Castle Super Beast - CSB307: Kendrick's Triangle Strategy

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

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["Sailor Moon Theme"] Hello. Hey. Am I supposed to be able to see you? You are supposed to be able to see me. Yeah, there you are. Hey, man. What's up? Not too much. Not too much Yeah, so hey Are you familiar? Let's let's let's get your terminology up to date. Mm-hmm. Are you familiar with the term nasty work? Yes, but probably not in the context you're describing. Because it's it's like outside of its euphemism, like that that's also like a real

understandable phrase. Okay, cuz yeah when I say the Super Bowl was nasty work. Oh yeah I can pick up on that. You can pick up on what that means. I think your context clues will do like 90% of the heavy lifting on that. Yeah. When you're putting the story to bed, when you're penning the final pages and you decide without generally acknowledging or mentioning mentioning one Aubrey Graham out loud, if you wear a chain that has a lowercase a on it, yeah, that's what we call nasty work. It's a, you hate to see it, it's an unpleasant sight to see, but it's secretly pleasant, but it's just, ooh.

There's a certain like. That's the definition. There's almost a, you know, that's the definition. There's almost a romantic back and forth with the viewer for Kendrick Lamar's halftime performance where multiple starts and stops. Will he? Won't they? Yeah, yeah.

You know how they love to sue. No, don't do it. No, no, don't, don't, don't unleash it. But I have to. But I must. Like it's romantic. No, sue no don't do it. No no But I must No, no don't do it. Don't do it, but I must Yeah, yeah, I kind of had to you kind of have to do it. You know um Yeah, and lawsuits definitely did not stop the performance of not like us Lawsuits definitely did not stop the performance of Not Like Us at the Super Bowl. No, if anything, we stoked the fire. We poured oil on the flames.

And you can see how guilty he felt by that absolute fucking, that shit-eating grin. Being the first time he looks at the camera in the higher set mid stride you can see like there's a there's a rest letters a pro wrestler level craft in consistently avoiding the handheld camera and the hard camera with your eyes for 10 and a half minutes during a massive show, only to immediately snap and lock on. Yeah. For one second. Everything is playing at its right boosted volume, but just for that one moment when the pans out for A minor, you can hear the crowd. We all know what to do.

You got to just pen the conclusion sometimes. I'm looking forward to never hearing Kendrick acknowledge Drake's existence ever again. That would be the best part. When that halftime show was happening, I saw a lot of people describing, like, if I was Drake, suicide could never be enough. I mean- And shit like that. Well, so I have to say that it's like where what's going on

Everyone is posting the memes about him like throwing the TV and freaking out on over. It's like, but wait. What's going on? Where is he actually and it's like oh he's in his house like grimace. No no no Mr.. Graham is as far away as possible. He went to the other side of the planet. Oh is that true? He's in Australia on tour. Oh. He booked a tour on the other side, as far down under the ground as you can go. That's pretty funny. Apparently he's got a new album coming out which makes this timing just hilarious.

Impeccable really. That's what I want. Right before my new big thing I want a worldwide audience laughing at me and so while everybody Universally while everyone is just like oh my god. I can't believe this is happening exactly as we knew I can't watch as you peek through your hands You know um I have to say, a little bit, deep inside, I got a little bit of a messy bitch inside me, though.

Right? I got a little bit of that like, ooh, I want to see what's going on over on the Drizzy subreddit, though. Oh, do you? I want to go see what they're cooking. You know, like, let me just get a whiff of the copium for a minute, because I've caught them before in

these moments and it's incredible. It's always premium. So I decided- Oh my God. Is it actually the Drizzy sub? Oh my God. Yeah. You don't go to r slash Drake.

You go to r slash Drizzy. And I needed to know. I'm like, let me see the fucking mess. What the fuck you all getting up to dad here? And it is so much better than I hoped because effectively what you have is like the people that were brought in to the genre by Drake are the diehards that will never leave his side because to them Drake is hip hop and there's no difference between the two right and These are the ones who to this end are like nah right or die no matter what?

And you know, it's like there's a level there's a level you hit at where you're just like yeah people are It takes a lot for anyone to truly acknowledge reality and walk away for example Kanye still has fans. This subreddit is dire. Yeah, it's insane, right? It's all just photos of the new album. It's like no one's talking about anything. But no, if you go down to the moments, right? Like anyway, whatever you go in the moments when it was going down, right?

There was a whole lot of anyways, whatever like immediately like the poster coming in with passive aggressive tone on them you know and it's like hey look at him the boys on stage he's still doing it they tried to kill him but he's alive he's good whatever and then my favorite he's not gonna combust guys I mean he might but my favorite are the ones that are like actively on the lawsuit side going, Oh shit, UMG just dropped a statement. Oh yeah. Yeah. And you have these supposed fans of the genre. They're like getting excited over the lawyers Releasing a prepared statement about how embarrassing what's happening on? At the Super Bowl is and I mean terrible and it's unfair and just getting hype over the lawsuit is where

Right I fucking so excited for that statement, but it's excitement for the existence of nothing. Does that make any sense? Like, yeah, they released a statement. What does it say? Does it say nothing? Awesome. Yeah, it's it is. It is so much more fucking cucked than you could ever imagine. It is insane.

I yeah, I got my favorite comment this whole weekend was in referencing that Kendrick had to pull out a lot of the swears to have it air on the halftime show Of course was the statement of of course he had to make a kid friendly so that Drake would watch it Like I am yeah, you know, oh he's he's preparing his response track It'll be debuting at the Kids' Choice Awards. I think that just, I think I have seen the meanest slash funniest things I've ever seen in my entire life from some guy on a TikTok or a Reddit comment

over this past year. Just genuine amazing, amazing work is being done out there good bits strong bits. I think I'm enjoying in particular a because the thing about the Super Bowl is that like you're hitting then you're hitting like the widest possible and spread for like North America, right and That's where any story or anything that has not been mainstream, like Kendrick being one of the most influential artists and like basically being on top of the game at this point, winning all the awards, you know, just now, none of that actually means that like, at large, America is going to notice like you're

Yeah, but the Super Bowl is not just America, it's worldwide. Everybody watches the Super Bowl. A whole lot, a whole lot. Now, but just like, but Midwestern Dad is not gonna catch wind of any of those things going on, you know, or know what's happening. So when the response afterwards was some folks going,

this was boring, I didn't enjoy, I didn't know any of these songs, here we go, it's just another rap year or whatever. Well no, because you're 55 years old. But what I'm seeing is they're like, that's what I said, and then my kids explained to me what the lyrics were and what was happening, and holy shit, this is nuts, right? Like the update to the Bored Dad post being,. Oh wait. What that's what that means. I

Love that. I'm particularly This new stranger things that you see every year at the halftime show is older people going I don't even know who this artist is and it's like if Music was still following its correct trajectory, once you hit 50, none of the bands you like should have any living members anymore to perform anyway. So why would you ever complain that they're not at your show? Yeah, I mean, I think, well, you know, the different artists over the years, there's been, there's been a, well, I mean, there used to be just an old, like, Disney-ish halftime

show legacy. And then for a while, it was kind of like, hey, the general audience of people watching the game, these are the things you remember from your childhood. And then you fast forward another 30 years, and you're like, okay, what do people listen to? What's current? What's going on and in some cases? It'll be like what are people that are not watching the game?

Going to tune into yeah You know well the biggest hottest act of the current year sure and so you can get that or you can get the weekend stuck in elaborate Man next year they should get Nirvana to fucking play for the Gen Xers. Oh, let's go. Yeah Fucking get him up there bring bring the jeans back and everything No, but yeah, it was it was it was a nice it was a nice set list I particularly enjoyed starting on the GNX, you know and then What was tricky too that like just in terms of the music that he played,

was he just performed with all the Hip Hop Goats the previous year, so to do another set list and not cover any of the tracks that he already did, so he had to kind of avoid everything he already played, and so he did a pretty good job doing so, and I'm super glad that like well one you get the fucking Uncle Sam bit right you know Sam Jackson leaning in doing is doing pull like getting all that Django energy you know um and

Yeah, I think at first I was like oh, it's like a game of tic-tac-toe, and I was like oh no wait We're play we're doing PlayStation control No, that is a PlayStation right button. Yeah. Yeah, and the whole and you set all of that up to go like, yep this is like a life is like a video game and Also that on the on the closer you can have game over where it's like he said in the preview There's no retries, you know, uncle Sam said minus one life and it's like yeah, this is oh this is done done done Like any attempt like it's not like the whispers of an attempt or the saddest shit ever but now Actually, just hold it and yell at the judge. There's there's no firing back in any Respectable way here at your honor. He was very mean to me

here at all. Your honor, he was very mean to me. I really like the hilariousness and just when the warmth in the in the your chest that you get from all this I do have to say that it is a lot but I started feeling like I started feeling like just a sense of it didn't have to be this way. Why did it turn out like this? Like I just started feeling like if you had a modicum of self-awareness, this all could have been avoided. It was so avoidable. It always had to be this way.

So me and Paige were talking about this exact thing yesterday. And we landed on the fact where we were describing it because we, you know, we weren't big in any of these artists prior. I wouldn't say I'm big in any of them now, but I've been following Kendrick like since. Um, and I pointed out that, you know, there was that other rapper that backed out of the beef very early. Wait, don't say it. Don't say anything. And like he was really smart. And then me and Paige sat there realizing we couldn't remember his name, but we can't remember his name. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

People that got in just like me, just to hate. Yeah. hate yeah, don't even remember It's not I'm seeing now. It's J. Cole. I don't like mission accomplished the beef conversation entirely mission accomplished he He successfully got out of there and now that name is forgotten Yeah, no longer a Drake accomplice in the end of the beef when you in the, the list of belligerents no longer includes one J. Cole. Oh, man. Yeah. And you know, I'm very good. Very good.

Just enjoying enjoying life. That feeling of like winning the lottery, you know, when you when you just like you're like, Oh, I nailed it. Oh, that was a good call. Yeah. And I'm really happy to that like, you know, after the teasing it, and then you finally get into it did not like us and fucking Serena Williams gets up and starts sea walking and you're like They got so for the record, you know tennis player fucking extraordinaire of our lifetimes Serena Williams is Drake's ex This is a this is a situation in which Someone like me saw what's Serena Williams doing there?

And then I had to be like, all right, all right, Wikipedia hit me, oh wow! Yeah, and if you wanna just throw a little bit of extra stank on it, SZA, right, like who also does the vocals on multiple choruses and the sound of Kendrick, like the black panther kind of sound the sound of is Sizzle on the chorus Kendrick on the on the the verse Vocals in Luther exactly yes, and she's great. Yes also had a brief stint dating Drake

years ago, so that was a trifecta. I didn't know that. That's, that was a fucking team on a war path. Just performing the show of a lifetime on a man's grave. And he's standing next to it. Like, I'm not dead. If, if this continues, it's the only, is the only like possible thing we can go for. It's like and meet the Grahams for real. It's Mr. I mean, like, I don't like walking on the goddamn stage. No, I just this the hyper team combo finish.

That was all three of them is that's it. We're done. Right. It's we close the fucking book man triangle strategy was applied at the Super Bowl halftime show yeah yeah that's there's nothing else to say and as you as you you know the like after the Crip walking all over the grave, I'm really happy that my favorite was the last bit because straight after that, after not like us, you go right into fucking TV off, you know? That's the battle cry, right?

That's the mustard going right into it. And again, one more time as he's walking away, turning towards the camera to just be like, ah, off, bye, it's done. I, yeah. Now we get to live. No notes. In the post-Super Bowl confusion, which is, all right. in the post-Super Bowl confusion, which is, all right,

so stopping the performance with the lawsuit stuff didn't work, what do you do with the lawsuit now? If you drop it now, it'll be so obvious that you just got bitched out even harder than, you got bitched out so hard hard you pulled your papers off the desk But if you go forward with it Then you have to have the argument with the judge that Kendrick was really mean So I believe his his representation has prepared statements that they've released During the performance and they're essentially just saying like, no, we are doubling down.

We are continuing forward. Definitely. Yeah. And this will be settled. This will be settled in the court. That's it. I have a question. Was this filed in the US or Canada?

I'm pretty, pretty certain we're talking US. That's great. Because Americans, it's a lot easier to watch what's going on inside their courtrooms. And like, you know, there's a lot of content creators out there that just go through like there's a, I think her name is Rebecca on TikTok, this blonde lady, she's a lawyer who just goes over iconic court transcripts. I would love to see people go over the court

transcripts of this lawsuit when it see people go over the court transcripts of this lawsuit when it hits a courtroom. That sounds like a fucking hilarious time. It's just gonna be fucking, exactly, just Interscope emails and whatever assault, whatever, like any feelings. Rep for the rebrand, that's the lady, she does good work. Any feelings that he's catching right now are being redirected into legal.

You know, because that's the only outlet for them. Legal doesn't get you feelings, man. Like you're not going to get closure from this, from the court. There's no one, no human being has been in this place before like this is a new type of human being I think we'd like we need to establish that this is a new type of person. You know, we don't know how this plays out Like it's it's the the you know, there's a lot of artists that self-destruct and Like pull themselves out of the equation.

This is a case of like the door being shut for you. And like, no one's really, like you can still stand on stage and like sing into a microphone. Yeah, sure, who's gonna stop you? No one's gonna, you know what I mean? No one's stopping you from doing that. But just the social contract has been signed. The energy is what it is.

And especially now that you're like a whole lot of people, the first thing they've ever heard about this dude is this you and this whole context. That's step one. Yeah, more people now know that Drake likes him young than knew who Drake was on Saturday. And it's crazy because Drake has been a thing for like, just radio for decades, you know,

the biggest, the number one most played. Oh yeah, but you hear people on the radio all the time. You never put the song to the face. And music is discovered now through internet and new generations of people playing shit off, you know, Spotify and TikTok and everything else. So that's how it goes, you know? Yeah, Um, yeah. Yeah, I really do. I really hope we just we fully get to enjoy Kendrick and never acknowledging his existence again. That would be for the best. That would be awesome. He should just he should have just a fucking big, like 10 by 12 photo of Drake on his mantle and just surround it with his Grammys. Even that's too much. Come on, that's classy.

Sometimes you gotta John Wick part one them. Sometimes you gotta just, and turn, just pat and walk around and turn around and that's all there is to it. And here's the thing, right? I think a genius move here is that the energy of this has been successfully redirected into just screaming out Mustard, right?

Anytime Mustard shows up on the beat for anything Kendrick related, we all know what that means. We all know what that connotates. I have breaking news to me that apparently, according to chat member, Kendrick and SZA will be performing in Toronto on Father's Day. Correct. Yes, they're going to be here on Father's Day. Yep. Conf, confirmed.

To those of you listening to the audio version, I am shaking my head, just going, mmm. Yeah, this was announced, I thought we touched on it before, but yep, just in case anybody, you know. Because yeah, the tour is coming to Canada, so that'll be the deal. Oh. You know, that's it, that's it.

But yeah, it's just, you put all that energy, put all that energy on Busted on the Beat, you know? So like, at some point during this process, so you know, while you were talking, what you said slightly earlier about how it didn't have to be this way, and I said it did have to be this way, you reactivated a thought in my brain,

which was like, Drake's ego is so out of control, because this whole thing started with, I'm the best, no, I'm the best. Like the single most common bragging disagreement possible. If you were a normal human being, most common bragging disagreement possible. If you were a normal human being, you would have processed that for the lighthearted jab that it is and taken it as a means to excite yourself, to work hard and to make good music.

It's a challenge, that's it. It is a lighthearted challenge to say, yo, bring your best, bring your A a game because I'm gonna bring my a game That's all and you can't process that because you're insane. So here we are now Do it. Oh Boy Yeah, good stuff good times. It feels it feels like good in my chest Because like Kendrick's getting to be in one of those situations that everybody has at least

one in their life in which some kerfuffle or disagreement or problem happens and you like lock in and you walk outside yourself and you're like, oh no wait, I'm completely right. I'm not even being arrogant. Like, oh no, I'm just completely 100% in the right on this situation. Yeah, the assessment. I've been given the mandate of heaven to act how I will. No, that feeling that folks like I have had about Drake for years is being, it's cement it's it's like yeah you were correct to feel that way in fact what you checked out years ago because of

this shit you were right to do so and then you just oh so warm and the angels fluttering through my lungs so that's that's it's nice you know and did you know that a football game happened as well I do know that a football game happened as well? I do know that a football game happened and I do know that Sometimes the Super Bowl was fun. And sometimes it's a one-sided complete fucking debacle Which is like god-awful watch go birds. I Think like getting to like I don't know what I don't know what the deal with The way the NFL because I don't know shit about American football or Canadian football for that matter but I don't know about football I don't know how the

playoff situation is Reaches the Super Bowl But like I think it's fucking weird that I've heard like a couple years of the past You know decade that it's a like complete one-sided fucking mismatch. Oh, StompFests. Yeah, yeah. How does that happen? Well, AFC and NFC champ, there's two divisions that eventually the best teams in those two divisions

kind of come together. But I mean, there's a whole intricate level of tech and knowledge and everything around the game at this point that I don't know, understand or recognize. But yeah, curb stomp victories are basically becoming more and more common as data is becoming more and more exposed is my understanding of these things. So what you're saying is that these football organizations are ruining the meta with their sweaty play?

There's matchups and there's hard counters. So yeah. Is a genuine argument to be made that like data driven meta analysis for competition does make competition worse as far as a spectator for the spectators better. Yeah. But for like the spirit of the game,

it makes it like worse overall. What I just find it hilarious though to imagine the amount of like tech analysis and meta and all that stuff of being applied to fucking grimy ass Philadelphia. Yeah well congratulations Billy. Fly Eagles fly on the road to victory. They won their super bowl. The city greased up the polls in preparation to stop this? They said don't get the mayor. The mayor came out and said, hey, hey everybody, listen, I know I get excited too, but don't climb the polls,

don't climb the streetlights, in fact, don't climb anything. What? Is that a thing? I swear to to God because they trashed their own city. I Mean they did tens of dollars of damage listen as a as a Montrealer I cannot judge When sports fans wreck their own city. Oh, oh yeah, no. It is not within my capacity to judge. We know a thing or two about that, but yeah, they kicked over some posts, they lit some shit on fire,

and some horses were ridden down the road. Literally, fans jumped on horseback and were galloping as they were singing the fucking, the Eagles song, you know? You Americans are silly. You guys are silly as hell. Philly goes hard, man. Philly goes hard.

Philly should stop. In all things, they can't stop. They won't stop. They've never been able to stop. That's why it's Philadelphia. Oh, Philly's where that hitchhiking robot got killed. Now that I remember it, that's where the robot got killed. That's, that's where, uh, will have to leave because he got into one little fight and his mom got scared.

You know, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. That's where, you know, Rocky climbed up those steps and you know, it was the whole thing. That's it. Right. You know, there's. That's it, right? I think it's in Rocky Balboa where someone's talking to Rocky and he's sad and he just goes, you mad about the statue? And I then remembered that Philadelphia had a statue memorializing Rocky, not a real person. Nope. And then they took it down. Never forget the Bill Burr 13 minute rant.

Oh that's right, yeah. When he goes up on stage and gets booed right at the ONA Virus Tour and he goes, oh yeah, Philly, you're fucking shitting on me. I will stand here, dig my heels in, 10 toes down, and shit on your fucking excuse for a city for the entire time and I'm not leaving. You're like, your hero is fake.

That statue isn't real, your shit is garbage. Fuck all of y'all. And he gets through like a giant list and he's like we got eight minutes Left yeah It was incredible. It was legendary, you know and and everyone like they loved it They complete he won over Philly by shitting on them for fucking 13 minutes straight Never forget stupid one bridge city for fucking 13 minutes straight. Never forget, stupid One Bridge City.

Do Canadians have a Super Bowl for hockey? Yeah, yeah, man, it's the playoffs. We got the cup. Well, we don't, oh no, no, you know what? That's a really good question, actually, because Canadians don't have a Super Bowl for hockey because we don't leave it up to one game. We do a series.

Like NBA. Yeah. And then the Super Bowl becomes the final game of the series. But everybody that gets to participate in the series in different cities gets the chance to go nuts and enjoy a little bit on their own. It is kind of funny though seeing like I saw like a There's like a like a tick-tock or something where they're like, oh yeah, like what do you think is bigger at this point? Like the the Super Bowl or like the rugby finals world finals or whatever. Oh my god Oh, yeah, I don't know, like 120 million viewers. I mean, it's insane. I don't know at this point,

it's gotta be the biggest game. It's gotta be the Super Bowl. And then two dudes in like soccer jerseys just hold up a paper with like the World Cup. And it's like, what, like 1 billion or 1.5 billion or some shit like that. And you're like- People like to kick the ball

and the ball, kick the ball doesn't give you the brain damage. You're like a fraction, like a slice of planet earth tunes in for the world cup. What the fuck are we talking about? I mean I don't watch the world cup, it's boring as fuck, but like it's just, you know, everybody likes it. Planet earth has decided on the sport. Yes, planet earth has decided on good old footy. It's done.

You know, and you know what? As a kid, as a small child, I was once a small child. You could always play soccer anywhere. That's the whole point. Under any circumstance, no matter how rich or poor. Yeah, you play street hockey. All right. Let's fucking go. Let's find the only places available to play street hockey, which are in traffic. First of all, there's your first problem. You know, second, let's see, make sure let's, you know, play in a way where neighbors are cool with the idea of their car getting dented the fuck up. Yeah. Every time a snapshot goes awry. Yeah. You need sticks. You need all the...

Yeah. Obviously, you got a wall, you get two rocks, you get a ball. Car. Come on, guys. Nearly dying playing street hockey like every time I ever played street hockey. It's a bad system. It's fucking terrible. street hockey like every time I ever played street hockey. It's a bad system, but it's fucking terrible. Never really never really played it. It sucks. The experience of playing stick hockey in the street with

the neighborhood kids fucking sucks. It's terrible. It is way better to just get a baseball bat and a baseball and just go fucking hit balls at the fucking You know your local park. So I have wholesome memory Association with the concept of seeing kids in the streets playing and having fun in the summer you know, I'm like, oh look at those kids doing their thing I Don't want to be near any place where the fucking ball can come crashing through the window or fucking up Oh, I mean a hockey ball isn't gonna crash through anything, but like I was thinking about how Yeah, but that one shit kid is swinging at full speed and like no man

It's like it's made out of fucking rubber come on, but or even the hockey stick itself hitting the car now We're talking now. You know I think I think at the end of the day, like if you had to put like a single defining point, you don't play street hockey with a puck guys. No, you're saying that shit. Oh no. Come on. Americans. Come on. Come on America. All right. All right. But I think the defining thing about why street hockey sucks compared to just playing football is literally every game of street hockey I ever saw, not even participated in, in my entire life mandated that blood would be spilled by the end because the nature of what you're doing means that you are going to fall and you're on pavement and you're going to scratch your shit up and blood will occur.

Go look at old photos of goalies from like the 70s. Yeah when they were cool. When they were cool as fuck. they weren't god damn man looking like you're coming off the assembly line teeth split face eyes fucked like it's good shit cauliflower face is a pretty good hero put it heroes what what protection you mean this little strap of leather I'd like wrapped around the top Your face is a pretty good way to put it. Heroes. Heroes. What protection? You mean this little strap of leather I wrapped around the top of my head? Yeah, that'll do it.

It'll do it. Anyways, there you go. That was good. What's been going on with you this week, man? Not much. Not much. I was going to say you jump in. Oh, I'm going to jump in?

Okay. So let's start with something that's been a long time coming and it is kind of embarrassed that it took me this long to do it, but I did it. I got this sticker. Hey, L. For loser. I have a big L. Put it on your chest. I have the biggest L of all.

I'm almost 40. There you go. So now I will go start drive car. Good for you. Yes, thank you. I have commenced the process. Yeah? Yeah.

Man, we did like a fucking, we're gonna start driving podcast announcement simultaneously like 18 months ago. Yeah. And when I, when I actually sat down and was like, I'm gonna read my book. It took like two weeks, but I'm, I'm lazy. You know, it's, you know, it's sad is like that learner's permit sticker is like more unrecognizable to me than the Japanese green and yellow. unrecognizable to me than the Japanese green and yellow. The fucking stupid. Come on. Oh my God. It's bad. It's bad out here.

That's it's very bad. You need to go outside. It's not good. I'm not saying that it's good. Um, um, so hey, wolves, when you go and get your, when you do your L test, um, I have, I have a piece of information for you that you would probably appreciate, which is, uh, if you pass, they're going to take your picture right then and there. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Which I was not planning on. Oh, oh, did you have that? I had that like, cause yeah, when you go to like take your passport photo for example And then it's like okay. Let's go and you're like oh, yeah, right now true I thought that I thought I was gonna get like a fucking oh you passed in the mail right? Yeah No, it was like all right saddle. I'm like oh, I got a pat down this Bald oh, and you know what? That photo is what they need to identify you as,

because that's how you look on a regular day. Yeah. You know, you're wandering down to the, well, I mean, for Americans, it's the DMV. For us, we have, here's the SAAQ. I don't know what they got out there. No, it's not. It's the SAC, isn't it?

SAAQ. Oh my God, it is the S-A-C isn't it? S-A-A-Q. Oh my god it is the S-A-A-Q, god that's so awful. What? Quebec! As opposed to... Quebec, what the fuck? You know. Do you wanna go down to the S-A-Q

before going down to the S-A-A-Q? Don't do that, don't go to the S-A-Q where you can buy alcohol before you go down to the S go to the SAAQ where you can buy alcohol before you go down to the SAAQ where you get your driver's license. No, you go down to the SAAQ first, then you go down to the SAAQ. I see.

That way, you're not tipsy. Societe Des Alcooles. So I tell you what, you know what, one of the contributing factors, I don't know if I talked about this last time, but I mean Have the baby, you should probably know how to fucking drive. You should right? But the other thing is that when I'm like, yeah, I can't drive. I've been hit with the look and I thought the look was shame. I thought the look was like, man, this guy can't even drive. Like from, you know, people that we know kind of thing.

Right? That's not what that look means. That look is, oh, he's got DUIs. What? Okay, that. I can tell. You know when you can tell? That's gotta be people that don't know you very well. They don't know me that well, no. Okay, that's pretty nuts.

No, because I would say that like, I never... Here's the weird part. For me, everyone that is from here lives this experience. So we all get it. The first time I got the weirdness you're describing was from talking to the internet here. Because if you live in the city, you realize how driving is, how insane it can get owning a car

here sometimes. And someone like Reggie kind of existing, where I'm just like, hey, what has your life experience has been like? And you're like, oh, yeah, no, same kind of existing where I'm just like hey What has your life experience has been like and you're like, oh, yeah, no same kind of thing I'm like, okay, why would I ever need to drive a car? Like it's just it is a different thing here You know if you happen to be in the city as well Like if you're coming from the West Island or further out then yeah, that makes sense for sure I remember we have a friend of ours that we'd be like, hey man, we're gonna go see the movies

He's like, okay, hold on, let me go find a place to park. And then he'd be like an hour late! I mean, poor Min, like I've said, he's had to leave the office while we were working to go home to fucking pay for extra meter time to then come back to work. It was brutal. But anyway, it's still a skill that's very useful to work, you know? It was brutal. But anyway, it's still a skill that's very useful

to have, but it's just very common that when you live in a really walkable city, there's a lot of people like me and my friends that grew up that were like, we walk and or grab the metro or bus to go anywhere we want to. We bike where we want to, we grab the city bikes. Like people just move around very quickly and easily. It takes about 15 minutes to get far places, five to get close places. So you know, that's the pace of life. But I tell you what, though, there is one thing about the L that I did not like, I really did not like. So you have to pass 40 of 50 questions, but then the test just ends once you've answered 40 correctly. Oh

So like I got to like 43 questions and I answered the 40th correctly and it was like you have passed It's over. I know I wanted to do all 50. I wanted to see what my fucking score would have been Well, now, you know, you got three wrong Yeah, but I could have gotten yeah hypothetically I like it's annoying come on but like you you know exactly how many you get wrong for each count after for the three that I got wrong were like those ones that it's like all the answers read the same And they're like which of these is a smart way to say this and like fuck off These are all things you could say to somebody Okay

Well, yeah That's nice. That's nice. And I remember the thing I always learned was like hey And even if you don't use it by getting it early you get your insurance to go down because the longer you- Well, yeah, because I have to wait a year now. Exactly. I can drive by myself. But then the longer you have it, once you get the full license, the longer you hold it without anything going wrong, the better your insurance gets.

I wonder how it's going to work with my insurance because I'm not an 18 year old child So I'll tell you exactly how that's gonna go is by the thing by the exact statistics If you are in the 18 to 25 like bracket you are like 80% of the accidents that occur It's insane. Well, I'm aware of that and then the moment you turn 26 You drop down to like where the rest of the population is which is very very squished at the bottom and then when you're in the 55 or 50 to 65 range You're actually the safest and then the moment you turn 66 you're dangerous again Like think of how how much cooler we would have been if we were breaking the speed limit while driving when we were 20

Sure. Yeah, everybody that would have been much Very cool. Everyone would have thought you were the raddest and that's right And the type of vehicle you have makes determines that attitude as well And the color of the vehicle determines that as well Like it's so nuts that it's just like, insurance says we don't know why or care, but red cars mean we're gonna charge you more because by the numbers, people in fast red cars crash more. Well, because red cars go faster.

Yeah, sure, you know. They do. But just like that is the color of impulse. I think there's something that we failed to mention earlier, which is like, yes, Montreal is an incredibly walkable city and subway oriented city, but there's something else that really contributes to not learning how to drive if you grow up or live in Montreal for a while, which is you walk down the street and see 10 minor accidents in a 30 minute walk and multiple pedestrian almost fatalities and cyclists fighting people

and you go, I don't want to enter into this world. You know, so what if I can't turn right on a red light, I can go right through it? Yeah, that's the classic But yeah, no, I like you remember that place. I used to live where Next to the metro station. There was that red light that just had a cop parked next to it permanent day every day Because every single day people would just sail right through that fucking red light like you can give fuck just sail right through that fucking red light like fuck.

It also doesn't help that like potholes that you speed people are speeding past or like dropping it so that the bottom of the suspension is hitting the pothole as it comes out. Someone in the chat asks a fun question. Oh you guys can't turn right on red. Oh no you can turn right on red. You can turn right on red in Quebec. You can only specifically not turn right on red on the island of Montreal.

Not on the island. Anywhere else. Montrealers can't be trusted to turn right on red. Too dangerous for pedestrians, man. Too dangerous. Can't be doing that shit. Awful. Just the worst.

We gotta save lives and just say, you know what? Nah. No, don't, you can't do it do it well cuz if you allowed turning right on red in Montreal I think the first thing that would happen is that like people would be turning right at stop signs into one-way streets Yeah, well, it's just it's one of those things where you're like This is up to the drivers discretion But a lot of discretion of drivers on this island is dog shit and cannot be trusted.

It's bad. It's not good. So we will not be letting this be up to the driver's discretion. No. You are not trusted. That's it. I can't do it. Too dangerous.

Not allowed. And again, we're a... And here's the thing too. Because we're also a pedestrian city, there's more pedestrians all over, right? Like imagine, I mean, like the risks are not just the crazy driving and stuff, it's also there's a lot more people about not using the roads to get around the chicken head. Well, pedestrians in Montreal don't believe in crosswalks.

I mean, we have little versions of Shibuya popping up all over downtown. Those painted lines on the street mean nothing to me. They're suggestions. They're suggestions, Pat. Anyway, I talked about the video. There's the channel, Not Just Bikes, that did like a big analysis. Yeah, yeah, I watched most of that. It's quite interesting to see an outside perspective on it because it's like, yeah, as far as this city goes

compared to North America, it's way more interesting and it's got a whole lot of friendly passages for pedestrians to move safely and not be crossing anything that dangerous. friendly passages for like pedestrians to move safely and Not be you know crossing anything that dangerous, but then you get out at fucking Namur Yeah, no, what it was called. It was like traffic islands or some shit Yeah, you're like you get stranded in between and you're now in a Death Star trench of cars going back and forth areas that a pedestrian can be shuttled to or walked to but cannot leave Oh

man Yeah, it's it's it's crazy How like on one in one fell swoop the you get out at a door of a stay station? And to the left is a park and a bunch of closed streets and amazing walking. And to the right is just absolute hell. Yeah, crossing fucking like eight lane strode, as they're called, street roads. It's an urban planning fucking disaster in some cases and miracle and others. Now that I have the L, I've made the decision for my family and marriage that I will be taking professional driving courses instead of just going, hey wife, teach me how to drive. Because that might cause friction. It's possible.

It's possible. Yeah, I can see that. That could cause a slight degree of friction. I can see that. Uh, well, he says he loves Montreal, but everything he says about it sounds like a shithole. Listen, if you don't- That's how you love things. If you can't shit on the place you live a little bit accurately, then I don't trust you or believe you. It means you don't really live there. You probably don't actually live there.

Having been here, I can tell you top to bottom what the fuck is going on and it's real shit. Yes, and there is absolutely a ton here that I am all about and love. In fact, well actually, yeah, there's some folks that might be coming this way. I'll not say just yet because I don't know if they've announced, but there's someone that we know that might be coming to Montreal to live. But, and because I've just been recently like looking around and thinking about all that stuff and it's like yeah

You gotta be able to tell me like where you like to go eat What's a cool place to hang out and also where the shit is happening in your city? That's how I know I can fucking trust you That's how I know it's real Let's see what else is going on with me? The past week, I decided, so I saw that a lot of people are ranting and raving about Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. I thought that was really strange because that is a peak Eurojank-like RPG.

And then I realized that I had kickstarted the first game, played it for four hours, went, yeah, this needs more time in the oven, and then just left it completely unplayed for six and a half years. So first of all, for open world RPGs, now something that you can be familiar with, wooly, the best time to play them is when they are talking or releasing the sequel, Because then it'll be done The original that is right so like cyberpunk is it done they patched it like a couple weeks ago

After I started yeah after my first you waited so long after my first session There was a new patch with new content After my first session, there was a new patch with new content. Yeah, you waited so long and still. So Kingdom Come Deliverance 1 has been taking up my time lately and it is such a fascinating fucking weird game that I am so in love with. I love what it is doing. It is, its jank has been overstated, I believe, like genuinely. Like, yeah, there's a bug here, there's a little mechanical interaction that's gone off here, but overall it's been pretty solid. It is the virtual fighter of open world RPGs. How so? What should virtual fighter be,

Willy, above all other things? Boring. That's right. It should be fucking boring. Okay. So, Kingdom Come Deliverance takes place in 15th century Bohemia, which would later become the Czech Republic

in 1403 in the most mundane setting I have ever encountered in any game. You are playing Henry Dirt Farmer, fuckhead of scallets, and you are a uneducated, bad at everything peasant. This is not a fantasy medieval game. No, this is 1403 Bohemia. Like North of Grog, I think. This is anti- anti fantasy. Mm-hmm. This is like This is so history channel core. So Europe Yeah, yeah, this is like the codex is just explaining to you the you know

The massive massive X style codex that explains you all these little details you might be unfamiliar with that is Here's what the fuck a charcoal burner is as a profession. I didn't know there was such a fucking thing as a charcoal burner. What the fuck is that? I've heard it as a slur. Here's the term women. And then it's like two, 3000 words about like the rights and responsibilities and whatnot of women of the society within this country, et cetera. Okay.

So now that you're playing cyberpunk and have you seen oblivion in your life? I've seen it. Okay. Think of that. First person perspective, melee combat, all that stuff. You have your skills which go up as you use them. So, you know, sword fighting goes up as you use it, sneaking goes up as you use it, archery goes up as you use it, etc. Right? The difference here at the beginning is that since you are a dirt peasant, like 18 year old,

you start the game at a profound mechanical disadvantage compared to, I would say, nearly every single game ever made. Step one, can't read. Can't read. Nice, yeah, okay. Why would you be able to fucking read? So, also, like, stats. Like like magic is not gonna be a stat. No, you're no here the the skills are

Hunting marks hunting archery sword fighting drinking Stealth nice. Okay lock picking pickpocketing etc. Okay, right Yeah, it is it is mundane it is mundane to the extreme and so, you know your first Your first little tutorial interactions are hey dad wants you to go get some money from a guy who owes him Go get some beer from the tavern And that's it. Oh and get some charcoal. That's it. That's your starting point. Like the most mundane son of a

blacksmith day possible. Now it wouldn't be a video game if there weren't a hint of nobility that you could aspire to. That's right, but that's later. So your start is, okay, the guy won't pay me money. Do you want to try and convince him with your speech? Failed, because you're an idiot. Do you want to fist fight him? No, he's a 35, 40 year old man and he beats your ass into the dirt. The fight is bordering on totally unwinnable. Okay, I'll go talk to my friend and I'll get a lockpick and then I will go and try and sneak into his house and pick the lock to get some of his money, right? You then encounter the most

difficult lockpicking mini game I have ever played in any game. Because the instant you touch anything outside, like the fancy zone for lockpicking, the lockpick just breaks, which causes a noise, which causes the guy to come into your house and beat on you. Oh, okay. And the reason why is that when you are below level five and anything you are not just bad at it You are not just unskilled. You are an active threat to yourself due to your incompetency Worst the best example here is trying to shoot a bow and arrow in this game is Misery because there's no reticle

The bow is constantly moving around. Even if there was a reticle, the arrow does not exactly go where you think it will. And if you try and shoot a bow and arrow below level five in archery, and you don't have gauntlets on, you're so bad at it that the bow string will snap back and slash you. Oh, fuck. And you'll do health damage to yourself. Yeah, okay, you have negative skill. Yeah. Yeah, okay.

So, it has an extremely in-depth and good pickpocketing mechanic, it has great lockpicking, it has good realistic sneaking, it has very, very weird combat in which you are point, like there's a circle where you're aiming your attacks to five points with a lot of parrying and blocking and stuff. But because you start out dog shit at everything,

it forces you to engage in the game mechanically in a bunch of ways that you wouldn't normally have to. So in order to actually get the stuff back from Tutorial Man, I had to do another quest to enlist my friends to help me beat on him in a big group. big group. Okay. So how long before you stop bumbling about and just dying and eating shit all the time? I would say the tutorial and your village gets destroyed by the Hungarians because it has to, right? I would say it's about five to 10 hours

before you acquire a certain level of generalized skill in enough things that you feel like you're a capable character. There's a really interesting thing that happens with this game, and I think it really sums up the experience of how you would have to take it seriously. So you can't fight for shit. There's early combat in the game and it is incredibly difficult to the point of being impossible. So run, don't fight anybody. You can't beat a soldier, you're a peasant, right? At some point you are offered a man at arms

will teach you how to fight. So you go and do the fighting tutorial, right? And a lot of people go, I now know how to fight, I will now go and start adventuring in 1403 Bohemia. That is not good enough. You barely know how to fight and bandits tear you up. The thing that I did, which is apparently the smart thing, is keep practicing with that guy for like 90 minutes

until you are actually really good at the combat and you raise your stats. Practicing as in you yourself are learning how it works or your character is increasing numbers? Both. Like with practice swords. Okay. Like you lab it out and how things work and how combos work

and how the different attacks, different parts of the body work and all that stuff. Okay. So for all of this that sounds really interesting I'm curious then is this a game where combat is Important it's a weird question, but some RPGing you can do in some so there's no kill combat achievement for this game and Running away is always viable. Outside of like, I think, a single mandatory scripted fight in the entire game.

Because it sounds like, you know, it sounds realistic in that it's hard to be competent at anything. So can you just become a really good after dinner raconteur that can talk your way out of trouble and you know? So I've been playing, I play the game for about 43 hours and I would say I have fought like 18 times outside of like a tournament that I join. Like Bandits on the Road. Like it is, there are like five to ten hour stretches of

No combat at all. Okay, depending on what you're doing which meant that I would be doing something like breaking to people's houses at night Doing you know quests going here and there And the quests are a really good example of where this game shines, because the quests are like hilariously mundane. They are like laughably simple in context.

Go collect firewood. Hey man, the refugees are starving. Can you get us some rabbit to eat? Is one of the first quests I acquired. Which is very simple, except for the part where game in 1403 Bohemia is the property of the king, which means all hunting is poaching. So you go into the woods and wander around for like 15 goddamn minutes because I can't find rabbits for shit. And then I, okay, you know what? I'm going to shoot the rabbit with

my arrow. Fuck, it's really hard. It's really fucking hard to shoot the rabbit with my arrow. Okay, I've killed the rabbit. I now need two more. Okay, I've done that. Now I have to get back to town before this meat spoils. Fuck. And while I'm doing that, you have integrated hunger and sleep mechanics. Yeah. Where I'm now hungry enough that my stamina is shit. Okay. And when you get sleepy enough, your camera starts to get away from you. It starts to drift outside your control. And when you are real low on sleep, the screen will intermittently,

eyelids will come down over the fucking screen and you will like kind of nod off and black out while you're walking around. Okay. So this is for like give me a shitty middle-aged simulator. Yeah. I want a simulator. Garth, dirt face life, just horrible.

Everything sucks. A bunch of quests are timed and they don't tell you they're timed. You're just an idiot if you didn't realize it was timed. So like, hey, we got to take care of those sick and wounded here. Well, I ignored that for a while because it wasn't on my priority. And now one of those sick and wounded is dead because of course they did why would they not die they're dying of poison And I guess like what is the What is the pitch as to like where this goes Well in this I have moved from dirt peasants to Squire, okay, okay and kind of working my way up

dirt peasants to Squire. Okay, okay. And kinda workin' my way up. Has the studio Warhorse, are they like a collection of ex-devs from something? I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea. So I'll use a different quest as like a really good example of like the kind of thing that this game does extremely well.

Your local executioner is really pissed off because they're bringing in a out of town executioner for high profile criminals, which is money out of his pocket, but it's also like personally embarrassing to him. So he goes, here's what we're gonna do. We are going to sabotage the executions so that the guy they brought in from Kutenberg looks like a fucking fool and then they'll never have anybody but me

do the executions here, right? So step one is go to the local bailiff and find out what were these guys actually arrested for, which requires a speech check. Okay, I've gotten their names and crimes. Now the next step is I have to go into the black book inside the bailiff's office and read the historical precedent of existing crimes and their punishments and if they were a nobleman or a lowborn. So I broke in and I snuck in and luckily I was able to read the book because I went on the side quest to learn how to read. So then you read and it's a historical document of what types of crimes people get killed for.

Okay, it's a hanging, it's a chopping block, and it's a torture kill. Okay, back to the executioner. How are we gonna sabotage this? All right, we'll poison the torturing tongs so the guy dies right away. We'll blunt the sword of the executioner so the chop takes multiple tries and we'll replace his rope with rotten rope so that the guy, when he gets hung, it snaps and he

gets away. So now I have to go in the dead of night, it doesn't say go in the dead of night but that's when people are asleep, to the executioner's camp, sneak in, steal the sword out of the chest, go back to town, use the grinding wheel that you used to upgrade your weapons, and fuck it up on purpose. Like fail the mini game on purpose, then take it back, put it back in the chest that you found. Then take it back put it back in the chest that you found Then go and poison the tongs. Oh wait. Did you learn how to make poison? Okay before this Go to an alchemist learn how to make poison

Then go through the alchemy mini-game, which is literally men It's run it at a boil pick this put, put it in, check the book, pick this, put it in, cool it to a certain thing, put it, okay, got poison, go poison the tongs, then replace the rope and then he says, okay, great, it's done, meet me tomorrow for the fucking execution. I go to the execution too early and you can watch every single fucking peasant in town walk the like two kilometers to the execution too early and you can watch every single fucking peasant in town walk the like two kilometers to the Execution site it took them like six hours. So I waited in place and got so hungry my character almost died Jesus Christ and then you get the cutscene of the execution. Yeah, this game is for a certain kind of person This is it is it is like it is. Oh boy. Okay, it's

mundanity is Like belying the fact that you have to engage with every single thing Mechanically what would happen if you accept really solid what would happen if you accepted that quest but didn't know how to do any Of those things then I would fail it so the first point of it doesn't wait you get the executions wrong Yeah, and then the execution goes off without a hitch because you sabotage the wrong instruments then I would fail it. So the first point of failure is you get the executions wrong and then the execution goes off without a hitch because you sabotaged the wrong instruments. And then the guy who did the quest is like, oh, come on.

I ran into a quest that had me try to find a new house for somebody, but I didn't like them, so I killed their extended family. And when I went back, my character had a dialogue where it was, hey, I found your extended family and they're happy to take you in, which I had convinced them. But then I decided to kill them. And then Henry adds then, oh, but they died, sorry. And it altered the trajectory of the fucking quest accordingly. Like it is the most immersive sim open world RPG I have ever played.

And it is jank and there are mechanical problems. And there are like all these little annoyances, the number one of which is they want you to change your outfit constantly because you don't have, you don't just have like armor, you also have conspicuousness. It has a status for conspicuousness because the sneakiest clothes at night are all black, but if you are in all black in the middle of the town square next to somebody's door and you're covered in mud, they gonna be like what the fuck are you doing right the fuck away from my house I guess so it sounds almost when you're describing that level of complexity to a quest it sounds almost like either a this is a

like meta quest with multiple parts to it, or B, it's expected that a lot of people are gonna fail this and then you kinda just bumble past it. Depending on what order you would do things, it is expected that you would make big mistakes a lot. Okay, and then once you fail, that's the state you're in and then we keep it moving, right? That's just how it is. Yeah, okay, okay, got it.

Failure is expected in cases, yeah. Yeah, and it's like that's just that's just how it goes And you don't get the good reward and all that This is the first one you're describing right? This is the first one the second one second massive improvement And the second one is a massive improvement in the way that I am so glad I'm playing the first one Because if I played the second one first going back the first one would be impossible Lot of a lot because I'm hearing about the second one just from you know, it's it's current and

You know, I mean there's there's things about like oh Unreal Engine is this shit and you know hearing about the director complaining about like that Which is on the docket somewhere there? The the improvements overall are like, or rather, this is, was the second one Kickstarter as well or was it a... No, second one was made with money from sales of the first one. With just the profits, yeah. So it's bigger, better, et cetera. There's something really funny about the because the second game looks way better,

but it also runs way better. Like it's not just like it is visually a lot prettier. It is so much better optimized that the second game runs better. Okay. Would I saw someone say that like you have to take showers and you have to like... Yes. You have to clean your clothes. So there's a survival game bit to that there too. Yes. The smart thing that they did here is like, I don't know if you... Okay. So you haven't

played many open world RPGs, but there's a tendency for something like Skyrim or Oblivion is people mod in hunger mechanics Because that's like a cool thing that a lot of people want to interact with and they mod in sleep mechanics And what I have found in my time playing those types of mods is that they are horribly over tuned And they are oppressive The person if you're modding in hunger It's because you want to experience the mechanic and thus it'll it'll happen frequently whereas in Kingdom Come Deliverance It's like listen every two hours of game time three hours of game time

Take a nap If you find food off a fucking bandit you killed and Your character is starving fucking eat something. Yeah II don't like that. I I think I enjoy games where hunger is or not hunger but eating is for buffs but not like it is for mandatory. Yeah. The buff is that you have your full stats. You stay alive. Yeah. Exactly. Oh. Oh, you want you want the really big one? If you if you're like, you know what I'm gonna do

I'm gonna keep tons of food in my inventory and I'm just gonna eat Like as much food as I can so that the rolling, you know food buff Goes over well if your food goes over a hundred you get the overeaten Debuff and it's the same debuff as hunger in the other direction. And it has a little piggy icon next to your stamina that ticks down because you're a little piggy. Yeah, you have to keep it in the magic spot. There's a character that has one of those mechanics, or overeating is bad as well, I forget.

Is it Sin? Did Sin have the overeat? No, I'm thinking Somewhere else maybe but but yeah, it's hey go to a town. Are you filthy? Clean up are your arms and armor covered in blood? Clean up Is your shit damaged repair it? Are you hungry eat?. Are you sleepy? Sleep. And it's all like mechanically intermingled in a really interesting way. Probably the most interesting thing about all of that is that, hey, when you go to buy things or talk to quest givers, you will get a very negative reaction if

you are covered in human viscera. But if you try to intimidate someone covered in human viscera, you get a massive bonus. Oh yeah, okay. Because you have guts on you. So I guess, yeah, like for all of this, is there a mechanical... Because like, I guess, is the RPG and kind of like on a Baldur's Gate level where? No, no, no, no, the the RPG is is perk based. Okay, so cyberpunk, oblivion, Skyrim.

And the perks are excellent. Like the perks are fucking fantastic. There are ones that jump off the top of my head is you can pick locks better when you're drunk, but it makes more noise. Um, which then led to me always keeping beer on my person. So when I wanted to break into a house, I would have a little sip before I would drink something. Um, which then led to me getting a level in drinking,

which I then option selected for prefers beer. So beer gets me half drunk, but wine is now gets me drunk twice as fast. Wow. To that level, Jesus Christ. And the various combat stuff, but also like hey Do you are you is your character a savage static you get stat bonuses out in the wilderness you get stat? decreases in cities

What's going on with the best one I I'm sorry what's going on with the save system It's increments So It's in cribbing. So consumable. Consumable. Say you must go find and or you can exit the game and save on exit. Oh, fuck. Okay. All right.

So I have now played enough of the game. Wow. That I I had modded up, I had modded the save system out and just given myself quick save. I'm now deep enough into the game that I'm going to mod it out and go back to ink ribbons or save your schnapps for a couple of reasons. One, a lot of the crime systems only work on the assumption that you're just going to have to deal with the problem that you created. And the second

one is that the save system yourself with alchemy. Okay. But the other thing, and this is really important because the first game had some stops and starts on this, originally, when the first game came out, you did not have save on exit. It was hope you have the fucking item or you're near a friendly bed. Or you can't turn the fucking that is too far. Yes, that is way too far as someone

who's gone through fucking saving, saving hunger, fear and hunger. That takes it from that. Wow, this is challenging to this is not fun. That's a that's insane. Yeah, okay. The second thing is that the second game from people that I've spoke to you just find a lot more of them around like it's still a limited resource but it's not a precious resource. And to the game's credit, the reason I modded it out was because we because open world games crash all the time. It has crashed on me once in 43 hours.

So you know what? Okay, you know what? I'm going to mod the Savior Shnaps back out. It's fascinating. I had a different mod which was when you pick flowers in that game, your character crouches down, picks the flower in third person and pulls back up, and it takes forever. It is like a five second animation per flower for herbalism.

That's ridiculous. But then when I leveled it up to level five, six, seven, all of a sudden when you do that animation to pick a flower, you are scooping up every flower in like a 10 foot radius of your character. Okay. So it's like all these little annoying mechanical foibles are there to make you appreciate your level of skill increase. Slow or like picking versus like ba ba ba ba ba ba. Yeah. slow or like picking versus like blah blah blah blah blah blah yeah I feel like

I feel like the big part of whether or not something like this could be a lot of fun for me would be can you fail through the game and keep going oh totally so like for example bumbling about not pulling this off but moving from quest to quest and advancing is a possibility as long as your skills go up And as long as you don't outright fail the main quests. Yeah, absolutely great. Okay Um, like one of the things like I was I've robbed a lot of houses in that game I like to I like to sneak into people's houses and take their shit game. I like to sneak into people's houses and take their shit. I got caught a couple times. The jail time penalty is pretty severe. It is they put you in jail, they take all your stolen shit back, and time advances while you're in jail. So if you had any quests that were timed, say those

goodbye. And for every day that you are in jail, you will have a day of decreased stats coming out of jail. So if I'm in jail for one day for pickpocketing, for one full 24 hour period after getting out of jail, my stats will be decreased by 20% across the board. Because being in jail is hard. Do you get like people or a group or followers or any sort of like... Yes. You get a dog. A dog named Mutt. Sick. A dog. So then the dog is part of the houndmaster skill, which means you can teach the dog to hunt for you. You can teach the dog to sick anybody that you want. The dog has my dog has now

been upgraded to have an increased chance of bleeding. Sorry, like like causing like blood loss on enemies. Okay, yeah. Probably the ballsiest thing the game does is the combat is really difficult, because it is a onev1 combat system where tons of enemies attack you simultaneously. So like when somebody comes at you like the camera like first person locks on to them and you have your radial window for like up attack their head or attack their feet but his friends are coming around to like attack you from the side. So large group confrontations have you kind of unlocked and you are always backing up going, ah, ah, ah, as different guys are trying to get outside your field of vision. And it looks really it's it's really frantic and it works really well for

like this feels like I'm being jumped by a bunch of goons and I have to focus on defense until I can you know bought one in for honor when you're dueling somebody and like some shit comes from this from left know and you're like yeah, you have to unlock. Yeah. Yeah, you're like, oh god Like that. It is just like that nice It is a fucking cool game that I would recommend to tons of people who like an RPG with a lot of mechanical depth this is Way more in-depth mechanically than CD projects games and Bethesda's games. Like all the systems intermingling with each other is fucking fascinating. It is awesome.

Is it mainly about the mechanical elements of it? Or is there like a story or yeah? There's absolutely a story and the dialogue in the writing is absolutely like very interesting and very well done It's also like hilariously mundane Okay, it is yeah a lot of this is a lot of this is about the mechanical depth But I'm curious if like if it's compelling, you know, oh, yeah No, Henry's story is very interesting. The core premise of the game is that you built a really nice sword for the local nobleman, and then a local army attacked and razed your village, and in the ensuing chaos, you got

your parents killed, and you saw the guy who did it, and you lost the sword that you forged to abandon it. and you saw the guy who did it, and you lost the sword that you forged to a bandit. And the main quest is, I have to get that goddamn sword back from that bandit, but I don't know where he is. Damn. You even have like the guy you made the sword for going, dude, it's not important.

It's just a sword. And your character's like, no, I have to get it. It's important. My dad made it And then you have to do things by a certain Timeline otherwise history happens. Yeah. Well history is gonna happen like it's it's in the in like a Conflict of powers and the Holy Roman Emperor in 1403 the second like a conflict of powers in the Holy Roman Emperor in 1403. The second game I think also takes place in- Oh God, not the Holy Roman Empire, God.

Yeah. One of the first things that you find is like a German guy arguing with some Czechs at the bar and they're making fun of him because like, so which pope do you follow? How many popes do you guys even have right now? They weren't Holy nor Roman nor an empire. Yeah, well.

Fuck that. I saw someone in the chat describe it as peasant Shenmue and you know what that's a decent sell. Good, good I like that. I saw folks talking about how when I described it or played it that it reminded them of Red Dead Redemption so it was a little strange that my complaints about Red Dead Redemption 2 are not being echoed here. And that is for two really simple reasons. In Red Dead, you don't actually have a lot of mechanical depth to any of the things you do. A lot of the things that you would do in Red Dead are actually just cutscenes, skinning, building a house, stuff like that.

When the game asks you to go through a quest in Kingdom Come Deliverance and say brew a potion, brewing a potion is really hard in this game. You have to set up the different ingredients on the shelf correctly. You have to learn how to read so you can read the recipe book. And by the way, until your reading is high enough It's still littered with spelling errors Because you're not reading it good Then you have to pump the bellows to boil it you have to Our glass how long you boil

specific ingredients It's a whole fucking thing. Oh, you're describing crafting with extra steps and I'm dying. I'm dying. I'm dying inside. Oh my god. That sounds horrible. One of the things that has made me so glad I'm not playing the second game first is the

second game has a crafting mechanic for blacksmithing and that crafting mechanic is get a slab of iron, manually heat it and manually pump the bellows. Now put it on the thing and then take your hammer and aim to even it out correctly along the hot spots. Okay, that's cool though. Over the whole sword. Yeah, okay, but forging a sword,

forging a blade is rad though, that's cool. But mixing concoctions, I'm dying, dude. I can't, I can't. Well, if you don't learn to mix concoctions, you're not gonna be able to learn how to get the Respec potion, which is just really strong alcohol. The respect potion is you are crafting like super moonshine,

and it causes you to black out and forget all your perks. But if you use it, you run a percentage chance of developing instantaneous alcoholism, which will fuck your shit up unless you're drunk all the time. Just go go blind. Yeah. Okay, it is it is fucking fascinating. So before you before you drink the lithium potion, which is super booze, you can do one of two things. You can get a hair of the dog potion, which will cure your alcoholism, or you can dilute the lithium potion into drinking water, which gets you five potion infused drinking waters, which don't have enough alcohol content to cause you to suffer from alcoholism. What is the task time for like, let's say, like doing something like a concoction like that

versus kind of like quest completion? Are you spending more time on the mundane? It is so wildly variable. There are a bunch of quests bang out four minutes. Okay. It's this guy at the end of town, this other guy at the end of town talk. Did you, did you, could you speech check it? Talk, talk, talk. Right. Cause like you can play like the, the execution quests that I described.

If you included the steps, which are learn to read and learn to brew potions, that thing was like three hours. That, that thing was, was crazy. It was, and also none of the people involved have fast travel points anywhere near them. So you have to just hoof it on your horse. Is there any part of this? That's like Home building or construction or like stuff like that or yes So there's a DLC that added a town that you rebuild. Okay, and

But it's not a main game mechanic though. No, no, it's not a main game You're mainly just like getting tavern beds and okay friends will let you stay with them Cuz I get cuz part, you know, you can like, if you let me feel like pal world, you could spend all day just managing your shit. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that, that, no, it is very much like go out and do, go not stay home and build.

It is, it is so fucking fascinating. It is so interesting. It is like every single minute that I spend with the game, I am doing some interesting little piece of gameplay That I'm crazy about it. It's so goddamn interesting It is such a cool game. It is also occasionally really mean like I got I got out of seo. I fucking fast traveled somewhere and I in the middle of the night, I got attacked by bandits and they pulled me off my horse.

And before my character could stand up, I had lost 60 70% of my health because they pull you off the horse and then they start beating you during the you falling off the horse animation. Because of course they would And I barely and I mean bear like within a sliver of health survived that encounter And if I had not survived that I would have lost like an hour of progress So I was gonna say you go back to the last time you slept The last time you slept the last time you got your clothes laundered the last time you used a

Save your snaps, which is right the usable thing so when I play the second game I'm not going to I'm gonna leave the save system alone. I Think the game probably plays better with it intact Okay, what an incredibly cool now now I know what type of people are getting excited when I hear about this game coming up now. I would genuinely recommend that if anything about this interests anyone to try it, because all the little pieces are interesting and fun, and they combine into a bunch of really,

really cool and interesting ways. I think the bit about the executioner's quest there sounds really complex and that's probably the most interesting part. Oh, absolutely. But I mean, I couldn't imagine every quest has that level of in-depth decision making. But it's this kind of thing where very, very, very simple requests get like, like very turn out to be much more mechanically difficult. Right. Like I got a quest to weed a guy's garden. And it was actually really difficult to select the correct weeds. And then I ended up in my inventory with like 300 flowers that I could sell Okay

It is it is it is fucking great it is great I'm I'm so glad I'm playing the first one first and then I'm going to roll right into the second one Kingdom come not deliverance one Not Alex Ross Superman No, no not that All right, 1403 Bohemia sucks by the way Sucks to live there. Uh, yeah, I'm good on any year That doesn't start with a a nine is the second digit.

Don't worry. Don't worry. I'm good. You don't have to worry about that at all, because you are hilariously unrepresented in the game. There was actually a big kerfuffle, because the head dev of the studio Warhorse is like a massive shithead.

There is not even a single person of color at all in the whole game. Which is weird, because there's Turks in the story. We're in that part of the world. That's all there is to it. Yeah, okay. Um, I mean, you know, I'm I'm looking through these screenshots. I see what's going on Um You could always this is the type of game where i'd be like, oh there's one and there's a big quest about it You know, really? Is what I would expect you just you just described witcher one and witcher three Do you know what? You just described witcher one and witcher three. Okay.

In which there is like literally one person of color in the entire game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, no, I'm looking at this dude's haircut right here and I'm like, oh yeah, no. I think. Oh, you totally just spoiled something for me with that screenshot. I'm sorry! It was on the Steam page! Holy shit!

Holy fuck! Oh, it was on the Steam page! It's a screenshot on the Steam page! I'm sorry! On the second game? Yeah. Fuck! Oh shit.

That's so fucking funny! Holy shit! Oh Shit Damn okay, I'm sorry. I literally just went to the screenshots on um no hey listen to be fair to be fair um I Got spoiled on something in my stream stream and it was maybe the funniest interaction I've ever had with a chat member in which I was making jokes about two characters Becoming gay and kissing and then someone asked me in the chat Oh did Pat did Pat get spoiled on the second game and I went what? What really? Okay. Okay. Yeah Okay, okay, yeah

It's a gank-cation? What? Yeah, they picked their promo material and chose that for some reason. Yeah Alright, well Um, that's so funny. That's so fucking funny. Oh Well, that's cool. Now I can imagine. Yeah, I guess. Well, that's cool actually. Alright, well Yeah, okay, so yeah, that's that's what I've been playing, like exclusively. I can't get enough of it. I can't. It's so goddamn amazing.

Okay. And then I hear little bits and pieces of the second game and I'm like, wow, that's awesome. Like, hey, you know what? In the second game, if you steal and murder enough, the town will brand you in the village square so that everyone knows to fucking ignore you. And the only way to wash the stink of the brand is to go to a priest and agree to go on a holy pilgrimage and walk the length of the map to a holy site

to redeem yourself in the eyes of the Christian Lord! Wow. Okay. Um. Well then, Pat. What's going on on your schedule this week? My schedule's not going to include Kingdom Come Deliverance. My schedule is going to include more Virtua Fighter with Woolly. And it's also going to be including playing the Night Rain beta on Saturday with Wooly because me and the family, including this dog, are going to be traveling to Montreal tomorrow. Hey, how about that? For a visit. Mom and dad need to see their grandson and also this thing, this freaky

dog, which means that you know what, Wooly? We're gonna bring this bag. Oh yeah. You should wear this bag. Okay. With this thing in it. Okay. Catch the weight on that. Yeah, Montreal trip. So obviously that's our schedule as well. More details on the what's and the when's in specific will be posted on the schedule. Yeah, we'll hash out the times and shit and then we'll put up little pictures on our blue skies. I promise not to have any side embarrassing ambush cameras set up. I don't believe you. You shouldn't.

Yeah, I'll say. All right. Quick break, BRB. Yeah. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. I love our sponsors. This week, Castle Superbeast is brought to you by Raycon. That is the solution for getting the wires out of your life.

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All right. This week the podcast is sponsored by Hero Forged. Let me see if I can get this set up here. So Hero Forged, as I've discussed last time, is the best way, if you're tabletop gaming, if you want to get a custom miniature ready to go, they've got you set up. Check this shit out. Oh, do you? Oh, oh! Ready to go. They've got you set up check this shit out. Oh Oh

Lolly full screen this on my end. Oh cool, man. Yeah, you gotta hold it slightly further back The camera's having trouble focusing. Okay. Yeah, there you go Right. I made a little miniature wooly little punch wooly. Yeah, good. Yeah, he's in a monk outfit I got the colors going. The dreads with the blonde hair, with the dyed blonde tips, black at the bottom. And then, yeah, down there, a little Wooly Versus even at the... You can customize every element of it. I put him on a wood floor with the full monk's outfit as well. That looks really good, man.

I picked the pose. I picked the facial expression, all the details of the fabric and the clothing and all that. There's even the little beads that are wrapped around the monk necklace and stuff. Yeah, there's a punch monk. Woolly over here and This was super simple to do like I just Took a look over at their website browse through and it's like a character creator in a game you You're very easily you have a very easy setup for Yeah, just browsing through tons of face details, extensive clothing areas, poses, and you can go in and like fine tune the scalp, eyebrows, jawline and more.

And you're getting a print quality that's like super detailed as well. Like it came out great. This is a, you know, this is ready to go for any tabletop needs. And again, even down to getting the colors and name on the bottom and stuff as well. So yeah, they've got a new system as well for like posing ears, teeth selection, and like I'm just describing stuff for humans, but like there's a really detailed set of parts and stuff for monsters as well, creatures, you know, more than just your basic human setup, you've got like all kinds of fantasy races and clothing options and stuff to pick from.

New premium plastic as well are the material they've got for their minis. Yeah, there's a good durability and longevity to them. You don't have to sacrifice detail to have them be able to last. And the detail you're getting, the new specs for premium plastic minis are 35 by 30 by 30 microns. So every- That's pretty specific. Every feather on your Griffin mount will look sharp.

Don't usually talk about things with microns. Yeah, no. It was quite impressively detailed. And yeah, it was very simple and fun to set that up. And I think I mentioned as well, there's a kit bashing system that lets you go in and grab parts and pieces and accessories from multiple different other models as well. So if you want to really just freestyle it and go completely

crazy, there's a pro subscriber option called kit bashing where you can just make absolutely anything. You can bring up to 20 more items onto the same mini, pose them individually and create like a very complex figure with multiple parts, aspects, weapons, limbs, clothing, whatever you want to do. All printable on their minis or you can get standees as well. You can get digital products if you just want the STLs. You can get that printable. And then yeah, the regular options include like regular plastic, premium plastic, color printed, bronze, or color standees. So go take a look. Visit heroforge.com to start designing your custom miniature today.

And check back often because new content is added every week. Again, if you are looking to make yourself a cool little tabletop miniature and you want to get that shipped out to you real quick. And it looks, the one I got looks pretty cool. That's again, that's heroforge.com. If you use the code castle, you'll get 5% off all orders on physical miniatures. So heroforge.com and use the code castle to get 5% off of all your orders on physical miniatures. Pop it in there, let them know we sent you. And legit, this is one of those ones where I'm like, oh yeah, I super love, this is a great fit for for us and what we do here I had to I had to pick between wearing a suit or going with the

monk look and I'm thinking like chances are if I ever use this in the future I'm probably going to go with the monk build so let me have this preemptively ready to go uh yeah thanks hero forge thanks hero forge show monk one more time. Here, let me see if I can get the light and camera good for this. Let's see. Focus, there we go. Yeah. That is really cool.

At the bottom there. I'm going to keep this right on my desk. There you go. This week the podcast is sponsored by Shopify. Cha-ching is the sound of a sale on Shopify. That is your number one checkout on the internet if you are getting yourself into an online business and you need to figure out how to take it from the beginning steps to getting your shop up and running and getting your cart up and running.

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your selling today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash superbeast, all lowercase. One more time, that's shopify.com slash superbeast lowercase Thank you shopify. Thanks up a fire And this week the podcast is sponsored by Express VPN express VPN, how are you doing? I hope you're doing well I Mean I had to I had to use this literally just two nights ago, as I was browsing and I was told, no, you can't do that, you're in Canada, you can't read this article. And I was like, ha.

You don't tell me what to do. No, I'm not. So, yeah, let's see, going online without ExpressVPN is like going on, it's like forgetting yourself on a Zoom meeting, forgetting to mute yourself. Do you really want your coworkers hearing you trash talk them? I would much worry about like farts, man. Or flushing the toilet or in your own embarrassing example Sometimes when you're talking I just like

Move that white right down so that I can just start farting and no one can hear me Yeah, no if your zoom meeting is happening with an earshot of your toilet Massive braps coming through. That's a rough one. See, we've got the studio set up. I've got the mute button over here so that at any moment I can... Yeah, you got the mute button.

I mean, I think the funniest thing I could do is that like by, instead of, instead of muting it, I could like accidentally hit the devil noise and have like devil braps. Oh, no! Devil farts is bad! Don't do that. No please.

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slash superbeast. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash superbeast and you can get an extra four months for free. Expressvpn.com slash superbeast. Thanks ExpressVPN. Thanks ExpressVPN. All right. So for me, it's going to be pretty short. I did jump back online in Marvel Rivals. Yay! I jumped online with the group. So Black Gift, we rode, we got some games. It's interesting. So you can only queue up with a maximum of four going on ranked unless you're in a tournament

then you can do six but like. Really? Yeah, or if you do casual I think you can do six. But if you're going into ranked, you can't go more than four stack. Cause I guess they just don't want people, they don't wanna have like full groups where people aren't able to join matches and they don't want to have to have you wait for another group of six.

So interestingly you they just decided to put a cap on that. I had no idea that was the case. You can't. Yeah. You can't do five. You can do six. People are saying you can queue for six but not five. people are saying you can queue for six but not five oh is that what it is okay oh you know why because if one person gets bullied queuing with five that means you can only get solo queers into your thing but if you're ranked queuing with four then you can get all the people doing duos in. And I guess to stop one person from getting bullied, right?

Yeah. I... That's interesting. Okay, I think we misunderstood that then. Yeah, we thought it was only four unless you did casual or tournament. Okay, so full stack, just not five. Hmm. All right, well in any case, yeah, obviously, you know, needless to say, that's a much funner experience,

much funner way to play the game is, you know, on coms with other people and minimizing toxicity. And I also, you know, it took the opportunity to just learn how to play better, how to improve and, you know, work on the characters that I'm focusing on. So, like Moon Knight, you know, I was able to, like, learn a lot of, learn some tricks and get better at some simple things that I kind of, I feel like are particular to that character, you know, learning the match-up, so to speak. The way Moon Knight kind of throws out, like know, learning the matchup, so to speak. The way Moon Knight kind of throws out like three blades at a time, there's these little

things to it where it's like, oh, if you kind of like zigzag left and right to stay defensive, sometimes if you're moving sideways while throwing the three blades out, they're going to land in linear fashion and you're not going to hit all three on target. So every time you have the rhythm of releasing the three, you should stop, aim, and then keep moving. So there's a rhythm to how to fire with that character. Learning how to aim the Ankh behind them instead of in front of them so that they have to turn around for an extra second to deal with the onk, you know Calling out his ult and throwing an onk down that pulls them into the middle of it

And you know all these little just a little little basic tips and there's even um There's combos where you cancel attack animations to improve like yeah, that's crazy. I don't do that I can't I so it sounds it sounds intense But it's actually not as bad once you give it a shot But essentially certain things you can certain buttons you can kind of like blink from one into the other Just to begin the second one faster and you know in a in a life-or-death situation where somebody's got two headshots on you It'll make all the difference as somebody who's bad at aiming,

I need all the tech like that I can get because when I find myself one-view-one in a room and we're both jumping around and doing the dance type of thing, anyone with basic FPS aiming and a mouse is going to just take me out way faster. So I need to have tech like that to compensate. And I also, yeah, same thing for Iron Fist. There's a lot of fun I learned about playing melee in that game and learning how to go in and go out and finding the right rhythm to it. right rhythm to it. Like the the picking your picks like like like

with precision, you know, there's there's there's there's don't overextend. Don't ever overextend. Unless unless the situation calls for it a little bit, but even then, you know, sometimes you can you can go out a little bit, get that last kill, but don't don't. Yeah, don't don't don't jump off the point too hard or fuck up the the rhythm by getting greedy

And Yeah, no, it's just there's there's there's obviously a lot to this. It's interesting to see too So something you know that they announced was that there's gonna be a half season reset So something that they announced was that there's going to be a half season reset where with the release of the next Fantastic Four characters, they're going to drop everybody down by four, not full ranks, but not full tiers, but like individual sub ranks or so. And so that has caused enough of a backlash that they canceled it. So yeah. People hated that people when season zero went to season one and

everybody dropped four ranks that everyone was so miserable. The idea of a of because like the idea of a half season leading to a content update is like, oh, shit, more stuff. That's great. That's cool. You know, the we're getting more things more frequently, but then yeah, getting losing progress because of that, it feels like a bummer because, you know, like in the case where I'm like, okay, I'm in silver,

and if I lose four divisions, that means I'm going right back to bronze three. Yeah, no, most people playing the game would be kicked all the way, because as you increase the ranks, like they become less populated. So four out of seven ranks going down, that means most people are starting over. Yeah, feels bad if you've been trying to keep up. And furthermore, if there's rewards associated

with the rank you get to, it sounds like now they're going to just keep you where you are. And if you play 10 ranked matches matches you'll get the reward. So that's nice because yeah like it's half rank reset is weird. It is like for half season you know. Between full ones where there's a big balance change and other stuff it's more understandable but no obviously everyone just losing progress sucks. In a lot of cases too, that's a rather sudden thing to drop on people with it coming around the corner as well. Sometimes people wait till the last minute to go hard on whatever their tier was at.

Nice to see that 180 very quickly. Yeah. Nice to see that 180 very quickly. Yeah, no surprise there. Queuing up with people is a better experience than queuing up with not. Although it is still like, you still get those people that talk shit in the stack where you're like, literally it was like, I think we were a group of four and then two and then like the two people just like rage Quit and left in the middle of the match, you know, you're like What the fuck you gonna do there? They went you know, that's a win. No, no our team. Oh your team Yeah, we were four and then there was another two that we you don't know who's together and who's not

the names but when they one left and then the other one left mid match and you're like All right there. They go oops you know so Toddlers are out there doing their thing That was cool jumped back on metaphor still working on the one two three fourth Jumped back on metaphor. I'm still working on the one, two, three, fourth location. Hold on. That's capital.

That one, that one. Ooh, the fourth one. That's a good one. Yeah, where you travel, you go pretty far from... That's a good one. That's my favorite one oh interesting okay so that is my favorite one interesting okay yeah it's a cool location you know we're hitting the island up and seeing what's going on not much to say about progression points and everything until did you did you laugh when you met the party member there? I saw them and I was like that's cool that

it's funny that you know that's the reveal of what you look like. No I mean their name. No? If you're John Metaphor, then they're... So I'm talking about, okay, you're talking about Virga Island, right? Yeah. Okay, what's the party member's name there? I forget his name. Oh, well never mind then. Okay. But we met the dude that's likely going to be jumping in the group.

But yeah, I don't know. I pop back in. I did like a couple little like- There's a pun going on there that I think is really funny. Gotcha. Okay. I forget. I don't remember.

Once I complete the area and do more, I a fucking wonderwall duo there. Oh, the blowjob brothers? Is that what we're going with? I was just going to go with Oasis, but sure. I feel like we got Oasis chilling while we're trying to get up to our adventures. I can't believe, I could not believe when the game took a turn and they're like, you're gonna hang out with these shitheads. I'm like, really? I'm gonna hang out with these shitheads?

For an extended period of time. I'm gonna hang out with 50% of Lewis's gay boy squad? Are you serious? I mean, the gay boy squad is in, like, that's the expansion team for sure. Yeah, yeah, we'll see what's going on. But you know what? Anyone that's got good fashion, I'm down to chill with anyone that's got the extra textures and layers going on with their outfit. I feel it. I appreciate their presence. So yeah, no, not much else say, though. Again, I didn't do the main Mish, so. But I did, I did Boodoo Backup, but I did get hit with that. Oh, God, how do you play this again? What was happening? Okay, wait, what's going on? And then like after getting all my bearings around just the world and the plot and the characters

and where I left off, and I was like, Oh, God, and then there's the systems and what I wanted to do with my build and my jobs and Don't take breaks you can't that game is brutal for don't do that Because I had a bunch of short goals in mind for like synergy ideas on the the archetypes and I forgot all Of them don't don't do that. You should focus on that game because it's going to get really incredibly easy to forget both the plot as well as the mechanics because it's only going to increase in complexity from where you're at. So there is a detailed memorandum to look through, and you can talk to your fairy buddy,

but unfortunately none of those things are really giving you current summaries of what you just did. Yeah, because it assumes that you were playing the game over the course of six weeks, basically. Well sometimes people step away. Sometimes you take a break. I would highly recommend powering through and finishing that game. It is excellent. It is fantastic. I'm doing my best. I can't make any promises, you know But we'll just make the promise and just fail later. Maybe It's fine, you know, I can use the threat of shame to motivate you

What I am noticing is that that is a bummer is I used, when I'm playing on PS5, I actually like the share feature for remembering things and just quickly screen dabbing things to reference later. Oh yeah, oh yeah, okay. It's really become handy for that. And PC, I'm not really doing that. I guess I could reach over and do the print screen, but I'm not really set up with the

keyboard next to me. But I've come to rely on that share button in the weirdest way in this generation, not for sharing at all, but for recapping in LPs what I did off camera and for remembering things that I might forget later. That is interesting Mm-hmm not at all what they wanted that share button. No, that's that was not that's not even for you That's for you to go to other people. Well, it says share on it Why didn't we learn from Metal Gear Solid 1 when you loaded up your save and it gave you a summary of what? I hate that. I recently played through that game I was so annoyed.

The summary in case you walked away for a while. Yeah, no, it's taking time away from me getting back into the game. It's too long. I heavily appreciate a nice little, what's up right now? What's been going on? Just use your brain and remember! Sometimes you, you know, a game you walk away from it after for a while, a couple weeks. A great refresher is super useful. What was the other? There's another game we played. You beat MGS1 in an afternoon.

How long are you walking away from MGS1? Yeah, but when you're fucking 10 years old, it might take longer than that, man. Yeah, and when you're 10 years old, you have infinite time on on the weekends so you blow through it by the end of Sunday anyway this is stupid a game having a reminder for the stories is a useful thing I forgot what the more recent LP we were playing was there's something else that had another like the story so far thing that was that was appreciated but But in any case, yeah, a little bit of metaphor. Mai came out and that's cool. Not much to say beyond just that. That fan tech makes her a Blanka-like character where you've got to go and practice permutations, right?

Because the fan, first of all, you have three types of regular fan, then you have the charged version of those, so there's six, and then you have the charged version of those so there's six and then you have the flame version Uncharged and then the flame version charged So you know that's 12 and then you have the od regular and od flame, so you know what I'm gonna do wooly Yeah, sure exactly yeah scissor kick a hundred percent right? But if you really want to think about it, like... No! I don't! Sixteen different kinds of fans could be coming your direction at any time. Actually, 17,

18 if you add the follow-ups. So... Yeah! EX Psycho Crushers. Eighteen kinds of fans, of fans right now between these fans you also have the ability to you know rush in and Get a high or a low or a throw and get a mix-up going so if you are prepared to like create

Complex your opponent doesn't know what the fuck is coming at them setups. You can practice and make by really good by labbing out what each of those situations looks like. Because when the fans bounce upwards and drop back down on your opponent, the height they bounce at depends on the strength of the button you press.

So boy, there's a whole lot of possibilities that you can't really fully ever predict is what they're going for. You can see the height they're coming at and if you want to go for a parry, you can, but they want it to be overwhelming. And so they made it that way with the fans. That's a fun part of it. I would say that it's also interesting that her level two, where she ... the elbow with the fire from full... Right. Super deadly ninja bees.

Works from full screen that thing is a bionic arm oh yes I did not expect you to say that you can throw out her her fan and like her like her OD fan for example and if they're getting hit full screen just go right into the level two with the fire charged stock on it and you can hit them full screen all the way that's really funny and if you take him to the corner you can even do a follow-up, you know Dragon punch right so Yeah, there's there's a there's a really there's something to like putting a technician character

Into the game here where my was not this in the past at all. No my is I'm gonna jump in the air where Mai was not this in the past at all. No, Mai is I'm gonna jump in the air and do stupid shit. Throw the fan out, don't jump at me, eat shit, here we go. And now it's Angie Mito with the butterfly setups combined with Blanka for just confusion. Yeah, pretty fun setup though. It's definitely the funnest version of my, with that level of complexity to it. The things that I enjoyed with her aerial game and stuff were not going to work on good

players that have great reactions at the end of the day. There is something to consider there. For example, I'd say there's a level where a character's game plan, it only works at a layman sort of intermediate level, and then when you get to a higher level, you're like, this entire character doesn't work. So King in Tekken has a bunch of grabs where,

like, to you or I as human beings, we're like, god fucking damn it, I can't escape, it hurts, I'm dying. That's 50%, that's crazy, that's too much. But really good Tekken players know exactly what grab is coming at them, can react to the, which hand is above which, if it's left or right, and they immediately just break the grab, and it's like if your whole game was built around

landing this grab and good players can always react to what you're doing, you cannot hurt them, therefore this character is pointless. So they had to put in some stuff where it's like, oh, he can do an identical animation, but you don't know which of the two is going to come out of it. So similar thing here where they kind of have some setups where you're like, okay, even if you're really, really good, you're not going to memorize 18 fucking fans worth of setups. No.

You know? So you as my get to learn five. And it doesn't matter which five, just make sure they're different situations. And then every once in a while do one of the yellow ones and who knows what will come out of it, right? Yeah, 100%. This is the Moon Knight random shit go. Random bullshit go.

Yeah. Yeah, there you go. So that is pretty much it. So yeah, we're still gonna, I think, get a chance at a cyberpunk session this week. So yeah, stay tuned for that. And then as well as of course, via five and night rain. The night rain beta test. That'll be a night night stream. Yeah, the night rain beta test is Saturday night at 10 p.m.

Yeah, we had the choice of doing it from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. or 10 p.m. to 9 a.m. or 10 p.m. to 1 p.m. and that was an easy decision. This is my least favorite kind of beta test. I totally agree. Closed and time limited. And for a game that's super hot that you would be a fool to ignore. Yeah, I get not everything is gonna be open and not everything is just gonna be running for the whole weekend, but it really means that if you don't hammer those servers immediately, right,

you're probably gonna have some error messages right away. There probably is gonna be an hour delay, you know? So it's like, oh fuck, okay, well it's 11 p.m. now and we still can't get in. Oh, we gotta talk about what to do when we load up NightRanger at 10 p.m. and it just doesn't work. And the server error message and they're like,

sorry guys, we're working on it. And then they eventually get it up at 11.30 and you're like, okay, so now how long does it take to get through one run? 45 minutes. Yeah, so there's contingencies that we need to consider for sure. But yes, Saturday night-ass stream is the only way to do it. So yeah, I'll be posting the schedule about that as well.

And hey, hopefully PSN won't go down. Exactly. Oh, wouldn't that be wonderful? Yeesh. So yeah, Woolly versus on Twitch, Woolly versus on YouTube. And stay tuned for my schedule posting on my socials. OK, so right into that, actually, PSN goes down. It just went down for like a whole day. It went down right when I was doing the MyStream,

or rather the day before. No word, no updates on what was happening, but servers were gone for hours, and it got to the point where apparently Krispy Kreme was like, hey, if you're bored because because PSN's down come on down and get a free donut. You know? And there was a weird confusing point where folks were trying to load up physical media with their PS5s to go online and discovered a weird setup issue.

But if you pop in a disk drive while PSN is down and you have all settings on the default, you get a message that says you cannot pair your game disk to your account if it can't verify through your PSN. Which is pretty horseshit. The error message says can't use your disk drive, something went wrong, registering your disk drive to your PS5. Yeah, if the problem persists, wait for a while and restart your PS5. So fuck, obviously, this digital only future that we were approaching. Fortunately, this like I was like, does this mean that you cannot use offline games to you know, in physical format? And it's like, no, you can. When you but when you, but when you have to go into the PS5 settings and turn on console sharing and offline play is a setting that needs to be enabled because it's off.

And if you, like you need to basically tell the console, yes, allow me to play my games without internet, please. Yeah, that's stupid as shit. But we all know that they were pulling PSN down on purpose to secretly add blood-borne Remastered to our accounts. Oh, that's what it was. That's why they're gonna have the state of play tomorrow And that's why they were so aggressive about making Budliff take down the the the old

carts Level of cope on this is so unbelievable the old carts. Man, the level of cope on this is so unbelievable. Oh god, so Nightmare Cart, by the way, got its own old hunter style expansion with some new shit coming. And Bundleth aka Botster put up a post and then it got fucking hit by Sony saying, you get that shit down. It's like, wait!

Yeah, it's like how late McDonald's Bloodborne patch got taken down,. I think two weeks ago. Yeah, but it's legally distinct blood-borne What's the problem and it turns out the problem was the description of the video linked to? blood-borne PSX and That was the problem. It wasn't the actual content of Nightmare cart, you know. Yeah, speaking of which blood-borne PSX is down off of nightmare cart you know yeah speaking of which blood-borne PSX is down off of off of the itchio now because same reason so like you'll never be able to play blood-borne PSX there's just no way to get there's no way to get it now gone forever it's gone if anyone is this aggressive about their licensing, surely it must mean they care about

that license and are actively doing something with it. Yeah, no. Anyway. Great. Cool. PSN came back. No word, but that's all it was. You know, I think somebody in our chat really nailed it. It was like they're going to announce Silksong cart tomorrow. I just, I just, I don't even want to hear the word Silksong anymore. I didn't want to say it with my mouth, but here we are. I just, I'm tired of the entire. There's a bitterness on my tongue. There was another confusing story as well that popped up and then was not real. But there are not not not real, but like required clarification. So there was an update to

uh Valve's um steam terms of service and they highlighted a section that bans advertising business models uh that are essentially like forced ads like mobile games. So a number of articles came out reflecting that they had a section basically saying you cannot have paid advertising business model games where the game is free or whatever the case is, but then you force the user to watch ads. And thank fucking God, because obviously that cancerous shit on proper consoles and or steam would would just populate it with absolute dog shit. So that's cool. However, this was already a guideline. They simply carved it out into its own section. But this was this was not new. This was already in

the case. And that stands to reason that it's good. Yeah, and that makes sense. Because we would have seen a ton of these already if that were not already the policy, right? You know, I think I know that when you like on on App Store and on Android and stuff like there's the in app purchases in or includes in game ads kind of stuff you see, but you just you never quite know like how nuts it's gonna be because sometimes there's the games where it's like oh there's an there's a banner on the title screen or some shit and then there's the full on like you get one game and then you must watch this video and then you must yeah fuck all that. Uh, beyond that, we did get so yes, the night rain beta does close the beta does start Friday until Sunday. But it's actually only for nine hours. Ha ha ha ha. Because three hour

increments at a time. Which to me, that's the mark of basically, that's the mark of this is not a network test for you to enjoy yourself, this is us stress testing the network. Yeah, I don't care, they sent me the fucking beta Elden Ring and I played that for a while and I put a video out and that was great, they should have done that.

Yeah, it's not. It's just, you know, having been behind the scenes during one of these stress tests, you know, for compliance purposes, during the downtime is when all the debug is going on, all the regression is going on, everything from the live environment, you know, they're noticing bugs and trying to fix them in between. But as a public facing thing, this is a first opportunity to play the game. So you kind of get these two different interests clashing with each other and it sucks because it gives you a much, as a user, it gives you a worse experience. I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know that they've done anything like this because I think this is this is their first super online game, right? Like, yes, from soft hasn't done anything. This I mean, you can you can play online. Well, it depends on what you describe a super online game, because literally every game since Demon's Souls has had multiplayer. But when they add like Colosseum expansions, then like those are much more dedicated online environments, but like persistently, unavoidably online, I guess I should say. It would be really nice if the matchmaking in this worked better than literally every game they have ever made. I have never had a universally good matchmaking situation with every From Software game. That would be nice. It is always like, the amount of times I go to invade someone and it just says failed is too high. Well I'm just remembering the room right before you go into the DS1, right after Artorias,

the room to the left and right where you're like, you just try to join these things and you're just getting error messages on all of the fucking online modes and you're like, yeah, what is even happening here? The shit that works- I think the irony is that the game that I had the easiest time playing multiplayer was Dark Souls 2 Where it worked the most consistently? hmm It's like the only thing in that game that was like way better than all the games around it

Yeah, the the The stuff where you know you had like the old monk and all that are always like little little fun bits and the mirror Nights and such even though there's that big old like loading and connecting masked parts of the fights and stuff, but In any case, yeah, it would be nice if You could play offline during you know the downtime or so, but well, you can probably play solo during the downtime or so. Well, you can probably play solo during the downtime. I bet you it's going to just say no connecting.

If it's a true closed network test, you're just going to get kicked the fuck out when it's not online, when the servers are not online. Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, no, no, I mean, you'll probably be able to play during the stated hours solo. Oh, yes, yes. But when the hours shut down, yeah, that's it. Like there's no nothing you can do

So we'll see They did announce as well that You know despite the fact that this is not a Miyazaki directed game. There will be swamps. They will be procedurally Appearing get out. Are you serious as well as a volcano and forest like environment. They're going to swamp up random areas? Procedurally generated swamps. That's so fucked up. That's fucked up.

Because large scale terrain changes happen between boss fights. The swamp will come to you. That's fucked up. Yeah. The swamp will come to you that's fucked up. Yeah Junya Ishizaki is is taking notes. He wants to get a pat on the head from from Miyazaki We'll see I'm really excited for that game that is that is like I was like, oh man I'm so burnt out on Elden Ring and the night rain comes out and or gets shown off and people like didn't you say you were Built out on burnt out on Elden Ring

It's like yeah The parts that I was burnt out on Elden Ring was starting up Elden Ring and having the invisible mental checklist of places You need to go to play the game Which this game is literally built to be the opposite of that. And the fact that the characters are also set means a streamlined experience means you don't have to stress over those things. This is basically just From Software's Hades. Yes, the stress that we were anticipating is the openness of Elden Ring.

And this is a much more digestible thing. I would love it. Yeah, I'd like to see like the you know what those those character builds and stuff like look like and what to expect of that. You know, it'd be cool if they put something out like that this week. But it's much just less it's a less stressful thing to prepare for going in knowing that you're you know, you have a limited number of ways you can go about your character Yakuza aka like a dragon is getting its 20th anniversary

celebration going yay, and What better way to celebrate 20 years than to have fans voting for random objects or items associated with the franchise to be turned into collectible things. It's so weird. So if you want to go and get yourself, let's say, a Majima body pillow or Namba's umbrella or the cup from that Odin shop. You can go vote. Yeah. You can get an ugly sweater with Ichiban on it. Can I get an Onomichi-O anything? Didn't see that. I did see a bag a say you link me to this sure if you want to get a costume of

The cult leader of the moon and show hep ten asseh pet nas you can you can get that But you can vote for that or a big pylon Even So yeah, I want to go vote. I want to see the dumbest shit here all right let's see what we got go vote on what merch you would like shorter peepee oh man there's some dumb shit in here let's see I can't believe it's that cup. That's so weird. So what, it's the cup from the Odin, that cup from the Odin shop is literally the name

of it. What the fuck, what are they talking about? Don't worry about it. Okay, I'm on the list. All right, here we go. Oh, the pins, that's good. Akiyama's watch? There's a lot of gold stuff. Gold plate, gold statue,

gold pants. Gold safe. Fuku fuku gold pants. I'm looking for anything to do with Otomichi-O. Bodlosaki. Oh man, you can get Zhao's rings. That's fucking stupid. That's so dumb it's a bonds fucking black featureless baseball cap a fountain pen perfume aromatherapy candles mahjong tiles is pretty cool. I am I am I'm becoming increasingly disappointed by not seeing anything. Oh yeah, Oh no, me too. Statue. There it is. Yeah, that's the one right there. Let's see. Majima's leather gloves, steering covers. Okay. Oh, and on a Michio standee, ooh That's a good one to Majima's lingerie. Oh, yeah when he's Goro-chan there you go They yeah, so you can vote on like it feels like a hundred things here

things here. This is the stupidest shit. I love it. I love it. I love how stupid that series is. Toyuki's zikoi pants. There's there's panties with a bear on them. What is happening? I don't worry about it. Okay. It all makes sense if you play enough games. A bicycle. Just a delivery bicycle. That's really good. That's really funny. That's really funny. Big pylon has got to be like, that's a fucking, that's a standout though, right? That's stupid as shit. I feel like big pylon is a clear front runner. Yeah, this is like a clear, like a natural follow up to like the infinite wealth thing where there's like the biggest side quest in that game is Kiryu walking up to locations and the game going remember that time and then saying like one of the stupidest things that's ever

happened in the series remember that time I was a pirate next year yes yes I do remember that time which is weird Yes, I do remember that time. Which is weird, because you don't remember that time. Because you had amnesia. Uncool apron. Oh, hey man, I gotta take a quick break. I gotta take this dog out. I'll be right back.

Speaking of the PSN outages and such, it seems like as a result of that, the monster hunter wilds beta is going to get an additional day. Um, that I, that beta is so weird. Cause it didn't, it didn't start yet, but they're putting an extra day on it probably because they lost. Oh, my mistake. Okay. Cause they, yeah, you lost, they lost, you lost a day of work on that so you extended so that

people can you know yeah no that made it so weird I haven't even touched it because it's like it's they're like it's an online beta but it's like a really and I mean really old build that like runs really bad oh that's the one with the no hit stop yeah I think that's been changed, but like, yeah no it still runs like shit. Uh, okay. So yeah, this is an extension for from the 14th to the 18th. And it's super weird because like review copies of Monster Hunter are out with the new performance with the updated versions Okay, and the benchmark is out and the benchmark runs really well

Well Capcom did this with the with six right like they the the early beta version was like Unupdated mm-hmm. It's super strange Yeah, so there was that and they also announced the state of play happening tomorrow, I believe. That's great. I'm so glad I'll be able to cover that while I'm in the sky. You know, you know they're gonna announce Skongborn tomorrow because of that. Well, I'm not in the sky and I don't feel like covering it. I'm going to be fucking, I'm going to be wrestling a toddler and a disabled dog in my airplane seat while this state of play goes on.

So fucking pray for me. What time is it even starting at? 5pm Eastern, 40 minutes. Hmm.m. Eastern 40 minutes? Hmm. Hmm. Ah. If I feel like it, I'll put it on. I'll put it on if I feel like it.

I was gonna just do some cyberpunking. Just put it on in a picture in picture so that if something cool happens you can just go oh. Oh yeah, okay. Thumbnail. Not on stream but then yeah okay okay. So then people can sync it up themselves.

Yeah. No no put that on your stream like put it picture in picture. I have to play cyberpunk but there's your and then there's your head but then next to it have the state of play like it's like It's a tiny little thing We'll see what happens skong watch Skong born oh That's just sound like shit. I make no promises um and

Yeah, not much, but hey they released a post. Have you seen the poster for Mortal Kombat 2? And yeah, not much, but hey, they released a post. Have you seen the poster for Mortal Kombat 2? So they released a poster for Mortal Kombat. I can confidently say I have seen a poster for Mortal Kombat 2. Yeah. But I don't think that's what you're saying to me. The official poster for Mortal Kombat 2. Yeah. Has been released. Johnny have... Uncaged Fury. Oh, okay. Johnny Cage, Rubble Without a Cage. It's just a Johnny Cage movie poster. It's committing to Scott Pilgrim, whatever. Amen. Whatever you have to do to distract people from playing the game. This is the movie. I'm talking about Mortal Kombat to the film. Wait, what? The sequel to the movie Mortal Kombat that came out. From the 90s? No, the new movie. There's a

new Mortal Kombat movie from a couple years ago. There is? Did we talk about it? Yes! 2021! With the new kid. There was a new kid in it. And yeah. Was it good? Yeah, Cole Young. No, was it good? No. Okay, yeah. Was it good? No! Okay, yeah. But it did have the best depiction of Scorpion, Human, and Sub-Zero, you know? Dude, whatever. They did their thing, but then there was the- If I get the ability to watch this on the plane tomorrow, should I watch it?

I'll watch it, but should I fucking plug my headphones in or not? That's my question for you. I mean, if your brain deleted its existence, then yeah, you should plug, you should watch it. You should pop in and see what's going on over there. Absolutely. It was a pandemic movie. Oh, right in the middle of it. The Adventures of Cole Young. He's an MMA fighter with a hidden lineage. Dude, I hate that shit so much. How do we get new audiences in? Let's make a bland pile of crackers the fucking main character and then, no, don't put salt on them. That's too spicy. But then you can, but how else are they supposed to relate? I don't relating this shit is fucking stupid Stuff is fucking dumb isn't it the dumbest isn't it the worst fucking hate it

It's so dumb so many genres are all baked around the idea of having you relate to shit like no Let me control of a mess who's already like losing control of their life you know jump into someone else's head things I've ever seen or things that like I like wow I don't understand that at all what's that like taking you want it you want to get a character whose dialogue options are all things you would never say. Don't relate. Absolutely. Relating this shit is so fucking stupid. Anyway, whatever. I don't want to go on this rant again.

Why is this girl movie about periods not talking about 9-11? I can't relate to this. I can't relate to this. How could you go through puberty without talking about 9-11? What the fuck? Like again, your in self inserts, self insert Mary Sue's and RPG protagonists and so on and so forth. It's a whole spiel. And you know what? And like the real the real deal is that it's actually an extension of like children's like TV, right? Like when you create a kid that you as a kid can relate to in the thing, you like the thing more and you just age that up as you grow up and then you're like, well now I'm in high school so I need a high school kid I can relate to. So make the protagonist a 15 year old and then that just continues. It's fucking weak It's now you're in your late 30s and you still want to relate to that 15 year old high school protagonist

He's gonna he can pilot the robot he can he can go on all the dates. Let me relate to that Like hey, listen, I'm 38 The cast of like a dragon is now my age and they're all really tired about it Okay, and I think that's really cool that I'm like, hey, I understand being tired. But guess what? I started playing those games in 2005 When I was 20 something and I was like, oh, that's cool. They seem really old and tired weird. I Love Oh, that's cool. They seem really old and tired weird I love

inserting myself into the shoes of a Nasu verse style visual novel main character Shinji Japanese boy That's the most that's the most relatable experience for me stop Anyways for me. Stop it. Anyways. Let's take some letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to Castle Super Beast Mail at gmail.com. That's Castle Super Beast Mail at gmail.com. You know, one time I did actually have to wear a white T-shirt white button-up shirt and uniform like school pants I actually had to wear like visual novel main character outfit for a couple years of my life And I fucking hated it. It was oh, yeah I hate that dog shit

How am I supposed to empathize with this person unless they're just like me and also look just like me and Also have my same values How could I what? If they don't have those things they might as well be a monster. I don't get it. So fucking snow We've had we've had this conversation for fucking two decades now. I have to play every video game in the world almost as like a person who can reach every shelf they interact with and that's unrealistic. Yeah, no.

God bless Rust and people loading up into a character that was black and had a dick size that they were not happy with. Oh, the deep rage that comes from being forced into a body that you just don't want anything to do with. Let's take one over here from... Let's see. Hey wall run wooly and pop vault pat. Connie here.

Ever since it first came out and others have proclaimed that they've loved the never fire a bullet achievement in Mirror's Edge. That's us. I feel it's obviously, or rather they proclaim it's obviously the superior way to play the game. It's been a take I could never get behind. The issue is that running fast and doing cool parkour is the only actual fun thing about Mirror's Edge and the few times the game stops for you mandatory combat aren't fun whether

you use guns or not, but at least solving them with guns is fast and easy. Clearing them with only melee combat is a trial and error exercise of memorizing spawn locations and finding arbitrary magic routes that keep you from being exposed too long so you can get close to performing Faith's jank limited moveset. And when people talk about how satisfying it is to work that out, all I can think of is how while they were getting bogged down in that, I simply clicked on the cops' heads and got back to doing cool level traversal long before they did. So, ever hear of people glorifying a game with self-imposed limitations that make you think, why do that? That's a worse game. Cheers. I think this is a great email because this is a forest in the trees thing in which I

completely agree with this email. 100%. But what's missing? What's missing from this scenario? What's missing is that using the guns in Mirror's Edge feels and plays way worse than the entire thing they just described. It is faster. It is objectively faster. Right. But shooting guns in mirrors edge one is miserable. It's it you're super slow. It feels bad. It's not like built for it. So it's interesting because as someone who likes the idea of the parkour person taking on the guns

and fighting in that way, I love that idea. That's a fun immersive thing to get into and try to solve the problem with that limitation. But games that have come out since, like there's parkour in games like the fucking, the ninja wall- Damn near everything, honestly. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of games

that have come and have, exactly, right, that have had Mirror's Edge-like mechanics, but the gunplay or swordplay or fighting has been way more advanced and feels good to do when there's a whole, the system's built around it. The entirety of Titanfall is practically like that. The clunkiness of gunplay in Mirror's Edge clearly feels like you're not supposed to be doing this.

And whether or not it's supposed to be, we do know that there was an argument internally as to whether or not to include guns at all, and then they split the difference by having the ability to just not do it. But yeah, no, guns in that game feel bad. And to your feeling that like, yes, I got through it a lot faster. And so I got rid of the bad part, like more easily. And that it is annoying to like, you know, figure out

the spawn locations and go through the magic path. That's true. But you're, you're not accommodating anything for scale. And a lot of this is taste, right? Because me slowing to a crawl in Mirror's Edge when I pick up a gun feels way worse than having to figure out the enemy locations and die 20 times, because at least when I'm doing that second one, I'm still getting to run fast, which is the reason I'm playing Mirror's Edge. The momentum of picking up speed and avoiding getting hit because you're moving at max speed is a real fun system that works into the game loop, even if you have to find a couple of

difficult routes to take to get up close to do a takedown, you know? Yeah, and I don't know what to say besides like, if the immersion part of that means nothing to you, then you're just a different person from me and you don't like the same things and that's okay. But I also am somebody who, you know, like I don't wanna, you can use a bunch of items in character action games and move over that experience and you can use a bottle rocket in Wonderful 101

and see what it does. I don't even know what it looks like when you use it, but it's there, you know? And that's a way to play the game. But I think that when I'm thinking of like the part of, the part of the story with the character that is like not really a gun user and the fact that they allow you to do that, yeah, I

enjoy that loop a lot more. I get more out of the fact that this is a parkouring game, and it gives you a way to solve this. I'm also somebody, of course, I've said this, going out of the norm here, I've played Bioshock 2 going for the Big Daddy build the whole way through the game. That's a really unusual way to go with it,

but I enjoyed that too. So I'm down to approach the whole game in a very different way. But yeah, I just feel like this is one of those cut cases of they made it feel bad, and the part of the team that did not agree at the very least, whether or not they wanted it to, if they made gunplay bad. And the part of the team that did not agree at the very least, whether or not they wanted it to, if they made gunplay feel really good

and then part of the team was like, no, we don't want guns, that would have been weird. You know? Yeah, and like the character action thing that you mentioned is like probably my perfect example because the core of the email is like, do you think of anything else that people decide to self-impose limitations? And it's like the reason why

you and I don't use items in character action games is not because they're not effective, it's because using them is dull. Like getting better at the combat is more interesting than using an item to mitigate damage or enemies. So something that I'm talking about, I mentioned it last podcast, what I was like, the reason why I look around in cyberpunk is because while people are talking, it's not because I'm like ADHD, HDing around the room, but it's because I'm trying to immerse myself and emulate a real conversation where I would look around while talking to somebody, right? We are looking at a history of games where we see the cutscene version of characters

and then we're like, can you live up to the promise of cutscene Dante? Can you live up to the promise of cutscene faith? You know, the cutscene version of the characters is like an ideal and then the gameplay is like, is a challenge. I can only think of one game I've ever played in my entire life in which the in-game version of the character is in fact more impressive

Than the cutscene version of the character and that is vanquish Yeah, sure right the vanquish is cutscene yeah, yeah Sam is fairly Restrained but like end of the game gameplay Sam is out of control That's it that's it so, you know It's ultimately like I can't tell you to like pick up a habit and do something that feels annoying to you and say like That's the superior way to go but I can say that like a lot of the time when I'm playing a game and I see like You know a style of play or like a challenge

or something inherently like as a possibility that feels right with what the game is going for, I enjoy striving to achieve that, to match the design. So I've been playing MGS3 and somebody asked a question, do you think that the the Trank Gun ruined Metal Gear? I said no, I don't think the Trank Gun ruined Metal Gear. Interesting. That's ridiculous because like in gameplay terms it is like nearly it's just a worst version of the pistol that you get for all those characters But there I think I thought about it more while we're having this conversation and like for a certain type of player It totally does ruin Metal Gear because if you want to do a no-kill playthrough Part of that with nearly exclusively lethal weapons in Metal Gear one means you have like a really limited lethal weapons in Metal Gear 1 means you have like a really limited like option to do that. Yeah. But in Metal Gear 2, they just go, no, here's a really effective gun that will actually,

you can just shoot everybody and then it'll be fine. So it, well, it's two things, right? One, it's the, it's going against the, the no kill philosophy because if you're playing the game and you have like a Batman rule in your head, you know, that's one experience that you're challenging, which to be fair, a lot of games do. I mean, you know, obviously like Deus Ex, right? I beat Human Revolution with zero fatalities. But then the second part of it is being sneaky is the other part of what a Metal Gear game is supposed to be. And if you stand on a cliffside and eliminate all the threats, then you don't have to do any sneaking.

Did you have to sneak? Like the most interesting thing that I did in the last time I streamed Metal Gear is that I went to one of those little bases in Metal Gear 3 and I thought I had pranked all the guards, but I didn't. I missed one and he found one of the guards I had pranked and then they spotted me and then I had a whole fucking interaction and a fun gameplay sequence in which I was hiding from people and shooting people, etc. And it's like if I just perfectly pranked all those guys from a mile away, then that section would have been really dull by comparison. Also, some games are about sneaking and eliminating as you go, and other games are about sneaking

and not interrupting the flow of things. Yeah, it's the difference between pacifism and ghost. Right, right. People that are calling in for radio rounds and going, somebody's missing, go check it out. It's like, okay, the game doesn't want you to remove people as you go. So yeah, Hitman. It's always interesting in a game that it's like can you do this this mission and it's like you didn't exist

Outside of the main objective nothing no hair is out of place except like like, you know The higher levels of difficulty on hitman. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's like the guy is dead, but nothing happened. That's what huh? I'm always reminded of the snow mansion where you just shoot out the bottom of the hot tub from the glass from way below. And if your mark is in the glass, there they go. And we don't even walk into the house. We don't even walk into the house. We don't even walk into the house. We don't even play the mission. We just look up, pop pop. All right. Good job, 47.

Yeah, but there's a lot of ways to limit yourself and get enjoyment. Like for example, let's take a really long look at this. Let's say I wanna to play Street Fighter, and Paige doesn't want to play Street Fighter. Well, there's only one other person in my house right now that can fight me in local Street Fighter, and that is a human baby.

Now, if I just grab this controller and grabbed all these buttons and went, let's go little man, that's not going to be very enjoyable because he's like a goo goo gaga and I will whoop his ass But if I have the condition of I can't hold the controller I can only press buttons with my index finger. I could at least have some level of enjoyment There you go. I'll send though. I'll still win though. Give the baby dynamic mode. Then you'll see what's up. He's got to learn Give the baby dynamic mode, then you'll see what's up. He's got to learn.

Yeah, no, there's use cases for those things. Has to mow the lawn every week until he can beat me in a fighting game of his choice. That's a good motivator. That might take a bit. That might take a minute. Yeah, that might take a minute. That's take a minute. Yeah, that might take a minute. That's a hell of a motivator though. All right, let's take one over here.

Matthew says, dear Lords of Castle Superjump, a discussion a month back about Marvel arrivals, Willie was asking about MOBA characters and their movement options and it got me thinking about movement options as a whole ecosystem, which leads me to a question. What are the best options in general? What are the most fun, stylish, expressive movement options? What are the most practical, versatile and overall and so on and so forth? What do you think of first when you're like, we're really moving now? Speed is number one. As a lifelong Dragoon mark, I'll always be a

fan of super jumps. Yeah. So speed is number one. The faster you are, the better you are. But in going with Dragoon in a multiplayer context, the ability to leave the sight line of another player by going really high, really fast is really strong. That's why in a lot of first-person games you can run at somebody and you have a good jump, jump over them. They got to spin their whole fucking bullshit around. It's annoying. So it's interesting because there's a lot of really specific examples you can give like an air dash, a web swing, a grapple, etc. a grapple, et cetera, a boost, a double jump. But I think the common thread is the same.

It's not full on flight defying gravity. It's limited defying of gravity, right? When you get to accelerate into the air in a certain way with a certain trajectory for a limited period of time, and then gravity kicks back in. It feels way better than just staying and, you know, not being affected by it at all. We learned this long ago when tribes came out

and skiing in tribes happened, and it's like, wow, this is way better than jet packing. That's it. This is way better. You know, I think a lot of people fucking love Spider-Man just for the traversal aspect of it. And wall running, anything that you can throw on to just extra, wall running that increases your speed,

and you go into those bunny hops where you start sitting like you're sliding. And now I'm and faster and faster This is the opposite of how it really worked, but fuck it. It's fun Absolutely people chat mentioned bullet jumping and warframe which completely transformed that game from a cool game to a pretty cool game You know getting around with with trick is is really nice because One of the first problems presented by Devil May Cry when you didn't buy

your stinger yet is how the fuck do I get over there? It takes so long, you know? And then you start stinging up to people, but then it's like, ah, it still takes a while. And so like, yeah, finally getting the ability to really just instantly be where you wanna be feels great after you feel like the shackles of your speed. Yeah, the core of like a good a good movement is it's complex like has depth to

it but it's predictable. So like even though like like the spider-man swinging right there's a lot of stuff there but all of it boils down to, do you understand how an arc works? If yes, then you can understand swinging at an intuitive level. If you do not understand a parabolic arc, then why did Spider-Man go straight forward when I released here, but he went straight up when I released here?

It might be tough. The reason why dogs enjoy playing catch and catching frisbees is because they feel like they are the ball or the frisbee when they're looking at it. And I feel like we can get some of that when you're swinging and then falling and then swinging and then falling. You get a little bit of that, woo, you know, the rush of a bungee jump into a nice pull out of it, a dive. I'm going to throw in there that armored core is phenomenal when it comes to camera movement, where the camera can barely keep up as your side dashes and dodges and assault boosts are pushing the camera to the limit. Yeah, it's really good. Because when you boost, the mech always goes much further

off to the side than a camera would normally allow in most games. I also say the camera barely keeping up when you do, when you shine spark, right? When you, in Metroid, one of my favorite things as a kid was just like, it cannot keep keep up Samus is too fast You're at the edge of the screen, you know and and that also introduces I'd say the after images effect as well K-dash doing blackout

You know is one of the coolest looking movement things I can think of I wish more things felt like you could do a blackout in any direction Someone in the chat mentions gravity rush and I think that gravity rush deserves like a special like attaboy and like a thumbs up because Gravity rush is essentially point-to-point flight like it is it is it is exactly what we are talking about How not to do it but the level of animation work and perspective and camera work Really quite sells that gravity rush you do not fly anywhere you fall everywhere you fall to and that is a destination a dramatically different feel yes a million percent yeah and and you know

well just just to elaborate a little bit more on the last point camera is also like a fake trick, you know? Like the camera feeling like you're sprinting in Mass Effect when you're actually moving the same speed, but it's just adding a little more. Hilarious, hilarious. So camera can do a lot, but in the same way, after images can do a lot.

If you're fighting a boss in any game that's one-on-one and then they dodge to the side, but you see after images behind that dodge, you're like, hold on a minute wait a second some real shit is going on you know like there's something noteworthy about that that that just you feel the movement and the momentum a little bit more with things like that so even if it's just an illusion as well, you can make movement feel better. I will say though, swinging feels better than point to point. Movement along an arc feels better than movement along a straight line in games. Always.

Always. Yep. Yep. That's why I remember when I was told about Freedom Wars and it was like, oh, it's got a grappling hook. Yeah, but it's a point to point grappling hook and I saw that and I immediately went oh that's not that's not what I like though it was like oh no that that's not it no it's not it's not don't give me the zipline I don't want a zipline I want to because momentum is fun momentum and inertia as physical concepts are fun that's it yeah

steps are fun. That's it. Yeah. So there you go. I think. Oh, Legend of Kage and Otogi 2. When you do a normal jump and you are just soaring through the air like an old kung fu film, you just like, like Hulk jumping, Hulk Ultimate Destruction jumping, you know? It feels great, and it feels great because you're just, you're soaring for a minute and then you know you're going to land somewhere. So that's it, that's it. Cool. All right. I will see you in a couple of days, Wolves. Take it easy