugular, which then almost killed him with a blood clot, um, because he works like 16

hours a day for like, you know, 11, 12, 13, 14 weeks in a row. Um, uh, so don't do that. Yeah. Um, kind of need that. It's like a bit of that saccharism going on there where you need a team member to come over and just literally turn your computer off. Yeah. But you can't do that when you're making your own things.

Yeah. Self crunch. All, also on the topic of crunch, uh, in the beginning and in live stream, Tim begs you not to watch all seven parts in a row and to definitely not tell him that you watched all seven parts in a row because he wants you to pick part one, then two of the six and then the final, which I did and then watched all the remaining parts in a row. And is there a really good reason underneath it?

Yeah, they're all, they're all different focuses. One talks about the game's reception. One talks about what he liked. One talks about what he didn't like. One talks about, uh, the sweeter, the honey tunnel, the bigger, the blast waste, which I don't know what that means. But, but when you beg somebody not to see content, how do you, can that possibly defeat the FOMO of wanting to watch content?

It doesn't. And it clearly doing a shrug here. I'm doing a, I'm doing a, it didn't, it clearly didn't work. Though there's a secret about that in one of the parts, but I won't mention it. I see. What's fascinating is Jean got a shout out in that, in that video. That's cool.

In a, in a segment in which Tim is railing about the nightmare of a modern life, he yells at Jean that he doesn't have to retweet everything he sees on his timeline. That's funny. That's great. Yeah, don't crunch. Crunch will kill you even if you're a smart person like Tim Rogers. That was my week.

Okay. Um, you want to check out more of my crap? You go down to twitch.tv slash Pat stairs at. All right. Uh, we hitting a break or yeah, I could take a piss. Okay. Be right back. Alrighty.

Quick word from our sponsors. This week, the podcast is sponsored by express VPN who are out there to help you watch whatever the fuck you want to watch. Regardless of where you're standing, sitting or logging in on whatever device you want to log in on. Um, what's the analogy here using the internet without express VPN is like walking your dog in public without securing them on a leash. Most of the time you'll be fine.

But what if one day it wanders a bit too far and gets dog napped? Is that written down in the copy word for word? I fucking freak out. I don't want that to happen. That's pretty dark. Um, yeah. Well, anyway, every time you connect to an unencrypted network, you know, hotels, airports, cafes, et cetera, your shit ain't secure

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Okay, I have to point out that in the middle of one of those ad reads, I completely lost my shit. It's because I looked over and saw a long time fan post the words. Well, I must have stolen a lot of data then during my express VPN analogy and I couldn't handle it. I see. All right, a couple stories this week, just a handful, but some stuff that's worth a peep.

First off, I didn't expect anything to ever come of this, but it would seem that it would seem that gung-ho is going to continue the let it die franchise. Yeah, this is actually like without suda 51 or so far. We haven't heard of his involvement in any way, but there's a new game announced called death verse, let it die. That's clearly a sequel that's taking place hundreds of years later in the let it die universe. Very strange.

I didn't think they would look at someone's like unique because it feels like it's like that's his property that he made with them that they own it, but it feels as if it's like, yeah, he made this wacky new world and, you know, like maybe he'd come back to play with it someday or maybe not, but they're doing they're doing it. They're doing something without him. Um, so there's a trailer and it seems to be focused a lot more on a outdoor kind of battle royale ish vibe.

Um, then the climbing the tower, souls ish, punky elements of the original. Don't know how far you got into that. So, uh, not very, not very, but it turns out, it turns out that there are some large pockets of let it die fandom out there, um, because it was free and that means a lot of people got their hands on it and got a chance to go pretty far in, you know, there was a, the, there's the optional buy-ins at certain points and whatnot, but like you could play a bunch of the game for free and that meant, yeah, there was a lot of

people that just, you know, we're fans. So I'm seeing people excited for that. Although I don't know if this game is going to be free. Um, they announced it for PS4 or PS5. It's coming out spring of next year and, um, yeah. Oh, it will launch us free to play. Okay. Yeah.

So it's going to be free. So, um, that does wonders for, you know, getting, getting the word out there on this stuff, but it just feels very odd to not get Suda back on board. Um, unless he's too busy with whatever else he was doing, well, you know, maybe perhaps, uh, uh, you know, no more heroes would be taking up that attention. This is, I'm just like, no thoughts. The, the only reason I gave a shit about that game at all was

because grasshopper worked on it. Like removing them and going forth. Like, what if we did a grasshop, what if we did a let it die without a single thing that's interesting about it? Hold on. People are saying he wasn't really involved, but when I saw the, the premier, not the premier, at the stage show. Okay.

Hold on a second. Let me just let this up. Um, I remember. Hey, he was like at the booth promoting it and I had always assumed that, um, that was something he was involved with. If he was not, then this could all be fake news right now. It could be the fakest news you got. Well, I mean, the, the, they did announce the sequel.

I did see that. That part's not fake. Oh, okay. He is not actually, yeah, it's not, it's not actually a pseudo. Okay. Well, then, you know what? Never mind. He is not, uh, the director, producer, designer.

He's not. Yeah. He was just a part of the promotion. Then you know what? I'm going to go back in time and still not care about it. Okay. Okay. But hold on.

Hold on a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait, pause. I, I, I'm, I'm not crazy here, but Lily Bergamo was that not a pseudo project? Was that net? Am I, am I like, do you remember the timeline on this on, on Lily Bergamo? Oh God. No. Okay.

Talked about it. And then it fucking never came around for a year. And then it's, ah, it's let it die. Little dies happen. Yes. Exactly. Okay. So stop it.

If you, here's the story. Lily Bergamo was a game that was originally supposed to be a Suda 51 game that was, um, um, announced years ago, way back when, um, what, 14? What, but anyway, it was years back and that project, we went quiet for a while. And then eventually reemerged as let it die, which, uh, was I guess a re just, yeah, they, they redesigned the game, but the redesigned, let it die isn't exactly his game, even though the first one was. So he was still associated, um, in, in with the original and he was around for the promotion of the new thing, but the new thing is not his work. That's what happened. So now the, the connection is there because you think of Grasshopper and I think of, you know, the promotion. And I think of the fact that it was originally going to be one of his games, but then it turned into something else.

That's okay. I remember, I got it now. There you go. Um, all right. Why all this noise about let it die now if no Suda 51? It was, it was the original project, but then it, it, it, it, yeah, its own thing. All right. Well, anyway, death versus let it die got announced and then they're doing that.

Um, yeah, I, you have to assume that if they're doing another one of these, right? I, I, I started, I enjoyed some of the first game. I thought some stuff was really cool. I did a couple runs through it and I did a couple of streams actually back in the day. Um, and I had some fun, but you know, the kind of dropped off. I have to assume that like the free to play aspect and the, the attention it gets and then eventually the money it makes by, you know, having the micros is profitable enough that they want another one out there on current gen.

You know, clearly it worked out that they're, they're going back to it. Um, yeah, I thought it was okay. I just, I just, I could, I like, what did I get to maybe like the second or third boss? And then I was like, all right. I think I was, uh, satiated there. All right. Okay. Absolutely nothing.

No problem. I got nothing. I got nothing. No problem. Moving on. I have my head about this. Moving on. Um, like, like it's one of those games that like I saw get announced in the light.

I like turned my head and deleted, deleted from my brain. Sure. All right. Uh, Shoji Meguro is leaving Atlas, which was a way bigger piece of news until you click through the article and say, and see that it, oh, he's going freelance, but he's going to still keep working with Atlas on Atlas games. And you're like, Oh, thank God. What the fuck?

This means they change the headline. Oh yeah. Yeah. Hold on a second. Yeah. Okay. No, because originally, okay. No, no, no, no, no.

Hold on. The emphasis was, uh, composer Shoji Meguro leaves Atlas and he's developing Indie and Indie game to be announced on November 6th and that was the, that was the, the, uh, thing where it's like, yeah, he's, he's leaving to work on Indie games that he's going to be announcing very soon. Um, and now, yeah, Meguro to continue working on Atlas titles. Well, all right. I got fucking other games.

Can also have Meguro soundtrack. Jesus Christ. Great. Jesus. Good news. They made you think it was bad news, but in fact, it was good news. Why would you bait? Why would you bait?

Fucking. Okay. Well, anyway, nothing then there. I was like, Oh shit. P six is going to have to get a completely different soundtrack and they can never, ever use jazz again because jazz was invented and dies with Shoji. So it's, you know, it's really weird because, uh, you see the, the cowboy bebop trailer come out that has jazz in it, which is apparently from the original

cowboy bebop, which is impossible because jazz was invented a couple of years ago with persona five, but cowboy bebop came out before persona five. So what the fuck is going on? Well, what's going on is you literally repeated the exact same joke the next week and I was just making a quick reference to that joke as we moved on to the next story, but instead you took it as a cue to literally just repeat the exact same joke verbatim. It's better the second time.

Congratulations. Some people could have missed it. Um, all right. So we got that going down. Uh, what else have we got? I didn't, I'm surprised that this carried as much news, but there's, there's an article on just about every, um, every news site about the fact that bloodborne D make has it a release date.

The bloodborne D make is coming January 31st, 2022 to PC, of course, and there's a trailer and everything you can check out and it looks fucking great. It looks so impressive, dude. Um, that, that Twitter account is a really fun follow because, um, yeah, uh, Lilith Walter, uh, has been posting just awesome footage of like boss fights and like cut scenes and like world design and all this stuff. And it's like, yeah, man, like hearing the D made version of the music,

hearing, seeing the D made version of like, you know, uh, gas coin and just all this shit. It looks so fucking cool. And there's no possible way a disc, a PS one disc could have handled this much, this large of an area, this many assets on screen at the same time, this quality of like voice and, and, and like, yeah, it's like, it just, it looks like the fidelity, but it is like a shovel night in that you're cheating in displaying way more power than the original could have.

But it looks, it looks fucking cool. Um, check it out. Bloodborne PSX. Bloodborne made it to the personal computer, everybody. It did. It did. And, um, so far, they're letting it happen. Yep.

Like literally an announcement for the release date of this fan game property and it has not been disturbed by Sony or by front soft. So there you go. Fuck your God of War. Here comes Bloodborne PC. Get out of here, Kratos. I got blood to smell. We've also got, um, less of an announcement, but more of just something

that Nebelia noticed, uh, looking through Capcom's integrated report. There was some information that came out. One, they considered Resident Evil three a hit. Uh, yeah. Pragmat is making steady progress, has young talent working on it. RE engine continues to evolve. And, uh, most importantly, free additional DLC will be coming to Monster Hunter Rise and Resident Evil Village.

Could you read me? This is an internal. Just what is, what is the source of, of this part? Capcom.co.jp. Yeah. With an English document that you can click on and read. It's a PDF of their annual integrated report, what they would release for shareholders to read of, of how everything is doing.

Oh, okay. It's the share. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Cause when you said that RE three is considered a hit, my brain exploded with the fact that the development teams in Capcom definitely don't consider

that game a hit and it caused like a bunch of teams to get shuffled around as to what they're working on. Well, but financially, I guess it was. As far as, uh, getting investors, uh, on board is concerned. They do consider it a hit. That's great. Yeah. And if you do decide to look at the report, um, you're, you know, of

course you're, you're, you're scrolling to about page 48, uh, to get there past all these charts and corporate value income increases and such. Uh, you can, you can check it out. So yeah, they've got basically free DLC plans coming for those games. Uh, no details on what that will be, of course, but it's really weird. They didn't just say, Hey, there's RE eight DLC coming out. Like, as soon as it came out cause like that game smashed. So apparently crazy good.

Apparently they just started working on it. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. So that's the other thing. Uh, uh, I read an article here that indicates that, uh, yeah, work has just started on free DLC for both of these games. Good old free LC. Good shit.

Um, then we've got just a little, just a little, a little, a little nice feel good over here for those in the know or for those who care, but rage of the dragons is in fact getting a re-release and we, uh, saw a company had picked up, um, the, the rights to do so. I think not too long ago, uh, and there was like, Oh, word on the street is the sequel might be in the works or something. Uh, and now we've just gotten confirmation that yeah, they're porting, um, rage of the dragons to everything modern, uh, PS, uh, switch and, and X bone.

And, um, we will hear what's happening with netcode hoping for good things. I have a silly question. Cause rage of the dragons is bizarre, rage of the dragons got a regular release at some point, right? Yeah. It was originally a Neo Geo, um, um, home system game. Cause everything about that game is fucking bizarre. It was cause it was during that confusing era when SNK was sort of dead, but not

really. Right. Okay. So then, um, what they had to get Playmore, Evoga, Brezza soft. All these different companies stepped in, um, from not just Japan to work on, you know, uh, some fighting games for Neo Geo and, and, and this was, yeah, before like Playmore fully came back and it became SNK Playmore. Um, and yeah.

So this is when Japan was working with, uh, I want to, I believe it was Brazil on creating, uh, this game and it unfortunately was supposed to be a double dragon fighting game officially, but then the license got revoked right before it or, or like they didn't have the license anyway, they made the game and then they were told that it's not an official, uh, double dragon fighting game, but it, so they just released it anyway. And the characters are still Billy and Jimmy Lee, but whatever. It's, it's, it's not rage of the dragons.

It's not double dragon. It's something else. Um, but I bring it up because what they did release is a fucking cool fighting game and it was, it was good. It was fun. Designs are dope. Characters are nice and it's a nice two on two system. And, uh, yeah, it's worth bringing back.

So excited to hear about that. If it gets some rollback, then, uh, I think people will have fun with it. Cause right now we're getting also some word on the street about, uh, the breakers revenge port that's coming. And apparently they're going all out with giving it like not just rollback, but like a super detailed training mode. Um, for breakers revenge, dude. Yeah.

And, uh, it's getting, I mean, it's dude, that game's legit, man. They're shitting there. That's super sick. It's a ton of fun. It's a ton of fun. I swear to God, breakers is an awesome fighting game. It's really good. Don't believe you.

Well, anyway, it's coming and apparently it's also going to have the, um, replay interruption system where I think you can like, I think I saw something about like, yeah, they might be doing the thing where you can interrupt a replay and take control as well. So fuck. Yeah, man. I'm, I'm all for this. Like give, give love to these old fighters that a lot of these new people

might have missed out on. If you started playing fighting games after 2009, you might have missed out on some fun shit. You know, you assuredly did. There's a lot of fucking weird ass shit. Fighting games might have like the most amount of niche releases of almost any genre. Like it's absolutely bananas.

How fucking many fighting games just fallen into a like a pit. More than any other genre. Yeah, dude. Oh, well, I mean, I don't know why it schmops exist. Like what the fuck do you know about Ibarra pink sweets? Mushihime sama to who? You know, all right. That's enough.

That's Karas trigger heart. Accelica. Perotius devil engine. Yeah. Perotius. All right. And I didn't even say Icaruga or radiant silver gun or judgment silver sword or the dawn patchy.

All right. Anyways, keep going. He's just going to go. I yes. Yeah, we could. We could, but we won't. We got those. Gundam cafes will be closing in Japan starting next year.

The pandemic has forced a change of hours and operating times and while they did not specify a reason, it seems as if they're just not getting enough attention to keep them open and they will slowly be closing the various Gundam cafes at different dates and it sucks. So you're going to lose the Akihabara. You're going to lose the the Osaka, the Odaiba, the Fukuoka and eventually they're going to keep the Yokohama satellite one open until about March at which point then that will shut down too. It's going to be weird to not have. I mean, I assume they'll probably just keep like the little trailer shop open, but the Odaiba one, it's like that's where the fucking Gundam statue is like. To not have a merch store there open. It seems a bit weird, but I guess it's just the cafe element. They're closing and they'll just keep the little merch hut.

What if they put the robots in cute little dresses? They already did that. Oh, did they already do that? Yeah. It works. Put another cute little dress on top of that. That might get some attention going, but in the meantime, you know, end of an era. That being said, they did say that they are trying to plan what they're describing as a new place for communication of Gundam fans.

So they might be closing all of these and might announce some other single location for people to meet up in, you know, and be Gundam fans. I'm sure there'll be another location that people can come hang out, talk about Gundam, and all collectively miss the point together. I'm sure there will. Yeah. They're the ones that, uh, they started the neon Genesis. They invented it. They, the, the moment that anime changed, you know, um, you could, there's a whole history about that. Actually, you can go read about it.

Like, like, like the reference to, to the, the reference to the new Genesis of anime started with, like, with Gundam and they had a big meetup in, um, uh, in Japan. When like a bunch of adults basically got together and, and, uh, told me no got on stage and there was a big thing with like, hey, adults can like anime too. And, and anime is not just for kids and we can make cool shit and everyone was like, yeah. And then that's where like the first cosplay basically started and they went, I want to dress up like the cool robot. Who's that guy on the stage? Get out of here. It was, it was the birth of cosplay. Um, I can't get, I can't get, wow, cool robot out of my head.

Like, I can't, it's just. Oh, so. Do we talk about squid coin last week? No. Oh man. So there's a new NFT token thing called the squid coin based off of the squid game. Uh-huh. And, uh, it, it rose 2300% in a single day because people wanted to hop on the new NFT fucking bullshit of the new hot show only to discover that, um,

squid coin does not allow itself to be transferred, sold, or trans, or given back. It's completely locked, the instant you buy it. So do you truly own, do you truly own the JPEG then? No, you don't even own anything. It's a coin. It's not even a picture. Oh. And there's just thread after thread after thread of guys going, how do I transfer this into Ethereum? And dudes doing like, wait, how do I, does this thing, how do I sell it? And you, you can't.

Maybe you have, maybe you have to play the squid game to sell it. It's, it's, it's, oh fuck. Oh man. Yeah. It's, it's like the squid game, like cultural thing has been the absolute most bizarre thing I've ever seen in my life. I saw like American news doing like drone footage of their children playing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The games.

Yes, I saw them. Green light in school. How did this nefarious thing and like, are you fucking serious? It's, it's, look, it's shit's weird. Shit's weird. I thought you were like the other thing. I mean, I saw some, something about a bunch of dudes are trying to steal meta bots by turning it into an NFT game. And like they bought, they bought the meta bite.

They made a trademark because there's a trademark that expired. So they bought, they got a trademark and they don't actually have the IP. That's still very much owned. But, but, but they, because they got the trademark, they thought that they now own meta bots as an IP. And then there was like an indie go-go. It's, oh, it's, yeah, there's a whole thing. And, and, you know, through sheer brute will and force, it seems as if they're trying to like just force the idea that like they own meta be and they own meta bots now, you know. Anyways, what do we got?

We got, you know, there's not much to this story because it's just, it's a big announcement, but it's effectively not nothing to say here. Sega's entering a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Specifically, they're going to be using their Azure cloud platform for working on what they consider to something called next gen large scale super games. Oh, it's a fucking lie. So it's just, well, it's, it's just games with cloud computing, essentially. That seems to be the case. Everything in that description is a lie. Oh my God.

This is, but the only reason why I bring this up is because I am shocked and surprised to see that Sega and Microsoft are like working together. Yeah, that is wild. Well, they did have a little bit of a back and forth with them over fantasy star online too. True. Microsoft store. True. But, you know, without going into a ton of detail or, you know, saying anything that I can't, I have mentioned in the past before that I have spoken to people directly in the industry who have, you know, essentially told the story of how how Sega and Microsoft had some bad blood.

Yep. Because they were supposed to work together on things and then eventually they stopped working together on things and then suddenly an Xbox existed. So it's very surprising to see that, you know, I guess time heals all wounds. Money heals all wounds. This is true. This is true. But for a while there, I didn't think they'd be on good terms. Yeah, there's a bunch about the creation of the Xbox that is in dubious form.

But anyway, super games coming soon. Sega can't make any super games. And one more little thing here. Trailer dropped for the book of Boba Fett. Yeah, it looks good. You didn't watch season two of Mandalorian, right? Just season one? No, I watched it all. Oh, okay.

So trailer seems fine. It, I guess you just have to like erase whatever Boba Fett expanded universe versions you had in your brain and replace it with this one that is going to be Gangster Man. Alright, give me a second. Done. Yeah, so you're getting you're getting Gangster Man, Gangster Boss, Boba Fett. Trailer seems fine. Seems like it's going to have similar energy to Mandalorian. A little bit too much helmet off.

Like for something that was like, whoa, reveal in, in, in the, in the, this is what we just watched. I feel like about half of that trailer is helmet off Fett. Yeah, well, actors. Yeah, exactly. Not everybody can be Keith Kyle, Mr. Urban. What's his name? Sorry. Kate Urban.

Oh, yes. Dredd. Judd Shredd. What's his name? Kyle Urban. Carl. Yeah. Not everybody.

Carl. Carl Urban. Carl Urban. Not everybody can be Carl Urban. Yeah. And that sucks. I wish more people were because it's not that it's like, oh, Mandalorian. And with us it's by religion and creed that this helmet never comes off or anything.

It's just like he's doing his own thing and he can give us little or as much as he wants to, but obviously it's on a whole bunch of the time. So to then just casually rip it off a whole bunch of times just because like actor needs to have a face. It's like, yeah. Actors. You know that. If I show enough of my face during this fucking shit I can do something that doesn't have

anything to do with fucking Star Wars. Not just, but not just Judge Dredd though. Mandalorian as well. Like the face is a plot point, you know? So I like when you have those things where it's like, yeah, there can be a character who's masked and like you don't have to do a ton of like, oh fuck this, I'm taking it off. Act, you know, or the Gene Roddenberry aliens where if they can't- Let me ask you.

I want to say we both have the same answer. What's the worst actor slash role that ever did I'm going to show my face when I'm acting goddammit in a movie? Because me, for me, it's Toe for Grace as Venom. Oh. Every- That's yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Every single time he fucking speaks- It rips off of his body. When the face comes off. Yeah, that was really bad. I wouldn't, I just, I wouldn't have thought of that, but that's a really fucking dumb one because they just insist you have to see the performance. How else are they going to get their Academy Award nomination? Man.

Stallone as Judge Dredd is also really good. I'm seeing people see because like, man, he does not wear that helmet outside like the opening scene of the movie. I still remember seeing him though. It's been a long time. I haven't watched it in forever, but I still remember seeing Stallone's face. Which is why, like with Carl Urban, it was like a noteworthy thing that, no, he stays in it the whole time, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Also, like, you know, with the way CG's been going now too, it's like you can still get the performance capture with like, you know, let's say like Hulk or Thanos, which is like when the character- Yeah, like Thanos looks like Josh Brolin. Rocket Raccoon does not.

You know, it's fucking- it's a raccoon. So- I mean, that's your opinion. Sure. But I- Bradley Cooper has a kind of raccoon-like exterior. All I'm saying is I appreciate when the actor can put aside that like face performance ego part and just let the role be the role, especially when it's appropriate.

Uh, yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Hopefully the actual episodes are not 50-50 helmet on or off, but, uh, yeah, Bookabub Effect coming soon. He'll put his helmet on to kill and then take it off to hang out. The most important part is that the stakes must be incredibly low for the whole season. The lowest stakes possible. A couple of bucks here and there.

One or two revenges. Just local ass politics. Getting fucked over in Star Wars. Hey, I want to do some crimes on this shit-hole planet and I want money. That's it. And some guys are going to be like, I also want money, but I don't like you. I want to see, like, eventually there will have to be a lightsaber and it should be on the ground in some dead person's hand.

No. Low stakes. No, it should be. It should be. Bookabub Effect shows up and some guys like, yeah, motherfucker. Well, I have a light and then Bob Fett shoots him before he even turns it on. Sure. And then he's just dead.

Sure. That works. He's dead. Just take some letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, you can send it to castlesuperbeastmail.com. That's castlesuperbeastmail.com. Check it out. We got one coming in from Agrawil says, dear six-star wooly and SSR pat.

How do you deal the maximum amount of psychic damage to any gacha game player? You say, I have dozens of packs and I haven't even bothered opening them because I like my deck. I don't even play Teppin anymore, but I've been playing. I was just going to say, that's totally me right now in Teppin. They give you tons of free cards all the time. I don't know. That's what I said last week. I don't even play Teppin anymore.

I've been playing Mega Man X dive. Yeah, it's gacha trash, but it's fun and I miss Mega Man X. And hearing wooly say that gave me stomach churning mind goblins. It also shows wooly psychologically amazing immunity to gacha tactics because of the tastes. Here's my attitude and the attitude of 99.99% of gacha game players. You aren't opening packs. You could get rare cards. Who cares?

Just use it. It might be something cool. You can't know if it's in your inventory and if it'll give you good brain juices for five seconds. Do it. Yeah, well, you're not a gacha game player. You're a person who happens to play a game that has gacha elements. Excellent unintentional trolling, wooly. Thank you.

You have absolutely shown like a remarkable resistance to these kinds of manipulative game tactics. So two days ago, I opened up Tepin and I was looking at the free packs at the top and it was at like 59. And I was like, huh, I wonder if I can get that up to 99. Oh my God. Yeah. So, I know, but I pressed the button and then, you know, got a bunch of them. So whatever. It's fine.

Bro, I'm still like, if I'm getting top 500 and I'm doing it with my fucking, my existing abilities, then what the fuck do I care? You know, until the meta makes it a problem. I don't give a fuck. Good question. We got one question. No, who cares? It's funny. We got one coming in from Jake who says, hello, Willie the Wise and Lord of the Orb, greeting from North Texas.

Long time fan. I was listening to CSB 13. Pat was staying saying that he has issues with the morality system for the endings in Metro last light and how it extended to ambient dialogue. I don't know if you've gone further into that. I'd have to double back on the episodes, but it gets even deeper. To my knowledge, there's another layer of morality that goes as far as looting dead bodies across the entire game. And the game accounts for, did you really need to loot the corpse by running a check on your ammo health syringe and filter count and determining if you needed the items and adds to the morality check in the background. Another one is whether or not you want the teddy bear from the shooting range or whether or not you killed the demon guarding its child and a nest later on.

Or if you get attacked by a bear and once you win, putting it out of its misery or killing the demons that come to get it while it's down, these are all accounted for in the morality system. Yeah, so are there other needlessly complex systems like that you can think of? I really have to say that the Metro games morality system might be the worst I've ever encountered in my life. Did you really need that ammo is some bullshit? That's insane. I'm not personally familiar with that part of it, but I can tell you for a fact that the morality system will take into account, like for real, there's only a bad ending and a good ending. And the way to get the good ending is to fulfill enough of the requirements to get the good ending. It's you have to do all the nice things in the story. If to save everyone available, you have to catch all sorts of ambient dialogue around you. And the one that really drove me absolutely nuts was that in like sections that are like stealth-ish, right?

Like, you know, the like kind of murdery stealth kind of situations. It's like get through without killing anybody, but also there's no way to take anyone out non-lethally. So it's just like sneak through the whole area with that. And like all of it combines to the, it is the only game I can think of where I would say play fucking whatever and then just watch the good ending on YouTube. If you feel like it. It was so absurd that the bad ending is the canon one in the first game. Hmm. Because no one got the good ending. Can you tell where you're at by the, by the end?

No. Okay. It sucks. Yeah. As for anything to that level, I think it's the worst one. I can't think of anything. Well, just the idea that looting a body for supplies in a survival situation could be counted as unethical is fucking, that's insane. That's the stupidest shit ever. Like, no, leave it on the body and run and walk away from it.

Like, what the fuck? Like, no, that's, that's stupid. I just want to give a shout out to the modern Fallout games for the, the karma mechanics of theft being very weird. Hey, this guy's a slaver, but he's not attacking you right now. So stealing him from him is bad karma. But if you shoot him because he's a bad person, you'll get good karma. Oh my God. But you might get bad karma from looting his corpse. Like, it is all over the place. It is wild.

Okay. You can shoot that Nazi, but you can't, you can't torture him. But if you steal from the corpse, that's also bad. Well, no, it's because negative karma is attached to stealing and stealing in those games is taking an item that is owned by anyone else. Parolence by anyone who isn't you. Yeah, okay. Regardless of who that person is. That's when complexity doubles back and like falls apart because these multiple systems are interacting with each other and you have exactly that.

Where you're like, well, this person's bad and the game should therefore not mind if I blow them away. So anything else I do to take from them is should fall under that same system, but it doesn't. Well, New Vegas really kicks it down like to the real wild because it's like, oh no, I got too much negative karma from stealing from this complete scumbag. I better go to the west side of town and shoot drug addicts until my karma evens out. Sure, sure. All I know about like fucking, what was it? I guess Skyrim or Oblivion where you walk into a house and there's a bunch of children and then like a whatever, a guardian or a parent. Oh, Skyrim.

Yeah, and then you just blow them away and then the children are like, yay, you killed the evil. Yay, you killed her, we hated her. Anyway, here's one coming in from Matt, actually. This is the Dishonored design system. Similar topic here. The rushed design in Dishonored gives the morality system that Pat wanted in Bioshock. So dear Pat and Willie, mostly Pat on this one. In previous episodes of the podcast, you discussed Bioshock's broken morality system, the dilemma between harvesting little sisters for more resources, but killing them or sparing them for fewer resources.

Except that if you choose to spare them, the game gives you more resources than you lost out on. So there's no reason to ever make the bad choice. It's not a choice. It feels bad and it rewards you less. But now along comes Dishonored. In Dishonored, it's fast and easy to kill people. You have an arsenal of firearm, swords, crossbows, et cetera, traps, bolts, powers. The lethal defenses on enemies can be hacked and turned against them.

Stealth-wise, you can take a power that turns bodies into ash as they die so they're never discovered. But if you choose the good option, going non-lethal, your options are limited, they're much harder, and you have to be slow and careful and rely on stealth. You have to hide unconscious bodies, get them eaten by rats, no method of crowd control, so you have to stalk them until they're alone. Your priority targets are easy to kill, but handling them non-lethally requires a long, difficult side mission. So is this not exactly the morality system you wanted for Bioshock? If non-lethality was to take a late addition to the game's design, then might that morality system make the ramifications unintentional, which is even more remarkable? No, because the difference with the Bioshock morality problems was that it was a numerical change only. It was a feeling-based check that was supposed to have you deal with your feeling and then get more stuff and then it fails on a numerical level.

In Dishonored, the problem, and I call it a problem because this is what was just described, is the actual development explanation for the way that it is to go, was the idea of that game's morality. The issue is that one of those things is more fun than the other one. When you're playing a paladin in a game and you're supposed to be doing a good job and be good, it might be harder or it might be a little more strict, but it's still the same amount of fun as it is being an asshole. Let's take Deus Ex Human Revolution. I saved Malik from the helicopter crash and I did so non-lethally, which was hard as shit, but it was a blast because I had to use all the non-lethal things in my toolkit because there were non-lethal things in my toolkit. I had grenades that could knock people out. I had stun guns that could knock people out. I had takedowns that could knock people out. I had gas grenades that could knock people out. In Dishonored, you have a rear choke and a trinket dart and that's it. So the difficulty being spiked up for the moral choice, you're okay with that as long as the reward is harder earned for doing the right thing, as long as the methods that you have of play are hard.

Or even that you just get less reward for doing the right thing. The issue with Dishonored is that it tells you, hey, if you want to play the game nice, you can do this and it's a less enjoyable way to play the game. I had much more fun with Dishonored once I loosened up a little bit and started playing like an asshole. Because in Bioshock, in both ways, you're fighting and beating the big daddy, it's just what do you do with the little sister afterwards? Yeah. And here's the thing, they could have even fixed the Bioshock like a number problem with the atom based on the little sisters in a really simple way. All they had to do was that instead, because it's like, I think you get like 50 if you just harvest the sister, but you get like 120 every two or three sisters when you don't. Like the numbers make it so that the good option is more lucrative in the long run, but it's delayed by like one or two sisters.

All they had to do was delay it by like a lot of them. Like if you went, you know, in the end it pays off where you meet Tenenbaum and she takes care of you. They should have given you all of the accrued bonus atom there. Yeah. Or an alternative, which is like, if you want to go from soft approach where it literally gives you a different like result, a different option entirely. You know, you kill them, you get one drop, or you get a reward for helping them as a different drop, you know. Yeah. Also, this is one of the things that I learned digging into Mass Effect and going through the Mass Effect stuff and, you know, the data that they had on the games that devs should be aware of when they make a morality system.

80 to 95% of people play a good character the first time through their game. Yeah. For sure. Every time I play a game, I do that. The vast, vast, vast majority. So you should definitely not make a system that the evil way of doing things is the more fun way unless that's kind of what the game is about. Like your dungeon keeper or your tyranny or, you know, a character about a game about playing a bad person. Like, you should assume that players are going to tend towards the nice options.

Yeah, I think most people play games as if they're like, well, this is what the movie would be. If this were a movie in my head, it would play out in this way. The good guy would do this and, you know, you kind of go through the expected motions and then you come back around to see the rest of the content. I think it's simpler than that. I think the average person just doesn't want to be cruel for no reason to even fictional people. Um, like the only, the only one, the only game I can think of that I ever played the evil character first was Kotor. Because being evil in Kotor is absurd. It's, it's, it is cartoon evil.

But not just that, but it has degrees of nuance because you can be Kotor. What? It doesn't. Well, no, because I'm talking about the choices where you can be evil as in kill the person as soon as you meet them, or you can be evil as in agree and betray them later and lie and, you know, extend the quest and then fuck them over, get paid more by their rival, etc. Yeah. You know, so like there are times when being just evil for the sake of evil in Kotor kills content and punishes you and you get less for it. I'm going to say something controversial. I think morality systems in almost every game is terrible.

Sorry, I misspoke. I think the morality systems in almost every game ever released is terrible. Hmm. I can think of it. I don't, I don't refer to the ability to make choices that are better or less. I mean, every system that tracks your good or evil and then assigns results based on that is terrible. I can think of one example that I like that I think is important to the game and is implemented successfully. I can probably also think of two or three, but I can also think of like 50 in which it sucked.

I mean, I think the scale is the shining example in my brain of- Undertails the one. How to do that properly. And when you choose not to do it, that is the point. Or when you choose to do it, you can just go through normal, but you have to work to do like, to be a pacifist or to be a genicider. Yeah. Probably my favorite example of the total failure of this is New Vegas because New Vegas has two morality systems. One is great.

The other is a trash fire. The trash fire is karma. The one that I just talked about a little bit ago because it's nonsense. It's totally divorced from anything. It doesn't really affect anything, etc. The other system in the game is your reputation, which is based off of what people fucking see in regards to their direct peers. Did you go to the NCR base and shoot a bunch of cops? The NCR is not going to like you very much.

Okay, fine. That- Oh, sure. Right? Did you kill a bunch of people to steal their money and then the good guys of the story look at you and they go, you're a bad guy. We don't like you here. Get out of here and go to the neutral or evil quest givers because you're bad. That's garbage.

My thing is like, whatever choice you kind of end up with, the player shouldn't feel robbed of content. Unless they're playing the Witcher 2. Which is the point of that game. Okay, sure. The middle 50% of that game is dependent on a single choice and it's a completely different game. So punch mom, punch wife is enjoying Disco Elysium, but due to- You know what? Because I didn't want to give too much primer going in, but going in, playing it and just giving her honest replies to things,

she made the same mistake I did, which is the same mistake a ton of people make, which is early on in on day one when you hit the threshold for a number of thoughts, you opt out of them because they sound like shit you don't want to do or shit you disagree with or shit you're like, what the fuck, no. And then you just don't even get the thought cabinet at all. And you don't know that what you should be doing is opting into everything and then just not internalizing the ones you don't agree with. And what I was saying, I was trying to look at that. So she got to like day four and then restarted from day one because the vision quest she wanted was something she accidentally opted out of. You know, and it was like, oh my God, now we got like, I was like, can we fix this?

And I was like, can we fuck with the save file? And I even tried to do that and it didn't work. Had to go back to day one. And it's like, this is an excellent game, which does it really well. But it does, but that's one thing that fucking sucks about your choices in it is you don't know when you're starting this game out. The idea of like playing along is not something you fully understand because you don't know what direction it's going to go in. Right. And I thought it was kind of unique and it kind of, it's the one thing that it suffers for its uniqueness because it doesn't really play by a bunch of the same rules that regular ass video games do.

Yes. And a lot of the game is amazing because of that. Right. So I was like, how can you fix this without telling the player? Hey, be kind of crazy, have some fun. It'll be worth it. Right. In the end, some of these crazy red checks are going to lead to some shit that you're not, you're not out of out of the woods.

I rather you're not. You'll horribly fail the sympathy check and just red pill the shit out of guard. Maybe you'll hug this lady un, uh, unprompted and invade her personal space, but she'll kind of just let you have it because she can tell you're suffering, you know. And so I was like, how do you do this in a way that doesn't have a little message saying, hey, don't be too uptight. Go nuts. Right. Cause that would, that would be bad. So then I said, what I thought of is it's simple.

Just make it so that opting into a thought makes you internalize it, but opting out gives you the thought, but you don't start internalizing. Sure. But at least you hit the threshold to earn the idea of communism and then you can choose to come back to it later or not. So that way saying no to these things doesn't mean you don't get that content at all and now you get no vision quest. Fuck you. Just, you know, because it's a, it's a, it's a way of locking people out of shit. And then by the time you realize a shit, I should be playing along. You might be two or three days in, you know,

Is disco going to become our new platinum games where we're talking about anything to do a story in a game and we just go like, man, they should have done it like disco. Elysium. No, because I'm talking about something that disco didn't do that well. Yeah, I guess the one thing it didn't, exception that proves the rule. But I'm going to use it a lot when it comes to any game that that's about dialogue choices for sure. But yeah, morality systems are trash. I, I am. I tire of them.

What's the worst one? Metro's up there. Metro's way up there. What's the actual worst one? I mean, at SMT games are like now just a, like that's, it's an expected way to play them. Like it's a part of everything you're going to have your three runs. Fable. I want to say.

Mass Effect 2 is actually the worst one. Oh yeah. Paragon or whatever. I think Mass Effect 2's morality system is probably the worst one because there are two moments in that game in which the only way to get all your team members to be loyal and all that stuff is to have hard be lined all Paragon and all Renegade. And if you're a mixture of the two, you unlock and it's like the Mass Effect series and Bioware in general have had a horrible problem with Kotor and Jade Empire and the and Mass Effect where like you get statistical bonuses and unique. I solved every problem with my good hero or evil bad guy character.

Conversation option. That it's like the obviously best way to play the game is to pick the goodest or meanest option in every single dialogue choice. At which point, like in Kotor, you know, it's Kotor. I'm sorry, it's Kotor. One. Because in Kotor one, when you're an asshole the whole time, but you want to be nice to somebody, you can lose stats from deviating from your life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you push against it, your strength will literally go down because you changed your mind.

Yeah, you can't act. There's no there's no nuances or in-betweens. And yes, I know apathy is death, but assigning like power to you always picked the same option sucks shit. Well, it's it's it's more like if not in there. You can't put a neutral incentive, but if you feel like you're having a like shittier character as a result of not going complete scumbag or complete a paragon, then you if you just want to play a realistic character that might fall in between and then you're weaker as a result, that sucks. That doesn't feel good. You know what's fascinating? I don't know if I ever did I ever tell you about how Mark mere and stop reading just click blue.

Yeah, no. And she was playing it like a regular video game. Geez, things based on what she felt like at the time. Yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry, honey. Like I don't mean to backseat you here, but like you'll actually run into real problems in the game by not blue or redding it. Did I ever tell you talk about Mark mere and Jen Hale talking about how they played Commander Shepard? No.

So Mark mere and Jen Hale are fundamentally different characters as Commander Shepard, despite keeping all of the same dialogue. So I was told and I played Femme Shepard and I loved it. And that's because of one simple change based on the way they decided to play the characters. Mark mere looked at Paragon and Renegade and said, I'm going to play a Commander Shepard that could ostensibly be the Paragon Shepard one moment and be the Renegade Shepard a few moments later without sounding like a complete psycho. Right. So he starts at neutral and he'll kick it up to 20 good and he'll kick it down to 20 bad. Right. Depending on the situation to try and play it as like a real person.

Okay. Jennifer Hale, on the other hand, saw the system and went, no, Paragon Shepard and Renegade Shepard are two completely different people. So Paragon Shepard is going to be played a certain way and Renegade Shepard is going to be played a different way. And these approaches means that if you mix and match, it sounds bipolar. If you mix and match your male Shep dialogue, it sounds kind of normal. It sounds reasonable, but the highs and lows are not as pronounced. When you beeline Paragon Femme Shepard or Renegade Femme Shepard, it's great. It's better than Mark mere.

But if you make any deviation at all, Shepard comes off like Commander Janeway bipolar psychopath. Why are you screaming? And then being super sympathetic later. Yeah. So nice to me one second and why are you screaming at me the next? Wow. Interesting. Well, I mean, like, it's, it's, it's the problem with BioWare's morality system right there.

Even the actors could see it. Yes, even actors. So her decision reinforces her decision reinforces the like, don't read just click blue like this system. So it complements that. But it's still a thing where there's there's totally a fucking there's totally an idea in my head where there's three ways to play a Mass Effect game. I want to play, I want to pick my options or just toggle a button. I want my character to be nice every time or be mean every time. And I bet some of those games would play better.

I bet if there was a, I bet if there was like a button that you could hit at the beginning of the game, it's like, I want Femme Shepard to be nice to everyone. I bet that would work super well. Just make a slider that says asshole or, you know, chill. And you can just lock it in to asshole and then it'll autopilot right itself out. The issue with Mark Mears portrayal as well is that what the what he has decided or what the writers decided the lines were what renegade is changes from game to game. Renegade in Martin Mass Effect one is quick, practical, no nonsense. Get the mission done. Chaotic good.

Don't care. Right. Mass Effect two's Renegade Shepard is like a murderer and like a psycho. And we'll be like, Hey, you tried to poison me. So I'm going to force you to drink the poison or I'm going to kick you out of a 100 story window and say a one liner and laugh at your corpse. Okay, chaotic evil. And then and then Mass Effect three, Renegade Shepard is like, we're going to get those motherfucking reapers. Not all we got to do whatever and like comparison to the Paragon who's just like a downer and kind of defeatist and just kind of sad.

It's fucking weird. It's so god damn weird. I only again, I only experienced the way they did it the first time and yeah, I did Paragon and I thought it was good. But it's not tied to force powers, but whatever. Anyway, this can just. All right, that's good. Podcasts over. Y'all have a good week.

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