Castle Super Beast - CSB 196: Scam & Flow

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Kids Love Mr.Beast, Hank McCoy's Time Is NOW The Callisto Homecoming Why Red Shepard Returned Panda Stomps On Smash, Nintendo Sips Wine And Joins In Hustle Or Scam: The Violinist You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://expressvpn.com/superbeast to get an extra 3 months free with a 12-month plan. -- Go to http://buyraycon.com/superbeast and use code HOLIDAY to get 15% off sitewide and free shipping. -- Download the DoorDash app and use code CSB to get 50% off up to a $20 value, and $0 delivery fees. Mario Trailer 2 #CocaineBearSweep trailer for Transformers: RiseOfTheBeasts Callisto Protocol: The rules of conduct for a single player video game. Gameplay Basics & Tag in Project L Dead Cells' creator's next game is Nuclear Blaze The protagonist of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Part 9: JOJOLANDS will be a descendant of Joseph Joestar FTC reportedly softens stance on blocking Microsoft Activision Blizzard merger Latest statement from Panda Global announces that Dr. Alan is no longer CEO, Panda Cup postponed due to security concerns

... Hey. Hey, good morning. How's everybody doing? I'm doing all right. They had a Doom guy at a fortnight. Wait, really? Yeah, Doom guy and Geralt are in this week and Deco. I saw a bunch of other characters. I didn't see that. Oh, shit. Okay. Well, the prophecy is fulfilled. Now it can be Doom guy and Halo from fortnight. That's right. That's right. Oh, man, I love Deco from fortnight. Oh, they got a new show coming out about that fortnight guy? Jesus Christ. Mr. Beast got in. Damn. There you go. Yeah, the kids fucking, the kids are shitting over that one. Oh, I can only

imagine. Wait, the human man, Mr. Beast? Yes, the X-man. Correct. The blue X-man as played by Fraser Crane has made it into fortnight. No, you know, I was trying to figure out all this time why Beast was so popular, why all this noise about Beast now? And I was like, you know what? Fuck it. It's been years and Beast has never gotten the spotlight he deserved. So when I heard about this new Mr. Beast thing, I was like, hell yeah, Beast deserves to get the spotlight. He deserves it. I love how he's now popular with the kids. That's great. Yeah, that's absolutely what's happening, buddy. You just keep on growling with that. We fans of Beast have been waiting a long time for people to

recognize. But finally, the kids are seeing the way, you know? Spider-Man's still pretty popular, but I feel, but from what I hear on these streets, Beast is making his way up. Are you on the streets hearing the news from the kids? That's that's what I'm hearing. Are they telling you their secrets? That's that's the word on the street. In fact, he's got his own burger chain now. It's I never really took him for a fast food guy. It seems like more of a knife and fork kind of character. But you know, that's fine. There's Mr. Beast burgers, right? I don't I don't know. Oh yeah, there are. Why would I know things? There are. That's a thing sometime. I mean, I can tell you what the fuck stupid shit at the fucking

Aka Supa is. But if you want me to actually be on the fucking Internet, knowing things that I should know, I don't know fucking nothing. Yeah, no, I'm still embarrassed about Vinny fucking looking at us like we're crazy with that pubg shit. He deserved to like in the moment, in the moment, there was no way to know. But now this is how we know. But it's OK. I feel I feel like the consumption of slop and trash has been somewhat helpful in propagating at least some of it towards my direction. Slop and trash. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that is a burger place I would love to go down to. Like you're not getting into the filth of it, but you're skimming some off the top and you're getting a little everyone's

and they're like, oh, what's up this year? What are they? OK, you get to the pond. Yeah, you just say it's you just you do the pool cleaning and then you get it off the top of the surface and you take a look and you go, that's what's going on on the Internet. OK, OK, I see. Hey, no need to go beneath the surface. Hey, man, I have I have speaking, speaking of being embarrassed about pubg and pond scum. Do you want to talk about the Galista product? I mean, it's there's stuff to talk about for sure. Oh, there's at least there's at least one docket story here or there. But yeah, let's, you know, like the again, the George Carlin bit, right? Because sometimes you got to throw the rock in the scum and

dive in to try and build your immune system up. So right. Yeah. So eat a sandwich off the sidewalk in Calcutta, Mr. Carlin. Thank you. Now, I saw the first thing I got after we last discussed Galista protocol was videos of people showing off that you can cancel gun into Melee and then basically putting that together to be like, hey, you know that thing, Willie, that you've been trying to do in Silent Hill and in Dart Dead Space. Well, this game actually lets you do it. This lets you do Melee into gun combos as a full string into a lock in execution. And I saw a sequence and it looked rad as shit and unintended. Mm hmm. Very, very unintended. So this game has Melee. So I'm going to I'm going to I'm

going to I'm going to bring you down a little story. So a long time ago, there was a absolutely fantastic series of horror games that had a lot of action shooting in them. And then that team and the head developer ended up leaving their original parent company. It was a really big company and moving on to make a completely new company so they could, you know, really follow their dreams. And by follow their dreams, what I mean is, is that their new parent company told them to make the same game they made the last time. And they went, oh, okay. And then they worked real, real hard on it. And then it came out to middling reviews, a lost focus, unfavorable comparisons to the game they made before, and a wide string of horrible technical

issues. And that game was the evil within. Mm hmm. And Callisto protocol is like literally the exact same thing, except for a different franchise, except for instead of RE four, it's Dead Space one and two. So the history of the spiritual successor game by the Phoenix studio is supposed to be a happy and joyous occasion where you go, look, they're making the thing that they like that they're good at that they're passionate about. So I think the best part about this is that both stories link up in a way that's like very highly specific, which is Shinji Mikami was like, we're going to make all sorts of weird shit. And then in an interview, he's like, yeah, when we showed up, they told me to make a game like RE four again. Yes. And I was like, okay. Yeah. And if you remember,

Callisto protocol was originally actually a pub G spin off set in the pub G universe. And then the Dead Space remake got announced. And then all of a sudden, it started to look more and more like Dead Space. I don't know how much of that was a coincidence or how much of that was intentional, but it did. If I recall correctly, the reveal trailer was within the pub G world. And then the second trailer was the reset. So although you played, you played through Dead Space one and two, those games are great. Not to not yet. Oh, not to. Okay, you played through Dead Space one. That's fine. That game's great. You got the little, you got the, the, the, the UIs in the world and you have the little health bar on the back. You know, why do I, why shouldn't sorry, why shouldn't a

trailer then come out later and say no longer a part of the pub G universe? Just to clarify. That was an interview, not a, not a trailer, but, and this is my favorite part, Susie found like pub G iconography on like in universe desks. She found like the, the fucking stupid helmet that the pub G guys wearing on the cover hanging out on something. So they didn't get all of it. Perfect. Nor the Yula apparently either, which we'll get there. Oh man, that thing. It's so yeah, you load up. So you crash and it's space and there's space monsters and it's, it's, it's, it's just worse Dead Space like, like, like visually art wise, story wise, like you discover, you discover within the first 40 minutes of the game that like, oh, why are there monsters everywhere? Well,

because the head of the prison is into some kind of weird religion and thinks that this is the way forward for humanity. Like it's, it's, it's the same. And so, but all the monsters are like zombie mans. They're not like crazy body horrid freaks. They're, they're dudes with like, and like the, the, the first like monster you encounter, he's a dude that's a little bigger and he's got like a half, he's got like two faces that are like, and it's like, where's, where's the extra arms? Where's the weird body contortion? But they're like, that's okay, because you're going to be fighting these dudes with your, with your fucking stick. You're going to get a big old stun baton. And you're going to be melee combating these guys. And the way the melee combat works is if they attack you,

you dodge left or right. And then you can dodge the other direction. Like if you dodge right, you have to dodge left on the next one to dodge their strikes. And then when there's, when there's an opening, you, you do a quick one, two, three combo on them, or you can upgrade to one, two, three, four. And then if you do that, then you can pull your piece and you can shoot them and it'll auto track like it locks on. It's so hard the camera starts going nuts. And then once you shoot them, you can go back into your combo one, two, three, one, two, three. Okay. Right. And so you're like, wow, that's actually like kind of punch out. Cool. Yeah. There are like immediate and I mean like immediate systemic problems with that system right away. First of all, there's no timing.

When an enemy runs at you, it literally explains to you just hold left and you will dodge their first strike. There's no timing to it. There's no button. It's hold left. And when they attack you, you'll, you'll dodge. And then as soon as you start dodging, hold the other direction and you'll dodge again. So there's no timing. There's nothing. Right. So it's super, super, super easy. Okay. If you're not confident, you can hold back to block, but blocking hurts you. So don't and dodging is perfect. And it always is perfect. Yeah. It doesn't matter what direction left or right. It doesn't matter. Okay. Hold a left or right direction. And so Paisa is going through it and she was having, she was having an okay time and I wanted to

feel what the controls were like. And I picked it up and, you know, in one of those rooms in dead space where like 10 guys come at you. Well, in, in, in Callisto protocol, they come at you like that they will, they will run up to you and then kind of stop to do the shuffle. Yep. To get into your, your camera lock. Yep. And I discovered that like the, the game, like the, the enemies are solvable in that like they, after their animation, like when they're ready to be hit when it's your turn to hit them, they, they, they, they, they stop for a second. Cause I guess they're monster tired. And so I was just like, I was just like, okay, here comes one dodge, dodge, one, two, three, shoot, one, two, three, shoot dead. Next one, dodge,

dodge, one, two, three, shoot, one, two, three, shoot. Okay, dead. Next one. And like they're, they're solvable. Like you, there's an equation to beat enemies that is perfect and just works. And then on top of that, you have the, you know, the TK power from dead space. Yeah. Okay. So they have, they have released the rule. You can pick up enemies. You could pick up entire enemies and so you just pick up an enemy and turn and just throw them into the spinning blades and the enemy is now deleted. And then you take an enemy and turn and throw him off the ledge and the enemy is now deleted and just to shed the problem away. Yeah. And so like there's tons and I'm like, how, how am I supposed to,

how, what's supposed to hurt me here? Right. And then I found out what's supposed to hurt me is sometimes they take their turn one at a time and sometimes they just smack you in the back when you're engaged in the dodged back and forth melee combat with a different guy. Sometimes they hide in the corner and fire projectiles at you that you can't see until they hit you. And that's how encounters are made tough. Okay. Encounters are made by putting enough enemies into it that they blindside you. If you spend your, your TK to delete an enemy, is it on cooldown? No, I was able to do three in a row. Cool. And then it's on cooldown for a minute. Hey, Willie, did you, did you've played a horror game that plays like this game?

And that game is Silent Hill Homecoming. Okay. Right. That game, Silent Hill Homecoming's combat though, like from what I remember it, you just kind of like you run and then if it gets up to you, you go into like a kind of like a cutscene tackle mode, right? No, no, that's, wasn't there like a, wasn't there like a thing where like when it, it's, when it's up in your face, you have like canned dodges? Yes. Yeah. That's kind of what I'm remembering. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah. And the, the, there's all that. And then the other thing that's like, so it doesn't have the dead space, like hold your hand out and look at the right path thing. So I spoke to people who

beat the game and the reason why it doesn't happen is because the game is a hallway. Paige was playing it for like three and a half hours and there was like one, like laundry room she went off into the side and the rest was like literally, like, you know, if you gray boxed it, it would be like a, like a five foot wide hallway, like the hallway through only one enemy type so far. Oh no, there were, there were, there were three enemy types. There was the, the, the zombie monster and then there was the fatter zombie monster that had no changes. And then there was the zombie monster that's a foot taller and can spit acid. Right. The shooter, but you beat up the rest of the, um, it is, it is like, and, and my favorite part is that

on PC, it was like a stuttering fucking mess until we fucked with it. And I have the new computer, so I could power through it, but most people, it was just like an absolute stuttering, like unplayable mess. Cause like you're going, you're trying to do dodges and melee combat. And then the game is like stuttering down to like five frames. And it turns out that the reason why it was stuttering so badly was, uh, that, uh, somebody, uh, rushed it at the last second and uploaded of like a bad version of the game and made a mistake. Well, no, I don't think it's a bad build, but somebody made a mistake at the last second cause they were rushing. Okay. And so the patch is out now. And it's like, I wonder, I wonder what could have caused a mistake from

somebody rushing at the last second on this game that people were working on for seven days a week for six months straight. And Glenn Schofield was like, crunch is the best. The walls closing in, crunching in around. So people are, are, are correct. Correcting me. They pushed out a version with shader pre-compilation disabled. Nice. Get your cereal out, pour yourself a bowl of cap and crunch. Exactly. Um, so this is a very funny, uh, contrast coming right off of Signalis, which is a, uh, survival horror love letter and, um, has very simple goals and accomplishes them in simple ways where, you know, as you're talking about combat, for example, the complexity in a game like that, um, mirroring Silent Hill or, or older resident evils is not going to ask you for

much in terms of just like shoot the thing, try to get two headshots on it to make it go down, right? Um, to solve quote unquote the problem. But there's a lot, there's other things going on with like the puzzling of your navigation and the inventory and such. Um, but it does all that. It does it pretty simple and then it works. And then it also has a compelling narrative pushing you forward. Um, and I guess here we're looking at like another beloved sort of spiritual remake in a way or, or, or whatever homage to something, but like there's so many moving parts. So there's more examples of things you can fuck up. And so the more those things fuck up, the worse the overall impression is. Um, it's, it's interesting to watch the contrast between like a dish with too

many ingredients and like they're, and like you're getting many of them wrong versus very few ingredients and you get them all right. I think, I think the funniest thing about it is that Kalisto was clearly crunched, like even up to the last second, like people, you don't release a game on December 2nd unless that's the last minute you could possibly fucking release it. Like you, you missed, you missed black Friday for fuck's sake. Sure. Um, but like signal us on the other hand was they put out a trailer and people like three years ago and people were like, when's it coming out? And then you hit a fucking blank stare until like two months before signal us came out. They're like, yeah, it's coming out. It's done. We finished it

because like there's something to be said about, you know, Hey, did you like that space? Then you'll fucking like this. And then that's it. Right. Um, but yeah, if, if the things that are, are compelling kind of are left behind, like that melee combo shit sounds super red and it looks super red as well. Um, I don't like hearing the word solved in regards to enemies, but it does not, it feels pretty good the first time you do it. And then you realize that nothing can, nothing in the game can hit. So the, the, the clip you're talking about, right? Is, uh, is you're using the aim to cancel your melee swing, right? So here's the fun part about that. The way it's supposed to work in game is at the end of your combo, you're allowed to shoot

the enemy and you're able to just instantly aim at them and it locks on super strong and you're supposed to shoot them and then that puts them in a hit stun and then you keep mailing them. So it's supposed to be when you're mailing, you're using ammunition to continue your combo, but it turns out if you just tap aim and just don't, the enemy's still in so much hit stun that you can just keep going in your combo anyway. So now it's free. Yeah. And, but the camera's going nuts. Yeah. There's no way that's the way it's supposed to be. And you're not supposed to show people that that's how it works. It's against the rules. Um, so, uh, uh, the other thing, of course, with dead spaces, different weapon types add variety to the kill and the, you know, the enemies you

have to aim a certain way. You got to figure out the situation. Um, are you getting other weapon types that are unique and or different that make you engage in a different way? In the entire stream that Paige was playing, she had a pistol and she unlocked the schematic for a shotgun, but it was not able to build the shotgun. She didn't have enough credits. Um, but it was like, it was a stun baton and it was, it was a pistol for about four hours. Okay. Um, is the atmosphere doing its job? No. Really? Wow. No, it's, it's, it's cause it's a hallway and also none of, none of the enemies are scary and like, they'll, they'll like have a mod, they'll have like a, they'll have like a mod, like a, like a grunt come out of the floor board, like, you know,

like a great, and then you just beat it with a pipe for like 10 seconds and effortlessly kill it. So like the challenge, right? Like there's nothing like, there's nothing to aim at, right? Cause it's all auto locked and shit. Like I remember in, in Dead Space, like really early, like there's like the, the slashers just come out of event, like really far from you and start running towards you and you have to go, oh, I have to hit their legs adequately so that I slow them down and they fall and then I can finish them off later. Right. Um, it also has a stomp. Yeah. It has to, and the stomp and the stomp sucks. That's crazy. That's the stomp. The stomp is bad compared to, compared to Dead Space, but the stomp is everything. Yeah. It's bad. It's not heavy.

Um, enemies don't like freak out in their ragdolls and go nuts and the, the sound is like, you know that like that fuck. Yeah, it's gone. It's not. Also the save game system doesn't work. Oh no. The saves don't work. Uh, okay. That should have actually, no, that should be below the stomp on the list of criticisms that comes second. Fine. When you go to a workbench, when you go to a workbench and then like, um, you know, do all your upgrades and stuff like that. Uh, and then go and die. You load back to whatever checkpoint you had before the workbench and you have to do all the workbench shit over again. Oh no. Oh my God. But on top of that, when you save the game, you can save anywhere. Uh,

and saving anywhere, it doesn't matter because all it does is it resaves over the last checkpoint. And when you go to load it, it just loads the last checkpoint. Oh my God. Okay. So it doesn't, it doesn't actually save anything. It's not, it's not an actual, yeah. The save button doesn't, like I can't even explain it. Like it doesn't do anything because it always just goes to the auto save. It picks the same slot. Even if you have a different manual save, the manual save is just saying go back to this auto save. Once upon a time, there was a check for that called confirmation of destructive actions in which if a player manually says, I want my progress here, and then the game says, no, we're just going to go over that at your next checkpoint.

That would be deleting something that the player intended and that would be a fucking unshippable block, you know, for compliance purposes. But yeah, Jesus. It seems to just be a very strange way to do chapter select because you go, I want to go to the checkpoint before this one. I don't know. The game, and here's the thing, the game looks nice. It controls fairly well. It's got very fancy face capture stuff. It's got decent sound, but it's literally just we have dead space at home. Is it part, it's roguelike? No. What? Okay, someone's crazy. All right. Someone is crazy. Yeah, it's so mid. It's like the most five out of 10 shit I've seen in a while.

Is there any sort of environmental, like, you know, dead space, you got the zero graph and you got like, you know, air. Not that we saw. Yeah, okay. Like, is there other factors in puzzles or in level, you know, other mechanics that are crucial to to figure out or is it just headshot what you see and look for? No, the headshots don't matter because the heads don't matter. So that's the one thing they kept from dead space. They kept that. Okay. But honestly, in the whole time, Paige was basically playing, there was like no reason to shoot anything at all. She was drowning in ammunition. Okay, so as per Susie and Gerard, there are no puzzles of any kind. Nothing. Nothing at all. Jesus. I saw, I had a guy in my chat the other day that had beaten it

and described it as the final fantasy 13 of horror games. Just just an endless, endless hallway. So what if PUBG, but spooky lighting in a single player context? It's so disappointing. Oh man. But it's like, it's like they put enough money into it that it's like it's not like a two. It's like a five. Like I could not recommend this to anyone. Jeez. Like total bummer. I mean, the fact that the red, the dead space remake was around the corner and they had to like swerve the project around based on that is already kind of a weird late decision, you know, to make on something like that high budget.

Like it has there been, it says a lot about Callisto protocol that there's a clip floating around of Max getting so frustrated with it that he just pauses and just installs it and I heard, okay, that's it. I heard he lives a little bit. That says everything, man, because he's pretty patient. Yeah. I kind of, so there's things that like really help tell you, like get you, let you get the lay of the land. And I would say like getting to a first boss, if there is any, would be an interesting like way to get the lay of the land, so to speak, because it speaks volumes about the game. You get to the first boss and sonic frontiers, and that says something about that game. You know, I have been told by people trying to correct

me in chat that the bosses that are there will one shot you. So that's how they're tough. Okay. On that note, actually, turning up the difficulty for regular encounters, like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know if that would like, don't I don't think it, what could they even, that's what I'm wondering is like, if the answer is they don't stagger as long or something that might change things. But Oh, people are saying there's basically two bosses and one you fight four times in a row in a 90 minute span. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Great. Yeah, no, Callisto. And so now we know why you and Paige were sent codes, but not me, because I, being the horror master would have known and been so much more harsher. That's, that's the reason.

Well, to be fair, I was sent an opportunity at a code, which I replied and was not replied to. So I have, you know, that's fine. I have, I have a, I have actually a slight bit of information on that, where the main source to get a fucking Callisto protocol codes was a website that you would like sign up. Yeah, I remember those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it didn't have any limits or any human verification. So if you found it and had an account that could access it, you could just get as many codes as you want. And then it became sorry, we ran out of codes must be so popular. Yeah, I think, I think, um, replying after, uh, replying the same day that the clip came out, where, uh, we were shitting on them for the whole crunch thing is probably not the best way to,

to queue up them going like, who, who's this? Click on the thing. Oh, darn. Oh, yeah. Okay. You know, so that is unfortunate. That is a shame. Um, damn. Well, if it follows the evil within, if it follows the evil within, uh, trajectory Callisto protocol two will be really good. But there's actually something that's much more troubling. Um, every single like attempt at horror or spookiness in Callisto protocol that I saw was a straight rip of an earlier dead space jump scare that was executed worse. In particular, right when me and Paige stopped, you get onto and you play dead space once, you'd remember this very well. You get onto a conveyor belt,

like little, little sideways elevator and you start going and then, oh no, there's a bunch of necromorphs on the other side and you have to shoot them before you get there. But in Callisto protocol, what you do is you just TK them and drop them. Oh, yes. And the encounter is over in one second, the force unleashed. Yeah. And then it fun thing that you mentioned that the guy who plays Starkiller is in the game as a character and he, and he starts, and he starts, uh, TK you around the room, like, uh, like fucking, uh, Starkiller. I mean, yo, those face models are still, they're very, very good. They look incredible. You know. And then so after you get, after you do that thing, where you just drop them in the pit

in dead space, one, what you did is you entered into the engine room that you fight the pregnant for the first time. And in this game, you just fight like 11 guys that you beat in like four minutes because there's nothing they can do to you except shoot you in the back. So the impression I'm getting in Dead Space Two is good. You should play Dead Space Two. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. No, we're working. We're working towards it. The, um, the impression I'm getting as a, as a late silent, um, silent horror, as a late survival horror, uh, experience or enjoyer, one might even say, is that I guess there's just, um, there's a hard line for basically the games and or people behind the, the, the spoobs in

the games and shit. It's like, you either can just break it up until you get it or you don't get it. Absolutely. And if you're copying it, but you don't get it, it's going to fail every single time, which is, wow. Cause like from Dead Space to this is actually the same people. So like they, they did get it at, at some point, they totally got it. Also, I thought what you were going to say is that survival horror has like a, has like very little middle ground. Well, that's, that, that is what I said. It's, there's, there's no, like I, I, I, I've never heard, I've never heard you or anyone else describe a survival horror game in terms that we're like, yeah, it's like, it's pretty much like, no, that's a good one.

Or a holy shit that completely fell apart. You know, the only, the only, the only in between that there is is like, yeah, no, that game is bad, but it has this cool thing in it. Right. Yeah. Um, you kind of have a duty to get lore first and foremost, you know, there's an auto dodge. Get out of, beyond the holding the direction thing you mentioned. Get out of town. That then what are you doing? The Callisto protocol auto dodge makes it so that you can hold the same direction for every, for every attack the enemy does. You no longer need to alternate between holding left and right auto dodge makes this, you can hold in the same direction

the whole time to auto dodge all attacks. So simply hold left on the left and it'll dodge all attacks. That sounds like what you described. However, it will not dodge attacks by any enemies behind you or to the side. You can only dodge the enemy that is in front of you. It's an accessibility option. So I understand. Sure. But like, hey man, Sonic has a fucking instant full length parry button that you got, you, you held that parry, right? And that's just super weird. Yeah. Honestly, that's a really good example. Dodging in, in, in I almost said alpha protocol, a Callisto protocol is very similar to holding the parry in Sonic waiting for the attack to come. It's so strange. It's so strange.

Okay. That's, that's a fucking, I mean, I don't recall. I remember when the, the, it was VGAs, I want to say where it was announced and it was, it was also, was that the same VGAs where it was like alongside like three other like survival horror things and that like can't space. Can't parse them anymore. Yeah. Like it was announced at the same time as like three other space horror things that just kind of blended together in my brain. So, you know, oh well, I suppose you're better off buying a signalist four times than, than playing Callisto protocol. I have a very important question. I've, I've caught wind that the dead space three is not the good one. It's, it's not. Which is worse? Oh, definitely this. Definitely this. Damn. Okay. Dead space,

Dead space three still has, it's still dead space, just a bad one. You're still shooting necromorphs and you're still doing puzzles and you're still doing like dead space shit. But like this is like there's, there's nothing going on. Okay. Yep. All right. Like Dead space three is like damaged by the eafication of games, something that you are feeling very strongly right now as you play through mass effect three. Oh yeah. Yep. Right. Like that dead space and mass effect right next to each other as like little sister franchises as they literally just went along the same. Hey, put, put more shooting in it, put more shooting in it, more shooting, more DLC. Yeah. Yeah. I will do mass effect. I mean, unless there's anything else to say on Callisto,

I have some thoughts on mass effect. I have some thoughts on mass effect. Okay. Let's go with you first. Well, I mean, when I saw the changes from one to two, I was like, Oh yeah. Okay. Lean towards action. Right. This is what we're doing. The radio wheel is gone. Yep. We're, we're trying to, this is the era. This is what it needs to become. This is what games are. This is what gamers want. We walked into a room that you take. It's the tutorial room where the, the turret is shooting at you in the beginning. And like, I mean, it's, it feels almost box for box, like a room in dead space in a Deus Ex human revolution. Like the DXH harness is dropped in a very feelable way. And that era, it makes sense. You can feel they put that in and you're doing the round the corner bits

so you can do, you know, some shit that's a bit more Adam Jensen, you know, from surface to surface. And then you, and then like, that's, and that's as you're, you get out of that and then you go into a roadie run, you know, to get to the next room and you're like, yeah, man, EA is just, they're just, you know, they're taking the zeitgeist apart and putting the pieces in. I recently went through like the Arkham games and the Bioshock games and you're doing Dead Space and Mass Effect. And it's just like, it's crazy how similar everything in that four or five year period came out was. Like they're, they are all the same game over and over. Now, what's interesting though is that like for shooter, it's, it's hard to say because for shooters, like you're seeing

these flavors and I'm like, they just, they aggressively remind me of each other in a lot of ways. But when games have quality of life improvements, you want to see those move forward in a genre, of course. If someone makes a good decision in a game that becomes like a convenient thing, that should follow through down the line so that others don't have to, you know, continue to stumble over that. Now there's stuff where it's like, okay, not every game needs to have a quick reload mini game, but that. Oh, come on. But that was fun, right? That was cool. I really liked that. Not every game is going to have a fucking just snappy ass, sick ass reload animations even, you know, but it's nice when you see them. But the feeling of like running into the

room or seeing like the, the, the, the, like again, the Deus Ex into the, into the gears of war moment. And like at this point too, like with the sort of like charge into power geyser into, you know, like, like, like full on combos and then, and then a melee blast and shit. And you're like, okay, um, this barely resembles Mass Effect one in any way, shape, or form. The RPG is almost completely gone at this point. It's gone. It's totally gone. There's no, that entire stretch is like, there's no RPG left here. You know why? Cause it's war, brother. It's war. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then so you get like, you start that off and like right away, like Mass Effect threes opening was so intensely disappointing to me for a number of reasons,

but it's, it's something I've complained about before, but I don't think you had the context to appreciate it. I'm like, Hey, you said you had something really special to do with earth that we're going to see earth. And here comes Mass Effect three. Hey, we get to see what earth looks like and we're leaving and we're leaving because war. So interestingly, I didn't of course know that, uh, until I was grabbing, you know what, I, here's what I found out about the earth. When I was grabbing the wallpaper to post for, Hey, we're streaming now. And then I pulled up, I was looking for a decent one and one of them had shepherd overlooking the, the reaper fall and it said, save the earth on it for like promotional material. And I was like,

Oh, Oh, I guess that's what they're promoting. I guess that's the title screen. Okay. Wow. Yeah. The trailers are right. The earth is under attack. Yeah. So I mean, no, I mean, that's great. I like, I like a cold experience, you know. Um, and yeah, you see Vancouver for a second and then you're out. And I was admittedly when we, when we were there too, I was kind of like, Oh, I was talking about how, you know, the earth is almost like an off-handed little mention in the first game. And in the second game, you know, there's a bit more as you get that DLC, but earth shouldn't be that important because these are people that might not even be from earth. It's not, it's no longer like the human, you know, the Citadel is the most important thing. Right. So

yeah, like we should like the, the like undue amounts of attention would probably be unnecessary except the, that the player as a human being on earth would want to know about it. I care about earth because I'm from earth. Right. And then yeah, no, one scene later, we're out. And I was like, Oh, okay. Cool. And it's just, yeah, it's like the, the interview really set me up for disappointment because like we have something really special planned for earth. And it's like, is it the tutorial? I guess it's the tutorial. Vent kid in Vancouver, Vancouver, vent kid. Oh yeah, that kid, the fucking the kid. Someone said, someone said, now that a white child has died, you know, the stakes are real.

I want, okay. So you've, you're, you're in it enough. You're in it enough that I can finally point out, dude, you blew up a planet the last time you sat down, didn't bat an eyelash, didn't bat an eyelash, right? You've killed NBB tens of thousands of mercs and aliens on others. Right. And the reapers are in like the, they are like glassing like, like sizes of the earth that are the size of us states in front of you. Oh, that kid though. Oh man. He didn't make it. Yeah, man. Oh man. No, it's close to home. It's, it's close to home. So, don't make me ridiculous. Don't make me time to kill it once again. You know, so if you're, if you're, if your shepherd is like, is like red shepherd, like,

or like, like, not your red shepherd, but like, like renegade shepherd. Yeah. Like they look disassociative for caring. Like it doesn't even make any sense. Like renegade shepherd would like shoot or hoarder in the mouth for asking him an annoying question. Meanwhile, some kid he doesn't know gets blown up in a transport ship. Again, the thing is, is that the, the box art paragon is, you know, every decision hurts them. Right. Even when it's necessary, you do what you have to do, but God damn it. I didn't want to. Cool. Now you're telling me, so you're telling me, so you're telling me that the reapers and the biterians are now a thing and that there's reaper fine

biterians. Like how hard can a trigger be pulled? Was there even any convincing that need to happen? And furthermore, how much popcorn can I get when I watch their planet go down? Like, can we just welcome to the peterians are gone. Like that the codex, like they're basically just completely gone. Yeah. No, I think so. The episode title, I think for that one is reapers versus biterians. Whoever loses, we big E popcorn.gif. Yeah. You're starting to hit. Like if you want to talk about like the loss of RPG stuff, like the codex for stuff like that presents like a real like plot problem, which is the biggest problem with the reapers are coming is the reapers are fucking thousand foot tall

invincible spaceships. So how am I supposed to fight them in this third person shooter? Yes, exactly. And the answer is we're going to just make a bunch of monsters to fill out the roster while the guys are the big, the big monsters in the background. But I'm glad the I'm glad that the Titans are walking through the city. That's right. No, that is that is easily the coolest part. I was really worried that it would be too hard to commit to that. And so we would just kind of have to fight reaper detachment fleets. You know what I mean? Yeah. For a while until you hit the button on McGuffin town. And I'm glad that the Titans are walking through the city. Like I want that. Before I continue, how far have you gotten them again? I mean,

really, just the the intro, like we did the intro. We saw Tim show his true colors, right? Yeah. And then after getting introduced to fucking traps. Oh, yeah. James James, Freddie, Prince, Jr. actually. Yeah. Yeah. After getting introduced to Freddie, Prince, Jr., who apparently whatever ship he's in also takes on his body qualities because he could just ram it and like be fine. Yeah. You know, so that was that was cool. And then the terminatrix showed up and then yeah, we've been basically sat down to read the codex after that, which are now in the journal page. Interestingly. So yeah, I don't get it. So there's a there's a there's a single codex detail that some people miss that burned a hole in my mind years ago, right when I first

started playing it before I fell off of it. That's really important for you to remember and think about whenever you go hang out, talk to people at the Citadel, hang out on the ship, have a drink, do a mini game. The Earth is losing one million lives a day. Yeah, that's about right. Yeah. And and I feel like making the game during the active war instead of them being right outside the door is a massive, massive problem because every time you do anything that isn't related to the war effort, you're being the most sick ass freak in the world, right? A million people a day on Earth alone. Right. I can only I mean, I'm going to see how this plays out, right? But I can only imagine that like the situation you would be in while you, Anderson,

Hackett, basically the leaders of humanity at this point, you know, for what it's worth. Like I would imagine that you're just completely round the clock, non stop, no sleep, insane, stressed out war room 24 seven mode, you know, you would think, right? You would, you would think, you would think. But instead, there's time to walk around the ship and be like, where's my toys? Grab some asses. Play a little grab ass on the Normandy. My fish okay. It's still mass effect. It's still mass effect. Yeah. No, no, that's the thing too, is like the process it seems has started and then it fades out as if to imply like, and that's what happened to Earth. And then the Kodak entry pops up and says the fall of Earth, you know.

But that's a lot of people. That's a couple billions to get through. And they're not just killing everybody. They're trying to hamburger them. So, you know, hamburger them into like, you know, goo monsters. Yeah. So it's going to take a while to do the processing. So like this is an ongoing situation, no doubt. But more but but besides that, again, what's what new asses can we grab? What's going on? What colors we got today? Point pump pull out the flip book, pick check check off the colors, you know. So, yeah, with that, I, I, unsurprisingly, there's been the there's been a change, you know, red shepherd has returned and I want you to explain to me exactly how this works.

It's really not that complicated. It's a lot of there's been a lot of speculation as to don't believe you. There's been a lot of speculation as to what was he think what it's really simple. The most people in watching this would enjoy that. So I wanted to do the thing that more people would get hype over end of story. It's not a complicated decision. There's no three, four, five levels of this is what he did. He hated the ending there. No, more people would get hype if if red shepherd returned. So I decided to do that instead. That's it. And they were not complicated, but I need you to actually explain to me how it works. I announced I was going to play Mass Effect two and three since I never played one. And

since we never played one on the channel, but I played one in my own time back in the day, I was said, okay, we'll have Reggie get through that. And then I'll do two and three because I'd like to experience those games. And that hasn't really changed. But at the end of one, the part where I kind of announced the plan in advance didn't really matter. People were very attached and loved the play through and it was a really great one. So when I jumped in and wanted to play the game, there was a feeling that I shouldn't do that because we should continue the thing. And I get that you watch the thing that you enjoy and that's cool. And it doesn't, my intent being declared in advance doesn't matter as much per se than the thing you're making.

But I enjoyed playing as blue nonetheless. And then when it came down to it, after that, I was like, well, I still want to do three and I want to do, but I feel that despite that desire to play it, the amount of people that really get hype to see Red Shepherd is really high. And people were very excited. So they really, I want people to tune in and enjoy the thing. So I made a decision. That's not actually the explanation I was looking for, though I do appreciate what I mean is, in terms of the game's story and you switching between these characters, literally how does it work? Because Red didn't carry over to two, but is blue carrying over to three? But isn't it red now? In canon? In universe, you mean? When you're playing Mass Effect 3,

is Malon's data going to be there? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, sorry, sorry. Okay, yeah, I was confused. I'm like, in universe, who cares? We're just swapping controllers, whatever. In terms of what's happening, it's exactly the save you saw on screen with the exception of obviously a Garrus romance wasn't possible. So I asked Reggie who he would want to go with, and then he picked Tally. So that's the swap, but everything else is pretty much identical to what Blue did. Okay, so let me try and break this down. Mass Effect 1 was Red Shepard as Reggie. Or sorry, Reggie as Red Shepard, rather, right? Yeah. However, moving on from that, it was you as Blue Shepard with your own series of choices in Mass Effect 1. No, I used Reggie's choices.

Wasn't Rex dead? No. No? Okay. I tagged Reggie past the baton over to me. I continued Red's choices with Blue. Okay, so you continued Red's choices. Then you used the mod that combined all the characters in the one character? No, at some point you- No, I just went Vanguard. I- We didn't keep that. That was the first session? I was about to say, and then you moved on to just being Vanguard. Sorry, yes, yes, yes. Right. And now you're going forward with Red as Red as- I keep saying it like that. That's so strange. Reggie as Red, but dealing with Blue's choices. Yes. Right. And then for Citadel, you want you to go back to Blue? So that- I put that in the- I put that out there just based on the fact that in my head,

if it's a cool little send-off, then it would be a fun thing to do. But I'm not committed to that on the- in the sense that if it doesn't work, if it doesn't make sense, if there's problems, if there- which there seem to be, because some people are like, oh, that's cool, but a lot of people have made it very clear at this point that it won't work as cleanly as you think it will. There's reasons to probably stick with the main character you played in Three to go into it. So I'm not committed to that. I put that out there in the- in the episode as a, hey, this is a cool thing that I think would be fun. But in my head, all I know is Citadel is a little epilogue. So it's just like, if it's not- if it's something where it would make sense and it would

feel cool to do us- to do that, it would be a little send-off where we have both characters in the final third game. And that's- that's all I thought. I was just like, okay, it'd be cool to do that. But obviously, not knowing what's coming, people are like, ah, that might not be a good idea for these and that, and there's a- there's a whole feeling and that I've- I've gotten the energy. So I'm like, all right, then we don't have to do that, you know? So, um, Willie, I'm gonna speak to you. I've been friends with you for a long time, but I'd like to speak to you purely as your colleague right now. Sure. You have lost your damn mind playing through Mass Effect in this bizarre ass way. Okay. I was talking to Paige about it, and she came up with an analogy

that I thought might be the best analogy for this type of behavior I've ever seen. You are reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book back to front in terms of weirdo shit. This is the strangest thing I have ever seen. Now, moving back to also being your friend, switching back for Citadel is going to be a fucking weird experience, and I really don't recommend it. Of course, other people have said as such, like I just said, right? Now, in terms of all of the rest of that, at the end of the day, it's a video game trilogy that I think I'm doing what is- I'm doing what I think would be fun on the channel. That's about it. I want only one thing out of you. It doesn't need to be- it doesn't need to be over

fucking- it doesn't need to be that serious. It's really just- I'm doing what I think is fun. Oh, no, totally. But when I see this, I go, what, have you lost your damn mind? Yeah. There's only one thing. There's only one thing I don't think you have the grounds to stand on in the future. When somebody asks you about watch order for something and you roll your eyes and go, well, obviously, just, just start at episode one and roll through. Not at all. That has- I didn't play this out of order. We're experiencing the games in the chronological order. That's- Well, you're not even playing it in order at all in some cases. But I am playing it in order of one, two, three. Watch order has nothing to do- You're not. You're not. No, but one, two-

Reggie's playing it in terms of one, three, and you're playing it in case of two. But we're playing it together and we're experiencing the story in chronological order. That makes no sense. That has nothing to do with the conversation. I'm experiencing the first game first, then the second game second, and the third game third. Part of doing LPs with people is you play games together. Sometimes, if you're not on the controller, you're experiencing the story at the same time, but you're not playing it. In this case, I'm still going through the game chronologically. It's- It's- I'm getting this- You know, it's- It's- That's not the same as a watch order thing. This- This feels about as insane as those weird Star Wars watch orders.

No, it really isn't. I'm getting the first game first, the second game second, and the third game third. You're making shit up. That's not it. I'm not making anything up. This is my opinion. Okay. It's not parallel. Like, if I were to jump in to the future and then- And then fuck around in that way, then I'd get it. But like, in this case, it's really just having fun with the characters and choices. I also was, you know, when I was thinking about how early on, too, this is a game where, obviously, there's tons of choices and shit like that, but like the parts where there's really cool, you know, like, Femme Chef, like, only content, and there's really cool male chef-only content and stuff. I was like, ah, like, you know, I don't- Like, it would be unorthodox,

but like, if we're switching controllers off, I'm like, at least we get in a little bit of both in there. At least we get to see a bit of, you know, Garrus romance. You get to see a little bit of Jen Hale. You get to see a little bit of this and that and stuff, you know, so I'm like, at least by the end, we kind of experience a overall sort of unique amount of content otherwise. Now, of course, I understand that, like, sacrificing the canonicity of one person's, you know, full-on trilogy is, yeah, that does go secondary, but in terms of just making a fun thing to watch on YouTube, I think this is pretty fun. I wouldn't have done it otherwise, you know? But I did, and I still do, like, I like being able

to experience a game like that for the first time with the controller on, obviously, but I just, you know, I did what I thought would be hype. And I think I was correct in that the pop-off was insane. People were fucking, you know, throwing up, like, people were going nuts, like, holy shit. And I was like, yeah, great. That's what I wanted. I wanted a huge pop-off, and I want to go into this, and, you know, we're expecting all kinds of wacky things to come. I know that it ends on a weird note, and there's Kai Lengs and all kinds of nonsense to come in. Oh, have you met Kai? I saw him walk up next to Tim in one cutscene, and I had no idea he was Tim's ninja,

and I fucking, I lost my shit, because that makes- Oh, did that never come up? I didn't know his job in that regard, so now that I know his job, it's even funnier how lame he is, so that's hilarious. But all this to just wrap up and say that by the end of this man, I think we're going to have a classic, fun, all-time LP of this game, you know? It's going to be a weird one, but it's going to be full of some wild shit. And I like how Reggie can crucify me on my choices, and I can crucify him, and we can go back and forth, and everyone can see the difference in dynamics, but also the insanity of the way we play in different ways.

It's a fun thing, man. I'm happy to do it this way at the end. Oh, I'm not saying it's not fun. I just want you to admit that you're nuts. It's a completely unorthodox, wild-ass way to do it, because it's not a two-player game. It's not meant to be a two-player game at all, but to me, it's a more fun way to do it, you know? So that's it. That's about it. By the way, don't listen to anybody who tells you that veteran is the new normal, or what of the fuck? Yeah, it was accidentally on insanity, and I was like, let's just take it down to normal. And furthermore, I had a chance to get used to the system in two, as it's changed from one.

Reggie hasn't, so he needs to take a second to get used to the new active combat system, the combos, the stacking, all of that shit. So we're going to just keep it normal at the end of the day. Yeah, that's it. And I kind of think, too, the way this game is... I mean, obviously, it's a very... Anytime I play a beloved game, I know that it's going to have the most magnifying glasses, and people are going to have the most opinions on it and shit like that. Like, there is a part of this where I definitely considered, too, that I was like, if I wanted to be, in my opinion, boring about it, I could have just played on my own off-camera in the background, and then waited until I completed the trilogy, and then went here,

we'll start with Reggie going through it or something like that, and then that could have been one way to do it. But I didn't want to wait that long, and I kind of thought that was, you know, I thought this way it sounded a bit more fun. So it's, yeah, it's insane. It's an insane way to do it, because it's not the way anyone else experienced it. Thank you. That's all I wanted. Sure. That's all I wanted. But this is one of the rare games, what I was trying to get to. This is one of the rare games where I think that the double blind playthrough makes it better, because the game, it's not like you're going to run into, you're not going to get stuck running in a fucking dungeon for an hour, you know what I mean? It's just going to be about your choices,

and your RPG is going to move forward regardless. So when it comes to romance, and it comes to friendships, and who you save, and who you don't, and shit like that, you know, games like that, almost like telltale games, are great for double blind, you know? When it's a Souls game, it works best single blind, and then Sherpa, you know? But like genres that are more story driven, that are not going to be about like getting lost in, you know, Anor Londo. Yeah, I think it's better to do it that way. How are you liking it overall? I noticed we didn't actually get to that part. Oh yeah, no, I just, I wanted to, because I was, I mean, I expected people to be like confused, but I didn't expect as much like, like speculation on like, the theory crafting,

you know, on, it's like, oh, Willie hated playing it, he didn't want it anymore, it was just like, nah, man, it's really simple. Occam's razor. The first thought that jumped in my head when I saw that, I'm like, wow, you really don't want to have to deal with Manlin's data, huh? Yeah, no, it really, yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone was like, oh, what a, what a, what a way to bitch out of the consequences of your actions. I'm like, I don't know what those consequences are, but no, really, I just thought it would be hype and people would be hype. That's it. I still want to play, but I want to make people enjoy it more than I want to play. My desire to have the LPB really good for fun, fun for people is higher than my desire to play it myself.

That's it. It didn't start that way, but it became that way. And that's why we're here. I feel so far that the decision to make the combat combo stack shit just just throw it to the fucking limit is awesome. It's one of the weirder things where like the RPG elements get way worse as you play through the games, but the actual part where you play the shooting parts get way better. It does seem like they're doubling down on the genre. They're doubling down on the era. But yeah, the synergy of being able to like now use elemental contrasts to, you know, you build your team out so you free somebody and then you pop them with fire or you biotic and electric like that shit. The combo stuff is really cool. I love that. And it was already nice that

you could use your partner's abilities to kind of circumvent cool down restrictions in two. But now that they're like, hold on, how badly do you want to go nuts with your powers? Because if you want, you can use your partner's abilities, but you can also carry less guns. So that's what I did. Yeah, I carried like the bare minimum, like maybe a shotgun and vanguards like a Dragon Ball character. It feels really strange. It feels like they had a decent think about it, you know. Now, I don't know what it's like for other classes, but I can only imagine if you're summoning and detonating robot drones and then resummoning them instantly that you're also just dominating the battlefield from afar while sniping or something, you know what I mean? Like I could see the way that

commiting to a gun, maximum cool down, building things out in a way where you can either do the most damage on one, you know, the spread feels like if you can target them running into the room, that's where the hit the most enemies thing will benefit you. But then otherwise, once they split up, you kind of are like, okay, let's do some damage. Yeah, it feels like they thought about it. Now, the only thing I need to see is just like, what kind of teammates are you going to get? And will their power distributions be like synergistic, you know, if you need a nice and a fire combo? I don't know about synergistic, but when I was playing, there were team members that were like, like definitive winners. I'm not even going to mention, but like there's a team member

from the old games that you get to play with again, and they just win fights by themselves. Wow. Okay. Yeah. It's quite interesting to see this choice, because Mass Effect really started as a Kotor analog. And yeah, how do we have the gameplay work that's not turn based? We'll make it shooting, but it's pop and stop and pop. So it's kind of turn based? Yeah. And we'll and because guns are more like guns got better to shoot between the Kotor years and oh man, it's, you know, 2000 and whatever, right? Go go go play anything, a chat and people listening at home, go play any shooter release between like 2005 and like 2009 and see how they're all just wanting to catch up to RE4. Like all of them are just like, well, how do we make

it feel as good to shoot and reload the gun as RE4? Nope, didn't do it. Yeah. So try again. So the idea of like shooting is really just a fancy lightsaber or stick in Kotor is like, yeah, fair enough, you know, it would have felt like shit if you actually had to stop and aim with these terrible controls. But everything else was like, no, but we're doing it our own way this time, you know, and then where we are now barely resembles Kotor at all, you know, now it feels more like fucking dead space. Sure. Sure. And we'll see where it goes conversationally, but I will say that like they've streamlined things in such a way that, you know, the, there's always the top to bottom conversation flow that you kind of do.

But like the way Kotor did dialogue, like it was not afraid to just put a list of, you know, 10 things to select, which you also, which is also, you know, the way disco does it kind of thing, right? Just here's all the subjects to cover. And Mass Effect wants to give you that in some places, but also wants board gamers to just be able to say the thing and move on. So it feels as if conversation is, you know, like simplified compared to what that Kotor situation sort of was over the over time. So yeah, the DNA is just unrecognizable, you know? It's, it's, you get, you get more change between one and three in some aspects than other games got to their like pseudo, not really sequels, like by, you know, like,

like spiritual sequels, like it, what, like two, if two didn't exist, you, you'd swear that three was made by a completely different team. Right. Right. And here's what's crazy though. It's for the most part that I get the changes and the combat stuff especially feels really good. Again, the blatant copy moments are, they're, they're blatant, but it's not the same as I feel like other franchises where we've turned it on its head and now everyone hates it. You know, it didn't go over as poorly as a reinvention as it could have, certainly. You know, there's, there's, there's stuff where, yeah, you just, I mean, like, well, for example, like here's another EA game, Mirror's Edge, right, where you get, you get a real shift and

flip in priorities from the two games. And if there was a third one, God knows, you know, how far that would have changed from two, but this is, this is one of the most evolving, most changed from its original game, uh, trilogies I've ever seen. And it's generally accepted. If you want to see, and I know it's not really your, your wheelhouse in terms of genre, but if you want to see the EA thing happen lightning fast, right, you need to go play Dragon Age one and two. So how do those games, yeah, it is mythic. It is, it is, it is like legitimately unbelievable. It is the only thing. So Dragon Age two has quality stuff, like there is stuff in it of value, right? But it is, it is like a meteoric drop in quality.

And it is a very, very different game. It's so strange. It's so fucking weird. It's like, I don't, um, I'm trying to think of examples, you know, where you just see like moments that are like in one game. Okay. So here I have an example, right? Um, when in the original Jet Set Radio, uh, spray painting is a little mini game that you do with the, and you trace the, the shapes of the size of the, the graffiti you're trying to paint. And in Jet Set Radio Future, it's like they decided that was a mistake and that's, that should not be part of the game. So really it's just press the button and then you successfully tag. That's it. You know, uh, and I kind of liked those mini games, but, um, they look,

they took a core mechanic and went, Oh yeah, we shouldn't have done that. Remove it. Let's just get it. Let's just lean in on the, on the grinding. Does Dragon Age kind of like reinvent the wheel? No, that's not what's happening at all. Okay. Dragon Age. Okay, man, I'm going to hit you with a little history lesson because this is the most fascinating thing because it's the EAfication of games. Dragon Age Origins is, Hey, Baldur's Gate, those games were pretty good. We're not going to be able to make a new Baldur's Gate because those games were back in their own time. And this is before Larian, right? But we'd like to make a classic Western RPG, like the olden days. So we're going to make Dragon Age Origins and the big, the big, um, uh, you know,

selling point is the origin, whereas the start of your character is going to be like the first whole chapter of the game is going to be completely different. And then I'll have knock on effects. So if you have a dwarf noble, the first four hours, five hours of the game is the dwarf noble storyline, and then it'll affect you onwards, yada, yada. And it was a very, very good, very classic style, like computer RPG done in like the Baldur's Gate style. It was excellent. It definitely has a problem here or there, but it's excellent. And then what happened was that the PC was the main skew on, on Dragon Age Origins, but the console versions outsold it a lot. Like the console versions of Dragon Age Origins sold like crazy. And so the, the,

the message from on high comes down, uh, get rid of this, this, this like slot in your, your abilities on one to 10 and then adapt it for the controller stuff. No, we're going to make this play like a controller based video game. So auto attack is now moved to a button. And there's no such thing as auto attack. It's hit, hit, hit, hit, attack, attack, attack, because you're fighting, man. And then, then part two comes down that says also you have 11 and a half months to make the sequel. Of course. Classic EA fucking situation. So it has to be awesome. And one of the like weird dev taglines was every time you hit a button, something awesome has to happen. And I'm like, okay, it's a goddamn squad RPG. You play from the top or so. Are you fucking nuts?

That doesn't make any sense. And so it's like super weirdly actiony. For no reason. Like you're just hitting the button and it's, it's super like bombastic, but also with like the ugliest art change ever. Do you, do you press the button to begin combat mode or do you press the button to swing your sword? Swings. Okay. Okay. And it, but, but here's the part where it's like it's otherwise kind of the same system. They just moved auto attack to your buttons. Okay. And it's, and they're like, well, we don't have enough money to make new environments. So like have every single side quest environment in the whole game take place in the same like eight caves and basements and shit like that. Do it in a year guys. Yeah. Sure. And then they went, Hey, you know what,

all those, those dialogue things that's old fashioned, you know, it came out the ruled mass effect. You know what you guys need to do? You need to put the dialogue wheel in a classic old style CRPG, but instead we think, you know, people complained. Well, people complained that shepherd doesn't always say what I think he's going to say. Yep. So do you know what the solution to that is going to be? The solution is going to be let's not have it say anything. Let's just have it be like a funny face or like a heart or like a fist. Oh my God. Fuck off. An icon. Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, that's a million times more frustrating. It sure is. And then if you like hold on it for a couple seconds, then I think the dialogue shows up as to like what it's going to be.

But it's, it's like vibe. It's vibe button. What kind of vibe do you want to throw out? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Jesus. Oh, man, let me get a fucking screenshot of this. That is like as far away as you can get from the thing we like. That is the these are all the things you can say. You know, that is that rep like that is the furthest end of the slider from what is the nature of a man. I want I want a photo of this fucking thing. Jesus Christ. I there it is. It does. Oh my God. I'm remembering incorrectly. It does show the dialogue, but they are all associated with fucking emojis. And then there are like 50 different emojis that mean different things. I mean, I just I'm like, I'm afraid to ask what happens in the, you know,

the others in that series, right? Like there's a three and isn't there like an inquisition and then all the other ones. Here you go. Here is the list of them. I found it. Here's the list of emojis that show up next to all your dialogue prompts to let to help you know what each of them means. Okay. But they they and you're saying that you highlight them for a bit and then they update. Yeah, I believe so. I think they're there. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. But they switch it to normal. One second beer. Yeah. So you're saying that these things change when you highlight, but it's no, no, no, no, I'm I'm incorrect. Okay. They did show the dialogue, but they did switch it over to emojis. And instead of a whole wheel, I believe you often only get like diplomatic icon, helpful,

humorous, charming, aggressive combat. I don't understand the purpose of having the emojis while also having like 40 of them. Okay. So this becomes something good if you have the normal dialogue wheel with one of these next to them. So it's more information. So in the same way that a power gone and renegade choice is a red and a blue line, you know, and then I, if you recall, I asked that there would be a yellow line for a committal point moving forward point, you know, things like that for like move the conversation forward. If you have a line of dialogue that's normal and then next to that it says combat, you're like, oh, this is going to start a fight, you know. So that's not bad to have. I can see that you can you have to design a game

with that in mind because sometimes, for example, disco, you kind of want people to not know where their choices are going to lead. And then you fucking shit your ass into a into an amazing sequence by taking a risk on a red check, you know, so that can be built in. But like, in this type of game, if it's something to just give you more information on a normal dialogue choice, that's good. If this is what the only info you've got to go on, that's horrible. No, I misremembered it as being worse than it was. What I am definitely not misremembering it being worse than it was was the art style change. Okay, the art style change is so astonishing. I don't I see this picture of a ogre man. Yeah. I am now trying to find a picture

of it. Oh, this is the shot. This is the fucking screen shot. Oh, this is what I want. Here we go. So I sent him a picture of the purple ogre from Dragon Age One, and I'm sending him that fucking photo of a guy jumping at the ogre in Dragon Age Two. Oh, Jesus. Oh, no. Wow, that's so much worse. Okay. Yeah. 11 months. 11 months. Yeah. 11 months. 11 months. It's like in hindsight now, like, oh, man, why did they make it different? They made a difference so they could make it faster. But like, yeah, no, it has created this bizarre, like almost DMC two situation. Anyway, that arrow is obviously two though. Yeah. That arrow obviously was like a fucking hilarious just like thing to look back

on the clown shoes decisions. But I mean, the like step one with any of these games is like, it needs to have a writer fucking right, man, you need like, like you have to start there and have them write in a really like fucking fleshed out ass way. You know, you can build a game that is going light on narrative in a shorter period of time if you wanted to, but you should still give the writing a chance in these games like, fucking one year. That's so insane for this and for Kotor and like, man, EA fucking and then didn't understand what made their games good. Inquisition came out and Inquisition's like, okay. And because of the like the cratering of the graph, people went, Oh my God, it's good again.

It's like, it's not actually it's like fine. But it's definitely better. What an incredible history of like, not understanding why things are good, but having the money to acquire them anyway and then stepping in to try and just force it, you know, squeeze it, squeeze blood from the stone. Like this is what it's been for years, but hey, just. I also want to point out that this so Mass Effect two, Mass Effect three, um, Dragon Age one, Dragon Age two, um, and there was one other, uh, but are from the era of the most confusing DLC roll out ever specifically for Bioware where you couldn't just buy your DLC for your PC game on steam. You had to buy it from the Bioware store

Oh no with Bioware points. And then when I, when I went into like, I wanted to replay Mass Effect before the, the trilogy re-release came out and I discovered that the Bioware store no longer exists. Of course not. And in order to download it, I had to, I had to somehow figure out that what it wanted me to do was log in to origin under my Bioware store account credentials. And then it added it to my account. And I have, I own two versions of Dragon Age origins on my PC, one in which I bought all the DLC through the Bioware social thing and one was the greatest hits that came with all the DLC, but the one that already has all the DLC can't actually put the DLC into my steam account because it's already linked to my Bioware social account that

no longer exists. I was about to say, well, obviously you're supposed to just wait for the legendary edition and then go buy that because fuck you, you can't get the pieces. Wow. Wow, there's always a story. How long is what, sir? I said there's always a story with these fucking things. Like, I don't know how, if I wanted to play Dragon Age Origins right now, I would probably install the ultimate edition, go to log in and tell me that I don't have the DLC on the ultimate edition that I bought. And like, is DLC like characters as well as like campaign stuff? Oh yeah. Yeah, missions, all that shit. Don't forget in aspect two, the Dragon Age Origins future armor. And in Dragon Age, there's the fucking, I think in Dragon Age two, there's the

Commander Shepard armor or the N7 armor. It's like, oh man. The worst of the era. Oh man. Yeah, okay, okay. Well, in any case, though, you know, so far, so good. I just do have to say that like, the part where every time you start a new game, the Codex just refreshes with all the old shit without just putting the slightest indicator of what's old and what's new. It's because they're all new. They're technically new entries. I hate it. I also hate it. Just say what's already been in the last game. The audio quality in two made it obvious, but still just put a little color, make a yellow, make a blue, a red, and then you know, you're supposed to be playing these games 18 months to years apart. Yeah, of course. At which

point you would actually want to reread the Codex anyways. All the Codex again. Yeah. Hey, Woolly, don't forget my favorite. So there's two stupid things that were said at the time. One is every time you hit a button, something awesome happens in Dragon Age two, which was like hilarious, but never, ever, ever forget now that you're playing Mass Effect three. This is the perfect time to get into Mass Effect. I mean, there's never been a better place to start than right now. Like if you if you put your brain in, like if you if you fucking quantum leap into Paul marketing's perfect, just like ignorant gamer, that's like, I don't know, but all the aliens are blowing up earth. We got to stop them. They got that kid. I'm going to do it for him. And then

whenever a character comes up and goes shepherd, what the fuck were you doing in the last game? And you're like, I don't know. It's just like, it's like, don't worry about it. It's like when you're watching a movie and two characters don't like each other. But it happened before the movie started. It's just backstory. Don't worry about it. Yeah. You know, when when Game of Thrones started rolling, you didn't know why these people were beefing, but it happened before. Don't worry about it. So we got to stop them. It's been a little bit. And it's I'm a little, I'm a little unclear, but like the biggest problem with telling people that they can start now is that there are optimal outcomes to many of the story beats that have been built up over the trilogy. And people

who are starting brand new can't get a bunch of them. Yes, I realized. I realized I realized starting with two that like the options for starting a new save were you never met any sidequesters end of story. That's it. That content's gone. And now that plus any other continuing through line is just auto set to like there's there's past fail and then there's any does not exist, which might as well just be fail. So overall, how does your game play when a brand new shepherd walks into town and doesn't know anything and hasn't done anything? Is it a significantly worse story? Probably the most interesting things about the franchise so far have been those moments, those characters and those decisions, you know? Yeah, we'll see.

We'll see where it goes. But, you know, looking forward to just more expansion, more conversations with the people that are fun to talk to. I want to yeah, I just want to go ahead. I have a piece of news about Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition on team. I downloaded in the past few minutes and get to the part where it's installing the, you know, the Microsoft requirements. And it goes, Hey, you need to activate your DLC on your copy of Dragon Age Origins. Use the CD key here. And then it links you to the website gobyaware.com slash Dragon Age slash PC slash DLC activate EN. At which point I am met with a 404 because that one exists. So I actually have no way of playing

Dragon Age Ultimate that I bought all those years ago. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. There's just no way. That's what you get gamer. That's what you deserve. Like, like I think the stated explanation to this is go rebuy it on Origin Loser. PC Master Race, right? Oh, man. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. The GOG version just works. Yeah, I guess so. Wow, that is, I'm going to go to the store page and see what it fucking said, because that's just terrible. Oh my God. EA is the EA is the worst, like Activision is the worst, but EA is also the worst. I mean, they don't care. They don't have a reason to care. And what, like what, how many people like, so what if you complain about it? Fuck off. Get our re-release

if we ever decide to make one end of story. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Is there a robust modding community for those games mirroring the mass, the mass effects community? Okay. Okay. Because, um, yeah. Dragon Age has, uh, Origin says way more mods, actually. I have to assume that, like, at the end of the day, the fans figured it out and jumping on those, those mod forums and such would probably just solve all problems and then some. Um, well, in any case, uh, yeah, that's how that's going. EA such a fucking piece of shit. That was the worst of their eras. Um, poor, maybe the one to come. Oh, maybe. Who knows? Now that palms have been greased and the FTC has decided to go forward, uh, and allow, uh, never mind the antitrust, the merger continues. Oh yeah. Is that how

that's happening? Great. Yeah. Well, you see, last time we talked about it, there were three, um, nays and one yay and from the FTC board, the in favor of the acquisitions. So three people thought no, but then, um, then it's become a 50 50. So someone has changed their mind. So they got a new car. I wonder what, I don't know what could have changed a mind, you know, really what, what, what, what changes the nature of a man? What could, what, what can change the nature of a man? You know, you know what that, that reminds me, Willie, um, Dragon Age one to two has the distinction of being the only existing game series that went from pick dialogue out of a list to the wheel.

Like Mass Effect started with the wheel and like Baldur's Gate had the dialogue and then, and playing escape had the dialogue, but Dragon Age has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 as options. And then Dragon Age two has the wheel and it's yeah. Oh yeah. Fallout did it. Yeah. Fallout, but that was later. And also fallouts wheel is the worst of them all. I did get to see a bit of that fallout wheel as well. Could you like, could you imagine playing disco with that, with a fucking wheel to get through? Like just imagine that. It would be like, it would be like alcohol, a picture of a dick, a fist, money, and a dollar sign. Oh, a dollar sign. Yeah. A dollar sign. But just imagine having

that conversation with Joyce through a couple of wheel selections as opposed to expanding on literally where are we? What am I? What is happening? Like that just anyway. The fallout four wheel is the worst of them all ever because fallout four has like four options, and sometimes all four options are the same fucking line of dialogue. Nice. Love that. Maybe you call him a motherfucker instead of just yelling, but like there's no act, like it's just, no, I'm trapped. Okay. Well, something else besides Mass Effect, I got a little further in Bayo. Yeah. How you liking it? You know what? So, okay, I solved my lock on problem. And I identified the nature of it too. So you can fight without ever using lock on. But the main

thing to keep in mind is what I was doing beforehand was I would like like the way I would play Bayo too is I'd lock onto an enemy. And then I would not be, if I was close enough to attack, I would not be touching the stick until I needed to input like a clean input if possible, like a Tetsuzanko or something like that, you know, I would be just using the buttons. So I try to input like as little as possible, depending on positioning in Bayo three. If you constantly lean the stick towards the enemy you want to target in the group, you're always going to swing towards that enemy. But you will no longer be like not moving at any point. And not that you really should be, but you're always going to be like deying and leaning towards your enemy. So

essentially, as long as you just tilt the stick the entire time, that's what happens, right? So fine. It's kind of what I did, I think. Yeah. I mean, it solves the problem. So when I went back to practice, I kind of went, Oh, I see. This is what it's going to be. Just always, always be hitting the direction towards the enemy. So and if they're far away behind you, then estimate and go for it and then, you know, spin the camera around. So we progressed, got some more weapons. I'm sorry, can I hold you there for a second? I got to help somebody bring in a package. BRB. I'll do this. Hey, warning, Bay of Three spoilers ahead. That's it. I got to the, well, so I went through the Tokyo section.

Look out behind you. Oh, no. Hey, look at that. Willie's smarter than Bayonetta. Wow. Wow. So Jay and Anna, as I'm calling her, is a very, very cool design. I really like it. I didn't watch the trailer with the alt designs shown off, so I'm getting them fresh. But I did definitely feel like after that sequence, which, oh my God, the spider sequence on the rooftop is one of, no, it's the, I hate it worse than the whatever minigame, like the afterburner shit and all that. It's a fun homage, but it's kind of annoying to go back to all the time. That spider rooftop sequence is the worst

one in the entire series easily. I would agree that Bay of Three has the best combat of all three games, but like I've over the past like couple of months, I've gotten to this point of like, how about you let me play? Because Bay of Three has like the best combat and it's like, it'd be nice if the game let me do some of it. Like the camera is going fucking crazy, tilting left and right every time you go over a bump because that's how a spider controls. And it just, and I'm like the whole time it just, it's clown shoes and I'm having a hard time controlling it, trying to do stuff. And you know, I have my own foibles, certainly, but you're not wrong. It's hard. It's bad. And there's a, and then like the whole time,

it's like, if you just gave me that fucking double jump that you get in the next scene where you spider swing, you probably could have helped part of the moveset, but instead you can't do that until the next scene. Anyway, once you're controlling spider bail on foot, you're, it's fine, but that sequence, just as a slave was just anyways, Janeette is cool. And then, you know, you get her, her power and stuff. And I kind of see what might be, I guess a signposts where I go, oh, I really hope this is not an adventure where you get to pick your robot masters, except every robot master is another bao dying. Like, like, are we just going to watch our bao die for this whole game? I don't know. That's not what I hope. And then it happened again. And I was like,

oh, Jesus Christ. And this time around, she didn't even put up a fight. She was, she was fucking flexing and being cool. And then just, just got God. Hey, Willie, look behind you. Hey, look at that. Willie's smarter than Chinese Vanetta. So, uh, Shay and Etta, as we call her. Willie, I want you to keep the phrase look behind you in your mind, dude. I like, like, with Jay and Etta, I'm like, okay, she fought. She had a, the first thing you see is, you know, her losing her, her, her Jean. And then she has to, um, she has to keep on fighting, you know? Um, oh, it's, I'm sorry, if you're trying to avoid bao three spoilers, I should probably games week sold. It's okay. I just work. I'm going to describe what I've seen so far in the game. Also,

don't worry, man. At this point, no one is avoiding bao three spoilers. Okay. Um, you know what? I'll just do an editing. I'll do this. Hey, warning, bao three spoilers ahead. That's it. All right. So I'll cut that and I'll put it earlier. All right. So, um, when you are, seeing her, then do her thing with phantom, you know, Phantasma Renea, as, as it were, you're like, okay, so yeah, she fought and then she lost. And then this is the process of, of us going through fucking whatever the multiverse man. No, it's the, it's the alpha. No, it's the sigma verse. It's the sigma verse. It's the fucking summer. It's the, it's the migtail verse. All right. We don't need these hoes. Singularity and his migtail verse is taking out, taking out the bao.

So, um, anyways, when that happened, I was like, oh, shit. And then she left her power. Okay. And then when it comes to, uh, Shayonetta, um, the Chinese bayonetta, she's totally fine. And then just gets like the single one dumb shot, which is like always, always in everything, the worst way to like kill a cat. It's like the mortal combat Armageddon, uh, not Armageddon, um, um, annihilation style. We're just taking this character out type moment. No time for this anymore. And you're like, man, I know these have been goofy before, but like, why did it get like, why did it get so much worse? Like Wally, Wally, because your baonetta is the baonettaist baonetta. Sure, man. Um, so I'm priming, I'm priming for what's, what's to come.

And then we got introduced to Viola a little bit more. And, um, I described it as, okay, this game is not even pretending to like homage DMC five. It's like peeking and copying the homework. And I just, yeah. You remember when I talked about this? And I'm like, it's, it's like weirdly obvious. And you're like, hmm, it's, it's crazy. It's crazy, right? It's super crazy. Um, so the train demon is super cool. I love it. Um, but when you get it in handheld form and it's like, Hey, it's fucking Cavalier shut up. We're not going to pretend it's not Cavalier. And you're like, Oh, you really, really just copied homework. Like you just peeked over, you know, and of course use my homework,

but just, just change it, just change it a little bit. The teacher doesn't notice. And so Viola is full of that energy. Certainly. You're like, man, she's got a lot of that Nero going on, right? So yes, of course. Um, but like, uh, I was looking at her going, okay, I'm down for like, like, you know, I was down for Nero and then I ended up loving him and now Nero's my fucking is the best, you know, I'm down for a third to join in the game. I'm down for the, the new character energy, you know, and whatever that comes with. Um, and, um, you know, I'm, I'm looking at her as like, okay, I can see. So she's kind of like, uh, she's kind of, she's got the tough girl. She's got the fucking Biff naked soundtrack going. Yeah. And she's incredible. It's like a new target. Yeah.

It was super quiet, but like when you turn the volume up and you can hear it, it's pretty, it's pretty good. Yes. It took a second, but I'm like, no, I like, I like her track. I just wish that the soundtrack didn't like bayonetta one and two with the main theme song and, uh, fly me to the moon and then tomorrow is mine and then, um, um, moon river, all four of those create a style that is similar to James Bond themes where you hear the similarities between them. There's a, there's a thing that you're doing and I feel like they broke the combo here and it just, it's not that the song choices are bad. It's just that I'm like, dammit, it sucks that they didn't keep the combo going because you established, you know, she lived the end of

those games, say bayonetta will return. I mean, the bond comparison is not completely lost there either, but I just wish that the main theme song continued that energy regardless. Um, I was looking at viola hoping for a sort of Travis touchdown energy, I suppose. Like, okay, she's going to be kind of goofy and cocky and you know, understand that. That's what I was hoping. And that's, that's the, that's the, the leeway I want to give her so far. It was not that so far. It's been luca. Yeah. Remember luca slapstick shit and how it was super funny. Oh, man, man. And like that choice deliberate or not, whatever that may mean is not lost.

You're not stupid. It's, it's like, Oh God, dammit. You didn't look at those little goofy dumb things as optional, hopefully, ignorable moments. You committed to them and tripled down. And why wouldn't you? You, you've kept it up. And to be honest, like luca is just the, do luca's dumb slapstick shit? Like eventually I'm just like, yeah, whatever. It's luca. He's trying to flex. It's fine. You're in the background. Do your thing. Who cares? Like my brain accepts that it can turn off. You know, and I kind of have like grown to just accept luca as just like, yeah, that's your job. You're there to be spanked. She's got to spank somebody. Right. Fine. There's a dynamic to it.

Fucking God, dammit. I didn't want to get that here. And that's what we got. And Hey, cool new girl. Wait. It's cool new girl with aspects of like the character you hate the most. And it's not, it's not working, man. It's not working. And whatever that may mean and whatever that may mean, which I'll tell you this, that like I talk about the plot gun from time to time. Sometimes we take sprays, saw it off the moment she started reacting to him. And I put that with what we already threw up on the board. I wanted to 180 that plot gun and put it in my mouth. Yeah. Like the instant that cutscene starts, you're just like, I don't, I'm not going to be happy with the resolution of this. What an incredible right away. What an incredibly unfortunate series

of decisions. What a, what a terrible series. I don't know what you were thinking. So it's, Band of the Threes plot is really fascinating because like it's like the ending, I mean, the ending's bad. You'll get there, right? But like when you're playing through and you don't know the ending is bad, all these little silly moments that just kind of suck ass, you kind of move past them in view of the special. I still am. I still am, right? But like, I hate most of the cutscenes Viola is in. Like I hate like 95% of the scenes in the game that she is in as a result of what you're talking about. So did you go through the, the books and the, the umber and lore pick stuff when you were

picking when you're playing? I started to, and then I was like, I don't care about any of this shit. And I, it sucks. And then, and then I hit the credits and part of me hitting the credits was me going, what the fuck happened? And the response was they explained it to you in the books. Yeah. Okay. So, um, we, we, we, we like to, to, to go into, to catch the Laura where we can and, you know, um, in this case, I felt immensely, uh, uh, uncompelled, I think maybe to do it as we went because they always are flow breakers that suck and are not interesting. Uh, they were, they were in the last game too. Nonstop flow break. So the flow break, in this case, I was like, fuck this, we're going to do this the way we did it in death stranding,

right? And death stranding would be, oh, that makes sense. We did, we did two or three, um, sessions and then we had a big old reading hour, right? Going through all the emails. Yeah. So that's it. So I was like, let's do that. And we did it. And I was like, all right. So there's the demons. There's the, there's the, there's the angels and all that jazz. And that's fun. And hey, yo, yo, hey, copying homework, uh, shout outs to fucking sin. Gamora using the word sin even on its transformation. Uh, that shit was rad. And I'll even say this, like those power ups with her and with, um, queen, uh, butterfly are, yeah, they're cool. They're great. They're the, those are the wonderful one-on-one punch out moments

that are not the same as the rooftop sequences where you're sliding around as Gamora or spider. They've, those feel, those feel big. They're slow and lumbering, but they're more fun, you know? Um, so yeah, we go through the, uh, uh, the first page of the, the new enemies, uh, and the, the homunculi. And you see the first design and then it gives you the description and it talks about, you know, they're genetically produced and, you know, they're mind slaves and you can see the cord actually that, that is like an umbilical cord that leads back to their, uh, mind slavery with, um, uh, singularity. And I was like, oh, that's cool. And then also their genetic makeup can break down to like form all the others. They're the building blocks and you can see them inside

the attacks of the other larger ones. And you're like, that's cool. That's cool. Um, and then the second one is like, it's like the, again, discount warframe design, right? But the second one, which is the, it's the normal guy, but with the shoulder pads and like the speed, like, like that's a cool design that would be stronger if that was the only of its type in a game, right? If that guy walked up to you and no one else had that motif in the game, you'd be like, that's an awesome character, right? Great. And then you read the description and then you move on to the next and like 13 descriptions later, neither Reggie and I can remember what the fuck we read. Can you like tell Willie the cool one with the spear? What's its name?

I get cumulonimbus. Are you sure? Uh, uh, pyro, plastic flow. Like, like you're like, you know, maybe I forget some of the names from bail one and bail two. Sure. But like, I didn't forget them while I was playing it. Yeah. Um, and it was around like the seventh or eighth one where, um, as opposed to swindler, swindler of progress, for example, you get frontal assault battle unit. And I just, I'm like, okay. So the theme is that they're manmade and they're mass produced and they're militaristic. And they feel fucking mass produced because I can't tell the difference between any of them. Yeah. And like that extends to some of the bosses. The bosses just like some,

some of them just look like big versions of the regular guys. And I don't know, even if you kind of are looking through the, there's, even if you're scrolling through the dumb lore in the first games or whatever, you come across some shit like Johnson forest and you go, Johnson forest, what the fuck is that? That's some goofy dumb, whatever name for a forest where the demons live. There's nothing you remotely stand out or quirky about. There's just nothing. There's, you read the descriptions of all them. And the first one is the only interesting one. And God damn it, man. And then some, and then someone said fucking toothpaste ass designs. And I was like, Oh God, I can't see it. You're fighting motherfuckers in the Colgate dimension.

They're minty fresh. I can't unsee it. It's done. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking about it. And I had trouble, you know, cause you hadn't played it. So there was only so much I could annunciate. I feel like I didn't get it across, but like think about the angels in Bayo one. Like they're, they're marble with gold trim, a lot of blue and red highlights on there, on their silk. But then when you beat them up, they're disgusting bug creatures underneath underneath it. Yes. Right. Yes. The, the, um, the, the demons in Bayo two, they're a classic demonic designs, but they're also robotic, but also mineral, like they're gemstone kind of thing. And like, okay, that's a cool twist. These guys are,

and they get standouts like Joy and Alaroon. Yeah. And then these guys are, are toothpaste robot machine guys. And what's their, what's their second layer of visual interest? It's nothing. Yeah. You absorb a prime Eve. You absorb a Bayo and then you get big. Do you know that even? No, no. Are you sure? Yeah. What's happening in the game? Yeah. I mean, well, we're trying to track down. Okay. Well, what's happening is I'll tell you what's happening. Uh, Jean, uh, who is ostensibly Vegeta. If Bayonetta is Goku, Jean is Vegeta. Vegeta is on a stealth mission to sneak past the cameras into a facility to meet up with the guy with the scar on his eye from the beginning of the game.

And I'm like, it's Vegeta. What do you mean? She has to stealth her way through. I get the part where the femme fatale spy aesthetic is the gag and you kind of need her. I get that. I get that part, but it's also hard to, to, to take it in when you don't really get to play her in a context that is larger, more powerful in the way that she can keep up with Bayo, the Goku of the world. So those levels have this huge like, man, we really couldn't spin this off into a whole different thing. The energy, the oversight, I suppose, to just not make Jean a playable series of like other Bayo missions, right? And then have Luca be the one sneaking as a weak human through the base as he does. Luca has to be there in China so that

Viola can be like, come back for some reason. Because Luca is the person who can infiltrate and have to hide from demons and shit. That makes sense. You know? So I'm just like, that's all you had to do. You could have kept the bit. You could have kept the whole spy bit, but you just needed to take the actual weak human who runs from conflict and make that the stealth character. And then take Vegeta and make Vegeta go out there and do what Vegeta does. Yeah, anyway, you know. You've played a lot of, you've played enough Bayo 3 to get to play as Viola, right? Yeah. So she's cool. She's got cool stuff. She's different. I didn't quite understand that you don't control Sheshir. No, she's totally automatic. Yeah, I missed that part. So then you're

sacrificing an AI partner for the ability to block and parry. The way that I internalized it is that Viola is, what if we made an entire character archetype around round trip? Yeah, yeah. Because that's what she's doing. She's throwing the sword out. She's throwing the sword out and then you have a bare knuckle mode. Yes. It is definitely less astral cheney than Bayo is doing, you know. There's also a part that I like violently disagree with on a development perspective and I want to fight whoever made the choice. So lock on and shit is like attached to certain buttons. And like, so if you double lock on, you do like the dash forward and some of those moves, right? And the decision to be like, well, Viola has a dodge. Oh my God, I was waiting.

Yeah, Viola has a dodge and that'll be on the same button. So we need to use a different button for her block, which is her witch time. And it's congrats. You've, you have built up a series of two and a half games in which the defend myself button. Oh my God, dude. I could not adapt it. I got to the end of the game and beat the final boss without having adapted to it immediately. So I did a couple of sessions and I was like, I can't fucking like I pressed the dodge button to get out of danger. The block button is the other one. And I go to the options to look for a free option. And you can, you can switch it. You can swap the two, but you can't customize the controls completely. No, because all the moves are now swapped to the wrong button too. So I had to

switch it back because I didn't sprint. So do the lock on dash. So the lock on dash and the sprint arm, for me, I'm getting used to it swapped is what I'm doing, but it's put the moment. Yes. But now you go back to Bayo and then you have to invert it again. What a terrible decision. It's not per character. It is per character. But what that's what I mean is I'm gonna, but now Bayo goes back to the correct location. You can't do it. You can't do this. You can't do that. And on top of that, right? Viola's dodge sucks as terrible. It's not even exist. It should just be a block. Like what's the point of putting like it shot? It is like, I don't like we don't I'm not a game dev, right? So I don't want to, I try not to be like, this is what the devs should

do or else they're stupid. They should not even have her have a dodge at all. It should just be the block button and it should be on the fucking right trigger. And then that character would play 10 times better. I mean, you could always like make it like stinger your way out of trouble if you need to, you know, things like that. But yeah, the dodge is pointless and it gets, I don't know what iframes it has, but obviously it's very little compared to what you otherwise would get with Bayo. It's a pointless fucking thing. And then yeah, you have that. It's also a panic button when you're like, oh shit, I'm getting me out of this situation. And now you have that over on R1 and it's a terrible idea to do that. It's so interesting because like when you switch characters

in the Devil May Cry 5, the game that this is fucking cribbing, it doesn't, you don't have this issue because like your defensive mechanics are most often like, okay, well with Dante, you're picking, you're switching to your Royal Guard, but otherwise in many cases with Devil May Cry, offense is defense, you know, you use your moves to get out of the way. So whatever you see in the kit, that is a useful tool to get you the fuck away or up to something is used for both purposes. So when you adapt to V and his, to him riding on top of, you know, the Panther and Church, you don't have to worry about it. Absolutely. You don't have to worry about it. There's continuity. In Devil May Cry, the only control thing that applies to this is the

one that you and I and others people made ourselves, which is switching Nero's gun to a different button that you don't really use that much. Sure. Right. And that's a little strange compared to Dante, but that's a choice we made. Yeah, because I want to color up on the trigger button, you know, sure. Yeah, to change up the default controls, which were otherwise totally fine. Mm hmm. That's a really, really terrible one with the block thing there. It's bad. It is bad. And then the part where when you do parry her witch time is way worse. So it's, it's, it's way worse. And then it's like, well, if you just frame it, you get the good witch time. But like, hey, guess what? Blocking is not dodging. No, it's not. Or should it be?

So just framing the block is way more dangerous than just framing the dodge. I see. As a result, whenever I did do the timing at the time that I thought it was correct, I get the shitty version, and it's not even enough time to dash. So that's kind of what I'm wondering is because I did that first challenge with her where you are only hurting things in which time. And I'm like, what's, when you do, I guess, if you're not just framing within which time you have time for one action, give or take, be it a jump, a swing. The good witch time, you have time for, sorry, the bad witch time, you have time for one. One action time, you have time for four. Okay. And it's strict. It feels much stricter for Viola as for Beyo.

So I don't know, man. And then of course, the alternative being like, well, Cheshire can jump in and then you don't have your sword and then just figure it out that way. I also did some of the side missions as Viola right away and like, oh man, some enemies started to bad for her. Like that two-headed dragon thing in the side mission is fucking terrible as Viola. It's awful. That's a struggle. Yeah. So I'm, it is kind of strange, you know, but I do welcome the ability to just like fuck around as a new character, try a new series of combos and get used to that feeling. I, yeah, I though, but then I, and I accidentally used a witch heart honor and then like remembering those like, oh wait, this is not, this is not a full-fledged character. This is a,

I'm gonna tell you right now, that character has like one, one, six of the levels Beyo does. You put all those witch hearts into Beyo, man. Of course. I made a mistake. Yeah. No, I forgot. You know, so it's just like, okay, so this is not even fully. Yeah. It's, that's a bummer, man. Um, didn't have to be that way. Don't know why they did it. Don't know why they did it, but she could be fixed with a couple of little tweaks there. And then of course, the other thing too, is I need to, you need to unlock all the moves. So when I want to unlock the full kit, you know, we'll see how things feel, but I'm also spending points that I'm like, ehhh. Do I want to put this into something else? You know? Well, the point shit is like,

hey, I will give Bayonetta 3 like a huge round of applause. There are too many weapons in the game for you to even unlock like two thirds of the moves on them as you, as you acquire them. Right? I tried to do the thing where I got a new weapon. Cool. I'll use it, get all the moves, and then the next level, I'll switch to the new weapon. Not possible. There's too many. And demons too, mind you. And demons. Yes, you have both. I'm picking and choosing between the weapons and demons I like. So I'm skipping over upgrades on something I'm not going to use as often. G-pillar, sorry. I hate it. It's, it's like, uh, Takemikazushi was, you know, the big, heavy, slow. So you got to have that equivalent. In this

case, it makes sense to weave into it, but otherwise I kind of just don't want it on my alt. I don't like it. Yeah. Um, also you're picking weapons based on their jumps now. There's, yeah, exactly. I need a spider jump. Get me back to that. Exactly. Uh, for sure. I'm, I, you know, and there's, and there's times where I'm kind of like, I really want to switch between color my world and love his blue. Like I kind of want to just go back to the old moveset for, uh, you know, a bit, because that's, that's, I like having Tetsuzanko in the fights, you know? I, I fucked around with it a little bit and was like, wow, I, these movesets are, these are better than the default gun so color my world. But the thing like what, what that gets is the, um, the 360, like, uh, kick,

like, um, like basically like she's gets the, the, like the 360 kick and 360 punch moves, which are great instant weaves, you know, and you, and, and like the trade off there is like, yeah, that's the equivalent of your Tetsuzanko or your stomp from color my world, you know, but in any case, man, um, you know, we're going, we'll see, but yeah, definitely the strangest decisions, uh, at the end of the day with this and it, it really, it didn't have to be this way. I just, while I was playing through it, I kept getting this feeling of like when, when you're in it and you're like verse to verse and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm doing it and like they want to vary it up. They want you to never get bored. Yeah. And they want, they want to like

mix up the pacing and that's laudable. Some games have terrible pacing, but like they might even be bored of their, of the, of the games pacing in previous games and want to spice it up for themselves. Totally. But like at the end of the level, I'm like, okay, so I started, I saw a cut scene and the cut scene was cringe. Okay. Maybe the next one will be fun. Um, and then, uh, I'm exploring and I fought a verse and I fought a verse and then I spent eight minutes trying to catch the cat and, um, and then I found a secret mission that was terrible because it was the one where you have to fucking stay in the air while killing enemies. And then I fought a boss and I fought two more verse. Okay. Here's another cut scene. Uh, they killed throwback to the enemy step

challenge, you know, right? They killed a bail in a stupid way. Didn't like it. Okay. Got a new weapon. Don't have enough to upgrade it. Should I, should I upgrade this? Okay. I did a verse. Okay. Here's a vehicle section. It's, it's awful. It's awful. Uh, here's a boss mini game. That's cool. And Jan mission. Okay. This Jan mission. Awful. Great. Submission with a weapon in it though. That's, that's, that's cool. Yeah, that is cool. And, but it's like, there's no uninterrupted period of like 30 minutes where something doesn't kind of bring it down. Yeah. Um, strange. There's a viola section later. That's just like an absolute pile of dog shit on, on replay. Okay. I also like had a level or two where, um, what was it? I think it was okay. So the submissions are within

the, the submissions are within the areas that you do the main one in. And like, I started the one where you're in China. And then, um, one of the other ones where it was like the obstacle, the objective was to go collect these five things. Yeah. But it kind of just like, I'm like, the first and second game had wide open areas and then, but they were still linear despite that. This is also the case, but the wide openness in this case doesn't add a ton. So you remember me trying to explain this to you and I couldn't get it across. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's just, um, and you know what? It has the problem that a mortal shell had where you have a whole lot of space, but the only thing of the, but the thing that's interesting is way the fuck over there. And that now that

cross, cross the sonic frontier landscape, you know, and now we can say that the level is more open because there was nothing between here and there, but then we walked a while. So now it's open, you know? And I kind of felt that way when I was chasing down an objective, I was like, what, why does it have to be like, like, yeah, anyway, um, the one thing though, I'll say this, hey, shout outs to, um, taking your references all the way to a hundred percent and then, uh, and then back by, uh, committing to the Shinu made a sky building as a location where you fucking, I saw that building and I was like, I've been there. I know what's up. You're just your, this is what you do walking out to lunch. You looked around and said, how cool would it be to have a fight

right here? And then like, no, we're going through the offices of platinum itself. Fuck it. Um, shout outs to Malakef making a fucking return back for revenge. Listen, there's a lot of shit that is kind of off in that game. Those boss fights are fucking a plus. Strider is sick. Strider is a whole lot of fun. And, uh, I'm like, thank God you're here. You are, you are the persistence rivaling. Let's do it. I'm glad you showed up. Cool. Yep. Been waiting, been waiting. Um, I'll say, yo, uh, uh, uh, if that was in any way a letdown compared to the Lumen sage or Jean, it is. Okay. Well, so far it hasn't been so fucking hold your horses. It's been fine so far. I loved it so far. Um, but you want super tight rival battle. You

must not fail that. And that was a really fucking fun fight. So you have something to look forward to as you move, go through the game. Yeah, because that is fight Strider again in this level. Literally, that's it. That that's maybe I'll, when's the next Jean fight? When's the next Lumen sage fight? Oh, fuck. It's right now. Like you, you have to like put that in as a major motivator to move forward in each game. And you know, that's still here. So I want to fight Strider more and, and fucking, um, um, disappoint, um, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Malakath looks like Malakath. Look at him. He looks like Malakath. I want to say like, especially after playing through like many contemporaries in and around the release and after the release might, you know

what my feeling like, my, my, my, my, my, my, my heart feeling coming out of day three was like, wow, man, DMC five is like one of the best games ever made. Like, I'm trying to convey, I'm trying to convey to Reggie that like all the times I've talked to him about how stupid and forgettable and silly devil may cry story is like that it's actually really solid by comparison to like what we're solid and sincerely told, you know, and that's the, that's the, I'm trying to get that point across. I'm like, I'm always dismissing these games stories as well as nonsense because they pretty much are. But what the way I put it was like when devil may cry does attempt to like be sincere, it, it works in the later games with filling your dark soul

with light will never be let down. But no, it in, in, in, you know, the later games, they kind of figure that out and it works on words. There's a definite improvement. Yeah. Like there's a couple moments in three where it actually hits like, oh, you're like, oh, shit, damn, you know, the argument between Nero and Dante and like mission 16 or 17 and DMC five is like really good. It's a really good scene. What the fuck? What's he supposed to think? You dropped in and killed everybody, you know? Yeah. And then five, of course, like, you know, that, that entire, like, the, well, the, yeah, fives moments are great, you know, they're, they're fucking huge pops. So one of the games, one of the most hardcore action game around one of the emotional,

like one of the biggest emotional pops is your main character calling his girlfriend on the phone. Yeah. To be like, I'm really fucked up about this stuff. And you know what, and what really underlines the point, what underlines the point to me as well is fucking when it comes to just goofy ass side characters, you tolerate Enzo because it's been long enough. You tolerate Luca because it's been long enough. Nico is excellent. She's not, she's not a goofy side character. She's a great character. I don't like her. I don't tolerate Nico. I love Nico. I want more Nico. I can't wait to see her on screen, interacting with everybody. She's fantastic on screen. And every time Luca's on screen, he's like, he's, he's, he's putting away his fucking

pickup guide handbook into his pocket and pulling out flowers and fucking the music, the music starts, the music starts playing to tell you to stop paying attention. Like you start hearing his theme and or, you know, and it's like, okay, cloud choose time, turn your brain off. Right. Meanwhile, when five is going silly, it's either Nico being great or Dante dancing and doing his fucking MJ while Nico gets super hype at the fact that he's dancing. Like, it's great, man. I think Luca in the band at a series is like the worst character that platinum has ever made. Because in, in one, he was there as like an emotional antagonist, right? He's not going to fight Bayo, but he's there to like, like mess with the mystery stuff like that. And then he gets his

moments with Sareza, right? And that, and like in that game, he's like, he's fine, right? Do you, do you remember him showing up in two? And then by the end, you're like, why was Luca even in this game at all? Yeah, he kind of, he swings in to do his bit, you know, and you're like, okay, he's got to make the cameo. Here you are. He does the bit and he basically gets, he's there to get Loki out of the way so Bayo can stop holding back. Yeah. And then you get to Bayo three where he has, he has a role in the story again. And you're like, I wish you would just die. I wish you're, you're like, you're sitting there and he's talking. And you're like, I wish you would just fucking die in this scene. And then I wouldn't have to talk to you anymore.

I mean, and what's, what's strange to consider is that 101 doesn't really have this problem. Um, nor did Astral Chain, um, you know, supporting cast and overall, well, I mean, everyone's a supporting, but also main character and wonderful. But, um, yeah, it really, it's a Bayo thing, you know? Yeah. Cause, cause 101 goes for all levity with moments of seriousness. Precisely. And Astral Chain goes all seriousness with moments of levity. And Bayo wants to be both at the same time, wants to be 50, 50. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Um, and you know, and then there's, there's, there's the dead serious. There's the levity. And then there's the, the Bayo confidence, you know, uh, uh, the one liners, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah. Totally,

totally fucking weird with that. Like, like Bayonetta, Jayonetta, as you called her, it's like being like eaten and dying and screaming. And then Bayo from our dimension is like, I guess that's not her day. I'm going to do a dance. Which the fuck is this? What is that? Which, which I suppose to some degree was telegraphed by Enzo's dead family. You know, while like her, while she's like shaking her booty on the fucking gates of hell. Like, yeah. Yeah. I'm like, Enzo's going through a super villain creation arc and we don't even look twice in his direction. You know, so anyway, Bayonetta Bayonetta in Bayonetta three is the kind of girl that would do a dancing tick talk in her grandmother's hospice room.

A music alley. She would do. Yes. Exactly. And, and here with Anna. She can't breathe. Sorry. Doesn't know how hard I miss her. I didn't want it to be this way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, it fucking, the tone is super weird. And the thing is too, like I was in the middle, I was in the middle of complaining about, like I was still complaining about how Shayenetta got it when Queen Butterfly popped up and the fucking fun, like with fun and joy kind of bathwater kicks the enemies into space or whatever. You're dead. I will make a mockery of the enemy that killed you. They are so easy to defeat. What the fuck is this? Yeah. Absolutely. All right. That's, that's, we'll see where the fuck this goes.

But I'm so, I am so excited to hear more thoughts about this next week. The whiplashes aggressive as you, as you go to a series of wildly disconnected areas that they invented a multiverse plot so that they could just do whatever levels they wanted. At least it's still fun to do the combo. Yeah. When they let you, when they let you, when you're allowed. And of course, not when there's lava on the ground or, you know, other things, but that's a whole other thing to me. I, I, I really floor lava in any genre. I think I pretty much despise like the stop, stop, stop, fun, but an Elden Ring video the other day and there was lava in it. And, and your hatred of lava is so strong that it came through just by

me seeing lava on my screen because people started to talk about how like you see lava and your, your entire perspective in life is just, I don't want to touch that lava and get lava. Well, certainly memories of how, how hard it kills you and other souls games came back. But just thinking about like the floor goop and doom, you know, I'm like, oh right, the anti-fun sections. Cool. Let's go. Can't wait. The part where the game design says stop playing and having fun. Did you play the doom eternal DLC? Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Oh, dude, the, the first DLC on that has like huge areas of don't jump poison gas. Just zones and it's awful. It's, it's just, how are we still learning that this is anti-fun? You know, like,

challenge and then, how many may freeze guns do we need to get rid of before? Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Being able to move sucks. No, no, no, mash the button, mash the button to shake the ice. Do it. Oh my God. Yeah. Okay. So I want to, I want to take that moment to roll through in a God of war, which the back seating in God of war has hit the point where I am screaming. Okay. There's one in particular. Okay. If Kratos gets, I complained about this last week, but I have a follow up story. If Kratos gets lit on fire or frozen, Mimir will yell out, you're on fire Kratos. It'll pass. This is, this is so infuriating that when I was raiding with my friends last night and started to complain about it,

I said, oh, if I swear to God, if Mimir fucking tells me I'm on fire again and two people in my raid group simultaneously said it'll pass. Like it's too much. It's too much. You need to stop. I mean, that is a funny line. Like all things considered, hearing it for the first time. Jesus Christ. Wow. Like I'm going to scream just thinking about it. It's so, it never stops. And I feel like the farther I get into the game, the less time they're giving me to actually solve them. In one particular case, I'm listening to like Atreus talk to me because he's, we're doing a story. And then as soon as his line about the story ends, he just immediately launched into maybe you should shoot that thing up there, father. I'm like, I'm not even looking at

the puzzle. I didn't even look at it. Can we just get to the point where Atreus walks off screen and goes, okay, I solved it. Solved what? Don't worry about it. The door's open. Just please. Yeah. All right, I'll say it. And here's my, that's infuriating. Now for the good part. Hey, remember last week when I was like, man, this game's too long? Right when that hits you, right when that hits you, they give you a new weapon. And it's the best weapon that's ever been in a God of war game. Is that the one where you said, I don't want to play anything without this? Like if new game plus comes out and I feel like doing it and you don't get to start with this weapon, I will never play that game again. That's crazy. Hey, get this. If that weapon's not in the

next God of war game as like the default, fuck them. That's crazy. It is, it is so much more fun than the axe and the chains. Wow. I have put every upgrade into it. I don't use the other two unless I have to. Wow. Okay. Okay. That's a really good sign. Yeah. It's, it's, it's the best. And so I'm like, huh, I'm a little tired of it. Oh, come on, Kratos. And then I'm like, no, I get to play with this thing. Fuck yeah. And just completely reinvigorated. Okay. So you were, you were right at the point where the design was waiting to give you a new toy, a new toy, new toy. Yeah. And then you get it and you're just like, Oh my God, it's so good. Yeah. It's the God damn it. It's so good. Now it needs its time. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Well, that's deliberate. They play tested that

to shit. It's a fucking quadruple a game. Yeah, they did. And then I'm like, okay, I'm finally making progress in the story. And then I then the game goes, Hey, do you want to look over here to the largest side quest area that's ever been in a Sony game? Okay, so this side quest area is like a full game length in content. And it's just over here if you want to do it. What are those classic six hour side missions? Try eight to 12. Oh my God. Okay. Wow. Wow. Yeah. It's just right over here, right over here. Is it good? I don't know. I stopped when I started it. I did like an eight hour stream last week and I got there and I'm like, how big is this?

And then I spoke to like three or four people and they're like, it's the biggest area in the entire game. Okay. Apparently it's super, super good. Okay. But like, it's also like the story was just starting to get into what I'm going to call it's active phase. Okay. And then it's like, no over here though. And it's, it's, it's funny. It's funny as shit. That game's good. That game, that game's money. That game's money as hell. But when something gets to be too money, you can see the x-ray, you know, you can see the, the sausage, so to speak, and the, the, the moments of like, like, like even this one, like boredom followed by a release tension into, you know, expansion, discovery, et cetera, arcs, acts. But for all that, I mean, well, whatever, I won't,

I won't ask more about the swapping characters bit, but are you being ripped away from your cool new toy narratively? Sometimes. Okay. Well, there you go. And when you do, it's like, that's like, okay. Those sections, those sections need a skip button, man. Like bad, like real bad. But it's important for the story. I don't care. Don't care. Yeah. No, that game's, that game's huge, big money, fancy, great, good game. Okay. And no horizon in sight. Like, no, not it. I don't even, I like, like, okay, the game's called God of War Ragnarok. So I'm pretty sure I know what the last sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, but I can't see it. Right. I don't see how I would get from where I am to there.

Let's see. What else did I fuck around with? Dark Tide came out. And will he ever play Left or Dead? Yep. What if you played Left or Dead, but it was Warhammer 40k. Yep. We talked about the classes and the enemies and the whole shooting cover mechanic and stuff. I gotta use the bathroom real quick, actually. Let me just do that. Oh, you know what? I do actually have something to say more about God of War just real quick. You know the Val, you remember the Valkyrie fight? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So there's the new thing is Berserker fights like Viking Berserkers. And that's cool, right? Cool. One of them is the worst fight in God of War history. Worst ever. You are fighting three bosses simultaneously. Oh, and two of them, two of

them are mages that throw projectiles at you constantly. And they throw a slow tracking fireball that will hit you unless you shoot it with like your hammer, you know, you throw your axe at it or something. And it does your whole life bar. So you'll be fighting the melee boss, fighting it, fighting it. And then out of the corner of your eye, you'll see the goddamn orb creep in and then it hits you and then that'll stagger you and then the melee boss will hit you and you'll just die. Sounds like you're trying to kill Lotrek. Yeah, that's how it feels like. That's what you're describing is that. And also, here's the part. They constantly hit you with fire and ice attacks.

So the whole fight, you hear nothing but... You're on fire, Kratos. It'll pass like over and over and over and over and over. It's crazy. Did I talk about The Devil and Me? No. So me and Paige are playing The Devil and Me together. We're doing the, you know, past the controller thing. And it's the latest game in the Dark Pictures anthology that was Man of Medan, Little Hope. Passing the controller off. That's crazy. Well, no, the game is built for it. Yeah, it actually allows it. And we're actually finishing it tonight at Six Pacific,

if you're listening to this live over at twitch.tv slash peach saliva. It's fine, I guess. It's okay. It's okay. It's a simple stack every single time one of these comes out. Until Dodd is here, where is it? Until Dawn, then the quarry in House of Ash. Power gap. Okay. This Man of Medan, Little Hope. Okay. Like it's the lower tier. It's fine. It's like it's okay. Uh, we haven't beaten it, so who knows, but like, it's okay. That's it. That's all I have to say about it is that it's okay, I guess.

I hope that they gather enough data, data. God. That's good. Fucking Tony Dancer over here. Oh yeah. Angela. Angela. I'm the boss, Angela. Let's gather the data. Tony Dancer. Anyways, I hope that Supermassive gathers enough data with these short games that they can, you know, then go cool. Never do these again. Do more of these, you know? Yeah, I'm telling you right now, I have the data for you right here. Are you ready for the data? Step one of the Supermassive formula. Is the monster real or a monster? If the answer is yes, you're already halfway there. The ones in which the monster is either not real or is a man are

already a step back. Okay. Number two, did the people who wrote until dawn or or a house of ash write it? You're good. Okay. The main issue with that, with the the fucking dark pictures anthology is each of them is written by a different person. Yes, that's, but that's, that's the gamble. Anthology. Yeah. I just, I don't like that. Remember the whole fucking from soft A team, B team shit? Yeah. You know, and then like team ninja, A team, B team, like, I like, I hate that. I hate that. Like, it's like, oh, like you can tell which team was working on this. Like, fuck. Okay. Like I feel very complicated about that. It's obviously an incredibly dismissive and not entirely realistic portrayal of like any

form of development. However, there are obviously different teams that work on things and some teams tend to have a better, more consistent output than others. Yes. Now, I can tell you firsthand when I'm looking at it that like you're at a studio like squeenix or idos and you're watching, you know, a team of people work on a Deus Ex game and then a second team is working on like thief. And then a third smaller group is focused on, you know, whatever other project, you know, special edition of human revolution or whatever for the week. So then you see people like finish something and then in some cases migrate over, you know, sometimes chunks will push forward, sometimes people will go help on this and that. So there is a fluctuating thing,

but for the most part there are core teams that represent. There is an A and a B you can roughly circle around, but its members will sometimes shift out a little bit. Call of Duty had the absolute most obvious thing ever because like you'd have Treyarch and Infinity Ward working on one year or the next and like movement would change in between. Yeah. Like they were a different company logo shows up like they would be making sequels to the last game that they had made. Not the last one that came out. Yeah. They were competitive to that point trying to prove, you know, they're like, they're fighting within the same franchise, you know, so that's for sure. But in this case, yeah, that whole feeling sucks. Anyway.

They should make it good like the good ones. Do it like the good ones. Cool. That's my advice. Okay. Hey, I guess I'm done with my week. If you want to check out more of my stupid crap, you can go down to twitch.tv slash pat stairs at. I'm going to be streaming Tuesday, Thursday, Friday nights. No, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday nights, and Wednesday afternoon. It's going to be God of War and game awards this week, man. Game awards. You ready for video games? G W A G W O. Anyway, yes. I really don't. But I guess maybe we'll, I don't know. I'll make a decision. We'll see. People are asking me to talk about dark tide. Here's my thoughts on dark tide.

It's, it's brainless and fun. Cool. It's not quite finished. Needs more time. You hear anything? I came hearing about this. What is evil West? I have a code for it sitting in my fucking inbox that I am not able to use because there's too God, there's too much God of War to play. Well, damn. I hear it's really good. So I'm curious about that. I've also heard it. That's the game that Max switched to once he deleted Callisto protocol. Perfect. There you go. Nice. Yeah. Over on my side again, not much as well this week. Well, yeah. So I had my little birthday like fang yesterday. Me and the wife went out and checked out a ceramic cafe where we got to paint our own little mugs and stuff. And then they

they fire them in an oven and then you get to keep it. That's fun. Does Patrick Swayze's fucking ghost help you out? No, no, no, no. You're not. You're not sculpting it with big sex clay hands. It's already done. You're painting it and then. Oh, I see. And then they cook it. And then there was like a light forest nearby, which is this like the third light event I've gone to. And like it's kind of interesting because like light forest arts or like light in light as a medium is actually like it's pretty cool. It's a new thing that like I'm starting to see more. And this one, it was kind of funny because like as we're walking through it, I was like, let's get some cool pictures, some fun stuff. But

I was like, oh, but this light forest wasn't as nicely done as the last one we went to. And we just feel like such douches because we're like, oh, yes, this, this attraction just doesn't quite cut it. The other light forest was quite not, you know, and we had like exact emotion and like we had this feeling the worst when we were in, I described it when we went to fucking Reykjavik and in Iceland, we're at the Blue Lagoon, you know, this beautiful open hot natural thing, not hot natural bath. And we're talking to, you know, like a fun other couple that was there, this older group that was in the water. And just describing how we're like, yes, it's really cool, you know, we've traveled a couple places. And, you know, and then we kind of had a moment where

it's like, oh, yeah, well, these baths are great. I was like, and we're like, oh, yeah, but the onsens in Japan are even better. Fucking piece of shit. And just like, and like we had that moment, it's like, okay, we can't, can't do this, can't be the people that like, as we're in the miraculous Blue Lagoon in the location that's remote, you're like, yes, well, the heat is just nothing compared to the onsense of Nippon. Like, I'm like, oh, no. Oh, it's done. We've, we're ruined. It's already ruined. Just completely spoiled in that regard. So it's like, yeah, we had like, I'm like, okay, at least we have the self-awareness to fucking catch that. You open your mouth and then you go, close that mouth. Yep, exactly. You know, and I think we've concluded that it's like, okay,

we can have those sentiments and because they're real, but you can't say them to anyone else around you. That's enjoying their trip. You're right. Because then you're just an asshole. You're the worst. Like, let everyone enjoy themselves if they're having that experience. And if you've done something better or seen better, cool, we can say it to each other. Don't fucking Oh my God. It's it. Yeah, you know, I just, we walked around that forest like, yeah, well, yeah. I gotta ask you, it's your birthday recently, as of yesterday, and you're a little older now. I have to ask you, because this happened to me a couple of weeks ago, and it's kind of stuck with me. Have you had the moment yet where you're brushing your teeth in the morning and you look in

the mirror and you, you're like, when the fuck did I get so old? Yeah, that happened years ago when I started getting gray in my beard. Yeah, okay, that's what did it for me. I had this moment. I'm like, dude, like a third of my beard is gray. Like after I trimmed it a week or two ago, a third, a third of it is gray. I am an old fucking man now. So pre pandemic, I was able to pick out the individual, right, right. And now it's just salt and pepper. It's not going to show in, in, you know, distant lighting like this. But if it were the bright enough location, you'll see the fucking salt and pepper going, I'm like, all right, there it is. It's happening. Um, and I, I've forgotten my age many times before, but, um, that, that has been a thing.

Uh, punch mom forgot that it, my birthday didn't happen yet and also thought I was 37 the entire year. So we both had this that problem. It's like, okay, no, it's done. It's done. I, um, um, I spent most of this year at the wrong age. Yep. Yep. Most of it. So I thought, I thought I was old past the entire time and it, you know, I wasn't. I'm, I'm 36. I spent like up until like fucking August. I think thinking I was 37 but here we are made a minor arithmetic error like a year ago and just kept that, that rolling. Yeah. Um, well, but, uh, one of the things I, I, I, I got, which is a right on, right on point is a, um, got a fit bit. Nice. That's going to be, uh, basically, I've already, you know,

made those changes health wise to start improving my shit, but now I've got a thing on my wrist that says, Hey, fucker, actually do it though. Fatty stop it or get up, whichever get up now. You haven't moved idiot. No, go to bed. No, shut the fuck up and go to bed. Like, okay, cool. I have a thing on my wrist that's going to yell at me about what's going on. Great. Great. Um, you should get, you should jailbreak it to make it get like real, real toxic. Just get salty. Yeah. I would love, I would love a machine that gets like super toxic at me for fitness goals. I mean, it's kind of a little bit already there because like I'm doing, so every morning I'm doing them on my boxing bit and I did it this morning was the first time with

the bit on and I check it afterwards and I'm like drenched in sweating and like, and then it's like, Hey, yeah, that heart rate, like, cool. You hit the active zone. You're, you're, you're burning some fat. You're not even remotely close to peak though. So get the, what the fuck you think? Like, it's like, Hey, congrats. You just started to sweat a bit and I'm like, I'm, what are you talking about? And then you're like, like, yeah, your heart rate can go up quite a bit more than that actually, buddy. Well, I do have a good piece of information for you, which is that if you're highly sedentary and you have like a significant amount of fat pounds to lose, you hit the burning point of your calories immediately. Like, like any activity

will kick you into the burn zone, but you burn it like shit and like really badly and not efficiently. So like out of a real workout, you actually end up getting like way less burn than somebody who's already physically fit, but you start to get the benefit right away. Yes, though it's a little different if your body's in ketosis. I wouldn't know about that because then it has no carbs to power itself through the workout. It just has to grab whatever fat is left, you know, which is what you've been kind of feeding it. So it ends up ripping through that very, very quickly because fat is a less good energy fuel source for your body compared to carbohydrates, for example.

That's entirely possible. But yeah, this thing is already kind of toxic because while I'm fucking catching my breath, it's like, yeah, all right, you're getting there. You know, like, oh my god, here we go. So and, you know, I did do like any time the workout isn't intense enough, I throw on fucking fire on the flames, you know, on hard and just that'll do it. So yeah, anyways, so that's me. You can check out the playthroughs over on Woolly versus this week.

We're continuing with Mass Effect 3. We're continuing with Bayo 3 and going into... That just worked out, huh? It's just like both trilogy. Okay. Yeah, yeah, line it up. Yeah, and then we also had over on Woolly versus the algorithm some fun clips. We did Woolly versus whatever, watched some trash, had some good stuff.

The white girl bit now available, one of the classics, an all-timer, definitely one of my favorite clips. Go check that out. Go peep out the side channel. We got some amazing fucking highlights coming through. And yeah, I don't know. The less I know about what the fuck these videos I click on are, the better. Because some real, just toxic habits come to the surface sometimes, you know?

And we discover more about Reggie as well. I believe the quote is, red flags need love, too. You know, how old's Reggie? A bit younger than me, I believe. I think he's like 35, yeah. Okay, yeah, that's about right. I remember that part of my life. I remember that.

And then I was like, no, I'm fucking super done with this. I can't anymore now. Yep. Yeah, I get it. All the signs, all there. And I'm just, I'm trying. Anyways, like you, you got to touch the stove many, many, many, many, many times. Oh, so what if I, what, okay, it didn't hurt me that bad.

What if I use this side of my hand? What if I just, what if the pinky side, if I just, Still burn, still burn. Okay, so Wally versus come check us out. It's good times. Let's take some ads. I'll have ads. This week, the podcast is sponsored by

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Well, I'll tell you one thing. You know how like every time there's a new Smash Brothers, there's a new threat, whether it be the Master Hand or Taboo showing up pedophiles, whatever the threat might be. Whatever the threat may be. Some threats are much more threatening than others. Yeah. The auras may create a vibe.

Well, I don't think anyone could have predicted just a panda bear has attacked the cast of Smash Brothers and is violently ripping them apart as we speak. The pandas aren't the most violent creatures. So it was kind of surprising. You'd think that I thought they were peaceful, but it turns out that a panda has just decided to fucking take on all the space animals, princesses, and heroes of the video game world. I just realized pandas are an absolutely incredible animal to be associated with Smash Brothers because they roll around and wreak like piss and they're also really negligent

and letting their kids getting taken away from them for food. Yeah, but pandas also really don't like to fuck. Unless they're covered in piss. That's actually that was that was the big discovery, by the way, why pandas couldn't like really do it in captivity. It's because they want to piss all over each other. Really? I didn't know that.

It's true. I've never heard that. That's crazy. Yeah. Okay. Well, anyways, this week, there's been a pretty fucking ridiculous series of events that has basically been capped off with more or less as of today. We'll start with the end of the story.

The end of the story is panda global. The the eSports company has announced that sounds evil, by the way, panning global at the end of your company. The eSports company has had its CEO, Dr. Alan, has stepped down and they've postponed the panda cup, which was an upcoming smash event. Now that fall in a series of essentially just really, really awful stories coming out where there was a smash world tour and my understanding, I might get details wrong, of course, but there was a smash world tour that was, it happened last year and was, you know, scheduled

just to happen again this year. The idea, though, of course, is that Nintendo needs to give the license to operate to any splash tournament. As it were. Yes. So it's, you know, smash and Nintendo and the community has always been troubled because Nintendo's been fucking bullshit about that in the past ever since Evo 2013, where, you know, Nintendo was like, no, you can't run your street, your smash tournament.

To fighting game tournaments, that's ridiculous because it's like they've been grassroots from day one and the parts where the company gets involved have always been optional, preferable, but still optional. Fans of the game can get together and play them in tournament contexts. And if a company says, hey, we're going to sponsor this event because it helps sell copies of our game. It looks really good when people are excited about playing our game. And a lot of people tune in to watch streams of our game.

It's generally considered a good thing. But for Nintendo, that's the worst thing in the world, of course, because we hate you and we despise that you've purchased our game. So all this fast forwards to a situation where in order to do smash tournaments out of a certain size and caliber, you got to get the approval. So Smash World Tour was working on getting that approval. And it seems as if they were told by Nintendo that it would happen, even though they ran unofficially the first time, they would be able to get an official approval, then allowing

them to have a series of tournaments be qualifiers for a major final. And that'd be nice. And that'd be nice, which, of course, all the sponsored players and such in the community can have a big old series that they can follow over the course of a season. It's always pretty hype and then you have the big pop off. So it turns out that Panda Global also has been planning a Panda tour, which is more or less the same kind of idea. It was going to be a Smash series of a season up to the finale.

And the problem was they seemed to be unhappy, particularly Dr. Allen, the CEO, was unhappy with the idea of there being other tours happening for Smash at the same time. And so them working with Nintendo on a contract to broadcast and such, they were trying to get exclusivity rights. So the World Tour folks were kind of being assured by Nintendo that it's fine. They can both do whatever. Don't worry about it. But Panda was trying to make it so that only Panda tour would exist.

And in order to facilitate that, they started to intimidate other tournaments that were happening, including the smaller events that would be stepping stones along the way to the finale. They tried to force those to join their tour instead. And anyone that was already signed up or had pre-planned for multiple events or for the tour, they're essentially being told that they would not be allowed and that they'd be blackballed and such. There was a similar thing going down with the streamer that was going to run and broadcast the stream. They tried to force them to join the Panda tour instead. Essentially, it's a series of just shitty ass fucking decisions from the CEO who tried to

make it so that only Panda's tour could exist and that anything else that was happening that was affiliated with the Smash World Tour would be shut down by Nintendo. They were speaking as if they were officially representing Nintendo and threatening that that would happen. And we're trying to even merge with the Smash World Tour and get them to join as well. Smash World Tour didn't want to do that. So it seems as if the bullying tactics and such were able to pay off in such a way where Panda then did get... There's still a conflict between what Nintendo's saying and what's happening, but it sounds as if Nintendo was able, was then listened to Panda and forced the license to be exclusive. And with that, their connection with

the World Tour's connection with Nintendo then told them that they would not be getting the license and that they, without that, they would have to shut down. They could not run their events. It became a messy situation where Nintendo's update to the situation became, no, you don't have to, and no, it's up to the World Tour if they want to shut down or not. We didn't say that, but that is being pushed back by the World Tour folks who are saying, we have it in writing and verbally that they did say that we would have to shut down. So that has led to the biggest Smash event of the season being canceled, lots of players being, you know, with it with two weeks to go, almost practically waiting on this information coming

through. They've all shut down. And this has, of course, led to Panda, which is also a sponsor for many, many players in Smash, as well as outside of Smash and fighting games as a whole. 80% of their sponsored players have said, fuck that shit and have walked away. And you have, you know, no longer want to be represented by that. In response, Panda has then said the CEO has stepped down and is now saying the things that we've still a majority owner of that company, regardless of not being a CEO. So it's totally meaningless if he steps down or not. I mean, probably, if you're talking about, like, is he still going to make money off of it? That's very likely. If someone steps down in that case,

it's also like, are they still part of the company or not? And, you know, in this case, who knows? But they're doing the damage control in the interim, a, you know, whatever a crisis team is figuring out the rest of it, but it's too late. And there's been a lot of talk about what to happen from here. I want to say Ludwig, the popular streamer has announced a, like, sort of replacement tournament for people, but also some of the players are asking that, like, maybe Nintendo can give the rights again to the World Tour. The Panda event is now canceled as well. So the whole thing is all a fucking mess. And that's what you get when someone who has power and the ability to coerce can get right in the ear of a company like Nintendo. And then

Nintendo is going to support that stupid shit. And they've been practically hostile to the scene over the years. So this is just a, all the goodwill that's been built up since 2013 towards like, Hey, no, we actually kind of care out the window. Fuck that. Fuck you. We hate that you bought our game. I have to say that I'm gonna, I'm gonna tone, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put my, my smash jokes. I apologize if I've gotten any of that wrong, by the way. I did my best. I read through it myself. You seem to have gotten the gist of it. It's complex. I have to say putting all stinky, stinky pedo jokes aside for a second. Nintendo has been very actively hostile to its own fighting game community for literally forever. And every time some kind of progress is made on

that front, there is some kind of massive disaster associated with that community that torpedoes the shit out of it. Like after this, after like a bunch of wheeling and dealing and intimidation leads to every single tournament being shut down, like what fucking incentive is there to support these in the future? I just can't help but think like, because of the nature of Nintendo too, like the fact that they'll pursue you and shut you down if you try to do anything without their blessing. That's such a draconian ass level that other fighting games don't have to deal with because when it comes to getting officially recognized, sponsored, supported, whatever the fucking case might be, the choice should be grassroots or corporate, right? You can, you can, that's what

it should be. It should not have to be, you are not allowed to take the thing you bought and walk into a room with other people who have the thing that they bought and play the game together, which is ostensibly what's happening when it comes to these tournaments being denied. It's always actually not been whether or not you can play the game together because that's obvious fair use and broadcast. It's broadcast and it's whether or not you can make money doing it. Yeah, sure. I have to say, I think you're right. You shouldn't have to deal with that. However, here's the thing. If you look, if you, if we teleport into Harada's office right now and he's like, I would like to watch some Tekken videos of some players playing Tekken, right?

He would watch some matches, right? However, if we, if we teleported over to Japan or maybe even the U.S. and see like, let's say Doug Bowser's office and he's like, I would like to look at Smash Brothers. And the first result is Smash Rage Controller Destruction Compilation comes up and he's like, the fuck is this? And the first news story is Scumbag Company screws over everyone about Smash Brothers tournament. And then the story after that is which Smash, which of your favorite Smash Brothers player tried to kill people at an event with super COVID. And then the story after that is adult man playing video games for a living, throwing a tantrum because his controller isn't broken in the right way. And the story after that is yet another child abuse scandal

in the Smash community. And the story after that is, hey, we're modifying your game in a way that makes your company really uncomfortable and we're going to play that at a tournament for money. And then the story after like, every time there's any attempt from Nintendo to fucking, hey, maybe we're going to do it, something happens. Sure. Yeah, there is a long and fucking gross shitty series of garbage events that pop off in the in the community over the course of its history. And, you know, if you you can extrapolate, I'm sure every community has its like shitty fucking moments and anti heroes and criminals and fucking all of that. Smash in particular has had a very bad run and fighting games have also had the whole thuggery fucking core values, all that shit.

So there's a bit of a stinking frown on the FTC from back in the day that it takes forever to wash off. And all you can really do is if you're trying to run an event for just normal not criminals to have fun with the game they like, you just have to put your head down and put the work in, right? There's there's you want to rehabilitate image, you can't control the images of people that you don't control. You can control your image and what you put out there. So by trying to run events that are just good and fun for the people who want to show up, so be it. That's what you can hope for. But if Nintendo is looking at this and look and going like this is too toxic, a community or a group or in general, we don't want to associate with these types of things because they do things

that are not Nintendo friendly and we don't want to have that be linked to us in any way or whatever. Okay, right? There could have been a time when, you know, other fighting games, like I could see there could have been a time when Capcom would be like, oh, we don't want to. So it's like whatever, if the company doesn't want to be part of the community, essentially, then fuck off, right? Then fuck off and don't support it and then continue to be radio silent on it. And when the game comes out or whatever, just give it, pay no mind and give no shits about anything competitively. Don't try to edge in with some money every once in a while to maybe support. No, just completely fuck off. And with that, fucking off means not coming back to tell people,

hey, you are not allowed to play our game on stream period ever at all unless we give you the okay to. Because of course, if you run a tournament in a room, like again, the broadcast rights of having multiple people in a room showing off their game, Nintendo is not shutting down individual streamers who are playing their copy and streaming it, of course. So this whole thing of like when a tournament gets with people getting together to play it for them in the way they want to, it was get to get special attention. No, if you don't want to support your community, fuck the fuck off like completely and leave it alone to be grassroots. And then that's it. The players will do it themselves. Here's where the other side of this, right? So I started off

saying, hey, maybe it's, you know, scandalized, right, coming from the community side, right? It happens. But then on the other side, the gentleman or gentlewoman who's sitting there going, hey, should I sign this document that gives people broadcast rights for the smash thing across from them, one desk over is the Pokemon guy who says, if you say Nuzlocke to me, I'll fucking kill you. Precisely. We just finished covering a story a couple weeks ago about how insane they are when they're like, what do you mean you're doing a single player modified rule run of the, you're going to promote our game using unofficial rule sets? Are you modified? No, no, no, just the player themselves is choosing to play the game a certain

way. How fucking dare you? The level of insanity and dinosaur brain, it takes to be that out of touch, right? Fast forward to if just fucking Callisto protocol saying, don't you dare play this single player game unintended in any way that would violate our, it's so crazy. It's so crazy. So like that level exactly dinosaur brain is in check. So there, these are the same brains that are that have to then now look and decide whether or not people playing their game in a promotional manner is going to be good for the brand. Do you remember when Bowsette was like the most popular thing that had literally ever happened on social media and the only word back from Nintendo is like, please stop. Please do not make sexy Bowser. It would be very, it's

disrespectful. We hate you for buying our game. Fuck off. Stop it. Leave us alone. Go play it in some corner somewhere, hopefully on wifi. In fact, there's no other choice. And, and don't you dare try to have fun with your friends. Don't you dare try to have a community. Don't, don't just like as shitty and as dumb and as fucking like just greedy asshole as Dr. Allen has been as the Panda CEO with the story. The fact that the second step is and then he whispered in Nintendo's ear and they listened is the part, right? Because if this type of shit happens and then Nintendo says, no, you can go on and then everyone finds out about what was happening with the Panda shit. Then they go, okay, well, fuck that tournament. We're not

going to support that. Fuck these people. And you know what? Grifters have showed up in the fighting game community before and have tried to run shitty ass Grifter tournaments. They've happened locally in Montreal. The money is totally there. Trust me. Like money is totally real. I mean, we have laughed at tournaments that have popped up at fucking casual spa where some dude is like, oh, yes, the Montreal street fighter. What you just like some nonsense dude that's just like, okay, so you're going to run this on what setup? Where's the setup? Okay, cool. And hand you the money now and then show up later to the, to the tournament that does, does the location know that an event is running here? They seem to not be too aware of what you're talking about here,

Facebook man. Like there's been grifters that have showed up in the, in the fighting game tournament space for years that have tried to capitalize, get some money and get out on a quick buck because it's easy because people are used to showing up, dropping some money, playing a game, and then that's it. You know, of course, those people have to do is take the pot and like run out the door quite literally, quite literally. And it's, it's, you know, and again, when you're talking grassroots, you're not, you're talking in many cases, a very just simple, more or less otter system people are running with, you know, something gets a bit more complicated and a bit more professional like the world tour, you get broadcasters in, you get pot bonuses, you get

large amounts of things to figure out. But at the end of the day, like they ran that without the, they ran that unofficially in the past and you can do that and you should be able to do that with your games. When one fucking company gets enough influence, even as an esports team to come in and whisper and shut down anything else that the players are doing themselves, that's horseshit that's on Nintendo. So, you know, pandas players walked away and they're fucking suffering the consequences of that shit. Good, fine. But like Nintendo and the having their hand in this and forcing this stupid fucking system is never going to go away. It's always going to be a problem. Unless, you know, again, they fuck off.

Nintendo absolutely created the climate for this type of situation. Every time you have some kind of license, some exclusive license, all of a sudden, everybody starts to come out and be a dirtbag piece of fucking shit to try and get that exclusive license. You know, and, and like, it just happens that like, this is the type of event where it's not just about our big event versus yours. It's, we also have to try and lull, lull over smaller tournaments. So, a bunch of smaller events have to hear from you as you try to fucking, you know, beckon them over. And then when you say no, they try to force it. And then, you know, all the other things, you know, you get to hear the story. You're describing smash really well, actually.

You're trying to lure the younger, smaller tournaments to your house. And then if they don't like it, you try and force them. That is very smash. And then, and then when you can't get your way, you go to Nintendo and force them to what? Oh, it breaks down right there. It immediately breaks down because, yes, but, but, but ultimately, yeah, man, that's, that's the part, the part where Nintendo is actually listening, you know, is just so fucking annoying. Because you should just have, well, that's where I was going with

this is as grifters come and grifters go, you can't ever show up again in the FGC after you've run a scam because people will see your name and go, oh, that fucking guy, don't go to that event. Fuck no. And depending on what community you, you grifted, they'll beat your ass. You know, so that's supposed to happen here. Everyone is supposed to find out and then go, no, we're not going to do this anymore and peace out. And then at the end, Panda just goes the way of other esports teams that have died. Esports is rife. Long live empire, Arcadia. Like esports in general, it's just rife with scam.

It's, it's, it's a young, it's a young new thing by that's run by a bunch of young new people. And they are like ripe for the oldest scams in the book because they're experiencing them for the first time. You know, now what everybody has their first time with a pyramid scheme. Yeah. Now what's supposed to happen is NFL NBA or MLB star is supposed to catch wind from one of their money people that it's time to buy an esports team or create one because that's the best way to make a ton of money on the side, alongside other hustles and scams going on. And so then they're supposed to go and invest heavily and create a team and then completely ignore it because no one knows what they're doing. And then after doing some tryouts and

completely failing to find any talent or maybe swaying one person over with nothing on paper, just sweet nothings in the ear, a verbal deal and a handshake and a Steve Ditko style, we're going to take care of you. You know, you're supposed to then hear about how, yeah, that fucking company shut the fuck down and then all the money went away and the players that signed up with them found out when you did as the story is breaking. That's supposed to happen. That's the way it's supposed to go. You know, the part where they get to fucking come in and set the community on fire and burn it to the ground as they shit themselves and then leave is not supposed to happen. I mean, at least luckily in this particular case, when they

shit themselves, no one would notice. So yeah, because of the smell, of course. I like how you said that you were going to put it aside and then immediately then I put it aside to make my point and then I locked it back in. Yes, you cannot resist. I can't. It's a problem. What else is a problem? I'll tell you what else is a problem. Did you know that at some event, some guy snuck in a dead lobster in his pocket and was able to watch an entire tournament without being noticed so that he could throw it up onto the stage? Do you know how fucking disgusting a fucking dead lobster smells and no one even noticed?

It was a crab. Whatever. They're fucking gross. I've said this before, but like to unsandbag for the slightest briefest second here to open up the sandbag for just a moment. I am pretty sure. I don't know how to describe it, but the subject matter of Smash Brothers is why that these things happen. Like the subject matter of a game brings out a fan base. Yes, I remember. So there's an old clip from some fighting game show in which Mike Ross is like trying not to cry, laughing at, oh, you guys don't have casuals, huh? You don't have casuals? What do you got? Oh, we got, we have friendlies. And like he is like about to cry. He's laughing so hard because it's so fucking cringe.

It's like all that. It's like Mike Ross Ross. Yes, of course. Yeah, Mike Ross Ross has been a thing. I did not know that, but like it's because it's like you take and it is what it is. I mean, every game has its fan base and fan bases are going to be a certain thing for whatever. You know, anime games are going to, anime, you know, fate's going to fate. Tekken is going to Tekken. You whatever you're into, you're the people that show up are, you know, going to be like that. So when it comes to Smash, like, I think you're kind of getting like, if you look at, like it's a, it's a broad collection of highly popular, massive video game childhood characters. It's, it's. The skews younger and has a culture of

at your house with your buddies. Exactly. And it's, it's skews younger at your house with your buddies and it's the, and like it's like roster and a theme in an overall world that is going to be right there next to people who go crazy with Sonic fandom. You know what I mean? Like it's that same younger, just more cringy, kind of crazy. So a lot of that, like just coalesces so that like you put the more, like there's going to be Venn, Venn diagrams in different communities of different types of people, but this one, because of the subject matter is going to bring in the most of that. And with that energy comes shit like fucking immaturity hygiene problems. And as you described, like the, the, the, the insanity, the insanity of the whole

fucking sex criminal pedophile weird shit that was going on and all of that, unfortunately, comes linked with the subject matter. I'm trying to put words to this because smash is like so wholesome and like, like, like kid friendly characters and it's very happy and very chill. And like, despite being fighting, it's not like violent, right? It opens up this door for this community level of, um, am I really so toxic? Ooh, fucking wholesome mask for complete pieces of fucking shit. You know, the type that are like, Oh man, let's all, let's all be really, let's all be real positive while I talk just the most insane shit you've ever heard behind your back. Woo. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so you've got a, like if crimes in, in like a cute Kirby outfit.

Right. Right. So, so like, and if you're like a normal person and you're trying to like, you know, do your best to kind of like thrive in the surroundings, you're going to have to do so despite all that weird energy around you, right? Like for all the criminal shit discussed or whatever, there's tons of just, just weird moments that people have had that are just like, what, why would someone do it? You know, so like, and it's just, and it's just, it's just a fucking subject matter thing. Um, you know, and, and, and if it were not that, if it were like, not these IPs that are childhood friendly, beloved Nintendo fan, you know, Pokemon has a bit of that too, when you get to the crazier levels of people's, you know, behavior with it. Um, if we're not,

animal crossing is like the most wholesome childlike game in the fucking world. And then you, you, hey, what's going on in the animal crossing community? Oh, people are talking about how to like design like ugly villager ghettos in order to get them out of their town. Sure. Sure. And all that shit. And it's like, Jesus Christ. Yeah. You know, it overlaps probably with like somewhere in their Brody culture, but like, specifically the types that were like, I didn't understand this war crime photo until somebody put rainbow dash in it. I hate it. I hate it. But you need, but like these are the, this is the type of thing that just has they, this is why this gets to the core of why like, I like the bit, I'm opening the sandbag because

I'm like, the bit has a, has a reason that's identifiable, you know? And it's just, it's, it's because that overlap of, of fandom is strongest there and other random fighting games with punch man and punch girls beating up each other doesn't bring that energy. Yeah. So like, if I want, I'm going to, I'm going to drill it down to the absolute most like obvious example, right? And I think you can, you can follow me on this. Let's take stick throwing and controller smashing, right? People, some people get fucking pissed and they toss their gear. This happens in pro sports with helmets and sticks. This happens in, in your traditional fighting games. I mean, there's that great clip of fucking Rico getting

Sanford to just trash this fucking. Oh yeah. The fresh maker, right? And goo text through his stick that one time, et cetera. Right? That's, I don't even know. Shut up. Don't know. Okay. It's a whole fucking pretty sure that never happened. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't. Like you might as well have at this point, go on. Okay. So right. It happens. However, in smash, there is a crazy, crazy amount of game cube controllers spiked into the dirt and destroyed. Like it's, it's a whole nother level. It's a whole order of magnitude. And the only way that I can understand that happening is the, the beginnings of that games competitive culture are different when you're at the arcade and you're playing Street Fighter two or Marvel

or whatever. And you are so pissed off. You could smash something. What would you try and do? I saw a guy do it once to an MK machine. He hit the machine and everyone around him rose up and was ready to choke him out because we're going to play on that in a second. You dumb ass. That's everybody's machine. So what do you learn? You learn not to do that. Right? It's, it happens. Some people do it, but it's not a common occurrence. And people make fun of it, even if it didn't really happen. Like with goo text, right? Then you go to smash and where does, where does most of that beginning of that culture happen in your basement with your friend? And the only one to judge you is your friend and you're spiking your own controller. And you do that until you leave

to go to the tournament. Now, admittedly, this happens with any game that you are. This can happen with any game you're playing in your basement, you know, and, you know, the fucking smash this keyboard, keyboard, smashers and mouse tossers exactly are not uncommon in that way, certainly. But I think the whole skews young bit is really, really, you know, a major part there too. Cause yeah, man, fucking, of course, this Mario game is going to be played by teenagers and such. And, you know, in, in, in a game like Marvel, you know, when a 15 year old or a 14 year old shows up and it's super good and you're like, Oh fuck, Noah, that's crazy. The prodigies here, that's an exception, you know, and then there's going to be young, but really good five players

that like make a name for themselves and shit, but, or like, you know, CJ and stuff. But like, um, but, uh, in this case, that age is just the norm, you know, and, uh, it means that like what, what's normal is that younger teenage. So then the exceptions become, Oh, that eight year old is really good at chain grabbing. You know, that eight year old is insane with ice climbers. That's crazy. Um, and 30 year old opponent got so mad that he stood up and threw equipment and broke it and scared the child. But also it, when that child loses and cries, because they're eight, it's not an unexpected sight. Certainly. You know, um, so a lot of, anyway, so it just, it's a weird coalescing of factors that unfortunately, you know,

have everything to do with what, what it is. And I guess the fact that it's a premier Nintendo fighting game, the, the, that, you know, anything premier Nintendo is going to have this kind of attention on it. This happens to just overlap with FGC. So whatever, um, that, uh, uh, that's, that's what I think is, is pro, that's my diagnosis of the situation. That's my prognosis as doctor, as doctor fighting games. Um, anyways, uh, and whatever, there's a whole other thing to be described about, um, that the norm becoming something where, well, that if you, that eight year old plays for the next 10 years, that eight year old becomes 18 and might not change their behavior that much, you know, that's a whole other fucking, you know, um, inference that is, that is,

um, at home, but anyways, uh, I only benefit here is that eventually melee will die. They're not making CRTs anymore. It's, it's gonna have, like it's gonna go. It's, it has a life cycle. Um, and eventually the game's going to get too old for the average melee fan to be interested in it anymore. I mean, ultimate, you know, still being the thing that's, that's got to everybody in it, and it's the big, big thing. Like that's going to be popular for a very, very long time. I hope that, um, the only, like the only, uh, there's a couple update ways the story can update. We can update it by hearing Nintendo says, ah, change our minds actually here, they can do it. Again, the conflict is unclear because Nintendo says, no, they can, you know, he said, whatever

there's, he says, he said, but if we get the update that they can go forward, that'd be great, especially considering the panda tour is not happening anymore period. Um, but the other way to go about this is to, um, you know, completely not have to deal with this in any way. Like if other events can run, uh, unlicensed, just we're doing it ourselves and Nintendo doesn't approve, but actively doesn't pursue and shut down, then that's, that'll be, that'd be great. And I know that, um, they're not treating every sized event that way, you know, like in this case, the major ones are going to get the most scrutiny and attention, but like with this good will being fucking roasted and, and shit on, um, you want to hope the players can just fucking

get together and do their own thing, uh, like any other fighting game could, because if, if at the end of the day, if, yeah, if Capcom said, we hate you, if, you know, SNK said, we hate you, if, if Bandai said, we hate you and we don't care about what you're doing as a community, then cool, we'll keep doing it like battle by the bay. So I feel like that's slightly different. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass because this is a gut feeling, but I feel like if Capcom said, stop it, the response would be if only, if it's a crime to play Capcom games, then only criminals will have Capcom tournaments, at which point there will just be like, uh, wordblurred playing street matter six on a fucking

island in the middle of the Pacific. Oh, make no mistake. We will shit on those companies till the cows come home. They will be fucking done as far as at least community outreach and having a good will with the people that you are buying your shit goes, but people will still get together and play them. Yeah. And you can't stop that. No, you can't. So that's, that's, that's the way I feel about it. You know, when I, um, grabbed my Xbox, went down to the fucking Sine Express and said, Hey guys, I'm doing a street fighter tournament who wants to come play. I didn't have to run any approvals by anybody. You did not. And people showed up and did play. Other than Sine Express actually. Well, yes. I said, Hey, Sine Express, do you mind if I bring

like 30 people who are going to drink have nachos and place a game? They better buy something, but otherwise than that is that sounds good. Yeah. We're going to buy pictures. It. We're going to buy a lot of fucking pictures. Yeah, we got drunk. Yeah. That was, that was, and that's it. You know, um, we don't have to fucking get that approved by anybody. And you can always return to monkey. Man, 21 years of smash melee. Let's see what happens. It's been, it's been a, it's been a totally smooth ride the whole time. Yeah. I, I, it's whole life cycle has been just a, a, a wonderful smooth ass experience. If you can't, like if the whole crossover with Evo, FGC, all that stuff, like doesn't work out.

And it doesn't like, if it, not if, when it didn't work out. And it was like, all right, these are separate events, but they've got their own healthy series of events. And, you know, again, for the people who are, for the people we're talking about right now, they did, they did. What I'm like, in other words, like when smash and Evo didn't fucking work, uh, because of all the, the, the shit they did. And then a number of other crossover tournaments with smash didn't work as well. There's a, a history of like ones where it's like they, anyway, they tried to fit smash into a corner of the same size as like other games when it's like, are you insane? The venue size can't take that and nonsense. They're just trying to save on cleaning costs, man.

At some point it was, it was kind of made clear. I heard that in your voice. I heard it. I heard that. I heard that. I heard it. I'm saying at some point they kind of made it clear that it's like, whatever, smash is just going to do its thing on its own. And there's enough people interested that they can, they can do that. They can get their own sponsors, make their own big events, and, uh, be healthy as a community. And they kind of did for a while, but, um, every time Nintendo decides to step in, it always fucking ends in tears. So, all right, we'll wait for the update. We'll see where this goes next week. But for now, at the very least, Panda's on fucking shell, you know, notice situation, rough day for the

people who were just kind of like trying to be sponsored players that made it. And that's all they were trying to do, you know, Hey, to the, to the sponsored players who dropped out of Panda over this bullshit, I want to point out that you guys actually made the right decision. And it's a, particularly since you would then lose your sponsorship, it's a very difficult right decision to make fucking sucks, man. So it's so hard to get sponsored, dude. They should definitely be lauded for, uh, putting their ethics first with this kind of thing. I don't know if I could have made that decision. They're saying that they're working, uh, they're

the, the statement said that they're going to work with people who want to leave on landing somewhere, perhaps with another group or company or whatever. So, um, that's part of what the, the, the statement said, uh, we'll wait to hear from the players themselves what's going to happen. But, um, it, yeah, it fucking sucks because of how hard it is to just get to that level. And when you finally get there, it's an accomplishment. It's genuinely a, I fucking did it. I got, you know, um, the results. I worked super hard to be in the top 0.01% that, you know, not only are not only, because here's the thing, it's not just placement, right? If you, um, destroy everyone in a game and your top, like that does a lot for your

profile and your, your, you know, you getting signed, but a big part of what they also want is you being a consistent streamer. They want you to be a content creator. They want to make sure that you have a personality that is, uh, fun to watch and that people want to tune into so that you're not just a, uh, a complete piece of shit who's ranking in top place, but you're actually someone who is now, uh, an entertaining internet person that people want to tune into as you also rank high. Um, so it's very hard to do all those things and the people who do, um, um, they, they earned it. Them walking away because of this type of shit, but it's also like the integrity thing though. You have to consider this as well, especially for the, for the people

who are sponsored, but, but smashers, like that's your community on fire. Yeah. That's your events you want to go to. Like it's a bit more of a, a no-brainer when you're like, what the fuck am I going to go to? It's also like, I don't want to be the pariah of this problem by sticking around. Congrats. You're now first place at an event no one showed up to. Like, you know, if, whatever, it's weird. The, the people that are peripherally, uh, uh, not in the smash community and are still getting burnt by it. Like that's, that's just a call on, on integrity. So, uh, we'll wait for the updates. All right. Speaking of bears, what if you, what if, yeah, got it. Panda bear got it. That took me a second. I feel stupid. Cool. Now, what if you took that bear and you fed it cocaine?

You'd have a cocaine bear. I feel like that's a pretty one plus one equals cocaine bear situation. If there's one thing we know about cocaine bear, it's that cocaine bear fucking loves cocaine. Yeah, that's right. I, in fact, I saw a picture maybe 20 years ago that told me about how cocaine bear loves cocaine. Yeah. So, uh, I've never done cocaine. Apparently cocaine, uh, fucking rules and apparently rules. Apparently people who start to do cocaine love, love doing more cocaine and there's no reason to expect that to be different from a bear. In fact, I saw a video where a bunch of animals were eating from a fruit tree where the fruit had grown overriped and was actually, uh, kind of alcoholic. Yeah. And there were a bunch of animals

that were getting super fucked up on, I think like oranges that fermented and just falling out of trees and fucking slipping around and getting super, super fucked up. I got a cat. I've given that cat catnip and that high as fucking balls. So, uh, when you take a bear and you add cocaine, um, you get cocaine bear and more importantly, when you put that in the movie theaters, you get hashtag cocaine bear sweep. Yeah. It's coming. That's great. I miss, I miss, I miss these, these hobo with a shotgun era things. It's been, it's literally been over a decade since we've had them, you know, where you just shut the fuck up. What the title says what it is. What's it about? Shut your shut up. Shut the fuck up. What a stupid question. Hashtag cocaine bear sweep.

And you know what? Um, the trailer showed you the cocaine bear getting some people and then it got some folks. Yeah, good. It got them good. Yeah. So you're like, yep, that movie's going to, it's got one job. Yeah. It is. The cocaine bear is the cocaine bear variation of snakes on a plane, except instead of snakes and a plane, it's cocaine and a bear. That's correct. In fact, I think in the trailer, they go like, oh no, not a cocaine bear. Yeah. The guy freaks you. The guy goes, that bear is on cocaine. As far as I'm concerned, the trailer already meets the requirements. It's there. It's two check boxes, both of which have been filled. So from here on out, from here on out, we're all,

we're all gravy. So yeah, I miss it. I miss that. I miss these movies, you know, post grindhouse. Not the only movie trailer, of course, because we then got to see a little bit more of the world of Super Mario trailer to dropped. And you got to see a whole lot more of the rest of the supporting cast, the, the, the non Pratt as, as, as we, as we can call them. It's me, Mario. Wahoo. Yeah. Oh, fucking awful. You know what? It's going to be fine. The movie's going to be fine. It'll be fine. The jokes are going to, some jokes are going to land. I think Jack Black's probably going to do a good job. I think it's, you know, I think it's going to be, I think you're going to walk out going like, yeah, okay. Kind of like you will, you know, Sonic the Hedgehog. They're like,

let's make sure this thing is, is fun. Let's, you know, let's not get our fucking John Leguizamo a situation happening 30 years later. Did you, um, did you see the weird statement that Charlie Day gave talking about like what it was like recording lines for the movie? Oh, um, they were not told plot details. Yeah. No, the secret. The plot was a secret. They were not told plot details so that it would just be them riffing off of the lines in a isolated context. Yeah. And then they would ask him no motivation, the line 10 times, and then they would just pick the one they liked and then they wouldn't tell him what it was. That is a, that's not cool. You should, you should fucking people

need to know what's going on at the same time. Make no mistake that if they didn't, if they told everybody what was happening, this entire script would have been spoiled by now. I still think I still think my favorite voice acting story ever is talking to Laura post about doing, uh, uh, her character in 13 sentinels and I go, oh man, is this, I'm really loving it. What do you think of the story? And she's like, I don't know. I did my lines by themselves. I have no idea what this game is about. What if the Silent Hill sound director that was talking to a guy see he about syllable by syllable pronunciations of thines lines? What if that's just the way game, game company in Japan is going to handle this and they just kind of came in and went,

this is your, that speak the line, say it in this way and, uh, you know, we'll build it piece by piece and no one's allowed. Like that might not just be a Silent Hill thing. That might just be a like, I need to point out that this is weirdly close to the worst voice acting ever being Resident Evil one, but Resident Evil one, they recorded like a dozen takes and then non-English speaking staff members chopped them together word by word from separate takes in order to what they thought sounded cool, which is why the voice acting in that game is just complete insanity because it's actually like 20 takes chopped into one. Dude, like one of the best things ever is when you get to see like the, the table read where, you know, or even the recording session

where all the voice actors are just in the room, like riffing and doing the bit and then going over it and then like more or less acting out the entire story off camera and then they just animate that shit, you know? Um, it's certainly not out of the question to have like, you know, things filmed out of order, scenes recorded a certain way, whatever, there's the, you know, the production's production, but to have them not know what's happening almost implies, well, that means that they accepted and auditioned for a project with no script. Yeah, that's right. No screenplay. They, you know, they just the gravity of the role was like implied and then they took it and that was that. So in video games, it's Resident Evil in, in movies, I still think

the, the, the high mark to beat is Tom Holland talking about far from home. No, not far from home. Um, no way home. Oh yeah. Yeah. No way home. And he's talking about doing a fight scene on a bridge to like, you know, the CG marker, like, you know, the tennis thing. And they're like, act more like this. And he's like, who am I fighting? And they're like, I'm not going to tell you, just act more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, no, no, seriously, who is, who am I fighting? No, Tom, you will spoil it on Conan. God, who was it? Which old dignified actor was complaining about sitting in a room full of green shit? Um, it was, it was, it was, it was Magneto, right? Yeah. No, it wasn't, it wasn't for, it was not for X-Men. It was for Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings.

Yeah. So many shots on a green screen. There we go. That he's like doing like half or more of the movie by himself and he's a stage actor. Yes. Yes. Really stressful for him. And he ended up like crying a bunch because it's like, I just want to act in my fucking movie. Was the Hobbit not Lord of the Rings? It was a Hobbit one. Christ, man. I just, I just want to sit here and read um, unlimited blade works. I want to sit in, I want to stand or sit on this fucking set and do my lines and talk to a person, not this fucking tennis ball on a field of blue. God. Yeah. Yeah. No. Um, the, I mean, the, the compromise you eventually get to where full capture performance capture and face cap allows like a Mark Ruffalo to be like, no, I'm here. I'm in the scene. I'm

acting too. The Hulk is not just going to be completely dropped in. We can, we can perform against each other and then they'll, you know, use the face and gestures to inform that. That reminds me because God of War has the, the performance capture shit. So it's, it's Chris Judge and Atreus's voice actor or actor rather doing stuff in the, in the weird mo cap universe. But there's something that happens in which I'm like, Atreus looks like the game's only two years prior from the last game, but Atreus is like much older. Um, and I thought that was really weird. I'm like, Oh, it must be because he's a God. And then I saw like behind the scenes performance capture. No, it's cause the actor like doubled in size. He hit puberty. Oh yeah. Like two feet

and his voice is completely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That thing where you go away and you come back next Christmas and your fucking nephew shot up past you. Yeah. Yeah. That happens, man. Like he's coming up to like fucking Chris judge, like just past his knee in the original performance cap. And now he's like maybe, I don't know, six inches shorter than Chris judge. Some people like ease into puberty and other people click L three and R three to access puberty. Yeah. You know, damn, I had the worst puberty ever, man. I started getting this beard and I'm like, cool. The growth spurts gonna hit and the growth spurt hit and I was still the smallest person in my grade. Like I got, I got the, you know, the, the teenage boost. Oh, cool. Still

nothing. I gained like three inches. It's bullshit. Well, I mean, for what it's worth, like to, to look that way, you must have had like a fucking insanely high T puberty drop, you know, starting to get in this at eight. Yeah. So, and that's the one that's fucking left. There you go. High T. Although like nothing's worse than the fucking 14 year old grades, grade eight mustache, you know, like that shit looks so bad on everybody. It was, it was like maybe this year that I finally put it together. Why everyone told me to shave my face and it would come back thicker and darker. It's to get that disgusting shit, that disgusting, like puberty fucking mustache off your fucking face. The shaggy facial hair. It's awful. It's

so bad. It's so dirt off your fucking face. You can't understand until you're looking back on it, how bad it looks on you when it's halfway to nothing like nothing or all of it. But the in between just is abysmal. Stop it. Don't I know you feel pride that you're finally getting something. That's cool. Wait for it to happen. In the meantime, stop, get rid of it. All right. There was another trailer and this doesn't need much time, but it's simply an acknowledgement that I saw that first Transformers movie and I was satisfied. I'm quite fine never going back to that. But fuck me if I'm not baited in by a good old beast war. I am. I am now in a household in which there's intermittent squealing and shouts of joy. Page is the world's biggest beast wars

mark. It's so good. It's so good. They got me. I can't like I really like transformers the movie franchise to me. I can't describe how alien and foreign and like it's just apparently doesn't exist like fucking thumbs up good. Never cared just that. I saw that first one and I could and like you couldn't make out what the robots were doing when they were even when they were transforming in slow motion or it didn't matter. It was I just and I'm like, I'm good. I'm completely, completely utterly good. But fuck me, man. Optimus Primal, a chance at a T-Rex Megatron. I need to see that for sake of what mainframe did. I'm down for a beast war, man. And I'm going to call them beasties too. Yeah. Let me ask you, how does it feel that Page has now definitively won

your argument that Beast Wars is better than reboot because they're getting a cool movie and reboot didn't? Well, that argument ceased to exist the moment the Guardian Code existed. Yeah. I just wanted to say it out loud. That's never been in and out ever since they decided to fucking. Hey, both of these franchises went towards the live action. Guess what? Only one of them actively put a, I don't know, but I'm assuming only one of them actively put a fan in the thing specifically to make fun of them for being fans of the thing. I mean, in the fucking trailer, we were watching it again the other day and like Primal calls Prime Orion. He doesn't call him Prime. They're not going to call him Orion.

Okay. Okay. And it's like, oh, oh, we're doing this now. I honestly, I was waiting to hear whether or not they were going to have Prime and Primal or I assume they're not going to Orion. It is. It's going to be Primal or whatever. But like, it's his, he calls him Orion, so he predates Orion Packs. Like, whoa. Are they going to have the golden disc? I mean, I honestly, to be honest, I'm expecting nothing, but like, hey, look, it's these animals, and it's still a Transformers movie. They don't have to acknowledge any of it if they don't want to. And they probably will, you know, if it's like, hey, look, there's a Rhinox, there's a Cheetor,

you know, we're good. There's a Black Arachnia. We, we've did it. Oh, hey, there's new. There's new project. L shit. There's new project L shit. Yes, there is. So anyway, that's, that's just an alert that they kind of got me. Oh yeah, they showed off the project L update for the last one of the year. They showed off Illaoi in prototype form. Since they introduced it last time, she swings that fucking pot around and the tentacles do their thing. That's cool. And then they broke down the tag mechanic, which looks like it's going to be a super tight version of the Marvel versus Capcom infinite tag mechanic, which is to be too consistent jumping in and out. Your tag assist

can come in and do a striker attack can do an assist and jump out. They can jump in and then you can take control of them, or they can jump in and do a burst that stops the combo. So yeah, Fluid 2v2 is a lot of fun. It's proven, you know, in other games. And the BlazBlue Tag Battle system as well represents like an overly complex way to take control of two characters at the same time. In this case, it seems like they're probably, they're keeping it a little more sane. And it's good because infinite's gameplay deserves a better frame work and context. So then infinite. So yeah, that's, that's, that's dope. They showed off some more moves with like a bunch of the cast as well. Like just through incidental gameplay, we saw some, some jinx,

we saw some Ari, some Darius. Yep. Yep. Yep. All of that stuff. More echo. Yeah. So looks like it's going to be fucking good, man. Nothing else to it. Still absolutely nothing about a date, huh? They're taking their goddamn time. We saw a super and it was just like pop, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know? So they're going for the short and sweet type, but yeah, it's a nice update. And not much else to say really. I just kind of want to see what the rest of the Laos kits going to look like though, like she's probably going to get some big old grabs and toss you arounds in there that I really want to know about. Project Elf, the, the, the, the, the, the

savior. My God, how many times, how many times do we do this dance? How many times do we sing the song? I mean, look, I mean, I'll tell you one thing, like at the, like it'll be part of the big five, you know, like it, like, oh, absolutely. It'll be pretty. So yeah, yeah. So that, that, at the very, you know, you're going to see it come in. It's going to disrupt and, and quite freely, really like the big five, there's a big drop off after like the first two. So we'll see that and more details whenever they fucking get around to it. They also, what did they do? We're going to see some more save, save the day eight, tech and eight, which is going to be on the game awards. We're going to see some tech and eight on the game awards.

I'm shocked. I'm guessing that Nina is going to do some moves on Paul Phoenix. You know what she's going to do? She's going to grab Paul. Paul Phoenix is going to do the punch and then she's going to grab the punch and then put her arm behind his arm to do that fucking move she always does. Perfect. And the graphics will be fancy. Except if you buy the special pre-order bonus to get triangle shadows on every character. They should do that. They really should. They should really do that. Super high resolution characters and details and a triangle shadow. Oh, great. That's coming. You got, oh yeah, you got Street Fighter Beta Two. Beta Two. It's next week. Coming. And they're not announcing any new characters. So it seems

like Blanka is not going to fucking be in it. God damn it. But we'll see. We'll see. Seems like it's going to be just mainly a couple of small changes system wise and variable options for the online stuff. And SageM made a really great point earlier talking about this. So the rollback is going to be there and they have a new setting that's going to allow you to adjust for the delay. So you can have a variable delay. But the way the game works is there's going to be, so, excuse me. The way the game works is if you have a particularly bad connection with someone, it'll move the delay in your match with that person to the lowest number it needs to be. And then it'll stay there even if your condition improves. That's perfect. There's no downside to that.

There is one downside in that. Well, because it's one, it's round by round. So whatever offset occurs will stay for that match. And then if you have a momentary bad rollback with somebody and then it hits a low delay, it'll stay feeling bad for the rest of that match when it doesn't need to. What solves this is picking in a delay and making that the baked in hard number. Variability can give you sometimes better options, sometimes worse. If they pick a number and work around that and make that the static number, you don't have to have any of this be in question. So most matches are going to feel fantastic, but you might have edge cases where, yeah, a hiccup with someone will create extra delay where you don't need it, and it's going to change, perhaps,

from one round to the other. So one moment your move is going to feel more crisp, the next moment it's going to be a little bit later, and that's between the same set. Yeah, just pick a number, let us work around it. I have to admit, though, the, I mean, my experience with the beta was absolutely fantastic. Yes, these are going to be edge cases for sure. It's going to do, rollback is going to do its job, but the hypothesis is that by creating this variable, because code mystics did this a bit as well by having hybrid where you can manually increase and decrease the delay. By doing that with Street Fighter 6, you're going to have less teleporting moments with a bad connection. So I think it's going to prioritize the aesthetic there.

Anyways, all that coming up in a little bit, and yeah, a couple other announcements that dropped. The Dead Cells creators next game just got announced. Oh, really? What is it? Nuclear Blaze. Oh, look at that. It is, it is, it appears to be a possibly side scrolling, possibly, no, it is side scrolling, possibly roguelike, hard to tell. It's a firefighting game. Oh, cool. And, uh, oh, it's cute. Yeah. And I'm like, goddamn, that joins the short and sweet list of firefighting games. So it's out. Wait, what am I looking at a different game? Nuclear Blaze, firefighting. Nuclear, Nuclear Blaze, firefighting. No, well, no, it's just nuclear blaze. Nuclear Blaze is a unique 2D firefighting game from the

creator of Dead Cells, released 18 of October, 2021. Okay. Maybe in early access at that point, I didn't, I didn't, didn't catch that then. Well, seems a lot of us didn't catch it. Damn. Okay. Well, Dead Cells came out super early as well. So if they're doing the same thing. Yeah, there's always been a very short list of games where you can, you can do some firefighting. And, uh, I feel like, yeah, that's, there, there was something I wanted to do back on the old channel that would have been a fun, like little, uh, firefighting week in the series. And I feel like a short week. I can't, I can't even think of more than two fucking games. I mean, you got this, you got Burning Rangers, you got, there's that arcade one. I can't forget. I forget.

It's where it's kind of like backdraft and that's about it. Um, and then there's that weird Japanese one. Um, you fucking asshole. There's anything and say, well, there's that weird Japanese version of that thing. I don't remember the name of it. It's the, it's, it's a thing, but there's, there's honestly about like five. So, um, yeah, that could be, that could be interesting. But anyway, um, Dead Cells was a whole lot of fun. Um, I think I made the mistake of playing too much of it too early in early access. So I might want to wait for this to come shape up more so because, uh, I do get, um, a bit burnt when early access versions of games kind of go on forever.

And then they balance themselves to be more completable later on, see darkest dungeon, see, um, um, uh, Hades. I actually had that happen, uh, relatively recently where I started playing satisfactory because it's on update seven as of this week. And I stopped playing an update three. And I got to the point of like, oh man, I really like this game, but how much am I willing to go through it again for the second out of three times because I'm going to do it on 1.0. I'm like, I'm probably just better off waiting. Yeah. I think that's exactly, exactly. Um, and you know, it'll still be there. Um, they announced that. And then yeah, the only other thing, um, is just we've got shocking, shocking, breaking news,

hard confirmation. You never saw it coming, but here it is. Here, here a hero, here, here, here, here. Araki has confirmed that part nine Jojo lands will feature a protagonist that is a descendant of Joseph Joestar. I, you gotta be kidding me. I fucking swear to God, bro. You got your, you fucking man. Wait, which joke? What actually? No, wait, no, that's actually more confusing than I thought it was when I first heard it. Shut up. Which Joseph Joestar? Shut up. Hmm. The protagonist will be a Jojo. I mean,

uh, yeah, it's going to be called world tour baby. It's called Jojo lands. So take that as you would. Uh, I, I, my guess is that that sounds like, like, um, when you go to an island and you have island adventures, right? Wildlands, you know, wild, wild land, wild open, you know, Jojo lands. I feel like it's like, there's going to be a, it's going to be that maybe. I don't know. I have no fucking idea. I have no fucking idea. Is it going to be that? I don't know. Great. Good. Good. Excellent. Also Rohan's coming to America. I'm fucking shocked. He wants to do, uh, the spake adventures where Rohan goes to America. All right. You believe it's still like literally impossible to get a PS five?

It's just not available. Like I hope these, like I'm, because my street fighter beta is on the PS five and I'm, I'm now suddenly afraid it's going to break. It's always a risk. Let's take some letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to castle super beast mail at gmail.com. That's castle super beast mail at gmail.com. Hello, Mr. Rohan. Welcome to America. Here is your gun. I don't need this gun. I refuse. You can't make me have this gun. Oh, we will make you have this gun. New chapter. Rohan comes to America. He's trying to get through customs. Okay. I'm going to look up some breaking news while you read this. I'm going to confirm

something. Somebody's screaming in the chat. Oh, okay. Sure thing. Here's one coming in from Brendan who says dear long time, long game taker, excuse me, dear long game talker and little leg walker. Last week you brought up how the Pokemon trading card game people are insane and that magic, the gathering doesn't push you to collect all the cards, but I wanted to update you on the insanity of what's happening with Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast. Hasbro has demanded that Wizards of the Coast double its revenue each year, leading to the disastrous results for each parties. The latest product is Magic 30 celebrating the 30th anniversary of the game. The bundle contains four packs of 15 random cards from

Magic the Gathering's earliest beta set for the low, low price of $1,000 USD. To make matters worse, these cards are not tournament legal to keep with a promise that the company would never print copies of these cards again. So they started cease and desisting popular proxy printing sites so that if you were going to play with these fake cards, it would have to be their fake cards. With the PR and shambles, they began reaching out to Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon creators to do unboxings for their terrible new $1,000 product, knowing that they had burnt every bridge with their own community. Has anyone ever annihilated their image with the community this bad? Yeah, Nintendo. See today. The difference with the Nintendo is that Nintendo

is so beloved and people are so crazy about Nintendo and will die for Nintendo that it doesn't matter. People will die for Nintendo. The way people talk about that company, it's like it's their parent. There was a period of time when, dude, going from NES to SNES created a loyalty that could not be shaken come the time the N64 was ready to drop. And it meant missing out on a whole lot of really cool things you could do with a CD in a video game. But I didn't care because, yo, Nintendo's what I grew up with. Nintendo's what I'm sticking with. These games are great. They have the best games. It's going to be good. What do you mean there's no fighting games on this console? What do you mean the big RPG is over there? What? Wait, why is that music so good?

Vocals? Lines? Like the actors? Like David Hader is saying lines? I got a rumble pack. Wait, no, Star Fox is talking. Hold on, we're okay. Star Fox is not talking. Star Fox is not talking. Star Fox is not talking. Star Fox talks like twice. No, no, no, no. When they get the voices later, not the... No, no, I mean, yeah, there's like fucking 20 lines of dialogue in that whole fucking game. And then you hear Foco be an asshole and you're like, oh, they're talking to. And then you're like, see Resident Evil. Look, look, they ported it. And then you try to pick it up. And it's like a five pound weight. It's not a good version of that game. The cartridge is so heavy. That's not a good

version of that game. All right. What's the breaking news? They're going to be adding very likely people of data mind shit out of Fortnite that says there's going to be double jumps and wall running. So if you want to play an apex battle royale that has all the shit you actually want from fucking Titanfall, maybe it's time to load up fucking Fortnite in a couple weeks. Dude, they already dropped like ships you could pilot into that game many times. I kind of feel like a Titan is just like waiting to happen. Like, wasn't there a robot you could pilot? Like it was like a silly little goofy small thing, but you could... I don't know. I don't know. You know what they're going to do, right? For apex? They're going to

be like, hey, man, guess what? It's Titanfall week. There's a Titan update and you can run on walls for the following six days. Nah, dude, there's going to be a Titan battle happening in the background. And on some of the screens on the inside the base, you can look at it. We got one coming in over here from Michael says, CSB, what's up? No time for funny names. We got a serious hustler scam debate on our hands. All right, let's hit it. Earlier today, we were driving out to the local Wal-Mart, saw a street musician playing some beautiful violin music. Right. Next to him was a sign claiming that he was getting into music to help his family. We passed him and he looked at us as we passed. And then after we passed,

we could see in the car's rear view mirror that he put the violin down and stopped playing, but the music kept going. He was playing a musical backing while pretending to play the violin. Hustle or scam? That's a hustle. That's a scam. That's a hustle. That's a scam, bro. That's a hustle. It's a complete, it is, it is the, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It is a scam. And here's why. Why is that? The sign says that he's playing and he's doing it for his family. If it was just, the sign says he got into music for his family. No, I'm, the sign lends a bend that if the person were just standing there

dicking around and you had to, and you just like, they just left it up to you to interpret what's going on here. He never said he wasn't just completely fucking faking it, but the sign says, Hey, help me out. I'm trying to, I'm getting into music to help my family. Right. And he is, he's, but he's performing music. When you, when you kick in a couple bucks to a musician on the street, you're not paying them for their skill. You're paying them for their performance. So I'm getting into music. Therefore, I'm not implying that I'm already capable of playing. Therefore, my fake hand gestures are covered. They're not fake if the violin actually made noise.

But he's not playing a musical backing to an existing track, which means he was adding like one note or here. If somebody is dancing, if somebody, hold on, if somebody is dancing and lip syncing a performance in the subway, that is what this is happening. And they're not really singing it. They're lip syncing it. If the, if the, if the music is actually just accompanying and you're supposed to play over it, because there's room for you to do so, then that's legit. If he's, if string is not touching bow, then that is just a scam. If he is actually touching the string to bow, then we can call that a hustle.

So let me ask you a question. Cause I'd like to go one deeper on this. Right? If, if, let's say, let's just say they are not getting into music for their family. In fact, the sign is a lie. Okay. Does this mean that man who holds up signs says, need money for ninja lessons, ninjas killed my family? Yes. Is that a scam or a hustle? That is not a scam. That's a hustle, despite its dishonesty. I mean, I don't even know if I'd call it a hustle. I think it's just, it's, but it's, if you had to categorize the two, that falls more to the hustle side because contextually you understand that no deception is occurring here. It's a joke.

So, and you're, you're classifying music man's thing as a scam based on you not being able to get the joke upon first viewing. So you think that faking playing the violin while it's playing in on us off of a track instead, no, no touch of, of string to bow. You think that that's a joke? I think it's hilarious. I think it's like the funniest thing I've ever heard in my fucking life in terms of like people playing music on the side. I think it's dishonest. I think it's a grift and thus I think it falls into the scam category. That's, that's how I feel. I think if you are, the, the, the general feeling has been hustle is like no one gets hurt.

It's a little hurt. If there is a lie, if there is a, a, a, a deception in the process of profiting that falls into scam territory. I don't think there's a real lie here because he's not saying I am playing, but I'm willing. I'm willing, I'm willing to caveat it to boat it to, to the actual playing versus pressing the buttons, you know? Um, all right, we have the spurt, the first split decision. This is actually the first time. Absolutely a hustle. The dishonest is too palpable. This is bordering on indistinguishable from a magic trick because he's not actually performing real magic. It's trickery for your enjoyment.

Certainly, but when you, the, the social contract of a magic tricks is busking to with an instrument implies I'm, I'm, I'm playing the instrument that I've learned to play for your enjoyment. And this is why you're going to come in and support me. All right. Here. Okay. Okay. All right. I have a follow up here. It's a, it's a, it's a vague unwritten social contract. I have a follow up here of a situation that we both remember that is somewhat similar actually. All right. So I'm Snoop Dogg and I'm playing my video games on my Twitch stream. Right. And I'm so blazed out my damn mind that I can't walk away while the gameplay

keeps going during the, the show that I'm putting on. Is that a hustle or is that a scam? Are donations open? Probably scam all the way. That's my favorite. I love it. Scam and flow. Scam and flow a hundred percent. I, I, I, yeah, fucking story. It makes me a rhythm and gangsta and scam, especially if donations are open open. All right. Well, I think we can find a point of content of point of agreement here, which is hustle or scam. The idea of like looking back in the car rear view and seeing like them not play, like that's hilarious, right?

As you drive away out of earshot. Um, yeah. All right. And one last one over here. We got one coming in. This one is from Asuna. Hello. Asuna or Dad Asuna? Yeah. Well, it's Dad Asuna, you know. Dad Asuna, what up? So Legion's writer and the N7 answer. So we were discussing the Legion stuff. We got some elaboration from the Loremaster herself. So, so since Legion's evasive answer about N7 pauldron came up last podcast, here's the real answer. It's just not an in-universe one, however. Uh-huh. The source is the writer for Mass Effect 2 in Legion, Chris Letoile,

who frequently posted about his work behind the scenes for the reasons of stuff. He also wrote Edie, Thane and Ashley, Ken Albee winners, I guess, and a bunch of planet descriptions. We'll talk about some of those later. He left Bioware before three came out, but spoke out about what was and wasn't planned during two and how the varying stages of drafts rewrites and et cetera went, I suppose. Okay, so just a little subtext moving on. What he did say about why Legion wears the N7 patch, several things. First, it was imposed by a superior because an artist drew it and it was cool, fairly standard. So he wrote it such that Legion gets a hole punched in it during the IFF mission and needs a spot repair to stay

intact until you reach the Normandy. Then the same superior decided it would be cool if an enemy from the first game was obsessed with Shepard and stalking them. Chris really did not like this as he felt it contradicted the core philosophy on his writing with both Edie and the Gath not expressing emotions or consequently obsession. Legion's KG no data available line was a result of him doing as told while trying to elaborate as little as possible. I see. There is no real in universe reason because they were arguing about it back behind the scenes. Thus leaving room for interpretation, which is the correct way to go about this. Oh, that's smart.

Yeah, it's actually helpful, but yes, but knowing that, I think we got the best result we could because you say something without saying it, but it's still open. Fair way to deal with that problem. On the note of AI versus emotion, Legion was written with Star Trek as a negative inspiration as a response to the qualms with the Borg slash data with the Borg as you are different. So we will absorb you destroy you and data as I am different. So I want to be you or what he called the Pinocchio cliche. The 12 draws the distinction between Edie and the Gath and that the Gath are the only AI in Mass Effect one and two that evolve from the ground up. Yeah, they have no interest in becoming like you. They want to be their own thing.

Without hormonal or chemical influences, whereas Edie and the Mass Effect one side quest AI are top down as in they're created specifically to gain sapiens. The AI you meet in MAU one was itself created by another AI from the ground up, but was found and destroyed. Hence why she shackled and altogether more humorous compared to Legion, who's written to be unconditionally accepting as the only intelligence divorced from emotion can. Cool. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, that is a, Legion's the best. That is a hell of a solution to a compromise when

you creatively can't get on board with a decision. The idea of, yeah, I don't know, the way what we got, I feel added some charm. The idea of patching up Legion temporarily with an N7 thing until you got back is, it's, you know, coincidental, but like, yeah, the mystery of what's up and why'd you got this? And then he's like, no comment, works better when you also go and learn about his gamer tag, right? Like you need a little bit of extra there to infer that, no, no, no, no. There's a personality here and it's growing, and, and it's learning to enjoy itself, right? There's, there are feelings they just don't really want to show you them. So beep, boop, boop is a front is wonderful. And I really am happy

that we can at least infer that feeling so far. And of course, the gaff as on their own don't have to at least yet answer to the same situation that Legion is in, because Legion is a container at the end of the day, you know? So I'm, I'm happy with what they did for sure. All right. Thanks for those answers. Cheers. Good emails this week. Yeah, I like those. That'll do it, everybody. Take care. We'll see you next time. Stay safe, everybody. Have a good one.