Castle Super Beast - CSB 218: Shame The Cat's Pathetic Tits

Starting point is 00:00:00 [♪ Music Plays What is up can you fucking believe zelda comes up this week is it this week it's fucking Friday Jesus fucking like that's how you know we've become old fucking men that like we'll see like wow there's a zelda oh it's gonna come out in a year and a half a bummer that could be a while odd oh wait so it's now damn I was not paying attention like I remember when street fighter six got announced and like the release date was like six and a half months away I'm like oh that's gonna be oh that's gonna be terrible to win oh no that's in like three weeks I think it kind of snuck up and I think the impact of it is somewhat less from what it would be if it were a brand new I think it's a sequel I think it's a little less of an impact it's kind of like a major is mass kidding I mean breath of the wild is still obviously a massive fucking deal but because this is breath of the wild to it doesn't hit the same way as a completely new zelda entry would have I think yeah and then some remixes of those concepts you know yeah so here's the fun thing I didn't stream breath of the wild hmm yes neither did I so that was that was before we were just live broadcasting at all times so like that's a totally different fucking experience like my experience with breath of the wild was hanging out with my dumb ass friends on discord and being like would you do I found a goddamn fire sword behind the the cave next to the stables wow cool I just got hit by lightning etc.

Starting point is 00:02:33 My hope is that like the moment to like the moment to moment feel despite the fact that major is is like you know Ocarina to the moment to moment doesn't feel like it because of like the time pacing and all that stuff that you know makes it overall a unique experience you still got to do a tour of dungeons and do the zelda stuff but they do they do a lot to make it feel as if you're playing a very different thing and yeah major is mass is a fucking major is mass might be one of the most different games that is actually the same game as its prequel exactly and I think that's probably a result of them going we need to make sure nobody thinks this is just the same thing they just did you know so they went extra hard with the format change I'm hoping that breath of the wild tears of the kingdom breath of the wild to just say breath of the wild to I'm hoping that it has a similar feeling so that like you know it's not like is most of the breath of the wild is you know wilderness one wandering open worlding kiting and and and you know going into those those those ancient you know temples and it's kind of like if there's a major gameplay hook that'll make this pace a little different or make it feel really fresh that'd be a good call so I certainly hope you want to do you want to hey do you want to laugh at me being a stupid idiot sure always and having no pension for subtlety it was like three days ago when I understood tears of the kingdom as a subtitle what am I camera tears of the kingdom wait because of the sky no I think you made that up no I did not make that up no that's that's because there's the ground and the sky no that's your stupid brain that's that's not stupid that's smart it's it's even more embarrassing that you thought you were on to something and then proclaimed it as if you want to something

Starting point is 00:04:45 it's it's not it's not that you whiffed on an obvious concept it's that you invented a completely nonsense concept and you're now delivering it with confidence nonsense that's tears does the top and the bottom um yeah um no you're not responsible for raising a small human shortly so you are not cooking you have to tell me my ideas are good you are there is nothing in the pot you're dry you're dry heating this pot with no water and no get out of the kitchen oh come on all right well in any case yeah you know else is out darkest out right now it is 1.0 officially and I clicked it bought it it's because it's now on steam and I'm like wait fuck I already can I transfer my save from my but but but um Hades let you do that yeah cuz cuz yeah so the answer is not no the answer is maybe you know maybe the answer is maybe because you can do that right like I was super happy to see that in Hades they'd let you upload and cloud download your save once you switched over and if I can do that from here with the epic game store version that'd be fucking fantastic cuz I I'm down to support I love darkest dungeon enough that I'll buy I bought it again anyways and I just don't want to restart the progress if I don't have to I'll say it again just start a new save yeah but I don't want to why you played it I mean a long time ago but like oh not a long time I mean whenever the fucking you know release was but I don't want to do that stuff again I don't want to do it again I wanted I want to continue I enjoy it but I want to continue where I left off I don't feel like doing it again so I feel really conflicted I mean I'm gonna I'm gonna hold up my hand here right I have not played Darkest Dungeon 2 since early access right I played it for a couple days then and I'm like no waiting and now is now right and I feel really conflicted because I was surprised to see mostly positive on the steam page instead of like very

Starting point is 00:07:01 positive or you know overwhelmingly positive or whatever and as I go through it I'm torn because this is a problem that happens with sequels and it's weird to be on the other side because every negative review is they removed every single thing I liked from Darkest Dungeon 1 to make it more into a game that Pat likes right like who like it's just a bunch of people who wanted the consistent building of the Hamlet and the team and the management I as someone who and it's been turned into a run game that's interesting I mean it's still mostly positive there there if there's a yeah and over because people around the time when it revealed its gameplay I think we all kind of saw that if you're like I'm someone who loved the fuck out of Darkest Dungeon 1 I have no problem with the Hamlet removal slash change there the cart thing my problem with that is the controlling of it but I don't mind the the overall narrative change in the idea of like now we're moving on a journey ourselves as opposed to like coming back to home base I think that's fine I also think that the gameplay from from moment to moment remains exciting and consistent for all the same good reasons and overall like you're not missing any of that like I feel like tension and sense of progression either and the backstories they added for the characters are fucking on a really awesome new aspect as well totally so it's just like I remember when like Resident Evil changed yeah and Resident Evil changed from a great series of games into a type of game that was a lot more people were into right straight up mainstreamed it and there are a lot of people me included like no I want the old one no they shouldn't have made it like this they should have made it like the old one the old one was better and people were like yeah but I didn't like the old one I like the new one this is better

Starting point is 00:09:13 right because everyone's tastes are different I look at Darkest Dungeon 2 and I go yeah I prefer like you know the runs in the new game are two hours maybe three hours if you have a really incredibly excellent run right I way prefer that then what like Darkest Dungeon 1 I felt like I dump eight hours into it and be like oh cool I'm fucked time to start over because I just I ran into a series of inescapable failures yeah no I definitely think that the like the frame the Hamlet is just the container for the gameplay that you know for the for the quests you do and if the container changes that doesn't fundamentally like take apart what the the moments moment gameplay should be about you know I think you can take that Darkest Dungeon style like put the party together and crawl through it and you can make it running through a chariot you can make it of just a full on narrative if you want it there's a lot of different ways you can present that as long as when the time comes to walk through the dungeon and or get into fights and shit you're doing it in that that that manner you know yeah I don't I don't think that's much of a big deal overall I also think you know we're gonna see what happens with the chapters expanding on each other and stuff but this is I don't think it's just something you're gonna like more I think overall it's probably gonna be I can see this being a more popular game and I mean if you do want Darkest Dungeon one two if that phrasing makes any sense there is the black reliquary mod which is like a completely new game which coincidentally also features the audio stylings of peach saliva as one of the characters there yeah that was an insane overhaul mod with just new everything across the board yeah but no fucking awesome to see it in 1.0 I'm gonna take a look and really really hope I can transfer that shit I don't think it's unreasonable for me to hope that I didn't lose my progress

Starting point is 00:11:29 you know I took a quick look over here and I can see that I put what is there okay the experimental I have seven hours on 752 and then Darkest Dungeon 2 regular I see have 53 on I'm gonna you know we can probably shake a little bit of that down for just like pause and walk away time but definitely like a lot of hours there just fucking around on that initial thing you know so the way you go super hard on the the first version of early access games actually fairly fascinating to me it's a taste of a thing that I that is like oh this like hooks me hard and I just want more and more and more of it until I've had my fill or until there's nothing else for me to really get from it and then you know later it comes and it's like well yeah let's let's do it I'm down and I understand it I just again I hope that there's a way for me to lot not lose everything you know again Hades was a perfect situation where you know like I have the cloud existed that that allowed me to not lose anything but I don't know what to say man I loved it and when I got a chance to try out the new one I'm like yeah let's go you know I feel I feel like I'm in the the absolutely absolutely strangest place to talking to you about this because I don't think it is unreasonable to be able to transfer your save I don't I really I think that's that should be a average feature unless the one point 0 version yeah some kind of yeah yeah yeah you know absolutely yeah technical or dead souls I don't I don't hold it against that souls that my my my beta version of that is like there's new weapons and levels of the game version changes it's no absolutely say hey man the at some point because it's pretty often the like you go from point six to point seven or something you know saves are broken they're fucked you start new characters like last epoch does that every now and then like a new new like numbered version will just be like

Starting point is 00:13:40 nah your character is gone do it again right that kind of game it's a little more common so yeah I don't think it's unreasonable for them to try and have saved transfer over I think you're unreasonable for wanting your saves to transfer over because of the because of the the shenanigans with Hades what what's the difference in those two statements because you put you put you tend to put like a huge amount of hours yeah in into the like let's say version point three right like the very first early access build right maybe maybe the second build or the third build then you put it on the shelf for like a year right and then by the time you come back it's not like you were following it every version number every update you'd go back for you know five hours or whatever you always run in this issue or at least you do with Hades or the jump between the last time and this time is so enormous that it's like functionally a different game. So again if it if it is one of those cases where the the jump to one point oh is like such a massive content change them. Yeah like I would not expect that to carry over with dead cells is the example that I just mentioned right with Hades it wasn't a such and I was able to keep you know and and and and. To use the cloud but I mean I don't I promise you I don't think too hard about it I hear that there's a game and then I. They it's and they go here we have it out in early access and then I go cool and I play it and then I go wow this is really fun and then I finished playing it and then the next day I'm like what do I want to play right now and I go oh the new thing that I really

Starting point is 00:15:28 like so I go play it again and then I continue to do that because I'm interested and I want to play more of it because I'm having fun with it and then here we are like I'm playing the thing that is out because I'm enjoying it it's not a like there's no extra thought behind it so when we get to the point where I'm hoping that I can you know have the time and things that I've unlocked in the process of having fun with the game. I hope I can resume that I that's literally the end of the thought I unlocked some stuff I built up the. The story into move on locks with a lot of the extra classes that were made available in that first chapter I beat the first chapter in the heart and stuff and I'm like. I hope I can pick back up I don't know what to say here's to be. Darkest Dungeon status seven days ago Darkest Dungeon releases in one week we're putting together an info graphic we have a lot of console. There is I intended because I'm trying to understand is the steam then you'll be able to transfer your Epic Games file because keep playing on your regular profile so so hey look here so yeah you will be able to transfer perfect awesome beautiful thank you hell yeah don't let's go that's fantastic thank you red hook.

Starting point is 00:16:48 The but but in terms of like the the pushback I'm seeing here I just want to know like so again just in terms of what's reasonable is the is the idea then should I like play some of it and go like this is really cool and then there's more to do there's more to unlock there's more content but then should I then go I really want to play this right now and I can but let me stop because I'm like I mean just go no don't go too far into it because it's early access I mean obviously it's going to depend on everybody's personal taste I tend to do what I tend to do is like I will see something on early access it just comes out and like oh wow I will try this right and I will play it for six to 10 hours usually one or two streams or like one stream and then like a little bit off stream and then I go I don't I'm pro like like my brain goes a little different with the roguelike like Hades or darkest dungeon but I go like I'm probably only going to play this once so I want that version to be the 1.0 version instead of like you know because you'll always encounter something fucked right so like last epochs a really good example right that's at point nine so it's almost done it's probably got like four months left whatever but it's it's getting there right um I played it on stream for a little while and ran into a situation where uh three four five times in a four hour session I couldn't pick up items off the ground it's a fairly fucking serious bug yeah as you mentioned yeah that's pretty severe yeah I took it and I fucking put it on the shelf for like yeah I'm going to come back to that once that shit is fixed if I were to encounter anything that severe I would probably also have major reservations about continuing right I would know that I'm in murky fucking progress territory that might go you know tits up on me any minute and then I'd be like yeah okay

Starting point is 00:18:46 if things are running smoothly like they did with Hades and like they did with darkest dungeon um I kind of like if I'm if I'm if I'm like looking at it like okay think about it like a demo is what I see some people are saying right that's like a demo will bring you up to a point and then stop you and go here's the end of the content for the demo thanks for enjoying it please play more when the full version comes out if that's what we were getting I'd that'd be fine to me too but the fact that I'm enjoying it and there's more to do makes me want to keep playing because there's more to do and when I go out I have a so you you're familiar with like the feeling of you know wanting to go hard on a game when it becomes available to you we've talked about this where stuff that we LPs we've started off camera and scheduling for things like that it's been a huge point of discussion for us over the last over the years of like how hard you go on a game as soon as it comes out so I know you know the feeling of wanting to play more would you describe it as accurate as like when there's like a hot new like like um when Dark Souls 3 came out and like I walked in to sit down to start you describe me as like vibrating yeah I would say so I would say I get excited yeah very much excited um so no I totally get it but I'm like I think I think I guess the biggest difference is like what your personal tolerance to to to jank and bugs is yours is probably really high I have a lot for for obvious obvious fucking reasons but I in these cases like I said if I ran into anything that I would consider a class or even high B

Starting point is 00:20:27 I would absolutely stop and go hmm right as you're mentioning with the last epoch I would totally not be able to pick up items and go okay hold on a minute this is fucked time to actually what killed me dude is I had to back out of the whole game turn it back on and then it happened again 20 minutes later and like this one's going back on the shelf this no no no yeah um but but I'm like I'm looking and so like yeah so some folks are here like no dude just stop right I was like okay cool so what's the right place to stop then if if so far this games first chapter has everything up to the first boss and you can unlock maybe three or four extra classes and then their full move list um and then there is a stopping point you can't go into a chapter two right so it does kind of feel um a bit like so if you played um ultra kill right did anyone here play ultra kill um and then it's an early access and then halfway through their progression say okay I'm not actually going to go to the end of that chapter where the early access chapter one link up stops I'm going to stop in that progression midway through and um wait for the next chapter two update to continue like did you arbitrarily pick a spot to go okay no more or did you play until you hit the like or did you play until you hit the point that Hikita wanted you to hit at the end of chapter one and then go all right well now chapter two I hit two stopping points for ultra kill uh on stream the first stopping point was bro I can't beat V1 like I that I don't know if it was a bad night because I smoked him the second stream but um just can't beat him like okay well I'm not going to spend five hours on this on the second thing I went to the end of um whatever chapter two thing they had at the time and then I'm like no I'm gonna like once I get a certain chunk how do I what's my what's my break oh I can tell you exactly what my breaking point is

Starting point is 00:22:32 my breaking point is when I encounter something in the early access game right so darkest dungeon two is a really good example because I remember the exact second that I made the decision where it's not the natural stopping point it's when I would have encountered something but it's not done so when I was playing darkest dungeon two the day it came out there were like two of the of the characters that had the flashback things right they didn't all have them you could you could only I uh the the plague doctor was one and I forget what the other one but I was like oh I would like to go the vagrant no the cutthroat the cutthroat I think that's what I was um and I and but I wanted to do the other ones it's like well they aren't in the game yet and I'm like oh this is interfering with like the natural way I would play the game like the game has actually like got put a hand in front of my face and going stop right and when that happens I go and that is the the last epoch bug is some is I feel like that's like a little man going no stop it you can't pick up items okay with with ultra kill it was hitting hitting the end of the early access content okay because like ultra kills like fairly strange and that it's early access levels come out and feel like completely fucking finished yeah that's and that's kind of what I'm trying to get at here is that a big part of this is also that I don't remember hitting anything that felt like fucking construction sign up go men go go minus I you know no continuing past this point I don't really recall hitting that I kind of just felt like I hit the boss and then at the end of the boss was well that's the end of this early access kind of chapter which reminded me of how ultra kill one about it as well which is kind of like here's chapter one it's also early access but like the feeling and again I who's to say unless we ask each developer but the feeling I get I got was that they what they give you an early access is what they would expect you to play

Starting point is 00:24:46 and like if there was a whole part of like the framework of chapter two and then like you know like like there if you could start if you could really actually see the skeletons of like the development build for the future that'd be one thing but what gets released on early access see it tends I feel like it tends to be the developer expects people to play it it's here the content oh yeah constantly yeah so I don't for Hades I hit the I hit the hydra and I beat the hydra yeah and then I ran I think I ran it twice again and realized oh the hydra is the end right and then I'm like okay Hades you can now go up onto the shelf until you're done by I guess I guess I would say the mentality that it is is like so I am I'm I'm kick starting it yeah and then they gave me like access to the beta but the beta and I go in and I fuck with the beta and I go okay that's enough for you go away right and the but the again the beta with the limited content will have that stopping point so yeah the part with the hydra for example it took me a while to get to the hydra and then to be able to beat it so I spent a lot of time in early Hades like literally just not maybe even making it there you know whether or not that's just because I'm not a good player or the balance was different at the time I that is the only way that's the only reason it could have been but it took me it took a while to get to that point so that I spent some time doing that too and I remember doing the runs and again there's content between runs there's new lines of dialogue and things to explore and unlock and conversations to have so you're like yeah each time I'm trying to hit that wherever the end of this like wherever the game's final point is right now the upper limit it's challenging enough to keep trying to get back to it

Starting point is 00:26:35 so there's a lot of reasons to just be like alright let's just do another run you know so yeah no in any case ultimately that's kind of what it comes down to is just like I feel like if the developer puts out an amount of content and then goes this is the early access version there's more they could show you but the thing they're releasing is like what they are comfortable being public I also expect that they expect people are going to play that and I don't look at an early access build and go okay mentally where's the arbitrary stopping point depends on the game right our ultra kill doesn't intend for you to stop in the middle of your first taste of it while it's at early access but no if people are currently suggesting that I do that for every early access game I don't think that's very reasonable right so to me I'm just like I know you put the message up certainly though with the warning that says hey Barlow's Gate 3 at your own peril you might lose content and that I'm fully aware of my hope is just I really hope I can save this cut this and bring it over and migrate it so that I don't lose anything if I couldn't and we didn't we found out that my save was going to be gone then I would have to restart because the game is too fucking good to not well obviously but that'd be the end of that you know but I think the devs will tell you with their early access release posts and game like here's what we expect and want and are hoping you guys to play and that's the content they hand you

Starting point is 00:28:09 I don't think they expect you to necessarily put up a little like okay that's enough you know you can do that but it's going to change from game to game you know imagine if silk song was like coming out in a way where like they were adding levels to that thinking we know how giant it's going to be and you're going through it and like you don't even know where the end of the early access build is because the two areas available to you take up your entire time and focus and are challenging enough anyway that you can just keep working on those two areas you know so I have to say like the silk song example you use is actually like wildly fucked because that's what it was supposed to be with the DLC 3 like the gods and fucking gods and bugs or whatever the fuck DLC where you fight all the super bosses like one of the reasons people went so hard on that is they were like oh I'm going to get super good for when silk song comes out as DLC ooh here it comes oh fuck it just there was too much you know and now we're in this we're in that that part where maybe people have been waiting so long that the hype fades and becomes you know animosity it's going to half life too it's already there it's already definitely becoming a like when you say silk song it's not excitement where I'm seeing from people I'm it's it's god damn it you know and this and clown makeup yeah clown at the state like the the philosophy that they have for the amount of content they put into their stuff is so unlike the rest of the industry and it's also it's also not reasonable they it's too much you know it really is it's giving you so much more than you really need I think people would probably have been satisfied with like that for with silk song being like here it is you can play it we're going to keep working on it in the background

Starting point is 00:30:18 but like we the the the type of work ethic they've shown is one that would release the silk song would have come out and it would have been a bit like a team ninja game where the game is awesome and they would quality of life it into perfection right but I they could have easily had that because you know all the neo games and everything in that series is like no no one's hating like the first version of that we're having fun with but we know it's going to get quality of life unbelievably over the course of its life they could have definitely have done that with this and that would have been an interesting really case for this discussion we're having because then it's like alright so if you're playing early access fucking silk song where do you decide to put the fucking you know pump the brakes and go personally I'm going to stop here right anyway it's interesting though because yeah I think when when a game that I'm excited for like drops in early access and they give you more than just a demo more than just a taste they give you like a whole first level or a second level or something I mean fuck man I'm gonna you know I'm just gonna play what my heart feels like playing and yeah it's why sons of the forest is so fucking confusing because sons of the forest is like this is 1.0 but it's a 1.0 they didn't feel confident in so what the fuck is the game fucking done or not it's it's so it's so goddamn weird I don't know this this world of early access is confusing though it's it's different from the one that I'm used to that I grew up with this is different it is uncomfortable I'm not sure what to make of it in any case yeah you know I see folks try to make the analogy with like oh labbing with demo characters and I mean yeah I'm playing Luke and Ryu and fucking around and whatever but it's but it's not the same thing right like a demo is effectively again a deliberate slice you're getting with an endpoint meant to tease you if an early act that demo is a complete thing

Starting point is 00:32:36 I don't think you guys are necessarily getting it well anyway I'm talking to a bunch of people and you all have some anyway whatever the point the point is is fucking go get darkest dungeon to it's a good ass game you should buy it and play it I'm gonna go pretty hard on that but are you but I'm shocked that's not the only thing to go hard on because speaking of returning to things I finally returned to and hit the credits in vampire survivors oh fuck yeah and I did so after unlocking everything I could in 20 minutes till dawn so I got all the stuff in that and I think it seems like it only has three stages and there's a couple unlocks but you know I played a bunch of it had my fill and it was it was fun so I went back to vampire survivors and and I remembered something that I kind of there was a problem I was having with the game that I didn't and I forgot about and because I come back to it like you know I play a game like a and then like a month or two would pass and I play a bit more and then and I finally kind of remembered what that problem was and now I've overcome it I didn't hit the credits when I was playing it before but I unlocked a ton of shit right yeah you unlock a fucking stupid amount of shit and I hit major plot moments of you know like lore being dropped in cinematic one off levels and things like that but I realized that I think what happened was at a point I got the game introduces like from the moment you you after you start after you unlock like a bunch of the characters and a bunch of different variations for each stage it introduces like there's all the unlocks you can work on but then there's all the power ups and then there's all the secrets and the like there's a you know a handful of different things that are places you can put your attention and I wasn't sure what my priority list should be because you're kind of just like I don't know what do you want right like are some of these achievements or are they

Starting point is 00:34:51 progress points you know and so what I kind of went was okay my next focus since I've gotten the characters that I can see available then I started getting and then I went to all the the the coffins and I unlocked all the coffins and then like did a lot of then I did some of those bosses and plot things and then the next point of seeming progress was now try to unlock all of the secret items right that were in each hole fucking extra task in each stage right and so what I ended up doing was I unlocked them just about all of them or as many as I could except for the one in the bone zone because it's really fucking hard and the bone zone is really fucking hard so I stopped playing the game when I hit the bone zone trying to unlock the thing there and then came back and did some more of bone zoning trying to get these the secret item there got nowhere got nowhere close and then unlocked I think like more power ups in the progress but like I spent a bunch of time there and then stopped again and then I kind of forgot what my goal was upon returning and then I booted it up and again and I was like oh yeah there's still one secret available in the bone zone okay and I just hit my head against it forever with nothing happening and I was like this is weird because the progression and the feeling of powering up and like unlocking things has now hit a complete wall I have stopped I am not moving forward at all Vampire Survivors is wild because it has a exponential curve of character power like other games don't do that where you start getting like every game has you start to get really strong in the early levels and then you start to slow it down so it's you know Vampire Survivors you start getting stronger faster and faster as you get like that's weird but games don't do that but each successive run was not yielding me anything useful because I was no I maxed out all the available power ups I had and then

Starting point is 00:37:17 I had access to like golden eggs that I could buy I guess for 10k a pop but like this is a stat increase on your character overall I'm like that can't be what I'm supposed to be doing here you know so I just hit the wall on that and collecting the artifacts from each thing I think I only had one card of the Arcana because it was also like oh the Arcana just got introduced and I was like great how do I get more and couldn't couldn't figure out what was next you know so anyway came coming back to it again did that and I think I spent like couple days like just a couple days like going at it again with the bone zone then I was like something's wrong this is this is not what they intend for me to do here what am I missing and I that's when I went back and I was like okay let me just what are my what are the what's any other goal I can find and then again no the goal no I went back to the I went to the list of what I have achieved of achievements exactly and I was like let me just work on achievements instead of this thing and then through the achievements a bunch of shit started happening again I was like oh there's the power up in the I unlock the the torrent a box and then the box you weren't doing it like that oh dude that that achievement list is a strategy got it's it's it's the actual progress list for content to occur this the the yeah do you remember do you remember when it was an early access and every update for like four months I would go there's a new vampire survivors update and then I would post that I had gotten all the achievements in the new update which is weird for me because I don't usually care about that I mean I wasn't playing it early access but yeah yeah because all of those all of those achievements are like new thing new character new whatever yeah same thing with all their DLC so I was using so no so I was using it

Starting point is 00:39:17 initially but like when I was first going through it and unlocking all the characters and unlocking all the shit and then I hit the bone zone and then I hit the the story point where they introduce all these secret items to go get and then I was doing all of those and then I got stuck in that loop and that felt like I was supposed to get that through that list of objectives it felt like it was a higher priority thing and then after not playing for a while and come back to it I kept on that goal and then I didn't know I was like well I don't know what to do if I can't beat this one thing and then coming and then eventually it was like oh right the achievement list was how you were and it was just anyway so everything there then made sense and then like yeah I powered up just following the achievements and the achievement power ups then lead you back to having the ability to just crush soon to be animated series vampire survivors and then you get like you get some of those arcana cards that are the most broken insane shit where it's like here let's pull all of the collectibles on the stage towards you you no longer have to even worry about going to them you could just pop that when you feel like it every two minutes that is you know I am really torn because like there's a lot of arcanas that are fucked mm-hmm I'm torn as to whether or not awake or that one is the strongest because awake is the one where you get three extra lives and 5% extra per I thought that was the strongest and then I realized for me it's actually the one that puts money into life because you just pick up that's a good you pick up a cash bag and then you do you use game killer oh yeah yeah yeah yeah no I still killer stupid yeah it was fun for a bit but then I was like this not what I'm trying to do here you know I'm trying to get specific builds you know but anyway so overall now so I've beaten it and then and then I started the first deal see the mountain and unlock the samurai and I guess I'm going to continue on and see what I

Starting point is 00:41:16 am that you start playing those DLC characters and you get like the first new weapon you're like wow this new shit is great well the fact that the map is actually like a map that you have to navigate with building turns and like I'm like already like this is a different video game like I have to navigate where I'm going that's crazy yeah no it's quite a you know like I mean like okay this is what you're buying you're buying extra content with a lot with shit in it so far so good but I think the the game is odd because I don't think I've ever played a game where like progression changes what it's asking you to do or yours like the progression will switch from unlock as many characters as you can unlock as many weapons as you can beat each stage for half an hour beat the bonus stage now that you've unlocked these things go level up these weapons and then like like the things that it asks kind of like like once you get that list it just you know it it's a checklist but it introduces enough different things on the main menu and then on the character select screen and then on the stage select screen that like you're kind of able to pay attention to many different things as progress you know and yeah so I think that's kind of what led to me stalling out in the bone zone you know it's interesting about vampire survivors because we're talking about early access before that right and I never mentioned vampire survivors and in fact I just described the opposite of all of my other behavior with vampire survivors where every time a new update would come out I would hit every achievement and then be like okay waiting and all I can all I can think of is that like vampire survivors had the incredibly obvious distinction that 1.0 was just going to be another update

Starting point is 00:43:24 okay right okay because like the ending of the game wasn't like version 0.7 because I know it was like 0.6 and then you beat the angels and then the game would turn into version 666 and then would get scrambled and upside down and then he added another ending and then he added another ending characters disappear was it too easy or too hard what item do you want yadda yadda yeah yeah I think the simplest elegant thing you could do that would like probably have saved me would have been when you select the stages and it tells you like here's the secret items you haven't collected yet it could all the other stage achievements or things to unlock that have not been unlocked yet could be right there as well so like if I had to make if I had to make one change to vampire survivors it would be able to type in a cheat code to get the fucking secret characters that you need to be frame perfect on they actually did that so if I were to make a second change to vampire survivors it would be I would like to be able to check my achievements from inside the map that would be great and even on the character select screen as well our stage select screen when you're selecting it because I mean there's a bunch of like again music and which sprite you want and a bunch of stuff and it's like the goals you have at each stage like they're separated and then the ones you can see on the stage select are not the totality of them they're over in the unlock sheet that information can just be transposed over here too at which point as soon as you select

Starting point is 00:45:11 anything you can realize oh yeah I have a bullet point list of actually 10 things to do not just these two things so that would have been a quality of life that being said that's a fun ass game man I can't believe there was so much more from the point that I thought I was like near completion out at there always what's what's what's wild is that so I've been following this game from like pretty quickly and early access right throughout its life cycle just so the DLCs are like bigger pieces of content than ever then then you know like any update would have been like a DLC is like 0.6 and 0.7 and maybe 0.8 together but if you account for that vampire survivors has been continuously updating at the same speed the whole time like it's it's still updating at the same speed it wasn't early access it's just spread out a little bit into bigger chunks and so I fully expect another DLC in like two months or three months well I didn't even notice like the sprite redraws because like there's all you can what they did a trailer for that and it was like look and it's like one extra frame of walking yeah like like like shut up some of them drastically change when you go switch back to the old ones you can really see a huge deal you know but some of them are just like yeah we

Starting point is 00:46:48 made Domario's cape go from being behind him to now kind of in front of his chest that's that's it anyway yeah so putting some putting some time back into that I feel like early access went from being a joke to replacing Kickstarter as my weird game that I want to support location I could see that if you're interested in this thing you get as you see a trailer for it and then if you want to financially support it you can buy it and play it right now well the main thing is that also it's happening for sure that's that's the part that it's yeah because there are everyone everyone who backed more than five kick starters had one of those kick starters just fucking evaporate I have two that hurt me one is mighty number nine which never came out it's a shame it's super weird and then and then there was project Phoenix which they still send me updates on that shit now important to note if I go pull up my steam there absolutely are early access games here that have not updated in the last five years or so there's a there's at least one or two indie fighting games that are in early access with like here's two characters here's a stage you can play it and we did a video on the channel or something and I was like yeah let's see where this is going

Starting point is 00:48:24 and then nothing what what the fuck was the one called I want to say it was like no not no Queens gambit is that Netflix show right the chess show yeah that's a that's a that's a Netflix okay that's about girls playing chess there was a fighting game that had like two characters uh Queens conquest uh has been if I remember this was an early access thing and I don't know what the fuck happened with it oh okay hold on they had a March 21 21 update and then a May 2022 update okay okay no stuff's going on alright fair enough it's really funny to me when you see something that you thought was dead and there's an update and the update is functionally nothing and you're like I'm gonna fucking die before this project Phoenix still emails me every every like six months being like we're working on it and like I have never seen the game that was that was like the second Kickstarter I backed like eight years ago mmm yeah I mean go song did come out I played go song the other day the fuck you did no you didn't that was a dream I did I played I controlled the character

Starting point is 00:49:54 I made a couple jumps and I was like yep feels like Metroid you were hallucinating might have been that's a conceivable possibility this week apropos of nothing I got some friends had some tickets and invited me so I went to check out there's a Coheed and Cambria concert and guess what they're fucking awesome they're doing it I've heard good things great yeah I don't know if you remember rock band one they had their main song welcome home they give me give me me no nothing no fucking nothing it's great the vocalist is high pitched and they have comic books associated with their shit and it's all pretty fucking like sci-fi metal power yadda yadda awesome and they've always been one of those bands where I'm just like yeah I could easily just get into everything they're throwing down I remember listening to an album or two back in the day and I was like yeah no everything sounds great I just never there's no reason why I just never kept going but they have a sound that is really fun

Starting point is 00:51:29 and going to check them out live fucking still doing that sound still great I guess smaller venues than I would have anticipated because it was yeah not a huge huge it wasn't quite like the fucking muse show or whatever but now they it was cool and the one thing I guess I've noticed that that song is what I guess they're known for it's their biggest thing it's it was the one in rock band and yadda yadda and they didn't play it and I was like yeah okay I guess there's a bit of a like if you're a casual fan then you want to hear the one thing but if you're in there you're kind of like there for the lore of the recent graphic novel and you know it's I guess a bit like with Radiohead not playing creep or you know anytime there's a like that's the that's the radio casual thing we're not going to do it and it's like never forget every time this comes up never forget that fucking interview with Madonna in which she was like I fucking hate going to my concerts and people yell out like a virgin right I don't even know how to sing that song

Starting point is 00:52:37 shut the fuck up and sing the song Madonna you're a dancing clown for the people who paid your ticket it's it's like I'm like I get that you're over it because you've you've like you know had that thing and like it's it's it's the only it's what you're known for but man if they oh if the opening riff the opening links to that started the fucking place would have erupted it would have been pretty amazing I don't know I've heard I've heard it with you know it's I remember Neil Young would do that as well I've heard complaints about like Neil Young concerts or he just like it's like I'm exclusively doing my new shit nothing you know or care about sorry fuck you yeah you know I saw a fucking interview with one of the guys that led Zeppelin a couple years ago that was like we fucking hate stairway to heaven so much we regret writing the song we hate playing it it's the worst part of our concert and it's the worst part of our career but if we don't play it we are afraid that the crowd will kill us like rush the stage and tear us to pieces because when we when it looks like they're not going to play it

Starting point is 00:53:55 the crowd would start to get like nuts like aggro damn imagine how much worse it would feel if someone else stole it from you and started calling it their song I don't know what you're talking about actually led Zeppelin has gotten in trouble for theft of fucking music a couple over the course of their career is more than once no oh darn lawsuits that they lost for that matter so oh wow it's got to be real fucking rip off to lose one of those lawsuits not great but hey stairway to heaven though yeah no fuck did vanilla ice get the fuck away with it I mean I blame sugar night you know at the end of the day he was okay he was crafted so that's that but no is led Zeppelin is just one of the one of those classes of just like hey old black blues musicians what y'all got over there okay how about how about we do it this way how about I just take a little of that take a little mix plate mm-hmm put it over here and let's let's repackage that for the white man maybe I don't that's me yeah well can you repackage it for me I mean if that's what you'd be interested in yeah I haven't seen it but I've heard about the the Elvis movie where this is where Tom Hanks is playing the Colonel or whatever and he's like

Starting point is 00:55:25 there's a part where he looks at him dancing and he goes but that boy is white okay so no no no that's not what it is something like that I've actually seen this scene and it makes me want to watch the Elvis movie because they're playing Elvis's music on the radio and he's like yeah he's pretty good and he's on the phone and a guy goes no you don't get it boss that boy is white and then he like puts the phone down and it turns into Armageddon like where it slowly zooms in on his face and goes he's what and then it zooms in on like multiple other characters going oh he's what holy shit shit damn dude yeah hit him with the time to kill man you know it's like ladies and gentlemen of the jury now I want you to imagine that young girl was white oh fuck amazing amazing actual you haven't seen a time to kill y'all should go watch a time to kill it's probably fucking Sam Jackson's best performance I did see on the on I was someone was watching the Elvis movie on a plane and I saw the ending of it and I was like it's one of those bits where I was curious I'm like so what are they gonna do here right because this is approved and stamped and signed off on by the the the estate so there's no way we're zooming out on of a man on the toilet just in the pose

Starting point is 00:57:09 just pulling a thinker and then that's the end of that and it's like no final words of Elvis the king of rock yeah and all I saw I need to go to the bathroom like I was like what you know so like I was just glancing at someone else's like chair on the at the plane and like it's like he's like you know he's having like an argument with with his wife and then they're like oh you know think of Lisa Marie and then it's like but I know you're gonna keep on doing what you do or whatever and they just kind of like it's like it's a tense thing but then it turns into a yeah and then he kind of gets out and he walks on the tarmac and he gets on the plane real slow and then turns to like as if he knows right it's like he's boarding the plane to heaven and he gets on the plane and kind of slowly and then turns and does a wave and then he gets in and then the plane flies off to heaven it like it flies into the sky and it just fades and it's like and that was the last Elvis was ever heard of or seen ever there was no toilet shut up the plane flying off into heaven is like the creative editing they would have to do for like an Aliyah movie like the highly highly creative I take so much shit every time I get I get it I can't I can't get it I can't I can't I can't dude dude people get really mad

Starting point is 00:58:42 my friends get really mad we can't do it I get fucking I get hounded the fam gets real upset man like my black friends like yo ever like don't talk it's Aliyah she's an angel I'm wearing the airbrush the airbrushed shirt I'm wearing shows you that she's got the wings because she and it's like absolute tragedy it sucks it's just the problem is just that it was it was totally unavoidable there was no way it could have been avoided no one could have foreseen it I mean of all the it's just of all the like it's ripped away too young style stories and you'd like the final story with Aliyah is that she was arguing to carry more luggage onto a Cessna and the pilot was saying they were overloaded and they couldn't carry more and it was a big blow up fight that led to the pilot going fine we'll over crowd it and then they packed all her shit on and then obviously the plane was not fucking stable and that was that and it's like man that's the fucking way it happened really so it's it's tough man because it's it's just a high end Darwin award right it's that is that is functionally indistinguishable from Darwin award where guy loses his spark plug or his lighter and the car won't start so he puts a shotgun shell in his dash to to turn it on and then it blows his legs off and you go what the fuck you didn't think that would happen wait the pilot was also on coke I never heard that what is Ronald Reagan at fault I said cocaine Pat you're right powdered I'm sorry come on some Colombian guy at fault oh back then was it was it was his name fucking

Starting point is 01:01:00 it's pee something oh Escobar that Pablo Pablo Escobar Pablo Escobar was it Pablo Escobar's master plan I mean yes we go back to Reagan anyways but sure get your con get your contract going back to Reagan yeah hit up those contras baby what are we doing if we just gave into their demands is that a good plan are we going to make money to fund our operations yeah we are well it's kind of win win really how are we why are we not there yesterday what are we doing yeah I have never heard about that alias pilot cocaine really that doesn't fucking so I love when we talk about this because as we talk about this somebody will inevitably hit me up with like a detailed researched article as a subsequent investigation determined I didn't even search for this the aircraft was overloaded by 320 kilos or 700 pounds wanted to take off and was carrying one more passenger than it was certified for national transit board so the extra passenger runway extra luggage cocaine in the system let's assume that any oh oh oh there's there is more the report indicated that the pilot was not approved to fly the uncertified pilot had falsely obtained his FFA FAA license by showing hundreds of hours that he never flew okay and may have also also find how many hours he had flown in order to get a job with his employer additionally toxicology test performed revealed traces of cocaine and alcohol okay yeah alright dude maybe maybe actually that that plane was going down like well I was going to say maybe if one of those three things were occurring it would have been avoidable but that sounds like a fucking three strikes are out Jesus Christ that was that was a cursed plane oh my god wow okay well yeah no I guess the luggage and extra person was only part of the factor to contribute to it the coke and the uncertified pilot

Starting point is 01:03:31 probably has a lot more to do that's with that going down experiment well Jesus regular real pilot that wasn't drunk be able to handle the one of those problems one of those problems I imagine not all three could that guy while drunk handle the plane if it had not been overloaded you know what if he was only high on cocaine and you know who got him that cocaine chug night our Kelly was our Kelly it all goes back to Robert is fighting for his life out here man do you have your passport do you have your shots do you want to come and live with Rob in America there it okay where are we I don't know I don't know it's Monday the eighth darkest dungeon two is out today okay so code in Cambria good shit I also read chapter one of the street fighter six good on comics backstory which is now available on the street fighter website you can go you can go read it and you can find out what happened and does that does that tell me why Ken is now dirty Ken we don't yet know why Ken is dirty Ken but we have set foot in the steps that will lead to dirty Ken so step one is Mel Masters is on the cover young Mel is guess what he's a young kid that's probably not getting enough attention from his dad and is probably not so far seems like he's kind of disillusioned he's being ushered around the world going to meetings and doing things that he doesn't care for and Ken's dad status not looking too wholesome not looking great so Ken was never going to be a good yeah he was going to be an anime dad for sure

Starting point is 01:05:51 but then you're like up and look at him getting punched in the balls like he's spending time you know and then he's he's around right like they're figuring it out maybe and then his after all like his family is what makes him strong and then Ken has that Goku Vegeta problem where he'd rather get a foot like up his ass from Ryu than spend time with his family I mean there's that but then there's the part where he's he's now so the Masters Foundation the you know it's not quite the Howard connection it's not quite the Garcia concern it's not quite the Mishima Zaibatsu it's tough times ahead right we got to figure out ways to stay relevant we got to keep it it's a business it's a moving business and so there appear to be regime change operations taking place in Asia there's a places where nations are being founded national the new nation of national has been founded and JP appears to be heading that up Johan we got his full name it's Johan something Paul whatever and he has like an accent and stuff and like basically he's like founding this nation and then Ken is getting involved and they're like okay so we know we're going to invest at this new nation Petrovich Johan Petrovich and they're like we know we know that the foundation approved to invest at the you know this this new uprising nation or whatever but but that also that we didn't approve cryptocurrencies and no micro insurances and Ken is like Ken is like hey then times are moving fast we got to keep you are kidding me you are fucking we got to keep up with the time the man like all the jokes and like a homeless criminal due to fucking

Starting point is 01:07:54 the Apes security fraud the Apes are what the path to hobo Ken starts with apes man that that is the best that is the best so so it's it's it's you so you want so it plays out because he's like his board the board of directors are like yo Ken I don't know man and he's like nah man we got to keep it going it's important to stay ahead of the curb and it's important and new nation yeah let's do it let's you know we can't let the surrounding nations like just reabsorb them whatever and then he goes to this nation and like they're all like yeah hey thanks for supporting us and thanks for the money and yeah good business we're all doing good business you're right and Luke is is hired as a Mel's bodyguard because he's yeah okay cuz they have that makes sense he's part of the PMC that they're like contracting for this area right and like they're like cool so anyways oh what's that over there oh those are the fires coming from the city where the the civilians are rioting because they hate what's happening and they're very upset about everything going on right now so but don't worry too much about that let's keep get gets keep that master's money rolling in you know and Ken's like I don't know should should I be is this the right way and then he's all stressed out and then also like at one point is he's like he gets a call and he's like God who is it now what and then it's Mel being like hey you told me to check in so I'm checking in can I hang up now and you're like I think I think the context of like Ken Masters being one of the best fighters in the world coming at the expense of him being a terrible businessman is fucking great so he's always had like his dad and the advice he's always had the fucking the Wayne Foundation run the company's had Lucian Fox he's had Alfred and you know and the and the trustees to handle the madness while he's like

Starting point is 01:10:17 alright I'm a go fucking do some tattoos y'all y'all take care of it but yeah when the weight falls on him and the times are changing and politics starts to get involved it seems like can might not be too quick on his feet despite having a run button but yeah no it's an interesting like like he like all the jokes are actually half right he's not a divorced hobo trying to run from alimony but he is confirmed to be currently steering the foundation towards disaster getting involved with what sounds like it might be it's like it's on it's on it's hasn't been specified yet but the presence of the massive corporate money PMC's on the ground and rioting civilians seems it seems like regime change fucking like corporate imperialism shit going on it sounds like it can fucking tanked Venezuelan it's what it sounds a lot like it we haven't said it outright but it does feel like JP and can are kind of doing exactly that and that's no good because I have confidence in Kojima's ability to write out an insane dictator taking over a country speech that references all kinds of shit you learned in American history I don't know that Capcom has the chops for I think this is the wildest like the wildest reason why Ken could be dirty again like as everyone goes oh divorced and he's like depressed or whatever it's like oh no he's like an international financial criminal due to horrible mismanagement but I act but maybe though the truth is as simple as it is maybe it's that Ken needs to be on the battlefield he needs to be in the ring to know who he is and anything else in his life just doesn't make any sense and is just a bad idea just keep him away from it yeah meanwhile like Ryu who always got made fun of us like ah you're like a weird monk homeless guy he's just he's just chilling doing the same thing he's always done he didn't bankrupt a developing nation

Starting point is 01:12:45 man just hangs out next to his waterfall yeah like you know the the the fucking the issue pretty much sets the story up and the issue ends with them like the car swerves into a protest and then people start throwing rocks at them and then like someone opens fire and then the car crashes and like the shit starts popping off because the angry citizens of Nayshaw are like fuck you corporate asshole like whatever the fucks going on Ken you're a pretty good fighter can you fight 25,000 people probably hungry and angry marching you know yeah it's it's it's yeah it's kind of fucked up it's you know so we'll see like I was I was not expecting the start of Street Fighter 6 to be Ken Masters being like yes this is my friend Mubarak how is he how are you doing sir yeah you know like in the middle of the fucking uprising like just how's it going yeah we're investing good good money all around good business you know anyways so we'll see we'll see where it goes oh that's fucking great that's fucking great and like yeah and then Mel is just like man fuck all this and then Luke is like hey I play Pokemon go let me let me add you on on on on my friends list and that's that's what we got so far

Starting point is 01:14:22 so in this comic how old is Mel Masters he appears to probably be like 13 I'd say maybe if I had to guess he's pretty young but like I'd say you know probably too young for playable character status oh yeah for sure but yeah okay but not too far from I guess like like Lee Fen is also probably like maybe like 15 if I had to take a guess I really feel like Lee Fen is like the face of the next generation he doesn't have to be right what could be interesting is if the the later seasons eventually go that was the world tour version and then here's her as a full roster character in season two or something like that like there's absolutely room for that type of progression to occur people in world tour can you know just be like alright she's got you know what the outfit is but like let's do the final version of it you know after we saw it introduced in the story mode Ed you know was a background character for a while and then he became playable and you know then we saw him go from the baby to the to the white hoodie to the young commander so I could go back to the white hoodie he does have it as an alt costume and it's great yeah but at the same time if you were raised by fucking ball rock I could see you being like okay oh you're gonna be super extra yeah let me just yeah you can let me let me get away from that but also I'm a scumbag the boxes

Starting point is 01:16:05 anyway though Street Fighter 6 off to a rollicking good start can't wait to see where this fucking story goes man it is it is of the times it is it is quite it is quite of the times yeah I just and and and being a massively disastrously failed crypto bro is just and the part and the things that the board of directors that in many stories would be like the people that are like pushing the young entrepreneur like the Tony Stark you know what I mean the brilliant leader like the people that are whispering off the board of directors will be like usually full of shit and like you know be giving him bad advice or whatever to be like fuck all the board I'm doing it the right way we're doing the right thing and that's the move of like the young braves hero CEO you know but in this case the board is like Ken I don't know man like no no it's good it's good it's good yeah it's good so it's not good Ken yeah that's a that's out and then yeah only other thing I want to touch on is so we're we're playing Mass Effect 3 we're you know we're picking up I have heard a few things and I've heard some things come down the pipe we have currently completed Leviathan okay so knowledge has been shared I want to talk about that's cool we're going to talk about that in just one second hey but I want to talk to you about Kai pussy Lang yes yes who you must defeat to become big pussy is that letter just the fucking worst it is it is the worst writing in Mass Effect in like 400 words

Starting point is 01:18:14 so it is crazy the idea that there's an entire novel you can read about this guy I like my fucking I can't imagine what's happening page to page if it's written from his perspective it's intense oh see he pisses in like Anderson's room like just to do it is it told from his brain yeah there's large portions of it told from his perspective okay I like this is disco Elysium levels of like narrative prose that I want I want to experience like I can't imagine a letter like that being the taste for an entire book that's fucking wild this is a character that like breaks into Anderson's room and I think he pisses in his flower flower I heard about yeah eating cereal spends like a bunch of time eating a cereal to like yeah I'm so up I'm so inside his life man he can't do nothing dude like I said it in the moment but it's like how can the highs be so high and the lows be so low like I don't get it I can answer that but not now yes we have in fact an answer that is on the docket that is the answer to this question will that we're gonna get into but it's wild how this fucking game will whiplash you from something so brilliant to just the act like at the time at the time did anyone even at the time think it was cool like was there ever others because it's dated there's a but it's instantly fucking cringe and lame like so Troy Baker was a big Mass Effect fan and was like you know he put the feelers out I would love to play Mass Effect character right and then I watched an interview in which he describes that a character was written for him

Starting point is 01:20:16 Kylian was written for him like with the assumption that he would want to voice it and him like reading it out and like it is it is game of Thrones final season interview energy he is he is like here later visibly trying to figure out a way to spin it and I think the best he comes up with is like it's not the kind of character I was excited to play but I was honored to be part of the series right right right yeah okay okay that fucking what's her name whatever Daenerys Targaryen I forgot the actress but that face she makes at the table read just oh man best ending ever Emilia Clarke yeah I like it's it's it's just such a it feels as if those are the moments where you can feel that thing where it's like every character had its own like writer not its own writer but like it had a writer that was responsible for them you know and like the pieces of the part are the parchment that come together the patchwork all the whatever you want to call it like someone responsible for something was also probably responsible for aria I want to say that it's Mack Walters okay because Mack Walters he was not I don't know if he was even there but I definitely know he wasn't the lead writer on Mass Effect one or two that was in the interpretation and Mack Walters and Casey Hudson wrote most of Mass Effect three okay and Mack Walters like like Kyling is his fucking OC like straight up yeah um I you can you can feel that right you can feel that and um at the same time like it's the same way you can feel that aria was written for Carrie Ann Moss and for her to be like yeah this cool boss bitch that no one fucks with yeah she's gonna love it she's such a cool character

Starting point is 01:22:39 oh man like just the most try hard edgy like badasses that uh you can possibly imagine and like they get so much time to do so much nothing and we keep going back to them and hearing from them and emails and and so everything you're describing about what they thought Troy Baker would like I see that with aria and what they were hoping maybe that she would like as well you know like I'm getting a cameo but I get to play such a cool character that is so important and pivotal and everyone loves them and fuck yeah it's not an embarrassing little unimportant person off to the side it's a real character that goes on an adventure and or is as good as shepherd so I'm gonna raise up my my hand here because there's a really important distinction you're doing some of the DLC you did omega you did Leviathan right now these were post game DLCs these are actually post ending change DLC right um in the main thrust of it you did um Thessia right okay so that means you're you're you're getting there that's why you're doing the DLC before you go to do the point of no return right so this is this is the point I've talked to you about this before but it's actually really important that you cement this in your brain so the Bioware writing process for many years for almost every project they ever did was the lead writer would write the main script or the main outline and then you'd had character writers and they would write you know within the purview of their character and what would happen is is all the leads and all the writers would sit in a room put that shit on the table and they would go over everything they would go over where so the plan is to do this plan and this planet and what do you got for tally here what do you got for garris here and then they would all workshop it right that was the writing process for the entire series and the DLC that you're playing through now

Starting point is 01:24:41 you are about once you touch the main game again you are about to slam into a wall and that wall is Casey Hudson and Mack Walters have decided to write the rest of the game for you by themselves in their office without like two days and then going this is it to the team and this this is going to be okay and there it is a wall it is the weirdest thing I've ever seen in a in a in a game you usually can't tell when you're playing a game when the writer changed you can hear the dialogue gets different not necessarily bad but it's different so it's not tone it's not that it changed so much as it is like it is no longer the product of the same process exactly which sounds eerily similar to D&D winging it once they were out of George Mark RR Martin scripts well hey I can't comment on that so what do you think Leviathan you found out the big secret okay I fully and I have to literally go back and watch the footage again

Starting point is 01:26:12 I need to properly understand that the cover the conversation I'm having somebody break it down for me right now actually so we can go over any sticking points all I can say is as it was happening all I could feel was what the fuck happened to that first conversation I had with sovereign that put the fear of God in me I don't know what like how do I put so massive every every problem with the Reapers and Mass Effect always goes back to the first conversation with sovereign and I don't know what the problem is is it that they they wrote that without something planned right was that the was that the problem or was it that they built up an unknowable threat and then decided that we were going to know it we got a great comment we got a great message that came in because this was a decrease we were discussing this as we were going through it and I was kind of like I was kind of like I don't always hate finding out how the timeline came to be I don't always hate finding out more because and me and Reggie both were people who are like you know what we didn't even mind Season 2 of Korra right where they explain the avatar system yeah sure it was magic but if you don't do it in a way that works well then you get midichlorians right and and I just I'm sitting there and as I'm hearing about the the the race and then the why and then the Reapers were made and then the and then I'm just like I this all of this just takes away any of that awe and fear and like excitement I had for sovereign establishing itself as effectively I use the word like Lovecraftian but I don't know

Starting point is 01:28:25 I don't know it's a cuttlefish for a reason it's it's on it feels like an unknowable machine God it really really does quids for a reason like and so you know I'm going to pull it up here because after we were talking about this yeah KYH 9 sent in a message saying Mass Effect is a great example of why I think LGIS topics are dumb to have in most stories because they're cool for being unknowable and in Mass Effect 1 they didn't bother coming up with the motivation for the Reapers but AAA audiences want answers so you get this it's like you're pretending you're interpreting DLC correct you're interpreting the DLC correctly woolly the issue is that inevitably people want motivations for their villains having Lovecraftian horrors as your villains in space operas is a bad idea from the start there's a fine there's a thin line between the motivations are unknowable and they have none I lied there is no line they're the same thing and you can't have a three game series long going before people start to realize that they are I wildly disagree with that comment so I will use the the the direct so like Mass Effect had a perfect perfect example of what not to do from their primary inspiration because the Reapers are literally Star Trek's Borg resistance right feud aisle we will add your technological and biological distinctiveness to our own alongside a handful of other overlapping race similarities there apparently I saw a little meme doing the one-to-one because it's like obviously the Reapers are the Borg but then it's like yes and and that that then follows that the Krogan are the

Starting point is 01:30:18 Klingons Klingons the Asari are the Vulcans the Volus are the Ferengi the Turians are the Cardassians they didn't try very hard the quarians are the Bajorans the Celerians are the Romulans Baterians are Andorians Edias Data Protheans are founders they did not try very hard to hide their influences right that that's fine right but here's what happened in Star Trek over the course of a couple series so in TNG the Borg are first of all they fly in which is totally fucking weird it's aggressively strange for the setting right and they are an omnipresent mega consciousness that like dwarfs a single individual's understanding right they're cool the first fucking encounter I don't think they even have a goddamn name they're just some horrible nightmare from out and yeah and they're from the old like fucking series one right the original with what they don't know they're from TNG Oh I thought they have no presence in series one okay so okay you know the clip where Picard and Riker shoot that guy and his head fucking explodes and a bunch of bugs shoot out right yeah okay that was a writing draft one of the Borg and they were like no techno zombies that's cooler so they became techno zombies in the season two oh that's what that's what it was right yeah there was an original so TNG they are unknowable they are a massive fuck nightmare threat that show up like maybe once a season and then they delve into what happens to you when you get disconnected and what a fucking horrible nightmare that is cool okay this all fits well with the

Starting point is 01:32:21 unknowable in a setting that's about knowing right it works then in Star Trek first contact they create the Borg queen which is an individual who controls the Borg and this is the worst decision ever this is the worst decision ever and it was made so they could have scenes of like data like jerking off with like his new fucking flesh dick and so that Picard had a person to kick into an acid bath because Patrick Stewart wanted to do cool stunts right this was like a this is not a story decision this was like an acting directing decision then you get to Voyager and Voyager goes into exhaustive fucking detail about every single thing about the Borg and the Borg queen becomes a long running character in like a dozen episodes and it sucks it fucking sucks dude it sucks so fucking bad and then let me guess they spit you back out to the present day and then you have to look at this what used to be intimidating threat and now it's just who the fuck cares well I don't know if you know what the finale of Voyager is but the finale of Voyager is the Janeway from the future comes back and like kills the Borg okay I didn't know that and like just has like like a bunch of action shots of like a Voyager from 20 years in the future just icing like a thousand Borg ships and fucking and that fucking that antagonist is now ruined it's like overtly ruined done so so the so after I read that comment it was interesting because it's like the unknowable is so good at buying you in on a premise right and I kind of I went off on a fucking little rant about it when I was just initially reacting to it because I was just thinking of like what am I feeling right now right and I'm like I'm feeling the way I felt when I was like what the fuck is this Gantz man doing in the ball and why are they teleporting dead people and why are they have to fight the aliens what what is the possible

Starting point is 01:34:41 reasoning you could have behind this and nine times out of ten the person making the story is like fucking no lol but hey cool cool fights though right um which is why and so like a lot of the time it's like oh you kind of had an idea that you had something I was like oh we're gonna buy you in on a wild premise and you're like what are the answers I want to know and you can string that along for a long time but if you don't have a fucking plan it's all for nothing it's all for shit the unknowable tech god how do you even begin to fight them like in my brain I'm like obviously you're gonna need a MacGuffin but that aside like how cool is it gonna be to find out more about them and this is a similar feeling to what I got from the geth at the end of MA2 when Legion was kind of setting up them in the fucking adicine traverse like from beyond the veil the persia's veil their count their countless their numbers cannot be understood by any other race and they're just chilling there you've been picking off little scrap skirmishes with the heretics the mad the fucking insane ones the real geth had an equation error that made them think that this was a good idea the real geth are just observing and chilling and off to their own thing because they've like they've faced their more their their their creator dilemma and they're like trying to work it's such an interesting prospect right okay so back to Voyager for a second okay Voyager ends in 2001 which is right before Mass Effect starts getting written because Mass Effect came out in fucking 2007 and it took like four or five years so like Voyager's ending was fresh and everyone on that project's a massive fucking Star Trek dweeb so they knew that their unknowable tech god can be ruined by over explanation as that was already on the page

Starting point is 01:36:36 yeah and if you're a fan of Star Trek you're avid at your if you're on if you're working on Mass Effect you're probably an avid Star Trek fan at that point in time the reason the the fucking first game has filmed great so it looks like TNG yeah as and the race this comparison we just made like it's it's you know and to be fair like no other game that well rather so that what they did with Sotor was so fucking cool that it made sense to be like what if we made our own that didn't have to be Star Wars related right like that's exactly what that's just a brilliant move to be because like you have the talent to make a space world that is that compelling and they did the fucking buy-in in the Mass Effect one world with the Citadel and the idea that all the future tech you have was given to you by like a malevolent but omnipotent race that exists and they're a threat but you you rely on them but they all like the whole thing you know and like you're just tell you the exact Star Trek episodes every one of those concepts is taken okay okay every single one I believe it I mean you know that Star Trek is a fucking institution that's been around that's visited all these concepts right but when it comes down to so that comment and then replying to like the what I think when I'm looking at the Leviathan revelations I'm like I don't want to just hand wave and say stop trying to explain away the magic stop trying to explain the unknowable because it can be done well right it's just it takes like real time to craft a fucking narrative that is strong and what I point to in my example is why the fuck are we stuck in these walls and why do these giants want to eat us I don't fucking know this sucks yeah oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit basement it can be done extremely well

Starting point is 01:38:49 totally and it can be planned out in a way where everything that every time we zoom out instead of making the magic go go away it just increases your fucking suspense and how invested you are in the setting because you recognized the pieces that like would attract the audience to the threat to begin with and then you never forgot what those were what we're dealing with now with the reapers even before we had this Leviathan backstory reveal we were blasting them left and right and we took on a what we called a reaperito right a little mini one and a harbinger is lame as fuck and so I got to stop you right there the moment that the reapers are become unsalvageable genuinely it doesn't feel like it at the time but it is is the first time you hear the an eldritch being beyond your comprehension say the phrase does this hurt you shepard right right right right right right right now I'm fully able to go harbinger sucks sovereign school I can go yeah this is a lame asshole right he's petty and shitty turns out he's one of the earliest and most powerful but shut up whatever you know also really upsetting because harbinger should be named sovereign and sovereign should be named harbinger because of the roles that they play yes I agree but regardless it's been fine because sovereign is the better name and the better character gets the better name I look at all of that and I'm just yeah I'm just left with that feeling of like if you're gonna crack it open if you're gonna tell us what we want to know or scratch the itch so to speak it better be like it just it better capture what we fell in love with to begin with here and follow through on that right and even if it's like like I'm trying to remember but like there's another version of this with did you ever actually watch a firefly

Starting point is 01:41:06 okay so I liked firefly yeah back to the day right yeah right and firefly is great and then what's it gonna call it the movie came out after that and I remember when it was like the Revers were the thing in that right and they you that's the threat of the franchise and then you're like it's the mystery it's the unknowable it's the fucking zombie space shit serenity there we go yeah and then it gets around to eventually cracking open like what the Revers are and how that happened and it's like oh okay depressing and interesting yeah and like I was kind of like once we find out is it gonna ruin it and it's like no it didn't no it changes it from threat and unknowing to tragedy yes but that required understanding what we thought they were keeping that in mind and then building on top of that not just throwing it out entirely and replacing it with this now which again this is downloadable content which is possibly missable okay in the cred this is where I need to stop you this is a really important part because you're gonna need to we're gonna need to sit down after you're done with like the main ending because there's a lot of bits and pieces that are that are that are combining in very strange ways and it's why talking about going through the Mass Effect series like now when it's completely done compared to its reality when it came out you have to remember there are two things going on with the Leviathan DLC the first of which is the Leviathan DLC is post ending anger attempt to add backstory to a decision with the writing that people didn't like say that again say that again so Leviathan's DLC the writing in it is post ending anger bandaid hey they're trying to smooth over writing decisions that you haven't gotten to yet hey with more information and go see it wasn't pulled out of our ass it was kind of here all along and it's it's it's like you're getting the backstory on something you haven't seen it's a little strange the way that that plays out right

Starting point is 01:43:30 the second of which is that the grand reveal that the Reapers are in fact an AI built to figure out why AI's go nuts that in fact went nuts is a cool little thing that this super advanced race made the same mistake as it's like slave races because they were so up their own ass that's okay that's appreciated and the reason why that's there is that I don't you you did not read the mass effect one book and that's fine that's fine okay but the important thing to note is that the first paragraph of the mass effect one book talks about the series is ostensible thesis statement because it talks about why geth are against the law and it talks about how AI is the largest crime that's ever existed right and it goes into like that that's the whole first chapter of the mass effect book because geth are your primary antagonist right and so they go with that and this is kind of a pivot back to that because the writer who wrote that fucking left was that the same writer that was responsible for them for writing the geth backstory in two that then wanted yes also set up the dark energy plot line which is not going to go anyway right yeah okay yes yes I got the notes on that as well so they pivot back to the original idea but here's the problem mass effect to happen you already started to put the pieces down you started down the pathway oh no man okay okay yeah it is it is a strange strange cobbled together series of pieces god just you know you're looking at how the fucking you know well fuck the star wars new trilogy right like the same idea of just like wait where are we going no actually never mind wait but what if no oh that's interesting no we're not doing it okay well then I guess we're gonna you know and then it's like it's like that that when you start down a pathway and then that could be potentially interesting but then you swerve off because someone else is taking the mantel over now

Starting point is 01:45:54 like you're not gonna fucking it's not compelling if you just swerve it somewhere that we didn't see it coming because it's like what was it that the chain though was it what show was it that changed their ending because people figured it out or whatever well to some degree mass effect three no but there was something else like that it was there was something else worth anyway like oh people people were figuring out the writing the people were were clued into what was going to happen so they the writers decided to change the actual show it wasn't Game of Thrones it was another show I'm gonna turn off emote only mode so that someone can fucking yeah that was a thing that happened and everyone's like oh that explains how Westworlds Westworlds Westworlds Westworld everyone figured out where Westworld was going so time to take the thing that is predictable but makes sense given what we've set up and throw it all out because we want to keep it unpredictable or whatever and someone else comes in and brings their vision instead of like trying to like follow through you know so anyway the last thing that I want to say is like keep in mind though the writing dynamic like collaborative to personal is going to hit you pretty soon and and remember that planet stories were often written by individuals yes yes as our character stories yes right so you're gonna run into a situation in which the person who wrote a story for a planet did not get to know what the games ending was

Starting point is 01:47:39 which is going to which is going to end up with what I'm going to call a writing mistake okay okay so the tea or the game starts to argue with itself right so let's say there's four different writers one of them is G and G is writing everything in King's Landing and then R is writing everything in the north at the wall and R is writing everything at the wall yeah and then M is writing everything in Isos and then none of them knew where those what was going to happen in any of the locations gotcha okay perfect and then it turns out that like when one of them has to move locations the story just doesn't make any sense anymore and the the story's theme starts arguing with itself okay it's fascinating I have to take a break yep alright I have to take a piss get it's an interesting topic but yeah BRB right so to just cap it off then there are two things about Leviathan that I do want to note in a positive light one I do appreciate that for something that is such a revelation to be delivered as a massive thing after the fact I like how you can dip your toe in a little bit and then back out

Starting point is 01:49:13 unlike all the other DLC campaigns where you're locked in for the hour long major quest in this case you yeah that sucks right in this case you get to uncover a little bit more uncover a little bit more and choose how you want to go about it and people can probably argue about when the right time is to complete it but it allows you to safely play the main line story and then go a little bit further into Leviathan and then come back to it as you're going through the main quests and yeah the ability to just kind of get a little bit more of a question mark but not quite all the answers is a smart way to have gone about that right secondly I have sympathy for a story ending and them not addressing something perhaps I don't know how it's gonna be done but I have sympathy if it was deliberately left unanswered and people some people were happy with it and we're like okay that's fine and then some were not and then those people then made their voices clear that they were unhappy with not knowing the answers to some of these questions and then the big AAA game and company went to answer these questions and went okay I don't know here you are I have sympathy for that because like those are the types of things that should be like obviously with a you know again with a coherent writing situation that we described where you don't have like one person just throwing something in there

Starting point is 01:50:54 you can plan in advance to deliberately say we're not answering this here's what you're getting from it and this is a choice and you can see narratively why we refuse to go further or if you choose to go in then you do it in a way where as we've described there's good examples of it but if it was like no we're not doing it and then people were upset and they're like okay I guess we have to do something and then the thing they came up with was just fucking not compelling that's that sucks I am I got a dance on this a little bit but you're starting to touch what I think is the game's fatal flaw which is not that they gave you answers or didn't give you answers is that the games writing doesn't understand what questions people actually cared about interesting okay okay it's not it's not like like the answer this answer being bad or this answer being good isn't so much the biggest problem it's that people by large were like I don't care about this part I'd actually like more of this yeah but instead you're giving me all of this one that I don't care about and you're doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on it in an unsatisfying way because I do absolutely you know I'm saying this a well aware that there's controversy about how the ending went down so assuming that this stuff Leviathan related was not the entirety of it but no but Leviathan was like okay that's yeah helping represents a part of what people were missing or so but in any case man it's just I think I think I like at the end of the day like Mass Effect 3 makes a problem and that is a problem they should have learned from Mass Effect 2 which is Mass Effect 2 nothing happens like the A plot in Mass Effect 2 is non-existent there are like four missions of it in the entire game and that's the one people go crazy about because what people actually want to do is hang out and talk to aliens

Starting point is 01:53:14 right right right I mean it's pretty much like it does serve its Empire Strikes Back role of like introducing the larger threat and like you know I guess changing the scale of warfare you know for the from what the first struggle was to what the final struggle is going to be changing the stakes as it were but yeah it's always going to just come back to the same thing every time we look at these types of things which is just well we wouldn't be having this detailed long drawn out conversation and analysis about it if it was good we would just be like damn then that DLC came out and we found out more and it was fucking awesome you know have you decided what order you're going to put Citadel? no I've been just rolling and I hear to do it last or later so we'll just do it last or later there's arguments to be made doing it right before the ending or doing it right after the ending I've been more or less following like if Azena's got suggestions you know she drops a couple things here and there and yeah I was going to say I assume she'll have this and I know she's listening what's a vital importance is that as you watch the ending you are informed of what was added six months later after everybody got mad because it's fairly significant

Starting point is 01:54:51 okay yeah there's been a couple of moments of like here's the alt cut for the other stuff and yadda yadda so I expect to get some context discussed right around the time when it's appropriate to find out but yeah it is a really it does really just make me go back and look at every time a story has like hooked me in with a little mystery and then just think about how many times the story delivers on that mystery and how many times it lets me down or how many times it like replaces the mystery with something equally satisfying you know mysteries are hard they're hard but they're easy bait to get an audience in right it's easy to get people in on a premise even if you don't know where it's going lest we forget the story of the fucking walking dead that was going to be an alien invasion that was being fought off and the zombies were a byproduct of it which then I think like lost is like the all time reigning oh god well there's another example of we changed the ending because people figured it out right I never got into lost I never I like the entire structure of like how that show was designed to just be a prime time fuck with the audience expectations live event season like I hate everything about that the idea of a show that makes no sense on purpose because it's designed to be a water cooler thing fuck that it's the worst ever I hate so

Starting point is 01:56:30 lost is right up my alley in that particular respect but like the the sequence of events that that killed me was like battle I watched another battle start galactica and then I'm like should I get in a lost like no because I don't want another battle start galactica and then lost happened and then Game of Thrones starts up and I'm like I don't want to look like one of the people on my timeline right now that are watching the season finale of lost getting ready to jump out of right right I will wait on Game of Thrones and now Game of Thrones has like fucking salted it for me man like first five haven't even started watching better call Saul but now it's done and it's great so I'll go watch it at some point first five are still good first four are excellent I know that there are enough people that still liked lost and still say that it was it was good enough to defend and go through the journey of it and everything and I'm sure there's probably nuggets of quality in there that I would appreciate but I feel like the overall journey on the sidelines when that was coming out and then the entire discussion about how it ended and finding out what all that was would make the show kryptonite to me so if you're one of the folks that's out there like no there's actually good stuff I get you I hear you it's not going to be for me I fucking now there's a plot line of a thing that is going to be if there's a monster or a thing they find that may come back up but probably not I don't know maybe what was that doesn't matter that's not the point man

Starting point is 01:58:11 bsg gets so far it gets all the way through its last season and then just like three episodes to go yeah right at the finish line right there it's crazy yeah oh and and well anyway I'm just thinking of the other bit with lost or is like and then there was like the folks who I remember were like no there were no loose threads everything metaphorically had its reason to exist and it's like okay you're like shut up alright the word just there's like shut the fuck there's no there's no saving you on this one yeah alright writing is hard writer strike yeah that's why you that's let's just load up chat GPT and solve the problem right fuck that why we why do we even pay these these assholes nobody needs what do they do is right words I can write words I wanted to be an artist but I'm not good enough so I'm just gonna fucking right words anyone can write words oh I wanted to be a programmer but I'm not good enough guess I'll just fucking right I wanted to do anything else but I couldn't do it so I guess I'll just fucking right words oh god damn it yeah yeah no exactly turns out turns out you need a fucking talent to understand how it turns out writing words hard turns out the word choices are very important actually wouldn't have seen that coming I mean last time around it created reality TV let's see what happens this time anyway so yeah that's what's going on if you want to if you want to tune into woolly versus you can come hang out you'll watch us getting through Mass Effect 3 we're gonna be getting through Final Fantasy 9 and yeah probably gonna take a look at idle showdown and all the V2 fucking beggars can watch that

Starting point is 02:00:27 and then shut the fuck up leave me alone get out of my mentions all right you'll get your stupid fucking idle thing no then you can go away all right god listen well here's I'm gonna break your mind here V2 V2 are just this generation's Muppets they're just Muppets dude yeah well there you go there you go right what if you show me a picture of Nyaners and like Cookie Monster same thing same fucking thing would you would you watch Cookie Monster play American truck simulator yeah yeah you fucking would I would let's play the fighting game and see what's going on with it shall we let's look at it with a fighting game with some characters and it's in and there's some combos I seen let's check it out let's check it out I'm sure there's a bunch of moves that'll be some some inside jokes and people are gonna be like anyway it's fine it's fine just be a sheer amount of like holy fuck right like the yeah anyway it looks like a fighting game looks like it's gonna be something so we will we will check it out I wonder how many other indie fighting game creators out there were just like wait you mean all I had to do was just fucking that's it I just had to put the dress like put the dressing on to make it the all I had to do you know just put this put this like head put the Nyaners head or the fucking whatever Corona Corona put the just had to put the dog head girl on any one of these OCs and it would have been a pop off but we didn't do it damn about why you wanted to play Street Fighter instead of some other bullshit it's because you were like I like the characters in street yeah yeah that's it that's it hey maybe if you do a thing with the thing that people fucking like they'll like it maybe maybe

Starting point is 02:02:36 it's extra good if you find a thing that you like that is like cool with you using their images that's all there is yeah so do some of that and and vTubers are probably more popular than Marvel in fighting games and I don't mean Marvel the game I mean Marvel comics wait I don't what what are you directly comparing I I think hollow live versus Capcom would do bigger numbers than Marvel in 2023 that's no you're thinking about it you had to think at all but you but it's because we keep forgetting that we're in this weird fucking internet space where like like don't forget all your all the people that we know that know nothing about video games or internet shit that no Marvel shit because of the movies taking over the industry and they and these people know nothing about the tubers because we're talking to internet people that are oh I knew it was wrong when I said it but the point is that you actually had to think about it for a second and you know what that lag is I don't know I there needs to be a name for this but it's the lag of thinking about the online the terminally online bubble we live in and everyone around it that you think are saying normal things and then you have to stop leave that for a second the rest of the world that does not use the internet as aggressively the rest of the world does like vtubers but like the comparison for like again your random family members who might have seen an Avengers movie at some point versus saying the word to them and like the nothing you would get and going right yeah no yeah but then you have then you have to go back into the cross section of people who buy video games because my mom's not going to buy video game but you see when you say something like what you said about like fucking vtubers versus Marvel or whatever

Starting point is 02:04:44 and I go huh and then a bunch of chat on the side goes absolutely apps totally because they're all fucking this is like you are not at all a normal selection of a sample you know you are about armored core they're doing exactly right so you have to try to remember not these freaks or these for that matter what is happening with the robots what is happening outside and then you try to figure out the whole and go wait no hold on a minute Marvel movies took over the entire film industry for the last 10 years they're the biggest fucking things in the world there are countries that care exclusively about the latest Marvel action movies dropping that have no idea what a vtuber is right there's entire nations that like are committed to following MCU updates so disagree only in the statement that I don't think there are countries that don't know what vtubers are anime has weirdly penetrated everywhere the hyper that was a hyperbolic statement what I'm saying is there are countries where like the vtuber pop off has been significantly smaller compared to here because I'm telling you right now I believe that Goku could run for president in any South American country and maybe win but that's Dragon Ball Z Goku not Goku of hololive fame imagine though there's a difference yes hololive whatever thing is not that like like no that Goku could Goku anyway whatever you get it the same could be said of a bunch of old classic mecha that weirdly got translated in and selected for for certain locations to be released to why do a bunch of people in Quebec know gold Iraq I don't know dude I don't know that's a weird one yeah it's like wait like people that live here specifically know about the sequel to Mazinger Z but they don't know about Mazinger Z and they don't know that it's called Mazinger Z

Starting point is 02:07:06 I was like no because season the second the see the gold Iraq thing was the only one that got translated into French and kids saw that and they didn't know what they were watching but it looked cool so end of story you know but yeah alright that's yeah anyway so that's that's pretty much it so we're gonna be continuing that might check out some sick demo six demo as well since that's been ported over so yeah come hang out it's gonna be fun over on two versus what's going on well there's two things going on one's about video games so I'll leave that to later because why is Willie so combative when it comes to VTubers it's just this one fighting game my mentions have been exploding for the entirety of its it literally nonstop like it's been an insane insane title wave I know it's a fighting game with the VTubers I get it that's what's up if you could see my mentions you would get it that's all that's why it's not that hard to understand you should you should take a picture of your mentions and like block out everybody's names and be like this is what my mentions looks like I mean I try I have the thing I think I don't know if I actually uploaded it or not but there was one day where I just I recorded myself scrolling down to show the you know the you know the the one handed mouse whatever the joy con not joy con yeah whatever it was the like use one hand to play keyboard games and then you have the little nunchuck for your PC yeah when they put that shit out and then every time there's an announcement about that thing which there are constantly there's just 85,000 tags going off and I'm like yes I know check it out guys like look look hundreds of people letting me know you know so I'm just like yeah that it's just one of those like yep yep I know the other idol showdown got it message received loud and clear you know that's it that's all alright so the number one thing in my day to day life this week is

Starting point is 02:09:16 you're familiar with my cat Elmo cool he is a cat that lives in my house oh shit he is 14 years old and we have hit a point in which like well buddy you're too old and you sit in your P too often so we brought him to a lady and he is now a bald cat that is a shaved cat he is in a teddy cut with his head all little poofy and he fucking looks disgusting well like when you shave a cat and you discover that your cats like horrible primordial cat pouch and tits are just swaying every step and breeze awful so close yeah I love him turns out you need a little bit of hair there just to remind you what's going on you know and like you know how cats but holes are just out all the time so I hear yeah yeah when you shave a cat it's like it's just you can't you just every time you look at the cat you're just staring right up the cat's ass here's the thing looking at you at all times like did the shave get accompanied by like constant trembling because it's cold because that's the thing that always looks like no so so when you shave a cat or at least when we shave this cat you don't shave it down to the skin you shave it a long haired cat to the point where it's got like three four centimeters of fur so it becomes a soft cat he is a little colder which has led to him being cuddlier because he wants to hang out in your lap and he hangs out under the sheets right but no he's he's he's well he's not cold he's not trembling he's pissed off he's pissed the fuck off giving you the stink eye all day um it's just at some point I will bring the cat onto the show not this show I mean my show or page stream and be like look look at the baby he is ugly now so so ugly I love him

Starting point is 02:11:44 don't violate to us it's just a cat shaved pussy yada yada the fruit was rotting on the floor someone had to step on it all right go ahead but yeah so that's what's going on Elmo was mad and now he is he is actually glad like he's very like chipper but yeah no it's just like shaving a cat into like a lion cut or a teddy bear cut is has turned him from like oh kitty to like an object of mockery in my eyes because I point and laugh at his his pathetic tits don't shame don't shame oh yeah dude I'll shame my my my old cats fat tits they're they're disgusting I feel like that episode of bullshit or or pen yells I love you dog in the loudest volume possible is like was like a formative experience for you no it's you grab you grab the cats like flabs and shit and just go blablabla you know shake him around and laugh I love that cat so much that cat's gonna live forever so moving on from that I just played Hongkai star rail all week like all week like nothing but so they got you not quite but and now I did it infected a bunch of people in my discord like a bunch of power all my FF 14 people are just on it I feel like this is not the first time I've heard of the I guess the the whale or not whale the like the wave effect of like I got into a gacha thing and then other people are like oh yeah that thing okay I'll go check out see what's going on and maybe spend a little bit and then getting a bunch of people back into something where they were trying to not go into spend money on it well here's the thing there's there's a couple things going on with that first of all MMO players have downtime and are explicitly weak to other things that are in any way similar

Starting point is 02:14:04 the second thing is of course us as powerful influencers right everybody looks to us and then third thing is obviously things that are free are easy to start the fourth thing which is usually not the case is that the deal is that Hongkai star rail is excellent as a free to play title or otherwise how does it compare to Genshin impact um extraordinarily similar the info the interface like the UI is exactly the same like like exactly the way currency is doled out the way you roll on things the way you equip things the way the portraits are lined out the way you switch character like it is it is overtly made by Genshin impact unfortunately still loses points however because whereas Genshin impact was fine to say saying the word Hongkai star rail sucks every time so just on name every time just just on naming alone I guess it's losing some fucking points there every time I like I usually just say star rail oh yeah yeah what was that again which star rail Hongkong here comes the train star rail um this is like the second game they've named that they had Hongkai third impact as well yeah yeah which is their first one um it is now that I now that I've played about 20 hours of it um also I've discovered a new a new word in the gacha space the new word is dolphins oh we said that last week oh we said that last yeah when I was talking about I was talking about like um like we were like there's whales and then there's people who just like minnows who just never bother and then I was like okay but what about like I'm someone who might be like I just want one thing and I'll never spend a dime on this game again

Starting point is 02:16:19 and I kind of was talking about how like I got Virgil I'm kind of I don't care about anything else it's like oh yeah you can dolphin you can be a mini whale for the one thing you want and then you're done yeah so it has the exact same like all the gacha elements of the game are identical to Genshin so you can just any thoughts or feelings you had on that are the same here um it is funny that when you get to the titular train all the lights in the passenger compartment are highly stylized whales hanging from the ceiling that's fucked up and uh one of one of the parts of the intro cutscene where you're talking about like the gods of the universe they just pan to a constellation that's just a big fat whale oh no they're leaning into it it's super funny oh god give us your money the gods are the fucking richest who offended yeah oh boy okay but um to break it down is where Genshin Impact was a open world action RPG that I thought was kind of light on the action um Starrail is scratching the star ocean like tails like itch on that side of the equation like it is visually stunning it is overflowing with really really interesting writing like just constantly fascinating writing

Starting point is 02:17:56 um and while people I think are massively over estimating its influence there are definitely parts of the game's side content that I look at and go this does feel like somebody who was a big fan of Disco Elysium like writing some weird shit okay it will go everywhere from every single trash can in the goddamn world has unique dialogue and events associated with it to uh like memories that are little stories like from Lost Odyssey sprinkled all over which reference anything from the pale blue dot to other sci-fi space shit um yeah that that's who that sounds like undertailish I guess as well to some degree I think anything that is also like has enough budget can afford to just like pepper their world with lore and personality there is so much interesting writing like it's it's actually just really wildly impressive it looks like where Genshin said hey why don't you explore this gigantic map and that's your big draw um Starrail decided to go what if you just had the ability to have interesting conversations or writing tropes everywhere at all times um by contrast the game's main story is pretty standard so far um with one wildly notable distinction which gets funnier and funnier the more I play

Starting point is 02:19:50 hey you've gone to the underground hey cool Virgil girl with a scythe is gonna help you out and she is gonna stand dead center of the frame in every scene in which she's in because she happens to be the limited banner for the version of 1.0 hey wow this boss fight against this robot is fucking incredible this is the coolest robot you've ever seen that you can get off the standard banner if you roll 300 times and it gets funnier and funnier and funnier the more that you watch them finagle cutscenes yeah to get the more expensive characters into the the center of the frame sounds like the modern day equivalent of hey the new transformer toy is out can we just fucking can we zoom in any harder can we make yeah can we make him glow get to your fucking local toy shop buy it now um what I'm surprised to hear is how much you're discussing writing when I fully would have expected it to be about how much the gameplay will live up to these giant sky battles with itando circuses and massive crazy choreography in reference to wasn't there a big cutscene that was like high octane action going on for really I think you might be thinking of honkai third impact maybe someone sent in that's definitely that someone sent in a trailer for what I thought was honkai honk honk and it was a big old

Starting point is 02:21:39 sky battle I now look down and see people saying he's not there yet okay alright nevermind nevermind oh or no it was not zedless zone zero I remember specifically zedless zone zero it was not okay alright gotcha it's it's a really really like the the the battle system is is fairly simple but it's it's like very appealing and it has a lot of depth to it particularly with making your team which obviously feeds into well wow your team would be way better if you had such and such or such and such on it um it's it's just really excellently well made like you could easily see this being like a new star ocean game like you could actually remove all the non mandatory party members and still see it being a star ocean game and they do at their credit they have they give you like this this party members mandatory this party members mandatory etc and that goes right um all the type weaknesses for enemies in all the main story content fit the characters they know you're going to have they don't give you a situation in which there's a boss fight coming up coming up part of the main story that has no type weakness to anyone that you're guaranteed going to have okay right what is making the side apps is fire when you're playing this game is it is it the the game moment to moment action in the game like as you're like unlocking characters or is it like like what's what would you say is like the thing that you're like oh this is the this is what it's doing it at its best I would say it is a mixture of the following most of all the presentation is fucking immaculate especially for being on your phone it is like the best looking JRPG I can think of it looks gorgeous and the character designs are like almost all a plus except for Arlen Arlen sucks

Starting point is 02:24:00 fuck Arlen nobody likes Arlen I think I think it was buttons who described that Mahoyo has the idea of if your game is going to make a billion dollars it should look like it makes a billion dollars and it does I am reminded I'm reminded when I see like the characters in the roster of like how Grandblue is like hey man if you haven't found the character that you've you've fallen in love with yet keep scrolling we'll get you the list goes long and deep star rail is definitely like that like there's like even the even the main cast like the the the guarantees that a lot of them are winners like genuinely this obviously feeds into the fact that it's as a gacha game that is a vital importance to make the characters that you would roll for cool and desirable but even beyond that the way the fights look the animations on the characters the way that the interface interacts with it the way that the auto battle looks the way that when you turn the game to two times speed you discover that everyone's ultimate has a second line read that matches up to the two times speed so that it doesn't fast forward or you lose the line read wait say that again. Okay so say somebody does their alt right the big fancy animation that would normally take about 10 seconds right Sam playing as a Jeopard he's a shield guy right he has one line read for when you're playing the game at normal speed and he has a completely different line when you're playing it at twice speed wow that's attention to detail okay right it's it's good and this it's just it's just bursting with presentational quality which is a really great first impression right the second thing is that it's it is fascinating

Starting point is 02:26:06 writing all over the place like fascinating sci-fi writing like all the time the main story is like a tales game and levels of complexity and that it's a standard JRPG with this interesting thing or this interesting thing all the side content which is like examining every single possible thing in the environment is really really interesting. Okay, you keep saying that so like can you give me an example of what you mean. Okay, there is a 10 minute sequence in which you are staying in a shitty hotel and you can walk up to a customer service satisfaction report and your character flashes back to them getting out of an Uber and the Uber guy asking them for five stars and you saying how that's an that's a violation of the impartiality of the customer review that you would never do that and that's the context to start shitting all over this hotel with the most bullshit customer review ever while your character is huffing their own fumes about an impartial Yelp reviewer they are and how they are the most magnanimous most present genius hotel reviewer there ever was and how you've done everyone a favor. And you congratulate yourself at the end of this process for having the single most unbiased review in the history of hotel reviews. You've made comedically I'm assuming. Yes, absolutely. Okay.

Starting point is 02:27:56 And this is just a throwaway little interaction where if you're in a cut scene in which you're staying in a hotel you decide to go look at the desk beforehand. There's a there is there is there's a sequence in which you you have to fucking walk around and in order to get permission to enter a new area you need to answer trivia questions about the robot settlement. And one of those is who was the winner of last year's vagrant settlement rap contest. And you go okay so you go talk to NPCs who will do voiced rap for like multiple minutes in every language the game supports. And they're not great, but they're a lot better than I expected. Okay, so tons of tons of little world building side quest voiced things going on content. There are like 45 trash cans and dumpsters on the first planet that all have unique interactions. And I don't mean like you click on it and goes this is a trash can and then you click on the next one and it goes some people put their trash. I mean some trash cans have letters in them that you can decide to dig out and put in a mailbox.

Starting point is 02:29:20 Some trash cans your party has a long series of paragraphs describing them talking about you as you route through the trash and what a freak you are and so on and so forth. It is just drowning in constantly interesting little anecdotes all the time. But the main quest doesn't have this tone to it. No the main quest is somewhat standard. All the planets frozen over we got to figure out where the where the the evil MacGuffin is on the planet that's causing the endless winter. Oh no the government's involved, etc, etc. And it's told relatively well. Okay, right.

Starting point is 02:30:02 It's not going to shake the end of the world. It's star ocean ish. Okay, I'm watching some gameplay of a character named Kafka and so far she hasn't turned into a giant bug. So I'm a little disappointed but okay. Yeah. Yeah, it's just it's just constantly interesting all the way down to when I log in every single day some character texts me some nonsense. Like fucking got a text this morning about characters that I've been dealing with all in a secret group chat gossiping about somebody and wondering if they're embezzling money because they're getting too many Amazon packages in space. I mean that just sounds like a fucking persona conversation with Ryuji and fucking yeah it sure does and really really sure does gremlin mode going off on on absolutely.

Starting point is 02:31:11 There is big big. I hope no one finds out we're part of the Phantom Thieves being yelled in an open market energy. Also, the weirdest thing is that your character looks like you Narakami or girl version of you Narakami. And you know how I'm persona for you the third option was the weirdo nonsense option for freaks. That's what this character is your main character is you Narakami is if they were picking the weirdo freak answers on every dialogue. Okay. Okay. You option three.

Starting point is 02:31:56 Like where it's like yes this character would just dig in a random trash can. Just to do it when you pick different characters do they. Have different dialogue and interact with no it's always going to assume that it's it's Stella or kale I think the male and female versions. And it's always going to assume that you're rolling with the party members they gave you for free. Which leads to funny situations in which with my free roles I purled a Jeopard which meant I was playing as Jeopard when I met Jeopard. And got to have a cutscene in which two Jeopards were walking next to each other talking to each other. Though it was talking with my main character's voice instead of Jeopard's voice because that's who I'm really playing as. It's very much like every party member is like absorbing into your chest when you're not looking kind of thing.

Starting point is 02:32:55 Are you playing with the controller or you just just the touch. I am playing with the controller and I'm also playing it on my telephone. The number one thing that really stands out extremely strongly Genshin sucked ass on your phone. Terrible phone game. You could play it on your phone right. But it was a it was like an action RPG where you were moving and jumping and swinging your goddamn sword. This game is a JRPG where you're doing turn based fights that also has a fast forward feature and the most competent auto battle I've ever seen in a game. And will allow you to teleport to your your daily whatever's which means that I can easily pull out my phone at two in the morning when I can't sleep.

Starting point is 02:33:45 It's bang out all my dailies on reset battles or menu selection so there shouldn't be any issue. What's is the auto battle doing more than just doing physical attacks over and over. Yeah, it actually is so it will intelligently use your physical attacks or your special attack. And it will also you can set it to use your alts or not and it will use your alts correctly which is the weirdest thing. So you know you have a character that has a full you know a heal that affects you know every party member and does more healing if they're under 30%. So the auto battle is going to tend to wait until one character is at 30% before using it. It's not what's what's the downside. What's the downside is that it's not perfect and occasionally they'll blow their alts on like shielded enemies or enemies that can't be damaged or you know what not.

Starting point is 02:34:38 So the basic gist of it is that for re going through areas that you're overpowered for or running daily content that you're overpowered for you turn that auto battle on and just smoke them. Well as you're doing story content you are manually controlling your party because it's more difficult or if you're doing really hard content you would actually control your party to make sure that they're doing everything correctly. But it's an extremely competent auto battle thing for the shit that you wouldn't actually want to fight yourself. Yeah that makes sense. We every day we stray further and further from God's light and by God's light I mean the most boring part of traditional RPG. But yeah like it's like but we want it but we also want it to not be boring but don't make it not. Keep a bit of it but not too much and that's why I'm just like oh my God okay what are we oh FF7R. Two times speed with the auto battle on if you hit a trash mob but they are gone in four seconds they're done. So there's that right all of that content and then you have you know Genshin had its side stuff.

Starting point is 02:35:54 So the main side mode that they have aimed at this game right now they'll be adding more later is a roguelike. It's using the game's battle system and it's essentially slay the spire and it's good. It's really good. The roguelike elements are pretty good. They're quite as good as slay the spire but it's a really good start. Are there any limitations to not buying anything? What is that? Are you going to hit a wall where you have to grind out something to solve to overcome a hurdle? I think to stop you from just going all the way through.

Starting point is 02:36:50 So you will absolutely have to grind because it's like it's a free to play game. That grinding does not necessarily involve cash. It involves dailies, weeklies, using your materials to level up your characters etc. The thing is it's a free to play game's implication a couple years ago meant one thing but that has changed now when people go it's a free to play game but it's the riot version of it then it's like oh you get way more than you expect to for free. I hear stuff like that about I've seen it with rune tower and shit like that. So I'm like what are the actual hey hold up we want to make some money here.

Starting point is 02:37:30 I'll give you a good example. Right now in 1.0 and I assume this will carry forward you don't need to spend a dime to beat all the content. If you want to do the super hard end game shit you would hopefully get lucky with your free shit, your free rolls and the main distinction is damage types. So persona has your four damage types and then light and dark. This has I think seven and it's like fire, ice, lightning, earth, wind, imaginary and quantum I think are they. The banner character right now, Sila is like one of the only characters that does a quantum damage in the game

Starting point is 02:38:25 and she's also wildly broken like fucked broken like absolutely busted throw the rest of the team in the trash broken. You don't need them, you don't need them. It's premium content you're getting, yeah. But you're going to hit your walls. Oh people are saying there's a Street Fighter 6 open. Yeah I was just looking into seeing what the announcement was for that. Wonderful.

Starting point is 02:38:59 Yeah so like hey if you get Sele right you're going to roll it. You're going to fucking roll it because she is busted. And here the probably the most nefarious thing about the whole game is you know you have your pity and you have your rolls and all that for the banner characters and the banner characters will leave for a year until they get rerun. When you do your dailies and only your dailies you can use one of your friends characters. Ah there it is. So when I do my dailies I get to see just how fucked Sele is compared to the rest of my gang because every single person I know playing this game but me got hurt.

Starting point is 02:39:58 Man there it is. I have a friend list of about 11 people, all of them. Well time everybody but me. Time to add more friends so that you get access to more characters. Right. Wow. And that's part of the thing. Now over the long term it'll always even out blah blah blah if you roll a dice enough times blah blah blah.

Starting point is 02:40:23 They also give you rewards for trying the character out in a training mode. So whenever the banner comes in they go hey we will give you a decent amount of currency rewards if you try the character out and beat a little battle thing with them which allows you to see their animation, see their alt, see their voice, see their design, see their etc. But yeah no it very much like Genshin the biggest problem with this game is that it is excellent. This is absolutely excellent and much more than Genshin. I love space and sci-fi a lot more than fantasy and I like JRPGs more than I like open world action games. So for the time being I'm in.

Starting point is 02:41:19 Okay. Yeah I'm in. I see some people are like oh woolly just needs to see this character and that's it. No it doesn't work like that. They say that in my dream and I'm like you people don't understand. If you've been around long enough and you still don't get how this works then there's no saving you. There's no helping you. Like it just have you not seen already how this works? Like my hooks are particular man.

Starting point is 02:41:49 They're very particular. That means we need to find the perfect character. Find the ultimate short-haired punch waifu that's going to do the Dempsey role. I'm like yeah that's dope. That's dope but that's not it. It's not all there is to it. But yeah yeah alright. There is exactly what I just described in that what was it? Project BBQ trailer and I was like yeah that's fucking super sick.

Starting point is 02:42:19 Are you talking about ZZZ? Not ZZZ Zone Zero. No Project BBQ was a different thing that they showed a trailer for and I was like yeah that's cool. Yeah but yeah. Open beta is only a weekend. There are genres that like have to step outside of their genre to get me interested. But anyways. Not every kind of bread crumb. Most in fact don't work. I think it's funny that like Virgil has become such an overwhelming archetype that like Dimension Cut is like there's going to be a character. Like the character I mentioned Sele. It's Virgil with a scythe and waifu.

Starting point is 02:43:09 Well because I've been accused of calling everything a Virgil like I'm probably never going to do that again. So like as much as this is becoming more and more real it's hilarious but like you're not going to hear it from me. So cool. That's been pretty much it. I'm going to be playing Darkest Dungeon and Star Rail this week. Plus I don't know Zelda over at twitch.tv. Alright. I got a P. B.R.B. Enjoy your P.

Starting point is 02:43:49 I forgot about something. Yes. Tape to Tape came out in early access. Yeah the hockey game. Yeah guess what. They've added the goddamn boss fight at the end of the first world that I got to. Probably more but that's when I stopped. Tape to Tape is a fantastic old school style hockey game with roguelike elements. But more importantly the boss fight against the referees.

Starting point is 02:44:17 It's a team of referees. Is the angriest I have ever gotten at a sports game. I fucking can't believe it. That's pretty funny. The following things happen. The ref, the real ref, the one that's handling your fucking game in your game against the refs, throws the puck over his shoulder to the other team on every faceoff. Every faceoff. You are guaranteed to lose every faceoff. On top of that, the ref will check your players. He'll check them. He'll just fucking check them. Okay. I scored a goal. The ref will say it didn't count.

Starting point is 02:45:04 Wow. He'll go no. It's no good. This was followed by the worst of them all where the refs hit the fucking beam on the side of the goal and it bounced out and they ruled it good. This was in like four minutes. This was like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And they fucking kicked my ass. And I'm just like, oh, this is the worst. This is the worst. Win the rigged match. That's powerful. That's powerful. It's great. And it's not like, because usually you're like, oh, it's a little rigged. No, it's super rigged. It's great. Like it is a boss fight.

Starting point is 02:45:51 Nice. That's at early access too. Yes, sir. Okay. All right. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. I love the sponsors. This week, the podcast is sponsored by Stitch Fix. Yeah. So we've talked about them before. Basically, Stitch Fix is for making you dress better.

Starting point is 02:46:33 I need to dress better. Yeah. I'm wearing pajamas right now. I am currently experiencing my renaissance of clothing that I can fit into again, that I couldn't fit into before. Look, look, see that right there? That's Nakali. I couldn't fit into Nakali before, but now I can. Well, it's not Naruto. It's... They're going to find out what looks best on you. You don't have to use your own judgment.

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Starting point is 02:55:38 Wireless is good. Yeah. So... Ooh. I don't like wires. Yeah. Here, what do we got here? Let's face it.

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Starting point is 02:58:22 All right. So yeah, while we were talking earlier, breaking looks like the Street Fighter 6 open beta is going to come out. We were expecting this. I was expecting at some point. I was also expecting this. Because closed beta will teach you a few things about what's going on with your network, and open beta for the stress testing. I'm kind of shocked it doesn't just roll right up until release.

Starting point is 02:58:43 That's what I usually think of an open beta very close to release is that it just rolls in. I think the major disincentive is that the demo will roll up to release. And the demo is the two characters that you can play with right now, offline only and world tour mode. But if you give, I guess, the full eight characters from the open beta up to release, there are people that might be like, well, that's a full ass game right there. World Warriors was eight characters at the end of the day. Never forget how fighting games started in the modern era.

Starting point is 02:59:17 There's a count of eight on the cast was enough at the time. So you're getting pretty much the same content as the closed beta test number two for everyone on May 19th to the 21st. And I guess that's going to be the real test to see the stress on the servers, see how it's going to handle what the game's going to look like on day one when it finally actually goes online. I hope that, you know, like, I hope that that's enough. I hope that it's not going to be like, oh, looks like we actually are going to keep this open beta running for a couple more days due to some. That's what I expect. Unforeseen, you know, issues.

Starting point is 03:00:16 I absolutely expect that thing to run for a full week because it's fucked for a couple days. You got to you got to see what happens when millions are hammering it, you know. And it's funny, too, because a lot of that can be upfront because like that spike of attention, of course, goes down from the day of release. Yeah, but it needs to be able to handle that release window, you know, so. What's interesting is that because of its openness, it's probably going to get hit harder than the actual games retail release. True. True. It's like everybody want it.

Starting point is 03:00:51 So like, let's say five million people do it. Like some of those people aren't necessarily going to buy three, five or six the day it comes out. They might buy it the next week or two months from now or, you know, whatever. Yeah. Let's see. Are they doing all platforms together for this one because they delayed PC last time? What does it say here? May 21st, May 19th.

Starting point is 03:01:23 PS5, Xbox Series X or S and Steam. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It's all platforms. Okay. Smart. You want to, you have to, you have to know what it's going to be like when everything is getting hit at the same time.

Starting point is 03:01:42 Oh yeah, there you go. It wouldn't be a proper stress test otherwise. Yeah. And naturally, nothing's going to change between the last open beta and now that content is going to be the exact same as it was. Now listen people, this is really important. Capcom heard that some of you might have been playing the beta after you were supposed to. Outside of the times that the game was limited to? Outside of those times, you might have hacked it.

Starting point is 03:02:22 What the fuck? What are you all up to out there? Okay. Capcops are not pleased about that. That's not okay. Don't do that. So we actually didn't talk about that when they announced that like two weeks ago? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:39 So it's interesting, right? Because there was a whole discussion that kind of happened when Momochi basically came out and was saying like, hey, there should be a ban on anyone that was using the crack. And that started a big discussion that more or less led to- That discussion is actually really fascinating. It is because it led to some great memes of just like, I don't know, the wolf character from somewhere in Dragon Ball Super just pointing to Yamcha going, he's right over there. It's like, if you can prove it, right, is the big thing. Which, you know, some people definitely were streaming their shit and having it out there with abandoned and, you know, for those people, it's like, yeah, okay, you can- it's pretty obvious. I think as well, there's a- yeah, so there's the whole, if you can prove it, discussion.

Starting point is 03:03:41 There's a couple of things that came up with that, right, where some folks were like, hey, weren't there versions of Street Fighter 4 that launched in Japan first? That the West didn't get access to? This is the part that I find the most interesting, because it's like, is cracking a beta to run it for hundreds of hours of practice on the game that no one else has access to, is that cheating? Yeah, probably. Yeah, it probably is. Um, but Momouchi was the wrong person to bring that to the forefront, because fighting games have come out, in some cases, years in advance in Japan, and we never heard that complaint from that side of the world before. The arcade versions of games would sometimes be out, like, wildly in advance of any console port, for like, yeah, literally a year or so. Now, the thing is, of course, right, the idea is that, for that statement to stand, then at the time, whenever that happened, Momouchi and anyone else that is saying that would, if they can, if they at the time went, oh, well, this is not fair that we're getting it early, then principled, all right?

Starting point is 03:04:57 Then consistent. Super, but I never encountered that attitude. I'm not sure if that, I'm not sure if I had seen that at the time or heard. Street Fighter 4 was like a really interesting experience with that, because Street Fighter 4 did release, like, July, August. Like, it was very close, right, in both regions, except good luck finding a fucking arcade machine of Street Fighter 4 in your local town in Boise, Idaho, as opposed to anywhere in Japan in 2008. Time to drive to Toronto for the one machine of the two in Canada. There was an absolutely gigantic advantage up until really recently for fighting games in Japan. And is that the same?

Starting point is 03:05:41 No. Is it cheating? Absolutely not. But at the end of the day, hey, you guys got extra time on it, but I didn't. Is, like, the emotion associated with it? And I can sympathize with it. There was a precedent that was kind of set at the time. And we also, I feel, got pretty used to the idea that, yeah, Japan's going to get shit first, and we're just going to get it afterwards.

Starting point is 03:06:04 We're just going to have to catch up. Because these are Japanese video games coming out in Japan made by Japanese companies, you know? So that's all it was. Exactly. We're going to have to catch up and, you know, lab harder and try to overcome. It's become a global market now, and it's certainly become big, big eSports. So you bet your fucking ass when a million dollars on the line is what we're questioning. Who is out there saying, I am not going to snitch on the principle when they can, if they can snitch the top seven out of top eight?

Starting point is 03:06:39 Oh, yeah. No, it's, it's fascinating. You know? I don't know for certain, and I don't think I would even hazard a guess. But I would assume that really, really excellent professional fighting game players that are going to be attempting the run at the one million dollar prize pool, I would make the assumption that many, many of those did whatever the fuck they had to do to play that beta for as long as they possibly fucking could. Because there's a million dollars and Capcom is now in a situation where some people got to play a sport, the whole sport. Like for months longer than anybody else before their big million dollar tournament.

Starting point is 03:07:32 Now you'd be surprised what people can like, like geniuses like fighting game geniuses, you'd be surprised what they can do with a single weekend on a game, right? Yeah. I'd be even more amazed at what they could do with 40 weekends. Certainly. Exactly. Right. But there, and I think like you see, like people kind of like, when tournaments come together and you kind of look at that, you go, oh yeah, okay. That was some tech that, that was developed, let's say more than 24 hours ago, you know.

Starting point is 03:08:04 But at the same time, like I do want to point out, like if you go watch, I'm like to shout it out. Juice box, right? Juice box able from back in the day, right? Like classic. You go watch the way juice box like breaks down his, his labbing on, on this game, for example. And like he's spending time not playing online against people. He's spending time writing down things and making notes and like digesting this game scientifically in a way that is like, holy fuck, that is a brilliant resource of information that's finding out the minutia. Right. I'm using my brain, guys.

Starting point is 03:08:40 I'm not just, I'm not just hand, hands in it out. Yeah. The scene needs people like that. And like when you are able to use that resource and other sources like that to like pull together information, you can do a lot. You can do a lot. However, make no mistake, just like Street Fighter V had a crack that had a lot of people grinding it out. You're going to see that there is going to be eight characters who are going to have some fucking wild ass tech. Oh, on day one.

Starting point is 03:09:11 Unless, unless the eight characters that people haven't got a hold of are wildly broken. The winner of the Capcom tournament is going to be one of the eight beta characters. Now there's going to be some changes, right? We know that. Yeah, sure. We know that there's been balance changes between the open beta versions of Luke and Ryu that we got in the demo. But I think, I think it's, it's entirely possible unless there's some wild unknown, like the unknown factor is always a buffer, right? It's like, right.

Starting point is 03:09:45 Absolutely. Right. The more, the little, the less you know about a character, the less you'll know how to deal with it. So there might be. Totally. Everyone's familiar. Everyone's labbing the shit out of a bunch of these cracked characters. There's also going to be people that have labbed against them.

Starting point is 03:09:59 Right. Totally. So it's both at the same time. You're completely right. Yeah. However, someone, someone really good is going to roll into that tournament with a fucking six months of optimization on Gile for this game only. Does that Gile know how to handle DJ's ability to throw out two fireballs for free one and or a fake and or a just. Yeah, cause it's Gile.

Starting point is 03:10:29 Except that Gile might actually be challenged as a zoner with the likes of JP and DJ. Right. That's exactly the thing. We know how insanely fucked up Gile is against those eight beta characters. What's he going to be like against what we've seen with these two, these with DJ and JP. You know, there's a reason why sort are online created the word beater as a pejorative for these people. It's bad. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:11:04 We're going to see. Also, I am like, listen, like if we're getting into sports now, which means, hey, it's Gile. It's fucking Gile. Okay. Hands up if you've played DJ or JP. Hands up if anyone's touched the characters I'm talking about. Hmm. All right.

Starting point is 03:11:24 Cool. What were you saying? We're getting into sports territory. A million dollars is a million dollars, right? Yes, it is. I would be shocked if every single person in the top eight hadn't played that beta to hell. And then I would also be unshucked to find out how many of them got prescriptions for Adderall this year.

Starting point is 03:11:51 Oh my God. Oh God. Yeah. Dude, the million dollars brings, I mean, people were already like discussing things like that before in the past with like performing and, you know, performance enhancing substances and yadda yadda. A million fucking dollars. 40.

Starting point is 03:12:12 Yeah. My symptoms for ADHD never came up until until the open beta. So I just, I needed a totally million air fighting attention deficit. Yeah. We're going to see. We're going to see wild new levels of thuggery going down. Like, like it's going to take everything you can and sometimes being good in game is not enough.

Starting point is 03:12:38 You know, here's my, you might need to Nancy Kerrigan the competition. I think, I think, yeah, I think practicing early when you're not supposed to and doing drugs to make you strong. Lane sabotaging other players snarking them out so they fucking get banned. That's what I'm talking about. Capcom sees right over there. So here's the thing. And this is very important.

Starting point is 03:13:09 And this is actually the funniest part about the entire story to me. The message that Capcom put out is very deliberately worded and very, very precise in its language. And it says that interest and essentially in response to the conversation that was happening they said, okay, if anyone has been proven essentially to to be using the beta outside of the prescribed hours, you know, for whatever reason, that person will face consequences for the Capcom pro tour effective as of from now. Yeah. So you could have, you could have lab your self to hell right up until you read that.

Starting point is 03:13:58 So you need to snitch while holding up today's newspaper. Yeah. And you need to catch somebody's cell phone filming June. You need to hold up the newspaper with your face and your fucking ID and then turn the camera around to whoever like grinding out some shit on the computer looking back going, huh? What was going on over there? Right?

Starting point is 03:14:25 You need to sneak up into the locals and blow the whistle while specifically proving that it is in fact today's date. And in the reality this covers Capcom, but also the actual message is stop streaming at heads. Yeah, stop it. Yeah, you know, like believe it or not, like there's dude, there's people like never forget, you know, oh shit, the screen went dark. Oh, you could totally see me.

Starting point is 03:14:57 Damn, that's crazy. Just see you in the fucking reflection dump. Oh, damn, that's wild. You know, never forget F champs, mom's curtains in the kitchen background. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's funny. But no, I think all things considered like those words doing the heavy lifting in the Capcom statement are like that's the that's the most like important underlined part is

Starting point is 03:15:26 like, okay, look, we did something. We did something as long as you stop right now. Right. Capcom is like, yeah, it's called hamster damn. Right. Y'all come here, you do what you got to do. And we will be over there and we'll be doing what we got to do over there. I think I think the the funnest, like the absolute most like fun way this could go.

Starting point is 03:16:00 I see people joking about it, but it's been talked about for a while is people cruising through pools and like dropping shit on purpose to make it like look less perfect and less optimized. Oh, yeah, I just tried something new. It didn't work out. I got to practice more now, man, 48 hour gods, you know. And again, like, you know, when like when when you have the people out there that are just like, like not able to lab physically, then they lab mentally, right?

Starting point is 03:16:36 They put it together. They see all the footage they go through. You just, yeah, just that's it. Just you're just one of the weekend gods, man. I think I will say there's another factor on this that actually adds to it very significantly. This is like the closest a fighting game has come out to Evo in a long time. It is June to August. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:16:58 So it's not impossible. But like we've had, I mean, look, we talked about the fucking cross-tech and skull girls. Oh, yeah, totally. Sam show, yadda yadda, you know, the two months. But it's close. Two months prior to Evo release has happened before and yeah, you know, but but but but but but but like, and it's an important to note too. This year, Evo top six is paid out, not top eight, which is fucking wild.

Starting point is 03:17:27 That's stupid. Like you're going to make it to Sunday and you're going to get on that big stage and you're going to be on the giant speaker with your face on the screen and you're not going to make a fucking red set. You know what, you know what, eighth place break their feet, make it really interesting. Damn. So seventh, so seventh place feels like a winner. Shouldn't have shouldn't have done it.

Starting point is 03:17:49 Yeah. Okay. Shouldn't have even shown up. Okay. I got you. Then you'll really appreciate it. Right. You won't feel bad about being top seven.

Starting point is 03:17:59 Yeah. Yeah. No. Very, very weird. And I was like, is this because top six for Street Fighter six? What? Yes. It's like, no, I think they just they're doing there.

Starting point is 03:18:12 There's a payout bonus, I think, and it's just they're not going to, they can't afford or not, they're going to make it just for the, yeah, exactly. Something like that or whatever. So anyway, the Capcom Pro Tour is where the money is going to be at and that's also, and where the money is at is where the grime comes out, you know. I look forward to some dastardly ass nefarious shit. Grime. Mm hmm.

Starting point is 03:18:37 Mm hmm. I mean, dude, like we're already waiting with bated breath to see like, yo, grand final Oh, winner just lost a set. Now it's losers set on both sides, the bracket reset and the switch to modern mode. What? You know, like, like there's going to be that moment because it's legal. It's real. It has benefits that you don't get from classic.

Starting point is 03:19:08 It's a point of discussion. You know what I want? You know, you know what I, I think is actually the most likely thing to happen out of all this, all this, all this cheating talk is, is salt from number two is the, the tainting of the win by accusations. Oh, after the facts. Okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:19:37 Right. Right. Right. You know, we're fucking prove it. Well, I can try. Yo chat GPT mid journey voice tracker. What are we doing? Can we get, can we get some footage together?

Starting point is 03:19:52 You know, can we just edit in a little screenshot and just put a little, you know, find some stream footage and Wow. I know Michi really love playing street fighter six is open beta on May 26th of 2023. It makes me so good. I mean, or the Evo for some top players, you don't have to look for that hard for some top players. You just got to go to that clip where it's just like, Oh shit, y'all weren't supposed to see that.

Starting point is 03:20:19 It's all out here. All out here. What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you stupid? You fucking idiots. You don't got to look that hard for some man. You know?

Starting point is 03:20:31 Oh damn. Wait, what? Oh shit. Hold up. Hold up. Hold up. Crack heads. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:20:41 Yeah. Yeah. Fucking. Unbelievable. All right. Unbelievable. Okay. So, um, yeah.

Starting point is 03:20:51 Get in there. I got to take a quick break. Excuse me. All right. One more. So, uh, open beta May 19th, 21st. Hooray. Um, Ken masters, uh, father and NFT criminal, uh, NF, Tatsu, Maki said Pukyaku, uh, that's

Starting point is 03:21:22 pretty good. Tarkis dungeon, idle showdown. Okay. Uh, so we touched on, uh, the writing and mass effect. Uh, and, uh, I asked a question, how can the highs be so high and the lows be so low? And the timing of that was quite apt because this week, a story came out. Well, there's been a couple of things popping up recently about just like, uh, the, the golden age bio where writing and how things were handled back then.

Starting point is 03:21:58 The story I read last time was about how every character was handed off to an individual writer and they were checked in with to see like, Hey, would this person say this or would that person say that? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and so the, uh, uh, the story here is, uh, dragon age narrative lead claims that Byron or Bioware quietly resented its writers. Um, there was, uh, an interview where, uh, yeah, one of the dragon age staff, uh, one

Starting point is 03:22:31 of the writers, uh, David Gator say it was basically describing that, uh, writing is one of those disciplines, which is constantly undervalued, something that everyone thinks they can do. Even Byron, which is built on the success and reputations for good stories and characters slowly turned from a company that vocally valued its writers to one where we were quietly resented with a reliance on experience, expensive narrative seen as the albatross holding the company back. Um, maybe that sounds like a heavy charge, but it's what I distinctly felt up till

Starting point is 03:23:01 I left in 2016. Suddenly all anyone in charge was asking was how do we have less writing, uh, a good story would simply happen via magic wand rather than be something that needed to be supported and a priority. Um, yeah, that, that tracks with their history. Absolutely. It's, it's kind of nuts because I'm coming from a time where I was not playing the games, but all I knew about Bioware games is those are the best written video games.

Starting point is 03:23:33 Holy shit. Right. You need to, they, like there's games that video games have video game writing. And then there's these games where it actually feels like, you know, there's full breath characters with depth and, you know, and all the things that you, you know, that you wouldn't get out of a typical, um, you know, I guess a typical 20 to 30 hour game, but you'd get them from a really long JRPG with good characterization or a long running TV series type of thing. You know, I remember my friend, I can lay the foot, I can lay this at the foot of Casey

Starting point is 03:24:07 Hudson, like directly at his explicit fault. Um, and the start of that was the Mass Effect three thing where, um, I don't, we don't need the writing team. I'll just write the ending. Hmm. It just, uh, uh, it's wild because the entire reputation, like I said, of, of the company was, was exactly this thing, um, to bring it into question and or to do anything that would deprioritize it would, I, I don't know how it could not be seen as a massive mistake

Starting point is 03:24:45 when it's the main thing you're known for, you know, um, well, I mean, part of the problem is the doctors were gone, right? So Anthem and all that and inquisition, like the doctors had long left. Um, uh, one of the really important things to know about the reason why Bioware is called Bioware is, uh, it was run by two doctors, uh, who were successful practitioners. I think in, I think there were family doctors who started a biotech company to sell medical technology with the name sounds like IE Bioware bio and tech, which was bio and tech. It all means very successful.

Starting point is 03:25:27 And then they decided, Hey, um, despite being successful technological doctors, what we'd really like to do instead of making tons of dollars is make a bunch of cool ass D&D video games because that's cooler to us than the money. So let's make a bunch of really good stories, like a, you know, like a D&D adventure module. Like I don't know, like Baldur's Gate passion project, when you have the money for it. It's crazy. Yeah. Um, but whatever the case is, you know, like, I think games develop a reputation for out

Starting point is 03:26:06 being outstanding in a certain thing. And at that time, like it was very much like this studio is good at this, like that studio is good at that. And it was, there was one thing you did. And yeah, for everything I knew about, about Bioware from a distance was just, it was all about the writing was all about story. Um, so, uh, I mean, at the same time, like I think about how we looked at the telltale era and how like we saw, you know, that's another instance where like the choose your

Starting point is 03:26:38 own adventure tale craft was one that started falling apart as well. And as the tricks started repeating themselves, it started to be less engaging and then the drop off and yadda yadda over the course of multiple telltale series. But like, I feel like that from what I played at least, that was more of a case of like, no, they kept doing what they do, but like the formula kind of ran dry and didn't really push itself in any way. Um, whereas over the course of these three games at the very least, and I'm going to count the core tour ones as well, like you just have these wild bipolar swings in quality,

Starting point is 03:27:18 you know, um, Dragon Age is like the most fascinating fucking series ever. Because it's not, it's not just like from chapter one to chapter two or from like game one to game two, but it's like within the same fucking video game, within the same room, within the same hour, two side quests will be unbelievably amazing and the dumbest worst shit ever, you know, and then you just got to go like, all right, XP is XP moving on. Um, it's fascinating because we're seeing that this quote predates the decision by the writer's guild of America to go on strike. Um, like it happened a couple days beforehand, uh, but writing is like wildly undervalued

Starting point is 03:27:58 especially in games. Writing is the least valued part of the games process because it's so goddamn annoying because you write the story and then the story goes this way and like, now you're telling me I can't move this level, I can't cut this scene, like this technical thing is fucking up all, no, I just need to move it. Like, uh, there's, there's discussions about like Halo where fucking war, entire missions were just rearranged all over the place. Cause it's linear, right?

Starting point is 03:28:31 It like the best, just right, just right around it, right in a nonlinear way. Okay. Yeah, just, just, just fix it, just fix it with the writing, just fix it. And it's like, that's bad, it leads to bad writing. Let's say, woolly, let's say you had a action game that had a really well thought out story, uh, and everybody was really happy with it and, uh, then due to some development foibles including a absolutely disastrous clipping, crippling save bug error, they had to chop and screw every level in the game into some unholy fucking mess, at which point none

Starting point is 03:29:11 of the story makes any sense, and it ends up killing its own series. Because ah, whatever, just right around it, sure we had to shuffle everything in the games of technical failure because this stupid save bug came in late, but ah, what, just write, just write, just write your way out of it, with a couple months to go. No, let's just, uh, well I was waiting for the question, but I assume, assuming I already know what the question is, the answer is, uh, take the most important parts of that, of what's left and slice it up and sell it as a pre-order bonus. Yeah, um, I, I, oh can you excuse me, I actually have an important phone call coming in, very

Starting point is 03:29:56 sorry. Anyways, um, writing is hard and, uh, it's also what, we fucking, whatever, what it's good, hey guess what, we fucking keep pointing back to it and going, oh my god, Disco Elysium though, and, uh, you know, that, like for, I don't know, um, that even in a best case scenario, like if someone, like who, if, if, like, for Disco's writing, for example, represents someone's multi-year fucking world-building thing that they, that, that they culminated into this and then they're like, cool, now do it again in a two-year period, um, and make it even bigger in breadth and, and depth because we're going to be twice as big this

Starting point is 03:30:47 time because it's the sequel, um, which, you know, obviously like movies run into this problem as well and shit. Under the best circumstances, a talented ass writer is not going to be able to do what they did, you know, and replicate like those efforts in the same way for a sequel or for a long-going trilogy or, or whatever the case is, um, and now you make it even worse by, uh, taking that two years, I said, and turning it into 14 months, I believe in some instances. Uh, people leaving the company in between that had the entire arc planned out that,

Starting point is 03:31:25 you know, others were not, I guess, necessarily going to pick up the baton pass from and, um, it's kind of, it's kind of a miracle that were, that like these games did happen to some degree. Um, yeah, I just look at like the, the, the Kotor two type situations and I'm like, well, that's almost an instance of without the restore, like it happened, but at least the restored content existed in some form and it wasn't just here's a thread paragraph where you go read it to find out how Kotor two was going to be good. You know, I feel like I've heard, uh, uh, uh, stories about like this was what was going

Starting point is 03:32:13 to be in the game if they had time or this was what was supposed to happen, but they never did, uh, for a bunch of different stories over the years and you don't, and in that case you were able to like fucking mod and hack the game and pull whatever you could out of it. Um, but just the sad interview after the fact about what was supposed to be is just the worst. Um, I'm trying to think of an example, uh, invaders in, I remember there was a whole thing about like what invaders in was supposed to become for season three before it got canceled

Starting point is 03:32:44 and it sounded awesome. You know, and it's just like, yep, oh, well, um, you know, there's something I feel really bad about writers that's only tangentially related because, uh, you know, say you're making the sequel to your game, right? Hey guys, we're going to really clean up the fucking, uh, the battle system. We're going to add this. We're going to add these new characters. We're going to, we're going to, you know, the levels are going to be bigger and the

Starting point is 03:33:08 graphics are going to, it's going to run better. And then you look at the writer and you're like, so it's the sequel. So, uh, write better than last time, write it, write it, write it better than you did last time. So like it's, so it's better like the rest of the stuff in the game. Look, I got more, I got more detail on, on Ezio's coat, writing that much more better and, um, well, um, or don't write details, uh, uh, about Ezio's coat, uh, get really, uh, fucking sloshed at a company party and just go on a grope fest and then, uh, create

Starting point is 03:34:01 an industry wide fucking unsafe, dangerous environment, uh, which then leads to a hundred million dollar payout settlement from, uh, well that was just Ubisoft, but we're talking about Riot, who, um, apparently are going to be paying out fifteen hundred and forty eight women, um, hundreds of people are receiving five to six figures as a result of, uh, yeah, sexual misconduct and discrimination, uh, of like literally a thousand five hundred and forty eight, uh, women. So it's, it's, it's the legal, uh, it's the legalese for creep shit. That like,

Starting point is 03:34:51 Don't do it. The amount of people on that list means that literally at some point it was please take a number, fill out the form, just submit it. You probably won't hear back from us. You'll just get a check in the mail like, like a thousand plus cases of that shit going on. It's way higher. That's way higher than I expected.

Starting point is 03:35:19 Like you don't even have the individual HR meetings at that point. It's take a number, we'll rank how severe what happened to you was on our little quick reference chart and you'll get a check and that'll be the end of it. Fuck, man. It's like they're triaging people into different rooms based on the diagram of the where did they touch you? Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:35:43 Did they say anything? Did they touch you or above, above? All right. Let's take it to the other room over there. Let's get them. Okay. And then each room is just like, what's our starting rate? What are we ending at?

Starting point is 03:35:56 What are the damages? How are we going to? All right. What would the lawsuit be? Like just, yeah, a hundred million dollar settlement from Riot, $18 million from Activision and a hundred million over, what was it, $1,500 and 48 employees and that is on average $65,000. But wait, there's a time window to it. An eligible claimant is one who meets the following requirements.

Starting point is 03:36:37 They were employed any time from at least September 1st, 2016 to the effective date. So only claims that were after September 1st, 2016, for example. So that number does not include anything prior to that. Anybody before that? So yeah. Let's see here. Let's, 2016, all right. So that is 200 and 2,555 days.

Starting point is 03:37:30 No wait, minus, no September, we can cut down a bunch of that. Okay, so that's close to, that is nearly one a day from 2016, nearly, but not quite. It is about maybe two, three years short. Yeah, you can definitely say one a week, absolutely above those numbers. All right. Bummer. And then, yeah, I mean, I guess, well, story's ongoing, but that was the part that got announced. Another article popped up here.

Starting point is 03:38:18 This is more of just like a data analysis thing, but someone wrote up basically a look at how the new $70 price point might already be affecting sales and suggests that the attachment rates are going to drop even further than they have. Yeah, no shit. The interesting thing is when they put the numbers out for their game sales, for PlayStation specifically, game sales yearly and revenue by type yearly, you can see that Sony and well, software in general is at an all time high, PlayStation is seeing record numbers for their hardware sales and for their software sales in terms of actual income, but they're

Starting point is 03:39:18 seeing a massive drop in unit sales. And so it kind of goes into detail, but essentially games are, there's more money, but there's less individual games being sold because less people are buying them and taking the launch year spike and then you kind of gradient downwards. If anything like that is going to happen here with the PlayStation 5 generation and games continue to be this extra 10 bucks on it and people are adopting less. In the end, that little, that the amount of the growth is not going to be sustainable because you need people to actually purchase fucking video games for your industry to continue

Starting point is 03:40:06 to be healthy and it goes on into numbers and there's a whole lot to it. But essentially like the increase in triple A games going up to buy that 10 bucks is already showing some ramifications. At least according to analysis here, yeah, shoutouts fucking indies, shoutouts like, you know, The Darkest Dungeon 2 came out and it's like 40 bucks, shoutouts cheaper games that look worse that have rested devs that we unironically want. I want shittier games that cost more and are made by tired devs, oh yeah, no fuck this.

Starting point is 03:41:03 Redfall really puts a fucking pin on this whole conversation. It's a fucking first party Microsoft game that comes out as a bloated, broken piece of shit for 10 bucks more. I think a Star Wars game is a bigger deal just because it's a Star Wars game. I don't know. First party to me is like, imagine if Tears of the Kingdom came out next week and was fucked. Well, Zelda's a thing.

Starting point is 03:41:31 Right. Yeah. I mean, first party, well first party can mean a lot of things. First party fucking Santa Monica Studios is not the same as, you know, like Kratos is not fucking the Redfall. That's kind of the point. In any case, yeah, well, we covered most of it. I think the only other thing here, oh yeah, new double dragon game, double dragon guide

Starting point is 03:42:08 and Rise of the Dragons. Guess what? Shit looks sick. Bimmy and Jammy coming back. So Marion's in it. She's got a grenade launcher and some guns and as that's all well and good, but it's kind of disappointing when you consider the design that she got in River City Girls 2, which is the fucking buff abs because she's never going to get punched in the abs again.

Starting point is 03:42:32 Yeah. And you're like, damn, that sucks that they that that energy was only for that one interpretation. But it's fucking double dragon. So just give it a year and you'll have another version and world and reality to jump into. But yeah, this trailer looks good for this one. Like the double dragon license and it's confusing, hand changing and or whatever the case is with that movie, they just they keep them coming. They do not sit idle on that one and it might even be a deal where like you have to do something

Starting point is 03:43:05 with it or you lose it. I wouldn't be surprised. Alrighty, fucking $70 games is fucking Star Wars and Redfall. What a fucking what an act like just what? What's the extra $10 for? Shit for seeing if we can get away with it. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 03:43:36 What are you going to do, not not not buy the new big AAA? That's crazy. Fuck out of here. Yeah, it's kind of interesting too, because this kind of goes into like the amount that Modern Warfare 2 sold and then comparing it to the to the games that to the third party sales at the time and then following it up the next year and watching how like from year to year like it dropped by like like massive anyway, the trend in quarterly sales kind of just went downward as the pricing went up overall in this in this situation.

Starting point is 03:44:26 And then, you know, but like PlayStation Plus subscribers kind of like went up as well as people were kind of just like, okay, well, let's just get in on the programs that'll provide for something, you know, but anyway, turns out when you raise the price of something unless people buy it. Yeah. All right, look, let's just say let's just let's just take some letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to Castle Super Beast Mail at gmail.com. That's Castle Super Beast Mail at gmail.com.

Starting point is 03:44:56 Your letter may be good. And if it is, it'll sound like this good letter. Here will you stares at and pat versus in your opinion, what's the difference between a good open world and a bad open world? Thanks from Chris and Fort Wayne, Indiana. That's actually a pretty good question. It's not a bad one. You can answer it fairly succinctly.

Starting point is 03:45:17 A good open world is a world that you can wander around in and has interesting things to see and do, particularly without looking at your map. A bad open world is a fucking vomit of icons, of disparate activities that are just spread out everywhere just to fill it up. I would counter and say that a bad open world can also be not filled with icons at all, or enemies, or settlements, or NPCs, or anything of note, see mortal shell, a world that you walk into that is vast and shows you a horizon and a ton of places that you think you want to go to.

Starting point is 03:46:08 And when you spend the time doing so, there's absolutely nothing to be found there. It's interesting because when you make games in Unreal, if you use Unity, if you use a lot of things that generate terrain, you can actually just like, I remember way back in the day with 3D, you can just use like Bryce was this 3D landscape generating tool, and you can just go like make a landscape, give me the geography and topology of this type of area, give me some jungle over here, yadda yadda, and then you can just scroll and make it as big and as wide as you want to. And if that's all you think it's going to take to keep your game interesting is just

Starting point is 03:46:50 scaling the size of the world up, then it's like, yeah, cool, Just Cause is over there, they've got an entire island, you can do whatever you want. It's going to be absolute dog shit when like 20 minutes in, you wander, you find nothing of interest or worse. You find something and then you find the exact same thing again, five minutes away from that last thing you just found, and it's identical. Elden Ring is one of the best games to probably have ever come out. And my long term takeaway from it is I could have gone with two or three less ulcerated

Starting point is 03:47:28 tree spirits. Like it succeeds on almost every level all the time, except for this one thing. The joke is, hey, see that mountain in the distance, you can go there. But actually, it's like on the way to that mountain, how many unique things are going to occur that I actually feel like, oh, I want to investigate that over there, and how much of that is, I don't want to say like a living, breathing world, because it doesn't always have to be that case, you know, but when it's designed well, you find yourself not like just running into the same encounters procedurally generated over and over and over

Starting point is 03:48:14 again, you know, it needs to be crafted, so, um, yeah, yeah. Then again, you know, I suppose like the word open world can mean a lot of things, right? Because it just mean a big map. But then there's a linear, like some people are asking in the chat, like a shadow of the clausus, a bad open world, like no, actually, it's one of the best. But shadow of the clausus is not an open world video game. The the vast planes you travel is the game's level select. There's no open world style content to be found in it.

Starting point is 03:48:49 You're not searching for side missions. You're not looking for upgrades. It exists purely as a, as a, as a travel. I would also say, I would also say, importantly, with that game is that the context and time it came from had made a big difference to I don't think making a game like that would feel the same that today when we know that like level generation can do that for people in one day, no problem, you know, it was a unique thing that stood out to have so much like nature, I suppose, and, and, and, and traveling and exploration and world building

Starting point is 03:49:31 mise-en-scène to get to like, you know, one isolated thing. But that was PlayStation two at the time, you know, like a lot has, there's been, there's a bunch of games that came along and there's some indie games too that did that, like they had big, open, empty things as you travel to one point and it was kind of like, yeah, that doesn't necessarily always hit the same way, you know, especially like if you're not compelling me forward with anything in that empty path, so to speak, walking simulator became a term at a point, yadda, yadda, yadda, so anyways, yeah, you know, that's, that's the short of it.

Starting point is 03:50:15 I think icon vomit is like the easiest distinction. Yeah. Like for me, I just avoided a bunch of that like prime Ubi shit, you know, I hit the fatigue on, on the, it's funny because there was like a really, there was a really good moment for that, which was Assassin's Creed two and Brotherhood. And then black flags and threes, like, oh, this is becoming a problem. And then everything after that was like, oh, just, it's just icon vomit on the fucking thing.

Starting point is 03:50:45 Like none of this shit has anything to do with anything and it's fucking vicinity. It's just, it's just there to pad it out. Uh, all right, Garrett says, hey guys, Garrett from Alabama here. Pat mentioned how Minsk being added to the D&D board game that Willie enjoyed made sense is he's the one to add from the Baldur's Gate setting that got my mind tumbling on times when a crossover reference or something else had a larger effect on new media that it's being placed in. For example, Magic the Gathering did a crossover with Baldur's Gate last year.

Starting point is 03:51:19 Minsk and Boo were added from that set, so it's good that it's making waves in Magic's oldest formats. Uh, they've been pretty well meta locked going for 30 years. Legacy Magic players have to know what Baldur's Gate is now full stop because they will encounter Minsk at some point. Yeah, Minsk isn't going away, I was in my local bookstore the other day and I saw him on a shelf on some D&D book that was only a couple of years old. Other example I thought of was the availability of a limited time only Dante armor in Monster

Starting point is 03:51:53 Hunter World that ended up being super meta and a must have for a time to do in best best in slot builds. I remember that. That was so stupid. It was limited time and it was Dante and it looked stupid, but whatever, it was super good. It was some fun or crossover references that ended up being a bigger deal than intended. Bigger deal than intended.

Starting point is 03:52:15 When the guest content outshines the main content. I can think. That actually happened again in Monster Hunter with the FF-14 collab where the Dragoon armor was like super meta. Okay, Dragoon from what? Oh wait, okay, collabed with, okay, okay, okay, gotcha. I would say that Akuma and Geese, no Geese, not Negan, Negan, Negan dropped, but not Negan. Walking dead so much bigger than Tekken.

Starting point is 03:52:53 Negan dropped, he's not as high tier or wasn't as high. But the cultural impact. No, Akuma and Geese Howard were fucking menaces on the Tekken tier list that were better than the main roster, like the everything primary about it, all the DLC characters that came that were super OP and nuts as well. It turns out you give Tekken characters a projectile to get really good. They are right. Not everybody though.

Starting point is 03:53:25 There is the vampire girl, but fuck her. No, Akuma was a terror for a lot of Tekken's life and yeah, the guest character just fucking blows it all up. Which is not always the case, I mean Link was pretty low in Soul Calibur 2, Geralt was not high especially in Soul Calibur 6, you know, a lot of the times it's like, yeah, they're there, Noctis showed up, he was around. You know, but Akuma and Geese were pretty fucking nuts. Every Smash character really is just that over and over and over again if you really

Starting point is 03:54:04 want to, you know. But that's a deliberate. We got to ban Minecraft Steve because he's too good. We got to ban latest DLC character because he's too good is that's the point. They want you to buy the character. So buy it for the lore and also buy it to win and then at some point we'll nerf it down but in the meantime it's a selling point. Yeah, and then there was one more about modern controls but we kind of talked about that

Starting point is 03:54:35 a little bit so that's fine. Do you really think that you're going to see people like in like top eight like actually using modern controls just because of the speed? It's not just because of the speed, it's because I think there's a real discussion. I think it's not going to be likely because you're fighting against, you know, three decades of habit and you're also missing out on tools. But there are there's actual tech that can't be done with classic controls that modern controls can do.

Starting point is 03:55:05 Really? Yeah. So for example, something that was found is if you press the fireball button at the same time as the drive rush button, which is just the dash cancel, you will get the fireball and then if the person is blocking it, the fireball will just get blocked normally. But if they jump over the fireball and it it's specifically like option selected specifically causes you weird options like nonsense. Yes, to dash forward at which point you can then uppercut them for doing that.

Starting point is 03:55:41 So you're using you're doing one thing with those with the fireball button and the and the dash button together. You're pressing both together and only a fireball is coming out, only a fireball is coming out and the moment they decide to jump over the fireball, the game will make you instead of doing the fireball dash towards them and then you can blow them up for it, right? That's that's how you're going to play rock and paper at the same time to their scissors. But you can't optimize anything because like combo and damage wise, because it's you're you're missing buttons.

Starting point is 03:56:15 You're missing buttons, but your damage nerf is not universal. So you take 80 percent of you scale everything you do in modern controls. If you do easy inputs, scales that to 80 percent. But if you don't do the easy input shortcut button, you get 100 percent damage. So if I press the super button, I'm going to do a big Hadoken, Sinku Hadoken, and that will be 80 percent damage. But if I do down, down to forward, down to forward and light, medium or heavy, like the actual motion for the super, it's going to be a normal super.

Starting point is 03:56:51 So I think it's encouraging you to use this, the thing sometimes and feel and once you get more comfortable, try using the real input. I'm just sitting here and I'm thinking like modern controls and is for a super. Is it one button? Yeah. So like, I'm just thinking about like, I mean, Zangief and Akuma. And just that that's, that's scary. It is bust out a 720 pretty fucking fast.

Starting point is 03:57:21 Yes. I can't bust out a 720 in one frame. No. Now the best grappler players and will be able to do a standing 720 anyways. And yeah, of course. But the difference between the instantaneous one and the one that takes just a little bit of a startup will make a difference when you're talking about million dollar play, right? Similarly, at not million dollar play at everyday casual last level, the ability to do a shoryuken

Starting point is 03:57:54 for someone jumping in on you with one button versus having to stop and focus on doing the input is one of the most challenging things to overcome as a beginner. That's where modern is going to absolutely make a difference for sure. It's real. It's real. I don't know how far it can go, but there will be people there like you can't nerf skill, right? No matter how easy the inputs are, there is no way that somebody that has higher skill

Starting point is 03:58:21 using the tools that modern gives you is not going to find ways to make their play more optimized compared to somebody who's not doing those things. There's combos people are doing right now that there's Twitter tech for where in the middle of a Ryu combo, if you do a micro walk, which is just walking forward for a frame or two, barely, you make just enough drive meter with that step to allow you to extend the combo into another EX, into a level three that you otherwise wouldn't get a whole bunch of extra damage. You have to do what's called micro walking to do it, right?

Starting point is 03:59:02 It doesn't matter what classic or modern that person's playing on, if they have those optimizations that they're playing with and you're not, they're going to beat you. Modern is a real thing. I'm interested to seeing the kind of zany shit and like how the, because there's a possibility somebody rolls up way high up using modern the whole way. I think people are going to try it. I think we're going to see that. We're going to see people working on modern pocket characters for certain situations.

Starting point is 03:59:31 If you specifically want to do like that thing I said about the fireballs, you know, I absolutely think some people are going to train to overcome certain matchups by getting the benefit of like, I don't want to have to do the input here. I want to be able to just press one button and do it. And I think the optimal way you're going to see people who are beginners getting into intermediate range, modern players are going to become a thing and the franchise is probably going to stick with this going forward. Classic will be classic.

Starting point is 03:59:57 It's a good idea. But they're probably going to push this as the main thing going forward. You're going to see a lot of people who are intermediate in that they do most of their moves, the traditional input while in modern controls. And then every once in a while for that little bit of a quick advantage, they'll press the shortcut button, you know. But they'll start switching back and forth. I think that's what we're going to see for sure.

Starting point is 04:00:23 Fascinating. All right. I'm not going to use it. I don't want to. But what if one salty day you go, fuck it. I don't want to lose like this anymore. I want the one button 720. I really like doing 720s.

Starting point is 04:00:42 What if you didn't have to? I find it really satisfying. Yeah. He's the only character that has to do it. The other grapplers don't have to do a full two spin on the stake. That's the distinction. It's the legacy. Saying you should have to churn butter.

Starting point is 04:00:57 Yeah. It'll be fun to see how far you can get, right? And is 80% like too much or is it not enough? I assume this is going to be tweaked over time. Like I foresee people discovering some fucking nonsense like the option select you described but like more and then Capcom will like roll it back and maybe decrease the damage reduction or something like that. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:01:28 Because right now it's balanced around the idea of the moves you do for the easy are going to be weaker and you don't get all your buttons which might help you if you need them in certain situations. But if people find more things that break the modern open and do really unfair things that classic can't do, then yeah, we're going to probably see it get touched. You asked earlier like, you know, is the damage reduction too much? And it's like my thought process goes, well, the Shoryuken that I performed too late to hit did zero.

Starting point is 04:02:02 So 80% is better than that. True. Yep. At the same time, that question is there's that aspect to it and then there's the other fold of it which is to the person who wouldn't be playing, if not for the modern controls, well that's a new player. So like I'm going to try and get the wife into playing Street Fighter 6 and I will absolutely point her towards the modern controls to just see if the act of fighting a match is enjoyable.

Starting point is 04:02:34 Start with dynamic even if you want to. Have you seen dynamic mode? I haven't seen it. Dynamic mode is even easier than modern. Dynamic mode is the button you press changes what it does depending on where you are on the screen. So there's a light, medium, heavy button and like if you are full screen, it'll just do a fireball when you press it, but if you get midscreen, it might try to do like a jump

Starting point is 04:03:02 and if you're doing, if you're all the way up close, it'll do a throw, you know, and I really like the idea of fighting game controls for a Street Fighter character looking like a mecha cockpit. How much do you want the AI to control your yaw or your turning radius? So that's exactly it, right? So the dynamic controls is using the AI in a way. It's like you control where you want the character to stand and then wherever it's standing, you have one of three options that the computer is going to start to try to do and you can

Starting point is 04:03:34 pick which one you want that to be, you know, you get used to blocking and then choosing how to do attacks out if you've never done this before and it's only offline. So you know, that's, that's fine. But I think for anyone who's like, I legitimately can't even get my head around what's going on, that's another entryway for them. If modern is still asking too much, you know, all right, there you go folks, we'll see you next time. Have a good week.

Castle Super Beast - CSB 218: Shame The Cat's Pathetic Tits

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