Castle Super Beast - CSB 141: Garf-Lord The Master Plumber

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

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FUNNY BOX! FUNNY BOX! Alright, there we go. Good afternoon, everyone. Good evening if you're listening to this in the evening or whatever. Hey, Willie, how are you doing? I'm doing alright. Not too bad. Uh, a little low energy because I had a cheat and I'm currently fueled by Como Pizza. Oh, I like that.

Willie, you gotta wake up. It's a momentous day. I'm gonna skip right ahead to a piece of news. You could play Otoki 2 on the fucking Xbox One. Oh, Jesus. That's a good. Yeah, they added 70 new games. They added a whole bunch to the backwards compat. I saw that. Fucking Otoki is good shit. That's good. Otoki is free from its cursed prison on the original Xbox. Now, if only the same could be said of other classic games like, you know, Grab Theft Auto. Oh, yeah?

There's much to discuss. There's much to discuss. Oh, no. Let's just move on. Yeah, well, look. You played a lot of shit, so. I played a lot of shit, so let's go with you first. Oh, OK. All right. Then, yeah, mine was pretty brief. Give me time to compile my bullshit, basically.

Yeah, mine was pretty brief. I guess the biggest thing I can do is I'll just... I hammered out Darkest Dungeon 2 and I beat it. And I also did a bunch of the, like, optional bosses of which there are, I think, like four, either three or four. What do you get for dealing with them in your run? Big rewards. Really good rewards. And by good, I mean, like, mediocre. Because mediocre rewards in Darkest Dungeon are amazing. OK.

And, like, barely... Like, a normal reward is, like, plus one speed. Plus three crit, you know? So, like, amazing rewards are, like, plus 25% chance of anything, you know, resistance. Or, like, if you're really, really nuts, there's even, like, a plus 50 at one point, but it's, like, holy fuck, good luck ever seeing that. You get, yeah, you get big quirks, you know, big payoffs in that way. Yeah, I mean, it's all the stuff I said before.

The only thing is, right now, there's the first layer of the final boss is in the game. Once you hit the mountain. I've seen what it looks like. It's not what I would have expected. Yeah. But it's interesting, because, I mean, I feel like lore-wise, the first boss is setting up what might be a very, like... It might setting up a story that you're not sure how much of this is reality and how much of this is actually concocted, you know? Or someone telling you something. Like, it's, it becomes a little bit unclear, you know, but we don't have enough details at this point. I'm sure they're gonna figure it out as the game goes on.

But, um, I mean, I'll say this, like, the... Like, there are, now that I've done every, like, every type of run, and I've unlocked every type of class, and I've felt the synergies, and I've maxed out a few of the classes, different abilities that you can choose from, I feel as if there is a, like, a way to tell early on whether this run is gonna have a crack at the mountain or not. Um, and the biggest... FTL had that problem. Really?

Do you ever play FTL? Uh, like, for, like, two seconds. There was, uh, there were a couple upgrades that were a million times better than other upgrades, and if you got them within the first jump, like, you saw the ability to buy them, you'd be like, Okay, I might be able to take out the Rebel ship because I have, I think it was a drone upgrade or something like that. Uh, and if you didn't, you're like... Maybe I'm not gonna do it, and if you didn't see it by, like, the second one, you're like, I'm done. No, there's no chance.

Yeah. In this case, like, you can get exactly, there's a couple of things that are early deciding factors. Um, and there's also, like, because of the lack of classes, unfortunately there's less synergy to play with. Uh, I liked having different team varieties beforehand, and, like, because you could choose, um, you know, between, like, for example, like, you didn't just have the occultist or the plague doctor as your healer, the Vestal also had a lot to contribute in that regard, and the Vestal's inclusion allowed you to mix up a lot of your other things. But in this case, it feels as if the plague doctor is definitively the best choice for healing slot, which means, like, you're then locked into whoever plays best around that, you know?

Yeah, well, that's the kind of, like, uh, it reminds me a little bit of the Elden Ring thing where, uh, they said, like, hey, guys, nothing in this is final. All numbers and, and, you know, abilities are subject to change. And with Darkest Dungeon, like, they're surely going to be going through, like, a dozen balance passes between now and the real game. Well, so when you install it, there's also an experimental client that gets installed. Oh, yeah. So you can, it's a bit like, so when Skullgirls was in the early days, there was always the Skullgirls mainline and then the experimental branch where they were testing out new shit. And you can go and play that and see whatever they're up to in theory, you know, or whatever's, like, rolled out yet.

It's almost like the, um, the PTR, you know, uh, in, like, an overwatch when you'd be like, oh, let's go try out the new character or the new map or whatever. It's, it's one of those things. So here they have a clearly labeled way to just try out new things. But, um, yeah, the biggest deciding factor, and I think what also is just a general tip in whatever anyone decides to go back and take a crack at it, is the, uh, your relationships should be your priority. Having everyone like each other is more important than, uh, whatever cool trinkets you can find, whatever gear you can stack up, whatever foods you get. And I would arguably say whatever flame of hope you carry on the, the wagon.

Um, the wagon flame is really important. You should try to keep it high. When it goes to zero, you get into unnecessary fights, but then you can rekindle it after that. But if you have everyone on your team in a relationship with each other, like I have, I've, I had like runs where, um, everyone is, is, is yellow. You know, and like everybody's got everybody's back. Yeah. Everyone is amorous and hopeful and, and inseparable. I've got a little wagon trip. Yeah. And I got a fucking polycule going with like little, like a little,

like a three way relationship between the characters because you roll the dice on like whatever type of relationship they're going to get. You don't know what it'll be, but like what, but you can get multiple amorous off the same person. You know, it's pretty funny. Um, and so you go through it and the, um, when you have that in place, you're constantly getting dual tech strikes, um, saving blocks went from like major damage, uh, stress heels, all these little great things. And like there's occasionally a bad one where if someone gets jealous, if like two lovers are there and like you kind of give, you heal the wrong person,

they'd be like, Hey, what about me? You know, um, but keeping that as a priority is, is my biggest tip because it just smooths out the rest of the game. It makes everything more manageable. In my limited time with it, uh, I had a couple of runs where everybody was shitting all over each other and they were disastrous. And I had one run where all I got was the two frontliners became hopeful together. And it was a meteoric increase in like survivability and power. Massive. Random stress heels, like 30% of the time it would be a double attack.

It was absolutely bananas. And so when you have everybody on the team doing that constantly, um, and I think I had one of my team members had like a, uh, a cork that was like chatterbox doesn't shut up. And then it was like, they kept talking and saying things, but they kept propping a bunch of these beneficial spells. It was like a skills. It was amazing, you know, so, uh, yeah, that should be your priority going, going into the game. And like anytime you have a choice between like other stuff that'll knock the relationship or whatever, consider keeping it high, spend your money at the ends to fix the relationships from going into the blue, you know,

and like that was the biggest thing that like took it to the mountain each time. Because by the time you get to the final boss, you're going to lose people and you're everyone's going to hate each other. Like you don't have the sustainability. Waffles. Good waffles do. Hell yeah. They stick together. Yeah.

Um, but that's it. And, uh, you know, nothing else to say for now, except, uh, the final boss is like pretty rough. Um, it's a challenge of your mechanics and, um, it's a cool idea. But like it with the weather or not, it's like as interesting as DD one remains to be seen. Like we'll just have to see where it goes. And cause it's clearly like the story is far from done. You know, this is just the early, the early access, but, uh, for sure that's my tip is if you want to even have a chance at that. Um, and, uh, yeah, my, my like cannon team at this point, by the way, the names can be changed.

Of each kind. Yes. You not only can you edit it to type in whatever you want. There's a little dice next to the name and you click that and it'll re-roll a random name of that class. So. Oh, okay. The defaults that you see. I mean, yeah, Dismas, Audrey, Parasalsis, like all that stuff will show up as the main, as the default, but you can always re-roll it if you want to get a different name.

Oh, that's nice. Uh, the team I, I have the best synergy with that I, that like is my, my main rollout is the leper upfront. Um, uh, highway, highway man, second slot, uh, grave robber third and then plague doctor fourth. I feel like that team synergy is like unbelievable together. Really, really good. Um, leper in particular is just like insane damage in one strike, but constantly has a 50-50 shot of missing. But then you can stack a bunch of, um, milk laden, um, uh, rags, which are like, they take away that self-debuff every turn. So every swing he does is just insane death, death store damage.

And then you basically use the others to support that. You know, you have, uh, uh, your highway man has like, you activate repost by doing, uh, uh, you know, the, the, um, dualists advanced ability. And then like anytime something attacks you, or you can specifically put something on him so that he always forces aggro from whoever's attacking. And while you have repost on, that's free damage. Um, and then you have your grave robber cleaning up the bodies and healing herself every time she does. And then the plague doctors in the back and you can buff up one of her preventative abilities to like de-stress everybody. And that on its own is just a, it's a self-movement management machine. It's wonderful.

Um, so yeah, that's my tips if you're trying to get there. And because it's also this short, like I also feel like I'm kind of done with it for now until they update it. Whereas with darkest one. That's a much healthier way of going about it than the way you did the last time. I guess, but I also enjoyed the process, you know, like it's, I enjoyed the process of going back into darkest one in a lot of different ways. But in this time, this time it's like, yep, we did it. We got a bunch. And then I guess I'm kind of done for now.

Um, I, I, it's a, I prefer when it lasts longer, but of course this is all early access. Right. So, um, I expect when the full version drops, it's going to hopefully dwarf the original in terms of just how many different, uh, adventures and things you can do. Um, so there's that. Other thing I did this week was I watched Shang Chi and the legend of the 10 rings. I heard that movie is better than eternal. So we're going to, we're going to hate, hate, watch eternals eventually. Right.

Uh, punch mom came over and was like, do you want to, you want to see what would you want to go in? And I was like, well, let's watch the one that I hear is good first, you know, and free of this, this worry. Because like Paige is like completely disinterested in all the Marvel stuff unless it's got Rocket Raccoon in it. Sure. Because she's madly, madly in love with Rocket Raccoon. Sure. Uh, so I just get to go, oh, I'm going to watch the garbage so I can complain about the garbage on my podcast. It's a shame that they didn't drop, um, death in her canonical comic book form because I feel like that would be a huge pop off for her.

Because it's skeleton lady with big curves. Right. You know. Anyway, um, the death and Marvel in the comics is a skeleton face. But I got it. But the robes have a buxom, curvaceous shape to them. Okay. But is it like a fate?

Like, is it all skeleton under there? Or is like, she's got a big rib cage. I don't really think you get a look at it. You kind of just, she's always roped up. She's always got skull face and then she's, she's chased. And that's what Thanos is going for. But the curves are there. We don't, we don't, we don't know, you know.

It's, it's wild to me that like original Thanos, like they obviously changed it for the movies. But for like original Thanos being like, ah, please mommy step on me. Slipping for death. Like, come on, dude. Yeah. Loser. Um, uh, so Shang-Chi, uh, like I didn't like full, I, I did not know anything about the character going in.

Uh, that was one of those things where I'm like, okay, I know they're pulling something from the seventies or so. Uh, yeah, I, I'm totally in the dark on the lore. Uh, in the end, I can say the movies, like I enjoyed it. Uh, but it has very clear, it's still absolutely following the formula. Uh, the Marvel formula is, is alive and well and very, very strong and very clear cut. And mandatory. In the, in, in Shang-Chi.

And I would say that the first act takes a while to get started. It lags in that like, um, in that way where your awkward protagonist is being a goofball before shit gets real. And you, you're like, we've done this many times. We know the goofball pro tag has to establish himself, you know. And then, oh no, it's serious because of someone to be dead or whatever. And then the stuff starts going and then it ends up being, you know, it ends up being fine.

It's a, there's stuff and it's enjoyable. Um, there's definitely as well a feeling of like, what if Wakanda, but Asian that, that's there where you're like, okay, this is, this is going to work. We can see how this works out. You know who will like that idea? The average Chinese guy going into the movies. Probably. Although I hear that currently out in the mainland China.

But I hear that it's actually not released there yet due to like political. Seriously. Yeah. Oh. And, and like there's a whole problem with that because I was curious. I was like, yeah, how is that doing over there? Is it doing gangbusters? And apparently it's, there's some, some shit that's, that's leading to, to it being.

So what's interesting about the, you mentioned the first act dragging, I personally have not seen the movie. So this is the second hand. And also I am not Chinese. So this is third hand beyond that. But I follow, I follow a YouTube channel called accented cinema, which is a film student who was a Chinese immigrant who actually immigrated to Montreal before moving out west. And he does a lot of really fantastic video essays on the state of like Hong Kong cinema

or Asian horror, whatever. And when he watched Shang-Chi, he described a problem that happens a lot, particularly with movies that feature Asian Americans. And the issue he had is that the first part of the movie when he's in, I think in San Francisco, it felt very true to life. It felt like a realistic portrayal of like a first or second generation Asian immigrant that has gone to San Fran. But once they go to China, the whole movie just fucking warps into now you're going

home. You're real home where you really belong. But you're still American kind of so, but it's this is where you're supposed like it's this. So worship. So yes. Right. That is totally a thing.

But here's the thing though. You can side skirt that because when I say Wakanda, but Asian, I really mean that in that the going home part where, but like it's even further because whereas Wakanda is the like amazing hidden city. In this case, the homeland is literally another reality. This is another dimension. It's another dimension. So it's not even part of, it's not even like, oh, there's like a hidden place in this.

It's like, no, no, no. I got to be real with you when they have to go through like a magic invisibility portal to Wakanda. It felt that way. It does. It does. It totally does. It does feel like Wakanda is in another reality and it is.

But it's supposed to just be sitting there with the shield around it. But in this case, it is like in lore, you are actually jumping through a portal. You know, the mystical, like mythical land to the mythical. Exactly. And in the mythical land, you see the mythical beasts that look like, you know, the, the, the large, like literally the large dragons and tigers and, and you're Kieran and your firebirds and whatnot. Exactly.

Nine Tails walks up casually, you know. So that's, that's the thing is like, it's like that, that effect of like, no, but now you're home, but the home is technically not a real place. So I guess you can do that. Right. It's like what, like what if you want it to have a big old like Viking history movie or like, or like returning to your Viking roots, but like they literally go to like Valhalla and not back to anywhere where real Norse mythology or Norse are men like were or fought or took

place, you know. I have a quick question. I don't, I don't want to spoiler here, but like the, the, the main villain, he's a, he's a big name actor. Tony Lynn. I'm not personal. Tony Lynn. I'm not super familiar with him myself, but I do know that he's a big deal.

He's a, he's, he's, he's a, a, a hot daddy aged man. A hundred percent. Yeah. I've seen him. I know what, I know what that's about, but so he's, he's out, out in, in mainland mystical China. And I'm going to assume he's a supremacist and isolationist, right? Like keep everything in here.

Like what's, what's the core like? No. Is it a rule the world thing? Is it a crime thing? Is it a isolationist thing? I don't think this is a spoiler, but it's like he's a very well known Marvel villain. He's, he's. He's no longer played by Ben Kingsley.

Yes. Okay. Exactly. And he's doing what that guy does, which is, you know, it's, it's the man. It's the Mandarin. I don't, that's not a spoiler. He's the Mandarin. It's, it's just so weird to me because like the Black Panther like analogs to this are

so bizarre in which in one, the American going back is the hero and the other, they're the villain. Yeah. In this case, it's, in this case, it's, it's, it's no, in this case, it's going back like to destroy kind of thing, you know? Okay. Yeah. It's not about, it's not about the Michael B. Jordan being like, you know, y'all abandoned

us and now it's time. They shouldn't have killed him at the end of that movie. Oh man. I don't care what they have to do. Just have a new Michael B. Jordan just fall out of a portal. I don't give a shit. It's just like, God damn it. Why does he kind of have a point?

You stuffy Wakandan's literally went, nah, fuck this. We're leaving you to your own, you know, fucking devices and we're backing out into our super portal to live our perfect lives. That shit sucks, bro. Yeah. Um, well, in this case, in this case, the, the excuse for the, the alternate reality is like they, they, they're busy. There's some stuff they got to do.

Okay. We're handling things over here. We're doing stuff. We're not, we're not just going, fuck all of y'all, we're out Wakanda forever, shields up. You'll never see us again. It's, it's the, it's the thing you always have to do with once you establish, wow, there's the, let's take a DC story.

Superman exists in your universe and then you're dealing with a situation where so and so has to save a bus full of kids and the viewer goes, why doesn't Superman just fly down from a different movie and save the bus full of kids and then the screenwriter leans over to you and goes, Superman was busy doing a fucking thing in space or some shit. So this is taking place in your MCU universe and it's quite clear that like, you know, no one's worried about the small scale antics of whatever's happening here and whatever big scale antics are here. Like no one can know about them because they're happening in a fucking alternate reality.

So it's fine, you know. But anyway, yeah, but once, like I said, once you, once you, once you enter the second and third act, I think things pick up and get pretty good. And that, and yeah, Tony Lung does an incredible job. In fact, he's like, I feel like he steals the movie from Simulio and often steals the movie. Yeah. And Aquafina and everybody like he fucking does a great job.

He does the best job in the, you know, um, and, uh, I'm sorry, I'm going to raise my hand because I feel very ignorant. Who did you say was in the movie? Did I say see, seem, did I Aquafina? That's a person Aquafina is a person. Not a water bottle. It is also a person that is, it is, she's a comedian. She's had some, she's had some, some comedy stuff.

How do you smell that AWK? Oh, are you serious? That is an unfortunate coincidence. As an awkward, but Aquafina, oh my God. Now I feel awkward. Yeah. It's a one, it's a one name, it's a one name celebrity like Zendaya or Madonna, but it's Aquafina.

I feel like a crazy person. Yeah. Oh, I saw her in the trailer. I didn't. Okay. Yeah. I think, uh, I think that's the, I think that's the gimmick name that's like intentionally chosen because it sounds like a, oh wait, hold on.

It is a gimmick name because she's a rapper. Yeah, sure. And that is not the name she was born with. She was born with a less water bottle based name. Okay. No, no, no, that's her. That's her Hollywood name. Yes.

But she's choosing to be credited in movies and on TV as that gimmick name, you know, whereas like Dwayne Johnson starts switched it around to Dwayne Johnson pretty early on. And we agreed that calling himself Dwayne Johnson was way better than that extremely long period of Dwayne the Rock Johnson. I want to, I think like, uh, what was the movie there? The, um, the, the one with the fucking, all I remember is like dirt and a whip. The, the rundown, the runback, the rundown, the rundown, the rundown is what we would have called it.

The outback. You're thinking of the rundown, the rundown. Yeah. The rundown. Well, anyway, um, I'm, I'm, I think he was, he was walking tall, walking tall. Probably. I don't know. Anyways.

Um, yeah. So she's credited as Aquafina. So that's, that's what that's, that's what we're going with for now. Um, in my mid thirties, I understand what the kids are talking about. I don't know if you'd like her, um, her, her comedy anyway. So you're fine. I think it'll be okay. You weren't, you probably weren't missing much that would have made you shortle.

That's a little, uh, you know, different, different, uh, everyone's got different tastes. So, um, but anyway, uh, yeah, he does a great job and, um, you know, they have their big, like cool fights with the big CG and the rings and the stuff and the, and the whatever's, um, and then there's, of course, there's some MCU cameos that are like, Oh, hey, look, it's, you know, but yeah, a couple clips from the fight scenes in which it appeared that they were using the rings as an excuse to get people doing air combos. Yep. Correct.

Totally. I think it's probably, I'm not familiar with the rings at all, but that seems like a really, really good use of that. It's an excuse to do air combos and it's an excuse to do super jumps and it's an excuse to do like super jumps into like Terry Bogard power dunks, you know, with the, with the rings out. Um, yeah, totally, totally, totally, totally a thing. Um, at one point as well, like a bunch of like dragon scale weaponry and armor comes

out and it's like, like, okay, monster hunter, let's, let's, let's see it. You know, um, but anyway, uh, yeah, you know, it's, it's, I would say it's like, I, I enjoyed it. Like I said, I enjoyed the second and third halves and I would say I wouldn't put it as mid. I'd say it's better than mid, but just realized that it's going to have a bit of a slow start and, um, you know, and that's, that's that, that's, that's Sanchi and it will clearly return. It's definitely a like, this is MCU next phase setting up and so does this, does this set

up a situation in which like similarly to Dr. Strange did, where at the end of the Doctor Strange, the Benedict cucumber man looked at the camera and goes, now the MCU will have magicians. No, no, not that. Um, I mean, what it does do, it does two things. It one, it does the thing where it's very clearly just like, all right, tiny adventures for tiny folks and then like, Oh, but the big leagues await you. You know, will you be ready to step up into them?

Peter. Um, but what it's more importantly, what it does is it with every fight scene and big explosive air combo thing and, and cool, Michelle yo, like, you know, wind controlling moment. Um, it erases the entirety of the Netflix MC universe from existence. The entirety of iron fist just gets wiped the fuck out by going like, nah, this is a big loss. This is the real, this is the, the martial arts energy for the MCU going for only parts of that.

Anybody really cared about was, uh, every character that wasn't the iron fist guy. I know a lot of people liked, like Jessica and Jessica Jones and, you know, Luke Cage and Darth Daredevil and Punisher. Yeah. I really liked Charlie Cox as Daredevil. I think that's great. And I think John Bernthal as Punisher is one of those castings that I don't, they would, if they were to bring Punisher into the MCU, they would be like, Hey, I'm John Punisher

and it's still John Bernthal. For sure. Uh, he is actually literally John Punisher. I mean, like, like Jay Jonah, you know, like you're just like, Nope, this is him, no matter what reality we're in, uh, but, um, when it comes to, uh, iron fist though, like a lot of what iron fist was and was going for and its plot and the things that it covered were all the same shit here. And this is just now we're, we're just doing it better.

So it, this directly erases iron fist. You could, you can feel it aggressively. Oh well. Um, I still remember when iron fist came out, people were like, wait, this is supposed to be the kung fu guy? All the fighting in this show sucks at. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, you know, like if you're going to do this thing and you're going to go like, all right, he's the white guy that learns the kung fu and he goes to do it. It's like, all right, cool. Is he good at it? No. Is the choreography awesome? No.

Then what are we doing here? You know? Yeah. Uh, but that's like when, when you do, like when they were casting Punisher, right? The cast of John Bernthal, which everybody had been familiar with, with walking dead and a couple of others roles. It's like, what is, what does Frank Castle have to do? He has to be insanely like frothingly pissed off about his dead family and he needs to be

able to act like a big tough man that shoot the gun. I had, we had all seen John Bernthal do those exact things like a year earlier. So it was like, okay, done. The guy who played the iron fist men, I don't even know his name. It's like he's supposed to be a decent actor and he's supposed to do martial arts good. And then it came out and it was like, oh, neither. Oh no. It's not happening at all.

Not happening. And then everyone, and then I like, I didn't fucking even see, or I didn't want a lick of it. But then there was the team up season, you know, where they were the defenders. So I was just told straight up just don't, just don't. Well anyway, um, that this is, this establishes what that was trying to and does a better job of it. You know, but yeah, it's, and it's not, again, it's not perfect.

There's some super like, that's not funny. You held the camera too long for a punchline. That's really not funny. But anyways, good old please clap energy, little bit of that, little bit of that is, is aquafina responsible for some of it? Perhaps. Um, may haps, you know, because the two, they're both kind of like the goofy out of place protagonists a little bit, you know, um, but, but ultimately, yeah, ultimately,

like I said, it works out, uh, that's shanky, you know, um, and then, uh, just, I guess, really, really briefly took a, took a quick detour over on the channel back towards the battle construction vehicles. Oh my God. Because we're still, we're catching Reggie up. That was not known at the time. Yeah. Yeah.

He's caught up now. He's catching up. He's catching up. So BCV, what we didn't do and what we didn't know was the full story mode is a fucking trip. Um, it goes places and it gets wild. And, and I mean, a fucking dog named Shishio shows up that has its own BCV construction driving license and that dog smokes its own pack of cigarettes.

It smokes new ports and it's just crossing its arms and it's got like a scar and it's one of the best, the best BCV operators in all of Japan. It's kind of amazing. Uh, so we, we did, we, we got into, we did get into fighting games, battle construction vehicles and then it immediately transitioned into a full LP. So please look forward to, uh, your Dokupon and your Dark Souls sprinkled in with some episodes of battle construction vehicles. We did it in one sitting and, uh, it was a good time.

It was a good time. It was exhausting to do a British voice or four for the entire night. It's the longest I've ever done a British accent for, uh, and it was very, very time tiring, but we did do it. Um, so yeah, check that out. Uh, not to mention we also played a, that, that little furry fighter called, uh, monster with a bunch of hot furries in it. Um, lots of abs, lots of cool guys, big ears, fuzzy noses.

Hold on. Let me take a look at this. So I'll, I'll, I'll weigh in on. They have, they even got the adonis line. So you want to type in monster eight one oh five graphics because that's the creator. The name is, okay, here it is. There we go. Okay.

Unfortunately, just the name monster is going to get you lost a lot of, a lot of, okay. What do we got? It'll show you a cool. Hey, these are not high quality videos. Oh, I see. Yeah. I see what you're going with here. Yeah.

We played it actually one week. And no reason for you to remember that attractive for man's, but yes, some big old dark stalker rejected character energies and, um, yeah, no, it's, uh, it's, it's pretty. It's pretty. It's stylish. It has lots of sigils. It's everything you want your little dojo and fighter to be, you know. So that was hate that I know exactly what you mean.

Lots of sigils. Oh yeah. Nonstop, nonstop gibberish English and sigils. Um, but, uh, that was, that was a good time as well as well as we played some Ki resonance, which is that, um, Yukio and woodblock painting, um, uh, Samurai game that looks like it's kind of like right off of a, a, a, you know, old school Japanese, like, um, scroll or views about Fuji type of thing. Uh, so that's all cool.

You can check that out over on Willie versus, uh, Twitch and on YouTube. Um, battle construction vehicles. I don't know how many episodes it'll be, but you know, we, we, we go the full way we learned the truth and we, the, the hero's journey of, um, hi, I toe, hi, I toe Congo. Oh, we forget hi, I toe Congo, come on, come on. Then I was born in a construction vehicle. Is that real? Yeah.

Is that true? That's the intro. That's the intro. He's, he's got, he's running up a staircase and he's being chased. And you're, it's like, it's like Batsu at the beginning of rival schools, but then like an old man on a giant tractor, a crane, like plows through the doorway and then like attacks him and he jumps on it and then he picks him up and he shows him the view of the city.

And as he looks out over the city and sees all the construction sites, he goes, you are the son of the great construction tiger. And only you have the energy to lead the crew and recreate your father's legacy. Look at all the construction out there. Behold, behold the city and everything that could be yours. I forgot if we actually talked about it when we first played it a million years ago, but like it's a formula that you can just substitute any task ever into. And it works every time.

I've, I've said it constantly, but it is like whatever, like adjective, adjective, verb character, um, wants to be the best, what an insert job slash classification slash whatever, you know, like, and either you do it yourself or you've got a buddy, monster, robot, partner, friend, AI system to do it for you. And your dad was either the greatest or your grandfather is one of the greatest researchers or lab coat wearing professor guys. It's absolutely fucked because like the formula works without modification at all. But what it does is it doesn't change the quality.

It changes the tone of what you're doing because it can be Pokemon master. It can be a monster rancher ghost hunter. Yep. It can be metabot mobster. Yep. Like it's, it's this, like how can be hunter crime things are, you know, your father ran this place a certain way and he was the greatest. Isn't that literally what the fucking Godfather is about?

And I mean, in the same way that like every cartoon for a while in America was mummies alive, like normal kid trips into some adventure, becomes chosen one and meets up with powerful friends and goes, there's the leader, the girl, the nerd, the brute. Yeah. You know, they have a heavy and, and like you get all of that. But in Japan, it's like, you know, kid, you can be the greatest because it's in your blood and go on an adventure where you leave home for a long time

and your mom is totally okay with it. Like I, my brain just auto completed that this formula is the pilot for Dexter. The murder show killer drama. Yes. Wow. I want to be the best serial killer. Unironically, his dad was a serial killer and he taught him to be the best serial killer ever, but he's going to use it for good.

Okay. Time to leave home and meet the girl and then go hang out on adventures. As we beat other serial killers who would, yes, that is, that is literally the plot to Dexter Jesus Christ. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, it is, it is, it's, um, like it is, it is every single one of these fucking,

you know, his dad was a cop. I don't understand the difference. What are you trying to say? Well, um, anyways, all I know is, I mean, isn't there a new season of that where like he's like a woodsman that's all like getting back in the game? Anyway, um, whatever. Uh, battle construction vehicles, full LP, it's super worth it. It's super worth the journey.

And like the best part of BCV is, is when you're not actively playing it. Oh, everything besides the gameplay. Um, so come, come enjoy, come enjoy the full adventure and, uh, you know, the best accents we can muster up for a couple of hours. Yeah, the brutal ones, brutal. Anyway, you know, what's great about doing bad British accents is that it only hurts the feelings of the British. Yeah, sure.

No, totally. And, and like, I realized to you that like every time I have to do like a high pitched or like a girl accent with like a British voice, it always just turns back into no, no, that's too, no, it's like, oh, no, your construction vehicle. You know, like, it's like, it just turns back into a fucking, you know, you know, it's like they're not even real people. You can't even, you know, just nothing, nothing to be done there. The River Thames.

Ah, yeah. So there you go. Woolly versus come check it out. All right. All right. Let's see what I do. Uh, let's see, uh, there's a lot. So I'm going to probably start, I'm going to probably do it from, uh, least time to most time.

So, uh, so the prize of many Halo just came out this morning. Halo infinite multiplayer just dropped the network test at like noon. No, it's like the, it's the beta. Of the Halo network, Halo infinite. Yeah, all your stuff will carry over to the full release and they're selling a battle pass for it. Oh, wow. Okay.

So then, yeah, that's a really, I woke up and I saw that John Halo man's multiplayer was available and I sprinted to download it. Well, I know I've talked about it on the podcast that, uh, I was there with Halo since day one and I played all of them obsessively. And then I'm, I've been saying that Halo is like the greatest FPS series of all time. I've always said that. It's true. He's always said that.

Thank you. So I was eager to hop on the Dorito wagon again. And, uh, yeah, it's good. It's fun. It's fun to play. Oh, you like it. You're enjoying it. Yeah.

Yes. I'm very much enjoying, uh, playing as the generic John Halo in the multiplayer. Do you enjoy it? Um, how do you, do you enjoy it even more than how much you loved all the last halos? I, I do, like I can categorically and unequivocally say that I absolutely enjoy the Halo infinite multiplayer beta. It's not really beta.

It's just out, um, much more than all of my former times with the halos combined. It is excellent. I've hopped into the Halo and then I, I saw an energy sword. They've added energy swords to this game. That's new. I don't know. I don't know if you remember, but the enemies used to have them, but now you can have the energy sword in the, in the, in the map.

That's super new. That's crazy. I can't believe it took them so long. I pointed it at a different Halo man and I hit the right trigger, this one here. And, uh, I jumped forward and stabbed the man with the energy sword and he died. And I'm, and a nice robot man told me I did a good job. Did you, uh, did you grapple hook into hammer swing? Okay.

So no, um, let's, let's, uh, I played it for 30 minutes. Like it lit, like it literally finished downloading at, at two 15. And I just scrambled to get some matches out before the beginning of the podcast. Uh, I did not find any grapple hooks. I don't know how to get them or where they would be. I did play with some of the new weapons. Um, I can't speak much to its actual balance or something like that. Uh, it doesn't feel like sprints, the game changer that it used to be like back in,

I want to say reach when I played it because your default movement is actually really fast. The sprint does not feel that much faster, like in terms of just walking around. Um, but more than anything is I was, uh, just kind of a, what is my phone doing? Uh, I was astonished at like how slick the package is. Like it has every potential PC option you would want. It runs immaculately. It feels incredible.

Like it is, it is absolutely like a, a first party, a plus time in the oven kind of thing. As far as PC options go. Absolutely. But just in terms of general game feel, like it feels immaculate. Uh, and it looks, it looks, how do I phrase this? Um, it looks like the most polished port of a 360 game that's ever hit the PC. Okay. Uh, it is definitely, at least in the multiplayer, not blowing you away with big graphics.

Okay, it is instead solid, clean runs incredibly well. Like, I don't, I don't know how to assets are not, are not hyper realistic and detailed. No, it's not. It's like, I see a chat comment. Does it look like Halo three two? Yeah, kind of. It kind of looks like Halo three again, but with more frames and less aliasing. Um, I really enjoyed it.

I have been, despite the millions of hours I've put in the prior Halo games, when I loaded this Halo up, it turns out I have lost most of my skills and now suck shit. Oh, no. Damn. Terrible. But you used to be like the fucking, there's one of the sickest online. It was Halo man. You know, I used to think about going pro, but I decided that that wouldn't have been fair.

Fucking damn the snapshot king. Yeah. Master Chief Keef. Oh, I got to say, speaking of load, because it's using people's regular Xbox names, because you log into the Xbox, even through the Steam client. And there's just like, there's something about Xbox user names that are just better than other platforms, user names. They're awful.

They're goddamn awful. And I love them. I fucking love them. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's your audience, right? It's, you know, you got, you got, like, like, I think every, um, ridiculous, uh, uh, game King's or whatever, whatever it was called console Kings era naming convention that we used to make fun of just great was originating on the Xbox.

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Uh, the other, the only other thing that I have note is that, uh, the, the Halo infinite. The reason why I say it's just out, even though they're calling it a multiplayer beta is that apparently the multiplayer is just free. Like that's going to be what they're going with is that Halo is a free multiplayer game from now on. Uh, did you, did you, did you make sure to, um, bookend your name with X's and dashes?

No, I didn't have to. Oh, because it uses my, uh, screen name. Okay. The weed God. Yeah, but, all right. Uh, they're doing a battle pass, right? Because of course they are. Uh, but apparently I don't know how I managed to forget this because apparently it was

the same as the master chief collection. Um, the battle pass, uh, is going to be, how do I put this? It's going to be infinite. Ha, ha, ha. No, um, uh, when you buy a battle pass, it never runs out. There's no time limit on it ever. So it's a one time purchase, then it's a one time purchase on it. And, uh, if a new battle pass comes out and you want to use that one, you would buy

that one and then you would switch to it and start earning on that new one, but you can switch back, you can switch back to the old one at any point. So they're going to sell you multiple and you just choose which to turn on or off. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. As somebody who has dealt with battle passes in the battle past. Ah, um, this is a much better solution than usual.

Well, it sounds like it's just normal battle pass system, except you get way more time limit on it. Yeah. So all right. Um, like I remember playing the fortnight and I wanted to get the final thing on the fortnight battle pass or actually let's use destiny as a much better example. I was playing the destiny and I wanted to get the last thing on the battle pass

because it was a fancy shiny and I was like, Oh no, I only have two weeks to go. So I have to grind out super hard to get the end of the battle pass on the destiny to get the shiny. And then I got the shiny at the end of the battle pass at the last second who I did it and then I never wanted to play destiny again. Mm hmm. Whereas, uh, when I was looking up the, uh, when I was looking up the interview about the battle pass and infinite, uh, they straight up said, yeah, if you want to

stop playing, we don't want you to feel pressure. Just go, just go away and you can come back and it'll still be here for you. There's no worry. How many matches were you able to get in half an hour though? I was able to, uh, well, it's more like I started playing at 250 and I stopped at 250 once it was at 36 minutes. I was able to mess around with the options and get into three matches. I played a capture of the flag.

I played a, uh, king of the hill and I played an oddball, uh, which were fun. They were fun to play. Okay. So, I mean, it's interesting because like, yeah, you're, you're going to get that like, you know, PVP, I guess, experience in and, and that's your thing. And if I ever take a look, I'm exclusively interested in the PVE elements since that's my, that's my halo journey. Well, that's, uh, in a couple of weeks, that's, uh, the December 8th.

But yeah, all in all, man, what a pleasant experience. And I have a lot of friends that are way into halo that I'm probably going to play a shit ton of halo with because the halo is free now. And you, and it's an FPS that you can play with your controller as designed. Yes, absolutely. Somebody asked mouse and keyboard or controller. I played with my controller and trust me, the reason I was getting my ass kicked was not because of the controller, because I could probably tell that

everybody else was using a controller. It was because I suck ass. It's because I'm no good at the halo, which is such a shame. I spent so much time with that series. Yeah, you get rusty, you know, you don't keep up on it. And, uh, it all goes up with your, yeah, that's it. Yeah, I'll have more, I'll more thoughts on halo next week after I put actual real time for it in it.

Uh, moving on. I played a bunch of the Shin Megami tense day five. Yes. I cleared, did you put any, I cleared space. I deleted, uh, idle things from my switch, but I didn't want to delete monster hunter rise. So I kept the rise and I installed SMT five, but I have not booted it yet. Okay.

I have been trying for days to figure out how to explain something. And I've kept having the, I kept having a thing where I would describe SMT five in a certain way to people that had not played the game and people would ask me what I meant and did not understand. And I would tell that same phrase to somebody who was playing it. And they went, Oh yeah, I totally get it. So I'm just going to go ahead and give it a shot. SMT five is filthy.

It is a filthy, grimy, grungy game. Okay. It, it runs like garbage. It is highly aliased. The, the, the band playing the instruments did not tune their guitars. And like it is mean, mean to you. Okay. It is so goddamn great.

It is so like, it is so the game that you should not have let the guy who only played persona on your review staff review. Okay. Because it is the anti persona. Yeah. It's, it's, so what you're saying is that, um, it's just inferiorly trying to copy what persona has already perfected. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say.

The way that I phrased it, uh, well, a little more depth was that if persona would be like a brand new iPod with like an iTunes gift card, like SMT five is like your uncle's old vinyl player that somebody spilled a beer on. Not even a zoom. No. Okay. All right. Right.

Like you can feel the, just the dirt on it. Now there was helps that like the whole area is like a sand. It's like an apocalyptic sand zone. Now for had a bunch of dirt as well, but it was hard to tell how much of that dirt was SMT versus 3ds. Yeah. So that was SMT. I still remember, but it was very dirty when you idle on the main menu in SMT four.

It's just the, the fucking guitar comes out and goes. Like it's just like struggling to play notes. It's, it's great. Um, in a persona game, let's make the direct comparison. You would spend maybe five hours before the game, let you actually play the game. Because you have to meet your friends, go to school, get your bearings, set up. You got to see the, the place you're going to hang out with. You got to go to school.

You got to meet your friends. You have to have the character established with your friends, hit the velvet room. Make a deal. You got to do the tutorial run of the dungeon, which is like the first two floors of the dungeon, wait for the crime, but it's not the real thing. And then they, they make you get certain things and you learn how to make demons, whatever in SMT five. You have the opening intro that says God and the devil fought a lot.

And then you go to school in the intro and then you're in the class like persona and the very first thing you do is leave class and you walk out of the school within 30 seconds of gaining control of your character. It's good. And you never go back. It's good. It's very, very good. Yes.

You walk down the street and fall through a portal within 20 minutes. And you are in an apocalyptic biblical hellscape very good for at least 10 hours, which is where I'm at. Okay. And in that apocalyptic hellscape, you get pretty hair and talk to demons who call you a dumbass, you know, and get instacrit into game overs. Hot take. All right.

Everybody relax. Hot take coming through. Let's hear it. I'm starting to get a little bit tired of high school in Japan. Well, that's because you're in your thirties old man has nothing to do with that being the de facto protagonist state in almost all Japanese media. The only setting that we can sell you media through, you know, and it's at the same time if there's definitely an it's not lost on me how much I am coming from

across the ocean to look at something aimed at high schoolers in Japan and going, you're not doing what I want. It is not lost on me that I'm some weird black guy from across the seas saying, hey, a little bit culturally removed. I have to say, though, it does make sense from a, from a cross cultural standpoint, whereas from my perspective, school was the prison that I had to escape from. To get out into the quote unquote real world where I was a free acting individual, whereas to many Japanese folks, high school is the last bastion of

your personal freedom. Yep, totally. It's unless you become a criminal, which leads into the Yakuza series. Criminals have infinite personal freedom. Right. But your college years are, are, um, like prepped for work. Exactly. So you get to take a breather and just drink with your friends and do shit.

And then eventually you become a salaryman and then it's all lost. So it's like, this is, this is one of those cross cultural things that's just, it just doesn't hit the same way. But like, but there's just, you know, when I, like, whenever you see that hallway of that high school classroom, like, like a, a one and a two or whatever. And you're like, this is every fucking visual novel. This is every, that has its own problem because Japanese high schools were built to a plan.

Yeah. They, yeah, nearly every Japanese high school is actually the same layout. That same shape with the courtyard in the middle and the gate and the three floors and then the roof that's sealed off with the anti-suicide fence. But it really is just like, there are other settings out there. And I remember like the one, the, yeah, that, that moment of like, is P five going to do the not high school? And it's like, no, they're not, you know, and they have their reasons not to.

But yeah, that's cool. Because to be fair now, like, I mean, um, uh, uh, like even long before, even before the three, four, P three, P four, P five, like even in P two, you're running around a fucking high school, multiple levels, multiple floors, getting into all those random battles for a while. You know. Well, not an SMT five. Yep.

Good shit. Sounds good. I spent way more time with fucking pretas and, uh, fucking, uh, sugi amas. I think they're called just calling me a motherfucker for not giving them enough money. Good. Um, yeah, it's really hard, uh, but it's not nearly as hard as SMT four.

How are your, um, how are your, your supporting cast that are not demons? I don't know. Interesting. Okay. Wow. Wow. I have had a total of one and a half conversations with who I think is the law protagonist.

Damn. Wow. Okay. Cause you get like, cause for what it's worth with four, you, you meet the squad right away, you know, and you hang out with them for a while. Yeah. And then you go, I, yeah, okay, I get it. You're this and you're that and then you go into the shit and never come back.

But no, this is, this is very much like, Hey man, do you want to fucking fuse some demons and fight your ass off in these big ass open world dungeons and, and do the gameplay and learn miracles so that you can, Oh man, if your gauge is full, sometimes you'll get MP back and, Oh, here's a, here's a, here's a skill you can learn that'll just add an extra fucking, uh, skill slot on your demons. And you're like, yeah, did you get press turned? Oh yeah. Yeah.

So SMT four is great. Apparently so is SMT four apocalypse. However, SMT four might have gone a little too far in a few places in that SMT four has the unfortunate reality that the battle tutorial is a real battle that the tutorial text will just play over the first random battle in SMT four. It's not a mandated battle that they, they walk you through. It's a real one. Um, which allows for the SMT four tutorial to load you into an ambush in which you

get crits and your main character dies before you're able to have a turn. And then you have to restart the game and watch all the pre fight cutscenes again. You're not allowed to play the fuck you think this is SMT four. For those you don't notice, it's possible to start that game and be unavoidably killed without player control. You are not allowed to play. Fuck you can't press turned that is no longer possible. They do give you a little baby fight to actually tell you how the buttons work.

That is controlled. Okay. So that you don't die. Um, yeah, dude, it's, it's like everything about the game's presentation and feel is incredible. Like the demon negotiation music is just one guy doing a baseline. Ooh, okay. It's, it's, it's so laid back, but it's still kind of, it's great.

Also, the game does not shy away from saying, here's the first enemy. And you know when, you know, when they tell you, Hey, watch out for that enemy. That enemy's a big enemy. Maybe you'll want to come back later. They really, really mean it in SMT five. Like there's a big guy that's stomping around. And I'm like, maybe I can beat him and I load into the fight and I'm level six and he's level 48 and I'm doing one damage per hit and then he does a single

move that like wipes the entire party by more than triple their health. It's not, it's not a challenge to the hardcore. It's just an impossible feat. It's just like, no, come back later. I told you, I told you to come back later. You should have listened. Yeah. I don't know what the game story is as of yet.

So you didn't get to meet the other person because you got the cool long hair, but you didn't meet the other dude with the, like the shorter hair with the same suit. Yeah. You meet him and he touches your hand and then he's your robot voice in your head. And that's like, that's like the first thing that happens. Okay. And he talks to you in your brain. He's, he's your burrows.

If you played for borrows, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah, games. Great. I love it. I love how filthy it is. And you got to do nothing in, in the 10 hours or so.

I gotta go find the angels at the Tokyo diet building. Makes sense. I gotta ask them what's going on. Damn, I wonder if things are going to get political once you get there. I don't think they will. I really don't. Yeah. I think the only politics anyone's interested in is fuck Lucifer or fuck God.

How's your demon team? It's great. It's pretty good. I got it on the tire on the team. Nice, big hammer. Every time I ever get a hold of the SMT game, it's always like a countdown. Yeah. On to Tara because he's always got heat wave.

Yeah. Fucking owns. He's also one of the, he's one of the sickest designs too. Oh, he's great. I love him. Let's see. And I also played a little bit of Elden Ring and by a little bit, I mean, I played that for the whole of last weekend, but I couldn't talk about it on last Monday

because of the bar go, which I'm now free of. Okay. Hey, that's a big Dark Souls. Yeah. So there are, you know, you put out your video. I checked out what you did, what you did. Thank you. And then some other people put out their videos as well.

And overall, I'm, I haven't looked at the extended like network test footage, but I have looked at the compressed half hours of things and the mechanics are all like, I have like, I'm like, I can't believe how much, how dense it, they went with this in bringing just about everything from all previous games into this. Like posture is in the game, but it's hidden. Huh. Like posture for enemies is in the game. It's just associated with jump attacks and strong attacks.

Um, some things have power stancing. Some things don't. All things have powers. Do they all have it? Okay. That's, that's the wildest thing. They brought back power stancing and it's literally equipped to of any weapon type that are the same.

Okay. And it will go into the power stance moveset. Weapon arts, of course, as a, as a full like mechanic that you switch up for infusions, like all of that. Um, one thing I'm seeing, and I'm wondering if this is as drastic as it appears, but that new block attack. Block. So guard counter is the name of that attack.

That not remember it in my original footage, but then I went back and check. That looks like a crutch that everyone will rely on forever for a long time. It fucking rules. Okay. If it's as good as it looks and it, and it knocks things down and or breaks things open and, and does what it does, especially the bosses. And it's like block first, then do this. And it's the best way to use your stamina for, for a repost.

Like it feels like you're just going to do that all the time. So, I mean, I could talk a lot more in depth about this, but the one thing that I want to mention is that obviously things are going to change because it's not final. So we don't know, right? They might tone down the damage of the guard counter, for example. Um, there is a lot going on in terms of different, different viability. Magic is super strong. Faith miracles are super strong.

Like they're very effective. I heard miracles were even stronger than, than magic in the, in this test. The, it was, okay. But it's unclear as to where all those miracles are going to be placed in the game and what you would start with. Um, the dodge isn't quite as good as it would have been in Dark Souls. And the block is much better than we're used to. Um, but the thing that I did not spend enough time with,

that people discovered is that jumping and jump attacks are actually really good. Okay. Like jump attacks break poise a lot. Charge attacks break poise a lot and will knock enemies or bosses into stun states. And the thing that I really didn't get that I saw some people doing videos of is that the jump has invincibility on it like your role. Whoa. And in fact, the whole way up on your jump, you're invincible.

Oh, that's huge. Which means that they want you to be like, like a sweep is coming. They want you to jump the sweep and do a jump attack. Sekiro. Or DMC even. Whoa. Eye frames on your jump. Okay.

So like I couldn't, like I, I fought, I ran into the, the mentality of I played the game like it was Dark Souls and there's parts of it that I had much more trouble with because I was playing them like it was Dark Souls. And in the footage that you saw, if you saw my half hour one, once I started to use the, the AI opponents that come in with you and especially the guard counter, things just turned around like right away. And I, in, in the longer term footage that I played, I got a better hold on like mounted attacks, particularly charged mounted attacks are really strong and do lots of posture damage.

And then I'm watching people fight the dragon, which I had a lot of trouble with and I'm magic to death with lightning. And people are using like charged attacks off the horse and knocking the fucking dragon down Yes. Yeah. I saw that. And it's like there's a bunch of different like combat paths or features and they're all doing something of value.

And like I just like a week or two ago was like sprinting from Calamite fire bathing the ground attacks. And now I'm seeing like, nah, just double jump it with the horse. Just double jump it with the horse and then, and then charge up a lance hit into the dragon and maybe the dragon fall down. So that's like it's interesting because like rolling into the direction of the of the sweep is a solzian thing that we've done forever at this point. But like visually when Sekiro introduced like jumping over sweeping attacks,

it's more logical in a combative sense. Like it makes sense. It's a sweep. It's a wide thing. You get to see the startup and get above it and then come back down, you know, as opposed to roll through it. Yeah. So that makes sense that they would like encourage that.

I wonder if it has more invincibility than like a fast roll, you know, because that would be like maybe, but maybe it does. But on a jump, you would go straight up and you have no movement options. Because I guess what I'm wondering is like, can you jump through a splat? You know, a big overhead. Because it depends on the hitboxes, right? Because like boss hitboxes in that, in that by that developer, it tend to be like enormous squares that cover like the whole creature's body.

Because in the same way that you roll into a into a sweep and you get through it, like if a splat's coming down and you jump through it, you know, like that'd be kind of goofy. But if the hitbox is massive and you're you get crit afterwards, then that yeah, that'd make sense. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So the network test has just a it looks like they grabbed everything from every game they've made

since 2011 and tried to jam nearly every mechanic in there to some degree to at least some level of effectiveness. And it's crazy. And then riding your horsey or your goat, I guess it would be fucking rules and having a double jump on him lets you skyrim up the sides of cliff faces and just like, this part of the rock is technically is kind of is kind of jutting out. I could stand on it. When you're doing the the the five hit R1, R1 swing, are you do you usually complete the combo?

No. Okay. So you yeah. Quite rarely. Okay. Because I'm wondering if does the last hit have extra damage on it? It does. I was able to find that out.

Okay. I was able to hit one monster with the first hit and then miss three times and hit a second monster with the last hit and it absolutely does a miniscule increase in damage. Okay. It's not like an R2 or something. No. Yeah. All right.

But I also so I did I spent about 15 hours with that network test. And then I cut together my footage and then I recorded a new batch of footage, which is the three hour one. And upon finishing that and seeing other people's footage, I discovered that despite spending all that time in that area, there were two bosses I had completely missed. And then I ran some math on it where the available the available playable area in the network test is approximately one third of the region that it is taking place in the Lindgrave region.

Okay. Which you said is like half dug dragon's dogma. Maybe maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but the Lindgrave area would absolutely be like dragon's dogma in its totality. So let's go and do a math. It'd be one third of six of one region of six regions, which would be one out of 18 ish, which means the closed network test that I couldn't find everything in in 12 hours is approximately

five percent of the total game. Wow. Okay. So let's go ahead and do five times 12 is a sorry, no, 20 times 12, meaning on completionist, it may be like up over 200. It's always promising to know that like, you know, the scale is at that size and this is so little of the percentage of what it's going to be, but knowing how empty worlds can be in giant open worlds and settings, like it's also about like the density and the fact that encounters

are distinct from each other, you know? Yeah. So like obviously that's going to change because like as you play, you'll get faster and faster as you actually know what you're doing. But like this is easily a 100 hour like it's a Skyrim. It's like it's a it's a breath of the wild. It's a it's a big motherfucking Dark Souls. Did you all the way down to Dark Souls three bugs are still in the game?

Like it is absolutely the DS3 engine. Did you go back and beat the like mounted motherfucker? Was it the tree sentinel or whatever? I did. Yeah. Okay. Um, he is a joke on horseback. Ah, okay.

He is a complete joke. I what I saw from other videos is he's a joke. If you stand on a high ledge and just magic him as well. The the AI tries really hard to get to you and it does it does a pretty good job in most situations of managing to get to you even if you think you're safe. But, uh, no, no, but in anything with an open area is you're always going to find some place they can't get, but they'll chase you to. Okay.

But when you're mounted, you can you can keep up with him and just avoid. Oh, when I was mounted and I was using my my claymore that I started with, like I charge attacks would do like one 15th of his health. And I would just run in swing and then he would start his animation and I'm already gone. Okay. Um, I had a situation where I pissed that guy off and he chased me into a church and then started smashing the church down around me like I saw that. So yeah, we're falling off.

Exactly. So that's like that seems to be a script like a scripted encounter. If you happen to run in that direction where then the pieces of the church fall down and then you can use it to get to somewhere you couldn't before. I don't think it is because every boss in an open area, every boss in an open area, in an open or semi open environment destroys the arena around them. Okay. The the dragon egg heel will knock over trees and trees will burn and fall over,

depending on if he hits them with his body or that when you're fighting a market, though it's the final boss, the network test, when he's moving around, he'll be like, there's a lot of spears in the ground and he will just knock them right over. Though that was a closed arena though, I think. Yeah, it was, but in that closed arena, there's lots of little destructible pieces. Like it's so silly because it's not that big of a deal. Like it's obviously just a visual flourish, but fighting a boss and trashing the area that you're fighting the boss in fucking rules.

But I think it feels great. I think in the church specifically, you could then get somewhere that was otherwise locked off. In the video I was watching, like that's like, I think you were able to then traverse where the broken church parts were. I had a situation where there's a statue I couldn't figure out how to get the shiny from within until a fucking giant hit me and broke the statue in the process and then allowed me to get like six upgrade shards.

Cool, cool. Like, I talked so much about it in both the videos that I made that I feel like I should just give the floor to you and just like kind of ask me anything because what I all I wanted to bring today is like, yeah, jumping has eye frames and all these mechanics are all kind of good. Well, I mean, yeah, there's a lot that like I feel like was answered by some of the footage I looked at, but I'm surprised that they're still so obsessed with a dungeon with a torch in your left hand. Like, they really like that idea.

Yeah, there's two dungeons in the network tests that are that. It's cool. And it also creates a situation where you necessarily have to change the way you're playing the game. No blocking. Like considering how many times they've attempted that and failed compared to how many times they've succeeded with, say, a poison swamp, which I guarantee you will be there. Okay, what is the bonfire density like across the map?

So if I were to be line it straight to market, right, the the direction the actual graces are pointing when you sit down with them, it would be the approximate distance in open world terms of a regular Dark Souls game. Right. So the first grace to the second is very close, but then the second grace to the third one needs for you to go through like a little garden campment, and then the next one is through an ambush, like they are, they're definitely more plentiful than like a standard like level based Dark Souls game.

But it makes sense because you might not find them. Like I was still finding them like pretty late into my time of the network test. Okay. Inside the actual what they're calling legacy dungeons, the, you know, the Stormfail Castle, which is like a like a big fucking Dark Souls level. Non-mounted. I encountered zero. I like to spike getting pretty deep into them.

Okay. And in the little baby dungeons, I encountered one at the start of all of them and nothing else. Okay. So wandering across the map, you're not going to see them like just kind of like equidistantly placed if you go enough. You're not going to see them in most cases from each other. Yeah. Okay.

As for how to deal with death in the open world and boss death in particular, they have finally given a caveat to everyone, which is there is a new type of pseudo bonfire called a shrine of Marica, which is just a checkpoint. So if you, if you're getting your ass beat by Agheil, you can choose to respond to the checkpoint, which happens to be right next to him. Um, so the other thing is, uh, I noticed, so like, yeah, you can go see like a caravan and get some items from them or whatever. And what I'm wondering is like there's mention of the fact that there's a day and night cycle,

and then at night, sometimes the, the life, wildlife like behaves more aggressive and shit. Does the game state actually change at night time if you return to like a certain area? Like, will you find different items in a cave? There's a boss that only appears at night. Okay. Okay. Uh, and, uh, yeah, there's at least one boss that only appears at night.

And, uh, the wildlife during the day is goats and eagles. And the wildlife during the night is like vampire bats. Bats, yeah. So like clearing out a cave during the day, you, if you go back and it looks like interior spaces are going to be the interior spaces. Okay. And exterior spaces are going to be like the ones are that'll be affected by the day, night cycle.

Now that obviously might change. There might be like, you know, an NPC that only shows up in the castle at night or whatever. But in the network test, that seemed to be the case. Okay. Because yeah, if you have to consider the entire map in two cycles, like that's a fucking lot, you know, that's a lot for secrets. Even, even in the network test, I didn't find the guy who shows up only at night until somebody told me about it.

Okay. Just on some bridge, if you're there during the night, there's a boss there. Um, is there, did you meet your level up lady beyond that first cutscene? No. Okay. She's already the best level up lady because you don't have to go see her. She comes to see you. And then otherwise it's bonfire chan.

No, I mean, she shows up every time you, you, you go to level up. It's just, she'll just show up. She'll come to you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Uh, hmm, any, any confirmation like arcane and it's like,

it's luck. It's just luck. Yeah. Okay. It's luck and then it says that some spells will scale with it. So, uh, I would then, I would say that it's closest to demon souls luck in which it's luck, but also there's just a couple things that work with it and some of those couple things are probably going to be really good.

Like blue blood in a demon. Yeah. A couple of specific builds if you want to go for them, right? Okay. Um, how many weapon types, uh, how many new weapon types have you seen? Cause I saw the dual bladed new weapon types, very few. Okay. They all, they all pretty much, uh, like you could map them to existing types that already

were around. So they mean there's a, there's curve swords, the straight swords, there's bastard swords, there's an axe, there's a club that, you know, and so on and so forth. Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, I mean, it does seem like everyone's experience has just been like, holy shit, the scale of this thing, you know, um, and like that and, uh, I hope certainly that it

doesn't end up, yeah, it doesn't end up being like the scale of this thing, but like this entire square mile is empty or uninteresting, you know, I did not in areas that I thought were empty. Turns out they weren't near a bonfire in which I thought was the part of the map that was in fact actually completely empty. I was riding around and a tree started to talk to me. Right. Right.

Huge changes to multiplayer and PVP. I saw, um, yeah, you now by default, you cannot be invaded. Yep. So you have to basically opt in. You have to, you have to opt in to multiplayer. Interesting. It's, you've, you've always had to opt in to multiplayer, but now it's like really, really like, yeah, in addition, like they, the way that it works now is that because

of this, you're going to be able to keep all your online stuff, like your blood stains and your messages and whatnot in and still get all of that without having to like make your character weaker or turn your internet connection off. Like in Dark Souls three, in Dark Souls two, in Dark Souls one, buffing your character up with humanity or an ember or whatever would render you like available for invasions. So if you wanted to keep your online stuff, but not get invaded, you have to forego that advantage. Right. Or if you want to just, or even if you just want to play PVP, um, if you want to play co-op,

you have to also allow, you know, the invasions in too. So yeah, the, I get the opt in opt out there. So, uh, for co-op, uh, Iron Pineapple and Susie got a lot of footage of them playing co-op and uh, co-op in this game seems like nuts. Cause it's easy to just meet up with the person you want to meet up with using the password. Right. And then you go to the summoning pool and then it's all it does is turn your horse off. Okay.

You have to roll together. Yeah. Yeah. So I heard there's a, I believe there's a max distance the two players can get from each other, which makes sense. So I heard about the summoning pool thing and it's like, yeah, it's like no matter where you put your sign down, it's going to, like everyone will be have, it will be grouped together. Like I didn't understand what that means.

It's, it's, there's the way to manually put your sign down like always. Yeah. Right. But there's also a thing that says just send my goddamn sign to the pool. And the pool when you turn on multiplayer just has like 10 summon signs, like all stacked and grouped on top of each other. So there's a spot that goes, I want a co-op person for this boss. There will always be a summoning sign right here.

So they're just preset places that your side will appear at when you, when you, if you choose to go with the pool. Yeah. Okay. Or you can manually keep it in the spot you're standing in. Yeah. And that also applies to competitive summon signs. You can also send your competitive summon sign to the pool.

Okay. So when you go, when you turn on multiplayer and go to the pool, you can see, well, here's five white signs and here's three red signs. I'll fight a guy. Why not? Yeah. So you don't, it just, yeah, it's, it's quality of life for people who are mainly looking for the PVP experience or the co-op experience.

And it seems like once you, once you do co-op with somebody, like you can just do the whole map. You can, you can just go. It'll, it'll kick the person out when a boss gets killed because, right? And they go, good for you guys. But then you can just summon them right the fuck back in. It takes like a minute. And if, and if one of you dies, obviously they'll need to be resummoned or what have you.

But yeah, no. Susie and I are in pineapple. Got tons of footage just running around the open world. Fucking a boot. Okay. Yeah. No, that's shit. That looks cool.

Not, not a ton more questions. And again, I'm not, I'm not consuming all the footage I possibly can. I just, I just, I just don't know if I can do that. I just, I just wanted to get the mechanic stuff figured out and I feel like I have. So yeah, right on. Some of that's going to change. I cannot possibly imagine that jumping, giving you full body total invincibility all the way up on the jump is going to stay.

I think they'll probably tone it down and it was very, very clear that the spells and numbers you get in this network test are not final. Like there's a, there's a claw spell that the miracle guy starts with that I refuse to believe that that will be actually the starting equipment of the faith person. Yeah. Act so strong. Yeah. I saw, I saw that as an example of like an amazing faith attack.

Did you, did you try each of the, the builds? Yeah. I tried, I tried all of them to some degree. Shields have been re-emphasized, like if you want to be a tank, it'd be heavy, like they've given you a really good reason to use a shield. However, two-handing your regular melee weapon is also emphasized because you have easy access to your really good weapon skills. Okay.

Spell casting and incantations, which is the new name. For miracles were good using a bow was really easy to, easy to use. And also they have sleep arrows that turn enemies off for like 60 seconds and when they're asleep, right, right, right. You can backstab them. Yeah. Did you, um, so how many, how many weapon art infusions did you find like seven or eight? Wow.

That's a lot. And I, and I found three for shields, one of which was the starting parry. One was a healing circle that also increases your defense. And the third was, uh, it was called barricade. And it's, it's the number one thing that I know is not going to make it into the game as is because it is a little shield. Because it is a little shield bop. That's like a little poop, right?

With your shield that, uh, makes your shield gray and magicky looking. And it is the spell great magic shield from Dark Souls one. Right. But it costs one 20th of your total mana and it lasts for like over a minute. And I saw people fighting market with it and they would just stand there and tank the whole combo and drop the shield for one second and their stamina would be full. Wow. Like it's, it's, there's no way, there's no way that's going to make it in as is.

That's the strongest shield move they've ever had. So like, again, it's there's PvE balance and PvP balance. And yeah, you know, like that, that's a fucking tough juggle. Um, so yeah, uh, shields are good to handing your weapon is good. Magic seems good. Arrows seem good. Power standing. I played some PvP where I power stand some great swords.

That felt awesome. Like everything's coming up. Millhouse, uh, fucking Hemdellermen, dual wieldings, Y handers. Yeah, totally. That's always been a Dark Souls thing. What I mean, he is very different. Um, it's a, it's a, so do you remember when you played Dark, any PvP in any of the Souls games or something called true combos, where if you hit the first hit on a straight sword,

the second hit will always hit because of the way the stud works. And then you can roll out of it. There are no more true combos of any kind anymore at all. Uh, if you get hit, it's because you let yourself get hit and nothing is a real combo. If you got hit on the second swing, that's because you didn't move or you tried to go for your own slower swing. And you couldn't get away and you didn't get away. Um, so what I'm wondering about is if you're rocking a big old fucking Havelass set

and you're slow, heavy boy. Oh, Dark Souls one poise is back by the way. Yeah, I, I, I, the ability to fully power through hits is returned. So what I'm wondering is if you're a big, slow, heavy boy, you, can you still nimble jump out of the way of things? And probably, you know, jumping did not seem to be affected by height, rolling did. Or, or equip load. Why say height?

Yeah, by equip load. Yeah. Okay. Cause if you have iframes and you're still nimble with that movement, then you still have a good role, even though you're heavily encumbered. Maybe they'll change that. It's, it's not clear. Uh, in terms of stats, they've changed some things about the stats.

And it's weird to talk about because it's so nitty gritty, but they finally changed what strength and decks do into something that I'm really happy with. Strength helps you carry shit. Yeah. There's no longer a dedicated separate stat for equip load. It's, are you strong? Then you're strong.

You can wear heavy shit. So that means everyone is going big strength regardless. You know, except decks increases three things. Cast speed is faster with high decks. Fall damage is less with high decks. And it's harder to knock you off your horse. Okay. That's smart.

That's really smart because those are the two paths you generally take. And you can supplement if you go, you know, your faith and your, your, your, your, um, um, intelligence, but like those key stats, giving you extra incentives or extra bonuses. That's awesome. That's really smart. I like that. Yeah. If you want to run a magic horsey build, you will absolutely put points into decks.

Um, I also saw an intelligence and faith are exactly the same. It's like, do you want to do magic or do you want to do preasty stuff? Or, or, you know, if you want to do, and like that's again, you get a shot at being a good bow and arrow run is possible. You know, interesting. Okay. But horsey, of course, is just applicable in certain areas, but applicable in certain areas, only certain bosses.

Yeah. So last week when I'm like, I bet they won't let you use the horsey indoors. Guess what? I knew you couldn't use the horsey indoors. Yeah. You can't use the horsey indoors. That being said, the thing I would recommend, not necessarily my footage though, I think it's pretty good, but you should

probably take a look at somebody's, yeah, no fucking everyone who can hear this. Go watch my three hour cut of the, the, the network tests on twit. It's on Pat stairs at the YouTube channel or whatever. And the reason I say that is because a huge, huge value or feeling or just improvement that's hard to explain is how liberating it is to go. What is that over there? I'm going to go check it out and something cool was over there, right? Like it has changed the, the, the overall flow from a corridor or a dungeon crawl, which

no matter how large the Souls games have been, even Sekiro, there are dungeon crawls. There's just a series of interconnected dungeons to what the fuck is that? And then you get closer to find out, oh, what the fuck is that? Ew, gross. Is that an egg that just spits poison? Why does that exist? Is that the Dark Souls three crab? Literally the same ripped model with the same moveset?

Yes, it is. So like the, um, the, the, the reuse is hilarious, dude. Like they are just going to, they, you are going to, you know how the, the drag enemy that has the flail sort of attack, how that's been in every single fucking sure thing ever. You're going to see a lot of that. I could not believe the crab from Dark Souls three is just dropped into the game. It's the same crab as the same moves. Um, the Iron Pineapple video of the half an hour summary is really good.

It's probably the best one. It's incredible. Iron Pineapple deserves all the props in the world. I've been a big fan of his content for a really long time, and this is one of the best pieces of content he's ever made. Shout out to Iron Pineapple. Go check that out on Twitter. I love you.

It's, um, it's just the Elden Ring network test. What's the full, the full title of this? I highly recommend it. If you're going to go look for a summary of like mechanics, I played Elden Ring for 30 hours, my thoughts, and it just, it's really, really dense and it really just gets all the major mechanical changes and improvements and things. It's also short and comprehensive, concise, excellent video. Yeah.

Iron Pineapple, um, on YouTube, super solid on that. Yeah. Big pimp on big pimping of that quality, quality shit. I, I really, really hope this game does not get delayed again because, like, you know, you've seen people diving into the cut content of all the Souls games and that you get to, you get to find some of the development history in there. Like you played, you go through the cut content of Dark Souls three and find out, oh wow, they just, the final boss didn't even exist until five months before the game was finished.

Right. And then they just slapped it together from what I think was like an NPC's armor. And you're like, wow, that, that's the final boss they came up with in like a couple months. That's really impressive. But we made a room full of dragon butts. Yeah. Well, that one you can see, that one you can, you feel it.

Um, this seems like the first game they've made in a long, long time that they're not rushing to cut anything because of its scale. I, I, you remember Bloodborne coming out and you, you got the feeling of like, man, they barely got this out the door. Like the load times. The load times was the worst indicator because it was right in your face immediately. Pacing was bad. And then you find out that there was lots of cut stuff in Bloodborne.

I would very, very much like this game to come out solid, even if they got to delay it. But the network test is solid as shit. There's always say the nature of development means there'll be always a billion cut things. But yeah, well, I will say one thing about the network test, which is really funny. Um, some corners got cut making the network test. Okay. There's some, there are some cut corners. The in the fog wall that stops you from exploring the rest of the map is a bunch of

square hit boxes. It's not like a contiguous line. It's like a bunch of square hit boxes of the same size that are just dropped into each other. So it's like a stair step. Okay. And there's like a couple of parts where you can just walk through it and get to the whole rest of the map. Oh really?

People got through. Oh yeah. They got through immediately. Oh shit. Cause I saw the one I saw was after market. It's just like, there's a ladder you can't climb. Right? No, they got to the east part of the map that currently doesn't have a whole lot in it.

I was going to say, is the game there? You know, no. Okay. All right. Um, and on top of that, uh, there's a spot in the game where if you use the, um, if you use the spyglass on, uh, the really far distance, the wrong LOD map comes in and there's all sorts of weird shit that you're not supposed to be able to see because it's coming in on a bugged LOD map.

What did people see? Well, I'm not going to tell you what it is because it's probably a spoiler. Oh, but, but it's the equivalent of a world state change that you're able to see a piece of because they, they, they have the wrong LOD loading in from super far distances. Oh fuck. It's the equivalent of seeing the amygdalas if you looked at them from a far away enough spot. Okay. Or like the blood, the, the moon, the blood born moon change.

Yeah. And you're like, and you're like, that's not supposed to be visible under any of these circumstances. Oops. I mean, there's going to be some magnificent bugs coming out of this thing when the time comes. Like it's going to be amazing. Probably like a big spider or like an ant. Mm.

Um, cool. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Uh, I'm big excited. What I'm not as big excited is what this is going to do to my February, March, April schedule. May. And then I'm running.

Okay. Let's assume, let's assume semi-complete playthrough is 80 to 100 hours. And I do a stream on average that's six hours long with five of that being gameplay. Okay. Let's do 120 divided by five is equal to 24 divided by five is equal to five weeks of nothing. But assuming I don't get horribly stuck. Mm-hmm. And then comes DLC some point next year.

I don't think that's going to be that. I think so. I imagine so. They, they, they drop that not that long after launch. That's true. That's Sekiro DLC was really good. Okay. Well, I, I had you.

I had you for one second. I saw it in your face. Um, yeah, that's, that's going to be, that's going to be a big old, a big old awesome time sink. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yep. Um, it, I guess the last, I do want to say one last thing. And it's like, ironically enough, like let's compare the elder scrolls to dark souls because

they came out at the same time. I don't even remember dark souls one and Skyrim came out the same year pretty much pretty close to each other. And there are a lot of people talking about which one they should get. Wait, wait, it was at Skyrim or oblivion? It was Skyrim. Okay. And, uh, those are both great games.

And the most bizarre thing is that in the 10 years since that, we've gone through DS2, DS3, Bloodborne and Sekiro. And now we're at the point where I'm running around in the network test, fighting a dragon in a scene that looks like the cut scenes, like the ads for Skyrim. What they, what the experience was intended to be in, in FMV form. The week of the network test, the elder scrolls has continued in Skyrim. Yeah. Yeah.

There's a new Skyrim release that is Skyrim. And it's like, man, like I, I still think back in the day that when I talked to people in 2011 that like it would be a hard choice on which game to recommend because they were both excellent. But like the distance that Fromsoft has come since then. And yeah, but one of them actually has not. One of them actually has a good combat. Yeah. So that's the one.

Except the other one's the biggest game ever. Yeah. Well, yeah. And, and well, it was a, listen, the way that I broke it down for people back in 2011 is do you want to fight shit or do you want to explore? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And because Skyrim's number, Bethesda Games has made a huge career off of their one skill

that nobody has the same as everybody is, Hey, what's that over there? And like, like making skylines and like silhouettes of landscapes really appealing so that you want to walk over to them. That's why Skyrim is so much fun. It's literally because at any given point in the, in the game world, you can look around and see something that is visually appealing to walk towards. Hey, you see that mountain over there? It's part of the Skybox.

It's not real. Yeah. Well, Elden Ring is now like caught up on that part of it. While also having a improved version of that good combat we all like. Mm-hmm. Right? It's, I saw people calling it, uh, there's some meme that was going around like, don't call it big Dark Souls, call it death of the wild.

Death of the wild. With, which like really got me. Sure. He's like, all right, that's, that's catchy. Sure. Sure. That's good. But it's not death of the wild.

Breath of the Wild is a systemic, like, Hey, what happens if I like this on Fire Games? Like the reason why, I don't, you said you watched a lot of people's half hours. You might have noticed a weirdly high amount of people saying the words Dragon's Dogma. Um, not as much as I heard them just say like everything souls or the gum, the gumbo, you know, whatever, like, yeah. This, to people who really loved Dragon's Dogma, that is by far the closest analog. Okay. It's about wandering on open space in which everything wants to beat your ass.

But you can get your estus back after you beat them. Yeah. Okay. Which I mean, that's a pretty, that's a pretty slick fix to what if I just want to roam the open world for three hours? That's going to suck. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, actually, no, you won't, not if you're, not if you don't suck. And the other thing too is like, how dead does everything stay when you kill it? Before sitting down. Extremely. Extremely. Okay. Until you sit down.

Okay. And then I fought a Naruto lion and I fought the dragon. I called it a Naruto lion because it's a white lion covered in chains with chips, enough arm blade on it. Well, that's pretty. And that thing died when I killed it. Like it didn't come back. Okay.

Oh, those fuckers. Yeah, by, by the way, like it turns out that the remaster of Dark Souls one specifically has an issue with loading out zones when you get too far and repopulating enemies. Oh, yeah. That can lead to like apparently like the, apparently the DLC can crash or something. If you, if you fuck with that. But yeah, when you kill things in Blight Town and then run back to Firelink and then run up to the Berg and then back to Blight Town, the Blight Town is repopulated.

Oh, yeah. So that's a, that's a weird issue happening specifically with the S1 now. Yeah. That's a pretty rare use case. Without sitting in a bonfire the whole time going all the way up and all the way back down. Well, if Firelink is dead because you just got your mantra adventure going that. Yeah. All right.

Yeah. Then you, do you experience the worst of it? I have to say, do you remember getting to like the Sense Fortress and you can see the wall of Anor Londo and you can see the Duke's archives like just barely, right? And the game is, it's fudging a lot of the distances. But there's a real element of like, you see that building, the unique looking weirdo building, you can get there. I feel like this game is the actual like realization of that because the gigantic

castle that is like 10 kilometers away from you, like thousands of feet up, is actually totally reachable. And when I got there, I went and looked back at the starting area. I mean, so like DS1, especially staring at it now is like, it's pretty cool with that effect of like, oh yeah, look, that's the basin right beneath you as you're going to see Andre. But they're moments like the one you mentioned where you're in Anor Londo and you're looking up at like, oh yeah, that's the Duke's archives up that hill. But then you walk to it and you're like, that's like 10 feet that way.

Like that's not up that hill at all. DS1 does a lot of great things for scale, but it definitely lies about the distances. They all do. One, two, three, they all lie about how far away shit is. And in this game, they can't. It has to be a real distance because you're walkering the whole interim path. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It fucking owns. Cool. I had so much goddamn fun and I barely scratched the surface. Where can they see that fun? They can go and well, in February, they'll be able to go down to twitch.tv slash pat stairs at where I'll be beating the whole game and it'll be the best one. But as of right now, if you want to go see 4k footage in the 60 FPS of both my short impressions and a much longer walkthrough of the network test, you can go to youtube.com slash pat stairs at.

And one last thing to talk about, Willie, specifically to you, not even for the audience, really, I discovered the joys of editing in 4k last weekend. Wow, that sucks ass. Was your editor able to handle that footage? No. Oh, how about that? It was able to render it and it was able to edit it, but it was not able to preview it. So what I would have to do is I like to use Sony Vegas.

I would have to select a clip of about 10 seconds long and I think it's shift B to pre-render just that in just the preview. And then I would be able to do it. And then the sound desynced at the two hour and 15 minute mark. Sure did. So I had to track down the specific instant that it desynced and then re-sync the whole thing manually. Wow, that sucks ass. Honestly, everything is having a hard time with 4k for as far as editing goes right now.

Like even premiere suffering, you probably like hand-breaking a bunch of shit will save you, but if you've got the hours it might take depending on what your computer is doing, it's brutal. It's brutal. I hear you. People were asking me like, hey dude, are you gonna put up the 4k footage when you do the LP? I'm like, no, I'm just gonna export the Twitch VODs, man. That's like, it's like, I was putting out 4k footage because I had embargoed

hours of content that only like 20 people got a hold of. Yeah, I'm gonna throw it up in 4k. I have to pre-record it anyway, right? I couldn't do it live. But like, fuck, 4k is big. Well, the final file is 150 gigs. It's not like there's any giant glowing things in the background that might crush your bitrate to fuck as you get close to them.

Those urtrees, I don't know what it's like when you get near them, but I feel like that would just annihilate, you know, the footage. Didn't have much problem with it myself. Well, anyway, just one other thing that comes to mind. If I ever do 4k footage again, guys, I'm gonna record 1080p and then render it in 4k. Oh, oh, you upscale. Yeah. Well, you can do that quite easily.

Just set your editor to render it in 4k, so it's a 4k video file. And then when you put it on YouTube, it'll give you the 4k bitrate, even though it's a 1080p, like, raw. Record in 360p and use AI upscaling, like the Sprite Smoother in KOF Rebound, and use that on your footage. Woolly, I don't know if that was intentional, but funny that you mentioned that, because that's part of the news this week. All right, hold that thought.

Um, I also want to, uh, apropos of not Elden Ring Talk, give a shout out over here to, um, Clem's put up a video as well, taking a look at, uh, damn it, what's it, not Luma. Fuga? Fuga. And I was interested because, uh, yeah, like, I had, Ipacha told me about it, and it's that CyberConnect game that, like, looks like you've got the big metal slug with the kids in it. The little furry kids.

And, um, Clem's did their first real video game in 28 years. Shhh. But yeah, I was, I was interested in it, you know, ever since I heard about what it was, and I heard about, like, the proposition of what, of, you know, what it, what it asks. Um, and I was curious to take a, to take a peek at it, and I just didn't get around to it. And then with perfect timing, Clem's dropped a video, being like, hey yo, check this thing out. Uh, here's the, here's a little breakdown of it.

Um, I would like to, to, uh, direct your attention towards that video, and, um, you know, see if it, if it strikes your fancy. I, I, I don't know if I'm going to like the game or not, but it looks interesting, and I like metal slug style tanks falling apart as they roll across the screen. And they're all on different layers, like the top cannon, and the, the body, and the wheels, and the treads are all shaking, like sprites bouncing on top of each other. I love that aesthetic. So, uh, I'm curious to check that out.

Yeah. Check that video before we move off. I actually, I have a shout out of my own of a new channel that I found, uh, in response to Elden Ring. Uh, but if you're not familiar and you like to see, uh, like development or bug or what have you dives into games, particularly the souls games. Uh, there's a lady who has a channel called Zully the Witch, the Z-U-L-L-I-E, the witch. Uh, she just put up a great video, uh, four hours ago where, uh, basically she's been figuring out how FromSoft codes their mounted player character, their mounted characters,

and how usually they just bullshit it. And the horse and the person on them is a single NPC. Okay. As well as the attempts that they've made to glue and PCs together to make more complicated animation sets and has been testing out, like, is the player on the horse or are they switching to a combined model? Is this a human centipede? Yeah.

Hmm. Uh, her channel is great. I've been, I was like in bed watching like all, they're all like minute long clips of just like, let's zoom in on this character and remove the fire effect off of them in dev mode and see what the person actually looks like. Interesting. Uh, let's, let's, let's go to like a development view of the sky box of earthen peak while you're going up the elevator and see what happens to the sky box.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, shit like that. Okay. Okay. That's, that's interesting. Her, her channel is fantastic. What actually fucking happens? Where does the lava come from?

Uh, it just switches the whole sky box. Yeah. It is. Okay. It's just a complete goddamn bullshit. Reality elevator. Okay. Uh, cool.

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And then BRB. Oh, kiddoke. This week in the news. Well, let's start at the end, shall we? Okay. Rockstar has pulled Grand Theft Auto the trilogy definitive edition from PC sales. But why? Because there were files that were unintentionally included according to the update as of

yesterday. But what kind of files? Well, it seems that some of the files that were at the root of the problem were probably GTA.exe and whatever else was compiled into it because there are significant issues that are arising and lots of footage of some of these issues has been spreading and creating what one might call a giga clusterfuck. I can say that. I have a quick addendum.

I can confirm that the reason why they pulled it down had nothing to do with what you're seeing with the giga clusterfuck. In fact, the GTA is a game of the sort. In fact, the GTA on the PC version was brought down for a multitude of reasons such as the launcher doesn't work at all. They accidentally left most of the music they were supposed to cut in the game as well as in the game's code the notes from Rockstar North dating back to its development in the margins.

And hot coffee and hot coffee so hot coffee was bafflingly still in. So you know what I realized in some of this news coverage has been that we are now so far removed from hot coffee that a fuck ton of people don't know what hot coffee is because they're too young. Oh yeah. Well, you see back in the day a PS2 game called San Andreas came out and you could use cheat codes to access a version of the game where you would date a girl and you would take the girl back to your house and you would fuck the girl.

And I don't even remember if there was like implied nudity or no close on whatever it was close on they didn't change their body fucking lost their shit and Rockstar out in trouble and then the games rating got changed while inside hot coffee in it and then it got re-released and it was a big thing. And I'm like I've seen more graphic sex in the opening cut scene to Witcher 2. So the thing that was the reason why it was such a cluster fuck was not just because it was like oh there was explicit material but it was that like they attempted to hide that but it was still in the game was still in the code they just basically something like a modder could

you know hit it basically unlock it with a single switch. Yeah what happened was is that the PC version you had to change a number from like zero to one to turn it on and then those shit storm happened and then it became discovered that there was a way to cheat code it out in the console versions. Right and then you know that so that you know when I think of like the times when the dildo duty on Hitman was a thing right go find not Hitman on DSX excuse me where it was go find every dildo and make sure it's removed from the game and then there was one that was hidden behind a destructible wall in the sewers you know like it's like yeah so if you leave the asset in place

and there is a way for someone to access it then your game your game rating has to reflect that that that's essentially what the hot coffee controversy was about. That being said like the anger was the GTA game for kids has sex in it to which anyone who had a brain went this game is not for kids you stupid motherfuckers but every kid is asking their mom for it therefore it's for kids. Yeah cuz San Andreas owns. Same thing for like Call of Duty and every other popular main thing it's like yeah but if it gets popular enough it's for kids because it's popular and kids want it therefore it's for kids despite the rating. Also the kids of today they know what sex is they probably think it's gross I remember being a kid and being like why do

people do the kissy stuff and then my mom was like well because they love each other and I'm like that's gross. And also not true. It is also not true but you know that's that's a white lie that's you know appropriate to tell a child that people have sex because they love each other. All right well anyway what are you gonna tell well sometimes people kiss because they want to know like come on. Well son sometimes people need to get the poison out. Oh god you know you've used that explicit phrase so many times that I thought it was a joke you made up and now I'm starting to think that it's a real sentence made by somebody in your life. It sure does exist outside of me. That being said when this came around again in the modern era and it was then there it's

a hilarious throwback to the the fuck up that is leaving in assets that are not supposed to be there then the music that was not licensed anymore just being like turned off we have found out over the course of the last two decades that it is not enough to turn things off and go there it's done. Hey why do you think there's no PC network test of Elden Ring because most of the map is probably literally still there in that network test because they'll they'll turn the demo into the entire full game. Yeah you remember when the RE5 demo got datamined and turns out like most of the game is in that RE5 demo. What are you doing why why'd you leave all this boss data and all the all the audio files for every cutscene in the game in the demo. The entire cross-tech and DLC

roster sitting right there on the disk when you buy it but you're not allowed to have it till you buy the the the two kilobyte key you know. That's a year away. Yeah yeah people point out that Yakuza 6 demo was accidentally the entirety of Yakuza 6 and they forgot to put the demo lock in so it was just the whole game. So this is a thing and in this particular case it's like how could they have fucked that up by leaving that in. Well maybe it's because their plates were full with everything else happening to this game. So before we get into this let's I'm just going to lay a ground portion that explains a lot of what we're going to talk about. The developer called Grove Street Games that made this definitive edition of the GTA games. These are not the PS2 games.

They're not the PC games. These are ports of the old broken mobile games. Is that the source? They're the phone games. People can tell because the weightlifting game in San Andreas is the shitty iOS version of the real PC or PS2 version. I didn't catch that. Okay okay. So these are port. These are not the PS2 redone. This is not the old PC versions redone. These are the nine-year-old iOS ports as the basis. And that would explain why like some of the faces are just ghoulish non-expressive complete like ridiculously low quality replacements for things that looked fine. It was outsourced. A lot of the model work was outsourced to I think an Indian company that is a I've never heard of them before. And judging by their work on this they either had

a very small deadline or not that much going on. But the textures is the absolute pinnacle because why does this always happen? Like this Silent Hill you know like it's always the textures that are the telltale sign. Well I can tell you. I can tell you right now it's very simple. In Silent Hill they they Konami is bad about version control and they just didn't have a final copy of the gold master of Silent Hill 2. They had somehow misplaced it. The only version they had was like six or seven versions before final. And so when they sent it off to the port house the port house had to first regold master it and fix bugs that were decades old on the PS2 architecture. And then textures that were just not good enough or whatever and so the time available to them was

like nothing. For GTA the textures specifically these are big games even though the textures are very low quality and you even if you made lower quality textures just to smooth them over like compared to the modern standards they're still very big games that lost of texture. So they decided you know it'd be a great idea let's just throw every texture in the game into an AI uprising robot program that people use for stuff like the CG backgrounds in Final Fantasy 7 or RE2 you know the upscaler. KOF 94 rebound. Here's the problem. Rockstar games have a shit ton of text on buildings and they're all puns and the AI upscaler that's been trained on real life botches every single one. There is a guitar store that has like it's like air guitar guitar

wank sessions or whatever every single word is a typo every single goddamn word is wrong. I mean yeah so uh this this whole thing like this is a content creator's dream to be perfectly honest. Oh Joel has been having a time of it. Have you seen this shit? Everyone has it's like there's it's wild everyone has been going nuts there is there is no better time than when something as high profile as this is such an absolute clusterfuck. Joel Vinesauce near and dear to my heart I love you Joel put out the absolute pinnacle of this game it is a 10 is a 12 second clip in which he decided it would be funny if he just drank soda until CJ got super fat yes yes yes and then the game crashed and then his save was ruined.

Yeah screwed up the save file for drinking too much soda. Mm-hmm then um just a series of tweets from just all around the internet you got credits to uh janky nedelko with um my eyes hurt part one which is when you get to just the rain effect the rain effect which like any random shit snapchat filter looks infinitely better than what appears to just be white lines falling at an even pace that ignore the layer of water of the ocean water and roads don't get affected by it but everything else does and it's there the brightest thing ever and you can't really see beyond them and then they're falling also at a rate where if you're in a helicopter and you descend fast enough they stop falling and start

moving upwards it's the ugliest shit and also it's a single image file transparent image file that's being stapled to your character so it stays completely uniform no matter how fast you go like forward and backwards yeah yeah yeah a shout out to Giga Boots they did a huge stream of this game uh they were about to pull into a goddamn garage only to find Tommy Versetti tea posing stuck in the goddamn floor with a fucked up look on his face like it is a trash fire and i'm gonna also shout out mr feels mr feels wild ride uh twitter shit poster extraordinaire for summing up the whole situation excellently which is people are comparing this to the trash fire that was uh cyberpunk right mm-hmm and feels correctly points out that cyberpunk promised you the world

cyberpunk promised you a gigantic modern game with all these features and it was a trash fire this is ports of decades old ps2 games that already had working pc that were fine and it's literally just tweak the controls a little bit make it run a little better maybe upscale some of the textures maybe improve anti-aliasing what like like the barest minimum of a re-release yeah i'm looking at the thread a way like it bums me out because i would love to go back and play by city in San Andreas and what do i do now emulate the pc ps2 version or go hack a fucking pirate copy of the de-listed pc versions like fuck we'll just literally just go grab the old disc you and pop it into an old console and play it you know what i mean like that um the the i was literally

saying when we taught we brought this up maybe two or three weeks ago i was like oh you know like i haven't played all the gta 3s right so yeah that'd be an interesting way to get around to it by city and san adreas hold up great those games are incredible i would love to to go back and play them christ and and and fucking hang out with sweet and talk shit about big smoke and listen to his fucking ridiculous order and chase the train so there is like there are infinite side by sides of just like here is what it looks like when you're rigged to a bike from the side view and your arms just completely turn into weird stretched out putty in order to fit onto the bike um there's a shot of a bikini girl in vice city that just like like i don't even understand

what i'm looking at the faces all like when you say it comes from the phone version it suddenly makes perfect sense yeah you know so i have to say that you said it's always the textures not true whenever we talk about these remasters there's one thing that's actually an even more consistent botch than the textures and it's the lighting so let's take vice city right if you go back and look at vice city that game is always kind of pink or orange somehow there is always a sunset or a sunrise somewhere and everything even non neon lights somehow has the color palette of neon lights because they want you to feel like this is the fucking eighties like all the time and you look at the remaster and it looks like bright ass middle of the day

los angeles san francisco harsh lighting and it's like every single goddamn remaster always goes well we have better graphics we have a more advanced engine now let's make it look more realistic like no how about you go and look at what the fuck the intent was which was to make a fucking game that looked like a goddamn eighties suit attached to a light source and just make it more pink more orange like the the sky in san angeles is a bright orange much of the time in the original game yeah i remember and now the fog is not even in these games so you can see shit through the skybox that you shouldn't even be able to see um the answer to that question is very simple it's because the it's like playing through the original and trying

to capture the intent of that scene is a lot of work that a studio that's hard is been hired to just dump the whole thing over doesn't want to do and like you're asking for a creative analysis which is not part of this porting process the porting process is we have this many thousand textures we have to work at a macro level and just you know like hope that the original code still holds up while we replace assets and textures and change resolutions even halo one the halo one anniversary which was and is in some ways a gold standard of a re-release in that they have a goddamn button to just switch between the two versions horribly fucked it up because the halo one classic that is present in anniversary is based off of the bad

gearbox pc port that doesn't have working bump mat mapping under lighting and there's a bunch of effects missing so when you switch back from the new fancy halo anniversary graphics to the old one you go wow i don't remember it looking like shit like this that's cuz it didn't it didn't look like that um i think the sign to point to for every fix that recently that's cool well here's what's important to understand right i get the idea that outsourced company is going to just cut every corner possible to get the the job done judgment is a remake of judgment from 2019 to 2021 it is a remake of a game from fucking 24 months ago and they still fucked it up and it's big and it's because the pro the porting process is not one that's attempting to keep the spirit of what

you're describing if you see what judgment looks like it looks like like it's a record on burnt film like it's super saturated right now judgment two doesn't look like that but that's fine because judgment two was not designed to look like that but it just it's just crazy that even something that recent can't get it right because again it's just it's the outsourced port you know um i mean for what it's worth all of every one of these it's like like remasters and remakes that just is absolute dog shit definitive editions etc it just makes me go damn demon souls is a miracle you know fucking blue point incredible um listen i i want to point out one last thing as part of this because you mentioned blue point all right remaking an old game or even remastering an old

game to get everything right is so difficult sony had to do it twice with shadow of the colossus and even then there's stuff in the ps4 ps4 version that some people are not thrilled about i think it's a great version of the game i can handle a few minor differences we were talking about the fat officials having different faces yeah but like it took two attempts on on this fucking game and shadow of the colossus is like a simple game with like nothing in it it's like wide open spaces and and light boxes couple of bosses some lizards go yeah yeah it's it's kind of it's kind of nuts so um this is yeah this is absolutely cyberpunk level of of uh how did they ship it why would they ship it like why would you not just take a look at this and just immediately pump the brakes on the entire

project you know it's deadlines must be respected we don't give a fuck it's really sad to me because like a lot of people who work at rock star are the same people who made those games right at least the houses right and uh they are making a shitsillion quadrillion dollars off of gta online and that's fine right i don't purposely care for it but sure right but these are like legitimate classics that you would think the people that still there that worked on them would hold them near and dear to their hearts and just people just they just tossed it off to some shithouse port factory and gave them two weeks to make it and like yeah whatever right like just the lack of respect for your own stuff and gta was a like video game industry defining series it moved consoles like

nothing else did in that time it was the reference point for video games for all demographics at the time even the ones that were too young to be playing it it's it's also a bummer for me because like i don't know about you woolly i don't like any of the new rock star games um i just haven't really tried them um the the ps2 grand theft autos are great i really i'm okay with four i strongly dislike gta five and i tried really hard multiple times to like red dead redemption two and it is how do i put this because you haven't played them it's an argument over you're having an argument while playing the game with the director you feel like an actor on a set with george lucas and you're like well what if i did this and he goes shut the fuck up you're

gonna do it like this or we're cutting the scene and it's just non-stop like hey go to the car to get your stuff what if i went over here mission failed oh it just gets more and more restrictive over time like like red dead is out of control red dead two is out of control with like they're telling you walk over to the horse pick up your gun go here walk through this door then a cutscene plays i'm like if you're gonna force me to do all of that that specifically yeah why even give me control at all right right i said someone wrote you saddled the wrong horse like yeah game over oh yeah interesting okay yeah um i would assume that like with all of the newer games that with infinite budget comes infinite polish so i feel as if like there's no way they could be bad games

because there's just so much like money to make sure that that's not that that it doesn't turn out poorly yeah well not this time interesting yeah well there you go yeah yeah for the for the newer oh you're talking about red dead two red dead two and the gta sixes and stuff like that you're you're completely right infinite polish it is polished as all hell it is absolutely as polished as all hell but it feels like and this is an example everyone can agree with you know when you're playing a game and you beat a boss and it gives you back control and then you walk five feet and a cutscene starts mm and you go why did this not just lead into the cutscene right that is the feeling that i had the whole time i played red dead two okay why why even pretend you're on let me

play you're on rails um yeah so this is like i i i don't i this is the i don't know if uh the end results here will be uh more of a shitstorm than cyberpunk but so far rockstar has only come out to say that they're pulling down the pc edition the pc sales to apparently it's back up as of this time okay so then the state of this is just it's just too late the whole thing is a fuck this is the version this is it shut up wrong i i would be surprised if this ever gets patched at all wow what would happen if you just ran gta 3 the original pc version on a modern computer like could you just compatibility mode it and run it i don't think you even have to i think it just works like because people who have access to them now are just like yeah just play

it what the fuck's to stop you you know and throw your own mp3 files in a folder like i used to do and just fucking hit that on the radio huh yeah these faces are terrifying when you look at them side to side there's um here let me find there's a tweet here that has like the full list and some of the faces look like you know when you see like Assassin's Creed style like uh oh i'm seeing the inside of the head texture yeah like some of them are outside facing but feel like you're looking at them backwards uh i saw like the back of um like the rear view mirror while like you have someone saddled behind you like you're staring at at what a dude's face like the whole time

just unbelievably horrifying and and fun oh yeah yeah the collage you know the number nine on the jersey has the cut out texture of a seven behind it the one that gets me by far the worst is uh the two hispanic guys that have been turned into like like children's characters just the absolute shittiest heads i've ever seen on character my life like it's it's astonishing yeah massive massive downgrade in every way well i guess i will continue to not uh experience the entirety of gta three um anyway a couple other things going on besides this one so ugly i'm like i keep looking at it god damn it yeah was that was it hold on let me just confirm what it was like where it got to but i saw someone was keeping track on metacritic and it was at a zero point something oh it's the

worst user reviewed metacritic game of all time yeah like um what zero point five user score uh currently and i saw that it fluctuated about bounced around a couple times well it's it's a combination of like one of the most popular series of games of all time with one of the worst botches of all time and uh no critic no actual critic reviews yet okay well there you go i saw oh man i just saw all sorts of stupid shit just like driving a lot you see the one where you can kill yourself bowling uh no so you bowl and it hits uh the pins a certain way and it hits the back of the fucking uh the back of the bowling you know ali yeah and because the physics were not correctly tuned the ball has real mass and jumps back at you at 80 miles an hour

and hits your character in the head and you fucking get wasted yeah okay i mean i've seen like oh getting into a helicopter and then like it just shoots into the sky and then you get you get wasted into like i don't know what happened but whatever um but yeah like i i assume there's a level of no being accurate even old gta would have these wild stupid physics moments yeah uh anyway hey hey i've got some dank tweets for you from the ceo of grove street games hot off some good ass tweets what's going on we got one from november 9th as art ages what was at the time of mistake becomes an homage it becomes history its preservation it's important han shoots first one small step for man some mistakes should be rectified and some should be preserved being on

the deciding end is a heavy responsibility and that was two days ago uh no wait that was five six days ago but the one from november 11th it's so fun to see players out here really enjoying what we've put together for them i'm honestly enjoying this unparalleled level of scrutiny on our studio today we are celebrating our monumental project launch while we work on updates it's good good enthusiasm good energy love the scrutiny i'm sure everyone at the at the at the studio is is just laughing it up loving the scrutiny they're getting they're all having champagne going yeah we did it every time someone posts a bug they're like you know just yeah i cannot possibly believe the the last like the the dumb brain of having the gall to say we are enjoying

this level of scrutiny in a situation like this i mean what else are you gonna tweet out lol just tell everyone to keep nitpicking as hard as they can and yes that is what they should say that would be so much more honest lol lamal rock star paid us we got the money like we done enjoy your garbage uh idiots yeah this anyway i i highly encourage you go check out uh the the vine potato tweet that carries uh uh that has oh dude i love this people are sending me all sorts of garbage this is not gonna play correctly for the home audience who are just listening to this but there is a donut shop in san andreas called tough nut donuts in which it's a a like a a bolt like a nut like a

hexagon nut sitting next to a highly polygonal donut on top of the thing ha ha that's funny and now in tough nut donuts both are now perfect spheres there's spheres and it and it makes no god damn sense at all it's gonna retweet this on my twitter pat stairs that's the entire joke of the of the polygonal polygonal donut is completely completely ruined amazing god damn it amazing yeah but that's that's exactly it that's the that's what happens when you're not paying attention to what assets are being put where and for what purpose you're just mass updating the game like at us at a at a um a god view level you know you're replacing files and folders you're recompiling the whole thing you're not actually going through the the game

and experiencing it and then or you're going literally asset by asset in a list sure right um and and you want you want to hear the absolute i don't know if i ever told you about this but the absolute most brain dead way to develop a game i've ever heard of in my life you ever played oblivion even for a short period i watched it okay you ever noticed the voice acting in that game is fucking gonzo mm okay like it's it's weird and all over the place the actors for oblivion were given their lines in alphabetical order and asked to perform them in alphabetical order why i don't know it was just the way that the excel sheet like parsed everything yeah oh they were just given they were given here's all your character sentences that start with a here's all your

character sentences that start with b oh my god and that's why when you talk to people and have conversations they sound insane oh my god if you don't have the lines that are from the same scene right next to each other you have no context for what you're supposed to be feeling or why and sometimes a recording script will have like notes from the director about what emotion you should be feeling but the full script should be chronological so that you have some idea that's fucking crazy i it's it's why like we have great moments like stop uh criminal you violated the law and shit like that uh i genuinely think that the only two people that got anything different were patrick stewart and shonbean they they were probably given like and especially they have very

few lines comparatively they were probably given like real like scripts to work with i'm curious like was this did this come out because like some of the actors like went yeah this is what happened like i don't know i don't know how it came out okay uh there's also there's also uh three or four lines of dialogue in that game that are the equivalent of i forget what the actual text of it was is like hey have you heard about the elves that all right no no okay let me let me try that again okay hey have you heard about the elves and like didn't cut it they're yeah they're totally still there the whole fucking thing yeah that's good that's good that's good that's good i like that nice nice nice you just again i know qa did their job they caught that they bugged it someone

looked at it and went w n f it's not important you know yeah uh all right well anyway a couple other things going on um everything sucks uh oh there's a halo tv show coming well that's okay wiki that's that's what comes next so about john halo well here's bass bros but it's not just it's not just any halo tv show in 2013 microsoft talked about getting a halo tv show done and somehow spielberg was attached and for years i mean we remember it went through neil blond camp um and then there was the ridley scott project it's really easy to attach big names to a project when you say hey let's do it and there's nothing and there's nothing forever right yeah yeah and and the problem microsoft had every single time it was that they'd sign on and they go cool i'm excited

to work with this and bungee would bring in this fucking bible of shit they're not allowed to change and they'd go i am out of here yeah spielberg was like fuck this i'm going to make uh block fling blocks or whatever the fuck that thing was called yeah uh and and blob cap even i believe he talked about it in an interview where it's like every time he wanted to do cool things somebody would come in and tell him that he couldn't do that because the gun didn't work that way or the alien didn't do that and he's like i'm just trying to god damn it i'm gonna go make chappy sure yeah um and then that what was it uh halo nightfall that did that did come out um the uh but this thing from 2013 uh the spielberg project is finally getting teased and it's coming to paramount

plus and uh you know you get to see a little trailer of uh of john halo man putting his helmet on oh good old john halo and it zooms in on the 117 and you're like yep that's a halo all right so let's you know i've been a huge halo fan for a long time um the longest time like the hardcoreist fan really halo has great music and it has excellent encounter design but the story is that spaceman gonna shoot the aliens yes but to be fair i went in expecting so little of the story and i was really impressed with like how cool some shit turned out to be um in particular the the you know with two shit got really really sick um it was and and uh the bible is happening

and it's big big bible but it's also a cool bible you know and then by the time i'm reading there's definitely cool a bunch of cool stuff in there yeah and by the time i'm reading about mendicant bias you know or the or the fucking um the the flood father and all that i'm like yeah i'm in on this i'm sold this is cool i like the story i like how somebody is saying i dare you to say that the arbiter isn't cool the arbiter is voiced by keith david the arbiter could have been a jar of piss and he would have been cool if he was voiced by keith david yeah yeah and the lore of the covenant and how it comes together and it's all big space racism you know that's all fun so i'm i'm i'm out here

saying that like i like the halo story that i that i played through i liked it in the context of a video game but i cannot possibly see how it would expand into something to really care about in like just a pure narrative sense well then you haven't read your bible sir no i haven't what i did is i played halo reach in the number one there are two points in halo reach that are just fucking thumbs up you completely nailed it this is absolutely incredible blowing up that goddamn covenant ship and seeing five come in after like an hour of gameplay and having you go oh fucking fuck motherfucker and then the final objective of survive yes that's where halo succeeds where it's telling you how it feels through gameplay those same scenes wouldn't

hit the same if they were just a narrative like a tv show well fair but at the same time you're not considering uh that if you were to go ask uh brian david gilbert he could also tell you about every novel and how all those books also contribute to what might be part of the show script right of which you know i don't know if you know this but the coal protocol though damn dude there's some books out there you should all i know about the coal protocol is that you were apparently a total psychopath about not hearing about it that's all i know about the coal protocol the bull protocol people people cared so much i just think it's i also don't know how well like for a guy like

master chief chris pratt is gonna work out i i don't know if he's gonna agree to keep the helmet on the whole time i you know well cg so that would be an extra weird request to have the character pull the the hat helmet off and have the chris pratt face but what if he gets confused by his roles and he starts doing the garfield voice accidentally yeah maybe that's the that's another issue is if he starts doing his garfield voice for halo and then starts doing his halo voice for mario that might be bad and then he just then he just becomes like then he just becomes garflord the master plumber and then nobody can figure out what the fuck he's doing okay you picked the right syllables in the right place good job there's a lot of ways

i'm trying to combine it there's a lot of ways that could have failed but you got what i you got the right ones in the right place was starfield the something like that's not good garflord there it is all right there we go done and done um godspeed spielberg godspeed other things going on so of course everyone's excited for uh from soft and their latest and greatest but what if mom said we have from soft at home oh what if what would she hand you lies of pee oh this this game looks like hey i want to make blood born too so some things it's interesting because some games come along and and their souls likes

for example um uh surge and you go hey look it's diesel souls what we wanted to enjoy this type of gameplay in a different setting and you go okay that's what you want to do got it then you see this and this like we don't even know if the combat actually feels like we do a gameplay a gameplay trailer came out it's blood born okay but holy fuck do you want to be blood born on every aesthetic level possible um hey remember woolly never forget that in lies of pee it's apab all Pinocchio's all puppets are bastards there's a strung up puppet with the phrase apab written on it in the trailer it's good and i'm looking at this and i'm going oh that's the type of social

commentary we need that's the tact we're looking for hell yeah hell yeah i am i support it what's going on so um that's not real go watch the trailer fuckers it's right there on the bridge is it yeah i'll get you a fucking screenshot you can put it up i'm look because i have the trailer open right here so there it is but i mean i'm down i'm down for this if this is what we're doing if we can get a shot of jepetto taking a knee you know i'm i'm here for it let's get it going let's go all the way why back down don't be a coward um this is a far right got it you got it let's see here's the screenshot make sure to download this to put it elsewhere or whatever

oh boy oh man that's real you think i would make something up that tasteless photoshop is a thing photoshop can be a thing i pulled that right off the trailer you can even see the part of the screenshot where it says hit escape to unfullscreen the youtube all right we're going in we're going in all the way no breaks um so there's no good puppets because the good puppets let the bad puppets get away with everything so in in this in this lies of p game it seems like you are pinocchio and uh you have your puppet arm with trick weapons and blades and wheels and things that literally are just bloodborne weapons

yeah yeah it's like you can make a bloodborne but still make your own weapons but instead they made their they just went no we want we want those ones we want that we want to make that one again i want that weapon though and then you know you see him swinging it around and you're like yeah and then he then he casts a spell with his other hand and does a big old you know wheel attack man he's a magic puppet boy and then we'll see what's we'll see what's up you know but it's puppets fighting in a big old dark maybe victorian sort of setting and dark victorian sort of clothing and you know lies of pee maybe your your nose will grow and maybe maybe jepetto will be a nice old man or maybe he'll be he'll be an evil fuck i don't know i read fables we've seen

this that's petto it's gonna be a total asshole and you know it probably if you're gonna if you're gonna go edgy jepetto then you gotta go like you know playing with life play playing god etc it's never about you know why do you want a real son why do you want a real boy is it hubris etc etc etc panocchio is an attempt to dethrone god create your own life therefore you don't have to follow the rules of god yes yeah that's right yeah right there yeah i'm done done and done um and the fun thing about puppets is that you can create them with eyes on the inside you know that's sure you can very very easily i just i'm i'm waiting for the trailer to show like like the orphan of pos you know like i'm waiting for the moment where it just starts flailing around and you're like yeah

sure there's some puppet based reason for this you know i believe it look who knows maybe it'll be fun maybe it'll be fun you know but it doesn't sure seem to um it doesn't care originality is overrated people i know tons of games that are original and they're cowards yeah they're not they don't they don't give a fuck you gotta you gotta hand it to him um good job lies of p good job uh also you've got uh a little bit of uh i honestly this is one of those bits where i'm like i'm surprised this didn't happen way sooner but yeah of course Naruto is coming to fortnight yeah that's been known for months and months and months and all i can think of believe it when i see that is just like like that's so obvious and such a like yeah people

are gonna love that and everyone is gonna take their now you're gonna be able to do the Naruto run with your with rick and morty yeah you know and and that's all people really want to do yeah Naruto run through the MLK memorial with rick and morty it's such an obvious thing that it all i can really think of is man like Toriyama and Bandai and the people in charge of Goku do not lend out the Goku license anywhere near as much as they should people want Goku in everything and he almost shows up in the final smash character he shows up in nothing people will always talk about but what if Goku was in it and he's never in it but Naruto is always in it and you're like what if Naruto wasn't in it it's crazy Naruto like is it's like they

know the American appeal they understand that and they realize like the clout and they're like yeah we'll fucking show up we'll guest star and whatever who wants us Naruto it's like shovel night it's like nah we're going we're gonna be there you want us to be there we're coming we're gonna hang out yeah you know it reminds me when i retweeted the oh my god it's the john halo tv show right i saw a guy who responded to me it's like it's weird that they made a tv show about the green guy on the Doritos yep yep yep yep everywhere like that's that's what Naruto feels like at all times everywhere that that um Naruto makes a cameo it should have been Goku and yeah someone is just not getting collecting the paychecks that they could have been

um anyway i feel like we're at the point of like so and so is coming to fortnite is like yeah of course they are it's the biggest game that's ever been by orders of magnitude it does it literally i literally fired it up last week to buy chris and jill and then turned it off and i'm not playing exactly yeah yeah yeah there you go yeah well that would remind me of my the waning days of overwatch when i'd fire it up to get a costume that was cool and then turn it off you know um yeah it's infinitely more um beneficial to the property than it is to fortnite for you to show up in fortnite anyways um that's going down what else is happening interview with sakurai reveals that they were planning to add air smash attacks

during the initial thing i don't think that's a good idea it's interesting i don't mind adding you know a little bit of uh uh you know variety to the system but the question is is do you float or do you drop while you're charging it um he says during the initial planning stage for smash ultimate we were considering adding air smash attacks and that would have made ultimate feel like a like a really new version a new game compared to updating smash 4 um as much as we think aerial combat is important we did not add it because it over complicated things even so combat options in the air are limited players end up checking each other using neutral or forward air attacks if we can change these things i believe it'll create a deeper level of strategy

but we did not because i believe that there should be a line to be drawn between casual and competitive play so uh yeah like that's one of those like we were going to add this it would have made the system a bit more complex but um we deliberately didn't to avoid like making it like worse on a casual in a casual feeling way you know i i think i i get it that would have been too harsh on the scrimblows but what about rpg mix sword guy uh mcj rpg whatever it is i forget i forget the other name yeah it's scrimblow the lovable scrunko no no scrimblow blimblow scrimblow scrimblow blimblow it is the lovable scrunko i remember that vividly

um but i forget what the jrpg guy was i think i think it was sword guy mcj rpg that might have been something like that um i don't know i i think uh i think it could have been interesting i mean you know when you a little bit in the if you dropped down and then the way is if you like when you do like the air falcon punch or the air warlock punch for that matter um yeah interesting we got a um a trailer for the next guilty gear strive dlc character happy chaos shocker indeed wow if you watched the story mode uh you would not be surprised seeing as he is a central ass villain that uh yeah you're just like okay obviously he's showing up the question is

is how's he gonna play and as the he's been introduced as the gun slinging broken messiah yeah seems like he's gonna be a modified elfelt so pulls the gun out and a cursor appears on screen which you can control and then you can fire and lock and and and you know hit the person wherever they are on screen and it seems like that he has a bullet meter as well as a number of shots you can take before you need to reload it meter uh not reload but like before you cool down um and then a couple we've only seen a couple moves where like he pulls the gun out and will like either be in a stance or will roll or walk while shooting and then a couple other moves where he like shoots out a clone so seems like you know he might just be like a tricky mid-range

zoner um not much to go off of because these trailers i don't they're okay they're not as bad as the dragon ball fighters trailers that show fucking two normal two auto combos and half of the level trailers i've ever seen they're unbelievable they're ridiculous um these ones show you a bit of the character but it's not enough to get a full full understanding um and uh yeah some more fun music as well i you know what i i get this is kind of like his theme is that a little jazzy sounding so i feel as if between um all three dlc characters so far the genre switch has been extreme with their soundtrack i feel as if every dlc character is going to be a different genre of music mixed with um guilty gear rock guilty gear but rock cross

you know jazzy piano or cross big heavy it's not a big deal whatever that is you know john goodman sitting on a stool burger sheriffing yeah you know um yeah so you know not much of not much of a surprise but i'm curious to know uh how he's gonna how effective his zoning will be and then the only thing i that stood out to me that whole trailer is that when he shoots the gun recoil on it looks like shit it seems to depend on like whether yeah like if it is it the do you have to go through the full animation is it can you keep shooting because alphelt could shoot multiple times you know and then have a little a little cool down um it's yeah it's unclear what the limitations will be with the gun and also the cursor the reticle changes color so there's

an orange reticle at one point and then a blue reticle so it seems like there's two types of shots or two special moves that'll give you off different options um what i can't say is based again if you watch story mode uh i'm gonna say i it's pretty obvious who else should be showing up and um between these two people from the leaked list but also yes but also like it it just who gets screen time you know what's the obvious move here and i think i think uh we're gonna get a bunch of zoners coming so um i want to know what that what that man move list is going to be i want to know i feel like you see in that story mode some ideas uh yeah he's dropping on the 30th so in about two weeks we should find out uh right and then last thing over here apparently um the new world's

entire economy needed to be switched off by amazon games after people discovered uh a duping glitch so the new world thing has been ongoing for a long time um the uh they had a situation where every time they try and stop something from breaking it breaks more so like they disabled player trading because of this thing and then because the trading was gone it turns out people's housing taxes were inverting and paying them oh my god this was this was a couple weeks ago and that and then it happened again there's a new duped glitch that is they turned it all off again so how do you how do you just turn off the economy but keep the game on turn off player trading oh that's it okay

can you um i like new world is a level of fucked that i've it's rare to see an mmo launch this way because it was built on sand there was a great thread that developer who worked at amazon games described that uh basically uh some people from different technological fields said no this engine would be good but then they started building on a separate engine to get the games actually running and just constant fighting with it um did you hear about the invincibility bug woolly i did not so the invincibility bug is if you put the game in windowed mode and drag the window when the window is being dragged the client can't update the damage to your character so you're invincible oh my god that's a bug oh that's a good oh yeah you think that's bad

get ready for this one man damn get ready for get ready for this one team that's dinner on me if you were on my qa team that's dinner on my fucking my car so the reason for that is because the game was written on a client authoritative engine which you can't do for mmo's isn't that just mean anyone can cheat instantly yeah oh no your anti cheat appears to be worthwhile but not the anti the anti cheat doesn't catch bugs that exist with the way the game works but here's here's the ultimate here's here's the best one i've ever heard and one of the reasons that i sent the economy one over is so that i could talk about this one from a couple weeks ago in-game chat right i'm i'm like hey hey guys what's going on

turns out the in-game chat is actually just an html box that has open parentheses and closed parentheses off of text at the beginning and end of it which means that if you if you type something and then close it you suddenly have access oh no in-game floating html input oh no which means you can then cause that to link code to it you have you can have a a you can code it so that a random word in your sentence will hot link to a type of image that will insta crash the client and you can type that out into general chat and if people mouse over what you said their client crashes you can instantly inject any kind of nefarious code if you can close the html parentheses that that was the first one that happened people were figuring

out how to make normal looking statements that if you moused over would crash the other person's client oh this is qa porn dude this is qa porn this is somebody with more knowledge than i says needs an image reference to a game asset however if the asset doesn't exist the game crashes it doesn't know what to do okay okay oh my god yeah the game's built on sand the whole underlying engine is client authoritative and they're going to be chasing this forever this is also the roots of these problems being engine foibles is why everything amazon games has put out has become has been a disaster because two or three guys in high end production roles didn't know what they were talking about when they went and got engines and told teams to build on this but

transfer to this and yada yada yada and so like yeah amazon games in general is a complete trash fire and will be until they start over from now with future projects fuck wow because like all of these side by side sound like when fable two fell apart with like all these duping bugs and economy things or whatever yeah but in the end it cares who cares it's single player game single player yeah and you get your co-op local experience whatever fun little fun little thing you can do wow oh my god you can completely ruin someone else's sub like yeah experience up new world has been bouncing from this type of bug to this type of bug weekly the entirety of its release that's every single week there is something that is like uh oh this is broken this is really

really really really broken fuck yeah no that we as we would categorize that is a miracle class bug that goes beyond an s holy shit dude wow um are there numbers for like what the population of the game is active players lost more than half of its active players since launch because that was a couple weeks ago so uh i can only imagine you know i can i can go look this up it's on steam steam spy it player count no no you just uh steam charts uh october 31st article new world has lost over 500 000 players in a month from a peak of 900 000 13 to 413 and these are from the end of october this is two weeks ago how many people are playing new world as of now or at least last week so

says 1.6 million i don't know if i believe that does it take like how does it long does it take to feed to feel if an mmo's gonna click or not with you like okay well one month of a sub i i found a five day old article that says the population has now dropped by 600 000 so yeah well then sure sure how well how fast you know i can tell you i can tell you right now one raid open the menu in game your character five feet okay okay you do you like like you remember me talking about those korean trap mmo's yep yep yep okay you you can literally tell from like two button presses whether or not it's gonna be garbage or not if basic movement is bad and the menus are bad leave now stuff beyond that it would take a week

to be able to feel it but like those two things are just instantly run just run away right now interesting okay will amazon games ever figure it out it's no been years of talking about them and absolutely nothing happening holy shit in some cases things unhappening with crucible yeah yeah literally like exactly you know like pulling back um god i just i hope they don't buy any other studios just to kill them yeah or not kill them to put them in a zombie state woolly this was a disaster and these projects blew up in our face god we lost so much money on it the only way we're ever gonna make that money back is by buying more studios maybe they can figure it out

if they buy your favorite studio or a studio that's pretty good and then you never hear from them again is that studio still alive no absolutely not double helix is gone man doesn't even count uh well it's like but always keep the people in management who are actually to blame for these problems never move them around yeah um speaking of studio buying i think um or at least new studios miHoYo is setting up a new one actually in montreal for whatever their next project is gonna be so the genchin follow-up is gonna be made right here it seems yeah cool so uh i'll be sure to catch the latest shit talk as i'll put the tendrils out

and then hear what's happening in the qa mines and in the local in the neighborhood and hear how things are gonna go um all right let's get some letters hey if you want to send in a letter go ahead and send it to castle super beast mail at gmail.com that's castle super beast mail at gmail.com we got one coming in from Jason says dear kite apprentice and orb master do you pondering this orb do to your jobs you guys tend to play and try more genres than your average person uh what genre do you think is the most helpful at improving general skills in gaming overall um this was brought on by a recent uh dark souls where uh during a

basic fight rage reggie responded by saying hey i know woolly i play fighting games um i that's an interesting question i i would think honestly like 2d platformers um i think a good i think an old 2d platformer like sets the basis of like but but then again a lot of games don't follow those rules anymore but i would have said like that's where the fundamentals kind of come into play you know um movement timing jumps a good old like in you know if it's got fighting combat like mega man or something like that like just the idea of like bosses patterns things like that a very a mega man style game i think is like video game fundamentals probably but genres are so fucking that like that like whatever you learned there is not

going to teach you shit about disco elysium you know which by the way punch mom just finished yo fuck yeah i'm gonna say resident evil four specifically go on you have to deal with multiple problems simultaneously teaches you how to shoot teaches you how to manage the inventory teaches you how to manage resources teaches you about combining items teaches you about upgrading items teaches you about 3d movement teaches you about qtes also any platforming really good no not really you can't really jump in re4 yeah i was like like no no real like yeah i no real um spacing and jump you know also if you can get through a game with tank controls everything else is going to be no problem hmm sure a lot of games have

that type of management required i could i could see it i think that's acceptable um yeah side note uh uh uh punch mom beat disco and saw some fucking cool shit that i did not see cool um so there are events that can go down that are like if you happen to do the right thing and have the right thing and line this all up um you're gonna get a very unique interaction here and of course we all talk about the tie the tie yeah the neck tie it's the thing you missed that i was the most bummed out i couldn't talk to you about oh my god the conclusion of the of the horrific neck tie is unbelievable i was great that was insane you know um and um also the ruby she had a very different ruby encounter from me and like oh yeah like it's so fun just reviewing the notes on how

things went but um that was uh yeah it's it's it's it's fun just getting a a getting to talk about a lot of that shit again and then the the overall like there's a lot of things that like she'll forget from time to time playing through some of these games or just like details that get lost or things that have to be pointed out after the point after the fact and i was really really hoping that burn baby burn would not go over her head and thankfully it didn't you know like it's like you've been hearing this the whole time and it's all coming together just like everything else in the game no matter what you do no matter how badly you fail and fuck up it all comes together and everyone is kind of in amazement at how well you handle each decision in each way you know

um see discos devs are looking for people for a new project uh yeah specifically with open world reactivity yeah yeah yeah um like i think yeah i saw i didn't read fully read the article but i saw that pop up and i'm thinking it's like yeah why the fuck wouldn't your next game just be an adaptation of the other book um i forgot what it's called but uh something something air yes hostile air or something like that uh anyway um i cannot think of a game that i would want combat lesson than anything made by that studio uh sacred and terrible air

could you imagine if they're like we are making the new game after the disco elisium and it's like it loads into like a 3d model and then you're walking around as harry or whoever and you've got a shoot button and then a good then a thug comes at you and it's like you have to shoot the criminals and i would be like oh yeah yeah yeah just kill me and also just like um the narrator in darkest dungeon um that narrator in disco you that needs to stick around forever yeah that dude i was his first voice acting role well congratulations you have a new career music man you're unbelievable at this and i really really hope i hear you again it's a dj and a bass player i want to say and who just had like this crazy voice that one of them knew they're like you

want to come do this thing he's like yes sure just complete i just annihilated the role fucking unbelievable um anyway we got one coming in here uh dear middle-aged leprechaun and silky dreads i hey hey i got a couple more years left in me uh joel says i've been loving a lot of the from soft discussions was curious how you felt about the eventual despawning of enemies in ds2 after killing them 15 times um i've been finding that i share if almost uh all if not like most of pat's mind goblins um and the same intensity so uh i don't believe i have any hobgoblins goblins this time but despawning and being able to run through empty areas if he gives a sense of completion in a way

on the other hand this could be strengthening my own goblins because uh any sane person wouldn't care about running through an area 15 times so i don't care for it but it's not the end of the world it was much more frustrating before people figured out that you could use the champions covenant to respawn those enemies again if you need to farm something off of them um what is the end of the world is that killing the the the ice kirin in the uh blizzard area the frigid outskirts in ds2 until they despawn appears to be the intended solution yeah you can't do that you can't that's not cool um i hate it i don't like it uh i think now like i that it was that was my first experience ever going through it and and i remember like

there's only it only happened in a couple areas i think it was um best deal i think best deal is where yeah exactly we saw i got that happens to a lot of people yeah despawn the best deal guys um but um now that i've gone through you know the other games i really don't like that idea um i especially like even though you can repopulate it via you know some type of means as a basic thing that you encounter going through this possibly on your own for the first time without that information the idea that you like can farm in areas if you do want to spend your time getting a bit stronger is fair it's it's i think that's a fair and okay thing given the challenge and you get to learn about fighting these things and and about these encounters and there's a lot

to just re-exploring these areas you know um putting a cap on it that says like no you've either struggled too much or congrats you did it but now you can't farm anymore i i don't like either of those reasons and um you the the idea of like just learning to overcome learning the optimal route to run through in many cases you can avoid them anyway it's not a big deal i don't see why you'd have to then reinforce the the like you know by taking reinforce like by taking away options from the player you know learn you can learn to run it it's not that hard or you can farm it if you want to farm it or you can you know um you know like like deal with it in the intended way but if you're if there's an enemy like that that you described where it's like no

no no the the best shot at this area is by killing this thing 15 times that's by by design fuck that that's awful so and you and you know it's a bad design because uh in that specific thing because the enemies keep respawning without a bonfire until they've been permanently despawn yeah so if you have a really incredible run you could actually kill five of the 15 ones and so it'll have in a couple shirts terrible it's a more um it sounds like a more annoying version of like like to do that thing of like oh um the best way to go through this is to like de-populate it why not make that thing die on the first kill like the toxic blowers and then because shut up make it annoying to deal with but once you get deal done with it once

you're you're okay that was totally fine in in ds1 so it's interesting because we're talking about this and this was kind of a capitulation or a solution to the experience of i know how to get to the boss i'm just gonna run past all the enemies right so at least oh now though you it'll be natural um elden ring is interesting because uh enemies in the open world obviously lease you only to a certain distance because they can't handle it enemies in the not open world will lease you to absurd distances um enemies from the front of the gate tracked me all the way to the part where the network test sealed me off wow um but you can stealth past a large amount of them so that's the solution is leash distances on interior spaces are enormous but you can get

through areas without actually procking aggro range on many of them by sneaking but if the sole reward is worth it then why not just do it anyway stealth take them down yeah i guess it's like if you can stealth through that's one thing but wouldn't it be more i guess intended to stealth take down and avoid the ambush um trump trumpets or the alert trumpet yeah you can do that yeah the sleep arrows are really powerful but missing out on souls that you can get clearing in areas let me tell you playing that elden ring network test there's plenty of souls around oh yeah you're going to be fighting out with like everything is current like at there's so money god damn enemies everywhere in every direction um not an issue here's a question what

um what was the largest soul a number you received was it from um final dude say was from egg healer market was like 3000 4000 something okay okay so that's the scale all right because well that's the scale for now okay because yeah like gwin drops 70k right um so that's your upper threshold for here's the thing right because like the the the souls are still going up in a like a exponential scale like you know 2200 2600 etc per level but if the game's five times the size of the largest souls game then we're probably going to be hitting like level 350 or some shit 100k soul dropping enemies yeah like you know what's going to be really interesting about this game what level do you complete it at that but also like let's it appears that the the map is

going to be a ring let's say you go all the way up the left side right and get to the final area and you're you're doing it and then you go back to like well what about that zone i didn't spend that much time in are you gonna go back there and just start walking through and just one hitting fucking everything and it can't touch you because that's an experience that you don't usually get in these types of games and that would be awesome ah i mean i got that in demons and ds just oh yeah yeah in both runs i just did of these games like i definitely came back to the starting zones in one shot at everything yeah but did you get to the point of like functional invincibility i didn't get to i didn't get to functional invincibility but i got to like i'm

holding havels in one hand and granted the other and menace can't do shit to me i want to walk through a starter zone with some kind of aoe fucking thing on me and it's like playing equinox in warframe where anybody that comes within 10 feet just drops dead i'm wondering if or or um uh instant kill animations for fun just walking into them and they explode like earth like earthbound or persona show me your true form rip the mask off you're dead um what is uh uh uh uh uh uh gonna happen in terms of like are we gonna get a lord vessel and then teleport to bonfires like no you teleport to them immediately can you currently just teleport everywhere absolutely it's a as soon as you have two of them you can teleport anywhere oh shit oh wow okay all right

otherwise fuck traversal in that game because horsing is fun but at a certain point like no it is it is absolutely mandatory yeah you have the ability to try to to fucking fast travel everywhere okay all right perfect done and done uh quick one from zack saying hey best boy woolly sexy boy pat quick question um about piercings sure uh getting my labyrinth pierced was i'm glad they're gone from smt five i didn't think they were good use of your strength stat hop hop up uh nothing wrong with pierce damage i like pierce damage it's it's fun yeah but i don't like that it's a split physical type instead just give me the physical you just want physical and then yeah sure yeah how many damage types there's too many you know i think you get the or elements

the nuclear and then almighty after that they at the end of all of that shit and you're you're fine um as someone who's getting thinking about getting my labyrinth pierced and uh was it a bad healing job with all the beard here or was hair or was it generally nothing uh hugs and kisses yeah it's fine it's totally fine even with the beard getting a piercing on the labyrinth not a big deal um if you've got one before i wouldn't worry about it too much um only thing i would say the only issue i ever had with any piercing stuff is i never did my ears um at the the lobe but i did my ears at the top part and they both just migrated out and that has created uh some bumps on my ear that look symmetrical and intended but they're not like i have two bumps at the top of

my ears that are just like a result of the migrating piercing so that's the only place i'd say i'd say be concerned about everything else has been totally fine not a big deal hope that helps uh last little bit lore dumps lost planet two guys says playing prey 2018 really enjoying the setting got to the part uh where you're in the history museum and they casually drop the timeline of why the world is so different um very little fanfare on this but it's left for it's left up to the player to go check it out it could be completely missed uh in theory but it's a fascinating look into the universe for those that do care uh i hear dread takes an alternate approach to this vomit's lore straight at you but it somehow also worked what are your opinions on lore dumps and

what's your favorite kind i think the only lore dump type of lore dump that i have a problem with is uh we're going to sit you down for 45 minutes and tell you what the deal is we ran mama we ran out of money or yes sure that yeah koji mom if you want to see uh the absolute pinnacle of the worst kind of lore dump that i hate go watch the silent hill movie where at the two thirds mark they realize they don't have enough movie left to explain what's going on and a character just tells you what the story is for 10 minutes zeno gears disc two yeah um i would say that like an awesome example would be doom 2016 where it's there it happens and you actively don't care about it in in game in media you know um but it's enough for you to be like

to get the idea of like where you're going and why but if you happen to want to hear more you got that little codec you got that page of lore that you picked up uh but in in game you're getting just enough to be motivational and sometimes it might even be like you go to hell and you get your in the first age like you get all that shit um it's it's it's nice to be like you can hear this it's going but you're still fighting you don't have you can give it as much or as little attention as you want uh but i would i would i would say currently probably crowding jewel is disco elysium because um just having someone be very charismatic and fun to talk to means i don't mind when joey sits here and spends 20 minutes telling me about the world

yeah that's the mood disco brings out of me you know um that's my favorite because it was the most rewarding but it has to be quality it just has to be that good of a world mm-hmm kind of falls apart if what she if joey's is telling you wasn't interesting luckily it's super interesting in fact it's the it's a fucking reset of your ideas of the setting and it's it's fucking magnificent um or the fact that everyone comes away with such strong opinions of the communard but you only meet you have that and it all happens in the span of one conversation you know um yeah so that that works out that's i'd say that's my favorite all right i'd say that's done podcast defeated good podcast i'm gonna go play halo because i'm such a big fan i've

always loved halo and i've been saying it forever he's been saying it forever see he's been saying it forever