Castle Super Beast - CSB 219: Hate Crimes of The Kingdom feat. Gianni Matragrano @GetGianni

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

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gotta boost up the server a little bit. Hi, hello. So, yeah, for a while now, on Twitter, I've been told to get Gianni, so guess what? Here I am, he got me, everybody. We got Gianni. We got him. They finally did it. It was, they put me in this padded cell, and they tell me that I will get to see my

wife again after this stream. Is that not your own personal padded cell that you built for yourself? Yeah, well, I mean, built is being generous. It's a studio bricks, which is like, they build it, and then I, am I, am I, wait, I'm you? Oh my God. Oh God. Oh Jesus.

Oh, Lord is mercy. This fucker sucks. This fucker sucks. Did I, did I fuck it up? No. No, you didn't fuck it up at all. Why, why now? Yes.

No, no, no, no, no, no, it's, it's good. Oh, man. It's the shittiest podcast. Fuck. Did you just for once in your fucking life? Why? I love this so much. What?

What? No, what? Like literally why? Oh my God. Apparently I'm still muted. Apparently. Yeah. I'm muted now.

Oh Jesus Christ. Claims to be a voice actor is muted. Okay. All right. This is my, this is my favorite podcast. Okay. It's fixed now. It's fixed.

Shut up. It's fixed. It's fixed. Did you? Hello? You're there. Did you hit one button? And it fixed it?

Oh God. It, the technical doesn't matter. Yes. The device keeps changing every time. It's fine. It's fine. Oh, I know exactly what that is. Did you upgrade your video?

No, no, no. It's the, it's the headphones that connect and then each time it's a, cause I, yeah. And then, you know. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's, hey Gianni. What's up?

Hi. Hey Pat. There's that and woolly versus. Uh, it's, it's, it's good to be here. Uh, yes. I, I was, I was saying how woolly did in fact get Gianni, uh, and they have put me into this, uh, padded cell that they promised me I will be released from at the end of this stream.

Uh, so thanks everyone for, there you go for showing up and wish me luck. The best part is that, um, uh, this is my favorite part. Well, yeah. Fuck all these live people. The MP3 will hear everybody. Just fine. Yeah. And they'll hear, they'll hear that opening twice.

So yeah, we're all good. Oh, did you, oh, did you show up to listen to the live yourself, Gianni? Did you? You know, it's funny. Uh, calling it building is pretty generous, uh, because it's, it's like half built and they send you the pieces and then you just put it together like Legos. Oh, that's crazy. But, but yes, you built it.

You're a big man. That's right. Boss. Such big, strong man. The real funny thing was when I didn't level the fucking floor and had to build it twice, but we don't need to talk about that. Dude. Oh, can you, can you, can you bounce off of them?

Like a crazy person? Yeah. There you go. I mean, I probably shouldn't do that too hard. But yeah, they're, they're, they're acoustic absorbers. So you can do a lot with them really, even, even, even stuff that I, well, I guess I won't talk about in the podcast, but yeah, you do anything with them really. Yeah.

Are you standing? Yeah. Yeah. I'm standing. I, I could like get a little chair in here. Actually, I did get one and then I just returned it because I found that I really preferred this as a standing setup. Is that better for, for throwing your voice?

Don't you, yeah. Don't you have to be standing for proper projection? For voice acting, most voice actors prefer to stand and usually do stand. I feel better doing VO standing. And so, yeah, the setup for, for VO is standing, but I also use this setup for gaming and streaming and stuff on PC. Like this is just an all in one for me now. Uh-huh.

I mean, except for, I have like the consoles in the living room with the couch and the big TV and all that. But it just works as a standing setup anyway, because yeah, with voiceover, you usually are standing. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, hey, welcome officially to the podcast.

Thank you. Voice actor, the voice of first and foremost in my brain at the very least, Gabriel in Ultra Kill. So let's fucking go. Yes. Yes. But more importantly to me, a wide, wide variety of dumb ass shitposts that you can find at his Twitter.

This is true. Yeah. They're, they're, they're very, very stupid. It's real. It's calling at the bottom of the barrel is too generous. It's beneath the barrel and far dug in, but yes, I do a lot of shitpost too. All of which on shitposts with Gabriel. All of which tend to show up on the slop streaming that I do sometimes where it'll be like, it'll

be like something will start and just like, okay, it's a screenshot of Colombo or Master Cheever. Yeah. And then the voice that it's like, okay, it's a Gianni tweet. That's what's going on. Yeah. All right. What's, yeah.

Yeah. That was, that was my philosophy with the shitpost was I always, I always called my philosophy like throwing a Lego set into the ceiling fan. So what it is, is they just fucking scatter all over the internet. And so anybody walking around for long enough is going to step on one and be like, ah, fuck, it's another one of these fucking things. That's, that's my shitpost. They're just, you know, it's litter.

It's just pure litter. Yes. Good strategy. Like, like Caltrops. Just toss them, toss them behind you. Caltrops, but for stupidity. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. How do my fucking foot? Why is Master Chief talking about deep, not hard, our wheelchair miracle? My sources that I made the fuck up. Oh, yeah. And then the armor shrunks up with that story. Yeah.

And, and yeah, I did. Don't worry everybody. So Pat has played act two, Willie hasn't played act two yet. But don't worry. I caught them both up to speed. That ultra kill is gay. So that is taken care of. Don't worry.

We're all on the same page. Yeah. Hell yeah. And then they're, and then they were kissing. Yeah. Also of, of a second trailer, second channel trailer, notoriety as well on the Willie versus the algorithm voice drop, which I very much appreciate. Yeah.

I hope you're okay with it. I put it into the, the little voice visual reels that I just uploaded. Oh yeah. Of course. It's like, you know, it's another thing to throw into the reel because the reels are for, you know, possibly some clients or whatever. So it's like, Hey, I do this kind of work that you could hire me for and so on. So.

Do you want good work or do you want bad work? You might want the bad work. It's possible. Yeah. And if they do want the bad work, you know, they just go to my website and here I am. You have to, does, does everyone have to like agree to a clause that says like, if you've voiced our character, you will also shitpost about said character. I am very, it's, it's a fine line that I walk with the shitposting.

New blood is super chill and and fucking yeah. New bloods like they are just shitposters, right? Dave, like when I first turned in my first lines for Gabrielle, he was like, he immediately said like, you know, you got to do shitposting with him, right? Like he just, he just said that to me, but different, different studios, different clients, some companies, you know, it can be a little bit different. Not every actor with every role has like full freedom to just mess around. I like to subscribe to what I call opt in.

So if the dev or the studio expresses to me that they think that stuff is great, then I'll start to mess around with it a little bit more. But I try not to assume to mess around with it, you know, because I don't want to, you know, like, I, I, every, every, everybody's different. Everyone has their own wants and boundaries and stuff for the characters and whatnot. I try to respect that as best as I can, while also being a horrible fucking stupid meme gremlin on the internet. Yeah.

So like, correct me if I'm wrong, but like, okay, Duke Nukem, anything from ultra kill, et cetera. They're like, yeah, yeah, more of that. Good. Right. But like Nintendo, it will, by example, would be insane. Just don't do it. I think I won't have to worry about working, working with a Nintendo just based on if they

were to look me up, they'd probably be like, we can't, we can't affiliate with this guy. Good Christ. This is a kid's company. And then Duke Nukem, I should, I should be clear. I don't actually voice Duke. So they, I actually, you know what, at PAX East, You're doing my head. Thank you.

At PAX East, there was a guy from Gearbox who actually came over to the New Blood booth. I was doing signings for, for New Blood. They brought me out. And the dude from Gearbox was like, yeah, we think that shit's hilarious. So that's, that's a little bit of a thumbs up. I was expecting him to like plug me in the chest immediately. So but now he didn't, he thought it was kind of funny. So there was a little bit of a thumbs up there.

I think, I mean, it should be clear at this point, if they're not paying attention that like shitposting about the character that you voice on Twitter, like amplifies and makes everyone love the character more. I think one of the best examples of that is Luke in Street Fighter Six is currently enjoying positive reception single-handedly because of Alex. Because of Alex Lee, yeah. He's been, he's been a little bit of a pal for, for a long time and he is, he is so fucking handsome and also really funny, mostly handsome.

And he, he has been doing such great stuff with Luke. He's turning it around, man. He's turning this thing around. Alex is, Alex is a hero. I first became a fan of his on, he voices Kyman in Dora Hidoro, the, the anime, which I am a massive fan of and yeah, he's, he was, he did, he did a bunch of the fun stuff for that character too. Um, Alex is, Alex is amazing.

I love him. If I could be half as good as Alex by the time I'm done with this career, I'll have been successful. He's, he's great. Yeah. I just, uh, no, I, I think, I think every company should take note, you know, of, of, of the, the, the endearing PR campaign that can be just like, let the voice say the dumb things, say the lying part.

Yeah. It's not even necessarily the voice, but I mean, like, look what happened to Sonic. Like, look how like Sonic's public perception has like inverted because that Sonic Twitter account is just allowed to go. What if I got trapped in a big balloon? Right, right. Uh, yes, that's definitely what I thought you were going to talk about in regards to Sonic's voice actor.

Um, yeah. So, uh, you know, we usually do, you know how this goes, right? So we, we do the weeks, obviously, uh, we have a hell of a big one this week with, uh, the tears of the kingdom, T-I-E-R-S of the kingdom says Pat. Yes. Um, oh, oh, keep mocking that. You're going to look much dumber in a few minutes. Oh, oh, were there, were there literal tears in that intro?

Yes, there literally are. Now, now I, I'm going to need to, I'm going to need to confirm this to myself to see like is it because just because like there can be tears, but is that the intention? Is there an intended Du Blanc Tante with the, with the title? That's the question. Okay, well go if there's any kind of verticality to it that doesn't necessarily automatically mean it. I will get Gene to bother him about this specific question.

Oh no. Should, should I, should I, so I've played a little bit of tears of the kingdom, uh, I, I did in fact touch it barely, uh, like I'm still super in the, in the early opening part. Is it fine if I dive into it? Go for it. Okay. Uh, still in the super early part, uh, and I, you know, probably like I haven't gotten

to the like the third introductory shrine or whatever yet. And anyway, I cannot yet vouch for whatever Pat is talking about. The only thing that I know is that this game is so brave. This game dares to have it take an hour for you to get a shirt. And when you do get closed, the first article of clothing you get is a skirt immediately followed by like a minute long upskirt as it does the title drop. And I was like game of the year. I mean, that's just so brave.

Like the sky drop, right? And he's in his, he's in his regular gear and then Link gets naked, like super fast immediately. They're like, we got a strip of immediately. And then you get the real shirt and the real shirt is like, it's still like half the chest out for like six hours. So is this, this is the, the longest, uh, onboarding to gameplay for our free play, I should say, of any Zelda so far.

So yeah. Okay. Definitely. Cause what happens is, is that it's, you remember the great plateau from breath of the wild. I know you don't, Gianni, but, uh, Gianni, in, in breath of the wild, you, you hit on this, this area called the great plateau and it was incredibly similar. It was, you got to go to the, the three or four shrines and each shrine will give you the power.

You'll use the power to solve one puzzle and then you'll need to use that to get to the next part of the island. Then they'll give you the ability to leave the island, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is the same, but it also includes, um, a intro sequence. It all, like you, you start the game and there's a, a, a narrative focused, like walking talk. Okay. Wild.

Okay. I didn't, I didn't know she was British, but I'm going to try to enjoy the Zelda franchise anyway. So this is for, uh, this is my first, this is my first time touching a Zelda game ever in my life. I never even played breath of the wild. I was just like, fuck it. I'm going to jump in on current thing.

Uh, and, and you know what, I'm glad I did because it's been, it's been very nice. You said it's like the longest intro to free play, uh, yet, but for it on, on the other side of it, the game almost feels like free play nearly immediately anyway, because even though I'm still like screwing around with the introductions to everything, uh, the game gives you a lot of dicking around. You can kind of do. And so like, I don't feel like I'm still on like a rail to get me introduced to the game. I feel like I'm just playing the game, even though I can tell I am on the guiding path

to introduce myself. Yeah. I, I, uh, what I recall from breath of the wild was basically, uh, I, I, what I recall from breath of the wild was basically open your eyes and then you do, and you walk out the cave and then you're on a rail, but you're, you're kind of able to, you know, a couple things and move around a bit and then after like two or three, uh, uh, more little interactions, you're kind of like, okay, go do, go do whatever, you know, um, right, right, the, the, the, the wide rails guard rails is a, a decent, uh, uh, feeling for like, I can do stuff,

but like you can't, if you push it too hard, you know, right. So the, the changes they made there is fairly interesting. So, um, in breath of the, breath of the wild, really after that plateau was like, fuck it, do it, whatever, go, who catch, fucking go, do yeah, yeah. Um, in this one, um, the, the nature of that, that starting area is a sky island. It's not the plateau. So it is actually, you know, a disconnected piece of land floating in the, in the sky. And so it does have like a much clearer like circle that you were to travel.

You're supposed to go to the top and then do the, the hands of a clock around as you get the, the powers. However, I was talking to a buddy of mine, uh, Christina, and, uh, she was like asking people like, Hey, um, if you skipped that first shrine and didn't get the first ability and ended up at the ass end of the map, is there a way to get back? Cause I feel like I softlocked myself and the answer is yes, because there's enough stamina items in the environment that you can cook enough food to climb up like a 200 foot wall and get back to where you need to go.

That's hilarious. It's just not the intended user path. No, probably not. The intended path is, is fair, is very clear. It's, it's a clock, but now it's more interesting than that is that they dump you into a town at the very beginning. Like they show you a town and say, go here. Interesting.

They dump you into that town, every single NPC starts to tell you, Hey man, maybe you should go over here and do that good shit over here, which they don't force you. They don't like railroad you, but they go, Hey, maybe you should go to the Northwest. There's, I hear there's cool stuff over by the bird town. And to me, this means a lot because I don't know how you played breath of the wild bully. I did 120 shrines and scraped the entire map and then did the four legendary beasts. And that was the wrong way to play that game. I forget at this point.

That was, cause then I got to the one of the legendary beasts and they give you a double jump. I'm like, you, I played this game for 95 hours without this fucking double, all this sucks. Now, now if it were any other Zelda game though, you get, you go to the dungeon, you get the item from the dungeon and then you can use that a million other places. So you know that your traversal comes from those main story beats, right? Yeah. But so I was talking to people about this.

I haven't done any of the temples yet, but they do give you like puzzle solving abilities, but you're, you're mainly working with the four that you get in that little tutorial island. And you can brute force any other solution. If you just fucking shove that triangle peg outside of those temples that give you that new one or more importantly, you can brute force some cosmic fucking justice on some little bastard. So it's really funny to see you like retweeting all the, the nightmare Korok abuse because

you don't have the context, Gianni of why people are so fucked about these little guys. No, that's, that's what I was really thinking the whole time was I was like, okay, here's what I gather about the legend of Zelda. This is a universe with gods of some kind, which to me implies that these creatures deserve this suffering. It must be in some God's plan that they're being crucified and turned into a shwana spin. There's got to be a reason, right? They deserve it, right?

Yeah. So unfortunately, Gianni, the reason is on this side of the television. The reason is that Breath of the Wild had 900 Koroks to find. Oh, yeah. Okay. There you go. Deserved. Okay.

Good. And every time you get one, I don't know if you've encountered one yet. They do that fucking thing that's just, your eyes go red. And so that's why the first footage of this game I see after release is someone pulling up and kidnapping one, locking it in a prison and driving away. Like what is happening? The child abduction. What are these crimes?

The mechanics of that are super fun because what they've done is that basically there's just a new type of Korok puzzle and the new type of Korok puzzle is there's a Korok. He has a little backpack. Oh, he's so tired. Oh, his backpack is so heavy. And he wants to get to his friend and his friends over there with the green smoke signal. See you in the camera points you over there. And the friend Korok is 100 feet away, maybe, but across a river or across a pit or whatever.

So how will you get the little Korok guy over there? And then sometimes they're like miles away and you can like barely see the fucking smoke and you're like, how am I going to transmit this Korok to that location? Don't know. So what they want you to do, what they want is they want you to use the fuse ability to stick some sticks and boards together so you can pick up the Korok and move the Korok. And very, very, very, very quickly, everyone figured out, you know, I could just strap a rocket to just the Korok and just fire this bitch at a rough angle.

And then you discover that you can attach Koroks to the back of your horse and like drag them. Oh, God. And you can attach them to each other. Oh, no. Yeah. It's, it's, it's crazy. You've been given, you've been given like so much creative freedom on what you can like

craft in this world and a perfect victim. Yeah. Because their backpack is an attachable point like any stick or, or beam or, or plank. They're an object. Yeah. Okay. So this is day zero, day one. Like where do we go from here?

By like, are we keelhaul the fucking Korok, drawn and quartered Koroks? You're like, oh God, if you could attach them to a horse like. I saw one, somebody built a platform, their horse could pull that had like flame emitters onto a cross that was just like roasting them in like a, like a, like a darkest dungeon pentagram on the crucifix. You're right. We, we are on a one way course to the Rube Goldberg machine of child sacrifice. You are a million percent correct.

More hate crimes of the kingdom. Like just what the fuck are we doing? Oh man. So well, you played Breath of the Wild. You had your four powers. You had bomb, which was bomb. You had cryo, which was make a platform and ice, which was the worst power ever. You had stasis, which was cool because you got to do all that stupid physics shit.

Like, you know, hit the ball and launch yourself in the castle. The breaker. And I can't even remember the magnet, which was pick things up, right? Tears of the kingdom gives you a way better set of four abilities. You have a ultra hand, which allows you to pick up and move any physics object and staple them together to create a bridge, to create a ladder, to create a car, to create whatever. Okay. You now have rewind, which will rewind any object in the world like a full minute on

its on its timeline path. Yeah. Whatever, whatever it was doing, you have ascend, which allows you to jump straight up into any flat surface and just pop right through it. So go to the top of mountain from a cave. Go to the top of your, your boat from the bottom of the boat. Just go straight up like a super jump. And then the last one is fuse where you're strapping like bombs and knives to your weapons.

I didn't know about the rewind one yet. That is really funny in the context of Korok torture because that means people are going to be going full on fucking am on these things and, and I have no tears, but I must kingdom. Yeah. I mean, what you're describing for that first power with the, with the thing, putting things together sounds like some diver down shit. Like, yeah, like, oh, oh, woolly. Um, when, when, when rewind kicks in, it makes a world sound effect.

And when link turns it off, he snaps his fingers. Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. So here's where it gets like zany because all like in breath of the wild, your powers didn't really interact all that significantly here. Every conceivable weird interaction that can occur can occur.

You can hold, like say, say you have a glider that you can't, you can't get off. You know, you can't run and jump on it while throwing it off the side correctly. Right. You just know how to do it. It's awkward. So what you do is you pick up ultra hand and you put the glider 10 feet in the air as high as it'll go and you just hold it there for five seconds, then you drop it, then you jump on it and rewind it and it will go back up to a private elevator, turn it off and

then you glide away. Nice. Okay. Okay. But more say that was a, I don't know, wooden board that you put up there. You can now ascend into the now frozen in air wooden board and jump 30 feet straight up and use that to platform that I saw earlier today right before starting. What if you made a giant cock and balls out of boulders and logs?

Of course. Okay. Yes. Naturally. And what you did is you pick it up and then you start to spin it. Can you rotate it as fast as you can with the ultra hand, right? And then you drop it. Then you've hit a Hinox with an arrow, those big gigantic goblin guys.

Then you rewind the cock and balls. The cock and balls will now start whipping him in the face and hurting him and killing him. As you ride spinners. Yes. Okay. Yeah. No, no, no.

This makes sense. I mean, really, like if, you know, they, if they're doing their jobs, they're paying attention to all the crazy ass tweets and videos that Breath of the Wild had and then going, we need to enable more of that. It's the best ad you can have for these games. You know, is the absolute physics nonsense that they, they get into, um, like the, and the Koroks are, the Koroks are, the reason why they're getting it so hard is the Koroks are the explicit seed of experimentation.

So I had a Korok by a river had to get across the river. You can't ultra hand while you're going across the river, right? There's a couple of solutions. You could take a board and raft them across. You could build a catapult, which I've seen people do and drop a big old rock and just launch that fuck like a trebuchet. I decided to skip every step and just to strap a rocket directly to the Korok and vaguely point him in the direction and hope he lands where I hope he does.

And sure enough, he did, but then you go, wait, I can just strap rockets to these little shits directly. I don't have to. Now, now for clarification though, the Koroks are not as annoying in this game. It's specifically because of previous trauma. They are, they are much less annoying in this game. I'd like to believe it's, it's because they're a victim that is available. Like, you know, it's, they're there.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. But like if one could, um, if one could take the feathers from Assassin's Creed two that you have to collect and strap them to a chair, cut out the bottom of the chair and spin some rope and knock that feather in the balls, like, yeah, people would be super down for that. Right. What if you could put a Riddler trophy on a torture rack?

Yeah, you know, that's it. That's it. Right. So it feels like, okay, so the personification of the thing that I hated can now be abused in the sequel game where they're not anywhere near as annoying. Well, time to just meet out some, some, you know, pay forward justice. Yeah. The real thumbs up is that on all these puzzles that you have to, um, combine, you know, get

the Korok to his friend, they give you two seeds instead of one, so finding them under a rock or climbing a tree and shooting the targets or whatever, that'll give you your one seed and you'll be like, yeah, haha, but actually going through the trouble to physics them up to something will reward you with two. So, um, Gianni, you mentioned that the, uh, we open up to a giant link upskirt and, uh, yes, and, and, and, you know, some, some nudity there. Um, is it possible that this is just setting the tone because we all know what's coming? Right.

We all know that Gannon with his chest bear is descending on high soon, right, rehydrated true to give everyone else, uh, you know, to get everyone else's thirst quenched. So if you're going to set that up on one side, right, the, the try force of thirst, the try force of fucking like, like you gotta get, you gotta get all of it, all the players in place. You know, I feel like that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

No, the dry Gannon opening definitely makes it starting to add up. There's, there's a, they're creating, they're painting the perfect climax, one might say. Yeah. The try force of Barra, the try force of twink, I mean, who knows, dude, who knows where we're going? I'm, I'm, uh, I'm, I know, I just want to see like whatever outfits you get for your link. Um, like you want to know that the green tunic is in it, but then you want them there somewhere,

but then you want to completely go wild with it and mix it up and do other things, right? Yeah. Just, just, I just want to know it's there and then make a barbarian link going in. So it's funny that you mentioned like, who knows where this is going? And that leads into like one of my most interesting experiences with a game. So, um, in the, in breath of the wild, they gave you those like nondescript photos and they said, Hey man, if you find this spot, you'll find a memory of what happened to link. But they were pretty hard to find to get all of them, right?

In this game, they go, Hey, there's a big fucking gigantic draw, like, you know, a crop circle drawing of a thing on the earth that you can see from space. Go there, you'll get your cutscene, right? So I go, okay, I'll go do that. I'll go get my cutscene. And I got the last cutscene in the game the first time I sat down. And so you're sitting there going like, Hey, where's this going? And I'm sitting there going like, Oh, this is this.

So this is where it goes. Oh, and it's so wild because not only does it show me like, here's what's going on with Zelda and tears of the kingdom, right? It has a part where Zelda flashes back to all the other cutscenes I didn't see in the fight. So I'm like, okay, well, I definitely got the gist of it now. I think it was similar. I heard in Breath of the Wild you could you could go and fight the final boss like immediately.

Yeah, you can bump rush Ganon super hard and just fucking annihilate that that you're play through. Beautiful. And here's the thing, right? So that's kind of nuts that that happened. But Pat, like, would it be like, is that is that freedom not kind of part of what you're signing up for? Right?

The fact that you just wandered into that shit. There is going to be this is my gut, but I assume there's going to be a you unlocked them all follow up to that scene because it didn't actually answer any questions I had. It does something interesting. So in Breath of the Wild, it was fucking destroy Ganon. And the camera actually points you to a Hyrule Castle and like there's very much a pointing at WrestleMania fucking go do it. And then you try it in your pussy so you can't so you go get stronger here.

That is not the nature of the games core task. The games core task is find Zelda. And I don't know where the fuck Zelda is. OK. Zelda is not a gigantic beaming icon on the distance that says fight me here is there's there's, you know, they obviously took every one of these like random things you can stumble into, put them down on a board and go, OK, what is the most fucked up version of events you could have displayed to you to learn things until you get to the final one.

And I'm sure that it's all accounted for, right? I'm sure that like you're like as weird as that is totally there's, yeah, like you said, there's probably going to be context to make it all feel, you know, decent by the end. But that's yeah, no, that's the cost of freedom, man. That's what it is, you know. So like the one of the reasons that in Breath of the Wild, I did all the shrines and did the beasts last was because the game story said, go fight Ganon right now unless you're weak, then do the, do the, do the, you know, the, the divine beasts and blah, blah, blah.

So I'm like, oh, OK, so I assume Ganon's going to be really hard. So I did all the shrines to get all the life upgrades, right? And then I all, oh, well, I'll go do the beasts, blah, blah, blah. Here they're like, yeah, I don't know where Zelda is. Go find her, I guess. Maybe the people next to these dungeons will help you find her. And so it's, it's a lot more like it seems they are aware that a lot of people left the dungeons and the temples to last.

And now there's a lot more elbow in your ribs of like, man, you should, you should go down to the death mountain and do the fucking Goron temple, man. You should, you should get down there. How much of this feels like, you know, following up on my question from last week, Breath of the Wild 2 versus like a new Zelda game where you're doing things that are not like a Majora's mask versus like expansion pack. Oh no, this is Breath of the Wild 2. This is Breath of the Wild 2 all day, every day.

So moment to moment, like overall you're, you're feeling more or less like a continuation of the journey with new powers. Yeah. So here's a really good example that I have to preface something. So the reason why I'm like laughing about tears of the kingdom is because I was like, yeah, there's tears because there's the surface world and then there's the sky world, right? There's also the depths. There's big fuck gross holes in the ground that you can fall maybe two or three kilometers

down much like Siofa River in Elden Ring. And there is an entire second world map under there. Okay. Elden Ring in it. Let's go. No, no. Remember when we were playing Elden Ring and we were like, it's disappointing that the underground is only these four or five areas.

It's not the whole map. This is the whole map again, underground. Okay. Now, it's not as detailed. There's not settlements and, and, and whatever, but like it's dark world, but we just dropped it. And it's a whole fucking thing. And the best part, it's dark.

And by dark, I mean it, I mean it's pitch and you have to self like the whole way. It is dark world, just physically like, like dropped. Yeah. Okay. Um, so that's cool. But you remember the cube, the cube mazes, uh, like the northwest of the map, there's a maze that's just a gigantic, yes, yes, yes, the humongous cube, yes, I do. So yeah, the cube is there.

It's still there. So, okay. That's breath of the wild. And it's like redo the cube and the cube has now been iced up in such a way so that the layout is different. Oh, okay. So I redid the cube. I, I used the trick that did the first time where I climbed to the top of the cube and

ignored the whole maze. Right. Okay. And then I realized that didn't work because now the cube is so messed up that I have to actually do the maze properly. Like, okay, cool. You learned it. So I defeated the cube.

Defeating the cube doesn't do anything. All it says is now that you have defeated the cube maze, you can now go to the cube maze in the sky and the cube maze in the sky is like four or five miles up. So I had to transfer to a different sky island and spend like 40 minutes building the shittiest flying machine known to man and strap it with a bunch of batteries and use my consumables to fly over there upon defeating the sky cube, I unlocked the cube of the depths, so I then had to dive deep underground and fight a gigantic super boss, which finally, finally gave me on item.

This is, this is bullshit. When Super Mario Sunshine gave you a cube maze in the sky, everybody bitched, but when Zelda does it, oh, it's game of the year, man. So they, they, they, but in the process, I assume in between these cubes, you are finding your way over to a whole new land and interacting with all the different things there and new enemies or whatever else is happening and then getting your, your equipment to go to the next cube. Well, so the main, the main thing that they've done, so it is the same map as Breath of the

Wild. It is the same geography. However, the, the, the Ganon juice, I don't know, the gloom, the miasma, the miasma, they call it gloom, has significantly altered the geography of the map. So this area used to be warm, now it's cold. This area used to be safe, it's now destroyed with ruins or what have you and there's new enemies. This game is so brave, it introduces a musk mechanic unapologetically, sorry, go on.

Are you, are you doing shrines? There's shrines going on? Yeah, I'm doing shrines. Yeah. Okay. Are shrines pretty much the same? Shines are pretty much the same. There's now 153 instead of 120.

The extra 33 are in the sky. And all the old shrines are gone, replaced with the new shrines. And the new shrines have a double purpose. So they're not just fast travel points and upgrade spots. In the depths, the shrines, the bottom of the shrine comes down and becomes a light root. And when you turn them on, it lights the area around the shrine. Oh, that's nice.

You can make the entire underground properly lit. Okay. What's more interesting than that is that if you're in the underground and you find a light root, but it doesn't correspond to a shrine, that means there is a shrine directly above your head on the normal map. Okay. Now, they're always one to one. A hundred and, yeah, it's like 153.

Okay. That started to feel like busy work as we, as we know in the last game. Do you get the feeling that we're going to hit that again this time around where you're like, okay, let's go fucking spend a couple hours banging these out? No, for two reasons. One is the addition of having the shrines be the light root for navigation of the underground is really nice. And the second thing is that, man, you need the health way more this time around.

It was stream four before I got to the point where anything larger than a moblin wasn't insta killing me with a single strike. Is that because of the path you chose? Or is it? No, it's because shit is violent. Okay. Like it is a significant step up in damage and difficulty and danger. It also, I guess, narratively makes sense too, right?

Because in the very beginning, like the first thing as you're showing the intro of the game is basically you get bitch slapped so hard that you lose all your hearts and stuff. So it kind of like, he gets like this, he gets unwell in the beginning. He requires a rash. And so I guess it kind of makes sense where it's like, oh, yeah, you've got to go like build that back up and in that classic way. Yeah. No, the Samus tripping on a rock and dropping all our missiles.

Oh, it's really funny because, you know, everyone complained about the durability, right? Particularly the Master Sword. How come the Master Sword isn't that durable? How is the fucking Master Sword? Opening 10 minutes of the game, the Master Sword is like annihilated down to the hilt. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you're like, oh, wow.

Okay. You have a nice moment. How about this stick I found? It's really funny. Oh, you guys don't like durability? Fuck your Master Sword. Just like shatters it instantly. And you still use it a little bit, despite it being totally destroyed.

Yeah, and then it breaks again, which is like, oh, come on. Have there been any changes to basic combat maybe since the updates of last time? Flurry still works the same. Throwing things works the same. The main big difference is the fuse mechanic lets you do all sorts of stupid zany shit. So I have, let's say, a halberd, right? And there is a, you know, those red barrels. You fuse the halberd and the red barrel together, suddenly you have an explosive harpoon, right?

Okay, okay. Monsters all have horns on their heads that will pop off, that you confuse to all of your gear to make it more durable and have various effects. Bombs are rare now. Like they're very rare. Because you have to make bombs out of other things in the world? Usually, you usually use bomb flowers, but they're very, very few and far between. You never usually end up having like four or five or six on you at any given time.

The most interesting thing is just the fuse mechanic of being able to add properties onto whatever your weapon is, causes all sorts of zany shit. So in the Breath of the Wild, when you wanted to break rocks or you wanted to break open like some rocks, either some ore or like a passage, I hope you had a hammer on you because otherwise you can't do it. Here you just go, no, I'll take any random ass stick and combine it with boulder. Now I have a hammer and I can now just pop through the wall. I put a boulder on my shield and then the parry will like smash rocks apart.

Oh, nice. Interesting. Early on, you find a mine with mine carts everywhere. If you fuse the mine cart to your shield and then do a shield hop, you can now skateboard on your mine cart. Nice. Nice. Okay.

That's great. I can try that. You can do bomb jumping. You can do sprint board jumping off of that. Do you choose where the thing fuses to it? Do you position it or is it kind of like a set? No, for the weapon, it always goes on the end of the weapon and for the shield, it always goes right up on top of the shield.

For arrows, it's the most interesting because like now you hit arrow, you hold down arrow to shoot and you just hit up on the d-pad to get your items and every single consumable in your inventory just goes in all lines. Like do you want to throw an eyeball on it to make a homing arrow? Do you want to make it a fire arrow? Do you want to make it a bomb arrow? Do you want to make it a dazzle arrow? Do you want to make it a light arrow?

Do you want to make it so on and so on and so forth? Instead of just having them in the preset types. You do control position for like objects in the world that you've used, which is how you get a lot of the Korok torture racks because it's crazy how much freedom they give you with it. You can rotate shit and spin it around and get it at really any angle you want. Things like attach only at certain points for the most part, I think, from what I've seen.

You still have what your internal vertice is. Yeah, but you still have a lot of selection in how you spin the item around and there's still a lot of different points where you can attach stuff usually, so there's just a lot of creativity. Okay. It's been crazy. There's so much. I have a buddy who says, the game is just blender to me.

Right, right. You're just in a physics toy box. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So like there's a lot of different ways you can solve any particular problem and there's also the dumb way. So I got to some goddamn tower, I didn't know how to climb and I could tell they wanted me to make some kind of contraption.

Instead I just made a laughably obnoxiously large bridge that I just tilted against the side of the fucking thing and just climbed up that way. It works. A proud Sam Porter bridges fades in in the sky as you're crossing it. It's very much like it's a game based on like, yeah, no, that's a win to win. As you had enough magic, you had enough magic to like keep it there for the entire duration of that. Oh no.

That shit's forever. Oh, it's not like time and then it breaks apart. Okay. Anything you fuse together like a raft or a boat or a fucking bridge that is until the next blood moon where the game flushes its memory. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Huh. Okay, so then I guess I'm wondering like, are you going to, or when you're, most fights when you're getting into, you know, running across like a mob blend group or whatever, like you can just run in and sword and just board it. Oh, totally. There's whale on them. But like, are you like fucking around with the interactions and yeah, because they make the, they make the, they make the interaction, they give you a lot more reasons to do it.

So last night I had two interactions that sum it up really well. I ran into an armored moblin, but my weapons didn't do shit until I pulled out a hammer item so that I could knock the armor off. Now if I didn't have a hammer item on me at the time, I could have picked up a stick and a nearby barrel or boulder and that would have knocked it off. It provides something. Yeah. Uh, later on I got, I fought like a camp of moblins that they threw a, a gigantic spiked

ball at me, which I then just used to my long sword and the properties of the balls knocked down, retained on the weapon. So I was like knocking down like a high knocks, like after two strikes, uh, because I'm thinking yeah, spoke to people and they're like, you could have just rewound the ball and then the ball would have anti crushed them. Cool, cool, cool, cool. Okay. Cause I found in breath of the wild, uh, that like I would start fucking around with the

like physics and stuff in fights when I got like bored or just kind of felt like it, but it was just kind of a like, eh, let's have fun with this fight now. But for the most part, you, you know, just otherwise can go about it straightened or wasn't like a ton, a ton, a ton of, um, pushing for you to, to think outside the box for, you know, a ton of encounters. Um, right now there's like, uh, you know, the tallows, the big golem guys, um, a lot of them have like wooden platforms on them. So the guys can, uh, moblins can hang out on top of them and shoot you with arrows while

you're trying to fight the tallows. Um, and, uh, there's a lot of things that you can do, uh, when they throw rocks at you, you can rewind the rocks back into them and then they get staggered a little bit. And then you run in underneath their platforms and you use ascend to teleport to the top of the monster and then beat on all the guys on top. It like there's, there's a lot. Nice. And I'm not even getting into the stupid mechanical monstrosities that I see people making.

I saw somebody make, uh, big wheel earlier today, which was a gigantic ferris wheel monstrosity that like could go through deep water. Uh, I saw somebody build a, uh, fucking Mecca. Yeah. There's, there was a, that's in the trailer. There's a Mecca fit moment. I saw it. No, no, no, no, no.

The Mecca that you're thinking of is a block of stone with an arm on it. I'm talking, um, uh, bipedal 16 foot tall robot with bombs and lasers that can be piloted and walks like a man. He's just fucking Christ. Okay. Interesting. Wow. Or you could just make a big old penis and turn the flame emitter on it and then just

go shh. That's fucking crazy. Okay. All right. It sure is. Um, great, great that, that now, now I'm, I'm what you're describing is the like, okay, what's the, what's the major is mass aspect aspect of this, right? What's the super different thing?

It's like, yeah, the ability to basically engineer shit, uh, uh, uh, from what you're describing this. Like I was expecting, you know, fortnight, build a tower, gentrify high rule, no, it is, you know, it's like Kerbal space program. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck.

Okay. All right. It's this fascinating experience going into shrines because you go into a shrine and you're on stream and so the back seating begins, um, and you start putting together the pieces and the back seating stops and is replaced with, what are you doing? What are you doing? What is, what is the plan with this? And then like, I made a really, really jank air balloon to solve one of the shrine puzzles

and it worked. It technically worked. I did defeat the shrine. That's great. It's the game, it sounds like it's dedicated to that, uh, bizarrely satisfying yet shameful feeling of any time. Like you're trying to fix anything and there's a guy over your shoulder going, uh, uh, yeah, I guess you could do it like that.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's a tweet that has a robot and I'm immediately like realizing as well that like this is pause. This is the worst game for back seating ever because like if I'm doing that, that's, if that's how I, that's how I'm trying to have fun in this game. The last thing you want is a ton of people going, no, do it the way I did it. Right.

Like if you can, if you can brute force some shit and the system actually allows it, um, then you should be allowed to cook. You know? The system allows for a wide variety of brute force details. Uh, earlier today, I discovered that, uh, by looking at clips on Twitter that the angular momentum of items affected by rewind that aren't being rewound themselves maintains. So if you put items underneath a plank of wood and then rewind the item underneath, it'll rise and the plank of wood will also rise, but it'll keep its angle so you can use that

to create platforms out of nothing. He's Christ. Okay. And as you're describing that, I'm looking at this like fucking Mecca. Is this game even Zelda at this point? Seriously. Wow. Yeah.

I, I, I don't, I don't know about any of this, man. I'm a boomer should a guy. You just shoot it harder. That's, that's all I got. That's, that's the full extent. Well, this is, this is shoot it harder, but first you have to, to build your own gun. One of the most unhinged things that I've ever seen in my chat came from friend of the show, Gene Park, which was, um, the master sword in tears of the kingdom is a metaphor

for the Shinzo Abe assassination. Uh, what you got to build the gun yourself if you want to get it done, man. And then it breaks. Again, and getting murdered by a goddamn Gizmo, a motherfucking thing. I'm a Bob. Jesus Christ. Okay. All right.

That's. Sure. Um, yeah. Okay. I, I, I, tongue in cheek on this though, like, uh, that you actually talked to an NPC like, Hey, why are all the weapons garbage? And like, it's crazy when the gloom came out, every weapon in the world became horribly degraded and will break in just a few hits, durability.

So you're going to have to fuse items to your weapons so that they stay durable. And like, okay, I get it. Thank you. Thank you. I understand. Have you been rewarded with like high durability, like, uh, uh, say, okay. Things you can earn the ability to not have to deal with that go down into the bowels of the earth.

You will find pristine weapons. Nice. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Um, yeah, I'm hearing, I'm hearing a lot of, uh, like, uh, uh, yeah, death stranding

like, you know, like solving of problems and just leaning into, leaning into, uh, uh, the weird ass physics and jank of it. Uh, dope. Uh, I guess my only other thing is like, have you had any like one on one boss fight or one on one Lionel kind of encounters that are just like the thing that I love the most about those games? So Lionels are there for sure. I have not encountered one.

I saw, now there is a enemy that supersedes the Lionel. Um, it is called a Gliok and I saw one from far away. It is a Ghidorah. Okay. It is a King Ghidorah. Yeah. It is a massive three-headed dragon. Okay.

Um, also, and this, normally I would talk about this. There is a new enemy that replaces the, uh, Guardians that has given me the strongest feeling of, I don't want any of that get me out of here. I have ever had in a game since Dark Souls one tomb of the Giants. Wow. It shows up and you go, I don't want, I don't want none of that. Wow. I'm out of here.

Goodbye. Okay. Okay. Sounds good. Sounds good. Unpleasant. All right. It's a good, it's a good game.

Good Zelda. I'm not playing this. The only thing I want to say is like, I can't believe it can run on the switch at all. It's, it's keeping, it's keeping a running tally of like every physics interaction in the world for like hours because rewind works on anything. I don't, it's, it's, and it runs a lot better than Breath of the Wild also, which is also surprising. It's doing a lot more, but it, it runs steady right up until you combine 45 items together.

Yeah. And then it, then it runs a little less steady. Fair. I, I, it's nice that, you know, however many years after launch, you get the, like we figured out the dev kit system, we figured out how to smooth over a lot of the, the, the launch struggles with, with development and improved performance. But it is just kind of a bummer that it's like, well, yeah, but it's Nintendo. So you ain't hitting 60 anytime soon.

They're just, they're just never going to go down mostly locked 30. Yeah. Yeah. Which is better. That's what Breath of the Wild was. Yeah. They'll get around to it. Village still chugs apparently.

They'll get around to it. Next gen. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. The villages definitely seem like, uh, like bigger, much larger, like population groups than like the little, you know, outcropping towns you kind of got in, in, in Breath of the Wild.

But, uh, okay. It's Nintendo performance. Yeah. Zelda, Zelda's big. Cool. It's, it's, it's obsessed. I've been trying to get to one village for four days and I can't figure out how every time I, every time I'm about to get there, I go, oh, shiny and just wander away.

Okay. Uh, I'm going to, I'm going to, this is, I'm going to play it for like three months and beat like 3% of it and be like, wow, that was a great Zelda. Yeah. I was going to say, like, I hope you've got time, like set aside if you're going, you know, these are the, yeah, it's a commitment. It's a commitment. Yeah.

Okay. Uh, I got to use the bathroom. So quick break, uh, and then we'll BRB. All right. So, uh, Zelda, that, uh, was what was up, um, why won't they let Zelda talk? As she said, open your eyes and then, uh, is it because of the British? It's because of the British. That's why.

No, um, it's, it's okay. Uh, yeah, I'm, I'm down for this fucking new awesome world of voice acted Zelda and cut scenes and story and all that shit. Like it's been one of those things that I've, you know, like it, it's yes for years. It's always been kind of just the voice in your head and it's a, a Zelda staple in a way, but you know, like every other franchise at some point, it's like we can, we've gotten like orchestral amazing music. We've gotten link kind of going for years, you know, but, um, I don't know that link will

ever have lines. It's just more of a, he definitely doesn't this time around like Ganon and Zelda are like talking to each other and links just go, yeah, yeah, it's like, dude, calm your shit. That's, that's there. That's for player insert reasons, you know, but, um, no, I, I'm, I'm super down for like Zelda to join the ranks of every other franchise that has been like, okay, we can, we can have this be complete with, yeah, full score, full voice acting, everything.

Just get, get it. She wasn't voiced in, in Breath of the Wild. Is that right? She was. She was. Okay. There just wasn't a ton of lines in. Gotcha.

For like. She sounds good. She sounds great. She was thinking about, oh, Zelda has a voice. And then before I could fully process that, I was hit with the whiplash of her pulling out a Nintendo switch and, and, and there's just a Nintendo switch in that world. But yeah, she sounds good. Well, yeah.

Act. So here's the dumbest part, man. That's not a Nintendo switch. It's a Wii U game pad. Right. That's what I was thinking is they were like, here, use your pad to look at the world. And I was like, this feels like a Wii U feature. What, why is it here?

Yeah. I mean, most of the, most of the, the time the voice acting would usually, I mean, there would be voice actors all the way back to like Ocarina, you know what I mean? You got Ganon going, but you just do a couple of barks and then that's it, you know, um, you know, we're good. Check black to voicing, whatever. Yeah. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm down for this.

Um, okay. Is there, uh, yeah, I don't know. We're just going over weeks, but, uh, Jen, is there anything you've been playing or checking out that's interesting? You know, I hate to say it, but like everybody else, I, I jumped on the mainstream and I've been playing a lot of a certain open world adventure game. That's right. I beat Rekor, uh, and I was, I was playing through Rekor just cause it was like randomly

on Game Pass. Uh, and, uh, yeah, well, I, uh, Rekor, Rekor, like, did that from like two years ago? Was it more than two? It turns out it was like, what was it? It was like 20, like in 17 or something. This is the last game I'm aware of. Rekor. The storied creator.

Yeah. 2016. Yeah. Okay. Uh, so I was, I was playing Rekor. In my defense, uh, it was Wale, it was Wale, it was, uh, by the way, I'm, I'm, for anyone wondering if, in case I sound a little sick, I'm still getting over COVID. And so while I was, uh, down most with COVID, I was like, it's time for Rekor, I guess.

Uh, and so that was the thing I was doing instead of, cause I was like, it really sucks. To be sick as a voice actor, cause you can't do your fucking job. Yeah. Um, and so I was like, I guess I finally have time to get in for video games. Uh, and so I picked, uh, Rekor to screw around with and I actually beat it. Um, and yeah, Rekor, uh, is, is fun. I, I, I don't know if now's the time to talk about Rekor. You know what?

There will never be a better time. Reset the clock. Why so much noise about Rekor now? Uh, and so I, I, I played through it and it was a good time. I, I thought it was going to be like, uh, like a uncharted new Tomb Raider kind of adventure game, maybe with an open world, you know, whatever it's more like a ratchet and clank to me. It's, it is a scrimblow, uh, which I did not know about Rekor.

It is a, it is a scrimblow third person shooter, uh, 3d platformer, jump around while also being a third person shooter, you're doing a lot of platforming and stuff. Um, and, and it's honestly, it's pretty fun. It's not perfect. I still encounter some jank and you know, there's definitely some stuff that could be better or whatever, but, uh, I, I, I honestly really enjoyed it. It's a fun little 3d, uh, platformer third person shooter game, um, that, uh, does, does some, so some cool stuff and, uh, you know, you've got all your little robot buddies.

Yeah. I don't, this was one of the most amusing things to me. Uh, maybe you'll find this amusing. The robot buddies, so when they talk, I would receive a fully subtitled version of what they were saying, even though what they are saying is total gibberish. Uh, and so I would get a total fully subtitled version of it. I think maybe in the original, it wasn't like that or something like this is like their definitive edition or something where you can't see it because in every time one of the robot

buddies talks and mind you, all you have pretty much a robot buddies, it's like a narrative thing that you're kind of like all that's left for humanity or whatever. So it's your robot friends. That's about it. Um, every time, because I think they didn't originally convey what the robots were actually saying or maybe if you didn't have subtitles on or something, every time Jewel, the main character, which is also funny because Jewel, uh, but anyway, uh, every time she has to repeat back to the robot what they said and be, so, and so it'll be like, uh, Violet,

who's like this little round guy I love. He's also your fast travel. I think he's based on like Napoleon or something, uh, he'll, he'll go on like total gibberish and be like, and he sounds like that. And you can make out, there might even be a language that he's speaking because sometimes you can make out names. So to be like, and like, oh, that was a word. I understood that one.

Um, she'll have to, he'll be like, Hey, the cult has the thing. If you go over there and Jewel will have to be like the thing over there, huh? All right. And then you have that cult. And it's like every line, mind you, it's not all the time because there aren't a lot of these conversations with the robot buddies, but it is something like almost kind of endearing that you start to notice. Um, so it's really, you're not supposed to translate R2-D2 like, right, right.

But what's really great about R2-D2 is not only do you have a couple of cutscenes where you have to talk to them. You know, it's not a lot that you're having these conversations with them, but the game has like a lot of games, you know, an audio log system that you got into the world and you collect. The audio logs unfortunately aren't subtitled, but it's no big deal because you can go into the menu and read them if you really want to, I guess, right. But Violet, who is the robot who speaks total gibberish has fully voiced audio logs and

they are like paragraphs. So you'll walk over one of these little pickups out in the world and for like the next minute, you're just listening to him go off like this. It's great. It's hilarious. It seems bad to do. Okay. It probably is, but I don't know, I found it somewhat charming.

He's depicted well in that he's like a charming character to me, so it's like, I have like perhaps a tolerance for it. Okay. But yeah, that was something endearing about Rekor. This is not like, this is not my main takeaway from Rekor. It's not the majority of your experience or anything. You know, it's a 3D platform or open world, third person shooter kind of game, but just a little thing I love.

So that exists. I remember when it was announced and I remember when I saw the footage of it and it's like, yeah, run around the world, post-bocalypt, you got your buddies, robot buddies. I think Horizon Zero Dawn kind of replaced its existence in my brain when that came later. Right, yeah. It just kind of overwrote taking up that same space for some reason, and until you said it again and I was like, what the fuck, oh my God, that thing, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's great. For most people, Rekor was replaced with Mighty Number 9 coming out and going, yo, we got ripped the fuck off, KG and Afune. So there's that. What the hell, man? There's that part of it. And more so with the robot buddies.

So Rekor was fun, and then other than that, I was able to play, like I said, a little bit of, yeah, sure, I guess this little thing called Tears of the Kingdom. And then besides that, honestly, there isn't too much to say about it, but I've been doing just gears playing through that with the wife through the campaigns. We're going through, we're up to three now, so we're just going through the gears games and always a good time. I feel like, go ahead. I feel like the gears games are like weirdly underrated.

I know what you. Okay. So my, my wife is like, she's, she's in the chat, by the way, it's a perennial astronaut in case you see you're talking mad shit about hello, that's, that's her. But she, she loves to, she's like a total snob. If thing is popular, then she's like fuck thing, fuck popular thing, right? She's all about like niche indie horror, you know, based stuff that, that, you know, it's, and so, but now she's like, okay, I am willing to like gears now because it used to feel

like the video game. And now it's taken this weird, almost more backseat over time. And so now, because it's less in the limelight and less, everything is about gears or whatever. She's like, she just says this openly, like willing to enjoy it now that it's not the popular thing anymore. So I know what you mean when you, when you say like, it feels weirdly underrated, it's insane to say that because there was a time when gears was every video game. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like years, like years three is probably one of the best games that ever came out on the 360 and people don't really talk that much about it because four and five were so disappointing. Yeah. I forgot how like genuinely like solid gears three is because I was, I was playing it and honestly, what it really reminded me of was how much the 360 like games kind of like, I mean, not universally, they got better, like, but like by the end of the generation, the

games were almost like a lot more technically impressive than I remembered. Like, you know, the 360 at the beginning is so different than the 360 at the end. When you're, you know, the different games that you have access to, which I totally forgot about. Yeah. I was going to, I was going to, was like, hey, we invented the meat cube technology. Right. Yeah.

How did the, so yeah, how do they hold up, I guess, because I don't think I've revisited them since, or I mean, so one rather is what I, what I played and yeah, I didn't get around to like, I don't think three, but how do they hold up? How does it? It's gears, baby. Honestly, like you, you would, you, you play it and you're like, I'm doing a gears of war. And it's, it's a solid time. There isn't like, I, I feel like it holds up exactly as well as I remember it's, it's

I guess like, I would almost describe it as like timeless in a way. I mean, it is not timeless. It's very much of its time, but because it's so cemented in your mind as like this is what gears of war is, I guess it, like to me, it's similar to Halo in that way where it's like, I know exactly what I'm, what I'm getting when I jump in for it. And so it ends up, you know, still being a really solid experience, especially, you know, co-op, co-op with the, the wife just hanging out on the, in the living room or whatever.

Classic. Can't beat it, man. Slam a monster, play some gears. What else are you going to do? Did you, so you said you guys are on three now, right? Yeah, we're on three. Okay. Do you remember the E3 presentation where they showed off gameplay for Gears of War

2? I might. I have, I've been like recalling deep memories that I forgot about gears as we play through them. Like, like just random shit. Like I'm, I've been, cause I played a lot of Gears 1, especially the multiplayer, like the PVP stuff. And so I'm recalling random shit, like how they balanced the host by making the host

get the screen damage because the host would have a connection advantage. And how they later came out to reveal that like new players were given like very slightly more health in multiplayer and like. Juiced mode, yeah. Yeah. And, and also at one point, I think there was a claim that like the game was going to be without bugs or something, like just random Gears memories are coming back. So the reason I met, I remember the bug, the bug one was Blazinski was adamant that it

shipped with no bugs in the day. I think it was like a game and former article where it was like, there will be no bugs. And even then I'm like, that's, that's not true. Yeah. Yeah. It's just fun. But the reason I asked about the presentation, especially if you beat Gears 2 relatively recently is like the, the gameplay demo, they showed it E3 the year before Gears 2

came out shows the final level of the game all the way up until the game's final boss. It is the weirdest fucking presentation ever. Honestly, they might as well have also shown the final boss because I forgot. I forgot a lot of Gears 2. Honestly Gears 3 feels more like a Gears 2 than Gears 2. Like Gears 2 kind of just happens. Like you go through Gears 2. It's a solid time.

And you're doing a Gears of War. But like there's a lot of stuff where it's like, you remember a few key set pieces. I totally fucking forgot the entire last boss of the game because it's not a cool guy like Romney. Oh, it's a Brumac that you shoot with a laser. It's a Brumac and you wrote him there. And I remember the writing him there, but I forgot that you write him there and then he mutates into like a resident evil boss.

And then you just, and then you blow him up and then, and like, actually you kill him. You kill him like almost immediately too. It's kind of weirdly easy. I don't know if that was. Was the train the last level of one? Yeah. Yes. Okay.

See the train is like super iconic, right? Yeah, exactly. But yeah, two just kind of happens. So they, they might as well have shown the last boss in that E3 presentation. And then, and then three I'm finding, I find a lot more of it a bit more memorable because they, you know, just do some interesting stuff. It kind of really like moves. I remember things are happening.

One, two, and three, and despite the fact that it was like the most dude bro shit ever, it's the, it is the best of the furious of, of shooters. Yeah, it is. It really is. They literally like, they do a fast of the furious like move at multiple points. Uh, UV head at Brumac by having like, I think it's like two APCs or whatever with razor wire caught between them, both go past the Brumac and I'm like, this is fast of furious. You can't, you can't come on.

So like all that's just going on. And then like, uh, uh, uh, uh, Jake, the dog slash better. I was about to say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Play that with Jake in your head. And it's like absolutely absurd. But for whatever reason, everybody was super excited about that game story and what was going to happen next in that series. Yeah. Yeah.

And like, but to add future to pass, like when general Ram shows up and, uh, uh, grabs your captain or whatever, I can be like, oh, shit, that's a zero frame command grab. That shit's dangerous. You should have jumped because he, you know, he showed up in killer instinct. So yeah. Oh yeah. That's right. I forgot about that.

Yeah. Yeah. He was pretty crazy. He had some crazy shit. He could like black out the whole screen. It was wild. That's, that's so sick. Yeah.

I remember that. That was awesome. Like Gears, uh, it's, it's a, it's a good time. Um, and yeah, it's, it's wonderful listening to the stylings of, of, of Bender throughout the game. Uh, you know, just, he's, he's, everyone's, there's, it's so, it's, you remember it is edgier than it is in a way. And like in playing through it, especially like Gears one, it's almost like wholesome

and how typically dude bro it is and, and like, I don't know, it's just, it's just fun to go through it and just Marcus is there like, I love you, Dom, you, you make me feel safe at night and like they, they, I don't know, they, they, they're, they're, they're cool. I don't know. My little, Marika calls them, or my wife calls them her little thumb men. Yeah. I think it's not that it's not as edgy as we remember.

I think the world got edgier around it that, you know what, yeah, that, that, and the tone was set by the Mad World commercial. Yeah. The Mad World commercial is just Marcus being afraid with tears for fears over it. And it's like, that's a soft mood to introduce these characters to you. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

It makes, it makes me wonder, because you mentioned the Mad World thing every time I think about Gears of War, little bits and pieces of that commercial coming to my mind as like tone. And it makes me wonder, like there are occasionally, particularly during that era of games that had like really incredible ad campaigns that made the game better, like, right. How much of people's insane devotion to Halo 3 is from the diorama commercials? Yeah. The old man, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

I mean, Microsoft was on to something when they got the, when they got that going with Mad World, and they're like, okay, we have a couple other things to follow it up with. And then they lost Odyssey, got its own version with White Rabbit, you know? That was fucking sick. The double head sword dodge and shit, like I was like, okay, those are really good music video commercials for their games that I have found pretty hype. So those ads definitely cemented my mind for a bunch of these things, absolutely. When I think of Devil May Cry 2, I think of Dante bursting through a church and flipping

around and doing all this cool shit, and then we don't think about the game. Yeah, good. Good, good thoughts. Think about that one commercial. I'm also remembering, like, the, the, what, I like, I, I, okay, I love Yoshi's Island. That fucking commercial with the big, big gross guy about to eat and explode. Do you remember that shit in the Play It Loud era? The ancient era of video game commercials, there was a fancy, there was a tweet blowing

up about this the other day, it was like, it'd be like one screenshot of the game in the corner. Yeah, I saw that tweet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With giant text that goes, are you fucking stupid? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just some ransom letter, ransom letter font, and it's like, are you fucking stupid? Yeah, I love, those, those ads are just so, so funny.

It's like, your favorite video game means you're a bitch, can you beat this one? There was a period where Sega was like, I can't remember the specific wording, but like Sega was putting out ads that were like, cool people play Sega. If you play Nintendo games, you are a homosexual. Yeah, no, there was, obviously Sega does what Nintendo don't. And then you had the putt, putt, putt, the van with Mario Kart strapped to the back, the back of it with a trombone going, blop, blop, blop, blop, blop. And then an F1 racer flies by it to show you blast processing, which means nothing at the

end of the day. But hey, we got blast processing though, you know. They went hard, man. And you know what? We saw those commercials and went to elementary school and started fistfights over the fucking console. Died for it. Yeah, yeah.

You know, someone came up and started. Like, fantasy star is a pussy, pass it along, says Joe Nintendo. Holy shit. Well, Joe Nintendo knows what he's talking about. He's Nintendo. All right, time to start kicking some ass. Yeah, go play your Street Fighter and have to press select to get your kicks, asshole. I think, I think, I think the, the final nail in that coffin and it will never be again.

And I can't believe I remember it because I think it happened once was watching Thursday night SmackDown and Michael Cole is sitting there listening to Taz explain to him the plot of Final Fantasy 10 to now available for sale. And he's like, she was a summoner and it's just is the absolute most fucking weird discussion ever. Yeah, man, I think we, I mean, we've touched on this a bit before, but like, we all grew up and grew out of that. And then just, you know, went about our way playing the games.

Maybe you did. I'm still playing gears. So, so I mean, we, we, but I'm saying the console warrior, ride or die for my side type of thing. Right. Yeah. I held on to that and 64 era because I was and like, I had a drought of fighting games because I was desperate for anything that, that I could get my hands on.

But obviously all the cool things were getting released on, on discs by Capcom elsewhere. But by the time I remember when we were in college and we brought him up before, but PlayStation Sam, right, the dude fucking PlayStation Sam. We met PlayStation Sam in college and this dude was as dedicated as we would have been back in grade two about Nintendo versus Sega. We were 20 man. And he was PlayStation Sam. And like, and like literally he spoke in press releases, you know, and just like, yeah,

like, and it was like, oh, that like when, when I forgot what game it was that got ported over later to PlayStation and he was shitting on it before when it was exclusive. And when it got ported, I was like, so you're going to play it now. And he's like, well, yeah, now that it has the power of the PlayStation behind it. I think, you know, the richness of the experience is going to be much more in depth than in tune, so absolutely be a good game. And like, I was like, and that was when we saw like what happens if you don't mentally get out of this and realize video games, please, wherever they are.

Like if you stick in that fucking mode, you become this guy and it was like, oh, dear God, that's a that's a potential future that could have been horrifying. Oh, yeah, man, anyway, brand is my friend. But that was that was that was the era. I guess I should try to I should wrap up so it's clear, like I don't ramble on. But that was more or less my week, so to speak, that and finally just catching up on work, which I can never talk about because, you know, every every voice actor lives in NDA Hill.

I do have a question for you. So yeah, what's up? You got how long were you sick, like 10 days? Well, it's it's weird because like, I don't even know, because maybe I'm even still technically sick. The first few days that I actually felt sick where I was like, you know, I'm going to lay in bed all day and sleep and whatever. And then since then, it's kind of just been like waiting for like, you know, inflammation

and congestion to like clear out and it hasn't really been that bad. So maybe it's been like, if you think I'm still sick, then it's been about two weeks. So does that mean you you you're like, OK, I can start voice acting again and you look at your, you know, your notepad and go, OK, here's two weeks of shit to catch up in four days. Yeah, more or less. I mean, voice acting, it depends. And I work with a lot of indies who will move the schedule around, you know, and, you know,

be able to reschedule for when I'm no longer sick. A lot of fraud, you know, when you become sick and you you can't do it, a lot of times you are just going to miss the bus on on some things or, you know, you do what you can, you try to schedule what you can. A lot of the stuff is pretty quick turnaround. But for me right now, yeah, it more or less has boiled down to there's like two weeks of stuff to catch up on. But you know, it's it's it's doable.

Just has to be scheduled smartly. You know, I just don't get sick, you know, hot take, but COVID is bad and people should try to not catch it. Yeah. How about that? OK. Well, there won't be any like I'm playing like we're playing through Mass Effect and it's like there's the Mass Effect one Codex readings and then there's the Mass Effect two

Codex readings, which clearly happened at a different time in a different sound booth. And then maybe this one was was read when the guy had a cold. You know, right? Yeah. Well, that's that's why that's what I'm really afraid of is I don't want to voice anything when I am when I'm sick because I don't want to live the fear of the Virgil actor and have to spend the rest of my life avoiding people trying to cough into my mouth to make me sick again so that I'll sound exactly the same way as they remember from

that. Leave Dan alone. God damn it. Oh, no. I don't actually know if anything like that has happened. I'm just making that up. But yeah, it's like it's about consistency, right? You don't want to do it when you when you sound sick because you want to be able to consistently

do the same voice again in the future, right? Yeah. Well, the David Hader got into the the the fucking bad habit of like swishing a little bit of whiskey. The whiskey. That's yes. Yes. Yeah.

That's what I remember. MGS three. He was like, I need to stop doing that. That's working out really bad because I'm sitting in a chair doing hours of voice acting and I'm drunk. Yeah. Yeah. And I believe.

Yeah. That's why Big Boss became just his normal speaking voice and not the gravel of solid snake. Right. Yeah. He sounded like shit in MGS four. And I don't mean like he did a bad job acting because it actually it's really appropriate that snake would sound like shit.

No, I mean, David sounds like he's having a bad time in the boot. Let's take the gravelly character that hurt my throat to begin with and make him an old man who smokes constantly. Now make that your voice go like, you know, he took a reprieve for Big Boss and then we returned to the hardest possible most throat damaging role ever. It's brutal. Right. Right.

So I, you know, just had to schedule out to to avoid anything like that. Yeah. But it's been it's been fine. It's been it's been really more or less okay. And again, I got to play recourse. So hey, that's something cool. And it is. Well, yeah, no, ultimately, it is no glad glad that you're feeling better and such because

obviously anything that affects your voice is kind of scary for microphone related work. You know, I was losing it because also with voiceover, they say if you ever want to book a lot of work, go on vacation because and it's like that with getting sick where I got sick and I had more stuff coming through the door than than like any other average week. And for anyone who doesn't know, I'm a huge fan of these guys in this podcast for like over a decade. It's insane. And so it's like here we are, it was it was like, you know, the idea of ever going on

this podcast was like an insane thing that I used to, okay, it's kind of cringe but daydream about where I'd be like, oh, that'd be so cool if I could do that ever. That'll never happen. Just don't get sick. And then you're right on, man. And then I got sick and woolly DM'd me and it was like, hey, you want to set that up? And I was like, mother fucker. But there is, you know, it's, I mean, I guess I kind of it's not like you totally surprised

me because I'd messaged you, you know, about possibly doing it forever ago. Actually really funny. I think it was like when Act 2 of Ultra Kill was going to be coming out, I had reached out and I'd been like, hey, you know, maybe it'd be, I'd be like a topical guest because this thing is going on, people are going to be talking about it, whatever could be cool. And you were like, yeah, let's totally work something out. That was, that was almost a year ago. I didn't realize it until recently, but Act 2 was like August of last year.

And so I had this much time to also build up the, the excitement and anxiety about the possibility of being on the show. So that was right when I got sick and got DM'd by you. So here we are. Yeah, this incredibly prestigious show that started off with half of its members muted for multiple minutes. You know, just all that, all that trepidation is absolutely warranted. God.

But yeah, so, I mean, as far as I can tell, that first encounter with Gabriel and Ultra Kill is very much like shit's going to get real right afterwards. I kind of, yeah, I think if I remember correctly, you do the first encounter. I spent a solid hour, maybe hour and a half just getting annihilated. Yeah, as you do. Apparently, I heard that Hakita then rebalanced the, the mini gun after that because of the way I was using it or something, someone told me something about that. Well, I believe I'm going to just go along with that and, and also blame you for that

getting rebalanced. I remember I cannot attest to the balance of the nail gun because in my play through, I missed it and played like the entire game without it. So I couldn't, I didn't experience any of what you experienced. And then that later also got fixed and made it so that you're not going to miss the nail gun. Okay. But yeah, it was, it was, it was definitely, I'll give you a fun story about that.

When the night Gabriel came out of, in, in, or was put into the game, came out, he was, it was, we both, my wife and I both hopped on to play it that very night. And basically I was able to get through him, you know, a handful of tries or whatever, you know, and I didn't fucking ace it immediately. But Marika, she got stuck on it for probably like a good couple hours. And she was just banging her head against it over and over again. And so we went to go to bed that night and I went to say anything. I was just like casual, normal, you know, getting ready for bed discussion or whatever.

And she immediately wrapped her hands around my throat and said, do not talk, do not speak, no speaking, go to bed, goodnight. So these are the ways that this job takes a toll on my life, solid, solid, yep, yep. Absolute torment. Nice. I don't want to hear that fucking rice. I was, I was fin, you know what, I, I, for once in my life, I shut up. That's great, man.

I also like, one of the things I do recall though, was that like the, yeah, the ending of act one is, is about Gabriel and not you, you know, the player, like that's like, oh, okay. Huh. Yeah. That, that's a, he has a few, a few twists with, with ultra kill and, and yeah, Gabriel is definitely one of them where it's like, this is, it's not, it's not quite what you expect as, as you're jumping in and even, even him being voiced is its own little surprise

in the game because up until that you don't hear voices or anything. I actually didn't announce him for like a week until after it came out because I wanted to give like the hardcore, like ultra kill community enough time to like, you know, catch up and experience it or whatever because, you know, it was like its own little surprise that you would, you were even getting spoken to and yeah, he's, he's definitely a lot more of a focal point than, than you might think with, with ultra kill. It's, yeah, it's, he's, he's there. He's very present.

I won't, I won't, you know, spoil anything for you, but you'll be getting more of them. That's for sure. Cool, cool. All right. I guess here's, here's another slight tangent that people might find entertaining, especially you, Pat, because I know you love what a himbo Dave Oshry is. Yeah. He, so the way I came into working on that role actually was this, this is why I always

tell people, because people ask like, how do I get into, to voiceover or whatever? And I always tell them, just jump into doing thing related to thing that you like in way you like doing thing. And for me, it was retro FPS. I loved retro FPS. I threw myself at it where I was like, I want to voice as much stuff as I can in this because, you know, voice acting was what I'd always done. And so I did.

And one of the things that I got thrown into was this mod project called QCDE, which is Quake Champions Doom Edition. And it's really amazing. It's like this, it's takes basically Quake Champions and puts it through the Doom 2 engine. It's really well executed. We call it the smash bros of retro FPS because everyone is there. It's got, you know, fucking serious Sam, Caleb, Duke Nukem, Doom Guy, Grace and Hunt, anyway. And so everyone is there.

And one of the dudes that is there is the guy from Dusk, Dusk Dude, or The Intruder. And they had me voice him. And so I voiced him and, you know, they did this cool little trailer for it. And then later Dave Oshry had, you know, seen that because it was their character and was looking for a voice actor who could do like a cool guy voice like that. And he, you know, reached out to me and that was when I started working with him. And for Gabriel, he messaged me. They finally, the original thing he reached out to me for actually didn't end up panning

out that that didn't turn into anything. And then later, like, like almost like a year later, for Gabriel, he reached out and he was like, Hey, I have a character here that that we might want you to voice, prepare your best aerial voice. And so that makes for originally, yeah, originally, Gabriel was going to be like machine, turn back now or whatever, right. And, and so I sent Hakita a handful of audio tests that just I do this a lot where it's like different ways the character might sound, you know, different ways we might approach

the voice and the personality or whatever. And the last one that I sent him was I just once again, I had been watching through the Berserk bloopers and I, I was I had Griffith on my mind from that. And just like, because the way the description of Gabriel was very like, you know, eloquent and proud and this and a lot of words that were just kind of making me think of Griffith. And so I threw in a little bit of that like, you know, lighter flowering us for the way that he talks. And that was that was the one that he actually ended up going with for the character.

But originally, David just reached out and been like, Yeah, prepare to be material. So we veered we veered off from that a lot. And that was you, you mentioned how it's kind of surprising with Gabriel being such a focus of the game. And that was another little twist that Hakita did because a lot of retro FPS and it's it's it works. It's fun. It's totally fine.

You get to the boss guy and he's like, I'm so cool and tough. And so it was a different thing for you to get to the boss guy and he's got that sort of lighter tone to him. And so doing things differently is definitely something that that that he loves with ultra kill. Sick. Also, Berserk outtakes still paying dividends all of years later. Forever.

Yeah. My God. Actually, I might have been it might have not been just the Berserk outtakes. I might have actually been also watching the golden age. But nonetheless, the outtakes are what I always think of first. Nice. OK, I fucking love that garbage. All right, Pat.

Anything week wise besides Zelda? Only other thing other than tears of the kingdom week wise is I have still been playing Starrail. That's Hongkai Starrail. I saw somebody asking like, why did Pat and Willie lose their minds and start giggling every time we say the word Hongkai Starrail? It's because the word Hongkai is awkward and silly in English. That is it.

It starts with honk. That's it. It's silly. That's it. It just starts with honk. I saw a comment on your reddit that says, she rail my star till I honk. Yeah, I finished our honkers. Oh, no car.

I finished off like the second arc in that game, which is the ice planet. And boy, they. What was it? Friend of the show Buttons was saying that, like, my Hoyo makes a billion dollars, so they feel like they should probably make the game look like a billion dollars. And it absolutely does. That whole finale goes through this enormous set piece and action sequence with, like, genuinely like, like metal gear rising, like levels of boss music.

Like the closest comparison I have is when the power vocals kick in on rules of nature. Nice, this game that I usually play on my telephone. Okay. It is a really, really good JRPG. That's all I could say about it. It is, it is absolutely a high quality modern JRPG that looks and plays great. The only issue I had with it at all, and it's not even one that I personally encountered is that before you fight this boss, they go all the way up the mountain.

And then they go, Hey, are you level 24 on your account to fight this boss? And I went, Yes, I am. Okay, go fight the boss. Go ahead. Some people can hit that dramatic moment and go, Oh, I guess I got a bang out of one more week of dailies in order to, in order to go fight the boss because I've been mainlining it so hard. Okay.

Okay. Um, yeah, also, uh, did, uh, Jenny, didn't you, did you have a little fang in, uh, Genshin Impact? Yeah, I voice, uh, oh shit, I think it's six characters in Genshin. They're all, they're all minor NPC roles. The most, the most like knowable is, is a character named Boyoung who's in, uh, he's in the cutscene with Bassatius where they're in the cave. And if that rings a bell with anybody, um, but it's, it's, it's a bunch of minor stuff.

Yes. Hmm. Uh, yeah. He does have a little mustache. Uh, yeah, that was, that's fun. And they, uh, those, those folks, I guess it's, it's kind of seems like a sort of like, oh, of course he's going to say this on air or whatever, but they're honestly really chill to work with.

Uh, every time I've worked with Genshin, it's been like a really chill experience and they're very down to earth and also like passionate about the world they're creating and stuff. Uh, they're, they're very like, whenever we get on the line, and it's pretty common for VO, but you'll get on the line and there'll be a voice director who's, you know, going through the scene with you and how you say the line or whatever. And then they'll also have a guy, uh, who's there to, uh, reference the story and the lore and, uh, it's kind of interesting. You'll be, you know, voicing through something and maybe you figure out in the voice direction.

Oh, this word would maybe flow a little bit better here, but we check it with the lore guy who's on the line, the writer, uh, to make sure that if we swap that out, the story is still going to make sense and everything. Okay. Um, and, and stuff like that. And they're always, they're always very, you know, um, genuine and, and very invested in, in the thing that they're making with Genshin, you know, just again, just like random little side NPCs, but it's always been a good time working with them.

So I'm not in, uh, uh, uh, honk, honk my star till I rail, but I would love to be. Uh, so hopefully that happens one day, but I have a strong suspicion based off of the fact that it's already making one shit zillion dollars that they're going to be keeping this going for a while. So you definitely have, there's definitely going to be a lot of role. Yeah. I think I'm in there. I think I'm in there like bullshit, uh, filler pile. I'm in, I'm in, I'm probably like somewhere deep in there, like D list where they got to figure fish out guys cause it's like, oh, we don't want the NPCs to sound like our main characters or whatever. Well, what a fucking random bag of misfits that we got. Oh, is this Johnny?

Yeah. Have him voice a guy who's like, Oh, I hate that. And then that's all he says. All right. Awesome. Throw him in. Uh, so whenever they start, uh, digging for that stuff, I'm sure, I'm sure I'll be, uh, doing some announcements. Okay. Uh, are you streaming it more this week? Yeah, I'm going to be streaming it just a little bit this week. Uh, new banner out. So throw my fucking, what's it called? Star jades at it and see if I get the fancy, the fancy item. The man, the new man, he's lightning. Anyway, uh, other than that, uh, I finally went ahead and, and it's getting summery and the grass is long. So I went and got a goddamn lawn mower for the first time in fucking, uh, 20. I've never bought a lawn mower before.

Wait, lawn mower or lawn mower lawn mower. Good question. Okay. That's going to play super good for the audio listener. The pushy push. Yeah. Push titties. Ascent titties or the ride and drive my, my John Deere. I don't have that much yard. All right. There's, there's another tier of the question, which is actually lawn mower, lawn mower or lawn mower. Uh, because there's also, there's, there's the one, there's only one kind of lawn mower that my wife tells me she approves of. And it's the one that isn't motorized at all. Those things suck ass. The push mower. Yeah, I know. I know. So, so she tells me that. So for context, right now I'm in Toronto. Uh, I just moved here. Uh, I was in Ottawa for five years and for

my whole life before that, more or less, uh, I was in Florida and the, I was in a house in Florida. So regularly had to actually mow a lawn because the grass grows like fucking crazy in a tropical climate go figure. Um, and so yeah, the, the, the normal lawn mower is, is definitely a, I'm hoping what you went with. Yeah. So, uh, so I'm sitting there and I go, well, I'm never going to get a fucking, you know, manual push mower. Fuck, fuck that. That's a, that's a nightmare. You're crazy. Horrible. Yeah. She's very nice. But, but she, she also, she also likes to see me suffer. So I'm sure I'll end up owning one eventually. Um, so I'm like, okay, well I'm going to get a, I'm going to get a mower and I, I discovered

this, this part of being an adult like, well, do I want to gas more? No, I don't want to gas mower. Gas is fucking crazy. I was like, well, do I want electric mower? No, I don't want electric mower either. Cause when I was a kid and I use the electric mower, I saw right through the fucking electric, the extension over and over. And so I instead went for the third option, which is brand new, the battery mower. Oh, that's new. Yeah. Charge a fucking five amp, two amp old battery. Yeah. Either, I can't understand. Throw that into your lawn mower. Hey, guess what? It works really well. Huh. Well, all right. Works really, really well. Like it lasts about an hour and I can slot it into my, uh, my weed

whacker. I was going to say that, yeah, I think I feel like by the time I was moving out, we pretty much started just weed whacking a lot of the spots instead, since there's a lot of trees and garden in the way. So lawn mowing was actually more of a hindrance. You know, so, so you're saying you can swap the battery into your weed whacker from the lawn mower and you can take, you can take to the core. It takes the same one. The core goes into another device almost like in recor. Almost, almost. It's, it's, sorry. I was, minor, like we're not, I'm not going to stay on this for long, but it's kind of interesting. You have your robo companions and you can actually take their souls out and swap them

between frames, which I found kind of interesting. Uh, switch, you can, you can do different loadouts and stuff, which is kind of weird, like body swapping. There's, anyway, so, so congrats on recoring, congrats on recoring your lawn mower. Okay. There we go. All right. Yeah. I've been, I've been like, it's rule of thirds, Johnny. You get one more to drop in at an unexpected time before we hit the end of this one. All right. All right. Start planning. All right. All right. It's just strange. Cause like when I was a little kid or a little kid, I'm like 10, right? Uh, my dad would be like, go mow the lawn and mowing the lawn meant I would stand outside for 15 minutes going, those clouds, uh, maybe they'll,

uh, you think it's going to rain? And my dad would be like, it's not going to rain. Maybe it's like just start, just start mowing the lawn. And I fucking hated, fucking hated mowing the lawn when I was a young person, especially since my mother would tell me, you only have to do the front today. You can do the back tomorrow. And I go, okay. And then I put the fucking mower away and put all the bullshit away and go, actually, could you do the back also? I'm like, what the fuck? No, I had the, go ahead. Now it's my lawn. I'm like, Oh, this is a nice hour out. So I had the arc. I had the arc where like having older cousins and siblings that I was, I was watching them use the big machine as when I was younger.

And I was like, Oh, I want to try. I want to use it. You know, so talking about a riding mower. No, a regular push, you know, a gas, you know, and I was like, Oh, I want to try it because it's like, I want to try the thing that they're doing. And it seems like a big old, you know, machine you're controlling. And that seems cool. And then that novelty wears off real quick when it becomes a responsibility. Yeah. And then you start fucking around real bad. And you're like, what if I put the leaf bag inside of the bag where the leaves get where the things the grass grows, and then I don't have to bag it afterwards. What if I can? And then you start doing that. And then it's like, Oh, that that doesn't work

at all. Actually, it's a horrible idea. Don't do it. But you try to save time. And you end up wasting more time because you just fucking anyway, whatever, man, just fucking just take the whole bag off and just mulch it. Because I was like, what if well, we know we had to get rid of it from the for the size of what we had and stuff. But yeah, I'm not doing that. Fuck that. I'm not fucking through. So that's fucking that's the thing, right? It's a grass of the curb. Step one was was mow the lawn. Step two is go back over and pick up the cut and, you know, and fucking bag it up. And there was a took time is annoying. But I always then you see it in America, everyone with their big lawns and the fucking John

Deere writing, I'm like, that looks fun again. You know, so the art of that looks fun into like, damn it, this sucks. And then it looks like the next step up would have been the fucking fun thing. But I never I never got that chance. Yeah. Page showed me a photo of her dad. He got a new lawnmower and it's like a fucking car. And he's riding around their fucking house. Just going, I'm on the lawn. It looks so fun. It's a fucking car. Yeah. So that doesn't exist in in in the city. But like, I wish there was an excuse, you know, like a Zambodi or something. Yeah, for me, for me, it was like, I hit that point right before mowing the lawn where I'm like, I'm like, I'm looking at the yard and I'm like,

Oh, it's May. May is not so bad. And then I looked out again, like, like I look out like grass is okay. It's May. It's not a big deal. And then I turned around and I look back out and I'm like, great, the lawn looks fucked. I'm embarrassed. I'm gonna fucking get a goddamn mower today and fucking get rid of this shit because someone will judge me. Oh, I was going to say, are you at that judgment height? Are you as your grass approaching a couple days? And then I was like, No, no, I'm not doing this. I'm not being that guy. Guy crossed me old guy. He mows mows lawn twice fucking week. He mows it too short. I'm like, I'm looking at this old guy mows lawn. I'm you're mowing it too short. Your

fucking grass is going to the sun's going to kill the fucking grass. You're doing it too short. You can't. But once it starts to hit above the shoe, like above ankle, that's that's where judgment height begins, I would say. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Okay. Well, now you have to sync up and listen to the sound of other grass being cut and then you got to go time so that you're out there at the same time. There's there's like a there's a decent amount of old people in my near vicinity that are just like, I got nothing to talk to my wife. No, I'm going to go outside. Yeah, you're never going to outpace them. Yeah. I said it many times, but like I don't ASMR is not a thing for me. I don't I don't have

the button. But I do get an immense sense of peace waking up to a distant lawnmower on a Sunday. Yeah, that's nice. Oh, yeah. Neighborhood feel like just right distant. Yeah. That that is just every good day of summer I've ever had is the smell is really nice. Yeah, yeah, the fresh grass, fresh grass. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mostly so I down south in Florida, I had a house or I was at a house. And now up here in Canada, I have not had to deal with any such thing. And I have mostly just been enjoying being free of all responsibilities like that. Especially, you know, being on being on the rental game, it's it's like, oh, like with with with dealing with like a house, it's like every little thing you

have to think about like the ripple effect of like, well, if this thing's a little loose here, what's it going to be doing in three years over time doing this over and over again, and I'm going to have to fix it and pay for it. I have kind of loved not having to worry about fucking anything where it's like, if it blows up, I'll just tell that fucking asshole to come fix it and not have to think about it. And also, okay, admittedly, mostly just not having to worry about a hurricane washing away my home. I mean, that's nice. But that is nice. Yeah, at the same time, like on Ontario cost of living, I was talking to friends that live there right now. And just like that has gotten so utterly insane in the city at

certain some points that it's like, yeah, like it's like, yeah, you tell him to come fix it. Because like, he's like, he's, he's claiming a chunk of look, everything you make and like handing you the remains, you know, like, definitely. Yeah, for sure. It's definitely a wild in Toronto. It's definitely a worse deal. But it has been nice to to not have to worry about taking care of the lawn or anything. So for a while, it's funny because like when I was living in apartments, I was like, yeah, this rules, I don't have to think about shit. And then my washing machine broke. And I was like, hey, come fix my washing machine right and I get the message back like, yeah, I'll get my cousin to get over there when

he has time. I don't fucking 10 days without a washing machine until I don't I'm calling a guy myself. I'm just gonna fucking bill you this this absurd. I don't I don't mess around with the ones where it's a guy. Like with rentals, I always just stick with companies because at least they're going to fuck me by some kind of book. Whereas like the rentals that are like, it's a guy who has like dominion over your whole life, it like gets weird fast. And so far, really honestly, so so good, I haven't really had too many trouble with with too much trouble with rentals. The cost of living in in Toronto is definitely high, higher than Florida easily. I could live like a king in Florida for what

has me a surf in Toronto. But you'd you'd be Florida, man. But I'd be in Florida, which which is a big downside. And honestly, with with voiceover, it's kind of weird. But location, despite it being such a remote capable job, location really ends up mattering. Really? Yeah, there's most of the studios still want to record almost everything at the studio at the one designated studio. And we kind of started to run into we started to see why it was like this once COVID hit and everything had to go remote anyway. Because basically sound engineers have to work fucking miracles in order to make it sound like everybody's in the same space when everybody has their own home studio. So there's like a lot of

logistical reasons why it kind of makes sense, even though it is a very remote capable job. And thankfully, with COVID, we started to see a lot more opening up to remote opportunities. To be honest, like if you look at my career record, you'll see that it really wasn't much until 2020. And then I just started like getting a million more opportunities and stuff. And a lot of things opened up. And now, because COVID is over, I say, ironically, I have COVID. But so now things have kind of started to go a lot more back in studio. But because the industry learned how remote can work, there's a lot more remote opportunities than than there were, I think. So it's gotten better in that regard. Yeah. But it still is very

location based. And there are still a lot more opportunities if you're in those main creative hubs, you know, New York is one, Texas has a lot. Texas has a lot of anime dubbing and stuff. And honestly, Texas is yeah. And so because yeah, because there's like no unions in Texas, right? So Texas is a big one. LA is a big one. And then up in Canada, you've got Vancouver, which is awesome, but the most expensive place in the entirety of Canada. And then Toronto, which is also very expensive, maybe a little less if you can find the right options. And then Montreal, which is pretty affordable. And they have a lot of opportunities over there. Okay. So I in that scope, where so many of my colleagues

are in LA, as bad as Toronto is, at least I'm not in LA, because LA can be really brutal and New York can be really brutal and stuff. If I was really smart, I so I'm actually an American citizen. You know, I only moved up here five years ago, like I said, if I was really smart, I would probably do Texas because I have a lot of connections there and it's it's very affordable. But I kind of don't want to rip my wife, who's Canadian from a country with healthcare into Texas, if I can if I can avoid it. So I'm given Toronto a spin and not so far it's been it's been pretty swell. I only just got here, but I'm excited about it. You know, usually deal with this kind of thing ourselves. But I still remember

the absurdity of talking to people at Ubisoft about six, seven years ago about, Hey, do you guys want to come in and do a video on Assassin's Creed Unity? Oh, absolutely. Okay, so it's going to be in San Francisco. And here's the dates. And I'm like, I could walk to your office. Yeah, there in 40 minutes. Yeah, no, but we're having the event in San Francisco. Yeah, we can't do I'm like the per you're in your office less than 10k from where I am sitting right now. Unfortunately, Capcom Montreal doesn't exist yet. But yeah, the with the voice acting remotely thing, it was interesting because yeah, I was talking to some friends of mine who have, you know, who are in the industry as well. And I was

hearing about how like what they kind of did for some productions was like, well, I guess it's probably standard now is they're not even going to take the chance with like your own equipment. We're sending you a briefcase. Yeah. Right. Oh, a kid. Holy shit. And it's like in this briefcase kit is everything you need to record exactly this sound exactly this configuration, and then take it to a location where you're as enclosed as possible. And then they get live they get on live with you together and then like direct you with like again, the full on like we are sending you all the hardware, you know, we don't want to leave it up to chest at all for remote. That's really I think I remember hearing a

little bit about the kits. I think like when I heard about it, and honestly, the people you spoke to are definitely more informed than I am. Whenever whenever I'm talking, this is this is part of the reason why I don't do a lot of podcasts is because to be very clear, I am really not a good representative for the industry or what's common at like pro because my path through VO has been such stupid random bullshit of just like posting random things online. It's been like I've just been it's random bullshit over like a really long time. So I've just gotten to know a lot more people and work on a lot more stuff, just building up a big snowball over like 10 years. So I don't have like as much like

pro like wisdom as maybe some of the folks you spoke to. But the kits sound familiar because I remember when COVID hit. What happened was a lot of the actors in these creative hubs where the jobs actually were actually weren't really that prepared to have to do a lot of stuff at their home studio. When everything went remote, which I think is part of why they started calling in guys like me who were in random fuck off places because home studio is all we knew. So it's all we had. So I could believe that kits got deployed so that they could still use those same actors who were not as well equipped in their home studios. I could believe that. Yeah. And I imagine to this a certain point where it's

like depending on the cost and the size of the role and everything like that, like, you know, if you can, if your demo is good enough quality for what you're doing and they hear that and they're like, okay, you can deliver then that's fine. But if it's like, because yeah, this is like during the during the height of like, you know, like late 2020, like there was absolutely nothing local going on. So like the prohibitive cost of sending out this massive thing is like, okay, but that's literally the only option we have, you know, so. But yeah, just I know that was a that was a thing for a while there. Interesting. Okay. Well, so I definitely in in the realm of that where location matters, and so many of my colleagues

are in LA now, I'm like, okay, Toronto is bad for for for like cost and everything. But I'm a count your blessings kind of guy. Yeah, okay, right on. Cool. So in terms of weeks for what's going on with you, man. So I finally got around to going to the Mario movie. Yeah, the Wahoo. Yeah, the Wahoo speaking of voice acting. Hey, right on. Oh, not interrupt you. So you know, I sat there and I was just like like, literally, it's the movie starts, and I'm like in my brain, I'm like, all right, start the clock. How long until we get Charles in there, right? Where is it going to be? What's it going to be? And it's like, yeah, it's like, maybe three minutes, you know, it's almost immediately like, and there he

is, there he goes, you know, Mario, you know, and it's like, it's pretty much yeah, it's actually less than I thought it would be. But it's still the idea of like, no, we nodded, we nodded to you. Here he is. You're like, all right. But, um, hey, the movie's great. And it was, uh, yeah, it was a lot of fun. It, it, you know, delivered on what it set out to do. Um, yeah, if you're, it's funny because it's just like, everyone's been, you know, talking about how like the difference between the critical reception versus like fan reception. But I feel like there's almost like a third metric that can be there, which is just like kid reception. And if you're a kid, like this would be a religious experience.

You know, like it's, um, and it's also kind of a testament to the fact that Nintendo's kept Mario relevant and popular with kids from the time we were kids all the way till kids now, like they've kept that going strong, really good. Um, yeah, I think it basically sets out and does, um, uh, uh, uh, I would say it does a, a, a better job, uh, at, at what it's there to do than Sonic even. Like I think it, um, and, and maybe it's just the part that like Sonic went for the live action buddy up, which is, it ends up working, but it's still, there's still that awkwardness to it, which you have to kind of lean into, you know, when they do, and then they have it like get super goofy with their dance numbers

and all that shit. Um, I feel like by making it just a strictly in animation universe, they can just kind of not have to confront any of that. And, uh, yeah, it just in the world that was in, you didn't have to question too much. Obviously there's references everywhere and like tons of stuff you expect in musical cues and all the, hey, recognize that, recognize that like, yeah, all over the place. But there's little things too where it's just like, oh, and here's like the rest of the Mario family, you know, no big deal. There they are. They're people. Um, here's Brooklyn, you know, whatever. Um, and it's like that could be like as much as it could be like, oh, here's a whole like lineup of other characters and cast like members

that you could be Mario family people. It's like, no, they're just a bunch of Brooklyn Italian sitting around a table, you know, there they are. No big deal. Um, and, uh, yeah, they, they also obviously, you know, you get all your nods to, you get your, your, your Mario card in there, you get your Smash Bros in there, you get your wrecking crew and yadda yadda and like, uh, by the end of it, man, it just internally fun journey. Um, the, the voice acting is, is great throughout it. You know, everyone does a pretty good job. Um, how about Chris? Yeah. Chris did fine. Chris did fine. Um, I overall know, yeah, no, no notes. I think it was, I think it worked out and, um, I especially appreciate, I never

thought in a million years I'd be saying this, but the fight choreography in the Mario movie is pretty sick. Like that, that is what I was noticing was I was like, this is a good action movie. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Yeah. That was my favorite thing about it. I was like, I didn't expect the best thing about the Mario movie to be the gameplay. Right. That was honestly my favorite stuff. Yeah. I was expecting fights of anything to be kind of downplayed because in, you know, your video game is video game. You beat the enemies, you move forward in the, in the, in the progress, but it like, once it's in a story, in a cinematic way, like, I feel like there might be a bit of a like, no kids, don't solve problems with violence kind of, you know what I mean?

Like it's a little more real when it's just like, fight someone. Yeah, the shit out of them. Yeah, that's it. Like you kind of, a little bit of my, in my brain is like, AC, are you just going to like smack the shit out of your enemies? And that'll be that. And it's like, yeah, no, they're going to fight, man. And they do. And, and like, when they do it, you know, when it, when things pop off, whenever that's supposed to be like a pretty like fast moment, it's really hype, you know, there's like, you know, I mean, you, you know, get her when you get around to seeing it, you'll be seeing it, but there's obviously like some anime choreography moments. There's wall jumps and dives and fucking like literally in a zoom of kicks, a gun buster slash Eva style

being dropped, you know, and then like impact is good as well on the hits. And I did that of all the things I kind of went in going, yep, they're hitting all the notes. The one that I think like would be go, Whoa, was like the fighting, right? Combat was good. No, same. I was like, this is a good movie. You know, it's doing it's the Mario movie. I'm getting everything I expected in orchestral. That's what a Mario movie would do. Yeah. Yes. But yeah, the, the, the fighting was honestly like, oh, shit, I'm, yeah, this is fucking hype. Yes. Yes, it was a rider kick. But you know, there's two of them. So the double aspect, then you get, you get to think about the Eva part of it. So you put, yes, the big, come on, come on, y'all. And yeah, you know,

and you get those, there's obviously like Jack Black just kind of like stealing the show and going in like hardware. I don't know how much the script called for singing before he was involved, but clearly after the fact or like, yep, do what you do and do what you do best, you know. And that shit, what was I going to say? Oh yeah, like shout outs to just full on Mario panic attacks as well in the movie, just like, just actually like having a real moment like, whoa, huh, that's, that wasn't very Wahoo at all. Yeah. But, but anyway, no, it was great. It was great. It should go in ego. All right, my bad. There you go. Fair enough. Anyway, yeah, solid. It's, it's one of the, one of the, of the mascot movie so far. I'd say this is the best one.

Huh. Like I thought, you know, Sonic was like, yeah, okay, see what you're going for. That worked out. That was, you know, some fun stuff. This was a, this was solid. This was good. I also see that they have the ability to absolutely franchise this shit and they're going to because it's illumination and, you know, minions yadda yadda. So expect a million years, Mario, Mario, million years forever. You mean like Mario? Yeah. Yeah. Are you going to get a Mario is missing fucking? I mean, they, again, when I talk about the referencing and such, it's like, like even in just the briefest moments, it's like, again, obviously there's the Mario Cart shit and stuff, but like when Luigi has to go his own place, like even before things are like,

you know, in the trailer, she gets kidnapped or whatever. But even before that, it's like, can we get a little Luigi's mansion in there? Yeah, we can. Can we get a little bit of, you know, like fucking even like cat and toad, like whatever, like all of it, just little little bits here and there. Hey, like, I recognize that. When you know, when you saw the scene where Bowser like touches Luigi's mustache, did they edit Bowser's hand any to make it make it look less like like a fat dong scraping on Luigi's mustache? They actually replaced it with his penis. Yeah. It was a surprising change, but honestly, for the better. Okay, I see it. I heard Miyamoto approved it himself actually demanded it even. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, nothing, nothing dynamic to add to the

chorus, but it was I liked it. It was good, man. And I guess that underlines it almost and then I like I remember when I first heard the announcement for it and I was like, hmm, fully animated, they waited this long after the John Leguizamo era, they're probably gonna make a movie that is like, okay, there's enough casting power behind this and enough money going on as well as like the animation studio to be like, yeah, this is not going to fail. It won't be whatever it is at bare minimum. It'll be like mid to above mid, you know, at worst, it's just it's got all that momentum behind it. And yeah, they absolutely delivered above that. I'm always totally fascinated by games and movies that you get the you get the feeling coming off of it that people behind the

scenes are saying, yeah, this is not allowed to be bad. It's not allowed to be at this point. We can't exactly. They probably if they're whatever version if this was to come out five years ago and be more mediocre, they would have scrapped it and said, Nope, can't do that. Gotta make it better. Good. Go back to the drawing board. And then of course, if the trailers haven't already sort of set that up to the the old peach of, whoa, Mario is like, yeah, that that seems to be not not a thing to a cake. Save me. I'm useless. Yeah, yeah. I'm doing with this. They made her wild style blonde. Whoo. Yeah. So so Peach is gonna zina her way through. But yeah, go go catch that while you can in theaters. This is good. It was good. Other thing this week. Other thing.

Other thing this week. I got to play me some idle showdown. And I got to experience the VTubers live in my home. Sorry. The way that you're describing this has the context that you have not already experienced the VTubers in your home. I've experienced the V2 Bing in my home. I have VTubed as a verb. But VTubers themselves in my home have somehow like totally dodged this completely. I mean, from a viewing perspective. Yeah, pretty much. I clips would clips would come across my my desk from time to time and I'd see them. But I've never actively seeked it out. You know, are we talking about what's happening to VTubers inside of Willie's house? Well, are we talking about just like witnessing

VTubers is what you've dodged? Is that what you're telling? So so back in the in the height of the of the VTubing craze in the pandemic, I at some point made a VTuber Woolly. Two of them actually. And yeah, very both very good. Yeah. And we did some some some skits and some some shenanigans with that, which involved, I believe the program was Willow live watching and trying for Reggie forcing me to learn how to be an appealing VTuber properly and how to have everyone pick me as their Oshi. Yeah, however, yeah, send over the Akasupas. Yeah, you know, I don't know that it worked out too well. I didn't see any tier four subs showing up unfortunately. But you got to you got to you got to be more abusive to the chat. I know,

I know, I was gonna like sell my bathwater yetiata like it's the whole thing. No, it's not about selling the bathwater. It's about being like a horrible little gremlin. Okay, right? Little moments of cute degeneracy. Gatmoe, right? I just the only reason I was really inquiring was I'm actually with you on having kind of missed a lot of the VTuber stuff. I'm also kind of like, not too sure about it. My entire frame of reference for witnessing VTubers pretty much has been once in a while, somebody would tell me I killed one. Because of my stupid shitpost videos, they would send me a clip of one of the VTubers, you know, it was Nyanors one time or Iron Mouse another time. I would get just videos sent to me of VTubers being slaughtered by my

hand and I'd be like, you know, another one down. So I'm with you on not being too familiar with them. Okay, all right, got it. So yeah, get get my best GTA five on and just in a melodic noise in a melodic tone, just drop a little nigga. You know, it's funny. I when I might be doing it talked when you talked about playing I'll show down last week, there was a guy in the podcast thread who said, I swear to God, woolly is not going to be able to talk about this this week without referencing GTA five V tubing. And like, I'm sitting here waiting for you to do it and like there it is. I'm Hey, I got through I got through the the entire episode without it though until then. So there you are. Um, yeah, I just I just thought it would be extra funny with a

with a guest standing here that has to like, you know, just yeah, we're dropping those. It's fine. No, I was I was ready. Honestly, I'm still amazed that I'm expecting it to to go worse places actually. So I'm ready. I know what I'm saying. Good, good, perfect. But no, we we so idle showed out is the is the v2 fighting game that came out not too long ago. And the hollow live vtuber fighting the hollow live exactly exactly. Yes, no, Janney part two of the bit is when I get you to join in together at the same time. Hey, I've known this guy for a long time. Oh, fall for it coming up on three hours now. Oh, I better get out of here. I know I was talking big earlier about having hair cut, right? I'll say it which no. I've been I've been trained for

this. All right. Damn it. Darn. Not not today, Willie. You won't get me today. Maybe not today, but anyway. Yeah, so so I don't show down. They grabbed a bunch of vtubers and they put him in a fighting game and it's indie. So, you know, as far as I can tell, it's it's not a official thing. So that's the weirdest thing is that it is indie, but it is sanctioned officially. So I know that a lot of the idols did like play it and wrap it like the parent company OK, that's why it's on steam. Oh, oh, interesting. OK, as long as they don't charge for it. Right. Right. As long as it's like it's like a hollow cure, the fucking vampire survivors won. OK. That is that is like officially like, oh, it's as long as you don't make money off of it.

So is it a bit of like is it a bit of like it's like a Sega situation where they kind of like, you know, acknowledge the the fan aspect and again, yeah, like as long as you keep it kind of free. OK. Yeah, so so, you know, that was a fun little ride. It was also quite funny because over the the course of the week since I scheduled it, I was hearing about how there was a there was on Twitter in Japan, the FGC content creators that have been covering the game have my favorite part of it have had to start working in kinder words and euphemisms for the characters whenever they were going to talk about characters being, you know, cheap or certain moves being OP or fucked up. They would have to start saying things like cute or soft because if you used to harsh

of words, Hawaii, Hawaii, like, means grimy because because if you speak a little too directly, the fans are not going to like that and they're going to get real upset and they're going to let you know about that because it's almost like the K-pop thing where if like you had a BTS fighting game and you were like, yo, this member of BTS is fucking trash. He's got no reversals. The K-pop fans will just go. Oh, you don't say that exactly. Dude, I described this while I saw Reggie. I'm like, this is we're playing the Backstreet Boys fighting game and we're talking about how fucking grimy AJ is with his setups and grimy and a bunch of high school girls have just logged into the chat and they see you're playing. You can hear the van coming.

They see, but they see Backstreet Fighter and they go, oh, yo, and they're showing up because that's it and it doesn't matter what the genre is and like they have feelings about what you have to say, you know. So I want to stop you for a second. I want to appreciate that you coming up with the phrase Backstreet Fighter off the top of your head. That's really good. Appreciate that. It worked better as it was coming out than what I initially said it, but there you are. Yeah, they had to find words to fucking cover up what they were saying, lest it sounded too mean. But at the end of the day, guess what? It's a fun, simple indie fighter and the formula works because if it's fun, it's fun. It's fun. It doesn't matter. And we, yeah, regardless of what's going

on or what the lore is, man, that grappler is going to grapple. That zoner is going to zone, you know. Korone shows up. She does her little wan wan wan dog stuff and turns into a little Mario jump sprite for her uppercut and it was cute. She is a showdown. Of course she is. It crosses a line with being so we didn't have Twitter back in the day, but now I guess you would have to be up to date with Twitter drama to know the official lore of this video game. It's kind of like how you needed to be in touch with the tabloids to keep up with the lore of Celebrity Deathmatch. Yeah, same thing. Different generation. Yeah, I mean, I've definitely seen and heard Korone memes over time. I think I saw the Coco, the big dragon lady. Yeah, I think I seen her.

I didn't super recognize the others. She's huge in the Yakuza. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Kiryu Clan was on her title there. And then, yeah, I picked Botan, who was doing some cool gun shit. Apparently she's a big FPS gamer, so a lot of her moves involved guns, zoning, grenades, all that stuff. She did some equilibrium gun kata stuff, Noel Vermillion style. Then we kind of jumped online and I saw like some full, some giant combos going off and heard she hit her super, the exact moment that I was like, OK, OK, no, this is this is this is what this is working is she hit her super where she drops down from a helicopter with a fucking minigun and just like blasts you from like almost like a Bludia Vulcan, like like first person view kind of thing, you know.

And it was like, yeah, I was like, OK, this is this is like it's it's the references. It's all the the the lore and all that, I'm sure every in joke that is known for these characters is, you know, got to be represented properly in their move list. But all things aside, it's just a really fun indie fighter. And that's the most important part, right? Yeah. So for something being indie as well, the fact that it's got like rollback, it's got online, it's got a decent, I hear it's got a single player mode where you got like you got like power ups and adventure stuff you can do tutorial, all that. It's like, yeah, that's a that's a pretty fucking cool intro. And yeah, simple inputs with a special button, or you could do the motion as well. But you can just,

you know, tilt and press special to get your stuff out. So I don't show that's pretty good. I had a fun. I started, I saw just enough sauce to be like, OK, we can cook, we can cook a little bit, you know, some wall bounces into some air throw resets and stuff that's like, oh, yeah, yeah, you can have some fun with this. And, of course, because of the subject matter, you can, you can lure someone in and go, look, look at your favorite idols, you want to play and then touch a death that shit, just body them mercilessly, you know, and then like, oh, let's play round two. Come on, let's, you know, yeah, it's, look, it's, it's a Iyame. Don't you want to? I thought you were supposed to be getting people into fighting games, Woolly.

Yeah. And then once they're in, you lock the door behind them. No, they can leave, man. It's, it's great. It's great. So yeah, I feel like I can, I'm gonna probably play that again at some point in the future. It was a good time. And I guess the only other thing, yeah, just went on and played some Street Fighter 6 via Parsec, which you could do. Oh yeah, you could totally do that. Fuck, yeah. You know, it's still the demo, obviously, but yeah, it's got to, got to mess around with some people and that was, that was cool. Are you still allowed to be playing it? Should I be

report you right now to the PC demo? The PC demo is completely available for everybody. Parsec to play it online is probably not an authorized use of that software, but I don't think that's what they're worried about. Hey man, my computer is connecting to another controller with X input somewhere and that's being used on my, on my software. Whatever, man. Capcops. You know, you know. Capcops. Um, submit the kids, submit the report just to be safe. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Might as well. Gianni the snitch right off the bat. He's right over there. If you see, if you see something, say something, man. All right. Snitching's right. I agree with Gianni. This is a good, this is a good point. Yes. From this point forward says Gianni, I'm snitching you out.

Um, reporting people for playing like four just in case. They're playing Street Fighter 4 and it's gross. Get it out of here. Um, yeah, did, did some of that. And, um, I mean, nothing, nothing new to report except just, uh, more rounds of, of Luke versus Ryu have taught me, uh, after, after kind of like, uh, I guess feeling out how much like there's my own inability to like, you know, my, my own flaws. I'm dropping combos. I'm not doing shit. And then, um, you know, there's also, and then like Reggie just being a fucking beast and stuff. I'm like, okay, I can feel the gap here. Um, Reggie got like, I mean, he's, he's been Ryu forever, right? Yeah. He's been a Ryu main. So the demo just

handing him his boy like that is just like, oh man, that's, but, but there was a point that like we hit where it was like beyond all of that, Ryu's actually kind of a fucking beast. He's, um, right? By, when you have these two, uh, uh, points of comparison, he's kind of unbelievable. He's amazing. And you don't realize it. Yeah. You don't realize it because you're like, well, it's Ryu. It's just, that's the middle. And then everything, I was like, no, no, no, no, because it is true that there is a thing where it's like season one Ryu is always like kind of crazy. And then season two is where they fucking pull it back because it's like, Hey, everybody, it's your fave. Pick your fave. You're going to enjoy it because you're going to win a bunch.

And then they kind of go like, all right, all right, just kidding. You know, um, but season one Ryu is absolutely in effect at this point. Um, and I think I was kind of just like, it wasn't until like an extended series of stats where it was like, okay, my flaws aside, I was blaming myself for everything. I'm like, okay, hold on. No, my losses and flaws aside, there's some shit happening here on like a fucking like frame data level on a range of how far his buttons go level that are just like, what do you do about that? You know? So anyway, it was, uh, yeah, if you're, if you're a Ryu fan, you're, you're probably going to be in pretty good hands on, on launch. Um, and another funny thing was Nemo, who's a top player in Japan as well,

was recently just like talking about and making a video just because he's, he's been an anti Zangief fucking anti grappler dude forever. And like the idea of the idea of, uh, uh, modern mode Zangief, like if you stop and think about it for a second, what does that mean? That means one button SPD. Yes, you got a one button grab. Fine. That also means one button anti air super level one. It means one button anti fireball, uh, level two, one button level three, um, one button armored running bear grab. Um, it's probably the most insane thing ever. Um, yeah. Different archetypes are going to get different strengths out of this kind of thing. Yeah. He was kind of saying he's like, basically he's like, I think the damage scaling should be extra high for this because

if you think about it like, uh, anytime anyone does any sort of drive flash anything, you just grab what you see and that's the end of that. Right. And especially in modern mode where there's no churning this butter involved, you just kind of hit the button. You know, so all this to say it's like, yeah, uh, that's probably going to be a humongous problem. I saw one moment in, um, um, when Daigo was playing where, uh, uh, I think, uh, yeah, he was fighting John Takahuchi, another player who did like a drive rush forward. Um, and then Daigo did a level three from Ryu in response to absorb whatever was going to happen. And then John interrupted that run with a level one and stopped himself and then beat out the level three from over here, which is like a crazy

fucking. So there's, there's tech people are fucking digging right now and they got some cool shit going on, but, uh, modern mode, uh, guys, Zangief will be a horrifying problem that is turned butter. Yeah. Uh, but you don't even have to. Um, but I will. And, and, uh, it's funny because Nemo's kind of closing point was like, if the whole thing is to use modern mode to appeal to new players to get them in, isn't giving, um, like, isn't modern mode Zangief also going to be the ultimate newbie killer and like in the hands of someone who knows what's going on, like no one will ever have a chance, you know, every, every control, kind of tutorializing thing they ever add to a fighting game to bring new people in

existing players go, Hey, this thing's really powerful. Now I'm going to use it to get even further in every time. Like, yeah, there's no solution. You've, you've made it easier for me to like, you've, you've created a larger gap for the distance between us because I'll use the easier skill thing to like do things you, you absolutely still can't do. Um, anyways, uh, that was a lot of fun. So yeah, this week, um, I'm going to have less streams, unfortunately, uh, because a lot of house rental work to do, um, got to fucking patch up some drywall and investigate some, some stuff going on, like I'm, I'm house working is going on. So, um, I'm going to continue, uh, started Citadel, um, and FF nine continues, of course, but I'll let you guys know, I'm going

to have to plan out exactly what I'm going to do this week, but it's not going to be a full one either way, woolly versus come tune in, uh, stream and, uh, on Twitch and, uh, on YouTube. And then woolly versus the algorithm, uh, I don't think it's out yet, but we got a fucking awesome clip, uh, Reggie will never escape home. Rekker Manon, uh, is coming soon. So, uh, yeah, check out the side channel as well. Uh, let's see this week. Hey, surprise. I'm going to be playing Honkai, star rail and fucking Zelda. And I'll touch the street fighter six beta this weekend as well. Uh, go down to twitch.tv slash path stairs at for that. Usually around 4 p.m. Pacific. Gianni, anything to plug? Uh, I, I, I do also stream on Twitch, I suppose, uh,

twitch.tv slash get Gianni, uh, in case you are a Twitch viewer who wants to watch a worst channel. Sometimes you just feel like dominoes, man. There isn't really, uh, my channel is not nearly as concrete in what I'm doing with it as you guys at this point. I'm like all over the place, but generally what I try to do is, uh, every Friday, uh, I hop onto an arena, FPS, an old school style arena, FPS game, like, uh, like a quake or something like that. Um, and, and play that because, uh, okay, I promise myself right now that I won't make this a really, really long tangent, but there's, there's a lot of like when, when I listen to you guys talk about fighting games, there are so many parallels with arena FPS, uh, like multiplayer old school style

arena FPS, like, you know, uh, you know, uh, quake or, or an open fortress is one we just played, or diabolical or a split gate counts too short. There's, there's all these old school arena FPS style games where there's this classic problem of not many players left. So new player wants to hop in, gets online, gets destroyed by 20 plus year vets, uninstalls the game and, and the genre people want to play it, but it's like completely inaccessible due to this like death loop, right? Damn, that sounds so familiar. Right. Uh, and so what I try to do with the Fridays is with the stream, I go, Hey everybody, I'm an idiot. Most of you are idiots. Let's hop on and be idiots on this game together. Uh, and you know, don't get me wrong, some of the heavy hitters still show up and like

destroy us, but there's enough of us on at the same time that it will, you know, still be like, Hey, we're playing a classic arena FPS, uh, and, and having a good time together and getting some matches in. Um, and so I try to do that, uh, about every Friday at, at 4pm Eastern. Um, I've been missing some weeks lately because I was doing packs East and then moving and then COVID and stuff, but, uh, hopefully it'll be a little bit more reliable going forward. Well, you did the right thing. You opened the plug by saying, uh, uh, if you, if you like, oh, you called yourself a worse channel, which is exactly what these people want to hear. You might steal all of them. They want the trash. They look there. They need it. So there you go.

It's, it's, it's, it's bad. You know what's funny? You mentioned like we were just talking about modern controls and street fighter, making it like easier for existing players versus the new people. I, I remember a short period of time back in the day, like the aughts were like, Hey, you know how we're going to make people aim down the scope with these sniper rifles? We're going to take the cursor off the screen and that's going to show them right up until somebody takes a little piece of paper and puts it on the center of their screen. And now the difference between people who can shoot with that and without is to fucking cast them. I was, there was, there's, so in arena FPS, there's this mode called a insta-gib or insta-gib depending on how you like to

pronounce it. I won't get into that debate right now, but, uh, it's, it's where you, it's, it's, everyone has a railgun. Everyone is killed instantly. So it's just point and click instant killing, right? Uh, diabolical is one that came out and had this novel idea. It's really fun to play, uh, where they have, uh, what's called webo insta-gib where it's, um, basically it's a crossbow with, with an arc and a projectile. And the idea was, Hey, you know, new players will hop in and, you know, now there's, instead of getting instant clicked by pros who know what they're doing, there's a little bit more leeway. So people are more likely to fuck up. And, and what instead, that wasn't the entire like plan behind webo insta-gib. And I'm kind of talking up in my

ass. I'm not like on the dev team or anything like that, but I saw some of that floating around. What actually happened was the pros learned the arc immediately and now new players can't hit a single shot. So you got even more destroyed. Um, but so yeah, that, that kind of thing is definitely every time. Every time. Uh, I'm actually, I wanted to mention, uh, I'm one of those idiots that's really looking forward to modern controls, uh, cause I, I keep hearing more and more about it. So I have not, I am like fighting game. I'm, I'm, you guys have fucked me up because I've listened to you guys talk about fighting games for years. So I've learned so much about them without actually playing them. Oh, that's a weird story. Interesting. I'm, I'm like, yeah. And, uh,

so I've, I used to like once in a while, I would dick around with like a story mode on like injustice or something, you know, just play through, have a little romp, whatever. I'm that weird ass who just plays the fighting game for story mode a little bit. Um, I'm really interested in, um, I'm probably going to give street fighter six a shot. I'm not going to become a competitive player or anything like that. Once again, I'll probably do story mode and maybe a few matches with friends. Um, but I'm really interested in it because the one that actually was getting me in was rising thunder. Uh, and rising thunder, I was hype about. Yeah. And I was, I actually, I looked on their Twitter account, I was like one of the last things they, they retweeted

before they got bought by riot to make, uh, you know, rising league of fighters. Um, but the thing about project L is it's, it's still not like they're taking a lot of that rising thunder wisdom, but I'm from how it looks like it's coming along. I'm, I'm already getting scared because it feels like it's, it's going to be more of a normal fighting game, which I am stupid and lazy. And so I will probably, it might sail right over my head again because I don't want to deal with like command strings and like inputs and stuff. Uh, so when I see what street fighter six is doing, my stupid casual ass is like a button. I can hit a button. Uh, so I'm, I'm kind of, I'm kind of interested on, on modern mode is for everyone. So it's, it's for people that, that like you have

the idea of what you want to do, but you don't know how to do it. So modern mode will, will ease that, but it's also like for me, like, Hey, you know who I don't know how to play Dalsam ever. I've never ever known how to play Dalsam. Right. I don't need to play a good Dalsam. I just need to have a match with Dalsam in which I can understand what I'm doing with his tools because I don't have to think about doing them and go, okay, this is what the game plan is. And then go from there. You've hit Dalsam a couple of times and you know where he stands and what he's kind of doing. So you can just kind of vaguely emulate that with modern mode. And yeah. And also again, the, the, the good news is that like modern mode is, is legit.

It is not just, uh, hey, I'm going to have an easier time getting my inputs out and stuff. Um, you can absolutely like, you know, get good enough at that and like fight against people who are using classic and absolutely win. You can, um, improve. And, and, and the, the smartest thing about it is the fact that if you're still not used to doing a Hadoken, um, you can use the Hadoken button, but if you feel like going for it just once, you can practice and just try to do a real one. And if it works, it'll come out, you know, um, there's a path here. But if you're like, ah, fuck, I can't, it didn't work out. You can go right back to the button and you can get as comfortable as you want to using either, or, uh, within modern mode, you know, you can still do

the old input if you want to try it out and get, get comfortable. So, um, and then the reward is more damage. Right. Like I could definitely see that path where it's like, okay, as I get more comfortable with the, the fundamentals and then the footsies and that kind of thing. And I'm like, oh, I like, I can handle playing a fight, being, playing a fighting game at a absolute basic core level. Like having that sort of, well, you know, maybe I could learn one of these, one or two of these moves and like start to get through it like that. The thing with fighting games that, uh, which is why I'm kind of interested in Street Fighter 6, which is like, oh, there's all this really cool stuff. But like in those, I would play through the story of like injustice or

mortal combat or something like that. And I'm, I'm pretty much just like spamming jabs through the whole story. And I'm like, this is fun. And I'm having a good time. You know, I'm kind of an idiot. I'm very easy to please. But there was like so much more like, like, I want to see the cool animation thing of like this, this like move doing a really cool thing that I wished I could explore and just didn't really feel like taking the time to actually learn it. And so in getting to actually experience that a little bit, you know, I could definitely see the path where it's like, I'm staying in fighting games. This is probably not going to happen, by the way, because when I say I'm going to play a game, it means I'm going to play it for like 20 minutes every week, if I'm lucky,

because my work schedule is fucking flooded. But it's, I could see myself staying in a little bit, you know, enough to have that time to be like, okay, maybe I want to play around, you know, a little bit more advanced style. So a lot of that stuff that, that Street Fighter 6 is trying, I'm really interested in giving a spin. But don't hold me to this, because I don't know how much I'm actually going to play. And well, I mean, and you know, I think an important part of that, too, is like, besides just having that fun is other fighting games have had regular and easy mode, like our choices as well, like all the way going back, I mean, Marvel versus Capcom one asked you if you want easy inputs or not. And for special moves, where you just double tap a button.

But I think a lot of people ended up kind of feeling like, oh, this is a inferior mode that is not real. And so they kind of like, I don't want to feel that way about it, right? A lot of the perception is a big part of what discourages people, you know, from using one of those types of systems. So in this case, because it's integrated and imbalanced in a way that is going to hopefully compensate, you know, for what you get for it, people won't feel any sort of stigma about trying it out, you know, it's funny to it's funny. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, you go ahead. I was just thinking it's funny for me to be like, yeah, yeah, the stigma and the discouragement, that was why I wasn't doing it. Knowing full well, I'm a boomer shooter guy and my genre is like, oh, easy mode.

Oh, you're a bitch pussy baby. Here's a picture of the character with a pacifier because you're such a bitch. Yeah, you can play that aggressively toxic fucking shit. And you have an extra secret power, which is your voice over fucking Mike, which you can use to turn on the fucking voice actor juice and make your dis is extra hard. You fucking scrub, you know, like just yeah, yeah, yeah, me, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna do that the whole time. I'll play I'll play Street Fighter six online and and try to hit him with like fucking intimidating talk and see if it works and be like, you stand no chance against me and and and and like get my fucking ass absolutely whipped and the whole time just be like, pretty good, but you're gonna have to try even harder than

that. Scrub quote machine, man. Ask them if they want to learn how to do an infinite. That's what you that's that's what you do, right? No, it's funny what you said about about Rising Thunder and Project L because, okay, so that thing you're feeling is real, right? Rising Thunder was an amazing fighting game for new players and it and then we are all hopeful for what Project L is going to be. When they showed off the Project L footage, though, you saw two on twos with tagging fast switching and what we call sauce, you know, like the the the things that you can cook with the things that you can fucking, you know, like interesting mix ups and hard to block setups and situations, things that can be dirty, right? While it's still a simple control system, but

the thing that you're describing, which is like, oh, that looks like it might be a bit too much, is like people who are like a longtime fighting game veterans also and like people like old heads and stuff like that, they kind of didn't take to Rising Thunder for exactly those reasons, right? Right. Those like people like that old FGC want to see something dirty and kind of interesting in their gameplay for them to be to appeal to you. So like there and the thing is, is that like if there was a balance of two audiences or it's like, oh, there's the people that liked Rising Thunder that want something simple to continue. And then there's the people who like thought it was a bit too simple and wanted it to they want to see more stank on on the gameplay. There were

definitely not a ton of new people like you who are like, oh, cool, this Rising Thunder thing. Like I feel like we here did a lot of pushing of that game. There were a couple other places and communities that pushed it. But overall, it was pretty quiet, you know. So there were a lot more people that were like, yo, take that basis and like give us some mix ups, give us some dirty left rights and, you know, and like they kind of show you in that trailer like, oh, it is probably going to be like that. Like the inputs will be simple, but like you're still going to get unblocked and mixed up left or right style, you know. So fighting games and the way it's going for fighting games kind of right now looks like a good ending version of what arena FPS has been going through

for a while. And so I think maybe I'm not a game dev, but for arena FPS to get to that point where it's like, you know, it's having kind of like a lot of resurgence and stuff, I think there will have to be and people have tried and failed to strike that kind of balance between, you know, the sauce and like actually being something that, that, you know, new players feel like they can jump into because like, you know, an old school, a quick player is like, well, it's got to have strafe jumping, which is this like super convoluted method of exploiting the engine and like moving your strafe keys back and forth so you can get as much speed as possible. It's like, it's got to have that obviously. And a new player is like, I like it when I click the button in the gunfires.

And so you kind of have to like, I think, yeah, meet somewhere in the middle there to, you know, have that sort of good ending timeline where things are playing out and you're actually getting players like that. It's an issue that I don't know how to describe it because it's most competitive games that have an attitude that is endemic in them over decades of you're going to learn today, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's like, yeah, no. Quake is like that. Fighting games are like that. Like new people come in and go, cool, die. Yeah, exactly. Die. Yeah. But and like, if you are a new player right now and you go on and you're like, you talk to the quick champions players and you're like, Hey, I want to get in on this. You know, I like the

genre. You'd be like, awesome. Die. Prepare to die. You will suffer. It is miserable, but you must overcome the pain in order to be able to enjoy the pain. It will be pain continue the pain. And it's like, Hey, guys, maybe they just wanted to play a video game. So that's the thing is the question, right? Like, because that's what it is when you walk into this legacy genre. But the question is, is what got them to walk in to begin with, right? Because if they walk, if they walked in and it was like, Oh, some of my friends are having fun. I want to have fun like that too. And it's like, those friends are kind of masochistic and they're having fun because of those losses and the girl and then coming back around and you know, and like you might not see that on the door

when you when you, you know, like when you push the door open, but there is a level of like, you know, it's not just in for a good time and then we're out. Like there's a level that is kind of the I think something, a commitment being asked of you, right? Right? Yeah. And I think about that. And I think like newer games that are like, you know, doing things that are more team oriented and stuff or finding ways to side vent that by having a cooperative experience overall be them at the forefront. That's why I was saying that like, what I think would make a the biggest change, like Street Fighter Six is doing everything great, everything perfect, you know, but what they what would really be fantastic for the genre overall would be for a

game to have it be that your average online night is you and two or three others, a group of people can online queue up together. And in that group, you can watch each other do ranked and talk to each other while you're fighting, you can spar with each other, you can do little team modes for fun and have that same feeling of a hangout that you get from going on any other team shooter or, you know, league or mobile or whatever. And you like you're like your Friday night is I want to log on with my jump on discord with my usual group, and we'll play this game together. You know, if they focused on something like that as a forefront feature, that would probably do a lot to help mitigate the single feeling of I'm responsible for my loss. I also I'm just going

to say it here because this is probably the the my only chance to say it and be heard by anyone it might matter for. But there is one more thing about just one more thing about Rising Thunder that is not in Project L. Yeah, really, really stupid. But I actually really like the characters and rising. Yeah, I thought they were really cool. And I'm like, they're not going to be in February. I'm like, so anyway, if you're out there and you have power over this, could you put could you put the Rising Thunder characters in Project L for me? That'd be really cool. I don't know. Just just throwing it out there. Dude, I scrolled through hate threads of people complaining about robots because they hate robots. And it made me so sad. I just want to tell us back. He was so

cool. He was like right there. And then, you know, he was so cool. I put the money on the table. Oh, this guy's awesome. Dauntless, man. I love Dauntless. You know, it just it sucks because like, yeah, like again, people were legitimately just like, they're like, these are not, there's not humans. I can't relate to them. They're just a bunch of robots. It sucks. I'm just like, this is the limit of a character appeal, right? Like, it's just there is a wall on a robot game, no matter what, you know. Yeah, there could never be a game focused on a robot that was successful. I don't know anything about that. I mean, and it's funny too, because it's like, if you put a human inside a robot arbor and they never see the human face, but there's still a

human in there, you can bypass that weird thing, you know, you can probably still be okay. Dark Souls has a bunch of fucking heroes with helmets on that you're not seeing their faces. And then there's people who you do. But I think like, they could be robots. They could be, you know, but just that little thing of like, no, there's definitely no humans here. For some reason, people were hate threading about that with Rising Thunder. That's just to add my two cents into what you were saying, Gianni, like I feel like going into a competitive game, everybody kind of understands there's going to be a hardship to some degree, right? Right. And you look at like, let's take Street Fighter Six and let's take quick champions, right? There's a core appeal

there. Either you like shooting people in your video game, or you think Ryu looks really cool doing, you know, a Shoryuken and you like the idea of fighting back and forth. And the two things that play is going to be, how much did you get into that core appeal? Like, do you see, like, some people sometimes see a character and go, Oh, I'm gonna learn that game no matter what, because that character, how strong is that core appeal? And how painful is the pushback? Yeah, exactly. So like, let's take the League of Legends, right? Some of those League of Legend characters are pretty cool, right? They're pretty cool. And you go, Oh, I'd like to play that. No, I got friends to play that. I'm going to sit down and play League of Legends. And then the

pushback is just a kick to the nuts. The pain begins. Yeah. And like, you can either increase core appeal, or you can decrease how hard you're going to hit people to push them out. And I feel like the best thing that could possibly happen with that, and street fighters trying and guilty gear tried is make the game as popular as possible. So the people who beat you barely beat you. Right. Yeah, exactly. The problem we always describe with fighting games, and I know it's the same with shooters is I'd like to play I started I'm dead. Yeah, exactly. And you don't just feel like you feel like emasculated. Like, oh, yeah, I couldn't even throw the ball before someone tackled me. And it's and it's like I wanted to play a video game today,

and I'm not playing. No, totally. Sorry about League of Legends, you just this is kind of a tangent, but you might find it funny. I was I was at the Ottawa Comic Con. I wasn't there as like a guest or as like a VA or anything. I was just dumb muscle for my wife helping her with her art table shoes and the artist alley. But we were there and I was looking through the pamphlet. And I swear to God, I might be slightly misremembering the title, but I swear there was a panel that was called something like So You Watched Arcane Now What. And I was like, oh, no, they're trying so hard to bridge the cap to make it like, hey, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, there's a game there. That's me. Yeah. That's me. I thought you might find that. Oh, that's fantastic. Like,

I saw a bunch of articles that came out along that time and a lot of people talk on Twitter like, wow, Arcane was great. Don't play League of Legends. Yeah, it was like, it was like, yeah, yeah, great show. Stop there. You know, I saw I saw that too. We're like, there was like an active, like cultural pushback to like, it was it was like a don't smoke campaign, but word of mouth, where it was like, hey, man, look, you know, you're a friend. I really care about you. I know you got into that Arcane show. Just just don't don't put the game. Okay. And it's so genuine. I feel like I feel like Riot understands that they've probably hit the carrying capacity of the planet with how many people are aware of and are ever likely to play League of Legends, and that

every time they do something, and the only path for the average person is, hey, should I start League of Legends and then someone either tells them no or they do it and then they just go, I'm done with that shit. Right. And that's all of a sudden there's tons of games coming out that aren't League of Legends. There's that ruined King RPG. There's Project L on the way. There's yeah, yeah. I definitely like I don't let me trash League of Legends or any MOBA too much though, because I have not gotten into any of them. I'm a pretty stupid shoot gun guy, so they would put text on the screen and be like, figure out these numbers and I'd be like, peace. So I'm from a very outsider perspective just to give that fair disclaimer. It's funny when Pat, when you're

describing how it's like, oh, what is it that gets you in, right? Is it that character or is it the ability to aim and hit scan? Is it the core conceit? The core, yeah. And look at the Street Fighter match ago. That looks really cool. And it's funny because for me, I mean, from genre to genre, it changes. But for FPS, I feel it's very similar to what I feel with like racing games where there's a reason why I never touched Counter Strike and why Gran Turismo is not really my deal. It's like the more fucking video gamey and kind of nutty things are, the more I'm like, oh, I want to see what that's about. You know, yeah. So if there was a new Unreal Tournament announced today, you might go, well, Unreal Tournament, whatever, create you doom, doom, eternal type shit going

off, you know, that's sorry, Pat. Best. Best I can do is taking down the servers and delisting even the single player games. Sorry. Best I can do for Unreal Tournament. That's all we got. Well, that's not the same, but okay. You know what the worst thing is is like you were talking about boomer shooters and this is not a boomer shooter, though it is old. Like, oh man, I wonder if there's, you know, some good games that people could get into, to get into FPS, you know, like, oh, you know what helps when you're playing in FPS? Having a really large team so that your personal failures don't necessarily impact the thing. Oh, are there any good battlefield games now? No. Oh, well, what up? Well, you could just go back and play Battlefield 19. You could go back

and play bad company too, right? Oh, no, it's being delisted. Like, oh, cool. Oh, God. And then get ready for, you know, fast forward a couple of years from now within the immediate distance of delisted games and also you cannot, you must be connected to, you can't go offline in any situation or have any kind of like, like land, I remember the old land type setup where you could still find a way to play a game in a closed environment. It was always like a fall back to keep any game alive. And I kind of hate that we live in a world where that's gone. Now, I should mention the delisting of the games and the pulling of the official servers happen. But in case there is anybody out there who's like, damn, I really would like to play some Unreal Tournament online, just to give

quick shout out to it. There are still people who are like running their own servers and get together on Unreal Tournament games and stuff. So you can there is there is like a path in through the community. It's just that, you know, it's been officially shunned, but just not totally shut it out for anybody who might be interested. I, you know, I'd hate to be like, don't even try. If you really want to, you know, you could probably make it work. Is this the part where I call the fucking epic cops on you? Whatever the equivalent there is. Yeah. Just go back and play fucking Unreal Tournament 2K4, man. It's a good game. 2K4 is that's that's my favorite too. That's actually, you know, so I don't know, like what

they're doing with Unreal, I guess I'll mention is they did that. And then with that came the announcement that they were going to be doing Unreal Tournament 3X, which is going to be Unreal Tournament 3 going free to play. They've promised no microtransactions. It's going to get some new update that I assume makes it work nicer on modern hardware. That's all really cool. So, so weird though, because most people feel so meh about Unreal Tournament 3. Yeah, it's the wrong game. Most people just leased. Yeah, most people feel like it's like their least favorite Unreal Tournament. And I'm with you. I would rather have UT, UTK4 or sorry. I'd rather play fucking Unreal Championship, man.

But I'll still like, I say this though, if they do whenever that comes around with Unreal Tournament 3X, I'll probably still play it. Like I'll still hop on because any arena FPS release has like a day, maybe even a week where there are players. So I'll at least hop on in that golden timeframe and get some matches in and shit. I mean, if for whatever reason people were to flock to it and fucking droves, which I don't see happening for Unreal Tournament 3, especially because everyone's so bitter about the fucking games being delisted and shit. But hey, if it were to happen and it became a happening spot for arena FPS, I'll play it. You know, I mean, it's still a fun game. Can we label that length of time, the lawbreakers' time, or even the shittiest, most unliked game

will at least get enough people to start a match? The lawbreakers' period. There it is. If we can call the death of fighting games the deadly alliance era, then you know, you can do whatever you want, man. Okay, let's take a quick word from our sponsors and then another break, if that's cool. Yeah. All right, I'm cool with it. This week, podcast is sponsored by DoorDash. I love you, DoorDash. Can I have a food? Yeah. Let's see. Are you missing the syrup for your pancakes? Ran out of coffee creamer? That's, ooh, that's rough. Those are particularly bad ones. If you go ahead and you have your pancakes made or your waffles, and then you realize you don't have some of them in the trash, dude. What else can you do? Put them in the fridge and come back

to the, like, that's just, that's crazy. It's over. It's a fail state. I should have checked before I started. Yeah, mid-flip. The screen becomes red. Mid-flip, you just put the hot pan and then right into the garbage you go, because you just, what the fuck are we doing here? Anyways, well, no, you can get stuff like that. Fixed weight. It's not a fail state, because you can get yourself some DoorDash syrup right to you, or whatever else you're missing. You can get them covering you with the grocery delivery, convenience store delivery. If you're out of toothpaste, toilet paper, whatever little cravings you got, they can get it. The crave toothpaste. I mean, you should use it as opposed to not.

Yeah. Also, yo, I just switched to an electric toothbrush. I didn't know how fucking sick those things were. God damn, they're amazing. I don't trust them. I get you. I get you, but then you try it and it's like a game changer. It's kind of nuts. They're fucking incredible. Maybe right now, I won't get into it now, but I would love to have more of the conversation of I don't trust it in regards to electric toothbrushes. It's okay if not right now. That's fine. Yeah, no, no, we'll get there, but for the most part, so it's like, oh, yo, I got to get some more toothpaste over here. You can get your DoorDash to cover that up, right? So obviously, of course, your favorite restaurants are all available as well with over 300,000

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Thanks, DoorDash. Thanks, DoorDash. I love you. Okay. Hold that thought. BRB. Okay. Okay. So I thought about it. Electric toothbrush. You know how when you leave the dentist after a cleaning, that is the cleanest your mouth ever feels? Yeah. Right? Right? Nothing is like that that moment, that day, right? When you brush your teeth, your mouth feels clean. When you use the electric toothbrush, it feels closer to the feeling you get leaving the dentist from a cleaning than a normal brush does. All right. Well, you've sold me. That's it. That's the best way I can put it. I was, I only wanted to circle back around to it because I find the the simple, quick, dedicated, I don't trust them. Like definitely serious. I was like,

what? Hang on. There's a story or something there. No, there isn't. I'm a strange person. I don't trust normal things all the time. Oh, yeah, fair. Okay. I'll look at a type of food and be like, I don't trust that food. I don't think it's for people to eat and I'm not going to eat it. Fair. You know what? Very fair. Yeah, I did make the switch to electric, but only probably about like five when I moved to Canada because the wife had one. And so I was like, I'll give it a shot. And so I am not that I used hers, but I got my own and they're good. Yeah, it does the trick. It kind of weird, kind of a tangent, but there is one time where my mouth felt cleaner than the dentist. And I'm not going to, I'm not here to advertise it because I probably like, I don't

really know much about it. But I swear to you, I tried, I don't know why these online, something called Mizwhack, which is like, it's wood, it sticks, you brush your teeth, you like, you like, put it in your mouth to like soften the wood into effective bristles. It's, I think it's from Africa. And that it turns the stick into a toothbrush. And I swear to God, I used it and I was like, I've never felt this clean. I know it sounds insane, but, but it really, it actually really, I haven't used it in like, I don't know, that was like probably eight years ago or something. So I don't really want to swear by it now. But like, it was, I distinctly remember it and it came in like all these different flavors and shit. It was so weird. So anyway, brushing your teeth with wood,

apparently partially Gianni endorsed. Ah, I'm looking at it right now. That's weird. It's, it's, it's weird, but I, I swear, I felt great. Mizwhack, I think it's M-I-S-W-A-K. It's a stick. It is a stick. Okay, a bristle. And then you chew it like soaks in your saliva until the wood becomes and you like skin the bark and the wood becomes basically a toothbrush. Okay. Hmm. Yeah, I was going to say like, is it, I was going to say, is it just like a water pick, but it's a stick pick instead, but it's like, no, no, no, it is not technology. It is a stick. It is a wooden stick. Interesting. Wow. Okay. Gianni dog toy. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Well, anyway, that's, that's the elevator pitch. Sorry. That total, total random tangent. Not at all. I apologize. We learned something today. And you endorse it. All right. Yes. 100%. 100% sponsored. Okay. Well, that note, let's, let's get into some, some stories, a couple things going on. I mean, look, why don't we can, we can, there's big things going on, but to me, there's nothing bigger than Eve online drama. Oh, yeah. Bullshit again. Man. Hang on. Eve. I thought, I thought we were in an era of peace because of the Excel spreadsheets. Tell me about the drama. So the Excel spreadsheet integration was in fact, from what I understand, a peaceful era. However, this

is more of some old stuff coming to light during the peak of the wars. Basically, a story came out. Wait, has it been deleted? Oh my God. Wow. Okay. There was a tweet here. It's gone now. They want to cover it up. Okay. Well, I copied some of the text. And yeah, I think that you just said Mitani. Like that's exactly it. There was a standing known character, an officer in the guild of a big Eve online faction, instructed forum posters to infiltrate someone named Remediae's house. At the time, the leader of a guild and install a key logger on his PC. And then they used the information gained from said key logging to hack the account and then also other compromising information and shit. And it's like the Eve online hijinks has always been kind of

insane under the soft rule of like, well, this is all happening within game world. But now actual crimes like were happening that involved like, yeah, some dude getting his computer key logged in completely fucking doxxed. And there was a whole thing going on about how they kind of like, just kind of played it off and pretended like, oh, someone just guessed your password, whatever. And then they were just monitoring this dude's like life activity, because like they sent someone over who pretended to not have a place to sleep or something. So they crashed and then started installing shit and monitoring like it was this it's crazy. It's fucking crazy. It checks out that when you say to me Eve online drama, what you proceed to describe is corporate espionage.

Yeah, like I guess that's what I would imagine if something is going down with Eve online. Yeah, okay, it makes sense. If I remember correctly, the player known as Matani was eventually banned from Eve online personally by the devs for encouraging a crowd to harass someone into killing themselves. Jesus Christ. So I'm not surprised that somebody who would do that at a public forum would get people to break in your house and install espionage shit on your computer. Yeah, so the when looking the story up to see if I can find the quotes that were from this initial story, the last thing that comes up is Eve's, Eve's online's most notorious player, Matani has quit the game. And I guess, my God, okay, yeah, it's fucking crazy shit dates back to

2007, right? Yeah, again, it's the tweet got deleted. But anyway, I again, I remember I have a friend in person who was describing like playing the some dude against another person who he was pretending to be so he was like he was acting as a middleman for like a deal. And then he would jump on a voice call and then put on a voice and pretend to be the second person. And they were doing both calls at the same time, and like pulled that off somehow, and heisted this person into suckering over money or items or whatever was happening in the game world with the trade that they were doing and shit like that where it's like that's insane. That's op sec. That's all of that. But like you kind of you're like, it's it's in the game, I guess, right? As long as the crimes remain within

the game world. Ah, that's that's where it gets complex, right? I mean, we have the level of crimes in which there's the espionage thing that we're hearing now is I would not be surprised to hear that it would be, you know, relatively common. There was one of those big battles that lost people millions of dollars about 10 years ago. Part of that involved doxing the leader of the clan, sending people to his house, tearing up the power lines in his yard and cutting them before the attack so that his internet and compute like all his service would go out because his house lost. Okay, so we're already describing the same level of fucking. Yeah, that's that's what we're hitting. Okay, you know, like just I mean, I'm going to burn your house down so that

you can't fight back in my video game. Because like if deception is, I don't know if deception is encouraged in the game, but it certainly is like supported, you know, like, yeah, I guess that's encouraged in the game of life, man. But it's like when your address is out there and people can come fucking visit you and key log your PC. They're like, that's jail, dude. What the fuck is happening? You know, castle super based viewers be like, I burned your house down hustler scam. I mean, oh, yeah, I just I like from a distance hustle. Okay, okay, I can see it. No one gets hurt. Yeah, cool. They were gone. They were out to dinner. No one got hurt. Everything's fine. It was just your it was just we just had to destroy your actual hardware.

Um, I'm like, I from a distance, I will always admire the idea of all of that shit. And again, it would started for me with that 10 years ago, the war, right? The fake bank that just went, nah, your funds are ours, actually. And the whole galaxy has to go fight, like, everyone at this like if you're a part of this bank, they're going to fight everybody in the game. Like that's so insane. But like from a like emergent story perspective, it's the most fascinating, interesting thing, you know, in a video game economy world like I it's so cool. But if all of that is predicated on people's real property and lives being destroyed, doxxed and fucking infiltrated, then then I guess we can't have the whole thing

pathetically and legally dubious dubious also has this problem. Okay, let's take Eve online. You have isk, which is in game currency. You also have Plex, which is the currency that you buy with isk or real dollars to turn into game time. However, you can mix and match these currencies in such a way that Plex has value. Therefore isk has value and you can steal isk. You can steal the money that turns into real money, which means it is real money. And you stole it. So if you request to switch player one and player two seats in grand finals, that is a legally that is allowed within the rules of the tournament. That's a fucking reset from the mental game. That's a hustle. You pull it off, you switch to the other side and so be it.

If you request a seat switch because you have you have filed down one of the legs on the chair. And then as you switch seats, you've been sitting lightly the whole time and as you switch seats, they switch over and they fall over mid game and whatever happens happens, you take the set. That's fucking scummary. All right, that doesn't fly anymore. So I've been admiring the seat switch technology for the grime that it contains and I'm finding out now that there was a I filed a down leg on the chair. I'm just thinking the closest I could think of the closest I could think of in the recent history with fighting games is, hey, what if I'm going to go to the loser's bracket, actively vomiting diseased blood? Okay, well, there is just scare

the shit out of the person sitting next to me as an intimidation tactic. There is that part. Um, dear God, I forgot, which reminds me, I forgot a thing of my week, actually. What the hell? How did it? How did it? So how did it remind me? How actively vomiting diseased blood bring you to your current thought? Because when the flagellants will is tested, it might become toxic. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Darkest Dungeon 2. You don't just become hopeful or have a meltdown. You might become toxic as well. Yeah, I played some Darkest Dungeon 2. I restarted and I'm fucking God am I back in hard on that thing? Do you like it as much as the first game? I love it.

Um, there's things I miss and there's things that I prefer here. It's a little up and down. Overall, it's fucking excellent. I think that there's a cost to the way they went about it is really, really great, but it means that there can't be as much of it, right? It's made in such a way where it's going to be, um, repeat runs, which is, you know, the, the, the, the first game too had that, but there was like a real feeling of like tons of new areas, tons of new stages to go to tons of new things. And like, um, overall sense of progression was like larger here. Um, I saw that again, I'm not really done yet, right? But I've, I've completed, um, so I'm on, I'm on the second, uh, uh, denial, not denial, the second, um, uh, in motion. Um, okay. And I think they're

called confessions and, um, you, you get introduced to, uh, before in the original demo of the game or the original, uh, early access, you would, you, you just see a different themes of levels that you'd have a chance of coming across, uh, uh, like the first roll, your first, uh, ride would be like maybe one or four. And then you'd introduce like another two or three for the second or third tier. And in this case, it seems like they're locked, locked behind these chapters. Um, I, I have to go back through and kind of see like how much fresh stuff comes in with the repeat runs. But, um, it seems like you kind of have more retreading of, of old, uh, material than you did beforehand. But the other one still had a lot of retreading as well. So it's, it's a minor thing. Ultimately,

though, um, there's new classes here that are like a lot of fun. Um, the overall ability, I've talked about this with, uh, when we first touched, uh, early access, but the ability to work with five abilities instead of four in your, in your fights is really, really good. Like just having a little extra, you know, um, because they're restrictive nature of just like, Oh God, which of these fucking amazing eight abilities do I want to go with? You know, like some builds are, um, you're like, I have the trinket for it. So I'm going to try this out or that out. But now you've got, um, what are they called? Paths, right? So you can set your particular class to have a preference for, um, this is a special thing they spent, like if you, you could have like your barbarian be, um,

a, uh, uh, I think it's like bloodthirsty path or so or whatever. But it's like their bleed abilities are going to get an extra buff and then they're going to get a balance for something else is weaker or, uh, the highwayman in rank one gets a bonus of 25% damage, but in rank three, it's minus 25 and minus 50 if they're in rank four. So then you kind of start their positioning starts becoming the most important part of their gameplay. It's grooves, you know? Um, and, um, yeah, all of that kind of comes together to just, uh, be just, uh, God, it's such an incredible fucking, just compelling. The narration obviously is just the strongest thing and there's so many, like there's, you barely hear lines repeat themselves. It's, it's, um, it's incredible how

I, God, I fucking don't know the narrator's name. Um, Wayne, yeah, like the amount of the, just the line reading and the fact and just how much it just carries the, the, the every play through, uh, it's such a fucking amazing tone set. Or, you know, um, yeah, I appreciate some of the updates as well in now the other way you unlock stuff. I didn't play when they added the, the new unlock screen kind of thing, which is the altar of hope after you die, you go spend your, your candles to, to get stuff. Um, when I was playing in an early access, you would just get things as you progressed and that was that, you know. Uh, but yeah, man, the 1.0 of this has been just super duper good. Um, the combo system where you kind of like have targets that, uh, it essentially takes

a system from the first game, which is marking targets and then they take more damage or have extra effects. It was a very, it was used a couple places here and there for like, you know, you can use a marksman to like, you know, point out something on a character and then some classes would have one or two abilities where it's like, Oh, if this opponent is marked, you do extra things to them. Now that is working across the entire cast. Everyone has stuff that works with marked opponents and, um, it creates a really fun synergistic thing. You have more synergy options as well. You can have a character who's entirely about marking and moving around people. Um, and then you have your healer, you know, and then you have your two like versatility or damage up front

and stuff. And, you know, you could do things like that before, but like now it just gives you a ton more options as well. Um, and yeah, as, as you know, I've said in the past, like as you go through the backstories of these characters, they're, they're all great, like narratively, lore wise, it's, it's always really, really strong. Um, the relationship meter as well is, it's interesting how this is the game has simultaneously gotten easier and harder, you know, the list of balance changes when you look at the things they did for 1.0 are like fucking immense. Um, but they've made the game essentially more feast or famine. So you can get on a roll and keep that roll going easier or you can get annihilated and die faster, you know,

like it's, it's just made it much more extreme in both directions. Uh, and that makes it a ton of fun as well. Um, yeah, I'm, I'm fully fucking locked back in. They got my, my, my attention and all I'm thinking about is damn, I want to get on the carriage and do another run of it. Um, and then the worst part about the early access with the whole carriage thing is, yeah, they've done everything they can to mitigate it. It's now completely an afterthought. Um, the steering of the cart, uh, you can completely ignore it. You just pick your next choice of location and it'll ride. You pick up stuff if you happen to want to steer, but it's not a big deal at all. Minimal effects. It's an incredibly minor out of items you get. So, and then you can, you know, buff that

up to make it like, oh, you get more if you want to steer. But yeah, they, they, they did the best they could, which is like, okay, people didn't like the steering aspect. It's not why they boot this game up. We're going to make it be a super optional thing, but it's not going to make life or death, uh, uh, pickups occur, you know? Um, I feel really torn about Darkest Dungeon 2. I played it on its early access release and now I'm playing it now, right here and there. The games tutorialization and UI clarity is one of the worst I have ever seen in any game. It's gotten better. I remember when we were first talking about the icon problem and how, uh, there really was just, you had to have a legend to go to on the pause screen. You still do, but the text and message pop-ups and

things have gotten bigger and better. Like they were really rough in the early access version I played. So they have now you hit control and you see a massive icon gloss. Yeah. Um, that does not include about 20% of the game's icons because some of those icons are not statuses or things you gain on combat. Some of them are, uh, outside combat things or yeah, I went to the end and I picked up whiskey and it just said ads and then it was a fucking yellow diamond. Yeah. So there's nowhere and I went through every tutorial page. I went through the thing and it's friendship. Yeah. But it's like, I'm not going to buy and I'm broke and like I kept running into that problem over and over and over in which a symbol would appear and it would either be like

hidden away on the character screen or it would be just not explained anywhere. And by seeing it enough times, I could intuit it. But like one of the things that really drives me crazy is like you get relics and the relics have subtitles like stained or indelible. Yeah. What the fuck does this, what does it mean that the relic is stained? So you get another, you get another relic that says if you have a state requires stained, uh, relic to use this, right? Uh, it'll be like, you'll, you'll, you'll see them paired up with another one that'll be like, oh, I can, I cannot use this unless I have the, the stained activator, essentially. Um, or you'll see, yeah, like you'll see a bunch of tokens that you can pick up in that glossary, but you're not

going to see every icon in the game. And it should be all icons really. It should make it so that it's not at all a question mark what you're looking at. I think it's so weird that the game has an icon screen that doesn't have some of the icons. Sorry, after you, after you. No, it's, it's because they distinguish it as a token glossary and it should be a legend. It should simply be a legend for all, like all visual icons in the game. The one that got me really bad was like, I had a, um, I had a token, not a token, I had an item that said, um, it was like a blue diamond with etches on it and it said plus 10%. And I'm like, the, the fuck is that? So I go to the token thing and it's not there at all. And it's like the only place you can see where that is is on the character

select screen. There's at the bottom, it's debuff. Um, is, is that, is that blue diamond icon? Okay, okay. And it's, oh, it's plus 10% debuff ability. And I'm like, why could I not just mouse over that icon and it tell me what the fuck that is. So you can, the weird thing too, and, and like, like I said, like this, it's, I've, I'm seeing it improve from where it was before. You can mouse over some things, but not all things. Anything fight. Yeah. So, you know, so like if you're highlighting your moves, right? And you're like, Oh, what does that icon do? You can click on the move and before you actually like target somebody and then it'll stay at the bottom of the screen. And then you mouse over the icons in the description of the, of the move and they'll,

though they'll all pop up and tell you what they are. Um, but, uh, and similarly, if you pull up a character sheet, you can mouse over anything on the character sheet and they'll tell you what those things are there too. But yeah, there's time to time where like the, the tooltip itself that pops up has to something you don't recognize in it. And you're like, I want to take a second mouse and mouse over the tooltip that popped up, you know? Uh, yeah, exactly. Um, so totally that is, that is, that is real. Uh, the other problem I used to have in the early access was some of the icons were just not distinct enough for each other. Um, there was like three slashes, two slashes, the shield, the hollow shield, the shield with the outline, um, and a number of other things that

were just like, those are way too close to each other. Um, they've redesigned some of them to be more distinct. So those have gotten better. Like I, there's still some stuff where I'm like, I'm squinting to see which kind of shield that is. But with the, with the icons getting bigger, um, it, it's not as much of an issue as it used to be. Uh, so overall quality of life changes, but yes, the overall glossary not containing everything is still, is still an issue. That is true. The other, the other issue that I have is, um, I think death's door applying to enemies has situations that become completely fucking absurd. Like I, I got into fights where I had an enemy at zero and I hit it like six times and it didn't die. And it's like, that's too much.

Well, so this is where the, the feast or famine aspect comes into play at you can focus on moves that have more deaths, blow resistance, uh, piercing essentially. Now, now hear me out, what if they just made it so like the fourth time you try it, the narrator just chimes in and is like low, low, and just laughs at you. Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be great. Uh, at the, as it stands, though, you know, I mean, he does so through, through like, like fancier words, but, um, you get moves that'll be more effective for death blow. You get trinkets that'll be making, that make you better at landing death blows, or you can have characters with, with classes that are specific for that. So the death blow mechanic being there just creates another thing

to think about when you put your build together, right? Or would you lay it out on it? Like I understand. And I, I at some point, my, my forward part of my brain does agree with you. Um, it feels so bad to not win a boss fight because the boss refuses to die. Exactly. It does. It feels so, so bad. So what that's, what that did for me, is it encouraged me to start stacking as many types of damage as possible so that as soon as a character, an enemy is on death blow, uh, and it becomes their turn, you get blighted, you get bled, you get burnt, and then you maybe survive and then come and do your thing, right? Like it has an effect of going, start using debuffs more, start using,

uh, dots more, you know, um, do everything you can to create different sources of damage within the same turn. And also, again, use abilities that have, that are anti death blow resistance, you know, death blow. I feel a lot like, I feel, I feel like the feeling I have is what people felt like when corpses were added to Darkest Dungeon 1.0. Now corpses, um, it's interesting because yeah, I remember we talked about those and how much those were annoying, but like corpse management is actually fucking fantastic now. And I love the corpse system. Um, it's gone from being an, uh, like it was a hindrance. And then now it's like, actually in some cases, it'll keep the last row enemy in the right spot so that your barbarian upfront can do an iron swan

and kill it, right? If the corpse disappeared and they moved up to rank three, you wouldn't be able to land that attack anymore. Um, but if you have, you can, and then it also allows characters who are classes specifically dedicated towards corpse management, which are fucking great. Like the flagellant I mentioned is gonna, um, take care of the corpse and blight an enemy after it destroys the corpse as a potential gameplay mechanic, you know? Yeah. Um, so they use, you can use corpses to your benefit in, in some cases, but there are also enemies who can eat a corpse and heal or destroy it, light it on fire, you know? So like it, it just finds another way to work in, uh, to the system. And of course, when you die, your own corpses on the field will be targetable.

So like if you have someone dead in that round, um, there might, you might be spared some damage because the enemies attack the corpse instead, you know? So again, feast or famine increased, you lose harder, you win harder, you know, but you have to use all the mechanics and now think about more of the new ones as well. So these are things I'm torn on. Uh, what I'm not torn on is that I think it's fucking absurd. The game doesn't have cloud saves. Uh, absurd. It, it really should. I wish it wasn't a one-way, um, transfer. Uh, it's, it's like, like I said last time, it's a single thing from EGS over to Steam, single serving. And then, of course, you can run into the problem like I did where you have the progress update and lose. Uh,

yeah. Simply, simply play the game again. What's it matter that you lost your progress? What's the big deal? Uh, I mean, I did, I did get back to where I was faster, obviously, this time around. But, uh, yeah, no, we saw Hades solve this problem instantly, easily. No reason why not. Um, fucking Dragon's Crown back in the day was like, hey, upload your save and download it on your Vita or whatever. I don't know. Like just, yeah, absolutely. I agree. That's, I, I, uh, by the way, don't take trash talk for me about Darkest Dungeon. The reason I've been quiet in this conversation is because there's really only like, I'm, I really want to try Darkest Dungeon 2. Haven't played it yet. The reason I'm looking forward to it is I hear some of those changes

that Pat, you were describing a lot of people like preferred it like the old way and the changes, you know, were kind of like dumbing this down. And, and you found that those changes, you know, made it more catered towards yourself. Um, I'm kind of looking forward to trying it because my story with Darkest Dungeon 1 is really funny and sad and pathetic, total skill issue. Uh, but around, like around launch for Darkest Dungeon 1, I put like about 30 hours into it, which for me is a lot. Yeah. Um, and, and so I put all this time into it. I got, I was hard stuck. It was bad. It was really bad. And so I was like, I couldn't, I don't remember exactly what I couldn't overcome if it was like a single dungeon or a chapter. Like I didn't get how hard stuck in the middle of the

game. I like didn't get past the beginning of the game. Uh, and I, I tried, I got like so desperate that a lot of my gameplay time was like, uh, okay, I have one infinite resource and it's that fresh bodies are always coming in. So if I just keep throwing bodies at it at poor quality, I'll be able to farm enough to yield myself some hope. Uh, and that didn't work. And then I tried setting the game to easy and that also didn't work. Uh, so I was like stuck. I got genuinely stuck. I enjoyed the game. I like, I still kind of, I wasn't frustrated with it. I still was like, this game is really cool. And like the moment to moment action felt really good, even though I was losing by the end of it. But like most of my gameplay time was I was doing it and I was doing okay. And then,

you know, I would get like towards like the end of a dungeon or whatever and all my guys would get executed and I was just, I sucked at it. And so the changes that I've been hearing about Darkest Dungeon 2, I'm excited to give a shot because it sounds like it's kind of been maneuvered in such a way that that's a little less likely to happen to me the way I play. Well, you'll just fucking die and then you'll start a new run. Right. Yeah, exactly. Quiet. Whereas I was like totally fucking, I could not figure out my way out of that cardboard box. It was sad. So there was, so one of the most forgiving things about this now as well is the like so far, you're kind of just expected to always take out new adventurers on each run. Right. The feeling of going like for hard for like

progressing a character up to max level, and then having them even survive the Darkest Dungeon and make it out and have like that extra little buff and like slash debuff and like you have a maxed out character. They're one of the most reliable people on your party. And then like you do a bad run at some point and you're just you're doing a run trying to get a level three character up to four or something. And then it all goes wrong and you wipe and you lose these characters that you've been building for so long. That fucking gut wrenching pain is kind of mostly mitigated and gone, but it still can exist in one form if you choose to, which is the memory system. Right. Before you would have to experience this because anyone who once your characters are on a roll, hey,

they survived. Awesome. Yeah, keep them going. Now when the run is over, you do a new run, you start out with a new cast. And if you want to bring an old memory back, you can. And if that memory dies, then they're gone forever. But it's not expected of you to keep that same thing going and then lose all that progress, you know. Right. So it is very different in that regard as well. It's still fucking hard, you know, it still kicks your ass. That's not going to be different. But I would say that like they've changed enough that it feels as if there's basically a lot of what you're describing, Pat, is like there's new hindrances and the answers are the new systems. Do you know? And and it's like, hey, start using this to deal with this new problem in a way.

And then, yeah, in terms of just like at the end of the day, like so far at the very least, because I'm not relying, I haven't used the memory system for anything, really. So far, it's kind of like you can do these upgrades to make your permanent progress on your wagon, be like upgrading your Hamlet. And so every time someone comes in, they'll have more abilities. And your overall, you won't be starting out completely fucking fresh, like like early game grinding required. But your chances increase over time, like any roguelike and whatever. That is much more forgiving in this game. And so the overall frustration of the consequences of dying has been has been lessened, you know? Right. Yeah. And with like the whole like roguelike

approach of like, you know, you are expected to do another run, I think it kind of fits more into what ended up happening with me anyway, where like I basically turned the first one into a roguelike within its like opening act. So I think this this structure might give me a little bit more hope. Again, I I don't even know when I'm going to get around to it. But I'm looking forward to it. The stuff you guys are describing about it sounds interesting. Are you using the radiant flame? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm torn because it feels like the radiant flame says that you won't get to have as many candles and that like it's the game's easy mode. So I look at that and I go, should I even be using it? It is an optional thing to put on. And it it yeah, you get it changes

odds and makes things easier in exchange for your rewards. But I mean, considering I did it without it beforehand, and the reduction is worth the trade off, I don't think it's that bad. I think it's a much I think you can have a ton of fun with it. You don't have to prove anything to anybody with it going like ha, like it's it's absolutely like you're going to get your rewards and you know, it'll be not too bad. Yeah, I see no reason not to. You have the option to put on the cursed flame as well to make it harder if you want. But so when I when I cleared denial, I still got like yeah 90 are so candles to fuck with, which is more than enough to like max out the highwayman. You know, so is it like slightly easier or like what I put the radiant flame is fucked. Dude,

I put the radiant flame on and I still get wiped like fucking crazy. It's not the Oh, it's not a Dark Souls summon in a buddy to help you carry through this boss at all. It is not free. Free. It makes some of it makes the light less of an issue. You will notice like you'll notice the what should we call it the will being tested will you'll notice more positive outcomes. Yeah, you'll notice a light that and friendships as well, affinities and such will, you know, definitely be affected towards the positive as well. But you're going to still walk into a layer and get annihilated. If you don't know what the fuck's going on, you're still going to hit the second late like you'll get through denial. For example, you'll hit that first fight or that

first rung of second chapter fights, go to like the fucking the wharf and then just get completely wiped and it won't make a difference. Like it's not going to carry you at all. It will make a difference, but it will not carry you. I also think it's throw it on and buy a pet while you're at it. Get a little get a little, you know, little puppy. Also, I'm I'm genuinely confused why this is version 1.0 when cloud saves and controller support, which we're supposed to be for launch are not there. It feels like they they push this version out the day it was one year after their epic sale. Like the way it went on Epic Game Store and that it's not actually 1.0. Yeah, I guess they got because they got in mouse only controls, right? So now you completely

don't need the keyboard. And I guess that was like, OK, good enough. But but it's also like when you go down the scroll down the patch list when you boot it up for like the 1.0 release. It is like one of the longest patch note things I've ever seen. There was enough drop in play enough MMOs. I guess not. I guess not. But I I can't believe how fucking humongous it was. And it's for for all those changes. So they kind of just decided, yeah, fuck it, it's out. And I guess there's an ending, right? There's proper like everything's in there with the chapters. One more thing, too, about the the flame. When you get past chapter one, to get to walk up to you can you can approach the mountain to get into the mountain. You have to

kill a boss. Right. And that on its own, the flame will not save you. There is there. It doesn't matter to kill a boss is real is real is real. You know, and if you do and to get and like you're going to walk out of there, you're not going to be in good shape either way. So it's it's asking daunting tasks of you, regardless. OK, well, thank you. Thank you for assauging my my trepidation. It's not a bit. It's not a bitch flame. It's not your fight. Well, we're four hours in. I think we did one news story. Oh, god damn it. All right, sorry. I and I know you were saying you try to be like careful of the guest time or whatever, but I still can't emphasize enough.

I'm game for for however long or whatever. It says his time has no value. Yeah, it doesn't. I cleared I cleared out today just for this. OK, I'm a fan of the podcast. So I knew when I got on the phone that anything could happen. So don't worry about me. We're moving. But I just needed to take a minute to let everybody know that Darkest Dungeon 2 is fucking great. The weirdest thing is about Darkest Dungeon 2. Paige has gotten way into it. It's so fun. Yeah, but that is not up that woman's alley. That is not her alley. That is that is really, really not. Like I was streaming last night and I just get a text message being like I beat denial. I'm like, what? I can't even get to the mountain. Surely, but it fits. It's fitting

into the role that I had vampire survivors in and into the breach and other downtime games because it's decision based, right? Make good decisions. It's not timing based. So I'm like, yeah, I kind of just want to. But I don't make good decisions. So that's fine. But I'm just saying like I can multitask. I can, you know, and then like like I can like take my time on a turn and like go do something or whatever. Yeah, he had a or like, yeah, if I'm if I'm, you know, whatever, listening to something, it's great for just that. And also again, like I can't stress how much I love the setting, the narration, the world, the feeling, the overall mood. It tickles every fucking little fit. Like I just love that shit so much. Yeah, you know, yeah, what they have there is so, so good.

And I don't get I don't get that enough and other things I play. So I just got it. It's it's it's scratch is a niche that I don't often get to scratch, you know, right? Yeah, absolutely. That's that's that's dope. She's she's in there. Okay. Sorry. I actually did I briefly mentioned there was also I had forgotten something from my week, just to cause you more delay here. I don't have to talk about it too long. But in case it's moderately interesting to you at all, while I was sick with COVID, I was able to I know right on time to the party finally catch up with watching all of a show called Rome that you may or may not be familiar with. So oh my god, I do. I really I'm trying to fix tight as fucking let's go tight as fucking pull.

Yeah. So I do not watch like enough shows. I still need to watch through fucking sopranos breaking that Benjamin bad breaking bad better call Saul never watched Game of Thrones. I am like media fucking illiterate because I just play boomer shooters. But I finally Marie that she has the the DVDs for it and we were we were both sick with COVID. And so we just watched through all of Rome. Yes. And it's honestly I loved it. I loved it. And I looked at she tells me it got canceled because it was too expensive. And I looked it up. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. The show was successful. People liked it. But it was still so expensive that it got canceled in a pre Game of Thrones world. Right. And then the same producers and shit learned from this mistake

and went and made Game of Thrones. The actor for Mark Antony was quoted as saying they stole our fucking show because Game of Thrones is basically like they did Rome and they were like, OK, we've now learned how to not spend so much that it has to get canceled despite succeeding. And you can see it was like and you can see the exact same budgetary setup for when it comes to war scenes where both Rome and Game of Thrones just pan away and pan back to the aftermath of the battle because this is not a movie. We can't afford it. You know, I then I went and learned because the second season moves so fast. And yes, because they knew they were getting canceled. Turns out like season two, you may remember, you know, a lot of shit happens. Spoilers for

ancient history. But you know, there's the whole thing with with the demise of Brutus. And and like the whole Brutus thing was supposed to take like another like three seasons and and like we were supposed to be in Egypt for a really long time. And it was really supposed to stretch out a lot. There was there was a question on the podcast recently about like things ending, you know, having to get a rushed ending or whatever. And this was one of those where season two is like Jesus Christ. You know, it kind of like feels lackluster. Yeah. And the reason was because they were getting axed. So they wanted to like put it in some kind of place. But I did. I looked it up and there actually was stuff. I'm going to do this to give myself hope even though

I shouldn't. There was stuff about possibly continuing it as a movie. They had like they have a script. And all the actors still wish they could work on Rome. Everybody wants it. And so they have like a movie script for like 20 years later, continuing the story from where it left off at the end of season two. Probably like never going to fucking happen, right? But it's still it was something nice to learn where it's like I can give myself this Hopium. Yeah. No things. But yeah, Rome, things, things kind of go downhill after the death of Julius Caesar, kind of like real Rome. What? No, huh? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Caesar stuff. Caesar stuff. Caesar was like really, I didn't expect to say this, but Caesar was a really interesting character.

Right? Oh, I loved the stuff with Caesar. Actually, so we're saying it wrong. It's actually Gaius Julius Caesar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. True bread for true Romans. It's such a good show, man. Yeah, I really, I really liked it. I definitely so here's here's shout out for Rome right on schedule. Fucking like 20 years later, whatever. Yeah. Well, yo, I just remember like, my friend, I remember my friend recommended it because he's just like, yo, you got to check this show out. Like Cleopatra is super hot. It's crazy. Yeah. Oh, shit. Okay. You know, but yeah, no, it really does have a lot of those proto game of thrones like this character has an attitude that you're going to buy into, you know, the wits, the banter, the sarcasm, the fucking,

you know, cutting jibes and the politics with sass. They really got me in with the two main characters, Lucius, Varunus, and Titus Polo. Like I because I was like, she started the video and I was like, I know what's going to happen. It's it's it's more of this ancient history stuff. All the characters are going to be like, my lord, my lady. And it's I'm going to get bored and walk away. And then they start showing me Titus Polo being sarcastic, imprisoned for for defying an order on the battlefield, even though he's like a hero of the unit or whatever. And I was like, I love this guy. And they told they totally got me in with the two main characters. I just love that a bromance they have. It's it's amazing. Yeah. And you know, I think they did a it was a

pretty great job to as well where it's like, look, we all know historically who Caesar and Brutus are. So how interesting can this relationship be? And they do a great job of making it very interesting. Yeah, you know. Yeah, exactly. The end in in the moment, spoiler, Caesar dies. What in the in the moment? He he there's I swear to God, they knew there's like Caesars on the floor and Brutus is like coming up to him, you know, or whatever. And they're having like the Caesar is dying moment. And you I swear to God, they bait you. Yes, because you're waiting for it. Exactly. You're waiting for it. Waiting for it. Yep. A to Brutus. And he looks at him. And he's like, Yep. Yep. And he dies. And I'm like, Oh, they're fucking with me. It's in his look, though.

Right. They know exactly what you're waiting for. And they don't fucking hit you. It's so effective. It's really good. Say the line, Caesar. No, he's dead. He doesn't say the line. It's great. And then also, yeah, well, I mean, again, season two, you know, things gets rushed up and go downhill. I feel like everything Augustus related kind of just like, it's like late Game of Thrones, right? It's like, Oh, my God, like, what are we doing? Yeah, really weird that Mark Zuckerberg becomes the main character of Rome. God, right. But that being said, though, Atia of the Julia, I call for justice. Yeah. Hell of an exit remains a hell of an exit. Like for as far as the late season goes, that was unbelievable. Yeah, that's shit.

Yeah, good. Good. I'm glad. I'm glad. But all this time later, post Game of Thrones world that you still enjoyed that. Yeah, yeah, I recommend easily Rome. And yeah, and even watching it with the like, think about how Game of Thrones became what it is. This is like where some of that those threads kind of came from, you know, people have done similar things with the wire, where they're like, Oh, if you like the wire, there's a couple other shows that were like similar and that came out before that like pushed that that sort of vibe and that, you know, the corner lahane, you know, a couple of different things, or you can go check them out and see like, Oh, yeah, this is where they they figured it out. And then this is where they perfected it.

Right, right. Feels like a similar thing with HBO and Rome. Yeah, man. Good shit. Okay. Now you got the theme song in my head. Yeah, all right. Yeah. Here's what's going on in the news, which apparently you rely on us to update you on what's happening in the fucking world of video games. Okay, don't do that. Don't do that. Before before the podcast, I told them because all I know is like retro FPS stuff that is the world I am totally immersed in. And then this podcast is pretty much where I find out about everything else that's happening in the gaming world at this point, which I knew would concern them deeply to tell them,

but is nonetheless horrifyingly true. Absolutely. So so please continue to keep me up to date. Okay, about how it's going. Well, speaking of old shows. Clone High is back. Holy shit. Fucking yay. On next week, on the 23rd, the season two of Clone High is fucking coming out. And it's just like, this is nothing bad ever happens to the Caesars. I like it's kind of insane because a lot of shows from that MTV era, MTV cartoon era, like they kind of go downhill. They never they'll never get funding again. And then you never kind of hear from the people again. In this case, it was the opposite where

Clone High goes away, like all the rest of those did. But like Lord and Miller go on to do a ton of stuff and are super successful and, you know, get like fucking spider-verse going and like are very, very much out there. But you're like, are they ever going to go back to it? And they're like, we want to, but you know, this is still rough because we still are like getting pulled in on all these jobs. And I don't think we have enough clout to like make it happen ourselves. So it's just been this like, we want to make it happen over the years. But, you know, finally they're like, it seems like they've, they've managed to gather up enough clout with their, with the projects they've worked on to be like, okay, we're going to get another season made. And it's like,

seems like it's, yeah, pretty much picking right back up where the cliffhanger season one ending left off. And it appears to be the only, the only thing is there's no Gandhi this time around. Because I guess Gandhi is considered not a well-aged character, I suppose. I can see that. So all things considered, I'm very excited for the return of clone high. That's a whole bunch of my form, like I'm thinking of all the fucking college era formative jokes that I remember from that and undergrads and Mission Hill and everything from way back when, you know? So never, I just, I don't, I'm not going to, I don't know the story of this show, like the backstory

or how it actually went with production or anything, but I'm just going to go ahead and say these words anyway, because it feels good to say, never doubt the power of memes. I feel like they're, it's so much stronger than, than a lot of people think where if something gets memed enough and brings it up, it can just like have a real helping hand in, in like bringing things together and creating enough like demand for, for a thing that like it helps it forge. Memes can do like anything. I walked by a fucking like international Salt Bay restaurant the other day and I was like, holy shit, memes can do anything. The new sir. Yeah. That's, that's, yeah. I mean power of memes. He was already a restaurateur, but you know, it's just how widespread it got

and everything, but you know, yeah, never, never doubt memes. They're, they're strong and scary and should terrify you. Yeah, I heard fucking people like radio, like where people who have no idea what is what on I rock, like say it's morbid time. And I was like, how did that reach? Like what is that? Has that broken out of containment? You know, right? Yeah. That's crazy. Anyway, so yeah, Claude High is coming back. King of the Hills coming back. Wild shit. What the fuck? Jesus Christ. Nice. Sorry, my bad. Webcam freaked out a little bit. Don't, he's beginning. He's, he's, he's beginning to warp. Sure. Shows my teeth. Okay. MP3 fans, you, you missed out on something scary. MP3 fans look away. His eyes flashed red

for a second. Back away from the lady. All right. So what, what happened is, I guess EU regulators have now approved the Microsoft Activision Blizzard acquisition. Did they? What has happened to change the air? Basically, they have created a series of exceptions for EU, particularly all the stuff that they were concerned about with the cloud game cloud gaming monopoly. So in the UK, they're going to have to provide a free license for all EU markets to be able to stream and use all games via cloud for free without any whatever interaction or all cloud gaming services. Here, the exact wording is as follows. The, the remedies that allowed for the deal to go ahead were 10 year licensing deals that Microsoft has offered to competitors, a free licensing deal to

consumers in the EU countries that allows them to stream via any cloud game streaming service of their choice, all current and future Activision Blizzard PC and console games that they have a license for. That seems like a fucking mess. Cloud provided cloud providers will also be offered a free license to stream these games in EU markets. Their automatic licenses and consumers will have the right to stream any of the games they've purchased or subscribed to on any cloud or streaming service other choice on any operating system. So the European Commission requested Microsoft offer this automatic license and this will now apply globally. They're not going to do that. They're going to say that they're going to do that and they're going to do none of that and

then they're going to eat whatever fine the EU finds them for. The EU didn't issue a decision until, until this one. It was the UK that blocked it and then they haven't changed it. The deal, let me see, going a bit further down. Regulators concerns about cloud gaming, not the UK as the exception, right? Okay. Yeah, they quit. So I guess it'll go ahead and then the UK will, I guess, be the exception. I guess. But it seems like it's still able to go through. The UK, US and European competition authorities are unanimous in that the merger would harm competition in cloud gaming. Microsoft's proposals accepted by the European Commission today would allow Microsoft to set the terms and conditions for this market for the next 10 years.

They would replace a free open and competitive market with one subjecting ongoing regulation. Um, and this is listed as one of the reasons why, uh, they're not going to do that. There's no, the idea, the idea that Activision is going to have to fucking give out call of duty and death and fucking every Blizzard game on every cloud streaming service that exists by legal default is so absurd. That would be a fucking mess to actually have to develop for. So they're going to have a legal battle ahead with CMA. Yeah. Okay. Oh yeah. CMA, the UK one's like, nah. But ultimately the concessions offered to the EU were enough to get the deal over the line in Europe. They're trading it like television

channels, but it's not. I was wondering though, like, could the UK stop the entire deal or is it, well, because when we were, when it was coming out initially, that's what it sounded like. And it was like, would they ever just go, okay, you guys are one market and then we'll ignore that and then proceed accordingly without you or figure something else out or whatever. It looks like, it looks like, it looks like Activision Blizzard will have to sue the UK in order to something. But they are there. They've been really adamant that like now we're not going to allow this merger. Yeah, I imagine because the thing is, of course, is like, if not every market is on board and they don't all agree, then I don't see them being willing to pull out of the UK entirely. But

whatever the case is between the last report and this one, it seems like they're allowed to go forward, even if CMA is against it. More as the story goes on, I suppose. I think the cloud gaming thing being the hand that contracts this deal is the funniest fucking thing in the world. Not at all what you would think. You'd think the overall general monopoly idea would be be a much larger concern, but it appears to not be the case. OK, so I'm reading up on it now on the BBC in order to go through the deal must be approved by the regulatory bodies in the US, the EU and the UK. They all have to give the thumbs up.

So no matter what the fuck the European Union and the US say, if the UK CMA regulatory body is like no way, then that deal is not happening. Regardless of the EU clearing it and making their concessions. More as it continues. But hey, that's fine. However you feel about this news, all you gotta do is jump onto your local Blizzard World of Warcraft server on Discord and talk about how you feel about what's happening. I love going on World of Warcraft Discord servers and being like, boy, I sure love World of Warcraft except for this thing. Oh, I hate it.

No way. Don't. Don't do it. Stop. Hey, guys. Sorry. Sorry. I wasn't listening. I just finished signing something on the Discord. What's up? Yeah. What did you sign on the Discord? I didn't really read it. Oh, yeah. That's I always love to not read the things I sign. No, your specialty. Oh, no. If you don't read the fine print, you might have to install tracking bots onto your Discord and you might never ever be allowed to say anything negative about Blizzard or its games ever.

Hey, whoa, this sounds epic. Will I get XP? Does this sound like a company that's in hot water just taking the absolute bluntest solution to being in hot water possible? Well, this hot water can't be that hot because a new character didn't come out. Oh, you're right. Change of plans. Drown the frogs. They did. They did announce today that you can skip Diablo 4's campaign if you already beat it with a different character. That was today. The threshold for hot water is did they release

a new Overwatch 2 character? We know the bar. So, yeah, basically, Blizzard introduced a new feature on their European community site, which was a community Discord program for WoW. And essentially, there's a ton of Discord servers where people are talking about WoW in Europe, obviously. And for you to become an official member, all you have to do is install tracking bots onto your Discord and you are never allowed to say anything negative about Blizzard. You must install and maintain on the server something called Clockwork Rocket and since it's called Clockwork Rocket and you must install sentiment tracking software

requested by Blizzard from time to time and grant Blizzard permission to such software. How about you track the sentiment inside my asshole? Look, guys, I just got to tell you, it doesn't take that much CPU and also I'm really excited about the new Overwatch character, Woolly. And I'm just, the text says, I stopped talking there. Okay, what's that? I mean, look, look, look. Here we go. The fine print. The program member represents and warns that they, dot, dot, dot, the program member, as of the effective date, holds a positive opinion about Blizzard, including any affiliate at its products and does not seek to become a program member for the purpose of harming Blizzard monetarily or reputationally

or for any other proper or misleading purpose and shall not make disparaging or negative statements or representations written or oral about Blizzard. I feel like whoever wrote that down wasn't paying attention to the universe because like the nature of the contract makes the contract impossible to enforce because by signing the contract, you're saying that I promise not to do anything to make Blizzard look bad, but the contract makes Blizzard look bad? So you can't sign it without making Blizzard look bad? Like, you would expect this type of like, like this, this type of like, like language control would be a non disparagement for someone that you're like partnering up with in a way that is not just, hey, fans of our stuff, do you want

to be officially recognized? Hey, don't get on the stage and say the Reebok shoes suck ass. Yeah, not to not to bring this back around to Rome, but this was literally a plot thread in Rome, where it was like, no, Brutus and Cassius can come back because they were ruled as traders by a tyrant. But if we decide Caesar was a tyrant, then anything he said doesn't any longer apply. Like the paradox you just described was a plot thread in Rome. I mean, it's it's fucking, it's just it's the insanity of like, yeah, this definitely is the type of language you'll see when, you know, yeah, someone who works for like a company, you know, gets fired or quits or whatever. And it's like, okay, you can't shit talk or you can't talk about your yeah, you have NDAs,

you can't just talk about the company or whatever. There's a term of time before you're allowed to do or say anything or take interviews or whatever the case is, you know, and these are often accompanied with like a payout or some sort of like contract termination deal and yadda yadda. But the idea of just being like, yo, you contractually have to like us guys, you have to. If you sign here, if you sign here, it means you like us a lot. Don't sign it if you don't if you're not my friend. So when's twitch giving us this for to moderate my chat with because I'd like to start heading handing these out, you know, you can't you can't say mean things about my skill in the game anymore. Well, unfortunately, Blizzard is currently reviewing the terms of

the agreement after the backlash and after a ton of many prominent creators immediately opted out from from from the proposition. So we're gonna have to see what what happens. But like, okay, so so you know, you always say like, we've we've calculated the backlash to the backlash. And so this has already been accounted for. And now we're going to do the back down. That's actually what we wanted. But how do you even like, there's no like, what step can you take back on this where people would be like, Oh, that's fine, then like, it seems like it's just so far out so far gone. Like, what are you going to do? There was never it was never about like a like, there's no point of this where it's like, Oh, we're going to sell you something and then drop the price or

whatever. It's literally let's reach out to the people that are our fans that are meeting up in discords, and then offer them recognition in exchange for like, control over your fandom. And then like, yeah, crafting a narrative and allowing and basically anytime there's a controversy or anytime we got to break that glass to reveal the new character, we better be able to go into these discords where people that care the most about this shit will not be able to talk about what's going on. We're going to shut it down because if they've signed this, then we have the legal grounds not to actually do anything, because that would be a waste of time, but to threaten something. And then then that discord is done with so we can't have any situations where people are,

I don't know, making a discord about World of Warcraft and going, Hey, here's the massive threat of everything that's fucked up in this expansion release or, you know, what have you. Yeah, control the message. Just try to, you know, if you're going to try to position yourself where there is somewhere you can back down to rather than jumping into a void, there's like no step backwards from like, assuming direct control of your discord messages. And it's just and again, like, it's like we're already a community that exists for Wow or whatever. This is like a nod of the hat from Blizzard, which is cool. But who the fuck needs it? You know, like, it's like, oh, we're going to spotlight you in exchange for like, at like fucking complete censorship and weird,

like it doesn't even the incentive proposition is not great at all. And I guess the hope is that they're like, Oh, no, but you're enough of a fanboy that like us looking in your general direction will get you excited, right? Like that's enough for you to install the fucking. Yeah, I don't know, man. These kinds of discords I found have a like nearly invariable antagonistic, like, aura of them towards the devs, because the devs are hiding information. Yeah. We're gamers. We hate these fucking games and the people that make them. What are you kidding me? Like every time I go into the balance, which is a shithole, everyone's there just like, Oh, why won't they fucking do this? Oh, I need my numbers. There's I think there's one game I can think of where the players are

seem to be just content, happy people. And I think it's Deep Rock Galactic. That's the only one I can think of where where you jump in and everyone's like, everything's okay, right? We're having a good time. It's like a bunch of dads just like having a beer everywhere else. It's like, fuck this game 3000 hours. But you know, it's yeah, totally. I just I like how the fucked up Eve online key logging story is from like 2007. And the fucked up Blizzard key tracking story is from this week. Anyways, good stuff. Good times. Nothing ever changes. Well, how about this silk song, extra delayed fuck, fuck, fuck. Yep. So Team Sherry says that it was planned for obviously the first half of this year, but development is still continuing.

I mean, it's just it's yeah, it's we know it's gonna be good. We know it's they're taking their time and I'm sure there's reasons that are probably good ones why they're taking the time to improve things. Hopefully, but delaying it is okay because not enough hours have passed that anybody could have possibly completed all the content in Hollow Knight yet. We still there's still like another good 2000 hours before that becomes right. We're catching up to the overlap point. We have not hit it. If you're still working on Hollow Knight and beating it, you will hit 100% at least by late this year. So they're yeah, they'll be right on time for it. This the the silk song situation is super strange. Normally with because Hollow Knight from all intents and purposes appears to

have done really well for Team Cherry and allowed allows them to basically just sell Hollow Knight and work on silk song, right? So usually you you would expect that they would shut the fuck up and not even talk about silk song and then maybe six months when they're in the polishing phase go hey, silk song's coming. Here's a trailer. It's gonna be coming. It'll be a big deal, right? But because silk song is the DLC that got away, they couldn't do that because silk song is the final stretch goal for yeah, Hollow Knight, which was gonna be free, but then became fucking this crazy thing. And I think the people who earn that stretch goal are getting it for free. I think so. Yeah, they were they were promised it. Yeah. But so it was this weird thing like back when Hollow

Knight was coming out and you know, the the you know, gods and whatever gods and bugs or whatever came out. And there was like, okay, so when's silk song at? Oh, when's the Hornet story? You guys you guys working on it? And that went on for like a year. And then eventually they had to be like, it's a new game. We're working on a new game. It'll be a while because otherwise it would look like they just fucking pieced out and never filled the final stretch goal. So I don't I think it's been like that's been it's become such it's become its own thing enough that like I don't think most people are thinking about it as Kickstarter stretch goal three. I think it's being seen very much as its own game and development at this point. And the fact that it's been this

long. I like again, I'm someone who's like, yo, make a good game, get better with time, take the time you need, right? Keep like cook as long as you got to do what you got to do. The thing is, is just like if you're hitting the point where like the excitement is kind of turning negative on people because of like, I guess the the announcement of nothing or the announcement of the delay and so on. We've seen this go sour over games that people have been very excited for. I mean, Bayonetta three just happened and you know, even before like the whole thing of its release, like just the continuous delays eventually turned a positive into a negative. I I'm sure there's whatever like there's reasons that we don't know about. I kind of wonder it's like, okay,

well, your choices are delay the game and give transparency as to what those reasons are delay the game and don't explain it and then don't explain it. Just keep going, right? I feel like as curious as I am to know like what it is that's causing it, it wouldn't really make it any better for most people because the point is they can't play it. And that's the end of what it is, right? Like, it'll just be a specific point of like, well, that means that this aspect is incompetent or so and it would just I think it would garner the negativity around a specific element. I think radio silence would also probably just create a faster descent into negativity. So I think this is like the most those are the least damaging path they could take going about it.

But I'm it's a bummer to watch people's sentiment of something we're all really excited for turn negative just because of the, you know, the weight. So I need to I like to whenever I start to feel this feeling of like, well, I'm getting really frustrated by this delay, or I'm getting really frustrated how long this game is coming out. Part of the reasons for silk song is that for a long time, it was shrug. It was like, I thought it was going to be a DLC pack that I was going to play like I'm until 2018 or 20 February of 2019. I thought I was I was still going to play a DLC pack. So Hollow Knight comes out in 2017. And silk song is expected like kind of like that year or the next year. Right. And then in 2019, it's like, Hey, no, it's going to be its own game. And now

it's 2023. So it's a full like six years after fucking Hollow Knight came out. And it's four years more than it's four and a half years since it got announced as its own thing. And when I try and think about that, I'm like, my dog didn't exist by a factor of two when I was waiting for silk song, right? People have gone through their entire high school education, waiting for silk song. They became a freshman and then they graduated to go to fucking university. Oh, I wonder when silk song is going to come out. The old game of things that have happened since Duke Nukem Forever, right? Like that list of the fucking the entire fucking Lord of the Rings, all of Harry Potter, the wars that have started in England. I think the only winning move,

unfortunately, is to go back in time and not announce it. Right. Because there is one other thing you could do, which is show anything. Yeah. Yes. Well, there is there is some there is a there is trailers, right? There's footage of there are two trailers, I believe. Okay. I do recall seeing a longer trailer that we talked about on the podcast some time ago. So many of the chats as Breath of the Wild came out and then Tears of the Kingdom also came out. So that's the thing, right? Is if you think about it in the way that a lot of other indie games kind of happened. Right now, no one I don't think is waiting on Shovel Knight two. But for all but there's been a bunch of other Shovel Knight side things. But for all we know, there might be a giant,

amazing Shovel Knight two in the works that's been fucking 10 years cooking, right? If Silk Song was not known about as a thing at the time, and it was just this is the end of, you know, Hollow Knight, and then we just go into what are they up to? Who knows? I hope we hear from them again. Then we wouldn't have this feeling, right? But there's a very real possibility that like, you know, that like, yeah, like if if Shovel Knight two just drops out of nowhere tomorrow or a trailer for it, it's nothing but positivity. So it's like, yeah, I guess the nature of how they got to Silk Song to begin with kind of doomed it to this sentiment. And then the worst part is whenever it does drop, what like for as good as it's going to be, there's going to

be a it fucking better be look how long this took, you know? Yeah. I'm trying to find right now when the Hollow Knight Kickstarter happened. Hollow Knight Kickstarter ran from November 2014. I actually wasn't I didn't know that there was like, I know it's been delayed for quite a while now, as you said, it's been a long time. But I didn't know that there was growing descent. I thought like I thought everybody was still kind of just chill with it. I hadn't heard too many people getting really frustrated, but I'm just not like in touch with it. I believe you. But I think I actually personally thought it was still all goodwill. So my idea is that they should start burning more goodwill faster. Yeah. And I think they should announce another delay and say we're

just doing it to fuck with you. I mean, I don't know if more footage would like, I mean, it might, I guess it would help. I guess it could help. But then again, it might be like, but here's footage of a thing that is not going to be representative of what you finally get, you know? It's it's it's weird now because looking at the looking at the Kickstarter, I'm like, so how long did Hollow Knight take to make? Oh, three years. How long has Zolksong been waiting around for four and a half, five years? So now the expectation is just like way up again, you know, if tomorrow we hear about, hey, Cuphead two is happening. And it's like, oh, yeah, they've been on that for years now, but it's just been quiet, you know, that's that's that's normal. That's the optimal. That's all

that they're just they're in an unfortunate state where they probably wish they could unannounce it, you know? I ultimately think I'm again, I'm someone who's generally like, I love it when it happens. And like, hopefully, right, if it delivers on what they delivered before, and like, I'm down for them to take their time probably because this this era is filled with no shortage of games to play. Yeah, there's just always too many games. So I'm generally going to be more okay with it overall. But I just feel like like reading the room on it and the sentiment every time we kind of talk about it, I'm like, oh, man, like, yeah, everyone's pretty pissed. I'm like, if I'd rather it fucking not come out and have these have issues, I'd rather it have its time or polish or whatever

they want to do. I trust that interesting place to sit is if you are a Kickstarter backer for Hollow Knight, you are now have been waiting for 10 years almost. Yeah, sure. For the soak song. I saw someone in the chat go, would you rather it come out rushed? I don't think games that have been in development for over four years can ever be qualified as rushed. Those are rookie numbers. You got to pump those numbers up. Thank you. I don't think you can ever like, no, you can't rush something at four years. That's that's not come on. If we don't hear about Hades to until 2028, I don't like that's a whole lot of goodwill that could turn around. I guess four to five years is about the time frame, right? But what is the time? What is how early? What's the perfect amount

of time in advance to announce? Is it one year? Is it two years? Is it immediately high fire rush? Let's go. It depends on the game. It like I think Zelda got announced last year, for example, or maybe a year and a half ago. Hades too is a really strange example because they announced it and then said it would be coming into early access. And that was seven months ago. And they haven't said anything about when it's going to come to early access. And my personal take on that is why did you even announce it at all? I think games that are sequels have extra pressure on their on the on the tightness of their announcement to follow through and games that are remakes have as almost like a longer

schedule to it, a longer through line because like, you know, I mean how like obviously there's the resident evils that we're looking at now where it's like that was a lifetime in the making. FF7 was also a lifetime in the making, but it's like, yeah, you know, they're redoing a thing and they obviously are trying, you know, like you can look at it and go, they're trying to like redo and make it like better in every possible way and whatever. And the original is already there. So like the excitement for the remake is like, you can still always go back to what is already out, you know, when it comes to a thing you've never heard of, it's easy to be like, well, it's a thing I've never heard of, right, whatever, it'll come when it comes unless you've put money into

it like go song or whatever. But when you're a sequel to something people really liked and like they're like, yeah, more of that thing. Like that is the exact one that is like the worst possible place to be in because that's where people want it the fastest. And like you announcing it, yeah, even three years ahead of time is like that used to be typical, you know, I would say like maybe two gens ago, but now that would be like what the fuck is going on? Where is it? Why is it not in the next Nintendo? One of the things that people like about smaller scale indie games is that they get announced and then they come out relatively fast compared to the big budget like five to six, seven year long shits or they get locked in early access. Yeah. But it's just it's

I don't know. Where's Sulk Song at? Where's it at? If they're announcing a delay, why isn't the delay also coming with the real date? Because they're not confident in the the the fucking release date, you know, they're they're not sure what to put a date out. And then if they put a date out and then they bump that date forward, you get extra mad when that date comes around, right? So let's just it'll be ready when it's ready. It I guess what is taking so long. That is what I would want. Grab your crowbar and hit it. Yeah. And sit and you know, these things, these bugs, they take time. Fuck off, Gabe. That's the worst. He should never have appeared in that fucking video. But you know, unironically, the bugs do take time because they take time to fix

bugs. They like really, you know, anyway, I think that game that I think that game also didn't come out. No, the the sword fighting game that he was in the background. Oh, clang clang. I think that game also didn't happen. All right. So that's going down. But a sequel that seems like it is happening out of nowhere. And I know this is this is this is to open air right now. But a Korean Korean ratings board has revealed unintentionally a game called Under Night in birth to sister set us. So hey, you can you can under in birthed it to again. You can inverse the in birth. All right. You can in boss even. Is this covered under Canadian health care? It might be. It might be Blue Cross, but they've

added extra words to the title, guys. So hey, you know what, though, actually, this does explain one thing of all the games that have been getting rollback recently. That was the one that didn't. And Reggie's been weeping because it's like one of his favorites. Well, it sounds like something you would roll back. It does. It does. It's it's a very complicated procedure. But fortunately, had I have a very important mission from you for you from the FGC. The FGC wants to know your location and wants to be in the delivery room. There's new check to figure out Pat. There's no time. Don't worry about that. Hold on. We can we can use the grid system to know. All right. Just from outside vanishing void. All right. So when when when this gets dropped or whatever,

it'll be like, OK, the reason why we didn't get rollback for this game is because they're making the sequel to it. And that's an acceptable reason. I'll take that. You know, the it is a pretty good anime fighter that has been left in the dust. So yeah, a little excitement there. If you're an inverse fan. And yeah. Beyond that, we got fun like Nintendo's copyright strike system for Tears of the Kingdom actually copyright striking itself. Good. Yes. So that's good. That's good when the system is is working. Why do you think my favorite kind of story copyright on this one? Is it because people were playing the game weeks ahead of release on their PCs at 60 FPS? I don't know. It might be. Yeah. So they basically have been going hard on the

yeah, against the the Yuzu footage. People have been going pretty wild with it on the leaked version. And there have been squashing leaks and yadda yadda. There's tons of footage that was out before the game came out. But then in an approach to, I guess, like push and go and overcompensate, there is their copyright striking went out to Twitter as well. And they DCM made their own their own Zelda official JP account. Good. Good. Awesome. I mean, God, just, you know, Jonathan Blow getting his footage fucking copyright struck for the witness. Like it's just it's it's a monster that can't be controlled. It's so stupid. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, the DMCA stuff is going to continue across the board as well because

it's even applying to people tweeting about IGN footage. So yeah, there's footage just people that have like have retweeted and or made videos using IGN's promotional footage and they got banned and DMCA takedown as well. So do you do you guys I'm sure you guys get it too on YouTube, those copyright strikes for Nintendo songs from like random fucking like group that covered the song and took a sample from the song and now they claim that the song is theirs or whatever. Do you think those groups that do that are careful to make sure like they probably shot kind of amount to everybody they can write the system auto detects and so they can shotgun it out. Do you think they're extra careful to be like, let's make sure Nintendo doesn't get one of

these. You know what I mean? I would love to see the Nintendo lawyer seeing a ding that's like, yeah, you can't use dire dire docs because it's from eight bit covers or whatever. I want to see like the room when they get that message. I don't think any of these people are thinking too hard about anything. They're just going, yeah, I can steal money from the money. No, that's that's it. Like I think I think much more realistically and awesomely is Nintendo uploads their their new Tears of the Kingdom footage to Nintendo's YouTube account and then it gets fucking flagged by a shitty ska band. I'd love it. Yeah. Anyways, so yeah, that's pretty much it. Let's take some letters. 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. Letter, letter, something, something sounds like this. Here's one's coming in from beta who says, hey, Willie Katsuragi and hobo cop Pat. So I've been thinking about showing my dad disco Elysium for the longest time, but I can't think of a way to sell the game to him without spoiling the experience. It doesn't help that he knows very little about modern video games. How'd you sell disco Elysium to someone with no experience with video games as a 50 year old man? That's the best book I've ever played. Yep. It's I've I've sold disco Elysium to non video game players already. It's real simple. You just you describe it as a it is a novel. It is a who done it book where you have you're playing more or less like a schizophrenic

cop that has like your stats in your head as voices. And ultimately, it's like it's an it's an it's a book that you interact with. There's narration for the you know, the whole process. And it's just a really compelling who done it. Just if that doesn't work, just approach him and be like, hey, dad, are you a communist and no matter what he says, tell him you got to play this game who and and just it's done. It's okay. Yeah, you know, yeah, you know, what's a stat? Don't even say I said the word stat. Don't don't even don't shouldn't have said that. Like it is it is a book about a is a book about a fictional world of fucked up politics and crazy again murders to solve and horrible ex wives. You you you should you should check it out. It's really good. Hey,

dad, do you hate ex wives? You know, I do, son. All right, I got you covered. Welcome to the world of video gaming. Your copyright strike is in the now. Yeah. Um, we got one over here from UKI says, uh, there be to the castle of super. Pat was talking about early access for the forest and the whole Kevin system dynamic some weeks ago. And it made me recall lost in blue two. Basically the forest but animu. You're you're one of two characters stranded on an island. Your partner can go out for necessities and cook and make items, build tree houses, punch wolves and crocodiles and so on. You'd use the DS microphone for cooking. And Arno for scaring gorillas and all this stuff. I had multiple endings, bit of old jank, but it was quite fun. And, uh,

I was wondering, uh, basically they're wondering about like when it would come back it or who owned the little rights to it. Why they never saw it again instead. And they want to go look it up. And the game was made by Konami in 2007. Oh, yeah. No, it's super death. That's a Konami game. So, uh, have you ever had a moment where you remembered the publisher or dev and realized that is gone forever and ever? Yeah, every Konami game that I ever cared about. That that's a really good one. I, yeah, that'll probably do it. I think there's like at the same time it's always like, you know, Silent Hills getting its whatever stuff going on now. There's literally a thing where you can wait for big enough franchises to kind of swerve back around. We will at some point be talking

about Metal Gear again, whether you like it or not. Um, I think though, for me, there's stuff I have where I'm like, okay, you know, treasure games, like I kind of feel it with them because treasure is a weird company. They make a ton of great games and then sometimes they make sequels, but sometimes they don't. And they, they haven't made a game in like 10 fucking years, but they're also like just a collection of artists and debt and programmers that kind of collaborate with each other and then put something out. So it's like, if you're a fan of treasure stuff, just you may get a new thing someday, or you might never see that thing again, or you just, you can't really ever get too committed to the series of whatever it is. Just be a fan of the logo and

the people that make it, and they may or may not give you something this decade. You know, holy shit, send in punishment to where the fuck did that come from? Awesome. But yeah, it's been, like again, I think a solid 10 plus years since anything. Yeah, I just want a goddamn HD. I was thinking of it. I'm like, I wonder if they're going to make a Metal Gear solid HD collection and re-release for modern platforms, you know, one, two, three, four, five, six. And then I'm like, they're not going to do that. That's just not going to happen. That's just, no, it's not going to happen. Stupid, stupid thing to think. But wouldn't they also like find a lot of ways to fuck it up with like, like just not be faithful and yeah, like it's like, do you even want it, you know? Port

probably remake, no, you know. I can't, I know I've had ones where I looked it up and like the developer is just straight up gone. The number one thing that I think of as a retro FPS guy is is the greatest retro FPS that ever came out was called Blood. And that developer isn't gone. See, with FPS, you don't have to worry about them being gone as much as you have to expect them to be packaged up and usually sent to the Call of Duty Mines. In Blood's case, it was sent to the Shadows of Mordor. It's Monolith. They're sorry. Is it Shadows of Mordor? I always fuck up the name of the game. Shadows of War? Shadows of War, maybe. The Lord of the Ring guy. Yeah, that's it. But yeah, Monolith, they made Blood. Blood's like a whole nightmare with

the IP itself. When you say Blood, do you mean one whole unit of Blood? Blood, like the classic retro FPS Blood. There was a version called Blood One Whole Unit, but it's just, I think the proper title of the actual game is just Blood. And that is one, that one's tricky, though, because there was a Bloodfresh supply that came out through Night Dive and that IP is in a whole special limbo. But like the actual Monolith developer, you know, you guys know what they've been working on for a long time. It's been those Shadows of War games. And so for anybody who likes Blood, it's like, hope this maybe gets to exist some more someday. And Blood 2 got like way fucked up. There's like a whole story about how Blood 2 basically like, essentially they sent

the game to GT and they were like, we need more time. It's not done. And GT was like, actually, we published it. So it was like the Blood 2 got fucked. And so like the whole IP is like in a crazy state of affairs. And so you look towards Monolith and you're like, please, will I ever see Blood? And they're just tied up with, you know, that studio is tied up with all those other things that they've been roped in for. So not like the studio is dead. But the studio is a long ways away from, you know, being in a position where anything is probably going to happen for the IP. That's a different kind of pain because that is absolutely like, yeah, it's not that your IP is dead. It's more like they've been permanently distracted by something

infinitely more profitable. And you know, fuck your love for whatever. Oh, do you like Prince of Persia? You like Prince of Persia games? Fuck you. Like Assassin's Creed forever now, buddy. Like you're never gonna, you know, and then obviously, I mean, I don't even bring them up anymore. But Titanfall stories are just like, like why even, you know, so you just, yeah, it's like, it's like the success of this of the successor that erases the past is like a whole other level of kind of pain on that. Yeah. All right. Last one over here. No title given. Dear obligatory funny name joke. I've been watching Eva and falling off of it for several years after watching up to Ep 13. Don't remember why I fell off, but I must have been stupid because I just finished 18 in

the Unidow three fight. My jaw is on the floor for the whole thing. Revisited it and absolutely loved it. Have you ever had that feeling where you never knew why you fell off to begin with? No. Never. Yeah. I always knew why. There you go. Sure. I just last week talked about Coheed and Cambria. I fucking randomly, I don't know, I checked them out and I liked them back in the day, but I didn't keep listening and then went to that concert and now I've been listening to a bunch of the fucking some of the new shit and I cannot stop fucking playing the Liars Club, which is a fucking awesome song from their new album. So yeah, Coheed. Yeah, I've never had any situation in which I've ever been like, I wonder why I fell off of that

because the answer is always like even it can be as simple as I wasn't enjoying myself enough to even click the button to turn it on. I mean, I kind of had ones where it's not that I wonder why I fell off. It's I know what the answer is and it's kind of just like other things came up that distracted me more, but like I meant to eventually get around to it kind of thing. It's very seldom like I don't know. It's more that I know I just kind of like, you know, got distracted by something else. But I got I'm trying to think of like very specific examples and it's tricky because I'm in a constant state of delusion where I believe I am getting back around to it. It's just like on like a back burner to do list that goes miles long and functionally might as well not exist. But

you know, it's there's just there's too much. I guess my answer is just too much good shit and that's the real answer why it's get there's a lot of media and there's not enough time to consume it and as life gets in the way more it just you know, you can't do it like you used to. I loved every episode of Better Call Saul that I have seen. I have not had time to sit down and pop it back on. There's no shortage of other great shows I've been recommended, but either way that remains there, you know. Time is often the answer in many cases. And of course, games are a massive commitment, right? They ask a lot more out of you than a lot of shows do, you know. Like I said, I'm going to beat like 3% of Tears of the Kingdom.

Sick! And you could ask you could ask me this same question in like four years and I'll be like, yeah, you know, I was enjoying Tears of the Kingdom, but I just got distracted by, I don't know, I talked mad shit about how I'm totally going to play Street Fighter 6. And so I got distracted by that or something and it just fades away. But the amount of people that we talk to and the audience that we, I guess, reach on a regular basis really fucks up and skews your sense of like, like priorities and list of things to consume because like you're, you're comparing all my keeping up with things to the collective,

which is fucking impossible because you're one person. I have a collective that's playing everything. The collective has consumed everything and the few and those who haven't don't speak up when the thing they haven't played yet has come up. But you're just, but like that'll make you always feel like you're always lagging and it's just, it sucks. It's not a good feeling. Like I'm playing Zelda right now on stream, right? Street Fighter and Final Fantasy 16 are coming, which means Zelda, as big as that game is, has a limited time to exist on my channel.

Right. Right. Yeah. It's a, I, and there's a special layer of it for, for being a voice actor, which is an additional guilt of I kind of like want to play through and experience all of the things that I work on. Because you want to really know it and then, you know, be able to really engage with it and like, you know, really, when people talk to you about it, you want to be able to have like, you know, conversations and be like, oh yeah, this thing and that thing. But it's tricky, like very, very few voice actors that I know. In fact, I would say none of them have actually like gone through the entirety of everything they've worked on.

You, you do try to like, at least the bigger ones, you know, you, you at least make sure you get through that. Because, you know, you're going to be getting like more questions about it and stuff. And sometimes it just like personally resonates with you. So you end up like making the time for one thing, like, you know, I've gone through all of, actually, actually, I actually, Ultra kills a perfect example. I still have to fucking finish. They added P2. I still got to, I still got to beat that. I was like, right about two and then packs. But anyway, I like want to, but, you know, especially with voice acting, you kind of, you have to do a lot of gigs in a month to make rent. No single gig is like paying you a million dollars, you know,

to where it's like, you kind of have to do a lot of different gigs. And so you're not going to be able to play through, you know, fucking 12 games a month or whatever. It's just not going to work into your schedule. So there's also that where I try to like, make sure I squeeze in some time on the stuff that I'm actually working on too. But it's just, there's just too much good shit. Yep. Yep. No. I'm going to be playing my 90s RPGs. Sometimes it's going to take me some time. But like, I can't, I can only focus on the part where am I enjoying myself in the process? And is this a fun thing to catch up on? Then cool. If I keep looking back to the giant list of things that, you know, I just, yeah, or pushing to go fat, like all of that shit, it's like, I can only

focus on am I enjoying this process? It's just, it's too daunting and it's too fucked up to compare yourself to thousands of people's completions, you know, which you'd think that would dawn on you early on in this type of gig. But it took a while for me to realize actually, dude, like, you're not talking to people who are talking about the things they haven't played. You're talking to someone who's always consumed the thing, you know, so. Right, exactly. All right. There we go. We did it. Enjoy your fucking five hours, you freaks. I love that at the very beginning of this podcast before we even went live, while he's talking to Gianni, he's like, I'm aware for a guest, we got to respect our guest's time, you know, we're gonna

try. And then he went on to say, don't respect my time multiple times. I'm just saying, I'm just saying. I think the real turning point when it became clear I was a villain towards this objective was when you were like, we've only covered one news story. And I was like, wait, before we cover a second news story, I need to talk about Rome. I agree. That was a good use. Yes. I think the I think the higher the respect is to is to fucking respect his attempt to sabotage my attempt at a brief podcast. Gianni, thank you for joining us. That was a blast. You did great. Absolutely. Glad to have you back in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I would love to be back in the future. Great, great time. The only problem is, at one time, you guys had Brenda Williams on.

And I remember he said this, he was like, fuck, now what the hell am I going to listen to for the rest of the day? Just pretend you weren't on it. Just remember to yourself and be like, this guy's got good ideas. Damn. You've got a great voice. And here, plug your stuff again, because people because this is going to be played a different day for the people who heard the first plug. That was two days ago. They paused it and they resumed this on Friday. So by Friday, they're going to hear this part. So yeah, well, I'm Gianni Matrograno, voice actor, in case you want to maybe hire me for projects, in case you're somebody who does do projects and you need VO. And then if you're just a Twitch viewer, I'm on Twitch at twitch.tv slash get

Gianni. Also on Twitter, twitter.com slash get Gianni and YouTube at Gianni Matrograno. You know, if you want to have your brain fucking rotted by the worst, shittiest videos you've ever seen, then be my guest. The terrorism will continue. There you go. Badass voice guide, but good range. You know what? Didn't have good range. Fuck off. Fuck off. Recore. Yeah, get out.