Castle Super Beast - CSB303: Grundlemaxxing
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["Sailor Moon Theme"] Good morning, everyone.
All right.
All right.
I got you.
All right?
Okay. I got you. All right?
Okay.
I got you.
Also to the video listeners, watchers, the dog is here, yay.
I saw people saying, I'm only here for the dog, and it's like, well, you've seen him,
you can leave now.
Don't though, don't.
Okay.
Let's try this. Hey, I'd like to congratulate Pat Stairzat.
I think it's quite an incredible accomplishment to become one of the world's only highest level 97, was it?
On like survival, one death and you're gone forever?
The hardest mode ever?
Oh man, that's crazy.
That's a crazy accomplishment.
That's really worth like applauding,
and I wanna say kudos, incredible job.
Yeah, I tried really hard.
I had to learn Mandarin.
I had to become very, very comfortable
with letting someone else use my account.
It says here that you're playing right now, actually.
How are you accomplishing
this? This is kind of incredible. So I don't know. I don't know. This is just like our
brains have synced up into what we think is funny. But like I spoke about this for like
25 minutes yesterday. Oh, okay. Because I think it's the funniest fucking thing in the
world. Well, your staff is only level 52. That's pretty sad, considering that your player level
is so much higher. Yeah, but that's, I yeah but that's I mean your items the level on your items is so much lower
than the level on your character that's really embarrassing yeah even though it
doesn't work like that that's actually minimum level so it doesn't it doesn't
mean that doesn't mean anything okay well look at all those maps though
surely you know how to use yeah. Yeah under the under the file folder Pat's Maps
Surely you know how to use them to get where I want. I label my own map tab with my own name if I was using it
Hey, you know look who does that can you teach me about your looting system because I've realized that you're one-by-one
dragging all of your loot into your
inventory
And you're not filtering in any way shape or form and that's a pretty advanced tactic. So
Hey, listen, so my my so I will help you with that in a second
I just need to figure out how to use this mana potion
Okay
Okay. Yeah, yeah.
The thing that you-
What button is that?
Is that, I know it's the second most important button in the entire game.
The most important mechanic that, okay.
Yeah, but give me just a second.
Okay, whenever you're ready.
Just a second.
Did you just walk past the rarest item in the entire game?
I sure did.
I sure did, because I don't even need it.
So I want to take the same track I took yesterday because now I have somebody to bounce off of. And it's like being an insecure little bitch with too much money is a common profession in these days. However, in the method of hoodwinking,
we have all sorts of methods, right? We have the Snoop Dogg have somebody play the game
in a video for you so you can just blaze so hard that you don't even have to be alive.
There's that. That's pretty funny.
Snoop Dogg smoking up and the game keeps playing.
And then we have the all time MMO classic, which is never show yourself playing ever,
but have the stuff on your account and take screenshots and be like, yeah, look, it's
this blah, blah, blah. And make sure that the screenshots that you take don't reveal shit like your region is set to China
or that the game's interface is in Mandarin
or that you have tabs with your name on them
like that's a thing a human being would do
instead of just having it be the map tab.
But instead, what we've done is I'm going to
like put on a suit, I'm going to put on a suit.
I'm gonna put on a clown suit
and then pretend I know how to clown
in front of a kid's birthday party.
And then when the kids ask me for a balloon animal,
I'm just gonna stutter and stammer and shit myself
because I don't know how to make a pony out of balloons.
Yeah, so it's like staggeringly embarrassing how every day, every piece of news that anything
that pops up that's that that Musk is doing is like just somehow getting worse and worse
over time. But when it comes to just needing to get some invisible kudos while being literally there anyway the richest dude
ever it's it's crazy because um I think the theory is that he showed off his
Elden Ring build and got roasted for it. So Wooly I absolutely I have been
putting forward this theory in a while like there was that nonsense where he
shit on that guy in in Thailand and called him a pedo over nothing. And that like turned like the personal aspect of like, oh,
he seems like he might be an asshole. But when he posted that dog shit Elden Ring build with
a nonsense explanation, everyone that played Elden Ring went, wait, this guy's supposedly
designing rocket ships and cars? Oh fuck. Oh shit. We'll reduce equip load for faster roll if necessary.
Like, yeah, you know, there's been, again,
there's a lot of theories. Some people say that because of that Elden Ring build roasting,
like, the decision to never feel that heat again
was the result of now going to what
people are, apparently there's words that like some of the most airtight NDAs were signed by the players
he has that are in some sort of group of Chinese players that are the best, that are whatever,
playing as a transporter.
If I was a rich, pathetic bitch paying people to do things for me, I'd have them sign fucking
NDAs.
While he's in the middle of talking in the spaces meeting at the same time or whatever.
So there is that. And yeah, does that, does it line up with the bit like he came out on
a Chappelle show and got booed into oblivion and so decided to seek out applause and people
cheering him on as hard as possible as a result? It
could be.
Chad wants me to mention, there's something that bothers me the most about the Musk Man,
which is he doesn't seem to actually care or like anything. I remember some person said,
hey man, tell me you like Evangelion on Twitter like a year or two ago. And he just like typed out nerve, like a one word answer and just went nerve.
Yes. Yes.
And it's like you just Googled Evangelion and looked for a proper noun.
Like you could have just said, yeah.
Yeah. Like, yeah, no, I do know the me.
The me. The me the cringe. I've also seen what's really funny is that?
I have seen pad of exile players use this as a point for their game against Diablo 4
Because he did the same thing in Diablo 4 but didn't get caught
By the the fucking developer like Blizzard didn't get caught by the fucking developer.
Like Blizzard didn't ban him,
they let his Diablo 4 shenanigans go off.
Whereas Path of Exile just keeps rebanning him
over and over because they're detecting
nonsense on his account.
Concerning.
Unbelievable.
Wow, you knew exactly what topic to bring up
to just like pull the sleep out of my eyes
Yeah, I told you I said I got this. All right. I said, give me a second. Don't worry. I got this. Oh
Hate this looking into it
There we go. Nice and awake
and
Let's why settle for why settle for you know awake when we can supercharge that shit?
Are you ready for your shot?
Yeah, hit me with the-
Or your chaser for that matter.
The shot is pathological.
Yeah, that was the shot.
Now I'm ooh.
The chaser is, well, I suppose this has to be founded
or such, but maybe this might be cover,
this embarrassing pants shitting just flail might be it might
be cover for a story that seems to be getting less coverage.
Oh yeah.
Allegedly there was there and there is and there is a photo and there is people that are attesting to some 20 years ago that he
was at a ABDL baby fur community meetup and there's photo evidence of this.
This is sick.
For those who don't know that that acronym stands for adult baby diaper lover community.
Hell yeah, brother.
And that sounds fucking crazy, but then it's like, well, someone who was a part of the
community went through 30,000 photos from 20 years ago at a brunch meeting they had
and there he is sitting in the onesie.
So what you're saying is the baby fur diaper community denounces Elon Musk?
And apparently it's not just that he was there, it's more that everyone remembers that he
got kicked out because he was being an asshole.
Oh my god, oh my god, it's so good.
They were like, yeah, this dude came out and he was being really annoying so we kind of
kicked him out from coming out to further munches.
So those who were
there, including those who are not part of the community and the part where... And there's
to the... Because that's the thing is it overlaps because the baby fur specific part of it is
where the adult baby diaper loving community overlaps with the furries. And so you have
kind of two in one and he was being insufferable to the members of that community so apparently was then booted for it
And that's I don't know that I don't know I don't know you know
But I will say that like there was some weirdness about like so then what was that weird hidden?
Account where he was pretending to be a kid about now as he's pretending to be his son not saying not the
You're such a good dad. Well, no, but that's the thing. It's not the one where he no that's we have people thought it was
Oh, no. Yeah, no, it was
Yeah, he's pretending to be a like a baby, right?
And it's like he wasn't going to be a son and it's not the ditman account
It's the other one and you're like, why are you commenting on like porn and stuff? That's a weird thing if you're a kid
unless 20 years ago You're like, why are you commenting on like porn and stuff? That's a weird thing if you're a kid unless
20 years ago
you're part of
You know so we can we can add
So money can't buy love and for a long time it looked like money could buy you respect but that has limits clearly and
It also sure can rent it sometimes it also can't buy you good attention
unless you're the type of person who has ideas in their brain that could get you
good attention anyway so if you if all of this shit was true and then I was
like you know what I'm gonna buy everyone a puppy with my rich money. People will be like,
well, I like puppies. That's good. But instead, all of it is
I'm going to make myself look so cool. That doesn't work. Trying
to be cool is so lame, bro. Yes, so lame. I mean, this between
the like, adult diapers and the pumping your Path of Exile account, suddenly
it makes a lot of sense why making a jumping X seems like a good idea in your head, but
then in execution it turns into what it was.
No, X is so cool.
Don't you get it?
Don't you get it?
That's why you thought that was the sensible bit to do someone in the chat ask
Who's the coolest rich person the coolest rich person ever is the one you'll never hear of because they just be rich and not
Cringe at you. I guess there's that
That's that's the the one you've never heard of and will never see
Yeah, everyone talks about Mansa Musa. I was about to say the guy who
rolled through and changed the geography by just dropping gold on his way. But I'm sure
you can dig through history to find whatever fucked up details you need to.
It's Tony Hawkrich, because if so, he can do a 900. That's pretty cool.
Yeah. He was performing tricks for the last time ever, for a while I suppose.
Wow, I wasn't paying super close attention to that phrase and I had my brain just go,
he's doing what?
Oh right, got it.
Yeah, he's like, I'm old and I'm going to die if I keep trying these things so I'm
going to start doing-
No, I'm just saying, it sounded like when you said that like wait Tony Hawk is like
Hooking for the last time ever
Yeah, oh no. No, that's not correct. Not quite. That's not no that's not accurate
concerning
Looking into it
What'd you do
Let me I didn't sleep. That what I did this is a bad sleep well
I thought that's good, but I just woke you up. Yeah, you did so um so let's see
I played Metal Gear Solid 2. Do you remember that game? Oh, yeah, big strut big shell. Let's go um
So that game's awesome, and it plays really well and yada yada after playing a bunch of them in a row
Man the big shell looks just like Zanza Barland like the interiors of the big shell
Look just like building two and three of Zanza Barland. It's really crazy. Like it's actually more like way
Despite the fact that MGS 2 is explicitly
internally referential to Metal Gear, it is also wildly externally referential to other older Metal Gears.
It's crazy.
I always felt like 2 was...
The departure between 1 and two was like where that like everything from two
forward is that sort of clean UI look style and sound.
It's very clean.
For the rest of the franchise.
It's zone of the enders almost.
Yeah.
And I was touching on it last time but I'm like damn I wish he didn't throw away so much
of like one from that point forward.
Not that I you know dislike the clean look and stuff, but again, there's something
to the sound and a bit of the crunchiness of that, of one that- Oh, MGS1 has its own aesthetic.
And I really, yeah, I would have liked to have seen where that kind of evolved to more than like
a completely different one. And then I think like Snake Eater is an evolution of two and everything after that kind of continues evolving off of Sons of Liberty.
One of the other takeaways that I never quite caught,
like it was it was very obvious that Campbell's dialogue is extraordinarily similar to his dialogue in MGS1 for
what are later very obvious reasons.
dialogue in MGS1 for what are later very obvious reasons. But what I didn't pick up on is that the dialogue that he has that is new is mostly like Mei
Ling and Naomi's dialogue from MGS1.
Oh, like him explaining the Soliton radar and shit like that.
It's actually like word for word, other characters dialogue fed into him
and other new bits like genuinely new sentence structures sound. And this is probably like
an accident, but it sounds like chat GPT is reading it out. Interesting. Okay. Like there Like, there is a certain stilted unnaturalness to the sentence progression that just, like,
now that we're all used to Microsoft Sam and TikTok voice and all that shit, it's so clear.
It's incredibly clear that it is a fake person.
I don't remember, but are there heartfelt moments with him at all?
No.
Or are they all with Rose, right?
All with Rose.
Yeah, okay.
Because I feel like in one, each character you spoke to had their heart-to-heart moment
with you.
Yeah.
Even Miller, you know?
Yeah, even Miller.
Which is crazy. Yeah. Even Miller, you know? Yeah, even Miller. Which is crazy. Yeah. But like, I'm
not remembering anything with Campbell in two up front. No. And like, I even like, even
the famous like, I need scissor 61. Like, it didn't, it did like, that just seemed like
a bunch of random bullshit. Except I'm now realizing that is a line that Snake says from the briefing
in MGS1 where he asks Campbell if he needs scissors to cut his hair so he doesn't get
confused.
It's all just fed into a bad robot.
When he's got the long white hair.
God, I remember, I just flashed back to seeing Raiden with the long white hair and then, like my friends
or whoever I was talking to at the time being like,
what the, what is with that look?
And I'm like, motherfucker, go back to the briefing
where you see they find Snake in Alaska
and then they actually have to like dye his hair
and cut it for him to look the way we recognize him now.
Okay, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and hey, guess what?
MGS2 is really great.
Though playing them, all these back to back, I have now, I am now playing the same game
the fourth time in a row.
It is astonishing how, like the ask for,
hey, let's remake Metal Gear 1 or Metal Gear 2
or Metal Gear Solid 1 is absurd
because all of them are remakes of each other.
And like MGS2 is even an in-universe remake of MGS1.
Foxhound's still the coolest right dead cell
The problem I have a dead cell is that they look and sound lame their actual like kit is awesome
But like vamps design into just so that sound man
Sorry, it's all it's all Fox sound. Oh, yeah Fox sounds way better Fox out rule and like
I'm like cojumbo agrees with you, which is why Psycho Mantis and Revolver Ocelot continue
on forever.
And yeah, Yell Dead Cell is great, but like...
Yell Dead Cell is awesome.
But Yell Dead Cell almost makes you forget how lame Vamp's coat looks.
But when you have to take a picture of the squad, you know, it's that's that that Foxhound shot of all of that. It's like it's too good. I think we can all agree
Collectively together that the B and B's are the absolute worst
Just complete dogshit just awful. Um
Yeah, by virtue of the fact that I can't fully remember naming all of them.
They can't talk! Yeah, there's no person there. It's just a story that
drebin drops after the fact. Yeah, it's like, this lady was hot, but she was very sad.
Okay. I mean, at least goddamn the pain shot fucking bees at you I
Mean and like yeah, that's his only character trait is that he's a man that shoots fucking bees, but that's cool
in the base games
How like what are how are the groups?
Are they in the other fucking terrible their fucking super dog shit?
There's a there's ultra, who's the four guys who
attack you in the goddamn elevator. There's shit like Black Ninja and Machine Gun Kid
and Dirty Duck. They are straight trash. They are god-awful mm-hmm there's a guy named running man and his fucking ability is that he keeps running
Like there's also a lot of like that more just like soldier and machine and tank yeah object bosses, right?
So and like some of them are also remade in later games
Like I forget the name of the guy
but games. Like, I forget the name of the guy, but there's a dude who just hangs out on the
ceiling and shoots darts at you with traps everywhere who gets remade into the fear.
Okay. Like, it's the same fight just like 15 years apart. There's a guy named Jungle
Evil, who used to be called The Predator. Who's the Predator? Okay. It's like that weird shit where like remember you fought Spider-Man and Shinobi as a kid
and then they then re-releases they're like well we can't fucking call him Spider-Man
because it's Marvel blah.
Um.
Dude you fight the Hindy like three times.
Yeah in in in um.
In one and two and solid.
Okay.
It's crazy.
So let's do it.
Foxhound.
Yeah.
Desperado.
Oh, oh, we're including the wins?
Desperado.
Okay, hold on.
Foxhound's number one.
I'm saying Desperado.
Yeah, Desperado, yeah, yeah, yeah, Desperado's number two. Then I I'm saying that's right. I'm proud of you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Desperado is number two.
Then I'm going to say Cobra unit Cobra.
Yeah, then I'm going to say Black Chamber.
Who the fuck goes people?
Okay, I don't know those guys.
They're there.
I'm going to say Ghost Babel Black Chamber.
Yeah, okay.
Then I'm going to say dead cell.
Yeah.
Yeah. And then and and then I'm gonna say,
then I'm gonna say the skulls unit and then I'm gonna say the B&B. Okay, I'll take that. Because at least when the skull unit appears, it's exciting.
Whereas like two of the four B&Bs show up and you're like, ugh. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, because, no,
like, the skulls intro is like a holy shit moment.
You know?
That's a proper like what the fuck.
Okay.
And yeah, I mean, we wanna go into pops and fuckin'.
No, we don't want to go into poop
We don't want to talk about hot cold man. Okay. All right, so the only thing we need to talk about from Peace Walker is that
boss canonically fought and beat a Rathalos
As as a as a fake AI
Walk now, no. The real thing. Straight up. He used Mountain Dew and Doritos to get
enough health and then he beat up a Rathalos with a gun. Okay. And you know what? I haven't
played the acid games so I can't really talk about the acid characters. Yeah. But that
didn't happen. Or did it? Or didn't it? I don't know but that's my list and I'm sticking to it
But yeah, no, he fought like a real Rathalos. He also fought a
organic Metal Gear Rex
Like a flesh Rex right so wait so then
Palicos are real and exists. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, okay, so so are the ape escape monkeys
That's real that Yeah, okay, so so are the ape escape monkeys That's real. That's what monkeys look like
Flesh Rex have I even seen this yeah hold on metal gear Rex a peace walker. It looks it looks like fucking horrible, dude
It's it's gross
Do you hear look I get a screenshot for you. Just give me one sardines gear. I see it. I see it. Yeah
Just give me one sardines gear right here. I see it. I see it. Yeah, oh my god
That's so weird it's a monster and it's a metal
Which you know what's funny about that it makes like Otacon like a massive fucking hack
You just looked at this creature And you just found this like drawing of an old dinosaur and then you were like I'm gonna do that
But also the name Rex then it doesn't imply like a Tyrannosaurus Rex is what it Rex means
King it does but when you first heard Rex you assumed it was you know yeah in
reference to the T-Rex because it screams like a fucking dinosaur when you
shoot it and it turns out no there's an actual nuclear dragon. Can we normalize big robots screaming like they're actually animals?
I mean, to be fair.
I think that's pretty cool.
Yes, and it adds an extra level of freakiness to not only when Rex is destroyed, but when
the rays are being lizard-like and sneaking around you. You're like, those fucking sneaky monster rays
are going, ah, as they're dying.
You're like, ah.
And yes, because Ed209 also died in that horrible fashion.
That's true.
Fucking Ed209.
And I want to say Ed209 put the fear in all of us
with his horrible frame rate existence.
It's not just being scary, it's also being scary and running at a different frame rate
from the rest of life.
Yeah, that's awful.
Creepy.
Metal Gear is great.
Shocker.
I'm fucking shocked.
Oh my God, still great.
Did you say nerd?
Still like, I swear to God, that's got gotta be like a huge part of like people's distaste
for Raiden right off the bat.
Like you gotta go to the node, Raiden.
Did you say nerd?
He obviously didn't fucking say nerd.
What are you, stupid?
What are you, dumb?
Is it like one of those Japanese puns where...
Me and Paige were talking about this for like 10, 15 minutes.
Nerd and node have to sound way more similar in Japanese
Yeah, yeah probably
Yeah, something like also also, you know what?
Maybe it's just my history but like every single time Rose every time I like
I have to save my game a lot because I'm streaming it and what if something happens and then rose? Talks to me, and I'm just like overwhelmed like
Rose oh
Everything you say is like nails on a chalkboard. Oh my god shut up. That's what it's like to really have a girlfriend Pat
You saw no it's not you thought it was gonna be like Merrill, but it's more like Rose. Oh my god
Young man, I think I think that game has like real issues
Like I I genuinely mean real issues because parts of writing story don't make sense because Rose is so
repellent look is like
Kojima like straight up was like we need like it's
not you can't just have your sniper wolf and your merrill kind of like soldier
girls that are hanging around as your in love interests you need to have
something that is a real romantic adult relationship and that's what a real
relationship. She's a fucking spy. That's what a real relationship was like. A real
relationship is where you find out your your wife's terrible secret after she nags you about their anniversary all day
Kojima watched Titanic
And he liked it
Fuck is that it I?
Mean Jack and Rose you know this oh you know this. Oh, you know this, you know this.
I did know it, but I forgot.
I forgot again.
And they're on a boat.
It's not a boat, but it is a boat.
God damn it.
Man, remember when Snake jumps in the water
and swims after the fucking ray?
Like, what a beast.
He swims, man.
And he catches it. He catches it. That's so crazy.
How did you do that shit? I have told this story a bunch of times about a conversation
that you and I had like 15 years ago when Twin Stanks came out. Or I was like, I think
these cut scenes are ridiculous. And you went, Pat, no, they're just played like cleaner and straighter
in the other games. And you bring up the example that I've used since every time I talk about
it, where when the pain attacks, Ocelot and big boss with bees, big boss is able to cut
every bee out of the air with a knife. No, that's so crazy. No twin snakes required.
He's actually doing it.
And I brought that up a couple days ago and someone in my chat said,
Dude, that's just like cutscene stuff, that doesn't count.
Except MGS3 has you carry injuries out of cutscenes into gameplay
and you don't have any fucking bee stings on you coming out of that scene
which means he actually used a little knife to kill every bee that attacked him
I mean he jumps back to dodge the sniper bullet initially the idea that he would then block the
Ninja swings with the sword full-on spike style and or back flip off the missile
You know he's fighting insane mutant freaks and winning.
The fuck?
You think he's just standing there shooting people, punching going, huh, huh, huh, and
then running in circles?
He's also a crazy super soldier.
He's doing dumb shit.
I got to say parts of MGS1 just like start to get really strange when you realize what
comes afterwards.
And like, you know,
the romantic ending with Meryl with, with snake and it's like, they're going to drive
off into the sunset and like, I'm, I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm sorry, Meryl, I have
to leave you for a man who pisses his pants. And she's like, don't worry. I'm going to
end up with a guy who shits his pants. Yeah. You're just driving that snowmobile off to carry her towards diarrhea man
You know who you also encountered like God
What a what a while? I mean look the idea that hey, you know
We're not gonna pair snake up with anyone really and in the future Meryl deserves to be happy so fine
Okay, but of all the people, you're like,
who's left that we haven't brought back? Let's get fucking Johnny Turbo bubble guts.
Hey, can I ask, did you play Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake?
No.
Okay, so did you know that there's a boss fight with Dr. Madnar in that game?
Okay.
Where Madnar gets the drop on you and gets a headlock on you and starts choking you out
and he'll kill you unless you throw grenades at the floor and mine the floor to get him
off you.
Snake is totally unable to overpower him.
That's amazing.
That's great.
And then he survives later to build Raiden's body. And he's that smart. He's that guy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The scientist. That's great. That's hilarious. Fuck yeah. These games are
so stupid, man. And like, and also like the version of Meryl that you're getting
That's with with Johnny later is like when she's back and buff and full-on soldier. Yeah, you know
Hey, remember when at the NMGS one, she's like, I don't think I need to be a soldier to live my life
fucking JK Okay. Well to be fair
The world became war and war
So, you know
If I was like I'm not fuck this soldier shit
I'm gonna go live a normal life and then a
Robot with a fucking dinosaur leg mooing like a cow walked past my window. I'd be like, where do I sign up?
Like what are we doing here?
You know
Anyway, um cool. I also put together one little thing
It's from MGS one, but whatever so and Metal Gear has like a lot of characters that are incredibly similar to one another for thematic purposes
Like there are multiple, older black bald men
voiced by Greg Eagles, like, in particular,
the DARPA chief and Peter Stillman in MGS2.
They're voiced by the same guy.
He's doing the same voice.
Okay.
And he's fulfilling the exact same role.
But one that I did not pick, stop saying the diaper chief.
Am I pronouncing that?
Kojima wanted a Murtaugh in the game, but the the the one that didn't jump out to me
until somebody pointed out in chat is that
The president of the president of arms tech Kenneth Baker Baker
Looks and talks a lot like Sundowner.
Does he?
They both look pretty much the same.
They're older white guys who have shaved their head.
Kenneth Baker is way older though.
Yeah, but they also talk at length about like
the end of the Cold War or the good old days after 9-11
and like how they have to make money with the new war economy
and all that shit.
I mean, Kenneth Baker is way more
like Bush administration old guy, though.
And I feel like Sundowner's like, yeah!
He's full on cowboying it up, yucking it up.
The accent's stronger. He's clearly much more southern and raw. I never thought I'd ever see Like he's these full-on cowboying it up yucking it up. You know the the accent stronger
He's clearly much more southern and raw. I don't know what I'd ever see a
Fucking character ever say the good old days after 9-eleven until I played revengeance
That game's crazy
That game feels like a bigger step forward than some of the games. I'm playing now
step forward than some of the games I'm playing now?
Like narratively and like thematically, like Revengeance feels like a bigger step forward than like MGS1 does.
Yeah, well because it feels like by stepping out of the, not out of the timeline, but away from the timeline,
he could just chuck in as many contemporary statements about post-911 shit and politicians in general, you know?
And yeah, the American two-party system that original Metal Gear can get at, but you still
have to go save the world from a nuke exploding at some point.
And here you're just kind of like spending way too long listening to a politician say
whatever the fuck he needs
to to get you on his side.
So I played the Metal Gear games.
I'll dive in back when I finish the MGS2, which is going to be a trip.
I also played a lot of the new season of the Marvel rivals.
Oh, yes, as have I.
I was just going to say that when you're talking about
Sundowner, I kind of realize that half of what I'm thinking
of with his dialogue are just the lyrics to Red Sun.
Yeah, that counts.
That's him talking.
I'm like, is he the one saying when the wind is slow
and the fire is hot, the vultures wait to see what rocks?
Yeah, that's him.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because I'm like, I hear it.
That's his internal self. Yeah. That's that's him. That's him. Yeah, absolutely. Cause I'm like, I hear it. That's his internal self.
Yeah.
That's his inside voice.
God damn it. Red Sun over Paradise. He's saying it.
Alright, fair.
So you've been playing that new Marvel Rival season. How you liking it?
Yeah. I'll tell you what, like, it's pretty...
First of all, Invisible Woman is a pretty solid drop in there. I kind of was like
Okay, what you're gonna do with her force fields and stuff is gonna be as busted as it seems and she's yeah
Support it is totally gonna be as busted as it seems. Yeah incredible incredible support character overall
The Mr. Fantastic, I like, his kit is a bit weird to me.
Like I get it, but I don't fully,
I've only fought like one or two people
doing really, really good with him.
And clearly there's moments of like, don't shoot him now.
He's absorbing and gonna deflect it back at you.
But like his alt is really strange.
I like the fact that you can stick his arms out and kind of drag it around for,
you know, like physics damage.
But yeah, I there's some stuff I just don't kind of get.
So first of all, I cannot believe that I am playing a video game in which I'm like, man. I can't wait to play is mr. Fantastic fantastic. Holy shit
He has so much going on
Mm-hmm he is his shit is so ridiculous the left right grab two people and slug them together as a move is great
So that's not even the good one
It's a really cool like thing to add as a move on a kit though. So I'm not gonna go down his whole kit because that's not what we're
doing here but like he is a he's a flex spot character like he enables you to
go one tank to healer like 3 DPS or something like that because half of the
time he's the tank. He can switch up to, yeah, with the buff modes.
And the basic deal is that if you hit the grab
and you can then pull them towards you
and then do the shield, sorry, do the dash,
like the E, to dash towards him,
to bump him and give yourself the shield,
and then punch them, and then do the grab,
and then punch them, and just punch them and just that you become big read your
big read is is really fucking crazy strong your elasticity maxes out from
just that one combo and then by the time big read is over all of your cooldowns
are back so you can just do it again okay it's time to work together gotcha
okay um so you are just like you're like you're poking at people or like throwing your limbs into team fights
And then when you see an opportunity you pull someone towards you and then dash towards them
And then you're there like an inch away from you and now you're big read and big read feels unkillable
But if you're in trouble on that he could
What are people calling it like fridge fridge man. Okay. Yeah.
Like big is the most busted fucking thing in the whole game
because like it's like, okay, you, you take damage and you
can't get hurt. Right. And you, you shoot it back. Fuck that.
It makes you immune to crowd control. So Jeff can't eat you if your
fridge read.
Whoa. Oh, wow.
Iron Man can't kill you with his ult if your fridge read.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a couple of things that can block that. Yeah, like Iron Fist
Parry or Doctor Strange Shield. Okay, that's pretty fucking good.
And so like, I was not paying attention
and I didn't know that the fridge man countered it.
And he is actually immune to Jeff's ult
because Jeff sucked up my whole team
and he threw me off the side,
but he doesn't throw you hard enough
and so you can use your e to just dash back to Jeff
Okay, so like Jeff has to
Yeah, no, no, no, sometimes depending on who's in the swallow if you have to kill yourself kill yourself Exactly, right if you if you're if you've been swallowed by
Doctor strange if you saw in a doctor stranger if you swallowed a an iron fist exam
For example, like anyone that can fly and just fly right back over
Doesn't matter right, but if you kill yourself you get them all so here's the question if you're a Jeff player is
You swallow five opponents and like three of your team
Do you do the sacrifice? No, you don't have to you can spit out the your teammates individually with the right mouse button
Well shit, I didn't spit out your teammates individually with the right mouse button. Well, shit.
I didn't know how to play.
When you swallow like a massive gang, you have two buttons.
One is spit out your team and the other is spit out their team.
Oh shit, I didn't even catch that.
OK.
Well, yeah, because otherwise that ult would be fucking terrible.
OK, OK.
You spit out your team and keep them in.
I didn't know you could do that.
Gotcha. On top of that, like, I just I your team and keep them in I didn't know you could do that. Gotcha
On top of that like I just I played like one or two games with him and was just trying to pick him up Because I was for for healing I was mainly using rocket and I was like, let me just try to pick up a couple others
Just for yeah. Yeah
Went over the balance changes. They're good. They're all really good. They look they look really small
But they're all pretty good storms They look really small, but they're all pretty good. Storm's good now.
But more than that, I sent you an article right before we started, which is the plan for Marvel Rivals is one character every six weeks.
Yeah.
Forever.
No. No.
No? No No, no they said They said the first of the first bit was a new hero every month and a half to keep everyone excited is currently
the the pace they're going with which is
Pretty a lot pretty good, but there's a previous
Statement as well where they said
future seasons will be substantially smaller than season one and that
this is a the pace is not going to stay as what it is for now. Okay so those two are not
contradictory. Season one has four characters in three months. It also adds two new game modes.
Like season one is huge.
Season one is absolutely massive.
I think we're disconnecting, but that's fine.
And they have Doom match now, which is just free for all deathmatch.
Yeah, that was really fun.
Which is awesome.
And it's also like, it's a perfect, like I would like to practice this character in a
situation that won't...
In a stress-free environment against real people.
It won't fuck people up.
Although, if I fuck on it.
Although, do matches just kind of like play a melee character?
I've seen, I've seen success.
I saw somebody was beaten up, everybody with cloak and dagger.
Oh, word, okay.
In one of my games.
The couple I've seen before...
What I've discovered is that mirror matches between Mr. Fantastic and Mr. Fantastic fucking
go nowhere because their skill rotation works out that they are always giving themselves
as much shield as the other Mr. Fantastic can take out.
So it just kind of just loops over and over and over.
It's really funny.
So I mean, if the idea is that there's going to be the characters every month and a half,
but the seasons are going to get smaller, I guess there, does that mean there will be
character drops between seasons?
No, what it is is that seasons are currently three months
and they put a bunch of maps in this one
and a new mode
and they're putting four characters.
So future seasons will have one map,
two characters, etc.
Okay, so the bracketing will change
for future seasons, but the pace of dropping will...
Okay. Well, I mean, that's an incredible marketing will change for future seasons, but the pace of dropping will continue.
Well, I mean, that's an incredible amount of content to promise.
Yeah, the other thing is that Battle Pass came out, and I think we talked about this
a while ago about miHoYo, where if your game makes a billion dollars, it should look like it makes a billion dollars.
And like, every single element of the interface has changed to fit the Dracula theme.
And they're giving like ten costumes for like fucking eight dollars for your battle pass.
And the battle pass is a joke. It is so easy to get.
Feels like a Halloween event when it's not Halloween.
Yeah. It feels like there was supposed to be a Blade movie coming out.
Or something.
It feels like in this three month span or the next three month span there was supposed
to be a Blade movie that existed.
But that's not happening.
Yeah, and I guess, so considering how they added a bunch of new payload and capture stages, how often are
those going to rotate slash change up?
I think they're just going to keep adding them.
Every season a different stage or something like that.
I think they're going to add one new level.
The Midtown level is incredible.
So is the Sanctum Santoris or whatever the fuck you call it.
It's great.
It's fucking awesome um I got used to
Asgard with with Moon Knight quite a bit like I have some like favorite points to
like pop the the on core people and don't see it initially I'm like the
newer stages I'm like kind of struggling a little bit to like find some of those
spots the the do match stage with the portals is rough it's very you just get I'm out, like the newer stages, I'm like kind of struggling a little bit to like find some of those spots.
The Doom match stage with the portals is rough.
It's very confusing.
Well, you just get lost.
You're just meant to get lost.
Yeah.
I had one match where someone picked Penny and just, we were coming out of the base and
they were like defending and in the new Robbie escort stage and the penny just planted
bombs and mines right outside the spawn door and webbed it all up and then there was a Thor that
was basically there and between the two they just kept everyone from coming out of the point
and because the mines can like four mines or three mines
will detonate and kill you in one shot. And then while those were recovering, the Thor
would beat you back into the spawn.
I have seen a million clips of stuff you can do to people walking out of've seen I mean, dr. Strange can just put the portal off the cliff and
You just watch them all kill themselves like how about you motherfuckers open your eyes. There's a portal you're jumping into a pit
There's also the the the Thor rail gun
Where you?
If I'm not sure has his alt from the prior round, you put the strange portal so that
he drops on them as they walk out the spawn.
Oh wow, okay.
The gauntlet?
There's one where-
Boom, that's pretty crazy.
There's one where if you have one of the maps that has two exits, you can put the strange
door on both exits and they can't get out Yeah, I also saw one where there's a couple spots in some maps where you can clip the strange door out of bounds and
Cause people to get trapped and be unable to kill themselves and just run the whole clock. Oh my god Wow
Until it eventually disappears at the very least
Yeah, one of the learning things for me is that like Penny's like little mind layer can
be shot.
I did not know that for a long time.
The big web.
Yeah, the big web.
Yes, you can shoot that.
Yes, you can destroy that.
You have to destroy that.
You simply must.
Yeah.
And the one that I got recently that was like, oh, is that Loki's shift where he heals everyone?
They're not just healed, they're actually completely invincible inside his green circles,
but you have to shoot the rocks above the circles to destroy it.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Yeah. Yeah No the
Like leah learning learning the maps and stuff. I feel like
the What's the new one where there's is it's oh, I think the Black Panther
capture point capture one
The like yeah
there's like if like that it feels like there's some of are way, way better for if you're playing
like a Magic or Black Panther or Iron Fist kind of like pick character.
Oh, absolutely.
There's some really, really good side paths for sneaking around, grabbing, taking out
the healer and getting the fuck out of there, harassing the back line and stuff.
And I feel like I suddenly started seeing a lot more Captain America now.
He got buffed fairly significantly. Yeah, they changed up a good bit, right?
Cuz like um, he stands and he holds the front line. Yeah, this is where as he wasn't before
this game
There's so much shit in this game. Like I was I dove down this path of watching this guy
Like I forget what his name was on tech talk, but he's just like Adam Warlock fan 49 some just
guy who's always been obsessed with Adam Warlock and like,
alright, let me show you.
Did you know if you put melee on your scroll wheel and keep
shooting, you can animation cancel every single Adam Warlock
shot with a melee attack.
So here's a combo.
If you jump correctly and jump cancel it and he walks up to like mantis and kills
her in like fucking 400 frames
Just like more like Marvel combos this character and like every day people are figuring out new weird
fighting game tech
So games awesome um
tech. This game's awesome. Eventually in ranked, at certain ranks, you get to a point where you start banning opposing
team characters. Is it Diamond? Yeah, okay. I was wondering, because I saw I was watching
some matches where that was a thing. I guess you ban two characters per team or something?
You ban whoever's the most fucked up in the current meta.
Right.
So like, you were banning Hulk so they didn't have to deal with Iron Man's Hulk synergy.
Yeah, and so this is the league thing, right?
Yeah.
I've never played-
Lots of MOBA thing.
Generalize MOBA.
In general, yeah.
I've never played anything where like, I think banning was a part of it.
Like I feel like, I know Smash had stage banning,
of course, and stuff.
I hope you play more than three characters.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a clear, when banning is a part of the rule set,
then I'm like, oh, you really are not meant
to be a specialist at all.
You're meant to be picking and choosing and switching up.
And I imagine, I guess, in peak competitive play,
not only are you doing role agnostic switches and stuff,
but I guess when someone counterpicks to,
like a Spider-Man to take out your flyers,
and you gotta counterpick someone
to take out the Spider-Man, right?
And you kind of have that back and forth
that's regularly going.
You kind of have that back and forth that's regularly going. Yeah, I'm curious what the consensus is on how you ban characters across the board and
stuff and what that's like.
I mean, for a bit, it was like you ban fucking Hela and Hawkeye for sure because they were
just totally dominant.
If you have aim, you gonna destroy the yeah, yeah
Interesting just fuck them
Now that now they're better so that works so yeah having a blast playing Marvel rivals. It is it. Oh, it's so good
Yeah, I'm so happy then I remember. This is exactly how I felt when overwatch came out
This is exactly the same emotion and level of enjoyment. So please,
please God, don't melt it into sludge.
I can definitely say that anything is possible, but but for me. I'm enjoying this significantly more than I've enjoyed overwatch ever
and
a lot of that has to do with the
Kit character and obviously camera variety you know yeah by comparison
Characters just get to do more
Yeah, I'm like flyers and and web swingers and shit like that. You have a wider variety of kits.
Sgt. Chris Smith And that's it. And yeah, they're not afraid to make a completely different style
of character that is not just a variant on gun classes. you know?
Yeah, I've been working with, that Magic is my kind of get in and go
because her combo setup is pretty fun.
It's fun.
But I really like Iron Fist's ability
to just get the fuck out, heal, and get back in.
Because essentially, if I feel like the healers
are not doing a great job,
I mean, the choice is either switch to a healer and pick up the slack.
Which you should do.
Every time.
Or, I mean, or I'll just pick Iron Fist and I'll be like, fuck it, I'm just going to go
harass the back line, get picks that way.
Your team is more important than your own personal glory, Willy.
Come on, pick a healer.
It depends on what's going on, you know?
Depends. It depends on it depends on what we what's going on. You know depends
If you if you have two healers and
It's not going great Switching to a third is probably yeah, you know what's super funny actually fuck up the you know
What the fucking meta comp was at least a couple days ago. It was three tanks and three healers, okay?
Yeah, because it's a it's team. No one can ever die dive comp as overwatch used to say
Yeah, no, I'm depends on what the matches and what's going on and all that I'm not I'm definitely I'm willing to pick up whatever
Roll I need to I've made sure to go and learn
You know what's necessary but in a lot of cases
I feel like I can help a lot better by going
in and fucking up their back line with Iron Fist and getting out than coming in and picking
up the heel slack, especially if the DPS isn't really doing that much.
So you got to make a call.
Please just don't ruin the game.
That's all I want.
That's where I'm at.
I'm like, oh, good, fun game. Don't ruin the game. That's all I want. You know, like that's where I'm at. I'm like, oh good fun game
Don't ruin it. Please. Please continue to have it be the same level of quality. Please. I'm begging you
And I and I'll be what it'll be fun to to see like I guess what the
archetypes are gonna be because like I mean with with
Fantastic four things gonna be nothing. Yeah things gonna be because like, I mean, with Fantastic Four, things going to be, not things,
yeah, things going to be, you know, front line tank.
I feel like he's going to be what you said last time, which is like the tank's tank.
I mean, he's made out of rocks.
Come on.
Most durability and, you know, some weaknesses I'm sure to make up for it and such.
Like you can't just be exactly what Hulk is.
And then, yeah, as a flyer, you know, is Human Torch.
I think his kit leaked out.
Fly and beam is what I imagine the deal is going to be.
Let's see.
Launches a fireball that can be split.
Unleashes fire shockwaves to deal damage to nearby enemies. Turn flame fields into tornadoes.
Can go faster while flying.
Connects flame shields together and forms a firewall.
Whoa.
And a dive. So he is like an aoe denial flame person wall
Okay, interesting
Just fuck up the ground with bullshit
That's a very interesting kid
And then and I guess there's something to to be said about like how fast can this character get back to the point after dying?
Right man playing Iron Man for an evening and then playing
Iron Man is case it is the biggest example of like just boost back in let's go
And then there's stuff where I'm seeing like like with Loki like from the spawn
Creating as far of a clone as possible and then teleporting into it
Just to get a little a couple extra steps, you know is like whatever tech you can you know?
Oh people are saying the things kit is also out. Oh, it's okay. Oh, here we go
Even just like with
with with moon night grappling the ground straight underneath you, getting
a super jump and then floating forward is faster than walk speed.
Okay, here we go.
The things kit.
Furious Charge, create a seismic zone by charging forward and moving enemies.
Immunity to knock backs. Ultimate is launch lethal force to
take down all enemies in front of you and throw them in the air. And you can help enemies
by giving them and yourself damage reduction. So it's not a shield. It's just a straight
up like, like, you know, help allies you mean yeah allies, okay?
So yeah, he's about not being able to be moved and moving other people so like physically pushing them off of the point, okay? Oh, I was gonna say earlier with mr. Fantastic. Yeah, like I'm surprised his alt is not just
like Luffy or
Murkava it kind of is the right he looks like bounce man. Well, he basically ends up doing what?
What?
What's his name?
Armed and dangerous
Winter soldier yeah soldier does yeah kind of ends up doing what winter soldier does but like less damage, right?
So I figured there is a there is a bit of a goofy trick with Mr. Fantastic's Bounce Man alt.
Which is, it's really, really, really bad if you do it outside.
But if you do it in an area that has like a definitively low ceiling, it becomes unbelievable.
Because you bounce.
Because you just go bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
It happens faster. Oh shit
Yeah, yeah, once once you hit the roof. Okay, you come back down immediately
Okay, gotcha
um
Luffy gear for what is that that's bounce man. I see okay got it
It's it's pretty clear that Reed Richards has been watching anime. Ah
Okay, okay, I was thinking of a different Luffy attack
So yeah the
Okay, so having a ceiling makes a difference okay interesting
Yeah, Winter Soldier is another one that's fucking
pretty solid, I feel like I see him.
Oh, it's great.
It's the best.
Getting good picks.
It's also great when you're like, oh, I died,
I have to get back to the point,
and I start hearing, again!
Again!
Ugh, again!
And whether or not that's like a big smile
or a huge frown depends on what side that that's on
But every time you hear again, you're like either all fucking sick or oh god damn it come on. Oh
No
Yeah, what else I what else I can up to oh did you see that um
Because of the way the camera over the shoulder position is is set you're better off aiming
Melee attacks and dashing forward things or any or you are better off that to the aiming
Anything that's not hit scan to the right a little bit to the right. Yeah
Because because the the attacks are coming out of your character fucking and your characters are offset to the left
Yeah, yeah, that was huge cuz I wanna cuz like with
Magic in particular her dash forward uppercut. You know was like yeah
It'll hit if you're a little bit to the it'll miss if you're a little bit to the left a little bit to the left
But if you're a little bit to the right, it'll pick up, you know, and it's just the cameras perspective
so
interesting
It's it's fascinating. It's pro tips for Marvel rivals. Oh my god
What else the only other thing I did this week
aside from
We got oh man. So's beaten me up at night so I'm a little sleepy but
his like toddler development, he's in that fast mode where every day
there's like a new thing, like the word list is going up literally every single
day, but we also got him like this gigantic Spider-Man doll, like it's bigger
than the baby, and it'll be like okay little man go get spider-man and he'll like
He'll like run his ass over and grab his giant spider-man doll and hug the spider-man go mwah mwah
Our love spider-man and so fucking cute
Okay, so are the is the that character design is just doing what it's meant to do right?
Yeah, that spider-man's character design is just meant to reach in to kid brain and be like this is the coolest fucking thing you've ever seen
Well the thing the thing is is that that I was like shocked by is not that he knows that he loves his spider-man
Doll it's that spider-man is a three syllable word
So I'm in the kitchen and I'm like can you go get spiderMan? And he will go into the living room to go get Spider-Man.
And they're like, can you give Spider-Man a kiss?
And he goes, it's adorable.
He's also at the point where he hugs the dog and kisses the dog.
And it's so sweet.
It's the cutest thing.
It's the cutest thing.
Oh my God.
That is all spider-man optimus prime
Superman you know just the the predominant red and blue he's also got a
sonic doll that's like gigantic doesn't give a shit about Sonic not enough red
on it it's a spider-Man, Spider-Man situation.
Also, like, I feel like when you especially like when you get a bit older too, like the the Spider-Man's kind of like swinging traveling getting around thing is a funner.
Like, oh, it's cool. It's a funner thing to imagine.
And it's even I'd say it's like funner than flying.
You know, yeah, it's it's way it's way more fun because you're
just like you're like roller coaster around around town.
It's great. Cool.
The only other thing that I did this week is that I did another
round of classic wow with Ashley Roboto. Once again, wonderful
lady had a great time hanging out with her. Don't know if
we're gonna be able to do a stream next week or the week after but we'll plan
something and I got controller support working for Classic WoW okay there's a
add-on called console port which just completely retrofits the interface and
control system to have a real controller support now it is an add-on it's not
official but it's it's better than what I had going with Guild Wars 2, so that's impressive. But fucking around with Guild Wars 2 and Classic
Wow, I am reminded of something I kind of forgot about, which is that there's a part
of MMOs that have kind of changed in the past decade and it sucks.
And it's that I'm playing a massively multiplayer
online game to play with other people, right,
in a large disconnected community, right?
When I play FFXIV, nobody talks in that game.
You're all talking with your buddies in Discord that you meant to do a raid that one time.
But like, general chat in FF14 is dead. It is empty.
Apparently, I was talking to people, retail WoW is similar. It's not very chatty.
But when I was playing Guild Wars and WoW Classic, I'm like, oh, hey, where is
this thing? Because you're spending a lot of time in the open area instead of instanced
zones. There's people in there.
Okay.
And they talk.
Well, if people aren't chatting with you in FF14, you could always stalk them.
And then-
We'll talk about that in a little bit. You can always show up. We'll talk about that a little bit.
You can always show up.
We'll talk about that in a bit.
I don't know if that's news.
Yeah, that's what I'm referring to.
That's what I'm getting at.
But it's like one of those things,
and it's like anybody who played World of Warcraft
on the Horde side from 2004 to 2008 or nine,
remembers something called the Baron's Chat,
which was the worst chat room you've
ever seen in your entire life.
It was one of those things that was accidentally designed to be the worst thing you've ever
seen in which horde players were corralled into one zone called the Barrens from level
10 to 30, which is crazy.
That's an enormous amount of the leveling experience.
And there were very few flight paths, which is the games like Transit Hub kind of thing.
So you were having to run all over the place to various disconnected parts of the zone
all the time.
So you were spending 10, 15, 20, 25 minutes
just moving around from place to place for hours all night,
which meant that since half the horde population
was in there, it was like 4chan just tunneled
into a live chat.
Okay, it was beef.
With dog shit.
It was the most toxic, mean, Chuck Norris fucking pile of shit.
Wait, and so Alliance didn't have this?
They did not have it. Their zones were more split up.
They didn't have a unified 10 to 30 zone. You usually have a 5 level zone or an 8 level zone.
But because there was the North Barons and the South Barons, but they're all the
same zone. You spent so goddamn long in there. You spent
like a week, two weeks in there. Okay. And having this
incessant pile of shit just running on the side of your
screen while you were vibing to the music was awesome. Okay. It was great.
Okay.
It was way, way, way preferable to the general chat in any given Final Fantasy Zone, which
is nothing.
Okay.
Which is like literally nothing.
This is all very strange because my impression,
given how I've seen not only my old roommates and stuff play
WoW and stuff, but even just me touching Ragnarok
online for a second or going back to Graal in the day,
general chat is just a thing to be ignored completely
as it runs is the impression I thought most people were under.
You're not going to participate in that.
You're going to go do the thing you're trying to do or meet the people you're trying to
meet, but that's a fucking nightmare in all games at all times, no?
It depends because the main issue is that WoW has a very large open space to exist in.
It takes a minute or two to run somewhere.
Like there's just a lot of map
that you're constantly traversing.
And so your absolute dog shit Chuck Norris meme chat
combined with actually seeing people playing the game
alongside you and having the opportunity
to ask them for help or offer to help them
creates that MMO feel of
you're playing a game with other people as like a
disconnected, like simultaneous hole.
Huh? Okay.
I yeah, I'm just thinking I'm like those again, like my
reference points are these these random ones, but like, I
Ragnarok, you get into that main area and it's just like this
doesn't, like
fuck that.
I'm not...
I couldn't speak to Ragnarok.
Everybody's trying to sell some shit.
Everyone's idling around the big middle and it's just nonsense.
It's complete nonsense.
You're insane to stand around and try to parse information out of that.
Get out somewhere else a little less populated and maybe, you know, you'll have an experience. When I was
playing Guild Wars 2 earlier in the week it was similar that people in there were
chatting in in in map chat which is their general chat and they would
announce if a certain boss was up and I asked a question in chat and it got
answered which is wild I don't think I've, like, I have spoken to more
individual persons about the game or whatever
in WoW and Guild Wars 2 over the past week
than I did for the entirety of Endwalker.
Like the two year period in Endwalker,
because like, why would I talk,
I mean, we're gonna run an instance,
we're gonna run a dungeon, don't talk. Why would you talk? Shut up? Just run the dungeon as fast as you can
so, you know, I would say that the the the battle hub in in six, right it's your
People coming out getting salty talking shit to each other and and you're like, wow, what happened there?
That's crazy.
Anyway, I am not interacting with it,
but you just glance and chuckle to yourself.
This time, you're completely right.
It is just like fighting games, okay?
Because the battle hub is like dramatically improved
by that chat scroll going by.
Someone getting real salty.
Yeah, because it creates that situation. Because
going to play, like, let's say I wanted to go play Shadows of Mistara at the arcade,
right? It is more fun to play Shadows of Mistara at the arcade by yourself in a full arcade
than it is an empty arcade. Sure. The vibe is just better.
I get that.
Maybe, maybe someone will be like,
can I hop on this with you?
Right?
And then you also occasionally see messages of just like,
oh shit, how do you block that setup?
Or some shit or whatever.
People actually be helpful.
And it's like, oh, that's nice too.
I'd let people actually be helpful and it's like, oh, that's nice too, you know
You know you do I but I but I do
Yeah, every time I'm just thinking back to my roommates like with like any of the bigger games and stuff
It was just there was no interacting with that You just stood around waited for people to meet up and then you went off. That's cuz you know, that's because
they they were in the,
they're in the part of an MMO
that caused me to stop playing FF14.
Catching up is more fun than being current.
Because being current is scheduling for people to hang out
and doing hard content and all that stuff.
Whereas catching up to the front is hanging out,
doing things, chilling, vibing.
Explore.
That's not a hard fast rule though, because while you.
Oh obviously that depends on any particular person's
level of enjoyment.
Because you fall into the category of MMO player
that is like, again, on the cutting edge of the content and
you know what's going on and like also doing stuff with your guild and I have, I'd say,
I think I know more people that are social FF14 players than grinders.
Yeah, I know more people that just meet up and chat and hang out. Is that I talked to some of my FF14 people about this,
and the social FF14 players are also disconnected
from the rest of the game.
Everything in 14 is segmented.
People are in their own groups
with their own friends hanging out.
They're either in their own groups
or they're in like designated locations
Right, like I mean do you want to do like you want to fucking cyber with a catboy in the middle of town? Well, you're gonna go to Limsa. That's where you're gonna go. So I
Because of my tastes, I don't hate the idea of a game that is like
Asymmetrical single-player, you know, oh absolutely, but if you want that group feeling yeah, you know? Oh, absolutely.
But if you want that group feeling,
yeah, you're gonna have to have
these town square kind of moments.
Yeah, and it's just, it's really interesting
because I've played a bunch of MMOs now to some degree
and it's that vibe of being a person
in a big community space
Even if you're not talking to them, even if you're not interacting with them
Like is is something that I always knew was something that was kind of missing from 14
But like it's really put a pin on it
Playing guild wars and and wow and it kind of makes me like I would like a new MMO to come out
In wow style that is not wow. Can we do that? Can that net ease warhammer thing? and wow, and it kind of makes me like, I would like a new MMO to come out
in wow style that is not wow.
Can we do that?
Can that NetEase Warhammer thing exist and be good?
Can we do that, please?
Well, that would be nice.
But I think for the same reasons you describe solo queuing
in like Apex or any of these other games being hell,
people want to hang with their friends
more than they want what you're describing.
Oh, absolutely, but here's the thing.
The friends that I have in FF14 that have become
since then like good friends of mine,
because I've known them for eight or nine years
and we've been hanging out every single fucking week
and I've hung out with them like in the States and whatnot,
is because I needed people to run an alliance
raid. So I went into looking for group or I went into general or I went into whatever.
I was like, does anybody want to run this fucking thing and queue up instead of just
using the auto duty finder? Right? That kind of social situation is significantly kneecapped
by an automated system that you just punch in
and get to the content really fast.
I do have a hard time imagining a design team being like,
oh, look at this bullshit scrolling nonsense toxic chat.
Let's fucking go.
We want that.
Let's put the, you know?
I don't know, Street Fighter seemed to know
what the fuck they were doing
I feel it like I imagine there are the ideas that in their head would be like, oh it'd be a helpful
You know nice place for people can suddenly make friends where they didn't know they could and you know kind of
Encourage something that doesn't actually reflect what the player base vibes are like, you know, mm-hmm
Huh? Well, okay. It's It's fascinating. It's just like
it's this it's this straight
I'm totally in love with
discovering or
like feeling the vibes of like different social
environments in different games.
Yeah. That have like large multiplayer components.
They're so different. Street
Fighter 6's Battle Hub
feels like an arcade. Yeah
the shit talk and the discussion is very accurate to an arcade, well an American arcade.
Minus the part where you go outside and people are smoking and having a, you know.
Okay so here's the thing, you know they're smoking.
They're just allowed to smoke in the arcade now.
Yeah I guess so. But you gotta have that, you know, that out front, like, chilling and talking shit kind
of corner, you know?
Would you like to buy some drugs?
No, thank you.
I'm good.
Someone snuck a couple PBRs in their backpack.
Dude, I was talking to Paige about this, about, like, you know, places the kids hang out.
Because we got a boy. He'll go hang out in places we don't, about like, you know, places the kids hang out, because we got a
boy he'll go hang out in places we don't want him to, right? And I'm just like, man, my
parents were totally right. That arcades that I want to go hang out were absolute shitholes.
And people absolutely tried to sell me drugs. And when I would come home, like, no, no,
it was just, no, I just put no, like, no like no no mom and dad were 100% on the
ball with that yeah I mean you're thinking of and you're thinking of that
that one up by Shattaghee right near the bridge oh yeah dude that place I know I
know the one you're thinking of. That place was so much grimier and shittier than you would expect for being in a
suburb I mean the one near me had its moments they're absolutely like I said
there was the dogs that pulled up and the, you know,
trying to sniff around for the package drop that was nearby.
But I feel as if it was kind of offset because there was an arcade, but then there were also,
there was a micro play and a comic store which were also like, you could go hang out there and play games for half an hour
there too. Yeah, the arcade in Shattagay was attached to a bar.
It was directly underneath a bar.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 222.
Which is like, well, this is obviously going to cause trouble.
It did. And it was awesome.
Yeah, no. When you and your clientele is kids after school and drunken adults
going upstairs to be like, no, I'm a policeman.
And teenagers with good fake IDs.
There you go as well.
Then go back down to the arcade to get super pissed about King Throes.
Yeah, no, we had a little rotation of like microplay, arcade, and then comic book shop
and like people would kind of just bounce around between all three, you know, get a
putz in and then like head back over and play a bit or go back to the foosball and one or the other. So you kind of spent like it was like a block where
you just kind of moved around the block after school.
I also have a wider topic on this where it's like, so you know, the the the trap of it
was better in my day nonsense. Except it never was. Except it never was.
Yeah, the Norman Rockwell trap.
I do feel there is something that has been lost
from literally all social video games
because of the creation of Discord.
It has made it really, really easy to do voice chat,
like for raids or for comms,
you don't have to get a team speak server or anything like that.
But it has also enabled the absolute most dog shit scenario of, hey, how do I find out
information on this topic? Join the Discord! By the way, we deleted that shit, it's gone.
Like, can you just have a website? No? Fuck! Can you have a web forum? Can you have a web
forum that this shit will stay up please?
Yeah, I have to say, no, of all the indie games I've booted up where it says join the
Discord to stay up to date, I've like never clicked that button. I don't want to permanently
add a clutter to my Discord side that I'm never really going to check and get pinged
on here, everybody. You know, that's not great, that's not great. A website you can at least go to take a look at.
I'm remembering the time when we were laughing
because Splatoon had no voice chat
and then when they eventually said,
okay, get your phone and have it in your lap.
And then-
Why not just use Discord?
And then pair the thing, pair pair your head set while you're playing
It was crazy. You know again because Nintendo's not gonna shell out money for the servers or whatever right now
You're like yeah, just discord completely deletes the need for all of that and then it all and also like it's it's inherently insular
And like I love talking with my friends, and I'm so glad that when I talk to my friends
I don't have to deal with like the worst dogshit opinion
I've ever heard in my life just go whoa right underneath
But sometimes there's value to that because like I still think about
Like how the first interaction I ever had with ultra David was him being like the training stage has to stay
It's good for the players, and I'm like that sucks David. No one likes that
And like if I was just chilling in my fucking
disk or that exchange he super fucking lost lawyer smart man smarter than me
yeah right fuck the training stage love you ultra David you're great but if I
was just chill laughed at my pulls Pat he laughed at my pulls I was trying to
get Makoto and I got good agent and he left like shit you pull like shit loser
But if I had just been hanging out in my discord
I would have just grabbed like a tweet and
And shown it to like my friends and be like yo check out this dog shit take by fucking ultra David
Ha ha and there would have been no interaction there
Yeah, I guess so, I guess so.
I do think as well though that with the rise,
well, one, the fact that Discord drops right over your game
also makes it extra easy.
I don't use that shit.
Oh yeah? I hate it.
Oh, okay. I hate it.
I've used it a couple times and found it to be useful.
Like when I did like, yeah, you know, like, I think like, was like phasmophobia, like among us and stuff like that. But I'm
also I hairs and I guess here's the ultimate thing is, like, we are on diverging paths
because you are leaning into like, you know, social tweet tweeting and chatting with people and
keeping up and stuff.
And I'm leaning away.
Yeah, which is considering our personality types is maybe the funniest thing that's ever
happened.
I am leaning away aggressively to to improve my day to day happiness.
And it's working. So yeah.
Well what helps me is when I see everyone else
be like dog shit and stupid, I'm like,
hey, you know what?
I'm doing all right.
Okay, okay.
I just, yeah, I'm just kinda like,
I'm enjoying life outside of this whole thing, you know?
And yeah.
I felt what it was like to be too locked into it
and on all forms, on all accounts, you know. Keep up with what I got to, but for the most part.
Well, one other thing that I want to say about Discord
is that certain games are like,
their balance has been like,
actively ruined by Discord.
How so?
And the number one that I can think of, easy,
is Dead by Daylight.
So Dead by Daylight has no voice chat
or in-game communication of any kind during matches.
Because even if you play with your friends,
you're supposed to not be able to talk to each other
Because proxies
And the game is based around that and when you play play with friends and you have a four stack and you are all
In discord the killer in DBD does not have a fucking chance in hell, right?
Right, right. They they are so fucked
Yeah, I
Mean the difference between the,
my only real experience with this, like I said,
was Overwatch and Apex queuing.
But the difference between queuing in a group
versus queuing in, like, getting matched up against,
like, a group of people where there's, like,
a bunch of solos and, like, two people together is insane.
Just, you know, we're talking,
calling out what we see everywhere.
Pinging
is unnecessary because you're literally just like, oh, behind us, you know, here comes
Star Lord, whatever. You're just the whole, the level of communication and the improvement
to the movement overall is impeccable. And like, I have seen teams coordinate on rivals
sometimes in a way where I wonder if they're queuing together.
So if you're queuing with together, you can only fight people who are queuing together.
Other queued teams, right? Yeah, that's usually the deal.
If you are coming in with a six stack, you are going to be matched around six stacks.
100%. That's what it ought to be.
But I've had a couple games where the coordination was just impeccable and I guess they
were just like on top of it, but it felt like they were
you know communicating outside almost you know. Oh, you know
what? There's a there is a great post in our chat right
now and they point out League of Legends. So League of Legends
and Dota I believe have have in game voice chat that no
one will use. No one's sane. It's a lot more effective to use in game voice chat in a MOBA. But don't, don't ever let them talk to you. Ever, ever, never, ever. Don't
let anyone in League talk to you with their voice. Are you insane? Yes, it's open mic
night at the Minstrel Show.
I'm assuming I turned off voice chat. I'm assuming that's what happened because
I've no one ever talks and I hear nothing and I forget if I actually went and did that
myself or if that's just because the way it's the way. I believe that Marvel Rivals does
have voice chat and I also turned it off in a second. It was the first option I fucked
on. Okay, yeah. So it could be those games were just people using voice chat to communicate
with each other. And you set it to push to talk, and then you unbind the keybind, and then you drag that
shit to zero volume, and you're like, yeah, now, mmm.
Yeah, anyway, but that's a very different experience of queuing together versus Solo,
for sure. Yeah, never talk to anyone in League of Legends.
Don't do it.
Just don't talk to them at all.
How about never talk to anybody ever under any circumstances?
Oh, sometimes it's nice.
Nah, I'm good.
Oh man, did you see?
There was a thread on the subreddit and it was about how the new season of League has
made the game even more toxic.
Why is that?
Because there is now a first blood achievement that gives the person who gets the first kill
an even bigger bonus than usual.
So if you were the first person to die, the incentive for your team to go nuts on you
is super high now. Even more than
normal.
God. Just... man. What a fucking crash course in here's a list of reasons why I don't play
video games. You know, like, that's crazy. That's great. Cool. Cool.
Very cool. Yeah, that's it for my week this week. If you want to see more of my crap this
week, you go down to twitch.tv slash Pat Stairsat. Tomorrow we're going to be playing Marvel
Rivals and Smite 2. That's going to be a sponsored stream. and the remainder of the week is gonna be Metal Gear Solid 2. We're gonna try and beat it
if
The Nintendo switch 2 has a direct on
Thursday then I will move shit around to accommodate that
But who knows I'm surprised speaking of banning characters that there hasn't been a game where the team could just
Vote to kick the character person been a game where the team could just vote to kick
the person on the team off the team.
Oh, there's a lot of games you can do that.
Can you?
Can you just go like everyone votes, get rid of this person?
Yeah.
Okay.
But what happens is that you end up reporting somebody who is bad at the game.
Oh, sorry.
For feeding.
I don't mean for abuse.
I don't mean reporting. I mean as a
game feature, remove this team member from the team. I don't... I mean any game that
has a server, you can kick them off the server. Okay. Yeah. I'm specifically talking about
as a intended game feature and not as a report for toxicity or bullshit. Yeah Yeah, no, that's that's a incredibly common feature that is in hundreds of games. Oh really? Okay, then I have not
Yeah, if you're in my party get the fuck out of here. Gotcha. Okay, you know what this whole conversation makes me think of?
how
fucking
Dark Souls. Oh, no, that's not the name of that game
El Elden Ring Nightfall is a solo or three player game?
I remember seeing those trailers and seeing people talk about it, I was like, oh please
don't be fucking mandatory.
Don't make it Dark Souls Apex Legends, please.
It's like, no, you can play it solo.
Night, it's night rain, not nightfall? Oh my god, there's too many.
Okay, looks like it's a standard feature,
and in most cases you are kicking people
instead of reporting them.
Gotcha, gotcha.
Like the number one reason I would kick people
in FF14 out of my party is they disconnected.
Right.
And it's like, I need to replace you.
Bye.
Huh.
Online video games.
What a, what a novelty.
It's so strange.
It's so strange to have this talk with you.
I don't care.
That's not true.
Okay, all right. You don't even believe that when you say it
Because online video games includes in fighting games, of course, of course, of course
I I don't care about communicating with the other people I
Care about lot. I'll just jumping in and playing against them. That's kind of yeah
You just want to fight against hyper intelligent robots the entire the entire
Discussion around the the communication aspect of this more or less falls on like a yeah
I'm not trying to look for that when I want to play a game online with other people. I kind of just want to play
You know
It's it's just I don't know
I get it
but
That's why I'm not going to know about that feature. I don't
know what to tell you.
Well, I'll keep filtering in information about this genre into the podcast for at least a
couple more weeks probably.
Gotcha.
Until I get tired.
Okay.
Yeah. What's going on with with Wooly over in versus land?
Uh, not not a ton. Um, I, I
know, I just we like it reset the clock. Wooly's an alien, you know?
Wooly. This is a strange discussion. Oh, yeah.
Usually I'm the alien.
Like in most scenarios, I'm talking to my wife
or my parents or you or any of my friends are like,
Pat, why are you like this?
You're so weird.
But it's very straightforward in that it's just like
what I want out of video games is sometimes
in diametric opposition to what the majority of others are looking for.
The experience I'm seeking is sometimes
completely the opposite of what everybody's looking for.
That's it.
And I'm used to those.
I gotta go, okay, right, it's me.
It's amazing.
There is a genuine reason for this I could anticipate,
which is you are extraordinarily comfortable exploring
a third space in meat space. So you have your three spaces, which is home, work, or education,
and then either Starbucks or the bar or the club or a bookstore, whatever. Sure. Um,
and you are very,
very comfortable going out into strange and new meat space,
third spaces such as the fighting game meetup. Right.
And in the fighting game community meetup with everyone's meat there,
you are engaging in this behavior. You're just face to face. Sure. Yeah.
I don't want to deal with people's physical proximity,
smell, or eyesight.
I just want them to be comfortable little text boxes,
and so I find it much easier and much more comfortable
to engage in that third space via a chat window.
Yeah, I guess so.
Stop saying meet.
Meet.
I think as well, like whatever the game is,
because like even if I'm playing a match locally
at a meetup of some kind,
and if someone was like bugging me,
you know, while that was happening,
I'd be like, okay, I'm trying to play,
I don't wanna, you know, and that kind of I'd be like okay. I'm trying to play. I don't want to you know and
That kind of that's different, too
Yeah
like cuz like listen if someone's if someone is is is
Being a stupid shithead in your favorite online game your options are leave ban block mute right?
But you're missing the best option of all,
which is standing up, turning around, going,
yo, shut the fuck up!
Right, right, right, right.
And making everything kind of weird,
and everyone stares at you and the person,
and the incentive for them to shut up is really high.
Yeah, okay, okay.
And then that pause has to play out pregnant,
as it is, for a minute.
Yeah, and then everyone goes, ooh.
Ooh. Ooh.
All right, back to this, and then that person's
either gonna escalate or calm down.
I mean, chances are not escalate,
but then everyone else goes, yo,
what the fuck with that dude?
Right? Yeah. Yeah.
He kept Z-targeting my colostomy bag.
And I don't like that.
I want my colostomy bag to be left alone.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And I guess the nature of the conversation as well also highlights that a new experience
or a new online thing will come out and the sort of the the social aspect of it will be
What you're gonna seek out for some people like I mentioned like some of my friends are
Social ff14 players that are going to hear about a new
Online experience where the social element is like worked into everything and they're like cool
I'm looking for that out of the game. And for me, there's also a second part to that, which is the social element in a brand new game is always a dice roll.
And it is always fascinating to see how it how it rolls out.
And one of the things that like Marvel rivals has shown is that Marvel rivals is a free to play game that appeals to the lowest common denominator of Marvel fans that you can play on Steam where you can change your name to anything so it has the worst
usernames of any game I have ever seen and that is awesome just the absolute
worst fucking usernames I've ever seen in my life it's incredible I guess if I
was yeah and you have to like pay a ticket cost to rename yourself or whatever.
Anyway, whatever, not much else to it.
I love it.
But I guess I'm just thinking, if I was playing me some Devil May Cry and then the only way
to do so was to be in a chat room with people kind of with text scrolling by the side. And then other people are like,
part of the experience but not really,
like they're like the co-op levels and stuff.
And be like, okay, well, I'm here to play the game.
And that element of it is kind of like,
it's not adding, I can just play and enjoy it on my own,
but it can detract depending on how bad that gets.
You know, I mean, I have to tell you, though, there is something that I forgot about during this conversation, and that is level of patience and level of tolerance.
Because you and I actually, regardless of our personal preference in what games we want to play, do spend a significant amount of our time playing games with an absolutely piece of shit text scroll to the side of the screen.
Just the worst, just the dumbest shit you've ever seen.
And unlike these other situations, the ability to not interact with that is not available.
You just, you just... Oh my available. You just you just oh my god
You've never been more right. I'm
Oversaturated with this. Yeah you get it all the time. This is not special to me. This is not unique
I'm oversaturated with it. My experience is not a default one that makes yeah, you're super right, dude
It's completely that's a huge part of it. Yeah.
Yeah. If I was not getting that in any other way, there would be very different, but because it's
the regular, it's not at all. Yeah. Cause like I'm at this place now where there are certain people,
there are certain people that I recognize from my chat, and I'm seeing them, like their name pop up,
and I'm like, I am so ready for the worst opinion
I have ever seen.
Okay.
I'm like so excited.
Like this is the same mentality that me and Paige both have,
where we're like, oh man, tell me about your cult, please.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, the Earth, oh the ice wall, absolutely.
You're hearing my opinions on on gaming and all that stuff are are filtered because of the experience I have which involves
Usually they're being a scroll of opinions. Yeah, that's a hundred percent
It's like why would I play a game where I can enjoy the peanut gallery where I'm?
Being forced to hang out with the peanut gallery for fucking 18 hours a week
where I'm being forced to hang out with the peanut gallery for fucking 18 hours a week.
I mean, you should like, yo, cyberpunk, I'm playing and I'm doing all the offline, it's,
you know, missions and shit. And I'm like, yeah, I'm just chilling. I'm running around having a decent time in that, you know, there's there's the on time and then the off time. And it's a
different experience, you know, and like, yes, Cyberpunk is so perfect for this
because you can just be like, well,
this is a mandatory ad for your eyes.
Is this fucking tech scroll that has to just go?
It's like, you got your eyes discount
and this is the price you pay.
I mean, there were some real like hilarious moments.
So I'll just take the baton here and switch it over.
But like playing, so playing Cyberpunk, this, you playing Cyberpunk this last session, I was kind of just rolling and then Reggie was
the one who stepped in and went, what the fuck?
And just started going ham on people because it was like, okay, there's overall an understanding
of main missions and then some fixer gigs, side jobs, but like overall, there's a priority list of what's worth
doing and what's not worth doing. And there's just a whole
lot to it. Oh, yeah, it's a whole thing. But there was like,
you know, in particular, there's like a moment where it's like,
okay, leaving the apartment, it's like, oh, shit, stop,
there's a side mission that there's so much that you can
only get with your neighbor right now. That might be gone if
you wait too long. It's like, okay, what are we doing?
Does it have to be right now?
Yeah, okay, all right.
It has to be right now.
It has to be right now.
And then you go in and then you start it up
and you talk to some cops and then you go,
and then it's like, all right, which door?
I took a second, I couldn't, I wasn't sure which door.
It's like, okay, the one there in front of,
all right, let's go to that one.
And then went in and it was like, great,
tried to talk to some guy, all right, cool,
nothing, come back later. And it was like, okay, okay come back later but not too much later because if you wait
too long then it's going to be got so you have to just you know like ah okay all right so you know
came back later enough in the time to like get an answer went in had a cool conversation with the
character seemed like a pretty good side mission and then walking out it was like all right well
the logical thing was after
talking to him, the cops that told me to send him to go speak, they're over there.
So let's go finish off the quest.
And I went and started talking to them and it was like, no, no, no, no, no, don't go
talk to them.
You're supposed to go somewhere else and you're supposed to find another path before,
because otherwise that might make a bad ending for the quest.
And I was like, oh, it didn't do that.
And it's like, oh, because you're supposed to highlight
the quest in the map to make sure that you know
that there's an alternate path to go
instead of just going to the direct quest giver
waiting outside the door.
There is a-
It's like, okay, well, what if-
This is the threat.
This is the threat.
And I really feel, I felt really bad
for anybody
who streamed Undertale not at release,
like anything other than the day it came out
or the week it came out,
because I remember when Matt and Liam were playing it,
and like they killed Toriel,
and the fucking backlash on that
was like the most outrageous fucking shit ever to the point where they had to start over and
Like awful and I remember when Paige streamed undertale
She was handling that and I just took this box right here
Yeah, and I put it over here and I'm like I'm gonna handle that. Oh, yeah, because the the level of
backseat nightmare was
Like even from like well-meaning like chill people was so intense
Undertale is particularly insane because of like the fact that
RPGs are about fighting bosses and beating them
Dumb yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and also, it's a lightning rod, you know, stream slash LP,
where it's like,
You killed my comfort character!
And I care more than the average viewer.
And also, I'm someone who doesn't actually
regularly show up, I just show up because of this thing.
So I don't really care about your shit,
I'm just here and I have these strong opinions
and you're just out of place ultimately.
And you're like, right, okay.
Like you, it's the worst version of it unfortunately.
This is, so there are a lot of reasons
I stopped playing BG3 in Act 3.
One was that LP took so much longer than I thought it was going to.
But the tipping point, like the final, final tipping point was going into Baldur's Gate,
the city itself, and dealing with the most incessant,
no, you have to bring this character to this room
because they have a special interaction,
like every single 10 feet.
Was like, no, no, you gotta swap out a star,
no, no, no, you gotta have Shadowheart, no, no, no.
No, that's what you got in your play through
because you were using those characters.
I was spending more time talking to chat and
like figuring out who I was going to roll forward the next 10 feet with in my party and then
retrofitting the party and then getting them up to gear than I was like listening to people talk
and I was like Jesus Christ. And I mean you know the result in this particular instance I'm describing was one where the
back room, so to speak, the war room, rightfully were just like, all right, Chats doesn't
know what they're talking about, just emote only.
And I was like, hold on, hold on, what is actually happening right now?
And I said, hold on, let me see, no, turn it back on.
And it was like, you've started the conversation but walk away and it was like go back and
Talk to them and maybe there's a way to save the fact that it's already
Started down this bad path and then it was like no you couldn't and it was like okay
So they were correct for just going you guys are probably like there's people that are like
I'm remembering the game before 2.0 happened and are making things
Favored is based on the unupdated version of the game.
That's my favorite.
It's a lot.
It is a lot.
So there's overall a thing of like, I kind of walked away from that going like, okay,
so there are moments where, like, don't go too fast through some of these quests, right?
But the whole thing is that this game is so long that you do have to choose how to progress
and make calls.
It's a big boy.
And you can't take too long on your calls.
You gotta move, right?
In fact, not moving quickly enough is also what results in Jesse Cox getting killed,
because I do the side quest where you gotta drive him because his balls are on fire,
and I'm pulling up to the stop,
and I swerved a bit too slow,
and there was a mission with an invisible timer,
didn't know, and yeah, he's gone.
And it was like, oh, try to save NPCs,
and it's like, well, I'm gonna do what I can.
As I play the game.
It's okay, it's all good, man.
Anyway, yeah, yeah, so it was just, it was like a wild kind of like, go fast, but not too fast, slow down
here, but not too slow, no way to go, roll hold him, no way to fold him.
You know?
I'm sorry his dick burned off.
Yeah, it's like, hey man, we're just, when... Especially with that apartment one, with the neighbor.
I didn't think the Jesse Cox beef was gonna end up with you letting his dick burn down.
But, I mean, here we are.
Yeah, well, he made fun of my Revengeance, like, lightning sword decoration that one time, so...
Oh, he did?
I did, I...
On Co-Optional, I had the the revengeance pre-order sword with the little lightning
Tesla zap thing yeah, and he's just like you got like a lightning dildo that back there behind you
Like now now your dick's on fire, but now it's a revenge. It's pre-order merch. God damn it
Don't make fun of my anime wall scroll right come on
but anyway, no the Yeah,, yeah, but it was particularly funny
because I kind of am like, okay,
there are going to be great quests, great quests,
that it's got you juggling hoops.
Because like your neighbor,
that's a pretty cool quest with the guy,
but it's like, yeah, and bad outcomes are just gonna be,
like, they're just gonna happen, you know?
And it's been made, and like, sometimes it doesn't,
you're not gonna have a rhyme or reason to it.
Sometimes it'll be like, oh, stop, pay attention,
make sure you don't miss the obvious cue.
And then other times it's like, well, at this point,
it's been made evidently clear just by the amount.
It's like, did you send the body back to Vic?
Damn, that sucks.
You're gonna miss out on a cool thing.
Because if you didn't do that,
then you would've gotten the cool thing.
But it's like, yeah, I guess I just didn't think
sending the bullet-riddled body back to the family
and dropping it
on his mom's front lawn would be the best move. Maybe Vic could do something
there but it's like, nah, it doesn't matter. You don't know what different families want with bodies.
Doesn't matter. Bad decision, bad content, here we go. You know, and it's like...
Why aren't you any good at cyberpunk, you stupid idiot? You can't, you can't go
blind, you can't go blind and have that experience
where you get it all.
You just can't, you know?
Yeah, and you know, and I will say that like,
admittedly, you know, imagine double blind souls
for the first time, right?
Like, you're gonna be like overwhelmed probably
and relying on outside information
to make sense of everything,
unless you've been intimately familiar
with the genre before.
But it was particularly funny
to have just this instance of like,
the quest end giver right there
that felt like a logical thing to do
was actually too comfortable of a turn to make, you know, that was the end.
And you know what, man?
You know, these handfuls of decisions that are just like, yep, they seem normal in the
time, but they're actually the heaviest decisions ever.
You know what, man?
It's all worth it.
You know what it's all worth it for?
That moment that someone tells you something that's just like completely wrong
And then you click a button and then the description of that thing is like in big text on the screen in a way
That's impossible to not read and you're like is it?
Is it like every time I go to the battle pass and Marvel rivals on stream someone goes
You just need to unlock the costume just unlock the costume now
And I just like slowly read out you must unlock all items on this page before unlocking the costume
Yeah, it's so worth it. It's like oh I get up in the morning for this shit because it turns out some pages
You can just buy the costume, but other yeah the one with the costume at the top. Yeah
Yeah, yeah, so this but I made I've had that same moment of costume, but other pages you can't. Yeah, the one with the costume at the top. Yeah, yeah, that's it.
So this, I've had that same moment of going like,
oh, how come I can't?
Weird.
Anyway.
It's a back and forth.
It's a back and forth.
Ah, shit, what was I gonna say?
Anyway, yeah, there's, Fuck me, something else about Cyberpunk,
but I think it's gone.
Yeah, it'll come back.
You're playing a bunch of that game.
Pretty cool.
Yeah, the ability to just kind of like
pare down the information
and get it has helped a good bit.
Now that the game is rolling full speed,
yeah, I,
oh, that's what I was gonna say, right, it just came back.
So, I'm definitely aware to just,
and look at like overall feedback in general with
LP stuff has been that like one of my one of the biggest issues
I think a lot of people have is just like my pace and that that should improve
By whatever means and so in some cases. I'm kind of looking at it going like
Okay
objectively if I'm playing like Phoenix Wright, I don't
know how much faster that could have gone except for zero banter and answering everything
right away.
It's like, yeah, no, be smart on every puzzle prompt ever.
Yeah.
So let's stop.
The stopping to think about literally how to solve the puzzle has to add some time and
a couple of jokes and a couple of banter moments have to add some time as well.
But otherwise, I'm like, we're just going straight through.
So like barring mashing through the dialogue as well without trying to read it out, that
adds time.
I mean, it's a visual novel.
Don't do that.
Exactly.
Right.
But I'm just kind of putting together, I'm like, why is it even in a best case scenario
when time is of the essence
I'm still trying to go forward how that still affects it because I'm like at the end of the day that was a
52 episode LP or so and
You know each one is about 45 minutes in the end
So that's still way more hours than you know 22, which people are usually play things right in
and it's like
Well, the lag there is on thinking
occasional banter not we didn't have a ton of banter a little
bit of banter every now and then mostly reading, and then
voice acting, you know, there's not much that could be done that
doesn't overall make it a worse thing, the worst experience to
LP. But with something like cyberpunk, so that it's so
open ended, I've kind of decided I'm something like cyberpunk, so that it's so open ended, I've decided I'm
just like, okay.
It's also very systems dense.
It's very systems dense. And so what I'm doing, I'm like, okay, well, I know that there's
no, sometimes there's just going to be no way for someone who expects something to go
faster based on their memories of that to actually get that experience. And I'm not
going to mash through things to go at the speed that you do by yourself.
So what I am doing is kind of going,
well, what are my goals for the session?
And let's see if that's a realistic amount
of things to accomplish, right?
So the heist is a giant mission
that could take one or two.
I wanted it to happen in one and we did, you know?
And I'm kind of just going in going like,
all right, at the very least, every couple episodes,
you'll hear me saying my goal for the next couple sessions is, or
for this session is to do this many missions, perhaps this types of things. And so you can
see more or less like, this is what I think can fit in the timeframe we have. And I hope
that while that doesn't change the speed at which things are going to go, it makes it
make more sense why it takes as long as it does.
Because I think as a matter of perspective,
like my own lag on it, like,
has a certain amount of an effect,
but looking at it like straight up breaking it down,
I'm like, there's a lot more time there
that literally cannot be shaved
unless you're not getting an LP at all, you know?
Yeah, I would, if I were you,
I would not change anything at all, and you should do things an LP at all, you know? Yeah, I would, if I were you, I would not change anything at all,
and you should do things at your own comfort,
and part of that is that you should do you,
and the other part is that I play a fun little game
when you start new LPs in which I try and mark down
the date that you will finish them.
Okay.
And sometimes I'm right, and I think that's really fun.
Okay, interesting.
I had the disco one down to the weak.
Fair enough.
And it was like fucking yes.
I mean what I will say is that like, yeah,
I think it might help to just set expectations
a little bit better.
I'm not, it doesn't, again, the pace doesn't necessarily
change that much but for enough people that have said
Oh, I've stopped watching what he's doing because it takes too long
hopefully their liars first of all
I've seen it enough that I'm taking it into concern
But but for for all of that I am like saying like hopefully
But for all of that, I am saying, hopefully, setting expectations will at least make it so that it doesn't,
so that it feels a bit better knowing, hey,
we tried to do two main quests, a side quest and a fixer gig
today.
We got all those things done.
That's about as much time as I think
we could get done in a five-hour stream being realistic.
And if it falls short of
that, then you know, oh, I'm probably wasting too much time and or this mission was particularly
long. But I think a lot of it has to do with expectations as opposed to like, practically,
what would Phoenix Wright have looked like if I tried to make any 22-hour LP?
Absolutely. And also, like, Wully, you have to make certain decisions like if you want to keep that motorcycle
Because you really like that motorcycle you can't use that fast travel. You got to drive there yourself. Yes, well I
You want to emerge?
Such a good clip you want to immerse yourself sometimes in the world of Night City and then in the sewer water
Such an incredible clip.
As you go flying off the side of the water, you know?
You couldn't have done that better if it was on purpose.
Hell yeah.
And so that's it, that's that's it.
You know, I think I'm imagining a,
although with a game like Disco Elysium, for example,
like you literally cannot possibly know
what that game's formula is gonna be your words
Gonna lead you you know if I go alright so today
We're gonna walk in this church and see what the fuck's going on here
You know see if we can get out by the end of the session. Oh, yeah
Excuse me what did you think you could predict where this was going no you cannot so this only works for
Gate or like a Phoenix Wright like oh, yeah the last case
Let's see if we can finish this in in one or two sessions. No
By the last case of a phoenix right game is 30% of the whole game
I'll do you one fucking better the episode the episode count was 52 for the LP in total
24 episodes
1 to 24 were cases 1 to 4.
Yeah, absolutely.
There were more episodes of case 5 than the entire rest of Phoenix Wright combined.
Dude, the Phoenix Wright games, if every case is bigger than the last one, then you get
to the last one, it's like 40- 50% of the whole game, it's crazy.
And again, not wasting too much time, you know?
So it's bigger than the entire thing.
Unbelievable, truly a turnabout shadow tree.
So yeah, Cyberpunk is good and Thousand X Resist, we got a little further, gonna be
continuing that this week.
Oh hey, before we get off that, I gotta say, I wanted to do the Metal Gear series for this
reason and boy was I right, cause January's a little slow and I'm kinda tired from the
holidays and all that shit, so I wanted to play a series that I'm like, you know what,
I wanna just put my fucking feet up and just chill the fuck out while the game
does its own thing for a while.
And Metal Gear Solid is the opposite of the whole conversation we have been
having because that game has decided how long it is going to take and it's going
to go and I'm going to sit there and that's how long it's going to be.
I mean, you're not skipping Kodak conversations, right?
Nope.
So yeah, Rose, tell me about the room. Yeah. And that's how long it's gonna be I mean you're not skipping Kodak conversations right? Nope, so
Yeah, Rose tell me about the room. Yeah, you can't
You're not doing extra calls I assume I'm doing a couple but like okay
And I'm dying on more bosses than I did last time because I was a child and played Metal Gear all the time
But like yeah, okay, you know what Campbell?
Tell me what Jim Houseman, the Secretary of Defense,
has to say.
Jim Hausman?
Sit back and just pet my dog for 15 minutes.
This is Jim.
God damn it.
Out of curiosity, when you play a game with a RPG
or visual novel kind of like text box,
are you pressing X at your reading speed?
Or are you kind of going at auto speed?
Depends, is there voice acting?
Yes or no, if it's voice acting,
I wait for all the voice acting to conclude.
If there's no voice acting and I'm reading it,
I am in fact doing it at my reading speed.
Okay.
And I look back at some of those videos
and my reading speed is
So fast that I'm skipping over shit to get through it faster and it kind of unintelligible mumbling And are you speaking the lines out so that people who are minimizing it still know what's going on?
No, I'm just reading it. Okay. Okay. I should be better. Okay. I should be better about it
Well, there's that don't do I don't do as good of a job as I should gotcha is what I'm saying. That'll shave some time
Speaking dialogue speaking text out loud for people who are currently listening only and not watching the video will add time
Yes, I think I think I think the fastest I ever went I saw somebody mention it is
Yakuza 4 in which I read that so fast that I would just and I was familiar
I beaten Yakuza 4 like three four times
So I just started to paraphrase every single line of dialogue to get through it as fast as possible
So I was reading these lines not as they scrolled
But they would come up in one big block and I'd be like, this is what they said. Then this, then this. Just go as fast as possible.
I mean, listen, I will say that the whole voice acting the lines out bit that we do
came from speaking the lines out loud so that people could hear it when minimized or whatever,
because initially that was the only reason why we read stuff out regularly. I would always
be like, oh yeah, I remember, God, it was years ago. It was back from like, I want to
say ultra despair girls was where I first learned about people going like, I actually
sometimes just listen to the LP
instead of watching.
Yeah.
And it helped.
Now luckily there weren't that many people on that LP.
No, luckily there were not.
But that's where I first remember hearing about that.
And then it came back up a couple times
throughout the years in a couple different games
or sometimes just kind of reading through and pressing
would elicit some people going like,
oh, like I prefer when you speak it out because I can follow along or so. I was like, oh, okay,
cool. And so because of that, Kotor, it also came up, right?
Yeah, it did come up with Kotor. Thanks, Notepad Guy.
Yes, it came up in Kotor. And so with those kind of moments, I kind of internalized that
as like a shit, okay, right, this is something that we got to do for games that are text
heavy. And carrying that forward then led to like, well, if I'm going to play fucking Goombella,
then I might as well give it a shot. And then it turned into what we do now. So it's a happy
accident that it's become a fun thing to do. But there's a secondary goal that was initially
in mind.
I have decided to solve this problem by looking up what games have full voice acting and which
ones don't.
And if they don't, I just completely ignore them.
Yeah, that's my solution to this problem.
Yeah.
And then while I trained on reading a fucking book.
It's really interesting.
I saw a GDC talk by Josh Sawyer about Pillars of Eternity 2 and how they had to turn into doing
full voice acting when they hadn't originally planned for it and how hard that was.
One of the biggest things they said was for a big RPG, having full voice acting is vital
because if it doesn't, streamers don't even bother looking at it.
And that is a big part of marketing now and it's a big part of their advertising.
And that if you can't get anyone to stream the game because it doesn't have full voice
acting, it sucks.
Yes, that is real.
And I'll tell you right now, if I was not a streamer, I would look at that and go, well,
that's dog shit because a good game shouldn't have to have to spend extra money.
It doesn't need to if that's not part of the
Absolutely like Pentament a game. I won't play on stream because I feel like having my voice for the rest of the day
Ah a game made by Josh Sawyer with a lower budget
This is apparently incredible that I will never play on stream because I'll be tired. Yeah
I mean we've talked about launch disco enough times, you know, and then the other part of it certainly is now It's it's almost like the extra the the when games have the the music cues that are like licensed music
And then you can't fucking get around that Guardians of the Galaxy type shit, you know
Cyberpunk is presenting a particularly weird one because we have the nudity off
Because twitch I also turn the nudity off. Yeah, cuz there's bunch. Yeah, Twitch doesn't care, but YouTube does.
And then we're like, okay, well nudity's off, that's fine,
but boy are they gonna throw around the C word.
Yeah, they're gonna say, yeah.
That's dropping heavy and YouTube hates that.
But what about this?
Tune.
But what about that ad where the dominatrix
is stepping on this dude's back and he's naked
and you don't see anything, but underneath. There's a puddle on the ground
And you're like, uh
That's nice. That's cool. That's fine. No, it's not YouTube hated it YouTube hated it. We had to go in and edit that
Okay, the naked guy with his parts hidden but the pool underneath him. It was like YouTube was like stop it
So that means it's a good ad.
Yeah, it worked.
But they're not censoring that when you take the nudity off
or whatever, because there is no nudity.
Anyway, wild shit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the context filters are alive and well on YouTube.
The other thing that Josh talked about in that talk
was the Divinity Original Sin 2 by Larian created the expectation for full voice acting
in all RPGs going forward.
Was that the first one?
And he said that was Divinity Original Sin 2 was a huge, huge RPG from them.
And I believe it was the first one to be like every single line of dialogue from every single
incidental character is voiced.
Well, what about like Bioware though?
Not everybody.
And like the Bioware, the Mass Effect games were like much smaller scope.
I'm thinking of Mass Effect and Kotor, yeah.
Yeah, Kotor was definitely not all fucking voice acted.
There was a million guys that go,
Mukeshaka Paka and Kachi and all that fucking shit.
Yeah, Alien Lines, Alien Lines, yeah. Yeah, alien lines, alien lines, yeah.
But like, with humans, were there none?
No, no, when you talk to people,
but the amount of dialogue and mass effect is trivial
compared to like a Baldur's Gate or a Divinity.
There's enough aliens you meet that like,
they can minimize the recording effort there.
And now with Baldur's Gate 3,
that expectation is now like fucking staked in the earth of
the expectation of voice acting.
And not just that, but like good voice acting.
Yeah.
Oh, speaking of Mark 100 million downloads of Baldur's Gate 3.
They have released the Withers Big natural mod for consoles sorry big naturals mod for consoles hey
man we'll get to my shrew newie later
anyways so yeah beyond also a hundred million holy shit Beyond all that
Just a quick shout out but we played some fighting games one of which I had been following for a long time was core upped
Don't play fighting games. I played some fighting games. That's fucking crazy
years ago at evo I
was walking around and checking out the the indie fighting booths and
So I was walking around and checking out the indie fighting booths. And yeah, there was one booth in particular where there was a game called Black Salt Corruption
and it was kind of like an anime fighter sort of angle with much more techie looking characters.
And it was really early.
It was kind of like just an initial
kind of like alpha build is pretty rough. But you know, I had been like walking through and checking
that game out over the years. And yeah, the developer Jesse, cool guy, you know, we chatted
a little bit here and there. It was I was watching as like that game slowly evolved and kind of
switched it up. And then at one point got renamed to a different thing called Core Upt, which was
in collaboration with Arc Forged, the folks who made Sonic Smackdown
head-to-head and
Origin of Storms. So these basically these fun indie fighters that were just full of Marvel bullshit
So these basically these fun indie fighters that were just full of Marvel bullshit.
And so they got their hands on this and started getting getting to work. And overall, the end result is a disgusting, absolutely filthy
kind of like Power Rangers, like just it's not Marvel, but you bet your ass there's going to be mix ups left, right, teleporting nonsense.
Fucking oh, it's like Marvel rivals disgusting disgusting
Yes, Marvel rivals exactly
And it yeah, and it was just a whole lot of fun
We played a little bit mess around with the cast
Found some of the dirtiest characters ever and then just did a nice long set where shit became anime
Because when both characters can teleport all over the
screen and both characters...
Yeah, okay.
...and everyone's got a dive kick, everyone's got a threat, everyone's got an instant overhead,
everyone's got a judgment cut and just bullshit and you just go to the maximum, you get a
really fun nonsense set out of it.
So yeah, be sure to check out the Get Into Fighting games
of Core Upt and the games available now.
And then yeah, we also took a look at a game called Knockout,
which difficult name for SEO purposes, unfortunately,
but essentially it's a bunch of stick figures
with like character attributes on them.
So here's a stick figure, but he's got boxing gloves
and a mustache and he tells
you that you have no dignity.
Okay.
Got it?
Okay, I understand that. I understand that.
Done. Here's another one with big gauntlets and he punches the ground and grabs you and
tosses you around and whatever. And yeah, it's like a homie fighter where you just get all
your homies and you put all your friends from school in one game except it's just legally distinct stick character versions
of all your favorite fighting game characters and a big old crazy mashup game.
It was fun.
It was cool.
So check that out as well.
Knockout is going to be coming out too on the channel.
This week, more Thousand X Resist, this week, you know, more 1000x Resist,
more Cyberpunk, and some more fighting games.
And I need to make a quick correction.
It is not 100 million downloads of Baldur's Gate 3.
It is 100 million downloads of mods for Baldur's Gate 3.
Ah!
That is very different.
Important.
Extremely different.
Yes.
And yeah, and just also to give a heads up to everybody,
so next week is going to be a very,
pretty much non-existent schedule,
so gonna be traveling to MagFest.
If you are out there, come say what's up.
We're gonna be, I'm gonna be there for the weekend and doing a couple of events. So're going to be, I'm going to be there for the weekend and doing
a couple of events. So there's going to be, yes, I'm going to do a signing versus Wolf's
Panel. I'm going to be doing commentary over as Sonic Fox fights the world in Mortal Kombat
1, which should be particularly hilarious. I should probably go watch some Mortal Kombat 1 footage
to learn how that game works so that I can.
No, you don't.
You don't need to do that.
Yeah, I'm already just, in my head, I'm just like,
I'll just be like, yeah, I don't even play this game.
That combo was crazy.
Damn, Sonic.
You know.
Wow, is that the guy from Scream?
Wow.
Crazy.
Anyway, so we're gonna be doing some stuff.
So yeah, if you're there, come hang out.
And we're gonna be obviously off next week
for the most part, except for we're gonna do
the podcast regular, so more details then.
Alrighty.
BRB?
What do you do, watch in Mortal Kombat 1?
Get out of fucking...
I'm gonna watch at least one stream
to know what's going on right now.
Well, yeah, you'll find the one guy streaming it,
and you'll check out what they got going on.
You know, I think, yeah.
I think I need to be able to quickly acknowledge
what's happening on screen while also talking about the cost of Fatality Halloween DLC.
I'll do some homework.
All right, a quick break?
Yeah, let's do a quick break.
BRB.
All right.
Let's take a quick word from our sponsors.
Oh, I love our sponsors.
All right, this week, we've got a new sponsor. This week, the
podcast is sponsored by Hero Forge.
Hero Forge, huh?
Hero Forge Custom Mini Forge, huh? Hero Forge custom miniatures.
Oh man.
You've been playing some of them tabletop.
I have been playing some tabletops.
Yes, so.
I don't have a mini, I only have these dyes.
So yeah, Hero Forge is a pretty cool way
So yeah, Hero Forge is a pretty cool way to just go and make a custom miniature for whatever your tabletop needs.
They've got a Hero Forge face customizer where you can go in with an extensive selection
of little editable areas.
You can change the scalp, eyebrows, nose, and jawline of your figures.
There is a KitBash option on this website.
Oh, yeah. Oh, we're getting there. We're getting there.
So you've basically got a 3D character creator tool to go in
and customize whatever you want to create your character
and then have it printed in the plastic miniature sent
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There's a ton of presets, sliders, control pads,
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their faces, the expressions.
There's a ton of different races to pick from,
different ear types, different texturing details if you want to have hair, fur, or
spots, whatever the races are. And down to teeth and hair selection as well, it really,
really has a ton of detail on that. You don't just have to print them out in like a...
You can print in a set color as well, but they have like premium plastic minis and they
have like a color printing system as well where you can have essentially the basic colors
put on so that if you're going to paint over them, it comes more or less like pre-set for
you to go in with extra detail if you'd want.
Yeah, they have like, again, different levels and scales and sizes
you can work with. The printing process, you can get specs for premium plastic minis at
a 35 by 30 by 30 microns. So that means that-
Microns?
Yes. So if you've got your noble griffin mount and you've got feather detail on it, the feathers
will look sharper than ever.
So you can get to that level of detail.
And color standees as well.
Acrylic standees are possible with more detail than they've ever had and you can get extra
texture and detail on those.
Put your name on the bottom, custom label it as well.
And, oh yeah, you can have, yeah, standees printed
if you're looking for a more budget-friendly option as well
where you kind of have the flat printed figure
that like stands up that you can use as a piece as well.
So the options are incredible.
I went through it and I made myself a little
wooly mini and I was kind of looking and deciding and yes, there are multiple dread options
available. I was very happy to see that. And yeah, between putting myself in, I was kind
of deciding between wearing a suit or going all the way in with my class.
I kind of went for a monk build because I'm like, yeah, that's probably what would end
up happening.
So I was able to make a wooly fig.
I got the face details in.
I got the hair, the dreads going.
I was able to put the little ombre, like, dye at the tips. I put myself in the barbarian outfit and had
the post, the posture doing like a punch so I could get my like boxing kind of monk fighting
position going on the bottom of the figure as well. I had wooly versus, you know, spelled
out underneath and I set the colors and everything. So yeah, it was a pretty straightforward. Honestly,
it was just like making a character and to create a character. It was pretty awesome. And I'm looking forward to when that arrives. So I'll
check out and I'll yeah, you guys can can take a look. It's not here yet. But it was a really
straightforward cool process to just go through this character creator and make a mini. So if you're getting your tabletop stuff set up, check them out.
Um, yeah, so this is so cool.
It's really cool.
They have guns.
I put guns on my dude.
It's not just fantasy setting stuff.
There's tons of detail for like modern day setting stuff, futuristic, uh, as well.
And yes, the kit bashing option is a new feature for
pro subscribers that lets you customize to a way crazy detail where essentially you can add up to
20 items onto your mini in addition to the regular options as well. So you can just take extra figures
and add the details so that if anything in the main simple options is not cutting it for you, you can kit bash to add more pieces, weapons, whatever it is to
get your character exactly right. So yeah, go check those out as well. There's also digital
minis and 2D tokens that you can sell too. So if you want to buy just the file of what you've rendered out too, they've even got
those available.
It's a really cool system.
So visit Hero-
Oh, wow.
This is so powerful.
Wow.
Yeah.
And given what you're currently getting back into Tabletop, take a look.
It could be perfect for what you're currently getting back into tabletop, you know, take a look. It could be perfect for what you're doing.
Visit heroforge.com to start designing your custom miniature today and check back often
new content is added every week.
So yeah, you want to go to heroforge.com and use code CASL to get 5% off all orders of
physical miniatures. Once again, that is HeroForged.com and use the code CASTLE.
You'll get 5% off all orders of physical miniatures.
Thank you, HeroForged.
Thanks, HeroForged. All right.
This week the podcast is sponsored by Shopify.
Hey Shopify, what's going on?
Hey.
So yes, if you got a business, if you're going into this year and you're getting your entrepreneurial
legs off the ground, you might know a thing or two about shopping and selling online.
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and of course I talk a lot about how I really like the
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Thank you, Shopify.
Thanks, Shopify. This week, the podcast is sponsored by...
Where are we?
There we are, RocketMoney.com.
That is a particularly useful service. If you've got a bunch of unknown, forgotten about garbage subscriptions.
I do.
I actually literally do.
To tons of different services.
This is a really useful way to find it and track it down and make sure that you're not
paying extra on things that you're not actually using.
There's a ton, a ton of extra payments that you could be ignoring or not know about, stuff
that's like deceitful.
I've seen and had that go across my accounts for a while now and it has been, yeah, it's
been pretty scummy seeing the different ways that they take advantage of you on forgotten
subscriptions and yeah, rock and roll.
Every single month, my bank takes money out of my account for my house.
It's like, it's my house.
What are you doing?
Terrible.
I assume they're not going to stop and cancel your mortgage.
But they can show you all your subscriptions in one place so you can know exactly where
your money is going.
And for anything you don't want anymore, they can help you cancel them.
You can check out their dashboard and it gives you a clear view of all the expenses that
are you might have not kept track of and get alerts for if anything changes in price.
If there's
unusual spending activity, if you're setting a budget goal and it's close to going over
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Yeah, just taking a look very quickly, seeing a bunch of stuff that was hooked up to my
accounts and I definitely did see stuff that I was like, wait, what is that?
Why is that called that?
Where is that going to? And you can see what's going on from your accounts or
from your PayPal or whatever the case is. I had one particularly like egregious example
where there was an app that was like, I signed up to use the service once and then to unsubscribe,
you couldn't do so inside the app.
No.
It created like a random different name for like a subscription that's a recurring payment.
And then you go to, it basically says you have to go to the website to do it.
So you go to the website and sign in on the website and then it sends you an email with
a time limited link.
And for the next five minutes, you then go onto that emailed link and
unsubscribe from that.
It was so garbage.
It was crazy how many layers of obfuscation and bullshit they put you through.
So that's going to annoy most people.
So the ability to track that down and just kill it right away, super useful.
Am I still subscribed to Crave?
How did that even happen?
What do you, yeah.
No, it was wild.
The three steps of obfuscation from an unsubscription
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The level of, you know, just annoyance-based marketing.
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Nah, you want a sub to what you want to sub to.
The bank is taking, oh yeah, right, yeah, there you go.
Yeah, right, perfect, nailed it.
This week, the podcast is also sponsored by Mando.
week the podcast is also sponsored by Mando. That is yes Mando. Is that that British thing? No, that is deodorants and the ability to smell good. Oh, thank God. This Lord knows the people listening to this podcast could use a hand.
Yeah.
So straight up, you're talking about the ability to get your hands on control of your body
odor.
It's, I guess, the best way to just put it.
You need to take
control. Body order can get pretty bad and I play Dungeons and Dragons, let me tell you.
You know the deal. Oh no, rude, stinky, bad. Don't do it. Nobody wants to be the guy who
goes, yo, who smells in here? Right? Especially if you're doing some sort of offline meetup in real life.
Yeah, where you're shaking hands and...
Whatever function you might be attending, you want to make sure that you smell your
best, right?
Do yourself the favor.
Thing is, of course, is that I've learned over the years that there's times where,
when you get to be a certain girth, when you get to be a certain heft, you kind of are
like, oh, there's new folds that were not there a couple years ago.
So the tech with Mando that's particularly impressive is whole body deodorant.
Right? So you've got the deodorant that you can apply and put straight on and you've got
deodorant cream as well that you can apply where you need to liberally.
You need to add it to the danger zones. That's exactly it, right? Because sometimes you take your shower, you come out, you're getting ready, you put it
all on, and then you grab your deodorant and you think, oh, let me cover my underarms and
that should be good, right?
Wrong.
You don't know, but you're creating an ecosystem down there.
There are danger zones, as you said, that need to be covered. So there are places with armpit-like
climate that need equal amounts of attention. Mando was created by a doctor who saw firsthand
how normal BO was misdiagnosed and mistreated.
When they went into his office and he was like, bro, you stink.
Yeah, I think that sounds so.
I gotta do something about this.
Oh my God.
Sounds about right.
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You've got sprayed deodorant as well if that's your preference, aluminum free, ideal for hard
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And then yeah, in particular, the whole body deodorant I found great.
That was very, very useful for just getting everywhere, getting everywhere that it needs
to be.
Don't mix diagnose the stinky.
Indeed, controls your odor better than just soap alone.
Okay, hold on, we got a stat here.
12 hours after a shower, the average man's grundle odor was level five out of ten.
There's no way that says grundle the average grundle odor with
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Yep, you like that?
You know what the worst part is?
The boost confidence part is like dead on.
But the people who need that the most don't gain more
confidence because they were confident before because they didn't know what the
fuck was going on. Ignorance is bliss. Like that like starts with confidence then you have to hit
them with shame. Shame is mandatory and then they can regain the confidence. Absolutely. Speaking of which, everybody, yo, uninstall honey. That shit's
garbage. They are literally robbing everyone. Absolute criminals, scumbag fucking company.
Can I say actually, allegedly robbing everyone, but legal eagle is going to sue them. So we'll
see how that goes. Let's see how that goes. But if you are hearing this and you listened to any copy or
ad that we read in the past where we were talking about it, don't install that shit,
uninstall that shit, get it off your computer, don't fucking use it. They're the worst
and needless to say, we shan't be working with them in any capacity ever in the future. And yeah, just do, if you did install it, don't.
If you, yeah, get it out of there.
That's it, that was something from, yeah,
like we, it was basically, it was something
that you would install and it would run promo codes
to use the place.
Yeah, it turns out it would steal promo codes is what it would do.
It would take your promo codes.
And delete the reference.
And your promo codes.
And whoever else's that was running at the time.
So there you go.
So that's no good.
Can we blame the bees for this? Ummm, if by the bees you mean PayPal, then yes.
But I have to use PayPal.
Yes, and Canadians don't have really cash apps or Venmos, you know, so we got what we
got.
We do have e-transfers though, which Americans don't have e-transfers, though, which Americans don't have.
E-transfer rules.
Americans don't have e-transfers.
So there is that.
It's super good.
100%.
But yeah, no, that's it.
Pretty straightforward on that.
Hope that's clear.
Fuck them.
All right.
And now that we're done looking down there, eyes up here.
Hey, Mai is gonna come out and Mai looks really cool.
Okay, the Mai trailer dropped and every time a character comes out for Street Fighter 6,
I believe we're going to see the discourse around the way their face looks in the first
preview trailer
There's going to be an ugly face discourse for every single character that comes out, right?
but
Can you feel?
It's not just that they nailed my looking really good
She's doing her shinkiro smile from CVS. Yeah, it's not just that
It's that like people were going to jump out of windows if they failed here
Like I don't know you like I can feel the pressure in how good she looks in the trailer
that it was like
Sweat down someone's back if this failed.
This isn't Marvel infinite. Okay.
This is street fighter six.
And Terry is a big old wacky pizza boy and he could look for Florida, man.
And he, and he can, he's supposed to look cool, but he can be kind of goofy.
But he's supposed to also be kind of lame.
But you cannot fuck up my, the, okay,
well you can't say the first lady of fighting games,
but you can say the, I guess the queen of fighting games.
She's that really hot chick from King of Fighters
that looked like she was gonna kiss Chun-Li that one time.
Yeah, and she's probably the second most popular fighting
game girl of all time, period.
Probably, yeah.
You just, yeah.
So you can't fuck that up.
And I feel like the pressure was clear.
And they didn't fuck it up.
They probably went through, I could see double,
I could see like 20 or 30 different faces.
I imagine tweaking until they're like that one from every angle it can't look walkie
from any angle whatsoever Terry Terry's got no job he can look weird but and
then the second thing I'll say that this does which is kind of wild because now
she's debuting in in Street Fighter instead of in Fatal
Fury or KOF proper.
Weird.
Super weird.
But the City of the Wolves outfit, her main default, the biker my look is now...
Looks great.
It looks awesome.
Some folks were complaining about it over in City of the Wolves, but I'm like, I thought
it was great in both cases.
I like the look. I think the only problem with it
Is that when she does her little spin fire thing without the tail it looks like she's just farting flames yes
Yes, but you know what hey apparently people like that now not a problem for everybody
Yes, so you're gonna collect your Harley Quinn limited edition covers
No, no, I'm not the fartacular? No, I'm good. Okay,
because you know, the Harley Quinn Fart-Tacular comics are coming out. Oh, trust me, dude. I'm
well aware. Yeah, it's hilarious, the joke. It's really funny, though. It's really funny. It's
super funny when you buy all three limited edition covers. Yeah. Isn't it funny? Isn't everyone laughing?
It's really funny.
You should show all your friends and insist on how funny it is.
Look how funny it is.
It's a joke.
It's a joke, isn't it?
It's for laughs.
So my, like in the biker look now, like I feel as if like the, this sells that costume
even better.
It shows.
Oh, absolutely.
It looks great, it looks great.
I liked her kind of Falcoon alt maximum impact
kind of look for a bit.
And I never expected that necessarily we'd see that.
It'd be nice to get it as a third costume here.
But that's rad as shit, nothing much on that.
Obviously Capcom marketing team knows
exactly what they're doing.
And much like Invisible Woman, much like Sue Storm,
coming straight to Marvel Rivals and Gunnar equipped,
I feel as if Mai is like,
hey, this is literally what her character is,
this is what she's been.
I think, just to go to Rivals for a second, I think the fact that like I have had no trouble
seeing like double support in every single game I've played since Sue Storm came out
is the funniest.
Like using gooning to balance your fucking game population is unbelievable.
But also, is it not the oldest, most reliable?
Oh yeah, it is.
It is.
It's not even a trick in the book.
It's literally why you open up shop and get into business.
The entire Dead or Alive franchise would not exist.
That's true.
Yeah, so you can go check out the breakdown on the details of the character and just kind of watch the description just be like,
hawkers, sweater mittens,
this is a sweater puppet. Big old fucking titties,
look at them. Ta-tas,
tig-ole-bitties even.
Yeah.
The kit looks like an army is incoming.
I see a DP.
Oh, there's a lot of zany fucking shit in her abilities.
So the stuff I was looking for is not there,
but instead we got some stuff that works
for a success system, right?
So she's got her big old DP,
and that's right off the bat, you're like, great, reversal.
Got it.
Her fireball, Kachosa, and she throws out the fan.
The simple, uncharged version can be punched or blocked
or destroyed with a fireball, so it's particularly weak.
But if you charge it for a little bit, it'll bounce up and then come back down on top of
you.
And hit.
Exactly.
And uh-oh.
And now you've got a mix going.
I'm trying to think of, is it Basara in Samurai Shodown that has projectiles that bounce
up and do that kind of thing. But either way, bouncing projectiles
that create a second hit afterwards
is really, really tricky
because she can mix you up while it's coming down.
And then furthermore, you can,
the deal there is because it's a little bit trickier
for her to like spend time charging up your fireballs,
you gotta find ways to hide it and mask it
because you're not gonna beat someone like Luke,
just sandblasting your face, you know, super quickly.
Angie, there you go, Angie Mito, butterfly.
That's what I was thinking of.
You can then do her level one, right?
The Kagerou no Mai.
And that like, does the full flame thing.
And she has five, she has flame stocks
that she can install
and she can then do fire fans and fire charged fans who have like way more hits. Clearly like
they hit up to three times which will break a drive impact and then you can get double fans out
and do a crazy like high or low mix while the bounce is coming so she can get really oppressive if you let her.
That level one flame attack like she used to have that as a normal move in like a real
bout and then like in CVS1. I always thought that was dope but like here in this case they kind of
like made it to super so it's like fair enough she's got a reversal.
She also in KOF 11 I used to really love her air control because she had like three dive kicks
and wall jumps right you could do charge like down for two seconds up and punch and then she would jump off the wall and then could fly at you with the normal dive kick with their butt dive kick which is a different angle a knee dive kick which is an even
different angle that's a straight drop down and it was disgusting how you could
mix people up but now all of that we're gonna have that air control in Street
Fighter 6. No, no she doesn't she just gets a simple dive kick and then like I think a
target combo version of it for simplicity
and like that's all fine.
A lot of that would be insane and jump trajectory changing in Street Fighter makes it really,
really hard to anti-air people.
Like it's really strong if you can jump at somebody, make them do the wrong move and
then just drop straight down, you know.
Someone tries to do a big Shoryuken and you're like, nope, I'm not there anymore.
But to make up for that, you get these fire stocks,
which not just improve our fireballs,
but it seems like everything gets ignited on fire as well.
You know, the, yeah, Ryuenbu,
like the big flaming spin, as you mentioned,
the elbow, the rush elbow as well,
a lot of that stuff looks like pretty strong when it's enhanced.
And I guess the other thing notable is her level two,
which is the big flaming elbow, is full corner carry?
Yeah, it's good stuff.
Marissa takes you straight to the wall with her level three
every time.
Shy of that move, this might be the move that carries you the furthest across.
I mean, it's a KOF character, so sure.
To the wall.
Yeah, it feels like, you know, the screen in Street Fighter Scrolls at least, you know,
maybe two screen lengths when you walk left or right.
It goes a full screen distance.
So if you're within, like, you know, a little bit of the wall or so, you're just getting put right on it.
Fucking that looks really good as well.
Yeah, I guess we'll have to see how she holds up with her buttons and she's got an overhead
and whether or not she's got a lot of safe things and good pressure. But it definitely seems as if when you get the fire stocks going, she can mix you the
fuck up.
I think though that stocks are kind of hard for people to start using because it's kind
of like drinks.
You have to find a way to get them charged up.
So her ability to kind of keep those higher is going to determine whether she lives or dies. But
she also seems to be reminiscent of jury in that the fan is like
a slow fireball. And then she like, can she could rush in
afterwards, but you almost don't have Yeah, because the bouncing
fan can create some mix up, you know. Yeah, I think she gets five stocks of fire is what they said so
Looks cool
this looks
Like I so this looks like way more fun than any version of my I've ever played
Because I don't typically like my kit at all in any King of Fighters game
I just I'm not into it, but what I see going on here looks really interesting
But also more than that I look at my and you know what I think about I think about wow those are some really
excellent King of Fighters style flame effects
On her character they do look like no one else in Street Fighter has.
They do look like different fire. They do.
I would also say that Terry's power geysers as well kind of look unique to him from...
and the Buster Wolf too, you know?
It would be really cool if there was another character later that got to use those flame effects.
Well, but let's be real, the way these games are
made, they're not recycling that stuff. They're making unique guest character
assets. Well no, it would be cool if they were purple. Sure, you could, but you know, Yeah. Yori showing up. Everyone- I don't say it out loud. Now it's all obvious.
As long as Kyo gets ignored again.
I see.
You know what?
It's funny.
I thought about Kyo and then I was like, no.
But I just, but like more to the point though, like I feel like the days of like, oh, look
at that flame effect.
That could get recycled elsewhere.
Those are gone.
Like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like,
you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know,
like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know,
like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know,
like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know,
like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know,
like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know,
like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know,
like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, like, you know But I just but like more to the point though like I feel like the days of
Like oh look at that flame effect that could get recycled elsewhere those are gone like that was sprites back in the day with fighting
Oh sure just make a CVS three
That's all I want to say just just just just every season have one SNK character
And then just by the end of Street Fighter 6 is life. There's like six Ash Crimson got it confirmed
No, I didn't say that you said Ash Crimson
You said you're crimson. He's coming. You are a liar. He's coming
Ash's move set would be so fucking toxic in Street Fighter 6
It'd be so infuriating that ass like more guile his ass would be so immaculately modeled
You can't even believe it.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm thinking, I'm thinking that, yeah, she's probably gonna live and die, like I said,
like on her ability to install that stuff.
But there's one little thing I caught there where it looks like when she does her drive rush
It sounds like she says lock it locked in
I don't know if that's just like why not did you just go super current is my zoomer sometimes you got to lock in man
It's my a zoomer. Yeah, let's say lock in
Well, it's it's pretty current say so. I feel like I heard that
years and years ago. Locking in has not in the same parlance you know. Lock the
fuck in, lock in is a particular current thing in the same way that like crashing
out is also a current thing. Yeah, crashing out just showed up all of a sudden.
You know, and like the first time I saw crash out was when you crash in F zero and die.
The screen says that's not what people know.
That's not where it comes from.
But when you die in F zero, the game says crash out, you know.
But yeah, this is just shit that you kind of might have heard that that you know, are the kids in the f-zero?
I bet but you know what though I like
Chances are it was from somewhere more obtuse and then comes back around again because like I said my brother in Christ was like
20 years ago. Oh, absolutely and then it stopped and now it's back again and it was like I don't know where Jesus
You know Jesus remains relevant
Every day every day always oh
Looks like I gotta go I'm being summoned. Oh shit. Okay BRB. Excuse me
The last thing I was gonna say about Mai is that in the trailer, they showed her and
Chun-Li having a dynamic intro where they both drive impact each other and between round
one and fight and they go blasting back to the back of the screen.
I'm assuming that's going to be a special fight in arcade mode or a world tour event because if every time you have
those two fight each other they get rounds started at the back of the screen
that would be really weird. So far I don't think the trailers of Street
Fighter 6 have shown off unique things only for the trailer that are not part
of the game whatsoever. They usually take a clip from some feature so I
don't think that was made just for the trailer. I think that might've been perhaps, you know,
it could be just editing, but I'm expecting that to be like either a world tour moment
in her story or something from the arcade mode, you know?
I think they should have that shit with every fight. I think everybody should have a unique
intro. I don't give a shit. I miss that stuff
Well, I've got a I've got a game for you my friend. You should check out guilty gear
No, I wanted to be Street Fighter Kurt guilty gear not only had custom intros between all these characters
They had them where they did damage
Yeah, that was so fucking crazy. You'd started in the wrong place, and you were hurt.
It was so insane, man.
Yeah.
No, but the, of course, like, all the way from the Dragon Ball clashes to like, round
start positions and stuff.
I think that shit's hot as hell.
But like, if they're not going to start back in the, like, the kind of the normal position
or so, do set it up so that you can,
you know? But yeah, unique intros are a casualty of new fighting game intros being like character,
load, character, load, fight. And I will say for all the shit I don't give about Mortal Kombat,
Netherrealm gets those intros right.
Yep.
Those characters bantering with each other is the funnest part of that game.
Well, I mean, if you make a game no one wants to play,
you should at least make one that people want to look at.
These things are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, they're complimentary.
And quite frankly, mission accomplished.
Mortal Kombat sold, did its thing, they're out.
And now they got your money, they're onto the next.
And now when I look in my phone,
I can look up Injustice intro compilation
to see the only part of Injustice 2
I would ever wanna see, which is the different dialogue
for when different characters meet each other.
Did you see when Shao Kahn and Conan were talking?
And Shao Kahn is like, ah, the lamentations of the woman, here are your enemies, you know?
Like he starts, and Conan's like, yeah, they get along.
O'Brien?
Yes, Conan O'Brien. Team Coco. Who the fuck are you talking about?
Team Coco, Conan O'Brien in Mortal Kombat talking to Shao Kahn. You should see how
they modeled his quaff, it's quite impressive.
Duh!
Mortal...
Combat...
We've got time.
Oh, Conan!
Oh! I didn't know he was in the game. Yes. The Barbarian with the Sword.
Yes.
The Adventurer.
Wait, you expect me to know what characters are in Mortal Kombat 1?
With his mighty sword protecting the mightiest of warriors is he.
Starmetal.
I would watch Conan the Barbarian.
That'd be pretty funny.
He's gotta vanquish their leader, the cruel Wizard Erathamon.
Anyway, wild how that got turned into a kids cartoon, but then again, so did Toxic Adventure.
It was a really good kids cartoon.
It was fantastic.
And so did Toxic Adventure, right?
That one's extra wild for me, because that shit's fucking...
The original on that is fucking stupid Ninja Turtles opened up the door
I think to any film franchise being like yo we can make money if we just made some stupid kids show I
Think the fact that there was a RoboCop cartoon and a RoboCop live-action television show
Rambo is wild Rambobo the kid's hero.
Yeah, anyway.
So yeah, we'll see what comes of that, but
we've got some great news
coming in today.
Diamond distributors has filed for bankruptcy
Fucking 30 years too late on that one. Who is that? All right. I'm glad you asked
Diamond distributors is the
monopoly company that has been responsible for shipping all
comic books and most toys
out to any big or small comic book shops for pretty much your entire lifetime.
And if you ever hung out at your comic book shop locally and spoke to any of the people
that work there or ever talked to anybody that's in that industry and stuff, they
would have endless nightmares about this fucking dog shit garbage company. And they were the
only ones in town. People started kind of like breaking off to make their own for a
while but like they only place a lot of Marvel DC image, IDW, whatever,
for the entire time. It would always be diamond distributing. And they were awful to everyone
they worked with. They were responsible for basically... Comic books, obviously, a lot of
small stores, you'd imagine over time started closing because business fades, online comics becomes more of a thing, direct ordering straight
to your door becomes more of a thing.
So it's a much more niche and novelty market.
But even without all of that, they would simply like fast forward that process because let's
say you went down to your local shop and you're like, Hey, I'd like to order the upcoming, you know, whatever, a couple issues of this coming out and then
a few issues of that. And like, Oh, when saga comes in, I'll buy saga and the latest berserk,
let's say, okay, cool. Great. We'll let you know. And then you know, the dates that
those things are supposed to drop. And then diamond would just be like, yeah, um, fuck
all these small stores. They're not, they don't matter to
us. The ones that are in, that are part of the clique that we prioritize, you guys are
going to get the shipments actually. And we'll just never ship out what you've ordered over
here. Even though it's been received and like the whole thing has been paid up and the money
is there and they would literally ignore that type of shit or you'd get it destroyed crushed like wrecked in a horrible condition like from the delivery truck right off
the bat. They would like just ignore orders entirely and again the only place in town no other
alternatives in some cases to ordering stuff.
And so yeah, you'd always have these personal nightmare stories that they would tell.
One in particular that stands out, I told not too long ago, was if you happen to remember
Devil May Cry 1 when they had a line of toys that came out and there was a Dante figure
and because it was DMC one,
not much lore existed around the time or so.
They didn't bother making anyone else
or any other characters.
They made one Dante and then they made like four
or five different puppet characters for him to fight.
And they would ship the cases with Dante being one per case
with 19 puppets in a box.
And if you wanted to sell this,
or if anyone was interested in ordering it,
and they said, yeah, order me a Dante, right?
You had one you'd get, and then the box would arrive,
and 19 puppets would fill the store up
that no one would fucking buy, because why would you?
And now you just had all this shit littered everywhere,
and you couldn't get rid of it.
And that's how they decided to sell shit. Because when it comes
to limited collector's edition stuff, making it one per case is how you force more shipments
of those boxes.
I have a, what is probably an incredibly stupid question, because I don't know anything about comics distributing.
Could people not use other forms of freight or delivery or transit for their comic books
other than Diamond Comics like every other company in the entire world does?
Not when the publishing company that you started with, however many years ago, signs exclusivity
rights and makes it so that you have...
So like DC or Marvel or whatever?
You are contractually obligated to exclusively work with them.
Oh my God.
Well then what's the incentive to improve the...
Nothing.
Nothing.
Zero.
Die.
They were a monopoly. They. Zero. Die. They were a monopoly.
They took over.
They crushed every independent attempt for other publishing and distribution services
to rise up.
People are starting getting their own, like out of sheer, like they eventually started
getting like, yeah, some smaller labels when we were doing stuff.
But for the most part, it is a complete takeover.
And if you worked with them, there was exclusivity contracts.
Absolute dog shit, the worst.
They were like a blight on that industry
that was already pretty much dying to begin with.
But even at the height of its popularity
when comics were doing fine and everything was going well,
they were awful.
So they have child filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, again, 30 years too late, but
hey, at least they're fucking dead. And, you know, comics continue to exist. You there's
a lot of again, there's online and there's like people shipping direct to you, but there's
still shops around and, you know, people can go and get their orders in. It's pretty much
kind of like a voluntary I'm going to keep this service going as my preferred method of buying comics. Like,
going down to the shop and buying it that way is a, like a habit thing, you know? And you're kind
of just like keeping like the local watering hole going, so to speak, you know? But yeah,
fucking finally, dude. Like, it-
That's good.
Yeah, they are nightmarishly horrible and no one could do anything about it.
And like you said, the quality of the service was pretty much in the garbage for decades
now.
And like there was no chance or incentive or anything to improve it to do any better.
People who got burnt by that because they just went to their shop
and then were like, I can't get what I want ordered from here. I'm going to stop going here.
That shop shuts down. And if that person just goes, yeah, fuck this, I'm just going to go online.
No one can blame them. Because the only way to get the like brick and mortar is struggling in
general, as you'd imagine. And then on top of that, you've got this garbage fucking company involved that's the only one in town.
So fuck Diamond Distributing, rest in piss,
good on them fucking rotting.
Being dead.
Yep, or being dying, being dying.
Good stuff on that.
I mean, literally, go walk into any comic shop around you
if you still have any and
Ask them how they feel about this news and you'll get some good stories guaranteed. I
Remember I mean this isn't this isn't related to diamond publishing but
I do remember one particular shipping situation that I got eyes on that was very unique.
I walked into the future shop that used to exist on St. Catherine across from GameBuzz.
And it was the day that Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver came out. And the manager,
I got to see him open the palette. It was a palette of fucking Diamond and Gold,
It was a palette of fucking diamond and gold, heart gold and soul silver. So it was like hundreds of copies and he opened them up and every single one of them was in French because
it was the Quebec store, right? But it was downtown Montreal and I saw him get on the
phone and just start screaming just as loud as he could right in the middle of the floor
Why the fuck did you say in in French accented English?
Why the fuck did you send me French copies like just totally losing it on what I assume was his GM
That is anyone walking in day one for their like immediate copy
180 go to...
The game that was across the street. Right around the, just go around the corner
and just buy a copy there, yep.
Straight up, I've never seen anyone lose it like that.
It's like, cause Montreal francophones
wanna play Pokemon in English.
Like, man. There's no market there.
That in-between era, it was 360,
I want to say like, not early 360,
but like middle 360, where game booklets stopped being,
like basically they started packing in the French booklet,
and the game booklets were still in color,
but the French ones were always black and white always terrible cheap as they could get and they'd be
too big to fit inside the case yeah so you just got handed this stupid booklet
that was way too big that you can't even slide inside the fucking thing was get
this away from me what was supposed to do with this ugly black and white thing? Fuck off! It was so stupid.
Anyway, good times.
Yeah, get a little rest and piss to them.
Man, freight and shipping is fascinating.
So much that goes into it.
You gotta get stuff from over there to over there.
It's annoying.
You gotta get all these copies of ET into the desert hole. Yeah, someone had to put those in a truck and move that. You had to load that shit up. That's not cost agnostic. And then labor to unload it. Took work.
So, on that note, where the fuck did that go? Okay, yeah, so some noise, some popping up, some shit occurred where I was like, what's
going on with Final Fantasy XIV?
And a couple of people explained to me-
Oh, this fucking shit is for real.
This is for real.
That like, yeah, basically stalking has been unlocked.
And I was like, what does that mean?
And it seems like it goes pretty deep here.
So obviously you're equipped to cover this.
But essentially the headline is Final Fantasy
14, Community's Panic.
As it turns out, change to blacklisting meant to help reduce stalking also lets players
use mods to track their alts.
So all right, let's get into the long and short of this.
So a couple of things have been occurring.
So e-stalking is an MMO thing across all games.
I have seen it in Final Fantasy XIV, and so they have finally, as of Dawn Trail, been
like, okay, you know what, we should probably do something about bad actors and whatnot.
So the first thing they did is they made some housing changes that you could put people
on a housing blacklist so that they couldn't enter into the periphery of your player
house. Like they would just be auto rejected from the space if they tried to
enter it. And that was like okay it's something. Further on they said okay
what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a blacklist so if you put a character a
person on a blacklist they will immediately disappear from your world.
It will be like that person doesn't exist.
The physical view of their character will be deleted from your view, so will anything
that they talk.
It will just never appear for you.
It will be like they died and stopped playing the game.
Now there's a problem here.
The first problem is that, well, how does that deal
with group content?
Well, they have to be visible in group content
if you do define into a thing with them, right?
Like you have to be able to fucking see them
if they're doing mechanics.
But in that situation, they still won't be able
to talk to you.
Or they'll say banned player and then whatever, right?
So this is still not the greatest.
The second thing is that what people actually want
it is for you to disappear from that stalkers world. Yeah. Like
what I actually want is for them to not see me. And so it turns
out that this is not a two way process of that just because you
block somebody does not mean that they're completely also, I
believe that the the blacklist has like a cap.
I'm not sure how high it is, but it has a cap.
So this is like a weak solution to an existing problem.
However, the long and short of it is that when they instituted this change, they decided to make the Blacklist system
store itself client side instead of server side. And since it's client side,
that means if you're willing to do some technical do-hickory, that means that you
can access it. And what one gentleman decided to do and thought this was a
good idea was he invented a plugin
that you could install which would scrape the blacklist data from everyone on your screen
which would include their account and like their account name, not their player name,
their account name, which is otherwise unsurfaceable.
Account ID was something that, yeah,
they're specifying got scripted.
That was not something that always existed.
Account ID was-
You can never see somebody's account ID.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
So this surfaces the account ID,
which means that now, if you have their account ID,
you can track their current character through any instance.
You can retroactively look what instances they've been,
which means what people they've hung out with you can track their alts which are totally
different names and are for all purposes unique characters but it's the same
account ID. So if someone was following you or stalking you across
wherever the case is now if you made alts to get away from the worst harassment
they have like a laser focus on you forever wherever yeah, and this would this would scrape everyone on your screen
So if you went to a highly populated area, you would just instantly scrape like hundreds of people's characters immediately
forever
Can I just say that the whiplash of discovering the existence of a concept called MMO stocking?
Immediately followed by this problem was wild.
Oh, well, I had a situation,
and I wouldn't call it stocking,
but I would start up my streams,
when I'd have 14 streams,
in increasingly obscure locations,
and I would time how long it would be
before people just happened to stroll by
that were in the chat at the time.
And I'd be like, ah, it took you a while this time.
But yeah, no, it's a total thing.
The stalking is, I mean, if you're gonna,
people who stalk people stalk them everywhere,
regardless of whether or not that's digital or not.
So the last that I checked this story,
the only way to get yourself removed from this
data pool to e-stock you was put forth by the mod creator where they made a discord
where you could go and ask for yourself to be removed off the list.
And the way that you would do that is you would provide
your real name and your account information
and the stuff that they would need to make sure
that you aren't on the list.
So now legitimately people are supposed to go
and for their own security start talking to
God knows who this person is and their mod set up for their own protection and
As you would expect the people that were populating that discord were like complete dogshit
Who were like well?
It's it's your fault for getting stalked if you don't have the technical expertise to prevent the stalking like what are you stupid?
Like this kind of right attitude
so we've also talked a bit about,
you've mentioned how modding has worked with 14 before.
And yeah, it seems like the system
in place is a don't be stupid, I guess, kind of system,
where some people are made, like whenever things are happening
in a modded environment or you're modding anything,
it's happening locally on your machine.
It's not happening on anything that's
going live on a server, of course. Yeah, So you're not supposed to mod in FF14. And I would
recommend to everyone to never mod in FF14 because it is very, very against the terms of use.
If you get caught, you're gone. But right. But if you were the type of person to do this,
the first thing would be don't stream yourself using mods like everybody who does World First.
Don't publicly talk about using mods.
Don't broadcast that your mods are infringing on the potentially criminal.
Nope.
Fucking don't.
Yeah.
You fucking idiot. And again, from knowing that the 14 intimacy and whatever mods
go pretty in depth, there's a whole suite of,
if you're going to inflate player characters and whatnot
on your screen.
Don't put it on a billboard, Freak.
Don't go advertising.
Yes. I have go advertise. Yes.
I have a follow-up.
It's a detail that I've been reminded of
that's incredibly important.
The creator of this mod did so for a specific goal,
and that was to find the player, location, and name
of a person who was undercutting his sales on the market board.
Right, yes, there was something about that.
Basically, just repost the same item one gill underneath what the person is selling it,
and that drives people crazy.
So this entire technical endeavor was so he could get a hold of that guy
Someone was showing up to always undercut wherever they set up shop, which is just the way the market board works in that game
So the last that I heard is that github itself pulled it down
Yes, so in the end the yeah, it seems as if the whole, it was called player scope and it was pulled
out exactly.
So in theory, that should not enable anybody to get access to an account ID and therefore
things should be fine.
I don't know if this then means that officially they're going to take a-
No, they have to pass the game.
Because people who have already used it can continue to still use it.
Right.
True.
But, I mean, I don't know if this results in a stricter stance on mods across the board
being, you know, happens after this.
Probably, but they can't get much stricter than if we ever catch you or see you, you're
done.
OK.
Right?
So I saw a description of like, what was the analogy?
It was like, if you're using one to, I think it said like DPS,
you can't actually see that number.
Ever.
Ever.
No.
But you can get a mod that will show it.
And if you see that, that's not going
to be an issue, but if you grief someone over the fact that theirs is too low, they can
report you and get you banned because of that.
So yeah, that's the basic thing, and that is the use case. And the use case is if you
use something called ACT to figure out what your DPS is, you can also see everybody else
in your party's DPS. And if you're using that for personal use and you shut your fucking
mouth, what would even be the problem? How would anyone know? But the specific reason
a DPS meter is not built into the game is so you cannot grief people about their DPS.
That is the, like they've said it out loud with their voice in in live letters and shit like that and
They're right because even
Though it's against the rules you still see people shit talking people in groups. Yo, you're fucking DPS is solo
How do you know that? Oh?
Just I just know
I'm watching can you can you see it through all the flashing and explosions can you yeah? I just vibes. I just know can I tell that you're not doing your rotation as efficiently as you ought to be yeah
So the the long and short of it they have to fix the blacklist system to not be client side
To fix this because then the mod can always be recreated put on a different
code depository it can whatever this is this is a technical error in Final
Fantasy 14 that is being exploited client side anything is always of course
a liability yeah what's this type of thing yeah Yeah, and of course, well, I mean, yeah, I assume that that would
be the simplest way. But of course, if people's account IDs are exposed, and it's out there,
and you have them, and whatever changes they make, that account ID continues to be associated
with whatever accounts, it's still too late for those people. So it would have to be a
massive overhaul of the
account system as well. Well, that's not going to happen. That's just not going to happen.
You don't think somebody in the chat points out this is ultimately a data security issue.
Exactly. But that's kind of what I was going to ask. So like the biggest MMO having a massive
security failure was not going to take all the money they've been making over all these years and use
it to address a problem.
I think the larger issue is that it's
going to take like three or four months for this
to get patched out, because their patch cycle is
like quite rigid.
I mean, for all the praises that have been heaped on this game
for decades now, as it's been, OK, maybe not.
But for years now.
Maybe not decades. It feels like been, you know, like, well, okay, maybe not, but for years now.
Maybe not decades.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It feels like it from the outside.
But for years and years and years, this has been a huge game and people have been praising
it for like how good it's been with a lot of stuff.
Here you have a major security issue that could be continuously exploited.
It would be really shitty if they didn't take this to the utmost.
Okay.
You know?
So you made a very understandable yet factual error that will change the context of this
discussion.
So you technically used to work for Square Enix at a time.
At a time.
And one of the things that you might remember from Square Enix is the fact that you said
that FF14 makes a lot of money in a conversation about anything to do with FF14 is a bit of
a misstep because the amount of money that FF14 makes has nothing to do with the amount
of money that FF14 gets.
FF14 paid for Foam Stars.
Yep, true.
It is what they can hedge all their risks against
because it's the most reliable part of their portfolio.
I would say that just as a flagship online title,
it seems as if it would need to receive the utmost priority
for things like this going badly.
If I was in charge, I would do a hot fix to completely disable the Blacklist system entirely.
Well, there's that.
But also-
Rather than let it keep going until they fix it.
But less from a budget, money, whatever perspective, more just from a we know the way that audiences work perspective. Negatives burn through goodwill exponentially faster than positive releases
do. If you fuck up something like this and continue to leave it unfixed for however long,
and you have to rely on people checking in every 30 days to see if they still want to give you money
Mm-hmm. That's a really dangerous game to play if someone is currently being like I'm one of the people being harassed. Fuck this
there's also an issue with ff14 that
has never been confirmed and it's one of those things you just kind of feel in your gut and
The longer I've played the more I start to believe it
English problems don't rate as highly as Japanese language worded problems
Is that confirmed or is that this is the feeling
Is that confirmed or is that, it's just a feeling. It's a feeling.
So I said at the very beginning,
this is not confirmed, this is not feeling.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, you're right.
But your complaints in English consistently feel
less seen than complaints that are spoken
aloud in Japanese.
Hey, guess what, this isn't the only genre
where that's a thing.
Oh, I know, I know.
Oh!
So we get into a very strange situation
when these types of things happen with FF14
in which the best thing for this problem
is that stalking is also a Japanese problem.
Right, right, right.
So it is more likely to be addressed more quickly.
Okay. So yeah. So it is more likely to be addressed more quickly.
Okay. So yeah, people, wherever your groups are,
you gotta reach out to the Tokyo partners
and have them start logging in
and being complete insufferable assholes on Japanese FF14
until the problem gets fixed then.
Accelerationism is what you're saying.
Well, the issue is that Japan doesn't have as many people using mods.
Well, they're unofficial.
Yeah.
Why would you ever look at anything unofficial?
I think my favorite story ever was like, hey dude, they're going to find those characters
in Street Fighter X Tekken's disc.
They're going to find them.
They're going to find them in like a day.
How would they find them?
You're not allowed to look on what's on the disc.
You're stupid.
Speaking of the clear and obvious fact that that which is unofficial can therefore never exist.
That's right. It can't. It can't exist.
Nintendo has been sending lawyers to Genki's CES booth.
Oh man, this is so awesome. The story rules.
And Genki is a company that makes accessories. I talked the other day about how they basically just revealed the shape and look of a Switch
2 in one of their games.
Oh yeah, it was really clear.
And then they have essentially fashioned a mock-up Switch 2 based on looking at the real
thing.
And it's not the Switch 2, but it's just like a...
Extremely similar mock-up. And it's not the Switch 2, but it's just a, it's like a, like a plastic.
Extremely similar mockup.
It's a plastic mockup that looks pretty much identical,
is measured identical, and they use it
for designing their accessories.
And so they showed the mockup that they made
with these, like, you know, I guess leaked images,
but they're not, it's not the actual Switch 2.
And they're at CES so
like people have seen like people saw the interaction right at the booth and
Genki is basically like we didn't sign any NDAs so we didn't sign shit we don't
give a fuck we have nothing to worry about here we We're not under any... We don't even work with you. We don't even...
We don't have any, yeah. We don't have any deal here, so whatever. And the most telling
part is essentially that Nintendo's replies and whatnot have all been to essentially say
that these images are unofficial. These are images and videos you're seeing. These images are unofficial. These are not, these are images and videos you're
seeing. These leaks are not official Nintendo content. It's like, so I think, are they,
are they not real or are they, they're not official? I think there's a real, so obviously
Nintendo's playing this
really strange game where they can't announce the switch to before the holiday
season in fact it's in their best interest to not only not do it during
the holiday season but do it just after the return period for the holiday season
so that little Jimmy can't give his switch back but they can't do it like
it's also like the most obvious open secret in the business
This is that this switch to is coming and like relatively soon
This is the worst I've ever seen in the entire video game industry. I think it's the worst
This is the worst I've ever seen I've never seen it this bad
This is job listings descriptions of games the skew the look the feature like it's ridiculous
Any sane company by now would have just cut their losses and went yeah, all right
Word leaked out here it is, but we're talking about fucking Nintendo and you would at least say hey
This was ahead of schedule, but you're not gonna hear anything for now, but yeah, it's coming
Right, but no they just like coming. But no, they just refuse.
We know that Nvidia has made a custom fit downscaling option for them for the fucking
thing.
We saw the motherboard, yeah.
It's so busted open.
Part of it definitely feels like they're like, we need to make the investor announcement
at the right time.
We can't pop that cherry too soon. It has to be part of the everything is this plan
that we're going that can never deviate.
Yeah. So the announcements in the first fiscal quarter of this year and then the fucking
release is going to be during the second fiscal quarter of this year.
People will have their hands on it and will be playing the latest Zelda and they will be like,
these are not official. Stop it. Stop.
These are not. These images and videos are not approved. These are not official.
It's insane. It's been the entire last year.
There's been nothing but leaks.
This would be less insane if the Switch 2 had not already technically been announced.
Right? They said there is a new Switch console and we will talk about it later. They didn't
keep that secret. Right? They confirmed that it exists.
They did confirm it. Okay, I forgot that they confirmed it's existence.
Yeah, they did.
It was some investor thing.
We're not going to talk about it this year, which was last year.
So what was the interaction at the booth?
Supposedly, people saw Nintendo Lawyer go up to the people at the CES booth and have
a discussion.
Was he yelling while some...
Not close enough to listen to the discussion, but-
Was he yelling while the translator next to them just went, he's very upset.
He's very upset.
He's not happy.
He says to change the head.
He says he wants you to change the head.
Oh my god.
Crazy.
Absolute bad shit.
Never change, guys. So, like, supposedly...
...um...
...they're gonna do a direct on Thursday for this purpose.
Just about the kit, not any of the games.
Oh, you know what? Let's get ahead of the story.
That's a pretty good idea. Let's...
...let's head them off at the pass.
I bet that was always the date.
Nintendo doesn't move things due to reality.
They better announce a fucking snoo feature. They're not gonna snoo fit man. Stop it. At this rate.
Okay, usually I
wouldn't really want to even bother here, but three credible leakers are apparently saying that Devil May Cry will be coming to Fortnite soon.
Oh, Fortnite leakers are super legit, dude.
That's the deal.
So basically there's two initial leakers that were kind of legit, and then a third
one who's super trusted.
Oh no, Fortnite leaks.
It's one of those things like miHoYo games where you go to the fucking subreddit for
leaks and you see people dragging pictures out of somewhere.
So Dante from the Fortnite series.
That's right now
Perhaps even others you know we'll see how this looks
Capcom has already worked with them, so it's believable to think that that might and you know that that would be a thing eventually
The question I have is just like is there gonna be is it just gonna be a skin or will there be like you know?
character stuff you can do because
Sometimes they do that right? I mean, he's not fucking spider-man
No, no, but can you like high time somebody you know is picking up rebellion gonna like be like picking up rebellion Would be a black would be a back bling
Back bling yes something you can carry on your back as a it's not a backpack because it's not always a backpack
Okay, it's a back bling because I know that like the good infinity gauntlet and the you know
Omnidirectional gear and stuff allowed for actual modes dedicated to stuff and this is nowhere near that level for sure
Well, that's pretty cool. We'll see how it looks as they get fortnightified.
Yeah.
I sure hope that if they add a Dante or a Virgil to Fortnite that they look, well, at
least decent or faithful.
I'm sure they'll look good.
The Resident Evil characters look fine.
Well, but here's the thing,
the direct comparison is there's another
mobile game that just announced a DMC crossover.
I forgot what it's called.
Punishing Grey Raven.
Was it PGR?
Yeah, it's PGR.
Okay, and the artwork
looks incredible for that. There's a 2d Dante and a 2d Virgil that look fucking
phenomenal
For just that
So hopefully hopefully they they know it doesn't look too weird when we see them fortnightified anyway
Beyond this only other bits of wooly versus fortnight incoming
Where we dropping man, I mean we're dropping nothing we're dropping nothing else convinced me until now
I'll say where we drop nothing else convinced me until now. I've resisted a lot of wooly bait in fortnight a
Lot my fucking I'm putting my fucking hand out.
Where are we dropping?
I've resisted a lot of wooly bait in Fortnite.
We'll see what the future holds.
Honestly, if you can do more than just look like the character, that's always a like,
oh shit, I want to, you know.
I mean, they got, they got katanas in the game right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I think I would like to see the Virgil sitting on that fucking plastic chair as an
emote.
I would like official confirmation that that's actually what happened on top of, what the
fuck that stage is called.
Yeah, but no, the secret is that simply showing me a
character is one thing, showing me Doom doing a dive kick or
like actually being able to attack on Titan, zip through
the air, gameplay affecting things is like, oh shit, that's
actually, you're changing how the game plays.
That's a different game, you know?
So that's what we do.
I think what we should actually get
is like fucking Dante and Virgil in Marvel Rivals
and just do Marvel versus Capcom the other way.
The other way around?
Slowly draw Capcom?
Just do it the other way.
Oh man, god damn it, dude.
Shit, I mean, every time I look at that iron fist
where he's got the skin with the headband on,
I'm like, yeah, I can see it.
I could just pretend that's a karate man.
That can be my Akira, Ryu, and or other.
Anyway.
Yeah, only other bits here.
One, just a random piece of shitty news.
Donkey Kong Country Returns HD Retro Studios staff has been removed from the end credits.
Oh, that's because Nintendo made that game.
That's some stupid dumb bullshit.
That's a Nintendo game by Nintendo.
Nintendo made it. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
It's such a, like...
Ah, eh.
Like, that's the, it's a Stegosaurus move.
It's a dinosaur move, right?
This old bit.
The Nintendo hiding the company thing.
This just happened with Mario and Luigi, right?
Brothership?
For a long, when that was announced for a while,
people were like, we don't know who's making this,
what's going on?
Nintendo's making it, you dumb shitheads.
And it took a while, I think it was by the third
announcement or so they finally said the studio.
Or people dug it up from LinkedIn or something like that,
I forget, but that's fucking stupid.
And Konami apparently has been up to this
with like Bemani for a while as well.
I mean, that's not all that surprising.
Yeah.
So like with the Bemani music group stuff,
like artists and people that have worked with them
and like worked on their music over the different DDRs
and everything, like just not getting credited
and getting like all like wrapped credited and getting all wrapped up
and grouped and called Benmani dev team or whatever.
And you get no individual credit
for any of the work you contribute.
You know what the worst one ever actually is?
So many in the chat mentioned it,
and it reminded me of the most outrageous moment.
When Pete Hines got up and said,
the 20 years of Doom history with Bethesda because Bethesda
made doom so but I don't know if you remember this but Bethesda bought id
software and then since then has been pretending that Bethesda invented doom. Yeah yeah yeah yeah no. It's the most fucking ridiculous shit ever. We all know, says Bobby Kotick,
that the legacy of Guitar Hero started here.
The Guitar Hero legacy starts here at Activision.
And the other guys, these imitators,
rock band I think they're calling it,
they're trying to just, you know.
Steal our thunder.
They're trying to steal our thunder
and encroach on the on the name, but they'll never be anything
But a pale imitation of the original
It's so disgusting you kind of have to add to them. Oh man. You're saying it with a straight face
It's incredible you could get through that
It's incredible you could get through that
And then you know what this one's just for shit for the shits of it, but hey there's been a trailer revealed
for a game and
You want to take a crack at pronouncing this yeah hit me all right all right let's see what we got here okay well that's gonna be really tough
how do you this game has been announced oh fuck that how you want to take a take a stab at that
Dynasty
Cross No, no, no, no, you're trying to put letters
In blank spaces and figure out what there's no letters announce block block block block block space block block space block X
Block block block block block block block block space block x Block block block block block block block block, okay? I'm gonna go
Cross I see yes
Missing block
For the font on your system that square when you that square
when you use used a symbol that a font doesn't support a bunch of those in a
row reveal trailer that's good this really good god damn it that was a bad thing to do with my mouth.
Woof, hold on.
All right.
So it can make a little bit more sense when you take a look and you see that Sword of
Symphony is one of those indie games which I've mentioned is the musical one.
It's the, you know, I talk about the Twitter games,
the Twitter indie games.
Whoa, hey, that's too loud.
Stop it, stop it.
Oh, luckily I didn't hear anything, I'm safe.
Whoopsie doodle.
I don't know why that was so loud.
God damn it.
The Sword of Symphony has been like,
it's a game that looked like an action game where
the main character kind of fights musically with a little conductor's wand and like does
everything to the beat and like does air combos and launches and all kind of stuff.
And it's been worked on for a while.
It's been a couple of years now that the creator has been promoting it on different
platforms and stuff.
And it looks pretty cool.
There's a development side story that this project is, and it looks pretty cool too.
It's just kind of like, I guess, full of artistic missing assets and placeholder bits and pieces
that are narrative like, narratively
being used. So when you hit things, words kind of explode out of them, attacking percentages,
stamina, you know. There's a bunch of cool effects that, like, kind of hit as you're
looking at, like, sketches and kind of, like, super hot, like, visuals as well. But I just
don't know what the fuck to call it. This is one of the craziest decisions
ever for the title of a game project ever. But it's symbols cross symbols.
Oh good.
We'll see what comes of it. But it's the other game that's not sort of symphony.
This is really similar to what's going on with Virtua Fighter and it's the other game that's not sort of symphony. This is this is a really like this is really similar to uh what's going on with Virtua Fighter
and it's a YouTube channel and how they keep misspelling the titles of their videos.
VF5 Ultimate Showdown version 2 developer Restrospective.
Oh no.
But that means that they're not giving the franchise the attention it deserves.
No, that means they're giving it the exact attention it deserves because they're not
bothering with any of this stupid shit-like spelling because they're too busy making Virtua
Fighter.
Oh, the typo is a good thing.
Yeah, it's good.
That's some real good arcade energy.
Okay, I will...
You know what?
Fine.
I will accept your bullshit under the premise that... That's not bullshit. That's the truth. No, I will, you know what? Fine, I will accept your bullshit under the
premise that... That's not bullshit, that's the truth. No, no. If your play, if your
fighting game is full of typos and shit, it's because the Japanese team
themselves did all the English. Absolutely, that's exactly true. Right, Terry Bogard
and everything he said back in the day were the direct result of, yeah we're
gonna do the English ourselves, no we're not gonna check with the native speaker. Fuck you
How about that? Hey now listen listen everyone
I see people in the chat saying cope and I could see woolly saying it in his mind and let me just let's just skip ahead
With virtual fighter. I am becoming a cope singularity. Okay, there's there's no fucking there's no
It's never gonna be worse than it is now, okay?
Okay?
It's forever, and y'all need to just fucking get on this fucking spaceship to cope planet
or fucking leave me alone.
It's been a lifetime ride.
Like this moment happens but once per decade, if ever.
I don't know if we'll ever have another one of these.
For your sake, I truly- You know why?
Do you know why?
Because the Virtua Fighter cope
that I've carried within my heart for this many years
manifested into something real.
It happened.
It happened.
The thing that I-
You just have to cope hard enough. You just- no! For long enough!
I've always said you just wait long enough and the things will come out. I've always said that. I continue to say that.
Yeah, but you weren't- you weren't- you weren't manifesting. You were just waiting around. I was manifesting!
I like- I like Virtua Fighter enough.
You know.
It's fine.
No, no, no.
I have positive memories of running sets with you and running sets with James Small back
in the day as the only two people I knew who gave a fuck.
And then going into the arcade and popping a couple quarters into Virtua Fighter 2 as
a kid.
That was good. However,
fighting games are healthier than they have been in a long time and I do fear for its
place in this, you know, Mortal Kombat 1 on the EVO mainstage economy. I don't know, man. I think it's gonna be like pretty easy to
Get up past MK for entrance.
I know, but what if it doesn't?
But what if they don't?
I was able to pull more people trying to play Virtua Fighter 5 Revo in my stream than Evo was.
What if, no I'm saying what if Evo puts MK1 up again and not...
Then Evo's like a worthless old fucking relic run by shitheads.
And fighting games have lost all legitimacy in this world.
Hey man, I just did an interview over there. They called me a
pro. Yeah, no listen, they know what they're doing, but even if that's true then we're just
gonna have to go watch Japanese tournaments because you know they're
gonna put Virtual Fighter in there. They really are. Yeah actually just like
that's mandatory. Just watch Fudo from now on. Alright right. Let's take some letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail.com.
That's castlesuperbeastmail.com.
You know, maybe they'll-
You can ask Wooly versus the professional questions.
Maybe they'll- Maybe when they have professional maybe they'll maybe when they have questions
They'll reach out to a pro for some advice. Maybe they will while you cope into oblivion
They could ask me. Hey, what do you think? Should we throw some special moves in here? Maybe we should put extra listen, man
I'm not a corn cob. I'm high fructose corn syrup. Yeah, and I'll be, yeah, why not throw another button in there? Sure.
I could see a meter showing up. Why not? It's really funny that we saw a meter and then
the next time we saw it, that's really funny. Yeah. You know, I'll just be like, Hey, you
know what, guys, listen up. As a professional here, I tell you what, I really love samurai
showdown and I think Virtua Fighter could learn a thing or two
from Samurai Showdown.
I could see the shepherd's crook leaning towards your neck
ready to pull you off the stage.
Is it a crook or is it a decapitation waiting to occur?
And then when I get pulled off screen,
it says, out of bounds. off screen it says out of bounds
Riggins. Out of bounds
Here we got one coming in
From Luke who says howdy mr. Short and mr. Sweet. What's up? Yeah, I
Work two jobs. I when I only get to play games for a few hours a night at most, I have to be choosy. Recently, I tend to choose massive RPGs that remove choice paralysis and I come
home knowing what I'll play. But this leads me to a problem with voice acting in particular.
I can read faster than I can listen. So often, side content in big games, I'll listen to
the voice acting fully for a bit until I get a vibe for the character and then just read the captions as I skip them when
they go through.
Recently playing bigger, newer JRPGs like FF16 or FF7R, I found the cutscene pacing
is infuriating because the need for unskippable voice acted cutscenes pops up, so I yearn
for the simplicity of a fucking silent text box and character
portrait. I love FF16 but its side quests were the worst offenders. Canned cutscene
animations you're forced to watch and the gaps between dialogue can mean my two hours
of playtime and a half is taken up by dead air and worthless animation. I would rather
no voice acting at all than watch Clive cross and uncross his arms for a full minute between lines.
Okay, so this guy is really, really on the ball. As people who play tons and tons of
games and we were just talking about like the voice acting slash not voice acting thing
earlier in the podcast. I have also begun to be wildly infuriated
by games that have specific cut scene timings
in which every line of dialogue gets an extra,
every extra second, it does not need
to line space out the next line of dialogue.
Every single line of dialogue has sentence, pause,
camera shift, sentence, pause, and it's like,
none of you are having a conversation like real people.
I want it to be faster, just a little bit,
just a little faster.
Yeah, I think, so, Well, to finish off here, you can try to skip the dialogue
and they force you to watch the animation. I'm unconvinced these green quests would
feel a lot more like read if the content occurred through text boxes instead of canned cutscenes.
What's the quality of life or good game design feature that can ruin an experience for you?
Okay, so I would say that like, anytime you feel like you're rushed or pressed for time
while trying to enjoy something is going to ruin that experience kind of almost no matter
what.
Like it's just a shitty sucky feeling.
I hate it.
And I'm more mindful of it now because we had that whole conversation earlier in this
episode where I talked about me thinking about how long it takes to do things and stuff and realizing in some situations, there's
nothing I can do to make this go faster without like, completely throwing it out the window.
But even in my own time, I do think about stuff like that because I'm like now a little
bit extra sensitive and paranoid about it. If you're skipping something, you should be
able to just blow past it entirely,
right? You should definitely be able to not have a just skip line button, but fast forward and have
the whole scene play out, gone. In Cyberpunk, when you tap the skip button, it literally,
you can choose between line by line or fast boarding the whole thing.
And yes, that's great.
When it's not for hiding, loading and stuff like that,
forcing so you'd have to watch something
because it's very pretty inexpensive is some bullshit.
Anything should be skippable,
assuming that the person's playing this
for the nth time forever, right?
If it's your first time through
and that is a little thing that's chasing you. I don't know man. I
don't
like
That's the more that maybe your choice of game is too stressful for the amount of time you have
No, I totally disagree
I know exactly what he's talking about and I've had this situation when I play games on my own time where I'm reading so
Much faster than the dialogue. I let people
finish the first line. Like, you know, when you get like a line, a text box,
it's like, Geralt is going to say three lines of dialogue here. I let him
finish the first one because I don't want to cut him off and fuck up the
pacing. But, um, I'm, I'm done with the text box. I'm, I'm, I'm done with it.
I'm done with the text box. I'm done with it. Like I'm all I'm just waiting for you to sit around
and a lot of games support that like the the characters will continue to talk and
Until you click a button and they would go to the next line and it works
16 is like specifically like annoying with that
It does feel though like it's a very simple quality of life issue that should be simple
enough in any dialogue game where mash X and move to the next thing and don't have too
much staggering.
But yeah, overall the ability to just kind of like completely move to the next option
to interaction point would be the winning way to do any of these types of choices. Like,
just completely blip past all of it and then pick the option and then blip past the rest.
I think the irony is that like the Yakuza series or like a Dragon series actually has like the
best of all worlds on these because sometimes you just get text boxes. Sometimes you get text boxes
that are being read aloud,
but they're read at a good clip.
And then you get directed cut scenes
in which you just fucking sit back
and it's a proper directed scene
in which you don't want to skip ahead
because people are moving around the scene
and it's a dynamic event.
You're playing Yakuza games dubbed?
Yes.
I switched to dub as soon as I could because it is so much easier for the audience.
Yeah.
Okay.
It is a million times easier for the audience.
Okay.
Was there anything Japanese that you played like like with, or that you chose to play
in Japanese voice acting-wise?
Not for a while, because it's tougher for the audience.
Gotcha, okay.
Hmm.
I can't remember the last game I played
in like Japanese voice acting.
Audience aside though, out of preference, would you ever?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
But like, I'm streaming like every,
like a dragon game that comes out.
Okay.
Because yeah, there's something,
because I'm just curious,
because I feel like something I've talked with Reggie
a good bit about is that like,
we will listen to the Japanese voice acting, you know?
And like, you can hear when it's really good, you know?
And like, when the voice acting, and when the voice acting,
and when the voice actor is a perfect fit,
you know, for whatever character,
in some cases it feels like, oh yeah,
I'd kind of rather listen to it that way.
But a lot of that is also a holdover from anime watching,
you know, from an era when watching something dubbed
was almost always inferior, you know,
prior to the adult swim and quality dubs of stuff
coming out.
Back when you had to just get a pioneer DVD
and it was fucking, I don't know,
is Johnny Young Bosch on this?
No?
Oof.
Then I'm afraid, you know?
Like now, now I'm in a place where it's like,
it doesn't even matter, cause Kaiji Tang is Ichiban for me. Mm-hmm
So I'm not I'm not gonna go back on that
Yeah, yeah, and you know what Matt Mercer isn't as good as Majima's Japanese voice actor, but he's pretty good. I
Think I think Kiryu was like the only real sore spot
Otherwise the dubs are fantastic on the Like a Dragon series. Okay, fair enough. Now Kiryu in my brain is everything from Yakuza 0. Like that's my experience. So it feels like any change to that is going to be weird.
You know, I don't know, but I guess we'll just have to see. Although, it'll never be weirder for me than Naruto,
because in my brain, it's all the original Japanese animated
voices.
And then for everyone else who's watching,
it's all the dubbed stuff.
All right, and let's take one last one here.
All right, and let's take one last one here
Jake says hey Pat and wooly as
People nominally familiar with shooter games. You've probably heard of the distinction between a clip in a magazine
Yeah comes to guns. Yes. In fact apex legends literally has
Bangalore say a clip is what you put in in your hair. This is a magazine. A very short recap is the clip holds the ammo that's going to be inserted into the magazine,
while the magazine is what loads the ammo directly into the firearm mechanism.
If you've heard of someone use the phrase detachable box magazine in reference to a
gun, that's why.
However,
Yeah, it's that big old crate you jam on a machine gun.
Big old box.
What you might not know is that the difference between the two is used as a form of hazing
in gun circles.
People new to firearms oftenly publicly are castigated in front of others for mixing the
terms up, usually with the exercise that it's to educate them or to stop them from looking
foolish.
It might not seem like a big deal, but firearms are lethal weapons, and creating this sort of stress on people new to their use
creates an unsafe environment for everyone.
The people who perpetuate this are often insecure
about the lack of knowledge or experience
and take it out on the next guy.
And basically, they were wondering about how this applies
and if we've seen examples of this
in other communities as well.
I mean, have you ever thought about how hazing weeds out people who are fucking pussies, man?
Think about it. It's weird though, in the sense that if getting made fun of for that makes you
more crazy and violent and turn into the when do we get
the freaking guns guy then maybe you shouldn't be here.
Do you know like there's a bit of that involved we're like wait what so you're now more
dangerous because someone made fun of you for the clip magazine bit.
Yeah I assume that this is always kind of the case because you know you've heard of
the tactical people right you can imagine I've heard of the tactical people, right? You can imagine-
I've heard of them.
Yes, tactical is like, it's essentially your military otaku, but like for the West of sorts,
it's anyone who's like pretending to be an operator, but is not at all in any way,
shape or form, but knows everything about it. And like, yeah, for those people, it's this weird, you know, it's this weird thing of
dick measuring and waving around your knowledge and, you know, actuallying people into oblivion.
But nonetheless, I just, I think that it's kind of nuts to think that oh
Someone who would go flying off the handle at the result of one of those things
There therefore we shouldn't therefore that shouldn't be the case is like yeah
You kind of need a filter to make sure when do we get the freaking guns guide is not part of the deal So I'm gonna I'm gonna put my hand up here wolves
I believe what they're actually trying to say is that
when somebody is loading a firearm, yelling in their shit
that they're fucking up by telling them a bunch of
academic bullshit between the types has the increase in
likelihood not that they become, I'm gonna shoot people, but
that they literally fail to load the gun correctly and or discharge
it by accident because you're fucking with their shit and making them so
nervous okay in a live fire environment yeah when you should be not like you're
making you're making people anxious on a range in that situation yeah okay and
ideally you don't want to be anxious handling a firearm.
That being said, hazing discussion is of great interest to me because hazing is really interesting
as a psychological phenomenon because hazing works.
That's the shittiest part about hazing.
Hazing fucking super works at the goal of hazing.
Now most people who haze other people don't actually know why they're doing it.
They just do it as a form of initiation to the new in-group.
However, the basic deal is that camaraderie and in-group mentality is directly facilitated
by a couple of things.
One of which is periods in close proximity and another of which is shared hardship griping or
enduring hardship as part of a group creates camaraderie. Militaries, police
organizations, frats, anything that's in group. Some religions introduce
hazing as a way to short-circ circuit your way towards in-group mentality.
Because, yes, we did have to stand out all night in front of the quad and hold these buckets
while the guys stood up on the roof and pelted eggs at us, but we did it together.
Right? And it creates this very consistent, like immediate, like,
bonding.
Burst of like, oh, we're all in this together.
Anyone who works a job where you see fucked up shit
or stuff like that, you know, you hear about Gallo's humor
and things like that where people are able to like.
And this extends past group hazing into new guy hazing,
This extends past group hazing into new guy hazing,
which is super common and often hilarious. And I'm not talking about you have to stand out there
and get your ass beat or whatever.
I'm talking about if you start working as a contractor
in construction, your boss will send you to the store
to buy something that doesn't exist.
It's going to happen. They're gonna fucking two way ladder or a fucking,
like people are gonna flood, a metric hammer. Yeah, people are gonna flood the chat with all
sorts of fucking stupid shit that they get sent out for. And the purpose of that
is to fuck on the apprentices, headlight fluid.
Headlight fluid.
Left handed hammer.
And then they go, oh, and it kind of kicks them down a notch, but then it becomes, well,
we've all been through this. And so you have, man, you have short circuited trauma bonding to create a form
of camaraderie. So the people who act like this may be insecure, particularly the ones
that go really, really crazy with it. And people die during hazing rituals because people
go nuts on it. And it is inherently abusive and probably wrong when you're dealing with
anything that would result in physical harm or like we're talking about gun safety threatening.
Right. Like you're, you know, we're dealing with shit. Like if you're doing the firefighters
exam and you're coming down the side of the fucking ladder, you don't expect the boys
to be pelting you with eggs, right? Cause you could fall and fucking hurt yourself. But yeah, no, the problem with hazing,
and the reason hazing doesn't go away, is that it works.
It is immediately effective at its stated goal,
even if nobody knows what that goal actually is.
I mean, it sounds like the entirety of like,
Bud's training and like, you know, becoming a SEAL
is like 95% hazing based.
Oh absolutely, they beat your ass to death almost.
5% learning and you know, 5% is learning the thing
and 95% is just getting hazed as you do
the insanely impossible task.
You ever talk to somebody in the military
about their brothers and coming up in basic?
I have a cousin.
Yeah, they sound like almost religiously indoctrinated.
That's because they went through trauma bonding.
Yeah, and as you mentioned, and particularly,
with that type of training, there literally are people
who don't die in the training as well.
Oh yeah.
And that increases the effectiveness
of the trauma bond of the survivors.
Interesting. Where'd you learn that?
I don't remember.
I read it.
Fascinating lesson.
Somewhere. It's either 15, 20 years ago or two weeks ago.
Because I go through this shit all the time, but I don't fucking know.
Uh, oh. don't fucking know.
Oh. Ah, we'll get into that another time.
I just remembered, like you were talking about,
a subject from another point ago
where I saw like a paper on something.
Anyway, I made it up.
No, I didn't.
Our writers wrote that one, Jonathan Fricks.
Yeah.
Hey there, I look forward to the next firearms expert writing in to tell us why everything
that this firearms expert said was wrong and how they don't know what they're talking
about.
We can skip that step, Willie.
We can skip it right now.
You're going to be using your firearms in a possible life or death situation where you
are going to be anxious in the moment, you need to be able to perform well under pressure and what better
place to practice that than in a safe environment with your fellow gun enthusiasts and an instructor
present. See, we just skipped it. Yeah, yeah, it's coming. They're coming for sure. And then round three.
Do not point this end at anything you are not willing to destroy.
Every gun is always loaded.
Alright, I'm looking forward to it. See you next week.
Have a good week everybody. Thanks for watching!