Castle Super Beast - CSB 167: I'm A Rare Shiny Black

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Acti-Blizzard-King Hires MEASUREHEAD A.I. The Somnium Files Is A Strand Game Best Berfs Wesker Survived & Soul Transferred Into Lance Reddick You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://joinhoney.com/SUPERBEAST to get Honey for FREE! Activision Blizzard Heavily Edits King’s Diversity Generator Blog, Removes All ‘Ranking’ Images Activision-Blizzard Announces New Tool to Let Players Measure the Craniums of Characters Activision Blizzard is union-busting in the middle of the union election by Raven Software game testers PlayStation has revealed its classic games catalog for PS+ Konami issues DMCA takedown of images claiming to be a Silent Hill reboot Google Store removes dedicated ‘Gaming’ tab, effectively burying Stadia, to highlight Pixel Buds Nintendo says the transition to its next console is ‘a major focus for us’ Resident Evil Netflix Trailer

Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah... Are you admiring my Morpho Physiology? Yes I am! How are you doing today, Woolly? Be calm, be calm, Ham Sandwich. You are not in danger, for you are no threat to me. Now that I have been promoted to Chief Executive Officer of Representation and Inclusion,

all will be well, all will be fine. Your Hablo Group A4B diverges from the Circumpinical as distinguished by our new chart. I would like to thank Activision Blizzard and Hard Drive and King as well as Hard Drive for the new technology which will allow us to measure the cranial divots of our characters to include maximum diversity. I had a moment. There are two moments. One is right before we start the podcast when we are coming in on the intro, Woolly tells me that we are coming in on the intro and usually it is like,

intro is running, ok we will be live, you know it is very normal. But today there was just the smidgen of the intros going, just the barely contained mirth. But more than that, last week, I want to say it was last week on this podcast, I brought up some bullshit about Activision Blizzard and you rolled your eyes and you are like, it is always the same story that is going to be here every week, it is never any different. And so I see fluttering down onto my network feed, oh this is a new one, oh this is, this is interesting,

this is definitely not the same story as last week. Oh boy. Pay no attention to the union busting efforts that are occurring. What's a union? Just over there. Don't what, who could even, what? We need to focus on the degeneracy of the ham sandwich races and the points and the values therein. You sir, are not Arab, therefore.

I'm not, that's true. You appear to have a score of a zero on our list. And truly this indicates that you are a consumer of Al Ghul. There's, there's so much here, I don't even know where to start. I like CEO Measurehead. So much. I'm a fan of, I'm a fan of Measurehead has been hired by Activision Blizzard and is now in charge. I'm down with this.

I have spent hours and hours digging into this to try and find every possible detail and I feel pretty happy with what I've come away with. But before we go any further, we should probably explain exactly what we're talking about. I guess. Do you want to take it or do you want me to take it? I mean, if you've done the digging, then by all means. All right. So in a news story, we will get to after it because it's actually pretty common and not nearly as fun.

Measurehead is in the process of cleaning house and attempting to put the kibosh on the Raven QA departments incoming unionization, firing people, promoting people to different departments, quote unquote, threatening them with extra pay was a phrase I saw, which was fascinating. And in order to put the the eyeball of scorn away from their staunch anti union tactics, Activision Blizzard put out a blog detailing a particular method and or tool that they are one, proud of creating to admit to using in at least two games so far. And three, discuss how excited they are for this method and tool for the future and how they want to share it, i.e. license it out to the entire gaming industry.

This is where we get the ill fated Activision Blizzard King blog about the diversity chart, which lasted less than 24 hours before they pulled every image from that that blog, as well as putting an addendum saying that it was in beta as well as they, you know, it's just a diagnostic tool. It's not being used to design characters. And then if you dig a little deeper, you can find the 40 minute GDC talk from five years ago, in which the creation of the tool is described ad nauseam. And that talk is fucking crazy. I highly suggest you go find and watch that thing.

That thing is not so I, I was, you know, having an all right weekend and as someone who's, you know, no longer a religious man every once in a while, a story gets released where you just kind of kind of look up. They're like, hey, oh, that one was for me. That one was for me. So I, why is it that the diversity tool is causing such a hubbub? Wally, could you take this away? And I didn't, I have not gone into the GDC talk. I didn't go into, into the, the, the background stuff.

So I don't even, I don't even know what's happening on that level. But essentially it appears that the, the chart that they've displayed here is one that basically ranks every trait of their characters and decides that like, okay, if the base level of zero is your starting point of a, you know, average straight white man that is kind of like the normal, the default point, then everything after that is worth a value of differing from that origin point. But the values then have to be ranked and attributed according to some sort of metric, which then score in fact, which, which then makes it very strange because one has to decide which shades of brown are worth more or what, well, places are worth more and what, and it's just, it is just the most ridiculously horrifying, but also obviously ghoulish look into what we know a giant corporation needs to try and understand humanity, right?

It can't possibly, it has to be quantifiable. There's going to be people that need these types of things. And quite frankly, there is not a chance that this type of tool is the first of its kind. This is just the first that's been publicly used as a diversion tactic from the Union busting going on as a major like, Hey, look at what we're doing over here. There's tons of tools like this. There must be. They just happen to keep them quiet because what the fuck are you doing?

So and then, of course, pulled the slides. Yeah. So that's the thing is that the story got updated and then they started removed. They removed all pictures, certainly. And, and here's the thing too late, mother fuckers. And like, and the pictures are insanely telling of what's going on. And, and it's, and it's, and it's, it's nuts because like everything following up has been like, you know, so I saw there was like an artist on that said like, Oh God, this is embarrassing and stupid.

And essentially, we'll talk about her in a sec. I got her her stuff bookmarked. Right. And that this is the type of thing that could be just for boardrooms and for those types of people and not necessarily. And because our artists have eyes and can just they don't need this type of wild shit. But then the five years ago thing apparently doesn't seem to make sense with that timeline, especially if, you know, they know that on the fucking on the if that's from the boardroom side of things that has to measure that it's not surprising at all. But it it seems based on what the article was kind of describing that this is also very likely well meaning employees that like

this as a background thing that then came to the forefront. And as a result of quantifying these things that, you know, we would like to see in general and putting a specific point value on each thing, it just it couldn't look worse. And it's like, I think it's the wildest video game news story of the decade. You need to go watch that GDC talk because I'm going to I'm going to break it down in general. Okay. But like, so let's let's go back in time. Okay, let's know actually, you know, let's start.

Let's start. Hold on. I'm going to upload a file to your discourse. Sure. Well, the called the diversity space tool one JPEG. Yeah, so that you have what I'm working with here. Yeah. Let's just stuff first and then I guess learned about.

Yeah, so we'll go we'll go in order. Okay, you've you've done some homework here. I just lined up some measure head memes, but by all means, take it away. It's like, oh, this is the most fast as somebody with a background and there was a potential path for me in a clinical psychology, which is where phrenology came from. This is just the peak like abuse of that whole field. So they put out a original chart that had Lucio's area and Torbjorn on it. Right.

And so we all know where those characters are from and what they look like. So right away you can tell that's interesting. The fact that Torbjorn is short and is missing a body part makes him more diverse than Lucio. Okay, you look at that chart. Yes. The chart actually Torbjorn is the highest score on that chart by comparison peak and and his big win is body type. Right.

Right. Okay. And I started to lose my mind. Wally, because under that metric, because I am small, I am more diverse than you who are black. Now, hold on a minute. Because that's how the scores play out. Hold on a minute. Because we're in the same place.

What? Oh, okay. That's true. Lucio and Torbjorn directly on the list. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So that started to throw people because one like, wait, why like Russia and Brazil are

being listed. But Torbjorn Swedish are these all the same level, but fuck that. The Anna slide is actually much more detailed in terms of analytics and actually tells you a lot more about the thought process. So we're going to go down Anna for one. I got points on body type though. Yeah. So Anna has the Egyptian and Egyptian culture and Arabic race options.

Yes. Which means she hits a seven out of 10 on ethnicity and race. That has to put Arabs near the top. Right. Because as you can see on Lucio's chart, black is a three. Black is a three. White is a zero. Black is a three.

Arabic is a seven. Culture and race. There's no way to figure out where Latinos, what's a 10? What's a 10? I'll tell you in a minute. I'll tell you in a minute. I have an answer. You have a 10.

Okay. There is. We'll get to that. Okay. Age 60. That's a seven. Old people. No.

Okay. So the age one is by far the easiest. You start at 20 and every 10 years. At a point. You add a point or two. You know, okay. That one I think everyone can understand. Okay.

Okay. Cognitive ability at zero. So there's no details anywhere that I could find on the cognitive ability chart. Okay. But it has to be level of mental acuity and or neurodivergence. So mental. The only person on the overwatch cast that would have a point in that would be. Symmetra.

What's her name? Symmetra because she was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. Right. At some point a million years ago. Right. So the more neurodivergent you are, the more points. Again, woolly, as I suffer from an anxiety and an obsessive compulsive disorder and you don't.

I'm beating you here on the diversity chart. We'll have to find out. We'll have to find out. Although the idea of looking down that list of characters and seeing a zero in the neurodivergency column and deciding, oh, fuck. Okay. Well, we got to throw one in there. Yeah.

Seems to be in somewhat a plausible scenario, especially when you consider taken up. We'll have taken apart the the averages you can see on the rolls. And so when you consider the fact to two gay characters, yes, the entire spectrum, exactly. So Tracer and 76 and 76 would have had way less points until you go, oh, well, hold on a minute. Let's introduce the last second. They were chosen to be the gay characters on the cast. And therefore that creates an average like it's like the number that they got to was

like, I think it was zero point three, three, six or something like that, said that some something of the full roster, it means that those are the two and then that's pretty much it. Yeah. Okay. So physical ability, one eye, she gets a four. So how much of your body is replaced by nothing? That makes sense.

Robot limbs are such you'd be a six or whatever. Then you have body type, which is slim and curvy at a zero, which is hilarious because that's almost every single female character and overwatch. So hold on a second. If you're gender age, if age 20 is a zero, then like, yeah, what about younger? I guess that would go physical backup negative, just go back up. Yes, sure. Well, not negative, but it would just be distance from the norm.

Okay. Right. Because I'm like, because then gender identity is woman as a five. Good job, women's right. Being a woman is more diverse than being black. I am not going to let go of black being a three. Right. No, that's the most hilarious thing.

However, out of five, however, out of 10, oh, sorry, my bad, scores out of 10. Gotcha. However, being a woman isn't as diverse as being Arabic. Mm hmm. Okay. Okay. So let's all keep that in mind. If a woman is five out of 10, then how do you, I guess that would, I guess that would

place trans at a higher value. It would have to, it would have to, but then the question is, do trans women and trans men have different scores? Okay. Now, hold on, didn't that also, NB is a zero and I saw NB is zero because that means that according to the chart, non binary people are being counted the same as men and so robots and bastion and yeah, like that's, that's all so that's, you get nothing, no points on that.

Not quite. No. Okay. Okay. Not quite. Then you have sexual orientation and heterosexual, which is zero and then socioeconomic background at middle class being a zero. So anyone rich or poorer than middle class will be a higher in the scale.

Economic background. So there's all this data and you're like, wow, this is really, really fucking warped. And then on the honor chart that I sent to you, do you have that up ahead? I certainly do, but like, I definitely can understand why so many questions about Winston are raised. Yeah, but before we move on, there's a little Easter egg in that photo. Oh, tiny little Easter egg in that photo. Oh cowboy.

Yeah. Yeah, you saw him, huh? Yeah. You mean McCree? Yeah. Is it still in documentation and totally being referred to as McCree? Internally. Yeah.

That's, you know, that's, that's, I mean, it's such a subtle thing, but it says so much, you know. Yeah. Change it. Just fucking, just fucking. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

So, yeah, let's go back in time. We're going to go back in time to five years ago where all almost all of these images actually come from, which is the GDC talk. Which would make sense. Okay. In that GDC talk, it was a talk exclusively by King in which they described, they wanted to make a tool to get rid of unconscious bias. Now King, I can't tell from their accent, it seems very like, like Eastern European.

It's like Swedish, Estonian, so I can't, I can't place it, but it's, it's East, White Europe. Okay. Basically. And so King is doing this talk and they're showing off these slides and they're talking about how they need to get away from unconscious bias and we need to get away from certain types of characters. And the number one, I don't know where Sweden is.

Who cares? Anyway, we need to get away from these types of characters. So then they pull out the slide of the types of characters they want to get away with. So I get away from. Number one is unrealistic body types in which they show every female character from Tekken on the slide. Okay. Okay.

And that is the only time a Japanese character is ever displayed in the fucking presentation. Wow. Okay. It is literally the cast of Tekken 6. So yeah, you can't be, you can't be jacked and have different, I guess, levels of mass, I suppose. But the real kicker, it's the cherry on top of the avoid bias tool is the second slide, which is we need to get away from angry black men.

Right. I did. And the slide has three characters on it. Barrett, Big Bo, Barrett and TJ. No, no, no, no, Jax. It has Barrett. It has Jax from Mortal Kombat 10 and it has Cole, Cole, yes, yes, yes, that you're right. You're right.

Years of war. That's what it was. Right, right, right. Yeah. And it's like two of these characters are actively happy and Barrett is actually a sad black man. He's just mad about climate change. Threatening.

Wow. Wow. Okay. All right. And if you dig deep enough into this GDC talk and you'd see into the bragging in which it was used for Call of Duty Vanguard, they specifically mentioned that this tool was used for Call of Duty Vanguard. You discover that the robot in Call of Duty has a higher score than the black guy, which

means Winston and Bastion and all of them get maximum scores as nonhumans. Okay, okay. So not quite angry stereotype as much as loud then loud stereotype. It's in giant block letters, angry black man must avoid. Okay. Okay, hilarious in its own right. It's it's just it's I keep I keep like again, like I keep feeling that it's the type of thing that just like the, you know, like the Borg is going to try to analyze and create

an output. So why wouldn't there be a spreadsheet that quantifies these things? What is the problem? What we have? We want an outcome. We want to ensure that outcome therefore plug in the data to ensure the outcome. Now we come to the artist. What's the problem?

I believe she's an artist. What's the problem? Who you mentioned earlier, one Melissa Kelly, who quote, God, I swear our own company tries so hard to slaughter any goodwill, the actual devs who make the game have built overwatch doesn't even use this creepy dystopian chart. Our writers have eyes. The artists have eyes, producers, directors, etc. As I all know, have eyes and I believe her overwatch.

The timing on overwatches development legitimately doesn't work with the creation of this tool. The characters would have all been made. But what does jive with the creation of this tool is, hey, we're in trouble. Symmetra has autism. Soldier 76 is gay. We changed the cowboy name. And then in that original blog, they described that it is the tool is actively being used in the overwatch to character creation.

So that's the thing is like the products of the tool can be used to like fucking, hey, over here, right? You can use the products, the results of the tool to like do the distraction. But at a certain point, I guess you run out of distractions. And so you just have to show the tool itself off, including the screenshots that I get that are, yeah, apparently years old and just go, this is what, you know, this is what this is how we're doing this. This is what we're probably doing.

And like, I guess the idea was just look how much they're doing and how conscientious they are of these things. So they say that overwatch to use the tool, right? That's currently there's been one overwatch to character that's been revealed. Are you familiar with this character? Who was it? I don't remember who the new character unveiled was. So the new character is a character called Sojourn.

And she is a black woman from Toronto, who is a head to toe, right? Like chin down cyborg, right, right, right, right. Yes. Okay. Um, and I'm, I'm looking at this character and I'm like, the white woman gets you points on the chart. But Toronto doesn't. So chroma up head to toe so you can get the body points.

I mean, like it, it does it seem like their goal was to get everyone as high a score as possible to a maximum 10 overall. It seems as if, uh, by showing that header of like multiple different shapes and circles, the goal was to have as many different circles, uh, be, be disconcentric. You're half right. There were two goals. The primary goal was actually pretty simple. And it is the one part about this whole thing that is like sadly laudable.

Do you remember that it's a meme image that was going around that was what every main character of the seventh and eighth generation of video games look like? And they were all commander shepherd shaved her at soldier man. I've made fun of it and I've talked about, um, a ton of times the character creator problem of multiple games that, you know, kind of just come in with bland options. Yeah. For sure. So that is an image used in the original talk and that image is what's being used as

zero in the chart. And it was basically, it was basically the people over at King going, that's stupid. But the, the natural inclination of the team is to just keep making these types of characters. So the goal is actually, it's not even to get to the most amount of diversity originally. It was fucking stop this exact problem over and over and over again. The failure point was let's make a robot that'll teach the team not to be racist. So when you come back around the other side, right, you go around, you, you, you, you, you start out with the, the purest intentions and because we live in a world written by

Hideo Kojima, uh, GB, the AI system has decided that the solution to war, you know, like, like it's, it's, it's coming around the other way and it's going, all right, there's a halfway point. Here's the fucked up thing. Right. And this is real inside your head internally, there's a halfway point that can exist that is generally a good thing when you kind of go, Oh, hey, you know, um, Street Fighter has been all about the world warriors, but there's never been a Canadian.

Let's throw Abigail in there. Right. There you go. And you're like, Oh shit. It's true. We've never had anybody from Poland. So then they throw in the Polish president. Oh shit.

A character. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's true. Hey. Okay. Cool. Of data as opposed to a numerically ranked and quantified, you know, distance from zero.

It's actually a really good example where, uh, in interviews back, going back to Tekken two, Tekken three, Tekken four, they say we, the way a character is designed in Tekken is they pick the fighting style. That's the number one. They say, Oh, we want a Muay Thai boxer. And then they go, what's a cool stereotype of Muay Thai boxer? Where would they be from? What would they look like?

And they design what they think would be a cool stereotype along that martial art, which almost always ends up being a person from that country. Yeah. Well, but then they kind of like people from that country, but then they kind of get wild with it. Like Fakum Ram is, you know, like a big Muay Thai guy, right? He's like, he's like 85 foot tall. But that's following up from the Wing Chun practitioner, Leroy, you know?

Yeah. And that's again, like no numbers, just like, Oh, what have we not done yet? What might be interesting? Which is something that an artist can sit and do inside their head as an on off binary switch. You know, it's just this thing where over and over and over, like I see every single response to everybody who works in game dev going like, so the solution to no diversity of thought was instead of hiring like a Latino guy and a woman, it was, what if we made a

robot that could teach us to not do a racism, implicit racism? And, you know, and identify the, the, yeah, identify the weak points and then build up enough in that, like at a certain point, the next natural step, because again, right, distraction, but also, and I mean, distraction works certainly because even in the ridiculousness of the story, it certainly did cover up the union busting and it will continue to because this is wild. This is a wild one. But the fact that you can imagine a world where that tool is they put it out there, right?

The next natural step had they not been fucking laughed off the stage would be, okay, the net that data now go and select from a database of pre drawn or or modeled body types, faces, hairstyles, locations, backgrounds and so on and literally hit the generate button and then go increase the point value. Generate seed, we randomized, increase the point value, generate seed. I want a male character, male character, okay, and I want him to missing an arm. Okay, now what, and I need what's that worth and how to fill in the blanks, right, desired score eight, okay, any other hard metrics, cool, we'll fill in the blanks on you and

spit one out, you know. So where this where it becomes the saddest, where it becomes the absolute saddest shit in the world is, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt to at the very least the Overwatch one team that they didn't use this because it doesn't even make any sense, right. But who I won't give the benefit of the doubt to is I bet you anything that this metric was used to deny characters on arbitrary grounds because they didn't fit certain criteria but the real reason was that the whoever was in charge just said I don't like this character for whatever reason.

Well here's the thing, right, you can go back to that Overwatch concept art and see all the characters that never got greenlit, right. The old piece that had like the first look at Athena and so on and I'm sure you can go in there and then go like yeah if this tool comes out about later you're going to retroactively probably put some of those characters through the list, perhaps decide a value and go yeah we're not going to go with that one. And I won't put it past a situation in which legitimately well-meaning artists and talented people are in a situation in which my fucking boss doesn't get this shit so bad.

I have to turn it into a number. Exactly. It has to be a number. I can say the cast is 42 white people and out of 46 on the Overwatch roster and they go so what? There's a black guy, there's an Asian guy, what? But it doesn't work until I bring him a pie chart. Doesn't work.

It just won't go through. Yeah the concept of inherent tokenization is not something that's going to be felt so you have to put it on paper. Like I said Borg must process, does not understand outcome you know and that may or may not be the case and I don't think we'll ever find out because unless there's another GDC talk in there that'll you know show but like that being used as a buffer between suits that need to see numbers to make sure that it's worth it for them to go down this road or into green light those characters are not is very very plausible but you know it could

it could also like the way they're kind of like mentioning it as like what was the detail about it? Like it was worked on in our spare time right? Like there was something along those lines that was kind of like it was worked on in the spare time and it was just developed over time and now it's become the sophisticated tool that kind of made it seem like it was like no no no it's not just a higher up buffer like there were there were like devs that were working on this that like wanted to include to use this as a tool going forward and you know who knows either way I guess now comes

the the the part where we'll talk about how happy we are to show you our results and we just won't show you a glimpse behind the scenes ever because that's fucking embarrassing and any other company that has a tool like this which I assure you they do will know to essentially just be like yeah we're gonna we're gonna have our weird creepy borg tool and keep it private because something as simple as like just going yeah I don't know like something as simple as going on like the intuition of someone who probably has you know like some experience lived as somebody who's not quite a buzz cut soldier man might you know be it might be more natural to just let them design and create a create a person it's wild

it's it's it's I think this is the single craziest fucking look internally at anything that's been happening at a game company in the last 10 years that I've ever seen it's that it's the fucking it's the craziest one it definitely so more than anything more than absolutely anything like we could throw all the details of everybody who worked and signed off on this like throw all that away the core takeaway for me is the person who was in charge of creating good PR to distract from the union busting saw this shit and was like yeah this looks good everyone's gonna think we're so cool show us the email chain where you decided what the numbers were show that's that's the not like I can't think of anything I'd like to see more than a

fly on the wall in the conversation where they decided what the numbers were worth right because there is no possibility it is impossible to have that conversation and not have it be the most insane racist mezzer had shit on the planet like when you decide what a seven is and what a five is and what a three is you can't not sound like the the most insane psycho racist it I can't imagine it I'd love to see it and I'd love to see the flowery language that was used you know to to to to present it in a different way but those numbers came out somewhere somehow they they were they're the product of some discussion I want to know I want to see I can I can tell you exactly how those numbers got created I can tell you the 100% certainty King or the teams that Activision

Blizzard decided that a zero would be the standard white man bus cut soldier man white male right that was in in the office and then every point up is how far outside the office do we have to go to get to that before we encounter this person because that's like if it's not just the darker the skin like the family guy meme the higher the point yeah right then yeah it it had like you have to go on I guess just like a yeah population and distance GPS you know like I would love to see the data I would love to see it incredible so I like I've been one of the reasons I scraped it so hard and there are people like breaking down every possible like math nerds breaking down like well here's the X and the Y can we get the Z there isn't enough there isn't enough can't use algebra

I want it so bad to extract because I want to be able to punch myself into the system oh man it I want to know who decided a robot is a top of the list on diversity that one of the most common characters in games ever well that's what you want I just want the evolution of the meta because quite frankly like I saw someone out of a video or like a post where they're like okay time to speculate guys highest tier possible character Dalsim right uh based on location based on age right based on a number of factors okay lowest tier possible speculation Ethan Mars right yeah I saw that definitely I have a I have a a potential max score uh and that is Kane from binary domain okay the French robot

wow okay um he's not just any robot he's a friend happens to be French and specific okay yeah no I want I want the meta I want the meta that's what I want to see I want to see people you know finding like we can retrofit other characters into this into this this this this build you know we can figure it out we can we can come up with some numbers here um I you know I it just makes me laugh super hard because you have these characters that from a distance would fit into the the the generic mold but uh I could do some creative math and give them big scores and the one that that drops the pops into my mind right away is Geralt from the Witcher because he's like 120 years old and uh is is probably suffers from depression

and he's an albino I've I like I can't believe like how prepackaged this meme was delivered to the internet like it's it it was bowtied and he's Polish and he's a victim of discrimination uh yeah yeah oh it's great it's great oh yeah I just did you know that to be would actually uh get a high body score despite being a sexy ass lady because she weighs over 400 pounds right wait okay yep uh yeah man I think I just I just I don't I don't know I just like I it feels anyway it feels as if like I'm glad that there's a collective like overall general feeling of just like like holy shit what the fuck is wrong with you um because like I there's been there there's been an era of like um if what am I trying to say I'm trying to say that

when you don't know it's so there's so much like I'm trying to I'm like are you now with this tool closer to the people who are like fuck any kind of diversity or inclusion or anything and representation we want our soldier men shaved headed and that's the kind of game I want I want to relate to that game the people who get mad and rust you know what I mean like art like is this tool not closer to that despite the fact that it was designed to be against it are you not just on the same side at a certain point the the the the funniest the the absolute funny what it matters to you to that level you know it's the absolute funniest thing in the world that I have noticed about this was uh somebody uh I retweeted that had the great idea to quote putting a 3000 year old

tsundere anime girl into the activism activism racism dial to destroy it like an evil star trap computer I mean uh no the the the core takeaway is that every time uh ever that uh you feel the the desperate urge to applaud somebody for uh sorry applaud a company for uh uh taking steps against tokenization or dive towards diversity or whatever uh remember that they all may not have nearly a sophisticated robot or chart but that is how all of these decisions are made at the top level every time no one gets any credit ever I think um I'm willing to give um less benefit of the doubt to Activision Blizzard over time as we've seen like the messes get worse and the distractions get louder um it's they have the shittiest PR company it's

unbelievable like it's it's oh my god the worst because yeah so we we reported on a story I get reported okay we we reported on us god god no no no all right no we didn't report on anything we we we looked at some shit that was happening and and fucking made dick jokes around it um but no the we talked about the fact that raven software was trying to unionize some time ago and um that they were getting some headway and basically um what came out right around the time of this uh diversity tool was that they're in the prod they fire 12 team members from raven and have started sending out um pre-election uh union busting things like letters messages and generally trying to um yeah threaten people and kind of say please vote no uh on on you know

all this uh unionization efforts that the the raven software team is putting together so like it's it's kind of it's an ongoing it's an ongoing bit but like every single step of the way um you you have to look and go like they would rather they they almost might rather the controversy of this discussion of this racial shit than that but yeah but it didn't work it actually spotlighted it like it's very obvious what's fascinating about the games industry because uh anti-union efforts at a big company that's common everywhere right yeah walmart you got uh uh the movie theater downtown on st catherine is crazy anti-union for example but depending on what company you're dealing with their efforts for dealing with the union are are varied so what's walmart do

when people start talking about shut the fucking store burn the whole store down fuck your community we're just leave total loss because it's it's better than letting you know uh you know giving an inch but the game industry doesn't like what are they going to throw away their whole qa department like in a day that they need that needs to be replaced right it's not it's not that simple so instead you get tier two of fire people threaten people uh move them around promotes people out of the office the amazon screen box just didn't quite cut it you know and then you run into a problem in which if you come down on uh people who are really genuinely gung-ho about starting a union the harder you come down on them the harder they're gonna want to

make a union because you're just demonstrating why they need why asshole the company is yeah yeah um no it was it was pretty funny like there's videos of like uh uh uh hr at amazon like walking by and like throwing the papers in the garbage and pulling the stickers down and super illegal to do that and they're like yeah well fuck you you know and you know they'll like fight well they get caught on cavern then come back 10 minutes later and do it again anyway and you know um what's fascinating to me is that all of this activision blizzard king stuff is in the wake of them being purchased by uh microsoft which has not fully gone through yet and we're in a weird situation where codex being sued saying he doesn't have the right to even do the deal and then you have um what i'm gonna call

cleaning up before the merger which is i would not put it past somebody at microsoft going you find we are not buying a fucking company that just fucking unionized you fucking kill that you fucking kill it and so on and so forth not to mention there's not going well there's that and then i also saw there's an article about um uh yeah the other things getting in the way including like i think like bobby caudix ongoing legal shit was getting in the way of the deal to some degree and the fact that um uh something anti-monopoly related was also like investigating to see if this was too big of a purchase you know like so it there's a million little factors coming through that are yes kind of interrupting this this this this deal um i still want to see the fucking i

want to see the point score breakdown i want the number what i need to know i need to know uh need to know yeah hey if you listen to this podcast and you're like mad at your boss at activision blizzard because they're an asshole and you have the ability to leak out the numbers please please seriously consider doing so maybe even the whole tool cool come on be a hero um this is only this is well this is tangentially related but um the um you i'm sure you've seen the uh the stuff that's been going through with like uh chris malls and the the amazon progress that's that's happening and stuff um i haven't i haven't caught much of that okay well in any case basically uh the guy that's spearheading the amazon like

unionization efforts is uh like he dresses in a very like hip hop black style kind of thing and like yeah is all and that's just that's what he does and it's just a very it's hilarious because every single time a picture or a post or something goes up play the game with me which is scroll down in the comments uh on any social media and see how fast you can find the post that says now guys despite the way the don't judge a book by its cover despite the way you some of you might be thinking when you look at this individual certain things but don't you know like good for it look good for him he's making look at he look at the things he's doing there's a really hilarious game of of fucking don't judge a book by the cover comment uh find it as fast as possible

every time one of those posts goes up it's it's wild it happens every single time anyway whatever um yeah you know what the saddest thing is what that um well you've been working in this business for a long long time you've really actually worked in the business i've always been on the periphery right and uh we're never gonna get more details on that on that machine because blizzard is is like the the shining beacon of the company i could never find out anything about ever at all whatever the fuck they have you agree to when you work there in terms of nda has got to be the the fucking craziest thing ever because we've had people who worked at microsoft we've had people work to capcom we've had people who worked at Bethesda that'll just

fucking blah blah blah you talk to somebody from from fucking blizzard hey what are you working on nothing mm-hmm what's titan what is well that's what i was literally about to say um like going back years that's always been the case it's been the most airtight ship um and uh i remember getting a feeling for that when um i mean again it wasn't it wasn't like a full test or anything but there was a point in which i did an eval i did an evaluation for starcraft 2 and um um this was in the end this was in the early days of it and i remember like the level of lockdown and and like it was the amount of red tape that the office had to go through to even get that kind of contract in was wild they had to like literally build new security labs for a different

level of like access you know and then um yeah the the idea of like what the fuck is this word titan what does it actually mean and like people inside the company did not know if you were not on the team you did not know being there didn't didn't mean you automatically were privy to that information which is crazy because the other places i worked after the fact when you were the when there were other projects in the office they'd often be like you know meetings to show you what else is going on and what other projects the studio is up to the stuff the usual feeling that i've gotten from most people that i talk to is is it in the building you're working in they'll show it to you at some point just be like hey guys from this department come on and we'll show you

the thing well there's a presentation and then here's what it was exactly yeah yeah so um good good good numbers i want the numbers good business that's good that's good stuff that's good podcasting material right there it's uh it's oh my god i just had the i just had a stroke of genius here's a free meme to whoever wants it the scene from call of duty black ops in which a figure behind a light is screaming at mason what do the numbers mean as a bunch of tv's as a bunch of tv's are filtering all sorts of weird coded bullshit if you're good at video editing and photoshop you just fucking go for it there that one's for free yeah send it to me though i mean dude like i may just be black but um i do have i do have an overweight body type um i do have

but you're tall uh yeah i mean okay fine so that balances out to some degree but i may not be black but i have an overweight body type and i am small okay well you know some things are a zero and some things are a five this is you were pre-diabetic but i have the gout hmm i dodged i dodged the the the pre-diabetic state admittedly i got back oh oh well that oh that puts you back to a zero that does drop me back down um yeah and then okay there's a there's a point somewhere in here hold on though just like but what doesn't doesn't confusing your left and your right from time to time give me some points no no aren't aren't i somewhere on the chart for that come on okay

okay wow this is the this is the best it made me laugh like the hard drive article not just black though granada specifically that's rare that that's rare is that is are you a rare black i'm a rare black because it's half Jamaica but it's half granada in there that is rare black well then shiny out the foil case you get one extra black point up to four shit okay all right okay fine fine fine i'm a shy i'm a rare shiny i'm a shiny rare black like you know you know how sometimes you see some kind of funny thing that happens

like um in events where uh hulk has his voiceline missing and it says disagreeable grunt and it's just a robot you're like ha ha ha that's funny and in your heart you know uh that'll be gone by tomorrow like no one will care about that yep and then other then other times you have things that people who follow really closely will remember forever like uh every interview that happened with itagaki where he would get wasted and like threaten western journalists with a samurai like japanese swords tequila right and and that'll that'll stick around in my heart forever right but then you get this this one's built in now this one's not going away like you've you've made mehser head proud you've literally done it you've done the thing where like because

like like there's the bit but then there's the part where in the middle of the measure head conversation when you go deep enough in he starts ranking the hablo groups yeah he gives them numbers and he tells you you know that if you if you astray from the ultra pinnacle you might have been a high value at a certain point but then that value lowers you know with the stench of potato like it's fucking unbelievable that it literally goes into that territory and it was and it was a it was a point of pride um i can only i i feel a little bit of sympathy for the guys over at hard drive because uh for one thing this is the fastest i have ever seen them make an article based on something one two hours later tops like i want to say it was like sub 20 minutes it was instantaneous

but at the same time like they they all the graphics were already made for them like like they they just use the existing nothing no photoshop didn't have to open photoshop at all like if you go and read the article like they barely had to change anything at all like yeah yeah like it unironically wrote itself oh i hope everyone at rave and software got a really good laugh at the shittiest deflect attempt ever in the games business man best of luck to your unionization gang when you just that uh there's when you push when you go so far off the fucking off the sides when you when you

when you suffer off life bar you know the the the the chart point and you just loop back around the other side and it's like it's it's like it well in game design turns it's really easy we want to get below zero racism just keep minusing oh we hit 255 but it's like it's the equivalent of like when you hit so 255 on one end and zero on the other right yeah and it's like the equivalent when you fly so far the opposite way where you're just like you know fuck these negroes we need to we need to get them the fuck away from our our woman because what would happen if they got to our woman oh could you imagine it could you imagine if they got to our woman i sure could it's when you you just you come all the way back like what happened where did it loop

all right all right so how was your week i couldn't my week was great because i'm sitting there on the twitter do do do and just like no for me for me for me yeah the only thing the only thing that could possibly make this better is if we discover that there was a uh a there was a partnership in cooperation in the development of this tool with the canadian government and with special inputs by justin trudeau in how you could get your diversity points higher that would be something i i remember uh i think it was the end of the get into fighting game stream someone came in and it was like yo have you seen this shit and i was like no not yet save it can't

save it all right um so yeah i had a great week aside from this shenanigans uh i played a couple games i watched moon night hair good things it's pretty good like it's it's pretty par for the course for um marvel's tv show stuff i heard it was a bit more well i mean because moon night is a bit more extreme he's kind of like that pool in that you know it's gonna be a little less tame right it yeah it was good i'm gonna give it a seven uh oscar oscar's cool is it yeah is that the guy he's the best part by far yeah he's great um him him flip-flopping between american and and cockney british man uh is a lot of fun um to the point where every time they have to do

superhero shit you're like um i kind of just want more scenes of them arguing with each other in a mirror like i kind of just want oscar isaac to just be hanging out in a room doing a bunch of acting and then when they start doing the kicking and the punching and the then that shit you're like okay uh ethan hawk uh is terrible oh no as the villain just like maybe maybe i'm crazy but terrible just just the worst does it feel like him underperforming or does it feel like the role is weird i don't know because i don't know i think can can do a good job in the right context sure it's just he's so boring he's just like you have that you have this this kind of hyperactive main character that's that's very interesting and then you have a oh you know what

maybe people are correct it's the antithesis of the hyper crazy guy he's boring as a result of the main character capping capturing the opposite energy no he's people are saying in that chat that the the character is terrible and me you know what the character is terrible so maybe i'm confusing his acting with how terrible the villain is in moon night um the villain is terrible in moon night okay it is it is a drag when he is on the screen because if um if like moon night is the type of character that's anything but boring so if there's an intentional this decision to do like what you do with a ton of other characters and heroes and villains and have them you know play opposites he's just hyper calm and soft spoken and smug and it's just so dull okay it's just so fucking dull

but it was it was a fun it was a fun thing or there was at least a cool like i don't know who they were they got playing conchew but it feels like peter cullen even though it's not peter cullen it feels like optimus prime as conchew you went through the whole thing yeah it's only six episodes yeah okay it's it's pretty short um let's see what else did i fucking do with my time uh now i gotta go oh i um i spent the better part of two weeks fighting dais x1 i wanted to stream dais x1 and you decided to not run it through like any sort of emulator to simplify the process i i tried everything yeah and uh in fact daxilog i swear to god i will ban you from this chat

every time i say this somebody goes just use kenti's launcher and like hey no when i say i tried everything i even mean i had two different friends suggest detailed fixes that worked on their computers but didn't work on my computer and my personal favorite was getting every single thing perfectly ready and it would work fine and it would fucking it would fucking record perfectly and then i restart the computer and obs no longer knows what dais x is and that happened to be three different times i don't know what the fuck is going on with that game it doesn't want me to stream it i'm so mad it made me so pissed off yo we might be heading for a world where some games are so old and incompatible with modern systems that the only way to play it is by streaming

like yeah there might be a parsec style stream service to run an old game on an old setup and actually like have it work it also created a very interesting situation in terms of uh streaming the game because it's it's a new version of works fine on my uh machine in which i could play dais x trivially easily i had no issues playing it the issue happens the instant you click that obs button and the game starts to go not oh so you screw up your monitors brightness you are able to use a virtual machine no i didn't need to the steam version works completely fine as long as i'm not trying to record it okay okay okay you go to record it and it goes to hook and it either doesn't hook or the brightness is completely broken or it stutters like fucking

mad and then you try and use direct x3d and the direct x3d runs like shit so then you try to open gl and then gl stuff it's like i'm gonna die anyway so i played i started playing bio shock one instead that game is kind of hilarious in hindsight because um in the immersive sim genre a genre which i've talked about on this podcast and people tell me doesn't exist but it does it is the baby of the isam like it was supposed to bio shock was supposed to be the spiritual successor to system shock yeah which kind of originated it i think if um if anything our last discussions about game genres prove that if one person believes in it the genre exists yeah it's like a tag on steam the devs who make immersive sims literally call them immersive

yeah but like who are you to tell me that boobs and butts rpgs don't exist i'm i'm i would tell you that they do yeah so that's it obviously boobs and butts rpgs they exist that's it um but uh bio shock one uh is strangely comfy as a game to go through nowadays because it's an isam where there's no stress you can't die you can't die in bio shock i don't know if you remember that but you just hit the vita chamber and you pop back out nothing lost um but on top of that like enemies are insanely like a single shot from a pistol will just ice them instantly and they give you tons and tons of crowd control options right away and you're drowning in items like it's hilarious like it's crazy how easy it is people point out you can turn the vita chambers off you

couldn't when the game came out most people don't know that but when the game came out you could not turn the vita chambers off now the last time i remember discussing with you uh you hated the pipe puzzles right i don't hate the pipe puzzles i hate how often you have to do the pipe puzzles okay it's like it's crazy every time you go to hack something okay do do a 30 40 second pipe puzzle i didn't mind them but i don't mind that kind of puzzle at the end of the day i suppose um so um h bomber guy put out a video about day sex recently which happened about two months ago which had nothing to do with my attempt to play day sex but a lot of people brought it up so i took a look at it and one of the things that he talks about in that is that hacking in day sex

one is you walk up to a terminal and hit hack and there's no minigame but you have to do everything that you want in the system while the timer's going down and he described something that i actually very much strongly agree with which is that hacking minigames suck they're kind of all terrible they almost all freeze time um and they almost all take you right out of the moment in fact in day sex one when you're hacking something and have to worry about patrols sneaking up on you or being able to read all the emails in time okay it is fair that they break your immersion i saw people just say other than nero automata you're fucking nuts that hacking minigame was

so awful by the end of that game i didn't mind it that's the thing is and this is where it kind of comes down like it does destroy immersion and pause the action um in a lot of cases uh but i guess if the minigame you're playing is something that i enjoy doing that i don't feel like it's a chore um and furthermore in nero automata's case the implementation of that minigame and where they go with it is fucking phenomenal how that gets used in the narrative is the coolest shit i love the payoff i i love that but as somebody who discovered early on in nine s's campaign that hacking enemies was the most optimum way to beat them and hacked like a shit zillion enemies i was real tired of that hacking by the end of it um i think probably you know i just thought of an

example that works against me um have you ever played any of uh you have you played uh fallout three or fallout four or uh new vegas no uh not really i mean i i so they yeah no so they have two hacking minigames one's the lockpicking one's the computer right i'm calling lockpicking hacking because it's functions it's a minigame that gets the door it's a mini game to unlock a door uh the lockpicking is great and one of the reasons it's great is that you can get really good at it and do it super fast um the uh computer hacking is so awful the first time i ever play any of those games i download a mod that just skips it because it takes forever it takes forever it's crazy how long it takes um well i i can i can attest that uh as someone who worked on thief uh i i started out

very much into the the lockpicking and by the time we were done testing i was sick of it but um the the the the the action of doing what feels like you're spinning the sticks around to find the hooks and and and you know doing the actions initially was interesting but there's a certain amount of time that can go by where you're like yeah okay i'm i'm good with this feature i'm done you know so regardless of that like um man boshak one's just it like that games art held up so well compared to many of its contemporaries at the time like rapture still looks and feels and sounds like one of the coolest locations ever because it's stylized and oh yeah it's stylized it's not realistic it's not hyper realistic yeah it's a cool looking location i guess really really

interesting it's really good and so if the game plays a little easy or if it's a little tired like ah whatever um what ruined my day what like unironically ruined my day was that i was talking about doing bioshock and i said if any if everybody really likes me doing bioshock maybe i'll do bioshock too and then if everybody likes me doing bioshock too then i'll swallow my own vomit and play bioshock infinite to which the dastardly mr. feels wild ride informed me that before you play bioshock infinite if you want the best reading of the text you have to go watch zack sniders sucker punch and i'm like no you don't to which receipts were provided in which prior to bioshock infinite's release zack snider and ken levin did a podcast in which ken levin

talks all sorts of adoration for how great sucker punch is and then i start to think about bioshock infinite and i'm like oh no oh no there's a connection there which is crazy because i don't know if you remember but but sucker punch plagiarizes the final fantasy everything yes it does the fourth section of that movie is just the the lightning trailer yeah the train and and i mean they're all like all the sequences um the again it was it was a collection of four music videos that should have been put out in isolation and then some not ah i i still say sure the the the whatever the gatling gun samurai put it out it's a poster poster you know whatever kind of art art moment and and then they just they they strung it together with some live action like horrible

fucking whatever but apparently the the infinite dlc like where you go back to rapture and there's elizabeth minerva's dad not minerva's dad the no no no the return to rapture yeah yeah apparently that stuff is like like kind of like a fucking like sucker punch like fan so man man that one though that like ken levin read half of atlas shrugged and went wow libertarians huh yeah yeah i mean damn dude like that but like they do a really they do a really good job setting up the world like i remember it takes you so long to get into rapture yeah it's it's it's got quite a start you know and and um the entire journey over there is like you're like okay this is this is the elevator pitch this is the full you know uh uh uh uh cell on the world and shit like

is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow is absolutely gonna hit the person in the chest that's like yeah absolutely yeah you know and so is a child is entitled to the sweat of their brow as well it's it's it's really great yeah it's really great because when i was watching like is the man not entitled to the sweat of his brow no says uh the man in washington it belongs to the poor no says the man in mosca uh sorry no says the man in the Vatican it belongs to god no says the man in Moscow it belongs to everyone and i believe i looked at that it's like no and at uh andrew ryan says no it belongs to me yeah yeah yeah yeah like my one of my favorite it is in fact a literal elevator elevator pitch that's true looking at um people picked all those you remember crypto land

that fucking island from hell they were trying to get going oh the um the um uh metaverse stuff crypto island no no the the physical island run by crypto with no laws uh no i must have missed that one one of the funniest parts of that is that people just started taking the main account and photoshopping andrew ryan's onto the yeah okay okay just changing the word crypto land to rapture okay and it was just like a one to one it was was right there is that where that screenshot about the age of consent came from yes oh that's what that was that's a real tweet that was just goofed around by changing the photos to bio shock characters okay okay for those of you at home you can't hear over woolly's uh nervous laughter he is pulling at his collar yeah okay but yeah no

bio shock ones great i'm interested to see i'm interested to go through it again uh and just see where the game completely falls apart um are you are you um doing any particular type of build or just going with the spare the sisters and do the weapons typical run i i'll i'll figure it out as i go because even though it's net net negative it'd be interesting to go through it a different way oh no i'm saying i'm saving i'm saving the kids because it's net positive and i'm i'm lambasting the decision every time for being what might be the worst moral choice of that entire generation okay uh but bio shock ones crazy uh you you beat two i didn't beat two yep but bio shock one just completely falls apart in the last level yeah no like like doesn't just do the same

thing um it it the problem with two's finale is that it it tries to overcorrect by replacing the final boss the one's final boss is one of the worst final bosses in video games right that's the whole level is awful so it tries to overcorrect by making it a um of um just a rush uh uh uh what you call it um god what is it called horde right yeah and you so you just go through a bunch of waves and like it's it's it's a wave battle but it's not an it's not a wave battles are not that exciting and they're not a big build up climax really you know um it's funny that you mentioned that because uh before bio shock one's terrible boss fight you have to fight waves of enemies hmm um and in infinite the final boss fight is waves the gauntlet yeah it's the gauntlet yeah

infinite is like offensive because they they build you up to fight the final boss and go no don't shoot shoot regular guys and it's upsetting now a gauntlet is not inherently a complete failure of a choice for a final conflict it can work if the narrative supports a really good example shoutouts to uh fucking zaks last stand right yeah you can have the concept of a final moment where you exactly and halo reach exactly those two are standout examples where the wave narratively is working and so that whole thing pays off i went through crisis core twice and i think it's clems who put out a video reviewing it and talking about it i think that the final fight in crisis core is better than crisis the entire game because like all all that shit with the slot machine

and the fucking uh the fuck all that system shit yeah is kind of garbage right up until until it starts breaking apart in the order you're right in the order of fucking impacts yeah yeah you put up with it and then that's what you get it's not a totally up to the on point not wrong at all but but anyway like you can you can make a wave work but in the case of bioshock too it was just trying to do the opposite end of the spectrum from one bad final boss you know yeah uh all right let's move on for bioshock i played kaiju wars you've seen this at all um you brought it up last week yeah check it out it's like into the breach but not it's uh into the breach but with more advanced wars in it

like you're you're building units to fight a kaiju that's and there's only one kaiju per man one enemy to fight it's got a cool it's got a and you can't beat them oh you just stall for time yeah it's literally stall for time even if you kill the kaiju on the next turn an identical kaiju shows up uh and you're literally just trying to stall until your research base can can make some kind of breakthrough so it is absolutely a hundred percent stall for time protect the structures or yeah yeah okay yeah that's that's all the shit i like it's basically protect the lab until the lab is able to build up enough breakthroughs to essentially turn the monster off uh but all the buildings uh around you the way they work is the monster will always

the into the breach part is that the monster will always attack the nearest structure okay no matter where they are they will 100 always attack the nearest structure if they are equal equidistant between two structures you'll actually see little percentage markers on each space so if they're equidistant between two it'll have like 75% that they'll be here and here then 50% and oh like there's odds okay yeah and then once they destroy a structure that's not like a lab it removes that structure from your economy phase so every the way the phases work is you start up and all the existing buildings give you cash to buy units in order okay and then so you're managing the amount of cash you have to buy units you're managing little cards

that show up to give you buffs how many you're managing these uh as like a ton like like eight to ten okay you really flood the map oh okay uh but but units die like instantly upon contact with kaiju they're they're there to slow it down right exclusively interesting okay uh it's really cool um yeah it also has a really super super intense like neon pink art style yeah i'm looking at it and i see the the the aesthetic is is absolutely on point it also has and this is a weird thing to compliment it has one of the best main menus i've ever seen ever because you're in like a control room and there's like 10 tv's in the background and they're showing off like footage of kaiju like live action footage of kaiju and they're showing off fake news reports and shit like

that and if you click on one of the live action bits of kaiju it zooms in and tells you well this is actually a public domain kaiju movie uh from the 50s okay and then when you click on it again it opens up the youtube link to the entire fucking movie oh wow if you so want to watch this old kaiju movie from the 50s or 60s interesting that's pretty cool it's it's really cool it's it's definitely like a labor of love kind of thing all right moving on from that man willy what's the difference between a ripoff and an homage almost nothing um okay the the feeling in your heart when you do it because i played a game called nightmare of decay which sits right on that fucking line it is an indie game made by one person it is a resident evil one and four send up

it is a first person shooter made in unity that looks like the re1 mansion and plays like the re1 mansion and has zombies like the re1 mansion and is basically like a little resident evil one fan game except every npc is a silent hill character like like like obviously clearly and one of the bosses is the butcher from diablo who yells out ooh fresh meat when he comes like it is okay it is a bunch of shit just slapped together someone's having fun with the toys in the toy box yeah and this would be hilarious if not for the fact that it's actually really good okay it's actually a really really genuinely great little horror game um but it it is it it feels like an almost tarantino level of like did you did you

like that in that movie did right so like for example there's a little puzzle where you would go and and put a crown on a little statue and it's in a big wide open room with four suspicious suits of armor that are flanking you and the instant you pop them down sure enough they come alive and it's a boss fight it's the exact same fight from resident evil four um yeah like it's people will go really hard like people will uh a lot of programmers and and game devs will cut their teeth on just a massive homage to the things they love you know and and like learn how to program by just kind of recreating the things they know really well um and when you look at like how in depth some fan projects can go it's like there are people that yeah are willing to put

the amount of effort that you would put into an indie game fully into just a a send up to the things they love and like you can't tell me otherwise um I guess if it's not trying to like like again it's the feeling in your heart is the only difference yeah that's it that's the only thing you've got you know between the two good so like what one of the bosses yeah like a dying man tells you hey man be careful run from the beast it's impossible and then you pick up a key item and you turn around and some monstrous shadow comes across and it's a bunny rabbit and then the bunny rabbits eyes glow red and get really big fucking teeth and becomes a legitimately very difficult boss fight okay and you're like oh okay um yeah it's as as a first project it's

really really great and it's also dirt cheap it's like four bucks it's called nightmare of decay it's it's the creator's first first project I believe so then that makes perfect sense then this is exactly the type of thing you see as a first project very often yeah and I want to give I want to give them like a like a little golf clap for like hey you really wanted to make a resident evil fan game uh congratulations on being smart enough to not call it resident evil afterlife or whatever and instead making your own goddamn game so that it's yours ever so slightly but it's still there yeah like good for you it's so depressing when you see people make games that could absolutely just be their own thing they can't and they're like but it's it's gotta be Mario

it's gotta be has can't resist the urge it's so tempting it's just like I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't love the thing that but it's yeah it's not a con I just call a master chef just call a master chef and just have him shoot the spaghetti you know as as the uh shut the fuck up guy every time something pops up on the internet like I get sent you know then the story about the the fan game right away and yeah it's this it's just it's infinitely the same story but again you're like you're the part that's saying hey like don't do that thing is yelling at the same passion that is behind the game's existence to begin with you know oh yeah master chef is also trademarked somebody points out well then call him hasty chef there done

done nailed it all right uh I also started playing I mean literally John Halo is not actually a title that you can't use you're right you can literally just use John Halo and that's that's allowed yeah you could you could use John Halo and have him fucking fuck some evil spy in front of his AI girlfriend and doom reach if you want it if you want to make your shitty fan fiction that shows a train wreck I don't know what's happened I just told you okay um like I what I don't what what the fuck are they doing anyway moving on um what about problem I saw me in what's that nevermind I started playing I saw me in vials again uh

oh man that game AI AI AI is an I but love but also the robot but also fully the name so much worse than I thought it's so much worse than I thought see because you need a character it's a that is that a strand game is AI is AI the Somnian files the second strand game oh oh it's it's it's out of control okay it's out of control yeah it is it is like you run into a character and they're like hey what's your real name iris oh my god and then and then and then and then you're standing you're a horse you're standing near a horse and she's like huh maybe the murder was a ritual killing because there's a horse and that's like Horus and he's the brother to Isis which means which has the eye of Horus because I

in the story are doing it like out loud I've gotten shit over like over this type of making fun of this type of shit where it's just like woolly white what's the problem with puns it's fine whatever and it's like no because like that particular style of pun you just said like IIII all the five or six different interpretations of that is like okay we it's the same thing of like the the strand fascination where you're gonna see like um language links that basically are connections being made by like a non-native speaker like I said last time yeah and horse and Horus is not something anyone is gonna connect because they sound alike because sound delights are not really a thing in English like like if you go for a pun so it's

often gonna sound the exact same not a not not sound alike I I have to give it a round of applause because the localization is genuinely excellent but you run into you run into what I'm gonna call um untranslatable humor like untranslatable right so Metal Gear has a lot of that a lot of just bizarre phrasing and you're like but why do they say it like that it's like oh because it was translated from this and they wanted to keep it a certain way so the one that kicks that that kicked me in the gut was like constantly you're constantly talking to your eye whose name is uh Iba because she's your partner of course and she's an AI naturally lives in your eye

and she's your Ibo um and uh you click on a locker and your character goes that's a rocker sorry that's a locker and she goes oh like what like progressive or like new metal exactly and he goes no it's a locker yeah and I'm and I'm like sitting there I'm like I don't know what there did wait is is she thinking he said rocker because it's a locker yeah yeah like what because you switched over to uh to the the L's and the R's and you know we make those mistakes all the time so it wouldn't know we don't know we don't yeah um so there's a line that kefka drops at one point where he's like there's a reason why oppose rhymes with dispose and I'm like oh man yeah that's uh that's the transliteration right there like you couldn't

there was no way to rewrite that one into a way that sounded like it anyway it's like that type of observation is not something that anyone really does in English it just it's that sounds like a like a particularly Japanese line yeah so on top of that I will say uh the writing is actually like really really super interesting it's the same it's the same people that did um same writer at the very least who did a 999 and VLR and like the the notary games and you could definitely tell because it has that that it has that like I feel like it's a Japanese style of writing but like maybe that's just my encounterant of like blah blah blah mystery someone used this name hey did you know that that name is actually derived from this and that that and then we're

just gonna talk about this now like almost jojo style like tangent tangential dialogue about nothing um but it's but it's fun and it's interesting and it's it's charming um in particular there's a very very early game moment like within the first hour of the game in which you encounter a character and cannot cannot get him to tell you what you need to know so that you hack his computer and discover that one he's an idle fanboy he's crazy he's obsessed he's obsessed with his idol who plays games on the internet particularly Minecraft I mean shovel forge sure and you you you get into his uh you get into his laptop and discover that he's running four simultaneous toe whitter accounts one of which is defending her and the other three are

sock puppeting and trolling her and the game's using the game is using the word sock puppet and you use it to blackmail him in front of her and I'm and I'm just like on point yeah it's dead on yeah okay like I I this exact horrible scumbag is being fully realized so excellently that's pretty solid um that game's great and man in terms of streaming visual novels are tough unless they got that voice acting like isomium files does at which point the difference between fucking phoenix right and disco elysium is a chasm I I think I feel like everyone has sat down and gone I'm gonna stream or LP or record phoenix right by myself and then they get to the end of the first case and they're like I am no longer going to do that yep yep I did it page did it

I'm sure you did it as someone who it's it's I I haven't gone through those games and I want I want to because I know how good they are the desire is there but uh yeah that is ain't LP that is an LP killer it's it's just so much uh every chapter is a every chapter in isomium files is a is a Japanese word that ends with AI and the AI is capitalized and the and the murder victims are all missing their eyes yeah I just I bet it has and the killer is called the Cyclops killer because he's got an eye so again I can only stare at these strand games and like laugh at the ridiculousness but I I have to know like I'm like in the in when you're when you're playing this in Japanese

does it just land as clever do puns land as clever puns have a different denotation in in English and Japanese like Shakespeare thought puns were the highest form of wit right right shake and but for whatever reason over time in English puns have fallen out of favor they have not fallen out of favor in Japan Japan loves puns we play a lot of video games you know Japan loves right but like even but like we we will take puns in the in the realm of like a self-aware silly dad joke moment but like when it's a dead serious conversation that two characters are having about you know mario and princess beach like yeah it's not meant to be a joke there so I have to assume that to the person who created this scene it's actually a cool clever thing

you know it must read that way I wouldn't call it clever insomnium I would call it goofy the whole game is goofy like it's going for this is really really intense like murder mystery and then you go down to the computer lab and meet pewter who looks like a goddamn pokemon doctor yeah um and then I find out that he is because the character designer for isomium files designed all the characters for pokemon go um and the reason why his name is pewter is because he's the computer guy and like the stone as well it's it's both yeah yes but then on level of characterization you're like ha ha that's hilarious but then you start rifling through his desk and you're like wow all the

books in the computer lab that you would think are like diagnostic manuals just nothing but gay porn manga nothing but okay like every single book like okay sure gets gets born down here in the lab huh um did did you find yourself learning about propognotia or not yet no ice nine yeah okay I think I think one of the funniest ones is like they tell they mentioned that the a former serial killer was called the cyclops killer and because the game was written for a Japanese audience your AI robot takes you on a tangent and goes this is what a cyclops looks like and pulls up like a like a diagram of a cyclops and explains that they're a Greek monster that I'm like oh right like I know what like I know

what a fucking cyclops is one of the most common monsters ever but maybe this audience it's not as common to know what the goddamn greece and cyclops is make no mistake though that other aspect of these games where you're wandering off and learning about god knows what because we're you're going on a jojo tangent as you described is what made you fall in love with metal gear when the fucking DARPA chief sat there and talked to you about uh when um they talked to you about muff uh not the DARPA chief when um um uh Kenneth Baker the president of armstack armstack Kenneth Baker is going on about muff and then it cuts to live action footage and you're going whoa whoa whoa what why am I looking at live action footage and real war nuclear material unaccounted for

and like that is exactly what buys you in in that moment because you've never had that experience in a game before I'm gonna give the all-time greatest use of seemingly completely extra curricular extra curricular knowledge in a game to 999 a game which is obviously based around a number game it's called the nonary game which means the game of nines in which you're hanging out with what appears to be a stripper in a fucking kitchen and she just turns to you and goes hey do you know how base 12 math works and you go uh no and they go all right let's explain how base 12 math works and it ends up being really important um you know any any sane creator would want to they'd want to establish their world by having you flip through the tv channels as things

get worse by showing you a couple of news clips and then you know world war z intro type of thing and then you eventually fade into um where we are today uh however um kojima will film entire channels that have 10 minutes plus running material you can't see most of it and like you they're all playing simultaneously and you can sit and watch like david hater sitting there and doing like a full interview you know like you know i'm just i'm just thinking about how much i love what the type of story we're talking about because i'm thinking back to virtue's last reward in which within the first 20 minutes of a game a character grabs you by the shoulders like had you ever heard of the logic problem called the prisoner's dilemma well you see the prisoner's

dilemma works like this and just like a game that's like hey so this is the theme dang and rampa goes hard on that as well um every single chapter case and murder always has a moment of like have you heard of some weird obtuse thing that is hyper relevant to this one specific case yeah absolutely i'm interested in seeing what uh i somnium spiles is because right now the core conceit is did you know that humans have eyes which i don't think that's the theme i don't think the theme is that people have eyes um it's a good yeah it's really good okay the the mystery is in the mystery is engaging the part where you solve

the little puzzle uh is both uh fascinating and dreamlike and engaging and weird but also there's two ways to solve every puzzle and depending on which solve way you solve it you get a different clue which will lead you down one of the your different branching paths so it it more it more cleanly builds into the way a pathway branch rather than i decided to go left instead of right it's like well no i found the clue that was these photos of this event or i found the the memory of this thing so then i followed the investigation in a different direction and lucky me the sequel is coming out in uh 45 days so here's hoping that goes well i also want to say and this makes me sad because streaming mystery games is terrifying right you you've had this

moment you played disco these have you heard of mlk i have i have um streaming a game that has a mystery is kind of terrifying because uh people in the chat could just go right yeah yeah um my experience with i somnium files was that everybody was chill and most people were just genuinely curious and the reason why that is is because the games not popular okay so everyone's along for the ride with you like 99 percent of the people in my chat were like oh what what yeah yeah like the 10 people that knew what was going on knew well enough to shut up and it's like wow this sucks because the reason why i'm having an easy time is because the game didn't sell gangbusters and people aren't coming into over excitedly ruin it for you

where whereas like disco elysium had like a really small amount of time where it was hot but no one had beaten it yet and then it became fucking molten hot fucking excellent and everyone knew what it was what right and like our our lps that were simultaneous got to experience that where i basically just barely hit the finish line before hit pop culture in the in the chat and then you didn't and people started being like complete pieces of fucking shit yep yep yep yep and it's why like like i believe you had a much easier time with 13 sentinels because 13 sentinels is a game that we had to go hey everybody you should really try and check out 13 sentinels it's cool it's good just try it but also like it was full lockdown oh you were full

lock i went i went full lockdown and a message on screen uh the entire time during the stream that was like yeah i'm not i'm not reading anything i'm not acknowledging anything okay it's not worth it this gate this it's it relies too much on that journey for me to risk it it's just a sad thing because like i'm i'm sitting there and uh i'm investigating a murder scene in this in this story and and i'm i'm putting down the the weight of the victim and trying to figure out how they could have been snuck into the room via elevator that has a weight lift right stuff like this and i'm looking over to my chat and people are like doing math and like well if you did this and like they're genuine like oh what you know uh pontifications

they're not like smug fucking gray smiley face piece of shit gray face like maybe it would be possible he's like oh wow when everyone is cool this is a great experience it's a shame it's so difficult to have everyone be cool i had a touch of that with uh something i played this week but i'll go back to to it once you're uh well that's pretty much it for me if you want to see more isombium files and bio shock and and uh the other the other crap you go down to twitch.tv slash pat stairs at and i'll be streaming at four p.m west coast time seven p.m east coast time there you go um over on my side uh played a couple things but uh yeah a friend of mine um who was actually i think you might have met him uh some years ago uh i don't

know if you remember nadim um he doesn't ring a bell okay well anyway uh really cool guy and like he's been like in like though he's been doing a lot in and achieving much in in the world of uh um computer tech and and academia and stuff and and he so he um also worked on a lot of like um encryption programming and things like that like really really smart guy but um it has a game coming out basically called uh dr kobu ishii's labyrinthine laboratory and uh yeah just decided to take a crack at making a game and it looks and it like the sprites are on point the music's on point and it's a lot of fun um so he put out a demo you spell that because i just tried to look it up and botched the spelling uh doc dr uh space yeah kobu ishi and then it should

show up uh here we go uh yeah and so yeah it's just a simple puzzle game that has a little like format to the like a grid system maybe it's like um i don't know how many tiles are in the each puzzle room but you have that and then you have a side uh sort of panel that acts almost like a permanent codex screen where the given like boss of an area will just be taunting you and talking shit the entire time while you're trying to solve the puzzle um and there's like a baba is you element to like you know make the right steps move in the right direction stepping out of place and doing the wrong thing and pushing the wrong thing in the wrong place means you can't progress um and yeah a very classic like puzzle game style it sounds sounds familiar to like dr brain's castle or

something like that if you remember that fucking thing i don't but uh that was an ancient ancient puzzle game that you could play in like your fucking grade three computer like way back in the day was a dos game okay yeah i'm looking at some of this uh sam and max esk art here but yeah um but yeah no and so you just kind of like you're you know moving around and it's again very simple just uh certain tiles once you step on them they fall through other things you got to push in place and whatnot and um oh like squid game sure and once you do like the first two levels immediately like the third level is like okay step it the fuck up every time you step forward on one tile an enemy will move forward by two tiles make it to the exit across the map somehow despite the

fact that this thing moves twice as fast as you do figure it out right and so now you got to play these little like chess pre-planned like oh shit if i go left there's a barrier there and it moves a certain way and like and then it like immediately starts to get challenging like like the there's no chill on the difficulty escalation um i want to say by puzzle six like it was like i'm sitting there with reggie and we're just sweating you know at the like 30 step sequence that you have to internalize and play out uh in perfect sequence because every time you take a step the enemies will move a certain way and change your threat uh uh uh you know um odds and such um so yeah no it it it just got fucking hard and like but we got to i think 10 and then stopped and we're just like

okay got it uh brain is hurting in the baba is you way uh very very quickly um but it but since it got so challenging so quickly like with baba is you i remember there was always a you get to a level and you see a bunch of people go oh it's this one you know you know i'm just i'm just thinking of there were so many gdc talks and so many dev talks about like you know the good the good particularly portal two or something like that's like you know the trick between with a good puzzle game is to make the the player feel smart when they solve the puzzle and i'm like that doesn't feel like the current era of puzzle games no because every time i solve a puzzle in anything current i just go why am i so stupid who's so obvious god damn it it is an anxiety release it is not elation you return

to zero when you complete these puzzle stages you don't go to you know up to a 10 or 20 um and yeah like in this case because again new game new experience we're all seen it for the first time everyone people were staring at it going like i can't try oh god i'm i'm out i can't i don't i give up i give up you know um but yeah i know it was pretty fun and um yeah i'm um um you know happy that uh he's is working on such a cool thing so for for baba is you headache vibes if you want to invite that man if you want to invite that world into your into your life again uh yeah check out dr kobu ishii's labyrinthine laboratory not to mention the again music and sprite art and pixels are just fucking awesome crisp really really nice looking very classic um and uh another game we

checked out this week uh it's it's just a demo but i think the full thing's coming at some point it's called splash um slash sc l a s h and uh it fits into um it's a it's kind of like one strike which was like a one hit fighting game there was another one called ki resonance uh where essentially it's a fighting game where you have a sword that one hit kills you and then you've got a couple of defensive options for movement parrying um uh and you gotta provide links to these because i typed in splash and got some fucking got skills win cash india's very own real cash skill based gaming platform oh god and then there's yeah and then there's the camon rider belt so that's not gonna work um okay so it's not the camon rider belts and it's not that it's the thing that looks

kind of like samurai shampoo um i think if you type slash game yeah that's that's how i know that didn't work either okay boy seo oh boy optimize that search engine results man even typing splash steam oh man dude it's it's tough it's tough out there okay well it's the result that has the orange and yellow background with the samurai that's basically doing the samurai shampoo thing right oh i see it now i seize it yeah yeah yeah it's that game um you gotta type it into steam the developer is bevel bakery so um it's pretty cool the art styles is is is uh very nice um kind of moody samurai game and yeah you your buttons are you know forward back um slash attack charge to do a hard one that guard breaks that well although there's no guard per se uh there's a

parry there's um a dash and there's a pommel strike which like staggers you for a moment um and then you have a stamina meter so you can only do four actions before you have to wait uh and so a lot of this uh as the basic fundamental game plus a ton of style and juice a every time you like parry something or pommel strike or dash up to someone there's like a dramatic slowdown every time you land a hit there's like a big like sort of like you know kind of samurai puts the sword away moment you know um it's just it's just a super stylish uh footsie based uh uh samurai game hey kids if you want one woolly versus to check out your game you might think about adding some more juice juice yes you love the juice yeah you love it it's one of your

favorite like man i was playing this game and it's just got so much juice i it it it fucking works it's important it is it's important to have juice there's a great gdc talk about adding juice to your game and yeah live on stage the the the folks doing the talk they show you a game of arcanoid and then they just start adding juice to it on the stage and then by the end you're like oh shit yeah look at each of these things little sounds little colors little you know there was an entire genre of games in like the psv era where they're like what if you took space invaders and just kept it space invaders and just juiced it as far as it'll fucking go add that juice every single one of those games was awesome yep with the king of course being pac-man champ dx exactly um pac-man

champ dx and uh geometry wars are so basic in their gameplay but they're juiced to high fucking heaven and you love it tetris effect is tetris but juiced up oh we got new new data we got new diversity chart data shut the fuck up up we got new numbers we have a tweet from steven titillo describing a problem emerged the criteria is subjective compare in point uh overwatch hero lucio's chart from gdc 2017 and the one we saw last week in which his ethnicity score went down over time wait wait wait wait wait wait the numbers are dynamic i don't know but whoever was grading lucio in the in 2017 game of my higher score and his ethnicity is near the top it looks like an eight or nine oh shit i got buffed

no no no that's the old one the new numbers you got nerfed oh wait but you said i was a you said it was black as a three yeah now oh it used to be higher yeah oh that was a nerf that was a post patch number yeah oh fuck no oh they nerfed black why would you nerf black come on we need it we needed it don't nerf black our kit needs it come on man okay every single like number or picture that ever comes out like leaks out or drips out on this is just gonna be like a whole new day yo let's go steven let's show us the fucking show us the metrics man find it someone please okay looked into the diversity tool began years ago inspired by sarkeesian's work early on people posted about it to shareholders

in 2021 tried to keep the numbers early on people on the project tried to keep the numbers out of it activision boasted about it to shareholders no it's gotta have a number it's gotta have a number it's gotta have a number oh they tried oh this means this means you if if someone has access to shareholder minutes they'll be able to go back and get the minutes on that shareholder meeting and find out what the fuck they were bragging about exactly oh my god wow okay it's it's it's because like i said that halfway point where you're like okay if you need a checkbox to say we have a black person we have a polish person right then you know what you can check that box but then they had to build on it they had to iterate so this reminds me of

my favorite star trek story as well as one of my favorite quotes about somebody who's trying their best but just isn't quite there you know that that emotion okay so when they when when gene roddenberry was doing interviews about star trek back in the 60s right go to old-ass regular fucking original series star trek gene roddenberry wanted a vision of the future in which people had overcome their differences and star trek is a genuinely hopeful view of the future at least for earth right so gene is describing listen that's why we have a multicultural i don't know if we use the word but we have a lot of different types of people on the on the the front of the the enterprise right we have a russian we have an american we have a japanese and we even have a black

on the on the front of the ship a yeah and and you're like you're like gene you're you're like you're you're really trying so hard you're trying so hard and at the same time uh you're you're you're mandating all the female outfits to have like super short miniskirts so you can try and sleep with every actress on set because you're a a consummate cheat on your wife um and you hate gay people and mandated that that in the future gayness would be solved okay well that's why there's no gay people on star trek but you're you're trying you're trying incremental progress yeah hardcore oh boy wow wow um

um i'm i'm very excited for the evolving story here oh tracing it back in time and making sense of it that's really interesting you know so the the part that kills me is in the anna screenshot you can see that it is in fact a tool it is a program it has drop-down bars right i want it mm-hmm i want the tool on my computer mm-hmm i want it man they try to keep the numbers out but the but they post it to shareholders that they they love the numbers that sucks so bad don't put a number on it don't put a number on it

don't don't don't and then some fucking weirdo in a suit goes but what if we did put a number on it we could get a score because we can't it's like we're not just being we're not just being inclusive according to the robot we're being the most inclusive and we can prove it we can even apply the two if we have numbers we can show how other people's games aren't included exactly overall score yeah okay that's good that's good well i'm glad there's updates shoutouts to the uh post podcast day news drop uh can't wait for it this time oh yeah um anyway so yeah uh splash is good koboishi's is good should be um wrapping up ff6 uh we're gonna have to move the schedule around this week by the way

just to let everybody know Wednesday i gotta take off of uh some things to do so i'm gonna see if we can't massage it and and do uh one elden one ff6 but yeah we should be approaching i think the last session or so um maybe maybe two but probably one the end game uh rng has been wild getting some of that final gear has been i mean like i i thought i was talking about like the grinding out to get certain sets in elden ring and like some of the some of the stuff in this has been uh surpassing that for sure um it ain't easy uh decursing a shield or running into a death gaze or uh getting a Celestri ad it it's it's kind of nuts um but anyway uh yeah that that's that's going good i hate to bring it back oh i've been informed that we missed something important

in that thread to tillo posted he described uh an example of how the tool was working oh yes okay uh so you're gonna want to click through on that it's a game oh yeah okay no no i did i did scroll past it and i didn't click as we were going on but yes they there is a game that they made called african rainmaker and this was used uh to present how embarrassed they were and that they had to deactivate this game oh my god oh no

oh king oh no king no no no oh boy okay yes yes so this candy crush right this shows off that at some point somebody walked in the room and saw this and goes something in this fucking office needs to change oh my god okay okay yeah and like they're in amsterdam right because i feel like i we went i feel i feel like this i think i feel like i walked by their office when i was there they have a they have a one of them bork bork accents um so uh for for the listener this game called african rainmaker from king

seeing as you know before these these mergings and acquisitions king was there the candy crush folks um they have a puzzle game in which uh just a full-on like african like uh mask and and like the the garb and the earrings and the the yeah all of it real bad real real bad is the main character and um collecting jams is doing the puzzle game puzzle game thing uh what they said they said huh we need a robot to tell the people in this office not to do that oh boy oh man like pre like straight up like world war one to two era animation you know the old disney shit like oh wow wow okay we need the numbers we need the numbers you can't like if you don't have the numbers how do we know not to do this you don't understand guys if you don't if you if

like if we don't have the numbers will tell us how far this goes on the chart oh oh king oh wow wow yeah i just didn't click on it yeah oh man and and and the article does it specifies that it's a king thing right like it specifies oh yeah their push like not necessarily the oh god like the other company names that that that would be attached to that it's it's the oh god okay okay yeah all right this is great this story this develop this story continues to develop continues to develop like actively minute by minute uh hey before we leave our weeks did you play any of uh sifu's master mode no no um it's great

it is it the way that it acts is as if uh level one is now level six and like like the difficulty curve just keeps going okay after normal fajar kick my fucking ass oh wow okay it is amazing how much harder you can make those bosses if you have them throw in sweeps just a little bit more often and you have your you have your new game plus tool kit nope start a new game from scratch okay and the other thing is that enemies uh you know the typical hong kong action thing of the enemies kind of come at you one at a time mm-hmm no more of that horde they're they're gonna come at you when they feel like it yeah okay you're gonna have to just deal with the way the enemies work interesting uh it's great i'm having a lot of trouble with it which is exactly what i wanted

i'm having just as much trouble with the hard mode after platinuming the normal game as i had platinuming the normal game so the staggering moves and the iframe moves are gonna have way higher utility now they're good now now they're so good now you need them yeah yeah okay gotcha um yep so uh that's going down and then yep elden ring is continuing having a good time with that of course um that uh went back uh went to knock ron cleared out knock ron it was impossible to not have heard in advance about mimic tear so that wasn't much of a surprise literally the most popular item in the entire game it's the old yeah people were talking about it from day one so i i i heard about that existing so you know got that um i heard though that in the

cut content there was supposed to be a quest where it followed you for a while and then learned to do that as a payoff that sounds awesome that sucks that that got cut what's fascinating is that the mimic tear is a boss fight that has like maybe the highest variability of difficulty of any fight in the entire game because uh i steamrolled it um and other people had builds that the ai could use very effectively against themselves so i was able yeah my ai is doing a whole lot of two-handed punching and a whole lot of um uh terra magica for some reason it keeps casting terra magica which i don't know why but i'm like if you're on my side i'll just stand here and use the magic like i don't mind um so the using mimic tear has so many fun little like pieces to it uh it's it's

one of the most fun things in the game because uh i don't know if anyone if you picked it up or somebody told you the way mimic tear works is it copies you perfectly the instant you summon it yes including your inventory bar including your inventory including what spells you have equipped including whatever so if it uses something a little too much you'd pull that off your bar you can equip the the shabri-ri's woe to make it a tank you can force it to use shields you can you can do all sorts of shit so i noticed um basically not even intentionally i put a um the perfume that tanks a hit um yeah i put that on my bar because i wanted to just have it there to test it out because i hadn't been using perfumes because finally now that i got to knock

around i got the ingredient that lets me mix it and so i put it on my bar summon the tear and now the tear puts a shield on me like a perfumer you know so it's like oh my god this is very exploitable if you give yourself tools that are like the best ones that you want it to always use yeah no it works in every direction there was a there were times where i put like all ranged spells on it and so all i would do was spam ranged spells there's a couple bosses where i pulled every spell off because i wanted it to just run in and start swinging like it's it's a crazy awesome feature in a in a souls game it's it's one of my favorite things the whole game i mean it on it can nerf it as much as they want it's still the best one it feels well it feels

like you get it with so little fanfare for how big of a deal it is you know um it's so good they nerfed it like twice and it's still so good like i expected that to be you know the end of a quest line with a lot of build up for you know at all like i expected so much to that and it kind of is just like here you go and and like the mechanics of it it feels like you could create a separate pause screen to go in and you know tweak and customize it if you wanted to like it could be yeah it's you know it's it's great so um feels busted out the gate and probably will be um but anyway so yeah i got to that and then i uh fucking rode the coffin upstream and uh basically like i'm walking around that area looking for looking for blive so

uh good times good times um that's a that's a great part of the game that's probably my favorite part of the game yeah it's excellent and i went back and i watched that story trailer that i avoided on launch so now i have all the context that i was missing and things make a lot more sense i love i love in the original trailer you see millenia and redawn squaring off and you're like oh who's this big evil guy squaring off against the heroine and then every single thing you learn like oh no redawn's the best he's the coolest watch this toxic bitch she made the shittiest zone in the game on purpose well i don't know enough about her yet but but he's a fucking champ he's a champ um yeah yeah and then also the um the selling stuff too which is like

finally let's get some some in pay off here so that's a good time um i will yeah so i'll be playing elden ring on tuesday wednesday is going to be off and then uh thursday will be ff6 uh and then uh it'll be a new week and well well no we're gonna have some fighting games as well for sure so of course um we're gonna be playing what are we playing this week i believe oh yeah hero versus that that um that fighting game that was being developed that was uh being developed on mobile and it's eventually coming to steam where they i they got up they put a woolly boxer skin in there and it looks pretty fucking sick so i'm gonna be checking that out um you don't play a fighting game for one week will you literally die i'll take damage

you know um but look i'm i'm out here like i'm i'm doing i'm doing what i gotta do i have to i have to you know show people why fighting games are cool and we gotta we gotta keep keep keep this thing live we gotta show off why these games are fun just curious yeah just curious i got i tried to get into that closed beta for multiverses i don't think i'm gonna get in it um i god i can't wait for that to come back man yeah that that shit was great um what was i gonna say though yeah so we're gonna play we're gonna play hero versus um we also played the karate tournament that old fucking weird mitchell corporation game that was like is pretty good but just like like like rotoscoped karate man from like the 80s kind of thing um we played it back in the down scrub lords too

and uh uh uh uh shit i forgot there's something else we're gonna throw in there whatever so tune in on woolly versus and then next week we've got a new slot and with a new slot comes an opportunity for a new lp and y'all yeah and and folks seem to enjoy finding out a little bit in advance what's going down so we've we're on a pretty high profile streak and uh i i mean outside of maybe like mortal shell i feel like uh well no that's not true we keep it mixed up we did some silent hill then we played some everhood we did some delta ruin when it came back and then we did some of this and that anyway we're all over the place um whatever fuck it mass effect let's go oh okay well you gotta do all three that's the rule you have to so that's mandatory so i've only played one

one and uh reggie's played none of them so okay uh we can definitely start from scratch on that and he can have the experience of the first game's journey and then with two i can grab it and take over after that is perfect because i ran like like i like to think that like sometimes we both do games and like there's too much overlap or whatever but that's perfect because i wasted so much of my fucking stupid life on mass effect and i went through all three of them and you didn't yeah so so there you go um and if i'm not mistaken two opens up with the ability to create to basically continue your character or kind of start from scratch and and i mean you you can continue like the the choices and all that which you probably should but you can also just like

completely remake what they look like right as well as their class yeah so um yeah since it's new for him and and i've done it he'll do one and then i'll pick it up uh from two that's that's that's that should be the that should be the good times i tell you what man going through those games years and years and years and years later like many years later i'm like wow the war on terror really scared people out in the prairies huh hmm really oh yeah huh like like like going through it as an adult you're like oh wow this shit's like oh i i oh i didn't get it at all back then i never this is the first time i've ever heard anything referencing uh that connection every every just just think about weapons of mass destruction every time uh commander shepherd gets frustrated

with bureaucracy okay okay um yeah so tune in woolly versus as you know that's the channel that's twitch that's youtube it's a good time um let's take a quick break and then we'll be back with uh the news which story the sony games list on there yeah yeah yeah we're gonna talk about that that thing sucks uh what uh yeah yeah well in a second first let's take a quick word from our sponsors um did they talk about blizzard yet boy did we uh anyway this week podcast is sponsored by uh honey and yeah honey is the service that is available to help you save when you're shopping online um not honey is in the food not honey is in the thing that bees make that's delicious too though you know i've been making a lot of tea lately

and i accidentally put too much honey in my tea and the tea tasted bad and that's a bummer reminding me not to use too much honey a problem i don't have to worry about using honey the service because you cannot consume um savings physically but you can certainly consume them digitally because honey uh fills in the promo code chart whenever you're shopping online and finds coupon codes for whatever you're looking for and then uh you watch the prices drop once you apply the coupons it works on tons of your favorite sites and uh yeah once you go to the checkout you just gotta watch as it finds for whatever discounts are available so if you're shopping online you know whether it's clothing tech tons of different uh brands gadgets etc food

even whatever you're buying online um why not save some money with it it's pretty easy to use and uh that's yeah it's cash in your pocket doesn't just work on your desktop it also works on your phone as well you can activate it on iphone on your safari uh to save on the go so if you don't have honey you could be straight up missing out uh do yourself a solid support the show and enjoy the savings get honey for free at join honey dot com slash super beast that's join honey dot com slash super beast thanks honey thanks honey all right that's it for today you know what sounds like honey money money what you would save using money there you go honey yep almost almost got it almost i almost i tried um can you excuse me for a second i need to help somebody i know the timing

is poor i need to help somebody with something okay excuse me oh it's fine oh you're strong okay no it's fine we're good we're good okay we're good all right i was gonna help the little lady carry something out from the car but she's strong false alarm uh okay well so we talked about um the the uh the diversity chart we talked about uh the phrenology and we've talked about the raven software union busting um so yeah with that out of the way let's talk about the playstation classic games that are coming to ps plus yo that list fucking sucks it's pretty meager for what you'd expect of retro classics and the thing that um i'm wondering about the most uh is like you're you're putting out a list of playstation classics for all consoles and not

a single metal gear anywhere on that list like a single resident evil not a single re anywhere on that list numerator it's wild like so cal castle baby is on there but it's like lord's a shadow too oh yeah that's the castle baby game ever wants to play like a playstation what a strange collection of like even amongst the third party stuff especially you know like none of the things you'd expect so there's two things to know one is that's not the full list because sony is stupid and two they say they're going to show off more games in the future but uh the games they show off first are the are the the ones they think will make the biggest splash so i don't think they're hiding any certified classics behind the next announcement i mean intelligent cube is certainly a pick

i'll say that i gotta say the way sony is handling uh this this thing is so fucking weird one they're like classic games but it's like 10 and they're like missing a million and then the other is like i got contacted by sony and they wanted to whitelist me for the new psn they contacted me like three weeks ago they're like what's your psn we're gonna whitelist you thank you and i'm like cool what is this and they're like we'll get back to you and then fucking disappeared okay well and i'm like you know what is it i mean i thought it was going to be a collection of like the like the brand third party and first party games that are like generally associated with playstation the most and some of that is that because you know um ape

escape is on the list and um tech n2 is on the list um but yeah like uh you got jack and daxter i was expect i would expect a sly cooper i'd expect a ratchet and clank that type of stuff no no fuck you uh bioshock remastered anyway um the other thing is that on the ps3 section it highlights via streaming so are we just stuck only being able to play ps3 games via streaming on on current gen like no one wants to learn how to emulate it god damn it man mgs4 is fucked forever but to be fair it's mgs4 yeah but it's like blow the dust off your thing and plug it in then

you know install it deal with me or just don't play mgs4 no you got no i disagree you gotta go back you gotta experience all of it i was just today not yes not today yesterday i was just thinking about ocelot running back and running away from snake and laughing and i was having such a good i was i had a great chortle to myself um because i want to thank a gentleman sir louis in the chat for echoing my statement perfectly the youtube port of mgs4 is good enough for most people uh um yeah everything everything coming to ps3 is uh streaming so that's it dmc hd collection zura's wrath loads of shadow 2 ninja guide in sigma 2 lords of shadow 2 like a bunch of action games where input latency couldn't matter more yeah ninja guide ninja guide in

devil may cry like yeah ninja guide and has you dodging people in like 12 frames like that game's going to be impossible it feels feels like a nintendo-ish kind of lists of you know here's a couple things but um but that actually is important to note because um the world of of of uh backwards compatibility is one that like it sucks how much of a thing uh how much that's disappeared from the current generational switches uh but it's coming up again in discussions because nintendo also on the subject matter uh recently had an interview and were discussing the uh transition to their next console and essentially they're talking about how it's a major concern that after building up their current user base to move to a new a new system and try to start from scratch uh would be

challenging uh and that makes sense given the fact that like yeah they're not on the like they're not on the technology cutting edge right they're not people are not jumping in to buy a nintendo console because it's the coolest looking that video games have ever been um so uh there's a point in the discussion where they actually talk about how uh back in the day with uh previous nintendo consoles backwards compatibility was much of a bigger thing so that you could keep your user base you know that you already had and so going forward with anything they're looking at um transitioning into the next console but trying to keep the switch user base are um um like in the equation and not just completely shutting them out the 3ds had not had backwards compatibility

that thing would have crashed and burned for a while but because it had backwards compatibility with the best handheld console to ever come out ever no question the nintendo ds yeah i mean everybody i knew played ds games on their 3ds for like a year and a half and so here's the thing too the question of backwards compatibility like there is always a matter of like well will hardware be physically inside of the machine right with the playstation 2 be inside of early ps3s but then they got rid of it you know and then it was emulated and such there was a whole discussion about like which versions of the hardware can actually support these games but with a switch and with an account system and with a list of digital purchases on your account there is zero reason you couldn't

just fucking pop your account on and just have every game that you've already purchased be available you gotta do is call it the new new nintendo switch too yeah yeah so um yeah nintendo would be insane if you had to restart the generation while they're existing in this side pocket place you know have the games run better because god damn are there are a ton of switch games that could really use running just a little better honestly like the switch upgrade that like you know that the the everyone's been waiting on the idea of like it runs at six it it runs games at 60 and it runs games undocked the way they look docked i i do i would be happy with it runs games at 30 done have you have you played

age of calamity no but i've i've it's the worst dude samurai samurai showdown like oh it's samurai showdown oh oh oh god oh god like that shit hits single digits it feels at points man it's crazy i i i i hit i turned on like age of calamity and like the first stage is loads you in the hyrule field and it's i i shit you not running at 12 frames as the as the first gameplay and i just laughed and laughed and laughed oh man i mean the real talk um the fact that emulated switch games are crisp and beautiful is something nintendo needs to be able to address they need to answer that problem because they can you can see demonstrably that it's not the software you know that ain't the problem that shit can look amazing unless you're talking about fire emblem

three houses at which point it totally is the software oh yeah you know you know why fire you played that game for a bit you know why the city sections run like complete garbage because they have all three versions of the game's storylines loaded in simultaneously on top of one another okay so just garbage optimization yeah um well nintendo don't you know be smart like absolutely backwards compatibility is pro consumer as fuck and and is the way it used to be certainly right at least for a period of time there you know i remember my my um gameboy cartridges sticking out of my advance really weird but like that was a thing yep and then the slot at the bottom of your ds upside down it's kind of weird

but it's there it worked um you see those uh resident evil trailers yeah any thoughts as the local resident evil experts uh i have one thought and it may these these new resident evil netflix tv shows which are going to take place one in the near future and one in the far future have this the most unhinged idea ever for a story um uh i i looked it up and found the director slash like creator the guy who made you know came up with the idea for this new series and these games are adhering to resident evil canon and as somebody who actually knows resident evil canon that is the stupidest idea anyone

has ever had in the history of anything because wesker is in the show uh he is now black i forget the actor the is it is it um it's lance red is it is lance reddick wesker wait what is it i was about to talk about lance reddick and and how much i like seeing lance reddick be lance reddick in everything yeah it's lance reddick oh my god he's wesker oh wow okay i didn't realize that in the trailers oh shit so that's because i like lance reddick i love lance reddick i was i was waiting for you to finish because i was going to say like i didn't know that like like just a drop of lance reddick into whatever i just i i love the guy i he's great i want to see him do whatever put on the journey of the forge mask five did you play re five uh yeah do you remember that part where

wesker just gets his head blown off by double rocket launchers in a volcano oh god the the and then yes the big finale well he uh got up after that and became a black man this takes place after five wait yes uh okay okay hold on it's not just canon it takes place after the future oh what wow okay that's weird so like okay so like like he's like we're not gonna go into it but wesker survived the volcano okay shut up what are you talking about that's insane you're nuts that i the the trailer because there's two trailers the first one was just like you know the shots of the zombos and then the second one was like the um corporate dystopia umbrella joy thing you know um and it's all and it's like oh the pills are gonna cure all your

problems but they can make you a monster the the events of the game are canon including the part where umbrella ceases to exist and is now the primary company in this new show and they're back to being a normal pharmaceutical company i it is i it is the most confusing thing oh my god like you can you're allowed to now pull the move off where you say it's canon after this number right yeah multiple horror movies have done this where it's like okay this is a sequel to part one none of the none of the sequels count just the first one matters and now this you know you can do that but if this is coming after five what the shit man it's it's so wild it's so confusing okay okay i just dropped my key well but um and on top of that they said well the movies aren't

canon so don't worry about that but we are going to be taking inspiration from them okay but like are we now are we in for a straight up like cedric daniels teleport gunfight scene i don't know like is that where we're going i don't know i don't know oh my god i just this like i feel very confident that that is the stupidest way you could possibly make a game spin off red eye glow broken glasses damn oh boy if they actually if they actually go through the the fucking trouble of saying that wesker crawled out of the volcano and swapped bodies with a nearby person the and that's why he looks like a different guy i'm gonna i'm gonna like i want a you're

gonna do this stupid shit i want a flat i want a live action flashback of him crawling out of fucking volcano and and then soul transferring yeah fuck it why not why not there's soul transferring in a resident evil revelations too it's the t5 what you think there is it you think there's no soul transfer resident evil i i'm not i didn't it's a plot point with alex wesker okay the t-virus can't save you mcnulty oh i i that's this is the weirdest shit ever um i guess just just fuck it get on board and see where lance takes it let's see where this goes i'm i'm i'm i'm stuck in this

weird situation where i actually don't i i did not watch some of all the resident evil cg movies i did not watch the recent mech flex movie because i'm like why am i just gonna go and do that make myself upset but lance reddick fucking owns so like you want to see lance reddick it's really hard i watching that trailer i had like i was just like oh he's in it that's fun let's see what he'll do you know um wow what a weird world let's see let's see and then do you get to like change that in the game canon going forward no it's a netflix series it's it's it's yeah all right okay let let me let me explain something

to you you know who cares about resident evil canon no one the developers never ever ever did are the cg movies canon to themselves they they fit into the timeline somewhere right no no yeah yeah actually the the correct answer to your question is susie well yeah susie would know but but as far as i can tell from what i've gone through it and i've gone through a lot of it is that um nothing is canon to receive um okay um i i will he here's the state of resident evil canon okay in the umbrella uh umbrella chronicles companion

books that were both put out to codify all the canon and resident evil they changed the word biohazard to resident evil via copy paste and therefore created the umbrella resident evil countermeasure force and also half of that shit is now no longer canon i was i was streaming re revelations to this week and was discussing with people in which like it's not even clear what characters are even alive at this point like it was always under the assumption that the events of resident evil outbreak didn't happen until one of them wrote a news article in re seven um there's a year in the trailer it says 2032 i think so yeah which is nice and past all current games i was like i'm like you're pre you're jumping quite a few years ahead from current day

i'm assuming that's you know nothing jumps into the future beyond that in any of the games that we've not yet anyway yeah not yet okay um all right what a fucking wacky ass franchise i mean like resident evil's plot is the worst as somebody who has followed it so of like obsessively for decades resident evil has the worst long running plot of anything but it's really just who cares evil evil corporation zombie story that's it like that's all that matters that is that is the reason so once you once you have those ingredients who gives a fuck like that's it yeah the the the the story of the events that are happening in front of you right now and the drama of ooh how are we gonna get out of this

that's interesting the overarching meta narrative is the worst is the worst in the meantime if you dare imply that dante drove into hell and took that out of the like if you dare imply that dante driving into hell is in the wrong timeline before five and you fuck that shit up you're completely misunderstanding the franchise how dare you like it's it's it's wild how canon timelines and events matter so much more in the complete nonsense that is devil may cry and then the original franchise that was they even made the anime canon because it had to yeah yeah the characters from the anime needed to show up and have a place in five even for a one like scene bit like like people like people go like hey where's rebecca

chambers we haven't seen rebecca chambers in a game in like 18 years and the answer is like we don't really like rebecca dante showing up dante showing up in fucking smt and nocturne needs to have a place in the timeline and we have to all respect it going forward in the franchise you know anyway so that's that's kind of wild and in the meantime as as resident evil tries to get its it's it's it's netflix thing going again konami coughs up some spiders and dust to DMCA takedown what appears to be a leak for silent hill and it goes hand in hand with the rumors that have recently popped up about bloober team possibly working on a new silent hill game well there was a twitter account where some images appeared of what appears to be silent hill

development stuff and the fact that it got taken down is as usual the ultimate confirmation the ultimate confirmation that oh shit these were probably real so here's what we're working with right now silent hill 2 remake being developed by bloober team which if i if i didn't mind as well just jam this key into my brain like like just just the team that made a horror game in which the lesson was if people are mentally ill you can't help them they might as well just die um being being tasked with remaking silent hill 2 and not be the worst thing ever not just that picking the baton up off the ground where pt dropped it yeah continuing from that it's not

just you know um yeah so we also have a smaller silent hill title by anna perna interactive which is supposed to be episodic short stories which okay that might be interesting that might be interesting anna perna does interesting stuff and then quote a new mainline silent hill game with no developer attached to its rumor what a wild franchise because especially especially now that i understand it um like the the conclusion to an ip that was like the the promise of pt and then the murdering of it like stifled in the crib fucking like it's so nuts because it's the highest promise and the highest level of excitement immediately followed by the lowest low um it if it ended if it if that never happened people would have still had their expectations

in the dirt and it would have been like okay whatever they're turning out another one so be it you know but you will never get over the trauma of like such a fucking interesting looking thing from a really cool team of creative people that were going to touch this game and work on it and then that promise nothing will live up to that like they're gonna forever be in the shadow of pt and why even bother you know so we're at a weird nexus here in which uh silent hill has been awful for way longer and way more entries than it was ever good like one two and three are great four is cool uh five six seven eight garbage the comics are terrible the movies are trash um

pt was killed smothered in the crib as you described um shatter memories is cool yeah you guys are right but i like shattered memories yeah i think it's cool um but like the last silent hill game that gave that name the the like the respect in the cache was silent hill three dude that game came out when i was in high school i'm almost 40 like this whole thing just screams like well well can we make any money off of uh the name all right let's give it a hurrah before we bury it forever um so yeah there's also confirmation because um akira yamaoka

said that they were working on something to be announced this summer um so they're they're they're they're picking it up and blowing the dust off and they're gonna try again you know um yeah there's gonna be a lot of horror games that are gonna get announced this summer ironically but um this is likely going to be one of them um the screenshots show off like a face that looks like it has look like it looks like rohan's heaven's door has ripped it open and is like it's got like you know and it says the phrase i hate myself cross there for it that's that's what i'm talking about no need to tattoo damaged on you can just you can

you can peel it back and see it right there oh man you don't even have to tattoo you know god damn it subtle you know there was an argument to be made for a while that silent hill too is at fault for everything wrong with silent hill and i don't typically agree with that sentiment but there's definitely a little bit of it coming through because silent hill was the one that was the most beloved and it's the one that took the the the mental illness like guilt aspect of it which um every single shitty silent hill game after it tried to recreate and did so badly with the only moderate success being um shattered memories no i i mean i remember upon

my completion when we were talking about it and it was like yeah it became clear that like the reason why this gets fucked up so often is because the things that were good were how simple and how few moving parts were in those first one there was first two you know like there's so much room for like it's like it's like it's like um i don't it's like you're trying to make a recipe that has like three ingredients to it you're trying to make a putin or like a calabrese salad you know like you just you got the three things to throw together and so you think okay like this works because of the balance of how it was done and then everyone who comes along afterwards goes tomatoes cheese oil go all right and you just keep trying to smush it together

in a way that doesn't understand how the balance was originally you know used in the first ones or the second one right so uh that's a shame man that's that's yeah i'm i'm only starting to you know i mean i've heard it for years but like looking at it now and looking and going like oh it wasn't like a complex masterpiece it was a simple well done game it was just it was very simple it was definitely more complex compared to its peers at the time the time of 2001 um but it just it takes a few elements and it treats them well it handles it handles the material that's very straightforward well not very straightforward but it had the very like not that complex you know uh it just handles it well um

i mean it's i'm not looking forward to that silent hell too remake it's interestingly not that dissimilar to like the problem with like trying to like like almost like the sonic problem of like it's an old simple thing that worked how do we recapture that trying to you know adding more and okay what if how do we well how do we keep some of that feeling you know what woolly you know it'd be a really good twist in the final boss fight with pyramid head if pyramid head took his helmet off and it was james oh shit like he became the pyramid head who is now attacking this new main character that has nothing to do with it damn it was james it was james all along

um i mean you could you could just come out and say like oh yeah like those last eight games were directed by the dog with levers pulling knobs and pressing buttons behind the scene you know what's funny you couldn't even do that because silent hell downpours joke ending is zany as fuck but the dog isn't there so well anyway you know what else is funny no here let's let's let's let's sad now i'm sad let's cheer up let's cheer up let's cheer up i know what'll cheer you up you're gonna be an asshole aren't you no i'm gonna cheer you up if you were to load up the google store right now

and then head on over to the gaming tab you might find yourself in for a surprise do you have that hold on no thanks gaming uh games yeah what what is it oh have you updated it yeah so i mean i'm looking at it looking at dislike looking at i've you is that is your is your app updated yeah oh okay well uh apparently then this is either happening or going to happen but the gaming tab that you're currently looking at is going to be removed entirely effectively burying the stadia completely

so or stadia there is straight up going to be uh yeah nothing there in an effort to highlight the pixel buds pro it says here apparently um so that's how you cement the actual uh the grave and the the to me shovel the dirt on it like the last bit of dirt onto it yeah it was already buried but it wasn't covered over with dirt yet um and now if i want to say the first one was the day they decided internally to never ever talk about it again whatever day that happened to be yeah if you can if you can no longer go to the tab to to experience the the system then you're not going to get any new people interested and anyone who's got it's just gonna have to deal they ran a lot of ads for stadia do you remember those uh i'd no i did not use this dude with big

hair screaming at a guy in a in a best buy go on the future of gaming stadia get my space canoe and then they would fucking go through a portal to see all these cool video games no console required it was fucking wild it was fucking crazy holy shit morbius is the stadia of movies morbius fans and stadians can team up apparently morbius sweep was unironically trending on twitter earlier today we can get a fucking power team when they combine forces man um the lunatics don't stand a chance well depends which lunatics some lunatics don't stand a chance and then the other lunatics really don't stand a chance because they're broke yeah um yeah no a little bit a little bit of dirt to cover over the coffin um it's officially done um and as i said every other

time could have lived could have just been a project could have just been a google labs project didn't have to be this way yep why not all right you know stadia makes me feel a certain level of not pride pride's the wrong word and satisfaction's the wrong word too maybe you'll be able to figure it out but like you know when when you you follow stuff in this industry for a while and then you look at something from like a far away distance right like something gets announced and there's no details it's just an announcement and you're like wow that is going to crash and burn and like it cut like a million business men and analysts to come through to tell you how great it's gonna be and it sails right past you into the ocean on fire mo crossing the stage

yeah into the reject line and vindication yeah and and you go okay yeah no it is that easy to tell from a distance so here's the thing easy um like i said this tech is is is going to come back around and there as there are successful you know versions of it we're going to see someone eventually pull it off it ain't going to be the stadia and it ain't going to be luna um but we are gonna be squaring it oh boy oh boy um i mean if if parsec ever partnered up with anyway whatever we'll see what happens but uh the we have not seen the last of however amazon acquiring a game studio and then them just getting butchered like oh yeah they're gonna you know they're gonna find another one that people are excited about and go do that for us for our new

thing and that'll be the end of the things you love um there's always a number that you know can just take all that creative all that create all whatever passions you have to make your your project it's like yeah uh no the the the people the shareholders the the the the boardroom is going to take that amazon number and that'll be the end of the things you love and then just follow the the the the credits of the the games you like because the you know um still waiting on whatever happened to whatever double helix was working on you mean the blockbuster stadia game they were making to turn it all around shout out to uh the new world the new world the new world new world am i getting that right

let's see how that's doing bad how's the world doing bad cool all right let's uh let's take some letters oh hey if you want to send in a letter send it down to castle super beast mail at gmail.com that's castle super beast mail at gmail.com you could write in to ask us about the insane press release square enix released detailing their plans for the new studios they're gonna make uh with their new money that they made selling off their old studios

wait beyond this beyond the doubling down in nft game stuff yeah they said hey we made all this money selling those studios we're gonna put that into new studios is that a pivot because in the middle of talking about using the money on uh uh crypto stuff it all started crashing there's a tiny tiny line that says that the new studios will focus on innovative new types of investment such as uh one point of obfuscation okay okay okay there we go what's really gonna happen is they're just gonna make new studios and then not do that because the market literally like a trillion dollar crash is in the process of exploding as we speak yeah while the ink was drying oh man acquisitions boy man embracer group

like with the plan of the year like like like no it's like it's like in the elevator it's like on the way down you know and then it's as you get into the car ah in that same statement they actually put forth that final fantasy 14 made 25 percent of the company's gross revenue which which explains why yoshi p gets to do interviews in which he goes no nfts that's stupid while the president of the company is going what about them nfts though letters let's take a couple what do we got all right here we got one coming in from jeffrey who says uh hello super pair of the beastly castle i'm an avid player of gundam battle operation two

recently we had an odd sequence of balance changes where a particular mobile suit came through the game uh the gm sniper two white dingo have you ever had a game where the dev buffed something with good intentions but it actually wound up making it a nerf pretty rarely gm sniper two wd has a beam ripe rate beam rifle as its main weapon and it makes you stop in place to charge and fire it the way most people who are good with the suit would play is with quick uncharged shots in close range to stagger someone and then keep them locked in a chain stagger between uncharged rifle shots and melee swings the devs decided that people were not charging the rifle enough so uh they decided to allow players to charge the rifle while moving and then only

have to stop in place when actually firing while this did make people start charging more often it changed the timing of when the firing shot came out forcing you to stand in place uh they were not as efficient as the two uncharged shots so as a result it made aiming uh incredibly difficult with the rifle and the change was so bad that it significantly tanked the win rate for the entire suit so they run they ran it back two months later um i will i will say the the easiest way to to see if a buff can damage a character is uh any game with bands so all the movers if you buff a a player so if you buff a unit and you allow people to ban that unit occasionally you can get into weird situations where unit like heroes have like 99 band rates oh interesting they're

they're functionally nerfed out of the game nobody wants to deal with this ever it's gone yeah there's some i forget what it was but there was some hero in league that was like completely broken for like two and a half years uh to the point where people just removed it themselves interesting you're not gonna put you're not gonna play it i by i have my favorite example and i it's it's go to but it was intentional when um that was it uh when marvel 3 first came out uh a really good team was uh anyone with akuma and wolverine together uh justin wong would play this team and basically jay wong invented the tech of doing um akuma's tatsu as an assist and then with wolverine he has a cross-up slash move so he runs past you

so he either runs up to you and slashes you in the front or he runs past you and slashes you in the back right so you do akuma's tatsu and then they they meet and they cross you up and right so while you're while you're either blocking or getting hit by the tatsu uh wolverine is running up to you and you don't know which side he's gonna hit you from and the tatsu hits you not fast enough it's like hit hit hit so it's staggered enough that there's a point that it's not a combo but the hit that he does with the slash will be a 50 50 you know um it's a fucking amazing really hard to block setup right it's great uh so what would happen though is you had to be really good once you landed the hit with confirming um into the rest of his combo launching and then doing your

whole thing a lot of people who played wolverine uh were not that good and so they would do the cross-up attack and then just mash the button until it connected and then go okay it's hitting and then like on the third or second one they'd be like okay now i'm going to convert into a full combo so it essentially gave you like a mix-up and then you didn't have to have the timing you could just mash that button out so uh when they made ultimate marvel 3 they added a new move to wolverine's arsenal called swiss cheese and what it is is wolverine does a hundred hand slap like honda yeah by doing a bunch of stabs with his claws and the input is mash attack to get that button ah there you go that's so brand new move hey cool right his arsenal has

increased he's got a new move in his kit guys why don't worry about it the first time someone picks wolverine and tries to do the cross-up and then just starts mashing they do this fucking shitty hundred hand slap and don't get that combo anymore because you have to tighten up your timing that's great that's great fantastic right a a nerf in the form of a buff it's awesome you really gotta fuck it up to do that by accident though if you if you i mean if you mash more than three times no no no i mean to to have like like the the the the the white dingo example is like the they did not intend to nerf them yes that was supposed to be a buff yes uh for sure honestly oftentimes i feel like buffs that actually lead to nerfs in a general case

is when the dev goes well people are winning with this character by playing them like this but what we really want is them to play them like that and then that is technically numerically superior but it's actually much worse um yeah yeah they also exactly that's another another great example recently is dan had an infinite in five when he first came out with uh godokin and by making it so that there's a chance that one of the godokins will be strong enough to cause a knockdown it it's a it's a better fireball but it means your infinite's gonna stop at some point right that's smart yeah i like that make make people feel like they gained the tool but that tool's application stops the thing from you know uh being abusable um okay let's take one

uh over here oh you know what i got one for you i got one for you fucking ember in warframe got buffed into uselessness so okay it in warframe you have a lot of you have a lot of frames that have abilities that are just mass guaranteed a oes they're gonna hit so uh equinox has it sarin has it stuff where it's just like 100 feet from your character right they're gonna be hit with spores electricity ambience damage etc and with ember it's obviously fire right so ember is gonna cast her four which is a fire storm that goes in every direction and every enemy within x amount of feet will catch on fire right so they were unhappy with how brain dead ember's kit was and they wanted

to improve ember's kit by changing some of her abilities to interact a little bit more with each other and do different kinds of damage and uh because prior to that her four was the only button that was worth it all her other abilities were complete trash and her ability didn't scale well and it was kind of a gimmick well they redid her whole kit and they're like wow it's way better except now her four doesn't stun enemies when they catch on fire so she went from being kind of nichely useful to completely useless because the only thing that she had going for her at all was that is suddenly gone okay huh because if you're doing this with damage why wouldn't you just use equinox who's doing percentile damage or sarin which has a stacking damage buff

now i'm sure this has changed recently because people are pointing out that they redid the the way elements worked but upon her kit rework she went from ah this is a niche character that some people really like to why bother picking this character at all ever uh including people that were big fans of it because they liked how uh the fact that she stunned people automatically gave them like more breathing room to shoot people and all of a sudden they couldn't play their character at all the way they wanted to like yeah warframe is warframe is frustrating well if you have a single purpose character you you have to identify that when you're when you're doing this type of shit well the problem with warframe is they have so many frames and so many of them have ability

overlap and you run into this situation of light but sarin is just ember but better in every way okay and then they changed sarin's kit completely and sarin was even better ember in every way right and it's like okay what are you gonna do i don't know uh that one coming in over here from melody who says uh hey pat and woolly my friend taught me how to play mahjong three years ago really enjoy the interplay between uh betting and bluffing the way the game forces you to constantly be thinking about how to fit things together uh and i'll never be able to share this with anyone mahjong is a four-player game three if you used modified rules but who here knows two other people that know the rules of mahjong i've beaten the mahjong rewards in yak is a zero and seven

i would love to play it in ff 14 but that requires matchmaking with other players and no one in the u.s both knows how to play mahjong and would sign up to 14 for the matchmaking i know one person who knows how to play mahjong uh and it's a person you may recognize me mentioning over and over as the person i know that knows how to do everything my friend vel who did a brief series of yakuza streams which were secretly how to play mahjong streams wow in which he would just be lying to the mahjong and just play mahjong the whole time um melody saying only only getting matches against the ai there's no reward do you have any skills or interests that are a curse because it's pointless and you can never adequately share them with others um i mean to be honest you describe a bit of how

i feel with about go i love the board game go it's it's my favorite one and no one fucking plays go you're you're gonna either jump online and do matches like that but that's never gonna casually in life be a thing that you're gonna use so i rarely ever play it when i was in a tj nature in high school i played ping pong five days a week the five years that i was in high school um and i absolutely adore ping pong i'd say i'm probably decent at it well i mean i haven't played in a decade but i absolutely absolutely adore ping pong but what are your options for playing ping pong outside of going to high school or college what you get a table so you can fucking dominate everyone you know that doesn't play ping pong like like like what are you gonna

do i'm gonna i'm gonna get a ping pong table in the house and go hey pay do you want to play ping pong and then just smash her into the dirt a couple times and then never play ping pong again i know that um reggie and the fgc guys are like they got into like badminton and they regularly get together and like go to like a specific court and rent out a place and stuff you're gonna put the effort in to find the people and do it um but yeah no there's some of these things are just like yep that's a that's uh it's on your character sheet but never gonna use it um the only the only thing i can do is i have to raise a child and trick them into becoming decent at ping pong so that when i'm older and shittier i have a kid that i can that i can just beat just enough

to keep them interested until i could make them cry when they're older but that's a lot of work for ping pong yeah and and i mean well you said just decent enough so i assume you're not gonna go for creating you don't want to like you're not going to be the the uh tiger woods dad or or or richard williams or you you create the ultimate sport machine yeah no so what i what i learned was the way that my dad taught me to enjoy certain games which was my dad was like hey would you like to play backgammon or chess or whatever or pool and i'd be like yeah sure and he would beat me every single time ever ever just barely and it was only when i was like in my teens i'm like dad would you stop taking it easy on me with pool and he's like okay and i didn't pick up my fucking stick

and then we played a second game in which i didn't pick up my fucking stick and then i'm like oh okay i'm i i'm never going to play pool with my father ever again he broke out lucille because like if he gets to break i don't get to play yeah and if i break then i that's the last time i get to play like i was talking to my mom on the phone and she was telling me that dad went to a pool tournament and the guy running it was asking him to leave because it's not fun yeah he wins like three tournaments in a row yeah yeah yeah okay well it's like you can't just blow them out too hard at the start or else they'll never do it it's not fun for him if his kid is shit at pool um somebody in the chat asked i don't know why dads are so stupid good at pool

it's because they had it's how they made beer money when they were 20 got a hustle is how yep you make people at the at the local bar that come in that are suckers from elsewhere you know think that they're gonna make an easy 10 or 20 and then you fucking you break out how you make your weekend money and then you break out lucille so yeah you lose two games and then you bet big then you bet big and then you you hope that they're not the type of sore loser that try and kill you and then you get your weekend money it's like that's that's why all right and let's take one more really when when fighting games no longer exist oh yes in 20 years when they no longer exist in 20 years and you're looking at woolly jr

and you're like hey you want to play this old game and he's like really ah cool and then you just beat them within a fucking inch of their life and they don't understand what's happening because you're doing that swiss cheese bullshit you just mentioned like how'd anybody ever get good at these this is crazy um i mean at that point i think it'll be my job to be decent at whatever they evolve into when they most certainly completely and utterly die off never to be found again when the when the genre gets merged into something else mm-hmm um yeah no that's

it's like a baby's game as they jack into their phone and their eyes roll back you you show them the ropes you get them to you know grab the stick move it back and forth press the buttons and then the moment one hadoken is successfully completed all in we're doing loops we're doing lightning loops we're doing tac combos let's go tac infinites fuck it the moment one hadoken comes out i can just see any variation of this of like honey you really gotta let him do no this is the way to learn the intro to the game shows you hey hatchy tossing the child off the cliff it's in the game all right that'll do don't take it easy on the on your kids they're never gonna learn if you

coddle them throw them right off that cliff they'll they'll they'll you know when they're when they're world champions they'll thank you for it they'll thank you yeah and also just like cosy you did did you know once they climb back up to the top of that cliff they're gonna be like i understand what you did for me dad thank you so much doria all right