Castle Super Beast - CSB 198: Arrested For Dark Patterns

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

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No thanks for watching. And there we go. Good afternoon, Ontario man. Yes, hi. Weird angle, because I'm in a small office. I'm at the in-laws weird microphone, because I'm not traveling with a high quality microphone. That's ridiculous.

You know, Woollie, as somebody who has done many a sit-down let's play, I am intimately familiar with talking to the side of your head. There you go. Yes, this is me just looking at a TV. No, and I mean, I brought the good camera, but unfortunately the size of the space I'm in doesn't leave room for anything in front of me, but a wall. I noticed that you brought your PlayStation 5 with you. There she blows. I was scared to move it.

I was so scared to just because I'm like, if anything doesn't work, there's no getting a new one. It's over. So Amazon was selling like a God of War bundle Canada and it was like 800 bucks and I'm like looking at it and I'm like, first of all, it's already a waste because I already own God of War, I'm playing God of War right now, but I'm just like, let's say Spider-Man 2, you know, that's going to be a hot game that comes out. If it broke right now, would I be able to get another PS5 by Jude? I don't know. I don't know. It's stupid. And I'm like even like exhausting all bullshit friendships and influencer powers.

I don't think I'd be able to replace mine. Like, yeah, no, there's markers you can pull in, right? And there's nets you can throw out, but it's yeah. And notice no disc slot either. No disc? Yeah, no. Fuckin' digital. Who needs it? Who needs it?

I was super scared to move it, but that I did do, that I did do. And, you know, I got here and I checked out the situation. What's the situation, brother? The situation is I'm upstairs and sure as shit, the router is downstairs. Okay. Okay. The fire in the eyes is lit. Oh, let's go.

Let's go. I mean, it's real. It's real simple. I kind of, I looked at it. I gave the, I assessed what was going on and I saw, oh, that's all the way down there in the living room on the far side. And I'm all the way up here in the back office. What's one to do? So it was real simple, actually. Yeah.

Oh, this is grand. One on down to Best Buy, picked up 100 feet of Cat 5. Good to go. 100 feet of Cat 5. Cat 6, actually. Are we, are we, yeah, I was about to say, are we a Cat 6 now? Picked up 100 foot of Cat 6, plugged that shit in. We rocked it, baby.

We baited all time. You didn't even, you didn't even try. Oh, I did. I did, actually. Just for the, just for the, like, the hilarity. I actually did, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I did, I did connect and I did a test and I saw, what did I see? I think I saw, like, 35 down, like, God knows what up.

Yeah. And then I connected to the beta and I went and I ran into a corner and I just did some, some training mode, which was obviously local and fine. And, because we couldn't get to the, the best buy yet. So I just did that. And then someone challenged me and I was like, oh no, oh no, he doesn't know. Oh no. And then someone challenged me and I was, I was on, like, South America console only room

for, like, I was nowhere. Yeah. I was gone from the map. And someone came and fucking still tried. And I'm like, all right, man, if you want this heat. We're the only two people in this lobby, but fucking clearly you want some shit. And yeah, I got to teleport around and I was like, well, that's what we get, you know, but I just came, I came to lab just to see.

But anyway, yeah, got the cable plugged it in and it was, it was great. So, first of all, I think for the live viewers, I think I'm a little low. If you could turn my volume up slightly, sir. Sure thing. I'll bring myself down a little too. Following that. Okay. Obviously there's Street Fighter six to talk about though.

It's not, I don't think we have as much to say it was like a slightly modified version of the old beta. Right. Yeah. They made some slight changes that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. So, you know, invent like, like a couple of balance changes, mainly networking, you know, was there was a difference between the setups on that, but definitely not like new characters or anything particularly exciting.

I played Ken this time because I wanted to play like, I was talking to Susie about this earlier because we had a match in which like, I demolished her and it was like, it was like a person being a child and she was like, I just want to play Kami. And the beta has this very strange thing. It was a minor annoyance before it's a slightly larger annoyance now, but it's a free beta. Who am I to complain, especially since Capcom sent me a code for it, but it's like all the characters in the roster on that beta are normies. Yeah.

No free, no free picks. They're all, they're all normal characters. And like, like there's like, there's nobody that fits tons of different play styles. Like, did you really need Ken and Ryu and fucking Luke all in the same one? It's funny because I was actually thinking about this, right? About how here's a beta and it's got eight characters in it, which is the same number of world warriors we started with back in the day. That's right.

And once upon a time, eight world warriors was enough, right? It was crazy. It was like, oh my God, because prior to that it was two. Yeah. But four of those humans, four of those were humans and four of them were free picks. Yeah. Right? So, uh, you know, they definitely like made their 50 50 on like, well, do you, are you

looking for a cool normal or are you looking for the classic street fighter freak pick? And, um, and yes, I'm counting Honda's ridiculous fat abs and, and insane yoga stretching as as free picks. Oh, no, no. You know, Dalsum, Gief, Honda and fucking Blanca are absolute freak picks. They're the monsters you can create using the creative character in six is what they are. Um, and so, uh, yeah, but in this case with, with this eight, you're like, oh, these are

eight fairly normal people. Yeah. All the, all the weirdos are away. Even the pseudo weirdos, like, like Kami, I wouldn't say is a weirdo, but I mean, she doesn't have a projectile and she does have a, like nobody has a body projectile. Uh, yeah. No one has a body projectile. I mean, Luke's like, like tackle, you know, and his lunging punch is kind of serving that

purpose. Um, it's like he has that in place of a Tatsu, you know. Um, but, uh, yeah. And Ken is like practically just a completely different character at this point. They've lived leaned in so hard with the kicking on him that he's just about that more than he's about the shoto tools. So yeah, I played Ken for the vast majority of the beta because I was like, well, I wanted to try out Ken, but I didn't have my stick and Ken is like, for me anyway, like it's

mandatory that I have an easy way to hit two kicks to do the dash, which I don't find comfortable on a controller. Um, dude, he is, he is, how do I put it? Like a while ago we talked about like, Hey, everyone has every tool they've ever had. Ken feels more, more than that. He feels like every Ken that has ever existed put into one character, like the, the, the V skill dashing and the, you're doing your, I don't know what the move is called, but it's her, it's SRK with, with kick dragon lash to dragon lash to bounce people off the

floor to get whatever you want. Yeah. To having like four or five different variations of Akuma's like jab, jab, hurricane, shoryu shit from third strike. So it feels as if the crazy kicks have like finalized in his fighting style as the like this, these three that are like good special moves you can, you know, cancel into each other and it feels like the dragon lash kick is, uh, it's the finalized version of his like scissor kick from back in the day.

Stole it from fucking Joe. So there's, there's the scissor kick from CVS too, right? But then there's also, um, the first hit of his, uh, Tatsu and five where he dashes upwards at you and then does the Tatsu like it's like he combined the two of those into like just this new final move, you know? Um, it's pretty sick. It's honestly like it's, it's kind of fun to see him being a shodo, but like he doesn't need to rely on those old, the tools that we use relying on, you know?

Um, and, uh, yeah, you know, and then of course you get, uh, uh, Chun in there and Chun's got a ton of shit as well. Um, something about, about Ken too is like, I saw some tech people were posting with him that like he could just do like coast to coast, like dragon lash links and shit. It's gross. Um, yeah, it was, it was pretty sick. Um, but I feel like, you know, getting, uh, so I missed out on, you know, about half of the time the beta was upright cause.

Due to travel. Exactly. Exactly. I got in a little bit of time sort of yesterday morning and then, uh, before the end of the day, last night, you know, I got some more in, but like it was pretty limited and, and compared to the rest of the weekend, but still getting enough time and to do ranked a bunch of fighting against people, seeing some tech, you know, um, like something that is, that I, I kind of didn't get the first beta that I, that I got this time around is like the

drive impact fucking button, man is it's so incredible how having this one thing, it, the game is still a street fighter paced game and it's still slower than anime games and strive and shit like that. But having that one thing to worry about for the entire match keeps your brain mental stack going and it makes the game feel faster because there's always a solid 30% of your brain occupied with reacting to the flash. I think that out of everything in street fighter six drive impact is by far the best new feature overall because it had, it completely changed the way I did almost every match.

First of all, I cannot, I cannot currently react to the flash. I can't, I can't do it. Other people can do it to me. I assume that's because they're looking out for it. But personally, I, I, I did it twice and both of those times it was so late that it, the game froze because it's acting like a parry. Yeah, yeah. You, you, you, when you do it on the last possible frame, you get a real big slowdown

on it. Yeah. Um, but more than that is that it has, it has dramatically changed how existing in the corner functions because it used to be, dude, I can block this all day. I'm just looking for my, I'm just looking for my, uh, my, you know, he can't cross me up. He doesn't have a good corner. Cross up.

I just, I just blocked this. I'm looking out for texts. I'm looking, I'm looking. Okay. Do I have an opening? Oh, I botched my opening. I'm still in the corner. Yada, yada.

Yeah. Now, if you're pressuring somebody and you're all up in their ass and they're rattled, just normal, normal drive, they're not going to be looking for it or they may not be looking for it and they won't react. And now you have a little, little guard break in the corner and you can bounce them around a little bit. Oh yeah. And if they, if they're not like ready to deal with that, that is going to be a, well,

it's funny cause it's like, you can call it a, like you can say it's a noob killer, but noobs will kill with it as well. It is, it is a mutual destruction shotgun ready to go. And it's interesting to see how it, it's used at that level versus when you use it like later on with people that are like able to react to it, right? So I, I mainly stuck to ranked because I just got better matches. And I was able to get to platinum and, and sort of like, and that's where like, you know, people are operating.

They're, they're fucking playing. And the way that dragon, the way that drive impact is getting used there is throwing it out at any point just in neutral is a, your death is death, right? You're asking to die in neutral. You can react to it much more easily. And so what it ends up being is you have to be in the middle of like some tricky quick strings and then like a little, I got, I got your brain preoccupied with thinking something else is going to happen.

And what it is is it's a, you up, you sleeping, but you press the button to be like, Hey, you sleeping. And they're like, no, no, no, I'm awake. I think what might be the most interesting version of that is that throwing a block string down on somebody and keeping their brain occupied to go for the drive impact has a weird, I'm going to call it an anti-option select. I don't know what to call it because a lot of people, when you're hitting them with jabs and block strings are waiting for a tick throw.

And if you de-i somebody who is expecting a tick throw, you just get thrown right the fuck out of it. And you option select yourself. You even have the opportunity. I've done, I've had situations where I'm going to drive rush, which is the dash cancel out of a button and in, and I see the flash happen and I'm like, I'm just going to throw you because I still, I still have time to do that. I have time to press a button dash and then grab you before it happens.

Um, throws eight frames or 12 frames and then the de-i is it's five now. Yeah. Okay. And then di is 27. So yeah. So you just, you just have that little, like that little snooze check on people, you know, just to make sure that they're still there and, um, and then, and like once you've both established we need to seal this, okay, you go, you get back to the regular game.

But what it does is something really interesting for the longest while in street fighter games, like medium punch and medium kick have been the least intuitive buttons for, for newer players to understand because you understand the point of a jab and you understand the point of a heavy roundhouse, right? Big slow damage or fast, quick interruptions. And the medium being in between was like, uh, I get that it's in between, but like, where am I supposed to use this? What am I supposed to do with it?

And then it's like, uh, it's special cancelable or it's range is good or exactly, right? And so that has become, and then people eventually you kind of realized that like, yeah, it becomes a range thing and exactly special cancelable. And that makes it way, way good in a lot of cases. So reuse crouching medium kick into Hadoken becomes the default way to play, you know? Yeah. Ken's crouching medium kick goes into everything he does. Like it's, it's a wonderful button.

Okay. So the history then takes it so that now we go, okay, we have mediums serving a purpose, but the purpose they serve is almost too good compared to the other buttons. It's so good. It's like medium, like, I remember you and me sitting around playing third strike and your friend Kingsley came over and he's like, why aren't you guys using meeting buttons? Do you remember that? Yeah, I do.

And we were both like, cause I want to hit the big one. He's like, you guys are idiots. Use your mediums. They're so good. You're morons. And they, they combo into each other. You fucking, uh, Makoto, you know what I mean? Like you have so many.

Are you in this? It's like, do you want a medium standing medium punch into standing medium punch into dash into standing medium punch into standing medium punch? So yeah, I do. So safe to say that in the street fighter games, mediums became something that was hard to understand at first to, oh, now they're the best. And now, um, people are using them without ever really changing up what they're doing because they're relying on these buttons for solid damage, not the best, but a good

combo out of it. And also I'm hitting you from the furthest away. Great. And then I stopped using Jabb's right when I was playing Gief because his jab is like his arm all the way out. So here's what the fuck street fighter six is doing. When you do mediums with a lot of characters, about half the cast right now, for example, has a thing where if you start a combo with crouching medium kick, it scales down to 80%

lower damage for anything after that. So it gives you a damage reduction for using that good button, right? First off, and then second, a lot of really good medium buttons that reach far and do good pokes cannot be canceled, which means if a drive impact collides with one, you can't get out of it. Yeah. So we've, we've, we've come a long way in street fighter games, um, but there's been, there was the old fashioned fucking dumb shit mirror matches between Akuma and third strike

in which you would see two Akuma players just wiggle their Akuma on the screen and just crouch at each other at random for like 10 seconds, you're like, what is this stupid? They're both waiting for the other guy to throw out a low medium kick so that they can parry it and then hit their low into their fucking, their fucking vortex. Yeah. Yeah. And now we've, we've gone so far away from that. We're now to the point of like, if you decide that I don't want to play the medium kick

footsies anymore, just get ready to like, Chun Lee's low medium and third strike was the most dominant fucking normal ever. I mean, you have a year. You can hit it, sip some tea, do your taxes and go, yeah, let's do that super. You know what I mean? It's good. Yeah. And then, you know, you can, and then you could also, uh, again, like walking forward

is like a sign of dominance, you know, it's an oppressive action. So all this to say though, just to keep it like on, on the simple, um, when you have these amazing buttons that can no longer be interrupted, uh, you cannot react with your own drive impact when you see the flash. So the best buttons are now so risky to do if someone sees you doing them because you can't stop yourself once the button is out and then they just smash you, you know, which, which leads to the technique that you used when you beat my fucking ass in the matches that we were playing of like, Hey, Hey, medium to above average players, you, you need to

start using your jabs, not just as your free hit confirm into something, which is, you know, like Ken has 30 Ken has like low jab, low jab standing, uh, short into fucking hurricane kick and a sure you right, but use them so that if you're doing it and they hit drive impact, you don't even have to react. You can just keep doing the block string you were doing and it'll beat the drive impact. You are covering your bases by doing either three quick jabs in the time it takes them to do the drive impact, or you could interrupt and react to the flash and cancel out of the second jab or so to interrupt theirs.

And when people are learning how to drive impact properly, this is going to be the most crucial thing in the world, you know, or use bigger buttons that can also cancel, you know, which like some, some characters that have like cancelable frames on like, yeah, like Luke has that, for example, you know, you just got to get ready to interrupt any flashes you see. Um, but yeah, it really just serves that purpose of like the first the first time we all touched it, we're like, Oh my God, it's so good. It knocks you back.

If you block it, you can't punish it. You know what I mean? Like what the fuck? And it's like, yeah, everyone has a gun and the solution is to shoot the other guy when he pulls out and draws on you, you know, you know, the strangest thing and it leads me to believe that my issue is not my reaction time, but my, my mental process for reacting to DIs, I, I did not react with to, to any DIs in that whole beta, sorry, no, I reacted to two, but they were super late, right?

Uh, with DI, but I did blow a couple of people open with, yeah, just raw level three super. Yes. Just, just, just, no, no, you won't, if you have a cancelable button, you can do that too. Right. There's a bunch of options you can do, but you just have to be ready for them, you know, and that process of staying ready is more taxing than any other street fighters system has ever been.

You did not have to worry about focus attacks like you do about this, right? You did not have to worry. That's way scarier than a focus attack. The blowback, then with a wall, all that shit, right? Um, this is, this is keeping your brain active. Even if you're like autopiloting the rest of your match, you know, sometimes if you're fighting somebody that you're like, eh, you know, I could probably not worry too much about this.

You still have to pay attention to that. Yeah. Uh, it's, it's fascinating. The thing that makes me, the thing that makes me like excited, but also it's like, we're talking about, so DI is the biggest change, parrying is here, but parrying is not how it was. And it will never be how it was. It can't ever be how it was ever again.

I've had a bunch of perfect parries where I still failed the exchange. Yeah. Cause you, you, the timing is different. You don't recover the same. You get six frames. Yeah. Um, but nobody in this thing, I mean, Jamie has one, but it's not really the same, but nobody has a command grab in this, in this beta.

So the, the, the mental, the mental breakdown of how command grabs interact with DI's is going to be a completely new world. I, well, even though it's just tapping both strong buttons right now, I don't have the mental space to tap that on reaction, but I play geef and if I'm playing geef and I see that character fucking move towards me, I can, I can churn that fucking thing out in one frame. You might even want to do a running bear just to get forward a little bit. You know?

Why not? Yeah. The thing we haven't seen either is like, so the Marissa trailer shows you her punching and breaking someone doing a drive impact, you know, and that's another thing to see is like, Oh, there's drive impact breaking moves, kind of like focus breakers in four. So there's, there's more to the system, but as it stands with these eight characters right now, um, it's just a little bit of extra load on your, on your system. And uh, that's enough, man.

That's enough to really like, yeah, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it feels like you're never quite, uh, just fully sleeping and that's fun. Yeah. That's fun for all levels. Hey, let me ask you, you went up to Platt in the, in the ranked, uh, system, uh, so I didn't mess with ranked play at all in the first beta and I, I did this, this time around, uh, with Ken and I, the, my placement put me in the middle of bronze. Okay.

And I'm like, okay, sure. And I played for maybe six, seven hours on ranked and 95% of that time was trying to escape bronze and one at bronze four was like match after match after match after match of 50, 50. Interesting. Right. Okay. And the instant I crested into bronze five, I flew from the, from bronze five.

To the top of silver in like 10 matches. Interesting. Just like flew through them. And if I had kept going, it felt like I could have kept going into fucking gold because I hit bronze, uh, four or four and a half and then had 16 wins in a row. Interesting. Okay. I was not getting better.

I was not. So I think you might have just, that might have just been a roll of the dice on what you got there. Um, but it is interesting because like, I did notice that a number of like the hardest players, I, the strongest players I faced were people that were still doing their processing matches. Right. So the first 10 matches you do will like guess your skill and then they'll place you

afterwards and like, yeah, I like some of the hardest matches I fought where people in placement, you know, um, and if you do your placements and then like you beat like I guess like the first three are so clean and they're all like feeding you high level people. They're like, Oh, you're, you're like high potential placement. So we're going to put you up against people that are like trying to break through the ceiling of whatever, um, ranking they're at, you know, there might be also games like that in jail.

Could be, could be, um, well, I don't know if they're ever going to be completely transparent because obviously gaming, the system is what you want to avoid, but it does, there is an impression that like they're, yeah, but, but it's, but again, it could just be beta random, you know what I mean? Yeah, sure. You get what you get. Um, but I definitely, I also, I fought some people that were in bronze that I guess, well, I guess they just got placed there, but like they're in bronze, but they're clearly better.

You know what I mean? Like you fight, like you fight some people who are like, Oh shit, no, I respect what the fuck you're doing. Um, you're There's also the new game, uh, jitters of, uh, you know, I did not fight many Chun-Li's. I think I fought four Chun-Li's and two of those Chun-Li's were really fucking great. And I'm just getting my ass beat in the corner. I'm like, I don't know what you're doing to me.

Yeah. Don't, I don't like you are a bronze four player and you clearly know how to play Chun-Li and I don't know what's fucking safe. I don't know what the command on that is. So what I'm waiting for and what I'm almost tempted to become or test becoming is the terrifying user of modern controls because so far I've only fought a couple. I fought a couple of modern control users and okay, modern, if anyone, I don't know if you guys have had the time to like fuck around with it, but the way that they have

it on, right? Every loud, every lobby you go into is people asking how to switch off of modern controls because, uh, it puts you in by default and right as annoying as that is for a lot of people. I totally get it. I get it, man. I super get it. People coming in and just grabbing it and playing a game and getting smashed brothers

like controls is going to help a bunch of people probably. And, um, you are fighting people that are like clearly still jumping around and getting the hang of like when to not do things and when to not keep doing the same thing over and over, but they can still like you got to pay attention, you know, because you jump at them and they're like, well, I got my uppercut. It's one button. I'm going to use it, you know? I played a modern guile.

Yeah. He beat my ass with that, too. There you go. There you go. Yeah. Just guile with the take away half or even 60, 70% of guile shit, but given the ability to just do a sonic boom on reaction and a flash kick on reaction, dude, he beat me so bad.

There's, there's a lot of people who the speed of the game moving around and stuff is a bit much for them and they're not used to that. Fine. But there's a whole lot of people that are used to games that are gaming speed, you know, they've played other video games and shit. And their whole thing is just like, I just can't do the forward, down, down, forward bit like, you know, but if I see you in the air and my brain thinks, oh, sure, you can him, if I can just press the one button to do that, I'm going to press it, you know?

So yeah, modern is still like, you know, it's going to help a lot of people, man. It's going to make people real mad. Oh, man. Oh, yeah. If you lose, if you feel like you're losing to modern, you're, and you're like, I'm better than this, you're going to start, you're going to get tilted like I played the bid on PC this time. I asked Capcom for a follow-up code because I was, I told them I was blunt.

I was like, I'm afraid my PS five is going to die and I don't want to miss the beta and they're like, okay, here's a PC code. So I go to the PC lobbies and the PC lobbies during 99% of the day is like, GG, yeah, GG, GG, GG, nothing, nothing but GG's. But when you play that shit and fucking two in the morning, Pacific time, it is, it is the most fucking angry fucking toxic shit hole. Everyone is so fucking mad and they're trying to see what they can get around the sensor and what they can fucking call each other and it's great.

It's great. Yeah, I've, I've walked into a couple of lobbies of people just losing their shit. They go fucking Jamie spamming piece of shit, just going off on the whole lobby essentially to everyone's like, okay, man, sure, you know, so yeah, I can see the modern tilts coming because you should in your brain, you end up feeling like I should be better than this person. Why? Why not?

You know, and there's never, no, just never been a street fighter where you hand people a keyboard and put them into a chat room in between their matches. It's amazing, man. Well, I mean, the Baron's chat of street fighter. So the answer is fightcade, right? Yeah. But people who are going out to fightcade oftentimes are through the sheer obfuscation of getting to there, probably going to be respectable opponents.

Not always. There's some fucking shitters up there, but most of the time, you know, it's like you have to climb this mountain and hey, welcome, right? Little monastery for you. Take a seat. Yeah, man, there's going to be some toxicity in these lobbies for sure. And I love it. I love it, dude.

And so I mentioned it quite a bit recently, but like there's a great Seijam video that just talks about, it's a subject that I've addressed in the past, but it's like, why do I feel like I keep losing to players that are worse than me? You know? Oh, I should watch that. That sounds like a great video. Fantastic, man. And it's essentially just putting into words the sentiment that like I kind of know, which

is like you have a moment where you decide to stop being just a gremlin and you start acting like a civilized noob. And that moment you go, okay, I'm going to stop just doing things instinctively and random DPs every single time I get swept, I'm going to stop mashing through every time someone walks forward. I'm going to think about what I'm doing. Yes, I'm going to do it on purpose. I'm going to button up my suit and tie and I'm going to be a civilized noob and you're

going to stop taking risks and you're going to be so free because you're no longer doing anything impulsive whatsoever. And someone who's just going, smashing their face on the keyboard is going to destroy you because they're all instinct, all it. I am, I am reminded of a, of a stupid meme that I talked, I brought up a couple of weeks ago with you or maybe it was before it was, it was the, the mental load bell curve or at the very bottom of skill and at the very top of skill, you have a guy going, lol, I'm just hitting buttons.

Yes. Yes. And then everything in between is more and more and more mental play and at the top of the bell curve where most people live is, I know how to do moves. I'm going to do this plan. I'm going to think for maybe two seconds too long on every hit I do in this entire match and somebody who doesn't give a shit is just going to blow right through me like I'm not even there.

Yes. That's exactly it. And like what you have to realize is there's a time and place to still be impulsive and YOLO. You have to still maintain some of that. The, and not, but also in the long run too, like if you kind of just go crazy and you never, ever try to stop and think about anything, you are going to hit a wall real quick. Right.

They used to be me. The analogy given was, did I talk about this where Sejam was wrestling in high school? Okay. So he describes how in, he had him and his friends started wrestling in high school and he was learning how to do all the moves technically and like doing the best he can. But like he was so low level at all of the, the different things, stand up game, ground game, this, that, whatever, that he didn't win a single fucking match the entire year. Right.

Meanwhile, his friend also knew nothing about wrestling. This is Greco Roman that is, but he knew one move that involved when you're on the ground, you do a quick trick flip over and pin the guy right away. And he won a ton of his first year matches using that on everybody because it was the best trick. No one knew how to deal with it. And he was like legitimately getting a good record out of that, but he had no other game. He just kind of like flopped around until he got to the floor to do that one trick.

Right. I have a similar story about when Street Fighter four was coming out. So once SF four got put out for review, I don't know if you remember, but one up the game website that was pretty good, got it way before everybody else because they broke the story for Street Fighter four. And during, I think it's in the review text, but if not, it was, it was on social media that every single person in that office was playing Street Fighter four and they were playing it all the time, except there was only one problem.

And that problem was that arguments were escalating to the point where people were ready to throw down, people were ready to actually fight in the office because tick throws were demolishing a full half of the staff. And there was about 40, 50% of the one up staffers just like could not take a tick throw to save their life. And the people who knew how to adequately tick throw people were just tick throwing them into the fucking dirt, like literally the entire match. And it was just getting angrier and angrier and angrier.

And it's like, yeah, no, that's the tick throw is a good trick. Yeah. People don't like it. People fall for it. People will fall for it over and over and over. It created an entire generation of fighting game players, oh, Niners that do crouch tech on every single in every game now as a result of Street Fighter four, right? There are people that crouch tech every single thing, hoping for the results that Street Fighter

four gave you for doing that because you never knew when it was coming. I mean, shit, I fucking had to wash that out of my system and learn the hard way. Yeah, stop crouch teching. You know what? That's how you get sure you three times in a row is when you keep trying to crouch tech. You know, Daigo picked up on that instantly. So when you when you go now to the next year after Sage M and his friend are wrestling, he goes from having a complete zero record to getting a couple of wins in there and then

learning how to do those moves in general better. And so he climbs and gets up to the point where he's like, oh, now I can wrestle. Now I'm getting some wins. Now I'm fighting for real and I'm better. His friend, everyone in year two knew exactly how to counter that one weird trick and he got nothing, right? So by the way, to the folks who don't know, I'm seeing people going, what the hell is a tech throw?

That is something I should have explained. Oh, a tech throw is really simple. You walk up to somebody and you hit them with the fastest jab you can and maybe a jab them a little bit so that you keep them blocking and then you walk forward and throw them while their brain is still going, I have to block the jabs. And it will it will just happen like a million times in a row, somebody who can't get their head into it. It's a jab into a throw because you're expecting to see a jab into a jab into a jab, but instead

you end up just go, oh, should I have to throw? Oh, should I have to throw? And that's it. Yeah. Um, so when you when you sort of look at that, that sort of perspective on it, the person who is trying to play like kind of properly is going to hit that wall and go, why can't I win at all against people who are clearly worse than me? But you are going to play like children or who are like, just I'm going to mash DP, ha,

ha, he, but, but, but like the person who has that one trick or that one thing they're relying on, they're going to hit a wall too. It's just there's walls going to come later because they're relying on one thing. You know, um, there's, there's knowledge check characters that kind of are like this in a way. I talk Kimberly is that way. I've got my ass blown up by Kimberly over and over and over until I realized I could just walk backward from her mix up.

I mean, reacting to the smoke colors is going to be the best way to fight her. But for now, I've practiced so that the moment she flashes any color smoke, I just do a dragon punch. Yeah. Knock her right out of the straight up or on the ground, you know. Um, but that's it. Like if you're in Tekken, if you can't fucking learn how to block the, yeah, the snake edge, the big sweep, you know, um, you're going to fucking eat it.

If you can't deal with Axel, just throwing his shit out at you, you know, you're never going to get past that level, that, that one knowledge checkpoint. So yeah. And you get situations like, like, you know, you're playing against Ken and Ken is not using any of his bullshit. He's just like, I'm crazy, crazy Brazilian Ken. I'm going to, I'm going to fucking jump, jump in with a sweep and then I'm going to shore you every opportunity I get.

If you try to play that guy like a human being in some cases that will actually get you because you actually, you're like, no one would just do another shore, you can situation. Yeah. Yeah. No, he's going to, no, no, he, he, he actually totally just did another shore. You can write my fucking face and I ate it because I expected more. So what I ended up doing for like, again, I felt like maybe two, three modern people

and like, for one of them, um, we did a couple of games because I was, he was just sitting down and I was like, yeah, I'll do a little, I'll do a set. Sure. And like, it was one of those things where I was like, oh, I'm getting hit by things that are, cause what modern has some, some combos on it that, uh, if they mash the button, it'll, if it hits you, it'll do the whole combo. But if they, but if you block it, it'll stop short. Oh, so there's baked in hit confirms.

In other words, so sick. It's really, really strong to give people the ability to not have to think about whether or not it hit you, you know, in normal fighting games. If I land the first hit, I have to recognize that it landed on you and then I have to proceed to do the rest of my combo. But if I just do the combo on you while you're blocking, I'm going to die at the end of that, you know, but this does it for you, right? Um, if for some, for some circumstances, uh, so when you're seeing that happen,

that's something that's an advantage they get that you don't, and that's where you have to kind of stop and go, all right, hold on. Let's break it down to the basics. If they jump at me, I'm going to do a crouching fierce. If they walk forward, I'm going to sweep them and we're going to just pray on their bad habits until they realize that they're bad habits. It's an educational match of sorts. You know, I think, uh, modern controls has done a really fantastic job of

creating a situation where there's like a, cause it used to be, I am a, I am a, I'm a fighting game child. I don't know nothing, I hit buttons, right? Then you would graduate to being a scrub, right? And then rising out of your scrub status is like this mountain. Yeah. It's, it's so far away because you don't have to just learn how to do your moves. You don't have to learn how to do them correctly.

You don't have to learn, don't just have to learn basic combos. You also have to get your head into a place where you can think about all this while doing, which is hard as fuck. But now we have modern controls, which is the post scrub, pre average state in which, yeah, you don't have to worry about any of that control stuff. Work on putting them in the corner, work on, on defending yourself from a jump in. Everyone gets relaxed. Everyone gets a free graduation up one level from where they were.

Yeah. You get a free pass up to the next grade for sure. And then once you're, you're comfortable with the corner, once you're comfortable with tick throws, once you're comfortable with basic combos, you'll go, you know, if I was using non-modern controls, I could totally, you know, space the sky out with different flavors of fireball a little more easily, or I could probably do more damage with this combo because this isn't optimized. And then you go and you learn just that while keeping your old stuff.

Right. One of the smartest things about the modern controls is that you can still do a normal move input and it'll work. So even if you do, if you do a Hadoken with the modern controls, traditionally, you'll still get that move. You do a tattoo or sure you can, those moves will still come out. You still get the, the, the, the strengths. Yeah.

So you, that's great. So you get to experiment with your own system as you fight. You go, like, let me try doing Hadokens. I want to do a fierce one. I want to do a light one. If I'm going to use the auto button, it's going to give me the one strength. You know, so I have to, so like, I know that's a crutch, but it's there, but I can try to get better at just doing the one I want.

And it lets you experiment as you still have that shortcut button. Oh, I got a dude. I think when I go, like, fucking Kimberly or something, I think I'm going to be using tilt controls. Yeah. Um, also I'm seeing people point out and, uh, there's a guy in the chest as modern control geef is going to be a menace in bronze. Mm hmm.

Um, yeah, I can't like grapplers have always been the most like goofy to learn because the 360 is such a bizarre motion and you jump, people fuck it up and they jump, giving him any SPD off of a one button is a terror. Well, love is a nightmare. Well, I already pointed out that if you do a raw super with, uh, modern controls, it does 20% less damage from doing a normal super input. Sure, fuck it. So I guarantee you command grabs will face the same penalty.

Whatever. The SPD's never been about its damage. It's about the range of geef's arm across the world. It's the threat. It's the threat, you know, but there's going to be a major damage reduction for doing the easy operation version of that for sure. And, um, I, I really think we should call them tilt controls. Sure.

I mean, whatever, whatever you want to call them reminds me of like the Wii U like I'm using tilt controls, but also every time I saw somebody lose to modern in that chat room, they'd lose their damn mind. I mean, quite frankly, like if anything, Smash Brothers, by having the Ryu do traditional moves for better damage or smash inputs for smash damage, that already was prior previews of what was coming down the line, you know, because you do the shoryuken with up and B and it's just like whatever, but you do the actual shoryu input with your, with your move and smash,

you got a better shoryu, you know. Um, uh, yeah, you know what, the next time the beta rolls around, which I'm sure there will be now that we know the game is out in June. Uh, I'm probably going to spend a couple hours like messing around with characters that I don't know how to play using that using modern controls because learning a brand new character sucks. Like it's fun. There's a lot like it's a lot.

I think the biggest change possible made that was a good choice was, Hey man, your ranked play between characters is completely separate. Of course. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because dude, I played, I talked about this before, I played Street Fighter 5 and I got Abigail up to, I don't know, like silver or maybe gold. And then I went to play, Oh, I'll try out, uh, the geef was actually really bad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you got to fight the same level of opponents. I got fucking destroyed. Yeah. Um, so one thing to note too, as, as, as well as that, like the modern controls have, um, the, you hold a modifier button, which makes it so that like you do three types of auto combo, you know, the light auto combo, the medium and the heavy.

And those, if you're learning a character for the first time, those are showing you what combos to do with these characters. If you do switch over to them on classic, you know, there's a nice B and B do that one, um, now the full thing to just keep in mind, of course, which again, and this is as, as, as fair is you're not getting every single one of your buttons as you would with classic, right? There will be some stuff missing. Um, and, uh, you're not going to have as much, you know, like you have all six

buttons with their, the classic controls in this case, you have three and then you hit the modifier and the modifier will often give you like a couple extra ones, but at the end of the day, you're still missing some stuff that is going to be really useful to have if you're playing on classics. So there is a trade-off in the sense that you don't get everything, you know? Um, yeah. And modern control seems to be like a total success. Like I can easily see it as I want to play street fighter, but I'm bad at moves,

but my brain can do the street fighter thing. It just can't do the moves. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Um, which is also great for people who, well, I'll get into my, the next game or it's a similar thing, but Yomi hustle where you're

like, I like the decision making, but the part where you have to do the moves is hard, um, modern is going to help a lot of people with that. Um, and I want, I just like, yeah, put it, putting it by default on everyone is probably the right move in the long run. Just make sure it's very clear how to, you know, switch to it, um, or switch off of it because if you put up, I realized this, even just like the subtlety of something like, let's say you boot up the game for the first time and it says, Hey, welcome to street fighter six, which one of these two do you want?

People are going to probably feel like, ah, I should probably play classic, you know, even if they're not really ready or slash, even if they're better suited for modern. So I get why, you know, they were like, we're not even going to ask you, let's just put you here, try it, fuck around with it. And if you don't like it, switch it off, you know, like, so I think, I think the way that it's going to work is, um, is basically, I mean, most people are going to be playing with a pet, like period, right?

And therefore it's going to default to modern. And then for it, for most people, that'll be fine, right? And it's going to go and it's going to hide the ability to change it inside button select where it is, where it lives now, because anybody who is into it enough to want to check or change their buttons is going to be the kind of person who actually wants to use classic controls. Yep. People that are using tilt controls just and loving it.

They're not going to change their buttons. Here's the other thing. I'm a pad warrior now. Oh, are you? Yep. Straight up. I, what happened? I, uh, the, the reaching over for the drive impact buttons is too slow.

Shut up. You're, you're, you're insane. It's just not for becoming a pad warrior, but for that reason, like, and not, no, not just that, not just that, like, uh, legitimately, like I've been playing, um, I've been playing, um, um, uh, uh, Strive on pad and I played, yeah, yeah. Um, it, the, the inputs on Nago, the roles and shit. Like there's a lot to fuck up there that I find it true. If I find I'm way more consistent on pad than I am on stick with, in Strive.

Um, yeah. Oh yeah. And, and Sam's show, I played entirely on pad as well. Well, I mean, Sam's show, yeah, that makes sense. But, but there's explosive moments of like performance where I have to just be like, ah, in the zone. And like when I'm trying to do those precise inputs, like I'm, you know, like it is interesting, but it's like, yeah, I've, I've just kind of had to

acknowledge I'm like, you know what, I'm dropping shit way less with the pad than I am on the stick and having drive impact right on my L one button makes a huge difference. Oh, is that where it is? Yeah. By default, you know. So, um, I absolutely just went like, yep, let's just, let's just bite the bullet, let's feel it.

And, uh, it's, and it's, and it's also, here's the interesting thing too. Like I have decades of muscle memory of Blanca on a stick. Mm hmm. I have tons of muscle memory of not Blanca on pads. Right. And, and, you know, going back to, I mean, my earliest, like my, my third strike days and my alpha three days were PlayStation controllers, like an, an, uh, uh, Dreamcast controllers before I even, you know, um, had my own home

arcade stick and then you get some of your games at the arcade and then you get some at home, you know, I had, I've always had like experience in both. And I just kind of was like, okay, where am I dropping shit more often? Where am I fucking up my level threes? Where am I making more mistakes? And, uh, I was, I'm just more consistent on pad, uh, in this particular context. So that's what I'm playing it on. Yeah.

So, you know, what's really strange is that I had a variation of that. I was playing Jamie on pad, uh, when I played, uh, the last one. Um, and I played Jamie this time on stick and I feel like I was better with Jamie on pad because he's got wreckers and like just the way that his normal's function, um, and I'm like, looking back, I'm like, okay, when did I start playing stick, right? When did I, when did I fucking start playing tons of stick? And it was third strike.

And I'm like, why? It's because I was playing Urian and I was playing Dudley. I was slapping out fucking target combos with Dudley, which was super easy on a, on a stick and he's got like 10. And I was charged partitioning with fucking, uh, with fucking Urian on a goddamn square gate, which then led to, uh, charging with, uh, Balrog on, sorry, Poxer on a square gate and running, uh, 720s with geef. And it's like, yeah, no, with the, the guides that I like to play, the stick

is going to stick is like holding that fucking stick in the downback position. It's just natural. It's so natural. Yes. Playing Blanka on the stick and doing your fucking, uh, you know, your Z-mote, not Z-motion, but the, the, the, the, the super charge motion, you know, super flash cake, um, doing the, yeah, doing Balrog backwards charge uppercut. All right.

Like, like that shit is very unique to having it on a stick. And that feeling is baked in. Um, And same thing with churning butter for, for, for 360s or 720s. Like it's a, it's a, it's a snap rather than a, but with like Ryu. Yeah. Straight up. I probably would be better with a pad.

And for years, and I, and this has been the thing, the thing for years, I've been way better getting supers out on player two side than player one side. Right. The double quarter circle motion for me. Cause like you just roll your fingers backwards. You sit, you twitch your wrist backwards naturally. Rolling forward is a more dexterous motion. Um, I can super confirm like a motherfucker on the play player two side.

That's it. That's it. You know, so yeah, it's, it's an interesting thing kind of, uh, um, I'm seeing these adjustments and stuff. And you never know what, like, like certain characters, again, I have a different feeling for, um, when I play, like killer instinct, I fucking feel that stick in my bones. Like I, I, that game is super fun.

Even my minor time with it, I was like, no, no, no, no. You'd, you want that? Yeah. Um, but in this case, you know, the nature of this whole fucking di game plus realizing that other stuff is like, yeah, let's just, let's do it this way. And I feel it, it feels better for me, you know? Um, I'm, I'm dropping way less and it's, it's showing results, you know?

Yeah. No, like my brain is still telling me that both strongs together is taunt. Yeah. Exactly. Like, like I need to, I need to, for me, moving my hand around the stick is not the issue for me move. It's like, I, I'm literally not remembering that di exists. Even when I'm looking at somebody do it.

The other thing about direct, uh, what's it called? Direct, not direct. I'm driving back to call drive impact that makes me laugh. Is that like, well the street fighter six is having us just have to re-interrogate ourselves on every position we've ever had. Okay. You're playing on pad now for street fighter. Blasphemous.

I'm playing on wifi, which we'll get to in a second, but more than that, playing against jury on training stage fucking sucks because her drive impact colors, like the purple looks different, but the white looks just like the training mode background gray. Oh, I didn't even notice. Huh. Like I, I found a very significant ability to react to D eyes based on who I was fighting on what stage they were on.

Weird. I didn't notice that. Whether or not the colors contrasted with the background. Okay. Like, like Jamie's is like really orange. So on the Chinatown stage, he's at, it's actually harder to see. Okay. I know what you're talking about.

I'm like, I'm, there's the ink. There's the paint. There's also the sound. There's the, and then they change color themselves. You know, there's a couple of cues you're going off of, but while learning it. Yeah. You, you should certainly have, I ran to that issue. I was like, when I fought a jury on training stage and like the white of her

D I, she's got white and purple, the white of the D I just completely blends in with, with the training stage. And there's only the purple and I'm like, is she doing it? Yeah. No, I'm, I'm being a D I right now. Go look at the accessibility options and see if they have something for that because they have so many huge, big D I fucking. There are what the screen to start flashing epileptic lights at me.

There are, there are pages and pages of accessibility options to go through. There might legitimately be something that's like, hey, flash for this or noise for this or something like that for sure. Again, I see this game winning most best accessibility next year. Yeah. Like it, you know, um, on iron, if you take a look. So, you know, what's the fun thing about accessibility? And I don't know how this is going to interact because a lot of the play on

this is going to be online. Um, so I talked about fortnight and fortnight has positional audio, right? But you can also go into accessibility and be like, I'm fucking deaf. I can't hear positional audio. So I want you to put the positional audio circle on my crosshair that shows me exactly where sound is coming from every time there's a sound. Um, I fucking play with that on a hundred percent of the time. It is, it is so much more accurate than your own ears.

It is a radar. It is so good. It's great. So an arrow pops up and then it's, it's like, imagine like a, like, you know, like the sound bar with all the different bars, but imagine it wrapped in a circle and it'll, it'll have little, it'll go up. Oh, like snake either. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, yeah. Play with that on, play with that on. If you're full hearing, it's, it's, it's so good. And I'm thinking about like, yeah, street fighter six has like cross up noise, like, and I'm just like, what's going to, maybe, maybe he's

just turning, like I just keep that on. Yeah. There's absolutely something to be said for just like, Oh, this is this, like this beep says a focus, a drive impact is coming. You know, um, you have all kinds of shit. And if you can just, yeah, pick the ones that'll help you, why the fuck not? You know, um, and then, and then you get, then you get the wonderful tournament argument of like, uh-huh, accessibility are available to what people.

So as long as you're in your own house, you set your game to whatever, when you're sitting at the same setup, there needs to be some kind of standardization, right? What if, what if you're, what if you're, uh, significantly disabled, but it doesn't present and you, you need the, you need the color blinds DI option for legibility. No, well, I mean, what, no, but like legitimately, if someone blind enters a tournament, you're going to have to turn that shit on, you know,

like you're going to, that's the way it's going to go. Um, yeah, just whatever the case is, you know, I guess talk to the, the, you know, the ref beforehand to just be like, Hey, I'm, I'm putting these options on or whatever, non-standard. And then that'll be that, you know, um, yeah, no, it's, it's, it's cool. I did not, I forgot about the cross-up noise. Cross-ups, approaches, jumps, um, a lot of stuff. Yeah.

Interesting. So, um, how were your wireless matches? Okay. So, uh, me and Willie played some wireless matches and I played a couple of wireless matches in general. And I also streamed the game myself for two, three hours. And those were on ethernet and, uh, so to break it down, uh, I've done more research since we talked about it last time.

Wi-Fi six is a new Wi-Fi protocol. Uh, it is basically a new standard, uh, requires new equipment. So you need to have a new router and you need to have something that accepts a Wi-Fi six input instead of just a Wi-Fi five input or Wi-Fi 2.4. So it seems, yeah. It's called Wi-Fi six, but what it actually is is Wi-Fi, you know, how there's Wi-Fi 2.4 and Wi-Fi five and those are bigger hurts.

Those are bandwidth. Yeah. It's literally just Wi-Fi 5.8. Okay. The next, the next man with up. So it's, it's Wi-Fi six, which appears five is not, uh, a Wi-Fi six device. It absolutely is. Oh, I thought it wasn't.

So is the Xbox. And so is, so is any computer that has a motherboard manufactured after September of 2019. Uh, so I think the funniest thing is Willie, you and I both had a very long podcast segment in which we were like, if you are a red bra, go die. Um, you need to just, you, you just need to go die Wi-Fi. I've also, I've also had, uh, woolly versus segments where the, the, the tone is okay, but sincerely, if you do have a shitty setup and you want to play

fighting games, here's some stuff you should think about. So, you know, right, but, you know, having fun with it. Uh, so that was, uh, in the second week of September of 2019. Uh, the reason I know this is because I went back and looked as to when all of my insanely inflammatory Wi-Fi statements were made. The last and biggest one was in, on the morning of September 14th of 2019. The Wi-Fi six wireless protocol was certified for future proof on September 20th, September 16th of 2019.

So the week after we had that podcast, Wi-Fi six compatibility certification went out and then it rolled out in 2020 to actually be used in modems and devices. So it literally didn't exist the last time we talked about this. How about that? In addition, I went and, uh, I looked up, it's, you know, it's stats. So, okay, what's it's, what's its signal strength, what's its packet loss, et cetera, they're all very good.

It has on average, maybe a 1% packet loss in general. Connecting to any server, which is a massive fucking improvement. Uh, it also colors the Wi-Fi. I don't know how this works, but basically the issue with the biggest issue with Wi-Fi for the longest time, in addition to its signal strength on like 2.4, right, or five even was the fact that every other device in your house also uses those spectrums. Your microwave can fucking blast out two and a half gigahertz fucking radio signals.

Your car garage, uh, uh, fucking, uh, uh, your remote control, your fucking, uh, uh, you know, DVD player, they're all, all broadcasting out at 2.4, right, which fucks your shit up. One of the things that when I was talking to a guy about this, when I was talking, it was not a, it was not the internet man that brought the thing. It was a guy at a local store. He's like, yeah, so one of the things is that if there's a kitchen in between your wireless device and where it needs to be, that'll fuck your shit

up because a bunch of the, the microwave shit and all the, the metal will, will interfere with it. Uh, six is on a different bandwidth that nothing else uses other than internet and it also has, I don't know how this part works. It's a little bit beyond my pay grade, but it, it, it will, it colors it. It, it puts some kind of tag to the information that makes it more discernible as no, this is the right signal that you want to be taking in. Okay.

Um, now that, because the thing is, of course, as I'm, as we talked before and talked about like jitterping and such, that comes up as a, as a, uh, an issue that, you know, is always going to be a concern, especially as much a lot of noise going. And what happens in many cases is if packets are received out of order in the wrong order, that contributes to why, uh, connection with a direct opponent, like is going to fuck up in a lot of cases. Um, rollback, of course, compensates for that quite a bit.

But, um, but like going on to say that you've, you've looking, looking into this, then you did some more testing. I did lots of testing. Uh, I've run speed test on both setups, maybe 50 times. Okay. Um, the download speed on the wifi is approximately half of my maximum speed because it has a, it has a bandwidth cap, right? It can, it can only go so fast.

I can download, um, shit at like 45 megabytes a second. Uh, and I can upload similarly, but like that's about half of what I'm getting over at the wired connection because there's only so much data you can throw over the air, but the, the, the speed isn't the issue and it's never been the issue, the, the, the stability has been the issue here where I'm sitting, where I'm plugged in with a cable, I have a jitter of maybe 10 ms, right? Which is pretty standard from what I have dealt with in various places that I've lived over at the house.

I have a jitter of 12 to 13 ms. Despite it being about 50 feet that way. Now granted, there, it's yard, so there's really nothing to interfere with it, whatever, but it is, it is, it is a couple, it's maybe one or two points higher on average in terms of actual practical use in terms of the street fighter matches that I played, I played, I stream, I played it with you here on wifi and then I streamed it for about two and a half, three hours. And then I played for about six or seven over at the house with the wifi.

I could determine no, and this is obviously up to the net code as well. I could determine no difference whatsoever. We had two big hiccups during our play, but when I was streaming via cable and I streamed for, you know, a longer length of time, I had the same amount of hiccups basically every 25 minutes to a half hour. I would connect to somebody and then I would hit them with something and the game will go, yeah. Yeah, and then catch up.

So, so, you know, I mean, far be it for me to coax down anyone who's built themselves across and has decided to hang themselves on it in the comments since the last conversation we had, which there have been quite a few, there's been a couple of people who have decided to really just nail themselves up there and, and, and, you know, based on the conversation we had, but I think it continues to be a pretty reasonable thing to say that, like, if that new tech combined with great rollback is covering a lot of bases, that sure is.

That's fucking fantastic. I want the people who do extensive tests of these things to weigh in and give us the breakdown, you know, in the way that digital foundry will give you your, not digital foundry, what you're going to call it. What's the fucking tech breakdown site for like. There's Tom's hardware. There's, there's hard OCP. There's all sorts of places.

Well, in any case, I'm forgetting the one, but like in the same way that you can get like a diagnostic on these things, there are absolutely people, especially FGC people that do diagnostics of like what the, what this tech would be like for fighting games in different contexts for different rollback setups, right? I'd love to see what they have to say about it and just kind of go like, okay, if this shit looks pretty solid in a lot of conditions, then that's cool. There might even be something to say where it's like, this is going to be

okay for games with this standard of like rollback quality, or it'll be okay to use in a setting where you're not getting as much interference. If there's a way to grade interference, you know, and we're quickly approaching a level where, you know, I only know so much about like this new tech and how much it improves and such, but I've been researching it, but it's complicated. Yeah, but I definitely, oh, digital foundry. I was correct. Okay.

Yeah, that's correct. I would like to see, you know, like people that are much more experienced, kind of like take it for a spin and do a lot of the tests that they usually do to give a report on it. And then it's like, okay, cool. If so, that's a fantastic thing to be able to just be like, all right guys, like it can be done. You might need to invest in getting a Wi-Fi 6 setup if you currently don't have

one, you know what I mean? But there might be answers for some people. And that's a totally reasonable thing. Pending we get that information and that conclusion. But on a casual report from what you're saying, though, you're getting something interesting. Yeah, so, I mean, I want people to remember that I'm an insane person and that I am crazy, crazy, crazy about performance in every aspect of my

video game crap. This, this, this thing, if you have the, the potential to upgrade to a Wi-Fi 6 router and give it a shot, it's a definite improvement. It's, it's a, it's a massive improvement. Now, obviously a hell of a lot more, a hell of a lot more convenient. Now the house I'm in, right? Like I just went and bought one of these things and solved my problem. And, you know, if you're innocent, if you're in a setting where you

can solve it that way, you probably still should, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm in the absolute fringe case here of like, I, I'm not running these, I'm not digging up my yard to bury a fucking cable. And furthermore, like, you know, my mother-in-law doesn't have Wi-Fi 6. You know what I mean? Like if so, this is how it's going. Um, but, uh, yeah, the, the, the potential that the times they are a changing, uh, as the, as the, as the, the, the net code improves and this, you

know, you're seeing more consistent, uh, uh, services and things like that. Like fuck man, it would be great for fighting games to not have this thing that all, not all, but most other genres don't have to fucking worry about, you know, um, but the nature of the genre is one that is speed and reaction based in a way that, you know, is like, uh, uh, uh, it asks more of, of the average, uh, game, um, in terms of just moment to moment, frame by frame, uh, reactions than most other genres. So it's always going to be an edge case.

It's a more difficult case unless you're playing, uh, fucking online rhythm games, which are also frame by frame, you know. It's this, it's this, we are gamers that have, we are gamers that, what the fuck is it? The speed of light is too slow for us, too slow for us. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's made me think like one of the, one of the things is like, I have

not tested it with, uh, delay games, right? I haven't, I've, I've tested it with shooters. I've tested it with FF 14. I've tested it with, uh, Strive and SF six, right? I haven't tested anything that's like classic delay based net code. Um, and part of me is just sitting here of like, no, I'm not going to. Uh-huh. Um, let's leave that in the dark.

Like, no, I hit this moment and I'm like, no, you shouldn't play fighting games that have delay based net code anymore. We're at the tipping point right now where like the entire ArcSys catalog is being retrofit with it. Uh, street fighter six will be coming out relatively soon. Joe is getting retrofit. KOF is like, no, you should actually just stop playing fighting games that don't have rollback.

Uh, and you know, there's always, there's the ones that are like, not, uh, not official rollback, but on fucking emulator rollback or whatever. Yeah, play that version, you know, because the idea of like, well, okay, this new Wi-Fi standard is actually incredible for rollback net code. But what about those old games that have terrible net code? It doesn't work with them. I'm like, fuck those old games. They shouldn't have come out like that.

I mean, it just, it sucks if you're a huge fan of the systems of Grandblue. What can I, like it really, it's, it sucks if you are a huge fan, you know, if you want like Tekken at its peak. Um, but yeah, when I said KOF, obviously, I mean the ones that the steam rereleases of 98 and 2002, um, um, but like, that's it. Like there's, there's a bunch of games that are like, okay, well, if you really want to play these, you're going to have this problem. You know, and I think there's a really strange time period

thing going on where like really old games have been like re-released with rollback or been like modded or like pirated to have rollback in them. Right? Yeah. And then brand new games are all coming out with rollback now. So the only ones that don't are from this era in which they could have, but they didn't. Yes.

Cause the easel, fuck them. The older, oldest, the oldest ones are easier to do because you just need to run it through the emulator. The modern ones are doing it from the ground up because we won't let them get away with not doing it. And the ones from the era where they could have, but didn't were built from the ground up wrong. And yeah, Tekken seven was built wrong.

For, and so the retro fit is so arduous that they just are like, nah, fuck it. You know, um, yeah. But, but again, most of what matters is getting in there. And like we saw Dragon Ball, like all of it, it's like, okay, the fam's getting back together, right? All everyone, all the, all of the Aunt Viv and, and, and fam, we're getting together and celebrating because like the things that matter at the very least are getting in there.

And Hey man, sorry if you're a Psygames fan, you know, what can we say? Very sorry. Um, most people are eaten, not everybody, but most, most are eaten. It's Psygames has to be holding that up, right? Like that has to be what's happening. Yeah, they probably are the ones that have to choose to pay for it. You know, because, and, and, and of course the fact that they're like, well, let's invest in a world tour without it is just the most baffling thing in the

world, but whatever, man, whatever. That's cool. There's other great games to play. I just saw somebody in the chat bring up virtual fighter and it hit me like I took, I feel physical pain in my body at the mention of virtual fighter, but okay, here it goes. Let's be consistent. You should stop playing virtual fighter.

The no one that is currently playing virtual fighter like virtual fighter has dropped the fucking ball so bad and so hard for so many years. I didn't bring it up. I did to the 10 or 15 guys out there still doing fucking a Kira knees stop. Just stop, just stop playing virtual fighter. It's a cute little mini game for the next Yakuza game. Just stop, just stop playing virtual fighter. There is no reason to play virtual fighter in a war like in a world in which I am

talking about how Wi-Fi is good enough with the new net code because the new net code is so hot and it's like it was like this big dramatic thing, but really we spent like 15 minutes on it because all we want to do is talk about drive impact, like I look over at fucking virtual fighter, fucking pissing its pants, going, well, we got servers for our bullshit. Fuck off. So like we are fast, honestly, like as much as the damage is there and it's real and like I'm hearing it, we're fast approaching the vision of the world,

the vision of the future that I held and that I still hold where when a new game comes out, you just go, how's the online? You go, oh, it works. Cool. So anyway, about the drive impact system, right? And you just, and we just, you just keep it moving because there's not much else to say because it's like, yeah, of course, we figured this out. We solved this problem years ago.

You know, the era when the other, the era when GGPO came out and Skull Girls used it and everyone went, holy shit. And then fighting games were changed forever. That timeline. Um, I also want to give like, it's a massive win for Capcom because the street fighter five beta, like, okay, betas are beta, right? Betas are not the final game. They're for shit to break.

They're for shit to not work. It's for them to test stuff. However, the street fighter five betas being complete train wrecks, top to bottom, did not give you a lot of faith for the state of the game on release in terms of online play. And that worry was founded. The street fighter fives online play is not great. This fucking beta, you could put this fucking game out right now.

Like, it's a lot of fun. I played like a thousand fucking matches over the two betas. Yeah. Um, no, the, the, honestly, the level of polish, uh, indifference for the, for between the five beta and the, like, it's unbelievable. This is the most polished we've ever seen a day one street fighter release be. Um, it's not the fucking release. Yeah.

They mind day minus six months, you know, minus whatever fucking 180. Um, it is, it is phenomenally polished. And, um, the idea that I, again, I just, like, all I, whenever it's like, Hey, what do you want to see? What do you want to, I'm just like, yo, just, just show us those fucking crazy Freakazoid characters doing all those, show us some weirdos, please. Come on, give me, give me a weirdo. Oh, no, no, no, I was going to say the creative character, like, like, um,

Cronenberg's just, just give us a mode where you can make them fight each other. Give us the wackiest, craziest mode where all that shit with the bullfighting and the bombs and the, the Medex and shit, just make it so that you can fight your Cronenberg's. And that's it. That's all, that's the only feature I could possibly be asking for at this point. Everything else, it seems like they got that shit covered. I was like, I played that beta all weekend and like every 10 minutes,

somebody would walk up and I'd be like, wow, wow. You figured out a new series of mistaken proportions that is hitting my brain in a certain way. Yeah, unbelievable. No, um, uh, I remember like, of course, they're, so the, the, the help of this, of, of the SS street fighter was questionable for, uh, a solid couple of years there and, uh, it's got a real up down trajectory thing going on. Yeah.

But when, uh, the new, when the new guys took over, right? And you're like, okay, they're steering the ship. Let's see where they take it. Uh, Nakayama and Matsumoto, like it was like, okay, they made five better. They made the best version of five with the pieces they had towards the end of that game's life cycle and God bless, right? They, they, they walked away from that going, Hey, we're, we're proud of the final release of that.

And you're like, yeah, that is the, that is the best version of that game. Despite the fact that I still don't want to play it. I also don't want to play it, but I can agree with that from a distance. Seeing what they're capable of from the ground up. I have to fucking give it up. Uh, they, they are killing it. And, um, the, the, you know, the new direction, all that stuff, they're clearly thinking about this from just a fresh eyes perspective.

We've kind of wanted for the franchise for a long time. And like, you know, sure, there's room for shit to, uh, uh, there's room for improvement when you have a fucking squinty, squinty-eyed Luke on the front of the box going, did you see they changed that? Did they? They changed his face. They changed his facial expression. No, wait, hold on.

They updated the box. Is that, or no, you might've got, you might've got trolled. I hope I, I hope I didn't get, you might've got trolled. Hold on. Oh, they should have SF six change. I did not, I did not hear about a change on the box at all. Uh, people are saying they did hold on. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I don't believe you got, did I get trolled? You got trolled. I'm, I'm looking at treefighter.com right now. It's the same one. You got trolled. No, they have to change it. There's tons of Photoshoppers, but no, no, no. Um, anyway, regardless of all that, uh, they're doing a fucking solid job, man.

Um, they're doing Japan gets alternate covers. Um, they're doing the inside cover. Mm hmm. Uh, they're, they're doing a solid job of it. And, you know, uh, hey, that Luke guy that people hate, not that bad. Luke's kind of cool. So I saw the moves you were doing. And first of all, man, he's not as a five Luke at all.

Um, I'm just like, I need, I need a costume. Oh, here's where I'm at with Luke. I need them to show me a costume that covers his fucking head. If you, if you shut, like, like, it's literally it's his fucking face and his hair. So I'm just like, so hate it. There's a moment right before he does his level three where he gets down into a ready set go pose and the hood flips up on his head for a bit. And I'm like, motherfucker, give me a costume with the hood up.

Right. Because like back in the day, unironically, I designed an MMA fighter character that had a sleeveless hoodie with the hood up. Like I love that look. I mean, yeah, I want them to just, just that, just put the hood up on it and have that be one of the costume variations. It'd be so sick. Um, I was describing this to Reggie, but like the cell, because I mean,

I, like I said, I've never been down on Luke. I've always thought he was all right. Right. The five version being in like not as cool as the six one, but, uh, the, the cell point is the C.A. The critical art version of his level three with the stay down. Right. And the final hit and then the close up cut to just him going.

And he gets back up and I'm like, Oh, that breathe, that exhale is so fucking sick. I love that moment and anything. I love it when Makoto does it at the end of the round and just like takes a second and you know, that, that little rep like that repose is so fucking clean. And I, it's my favorite thing about him, you know, that little cut sold me. Not to mention the, the person on the bottom in, in, in rear guard trying to fucking, uh, uh, you know, in guard pose, rather trying to punch back and get encountered like, I have to say that like his critical art level three is

actually really strange because in the non critical version, uh, he's, he's beating the fucking shit out of them and they're not fighting back at all. Right. But in the, in the, in the desperate one that does way more damage, they're actually like, they're blocking it. They're blocking most of the hits. Yeah, yeah. It's just that last one is fucking huge because it's a cross counter on the four.

It's a point black galactica phantom. Yeah. You know, and, uh, and then you just, and then the, the release, you know, is, uh, yeah, it's a fucking sell, man. Um, I feel like a lot of the, the, like, when you want to get the charm going with these characters, you got to have little moments like that. Like fucking Jamie rolling up and it's like, he's got the Louis Vuitton variant monk outfit and he's like, the top player is here and his theme song is called

Mr. Top Player and he's doing the bed, uh, bed, uh, bed, uh, and you're like, Oh, what a fucking oozing personality that I love. Like he would totally be hanging out with you and Yang, you know, Jamie's great. Like, I love that right off the bat. Um, yeah. I love that right off the bat. Um, I, I really, I, I'm no misses. Yeah.

The new, the new cast is all hits. No misses, you know, and we saw that Manon trailer and everybody has something they like to see on Manon or sorry, Manon. Yep. Um, even, even Sauron himself is like, yeah, he's being the old man with the cane and he's doing that whole thing. But like he's also like, if you checked like some of the footage stuff, he like leans away and like he has these very like almost like disgusted gestures

to the way he's kind of fighting you. Gross. I don't want to touch you. I just want to have Psycho Power beat you up. I'm going to call in my bison stand to do it for me. Yeah. You know, um, I, I want, I want that, that vibe. I want every character to lend like right off the bat with whatever it is they're doing.

I think the idea that if JP is the boss, that like after all the guff and all the decades of problems that M bison did with Psycho Power, that there's just some guy walking around that has it way in a bottle lock than he ever did. Yeah. I mean, again, it just, I feel like he probably, he's just got it in a bottle or in a cane or whatever. And it's just like, do my bidding, you know, so be it. Um, and, and, you know, wherever, wherever the fuck it goes, just, uh, like, it's like,

okay, that's cool. How did he frame Ken? You know, what's, what's happening with the, with the master's foundation? What, what, what is the implication that there's some kind of disaster that like Ken was criminally liable for with this company? Yeah, no, um, caught, caught, uh, defrauding people out of their, their, their crypto accounts and their NFTs and, uh, Oh God, dude.

He was, Ken was, if it was, Ken was found in the Cayman Islands, you know, That would be so good. That would be so like Ken master, like Ken NFTs, Ken FTs. Yeah, yeah. And then he's like, I just, I didn't know, I did, uh, I know, I feel like it has to, like for him to be on the run, I feel like it has to be like loss of life. Yeah. Like a building got built with shoddy materials.

And something happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, to be perfectly honest, the, that's more like Dan FTs would be the, the way to go. Dan FTs. Dan, Dan would be going super hard down that road. You get a free block of toy with your Dan FTs.

Mm hmm. And a free lesson, actually. Come on down to the psycho coin is, is this popping off? Come invest. Oh, that's, oh, I hate it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I want to play Marissa so fucking bad, dude. I'm watching. It's crazy. I'm watching that trailer right now and that counter punch. It's crazy. Where she puts you into an awkward position on the floor.

Like, God damn it. Yeah. And, and you know, I really hope that the loose ties between, um, uh, well, I forgot it was a pancretheon, I think the, the fighting style that, uh, Yuri and, and Gil use and like the ancient Greek, uh, tie ins with, you know, the, the Egyptian bit as well. Like I'm hoping the Illuminati kind of comes into play in some way there. It'd be more interesting.

It's fun. I hope that Marissa is like, I need to kill that fucking fish. I hope that's her storyline. Just move the pancretheon fucking, fucking mantle from, from Jeffrey McWild over to Marissa. Got to kill the devil shark or whatever the fuck that thing is called. Wasn't, was his boat the McWild? Didn't, didn't he lose his boat? I want to think that, I want, I think that's the whole story.

I want, like, I want to say it's a bit like Dudley where it's like, oh, my dad's car got fucking stolen. Fuck you. Blood Vendetta forever. God, I love how fucking stupid a bunch of these storylines are. Yeah. No. How did his car get stolen three times?

Um, Mr. Gotch is a really bad security guard. Yeah, he really is. He makes a great pot of tea, but, uh, yeah, man. Street Fighter 6, uh, they changed the logo on peer pressure. They might change the box art. Who knows? That logo is a massive improvement. It's so much better with the fist and stuff, with the button inside.

It's a way better logo. Yeah. I was also, uh, I was sitting around and I was like, man, June 23rd. That's, sorry, June, June 2nd. That's so fucking far away. Mm-hmm. And then I'm like, then I was like typing something and I looked down at my keyboard and I'm like, that's the best release date ever because it's coming out in June of 2023.

So it reads as six to three. Oh, oh, oh, it's coming out June 2nd. So, uh, it's coming out June 2nd, uh, 23, which is, uh, sure you can day. Sure you again. And then if you do 020623, that's a super shortcut motion. That's pretty good. I didn't even catch that. That's fun.

Sure you can day. Yeah. Save the date. Exactly. Um, yeah, man, I mean, I'm telling you, like I'm sitting here with already just the sounds of smooth jazz stuck in my head. You know, just fucking. That battle hub is good.

Just a little, just a little soft little piano. You know, like, yeah. So it's interesting because one of the only things that they had bugged me about the beta was that you can't go into training mode and wait for ranked play. You can only go into training mode and wait on the cab to walk up to your cab. But I feel like that functionality is there. It's just not unlocked because there were a bunch of features after rank matches that were also grayed out, like fight your opponent in training mode after a ranked match.

For sure. For sure. I mean, when you, when you search for ranked or casual, you see the option to have both colors on, there's definitely going to be a way to continue searching for a ranked match while doing other things. And I'm going to assume as well that like, you know, okay, this is just the battle hub, but the battle hub is one of three different full sized games or whatever they're calling it. Right.

Like each of those three things on the main menu is divided because it's like a major mode. So the traditional mode on the right, which is just the like normal arcade and all that shit, you're going to be able to just go straight into training from there without sitting in a cabinet, you know. Yeah. So I was messing around with the PC version and there's a weird, there's a weird side effect of playing that game on the PC because of the different modes.

And that is when you go into the frame rate counter and goes, what's your maximum frame rate? You can set it to 30, 60. So, you know, you can set it 60 or 120, right? But it says when you switch it to 120, by the way, you're going to be displaying at 120, but the game will run at 60 in the following modes. And it's every single mode you could possibly play online. And it goes like, like it puts its foot down.

Yeah. No, the moment you're online runs at 60. The fucking system works that way. You're fucking with it, but you want to play World Tour at 120. Great. Fucking go for it. Yeah. Well, because the rollback iteration of the game, because there's always the invisible

third thread, right? The rollback thread, what the fuck is it supposed to do when we're on different frame rates? Like, what is that neutral thread supposed to be? It's supposed to shit itself. Yeah, so that makes perfect sense. Like, that'd be crazy, you know. I saw, I also, I've fought some people that the connection was, okay, so the match was

really bad, but the connection seemed fine. And what I'm interpreting is that they aren't able to hit 60. And the rollback is going crazy. It can't fucking handle the fact that I'm fighting somebody at 40 frames. Did you have any matches where the delay changed between rounds? Did you notice? Yes. I noticed actually delay would change not between, the delay would change once or twice

between rounds. The rollback numbers would, I saw a rollback as high as 10 frames. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's going to spike. It was over here. It was sitting on ethernet. And I'm like, man, this guy is playing with a string and a can. Because the feature to test for this beta specifically, again, is the idea of before

if you had a drop in your connection and the delay increased and then it got better, it would decrease the delay again so that your moves would become more responsive. But your brain has already started adjusting for the lag. So you're like, ah, god damn it. This feels bad. So then like I said, now it's going to be like, we'll just keep you at the slowest one. And you'll just adjust to that. First delay, I don't think I ever went higher than three.

And that was only like one or two matches. Okay. The vast majority of matches were at zero and one. And there were a couple at two, and there was like one or two at three. And I'm trash. So when I'm playing on one frame delay, I can't fucking tell. I don't know. Things like, I mean, I'll tell you one thing, you'll notice yourself taking more drive impacts

once you start reacting to them with worse delay. But still, again, it's going to make it so that more people can get better games. And it's just fucking good. I still, I still think it's like the street fighter six has like the biggest win it can have, which is, oh, I started to play it to be like everyone needs to stop playing fighting games. Look, I'll show you. And then I played like 40 hours of it across two betas.

And like, I'm just like, man, I go, oh, street fire six is so good. Can't wait for that to come out. It's like, okay, no, get out of all the other fighting games. Get into this one. They're making it easy. It's man, get into fighting games. It has never been so easy because people ask me questions the same way they asked you. It's like, hey, I want to get in the street fighter.

How do I start? And the answer is always like, don't play an old game. Don't go to SF five right now and play it. You'll die. It's too much. It's too old. People will kill you. Yeah, you might have fun.

You might have fun, but you're also going to fight some guns real quick. So, you know, as long as you're okay with that. But it's never been easier to be like, hey, do you want to get into fighting games? Hey, that one. That's the one. But any project L because project L will be free. But as I stated with the analogy, when next week, next week, God, I wish, when next year comes around and the game releases, it's still the race starts.

Now we fire the gun in the air. We all start moving the longer you wait, the more behind you're going to be. So just keep in mind that like every time you don't start at the same time as everyone else, when the race starts, your arrival late is going to be harder if you want to be with the pack. If you don't give a fuck about being with the pack and you're okay with the fact that it's going to, you know, you're going to take more L's to people that are, you know, still starting, but also the majority of people have gotten a lot better than that's cool. But if you're not mentally prepared for that, get on the starting line with everybody else

when launch day comes, you know, I that's, that's, you gotta be there before the children get discouraged and leave when you hit the fucking button to join the server. The announcer yells, get in there, you know, and like, what better words could you use to, you know, encourage. So yeah, man, fucking kudos to the new producers and just like, let's go. Okay, so big Street Fighter Six talk aside. I wanted to just briefly, there wasn't much else to it, but in terms of my week, and it's also, I guess, a new story part of it as well. I'm super, super into Yomi Hussle. And what's that game called? Well, this is the new story. It's called Yomi Hussle,

you see, but there was a problem. The problem is that a new game called Yomi to was recently announced. And this is from the Fantasy Strike universe from Serlin Games. And so there appears to have been some legal conundrums and a cease and desist. You tell me is David Serlin's being a hater? It sounds like Sly Ivy or Ivy Sly, excuse me, the creator of Yomi Hussle, the really fun turn based fighting game I've been fucking Jones and on is, we'll try to reach out to no avail to Serlin who said, don't use the name Yomi. So the name of the game has updated. They were trying to figure out what to do. And in order to not get delisted completely from Steam,

the name of the game switched to your only move is hustle. So there's a lot going on here. Number one, galaxy brain, universe brain change. I repeat, legitimate, incredible, incredible. Your only move is hustle. Brilliant. Like just incredible. What the fuck are you going to do but hustle? It's also like a little thumb in the eye too, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's also some black album shit. If I'm making it up in my own brain, but it's like, it's great. What a great name change. Second of all, like Y. O. M. I. Yomi too. Ah, you can't, you can't use the word Yomi.

We own the word Yomi. I'm like, didn't you make a chest to dude? Oh my God, you're right. I forgot about that. Like fuck off. Oh man. Damn. That's true. Chest too. Well, nobody owns the word chest. So fuck off. So the thing is, is I think if let me just check real quick, but I think someone else was pointing out that like there's other games with Yomi in the word that were not an issue. But like, there's Trek to Yomi is a game under knots labyrinth of Yomi is a game. Yomi Domini is a game, but Yomi hustle is the one that's also FGC. And so that's why it came down in that way in our wheelhouse. Yeah. That's that's what someone on Twitter was theorizing. But anyways, fucking Ivy

Sly. Yo, all right, your only move is hustle. Great name. Great name for a great game. I continue to encourage people to have fun with that. Hitchhiker has been like having a lot of fun because he I see he kind of pointed out like he was showing me some examples of like how this is the whole thing you were just saying about like the chat room in the lobby of a street fighter game is just not a thing. Right. In this case, you're kind of getting the chat room in the middle of the fight. Oh, that's weird. And it's so interesting because like there's a lot of the time where I'm just silent, not in the mood or whatever. But sometimes you're like, oh, yo, nice, that was sick. You know, or like when there's a there's a look an influx of rage quitters

because people are fucking babies. And so like a couple of times I'd just be like, hey, you're not a rage quitter, are you? You know, and just like, hey, what's up? And then you kind of just start we're talking while you're having this fight. And it's a friendly thing just all types of like great little exchanges and screenshots. And because some of the fights have some hilarious exchanges. Um, Ivy has iterated the new version of the game to also make it so that you can make your character in the fight say something in text, and it'll be saved in the replay. Oh, that's just silly. So like, there's some great moments where like, like, like I like I did a hard read on something and I parried this dude's burst.

And the dude type to the chat like, fuck. And so I just emoted in game with my character just while parrying lol, you know, and yeah, like every honestly, like every week it feels it's getting updated with new features, new experimental shit. This is someone who's not afraid to iterate wild fast and loose. They're giving new moves and taking moves away, like from patch to patch and like just rolling aggressively with it. And like, it's it's in most cases, you're not really like so much taking the move away as like reworking it, you know. And it's been really cool because like whatever you learn, it's like, okay, you're gonna have to change it a little bit. But in the end, they're like balancing aggressively. And like the game is still just you have,

you have the stopped time to make your decision, make a better read. It's fine. If you wanted that tool so badly, do play, you know, make a better mind game out of it. One of the coolest things they did as well was it used to be a game where like, okay, you could you have a burst if you get hit. But you could spend a third of your burst bar to cancel your action if you're about to whiff or if you fucked up, right? So people would just go like cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel sure you can. And it would be like, oh, okay, every fight would be two people running up to each other. And then like, and then one gets through because we're all out of bar. And so then the next change was let's make it take half a bar. And they're like, cool, but still people are still

doing it nonstop. And they're like, okay, let's make it take the entire bar. Like, yeah, but that's too much. But now the whole mind game of like the guests is like completely eliminated. It's like, okay, how about this then? It takes the whole bar. But we also put in a new system, which lets you do up to two fakes per exchange. So I can put a move out into the ether that says, I'm about to throw a fireball, maybe. And you see the ghost of my move about to happen, maybe, you know, and if I decide not to, I can interrupt it or if I let it rock, then it's real, you know, and you can do the same thing up to two times. And it's built into every exchange. So you don't lose the anime battle, dragon ball, crazy Jojo fight shit, you know. But now it's just acknowledging that this is how

people were playing. Let's make it a part of the system, you know. It's a lot of fun, man. And it's a fighting game played slowly, one term at a time. And the the there's different things about like how to speed it up. There's like chess clock rules where it's like, okay, here's a compromise. If you don't want to do a half an hour per per fucking game. Yeah, no, I would, I would play this game with chess clock rules only. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the new rule set is 30 second turns, you know. And you can turn that off if you want. But depending on the people that are down, like you just you can set your rule set up, people are doing custom rules, people are doing custom modded characters. It's it's a ton of fun. Whatever version of it you want, if you're

patient or impatient, you can, you know, get that and play it. But like, the bare bones of what's happening where you get to just like, make hard reads against people and like, fake a mountain shit, like it's such a great fucking time killer. It's a lot of fun. I'm, I'm, I just can't wait to see like, like with all these stick figures and shit, and people are making all these fun ass combo videos, like, is there ever going to be an attempt to, you know, get some sprites? Or are we just going to ride the stick figure battle train all the way through? You know, it's, it's funny that you mentioned that because I had an experience with something that I also looked at for a long period. And I'm like, getting the sprites from the most basic graphics possible.

Oh, wow, that was a big step to actually put graphics on it at all. Like, Yomi hustle is running a million different fucking things simultaneously on a black void. And I imagine that like actually adding sprites to the different like permutations of events and holding them for long periods would be a huge endeavor. And I played Dwarf Fortress, which after 20 years, finally got a patch that adds graphics. Did it now. Okay. It's, it's the only game that I can think of that fits this profile at all. Dwarf Fortress prior to a couple weeks ago, was an ASCII game, and it was an ASCII game dating back to 2002. I've heard of it. It was just, was just getting updated and updated and updated and updated and adding every feature you could conceivably

understand with no graphics. And people would put out mod packs. Yeah, add their own graphics. Keep, keep in mind, of course, sometimes adding graphics is not the way to go. Nidhogg. Yeah. And, and, and other times the simple placeholder graphics you have are fine. Vampire survivors, right? But Nidhogg 2 is the fucking, it's the worst. So, you know, fuck, go back button in full effect. But what, yeah, Dwarf Fortress is a word that has been floating in my brain as like, oh yeah, that's a thing. But I don't know what it is really, or what's up with it. Yeah. And why all this noise about Dwarf Fortress now. So the, why all this noise about Dwarf Fortress now is by far the easiest question to answer.

And that's because it came out on Steam and as graphics. Okay. Right. It has a, it has a mouse interface now, which means you can use your mouse without having to download like a mod pack. So like a human being, like a regular human being could play Dwarf Fortress as of now. Okay. Right. Yeah. I'm looking. And you have, you have heard, you have heard over the years people's Dwarf Fortress stories about, oh man, all my dwarves took off their clothes and decided to start eating each other because a squirrel barfed on them, you know, whatever. Right. But it was never actually very clear to me what that game actually was. And what it is, is its own genre. It is a, it is a sim game in which you are a top-down God

perspective and you are working as a director to a group of dwarves. You can direct them to build, you can direct them to, to harvest materials, you can direct them where to build, you can direct them what to build, you can direct them however you like, however they have their own stats, their own needs, their own wants, and then they will have, they will do things on their own time. It is, it was the, it was the longest and most difficult thing for me to understand because in my head, an RTS or I go build it, right, becomes a, well, I put the fucking, I clicked the button to build the thing and then I moved it over to the fucking spot and I said, fucking build it. So I expect three guys to walk over and start building it. Right.

Instead, what it does is it goes into like a generalized work task thing and the dwarves now know, oh okay, Pat wants us to build the thing. When one of you has time, can you go start building it? Okay. And as they pass, and as they pass by each other, they will talk and then they will go and, and hang out and fucking complain that they don't have their own room and then they'll, they'll go back and do it and then I'm in the process of setting up work orders inside the interface and let me tell you, it's the most complicated interface I've ever seen. So like, like one of those factory games, but like, it's also the Sims where there's personalities. Yes. Okay. Yes. And, you know, I'm, you know, you're, I'm clicking on dwarves to find their

basic needs and it's like, oh, this guy's complaining that he doesn't have anywhere to pray. Right. So okay. Well, while I'll direct the dwarves to mine out a room underground and then put a shrine in there and then I have to go into my zoning bylaw function in order to zone the room as a place of worship so that they can do it. Okay. Now I'm going to zone this corner as the tavern that I'm going to name the tavern that I'm going to have them start working on fucking benches. Oh, they don't like that I shove them all into a dormitory because I like to do things efficiently. Okay. I'll carve out all these rooms and then I will use the, the bedroom zoner ownership tool to fucking assign each bedroom to a dwarf and now they're a little happier.

Oh, and now there's a trading company coming. Oh, did I make anything to sell? No. Okay. Do I have anything extra? Okay. I have some food that I got made. I accidentally made too much food because I didn't disable the ability to use booze to make the food. So now there's a bunch of booze food. Can I sell that for shit, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just, it's just this massive orgy of intertwine interconnected systems. Yeah. So the sentence describing the game of steam is the deepest, most intricate simulation of a world that's ever been created. That's a huge mouthful of a sentence to throw out there. And every, every conceivable permutation of interactions between two states will occur and be simulated. Right. I was told,

don't let cats into the tavern because if dwarves get too drunk and vomit on the cats, the cats can die. And then the cats corpses will be in the tavern, which will cause people to vomit more and possibly get, you know, just, just, just every conceivable simulation of events because it's been in dev for 20 years. And more than anything, I spent like four, four and a half hours playing it. And I was so, so miserable. And it wasn't, so you can pause the game at any time, or you can speed it up if, you know, you told them to build a big thing. And so miserable. I was like so anxious that I felt that I was going to vomit. Now, some of that is my own anxiety issues and some of that is obsessive compulsive disorder. You got to, you got to, you got to,

right? But the games community and the long running history of Dwarf Fortress has totally, totally failed to adequately describe what the game is. Because everybody's story that you see on Twitter or Reddit or, oh man, my Dwarf Fortress game was so crazy. This happened and then this happened and then this happened. And it's always a little event that led to a big dangerous event that led to some fucking catastrophe that annihilated the whole fucking settlement, right? It's always like that. So it gives the impression that at any time, at any moment, one chair out of place could cause a death spiral for your little guys. And you got to be careful. So I ended up spending most of that time paused, queuing up just so many instructions in a row. Mind this,

build that, build this, here's the work order, here's the work order, here's where you go, this is coming, build that. And I got to the point where I'm like, I've put so many commands down, I have to unpause and then just let it run because they have to start on these commands. Okay. And they're kind of like mad because I've assigned them so much work that they're not, like they're literally working like 10 hours a day and going to bed. And they're like upset by that. And I'm like, but I, and everyone's just telling me to let it run. And I'm like, but if I let it run, then something bad will happen or I won't be preparing fast, because I'm thinking of it like an RTS. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are there like diseases that they're going to get or outbreaks and fires?

I'm waiting for the fucking 11 minute Zerg rush to come in. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. And every now and then you see like one comment that just breaks your contextualization and completely reorders the way that you see it. And somebody described like Pat, the actual issues that you're worried about can take 20, 40, 100 hours to show up. Yeah, there'll be problems, but like you're not always on the precipice of dramatic failure unless you like load into like an evil or undead biome or something like that. The reason why people tell those stories, the reason why people talk about dwarf fortress the way it is, is because it was a entire group of guys that didn't want to admit that they were playing dwarf animal crossing with

no graphics. Oh my god, it's not an RTS. It's a it's it's a fucking or it's an animal cross. Okay, it's just it has millions of interactions when you said, oh, those problems will arise, but that'll be 40 hours in. I'm like, hold on a minute. Aren't all your things aren't you going to die and restart by then many times depends on apparently depends on the bio if you biome if you have an evil bio like everything that dies will come back to life and then you have a whole all your fruit goes rotten. Oh no, what are we going to do? Okay, go go make sure guys go fish more and you can mitigate it. It's you know, and it's got it. It's like it's it's a it's a bunch of dudes running a model train set or an ant colony that has no graphics. It's like literally

fucking like fucking numbers on a page like a matrix scroll that don't want to admit that they're playing with their fucking like dolls, essentially this came out 2000 2002. Yeah, okay. So instead of admitting I'm playing with my dwarf dolls and then they're making a cute house and they're going like, oh man, the zombies kept attacking me with the fucking. Yeah. Yeah. It's all and as soon that was like the last thing that I heard in that in that massive run and the instant I saw that I'm like, oh, I completely misunderstood what's happening. All the stress just evaporated. Animal crossing. And I'm just like, oh, oh, animal crossing. Oh, I should just jump in have fun jump out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, when you make a choice like that, like you're

doing like when you're doing a glitter mitten grove, you know, style thing, like that is an aggressive deliberate choice. I'm not surprised to see a bunch of people saying losing is the point. You know, because it's like the game literally when you load up because losing is fun. Don't worry about it. Yeah, because if it's one of those things where like it simulates everything so aggressively so that you could have the most creative disasters possible, not so that you could have the perfect, efficient, you know, output and succeed swimmingly, then it's like, yeah, then just take a little bit of that, you know, the disco attitude and lean into it, you know. Now, I will admit, people know about the Fallout 4 settlement community building tips that I had,

where you know, you can you can cram like beds right next to each other. They don't even have to have rooms for the NPCs to get up and on. And then I locked that old lady in a cage because she was annoying me. And then I just made a strip mall of all the stores. And when I played Animal Crossing, I had all the houses attempt to be equidistant from each other for, you know, efficiency purposes. And then I tried to make a gigantic flower bed that would most efficiently cross pollinate all the different colors so that I could get every flower color. And then I fucked it up and was like, my settlement looks like shit. So like, yeah, no, I definitely tend towards efficiency nightmares. But

like, I don't know, like the just just all like all I needed this whole time was like, I'm like, I have to because the game says, oh, you have to have your community succeed, right? But that's like a pretty vague metric, right? Yeah. And I'm just and like all somebody needed to tell me like, what's the point of door fortress to make a cool fort? Yeah, no, that's it. All you needed was Tom Nook to give you a loan and for amigos to be compatible. Yeah. And so I'm going to be streaming Rimworld tomorrow night. I've dedicated an entire stream for Rimworld because unlike door fortress, I have a bunch of friends that play Rimworld and have been playing Rimworld for a long time. And I went into Rimworld and I played the tutorial.

And first of all, it has a real tutorial. And second of all, it was built with graphics and a mouse in mind. And when you mouse over shit, there's tooltips. And like it's it's like a it's like a fucking real video game like like door fortress is like a fucking artifact of decades past that somebody made playable on your system. It's not just Rimworld is a real video game. It's not just aesthetically old. It actually doesn't like have like a mouse cursor and things like that. Like, oh, it has a mouse cursor now. But it was never built with the mouse cursor in mind. It was built so that you could play an Excel spreadsheet. Okay, okay. And the other thing is this is this is actually this is this is the the biggest nitpick I had

by far. And I don't think it's I don't think it's it's fixable, which is the dwarves don't animate. Like the graphics are cute, but they're very they're very they're very blunt, right? When a dwarf goes to mine something, it just places the dwarf next to the mine. And he stays there with his pickaxe out, totally unmoving. And then the the the rock he's next to disappears. Okay. Right. And then he moves over. It's it's that kind of thing. That lack of feedback made it like insanely difficult for me to understand what actions are happening. Yeah, right. Like, like, God, you know, doors would be standing in the fucking in the in the goddamn carpentry store or whatever the fuck it was. I'm like, what are you

building? I can't I can't tell what you're building. I can look I can go into your stats and see that you're actually really mad because you a guy said your wife was ugly, and that you wish you could play horseshoes. But what are you building right now? Which work order are you getting to? Are are you even doing anything? Are you on your way to leave? Are you? I messed around with Rimworld a little bit. And while it is also very primitively, you can see people like pick up items and move them. You have they have a little animation that's a little flash that looks like a welding torch when they're mining or building something. Is this where Shovel Knight got strike the earth from? Yes. No, yes. Oh, also, somebody asks a really good question. Pat, do you want them to animate

500 different animations for creating different objects? No, I want them to have one extra frame of animation that says I am building something. I want them to cycle from their neutral to a little hammer and have them switch back and forth between so I can look at it and go, he's doing something instead of just standing in the shop. I know it is not the end of the world. I know it doesn't actually affect basic functionality, but the actual feedback I get from that is really important to me. In case you have people standing around doing nothing. Yeah. Okay. Which they do. So I'm going to give Rimworld a shot. I don't think Dwarf Fortress is for me. I think Rimworld has a potential. There's also, it's interesting because they keep about the graphics

is that the graphics scales linearly in the opposite of complexity. So like Timberborn, a game about beavers making a beaver settlement, is beaver fortress is what it is. And it has really nice, pretty RTS style graphics. And it is way, way less complicated than Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld because they made graphics and animations for the beavers to do. Yes. Yes. Yes. Rimworld looks like madness combat. Right. So it's not quite as in depth as Dwarf Fortress, but it's much more in depth than Timberborn. Right. And so it's like a sliding scale. Yeah. And that's, I guess that's where the Yomi hustle kind of similarities kind of are. Where you're like, yeah, you're doing less, you're spending less time on the visuals so that you

can do more behind the scenes. Well, the thing with Dwarf Fortress was always that the guys who were making it didn't know how to do art. They're programmers making a programming game for about Dwarf shit. Which if you're fucking, if you're, I mean, it's always great advice. If you don't have an artist, that's fine. Start anyway. We can swap that shit in later. The proof of concept being fun is the most important part. So I'm excited to play Rimworld. I am excited to play Rimworld because I fucked around with it for maybe an hour and it was like the ability to like mouse over and see like a detailed tool tip of like what the zoning button does is night and day. The ability to, I don't know, go onto the mod workshop and get a mod that

makes it so that guys don't build themselves into buildings and be unable to escape the walls that they built around themselves. Yeah, that's appreciated. So the jump into, since Dwarf Fortress got updated, you're going to jump into the genre now a little bit. Because now I know what the genre actually is. More than that, I thought I knew what the genre was and that image in my head was completely wrong. Now I actually know what it is. It's animal crossing with depth. How long can you ignore it for and let it run before you have to re-interact with it? Depends. Because I'm like, are you going to try to run like a 400 hour colony? I don't know, man. When I was playing Dwarf Fortress, I had so many fucking things queued up

and I had to wait like a while for them to actually fucking do them. You could queue up infinity tasks if you wanted and have it run forever. You could automate some of those tasks and have it run forever like a little fucking ant farm. How long could I walk away from it and let it run? I guess that depends on how self-sufficient I made it. In my babies experience, like five minutes and just watch them go about their business and then click on them. What are they complaining about? It's like, oh, I talked to Dwarf master Ferguson about cats for 10 minutes. I'm sad now. What have you? Let's take a quick break. I need to refill my water. I need to empty my water out of my dick. There you go. We'll be right back. All right.

Take a quick word from our sponsor. I love sponsor. Yeah. So this week podcast is sponsored by Shopify. I mean, look, I think as evidenced by the last two hours and 22 minutes, we're aware of how to talk into a microphone. I know how to do that. And I'm aware of how to hit a mute button. Bam, you can't even tell. I didn't even notice. So that's pretty good. Got good at that. Took nine long years, maybe even to figure that out. But we got there. What I don't know how to do is anything else when it comes to a business and getting people to buy things and or send me money. I don't get it. It's difficult. It's hard. If I want to be like, here's some,

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not shit your pants. 25% is talking into the microphone. There's zero room for skills for the business. Otherwise Shopify needs to handle and that it does. So yeah, as perfectly described, I mean, getting merch going and like scaling up if people are like, Hey, those t-shirts are cool. I want to, you know, ship him internationally. I want to figure out how to get them all kinds of complexities as you go. Like that's exactly what they're going to come in handy for you with. So check them out. When you're ready to launch into the spotlight, do your thing with Shopify. It's helping back millions of businesses. You can try it for free and start selling anywhere. You can sign up for a free trial at Shopify.com slash super beast, all lowercase.

So go to Shopify.com slash super beast to start selling online today. One more time, Shopify.com slash super beast. Thank you, Shopify. Thanks, Shopify. Sorry about the poop stuff. Just being real. Hey, man. Sorry about the poop stuff is universal. Unfortunately. Well, anyway, we got ourselves a short week, not much to it. I mean, you know, if you want to check out more, of course, the ongoing LPs, everything over at Willie versus has happened. And so Mass Effect 3 continues, not much to say we're in the middle of it. But how about those dreams, bro? I got it. We had one dream. I had a dream. One

Vancouverian vet child, one white child was found in a forest. And he's getting in my craw, you know? It's like, I will say this. So many people. Okay, but I will say this, right? Because I have an open, I have an open mind, right? For whatever is coming. I can understand and like follow a story where somebody who's used to death, who's numbed themselves to it, if there's one that they can't shake and they don't know why, and it's weirding them out too, that I can follow, you know? But I need to see them kind of explicitly acknowledge that it's like, oh, no, I know how bad this is, but I don't know why I can't get over this one. Dude, you iced a planet. Yeah. So that's, that's the bit, right?

Four eyes. If you're, if you're going to play it, if you're going to play it that way, where like something is sticking with you and you don't know why, then that's, that's a more believable way to play it and not necessarily just like the picture perfect moment of Americana incident innocence being destroyed, you know? We'll see. We'll see. I mean, I don't know, that kid bothers me for so many, like there's other people on that ship that went down. Yeah, no, I know, I know, but that's the one that you tried to save, right? Yeah. I mean, look, like if you, if I had to guess, there was going to be dream sequences, I would have thought maybe if you saw like a Prothian child, you know, based on you getting all like fucking

microwaved up, that could have been like something, but I feel like what they could have done that would have made it like, like hit way harder because like people aren't going to necessarily attach to this one child you see for like one minute, right? But you know what people are attached to? They're attached to the earth. You could just put like a, like a globe in like, in like a prominent location and you could walk every story event, you would go check it and like the big blanket of red on the globe is like, well, there's Europe. Europe's just gone now. You know, or something. Always. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I mean, again, the shot of the darkness of that hole in the Baterian space opening up is quite an impact. Although if you wanted to go

more narrative, which again, remember, like the, the, when you're too far above it all, you lose touch with the relatability and the audience and such. So personal stories and personal conflicts are always going to be high priority and such. It could have been interesting if there was some sort of like, like, I just said like a second ago, I was like, Oh, a Prothian child. And I was like, wait, hold on a minute, like what if those beacons gave you insight into like a particular Prothian character whose struggle was watching it all come to an end, you know, and you're kind of like sympathizing with that person and feeling like, oh shit, it's super sad knowing that they're going to die at the end of this, even though I'm watching these

flashbacks, you know, that could be an interesting way to play it. If you're going with the hole, you beam some shit into my head and I don't understand it thing. Oh, no. Moving on, moving on, moving on. Oh, no. Oh, fuck, man. I don't know. All right. Right. Steve, full steam ahead, full steam ahead. We keep it going. Jesus. Wow. Okay. Fuck. Put this thing away. This gun's dangerous, man. Might hurt myself with it. Or somebody. It's the worst it's ever been in your whole career. That's the worst one you've ever done. Holy shit. Well, anyways,

if you want to see more of that, we got lots of fun in the form of the Mass Effect 3 play through. In fact, yeah, the, what was it? Oh, yeah, 80s, 80s a thing now. And I'm like, oh shit. What do you mean, sex robot? Yeah, it's like, okay, can I trust that we can go on a mission, get back to the ship and Joker will not have crushed his pelvis to death. Just going for it. You know, like, will he just die in the cockpit, especially considering that if you're in the ship while she's right there, technically it's always a threesome. Yeah. You spend most of your day inside me, Joker, like three and a find a vent, find a hole, find a port somewhere. Oh, God. Okay. And then the only problem I like that's funny and Edie's like a fine character,

but the only issue I have with it is like, you can you can see the story create itself backwards. Right. It doesn't go. We bought a robot sex lady on Mars. Oh, we could put her to Edie. You go, oh, they wanted to have Edie walk around and be a sex robot. Yes. Therefore you fought a sex robot on Mars. We gave we gave Edie an ass because that's necessary. And there was a terminatrix for two seconds. But don't worry about it. I'm just glad we didn't have to make her a party member because I was like, she was so nothing, you know, but like a reboot character basically showed up on on screen. And then they went, great, drop the personality in there. Good. Good to go. Um, yeah. So anyway, well, that's all that's all fine. That continues. And I really wanted to

finish Bayo three before we got to this week. But like, you're right there. You're like, it sucks, man. I knew we were like, do we I knew we could do it in one, but it was going to take all night. And we hit like somewhere around like six hours or so. And then well, like, hey, this works out because now I get to ask you where you add exactly. So the last thing I saw was a series of look behind us, including the big one. And that one I was describing as so again, you know, I guess some Bayonetta three massive fucking Bayo three spoilers to tune out if you don't want to hear anything about spoiling Bayonetta three. So I literally we we had to stop right at the end of the reveal of

singularity and then the stab in the back, right? Did you fight the boss or did you stop? I think that cutscene just played and that was it. Okay. That cutscene played and then no wait, no, no, no, we took I took control of Madame a butterfly. Okay. And that was I was like, oh, we're doing Kaiju controls. It's like, no, no, no, this is a bit better. Oh, no, you're just big. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I was confused at first because I was trying to do Bayo moves. And it's like, no, no, no, don't do Bayo moves. Do the moves you bought for Madame a butterfly. And I was like, Oh, perfect. Great. That's cool. Great. Yeah. So I remember you are right there. You are like, I know, I know. And we could have again, we could have kept pushing it for another

two to three. But like Reggie was dying. It was super tired. And like we had to we pushed it on that sesh, you know, so we're just gonna have to pick it up. That France levels way better than dude. Paris is in Paris is incredible. Paris was fire. Like it was so good after that desert apology. Because the desert again, they give you here's Malthus and the Phantom. We're sorry. Right. And here's like eight weapons. Like, we're sorry. Now go to Paris. And it's just like it's one of the best levels in the entire franchise. Absolutely. Paris was the weapon you get out of there. You're playing as the clock tower. Paris. Yeah. That's not like I was I was waiting for like Rosa is my favorite

character like playable style, you know, like I love Rosa. And I was waiting for like the umbran armor to show up in some way or form this integration of it where you're getting two in one with this awesome clock tower. So good. And then the weapon you get with it the fucking shield fists like, yeah, it's great. One of my favorite band at a fucking sequences. And then on top of that, the the mini game where you're shmupping, I'm like, you know what, this is landing. Right. The shmup reference. That's what they've made by far. Gradius into Raiden into, you know, for from your your kind of Star Fox view, like it actually really worked out for that weird scanner demon. And then even that one little room, I thought it was going to be

a much more in depth mechanic. It was just one room of like scan to not fall in the pit. It looked really cool. I was like, oh, you could have done more of this if you want it. I wouldn't have minded if maybe not a fight in the dark, but the little echolocation bit was like, oh yeah, okay, that's interesting. That was one room. It was one room. They had to, there had to have been more rooms they cut because that was one for sure. And it was a fleshed out mechanic for something that definitely had one use. The thing that the only other time you used it was to fight the invisible enemies and that's the one fight. Yeah, you know, so that was pretty much it. But very cool, you know, I really didn't mind that at all. Really interesting

that the clock tower plays as such a unique thing. It stays out and it stays active. And you continue to act like it does what you thought the slaves would be doing the entire time, essentially. It also does a great job of recontextualizing what's actually happening in the intro of Bayo one and two. Yeah, the falling clock tower, right? That's a dead demon that you're writing down. It's not a building. The clock tower is a super important part, and it's not just because it was like, oh, the building blew up. It was, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the armor and the role that plays in the, in the, the other wars and such, like, oh, that is great. It's what's one of the coolest fucking, if not the coolest so far.

Can't say enough good things about Paris. Then, yeah, there's only one thing I didn't like about Paris at all. And that was Rosa, look behind you. French Bayo? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the point where I hit, I'm like, oh, they're just going to kill all of them. French Bayo has a great outfit. That's that purple and white color, the wine red wine. I saw King slash Isabella Valentine, you know, really cool. But the, yeah, no, it quickly became, I suppose the word would be a contrivance was that, oh, yeah, that's the exact phrase, right? We need to get rid of these Alt world Bayos. And oh my God, so here's the weirdest feeling in the world, the weirdest fucking feeling. Balls of bull, right? Are balls above? Well, but it wasn't, but it was spelled

balls above. Oh, it's a spelled way. It wasn't, it wasn't spelled Beelzebub, like it was actually spelled ball, you know, like, yeah, like that fucking sequence and reveal and that whole musical bit. I was like, hold on, rhythm. And it's like, yes, rhythm. It is a fucking amazing finale to that amazing level. And while you're popping off at how cool it is, just like last time, they cut to French Bayo floating in the air, just cracking open because you attack her because she's evil at that point or being controlled. And it's the weirdest, like, am I supposed to pop off at watching these Bayos die? Like, what does the game want me to feel right here? Because the thing that you did is whereas a bad guy gets it, right? And then you watch them explode and

you're like, ah, and then you're flexing because you got the cool demon. But you just watch someone that you're like, oh, but I like that, but I like all these Bayo fun things. Like, what does Platinum want me to feel watching them just die over and over again? I don't know what you're going for, you know? And in that case, it wasn't even the like, oh, no, right? Or the Egypt. Yeah, no one cares. Like the, the, the, uh, the Farenetta one, she's like, I'll do it, right? You can't do it. So I'll sacrifice myself, right? They have these moments of like, oh, but they're just getting faster and faster. And by the time it's time for French Bayo to go, they just cut to her like popping like fireworks in the middle of a flex and then cuts back to Balzabug being all like, yeah.

So, uh, I went and I wanted to re, I wanted to, you know, get my head back in the game. Like, there was something I wanted to tell you about Balzabug, but I didn't quite remember because I couldn't remember what the boss looked like. So I went back and looked at the boss. I was like, oh, now I remember. Balzabug is a Platinum game reference. It's Simone from near automata. Oh, shit. I didn't catch that. I, you know, obviously you look at our room. The, the, the both hands out like, yeah. It's like the same. Okay. Okay. Because Al Ruin is a, is a reference to, um, 101, um, uh, what's her face? Uh, uh, Jesus Christ. Uh, fucking pink? No, no, no, no, no. Um, the, the villain, villain girl. Um, I don't know. I just, I just had it.

Don't worry. It's not okay. Okay. All right. All right. Um, anyways, uh, Jesus Christ. I'm sorry. This is bugging me. Oh, you can't remember. Oh, I used it in the episode title even. Vision. I'm trying to find the, vision, vision, vision, vision. Okay. V I J O U N N. Trying to find, uh, the, the fucking fight against what's it called. I was just looking at it. Where you're playing as big, um, what do you call it? Big, big butterfly. Medama butterfly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all, or really it's, it's like the big fucking spaceship. Yeah. I was like kind of looking at that thing and going like the first phase of it, I was like, please don't just be dodging me in the background the whole time. I want to get this, I want to

swing and then they show up on the ship and you're like, great, taking full control of Medama butterfly is awesome. I'm glad that everyone agrees and they all know Medama butterfly rules. She's the favorite. Let's get more fucking time with her. Uh, everyone felt the same on that and, and, and I like when we're all in agreement that she, she's the best, but, um, yeah, then you get to the fucking singularity reveal and it's just like, oh my God, like all the power of the umbran witches and two brain cells between them. Okay, sure. Um, Dr. Sigurd, pleasure to meet you. Sigurd's larity. It's awful. Yeah. And so the only thing to say, so I watched it happen and, um, it went down so quickly and so unceremoniously when, uh, Jean gets stabbed that look behind you,

Jen. Oh, right. So like, I don't know. So everyone has played then beating this game, at this point. So you guys all know the future, right? So you probably did not get this sequence paused in a weird way for you, the way I did, so that I'm processing it differently, right? So you guys went straight through from that moment all the way to the credits and you know what you know as someone. Yeah. The mission that we're talking about where you fight a fucking the, the, the, the boss and you fight Strider again as like a, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Everybody went from that to the end. Exactly. Right. So I need to remind people that like what it's like from just to give you a perspective here that I'm having, because when I saw that,

I was like, Oh, that's not real. Right. Because it was so unceremonious and nonsense. And people were like, Copium, look at you cope. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. Like if this were any other medium, you watch a moment like that happen in that way and you're going, yeah, sure, that's a Thanos snap. And then the, and then the episode ends and they come back next season on the X-File. Precisely. Right. And it's like, and it's not, and it's like, it's not to say that like that suddenness is an impossible route to go with it. But it's to say this, either that's not, either that's not real. And it's a Thanos snap where you're watching, you're watching Spider-Man die and you're going, you're looking at the money that Spider-Man makes and you're going,

yeah, fuck off. Right. Like the entire time. Or there needs to be a conversation with a ghost when the before the credits roll, because you don't go that way with a major character with nothing. Right. So if we have to go, if it's not, if it's real, then you're like, all right, well, I'm waiting to see which one of the JoJo buddies is going to have a conversation floating into the sky, you know, but one way or another, it happened so suddenly that it was like, oh, that isn't real. Is the impression you get while flowing through it. So I completely understand exactly what you mean. And I totally agree with you. Okay. That's, that's the bit.

And I will say no more because anything I add to that conversation would be confirmation or deconformation. But I just, it just, it was like, you know, to, to, but that's just more of like, putting it in the air, like remember when in that moment, anyway, whatever, I've repeated it, but like, no, I get it. When you know for sure, you, you have a different perspective on things, which is what all of this is really, right? I will say, however, let's, let's, let's leave Jen getting killed in like a second and then like her body being thrown to the trash to the side for a moment. Cause I wanted to talk, I was like, I'm going through the cutscene right now. Cause I'm like, what, what happens in that cutscene exactly? And what happens is to me, like the largest part

of jumping the shark is Strider is so cool. Strider is the coolest thing in the world. And because of Strider, we're now going to get the lamest character in Bayonetta history, Ferry Luca as the, like the biggest lamest fucking dweeb ever to just show up and be like, I'm magic. Yeah. So I'm staring at Lucayon or whatever he introduced himself as. I think it was Lucayon and I don't have any feelings because I don't understand what I'm looking at. He was in one cutscene, Viola went, what the fuck? And he was like, and then that was it. There was, there was not, there's not enough to feel anything. Like you're saying, you're saying what you're saying. And I'm like, I, I, I guess, but

right now he's an NPC that like set up a little bit and then showed up again. We're waiting to see what the fuck is that. So like, I felt that way from seeing him because I'm like, Luca is like a dweeb and a loser. And then we just meet this wise version of Luca who just like the, the first two times you run into him, he's just like standing around like looking wise, but he's not doing anything. Yeah. He's just, you meet him once. You meet him once. I'm, I'm magic Luca. He just, he shows up then and I don't know. There's nothing else to say about it. I was saying at some point in the past, even before he showed up, I remember I was saying something to the effect of like, if we have to stomach some sort of ungodly pairing, like, is it that there's

a cooler, non-stupid version of this character that was actually able to meet? You know what I mean? Like, like, like, is that, is whatever, I don't know. We're still, I'm still in the speculation zone here, but I'm like, oh, like, is there, is it, is it not as bad as it sounds, or it's like you, you smash two and who together? And it's more like. Like, I think it's in the goddamn notes, but I think the implication is that there are so many universes in which Luca is a cool werewolf. Okay, sure. That when the, when the universes are merging, sometimes he becomes a cool werewolf. Yeah, I just don't understand why Luca was just getting, why so much play about him. I mean. Okay, woolly, you're a smart man. You're smarter than me in many respects.

You can answer that question yourself with the pieces you have. I don't like that answer. I'm looking elsewhere because I don't like that answer. I put it back down on the crime scene, and I'm continuing to search for answers. And we'll find them when we get to the final session this week. So, man, when is that? Because I want to watch that. Uh, well, it's going to take another day to get back to, you know, Montreal. So, at least Wednesday. Okay, because, man, I gotta, like, I gotta get my fucking eyeballs on that. Because you are in a very weird spot. Yeah, didn't want to stop, but. All the parts that people are really mad about are going to start right away for you.

Um, I'm glad that so there was an important moment that like we took at the beginning of last session, which was like, as I started, I'm like, let me remind myself why I love Bayonetta. What am I looking for? Right? What do I want? What do I like the action, the fun, the combat, the way it feels when you parry something, when you dodge something, when you like crush it, when you get a perfect pure platinum, the way it feels when enemies are aggressive and you're able to keep above them, the way it feels when that aggression is like not just snail bullshit, but like actually like an enemy that is, you know, rising and chasing you down and has a pattern that's just like, you know, the way you fight Strider or the way you fight gracious and glorious.

That's snail, right? The snail represents the opposite of like fun aggression in that it's with the frost shit. Yeah. And the clouds. So there's, there's an enemy that exists in a character action game. There's actually remarkably similar to snail and its problems, but people don't hate it as much because it's cool looking and it's Blitz from DMC. Blitz. You're so right. It is. It is. Blitz is the flowstopper and you just, you can learn to fucking deal with it the perfect way if you can get your busters down, you know, but yeah. But Blitz turns on and goes, you don't get to play for 10, 15, 20 seconds. And then he gets tired and he goes, now you can play. And that's the same way the fucking snail works. Totally, totally. Yeah. It's not your turn. And further

more, you now have to deal with that with Viola, right? So you're not dealing with that with someone who's equipped for that matter. Absolutely like Blitz. Totally. You know what else? I hate that fucking two-headed dragon that just stomps around for all of these attacks. That's annoying. It's just annoying. You fight it a bunch too. I don't know why they liked it so much. Or the fire, anything, the fire like shit, like just like, okay, we get it. The floor is lava. We can't stand here. Whatever. Like kill me because you're out DPSing me, right? With swings. You're too fast. It's not that you're so big that I can't, you don't fit on the fucking screen. Or standing here is death. Oh, cloud death is fogging my fucking, like stop it. You know what was really

strange? Fuck hit me. You know how you fight the really, really big dudes that are just big mans and like they, the camera can only come up to like their shoulder. What the fuck is that decision? You fought, in Bayo one, you fight a beloveds is like the largest consistent enemy type and they're always completely on screen. Yeah. In Bayo two, you fight a number of much larger, but the camera comes all the way back so that you can always see the whole thing. Yeah, the air demons and angels and shit like that. I mean, like jubileus is, you know, the camera drops beneath the fucking frame to make sure you could see as much of you can that to swing at it when you're running around in the sphere and shit like that. But then, yeah, not

only that enemy in the the totem pole, right, is always usually above, you're like you're attacking it, but it's out of the frame because like you're looking, you can tilt up to check, but like ultimately you're trying to not get your fucking demon killed. So the totem pole is also just kind of like, I don't know, man, do damage until it gets down and breaks the shield, you know. So I'm looking right now, Willie. Chapter 13 is called Kingdom of One, which is the last one you did. Chapter 14 is the end of the game. Yep. And you will bust that out with talking. Sure. hour 10. Sure. Like you're like you're right there. Yep. I got I saw someone say one, I saw someone say

two to three, you know, whatever, Willie time I stopped to discuss things and I, you know, I read so that final fights pretty fucking go, though. But all this to say that I'm glad that I reminded myself of why I like these games because that sequence in Paris is one of my favorite in the franchise. Like I, I, I want it. I want to iterate. I'm taking this above the the moniker of just a best in Baio three, like no one, two as well. Excellent level. I wish that France section was more indicative of the whole game could have been. It really could have been, you know, and Tokyo was fine. Like Tokyo was I liked Tokyo. Tokyo was totally fine. Like, so that's the thing is like it makes me think like it really could have been that way. You know, the detours into,

into fire level China and desert level Egypt. Just, you know, China, like China was, it was the environment is so bland. It's the Great Wall the whole way. That's it, man. And it was the introduction of that too big, but nothing to fill it with problem, you know, and then of course, running around in the, I mean, I forget the name of the goddamn thing, but the whatever the overworld of nothing unreal overworld, you know what I mean, the sonic frontier land. Yeah, like, like, like when that starts getting angry, it gets like a little more interesting. But while you're just doing like the calm sort of overworld version of it, it's like, it's not any more visually interesting than Vigrid. It's not any more visually interesting than Fimbleventor, you know, like,

dude, did you get all the the the four like LP pieces that unlock the secret boss? Yes, and I did the secret boss. And it was golem took me like it took me like 90 seconds and I smoked it in the dirt. It was so I couldn't I was like, that's it. That's it. That's it. Okay. Cool. Nice to see you, buddy. You know, man. Yeah, so anyways, the whatever the memory of Paris lives on as we move forward. And then we'll always have Paris will always have patty gay patty. Never forget. And yeah, that's that's that's coming up this week on Willy versus as well. Come peep that out, as well as, you know, whatever we're going to do for getting fighting games. And Willy versus the algorithm second channel dropping some fun shit.

I want to say today, the video was at Hoara mania, we take the throw brother. And some of those TGA videos as well drop in. So yeah, fun clips, go check them out. That's pretty much it. Any announcements for you? Something. Yeah, which I'll talk about very briefly. Play to to Charles. What is that? Oh, you haven't seen go look at up while I'm talking about it. To to Charles is a very indie horror game, which is probably about two to three hours long in which you play as a man on a scary island. As you are doing little side quests and doing the horror game stuff and sneaking around and trying to upgrade your train train spider. Because to to Charles, the evil train monster is trying to kill you and eat everyone

on the island. Thomas the tank engine gone evil. It's it's super it's super cool. It's a ton of fun riding the train around the island and doing these these zany little horror game spoof side quests and upgrading your train with like a rocket launcher or a better machine gun or making it scarier with paint and armor as you're desperately trying to get away from the to to Charles trying to it's great. It's fucking great. It's it's it's great. Oh, you're just fighting this one thing the whole time. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'm looking at scary. He's he's like a spider, but he's a train. One developer. Wow. Okay. Yeah, no, it's it's great. As for me on my channel on Twitch, people, they're sorry, they're just like, there's a sub genre that like should be

listed on Steam called streamer bait. Right. Yeah, just like anything that's like, yeah, hollow live or fucking, you know, getting up with Bennett Foddy. Just put a put a tag on that that says streamer bait. Let me know as for me this week. Let's see. I'm going to go over in my fucking schedule thing because I don't know what I'm doing. Let's see. I got tons of shit going on this week. First of all, tomorrow's rimworld. This is a twitch.tv slash path stairs at tomorrow's rimworld. Okay, that was weird. Potionomics is Wednesday afternoon. Evil West and Warhammer 40 K chaos gate is Thursday evening on Saturday. I'm going to be doing Christmas Eve with Paige here. We're going to watch videos and hang out with chat. And on

Christmas, I'm going to be over on twitch.tv slash pizza live and we're going to start playing. It takes two. Hey, enjoy that, which seems like, which seems like the time. Yep, which is Christmas day. It is a very Christmas game. I'll tell you that. Get a nice cup of cocoa, get some, give some some warm booties and a sweater and get the papers. The papers get the papers and don't sign them. Just put them on the table at a pen, still cap on and just leave that in the room. Oh, get all those papers. Just just just get the papers and put them on the table. And that's enough. Not presigned. It's threatening enough of an aura and then press start. Oh, also, I believe Paige is going to be streaming the finale of disco Elysium on Wednesday. So go

check that out on twitch.tv slash Pat stairs at excited to see one world. I'm excited to see if I can handle playing with my dolls. Yeah, get your animal crossing in. All right. So yeah, not a ton and not a super heavy docket, but some big, there's some heavy hitters, some heavy hitters that say the biggest one when I went to go look at, Hey, what's going on in this old in this business we call show. Oh, I heard someone say that unironically. It's disgusting. Fucking barf, dude. Epic Games is it seems like the FTC hammer is in fact going to come down. What a weird thing where they there's four decision makers. Originally,

three were against them. One was for and then there was a 50 50 and then people are getting palms greased. Who knows what's going on with the whole Activision merger with EA takeover bit, right? But the FTC is being is they're staying busy. Because besides the the the antitrust case going on, they just hit epic with a gigantic case where they are ordered to pay 275 million as a penalty for violating children's privacy laws and 245 million in refunds for tricking people into making unwanted charges and use of dark patterns. So I took a look into this, I can't tell you anything about the dark patterns. But I can't tell you about the privacy violation and I can tell you about the tricking people into into buying things. That's okay, because

I can tell you all about the dark patterns. Okay, great. So first off, privacy violation, the game starts with your microphone turned on by default. Yes. And it's marketed towards children and it takes your data without telling you. So right off the bat. Yes. Big, big privacy violation. Second of all, the complaints about accidental purchases for the longest time in Fortnite, it's gone now. But for the longest time, there's no confirm on purchasing anything. Right. So and you could you could accidentally buy things as a bug inside loading screens. And while the computer was booting from sleep mode. Yeah. So they break it down, actually, directly on the fdc.gov website, they explain in detail each each of the allegations. And the way it's phrased is

in most cases, pretty fucking damning, especially when you consider that a lot of these are things that Epic employees brought to Epic's attention, pointed out that this was like fucked up. And they not only refuse to act on it, but in some cases continued to obfuscate and like, essentially like move the features around or like and push back on it. Right. So in particular, the one when it comes to the microphone being on by default, right, which is and you know, FTC is like the lodge that like, yeah, it's led to harm and abuse and stuff like that because children are jumping on and the mic automatically being on means kids are just jumping into situations that they're going, yeah, I'm not consenting to exactly some 25 year old fucking

asshole just goes shut the fuck up, you stupid kid. Um, like scares the baby. Exactly. Employees expressed concern about that default setting. They and they urge them to change it as far back as 2017 is what it says. And not only did they kind of ignore that, they then eventually they pushed back on even adding a mute button to begin with entirely. Right. And when they finally did add one, they made it hard to find. And oh yeah, and like started playing Fortnite. It was a pain in the ass to figure out how to turn the microphone off. Crazy. Right. So this is all just stuff where they're like, Oh no, the, the, we know it's deliberate and we want to, we want to annoy you because this is what otherwise attracts the kids in. Right. So that's straight up what they're

going for. You know what, you know what, one of the other reasons is one of the old business talks they had about DLC stuff implied that won't, that one of the things about the skin economy is to create a situation where children are shamed by other children for having the default skin. There you go. And that likely led to like, well, we got to keep the mic on. So people make fun of the kids for being default losers. And then they go to the store, which has no confirmed button on it. And they look at a skin and they hit the button, they go, Oh, well, they got the skin now. It's, it's fucking just the awareness and the predatory nature of like shit like that is crazy. And that's basically what they're kind of like underlining is that along the way, this is not a

case where it's a game that happens to be played by kids and is also played by adults. And it's, you know, it's kind of falling. It's like, it's unfortunate that they're included in an otherwise larger target that's their main demographic of adults. This is marketed towards kids, it's much more specific. And like, and in many cases, Epic was demonstrating that not only they're full aware of that, they're targeting exactly those behaviors, specifically stuff that can escape parental notice, you know. So there was exactly all that all the stuff about the the way you could purchase stuff. That's what they're discovered. That's what's being described as dark patterns, which is a fucking interesting term. But dark patterns are essentially

anything that tricks you into buying or making a purchase unintended, and then of course, giving you no ability to really fight back against that or cancel that out, right? So you could be charged while attempting to wake up the game from sleep mode, as you mentioned, in a loading screen, pressing an adjacent button while attempting to preview an item, right. So they're like, all of that led to hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized charges for consumers. And the thing, of course, is that if that happens, and you're like, in some cases, kids are just going to be like, ah, fuck it, whatever. Oh, well, I bought it, you know. And it's credit cards, parents, whatever, you know. But if you actually tried to charge back,

or if you were a parent who said, hold on, I didn't authorize this purchase. Epic would then ban your account or block, and including all other purchases you've made, at that point, that were authorized. And like, if you, and when they fought back against that, they would return access to some people, but they would warn them that if they ever disputed any future charges on their credit cards, they'd be banned for life. Right. So like, they had a whole thing where they're essentially like, yeah, unauthorized charges that are legitimately unauthorized. If you complained about that, your punishment was being banned from the game and take and like everything you've spent up to that point again, being taken.

Yeah, it's been a long standing thing. And this actually applies to an absolutely massive amount of video game companies, including PlayStation, Microsoft, I think Square Enix does it. If you get charged for like your Xbox account, and you file a charge back, your account is dead. Like they will kill your account because they don't, they don't fuck with, with credit card charge backs. They just go, oh, fraudulent. Don't give a shit. Die. But in this case, it's a legitimate charge back. Be aware that you may kill your like Xbox account. Yeah. And again, don't do it. I'm saying, fucking get ready. And even when legitimate and therefore, and they give people back their shit, they're still like, but don't you ever, you know, like it's, it's crazy.

So all this, I refunded something on the Stony store a million years ago. I think it was, I forget what it was, but it was supposed to come out a certain hour and it didn't. And I was buying it for stream purposes. So I got through Stony support and like, can you refund this and you've failed to provide the game by the date that it was supposed to. And then they refunded it and said, this is your one refund on your account ever. And I'm just saying, I'm like, that's not real. That's not a fucking thing. Man. So yeah, they actually, the FTC went on to mention as well that like Amazon, Apple and Google have also had similar instances of this type of shit in the past. But then one of the, and then one of the other major ones is just, it's the obvious, but it's

like, yeah, up until 2018, kids could buy V bucks with no parental consent or our card action required. So obviously, hundreds of thousands of dollars and racked up charges and nothing you could do about it because it was through the V buck system, you know, so that gets thrown on the list as well. And all of that leads to these giant numbers they need to pay. And the giant numbers they need to refund to people, which I'm surprised it's not more. We'll take them about a month to recoup. That's like, if not a week, practically at this point, because the I went, I found some people talking about it, like about 20 days. Yeah. Because the whole point of these practices, when you're aware of them and you deliberately are like, fine, we'll put that mute button in,

we're just going to hide it over here and make it annoying. Like that's the, that's the intent on display. It's showing you that like, no, no, no, we know how to gain this for maximum money. We know that we're like, fucking with kids privacy. And until we get caught, whatever. And now that we get caught, cool, give it three weeks, give it four weeks, fine, you know. So I mean, even though it was a four, yeah, it was a four, oh issue. Everyone has an agreement about this, but it's like, if this is if it's just the fine, and then no other actions, then that's not even good enough. Right. You need to have that shit come in in such a way where hey, no one else is going to have no one else can do this. And where you're not going to be fucking targeting kids. Like the

moment your game goes in which the only penalty is a fine is merely telling poor people they can't do it. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Exactly. And it's, it's times like this too, where like, you have, you have this is the other end of the slider from Nintendo. Just talk to your friends in real life. Don't add anyone's online. Oh, yeah, the watch. You know what I mean? Like, you don't need a friend code, actually. What is an account? You don't need online even. Yeah. We're going to just make the online so bad a predator could never get to you. So just like, there's there's a there's somewhere in the middle we can land in a same place. But, you know, when you don't have the Nintendo's out there being ridiculous about it, you go to the

other end where like, Epic is straight up putting the candy on the floor and, you know, leading the kids back from the elementary school. Like it's wild about it. And the thing is too, is like, you have to imagine and if you're seeing this kind of nefarious behavior, then there's no reason to give any benefit of the doubt towards what they're going to do with that type of data. And collecting kids data in general data has become a massive, expensive, super valuable commodity in our modern day. In fact, you know that any app where, you know, you don't pay for it, it's something where it's because you are the product, right, all that shit, social dilemma, etc. Collecting kids data is protected and illegal for a reason. But if you

do it anyway, and you have it, now you have an illegal, but super valuable thing that is going to, you know, it's like, it's like collecting fucking serial buying purchasing habits of a household, like you can still hold on to that shit and use that and probably find people that will buy it and or would do whatever you will with this illegal collected child data, you know. I don't know if they're being ordered to destroy or whatever the case is, but like them deliberately holding on to that shit and them deliberately collecting it up until now does not mean that like that no longer has value to them. So, yeah, it's like good that something's happening in this regard. And when you sort of lay it out on paper,

it's pretty fucking crazy how nuts Fortnite went in, you know, anything that gets to this size, it's not surprising to, you know, pull back the fucking curtain a bit and see some bullshit going on. But at this scale, it's less about the fight and it's more about how do you make them not do this shit, you know? Well, this is the FTC, right? The European Commission in Australia haven't gotten ahold of them yet. Certainly. So it's quite possible that eventually they will have to pay so many fines, they might actually want to change something. Yeah. I mean, we're heading into, we're not heading into, we're a firmly deep entrenched in the fucking loot box micro DLC era, right? It's normalized to the point of like, okay, fine, don't hurt me too much is

the way we feel about these things. Yes, you're getting a battle pass. How bad is it going to be? Right? What is the question? So like, every time there's shit that pushes back and puts a wall up in place. Thank God, there's at least a wall somewhere, you know, to just be like, yeah, that's too far. You can't fucking do anything you want and get away with it. Like, so yeah, anyway, good on that. And, and shout outs to dark patterns, a term which I've immediately adopted into the lexicon, whatever, if I see some sussy behavior, I'm gonna, I'm gonna accuse you of dark patterns in the future. That's, that's, that's a good word. So all that is going down. Other things happening. So there's, there's, we talked about how Henry Cavill has exited the

Witcher. But yeah, there's actually a domino effect of stories that sure is that are involved in this. And I probably going to get some of these details wrong, but I tried to piece together as best I could exactly what's going on myself. So Henry exiting the Witcher was one side of the piece of the puzzle. And they discussed like the onset, you know, difficult stuff with the writers and the bits where it was like, he wasn't happy about this and that. But behind all of that, it seemed like there was also supposed to supposedly a another reason for him leaving was so that he could reclaim the mantle as Superman at which he had, he was, he was done with up until the point when the rock shows up and does all that pre black Adam material going on about how

the hierarchy of power is changing. And then he may have committed financial crimes by leaking fake financial data about black Adam. Oh, I didn't, I didn't catch that. I caught that they looked at the opening weekend numbers and included like toys and so rock put out like this. Sorry, rock allegedly put out like a statement of like the opening weekend, which was like, complete fucking bullshit. Okay. Yeah. That's the same thing that when the movie actually totally lost a bunch of money. And he was like, yeah, look, black Adam killing it. And it's like, you're publishing, you're allegedly publishing like straight up faith, fake financial documents to make your movie. Again, as far as I heard, it was like, it was including like, yeah,

t shirts and toys and all kinds of other shit. That's not the movie, right? The idea, of course, of like, because, you know, he's one of those dudes that shows up in the commercial, which, again, you haven't seen an American TV commercial or movie commercial in a long time, probably, but they're unrecognizable these days because it's not like a movie trailer anymore. It's the rock sitting in a chair going, let me tell you why you're missing out on black Adam if you haven't seen it yet. It's the number one movie in America. And then the top and the bottom of the fill of the screen are just the date and then hashtag black Adam or whatever. And then he'll just go on and then it'll just be about how the FOMO of you not going to see the

thing with a bunch of out of context clips. And then it's like, is there a movie or is it just him sitting in a chair, you know, like critics are calling the black Adam, the number one movie. And it's like, that's what their American fucking movie trailer commercials are now. They're the weirdest things ever. And every time I see them, I'm like, what the fuck is happening? But who cares? His whole bit with like coming to the DC universe and all that shit, like, okay, so, you know, we like Shazam and like kind of we're just thinking like, oh yeah, that's the rival and the rock is bigger than the character. So he's probably not going to sign on to that unless it's got some major asterisks involved with, you know, turning black Adam into something bigger than

he originally was. He wants to be black Superman. Exactly. And straight up. Yeah. Because black Adam's supposed to fight. Yeah, it's supposed to, you know, Captain Marvel, like, but like fighting Zach Braff is not quite the same level of star power, you know, certainly. So in terms of character power, you got to go for Superman. So that's what he was angling for. And they kind of DC didn't really, it seemed like they kind of loosely agreed, but we're also planning to reboot everything with James Gunn at the head. So they just hired him to be, did I say Zach Braff? Zach Levi. He did, he sure did. Yeah, Zach Levi. That'd be a very different movie. Well, I mean, Chuck and scrubs, they're not so different, are they? Think of that fucking

dorky white guy going, whoa, they're both fucking trash. So I guess you're right there. Just think of, think of both of them going, whoa. All right. All right. Good. Moving on. So when you get to the part where they, they go, hey, James Gunn is in charge of DC now. Wonder Woman 38 happening because of whatever's going on with that. And they're looking to reboot everything, including Superman and go to Becca and you're going to be telling a younger story or whatever. Henry Cavill in the meantime is popping off on Instagram, going, I'm back baby. You know, I left, I left Geralt behind and now, you know, the boy is back. Let's, let's go and then throw like, yeah, actually, about that. Nah.

Nah, I'm not. Right. But clearly, like him and the Rock at least were like on the hype train of their own version of things. And, you know, he got, I guess, hung out to dry with the reboot. I don't know exactly what the communication or what is, but at the end of the day, James Gunn is not going in that direction. Whatever cameos he was going to play to, to build up to a Black Adam versus Superman movie ain't happening. And because we live in the modern fucking era, because we live in insert current year, the way part of this new story and the way you can hear the Rock's response to things is because he unfollowed the Black Adam and Warner Brothers accounts. And that's how you know, uh-oh, looks like he's done with the character, you know.

Oh, darn. Now, of course, Henry, you know, North shortage of scripts on his desk, I'm pretty certain, is like, okay, on to the next. Here comes Warhammer 40K. And he's going to be heading that up to be an executive producer on it, not just starring, but actually producing exactly. And that's going to be over at Amazon. So, you know, I guess all's well that ends well. He gets to do some fucking space marine shit, which is you want to talk about him getting going off on like being a nerd and all this stuff, like you don't get much more fucking in there than 40K shit, you know. And, um, in the end, probably a win all around in that regard. Are you seeing this, this fucking story that came out on some fucking podcast with no fucking

background that's trying to smear Cavill for leaving the Netflix show? So the Witcher. Really? Yeah, so some I can't even remember the name of the fucking podcast, but some fucking podcast with no verification, whatever came out and basically said that he left the Witcher because he was actually a misogynist and an asshole on set. And he was a toxic gamer. Um, and was this Castle Super Beast the fucking the like the source and the and the and the descriptions are like so fucking smeary and weird. So one of them is he refused to stop were using gamer language with the cast. He was asked repeatedly to stop talking to people

like they were his bros on the internet and he would not. And then the other part is that he was apparently I'm using big alleged a misogynistic dickhead to all the the writing staff on the Witcher, which he left the Witcher because he hated the writing staff because they kept writing shit that was impossible and was horribly inaccurate. Like it was very public that him and the writing staff like did not get along. There's a clip of him hanging out with fucking Colbert on the Colbert show on the late night. And Colbert asks him, Hey, if you use Henry Cavill, what potion would you drink from Geralt's? And he looks at him and goes nothing. And he goes, Yeah, but he's like, Well, did I know did you not hear what I said? They're they're toxic. They would kill me.

And he's we're talking to Colbert like Colbert is a fucking idiot. Like that's the stupidest fucking question he could ask. I could easily transplant that dude into the fucking writing room in which people like and then Geralt did this and he's like that's fucking stupid. You can't do that. They wrote it in the book. You can't do that. Just to clarify, when he was when the accusations of him saying gamer words came out, are we talking like he kept saying poggers? Okay, racism. Okay, okay. All right. Just like he kept talking like a dude bro gamer. Okay, gotcha. Gotcha. And it's like, man, somebody's real fucking mad that he yelled at people in the writing room. There was also accusations that he would rewrite episodes

without telling people. And I'm like, No, actually, I can totally see that where he would go. No, you can't do this. You can't do this. And Geralt wouldn't do this. And like, it just seems like this really shitty, smeary way to describe somebody who was unhappy with how on inaccurate the show he was working on. And then hey, look at that. He's executive producer on the Warhammer. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. Making sure. Yeah. That that's that was the first we when we covered the story when it first came out, like the description, you know, about the descript the problems that he was having with the writing and stuff, like, we're backed up by the the guy who was over there who's currently running X-Men 97. I gotta forgot his name. But like, yeah, that was the first

angle of it was just like, the source material is not being respected in his in his opinion, you know. So at the end of the day, I suppose, if you're looking at this, I'd say Henry gets a pretty good run because he does Superman for a while. He was also unhappy with a lot of the portrayal Superman. He wanted to be the happy, the joyful superman. Yeah. Well, that's not what the Snyderverse has in store for you, you know, because because because you got to you got to ask if we live in a society and zoom in on the damage tattoos and do what you got to do. No, I you get a pretty good run when you go, all right, you got Superman for a bit, you did the Witcher for a bit and now you get to bring Warhammer

life and like that's a whole other crazy space marine. Yeah, or maybe I don't know what other like major like Emperor of Man, I don't know, put a bunch of makeup on. No, he can't be the Emperor of Man. I'm telling you right now, Henry Cavill as the Emperor of Man would be the shittiest casting in the history of fucking nerd movies ever because it would be a fucking skeletal corpse in a chair that can't move or speak. Okay, I'm not saying it would be the best casting decision, but I'm saying, don't you think he would fucking love that? No, he would want to be a Primark. You think so? And he would not want to be the ultra marine Primark because the ultra marines are the popular faction. He would want to be one of the weirdo side factions.

I don't know enough to know anything. I'll tell you this, if you see the trailer for this Warhammer thing and Henry Cavill is a fucking space marine in that, I bet you anything his armor will not be blue. Okay, that's it. Okay. Now, and I suppose the other bit is like, when you decide to take a slice of this fucking Codex and present it self contained for Amazon, TV, whatever us, casual audience, new, new viewers, etc. Like in my head, live action Warhammer costs infinity dollars and then some like what is there to, can we go somewhere where we're just like, the budget can be sane by sticking to like one ship or like, I don't know, I don't know, but it sounds in my head like it would be just

anything Warhammer related is infinity dollars. There's a lot like the vermin tide and dark tide stuff obviously is just, okay, let's go down to ground level and, you know. Yeah, but even ground level in dark tide, you have like upside down cathedrals in cities that like reach into the I don't know. Just, just how many baseless bucks can you spend, you know, representing giant space wars? Probably a lot. So yeah, to me, that resume, that's a pretty good run. That ain't nothing to scoff at, you know. And if he nails it, he gets to be the fucking the hero of Warhammer. So Warham is having a good run lately. And yeah, and their licenses have been going out really well.

The company that makes it are fucking scumbags and will fuck your bullshit over unless you work for them. So I've heard. But the actual output's been pretty good. And yeah, maybe we can get a rock skin for Black Adam in Injustice 3. No. Well, Ed Boone's such an asshole, by the way. He openly admits that he's just like, he's like, I can't say anything. I'm like, then don't then don't say anything. Tweet about injustice rumors. And he just responded like, boy, I wish I could respond to this without creating a, you know, recreating a news thing. And then everyone's like, Injustice 3 is coming out. And look, Ed Boone says he can't talk about it. Like fucking

god, you know, he knows what he's doing. But you know, but at the same time, there needs to be someone to point to, to constantly tell everybody, don't listen, don't believe his lies. Like they're all, you know, he's the worst ever. Because if there isn't a constant reminder, then again, the Def Jam problem, they make it, they, their lies, their Def Jam continues to lie aggressively and bullshit everybody on Twitter because they only do it once every two years. God, it's awful. Right. If you keep it far and few enough in between, everyone forgets. Remember reboot has was rebooting eight times between the end of the show. And when the fucking thing happened, you just got to space it out. And every 24 months, people kind of forget the last thing you said.

So you come back with another stupid thing and everyone gets excited again. And then the news cycle goes nowhere. And then two years later, you just get to do it again. Ed Boone's doing it frequently enough that you can point to that as an example and go, that don't listen to that shit. Like, I bet you, if you walked up to Ed Boone on the street right now and said, Hey, Ed, did they find the last secret in MK2? He would smile and go, No, it's like they have day to mind that game. And they found the last one you were talking about. You were some full of shit. Yeah, I would skip away and laugh and throw his head back and go, ha, ha, ha. Like, yeah, it's like, I hid my name in the code somewhere. Yeah. Anyway,

so all of that goes down. And yeah, I like, again, I, it seems to be dubs across the board because quite frankly, a James Gunn reboot of the DC universe couldn't be a bad thing. So some consistency could probably help out side squad movie was fine. It was totally fine. Yeah, I guess it's like the one that works. It's like, okay, he did it. Okay, just hand him the whole thing. Take the, you have the keys to the kingdom now because you did, you got everybody on board. Although, oh man, I'm just hoping like in the young Superman by James Gunn, his dad walks up to him and goes, maybe you should hide your powers and let those kids die.

And then they stare at each other and it's somber. And then they just start to laugh. And then they laugh for 10 minutes and then go, Oh, that was stupid. Um, the other bit is if they keep doing the Joker style bit thing where you're like, hey, are these connected? No, shut up. Who cares? They're movies. Let them be what they are. Hey, guess what? A movie is like a movie. It's not like a real thing. Like the CU part of the CU thing. If you're not going to, I mean, look, even more like Marvel has exhausted it, right? Like they had a really good run. Their, their, the new shit is like people are still, the formula has, is overstated welcome. So

the getting people to sign up for like 15 to 20 movies is financially irresistible. But guess what? When the matrix did its trilogy back in the day and then everything had to be a trilogy. And then, you know, like Lord of the Rings that it's bit and then Harry Potter did its bit. And then that's like, Oh yeah, no, no, the big thing now is to announce a trilogy to not don't announce a movie. Like, yeah, that happened in games too. And it didn't work out very well for almost any of them onto the fucking next man. People are tired, you know. So make focus on individual things being good. And then if you want to weave a narrative at some point, you can maybe start thinking about

it when you have a body of work that proves you can fucking actually do the individual steps properly. You know what I want to go back to? I want to go back to the era of every single movie and video game, having a cliffhanger that you looked at and you were like, that's not gonna fucking go. That's fucking, that's not gonna do shit. They're not doing nothing with that. Damn, dude. When Shao Khan popped out and said you weak pathetic fools and Chris Lambert turns around and the music starts playing. What a pop, man. Oh, that that shit. Damn, that was a time to be alive. Anyway, anyway, so yeah. In other words, or rather in other news, Death Stranding is getting a movie. So sure. Oh. Yeah, I don't know. Don't do that. Is it gonna star Norman Reedus? Is it

not gonna start Norman Reedus? Is it they should? They should not do that. They should. They should aggressively not do that. But I think they're doing the strength of that game is that the weirdo story parts that don't make sense are split between hours and hours of enjoyable trucking and that if you put all of them in a row, the tech shit is like a fucking train wreck. Yeah. Okay. So we're now in an era where thankfully, I'm almost thankful that there are so between God of War adaptation. Disco Elysium. I mean, the Metal Gear movie from years ago. There's so fucking about that. Like it's gonna happen. Okay, so like last of us, okay, it exists now, right? Fine. There's so many non existing things that are announced for adaptation that you

can. I'm glad that you can hear something like this and go, Yeah, that that's probably not real. Right. I want I want most of these adaptation announcements to be a fucking 80% Fugazi just like there's not there's no it ain't going anywhere. You're never going to hear about this again. And if it metal gear one makes me laugh so hard every time, dude, I was hearing about that back in 97 live action devil may cry. I mean, well, Halo did eventually happen. Prince of Persia eventually happened. You know, there's that number of them that's came by. Halo took 15 years to make and then they came out and nobody liked it. Yeah. And yeah, and everything in the everything that happened in the wake of Castlevania Netflix being good. Like the moment Castlevania Netflix

was good, like a billion other things were animate ours. Us do it. Zelda, whatever that's happening or what like I want all of that to just be like, Yeah, don't even think about it. It's not real. You know, um, Five Nights at Freddy's. It was good for like four seasons. Try the absolute weirdest part. Dragon's dogma. Oh, man. So yeah, yeah. I don't know why, but you do know why because Kojima can't resist. He can't resist the movies, man. And and like as as horrendous as you can imagine, a fucking Kojima movie would be like God, it's it would like as great as batch. It would be like Lynchian in its in its attempts. But just taking Death Stranding straight up is like like why? I guess it's because no, it's it's it's you know what it is. Like I think the part of it

is that like underlining how much sense it would make or not make is is is irrelevant compared to Kojima Pro has established a successful brand. Therefore, that brand should now capitalize, right? It's the ways the the the bullshit takeover Estonia is going down where it's like, Zaum has established a brand that brand is now recognized. It is immediately time to capitalize in every possible way on the recognition of the name. And I think it's as simple as that. It's like, you know, they could build up a thing. But you know, you could also just put Death Stranding everywhere. And if it's bad, then it's bad. And you forget about it. And we move on to the next game, I guess. But so I totally disagree with Kojima's movie would be Lynchian. Because

I'm a huge fan of Twin Peaks in particular. But I follow like first of all, follow David Lynch on fucking Twitter, because he has the most unhinged Friday update. It's fucking nuts. He'll fucking post a video of himself every fucking Friday. It's like, it's the weekend once again. And he's been shaking his camera just a little bit more every week for like two years. It's like, yeah, possible to watch now. No, I've seen one or two. Yeah. But Lynch is like, like one of the shittiest interview guests ever. Because like, people just want to ask him what his movies or his his shits about. Like he'll say Eraserhead's my most spiritual movie. And someone will go, can you explain that? And he goes, no, no, refuses to elaborate. Yeah, there is actually a follow up to that. And

from a different interview in which he talks about like Twin Peaks, and people are obsessed with finding out what things mean, right? They'll watch Season of Twin Peaks or they'll watch one of his movies. And he goes, well, what does it mean? What did the scene mean? And he's actually said like, what the scene meant was the feeling you fucking had watching the scene. That's what it meant. Good. Yeah. That's what the scene was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tinted or confused or in it. That's what it meant. Kojima Kojima is going to stop and break it all down. Yeah, exactly. Kojima has a scene like that and goes, well, you see the the sand is a metaphor for the stick, which is the umbilical cord to the dirt of the Mother Earth. And he like, everything has to actually mean

something. It has to be a deep double triple quadruple pun meaning and he overdoes it. And it's ridiculous. And I love it. But as a game, it's hilarious. As a fucking movie, it would be unwatchable. The human body is fascinating, isn't it, Sam? Every part of your body is made up by thousands of strands of DNA. So that many so many that even if you were able to perceive them with with your eye, you would not be able to count them all mere grains of sand. And yet, despite how small these strands are, and they've shaped our world by allowing us to God damn it. Hold on. It's so good. Wait, wait, wait. By allowing us to truly understand human life as it began on beaches millions of years ago, our DNA is tied to the sand. DNAs is sand. But when a whale is stranded on a

beach, it dies. The reverse is true for us. Take away the beach and we grow apart and die slowly, stranded on the plains and the mountains of our nations. What do you think? What do you say to that, Sam B? Sam B? Replace the M with an N and the B in bridges with a D and you get sand D. What do you say to that, sandy? It's like, I genuinely think that you put out a movie. Hold on. Full credit to Capcant on that because it's brilliant. I think if you put out Death Stranding as a film, as it is, and just chopped it and edited it, you would have people like standing up and walking out of the theater at Amalai. I think that might be the worst Kojimaism ever by an enormous margin. It's fucking out of control. But it would be all of that, but it would also be unwatchable if you

were not paying all of the attention. You can't background a Kojima movie. I don't know, man. I was riveted during Death Stranding and I would struggle to give you a sequence of events or how anything in that setting works. God. You know that he's never going to stop trying for Hollywood because he loves it too much. He loves it more than games. I think it's safe to say he loves it more than games because from the jump, he's always been trying to turn games into that, right? Much like Daisuke at Guilty Gear wanted to make a weird shitty MOBA, but instead made a fighting game. Accidentally, sure. And then made his weird shitty MOBA and everyone went, no, stop. Go back to fighting games. Much like that,

if Hideo Kojima ever goes and makes a movie, everyone will yell at him, no, don't, stop. And go back to making video games, please. I mean, the whole time we've been looking at it and going, well, the end result of what he makes is video games. Therefore, that must be the highest priority, right? But you know, forgetting that he put fucking Kurt Russell's face on the goddamn cover, every portrait is just straight up a screenshot from back in the day in Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake of just a real actor. And putting the credits the way they do, the cinematic, the bars, like every moment, every opportunity to drop a casting note to make it like your video game is a movie, you know, is just been taken at all corners. So it's like he's always wanted the Hollywood life.

And games are just the medium that he's gotten his hands on. Like Death Stranding, I don't know how you could like do so long winded how like how what would the fucking how would you like even if you cut all the scenes of Death Stranding and it was just people talking to each other about bullshit in a room, that's like five hours. Yeah, like cutting all the parts out where stuff happens. So like the I thought about this, I actually gave it a second and I said, I'm like, what would the least train wreck outcome be for something like this, given how insanely massive and in depth that story is. And I think it would be to accept that you're not going to introduce

the world, get us familiar and solve the problem with the interpersonal relationships all in two and a half hours. No, no, it's not find one delivery for one person for one special thing in one location that involves him having to face the dangers of the world and make no attempt to resolve it whatsoever. I know exactly what you can do then. The story of the Death Stranding film is the story of one delivery man attempting to deliver a pizza and the trials and tribulations in getting across the United States in order to deliver that pizza and the dangers he would have to avoid. Sure. At one point, mulling the pizza and putting someone's corpse beneath it. Yeah, even right. Hey, you're going

that way. Cool. Can you stop off by the crematorium? And then he has to, you know, he'll stop by various places to rest and then he'll talk to a series of zany characters. Minimal vague mention of this Death Stranding. Minimal dialogue in general, though. Lotta, lotta, lotta just taking it all in, right? Did you watch Yoshi Stranding? I did not. Okay, there's a great animation that popped up on the trash, the fucking garbage streaming that was Yoshi walking around with Baby Mario as BB on his chest in a world where Mario and Death Stranding are together. And it is fantastic. A bunch of it is by, yeah, it's by NCH Productions. A bunch of it is Yoshi walking through, like, Mario settings with Death Stranding shit happening in them, obviously. But like,

you can make a thing where you kind of have a quiet character just dealing with their shit and not trying to work in the bit with America's Samantha Strand, or the mom, or the president, or Hartman, or the cause of the chiral reign. And actually, this movie's already been made. It's called The Road. Oh, God. Yeah, sure. Have you, have you seen The Road? I sure have. And how it how it starts in the wasteland. And then they flash back to the event. Oh, yeah. The road is, yeah, literally just do that. But instead of the cannibals, it's BTs. You certainly could. You certainly could. But that's what it is, right? In order to give this the biggest benefit of the doubt I can, it has to not try to summarize the world and fix the problem.

It needs to just show a delivery happening in the middle of this world, you know, maybe he has to escort somebody or some shit. But like, you just keep it at that level. And it's like, yeah, go into the game if you want to find out more like, fuck it. That's it. Hey, by the way, now that I've mentioned the movie, The Road, it's a good movie. If you decide to look up The Road after this podcast, if you are easily emotionally damaged by warning, warning, warning, warning. It is a sad, depressing, awful movie that will make you feel bad in your chest. No, fair fucking warning. If you're, yeah, if you're going to watch The Road and you haven't watched The Road yet, prep yourself. You're going into some shit. Anyway,

I remember watching it because like, I'll Last of Us is based on The Road and then I finished The Road and my pants Last of Us is fucking pussy. It's compared to this shit. Like, oh, yeah, I mean, it's no Dear Zachary, but it's like fucking, you know what I mean? Like, it's a movie. It's not a documentary, but it's still like, it hits. It hits. So beyond that, just a couple other things. Oh, yeah, quick announcement. Hey, thems high fighting herds is free today on the Epic Game Store. Go get it. Cool. That's the free today as of Monday, what, the 20th? Yeah. 19.

Hope, yeah, they're doing giveaway for free games. Go get the good game, good horse game, good fighting game, good. They announced, modus games announced God of Rock, which is a looks to be like a rhythm based fighting game. And the cut of his gym is pretty interesting. The trailer kind of shows off this setting where it's a rhythm game note chart, and you have to hit the keys accordingly to build, to attack each other. And every time somebody fucks up, they like, as long as you're both playing perfectly. So imagine if we both have our own guitar hero note charts, right? Excuse me, I'm coughing.

Oh, that was weird. Because I could tell you were coughing, but it was silent. All I could hear was the click of the mouse. So not that mouse, the mute thing. So as long as we're both playing perfectly, we're parrying and blocking and attacking each other and at a stalemate. When I fuck up, I take damage on a note that you successfully landed, right? And then as we play, we build up meter, we get access to moves and specials. And the the it's, there's not a song that plays to the end, and you have to do better than the opponent. The song, the fight only ends when someone dies. Okay. So the rhythm part of it is it's the method of play, but it's still a versus game, you know, it's a zero sum, in other words.

Yeah, God of Rock seems pretty interesting. And I guess like use of meter for star power and shit like that could be fun. There's been a couple of rhythm fighting game ideas in that have tried some stuff out. I remember beat boxers. How long are the matches actually lasting? I don't know. As you said, it doesn't stop until somebody dies. I mean, again, I don't know. It's just one trailer kind of introducing the concept. So there's no real way to tell, but we'll have to see. But conceptually seems pretty interesting. Visually, it's got a cool style. And, you know, Modus games, they also made mecha override, the mecha fighting game, which was pretty solid. It was fun. So, yeah, hope and forget things like this. And I always I always like when fighting games and rhythm can

sync up and you can do musical things like that's always dope. So check that out. There was an interview talking with Valve about the Steam Deck. And they said, don't expect a second gen hardware upgrade anytime soon. If anything, they'll just slowly tweak it to maybe improve the screen or the battery life. But they're going to they're going to stick with this one skew for a while. Yeah, you want to keep that for a couple years. Yeah. No, that's I mean, it makes sense. Because also, like, if you ever feel like, God damn it, why did I buy this now? The new one was just around the horizon. Yeah, that sucks. That sucks, right? And furthermore, as a platform that is playing

whatever works on Steam, the goal is not to have a generation like a console generation, it's to have a portable PC. So it makes no sense to like cut yourself off there, if you're aiming for a completely different type of all encompassing library. So yeah, just hard confirmation on that pretty good, ultimately. Um, if they do, um, yeah, if they do, I like to kind of fix things over time and it's like, oh, yeah, the battery got a little bit better. That's cool and such. The thing is, in the same interview, though, they said that they're trying to make a Steam Controller to happen. So, okay, can all be winners. The Steam Deck controls are excellent.

Ah, so if they made a Steam Deck, if they made a Steam Controller to that had that was basically as good as the Steam Deck controls, that would be excellent. That would be a great controller. That being said, the current controllers we have are pretty good. Yeah. The placement of the little touch pads on the deck is excellent and works for tons and tons of stuff. I would love to see a Steam Controller, too, that felt as good as a real controller. I've gotten quite used to and I'm comfortable with the Xbox, you know, but the new X-Bone, X-X, rather, version with the D-Pad, I hate that shit, but, um, the DualSense, obviously, great controller. I just, you know, want it to not fucking break.

If we could just get a durable version of that. Well, if you want to pay 300 bucks, for the fucking fancy version coming out at the end of January. Which does not say that it addresses resilience. It's addressing a couple other things, but I don't know that it's going to survive any harder. I'll let you know. Yeah, I'm afraid to take the plunge and have it fucking, you know, also break like the others did. Yeah, anyways, that's about that. And then beyond that, I mean, and Miner, not much this, but, you know, Carmack, Mr. VR, is leaving Metta and said that this is ending his decade in VR. And it just kind of got me wondering, like, so clearly VR is not where he was pointing at the stands hoping it would get to. But what, like, and Facebook is fucking

bleeding, hemorrhaging, doing bad, trying to keep VR relevant. I don't think there was ever going to be room at the table for a true, like, third platform for people. But like, VR is clearly here, right? And it's not gone the way of the curved 3D TV or whatever. Like, no, it has gone a much weirder way. As like a hyper niche enthusiast product. Yes. And when they were like, Hey, let's, let's figure out how we can sell this to mom and pop. I know. Why don't we make it so that they can have the worst grocery shopping experience imaginable with every ad we can jam into their eyes? People love that. Right. It's gotten smaller, lighter, portable, better battery life, better screen quality, optional plugin. It's gotten a lot

of the problems out of the way. And as they continue to like streamline it, that's great. But even in the perfect, like, just put a pair of glasses on, and you're good to go, Jordy LeFord style, you know, world where you get the perfect product at whatever the cost would be. I don't know how you would incorporate that into the average living room, unless you had some completely new, super addictive activity associated with it, that you could only get there. So remember when we were talking about Stadia, and I made a little gag about like, hey, you know, Stadia released in a time period in which everyone was spending more money on video games,

and you couldn't buy competing consoles. So it was like the absolute optimal time for Stadia conceivable, and it still was a dismal failure. Like meta and all that meta versus shit has been percolating in us in a fucking society in which there was a good year and a half in which a good proportion of the population was convinced that if they walked outside their door, they would literally die, like on the spot. And in that context, VR still totally failed to catch on in the mainstream. And all mainstream like, hey, what if you didn't have to expose yourself to a deadly disease? What if you went to a concert or a store with your VR headset have been the, like, they've been so bad that the response has been, I'm going to put a mask on and risk it rather than fucking

deal with the VR. I mean, look, so basically then until you can go to Best Buy and get a super light perfect headset with 4k and everything's good on it, and it comes bundled in with an autoblow with full on it that needs it needs to come in with a dick sucking machine bundled with an autoblow and full on buttplug.io support. Yeah. We're not there. We're just not there. Like, if they just said, Hey, here's the VR machine for getting your fucking dick sucked. But also, I bet that would sell a lot. But like, but like, you got to find the angle, right? Like, that's the angle. I just told you what the angle was. No, clearly, that's what the angle is. But what I mean is, like, you're that sitting on the shelf in a Best Buy is a world that America's

not ready for. You can't have the add on. I think the add on can't just be sitting in the sex shop. You got to find a way to get that on the shelf. You know, I think, I think America is ready for the dick sucker 5000 Don Quixote in Japan puts a couple of curtains up and says you go back there and you find what you want. Right. The rest of that store family friendly. But we got a little fucking we got the saloon doors. Right. Maybe it's time for the return of the saloon doors. All right. So back in the day during prohibition, you couldn't sell booze. You couldn't sell alcohol. All right. But what you could sell was a large brick of frozen fruit juice and a bottle and instructions to not put this and leave it to ferment in your fridge for X amount of days.

And don't put this yeast that we've included with it into it, because then it might turn into wine incredible in a sim in a similar thing. You can have the dick sucker 5000 be called the the the the tiny man's pediatric machine in which it is a massage. Thank you. Is a foot massage. This is what I was getting at normally small feet. This is where this I'm saying the the be it a Harry Potter wand broomstick rather or a Hitachi neck massager. Yeah. Right. Plugs into the wall. No going back from that. Right. Like you need an angle to get it on the shelf at Best Buy. And this is this is what I'm talking about. Right. It is a it is a immersive VR experience for people with hands too small for conventional hand massagers.

And then you look at it and you're like, wow, your hand has to be really long. And and and again, also on the packaging, this hand massager now included with buttplug.io support because that's what the name of the fucking plug it is. Um, yeah, I just looking back on it, you know, it's like VR is here and it's going to continue to improve, you know, but to catch on in the average American household, even in its best form, it needs transformation. It needs to go to the next level. It needs to be pair of glasses too. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's that you need to also like candle polisher. Oh, that's so good. That's so good. Also, it needs to have optional give up mode.

Or I still am worried about someone opening the door. Like I need a semi-transparent, semi-sound like like past through what it what it needs is a big red button on the side that if you slap it, the headset explodes killing you instantly. That'll do. Just just a kill switch will do just as well. You'll never know. You'll never know. Yeah. Wonderful. Um, let's take some letters. Hey, if you just want to send in a letter, you can send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com. That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com. The sicko mode button. Yeah.

Oh, man. You see, Karmak, you're getting out, you're getting out while the getting's good. Really, that's the problem. Karmak wanted to do crazy technical future shit and then he saw his fucking dream device turn into the most embarrassing ad machine invented by a human ever. I'd leave to dude wants to go build rocket ships and shit. I mean, yo, well, shout outs to the port websites. They've adapted to this new changing landscape to anything. They figured it out, you know, like, oh, we see you're on a headset. Here you go. And everyone's got those 3D cameras out and they're doing their thing. Um, all right, I have not I have not watched VR pornography. Apparently it is like very

disturbing. Oh, dude, I had to I had to fucking I had to check it out. Is it weird? It's it's odd, but it is if you're OK, if you've never used VR before, like if you give that to like, I don't know, like fucking Joe lunch pail, right, you're gonna like he's going to lose his mind. It's the craziest. It's a danger. It's a danger. If you I was impression that losing your body sensation because you don't fit the body of the performer is super weird. So if you're if you are used to like VR environments and shit, and you can tell the difference between an actual real environment versus just a 360 photo around you, it kind of just reads like a shitty 360 video that's playing, right? You don't actually have any sense of three

dimensions going on there. But yeah, if you're not if your brain is not can't tell the difference between those two things, you're done. You're it's over. You're fucking you're lost forever. You know, but but as you it would be one of the the whatever the the connoisseur player, like, you know what I mean? Like, you know, you would be able to tell Oh, someone stuck a fucking tripod 3d camera in the middle of a porn shoot. And it's it's it ain't much, you know. But yeah, had to know. So let's go with the emails. Yeah. Castle super beast mail at gmail.com castle super beast mail at gmail.com. All right, we got one coming in from Big Black Bank. Hi. Shout out. Hey, man. What's

up? What's up? Dear card. That guy. Yeah, I love his name. It's great. Dear Cardinal Woolsey and St. Patrick, inspired by this move, this last week's discussion of really discovering the top five movie, the thing, how and how you need a flow chart or flow chart for your first watch. I'd like to recommend the movie primer. If you haven't seen it, it's almost a 20 year old movie that was made for seven grand. And it's basically the most pure time travel movie ever made. Oh, I've heard of this. I talked about it on the podcast some time ago. Yeah, yeah, from you. That is to say the plot completely derails halfway through and from a traditional three act structure. And it doesn't work anymore because of time travel. I described the second

half as being a complicated stand battle. But you don't know the rules until a YouTube video explains it to you later. It's a fun ride. And in hindsight, it's crazy watching someone make a proof of concept and ensure the traditional script writing experience. Do you have a favorite media that's basically I want to see what X would look like despite how potentially disorienting the final product would be. So not quite, but just on the answer to that, I watched it I saw years ago, and I brought it up on the podcast. And yeah, I described it as like one of the best time travel movies ever made because it's not time travel as a like plot device for, you know, this love story or this like action happening or this world saving thing. It's time travel made

by time traveling nerds as writers that wanted to write down how fucked up and crazy it would be. And how wild it would be to have to stop and think about what time travel means. If you have it in a functioning in us in the real world in a setting, low budget, but super interesting. And the best part is that it's on YouTube. So you can just literally just just YouTube primer movie 2004 or whatever it says or you know, and it's it's great. And then once you're finished watching it, go watch one of the breakdowns on what actually happened. But it's it's probably the best time travel movie, because it's made by time travel nerds. And and yeah, it's not and it's not just like we

have to put this in, you know, so sorry, after you after you know, just I'll take the opportunity to reiterate. Go do it. Go watch it. Saw a fucking Tik Tok the other day of somebody like yelling at fucking Marvel in game going, this person can't be here. It breaks the own time travel rules. Time travel rules are stupid. I think that film even went out of its way to be like stupid time travel rules are dumb. Don't worry about it. I mean, it's it often just comes down to where's the camera going? Is it following the traveler or is it following the world? And you all need to watch Back to the Future. That movie makes no fucking sense. I don't give a shit. Yeah. But but like you just, you know, if the camera is the most important aspect of any time traveling

story. But that being said, all of the stuff you know about it into account, this is just a really fun, low ass, low budget movie. So primer, P R I M E R as in like putting that a primer coat of paint. Okay. There was one that was talking about I'm looking at a diagram of time travel on this thing and it is Oh, what? Okay, well, I'm not going to watch the movie. Okay. I didn't watch the movie the last time I recommended it to me. Fine. Fine. Fine. If you're hearing this and you are interested, watch it first and then go break down what you're looking at. Because it's the it's the thing is, like I said, like it's better time travel storytelling than anyone has ever made that I've seen. So yeah. Here's one coming in from Matt says, they're

William Pat, I have no funny names to offer. Self caused disappointment, been listening and enjoying the podcast for a long time never written in. So it's time to change that. A while ago, I was listening to a video on YouTube while working. Someone mentioned that they had started playing Gradius Eternity. I found it curious that it said that a new Gradius game came out and made a mental note to look it up later before it dawned on me. They actually said great ace attorney. And I had simply misheard them. Gradius Eternity. Gradius Eternity. That explains why I couldn't find it was I was typing it in. Wow, no, you just did it to me. You fucking asshole. Have you ever been similarly disappointed by your own mishearing or misunderstanding of

something? Just now. Yeah, it just happened. Just now. That's a particularly unique one. I mean, not really similar in mishearing, but like I did accidentally, whenever I talk about Radiant Silvergun and Icaruga, I referred to them as a trilogy from G rev because there was another game called Judgment Silver Sword for the Wonder Swan, and it was not made by the same people. It's just a homage send up. It's not actually a trilogy. So I have misled the two people that actually heard me talk about that shmup one time for the Wonder Swan. Criminal, I know. How could I ever forgive myself? Yeah, now there should be a game called Gradius Eternity. There should. All right, that'll do. I'm gonna get back to Ontario before Ontario gets back to me.

Works for me. Everybody have a happy holidays. you