Castle Super Beast - CSB309: Underwater Chinese Ghost Layoffs

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Boomers REFUSE To Learn City of the Worves OBT Impressions Yakuza Pirates: Ryo Hazuki Could Never Dauntless is Dead. Who Shot Dauntless? Mass Layoffs Feb 2025 Edition: You'll Never Guess Who Made It Watch live: twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://shopify.com/superbeast to sign up for your $1-per-month trial period. - Go to http://factormeals.com/factorpodcast and use code factorpodcast to get 50% off your first box and free shipping. - Click this link https://boot.dev/?promo=CASTLESUPERBEAST and use my code CASTLESUPERBEAST to get 25% off your first payment for boot.dev. Free-to-play Monster Hunter-like Dauntless is shutting down on May 29 following mass studio layoffs When Bungie recently had to defend itself in court in a copyright case regarding the Red Legion faction in Destiny 2's campaign, it had to submit two fan-made YouTube lore videos as evidence because Bungie had vaulted/deleted the game's campaign Warner Bros. Games is making big cuts, closing three studios — Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and WB Games San Diego — and cancelling its long-in-development Wonder Woman game, the publisher told employees on Tuesday. All projects from those studios have been canceled. NetEase began its cuts late last year, with layoffs and studio closures at Mass Effect veteran Mac Walters' new studio Worlds Untold, Halo Infinite design boss Jerry Hook's team at Jar of Sparks, and more recently at Liquid Sword, the company founded by the creator of Just Cause. Quantic Dream, the NetEase-owned developer behind Heavy Rain, Detroit and the upcoming Star Wars Eclipse has broken its silence following the layoffs and shutdowns seen across numerous other NetEase-supported studios. In a statement posted on LinkedIn, Quantic Dream CEO Guillaume de Fondaumière said the studio's teams had not been impacted by NetEase's dramatic cuts, and were "continuing to develop our projects at full pace". Tony Hawk Pro Skater tease shows legendary skaters, further lifting hopes for 3+4 remake UPDATE: Remake now rated in Singapore ahead of announcement. Konami and Bloober Team are working on a new game following the success of Silent Hill 2. The game will be “based on Konami’s IP” but isn’t explicitly confirmed to be a new Silent Hill First look at Anna Williams in Tekken 8

["Sailor Moon Theme"] Alrighty. Yeah, sounds good. Okay. Should I see you right now? Now you should. Yeah, there you are. Hey, Wooly. Looking good. Much better than a OBS logo. Yeah. So, you know, once again, absolutely nothing. Just, uh, whatever. That was a dumb one. But hey, there we are. Isn't the internet fun? Isn't making mistakes live fun?

Isn't making mistakes live fun? It's like Saturday Night Live, but nobody laughs when you corpse like Jimmy Fallon. I yearn for the days when we did this and no one was around. And it was just, okay, into the mic it goes, and then they'll hear it eventually. I have to actually disagree. As somebody who says many wrong things fast and loud. The auto-correction. The glance over at maybe a thousand people going, what the fuck are you talking about, you fucking idiot? It's actually really useful.

So no, there are pros and cons to it for sure. And yes, the auto- is a wild one, as well as anytime an unfinished thought floats into the ether that pops up. But at the same time, there's something simple about the process for sure that used to just be, it doesn't matter what time we decide to record, it doesn't matter what day we start to record nothing matters all that matters is the the publish button and Now this hey man, it's like it just happened. Yeah, it's like it just happened. Yeah, it's like it got magic doubt Well everything amazing everything that I do live was never intended to be live. It just became live by virtue of like Showing the process of it getting made. It was always meant for

post-release. And you know who you can blame for that? You know who's the person you can blame for that specifically? Twitch? Bezos? No, you can blame Mark Zuckerberg for that specifically because he directed Facebook to lie on all their ad research that showed that video was so much more lucrative than text even though it wasn't wait which caused the push to video wait that thing about how people see video streaming people tune into that more than text them tune into that more than oh that was

a complete that was a complete fucking sham like Facebook to push video. Wow. Absolutely. I still remember that. Yeah. And that changed the nature of all social media. Oh yeah. And so once video became the de facto, then there was only two forms video and faster video. But it is true that when people are scrolling through a feed and then a video auto plays, they are going to stop and look. That's the whole basis. No, they're going to stop and go, kill it. The basis depending, but the basis of how tick tock and auto scrollers work is, is on that idea of

like before you have a chance to make a decision on the content, you're already ads work on tech talk because when I see an ad on TikTok, it has hit my eyeball for like less than 100 milliseconds. Well, I mean, like it's just... Yeah. But that is to say the general nature of like, ad or not, your brain doesn't have time to decide.

You're watching a thing. And if the first two seconds are like, hey, God, that's it, stick around, don't scroll, you know, whatever. No. You know? No. No, I use TikTok the way most people use TikTok,

which is at the window into a completely dead society. It's awesome. Well, all this to say that if Zuck did lie about that, then one thing is true for sure is like the Instagram, well every single social media platform adopting the auto play, auto scroller is clear that like, well no, people are clearly using that more than stopping to read text. Well, that's, I mean, no, because text in this case was like articles. Remember CollegeHumor?

Yeah, you'd click on an article to go to a different website or so But that's also that's that is one thing that's also proven is like getting people going from one place to another Especially if the place they are is comfortable. They don't enjoy doing it, which is why people use tick-tock to Google things sometimes Right. There's an age group that will like post, hey guys, can you answer this question instead of going to Google? I don't think that... So I have a child, which means I'm on teacher TikTok, which I get to see teachers complaining about how the kids are stupid now.

First of all, man, the kids are stupid. But second of all, I don't believe that is instead of Google. I believe that is a genre of child that literally does not know how to use non-app functions. That would make sense too. There's an age where you just know what you've been exposed to and all you know is the one app.

No, no, that age is now like 15. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But it's- Going on 20. But there's been quite a few years now of the search bar in the app that I'm, in the social media app I'm using, or video app or whatever, is also my life search bar.

There's no idea that like, there are different places that you might go for some information, you know, or whatever the case. Yeah, learning to internet is, who knew? Nevermind the- Do you remember that period of time when all the boomers in your life just offloaded like professional levels of technical labor

to like six-year-olds? Do you remember that? I was one of those kids. I was one of those IT kids that had to do tech support for a bunch of boomers. Yeah, for sure. Like you 30, 40 year old man. It's too hard to learn. It's impossible. Hey, six year old, can you manage my fucking Excel spreadsheet and video shit for me? It was, it's just too hard to learn. Yeah. No, when I got no, when, when mom was asking me about an email problem 10 years later, that was the same one after

a decade. I went, stop. You have chosen to not learn this. 10 years later, you've made a decision, even though you use this almost every week, if this is a regular part of your life now, you have chosen that you don't care to learn it, and that's your choice. This is not about, I don't understand, it's too hard, because I had exposed myself to this less than you have now, a decade later, you know?

When I was explaining how it worked the first time. You need to actually give a shit about the thing you're using constantly if you're gonna always be asking for help about it at the very least. Or decide you don't need it and go, I don't use these things, that's one thing. But if you're constantly using it, fuck off with that.

That's crazy. Wully, we're talking about a generation that graduated from high school, got their GED or high school diploma and went, all right, not only do I never need to learn anything ever again as long as I live, but also I won't need to because here's a great job I can work at. Of course, of course, of course. It's like, yeah, if you never use the thing

and then every once in a blue moon you need to, I'll give you some benefit of the doubt. But if you're using it fucking constantly, that's crazy. That's crazy that you won't learn. My mom uses a Chromebook and I don't know how she uses it because I could never teach her how to use her own email. Right. I don't get it.

Yep. I've lit, like my dad, my dad, me and my sister all spent what I'm going to say is like a high school computer class level of time trying to teach my mother how to use email addresses to send photos of her kids to her friends over a period of 10 years. Just never took. Just never took. We are still stuck on the step of which things you double click on and which things you single click on and the difference between where you do that and why. We're still stuck there. You know, it's funny because I almost fell into the trap where like I have a baby and I'm like, oh, well babies are so good with computers. They can lap that shit up no problem.

And it's like, oh, actually, no. The reason we got good with computers is because the adults in our lives didn't know how to fucking use them. So we had to learn. They were hard to use. Anyway, yeah. I got to teach my kid how to format a hard drive. And defrag it. Yeah. And well, it depends if you don't really defrag an SSD and and and you know how to how to open up the case properly and touch the sides

and get your static out. Yes. Create a perimeter. I mean, I'm telling you, there's pictures. I think I might have showed you at some point a picture of me in Grenada at six years old or something holding a Nintendo controller. There's whatever, those baby pictures and it's like

Like three years after that photo of little scrawny me like playing in, you know in the islands Yeah, three years later. I've got a case open and I'm clicking fucking you know Ram into place like it's an and moving power supply cables around. Like come on, man. We can, if you just, just give the slightest amount of a shit, you know? Anyways, um, yeah, uh, uh, I guess a week happened, but, uh, on my end it was really, it's just, it's's it's all wharf town It's wharf town wharf tags. You got your wharf tag on mark of the wharves. Oh my god I thought you meant I thought you were gonna tell me you were just watching Star Trek. No, no

You're the one that corrects it every time. So now you are is it hoisted by your own petard. Oh oh I did get hoisted see so here's how stupid I am. I have become so enamored with City of the Wharves that I thought the singular of wharves was wharf. I say wharf. Not wharf. No, I say wharf because VES is pluralizing it. Oh no, that's how it would actually work. Yeah. So, and then when you make your online account, you make a wharf tag and then you jump into that online beta.

Yeah. So you got more time in that online beta than I did, I assume. Got a bit more time in there, yeah, and got a feel for what's going on with the system and what's going on with the game as a whole. And perhaps a little more than that even. I have heard that you got a little bit more than they wanted you to get out of that online beta. A little bit more than I bargained for. So the the long-awaited sequel to Garo, Mark of the Wolves. I think SNK's fucking one of their peak releases, the answer to Third Strike that they released for the 25 years we've been waiting. We finally got to take a look at what's going on. And they have, with the gameplay, found a really awesome way

to balance and blend old school challenging mechanics that require you to activate all neurons to play properly and to play at a higher level. And newer mechanics that are forgiving and allow you to do like a flashy combo and get a bread and butter down and kind of feel your way through the game and learn characters kind of quickly, you know?

They've taken the bones of an old fighting game, which Mark of the Wolves always felt like, and those are still in place. What that means is, is your combos, the first part of a combo is the most old school thing ever. You jump in and you land one button and you better land it really late. Because if you jump in, Real deep. You gotta land it deep. If you jump in and you hit them too high up in the head, by the time you hit the ground, they can already block. So you've gotta do what King of Fighters games tend to do,

and you have to hit that button late. All right, now that you've landed, pick a button. You're gonna get one in there, and then you're gonna go straight from that button into a special move, and that'll be what a normal old school combo used to look like, a two-in-one. It's like a Street Fighter jump in two-in-one. Exactly.

Now, if you're feeling frisky and you're like, hold on a minute, I'm kinda nice, then you can do a faint move, which is basically, you can do like fake Hadoukens or fake Shoryukens, and they serve the purpose of making somebody jump when you did actually nothing to bait something out, but they also allow you to quickly cancel from that first button into a second one, you know?

So you're like, oh shit, I did something fancy. I pressed hard punch, I did a fake Hadoken, and then I pressed light punch, and I landed that extra light punch, and now I'm gonna go into the special move. So you added one extra button, holy shit! You know? That's crazy.

And then that's your combo, that's it, you know? But the new modern way of things is that, like, if you decide to go into, like, an EX move, you know, then you can just go from one EX move to another to another and the game just lets you like cancel all of them. Burn it. Burn every fucking button you got. Yeah. And then at the bottom of the screen, your little accelerometer will go as nuts as you want to from the moment the game starts.

And so having the the like watching you do a bunch of EX special moves in a row is something very modern, you know, in fighting games. But the first part of that combo requires you to play it kind of old school and like, traditionally, land and execute your fundamental buttons and work and stuff like that. So what that means is a lot of old school players, a lot of FGC people and a lot of people that are looking for a higher skill ceiling are really, really happy with this game because you can see that it's requiring more neurons to be activated in moment to moment play, right?

Something that Reggie was talking about that a discussion is that's happening now is the cancel that I'm talking about when you press a button and then do like a fake Hadoken requires you to press two buttons to do that fake. And some people are like, oh, please put a button config so that it can be a single button instead. And Reggie and Kizzee K and a couple of other FGC folks

are kind of like, no, keep it too. Cause the fact that you have to think about that second one is just enough to like make it a little more challenging in the moment. And it kind of means like you can't just get it. You can't just autopilot it in your brain and like, you know, make it like a rote memorization thing. Like you have to stay a little bit more present to always to think about hitting heavy punch, two buttons, light kick, two buttons,

you know, and then the next thing it's it kind of adds that extra to it, you know, Okay, you know, and then the next thing it kind of adds that extra to it, you know Which I'm like, yeah, I I get that, you know I like the idea that you don't need to do this But if you're feeling yourself if you want a swag if you want to optimize and get the nicest possible combos going with every ounce Of damage then you have to add this extra level of execution to it which You know characters like Crimson Viper in Street Fighter IV kind of are asking people to do that a little bit.

And it's completely unnecessary for moment to moment gameplay. And I spent the entire weekend not really using those faints. I used them to kind of like, in the middle of standing there, I was trying to bait someone into doing something, but I didn't use them to cancel my buttons at all.

So it's a mechanic that is, you can just, you can look at that and be like, I'll learn that eventually or not for now. You can approach it at your own pace, but it is there for you. And that's a cool thing to do with your gameplay. I think there's been a lot of really interesting discussion in fighting games and other words, but we're talking about fighting games right now, about like the ease of accessibility

for higher functions in gameplay can in many cases go too far and basically ruin your ability to actually express yourself. So do we need to go back to fucking eight frame reversals on jump ins and like Street Fighter II or like fucking tick throw nightmare shit with Balrog that you can't get out of? No, no, God, no. But But increasing the input leniency on things too far, I saw people complaining about it in Street Fighter V, can create situations where, yes, parrying stuff with Reuse thing in V is not very exciting because it's fucking free. It's not the same, right? Certainly, no. But there's something to be said as well about like, I've seen an advanced, the next level of player expression,

when people are discussing that in the context of fighting games, what that meant back in the day when you think about that is like, different people would play their own character very different from each other, even though they all play the same character. Yeah, there'd be people who like if you want to pick Guile as an example, people would hide in the corner and just throw down an infinity of sonic booms and then the guy that would run up in your head with upside down kick. But now there's a counterpoint which says that like, oh player expression just means suboptimal play.

It does. It literally does. And then eventually when everyone shares the online data and goes into the information researching mode and labs it all out, we all know that this is the best way to play. And if you're not doing that, then you're not, you know what I mean? There's that level of like expression

goes away when knowledge increases, which is hilarious. I've played enough fighting games and MOBAs and MMOs to feel like the pendulum has swung in a certain direction on that discussion, which is in limited spaces with small amounts of people, you can have infinite player expression because no one actually gets any good Right, like people get like kind of good. They get good. They only get as big as their local pond. Oh Yeah to some degree like you can in your local pond You can just out learn to outplay each other like with your own your as individuals But that's to say but you can't but then people like Arsalan Ash rituals. But that's to say, but you can't, but then people like Arslan Ash exists as like Tekken gods because they found a way to make that pond represent Mount Olympus,

you know? So you instead get this thing where it's like, okay, well there aren't like 400 different ways to play Guile for each person that plays Guile at your local arcade. And so the solution tends to be for all of these games is instead of saying, well, I want to play Ryu like this, or I want to play Guile like this. The answer is we're going to make a new character that plays in a style that you want to play. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perhaps through that. Like I started to notice that with like, um, like FF 14 and MMOs in general, which is like, well, what's the class fantasy? And how do you want that class to play? Do you want to be fast? Do

you want to be slow? Do you want to be supportive? Do you want to be etc., right? And so then it all builds up to, this is the correct way to play this class. If you don't want to play this class, if you don't want to play this class this way, go to that other class that we made to play that way. Yeah. If you want a particular way that Ashoto plays, if you're looking for an evil Ryu, like that's going to be a specific like second slot character over here with some some particular differences that are not the same as Akuma that are not the same as the way Ken pressures you and all this other stuff right that has become something that has that has happened. The interesting thing too is that

so while describing like this this kind of like this is what Mark of the Wolves used to be, you know, like there's a level of like old schoolness to the to the basics of the game here. But the skill ceiling is high if you want to approach it at the same time when it comes to how you want to deal with modern mode. Right. It's interesting because here they've decided to do their own version of modern mode, which is very which is good Everything should have a modern mode. It's very and it's very similar to Street fighters But oh is it is not identical and it is much more limiting to the point that like It feels like while modern mode was And is something that like good players can use

for particular styles of play that can keep that can compete with classic players in Street Fighter 6 in this case I would not say that it's viable for like higher level play against people that are playing on classic. Ah so SNK's modern mode is for babies. It is it, it is meant to get you started, and it is meant to get you to play with your friends and have fun, but there is going to be a limit to how far you can go, because you- That's fine.

That's okay. I wish it did encompass more, but you can't do the feints or the breaks that I was just describing in the modern mode equivalent of City of the Wolves. Those mechanics don't exist, right? You have a special move button like you did with Street Fighter. And then you have, yeah, like two buttons for normals

and then one button for performing combos. But essentially, and you do have the ability to start training yourself. If you want to manually attempt to the fireball, if you're not used to that, you can do that. But you can't. But it doesn't let you manually do a full super, for example. So it's not completely the same. And I think it could do a little bit more to encourage people starting out that way to take a chance on one of these other inputs if they wanted to try it out. But it's there, nonetheless, and it means that people can pick it up and just start

pressing buttons regardless. I think that's honestly what modern mode's intended purpose is supposed to be. If you're someone who is just looking like, okay, I want to just move my character around the screen and then when I get close to my opponent, try to land a combo. And then when I've earned enough meter, occasionally I'll try to throw a super out. And that's basically what your entire game plan is. This is perfect for that, right? Yeah. It's like, hey, can we make a, okay, can we have our genre have a situation where the first time somebody plays our game it's

not an abjectly miserable fucking experience? Can we do that? Can we have something to mitigate that? That being said, over the years, the easy operations, stylish modes and stuff that we've gone through in earlier games, the reason why Modern stood out was because of the fact that it does allow you to get 90% of the way there depending on which character. Oh, absolutely.

So in this case. And depending on the character, some of those changes are worth it. Yeah. It might even, some might argue even more like closer to 99, but like in this case, it's much, the percentage is much further back than that. So in any case, I didn't see too much discussion about that over the weekend. Well, because the people hopping on to an online multiplayer beta for an SNK game are typically going to be old heads that can do raging storms.

Yeah. So the discourse around modern mode is going to be light. But that is what I yeah that's that's that's what I you know spent the weekend kind of running into you know some SNK old heads and stuff and part of that as well was participating in Rome himself's Regime Royale which was just a collection of some players getting on for an exhibition. They had some content creators, had some tournament players,

just a whole bunch of FGC people got involved and did a bunch of first to fives, ran a set with Regi and participated. That was a lot of fun, so thanks to Rome for doing that. I wonder what kind of world we would have lived in if Third Strike had Just Defend and Garou had the parry. Capcom versus SNK2 would have Pgroove and Kgroove inverted from each other, I suppose. You know, that's, that's the biggest thing I can think of.

But yeah, the idea, like parrying in Street Fighter III Third Strike, it gives you, you recover faster, and you can instantly punish. And it requires you to have the balls to move into the attack, as the way I described it in that video, the EVO video. Just Defending is like, be a coward at the last second. You know? Yeah, be a smart coward.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the weirdness of that is EVO moment 37 with Just Defends is Daigo is healing as he's doing all of those, tish tish tish tish tish, you know? As he's just defending, you're getting life back because the crazy thing with Just Defend, now in this game especially,

is that every single resource. Hello? Hello? Did I disconnect from you? Yeah, you disconnected for a second there. Weird, okay, well, I'm glad we're back. Did you just defend your internet? Perhaps, and I for a second weird. Okay. Well, I'm glad we're back Did you just offend your internet perhaps and I healed a little bit here we are there was a slight lag on it So every single resource that you have in that game your life your special meter your Excel meter

everything special meter, your Excel meter, everything gets improved and healed a little bit by just defending, right? So it lets you recover faster, it gives you life, it gives you, it's so much of a reward for doing it, and that on its own is great, but if you feel really really sick, you can instantly block a thing at the last second, get all those rewards, and then also instantly cancel into a super. And the super will come out faster than it usually does. So again, skill ceiling is up there. So I love you, just to. Yeah, I I'm looking at this as like, cool. I managed to pull off a just defend guard cancel super twice the the entire time. I did it two times and I felt like a god and that's it. You know, it's pretty hard to do, it feels like. And then, yeah, there's there's other things that are there where,

you know, you kind of have these like dodging high or dodging low mechanics, and those are meant to break or avoid throws or avoid lows. But they also work into the rock, paper, scissors of these big like drive impact style rev attacks that you can do the top attacks now essentially. So the system plays well together with all with everything going on. And yeah, it just it feels like an old school fighting game. But the moment you do you land that touch and you do that combo, the end of your combo is getting modern and fancy. It becomes 10 years later. Exactly, exactly, yeah. And then some of the design is very smart too in the sense that,

so earlier I was describing how you can do EX into EX over and over until you burn yourself out. When you burn yourself out, you don't have access to any of your special mechanics or any of the stuff I just described. You're kind of like stuck, and you can get have access to any of your special mechanics or any of the stuff I just described. You're kind of like stuck and you can get chip blocked to death, however, landing your big super secret level three resets your entire EX meter to zero. So.

Oh, I did not catch that. So if you land a combo and you look and you realize, I have the money to spend on a full cash out super, like level three everything, I can burn my full meter, spend everything I have, and the end of that super, it's all reset to zero. So you get a massive reward. Which is like, that's a really cool,

almost like doom eternal loop, you know, of cool downs. It's a really cool almost like doom eternal loop You know of cooldowns. It's a cooldown system happening where you've you've you've you've spent every resource you have You've done the full loop and at the beginning of the loop your cool Your first thing that you spent is now back to normal, right? That's the the rotation. Excuse me Is that the word right? You've, this game has the rotation in it. I mean, Wully, if you want to talk about rotations, like fighting in combos are just rotations. Yeah. That's all they are. But here you can only do it for like that one third of your life that you choose, you

know? So, yeah, quite interesting. You pick which third of your life you want. You wanna start the round with it. Do you want it to be in the middle or do you want it to be your comeback at the end? While being fully aware that you can easily get juggled into a combo that takes away the entire section of life

where that special ability would have unlocked, you know? Yeah, which is why you put it at the end. Terrible. End is terrible placement. I like so so far It feels like that's just like you get touched and like nah, you're you're not gonna get it All right. Well, who gives a shit about any of that geese is alive. So We were laughing at how stupid it would be if geese Howard just showed up in City of the Wars. I was like, Hey, I'm fine. And guess what? Oh my God. So it's weird because, um, so there's, there's apparently some, some stuff leaking going on or whatever. I on my own with my own two saw saw some shit because folks discovered a fairly simple way to access a training mode. And

inside of that training mode, you can, you know, go practice and whatever and you can see a couple things. You can see that there's a stage where the line system returns, which is hilarious. You can see there's that Terry Bogard stage, like the Rock Howard stage with the little cafe and stuff. But then you can also see all the music and the music collection that you can select for each stage. There is a full, every Final Fury games music is all there. And then the games full soundtrack includes characters

who have not necessarily showed up yet anywhere. Well, that's crazy. Who would show up? Nightmare Geese, Fallen Rock, Howard. Tons of characters they haven't announced that are not that surprising. Art of Fighting Staples. Andy Bogart and Hokotamaru. Yeah, and him being plus time. He's older now.

There was a little bit of... Of all the... There's a Rio in there. There's some stuff. And there was a Rick Stroud mention. That's crazy. I love Rick Stroud. Not as much as I love Vanessa, but he's cool.

But that feels like it's for the Rick Stroud fanboys out there, which literally became a gag online. Rick Stroud fanboys are like, people like me, like, shut the fuck up about Rick Stroud. So it's quite exciting to see that they're like, okay, we know some people care. And yeah, like, you know, a bunch of that. And then of course you got your even got your full version of the theme song chain reaction, which now that we can hear that thing, you're like this is a perfect punk emo, rather pop emo pop, like 2000s, early 2000s theme song that should be if Mark of the Wolves 2 came out right after the first game,

this was the era that it happened in. Yeah. Right. And the lyrics are all talking about Rock Howard's journey, how he's out running the circle of time undecided. Fate is irrelevant. And his heart feels one way But the blood in his veins is another and they're causing a chain reaction that no one can contain I fucking love it. I love that stupid emo pop song. It's the best. It's my favorite thing. So I

Feel really happy that we had a discussion about this almost a six months ago, and I think it was about hey Hachi But I feel like it now It's happened enough times and Capcom people have said that like Gen is alive and shit like that That we can now conclusively state that no one in a fighting game that has been a playable character has ever died. Nope. And if you think they did, you're wrong. It's like comic books, right? It's the same rule, 100%.

If a character exists and you know about them, there's value in them returning, especially if they were playable at some point. It is much more extreme than I thought it would be with characters that like entire games were built around them being dead and then decades went by You are dead if you were never playable on Except for when you become playable and undead shoutouts to go Ken So here's the question you are dead in so much as your move set was not very cool If your move set was not very cool. If your move set was pretty cool, you will undead.

Now people are saying Cliff in Guilty Gear and okay, give it a minute. Cause Guilty Gear has killed and brought back the same characters multiple times. I would pop off so hard for a Young Cliff flashback character. Just someone that shows up only in a flashback of story mode, but it's Young Cliff. That would be so sick. That would be so sick.

But no, I think here you just need to, yep, we just, Nightmare Geese a million years, never forget. And it makes more sense too, because I guess the whole thing where the Cain, and Grant were like the villains of the first Garo, and now that Rock is joining his side because he tells him that his mom is alive and that we can go find her. You can see that they're kind of like, chummy to each other now, and even Terry is kind of like, okay, I guess I understand why you're doing all this, so fine. You talk and monologue like a super evil villain,

but we kind of are growing to deal with you, so whatever. I would be astonished if that Grant is actually dead. I assume he will show up in an ending pad a title pad. Mm-hmm. He was there How he was there? Conferred he's you don't even like you don't even have to Like so this does do something that that is probably annoying when you're making a fighting game Like Tekken and people are like where the fuck is Heihachi on my roster? And you go, he's dead though.

And now more than ever, the response is, who gives a shit? Well, the weird, who gives a fucking fuck? Well, the weirdest one is the idea of like, okay, so Vox Reaper is the replacement for Grant. He's the new student. And you know, you see that with some characters that are pronounced replacements combat kids and

Well, they're kind of their own thing. You're right that versus like I think aki might be the best example ever Cuz like fang isn't dead, but he is permanently replaced forever We and I think when we talk about like this the caliber kids, right? you know those are those are replacements and like the combat kids kind of are their own new things that are hybrids and stuff. But then you have the ones where it's so replaced that you didn't even know that there was a different person. Like King and Sub-Zero are characters that died

and then got replaced by new versions of people doing their moves, and you didn't even know No one did if you if you play armor king in Tekken you're playing I think armor king 3 And you're playing king 2 and then yeah well that at one point that's it so that then there's then there's the armor king that like Takes up there's an army king king that takes on the mantle. So it's wild with that. Where there's just like, yeah, you couldn't tell it was a character and a different person in the same mask.

And then there's characters that they're not dead, but the new replacement is so similar that if you stare at the game and don't read the title you wouldn't know the difference Like whatever so fedius fucking daughter's name is in soul cow 5 Sandra Cuz no no that's there's her younger sister Sophia Sophie was her name fucking Sophia. Are you actually serious it so Fira or people are saying it's all here five okay okay okay yeah okay dude that is a that is like a Tekken style one-to-one Julia Chang yeah yeah yeah that is no though yeah just the complete report kuni mitsu as well as a different kuni mitsu it's not the

same as right that's kinamitsu toitsu. It's not the same, that's Kunimitsu 2. Yoshimitsu weirdly enough, the same guy. Same one, same robot. That's like the reverse of- Same robot alien, can't get rid of him. Every Jack is a different Jack, Yoshimitsu is forever. Yeah, it turns out you can't replace decades of love and memories for specific characters

no matter what you do to their moveset or look. I love Guile and Bison. Yeah. And Balrog. Like, I love them. Shout outs to Vox Reaper being like, stay away from my billionaires! Oh, that's great. Protect the rich! He's a villain!

That's good! What a villain! Truly, it's like, oh, the new guy on the bad team, huh? Okay, let's see how dark he is. He's like, hang. He says his shirt on, a t-shirt that just says, I love rich people. I love rich people! Law.

I need him and fucking Forrest Law standing next to each other, or Marshall Law standing next to each other, like Cena and that black guy with the shirts saying, I hate anime and I love anime. It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Which way, kid? Which path do you take? Truly the villain that's,

that's like, and you know what? He's a assassin that like was taken in and reformed and is now defending the most bourgeois ass kind R. Heinlein, you know, and his dreams. So of course you gotta be on board. You gotta be super on board. It's great. Yeah, that was all there.

What was it? I love that Genn is alive. That's my favorite one. That is by far my favorite one out of every fighting game character to ever not die. It's gotta be Gen dying of what? Lung cancer, leukemia or some shit back in like the early nineties then objectively killed by Akuma only to be like, ah he's fine. Nah, I didn't kill him though. He stopped thinking. He shung Goku Satsu the cancer.

Yeah, yeah. He grabbed a hold of Gen and took his cancer to hell. And Gen felt better afterwards. I can't wait to see what happens to Lau in Virtua Fighter. It's gonna be great. It's gonna be dead, man. Let's see. Yeah, so there was all that. I think as well, well, whatever.

SNK lore will continue, I'm sure. We'll have bits and pieces to dive into. And then there's what happens when you're not playing the fighting game. Yeah, what's that? What's happening when you're not playing City of the Warps? You're trying to matchmake. You're trying to find games and it's taking forever because the matchmaking is really really bad and uh it seems like a cataclysmic problem it's a step down even though they had

the same problem in KOF 15 and then they KOF 15 at launch had a huge matchmaking problem they tweaked it so that it got a bit better um a certain point. And now we're back to a worse version of it, which is just like, why would it be this way? And you're like, I guess the people that are the gameplay battle designers, you know, I mean, Neo Ge and all the all the the folks that made a bunch of great fighting games over the years are over back at SNK. So that side of the of the game is running smoothly. But I don't know

if the new board, I forgot the name of the Chinese company, but whatever they're doing, online seems to be enough of a priority that they have rollback, but not enough that they have a smooth matchmaking experience. Hey. You know what's a fun thing, the way we had this discussion? We're like, man, this fighting game is so cool to play. And then we segued into, if you can. Yeah, if you can play it. What?

The menus are a little bit clunky and weird with the negative edge buttons you release to move the screen over sometimes, which is very strange. It's not very straightforward to get to some places as well. Going in and out of your online profile is like 10 seconds of loading. doing anything relating to essentially your account. I never really thought too much about the big deal it was when Capcom announced CFN as like, hey, we've invented a thing called CFN. It's a big registered online network where you put in a fighter tag and it tracks your records and whatever, right?

I remember like, okay, they brought that out there for FIVE and FIVE had its own problems. We were just like, okay, well, you don't really think about that feature as anything special because you're just like, well, yeah, duh, that should be the case. I should be able to register my shit online and play. Now you're like, oh my God, actually, that is a humongous deal. Because it means that like, I don't have this weird problem where you go into the records and data screen on City of the Wolves, and you get a message that says, if you delete your save data, you're going to lose your record of all of data and matches and analytics

for everything you've done. Are you fucking serious? So it's like, you literally, yeah. And it's your, that shit's tied to your save file. This is especially bad because samurai showdown. That means you can just hack your fucking client side ranking. So not your ranking, not your ranking, your other info. Right? Oh, good.

Samurai Showdown had a problem when it released where your ranking was tied to your save data and that broke the online entirely. It was completely back shit. Oh my God. Because if you ever deleted, formatted, whatever, lost the console, anything happens, you just lose your entire ranking, right? You can't log back in anywhere. There's the game had no I guess budget to have an online Registered account of any kind so there was no way to just make sure that that shit was saved on the cloud and whatever, right?

so samurai shodown they learned a huge stupid lesson from that which was Don't tie your progression and ranking and online shit to the save file. And so here, now your actual rank is the only thing that doesn't get lost. But all other metrics, stats, usage data, et cetera, everything else associated is all gone there. And it's just like, if you just had the ability to have an account of some kind

This wouldn't be a problem. But then now it's like oh, but do they just are like we don't have the money for that You got to get the bare bones experience, you know That's what I can't wait for them to release this game and spend like 18 months patching it and Then be like look we fixed the online long after it has completely died Well, so this is why I was saying that when I see something like this where the game itself is super fun to play But you've got really long matchmaking issues and everything outside of that is just struggling Unfortunately, my brain goes damn. I guess second impact is going to be the one that fixes all of this, you know, because you've this is KOF 12 and KOF 13

is going to be great, right? You're going to come along and find a better package. Like the like the meat is good. The bones are brittle. You know, we need to replace those bones with some steel rods. And we don't have the fucking time to wait for that surgery to recover because this game's coming out in two months So that's what unfortunately you know that's that that's the bad side about this is that maybe over the course of releasing like six or Seven games SNK can make a decent online like cuz they get a little bit better every time, right? They do get a little bit every time, but now we got to step backwards. And another thing that gets a little bit better every time is like, you know, the way their

games look, right? And I will say that, you know, as stepping off the other two subjects there, the way this game looks, this is the best looking new SNK game they've released. It has a lot of fun when you go into the, if you screenshot any moment in one of the big specials, you see their answer to paint and ink splashes from Street Fighter is dot tone, right? You see pop art dot tones in the background.

You see really bright colors. You see a big white outline around the active character and it looks very fun. And like the filters and stuff are very aggressive and stylish. The 3D models are still kind of struggling though to look as impressive as anything that the other like mainline fighting games are because it's okay man SNK it's just like a little baby company that's just like a little birthday boy it's it's a it's some

really cool visual effects laid over some 3d models that are still not a hundred percent there you know better than 14, better than 14, way better than 14, better than 15, but way subpar to, I mean, it's going to be unfair, but guilty gear strive is the best looking fucking thing I've ever seen. You know, I would like to actually stop you right there and ask you, how is that unfair? Because I know that like,

this is a company that died and resurrected in the hands of a completely different owner that has a fraction of the team size, budget, and operating costs by comparison to ARKsys and Team Red and everything going on over there. But nonetheless, the history of this company and why that comparison feels normal is because SNK used to be second to Capcom.

I'm going to have to take a quick break in like two seconds, but before I go, I have to say I totally understand exactly what you mean about the team size and the historical thing, but I just Googled it on the Steam. No, I Steam searched it. And City of the Wharves costs $83 and Guilty Gear Strive costs $53. So how is not fair to compare new game that is $30 more to old game? It's a version of the why isn't every game hitting Baldur's Gate three levels of complexity? Right? It's a new version of that applied to this. We'll get into it in a second. Oh yeah. Well, I mean, I would say that KOF 14 started this discussion because

KOF 14 looks bad. Yes. Like it looks poor. SNK returning with KOF 14 was then, essentially, when Nintendo dropped out of the main two race and became like, we're going to be third forever, and we're just going to sit back here. We'll continue the thought. So yeah. To finish the thought, I think that most major releases of all the fighting games we know and franchises we know have

been striking upon first sight. And that leaves an impression with a new buyer, a new audience, a potential person that you can appeal to. When you see how good Street Fighter 6 looks, when you see how good Strive looks, Dragon Ball FighterZ, you know, all of these things are like, there's a holy shit, you know, impression to it. And, um, and even Mark of the Wolves, the original, was the most impressive looking thing

they'd ever made at the time as well, back then. So, um, it comes from that place, and now we're in a place where each game is kind of releasing its own like, check this shit out. This is some crazy level, next level visuals you've never seen before. And here it's just like, yeah, the style is just improved upon what they previously released and it's their most stylish but this new era feels like it's only Compared SNK is almost only comparing themselves to themselves Like Nintendo in this in this third slot of like we're just gonna be compared to what we do over here We're not in the main race anymore, you know

It feels like the When you look at the game look at the modeling in particular, like you can see it's clearly not a completely new team from scratch or anything. It's probably the same folks that worked on 14, got better over time and then made 15, and now got better again, and you're seeing the best they can do right now. Which is, you know, but it's just

like it's not hitting that level of the showstopper when you saw like Oh my god, Goku is just Goku, you know So like yes But I also feel like these are kind of all intertwined because like I don't know Maybe it's cuz I'm older or maybe it's cuz I use steam almost exclusively and there's a billion fucking games that are always fighting for Your time like hey, I love fighting games and I want to play an SNK fighting game. And notice that this brand new fighting game is... I really like the style City of the Wolves has.

Me too. But like, it's not the best looking game in the world. But I like it. Yeah, that's it. I care about these characters. That's exactly it. Yeah. And so it's like, okay, so I'm looking at a situation where it's like, okay, well, it's not the best looking game in the world, but

I really like these characters in this system. So if I want to pay full price for it, so like I'm in order to make me not feel stupid, it's got to have like banger online, right? Like if you're going to charge full price price, including then I kind of expect certain defacto settings and features to exist. It just, it can't be a discussion anymore. You know, we, we, we need to be past this part. And yeah, including all of season one, every edition is special edition is the way they're selling it. Yeah, no, of course, when I say Nintendo and third, I mean like they're not competing in the same race anymore. No, Nintendo pretends they exist in their own games industry. And to be fair, considering some of the news we're going to talk about later today, maybe that's a better game.

And so I think something, so the same thing, while I like the way this game looks and I like what's going on with it, it's just when you start comparing is where we get this discussion kind of happens. Not to put like the undue amount of weight over here, but it's, it is interesting considering the history of the franchise. Something that I noticed as well tells the tale of the tape even more than the character models is the particle effects. Because they've struggled with particle effects for a couple of games now, right? The way the fire and flames and explosions all kind of look.

How does the power geyser look in each game? Holy fuck, the power geyser in Street Fighter 6 looks incredible. There's two of them. Oh, it looks so good. It's SNK's move. There's two of them. And I think here you see some examples where it looks fantastic, right? So as a big old Rock Howard fanboy, the wings look great. I love when he does it and you

see the now the pedals drop down afterwards. They're like, oh, we know you like those wings. We're going to push them. We're going to put them in his extra super. Like they're pushed. It looks fantastic. And then when I think about, and I look specifically at Kane and his wind pose, right? That's the one where it's like Kane's wind pose in the original game was this amazing shot of him holding his hands open and a giant explosion of fire pops off, you hear the sound of the oxygen in the room

burning away and it looks incredible, right? And the team or the animators that looked at that and said, let's convert this to 3D, didn't notice the specific little details to make that feel as intimidating, you know? So either they didn't notice or it's hard. Maybe, I don't know, but one way or another, the things, there's little things there where you're like, I love this part of that. And you, ah, you didn't do that here. You kind of, he floats up and it's like a softer, more flaccid version of it. And you're like, damn, we didn't both feel the same thing looking at this. And the another, imagine if you saw a new animation

of Ryu doing a Hadouken, but now his shirt doesn't explode backwards, right? Well, that would be so- And you're like, well, it didn't used to in the past, but then ever since we saw that in Street Fighter III, and we all went, oh my God, that's such a cool thing. His clothing gets blown back by the fireball. And you're like, yeah, we're never not doing that again. And then, and someone comes along and then forgets to do that. And you're like, Oh,

but didn't you notice how cool that was? Why would you not do that? You know, it's a little, just those little bits where you're like that's what made that game back in the day, go put it, put it above everything they'd previously done, you know? I think that... I think these two topics are, like, intrinsic. Because no one would be complaining about the way the game looks if they were just spending time playing matches.

Yeah, I get it, you know. Yeah, that's it, that's it, that's it. You know, that's true too. And there is a level of, like, you don't want to become that that the the the person that like you spend more time Complaining about this game than actually playing it That's like that's a crowd of the FGC that is that is out there getting exposed all the time for sure Oh, that's not just the FGC Kim's pants is a really good You know a thing we've looked at over the years of like look how amazing those pants looked almost too good in 13 and we just had to, you know.

If you wanna be like super unfair in a way that's technically fair, hey, how come none of the stages in any of the 3D KOF games look as good as that Sweden stage where it's raining? Sure. How come they don't look that good? Oh, is it because that's literally

Impossible due to the way technology works empty. Yeah, I guess empty sandy desert in in KOF 2000 even like though even that there's got there's some character to the sand Yeah, so so all that to say you know that uh There's the there's those little bits that you kind of are like, yeah, I guess that that's just not what we're getting here. But I am glad we are still getting another entry into the Fatal Fury franchise proper. And I'm, look, I'm here to huff the copium. This is a good game and I want to see it succeed.

I think it can get there. And I look forward to seeing, you know, if it can get there. And I look forward to seeing if it can get patched into solving a lot of these problems because it really is like a really fun fighting game. And they did a great job just taking something, a challenging thing to do on paper with the gameplay and nailed that. I think it's wild that me, Cope Master Extreme over here, Virtua Fighter fan, I look at VF5

Evo, sorry Evo, and I'm like, yeah, no, that online was always going to suffer really badly because of the lack of players. That was its fate. And it's really cool that they're supporting that game for people like me and like the 2,000 other people to play it almost every other day but like yeah, that was its fate but I look at mark of the sorry city of the wharves and I'm just like man if you if you if people pick that game up on day one and

on day one and fucking spend a couple minutes trying to get into a match in that first five minute period. That game is cooked. That game is fucked. It has a five minute window to get you into a match and have a good experience and then get you into a second match. And if it doesn't do that, it's fucking cooked. Yeah, again, I mentioned it before, but the fact that you share your rank across characters is just a really dumb thing that needs to change as well while we're talking about it. Well, no, because, Willy, you're just as good

with every character. Everyone will get their ranking with their best character and be afraid to play ranked with anybody else because you're all gonna, you're gonna derank with anybody that is not your best character, you know? Stupid. Yeah, yeah. Really dumb. No, you know,

like when on the little stream on, get out of fighting games there, you know, you mentioned it, but it's like, okay, so what's gonna come out it, but it's like, okay, so what's going to come out is a game that's really a fighting game that's really fun to play. That's going to be plagued by other issues. And you're like, I don't know if it's worse or better because Oh, yeah. Because you want it to be shit. And then it's like, oh, I didn't even care about that. You can just dismiss it entirely. Or you want it to be? God damn it. It's actually really good, but it's being held back

You know, but look what is this? What is this genre been if not a series of good games held back by other bullshit, right? That's this. Oh, that's that's bull. It's the story of every fucking release I mean we talked about easy operation all that stuff, but like and you know online play so if grow Doesn't work out if city the worst doesn't work out. There's always multiverses Yeah, um that is the exact laugh I wanted I guess there's a time when quality of life becomes mandatory to life.

Right? It's one of those things. I saw this person talking about the other day, where they're like, people don't appreciate shit because up 100 years ago ago ain't nobody was getting hot showers right now a hot shower is just part of your day-to-day routine right and you should appreciate that for the miracle that it is nah people should have hot showers fuck you hot showers rule my online game should work when I pay money for it. Quality of life becomes life support. That's it really does, man.

The base functionality of my life now is to be able to wash my butt in not cold water. I'm not going back. Well, you see, this region you could move to is actually, it's amazing. There's no electricity though. But look, it's so pretty. Now, you know what? Electricity's important. Hot water heater is important. I- I- Mark of the Wolves, the most- the most formative and beloved fighting games of my life were played without ever touching an online connection. of my life were played without ever touching an online connection. And now you live in the current world and you're an adult man and you're not in high school. Yeah. Yeah, it does feel like

it does feel a bit like one whirlwind of a like of a director can kind of look at that and go like, we gotta whip this thing into shape. What the fuck are we doing? Oh yeah, that happens all the time, all over the game. Somebody comes into the room and goes, why are you doing it like this? This is stupid. Fix it. Oh, well that's the way we've always done it. Well Well shut up then But yeah, yeah, yeah that is a fatal fury city of the wharves and you know what I Promise you right now. My brain will not stop saying Garo so I I don't know if you've noticed but I have

Almost called it mark of the wolves almost every single time. Yeah. Yeah I have not acclimated to the the war city yet. I like saying Garo. It feels good. It sounds cool. I enjoy those words. Yeah. All right. So we'll see what happens. And I just wanted to talk about that, obviously. That's all I got to talk about.

So anything with you Pirate Yakuza and Hawaii's out Yeah, this is This is the deepest It's not shocking, but it's the deepest into the zany side quest land That the like a dragon games have ever been Zany side quest land The the like a dragon games have ever been

To the point where I am wondering if the events taking place are even real Like it is the absolute peak of absurdity Okay, so I mean Ichiban is insane and then infects Kiryu with his insane juice Is Majima not also just losing his mind? Yeah, Majima was doing it for longer. Okay, great. Perfect. So I think there's a lot of things I could bring up. Old men going insane. To really establish the tone. So one of the things, if you played Yakuza 7 or 8 or 5,

things if you played Yakuza 7 or 8 or 5 you would know that Majima has the ability to spawn shadow clones. This has happened so many times in so many cutscenes that the shadow clones are real. Are they solid clones or illusions? No, they are ghosts. Okay. No, they are not illusions. They are real Okay, they like like thought it was some kind of like metaphor for fighting mod Is it how fast it's kagebunshin? It's it's like they're hard. Oh, yeah, oh shit. Oh, absolutely

Okay, it stabs people But more than that is when you wake up on the beach as Gora Majima nameless because he can't remember and you speak to Noah rich in Hawaii, you know an island off the coast of Hawaii, right and You're in America and Majima has never spoken anything other than Japanese in his life. They do a cutaway in which he says, Yeah, so there was a real language barrier, but we got over that anyway.

And then the game just continues. And it's never going to come up ever again. Shut the fuck up. The fact that he doesn't speak English and no one around him speaks Japanese and you have a bunch of people that are co-mingling constantly. No, they are speaking the Dragon language now. So I was ready for a world where this was the same as Terrace House Hawaii where they kind of were like, there's enough of a Japanese population here

that fuck it, it's fine. That's what they did in... Eight? Seven, in eight. Yeah, okay. Where they're like, you're in little Japan. It's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It just happens to be that everybody you deal with speaks Japanese. Now they've just completely given up. Majima is inexplicably speaking fluent English I guess no I I don't know are they making pun jokes about his bad words or or his no okay no they're not doing that no absolutely okay everyone is fluent everybody got you gotta love that like everyone's speaking English, but then somebody says the wrong thing at some point and everyone goes what that's stupid Why would you mispronounce that and it's completely lost in translation? Okay So the reason for becoming a pirate is nothing

becoming a pirate is nothing. There is literally no reason to become a pirate at all other than fucking. Yeah, okay. Fuck it. Good, good, good. Strong motivation. And then you start traveling to areas which the Pirate Cove, Madlantis is the most like physically impossible location the series has ever done. It's got like multiple cruise ships like in the fucking cave wall. Like it's it's it's nonsense. It's complete fucking buffoonery.

Like he's not just taking a trip to a theme park and just daydreaming No, it is it is happening And you have your your pirate ship combat, which is not as good as black Okay, it's fun, okay, it's a it's very it's very blue skies Sega Pirate-ship battle. Okay. Um skies of Arcadia pirate ship battles, you know, there's, I like the concept, but obviously Black Flag was the fucking, that was the bar. So what do you do? I mean, you can shoot your machine guns straightforward and you can broadside people and you have boost, but it's very arcade. Okay. Okay.

And you can ram people. Of note though is that this goofiness goes on to the gameplay as well. So in Like a Dragon, Gaiden, the man who lost his name, here you had a secret agent style in addition to his dragon style, which was like shoot drones at people and throw a cigarette and it blows up and rocket boots and shit like that. It was horribly unbalanced and it was like side quest dimension fighting style. Majima's pirate style has a fucking grappling hook for snatch and a chargeable gun that colors up and you can round trip your fucking cutlass.

And you are fighting you are fighting 30 to 50 to 100 guys at once sometimes. Wow. Okay. Like I went to an island and it was fight a hundred guys and they came in at like groups of 25. So are there silly? It has become dynasty warriors. Okay. Um, is there still a ratio of silly side quests that are now just pirate themed? Yes. But like the main story is also that silly? Because because the introduction of pirating in and of itself can be a major game mechanic, kind of like

Cabaret running, that can take over gameplay if they wanted to. But is that what they did with this, or is it like it's just a regular Yakuza game, but you're doing this? No, no, the whole game's a side quest. Yeah, okay. The whole fucking thing.

And your big mechanic, your big meta metagame mechanic is staff up your pirate ship with people and it's everybody. It's like every somewhat unique NPC you've ever fucking seen in the Hawaii zone. You want to bring the nightmare mascot Aloe Happy, the fucking palm tree freak on your pirate ship? Do you want to bring in Hollywood actress, Nikkel Kidman, who needs to learn how to be a pirate for her method acting? Saw a screenshot of that, yeah. Do you want to bring in like the obiturion or the chicken head or sheep man pirate? pirate

libido I Haven't seen him yet. Okay, but maybe who knows yeah and the way that this has been integrated is Every single goddamn minigame every single goddamn minigame has a dude next to it that if you do well on the minigame or side content they go you know what I've thinking about being a pirate do you want me to be on your pirate ship so like I got a guy on my fucking pirate ship because I got like I beat the normal version of trick pool in

the pool holes and then I use my pool points to buy sheep man okay I have to join my crew there's a very important question are you actually pirating anything or are you just living the yo ho ho lifestyle you are searching for buried treasure which is the game's main collectible which increases your pirate rank. You're not attacking corsairs and privateers. No, everybody on the ocean wants to fuck you up, so you kill them and you get like rabbit meat

or superb components off their pirate ships. You'll sink like an entire three frigate pirate ship battle and you'll get like $12. Okay. It's and then you are going to little islands all over the place to do like little micro dungeons to find buried treasure. Okay. Yeah. No, pirating means like means wholesome buried treasure finding, not marooning people or attacking innocent ships. So much like the Yakuza, who are notorious violent criminals, the other pirates are the mean pirates. They're very mean. And whenever you run into a good pirate, and they're cool, guess what? They're going to join your pirate ship once you beat them up so Majima ship doesn't have a boo-boo box

No, okay It is It is so cartoon nonsense That I'm I'm feeling That Like the next spin-off game will be sci-fi. Like reality. Like every sort of human.

Add a genre to each character. I mean, Well, cause they've already done that. Kill you a Spider-Man, like 007. Spy slash Spider-Man. Yeah. So, and I mean, Ichiban is Dragon Quest. Yeah, video game. So now Majima is that.

So I mean, yeah, I guess you can go to space, but who would do it? I don't know. People in the chat saying Akiyama in space. Why not? People like, but the spin-off potential is now infinite because you could have a Tokusatsu sure it can get you like whatever team RGG fucking feels like this. There's no limit on anything It is really strange that the core storyline is also complete nonsense banana shit. You meet characters from earlier Yakuza games and they're like, hey, Majima, remember me?

And he's like, nope, gonna be a pirate, bye. I think one of the smartest things this brand could have done was essentially turn Like A Dragon as a name into the same thing as Monty Python. It doesn't mean anything. It's just okay, this kind of implies who the actors are gonna be here. But what's gonna happen when it actually starts playing is fucking up in the air. Yeah. Awesome. Brilliant.

It's kind of awesome and the game the gameplay is getting faster and faster in The in the spin-off games like Majima Majima is like halfway to a devil may cry character Are they consolidating and ditching styles or like yeah, yeah you well Guide in and this the spin-off games both had two styles and judgment had two styles and lost judgment had three styles. So they're doing styles. It's just two or three. And yeah, Majima's got air combos and he's got stinger and he's got round trip and he's got like he's he's got everything. But I was thinking I was talking to I was

talking to chat the other day and it's like all right we've done crime drama. We've done detective drama. We've done high school drama. We've done multiple samurai movies. We've done zombies. We've done pirates. We've done Pirates, we've done Secret Agent. Um, like, they're rolling through a bunch of these fucking things. It's so funny that I remember when Seven first got details and we, there was a discussion about how like, oh shit, I guess Yakuza's made a decision to become an RPG series Well, I really like the combat that was dumb and fun But I guess we can say goodbye because it'll be turn-based from now on and like they have Aggressively kept the action alive in these side games and other things in fact There's more action games now than there are the RPG ones

So I hated that discussion and I think I talked about that when we were brought up because those games were always RPGs. They just had brawler combat. Like from Yakuza 1 onwards, you are fighting random battles and leveling up your fucking character and going into the item shop and going on. But I guess in a tale sense where like reactions and timing matters versus standing still aren't turned exactly that's that's a hugely that's a huge difference yeah yeah so it turns out when you put out a game every ten months you can totally keep your spin-off

action games going it's so fucking ridiculous so I haven't gotten very far into it it is really really interesting how they have this is probably the best Integrated any of them the side content has been because behind every type of side mini game or side content There is somebody to join your pirate crew So if I want al oh happy the absolute freak mascot character who joins up, helps Ichiban change his jobs, then I have to go do photo hunt. If I want Camulop, the fucking Kamurocho mascot that's an old man in a sweaty bunny suit,

then I got to go get some good fortunes off the street by collectibles. Rio Hazuki could never be a pirate. No, he never would be. He could never. This is a fucking... He couldn't even dream it. You know what? I'm just thinking, one of the best things about the Like a Dragon series, in terms of

them having the flexibility to do all sorts of things is they have built up a situation or by default All characters are morally flexible Just a little because they're gangsters by default because they're Cops like Right on that's pretty much it for me pirate axis cool. I've been playing a million hours of Kingdom Come Deliverance I had a fun little thing where you know in a big open game and they say hey, you know what you're off So in cyberpunk it would be when you get Johnny in your brain, right? And they go, all right go you can go any finished the heist and the game begins for real real

Yeah Well in in Kingdom Come Deliverance What I did is I got to that part where I got a horse and then I did every single side quest in the Inchart Oh, and then I did all available DLCs And then and then the game that game built up to like I went back to the main story and then it built up To a big fight against a bandit called runt and it was a very climactic battle with a huge pre-battle and I climbed him up into a burned out church and then I literally went bop, literally once,

literally bopped him on the top of the head and he died. Yeah, that's you. That's all you. Then the cut scene starts and it's a big dramatic fight and I'm like, nah, I bopped him. And you're all beat up and you're like yeah absolutely absolutely no I bopped his shit in. Great. So that game's amazing that game's absolutely incredible I cannot wait to get to the second one. What you know

what's an interesting thing? Oh this is still the first one right not even the new release. Still the first one the first one True, true one from six years ago. Not the one that just came out right right right the one that just came out because if I ever Play that second one. I'll never go back to play the first one right and I'm having a great time with the first one but you know what's really interesting have you ever played a DLC and Before you played it you were aware that the reviews for it were terrible. I must have at some point, yeah. So the DLCs for Kingdom Come Deliverance have a wide variety of mixed reviews and I played one called a woman's lot which has extremely negative reviews on stream

Really really really negative reviews on stream and I liked it. I liked it quite a bit actually, okay But I can easily see Why it is hated. And that is people weren't using the mod to save anywhere. Because you've bought it the gay because because Teresa's DLC, a woman's lot has a lot of stealth sections and it has limited saves. And it also has wandering around on the side of a mountain in the pitch black at night trying to find herbs to heal somebody.

And there's patrols and I'm like, boy, if you got caught and lost your progress, if I wasn't just saving the game every five fucking minutes, every time I succeeded in one of these things, Oh man, this would take me like twice as long and I'd be fucking Superman yeah that could be miserable that makes perfect sense it also has a different problem which is it's what after the game's tutorial it is the very first person you talk to you can the very first person you talk to. The very first prompt at the top of their thing is, hey, what's the DLC? And Theresa's DLC, because she's a peasant girl instead of a peasant boy, is much harder than everything else in the entire

game. And it might be like the first thing that you do. Okay, so I've been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance for about 60 hours before I did it and I knew what potions were good to use and what times I knew how to gimmick the archery system. I knew this and that and that but if you were going in at like base stats don't know anything about the game. It's definitely the hardest part of the whole game. game okay and it might be the first content you do after the fucking tutorial is it like yours is it the kind of like you're

switching to like a full non combatant type of thing yeah okay gotcha the you can shoot a bow and arrow but shooting a bow and arrow in that thing sucks. And you can stealth kill people, but there's no ability to defend yourself at all if you get caught. And God forbid you get caught after 15 minutes of stealthing through the mineshaft. Okay. Or whatever the fight. Right.

Genre switch becomes a survival horror bit. Yeah. Okay. Someone in the chat asked Hey, did the combat ever get any easier for me in Kingdom Come Deliverance? Oh, yeah. No, my character, my character's combat stats are completely maxed out. So now I just walk into a battle with a with a mace and just go, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, and they all fall down unconscious. And then you mercy kill them and mercy killing somebody with a fucking hammer is Doesn't look very merciful Is he just?

Crush him I was I was turning the hamster wheel in my brain trying to think of DLC that I knew was bad in advance and The only thing I could think of his persona 3 the answer which count which is not DLC But my brain decides that it is it was DLC. It feels like DLC. Yeah That's that's about it But yeah, that's what's been going on with over at me not a whole lot going on this week If you want to hang out with me this week Go down to twitch.tv Pat stares at not tomorrow but Thursday we're

gonna be playing we're gonna finish Metal Gear we're gonna play Monster Hunter it's gonna give me a lot of Monster Hunter apparently Monster Hunter is really short I might beat it by this weekend that's ridiculous damn well but hey we'll play it if you if you feel like you and get your fill and you want more you can always switch over to Dauntless. I Could switch over to Dauntless Could I we'll get there? Yeah, meanwhile over here wooly versus on YouTube and on twitch

played some more thousand times resist and I feel like yeah, we got to chapter six of that, so I believe there's 10 total. Should be maybe one session, maybe another left, but. Let me ask you a question about Thousand Times Resist. So I don't know anything about Thousand Times Resist other than what I watched on the Steam Edge. Same conversation as last time, yeah.

No, no, no, no, this is a slightly different conversation And like I'll catch like like a like a 10 second clip of your stream when I'm like going through my twitch thing And I'll be like, oh, well, he's playing how like How sad gay robot is it? Because it's giving off massive sad gay robot vibe sad gay not robot Okay, but it is sad gay futurism Okay, and

It also is very gun-shy about giving Ans answers to things. It likes being cryptic. It likes not telling you what's happening. It likes being obtuse. And every once in a while, impactful moments occur

and you kind of are learning more about things. But it is really playing its cards super close to its chest right now as a because every time I Physically see it. I think that this is like the background footage for like a chapel row and music sure sure I mean you you are you are walking and talking and Scanning And yes, it is big sad gay sick futurism oh no but and and you know emotional baggage trauma parental damage and inherited bullshit right a lot of a lot of, I'm sick of generational trauma.

Generational trauma is the name of the game. I'm sick of generational. Can I just divest myself of this generational trauma, please? Turning red, no turning red automata a little bit. And this, this is a turning red that is brave and can talk about 911 can and And it does but not but not maybe not necessarily 9-eleven but does talk about Hong Kong and the umbrellas is a is a crucial plot point in the setting so is a crucial plot point in the setting. So, yeah, yeah. I'm still, I'm in the third act, and there's a lot that I really enjoy,

but it's so weird to say this. I'm still waiting for a shoot-a-drop. It's still playing its cards close to its chest going, mm, you know? Like, it's leaving you hanging. Oh, that's weird. still playing its cards close to its chest going, mm, you know? It's leaving you hanging. Oh, that's weird. And in the right places, in a lot of ways,

but it's really being like, you're still just gonna get a whiff, you're not getting the full bit yet, you know? So, we will see. There was a fake out moment that properly will terrify you if you're like, that's it. Oh, yeah. There's one of those.

But yeah, when I say near, I mean that to the full extent. They're doing a lot of those things too. I got to get on that. It has that good overwhelmingly positive review score. I'm really going to let you know when it's done. That's all I can say. The other thing too is that..., so something, it's interesting, because it's something where like,

because you're connecting themes with every line of dialogue, your processing power is high. Your CPU is high the whole time. Because as soon as you hear any line, you go, has anyone said anything like that before? Does that relate to any conversation that's happened before?

Does that look like anything I've already seen? Does that look like or resemble anything we've already encountered? And in some cases, they do. In some cases, they don't. But you're kind of always trying to process that part of it. And it does something really strange and different, which is think of the pace of a dialogue box in a given

visual novel, right? Got it, yeah. In Disco Elysium, you get a paragraph at a time. In a random persona game, you're going to get a couple, two, three sentences together. In Nier Automata, it kerns alongside the voice acting. In this game, every thought in every sentence is isolated. game every thought in every sentence is isolated so one sentence will get broken up into three a button presses I gotta watch this I gotta see what the fuck you talk and it'll be like this is well a we started the podcast a little late today, like say around press a 10 minutes later.

You know, like it breaks each thought up more and it slows things down. But it makes you like think a bit more about what they're saying at the same time. It's it's it's like it's a pace slowing down thing, but like it does make things have a bit more emphasis during sentimental moments, you know? It's theatrical, it's theatrical. Think of people on a stage in a play, speaking, enunciating a thought, a word, an idea. Each one of those. This is making me so frustrated idea each one of those is making me so

Frustrated one of those commas were like a button. I'm getting so I know you fucking trigger. I know here I swear to God I know But it's trying to do things and it's doing our things and it's doing our things that I like that you might not like so When you see the overwhelming positive remember that that doesn't necessarily mean pat positive, you know, it's true. You're a you're a weirdo So what? Oh, you're not a weirdo I just wanted to act indignant. You didn't have to fucking Yeah, so though we're continuing a little bit of that and you know, cyberpunk and such over on wooly versus on YouTube and on Twitch and yeah, wooly wools on my socials as well.

Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. Let's do it This week the podcast is sponsored by Shopify a cha-ching sound effect You drop that in there and that's the sound of a sale. Oh, I remember Back at the old house was growing up and they actually had like a cash register that had the little oh, I love those It's so cool It's so it feels fun to tactile press keypad buttons and hear the cr-ring, you know, and then it cranks open.

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They certainly came in handy when we had to go from talking bullshit into a microphone to figuring out a t-shirt and how to get it to people. That integration was fairly simple and easy and much appreciated. Yeah, from your first sale online to your millionth, holy shit, I can't believe it's actually working. Shopify is there with their award-winning customer service and support for you. So check them out. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash SuperBeast, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Superbeast to upgrade your selling today. One more time, that is Shopify.com slash Superbeast.

Thank you, Shopify. Thanks, Shopify. This week, the podcast is also sponsored by Factor Meals. Oh, hey, Factor. factor. You are talking about the ability to get chef made gourmet ready to eat in two minutes. Delivered straight to you. So you're active busy lifestyle, or lazy. Like anytime you see, anytime you see, anytime you see active or busy, and you can just just in brackets, autocomplete,

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And last but always certainly not least this week, the podcast is sponsored by Boot.dev. Hey, Boot.dev, I need to learn something. Help. The super cool way to learn programming. Really fun idea and just, yeah, one of these concepts that I find super dope and I think could help if there were more things in life that followed in the footsteps, pun intended, of boot.dev. If you are trying to get into backend web development

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And your eyes glaze over it can get very very difficult and let's be real Your tick-tock attention span poisoned. It's over You can't you can't read a book. No, you can't read a book anymore The original ways to learn things no longer work on your your brain Dope and so that's where boot dev comes in handy because learning to program is playing a game. The whole site is set up like an RPG where you go through levels, you earn experience, you unlock achievements, you complete quests, and you compete for a top spot on the global leaderboard while going through different challenges that each level asks you to solve a programming

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Programming is magic. You're learning how to cast spells. It makes sense that this whole thing is RPG setup because it really is the equivalent of that in certain fictions and stuff. In this case, when you're progressing through the lessons, you actually unlock a spellbook that has a cheat sheet of links and notes that you can review at any time as well. Check them out. Go to boot.dev and use the code castle super beast and you'll get 25% off

your entire first year if you choose the annual plan. One more time. That's boot.dev and use the code castle super beast and you'll get 25% off your entire first year if you choose the annual plan. Thank you, boot.dev. Thanks boot.dev. Yeah. Yes, that is all one word. All righty. So as I was saying earlier on, don't you worry about your Monster Hunter being cut short because there's always Dauntless, the monster hunter-like that's been around for a couple years now, and has a very beloved fan base that people are enjoying. No, that game's been trash forever.

No, people are enjoying Dauntless. No, no, that game is straight garbage. You can you can shoot the guns and you can No, no that that game's fucking shit So for whatever it's been shit the whole time so that I It seems like there are people who will fight you on whether or not that that be the case What it oh it got way worse. It got way worse. One thing is clear.

Yes, over time, and specifically with the last update in particular, it became completely, it was dead in the water. Hey, is that because they got bought by new people and then they tried to wring every single ounce of blood out of the stone that they had? That is correct. Ding ding ding.

Oh, that's crazy. So the story is that free to play Monster Hunter like Dauntless is shutting down on May 29th following Mass Studio layoffs. Hey, there's that word again. Sure hope we don't hear that over and over and over and over and over again. But yes, so Dauntless was in a state apparently that had two years go by with no new updates or anything for a while. What happened was at some point, the company behind it, Phoenix Labs, got bought by a company called Garina,

which basically bought out their studios. And after being with them for a while, Phoenix Labs bought themselves out of the deal. So they retained their own rights. And then with their freedom, they sold themselves to an NFT blockchain dev named Forte. With their freedom, they discovered that they too could kill themselves.

I'm free, give me that knife. And so what ends up happening in game is probably, yeah, well, I was gonna tell the story and then hit that point as the explanation after the fact, but it doesn't matter. After two years of nothing, they eventually did have a big update where they introduced something like one of the big new features was weapon switching mid-hunt, which was something you couldn't previously do before.

Oh, cool. And that sounded great. But the trade- off was every player's unlocked progression of weapon unlocks were all taken away. Everything that you'd possibly spent the hundreds of hours unlocking and such over the course of a free to play game you can imagine got pulled away from everyone. And so you instead received tokens. They sunset me, boss. They sunset my ass. So depending on how much you had unlocked, you would receive tokens to make up for that

progress. However, the token purchasing power could barely buy back one or two of the strongest weapons or if you had a collection of them. Oh, and also now weapon subtypes are now limited to loot boxes. And the weapons that you were buying back that you could barely afford to buy back were unupgraded and if you lost upgrades, which also took tons of time, you now had to go through hundreds of hunts worth of grinding to regain the same level that you were at before with said weapons instead. So yeah, they took away what people had already gotten and then dropped in a token based system. Of course they did. And then of course all

the original devs by that point were fired. Everyone was light off, and so it just kind of seems like the NFT blockchain dev decided to run one last grift on the game before shutting it down on May 29th. Now, I want to be super clear. I'm going to say it again. These guys totally ruined an already bad game. Like it was bad and not worth playing before and then they ruined it more. There is something interesting about like when I was looking up, when I saw the story

and people who did like Dauntless were kind of overall were like, yeah, when the game stopped getting updated and we were still playing it, they were kind of expecting at some point it would just announce it would be shut down at some point. And they were kind of waiting, you know, for that while being fine with it, essentially being like, yeah, okay,

I guess the, you know, ride rides coming to an end but no one could Have foreseen the we're actively going to kill it harder and faster than you ever could have imagined with a nice big shit on the floor on the way out the door So I just maybe this is the wrong battle to have right now, but we have some Dauntless fans in the chat and They like Dauntless and that's fine. I hope you enjoyed it. But out of the multiple Monster Hunter clones that came out, Dauntless was like one of the worst ones. It's, it's okay. I don't know. I've never touched it. So that's not even, I don't even care about the get that part of the story per se for anyone that oh, you know what?

You know what part of the story this is this is what we're talking about earlier with City of the Wharves. Oh Okay, if the game was worse Yeah, well and like what I'm what matters ultimately is that like the moment you're doing this like We're changing the entire system of progression fuck you, but here's here's some tokens for here's a pittance for your troubles And you go that's this that's scummy as fuck who would do that? Oh, oh That's who would do it This this game has been so cursed throughout its life because it got announced a long time

ago and it was like, hey guys, they're never going to bring Monster Hunter to PC or to consoles ever again. It's just going to be handheld. So you know what? We're going to make a Monster Hunter like game that you can play on PC. And then like, I feel like it was like two months before the game came out, World got announced. A Monster Hunter style game you can play on PC like Wild Hearts?

No, I'm talking about like seven, eight years ago. Oh, okay. A while ago. Yeah. I'm talking pre-World. Okay. Okay. And then then Monster Hunter World gets announced as hey man it's a Monster Hunter for consoles like Dauntless but but it's actually Monster Hunter. Well again the timing couldn't be better to have to this right on Wild's o'clock. Yeah.

Yeah, those are probably related. I wonder if you'll be able to beat Monster Hunter Wild so fast that you'll be able to play Dauntless before it shuts down. You can play up until May 29th. Oh, then definitely. Yeah, definitely All right, so yeah, that's good that's going on Beyond that What is going on with destiny too?

so This is a follow-up to an earlier story. Basically, there's a gentleman who put up this essentially fan fiction or what-if on his WordPress about an enemy faction that Destiny could have, and then he was very surprised when that enemy faction became the major enemy antagonist of Destiny 2 almost down to the letter. I believe it was like the Red Legion faction and he's like it really looks like they stole that shit off my WordPress page and whether or not that's viable or not is not actually the part that's funny. It does, I read over some of it. It does really look like they fucking lifted it, but

What's funny is that during the court case? They're submitting a youtuber my name is Biff or bife or his his YouTube videos as proof of the details of the game's campaign because the campaign no longer exists and apparently Bungie doesn't even have videos of the campaign anymore. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

So they're submitting Destiny's Vaati video. Pat? Lore videos as court case documents. Don't let anyone ever tell you that what you do is not important. Oh. It might be exhibit A someday if the company themselves can't be asked

to actually have footage of their own shit. That's incredible. Their own policies meant they couldn't go back and pull what they needed. I can't believe that they don't have a build or something. That they actually deleted it? Like what the fuck? I mean, I'm not gonna lie.

If I can catch the words, your honor, I present exhibit B, heaven or hell, duel two, timeline of guilty gear X. I would be super pumped to fucking have that be the deciding factor in some kind of case. That's that's great so yeah, it's it's it is is total nonsense and it Everything destiny to becoming the the be all like live service thing and then just making every live service thing Mistake possible. It's just been fascinating to watch.

It's so interesting how outside of the industry, there's a feeling a lot of the time that is like, okay, there's the official thing and every major IP has its Bible and its world and everything happening internally is like a closed bubble. And then people outside are looking in at the glass of the fishbowl, trying to interpret and writing it down and telling everybody about what's going on. But you have no idea about the inner workings and details and things that are being hinted at and such. And then finding out that like fast forwarding a couple years, it's like, no, man, internally, when someone's writing something and they go, yeah, let me just YouTube what this person,

what this YouTuber said about this thing in the last game. And then that's the canon, you know, like not everything has a Bible or a reference point or whatever. The shit that's going out there that the fans are discussing is the most in depth parts of the entire IP, and the actual official shit is way more shallow and nobody's in charge of or knows what's where. The video that is being referenced here

is from eight months ago, and it's the complete story of Destiny. So, is it My Name is Bife? My mistake, everybody, but My Name is Bife has made a huge amount of success off of Destiny, and he has extraordinarily well-produced, complete, well-researched Destiny lore videos. It's very similar to like, Fatih videos, just for Destiny. And a large part of the success of those videos is not just his incredible production and hot British voice, or Australian? It's in there. But it's the fact that the comparative difficulty of acquiring any of that information yourself

is almost impossible. Okay. It's one so those things. Yeah, destiny ones, all of its codecs, like it's Mass Effect codecs stuff, all the poetry, all the the the stories, all the details, all that. That was all on like a third party website that you had to scan in game and then go to your account that you linked to it on a different website. Every single piece of interesting thing that you've heard about Destiny was from people learning it off of this guy's videos

because it's impossible to actually get it out of the game yourself. Yep. Yep. Hey, did you play the Pachinko Guilty Gear game? Then you're missing out on crucial lore. Did you browse the Miiverse? Then you're missing out on crucial Kirby lore. It's the only place to get it. I mean, there's tons of people saying things, but somebody

like just just every like main antagonists, their backstories or what they do or how the religion of the main antagonist faction works is not available in the game. You have to go to this dude's YouTube to get it. Insane. And I don't know where he's getting it, but he's getting it from somewhere. And then when it comes down to official resources, what they go and grab is what the fans are making. Huh. Yeah, it's just a... Embarrassing. Embarrassing.

And this is any time that like an original writer or so is no longer around and like things have moved on and we're fast forwarding a decade or two into a franchise where like a whole new team are coming in and basically picking up and trying to get into writing a world or so. It's not someone's straight original vision. For sure there's YouTubing going on. There's absolute, there's YouT YouTubeing and there's Wiki diving happening officially on company time.

And like, that's not even getting into the vaulted stuff or the seasonal. Like, they'll have like... I remember the time I stopped playing Destiny, they had this massive seasonal event where you went into like the... I forget what it's called. It was like the Vex infinite hallway or whatever to save a character who had died years prior and then it became a character in the game's narrative and he hung out on the the hub and all that and then after that three month period ended. Hey, how come Saint 14 is here? Isn't he dead? Yeah, I know we saved him. Really? How? Oh, it's gone now.

You can't do that mission anymore and all the dialogue around it is gone and there is not a single piece of information in the live game now that will tell you why Saint-14 is standing over there alive. This is strange as someone who's seen snippets of that game through a couple bits of gameplay here and there, but the overall impression from launch, because that's what I played, was like the Peter Dinklage. Million years ago. Yeah. And that was the thing where the feeling was the story of the traveler and this world and all of this, the lore is going be the bigger deal, you know? The lore is the biggest.

It's actually very interesting once you go to Bife's YouTube channel. Ha ha ha ha. Like when EpicNameBro and VaatiVidia started doing this for Dark Souls, it was because of Dark Souls is narrative style, which is fucking read it, but nobody read that shit. Right. And so you as a player, when you started doing Elden Ring, because you've been trained by multiple games, you

could exercise a huge proportion of that games hidden narrative and hidden lore for yourself. But with destiny, it's not about being able to know where to look. It's gone. It's not there. I would even say that if those videos didn't exist, sure, someone might be able to grab a guide and get the info they need from there with Souls games, but the loading screens were training you to go look at the item descriptions because you would see something on a loading screen and go, wait, what was that? And then you'd have to go find it in the item descriptions and realize that, oh shit, there's lore in the item descriptions.

That's where the story is being told. So the game itself still taught you to do that. Yeah. No, the way that Bungie has treated their own franchise and the lack of respect they've given their own story is so weird. Because they want you to care about a story, but you don't know what's happening because you can't know because they took it away from you. And time-limited shit because of marketing and business and money-making purposes actively destroys your ability to tell stories because you could only access or know something if you were there for that moment in time

it's um we've been doing live service FOMO shit no I just the comment of this and it's also a bad story immediately followed by and the story's really good. Yeah, I love it. I love that. Yes! No, this is really important. Chaos! This is really important. If you are playing Destiny and you have all this background information and world building in your head, yeah, the things that are happening in the story can be pretty good sometimes.

If you don't, it's just complete nonsense that has no rhyme or reason and nothing leads to whatever and people are just doing things because the plot needs to get them. Right. It's just, it's a mess. Well, speaking of messes. Oh yeah. Hey. Oh, oh, oh, oh, I got it. Oh, yeah Hey, oh, oh, I got it We've been doing this live service thing for a while right the gas shit And I believe there I believe there was like Quantitative data on this but if there isn't I'm just going based off of vibes

when you are causing FOMO as the driving force to stay subscribed or stay in. As soon as the person misses that shit once, they're done. The spell is broken, right? The spell is instantaneously broken. Yeah. We've talked about this with MMOs and such because I despise FOMO as a motivator, you know? But yeah, that's, I get it. Look at Marvel Robles. I don't actually want to be here.

I kind of was just stuck in a pattern. Oh yeah. So speaking of messes. Here I thought Wonder Woman died because of Kill the Justice League. That's true. Turns out it's actually just Warner Brothers games doing the assassinating. So I saw someone in the chat mention that they worked for Monolith, or rather worked for Monolith until this morning

and I I welcome you into the brotherhood of being fired by Warner Brothers Big big big club big club a lot of a lot of a lot of numbers in that club. So monolith productions The shadows of mortar people not to be confused with Modelist Soft of the Monado fame, are being shut down by Warner Brothers games. They're making huge cuts with that. Obviously Player First Games who are responsible for multiverses and WB Games San Diego as well. The Wonder Woman game that's been in development for a really long time is also canceled, of course.

And yeah, all projects are shuttered. So hey, no more Batman, no more Shadow of War, no more fear, no more. What happens to the Nemesis system? It's on patent till 2036. Okay, but now does that patent get dissolved? What happens to the Nemesis system? It's on Pat until 2036. Okay. But now does that patent get dissolved?

No. It's on Pat until 2036. Warner Brothers as a company still exists. Yep. Therefore... And they don't have to use it until 2036. Damn. My eye.

I'll never forgive you for taking my eye. People are pointing out that the Nemesis system does exist in other games, like it is in Warframe. It's just not called that? Oh, okay, alright. It's called the fucking Lich Kuva, Kuva Lich system or whatever the fuck. It's the revenge, contextual revenge system. Like yes, this is a design that video games can have. You think if anybody makes a story

where the player makes a choice over something and then there's a get back over that later, they can get sued? So, this is essentially all of Warner Brothers' games, right? What else do they got? They got Mortal Kombat, they got... Rocksteady? They said that... Well, Rocksteady's probably next, because they cancelled the Wonder Woman game on them.

Netherrealm? Rocksteady and Netherrealm. MK is MK. Oh yeah, who made Harry Potter? I have no idea. But they're going to focus on Mortal Kombat, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones, vital gaming franchises. It's part of their...

Hogwarts legacy was developed by Avalanche and Shiver. Avalanche, is that the same folks that did... Just cause? Justice League heroes? Who knows? You would. Yeah, I literally went into the studio to work on that game on Hit Squad. So someone in the chat pointed something out that's the most interesting part of the story because how devious and evil it is.

So a couple years ago when Warner Brothers started a clean house, people asked the lead on Multiverses, what does this mean for Multiverses? This is like 23, I think, or early 24, to which he said, don't worry. And we talked about on the podcast. Multi versus has a multi year support contract with Warner Brothers were locked in. Right. I'm sure you remember that. Well, Warner Brothers bought player first games last year in the summer, which means they now had a contract with themselves, which they no longer had to abide by. So buying Ready First was probably so they could fire them.

In order to kill multiverses, they would need to own the company. Don't worry until it's time to worry. I'm sure the gamble was, but what if it comes back strong? What if it's fine? What if they come back and the whole thing's a huge success? I don't think it would have mattered the way that they're running things over WB. Well, using someone's services and then letting them go regardless of success or not success is starting to become more and more of a recognizable trend,

certainly. Yeah, surprised Pikachu face. The, those studios and getting shut down and yeah, player first, whether or not multiverses, well, multiverses having a long online service tail is always like one of those things that you can imagine. Well, okay, we need someone to keep this going if it continues to make money and the cost of keeping the servers up is worth it because of whatever the costs are.

But that exact same playbook, well, guess what? We were talking about Marvel Rivals last week. NetEase is also making tons of cuts. The... Oh, NetEase is making some deep cuts. They are in a lot of places in the industry as well. And yeah, the decision to pull back to just China was not the only thing. So the studio, Worlds Unt from, that was by Mass Effect veteran Mack Walters, got closed. Jar of Sparks, the Halo Infinite design boss Jerry Hook's team. Liquid Sword, the company founded by the creators of Just Cause. A lot of shit has been getting

shut. Nogoshi and Suda51's games are being told that they're not going to get any more time, any more money, and no, they won't get any advertising. And they're probably gonna be shown the door the day those games came out. Remember, I was streaming a sponsored fucking Visions of Mana stream when they fired those people. They did not even wait for the advertisement bump to go to finish. So the story there is Yakuza creators next game could be in trouble. So it's not a cancellation announcement but it certainly is a mmm. Put it out so we can be done with you. No additional funding. Yeah, exactly.

And the idea that no matter what happens, it's unlikely to meet expectations. But you know who's going to be fine, though? Who's going to be fine? Quantic Dream. Are they? Yeah. I didn't know that Quantic Dream was owned by NetEase, but they are.

They are? They are. Quantic Dream, the NetEase-owned developer behind Heavy Rain Detroit and the upcoming Star Wars Eclipse, has broken its silence following the layoffs and shutdowns across numerous other NetEase studios. Upcoming Star Wars eclipse. Get that. In a statement posted, the Quantik Dream CEO Guillaume de Fontdemer said that the studio's

teams had not been impacted by NetEase's dramatic cuts and they were continuing to develop projects at full pace. Yeah? Yeah. Are they? Show it. I had no idea NetEase was involved with Quantic Dream. And that is now something to consider anytime we hear any announcements about anything they work on. Also, that's another Disney connection that NetEase is making at a high level there.

So if they're working with them on multiple projects and properties and being like, okay, who do you have that's big that can take this thing? That's why they took Star Wars and put it over there and they took Marvel Comics and put it over here. Yeah, that checks out a little bit more with their overall branding decisions. Oh man, that Star Wars game that they're making, apparently, that I don't believe is gonna be really good, I bet when it comes out, it's not gonna come out.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, we all know that David Cage has displayed tons of cultural understanding about China. When you look back at his librarian character. Oh, they probably love that. And don't forget, that's probably why they bought don't forget the other librarian character. Both of which there was there a third there might have been a third librarian. It's possible. Yeah. With the foot with the voice and the teeth and the hat and everything. Like all in. Dude, I just I just want to put this back out into the into the into the airwaves that like The Star Wars eclipse got got fucking announced and then the very first piece of news After that from Quantic Dream was we were having an incredibly difficult time

Staffing up because of all the laws now full force guys full force Full steam ahead. Yeah. Oh, and then the piece of news after that was that they were modeling full actor bodies naked without permission. After showing up with a stalker journal to the first meeting. It's fine. Yeah. Sacre bleu. Damn.

David Cage can ease his way out of that anyway. Whatever the case is. Also speaking on the side note on that, apparently there's a, not Detroit, not heavy rain, what the fuck is it called? Not Detroit, not heavy rain beyond two souls Apparently Elliot page is like got the rights to a movie for that or something and so there might actually be like a film production or something so We'll see whatever happened, but it's already like a movie why bother Elliot

It's already a movie. I gotta take I gotta take a quick break. I'm being messaged by the ghost of myself Excuse me ERP Right. What were we talking about? Don't work in the games business Don't do it quantum dream net ease I Can't believe that we also got fired by WB. That's so fucking crazy. Chinese underwater ghost layoffs. Hard to lay off ghosts.

Especially if they're secretly Chinese and underwater. I can't stop thinking about that fucking tweet about I became Chinese and you have to go find them like I can't stop thinking about it. All right. Well that aside I guess there's some announcements for some new stuff apparently. Well, actually we kind of knew this already but Konami and

Bloober team are working on a new game following the success of Silent Hill 2. It's Silent Hill 3. Based on Konami's IP, but not explicitly confirmed to be SH. It's Silent Hill 3. Why jump to 3 without doing 1 though? Because you have the assets that you made for two but then the narrative is weird no you do it it's fine you could I guess it would just be like not as strong as if you you know did the one three yeah you're right

Konami really gives a shit about the integrity of its sequel. I know I know by the way by Metal Gear Solid Delta The first game canonically in the series Like I knew that was coming and I'm like, yeah Said they should do four they should do four. It's gonna be three, but they should do four Four needs it the most Well, everyone asks like hey, we got an email about this. Why don't they make remakes of bad games? It's like well cuz there's shit. No one loves them. But like MGS, sorry MGS 4 and Silent Hill 4 both bad games, right? Right. It could be saved

We've we've we had this discussion and we talked about Devil May Cry 2 Yeah Why would you not just make Devil May Cry 6 instead of Devil May Cry 2? Okay, monkey's paw Why would you not just make Devil May Cry 6 instead of Devil May Cry 2 again? Okay, Monkey's Paw. Kamiya is back working with Capcom. He gets to make Devil May Cry 2, but it's his Dante and his Devil May Cry and not the one, not the Itsuno one, but it's replacing Devil May Cry 2. I don't care.

It's not the ones we know and love but it's replacing the worst game because that's the only game he can onically, you know, yeah. That's what a weird situation there. That's funny. If they did do that, it should be called Devil May Cry 2 but it should be spelled T-O-O. T-O-O. Mm-hmm. It's just because even if DMC2 was good, you know that Kimya would just... DMC2's best game, dude.

Come on. But he would still want to just replace 2 anyway, because it's like my game stopped with 1. one so we saw that seems like Tony Hawk is gonna be his teasing three plus four remake how fucking thank God it's now I was such a bummer it was rated in Singapore as well so it's pretty much confirmed you know I've literally I own Tony Hawk Pro Skater one and two the remake and I've never even bothered to boot it. Oh yeah. Damn.

Why? So I can just get super mad about how I can't stream it? Yeah. Yeah. There's that. But what do you do? Do it for yourself I suppose. No.

Okay. I don't do that anymore. You don't do that anymore. Fuck yourself. I suppose no, okay. I don't do that. You don't do that anymore fuck yourself Fuck having fun alone. I'm playing KCD one so I can stream KCD, too I'm one of those Folks that has way more attachment to fourth into three I really Cuz I skip I didn't I didn't have three I got to oh well then that's then then that's when revert came in for you

And that's that's all yep I I completely missed three and then I went back to it after but I got four when it was on GameCube You know so because I missed it. It's just it's just I have no major Attachment to it or the soundtrack and it's it's like a bit of a you know a black space And then if we had that Canada map, that was cool. Whatever happens, as long as we eventually get to Thug, and... Oh no, that's...

I hope, I feel like... You're fucking dreaming. The world needs to know about Eric Sparrow. And... You are dreaming. But here's the thing Tony Hawk Needs the paycheck man. I'm fine. Do what you got to do. Does he yeah, does he's got a podcast He's out there figuring it out. He's not skating anymore as like to the fullest extent

He's doing his thing. I Think I think Tony Hawk is fine, man. I Think I think he's doing great. I guess. Maybe it's about maybe it's more about God, what's his name? His podcast is over apparently. The one with the wolf, what's his name? Fuck? Yeah, anyway, it's gone. The one with the Hawken burden word and wolf or With the wolf. What's his name? Fuck. Yeah.

Anyway, it's gone. The one with wolf? The hawking, bird and word and wolf or whatever. Anyway, it was Jason. Akira? Jason Ellis. Jason Ellis. The crazy Australian dude.

Well, my impression was that, well, I guess he needed the paycheck then perhaps whatever the case was. I don't want Tony Hawk to swoop in from the sky and steal my child. Can we get can we just get that Red Hawk sound effect on a button? For just... Well, you didn't even... Didn't even try. Didn't even really go for it. Didn't try.

You just kind of mumbled it out. Yeah. I was, I don't know, I think perhaps I'm misremembering something about Tony having a rough go of it. I mean, he's old now, not actually old, but old for his pro skater. Yeah, I guess old, but not necessarily broke. He's not, you know what? He's doing better than Bam Margera.

Is there news? No. That's just a statement. And that's actually all the more reason why we need to get to thug so that Eric Sparrow and his legacy and team bam versus team Tony can be a lesson that the world learns about a new generation. You just ruined my day. You just ruined my day.

You made me think that the next piece of news was going to be about Bam Marcher. I got so excited. Did you see how excited I got? You got very excited. It was almost as if Bam was a member of the royal family. I'm kind of surprised. Almost. Oh no, I know at least one friend of mine that's gonna have the same reaction listen to this pod

What the shit was that? Oh I don't like band Margera. Okay Okay, and like I I every time I see the phrase band Margera on an article. I'm like, oh it's today the dies In jail or something. Jesus, Bam, it's getting crazy out here. Maybe I'm crazy, but I remember watching the Bam Margera on Jackass and being like, nah. He's really mean to Phil.

Yeah, well. And I was like, I was like around his age and just being like, come on. Nah. He's really mean to Phil. Yeah, well. I was like around his age and just be like, come on. But as a teenage white boy, you were supposed to be way into that. How did it not work on you? He went way too far, dude. Jesus, man. Way too far.

The hell? Getting crazy out here. Anyway, you see Anna Williams? She's back in Tekken 8. She has a rocket launcher and jury's hairstyle. She also got younger again. Oh, they don't they don't age. They don't age. All right. Because of the freezing the freezing process. You know, yeah, that's fine. Yeah, she looks cool, man. I'm I'm I don't I feel as if the jury hair is like, that's

a choice. Yeah, no, of course it is. But hey, the rocket hair is like, that's a choice, you know? Of course it is. But hey, the rocket launcher is now part of her kit in the way that Nina's got the guns. And you know what, Nina fucking deserves it. So fine. Hit her ass with the stinger. She murdered your husband on your wedding day.

That was awesome. Like, you've, Nina super deserves everything she has coming, you know? Like, Anna's the like the crazy kind of like Yandere energy one. She's all like laughing and sultry and going nuts while Nina's all stoic. But like, Nina fucking deserves everything she has coming. The best thing Nina ever did was give birth to a more fun playable character That's fucking the way that sentence should have ended Like there's one ending to that set damn straight

All right, let's take some letters If you want to send in a letter send it to castle super beast mail at gmail.com. That's castle super beast Fuck it. My head is splitting. I feel like I'm gonna die apologies castle super beast mail at gmail.com Is that the right email yep, we got one coming in from Dragan 86 says hello swirl gamer and small gamer. Oh, swollen small. I recently learned through Eurogamer how Valve have banned a game forcing players to watch ads and they reiterated their stance about in-game ads and how they won't allow

that on the platform. True. We did talk about that. They've already had the anti-mobile game style thing. From a PC gamer's perspective, this is obviously great, but I'm thinking that this is Valve trying to cut a problem off at the pass. Absolutely. The inevitable response from gamers to unskippable in-game ads is to take to the high seas or to just not play those games entirely, which would reduce the number of sales and cut into the health of the industry. I don't know about that part. It's got me thinking. I think you're thinking a little bit too far ahead.

Yeah. That second conclusion, I don't agree with. This got me thinking. I think the first conclusion is rock solid, which is they looked at it and go, oh, this is going to be a fucking problem. Gross. This got me thinking about how the big corps like mega, like Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, et cetera, are pushing people into using their game streaming services and how other streaming services like Amazon and Netflix have pushed ads in their lower paid tiers. Do you think it's a guarantee that ads are coming to Game Pass slash GeForce now slash PlayStation streaming and how bad do you think the response is going to be? No, I don't think it's inevitable at all.

I think it is the single most likely audience to quit and pirate. Like it is the most informed audience in their ability to just give up on the whole system. And furthermore, I will say that alongside that, the likelihood to see various companies trying to test the waters is high. But it will be very, I think it'll show very clearly after a certain point that like, yeah, the rejection will be through the roof on that. Phones created that type of environment. And then like they were, like the phone game market kind of didn't emulate console gaming from the jump.

It came into and created a whole business around quick serve mini games that have a different purpose entirely and it's a parallel game industry. It doesn't run the same way, it doesn't have the same base core concepts. Yeah. Even mobile games just don't do it that much anymore. The shittier, more garbo ones do it

You're gonna, but you're gonna see testing of the waters. I'm seeing someone mentioned sports games have been doing it Yeah, but see that's the opposite of what I described sports game players are the most bought-in captive audience of dumb fucks ever because quality and Like basic stability have not mattered to them at all But and so you go hey, you know what watch ten ads for Arby's and they go. It's just like the football but Well if the ads are Super Bowl quality commercial, then, you know, hey, maybe you wanna stick around and fucking whatever, anyway.

And I wanna, mm, mm, after you. No, well, just to say that, like, that doesn't make that group of people exempt because it's like, that's still a part of what we're talking about. And there will be examples, like, for example, in sports games where you can talking about. And there will be examples like, for example, in sports games where you can probably get it, you can test the waters a little bit.

You can see how that goes, right? There will be attempts to do this because for sure, I'm sure a company like that, like an Amazon games that has been struggling to launch forever, you know, or to get anything off the ground, I've seen TVs now where it's like, the TV is a big screen TV that's free and there's a second screen underneath it that always has an ad.

That is something that they will continue to try for sure. But the ability for that to actually work broadly on a main console platform is highly limited in my opinion. Okay, so I want to say two things. One, I'm going to change my mind. Game Pass is going to have a free version that's ad supported. Game Pass is going to want to do the ad supported Netflix and it's going to ball. Oh, the thing that... Because the only way to make Game Pass work with the ads is boy those ads are gonna

Have to be fucking a lot. Are you say like very a lot? Are you saying this because Xbox is going to need to do whatever it can? No, I'm saying that Microsoft seems like the kind of motherfuckers to try that kind of shit Look all video games are free if you watch a one-minute ad every nine minutes And also it doesn't pause the game Can we force can we check to make sure that your eyeballs are locked onto the screen? Yeah, and the second thing is that I want to be very clear I hate people who play sport modern sports games so much because I used to be one of them and

I am I will eat you had a you play second Genesis games tons of mad games over the sports games used to be fucking peak up until like 2000 and fucking for I bought Regular amounts of fucking Madden on a regular basis. Yeah, I was a I was subscribed I can get my fucking hands on I could and I knew the differences between Quarterback Club and Madden back in the day and then the 2k franchise. They have been dog shit for decades. Decades of the worst sports games. It is unbelievable. So all this to say, I think I would draw a distinction between seeing

companies testing the waters and seeing it actually take off and work for them. I think those are two things that are highly different probabilities. Let's take one over here from Hot Pink Bunny. Hello, Garris and Fish Garris. Oh, cool. Can I be Fish Garris? I want to be Fish Garris. Okay. I'll just be regular Garis. I've been having fun playing Avowed, but as Pat pointed out, it's noticeable that the devs were working on a smaller budget.

The game's writing, however, does some heavy lifting to smooth that out. In Skyrim, if you lockpick an open chest found in military barracks surrounded by soldiers, they'll arrest you instantly. In Avowed, if you're the king's envoy, then everyone has been told to just let you do whatever you want so you can keep the contents of that chest after picking it open and the soldiers don't budge. Can you think of other times where the devs smartly hid the game's budget? I mean, I don't know if I would call that smart. That just feels-

I don't think that's smart. That's just a contri- That just feels lazy. Because also, like, and then my brain goes, well, you know, in Kingdom Come Deliverance too, people were confused about how the fucking crime system worked because they were like, no one saw me break into this house and steal anything until people figured out that if you walk out of an open door and an NPC sees you, they will then go search their house and if they find shit missing, they will assume that you stole it. You just talked about the actual in-depth nature of that game by comparison.

Yeah, that seems extremely contrived Yeah in Superman 64 Lex Luster released kryptonite gas into the city and that meant that you couldn't see metropolis from more than a couple feet away And that's why Superman had a hard time making it through metropolis, but The plot wasn't integral to why you couldn't see beyond the draw distance of a couple feet I the plot wasn't integral to why you couldn't see beyond the draw distance of a couple feet? I have one for development budget, like performance budget, and I think about Metal Grisaldi one, and I think about an interview with Kojumbo

in which they asked him, why is the game so dark and why does it take place entirely at night? He's like, oh, because you can hide the really ugly parts of the textures in dark corners. There's always a seed that needs hiding. Stick it over there. Yeah, okay. Okay. Or you can make a really big expensive texture that loads, makes the game way bigger.

Nah, fuck that. I like avowed, but it is missing something. I agree. I agree. And I don't I don't know. I don't know what it is. It is very similar to Outer Worlds. Outer Worlds. It plays way better, but it's less thematically interesting Like Like I just just make just make another top-down Baldur's Gate style game You know what I think happened. I think I because I realized something

Every time I boot up steam. I've been seeing that ad for Avowed with the beautiful skull that's all... Oh, it's so cool. That's all mossed over with mushroom shit. And that has put the impression in my head that this is a super high budget massive release high profile game. And I've seen it so much, it's been the front page on every single time I Mooted, that that expectation of polish was far from what I saw. It's kind of a bummer. We keep having a variation. So before we leave, we keep having a variation of two conversations back to back that need to be resolved, even though they don't seem like they're similar.

We keep having the discussion of this game is full price, but it doesn't look or sound or act or play as good as this other full price game despite being in the same genre and from similar devs. And then we also have everything but the biggest game ever results in horrible layoffs. And it's like, can we not just downscale these games in general? Like does avowed need to be as big as it is? Couldn't it just be a smaller scale game that didn't mean it was directly compared to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, which is like this gigantic super game. They came out at the same fucking time. I want smaller games with worse graphics and less devs who are paid more to make less,

and I want them to never come out like Silksong. Oh, you fucking bitch. You fucking bitch. Why you do this? You're mean. You're a mean man. Oop-a. We're in a fucking massive glut of that game didn't come out right now. Just a terrible, ridiculous glut of, oh yeah, I got canceled, didn't get canceled, didn't come out, oh fucking, fucking scong. All right, last one coming in from Dylan says,

hey Pat Velden, wool dow. Dylan here, and I wanted to share with you guys a tradition I've noticed that coincides with every release of a Monster Hunter game going back for quite a while. Pat might know that swung. Oh, fuck yeah, I know exactly what it's gonna be. Which might get a kick out of it. Willie?

Every single time there's a Monster Hunter release about a week or so before the game comes out, a photo will begin circulating around the internet. And every single time this photo is of dogshit quality. Blurry, bigfoot-esque photo. Supposedly depicting the final boss of a new game which Capcom has shown no hide no hair of in its promotional material but everyone knows will be there it happens this way every single goddamn time every time no matter the year I find it truly fascinating and honestly I hope it never changes the endless speculation of here's my idea how it looks fan art and is almost mystical.

Shout out to this year's edition though for receiving sexy monster girl variation fan art before anyone could figure out what the fuck they were actually looking at. God, I love these games. I see it every time. I think my personal favorite was Monster Hunter World. It was a Russian guy streaming the final boss at what I can only describe it as 60p. Like, like, if people who saw that stream know what I'm talking about, it was, it was, it was soup. It was absolute soup. it was impossible to tell. We live in a world of 8K images. Resolutions that you can see the pores

on the details of your characters. And still, there's a little fucking JPEG that you gotta... So dude, the one, this one around, it's like, I can't even describe its shape. And people are trying to like, use red lines to note where the fucking body, like the different parts of the body are. It's so fucking funny. Show me the glare of the fucking TV screen you captured this on. Let's go. Oh man, that's great. That's a great tradition. It is, it is in fact every time. It's a really funny.

And it's an actual photo or is it like... Usually it is like a Nokia cell phone photo or some bullshit. It's always like a photo with like a really bad phone camera that is at like an off angle from the TV and the brightness or the saturation is so high that it fucks it up The real hero is the one who captures direct feed footage and then fucks it up on deep fries it on purpose I still think and we said this before so sorry if you all time, but the the all-time greatest leak ever Was halo 3 in a barn halo in a barn Halo and I was that was a fucking production. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And they never got caught either.

No, you're gonna need to send a forensic team down to the Pinkertons are gonna have to identify which barn. Hell yeah, that's great. And what's funny is that I got to see what the Halo 3 palette looked like when it came into a game store. And it had anti-tamper shit all over the shipping palette like if it had like these these

Colorful straps that were all over that if you tried to finagle one out It would be really obvious and they would snap open you could see was tampered with I mean if you You're he went through that person that leaker went through the trouble of like plugging a CRT TV into a barn and setting it up. God bless. Have fun. Yeah. Alright. Alright, have a good week everyone. Does the sexy monster variation of the final boss clue you in at all as to what to be expected here?

of the final boss clue you in at all as to what to be expected here? Well, so there's variations on what goes on in Monster Hunter. And then there's, you know, there's like, are you looking at the photos? But nowadays we have the data miners. Pat, the correct answer was Nightmare Basil Geese. Nightmare... Not, not, not yet, but soon nightmare geese basil Geese and nightmare. It's the kid. Come on. I have a very bad headache. I'm on my low game. Goodbye you