Castle Super Beast - CSB 236: I Am A Dragon, Dr.Han

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Castle Super Beast Shirts: http://tinyurl.com/CSBshirts Go to http://hellofresh.com/50superbeast and use code 50superbeast for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months. -- Go to http://shopify.com/superbeast to sign up for a $1-per-month trial period. --Download the DoorDash app and enter code CASTLEFALL to get 50% off your first order (up to a $20 value) and zero delivery fees. Down With Jatz, Long Live Jizz Kamiya Leaves Platinum, Blows Out Underwear  Blasphemous 2: Less Disturbing The 2nd Time  MK1 DLC Prices Are Ridiculous  Like a Dragon: High School Protags Out, Unemployed Boomers In Watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast   Unity: "Guys, we didn't remove the ToS because we wanted to hide it from you, we did it because it wasn't getting enough views!" Unity apologizes, tweaks runtime install fees after gaming world outrage  Kamiya will be leaving Platinum Games in October Microsoft dismissed Baldur's Gate 3 as a 'second-run Stadia PC RPG' before it released—Larian doesn't blame them Star Wars Fans Launch Class Action Lawsuit Over Cancelled KOTOR 2 DLC JIZZ IS NOW JATZ Tokyo Game Show 2023 Trailer Roundup

МУЗЫКАЛЬНАЯ ЗАСТАВКА I They told him to stop blocking people on social media and he said fuck that I'll block you I quit Is that how it went down that's hey that's how it went down. I'm going to say there's a possibility that there were disagreements in a boardroom about perhaps let's say the future of Bayonetta, maybe there was a, you know, we should, we should zig. And then he was like, nah, we zagging, bro, we committed to zagging. And then maybe there was a little bit of, but, but there's a feedback that really wants it to zig. And he's like, but I want it to zag. And then there was perhaps a disconnect on that. I could see that being possible. You know, yeah, I read the statement and, eh, I don't think Platinum's gonna be doing well

in the near future. I think there's also, so here's my other like a tinfoil is like, do we see a fucking cameo walking into a capcom office? Oh my god. Oh my god. As a free agent all these years later. No, I see him doing like a little indie studio. I see that too. I see that too. But could you imagine just being like, you know what? I always wanted to do more beautiful Joe and Okami officially. So fuck it. Even though I put and the thing is is they're gonna be like, okay, that's fine. Put the collar on and he'll be like, no, that's not what it would be like. It would be like, who are you? Yeah, it's a new group of people, but maybe that's been a long time.

But that's the one reason why I think that is, that insane possibility suddenly sounds a little bit more possible, is because everyone and everything that was around back then, especially the people that he probably would have hated are no longer there. They're dead, they all died. So as a new company, he could walk back in

and be like, all right, time to pick back up. Like, it would be wild. Yeah, but no, more than likely, like Indy, Indy, Indy, Indy Jam. My 10-Foyle Hat thing is platinum being like, we're going in all in on gas and Camilla's like, that sounds like shit. I mean that and get because they've said they're going to go all in on gas. They said they're going in on on owning their own IPs as well right like pushing their own

stuff. Um, an argument about the future certainly feels like a pot the thing that would lead for him and in about to go their separate ways on this. I think as well, like as far as we knew, Gigi was the only thing on the slate, right? That he was doing the director plus story on, I think, because usually he's like,

he supervises a bunch. He was at like, that's what he's been doing for 20 since 2019 he's been a supervising director. There hasn't been a ton that's been like you know hands-on ground up for a while so I think perhaps you know some of that and and you know perhaps and maybe even just a like the games I want to make are not compatible with the direction you want to go type of type of vibe. I mean here comes the new fun head cannon in which he's supervising somebody and he goes, you know, you should fucking do right? You should put a fucking

Space here your level And they were like would you shut the fuck up he's like, I can't take this fucking disrespect. Sir. Every time I have an idea, someone tells me to shut up. Sir, this is Mario Tennis. What are you talking about? Yeah, everyone should work glasses. You know what you should do.

Peach and Daisy. That's my favorite image of him as supervising Director is just like the same six ideas. Just on and on every single situation like, what if you use the analog stick to make a line and then you drew it around and it wouldn't be fucking crazy. That set of a bitch has no range, but you know what? Neither do we. So, hey, I think like somebody in the chat just pointed out like, yeah, hey, Yoco Taro, what do you think the big gimmick should be for the game? I think when the game ends, it should keep going. It should keep going, yeah. And

then it'll delete your safe file. I think, um, God, it's like no, at the end of the day, man, just, you know, like, I feel like deep down, he has a game design that involves him just fighting Twitter. Like, I feel like he has a full fleshed out world of him just fighting comments as a game design that he wants to see made somewhere. You know, it's a bummer because you say that and I'm thinking of a project GG was supposed to be like basically Ultraman, right? That was the idea. And I had this idea that we've seen a little bit in other games that I thought the cameo would be perfect for, which is Ultraman or GG whatever the fuck save platinum man save the city But then platinum man has to like handle the social media blowback of like he stepped on that diner that people like

During the fight and it's just constant Constant social media garbage, but I saved the city. Yeah, but You know, it would be like you'd build up your reputation. People would read you could retweet whenever someone says something nice, right? Obviously, the most powerful move in the game is the ultimate defense block, right? And that would become more and more of a thing that levels up as you go. And you've got one model that you follow at all times. And you just, and you gotta, you know, just see what's going on there every once in a

while. Yeah, I can see it. I can see it. There's a whole game to be made. But really, I think when you look back on the the was so obviously the story we're talking about is Camilla's leaving platinum was announced like an hour or two ago. And uh, you know, at the end of the day, um, you look back on that that that career so far, he's he's not retiring. He's going to keep making games. He said, That career so far he's he's not retiring. He's gonna keep making games. He said

Mm-hmm not batten a thousand No, but he's batten over 500 Yes, and that's pretty fucking good. It's he's got the same thing going on that Yoko Taro does in which I Get the very strong impression that he's the kind of creator that needs a devil on his shoulder to say The devil producer essentially to be like fucking stop it No No, don't like the caller like it the caller the change. Yeah, I always think about suit a 51 And I think about no my heroes to and how no more heroes to is incredible and how my favorite boss fight in that game is against Margaret Moonlight

as the fantastic song and all that but like before that is the Insanely long parking lot fight in the supermarket That's like 15 minutes of just fighting guys endlessly and I remember reading an interview with Suda and it's like, oh yeah, that fight so long so that you really feel the emotions of like the endless drudgery of daily life and like, don't make it bad on purpose, Suda! Well that fucking crazy! The whole talk about the side jobs and the first game and stuff, the boringness that you want to get back to the exciting hero life or You know fight assassin life and stuff is deliberately boring and it's like yeah

No, we can we can find other ways to do this, you know You're crazy. I Want to say yeah Shenmue was built entirely on that philosophy. The excitement of working a day job is, you're going to feel more immersed with the character when you realize how depressing and shitty his days are. I feel like the only video game author or whatever you would call them that isn't like that is

Kojima and it's like the only thing that comes down on high is like the platform holder being like you can't do that. See Kojima does it too though but the thing is is that Kojima was like you're gonna be a fucking teamster and that's what you're gonna do here. And that is a, to some people, that is making it shitty on purpose. But if you happen to have that little thing that's like, that's a satisfying thing

to deliver to that place. And if you happen to enjoy that, it's actually quite fulfilling. You know, I don't think about that stranding along. Building out the road and then traveling to it and getting people their packages is a unique way to have fun. And it's not for everybody and it's not for the average person looking to play the latest Kojima like fucking bomb smash hit.

But I feel like death stranding is the most real video game that's ever existed. Because I feel like it's the only video game ever made in which the people making it didn't have to think about money even once. Like, hey, what do you want to make this stupid bullshit? And Sony just went, yeah, okay, as long as your name is on it. And the iron. You're letting you do anything.

And the, like, there is no mass market consideration in deaf stranding at all. And the irony is that for what the game ended up being, it could have been a fucking Kickstarter budget game. Oh yeah, it did not have to be that much that quadruple A to execute, you know, like the the a ton of the the model quality, the actors they hired. Did you really need a bunch of really high end talented actors? Did you need to scan in Del Toro? You know, really? Gord side missions with full lore details.

Like all you really needed was, here's how the enemies work, and here's the creepiness of the system, whenever it starts raining. But it's a faulty could have made that game. Absolutely. It had, it really didn't. The entire BB, go in your shower fucking system that like

Bunkering it's wild is the Kickstarter looking version of what Death Stranding could have been Mm-hmm it could have been an isometric view with like fucking pixel art sim city even like it could have been so stripped down For what it was in the end, you know, but he loves Hollywood. He loves it. He needs it. Anyway, yeah, so we'll see what happens again. I feel like even in this platinum situation where we left Capcom to do whatever we want. And now Platinum has kind of become something else. And he's probably thinking, well, now I need to leave in order to do what I want. But I think let's look to see,

because they made their statement, right? And not mention information besides, hey, thanks for all the good times. And it's something unpredictable, but in the end, it's right. Hope you had the time of your life. Let's see what they announce. The timing of this two was right at Tokyo Game Show, so I don't think we've heard anything. Platinum related. I feel like Platinum's tagline is possibly becoming incredibly unfortunate,

which is platinum never loses its luster. It's, well, I think what it is is it's starting to look like other companies that hit and miss and hit and miss pretty frequently. I want to say most of the hits were, of course, way back when. And yeah, the ability to not make a ton of cash will force desperate decisions out. And some of those are going to be like, let's lean into games as a service, which obviously I want to say the same people working there would have balked at having that conversation with themselves in the past,

you know. But when the bills are when the lights are fucking flickering, you know, they start looking at shit like that. Like it's a good idea. I feel like platinum had the chance to really show everybody that they that that capcom that they they knew what the fuck they were doing because like To those of you who are unaware the history of of of platinum is it it's born primarily out of a studio called Clover at Capcom Which was like hey do you guys want to make your own games with with you know, whatever you want to do great Just make sure they make money and then they made made the worst selling best games of all time. And then Capcom's like, how about you make some games that make some money?

And they went, fuck you, we'll quit, we'll make our own studio, and our games will make money. And then they proceeded to make like 40 games that make no money. They made seeds. As their first step away. And then they will. And it's like, man, whoever, whatever Capcom people were

responsible for the argument that caused everyone at platinum to quit, like, yeah, they were right. They should make games that make money. You should make games that make money. You should, but you should also make wonderful 101 in Bayonetta because those are great. I'm happy to exist. I recently saw a really funny comment

which was digging back to a really old conversation of ours about platinum, in which you were describing a mechanic from Wonderful 101 and like you were using it as an example to compare And apparently I stopped you and went woolly even amongst the audience of this podcast No one knows what you're talking about right like it is it is like the worst selling good game I have ever played in my life device belief first selling good game I have ever played in my life. It divides belief. Yeah, they, and it does represent the ultimate,

like fucking problem that is, you know, quality without mass appeal versus going all the way in and turning off the, not turning off the quality but diluting it, right? Something we're probably gonna touch on a little bit here is Titanfall versus apex legends right trying to find your audience Trying to find something that's sustainable while also executing on on you know the best of what you can do And of course the fact that we like niche things this help that you're like if they're making a niche thing How do you combine the best of both worlds? I think I'm like Of course the fact that we like niche things, this help that you're like, if they're making a niche thing,

how do you combine the best of both worlds? I think, like, Yoko Taro and Platinum figured that out. That's how it was about to say. I was about to say. Do you want a niche action game about ex-essentialism and the meaning of life? I don't know.

What if the robots have fucking giant asses in there and like BDSM gear and they got blindfolds on and they're, oh, are they gonna kiss? Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's like I was just about to say like if you do if you take on the role of like, okay, what property that people already care about, slash what world that has an appeal that we can step in and do the combat on. Be that near, be that a rising type situation or anything like that. That's probably the best bet for it. When it doesn't go sour, a sigh games crossover to make a grand blue game. And doing essentially what Arxis does in an ideal world, Arxis would be the equivalent where they make their guilty gear, they make their blaze blue, and then they also do

these, they do Dragon Ball for, you know, whatever, Bandai, and whatever guns for higher things, they do a really good job having that flavor. Hey, is that Platinum game with side games that's that got turned all out of like relink that used to be platinum But it's not planning anymore. That's coming out right that is coming out. They showed a big trailer for it off not too long ago So it is still happening I think With the yeah with the logo stripped and all that stuff.

And yeah, that's going to be fucking weird to play. You look at the combat in that, you're like, damn, that looks and seems to be the platinum style of thing. Yeah. If they built it on like the bones, or if they just threw everything out. There's also a weird thing in this, like when you're trying to look back on the timeline of the company and figure it out, there's a weird thing where you have a Babylon's fall situation where I was mistaken in how that game came about and switched up over the years and eventually flopped.

But when you have something like a scale bound which never existed, you just have the hypothetical what it could have been in your brain. And you're like, but what if it was going to be bad? What if it was not going to be good? What if the thing you saw in the trailer versus what ended up coming out was a huge discrepancy? And you know what I mean?

And there was just a massive financial loss, right? With that specifically because it's like a law, this is assumption. So it's grain of salt, everyone. It feels like all the shit from scale bound Bayo 3 with fight with your demon out and it's like I Didn't particularly like Bayo 3 at the end of it and that was with the character that I liked So like made Oh, what? What? Like, the tail band is like a coin flip.

I mean, about whether or not it could have been good. We'll never know, right? We'll never know. And like, because it's this mystery point, you can go, oh man, that could have been, or you could always reference it as like, yeah, that was the financial point where they just lost so much on the deal, but it would have,

the alternate timeline temptation, if you want a headcan in it, is, is, you know, you can pretend that it would have been something, but like it might not have been, you know. And it's like, okay, it got, it got, it got canceled. And Mike, and you're like, well, maybe, maybe Microsoft was, maybe whoever canceled scaled out of Microsoft knew what they were doing. And then this week part of the news is that we get a little peak at what the first party thinks of certain games and what they're worth. And you see Microsoft's internal documentation refer to Baldur's Gate 3 as a second run stadium RPG. Yeah. And low

balling it. Oh yeah, 5 million to get that on game pass forever. Yeah. And you're like, oh man. The the level of off the mark behind the scenes continues to be fucking laughable and unincredible. Yeah, there's a whole bit there. Um, it was wild watching um, Larry and Microsoft's like PR people try and salvage what a mean

statement that was. Oh, I didn't see the following. The Larry and guys like listen, nobody knew this game was going to be a huge success. We all of us internally didn't know it was gonna be that big because they're currently in the process of porting the fucking game to the Xbox and everybody wants to be like this. But it's like it's so there's so much shade there. It's so mean. Again, a shitty internal email and or document not meant for the public eye and now you've got to walk back the truth of how you feel.

You know? Um, anyway, we'll see. All of these questions and more to be answered in the future as, you know, we'll see whatever gets announced. If he's not starting something new then he'll get picked up elsewhere. And I mean the like stuff like Astral Chain comes out and you're like that's cool and you like to see I really like Astral Chain. That's my favorite platinum game of the past couple years, but but does that have the power to like, you know what I mean to carry? No, no, no, no, that's it. I care. You care no one else. And I mean, it probably would have had a bigger impact if it,

you know, perhaps like was on every platform, for example, that would help. But it would only help so much. I think there's just a limited appeal, unfortunately, right? So. To do that kill for Astral Chain on any other platform. Like that game running at a better resolution, a better frame rate, oh, it'll be good. Yeah, I think a potential outcome, you know,

that obviously has been resisted for a long time too, depending on how things go. It's like they could go for, if they take another couple hot ones and to no success, to no avail, the buyout, right? The buyout by an Nintendo or the buyout by a screen X type of thing. And the Nintendo one seems to make the most sense, honestly. Yeah, just this world of acquisitions that we are entering right word or fucking Microsoft is like maybe we can buy Nintendo and like you know just fish is eating fishes. I think

Did we talk about that last week? Was that out because I think that was part of the Microsoft internal documentation was leaked. Yeah, I feel like we might have touched on it, but yeah, like but like Microsoft's government would not allow Microsoft to buy, no, like seriously, I feel like there would be like a stated national interest in not allowing an American company to own Nintendo. Like, I cannot possibly ever see that happening ever. And also, we have this story from a couple of years ago

where Microsoft floated it before and they got laughed out in Nintendo's office. There there will be a monument erected of Yamachi telling ballman to lick his balls. And put that in the town square right next to Hachiko in solid gold. Like Nintendo's 134 years old today like that's an old company and people are apparently very happy to work there. Like I can't I could never see it Yeah, I could never but I also I said this before too I also think there's that statement where

Nintendo was like we have the money to we have the the money to run to operate at a loss for 42 years or some crazy thing like that. And it's like, back then, maybe now there's no fucking way, right? There's no way. I really see them being like, the transition into being a Sega style software only company is not that far away, but they still continue to make the most, I think the comparison of the internal Microsoft charts. They make the most profit out of them. Based on their expenditures, right?

Because they make more profit by percent than Microsoft and Sony combined. Because they're making hardware at a loss, right? Yeah. And it's like, good for Nintendo. Make the money. That light's getting in my face. So yeah, it's it's curious to see how they're going to go with this.

And you know, if the switch to is like, like halfway towards a steam deck or even like the ACES, raw or whatever, you know what I mean? Like if it's just like not even approaching that level. I would kill for a switch too. That's just backwards compatible. That's all I want. Oh, I imagine that's definitely going to be the case.

That'd be crazy if it weren't. There's a bunch of switch games that just I would like to run on a new hardware, please. No, I definitely imagine. I mean, the libraries, everyone has built on their games, on their consoles now has like expanded to this insane amount. You know, the idea of like, it was always painful to drop it off in previous generations. Dropping it off now is like hundreds if not thousands of dollars

and so forth. It's insane to think of just like, no fuck you, digital library gone. Anyway, yeah. That is some wild shit. And yeah, I guess the Microsoft stuff did pop up after last week. But... Kamiya is an unhinged man. I'm looking at it as Twitter account. It's the funniest thing in the world.

The platinum games announcement that he's leaving, followed by a couple of statements, and then a photo of his torn underwear. I just noticed my pants are torn to a degree I've never seen before. And then a photo of some alcohol going cheers. RIP, like critical damage, catastrophic underwear rip. Like the crotch is fully ripped out. Dicking balls are hitting the pants, like right through. There is no protection. The one job the underwear is supposed to do is no longer possible.

What does he mean by this? Oh my god, dude. Yeah. Who wants the hire? Anyone want to hire this guy? Put that, attach that tweet to the resume. That's fucking crazy. Unhinged is the right word. Anyways, all that and more in a minute. That's a man starting his own company. Energy energy is going to go start interviewing. No fucks given energy.

All right, let's get through it. Gonna try to try to keep a sane length of podcast today, but I doubt. Absolutely. Let's see. So, hey, how's about that Titanfall 2, right? I've played, so I think it's great that despite not colluding or discussing this even once

Me and Willie have the same idea for the same day Which is hey, let's fucking do this. Go back to timefall. Let's just go back to Titanfall We're currently allowed to play Titanfall. This is a blessing. Everybody get on it Also the game has been again giving itself away for the last couple years. Right? When you go back and you look at it and you're like, this thing is like $6 for depending on like which where you're looking. Um, and my God, does it instantly just tickle all the fucking right, you know, uh, uh, uh, thing nerves on the back of my neck, man. I played more tight and fall that I did any other thing this entire week. Yeah, I, uh, I jumped in and, uh, I was like, there's a couple of times where I was like, yeah,

let me just brush up a little bit before I wanted to play some street fighter. But I was like, let me just, let me just try to get my, my, my, my, my alternator game back up a little bit and, uh, yeah, it, it, it, fucking, it comes back and you just that, that feeling, that flow, you know, still absolutely dog shit at it. But man, there's these, there's, there's moments though. And I feel like on the stream, uh, showing Reggie that for the first time as well. He saw the, the, the, how fucking sick the flow of that game is. And it's so unique compared to others. And like what, what the exact type of thing that like works for me that gets me happy is like,

even though I'm fucking hanging off the bottom of that leaderboard, the ability to toss a grenade out up a roof to a blind spot that I can't see and fucking shoot it after tossing it and kill the guy that's up there. You know, the ability to have a double ejection mid-air fucking... Ah! Like those moments... I had the moment where me and another Titan killed each other and we both ejected and we're just ejecting straight up and then we are like face to face,

like two feet from each other. And she's like, ah! Oh my God! Right. Oh my God. Taking out somebody with a fast Titanfall drop right on top of them, you know? Like there's so many ways to just feel so good

about what's going on. Like I'm regularly putting myself at further risk to get in there, to get the melee finisher. Right, for that execution. Got one with, I think it was, it might have been with tone. I don't remember, but either way it was like the excuse just like Skeet shooting pulling the pilot out and like Wild, you know a road and so it like basically anime slash one that was Insane there's so much happening and so no point they just they put out a patch that those servers just work again properly. Yeah That's that's what we're talking about. There you go.

And yeah, it's honestly not only is it the most unique like first-person shooter, like Gameflow that I think of. And I would say I was kind of explaining this to at the time when we were going back in and playing it, how it really doesn't feel like anything else in that stuff. This is not to dismiss the tribes obvious references every time we talk about how tribes used to have tons of movement, but it's to say the switching into the robot and out of it and how you don't feel like one is better than the other because they're both awesome

and complete. Every time I'm on foot, I'm like man. I can't do nothing against titans every time I'm in a Titan I'm like, oh, he's fucking pilots So annoying you exactly right and you're like, oh my god. They successfully balanced a like an asymmetrical design Into the flow of the system and and really made it feel good and you get them to the flow of the system and really made it feel good. And you get them just frequently enough that by the middle to end of the match, there can be a 50-50 of pilots to Titans on the field. Some people wanna be more pilots,

some people wanna be more Titan. And that whole exchange of two Titans rolling up with one pilot around just to peek a boo and fuck around, pull a battery out. There's all these little things to it that like, I saw a guy in a game that I was playing. He had the good auto-tighten upgrade. Yeah, you're titan actually fights well when, yeah, yeah, the AI instead of getting in, he stayed out.

That's awesome. To steal batteries. That's awesome. To steal batteries. That's awesome. To feed to his auto-titan. That's fucking cool, okay? Because I haven't fucked with that ability too much, because I know it says, it lets you, it lets your auto-titan actually use its abilities,

as opposed to just the basics, you know? Man, that's so sick, dude. Yeah, now there's really, it's such a unique game flow and that is kind of, I hope in that brief look people that weren't around hearing the entire apex saga can understand like like the moments in Titanfall where you're both running inside of a building, sliding past each other and getting a nice execution or oh shit, blah, blah, blah, blah, you're at you, you round a corner and a snapshot, I believe, right, as the term were. But just to finish the thought, those moments that are like the best ones in Apex or getting a Crayboro shot from a million miles away

and taking someone out represent like 15% of what type about Titanfall? Well, my best Apex match in terms of feel, feels like my average Titanfall 2 match. Like, it makes me think of like, look at what they took from us. Like, when I'm like, I'm grappling, and I'm getting in a robot, and I'm wall running,

and I'm double jumping, and I just have massive as a regular weapon instead of like a gold drop. Yeah. And I can shoot while sprinting with my shotgun, and it's Like they prepared a whole buffet with Titanfall 2 and then like took a couple of items and put them over here for Apex and they're still Really good and that's fine, but man. Do you just miss the full spectrum of it, you know. And still don't understand

why they didn't just directly transfer Titan Falls came play into a big. I wish, like I, they've talked about it. And the reasoning never made any sense. They're like the skills they said would be too high. And they said they could, I just remember them saying they couldn't make it work, but I don't know if they ever went into the details.

It's a fucking mean. Right? Like, like, I'll tell you that if you had a, if you had a Titanfall 2 style, that a royal, then the person at the top of that leaderboard is, is going to be a Jedi. Like, they're going to be just like, but I mean, there's, there's, I'm, I'm there gonna be just like, but I mean, there's Hannibal there's there's I'm sure more than anyone they must have explored how to make this work But the feeling and thought that they they could they just never landed on any version of it that could seems really wild to me Because yeah, like I I whether you the flow has whatever the flow has to change to be, it's like by losing the, um, uh, the, the second half of that game, the, jumping on the Titan, jumping into the Titan, fighting the Titan on foot, being inside of it, feeling powerful and then

like having, and it's also a little bit of a twosick when you, when you eventually, your Titan blows the fuck up, right? And then you, you will, and you exit that and you have like a second chance back in that, to resume playing as it were. That is a, that's also a really good feeling that I think yeah, Battle Royale could have definitely benefited from, but anyway, whatever the case was, they just couldn't pull it off and here we are going back to it

and everyone can see right off the bat, like it just fucking rules. There's a great video that I watched that I've been trying to find while we've been talking and maybe someone in the chat or on social media can help me. It was somebody diving into what does it mean to play a quote unquote dead game? And how dead can a multiplayer game actually get before it affects your ability to play it? Because I look at Titanfall and I'm like 10,000 people online when I hop on, I'm on, to play on, on PC. And I look at that. Yeah, it does sound like race, but I was trying to find it.

I couldn't find it. And 10,000 is pretty low, right? Like, we're used to seeing hundreds of thousands bubble-bottles. And I hit matchmaking, and I want to play attrition, which is the main mode, and I got a match within 40 seconds. And then subsequent matchmaking was faster, and faster, and faster. And then I just played for four or five hours. So yeah, yeah, I have, I had matches queue up in 15 to 20 and I've had matches sometimes where like I'm waiting two minutes, you know, like it's been, it's been, it's been up and down, but I haven't had anything like really, really, really like, bad.

Yeah, because the fear is is that you go, okay, I'm going to play Titanfall to woo, woo, and then you hit matchmaking and you're waiting like 10 minutes. Yeah, 20 minutes, you know, like, and no, it just works. You get in the matches quickly. You play tons of matches. I've looped. I've generated another character. Okay.

Yeah. I regenerated because I was able to play so many matches. And while fucking, and this is something too that's really unique, is the fact that you can say, hey, like we're just going in on how fucking sick this multiplayer is. There's a single player that is absolutely stellar that surprisingly doesn't overlap 100% with multiplayer content. There's a ton of unique ass shit going on in a single player campaign there where in most cases you'd look at the multiplayer and go, oh my god, that multiplayer

is so good. No wonder the single player is ass, right? You'd either world tour it or you'd, whatever, I last of us, is that a good comparison? I don't know. Whatever the equivalent to the best comparison is like the old Call of Duty games, the ones that respawn me, which they had like really excellent campaigns and fantastic multiplayer, but they were completely different beasts. Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, just something where my expectation would almost be like, one is amazing, therefore the other has to suffer. You know, games where they slap it in an animal space.

Sure. So I was going to say, bio-shock multiplayer or Tomb Raider, right? Don't, careful. Somebody's going to come out of the woodwork and be like you know I love that fucking thing that was my favorite I tested a bunch of Tomb Raider multiplayer it was there he was there you know um but no

it was there but that's not the what's not the point the point is fucking the the the fact that they made both incredible independently. And like, it wasn't like... Like, when you played... When I played Halo, right, I saw a lot of Halo's multiplayer I felt in the kind of campaign. Yeah, no. Halo has like a really close relationship. It's just instead of enemy players,

it's enemy enemies that are using more or less the same rules. Like elites in Halo, single player have shields. Right, right, right, and they kind of function similarly. And so that feels really close where you're like, oh yeah, these are going hand in hand, fair enough. You know, look fucking gold and I with this shit. But yeah, Titanfall has so much like stuff that's like unique to the single player. That's incredible that you're like, oh man, this on its own is a fucking awesome proposition.

So I played a lot of first person shooter campaigns and like, I don't feel comfortable saying it's the best one, but I can easily say that the Titanfall 2 campaign is like top three ever. but I can easily say that the Titanfall 2 campaign is like top three ever. Yeah, if that effect and cause is the best level in a shooter of all time. If I were, if that type of game were more frequent with first person shooters, I might be like, woo-way more in on the genre. I might just be obsessed with them. It's super hard. If that was kind of like the average experience with it, you know. But in any case, yeah, fuck man.

What an awesome like, hey, servers work. Cool. Everyone go enjoy, you know? To those who are asking the level I mentioned, effect and cause, yes, that is the time travel one. That is the one. It's so good. So my God, I can't, and then they throw the mechanic away.

They're like, we did the level, it's done. Before the level ends, they throw it away to give you just a really cool set piece. And then we're out. We are out. The video I was referring to is how much does multiplayer population matter by race, Vic? Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, yeah. I just, I'm thinking of two of how like, there's a little thing as well where I have a special little tingle whenever something I like a lot ends up being something where they're like, oh, we know trust us. It's special to us too. And that's why, like in metal gear, right, when I was like, fuck, God damn it, the boss rules. And then like, Kojima's like, I know. And then you get the way that story works out. I'm going to kind you get the way that story works out.

I'm gonna kind of obsess the story in that direction. You keep the longer we go, the more and the more we fucking dip back in and you're like, all right, but that initial point post-snake eater when it was like, where are we gonna go from here? And like a big chunk of four is just like, yo, the boss though. And I was like, yes, thank you, right? So in Titanfall, one, obviously, the fucking noob gun, whatever, the smart pistol,

what's such a cool, like fucking feeling bit. And then, you know, you get the fucking knife and then you get Legion as my favorite of the the Titans and like all of that is dropped in at the climax of the fucking single player where the Seer Kid comes out and you finally get Legion and I'm like my god they're making the the high point of this the things I love the most and the feeling of running through with the fucking smart pistol like unbelievable man the Seer kit dude that's that's why so so this is building up to a Titanfall 3 announcement because the thing

and the the messages and the and the and the and the let me try to time I'm gonna try to time my hoodie around like a straight jacket and just start rocking They're gonna do it and nothing hurts anymore I just I can't I don't feel I don't feel you can't hurt me And you know what you know what I enjoyed some Titanfall this week and and it's up and alive and you can go play it and that's cool. That's great. Let's take let's take life in baby steps. So tell you what I had a bit of a jump scare loading in because I was like, oh is there a CSB group on PC? Oh, there is a CSB group. What is it? Oh, it's the Comshot Brigade. Okay, I'm gonna make it wait. What?

No, I thought I found I found that was Castle Super Beast Yeah, on on ps4 and on PC the one you found on PC. I made that one Look last week. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah Because when you because you can search by tag Okay, type in CSP and when I searched last week the number one PopMores populated group on PC under CSP is the cum shopper gade and then like all right What do you you afraid now? I'm gonna make I'm gonna make the real one. Okay. You afraid of a little cum bro Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll say it. I'm afraid of a little come what are you Star Wars?

Didn't think that was gonna work. What are you talking about? Jack's music, bro! Oh, you fucking cowards? Oh my god. They finally after years of just sticking with gizz music have finally said they've lost the battle They've lost the cultural battle against Jizz and now it's been retconned to be Jats I refuse to abide by this this this this this Nage. I won't do it dude, but, but there's something, there's something to be said about fighting that fight for as long as possible. And like, it has nothing to do with your IP at all,

but the culture has decided that this word is going other places and there's nothing you can do about it. Like, imagine if you decided to start a company called Good Old Fashion Country Cream Pies. And you sell delicious cream pies. Yeah, you sell them. Right? And every you get you get on your your your ox court, a card and you bring them down to the local grocery store and then that builds up into a company And now you got packaging and you're selling good old-fashioned

Home country cream pies and and and the world is moving its own direction What are you a humble farmer to do? You know, you fight that fight for as long as you can, but at some point, you just, you gotta rip your hat off and slap it on the ground and jump on it because, sorry man, you're not winning this battle. You know, I always laughed, I always giggled. And now that they're changing it,

I'm gonna giggle more because the thing that bothered me the most about giz music is how offhand and lame it is. What's it called? Space music. What's the name of music? Can I change a letter? Jaws. Yeah. Jaws? No. That one's not good. Not that one. Jaws. No, that doesn't hit. Jizz, there we go. I nailed it nailed it. All right, moving on, moving on. Like, why does it even have to have a weird space name? Sometimes you have to just lean into the bed. Sometimes Disney will never, but sometimes you do. For example,

the good old-fashioned country cream pie example is just given there. Excuse me. Are you familiar with the pot noodle? Not particularly. Ramin noodles, right? Yeah. So yeah, so in the original in the British office the character Chris Finch who's basically Sid's voice actor from f of 16 at one point oh I'll finesse I don't know the I don't know the full name but yeah he he the but whatever Finch he's he played the voice of Sid in final fantasy 16 like at one point comes to the office and he says something to the voice of Sid in Final Fantasy 16. Like at one point comes to the office, Siddy goes, and he says something to the effect of like,

man, you look like you've had a pot noodle in a wank, right? And that's like a big line that pops up and turns the slang, go have a pot noodle for Go Home and Jerk Off. Yeah. Right. Yeah, okay, good.

At which point the pot noodle ramen company just goes, fuck it. And makes a whole bunch of commercials cleaning into the idea of going and making pot noodle at home or getting caught, making, slurping up new noodles in your bedroom. And everyone's like, hey, what are you doing in there? And they're like, oh, you know you want it.

And they just go, they go all the way and they're marketing and the slang pot noodle for jerk it off becomes their marketing campaign entirely. Somebody sending me one already, God, you people, Asuna, you are two on top of this. So you have to lean into the bits sometimes. It's the only way to win. You can't fight it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. That's the only way. Jats music. Fucking outta here. The name is terrible. It's awful. Like, it also is a minor thing. And it doesn't help that the little like Jats players look like Dix Playing in their little problem Part of the problem is like it's very easy to make something look like a dick kind of everything looks like Dix If you look around everything's just Dix Yeah, I guess

But nothing to be done really but some things in Star Wars look more like Dicks than others, you know? Like you mean like everything cool in Star Wars? Like, yes! Like all the guns and the laser swords and the helmets and the spaceships. Yes! Like, we can point, we can say, oh man, everything in life is Dicks. But then Geeger is like, right? So what do you blame in me for? A lot. A lot, Geeger. Stop it. I don't want my dick to fucking meld in with the

wall and have a mouth too late. That's weird too late. I even got the veins that connect to the other part. Anyways. Snickers keeps its fucking dick fame. Society will maintain. What was that? I think it was like a bit or is like a trap for first. Yeah, or like no, wasn't the thing like if you see a Snickers without the dick fame

you think it's not gonna be as good Like it was it was some stupid shit post about snickers removing the dick vein and it caused a bunch of Fucking right wing Americans to put out like videos on their TV shows to be like they're trying to steal your dick vein from your snickers To be like they're trying to steal your dick vein from your snickers Fucking absurd shit in the world what a what a pure battle what a noble cause In any case I can't even look at a snickers anymore after that whole thing. It's such a dick thing. It's like it's hell. Yeah. Absolutely. Enjoy it. Appreciate it. Lean in. Don't fear it, baby. Don't fear that shit all the way in. There you go. What else have you been up to? aside from Titanfall, man? Um, so...

Did a... Took a brief look at RE4, uh, sponsored. Hey. I want to give you a massive thumbs up. I am... I am... I am thrilled to see you engaging in the age old... Man, my, uh, my partner on this couch is real anxious. Maybe if I just bark at them and scare the shit out of them

It'll be funny and you're when you were fucking right that clip is so incredible Because you can see your eyes look away and then the tiniest smirk shop on your face and you it's like 10 seconds of oh He's gonna fucking do it. Oh, he's gonna do it right now It's like 10 seconds of oh he's gonna fucking do it. Oh he's gonna do it right now He's a nervous boy the the energy in the room was very very tense and You know like I told him like hey you get a free one now, right? so fucking use it use it whenever use it wisely do your do your thing But yeah little little quick quick peak the, at the resident evil for remake, shout outs to the bear traps, shout outs to you. You walked in a bunch of them, didn't you?

It's shout outs to the burning fucking cow shout outs to everything going on in that little going on in that little introduction. And yeah, I remember that sequence being one where like, there's a lot of ways to play it out. But like, I guess I was like, I was kind of thinking back and I was like, maybe my, my, because my memories of it are for a million years ago. But I feel like that sequence was like, um, it's, it, you can stall for time once you kind of, I guess, are aware that stalling for time is what you're trying to do. Yeah. Versus, if you're trying to think about this, like, how do I solve this problem and get out of here because I clearly can't handle it because I'm getting overwhelmed, which is

the mentality you need to get overwhelmed. And every corner you look at, you're fucking surrounded, and yeah, it played out perfectly. I think I'm not certain, but I think if you kill a certain percentage of enemies, you can kick it forward. Ah, wait about the clock.

Okay. Yeah, it's a bunch. It's like 30 or something, high. And, you know, I mean look who everyone in a unfamiliar panic situation is gonna be door blind here and there you know so Yeah, it's just it's great. It's great. The game is trying to scare you and boy does it Yeah, this is a fun little fun little quick cookie tour there. So that That was a good one go check it out on on the channel if you haven't already Before you move on I should mention I played separate ways. Yes, the week capcom sent me a coat

So hashtag sponsored thanks for the code capcom. So separate ways is a does campaign that takes place I mean, it's a DLC that you'd play after the main campaign and it loops in and out Ten bucks right? Yeah, the big thing is that Ada has a grappling hook So when you you stagger somebody and want to melee them you can melee them from like 15 feet away She'll just grapple them and just do the kick like to jump over I Beliezer way way better than the on. I believe the correct terminology is grappling gun, Pat. Grappling gun.

It's really good. It's very obvious that a lot of classic RE4 remake, RE4 stuff that wasn't in the remake was then shifted to AIDA's campaign. Oh, cool. That shows up in AIDA's campaign, the people were like, oh, how come they're not there in the main campaign? It's like, oh, because it was given to Ada.

Where's the laser hallway? Oh, it was given to Ada, that kind of thing. It's great. It is way better than the original separate ways campaign, which is terrible. That was the PS2 exclusive campaign, the later out came up. But yeah, no, this one's really good. There's only one thing about it that's

not excellent and that is The actress playing Ada is once again back and she is she is trying her best and She she is reading those words off that script to the other characters. How long is it? I couldn't finish it in one stream. So I will say it is significant.

First is the original, which was just a little like epilogue, right? It was like four hours and it was bad. Hmm. Mm. Okay. So it's pretty beefy for a $10 DLC. It's good too. Nice. I'll be finishing it later this week. And then it came, oh, somebody point out,

it's longer than Resident Evil 3 Remake. Oh my God, the base game, Jesus Christ. I beat Resident Evil 3 remake in one sitting on Stream I just sat down and beat it both sides on There's no sides on RE3 remake. Oh, and I beat it on hard I Set down night of release for RE3 remake and put on hard mode and beat it in one go Jesus Christ Wow, okay Well only game that I have ever done that with in my whole career.

Well, that puts the value proposition in place then for this versus the disappoint. Sure does. Beforehand. What, and then there was also updates to mercenaries, right? Yeah, Leonsa. There's more characters. there's more levels, but more importantly, Leon's RPD outfit is not the reward for S plus plusing every mercenaries map. So his RPD outfit is finally back in the game. Hooray! Nice! Yeah.

So yeah, no, that was a fun little, fun little romp and uh, definitely like, I'm like, yeah, I think the, in a lot of cases, well, anything survival horror related, I mean, uh, uh, there's a bunch of shit I haven't played, there's a bunch of shit he hasn't played. Uh, it was a fun little, uh, thing that makes me go, okay, we can come, we can come take a look in this direction anytime we need to in the future. The RE4 remake is really good. Giving a thumbs up to the camera. Also, um, yeah, so actually sat down and, uh, jumped in on MK1 this week, starting from not knowing a ton, picking it up, seeing what's going on here.

Okay, so really glaring oversights, like right up top, the plan, as per usual, to kind of like jump in, As per usual, to kind of like jump in, mess around, hit some buttons, do some matches, and then eventually jump online. But no lobbies right off the bat is wild. It's a really bad oversight because the only way to play people is to queue up randomly in casual or ranked or to go private to your friends list and add people on your friends list, but you could not just play a match with somebody watching on stream, for example, or someone else in the community without having them directly on your friends list. That's really bad.

It's not really, really bad. Real bad oversight, because I'm like, I'm not going gonna sit here and add everybody to my friends list to play with today So that I can delete them afterwards so they can't look at what games I'm playing because they're gross freaks It just you know that's that's not going down and then like yeah no matter how hard I looked I couldn't see anything now if I was on PC I guess I could have done like a parsec style situation. But I didn't know about this. That's really bad. No, no lobbies, you know.

Other previous MK's had lobbies, so it's maybe it'll come in a later update, but it seems like a really bad oversight. And like that's a bummer, because we couldn't experience like, I'm like, okay, the last part of this is like, show me what this game is supposed to look like. Like show me anyone who plays that come jump in, let's, let's go on, you know, so.

Yeah, no, no real ability to play with the community. And then that got me kind of thinking, I guess, that like, it is, uh, there's some games that are like, depending on the genre, some, some competitive genres have like three layers of like online play, right? They have friends, private, they have community, and then they have raw open public, you know? And that's how I would assume it to be done on most multiplayer games of any kind.

And that middle area is pretty important. Like old, old multiplayer games didn't have it, but now we've come, you know, quite a long way to the point where it's like people who want to play together that are from the same community, but aren't necessarily again on each other's friends list entirely. Oh, you mean like how Titanfall you can just run private matches in the easiest way I've ever experienced in a game in my life. What lobby do you want to join? Do you want to invite the entire lobby to play with you? It's that simple, you know. I couldn't believe how easy it was to run match made and custom games with people inside the network and Titanfall 2. It's the best party slash group slash community

system in any game I've ever played. I fucking wish that were possible elsewhere. I also even just like any in Street Fighter 6 right, the CFN system when it's like I remember when CFN first got introduced and like was like hold held together with sticks and fucking twine. And like now it's like, oh yeah, you have a comprehensive way to go search people, find people, watch replays, add them, or don't challenge them, jump in the room. You know what I mean? There's all these ways to interact with people that are like looking for matches that are not just the open most raw random search and also the person that is like on directly

on your friend's list, you know, that middle step is really good and really important. So yeah, man, that was a big bummer, definitely. And then beyond that, I mean, yeah, there's more to combat, it's doing its stuff. What's the unlock situation like so Havoc is locked by default so you have to go through story mode to get Havoc Just Havoc and as far as playable characters go it seems to be that the the characters elect screen was only missing him I also but I have it is like really yeah There's a there's a shank song who you buy

Ten bucks and then there's the Combat pack with the five characters you buy 50 bucks Back up back up back up back up back up back up back up back up Who so is in the combat what okay? Okay, okay? So playable characters. I'm not talking about cameos yet Have it you unlock in the story And then shank song is a separate DLC and then there's and then there's most important fucking character in the whole game and then there's a combat pack with you know all those superheroes and the tie-ins the oh that's the DLC the Omni Man did a ticada etc. the pack of five and that is a that's a fifty dollar purchase. That's that's wild.

Absolutely wild. Hey I've won my personal distaste to the gameplay of Moral Combat aside that seems ridiculous. Yeah the cost of a full game for just that. And I'm looking back on the controversy that was half the roster of Blazboot Cross-Tag battle being sold. And it was like, what was it? Was it 30 or 25? What was the third of the roster in Cross-Tag and was that like 15? I mean, it it was it's insane Um, and then cameos so the cameos that you unlock in the story there seems to be

There's assists right there's assists exactly the assists there seems to be maybe like six or seven on the bottom row that are unlockable with like maybe if I remember like maybe 10 or already there. And then yeah, you get cameos that are going to come out in the future as well with the DLC packs. But my God, man, the fucking pricing is wild. But it's also the WBS pricing of we know who this appeals to, we know we can get you now, we know we're not going to get you later. And that's how we're going to push the game out. And I think it's kind of clear too, like they're aware that like Mortal Kombat, the

best selling fighting game is really like, yeah, it's not made for the competitive or community really when they roll this out. That stuff might come later once the very huge casual market has stopped playing and the only people left are the community. Then they might start rolling out features like this and putting stuff into play and putting out like a tour and you know Like let's handle the people that are stuck that are still around that's that that support it But that initial push and having the cost for the characters being this high in a game that doesn't have lobbies

Just seems backwards. It but like no, but my point is though is that like but there they know that like yo No, no mortal combat bunch of fatalities. Yeah, Diyada casual appeal while shit it's up it's the it's broad it's fucking broad so yeah it's it's it's it's closer to Smash Bros than it is the street fighter in terms of mass appeal yeah so no my point is that they're getting that shit in now while they can build the fuck out of everybody because they know that this audience is not gonna stick around for a long time. They're getting theirs and they're charging you the cost of a game for the DLC after you bought the full game. It's fucking insane, you know? Um... And what am I kidding myself about? I'm like this, this is WB being fucking insane, ridiculous with it.

So, um, yeah, I don't think, I don't know if there's ever been a worst, worst bang for buck, like character DLC pack, whatever ratio ever. That's pretty bad. And, yeah. How many characters are in the stand roster? It's three sections of,

three sections of six or eight maybe. Um, people are saying 23, 24, yeah, I want to say eight, 16. Okay. Probably about that. Yeah. Are you talking Canadian dollars here? Uh, yeah, yeah. The price. That's a hundred divided by 24 is equal to $4 a character

versus 50 divided by five It's ten dollars a character So those DLC characters are worth more than twice as much Changsung on his own was 999 Right that's so fucking ridiculous. I have to say, like, more to combat, picking the character that everyone wants the most,

like Shao Kong or Shanksong or whoever, to be the DLC. You gotta be good, but it's so gross. Yeah. Um, and Bison only on pre-order like shut up and Well here hold on I see it's all just said zero of them. Okay. Yeah, well hold on isn't ashera a new character for mk1 No, no, she's from mk Deception she's from deception as well. Okay, then yeah, not a single hat then not a single character is new

They're all returning characters. I was talking about the song social media a little bit ago and I was like, wow, the Mortal Kombat one storyline of a completely new universe with a completely new timeline and every character has a different backstory to end up with a roster of zero. It's funny. New characters. It's funny because like in Tekken, you really feel it when there's no new characters because of like, you know, they pretty much carry themselves forward the same way across the franchise as each new number iterates and replaces the last one. But in Mortal Kombat, like they're basically reinventing garbage.

You know what I mean? I'm torn, so I made fun of that. And then I thought more about it. And it's like, I'm kind of torn because I've seen New Havoc a million times better than old Havoc. They're reinventing garbage. Yeah.

So that it's the scope of what the story says it is. It's so broad. It just makes Luke Kang look so uncreated. I make Luke Kang look so. Like Luke, you remade a whole universe and Shang Tsung still turned out evil. So I don't know. I don't know the story and I'm legit curious to see like Like what goes down in how or whatever, but yeah the the idea off the bat that you know

The intro puts out there is everyone can achieve peace if they choose to But it's like you're you're writing the like like I just what the fuck is the reason besides you being an asshole For things to turn out shitty again anyways, right like that's yes, so anyways. Um, I'm sure I'm sure him being an asshole is probably high up there on the big old car now That's like that's that's Poor Baraka Outworld AIDS. Well, well Melina. Yeah, so the Melina's thing is a disease That's like that's that's um poor buraka Outworld AIDS. Well, well, Melina. Yeah, so the Melina's thing is a disease. It's not a race anymore, right? Yes, man. Yeah, so anyway, whatever. We'll find out. It's out here dropping pause loads off arm blades. I mean

Where there's pods low pause loads. There, there's gonna be a neg-ass somewhere. Do you want to hear the absolute most wretched moment of my entire public life? Wretched or wretched? I made it wretched. Wretched. Okay. I made, I pulled these people out of you mouth. I made a a joke about Leon

being pause in the separate ways DLC and a full 50% of my chat were like PA us E. What is that? What do you mean? What do you mean pot? What? What does that? What do you mean? What do you mean pot? What? I Know pause has a whole different meaning these days, right? No, wait a new one like a genuine new one. Yes, there's a completely different meaning. Okay, well I did not know that what is the new pause? Okay, the new pause is basically that's what she said every time you say something gay so anytime you say something gay. So anytime you say

something that could be interpreted as like whatever that's that whatever that sounds kind of gay you go pause and then that's like supposed to be like a oh in the moment, you know, because because people people thought when I called Leon pause they were I was referring to his kitty cat costume okay and that he was a furry okay and then I was referring to a kitty cat's paws okay well well I'm talking about eight when I say when I say new I mean let's break this to Pat all right PAUSE that is to say say, which is now something that's come back. If it's from 20 years ago, it was only being slung around on the internet post-COVID at the very least, right? Oh my God. Yeah, there's an older, faster. Yeah, dude, like, there's a bunch of shit that

also pops up. Like, I remember literally it being in high school when my brother in Christ popped up as a funny way to tag any sentence when you're gonna like go off on something. And then it went away completely and now it's back for some reason. So I can only assume like a big streamer somewhere said it and then everyone went,

that's hilarious and jumped in there. But no, it isn't, anyway, whatever. I think pause came back in the lexicon from the back. Yeah, I think I believe that pause came back in the lexicon due to the the general black podcast circuit. I think I think that's that's where the that's where it started. Is it so back? It's so back. Yes. It's it's very back. It's more back than on God. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. Anyway, so I usually look for a character to like fucking really attached to and like, you know, and often times really dump all your time into. I like if I, if there's a character that I like, I often like that character more than the game itself in some cases

I know when I want to go like my my dream my when I miss persona for arena I miss aki hiko doing his win middle combo. I know exactly how you feel about that I know exactly what you mean when I miss a guilty gear I miss like either bike in parries or Nago fucking blood combos and shit like I you know Steve Fox, etc When I played MK like so even initially I remember there's always a like The first time I touch it. There's always that like

Not sure and then Reggie had a similar thing we trying to talk about afterwards It's like we only kind of after labbing and or finding somebody or seeing something interesting and kind of going okay I see what's going on here. Does you do you start to kind of see something you that might be interesting to play but like there's not that initial draw I guess and for me I liked Codal a lot when I saw him in 10 and on your knees all that shit was dope and And then, you know, in 11, it was a journey down and up and all over the place. And then, yeah, Gyrus was, was all right. I thought it was a cool time character as well. And the way you fuck around with time shit is a

cool thing. And he's still, he has like the best playtality as a result of like the one we talked about the other day, you know,, handing you your head and shit. And then when I went to pick him this time around, I guess it was just an initial touch, but yeah, it felt like an uphill battle with this character. Maybe I'm sure if I go look and see what people are doing within in a proper, more competitive context, it'll make more sense, but it felt like in a proper more competitive context, it'll make more sense. But it felt like in a game where fucking,

it's right in sub-zero scorpion and everybody are just everywhere at all times doing everything they can want to, where smoke is coming at you, backwards low up down and traveling, zoning, doing whatever, everyone has so much, and a lot of their strings are able to go together. Really simply, you're a lot able to confirm off a lot of things that felt like gyruses like, oh, you don't get to do that at all. You are kind of stuck. You're, you don't get

to go flying across the screen that much. You kind of, you have a very limited move set that is going to be setting things up with time and getting some grapples in, playing like a grappler effectively, but a lot of the stuff that felt like more, a lot of his tools that I felt he had in the previous game, it feels like he's kind of missing here, you know, so, but again, I haven't really looked into what. Why'd you gravitate towards Gyrus instead of Codalcon? Well, that would probably be because Codal is as of yet still somewhere in a wheelchair, perhaps doing recovery and physical therapy.

I've been told that he exists in the story, but he jobs off camera. I saw a screenshot of a line where someone said, like, oh, you defeated Codalcon. So yeah, something to that effect, you know. I mean, look, man, that's a quick 10 bucks they can drop on you anytime they want to, right? No, let's get a pay 10 ton combined with combined with Aaron Black and Devora and you know Cassie or Jackie or something right? Yeah anyway so yeah, I kind of just hit that that initial feeling and went like, ah damn. I don't really I'm not really seeing it or feeling it just just just off this first touch in anyway. So um, with that um, I, I, you know, I, I see Kenchi and Kenchi's like got some cool looking things with the controlling both stupid Kenchi shit. Yeah, you control the ghost and you can do like a bunch of like non-stop

mix-ups three way three characters on Spool shit attack like that that is I never in my life expected to see Netherrealm aka the Mortal Kombat devs make a Character that has more pieces Attacking you then blaze blue did yeah, it's like make a character that has more pieces attacking you than Blaze Blue did. Yeah, it's like... It's ridiculous.

And I really just wish that they hard committed to making the game a 2v2 though, because not only would that fully capitalize on the whole cameo system they're doing and stuff, but and 2v2, like, you don't get it that often in fighting games, but when you do, it's usually pretty good. Tech and Tag is fun. And, you know, again, the system at infinite, you know, despite the game itself was really, really fun. I think if they also committed to 2v2, it would excuse, not excuse, but it would justify

the game's existence more with everyone who's kind of just like, why are we rebooting this again? What are we doing? Right? There's a very clear common like a sentiment out there that is like, what like really? We just, we're doing it again, you know? And Luke Kang when he recreated the universe said moral combat is a 2v2 trauma right now. But, but, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. who Kang when he recreated the universe said Mortal Kombat is a 2v2 trauma right now. But um...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's the way I figured I would make it up a little bit. But I think the way they're going about it is like because this is an in-universe reboots? Well, the last one was an in-universe reboot too. They're all in-universere-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re like one of the only other examples. And that was a novel concept, definitely. But the soft seaboot, yeah, the whereas what we're used to is just a brand new game comes out and it just says we're doing it all over again

this time starring Andrew Garfield, right? So here, when it's like not just a in-universe reboot, but like the previous reboot was the like little memory of right, it's like a little blip in right in thoughts to set up the new story and then you just kind of go from there. Here it's actually a continuation of you know everything in the past because of Fire God, Lukeang, etc. So I guess the thought is it's a reboot, but because it's actually a sequel, it's not, it won't bother people as much that it's a restart.

And if no one's really paying that much attention, they're kind of just like, eh, that's why we do it. I've seen a lot of people kind of, you know, down on that part of it. Anyway, if this were a straight up 2v2, like full on, I think the game itself being a completely different format would show a reason for it to exist. That was much more clear. You know, you're playing a style that you've never played before. Again, like tech and tag tournament regardless of what I think you're doing. I think you're completely right. However, I think that the average casual player will have their brain just fucking melt out of their ass at 2v2. I think Billy, the 13-year-old that wants to play Mortal Kombat to shoot Scorpion's

spear, doesn't want to play a character other than Scorpion. So Tekken Tag also had a thing about it where this kind of leans into like picking two characters and learning them versus like kind of wanting to stick with what you've got um and tech and tag you don't have to Kill both characters for the round to end Yeah, tech and tag is the most stressful A fighting game I've ever played in my life. If I was like sweating every single minute. I was playing that game If one character goes down the round ends there, right? So

If you decided to pick your main stick with them and never switch to your partner, you could just do that, right? It's almost like a stupid as fuck. Yeah, and it's almost like a soft groove system, right? It's almost like picking one character in skullgirls versus the three or whatever. But because you don't get your character killed and then your next one has to run in and your force to control somebody that you may or may not know on a player. So yeah, it could be softer on them. But maybe, maybe, you know, I don't know, I would like to believe you could, you know, people can learn a second character that's not that. If you're putting out, okay, let's put it this way. What they went away. Hold on. I think you're, I think you're missing the force for the trees.

I think learning one character is beyond most casual fighting games. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But here's where I'm going, right? The things they decided to pull out of the idea of a 2v2 with the cameo system are the most complex parts already. The Marvel jump-in assist while you continue to fight to at the same time thing is way more complicated than switching from a to b right so k o f style switching from a to b is that is a much more simple version of things then the learn how to fight two things at the same time. And they went

with the more complex one. You know? So I don't think it's more complex. I think hitting a single button to have the assist come in is a lot simpler than having a whole second character to deal with. In terms of padding, but I don't think the standard like way you would use a cameo seems to be do four hits your combo have the cameo come out to extend it do four hits your combo have the cameo come out to extend it and then finish a combo. Yeah, and that's kind of what it ended up being in other games like you know like Dragonball for example, but remember how the initial conversation we had about Dragon Ball was about how you were uncomfortable with how much tag mechanics would be really hard to manage because

I'm trash at all tag assist games. And so that's not just a youth thing as well. Like multiple people have definitely felt the stress of more than one character jumps out on the screen at the same time, not just a combo extender, but like literally out of neutral, we're fighting, and then suddenly Sony is covering the high, and I'm coming in low, and it's like it does overwhelm people a lot regularly. So that part of the game, which is a huge part of the game, because the assist doesn't just come in as a combo extender, they're coming in all the time doing different things. They're coming in after you throw, they're coming in with every...

We need somebody who doesn't know how to play more combat to weigh in on this discussion. We need like a, like a neo fight that's just like, I want to shoot the ice ball. Uh, I guess to simplify the, the, of all the things you could have pulled in with having a second character, the ones they they did go with are the ones that make the game the hardest for a new person to handle, right? Three characters coming at you at the same time is a very difficult thing to handle. And so I have to agree that the the the mix of not tagging, but then also the stupid canchy shit or like frost pushing you all the way to the end of the screen like that seems fucked Yeah, that's a lot of crazy shit you have available right and then there's there's assists that come out and hurt you and the opponent at the same time

Yes, there's assists that are and and not only that when you go to the tutorial there's there's assists that are meant to be only used, how do I describe it? Some assists come out independently of whatever you're doing and you move around freely and they do their thing freely. And some assists, you have to stop, taunt, and then they come in, right? And they have different utility that the game tries to teach you about, which is again complicated.

So they've already committed to a really like, out there, mix up heavy thing. I kind of'm just like, yeah, like if you made it like having two characters together, whatever the case would be, it would kind of justify the game's existence a little stronger. Plus, it might be a little bit more of a, whatever you have to do with the story in a reboot setting, if you had a tech and tag style, not Dream Match, but we're clearly changing this up, the game is different, the formula is different, it's mortal combat, but also new things are happening.

I feel- I have a quick question. In the $50 DLC thing that has the extra characters, do cameos also appear in that? Yes, so I think it lists a bunch, it lists five characters and whatever cameos come out as well. How cynical is it to imagine that one of the big reasons for the cameo system is so that they could use cameos to inflate the cost of the DLC.

A million percent? Absolutely. And- Wait, a million percent, cynical? Or a mill- Oh, they're absolute- when I look at the cameo system and I see all the old roster there, I see that as a very simple effective way of going, look, it's your faves. They're here. They're not really here, but they're here. Don't you want them? Shell out. It's like Syracuse is there, but he's not there. Yeah, Shell out, but you're gonna sell out

because he's there and what does he have? He's got his three moves, right? He's got his fatality, because you can do a fatality with just your assist. And he's a part of the game without being actually you know so it's more than enough if you're a Syrax fan to have him come out do his his bomb fatality do his web do his grenade thing and do his hidden missiles like yeah that's all I wanted to see you know I got my get over here I got my my freeze. I got my And I'm good, you know, like so that's that's kind of the deal is like if you look at each of these characters as three or four

Moves and fatalities you're buying that in the cameo you're getting the most Like casual what exactly the person walks version of events like like like It's that's what part of that price for sure Um It sucks. It's it's absolutely again. It's bullshit and it's it's milking Um, but let there they're definitely treating it that way Uh, and anyone who's like I want x or y. I why aren't there in the game or whatever is gonna be like Well, here's your cameo version deal with it, you know

um Yeah, so tag team fatalities, if they were, if that were a thing, I'm sure that'd be awesome. That'd be a fun thing to sell as well. You know, if, if, if you went with full 2v2s and stuff, but there's tag team X-rays that are true fight across Tekken style. So anyway, yeah, uh, that's kind of how I felt. You know, I was just like, man, I, I sure do, I sure do not like not having the ability to jump into a lobby and write off the bat. Um, you know, I, I'll be honest, I was like genuinely thinking of hopping into MK one and doing the story mode and finding out that Jason's full $10.

It's just, oh, that one hurts, that one's ridiculous. He appears to be a Zeku style character of switching between old and young and copying the opponent and stuff, but. How about that switch version, though? Yeah. How about that switch version though? Yeah. How about that switch version?

Yeah. I think, Kudos to them for having the practice and tutorials under a section called Learn on the main menu. That's a bowl choice, I like it. I like the, I mean, yeah, I like the amount, the, the amount of banter between, you know, the Mortal Kombat pre-fight banter is a fun bit that's gotten, become a staple in the recent years, the little clash, and then the fight starts. That stuff seems to be still intact and pretty good.

What was it? There was one, I forgot what it was, but I want to say like, Sindel versus like Rain or something where he's like, oh, like, I'll defeat you with the power of water or something and she just laughs at him. It's just like, you know, there's little, little, little quips like that are like fun. But, uh, yeah, I, I fucking, I can't, I look at the, the money on this thing and it just seems insane to me.

Um, and the features that are missing there as well. fucking I can't I look at the the the money on this thing and it just seems insane to me and the features that are missing there as well and I again I'll see what we'll see what the story mode has to hold you know but this feeling that you know we're kind of pushing the game out a little feature incomplete and charging a fuck-tun for that feature and complete version of it is just that sucks man. Anyway, offline you is the only place you get the banter online you don't get it at all. I heard about that when you when you queue up with people it just goes right into the match. You don't even get to have that little character select screens clash because it's a transition. The banter is a transition from the character select screen to the fight But if you just queue up you don't get it

But that's cool. It is cool. It's a bummer Anyway, that's that's the mad street fighter. It's like I doesn't have more stuff like that. I love that shit Yeah, I still miss fucking canary you bump and fist. Yeah, CVS men, Capcom vs SNK with the unique intro is across the board. And I've always, you know, talked about even in the most lazy form, SVC chaos, you just read some text between the characters. At least it's a little bit of personality

where there was none, you know. Wind quotes are all fine and dandy and you can get some personalized someone talking shit about someone else there. And I like that, but it's nice to see it with the characters before the fight and the interactions. Anyway, beyond that, not much else just played a bit more Baldur's Gate and had a much more, I feel like,

I had a better session after understanding it and playing it on my own like last time and things were Things kind of make more sense since I've had a chance to like process them offline, so to speak and Yeah, shit's good. Shit's That game just keeps going I am I'm like nearing the end of the second act and I've like done two full games worth of shit. And I'm not I'm in the second act. It's fucking ridiculous. It is a full trilogy of games in one game. It's ridiculous. And it feels like it's the overworld is are the the the map is one of those maps where any door you see is like just assume that's a that's a fucking multi-hour dungeon

I'm sure behind that thing you know like I'm like just like or like a big fight waiting for you or whatever because it's like oh shit what's over there peek inside well I guess we're going here you know it's a game with no wasted space hmm everything is clearly put there for a reason. There's traveling roads, you know, where you're just kind of walking from location A to B, but yeah, and then you walk a whopping like 15 seconds and then, oh, what's this, Zany adventure? Or, and then get, or like, get, get spit out at like a door that is like oh that was the halfway point between a and B that I just walked by anyway what the yeah so Anyway, yeah good stuff there. It's it's a fucking forever game. It's insane We will be jumping back into a couple different things

I'm not sure what yet this week, but of course stay tuned to my Twitter all announce the schedule there. I went back over my, I've been playing the replay missions in Armored Core. I was trying to figure out what the criteria for a rank or above was and I thought it was there's a robot that can tell you now actually there's an app somebody made Okay, cuz I thought it was just kill everything But it's but in a bunch of them. It's like do it fast, right? the most the most important thing is do it fast okay, and Yeah, and I and I feel like I'm like oh like in the helicopter mission

It doesn't care if you take on the challenge of picking off the scraps and then fighting the big boy and then taking out the helicopters. Because I feel it's more challenging to do all of that on limited ammo, to kill everything on the map with limited ammo. That's way harder than it is to just kill the helicopters quickly. Yes, so the basic logic is that speed is like, imagine speed is like the number one factor, but actually beating the mission on the, just, you know, imagine you didn't shoot anybody, beating it under the time that it requires for the S rank is insanely difficult, but every

enemy you kill gives you like a couple seconds of leeway. Uh, okay. The ideal is to go as fast as you possibly can and murder everything that is like in front of you, like directly in front of you. Okay. You go through the optimal path. Yeah, somebody's posted the the rank calculator for every mission in the game. And I'll just show you here here I'll send it to you. It just shows you, it's like a sliding scale.

It's super cool about like, hey, what do you need to do? Yeah, okay. You turn up repair costs and turn down ammo costs, and then clear time turn down, yeah, it's fascinating. Huh, okay. Yeah, I guess I was expecting something more like, you know, about the high-value targets since there's like, you know, a bunch of stages where there's a big boy waiting the fuck over there. You're gonna go deal with him more, no.

You know, but... So like Mission One, if you beat it within three minutes you can have just an absurd amount of ammo costs and higher repair costs But you got to be in three minutes So if you want to be in six minutes your ammo costs have to be really low and your repair costs have to be almost nothing interesting This is so different because like I mean this is probably I'm guessing this has been the staple in the franchise for a while now, right? ranking your you according to... Wouldn't be on a tell-ya. Okay.

But imagine you had to rank someone's run through Blighttown, right? Yeah. Right? Like, imagine you had to say like, okay, what can you do? You can factor in whether or... You can factor in how quickly you get to bonfires and then how quickly you get to a key lag or you can factor in taking out the little boss thing on the side there or you know what I mean like there's a bunch of things to consider and then poison damage and so on and yeah I did a bunch of, I kind of, well, I, I, that's the thing is like before, like in most

cases, I kind of just was like winging it, trying to kill everything to, and then realizing that like, no, that took too long, so that's no good anyway. I guess a balance between the two is fine, but I definitely like ones where there are rewards more combat oriented, because yeah, making sure you use your bullets efficiently and not being wasteful before running out is legitimately a challenge, depending on your build. I'm rocking a heavy arm style double gatling guns and then switch to the bunk, you know, after. Yeah, those gatling guns, a lot of fun, a lot of fun.

Cleaned up the arena with those boys, real, real sick. And once I got the OS points, so you can spread, like each category of OS is, I mean, thank God you can refund them, even if it's out of small cost, because there's the ones that just make you better overall with new functions. There's the ones that make you better with stronger, you do more damage or take less damage. But there's better melee or better kinetic damage.

Yeah, very specific. But the ones that like are straight up like, here is your explosion. Here is your shield when you're about to die. Like those you have to pick one chip of that set. And when I, so when I invested in like a couple of them that I thought sounded interesting and then I went, I was like, oh, fuck, I only get to pick one. Well, why would I ever spend on anything that I want I know what I want to later for different different robots, the different needs. Personally, I went with the one where you get an extra hit after you die,

because I was really bad at fixing it on purpose. Okay. Uh, it would constantly die and then be like, Oh, I guess I should have popped my shield, huh? Uh, I, yeah, I tried it out. And then when I saw that it was a cat five OS points for the magic pixel I'm like no, I want my fucking super burst because I was using my super burst a lot right anytime I got a crumpled or stagger going and the fact that you can get like multiple of them I'm like yeah, let's like like let's just invest in the thing we've already put the money into you know, so That's cool. I know I was looking at manual aiming and that's like a legacy ability, right? That's like a kind of halfway between softlock and hard

softlock, no lock, hardlock. And I seem to recall my old roommate was like talking about it, or is that not a thing? Well, because I feel like it's new, okay. Because I seem to recall my old roommate talking about. Yeah, even Armor Corps one never technically had manual aiming. Okay. I'm recalling a conversation I had where he talked about like needing to lead certain shots

where they're going to be. When you get better, you can put out the projectile where they're dashing to as opposed to just trying to chase. But yeah, I didn't buy it yet, so I haven't really tested it out. I never used manual aiming. I didn't find any particular use for it. Then again, I beat the game before understanding walk-on, so fuck me. I imagine if you're playing with a mouse and keyboard, manual aiming must be fucking

insanely busted. Oh, I bet. I bet I bet On a controller, you know, you're gonna do what you can but Okay, curious. Well anyways, uh, yeah, take my schedule. Let you guys know we'll figure it out this week But I do know that on Saturday We are gonna do a get to fighting games. We're gonna have have cheerity come over and we're going to jump in and do some cami. So if you're a cami player out there. Come check it out. We got a really good one. Coming to break it down for you. Plus I think Aki is going to be out at that time.

So she's out this week. Oh, she. Oh, yeah. Fantastic. And yeah, Min is currently at Tokyo Game Show, actually, and he got some, he got the triad, got some footage, yeah. She's doing things. So that's pretty much me. Check it out, Woolly versus on Twitch and on YouTube. I gotta run to the bathroom real quick. Yeah, me too, actually, perfect.

They are big. I'll imagine we're pissing next to each other. Two things I forgot to mention. Real quick. One, the newest, woolly versus whatever is also out as of this morning, I believe. So go check that out morning I believe so go check that out over on the second channel versus the algorithm. Slop Otaku Engage is the title. Good times. And yeah, so this week yeah, I'm gonna do the Cammy app thing and one of the days at least I know I'm gonna jump into Darkest Engine actually. So now that I've beaten it I want to do a run there. Do you feel confident enough that you can sit down and just fucking because I

remember I remember sitting down with you and you're like hey Pat let's take a look at into the breach and I'm like okay cool and then you sat down and then you fucking beat into the breach and like an hour and started breach. And I'm like, okay, cool. And then you sat down and then you fucking beat into the breach in like an hour and started all play through. I'm like, oh, okay, you really know what the fuck you're doing. I think I can. Depends on what chapter and how we go. The more I involve, like if I just play what I want

and pick my stuff and go, I'm pretty sure I can. If I kind of like let people sort of choose what to grab this character of that and stuff, then it's a bit of a challenge and it's like, okay, maybe not. But I'm feeling like, I think I'm feeling like, yeah. I could probably, maybe 60, 70% shot, depending, you know. I don't know, I don't know, we'll see, but I think that's the fun of it, right? We'll fuck around find out

What's going on? Let's see there's some stuff I missed from last week actually I wonder I don't have no idea why I couldn't get to everything I wanted to talk about last week, but it's a mystery I Actually beat blasphemous to oh I wanted to talk about last week, but it's a mystery. I actually beat Blasphemus 2. Oh! And by beat, I mean like 100% complete Blasphemus 2, like every single thing in Blasphemus 2. And it is larger, it is, it has much more weapons.

It feels cleaner. It has much more weapons. It feels cleaner. You don't have the awful thing in Blasmus 1 where you can only pick one traversal ability, sorry, two traversal abilities at once. Yeah, you talked about how instead of the sword now, you have multiple weapons and it expands on the gameplay quite a good bit. It doesn't have instant kill spikes anymore, which was insane in the first one. So how does blasphemous stack up, would you say, not just to its predecessor, but to like

of all the, I guess, 2D souls, you know, there's a lot, there's like salt and sanctuary. There's a scam bit. Okay. Well, I don't think it's a fair comparison to put it into the soul's discussion. Okay. Fair and a fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah, you're right. That's right. I asked Metroid game.

Sorry. Is there a Castlevania? Is the, is the, you know, the comparison point? Is there a Corpse Run? Yeah, but it's minor. Okay. It's like, would you compare, like, Hollow Knight to soul? Yeah, Hollow Knight.

Yeah, sorry. The corpse run makes the me like yeah. So on every mechanical level, it is way better. But it isn't quite as weird and interesting as the first one. White as weird and interesting as the first one And I don't know how I feel about that lore-wise No, or like how how weird the boss fights are I'll use an example. So the boss fights are better like they are better more engaging fun boss fights They're all against other penitent ones, so most of them are human sized,

and they're all variations of Virgil fights eventually. You but different. And their cool gimmicks, like one is the embroidery or her, so she is a needle, but it acts like a rapier, that kind of thing. And it's a much better boss fight than a lot of the big bosses in the first game. But the big bosses in the first game were all nightmare weirdo shit that was like a painting that they retrofit into a boss fight.

And it kind of loses some of that. It's a better game, easy, but I don't think I quite like it as much. Okay. I can imagine a setting where if everything ended up being the the virtual, it's not a special anymore, right? That stands out when you're fighting a bunch of giant monsters. There are maybe, obviously, 12 boss fights and eight of them are like people. There is a really cool bit where it takes place in the far future.

So like one or two of the areas from the first game are like deep underground. And that's cool. But yeah, it doesn't hit the same. I don't know how to describe it. I wish I had the words to do so. And it's it's not. It's okay. So part of the blasphemous appeal is, Hey man, Spanish Catholicism has tons of weird shit in it. Right? This doesn't feel like it's a sequel's worth of more weird shit.

It feels approximately the same, but I've already seen a lot of this types of weird shit. So instead of not hitting as hard. Instead of a further exploration of the themes into things you haven't seen, it's just taking the same, but spreading it out in a different way. Yeah.

And there's a lot of tiny little details. So like one of the things that's really minor, but it bugs me is that in the original game you just had the sword. Yeah, it's called the Mayacalpa. I like that sword better than all of the three weapons in the sequel. And there was a mechanic where if you stunned an enemy, you could do a custom fancy kill on them. Ben, because you always had the sword, there were a lot of animations.

Because you have the three weapons now, most of those stun kills are like you throwing thorns down into the ground and thorns go over the enemy and burst them. And it's like this is a really minor animation detail, but like I kind of miss it. Sounds like a good excuse for like something like the final level to give you that final ability to get you. Yeah. Yeah. You know. Um. Hey, look, it's a buster. One thing, and this is strange, because like the first game had some weird limitations on like pits or movement abilities. And a lot of those are improved. Like the second game has a really good in-game

mark the map system, where you can mark it with a red dot or a picture in person or a question marker, you know, whatever on any particular grid, right? And there's a time that you can unlock that'll that'll bing when you go into a room that has a secret wall so that you can, you know, scrape for secret walls. I am really genuinely really genuinely astonished that they made two games in a row that in order to get the final ending, you have to go find a bunch of secret little cherubs hidden around the map. And then in the second game, there's absolutely no way to see which ones you've gotten or ping them on the map in any which way.

So you have to open up a YouTube guide and go through all 34 of them one by one by one, and make sure you got all of them so that you can get the item to unlock the true ending. And that was really annoying the first time. I can't believe it's exactly the same again. Like they made all these little mechanical changes I can't believe it's exactly the same again. Like they made all these little mechanical changes that were like, oh, that's nice.

Oh, that's improved. This one's actually kind of a big deal because you really have to go and get them. How hidden are they? Like are we talking like? Very. Yeah. A lot of them are not that hidden.

They're right up in your fucking face. and you see them and you're like, I can't get them. And so you mark them on your map. Some are very, very hidden. And maybe you saw one before you understood what the map features were. So I spent like two hours trying to find the last one and going through a list on YouTube, only to find out that the very first one that I saw in the game was the one that I missed and

every time I looked at the stupid YouTube guy to my oh of course I got that one that's in the town how can I have missed that one and you don't have a check list yeah because there's no checklist and if you got one that was in an area that you thought you didn't get one in you might just bumble around for a while a checklist. Yeah, because there's no checklist. And if you got one, that was in an area that you thought you didn't get one in, you might just bumble around for a while. Yeah. So I had to just go reach the ease. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, when it, when it was in the first game that happened, and I'm like, you know what, this is their first try. It's open, you know, it happens. With the second one, it's just like, I'm sitting here

and that was like the last 90 minutes of the game before I went and bought the Final Pots. And I'm just like, oh, this sucks. Come on, just point a list of ones I've already got. That's all I want. I'm hitting, I'm getting waves of triforce pieces, I'm getting waves of dark world puzzles to solve in Metroid Prime 2, just right at the end.

And you can beat the game without it, the only thing that changes the ending, it's not a different boss fight. But like What is it stars in braid or was it I think they were stars I think they were stars I don't think they were stars Yeah, I think I think it was But yeah great game just not quite as as as much of wow, as the first one, which is kind of a bummer. Oh, hey, you know what? Maybe you know art stuff, maybe you'll agree. The cutscenes in the original game were really,

really rare, but the cut, I think you probably remember the one where the blast misses the blast misses the interest of one cuts cuts open a dude and fills his head with blood his helmet with blood and that's done in like an old style pixel like VGA kind of a good old PC game. The new cutscenes are done in like a more modern animated cartoon one that looks way worse. And there's way more of them. And I'm sure they thought it looked way better, but it doesn't fit the aesthetic at all, and it just doesn't quite work. It stands out. In the original, it fit perfectly right in. And then now it's like oh this is the cutscene that they had somebody animate for them. Okay. Yeah, that's that's that's a tricky that's a bummer. Um, I mean in cases this times like that where I kind of whatever

that's something like that happens I'm kind of like I wish you just did it with the sprites instead you know at that point just let let let that play out with the with the sprites having unique cutscene things instead but but yeah overall. Yeah still great game. Just just doesn't Doesn't pop the same way as the first one. Okay. I'd like to talk to you about edge runners. Unfortunately I haven't actually watched any more of it since okay It's I'm I've I've trapped myself in the wife lockout I've trapped myself in the wife lockout media room, which is, hey, honey, would you like to sit down and watch more? I'm tired. Not really.

Lockout. I was specifically given permission to bring this situation, this the way that this came up. What's wild? What's wild, what's wild? As in the middle of this conversation, I scrolled past an interview with the one piece, press, VFX lady talking about how chopper would be prosthetics in the second season.

And in the same conversation of, I really should have watched edgerunners before the podcast today came my wife asking, should we start watching one piece? I don't know. And then the discussion of one pace and all that shit. I don't know what chopper is, but he's the reindeer. Okay. I do know that it's a little adorable reindeer, man. Shit, I don't know what chopper is, but he's the reindeer. Okay, I do know that it's a little adorable reindeer, man. Oh, okay, yes.

I do know that the Netflix recommendation is now recommending a one piece anime because everyone's also watching that again, as a result of this being around. I'm not gonna watch the one piece And I'll watch one pace. Well, I will watch I will not watch fucking one piece. I can't well Dude like 40% of those episodes is like recap. It's like DBC on crack steroids I do know that like it has been pointed out and it's true that like you can read through manga pretty quickly

And I did burn through chainsaw man faster than I thought I was. I read berserk in a weekend. It was it's wild right well so and berserk berserk is like it gets wordy in terms in some at some points and then sometimes it gets like silent right it just just bobs back and forth between the two. Some depends on what manga you know like like chainsaw man is really light on words, at least in the first part. So you go real quick on that. But in any case, I mean, I think, I think curiosity watched the first episode or two of One Piece just to see what the fuck is going on in the live action, you know.

What we should probably do is you should probably watch the live action one and if that's to taste Switch over to something like one pace though. I went to one pace's website and boy. It's it's really confusing as to like How to actually watch the Dan episodes. I'll have to have somebody who knows better point me in the right direction Oh, it's not just like like a like a like a dragon ball Kai style. Uh, it is exactly that. But you go to, oh, I want to see the baritite arc and it's like join this Tisquart server.

And I'm like, I what? No, give me the magnet link. I see. Okay. Why is it so hard to read the manga someone asks? It's really hard to read the manga as a married couple together while taking care of your infant. It's a lot easier to put a TV show on the TV, motherfuckers. You lost your fucking mind.

Skill issue. You know what? You know what's really fun as a couple to both read the same thing next to each other. Ooh. Especially when you have like my like page actually reads way faster than I do. So like, that would just be disastrous. All right, so I'll talk about EdgeRunners next week. I did, so first of all, thanks for the free code CD Projekt. I got a cyberpunk and Phantom Liberty.

Haven't played that much of it, only played about two, three hours. Only really, only really two things to say. One, it feels like a completely different game, and I don't mean like, oh, because all these features are different. I mean, it literally feels like a completely different game. Like the way it moves, the way it runs, the way the controls feel, the way they added the new feature of double tapping to draw your weapon gives you the new reload animation on the first try stuff like that. The second of which is it is on a good computer.

The best looking video game from a visual perspective I have ever seen in my entire life without any without any qualification holy shit it uses that new fancy what's it called ray reconstruction which is a base it's basically a way to make ray tracing go really fast and run well hmm um the the Hmm. The, the, well, have you ever seen like clips of a guy who looks like Mark Henry in his limo in Cyberpunk?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that guy's Dexter Dishon. You meet him in a very early mission. And we're sitting in his car and he's got reflective detail off of every single thing out the window on his skin. And I can see on his sunglasses the world behind my character through my passenger side window. And it's like accurate, good reflections with colored lighting.

And it is incredibly impressive. and it's like accurate, good reflections with colored lighting. It is incredibly impressive. It's also something that I imagine most games and or settings don't need, but in a world that is called Cyberpunk, the reflecting of neon things into puddles. Puddles. All puddles.

The most important, puddles, yes, is the most important thing. It's like, number one, with a bullet. So like, when ray tracing was invented and, you know, shown off, it was like, you know, look at these reflections. And the, I vividly remember the, the Nvidia keynote was they were showing like reflections off a bullet in battlefield. And you're like, who gives a fucking shit about this? And it was always like, it was always like, hey, look, it's got better reflections at the

cost of 70% of your performance. Right, right, right. Like, you, you're running the game at 100 frames? Hey, guess what? Run it at 30 and the reflections will be better. This new feature that works with my video card, blah, blah, blah, it runs well now and it is not just like, it's not just reflections. It's also like colored lighting has a massive upgrade. It's, it's the, it is the best looking game I have ever seen in my life.

It is like I didn't get very far because I was actually doing things like what I wanted to do in the original release, which was stand on a street corner and like look at the, oh wow, this is like a wallpaper. Mm-hmm. Um, it's, it's, it's really, really fucking impressive. And I am looking forward to getting more time in on it. People who are farther than me, which is everyone, seem to be genuinely enjoying the 2.0 changes. I've heard nothing about good things. And I mean, the trailer right

off the bat looks like fucking awesome. I think one person talked about having control issues at some point, but it seemed like probably a that issue. I'm glad I waited. I'm really, really, really glad I waited. I think a while ago when we're talking about Baldur's Gate, I described how like a certain genre of RPG is like always play them like two or three years later. When the final big patch comes out and the developer announces they're moving on. Yeah.

I might my slow speed benefits a lot for things like this. Just get it in its best form. CD Projekt is like that and it seems like it's getting they're becoming more like that Like Witcher 1 to Witcher 1 enhanced edition was a little while Witcher 2 to Witcher 2 and enhanced edition was longer Fixing Witcher 3 took longer than that and Cyberpunk took even longer than that But the game feels done now whereas when the game came out it felt Patently unfinished. I remember having the strongest PC I could have at the time that that game released and the very first cutscene in the game where you look at a mirror almost crashed my computer. And just being like, what the fuck are you guys doing?

Yeah, no, the thing you hope for, I guess, is that like, again, if there is a really good game inside of the shit that launches poorly, that you can like in the future, tell people to go play it with no caveats, you know, yeah, now I you can run it to what you like Because it is still it's still a beefy like performance heavy game. I wonder what I wonder what It looks like on the PlayStation 5 or the Xbox series X in terms of like the ray tracing stuff Hmm, I cuz I'm running it at max on a PC Uh someone in chat says it's okay. Well Yeah, I haven't done a video card up great or anything like that. I think recently so I got somebody coming in my DM saying it looks close to ghost of sashima on ps5 That's high praise.

That game looks incredible. It's all I'll let you know more about more about that. Yeah, next week. Sex when you have to tell somebody to go play something with a giant asterisk and who knows maybe if you wait long enough you can enjoy your coat or two without any fucking patches whatsoever and then you'd be like hey did you buy a copy of this case? Sorry, fuck off. Too bad. Yeah. Well, anyway, we can we can get a lawsuit together. Maybe. I need to, I would.

So they're getting so asked for media is getting sued over saying that the restored content mod is coming coming to the switch version because they canceled it. And that seems legitimate. My question is, and this is really important, this game came out in a box, right? Like, there's like a box, is there a boxed copy of Knights of the Old Republic II on the switch? I would assume, so most physical games exist. Right, yeah, that's okay. So my question is

okay, so many in the chat has a pop. Does it say on the print restore content on the back of the box? Because it's so. Oh, yeah. I mean... I'm waiting for a boner 89 to answer my question. So the thing is, of course, is that games get canceled all the time and things, you know, cancellation is no unseen thing in the video game industry. However, the thing in this particular case, yeah, like they marketed the fuck out of that right off the bat, and that's what made everyone breathe easy on that trailer.

Apparently it does not. On the back of the box. Okay. What I didn't know looking at the story though, was that apparently anyone who wanted to, like they gave away a PC copy to everybody. Yeah. So that like, oh, you can just go play the steam version with their store content If you go figure it out on your own, I suppose

But yeah, that's that's that's still not that's not it. Come on. That's not the same deal See was was explicitly promised people bought that game for that result under that context Also, I'm not sure what the current state is But the last I heard The game was incompletable because of a bug I ran into where you land on on Drawn and you can't leave the Evan Hawk I Not sure if they ever fix that so it's also I mean whatever or just as on the topic like this whole story I feel like it just highlights

the biggest problem, which is not having a return system on all platforms for digital purchases. Like, that's the actual huge culprit here. Remember, I mean, I was talking about Cyberpunk and how much of a mess that had to be. Yeah, we're Sony had to like refund people themselves. Promise whatever the fuck you want and then when people are like unhappy with the fact that you don't deliver on those promises, well they like I never booted the game. I was waiting for that restored content mod.

Fuck you. Give me my money back. Yeah. So I mean PC gaming has a lot of problems like a a lot, like a ton, like a crazy amount of fucking awful problems. Um, but refunding shit on steam has allowed me to try out like hundreds of games that I don't give a fuck about and find dozens that I never would have checked out otherwise. Like it is, it is great, great system to be able to refund shit and be like, oh yeah, this sucks, or it doesn't run good on my computer, or, oh, I thought I had better controller support, or, oh, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

I barely ever use it. I really can't think of many times I've ever done it, but again, it's just, it is nice to know that it's there. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Yeah. That's fucking crazy. done it but again it's just I have it is nice to know that it's there and refund yeah exactly exactly yeah that's fucking crazy hey man as long as you'll play it for more two hours well it's more it's all good or more just like you know we're

moving into a brick we're moving away from brick and mortar fine give me all the things I could do with a physical copy of the game, you know? Actually, it's been a long time since you could return a physical copy of the game that you opened. This is better in a lot of cases. It's been a long time.

Yeah. As long as it's, okay, it had to, as long as if you broke the seal, you could no longer return it. Yeah, if you broke the seal, then you like, well we could you could trade it in we give you right right right right Fuck you, sorry. I'm about that. Yeah, okay I mean and assuming that this is not a case of we've already broken the seal and we're gonna put a copy of the disc into the plastic and give it to you bullshit Like they did for a bunch of games

I used to buy back in the day. Cause I mean, their whole thing was like, they kept the copies behind the shelf and then they would put them in, anyway, whatever. I was just reminded that I was playing a horror game that I really didn't like called Madison and the context of that stream became Can I beat it before the refund timer rolls over right?

And I can't remember if I did or the game called refund me if you can or whatever the fuck it was so Yeah, but especially for PC games in which you're gonna try games out And you don't know how they're gonna run on your computer. Like, the good refund is vital. Right? I remember back back before I was a professional content creator. And I had like a normal human PC. Yeah, I buy games all the time. The brand like fucking dog shit. I mean, the most famous one ever is FF7 way back on Windows 95. Man, that game didn't work on nobody's computer. Yeah, on a console, you don't get that part where it's like, oh, it doesn't boot or whatever. Well, usually it's rare.

Usually, usually. You think you're a compliance department would have a thing or two to say about that, but here we are. But yeah, I don't know what the metric would be, but I think having a timer and or, yeah, there's a couple things you can do to say, okay, this is a fair amount of time before you can say. If you own the game for more than 14 days,

have you played it for less than two hours? That's the easiest way to do it. I think it's worked out fairly well. And I think that to some degree, you can't avoid the fact that there's gonna be some people who are like, well, my whole existence will now be dedicated towards playing one hour and 58 minutes of every game. That's fine.

And it's like, all right, yeah, that's you, that's you, man. That's okay. What are you gonna do? That's fine. And it's like, all right, yeah, that's, if that's you, that's you, man, that's okay. What are you gonna do? That's fine. Eventually, one of the, eventually, they will, they will run over the timer and not be able to refund it. Though the question I suppose is like, what do you do for something like cyan hour wild hearts, right?

What do you do when like the purpose of this game is to be like a short and sweet experience, you know. I, I'm really torn on that. That's a really complicated topic. Mm hmm. I'm okay with things like that existing. I'm down with it. You can price it accordingly in my opinion.

You can make games with all length. Doesn't have to last two hours if that's not what you intended. Just price it accordingly. I feel like, I feel like if you're gonna make a game that lasts as long as a movie theater, that it should approach movie theater ticket pricing. Yeah. That's fine.

I think that's how I feel about that. Mm-hmm. I'd rather that than say no, everything must last. X amount of time, no matter what the idea is and whether or not it has two hours of juice in itself, you know. Cool. All right. That's it for me.

If you want to check out my crap, you can go down to twitch.tv slash past airs at. It's going to be Baldur's Gate, more separate ways, probably something else. Also on Friday, we will be enshrining into practice. Finally, the pat stares at segment, beating your wife in quotes at video games and Paige will be joining me for the continuation of the LA and War playthrough on my channel. Oh yeah, I'm Lys of Pete. I forgot about Lys of Pete. Yeah, Lys of Pete, definitely Lys of Pete. I was expecting like a competitive game to to attach that title to. But yeah, but I don't care. We've wanted to call something that for like five, six, seven years.

Okay. All right. All right. Quick word from our sponsors. This week, the podcast is sponsored by Hello fresh I love hello fresh Hello Fresh

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The one where you never finished up, you never finished the stack, you know? Yeah, and you look at it and you like both feel guilty about how many you ate, but also feel bad that you did need all of them. You know when you put that extra one that you were never going to get to the bottom of it. You knew it. Deep down in your heart. You knew it. Oh, no. But you scooped it anyway. And now you're staring at that fucking plate, aren't you? Right? Well, anyways, let's get in here. Let's let's dive in. What's happening? Let's just grab some syrup. Oh no, there's no syrup. You might as well

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What's going on? We have already sneakily covered Kamea and Star Wars Cotor 2, as well as Jesus now Jats. So look at that. We can chip away. I mean, we're basically done with the news. There's definitely nothing. Oh, wait, Unity walks back all it's shit, but it doesn't matter, because everyone I know is switching off their fucking engine. Unity apologizes to be the runtime install fees after the world gets mad at them. Yeah, so in an open letter, Mark Witten basically said, I'm sorry, and yaddy added into the runback.

And I think the summary of it is essentially the per install fee, the fucking the gangsters at your door, they only show up on the higher price plans. So the personal plan is not going to have that garnished amount on it. The enterprise and pro plans will have the per install runtime fee, but it'll be only if you hit the threshold of a million downloads and over a million dollars in the 12 month time frame. And they're also going to make sure that the versions that they supply to are only the new long-term support versions going forward. So if you're using an older version of the game, of the platform, it does not apply retroactively. So fun fact, the part where you only have to abide by any new agreement with the new version of the engine,

that was actually in the TOS. That was part of the legally binding agreement that they sent out to everybody that they kept up on GitHub that we all know that they stealthily took down last year. Well, it seems that we've gotten a little bit more information because... Is that true? Yeah! I mean, look, guys, the TOS did come down, but Unity is genuinely disappointed at how the removal of the TOS has been framed across the internet. Are they genuinely disappointed? We removed it way before the pricing change was announced because the views were too low. Oh yeah? Not because we didn't want people to see it.

Not because we didn't want people to see it. So you're saying that the lawyer's office that notarized the agreement between me and the bank to buy my house, their life, they're sitting there in their office, but you know, I never, I never pull out, Pat's mortgage to look at it. You know, I'll just throw it away. I'll just fucking throw it away.

I'll just use on this thing or two low. Yeah, it's a legally binding contract, but I mean, it's just fuck. Meanwhile, that contract that gets looked at at least two, three times a month maybe. Oh man, this thing's doing numbers. Oh shit. Yeah, it turns out views are a metric that matter when it comes to the terms of service and the decision to keep it publicly available. Well, you've worked inside QA and for companies and we've both been following the entertainment industry our whole lives. This is the most

flagrant lie. It's really funny because looking at the account recently, it seems like the way they've been handling the fallout, which again, just, you know, anyone who's working there, fucking God bless, good luck. You know, your job to spin this shit is a nightmare, but, you know, you're basically must be God's strongest warrior because getting his toughest battle. Well, like literally just be a White House secretary for this type of bullshit, right? And yeah, so the person running the Twitter accounts has been going like, hey, you know, chiming in here to say this or that or whatever the case is and Just flat out lying like this is like

It's like you this is you have like I'm surprised you didn't run every single word by the board In this time of you know in this trying time when an egg is needed time of, you know, in this trying time when an egg is needed. Lies to diffuse situations are supposed to at least pass a glance. No one ever would fall for this ever. It's terrible. It's a bad. Like I'm more offended at the incompetence of the falsehood. Yeah, then I am the falsehood.

Yeah, it definitely smells of like the legal team that pulled it down. Go, go, like it's like, hey guys, you guys pulled it. What do we say here? And then they went, just tell them down. They looked, no one was looking at it. Just say.

Views were bad. Some, just say that some system admin was looking through costs and did know what it was and canceled it. Right, right? Like, like, no, man. What are we spending $40? I don't know. And then they canceled it. And then no one noticed. Ratings, no. Very low.

The ratings were so low, you've never seen ratings this low. You've never seen views this low. It had to come down. I'm telling you, there was no other way around it. Yeah. Say you were in the process of a revision

and somebody thought it would be more prudence to pull it down before a new one went up, but then you got sidetracked and everybody forgot to put the new one back up. Like there's so many fucking better. Oh my God. Well, in any case, you know, shout out to the run back back having a little, a little stink of fun flug on the, on the docket. There you go. So I fall a lot of game dev people.

I'm sure you do a lot of indie people. This means nothing. All it seems to have done is given people the confidence to finish their current game and ship it and start learning a new engine because yeah, and nowhere in this back down do they ever say by the way we've, we're committed to never changing this price again going forward. I did.

That's it's literally just how do we know anything you say ever can be trusted at any given point like you can't and like multiple you know like the the xco and the the founder and everyone's coming on saying like we're sorry and or we yeah we fucked up and these things like that it's like that's it's just people in this chat talking about switching over to godo yeah so good though is getting all kinds of attention now as a result of this of course and then there's the other side of the discussion, which has popped up where people that are coming from like larger studios that go indie often will be like, well, I'm still going to use Unreal or something.

If you've got the ability to afford it, of course, if you've got the access, because essentially it's like, if you're making a game that is like, that Unity, that Unreal is almost like overqualified for. It's like that's a good thing because it lets you scale up, you know, if you want to. So there's some people that are just more comfortable in that environment anyway. And it's a whole discussion happening now. But either way, man, it's you've shaken the fucking tree and like a bunch of people are just out of here because you can't trust the kind of company that risks backrupting you with its policy changes retroactively overnight.

Remember that part in Star Wars where Lando was really mad at Darth Vader because he changed the terms of the deal and he says, yeah, I've changed it. Pray I don't alter the deal further. It's like that. Someone pointed out that like I think Genshin Impact runs on unity Yes, it does that's like that's a free game Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin Genshin G just because Genshin's against you know, and hunk I they're probably like a billion. What does that check look like? Yeah, that's that's that's that's that's exactly like in fate grand order to the fate game on the phones also unity game Pokemon go mm-hmm the niantic yeah yeah yeah yeah like what does that

check fucking look like right so it looks like a fucking lawsuit is what it looks like I don't want to pay it. Yeah well look I at the very least I think the the the best aspect of this is that Indies that were basically talking about canceling their games and or deleting them from existence can leading them from existence, can not do that while finishing up and then promptly serving off of this in the future, but they're no longer on a time limit to burn it all before January 1st. I have just been informed that in the past week, Mihojo, the company that makes Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Reel. And Koi over.

And Impact has posted a slew of job openings for engine development. No, kidn. Rendering development engineer, engine development for console, cloud game, engine development, cloud game, engine, engineer, etc. So, yeah, these are the kind of moments where if you're a big enough company, these are the kind of moments where you're like, we're making our own engine and then that becomes the basis of a platform that if it's like user friendly enough, I suppose, are accessible enough, you can sell that, you know, see literally unreal, see every other licenseable thing that the proprietary comes out of a game being needed for it first, and then becomes a flat platform after the fact. I would not be shocked to see Genshin, Honkai, all of Mejoyo's stuff, Pokemon, Marvel Snap, etc.

All come off unity. I would be wildly unsurprised. Yeah, and again, Indies get a chance to finish up whatever they're doing and then maybe start with the next project as opposed to having to kneecap the current one or worse. What's funny is that Capcom, you know how we've made fun of a lot of Japanese developers for being obsessed with making their own engines? And then some companies have had success in using more generalized engines.

And then you have Capcom over here with the fucking reach for the move. And like Capcom is laughing their ass off. They own their own engine, 100%. I mean, this is to be fair. This is unprecedented. Right? Not in terms of the...

Yes, it always could have happened. Yes, yes. Not in terms of the- If it always could have happened. Yes, yes. Not in terms of the names involved, but in terms of like the place that it's happening, right? On the foundation of so many games. Some very old engineer is like screaming in an office in Osaka. I told you, I told Osaka. I told you.

I told you. I was right. I told you happen one day. You says a bitches. He's got a fucking, he's got a cane. He's graying out. He's still working. And it's like, ah, the whole time.

Now you're coming to hold me, huh? Hold Tarosan in the basement. You want me to fucking handle this shit fine? God he was right he was right Yeah, what a oh my god the the cherry on top is to like gaslight everybody with piss on their face It's raining man. It's totally it's right it's strange. Ah Everybody with pits on their face. It's raining man. It's still it's right. It's straining. Ah, it's nobody looked at our Contrary Sad, nobody looked at it. Come on. So when you click on it, like is there like now like a little like do we have a little number of people viewing?

Well, you know what it needs. It needs a fucking guest book. Mm-hmm. Okay. I came to see the Unity TOS. and guess book. I came to see the Unity TOS. Yeah. All right. So yeah, we hit Unity, we hit Kamiya, we hit on the Microsoft Baldur's gate stuff, we hit Jats. Oh my God. We hit Kotor too. There's another detail out of that, so there's a lot of stuff from that internal Microsoft thing, but the most interesting thing by far is that 75% of the people who own an Xbox own the shitty Xbox. Hmm, the low end. Yeah, like it's actually been really strange why they have been so obsessed with feature

parody with that thing because it sucks and holds everything back. Holds everything. It holds three, because three quarters of people who own an Xbox have that. Because when you go to the store, it's the one with the lower number on it. It's the one that's cheaper also. But that's what I mean. Yeah. You walk in, you look at the shelf, you see the Xbox and you see the one that's

affordable and you go, okay, I'll go and get that one. Yeah. I've been, I've been, someone has asked me to describe what is happening with the payday three As far as I can tell the payday three situation is really funny and that they release an online Co-op shooter game that has no offline play at all and it has been unplayable for its entire release I think we're going on like four days now Just doesn't work. Is that what's happening? Yeah, it just doesn't work Just doesn't work. Is that what's happening? Yeah, it just doesn't work

Man That's gonna be a thing forever, right off-line things that are forced online because shut up get online we want you online So I will say one thing and I know this is obviously the game that I really like and so You know take it with a grain of salt. But remember when Enwalker had all that server shit and it's like oh my god it's so pot you can't get into play. But people were playing it you just had to wait. Right? The cues are bad. Yeah the cues were terrible and there were some problems when you kick from the cue but like when you got in you would just play it. It wasn't completely broken. Yeah, the forced online shit is really,

it really says a lot about like, the importance, like this is a company that's like metrics or die. Like we, if we cannot get all the info about everything you're doing, if we can't force you to, you know, sign up for some bullshit service or whatever the fuck they got going on with their, again, offline game. They'd rather kneecap the entire project. Do you, do you remember,

Outriders? I remember the font of the, of the logo. And I remember a vaguely greenish blue color behind it and some kind of not smite characters. So Square Enix paid a lot of people a lot of money to stream that game's demo. And not quite as many people, a lot of money to stream that game, Dave, release. And they were all very adamant. You have to stream this game within this like eight hour window on Dave release.

And so that the whole Twitch front page is outriders. and so that the whole Twitch front page is Outriders. And every single person was streaming Outriders and was stuck on the God Day and Main Menu for all of their sponsored streams was the main menu. Like you'd go to the category on Twitch and it was like 800 to 1000 streamers sitting on that game's main menu and they were all like time streams. They were all like play it for two hours, play it for three hours.

And it was, it is, it is the biggest fucking mess I have ever seen. And every time I see a game launch that's just totally unworkable for days and days and days. I think about it. Shout out to the time that I was sponsored to browse a series of videos that were not working. And if I just had to, yeah, just had to kind of chill and be like, well, the, what was it? That was the thing, you know, anyone who was there remembers. There was a, we sat and watched some stuff, but there was a bit, the period of time where we couldn't. And we just kind of chilled and watched, uh,

watched nothing for a while. And, you know, it's like, hey, man, we're on the clock. All right. I showed up to do what you wanted. I'm here, yeah. I was here. Ready to live. The office doors are locked.

Ready to work. I remember interviewing for a telemarketing job at which point I showed up and everyone was standing outside and had been for 1 1 1 2 half hour because the boss forgot to come in and unlock the building. And then they finally showed up and yelled at everyone that they had to stay an extra hour to make up for the hour. They weren't there in the morning and I just fucking walked away. I just walked away.

And my dad gave me shit. He was like, didn't you go to a job interview this morning? I'm not fucking working for that piece of shit. That's a fucking pile of fuck. He's like, oh, you guys are bad. off the days I mean I'm not I mean that's really a blessing that's that's what you want to see right off the bat you know it tells you everything you need to know I'm a fan of finding out everything you need to know right up front anyway the other thing I guess and it's this folder has quite a few things in it, but the Tokyo Game Show trailers start dropping.

Oh my God, that was this week, wasn't it? Yes, and there are a lot, but you know, just in glancing over the list. This first of all, can I tell a slightly personal story before we go? Hey, I love Capcom, Capcom. I love you so much I will kiss you on the mouth. You make my some of my favorite games Capcom invited me to go down to San Francisco Mm-hmm to play Dragon's Dogma. Mm-hmm and

I was like, you know what? I'm I got a new baby here. I Don't really feel like going down to San Francisco for a single day. I'm gonna pass. And then people went and they did it and then they came back and I'm watching their impressions. And their impressions are I was allowed to play it for an hour and here's the six minutes of footage. I'm allowed to put up. And I saw that and I'm like, if I had gone down to fucking San Francisco and Walked into a cackle office and they would have told me you can put up six minutes of footage

I would have killed myself there on the spot in their office Like street fighter was very limited. It was very limited. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, yeah, I want to change the director to trajectory of the people's lives in front of me. Yeah, I think there was, well, at least from what I got, I saw there was an invite for like a New York thing that was a bit closer, but still like the, yeah, getting on a plane for that type of frame versus a six-hour drive you know a little bit more feasible but nonetheless that's up front you got it you got to you got a lot of people know that that sucks or at the very least like the other thing you do is like you go you're allowed to put out this much but you can play for more right and that's that's what I know, for example, Project L,

a lot of the people that went in to write to go play that got to play for two days, I think, but they were only able to put out, like I think an hour or so, a footage. So, oh, that's plenty. So yeah, we got FF7 stuff. Lots of FF7, like lots. Like I'm shocked.

I watched like 45 minutes of FF7 rebirth gameplay. Sephiroth calls Cloud a puppy. Dude, okay. Okay. Like it wasn't, it wasn't intense enough before What okay, you played ff7 remake like I made the joke about like every time Sephiroth shows up Like I feel like he wants to like whisper into clouds ear like would you fuck me clown? Okay, so and then and then when then when Tifa shows up in the final battle

He's just like get out of here. You're annoying. Gross. Woman. OK. Now you've got like Cloud with big fat puppy eyes staring at Sephora. I'm going, oh, I want a little puppy. Like, that boy is a fucking gay for that man. So what's, what's, that is a gay relationship. Maybe my memory is a little bit like lacking.

Maybe I don't, you know, but I seem to recall that flashback of when they were first hanging out doing their missions and all that. The one where Sephiroth is just the cold professional. Yes. And that is how I felt that was played. Extremely super far ahead of this fucking little,

whatever, I'm barely acknowledging your existence. I'm here to do my thing, you know? And it was relatively limited due to the Popeye arms at the time. Yes, but the impression given was the cold professional. Maybe I misread it? Maybe you misread it? I'm possible. Why would I even, like, look twice to care about someone who's disposable?

But, like, they've got the two swords and the swords are almost touching. Almost. But not quite. Right. And it's like, Tifa, I would, you're worried about Arith, I'd be worried about something else. That's more like,

you know what you're like, more like, more like you know what you know like more like more like Semi-Rough Okay, so Okay, the games the games 45 years old. I feel confident saying this what makes that scene even funnier is that it didn't happen And that's what Cloud wanted to happen. Like that's the part that's just like wild. Or it's like... And maybe that's why we're seeing what we're seeing here.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Damn. Damn. What if Sephiroth patted me on the head and called me a puppy What if Jesus what if the in-can in world is exactly what the fans wanted Okay, it looks fun. Game looks cool Segways lots of stuff Segway season of Segways

Okay, so that's great right cloud and itchy bond rolling together on the segue is hilarious and awesome God bless it right genius the edit of Sephiroth on the segue that's super high up with the giant fucking oh yeah the Christina oh my god the absolute best my segway is so much longer cloud oh my god oh man oh gee what do you remember when did ff7 remake come out when did that happen ff7 four ago? I want was it three? 2020 so okay, so we're in what we're 20 we're 2023. Oh Okay, I thought we're 22 there for a second. Okay, so came out three years ago Do you remember three and a half years ago when we were watching the trailers for FF7 remake and there was a big

Curfuffle lots of discussion, lots of interviews about like, hey, Nomura, Katase, you guys are gonna make sure that FF7 remake still has all that goofy stupid shit in it, right? It's not gonna be super serious, right? And they're like, oh, don't you worry, Cloud, definitely dress and drag, we got you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's teleport to now, in which I'm watching this, and I'm like, I forgot just how much goofy stupid shit is in Final Fantasy VII. Cloud shoes. I mean, it's clown shoes. And when you've got a... Did you see the fight where Mr. Dolphin helps you?

And if I could Mr. Dolphin's back. And when you've got a- Do you see the fight where Mr. Dolphin helps you? And if I could Mr. Dolphin's back. And when you've got a runtime that is now stretched out even further, clown shoes becomes an entire segment. You know, you've got character development on jokes. Back story. Yeah. No, like I think the hell the the the the the hell house like is the that Extrapolation of how they treated what hell house was to what hell house became is just like that applied to everything is like

It's in good hands. I'm good with it. I'm good with it The whole Joe Beach moment is going to be oh, it's gonna be like a whole thing. It's a whole thing. That's the whole thing. Like the, the, the, the, the, the couple episodes back or whatever it was like, oh man, they better not get rid of that. And it's like, what are you crazy? Are you out of your fucking mind? in which you have to like put a fake mustache on cloud and fucking serve him drinks to find out like or and his plans and then are talked to the girls and find out how disgusted they are while smiling in his direction. You know, like there's a whole I'm sure that's a bit of no question. All of it. God bless, take your time, take your goddamn time. Yeah, so we saw a bunch of that. There was also, as we touched on just now, a fuck ton of, like a dragon, as well, like a 10 minute story trailer and then another eight on top of that I Feel incredibly conflicted about the like a dragon trailer Because I was told don't watch that trailer big spoilers. Mm-hmm

I then watched the trailer because I don't give a fuck Mm-hmm, and I understand what people were saying But I feel like it's part of the game's premise. Okay. I feel like the basic premise of a game is not a spoiler. I mean, what I know is America, but like that, anything beyond that,

I've clicked in and I started seeing some context and I was like, yeah, I'd rather dodge. Yeah, you know, I know that I have a little bit more like when I was completely in the dark, I could watch and let the whole thing wash over me. But now that I kind of know what I'm looking at a little bit, it's actually more dangerous for me to watch. So I clicked through a little bit and then avoided it. I feel... There's V-Tubers in this game. Wow. That's like main characters. Wow.

Which is wildly appropriate. These games are topical. And then at the same time, time like in terms of spoilers or so I think like I was also I clicked on the the Kiryu one and it's just him being emo in a bar and I was like oh yeah I yeah that's it that's fairly consistent with the Kiryu's character nothing else going on I was like all right that's that's that's the tone, you know? Yeah, I feel I feel like the the things people warned me about were things that you would learn

within the first sitting of sitting down and play the game, but I've played every single one of these fucking games who knows. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna talk about it here. I do think that the story things that they're going for with Kieru specifically are really smart in including him into this game. I think going to America is incredible, especially Hawaii, because there's a lot of large Japanese population in Hawaii, so it's a bond and Kieru in them don't have to learn how to speak English, but they can have lots of, I can't speak English shenanigans. I like, go ahead.

And uh, uh, fucking, fucking Johnny Gat, a K, a Dr. Han and Danny Trejo are going to show up. Daniel Day Kim is going to be there. And it's a bond's going to look at him and he's gonna be going I am a dragon Daniel take him I Wish you understood what the fuck I was talking about anyway, I'm done. That's okay The I like that For a while now there's been that little oh oh my god he's gone he's completely gone I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry. That shot's so bad. Oh fuck. Oh my god. Oh Okay I'm gonna be yeah, go without me. That's okay. That's okay. I wish I wish I was there But I don't I don't know where we are um No, the the the the thing where the the meme conversation of like, man, when is persona gonna make a game that's not

that's for kids in college or adults grown up, which we've had that we've had that conversation here and then it turns out it's been echoed a million times elsewhere. And then like Catherine is like, oh, here's the adults or whatever. But for the most part, like all these stories about Japan and high school and Yad-Yadda and so on. The Yakuza franchise was not at all in this space, but now by becoming an RPG and becoming an RPG about about a bunch of adults being fucking weirdos. A bunch of old people acting like humongous weirdos and nerds and geeks is like in his 40s and carries in his fucking late 50s. So Yakuza has become that RPG, right? Like it was not an RPG before,

but it just took that mantle of, here's the thing you were looking for with a bunch of adults, with adult ass lives and problems, being completely wacky. It's pretty fucking, it's pretty hilarious that they just kind of swerved for it because like no one was taking it, you know?

And of course, doing it and like no one was taking it, you know? And of course doing it and not taking it seriously at all where the summons of the fucking, like every summons is just insane. Like it's, yeah, it's, Yeah, you see a bunch of, you see Gary Buster Holmes's sister. Exactly, I prototype it.

And also the crabs and like it's the perfect clips to drop on Japanese TV and have celebrities in the corner do their react faces to like it's exactly that you know um for any one of those little summons could be a commercial for a product if they held up a a can at the end so yeah fuck it if atlas ain't gonna do it if no one else is going in is is is try to hit that if we're all still going for high school then so be it. Yakuza will take the fucking adult RKG.

So Yakuza anymore, which is I'm having a lot of trouble. I'm having a lot of trouble doing. We've moved over like a dragon. Like a dragon. Mm hmm. And a name change with a system change in gameplay like it's not yeah, it's true. Well, actually, it's extra confusing cuz like a jaragon guide N is actually just another care UK With actual combat, but it's a side story to y'all cuz a seven like a dragon so all

Anyway, I appreciate that that's how we got this this type of game eventually, you know All right, so a couple other things we saw There's they showed off a new Royal battle royale my hero game, which that's a genre that makes sense for the franchise. Oh, let's see that. What's it called? Ultra Rumble. It's a 3v3, a melee, uh, Battle Royale style game. Um, you know, anime thing, but yeah, I think that that if you want to go third person action on things like that then might as well hit that genre as well It only the fucker this looks like fucking rumper You know

This looks like rumper verse It's there's a there's a what you're called there was a jojo last it not not the last and uh whatever it was called The Not the last stand. Whatever it was called. The Fivergate. But there was a JoJo battle royale we talked about some time ago, you know? But, yeah, melee, melee, re-wrable. I mean, melee battle royale, rather. That's a thing.

Last survivor. We feel that survivor. We wanted it to be last stand, but it was not last stand, and that's why I was upset. Yes, last survivor, that's why I was upset. Yes last survivor That's what it was. Hey, how how is like a dragon gonna keep one-uping themselves with these incredible titles? Cuz y'all cuz a seven like a dragon is like inspired, but then you have

Like a dragon infinite wealth, but because it's infinite. There's a gigantic eight on the fucking logo and Then like that's, that's incredible. The man who erased his name, I don't know if there's any puns on that, but I don't know. He's Joe now. Well, look, if, if, if resident evil village figured it out, then I'm sure TeamRGG can do it. Like I said, the next game will be called RE6. Yeah, I think that both came up with that.

All right, we saw the,'s that they showed you under night two So we don't have to call it unicis we can just call it under night two fine Do can we? I'm sure there's some fucked up thing we can call it. Yes. You can call it unicis Celas if you want to That's so under night in birth to Unicis But yeah, three new characters Yes, if you want to. Oh God, that's so bad. Under night in birth to... We're gonna call it that. ...unicess. But, yeah, three new characters. Tekken showed off Fang.

And... P3 Reload. GunVolt is getting a... A-A-A-B-Rhythm game. Did not expect any noise about Gun gun vault, but here we are. A lot of Japanese trailers that it's interesting because you know when you see the like game show, Western game show style like, where's the gameplay? It's just like a tone trailer with, yeah, breathy vocals, right?

So the, the, the, the equivalent for a Tokyo game show is, it says PV. And then it'll be, you you know an idle song or a The Witcher McCallet song Whatever Jake Jay pop song and then like a bunch of art will flow by and you have no idea what the game actually is So the near the nearer the near automata trailer originally was like that. It was like a pizza But four pieces of concept art and like some, some soft music bunch of that What I I scry clicked through

um and I saw Was it hotel bar salona? I saw this like possible Metroidvania-esque thing cool character design for the the main character Metroidvania-esque thing, cool character design for the main character. Movement and combat looked a little unfinished, but you know, it seemed to be a thing. Character designs were interesting at the very least.

Sandland, a bit more of that as well. I had still kind of unclear as to what that is. I mean, it's the Toriama game. It looks great. I just, yeah, I'm not exactly 100% sure either. I also, I guess I, I don't, I feel like I read a chapter of it, but maybe I forgot. But there's a character in that that is just Darbara. That isn't, but is I mean, right? We can just the same conversation we always do about Toriyama having a highly

limited art palette. Yeah, you know, Master Roshi is just God in Dr. Slump and there's a not Yamcha character as well. So how many Vegeta's do you need? Yeah. No, but I think I think, um, uh, Beelzebub's dad is not, I don't think he's, no, guys, I don't think he was confirmed to be actually Dobrera, right?

I thought I thought that was not, I thought it was just like, it's the same design, but we didn't actually can link and confirm that it's the same. Anyway, um, Dragon's Dogma 2. Uh, dude, a bunch of footage of that. So drag, okay, as the rest, as the one of two people here that is, I would say, an expert on dragon's dogma That looks like the game that they wanted to make and then had to put out dragon's dogma this looks like dragon's dogma but more

I thought that was darker isn't No, no, no, the dragon's dogma got cut in half in development. And then it got cut in half again to ship. So like the Dragon's Dogma we got was like a pale imitation of what it was supposed to be. And then they showed off a bunch of really, really normal shit and cat dudes. And then they showed off a new class where you have a fucking staff that you use like Darth Maul that you can also use telekinesis to do magic bullshit with.

And knowing that there's a bunch of zany ass fucking classes from dragons dog him online. Oh, it's gonna be so good. Oh, it's gonna be so goddamn good. It looks exactly what it's one of those things like, okay, people who play dragons dogma, do you like what you see? It's exactly what you's one of those things like okay people who play drag is dogma Do you like what you see it's exactly what you were supposed to see It was exactly what it was supposed to be looks the same but more and more of the more Yeah, I remember how much Y'all were big enough d a does this I Wonder like does the itch that it scratches?

Is there any overlap with, like, new Elden Ring content at all? No. Okay. Okay, here's the itch that Dragon's Dawn of Scratches. I want to be a Devil May Cry character and fight things from monster hunter nice, okay? That that that is what Dragon's Dogma is That is a really fucking specific niche That's I want to play it the

The first demos combat Definitely like Was a far from what you just described but if it ended up in that place that's pretty sick Yeah If it ended up in that place, that's pretty sick. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, and I kind of, there's a lot, but I kind of just like stopped on those. I don't know if we're sorry anything else. Nothing of note. Apolog- I apologize to- What is that?

E3 reload. I'm aware that, you know, we were like, oh boy, this holiday season is, oh, it's crazy. Who will thank goodness it'll be calm next year? No! Like a dragon and a 5-7 rebirth coming out right next to each other. Get fucked! I can't wait for some random time in the future out of nowhere at propol of nothing while no one was looking.

Oh, I had person on three. Yeah, P3 reload. Yeah, I just mentioned. Yeah. I can't wait for while no one's paying attention. High-fi rush to chair shot to the back of the fucking head to just drop in on the middle of some season of highly anticipated shit coming out. Did you see the prototypes for high-fiber rush? No. So they put out some of the very first prototypes

for high-fiber rush back when they're like crash test dummies. And it's all gray box. It's really fascinating. And the most interesting thing by far is that Chai's run is as is in the very first prototype. Nice, nice. That was the first thing they nailed was he's going to run like this. To the music. Mm-hmm. Very cool. Yeah.

Now, I want that sequel to come out of fucking nowhere. Don't even tell us. Yeah, now I want that sequel to come out of fucking nowhere. Don't even tell us. Do the exact same thing a second time. Okay, well in any case, that's pretty much that. I think, yeah, again, there's some ackey stuff, but we'll see that in a couple days time. That'll be... PGS.

Who days from now? Do your thing. Let's take some letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to castle super beast mail at gmail.com. That's castle super beast mail at gmail.com. We've got one coming in from... Still on the bit. I saw Danny Trayho. I'm going to finish this podcast and just sob into my shirt laughing. I saw, I can't, like, I saw a picture of Danny Trayho in the game,

but I didn't know that Johnny Gatt Yeah, it was also in there Also you also played a character named Dr. Han on the good doctor The good doctor. Yeah, the good doctor is that doctor that has the severe autism has the severe autism. That's the premise of the show, by the way. Okay. It's that the character has autism. Okay.

And Dr. Hahn is like, you can't be a good doctor because you have autism. Dr. Hahn is the villain, by the way. That's probably why he's going to be the villain in, like a dragon, because he played the evil Dr. Hahn. So the show is about how you can't be a surgeon if you have autism? No, it's how he's the best surgeon because he has autism. Is the good doctor any good? I have heard that people with autism do not like that show.

I thought the correct answer would be he's the best. No. Okay. Well, maybe try one piece. It's great. I had a number of people, by the way, basically go, hey, yo, like, it's not just the live action show. Like, Luffy is like, no, no, I had a number of people go, like, Luffy is autism coded in all versions of it. And it's like, that's actually a thing, you know, it's potentially intentional.

And it's like, wow, okay, well, there you go. Then they, then they, you know, the adaptation is on point. So what you're saying is that when, when Luffy is standing there, like, you can't be a pirate and he goes, I am a pirate. I am a pirate. You can't, you can't dissuade him. I can't do this. You can't dissuade him. Yeah If that's if that if that's just carrying the energy that the your resource material has then it's like

You know they fucking got it man I got to send William the clip after this so he knows why I'm about to vomit on the floor laughing Okay, I am a blank is, is I guess. I am a surgeon. I am a surgeon. Okay, I can, I can feel it. I can feel it. I am a surgeon, Dr. Han.

I can feel it. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay. Yeah. I mean, Hey, emails. Yeah, no, it's been a long time since tropic thunder. You know, you got a To tropic thunder gets funnier like every day

Every day Like that movie lays out the rules for specific representation And then other things just ignored it. Like that's a movie that got away with the fucking character in full blackface for the whole movie. Sure did. Not gonna listen to these people. Sure, and I mean, I've said it before, but from what I last time I checked the notes, most black people fucking thought that shit was hilarious.

Like, I have yet to encounter a black person who thought a topic done. I can't. I can't, you know, there is no model if, but like, you know, the, uh, the message board says, yeah, that's it. That, that fucking hit. Um, Is Ben Stiller's portrayal of simple Jack retro actively more offensive than Robert Downey Jr. in Blackface? I don't know. I don't have the measuring stick for these things. It's it's it's a it's a debate.

There's a debate you could have. I don't feel qualified to have the neither do I, but like, you know, do I, but like, you know, there's some people that you can probably, you want to talk to somebody from, uh, uh, that we're gonna need somebody from both groups. Yes. Exactly. Pass it out. Pass it out. That's it. You know, um, but there's, there is something that is hilarious every time like a show or some, or piece of media comes out that's's like we're gonna tackle representing this or that to everyone from said group is like oh god, did you just stop me? Don't, just don't. Yeah. Alrighty.

Um, here's one and it's coming in from Reminds me because RE5 remake is coming up and I would and people ask me and they've asked me a couple times like what do you think they should do? And I'm like I think it would be really brave of them to make that Can we exactly as just just look man? I play that be so brave I played a mass effect mission and I was like what the fuck is happening right now? I don't know yeah, I don't know what was happening. That was crazy We can communicate with the death. Did you know what is that how that works? Okay, it is Anyways

We got one coming in good emails. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we got one coming. Any good emails? Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. We got one coming in here from Tom. He says they're willy and pat. Besides the video game crash of 1983, what would you call the worst or most disappointing year for games? That's pretty good. The year PS3 came out. There was, there's a 1998 that we always talk about and there's a couple others like that.

We're currently experiencing a pretty good year. But for the bad, I feel like there's a window like, it's not I don't know about the exact year, but there's a window of like 2013 street fighter cross tech 2013 Street Fighter Cross Tekken into like 2014 Pee yeah, you're talking about the 7th generation you're talking about the 7th generation of video again Street Fighter Cross Tekken and PT That no, we we just had the same answer. Okay, we both just said the same thing But like but like nip but like not just a gen because a gen last more than a couple years, right? Yeah, I'm trying to he asked about a year. I'm trying to nail it down to as much period fucking sucked ass I'm trying to when they were gone gone so bananas with the fucking passes and the Shared-owner-shoes-used games. Yeah, I'm trying to I'm trying to nail it down to a 12 month period somewhere halfway between

2013 and 2014 there was the worst It's fucking terrible Yeah We got one coming in from Eric who says hey patent woolly the karmic dye system in bg3 Revived the debate in d&d about whether dm should ever lie about their roles to protect players from the massive strings of bad luck On one side people say it's not fun to have your whole party killed due to consecutive bad roles While others say the randomness is part of the game learn to live with it. What do you think? Those are both accurate, but

Yeah, should lie 40 minutes into your fucking play through somebody fireballs and kills the entire party So you have to re-roll everything that bullshit. I think a good DM will have the ability to like roll with the punches and kind of make Something interesting out of what you get, but I think What the the DM's job should be there should be to know, know your friends, and kind of know the group a bit, and feel out if that's the right call to make. It should never be off the table, right? You should definitely say that like, no,

sometimes you can flourish, exaggerate, and do stuff to help make the experience a bit more fun. But whether you have a group of friends that's down with like rolling in the failure and turning it into something wonderful, a disco-esque group of people that will, you know, flounder and make something more amazing out of the failure is one group versus another kind that's kind of just going to be sad about it and maybe not have as much fun with that, you know. I think you have to feel that out.

Yeah, it's two different views of what the Dungeon Master is supposed to be. Some people view about it and maybe not have as much fun with that. I think you have to feel that out. It's two different views of what the Dungeon Master is supposed to be. Some people view it as the arbiter of a law in the campaign, like the rule man, or as others, I believe correctly view the DM as the facilitator for a good experience. The DMs have a screen so that they can hide shit. Yeah, one of the best, one

of the goofiest things I ever heard about in D&D was the idea of just rolling fake dice that don't do anything random. That's good. Yeah, why not? Because that makes the party that's interesting. Vib Curator is absolutely the deal. You just need to know one, who you're dealing with, and two, how much did you plan for the fail routes? How much do you have there? Do you have a group of people that can, well, I'm just repeating myself. Yeah. It's, it's, it's that. Absolutely. Lying should never be off the table.

I mean, the very, one of the very first things in the players' handbook and the Dungeons Masters handbook is that the rules on the paper are suggestions and that they are just there to help you and your buddies have a good time. There's absolutely no reason that you can't home brew your own personal rule or change a scenario so that it's more fun for the party or change the description of something. Like there's absolutely no, like yeah, like someone in the chat just mentioned, it's called a guide. It's a handbook, it's not a fucking chiseled in stone manual. chiseled in stone manual. There's, I think you roll for every action you do and they roll for every action that the world does, right?

Like, so, yeah, you can, you can, you can, you can, well, I'll take, here's an example, right? So the Baldur's Gate 3 voice cast actually recently did a D&D session on a show called High Rollers, which they did two Twitch streams of them doing a D&D campaign as their characters, right? The first thing that happened was they did a combat

against some spirits, which they performed abysmally. Like, like, no, I don't think anyone rolled higher than like a five. Like, they're, they're botching it really bad. And so the DM, I think, very obviously went, hey, someone came in to save you and then hand-waved away all the enemies because it doesn't suck like you guys are actually going to fucking beat them. Right? Like if they were doing that show and that party had to actually fight all of those enemies, they would have lost. So and that's not very fun at all for the first hour of your game. But if you're setting up a game of Kingdom Death monster and you fight the lion and

Half of you get murdered outright kingdom death monsters is an antagonistic That's the point, you know, so there's no there's no safety net on that like when you what you roll is what you get because exactly Dying as part for the course and at that point. It's time to take on a new villager because like there's a system in the game for having to lose your progress and restart, you know. Not quite the same situation but a D&D game where you make a character for fucking an hour and then you craft a whole backstory and you have a whole thing. And they die fucking curse flat and and that's when landfill Tim shows up man space first onto the spikes you know God what was oh yeah is the Mario movie animated just Mario trips on the first fucking thing and just slowly impaled. Yeah.

Alright, last one, let's take from... No name given? Hello, Grimiss and Hamburger. And anordinate number of RPGs. I'm the Hamburger, right? I'll take Grimiss, I like purple. I like hamburgers. Wait, wasn't there something? What did they they confirmed what grimace was, right? He's a fucking freak. His milkshake kills you. He's a taste bud.

He's a taste bud. He's a giant taste bud. Yeah, they confirmed it. I think it's really strange how Grimis went from McDonald's villain to just another part of the monagery of fast food, freakazoids. Wait, was he a villain? Yeah, that's why he's grimace. Ah. Like, because it's like, wait, why is one of your fast food mascots the face you make

when you eat dog shit? Well, again, hamburger is clearly a villain as well. That's still is. Yeah, no, uh, two years ago, um, they confirmed that grimace is a giant taste bud. Weird. That's fucking weird. Y'all didn't hear about it. Why is he purple? Was he fucking drinking lean? Yeah, man. Grim is came to fucking party your grim is getting turt That's what it is

There's nothing you can fucking eat in the kitchen There's nothing purple. There's nothing purple. Yeah, there might be there might be great crush back in the day There used to be great crush, but really I didn't know about that. I want to say I want to say there I think there was yeah. I Used to like rip crush a lot Anyway, and an ordinate number of RPGs seem to either start good reach a peak in the middle and then fall apart in the final act and This applies to all kinds if the game has talking and also combat, balance seems to go out of whack and skew towards the combat in the last third.

Plot seems weird and abstract, and the focus is taken away from actual characters. Many final and final dungeons are god awful. There are exceptions, like FF6 or so, but there are so many examples across time and subgenre that I can't ignore the trend. examples across time and subgenre that I can't ignore the trend. VTM B Earthbound. That's fanfare of the masquerade loved lines. Plainscape, Torment, FF15, FF3, Fallout 3, or great games that slog to the finish because they don't stick the landing. Fucking pathfinder, Kingmaker is like one of the worst final dungeons I've ever played in any game.

Note that some of these stories have good endings, but the last part of the actual game sucks to play. Uh, even FF1's Gate 1 and 2 end badly also. Even FF9 has an amazing moment that probably should have been quickly followed with an ending, but then it sort of trudges for long for another 5 hours. What do you think is going on here? Man. It's really hard. Persona.

Persona. Just... There's always that bit. There's always that bit where you're like it's it's been time for the credits You know, so I think I know understand the reason for this But this is arm-cared armchair game design from somebody who's not a game designer or made a game's ever I believe there's an issue with these narrative experiences compared to them as interactive mediums. The climax slash denumah for a story means that ideally the height of action should not necessarily be the height of the narrative.

However, as you get further into a RPG in which you are having to fight your ass off all the time, the climax of the narrative should also be simultaneous to the climax of the action. So what ends up happening is, well, the final dungeon should be the biggest test of your abilities. And it should be the most complicated, difficult part of the game. The exam. Except, except usually by the time you get there, you don't actually care about that part of the game anymore and you're actually just wanting to see what happens to your party and what happens to the world and what happens to the story. So what ends up happening is the frustration from having difficulties in the final, final, final, final, final moment are compounded because they're stopping you from finding out what

happens to your characters. Yes, I would also say that if in Persona's case, I'm reminded of how there's a calendar showing you that there's a, you know exactly how long you have to wait. There's a deadline at this point. And there's like, I guess, X weeks of cleanup you have to do, but there's going to be a unavoidable amount of just like conversations that don't matter, wrap up to like smaller minor relationships when something big and looming is pending and it's right there. There's going to be like, I've talked a bunch about the whole, this is how we say for

a while. Like the P4 and P3 had it bad, but like P4s were ridiculous. You've solved the mystery and now go do 25 levels of a fucking dungeon before you can fight the final boss. But like five was the one where I remember, like I was actively like, like I was actually done and satisfied completely while that last last last bit just kept stretching out, you know, and yeah, and it's usually because like you said,

there's that exciting moment, right? Be it the villain, the reveal, like you said, there's that exciting moment, right? be it the the villain, the reveal, the heist, all of that stuff and and you lose that you deflate after that point and the energy kind of just like starts to wane and then those those highs slowly fade off. I know it's not an RPG, but like just because it's but it because it stands out as such a just the impact of how just because it's, but it because it stands out as such a just the impact of how sudden and good it was was the God of War remake, not remake the God of War 2019. Mm-hmm. Anding, right, the way that played out and then you just do it.

Yeah, I'm still. And then you, that game has an actual den you might which most games don't have. Like I'm still like impacted and I still think about how good that finale was. It reminds me a lot of a full metal alchemist in that full metal alchemist has this bombastic huge action ending. And then it has like a chapter or two of like, okay, so here's every putting going on with their lives. And here's what they're up to. And here's what their plans for the future is. It's like a nice little book end. And I know that like depending on how long a game is to like there can be a

thing where for some people they're like I don't want to say goodbye to these characters and it's sad and I want to spend more time with them. But you got to kind of balance that I think. You have to really like in a game where you can choose to go spend more time with somebody versus like, it's forcing it on you or so. I start to get upset with games that start moving that wall away like the Simpsons couch gag, you know, and then in the end, I look, I think back on the game and I'm like, oh yeah, I did like that game. But then when I recommend it to somebody and then they go, but what about this partner? Oh go, oh my god, right. Fuck. I almost deleted that part from me my brain because it was like there's quality

There was and then there was quality again, you know, it becomes trifles pieces in your brain It reminds me like y'all cuz a seven like a dragon is one of my favorite RPGs of all time But it has like this pacing problem So bad. Like so bad. Um, that if I was like reviewing it, I would have like knocked a point off the fucking score. Um, you play like seven, eight, I forget how many chapters you play a bunch of chapters of that game and you're having a great time and you're playing Dragon Quest with with itchamon basically. And then the game stops and goes, hey, dude, do you want to grind your ass off in a

gigantic battle arena and do like, like 40 stages of increasingly hard enemies? No? Well, then you're going to get your ass kicked by the next chapter because you won't be behind a level. So do it. Go grind. Yeah. Like, so like, I did it and I did all of it and then got there and still felt under level like it is wild it feels like they cut a whole chapter from the game you were talking about how ff16 carries the 14 formula of like big bombastic boss fight followed by low-ass fucking busy work and down 16 when it dropped that bit in Dalmechia, it, I forget the part, but there's a line that actually makes fun of the fact

that you're now doing busy work. Like you write when you meet that the girl who, and the brother that are like, you're gonna take care of the orphan kids or so. Your passport or your relationship. Yeah, right around the passport part. There's an actual line someone says in the game that's like literally making fun of the fact that you're off to do a bunch of like little trivial nonsense, you know.

Yeah, I that is the worst part of the whole game. That that passport section in that tiny little area. I mean, stopping you from in that tiny little area. I mean, stopping you from doing the coolest thing ever. I can, like, what makes it a bit more bearable is when you're in a new environment, so at the very least, you're like, well, I've never seen this area before around every corner or whatever is a little, is let's go talk to some people and see what's happening

in a new zone, you know? Like you can give reasons to explore a new zone and that in and of itself, with a bit of busy work is not too bad. But when you know that you're in a downtime part and you're like no, we're committed to this length, like I don't know what you're looking at in the play test metrics, you know,

with what players need or what, but it't know what you're looking at in the play test metrics, you know, with what players need or what, but it feels as if you're like, no, we need exactly three hours of boring before we start getting exciting again. I think that putting in a little nudge and a wink, like, ha, this stuff sucks in games, doesn't it? Doesn't work when you're still doing it. Right, like, having a character going,

yeah, I know it's really annoying to go get five claws. They can't then immediately send you out to go get five claws. Right. It just makes you even more annoyed because you're like, well, wait, what the fuck they know? They know. I don't want to do it. Yeah, that ending thing, it fucking. Yeah, games and badly. It's very specifically why when I talk about games that I've beaten on the podcast or on my show, I always make a really specific mention of the game actually ends really well because it is so, so, so rare for anything to stick the landing.

Because what also- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I-

I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I-

I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- little bit past that HD era, we started to enter a thing around where games would have the fucking insane ass intro, the vertical slice somewhere in the middle and the ending, and then they would just fill for fucking time in between, right? I will never forget, and I know I've said it a hundred times, but I will say it again, I will never forget the vertical slice for Gears of War II was what they decided to put in as the last level of the entire game. The vertical slice that they showed off at E3 of Gears of War II

is the final level in the game. Damn. Okay. And it is, if you saw the demo at E3 and you get there, it is, it is the most deflated shit in the world. Because you know, you now know it's the final level and you're like, oh, well, what's the final boss going to be a turret? That's right.

It's going to be a turret. that's right. It's going to be a turret. Jesus Christ. Yeah, man. You see the moment when you play a game from that era and you finish the intro and you see the exact moment the budget turns off. You see it. The last cutscene little plays out or the walk-in talk or whatever it is. and then you get into what is now going to be the play-nass regular low like all the animations everything every conversation all the voice acting even probably goes away Depend you know it just we drop into the fucking side quest system for the next 20 hours fuck man Yeah, there you go. Good podcast this week.

Sure. Have a good week, everybody. Um, no, we're not done. Fuck shit. No, no, no, no, you know what? You know, you know, I just, you know what? I had, I was going gonna ask about the good doctor, but I think I'm good.

I think, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know what, you just look at that clip and you'll know everything you need to know. Everything, everything I need to know. You will know everything you need to don't. you