Castle Super Beast - CSB321: Empty Nest Gaming

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Twitch VODs are now being uploaded to the new channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive We Play Expedition 33 Like Sickos, Don't Listen To Us New Channel: Castle Super Beast Archive An Elevator Pitch For Kill Knight Marathon: Cut The Cheque Or Get Cooked AI Darth Vader & The Race For Fortnite Slur Content Watch live: twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://shopmando.com/ and use code BEAST at checkout - new customers get $5 off a Starter Pack (over 40% off). - Go to http://rocketmoney.com/superbeast to cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. - Go to http://hellofresh.com/superbeast10fm to get 10 free meals with a free item for life. - Go to https://www.turtlebeach.com/CASTLE and use code CASTLE to get 10% off your entire order. Clair Obscur's director Guillaume Brioche has an old YouTube channel full of masterful no-hit Devil May Cry videos because of course he does | PC Gamer Where To Find Fortnite’s AI Darth Vader, Already Swearing And Using Slurs Labor dispute erupts over AI-voiced Darth Vader in Fortnite: SAG-AFTRA claims Epic didn't negotiate video game AI voice replacement terms. New ‘Marathon’ Info: Bungie Morale, Launch Worries And Changing Plans Bungie Stealing ‘Marathon’ Art Is Probably The Last Straw https://antireal.info/ Artist accuses PlayStation game maker Bungie of lifting her work - The Washington Post There's an Offical Marathon stream going on right now with the Art Director and its going as well as you expect it to Kojima is leaving behind a USB stick with game ideas for after he dies. He says it's "kind of like a will." Lego shuts down Bionicle fan game Masks of Power after 8 years of work Project Rustbound on Steam Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford comments on $80 price tag: “True fans will pay for games”

["Sailor Moon Theme"] Hello. Hey, Walz, how you doing, man? Yeah. Welcome to fucking video games. Am I right? Yeah That's the other name for the podcast Is this gonna be the fourth week in a row in which we go man expedition 33 is so sick. It's so fucking sick, bro Oh shit, at least until credits are hit. Yes. Guess what it is Best blue mage it's ever been in anything. Yeah There we go anyone to bring me a better blue mage. There we go. There we go. Okay

I that is a shadow hearts character. That is a that is a shadow hearts character. That is a PlayStation 1 era Like niche character. That is great. I've never played anyone with a Card rotation systems like that. So that's I found that to be pretty fun. That is great. I've never played anyone with a card rotation systems like that, so I found that to be pretty fun. That's interesting. Yeah, I don't have a ton to say personally this week in terms of like- Oh, it's good.

Yeah, progress and again, no spoiling, but I'm just enjoying the little to little scenes and hangouts and conversations between all the characters. Those are fun. The skits, as a Tales game would call them, I'm enjoying continuing to break the build and the game open. And I'm also very, so the difficulty that comes from creating a build that just stomps everything into the dirt

and then increasing the difficulty to expert and then it's like, it's not enough. It's not nearly enough. I have found myself now, like basically, there's been some points I've hit where like big, cool fights happen, and I stomp it without getting touched. And I mean without the boss getting a turn.

I have setups where the boss doesn't get to act. And then reloading my save and standing there and watching them do all the cool stuff and then watching them say stuff and watching the phases change and then being like, okay, okay, got it. That's what it actually looks like, you know, because it's really fucking feast or famine and that does not lighten up as you progress.

So I talked about this on my stream and I had this weird moment where I was like overleveled for the stuff I was doing and I had built up a build with my pictos in the Expedition 33 and I was like and I said the phrase I don't understand what's happening. I didn't even do anything. Why am I so much stronger? To which someone at a later point in a comment said, Pat's saying he doesn't do anything

when he spent the first 40 minutes of today's stream fighting a boss he was too weak for and then beating it. Yeah, yeah, right. And then getting the XP and the picked over rewards from it. And it made me think a lot about like what the purpose of side content is in games anymore. It used to be in my in my recollection that the side content was there to get you up to speed for the main content. The main content was always the hardest, and the side content was the easy stuff that could get you a numerical advantage to help you with the main content. But in today's world

of the critical path, those have been inverted. Now, the main stuff is what they want everyone to be able to get through, is by far the easier path. And the side stuff is its own internal progression of difficulty. And it makes me think of like FF7 Rebirth in which like all the stuff on the side was harder than all the stuff in the main. Yes, you choose because you choose to subject yourself to those challenges versus wanting to just get that narrative, you know. And it makes me think about how like it's strange because like, OK, I am loving the game, so I want to see more of it. So by doing I'm doing all the side content to see more of it.

I don't want that to then make the main thing, the guts of it go faster. But this is this is, it's a side consequence of an understandable change in the way games are made, which is just we want more people to be able to play them and handle the difficulty and progression as you do. And there's definitely a lot of people who are like, well, I don't need easy, but I also need something less than that super boss.

So if that super boss requirement is mandatory for progressing, that makes me feel bad versus the idea of it just being optional. And then you're getting an outfit for it. You get a silly hat when you beat the super boss. And the game's curve is like flying all over the place. So that's actually... I fought a very important boss and I did not stomp them into dirt.

Like I had a boss fight, right? Like, and I was very happy with that. But prior I had a boss that was built up as just the, the boss of the Forgotten Battlefield, um, that's built up as the coolest. And I'm like, man, like that, like nothing. The, the, no, no, no. Okay. So the Forgotten Battlefield boss was one of the Yeah, like nothing. No, no, no. Okay. So the forgotten battlefield boss was one of the largest like

dissident moments of all that build-up and what a bitch, you know Oh, yeah, and he was a cool bitch, but wow you went down like nothing You know like what he gave me this the the sword I got was pretty good I'm not I've never taken it off. But yes the build-up for what you actually challenged and to be fair There's like there's a couple of lines the characters have that more or less underlined that like huh? They're like oh, this is so hard will we even make it or whatever no no no no like after the fact There's a I guess it wasn't that bad after all. Huh no he literally goes guess it wasn't that bad after all. No he literally goes guess it wasn't that bad after all. So you know but anyway um so what you're describing is actually like

this game is kind of exposing some some inner truths that we already know but like it has the strangest difficulty curve because we are discussing it amongst ourselves as we know each other and then now everyone else is hearing this conversation. I saw a great thread. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That they were, you saw that? Yeah, I'm pretty sure I know what you're about to say. Where someone was like,

I've been listening to Pat and Willie talk about Expedition 33, and it seems like the most miserable fucking shit. Oh my God. I don't wanna have anything to do with it. They're talking about their fucking builds and all these fucking nitty gritty mechanical things. I just want to play RPG. And the difficulty curve thing that I'm talking about

doesn't exist for a person who just wants to play RPG. And I think the thought was also like, it seemed like the most miserable thing ever and so brutal. And then when I- I'm having so much fun. And it's so simple and dumb. And when I played it, I'm having a good time

and it has nothing to do with what they're talking about. And it's like, right. So what we have here is like, if you are playing games for a certain thing, if you're conditioned a certain way in your brain, if you walk up to a boss and the boss in its first combo wipes your team and you go, huh? And then you take a swing at it and you see a little pip of damage go away and you go, huh? And you're like, it's not about 20 minutes. Okay, I can do math on that. Right. And then

you're like, and what about this pattern? Can I do, and then you kind of walk back in there, right? If you don't immediately, like, like if you don't immediately turn around and 180 and be like, I'll be back later, that's probably intended, you know? But you can also like, go like, ah, is this real yet? You can get that in between point. And in this game, obviously, since you can just fight

and beat something that you're way underleveled for through sheer grit, your grit determines how far you fucking go and how fast you level up. There's no such thing as, in this game, an intended median user path, right? It feels like it's completely up to you how much punishment you're willing to take. How confident do you feel in this moment right now?

Yeah, you know? And it's been really like, it's very rare that you encounter a game that that's that open, and you kind of think about that. And then you find out something about the director, and then you go. Something very important. You find out two something about the director, and then you go... Something very important. You find out two things about that director.

Number one, number one is, what are your three favorite video games? In order, fucking Devil May Cry, one to five, Dark Souls slash Elden Ring, Final Fantasy VIII. And then... It's like, on how you want to play this game You can make this turn based Devil May Cry if you'd like to make this turn based Dark Souls if you'd like Or you can make it turn based Final Fantasy 8 like the Picto system and Lumina is based off of the draw system And Junctioning it It's just junctioning.

So made for me finally. Yeah. And the second piece of information you find out is that, Monsieur Guillaume Brioche, the director of Claire Obscur. Could that be a Frencher name if you tried? I'm like, I have to go back through my mental roller desks to see if I'm like, do I know this person? Because I might.

It's crazy how much that sounds like somebody that I know. We've known many Guillaumes over the years. I have known many Guillaumes. Yeah, it's the French way. But Guillaume, French bread? Really? Really? Like, wow.

For anyone who doesn't know, it's the French way of saying William, right? So anyway, he has a YouTube channel from years ago. What's on that YouTube channel, Willy? It's called Don Poco, and on that YouTube channel is nothing but no-hit, triple-S runs of DMD Devil May Cry boss fighting. Virgil runs. Hey, what's Mr., what's uh, mr. Brioche's favorite style for don't oil fucking guard And you're like oh oh brother brother, where have you been I see who you are

I understand now you have revealed your inner soul to us And it's the thing that we have been screaming for, for our entire lives in front of microphones. Right? A kindred spirit has arisen and made a video game. And you're like, are you? Are you? And then you see the little secret history and you're like, ahhhh, there it is And then and this this puts part of the game's DNA In a very very clear thing. That's why you have parry which is royal guard Hmm, and that's why you have dodge which is dodge roll. Mm-hmm. I Don't know what the timing is on dodge. I don't know what the invincibility on Dark Souls is dodge roll is It's definitely more than their parry. But I can tell you that Dark Souls, sorry, Devil May Cry's Royal

Guard perfect parry, perfect guard is six frames. And Expedition 33's is nine frames. So that's not royal guard. It's a different genre You know yeah But it's but it's there and the idea of course is that you know you've got turns and turns to learn What's coming at you and a feel it out? And then also let's add some free aiming to the system You know what I mean like a little thing and then fighting bosses that make you use that a little bit more But like all of that that It's just like oh

Yeah, no, this is what you love to okay. Well fucking you're okay get in you know and this This we were destined to like this game. There was no way around it. Yeah, you know it was built for it's kind of insane You know um you talked about this maybe last time, but I've hit the point of the game where I'm functioning under predator rules. And if you remember, that was something that you also did naturally when we were playing Dark Souls way back in the day, which is, when I hit it, does gray appear on the light bar before the health ticks down? Does it bleed? Then you can get it.

And so I've run into a couple now and they don't bleed. Like I hit them with everything I got and I'm like, I'm staring at pixels and I'm like, I don't think it actually moved. I think it didn't move at all. And furthermore, there's an even more pure indicator of like when it's time to move on if you decide to. And that's where you're also like, because there's a damage cap, right? Yeah, the damage if the damage so I ran into two bosses on the overworld

that I was blowing out damage cap numbers on every strike. And I made an impersonate imperceptible changes to their health bar. And I'm like, oh, and I'm running the mental map? This is at least multiple hours of perfect play. And so that damage cap is in place as a, it is a limiter for how much you can. For crazy people. Yeah, how far you can go, right?

We'll see how that goes into the future, but for the moment, there's still a time hard limit on that, even if you have perfect dodging and stuff. I fought an optional enemy last night that was called a dancer. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that experience was,

okay, gray life happens when I hit them. And then it was wipe. Wipe. Wipe. Wipe. Parrot everything. Parrot everything. Parrot everything. 11 minutes later, it's done. Just like once a month. Okay.

What is the actual timing? Is it? Is it? Just get the rhythm down, right? Okay. The boss is over your find your tells. Yeah, you know Sometimes it's a little part of the animation that you're like Oh, look at the axe go back and when it starts to disappear behind it a little bit. It's coming at you You know, and I think the game does a great

mix of its mechanical statistic issues here because there was a mix of its mechanical and statistic issues here because there was a much more important boss fight that I fought in that area, like a storyline boss fight against some important. And my damage was way better than it was on Dancer, but I couldn't fucking parry it for shit because the moves were so much more like fake out. Yeah, full of shit. I actually didn't fully parry it like once the whole boss fight. I had to fight it like a goddamn RPG.

Yeah, just taking the damage. Which was like, oh wow, I haven't done this in a while. Right, yes. So two things, one, kudos to, yeah, KF Tragic posted a video of just like, in Expedition 30, with the bunny, with the bunny. Yeah, you guys are like, all right, I just gotta parry this, I got no life, here we go.

The bunny's like, ah, ah, fake out, what you got? Oh, I'm walking away, hey. Oh, a little bit, oh, bah! Fuck you, nigga, what you got? That's great. Like, how am I supposed to parry that? Fuck, it's great. Funny skit.

The, so the other thing too is like, what's, but what I kind of caught right around that area you're looking at now and stuff is like, I'm putting, I have the build set up and I've reworked everything around the weapons and the damage and such. So I'm swinging. I'm at the point of the game where I just max out

whatever the most important stat is for the weapon. But I'm fighting things and I. So I'm swinging. I'm at the point of the game where I just max out the whatever the most important stat is for the weapon. But I'm fighting things and I'm hitting that damage cap. And now what becomes important is the number of hits in the move. Yeah, no, yeah, no, that's the exact point. I hit that last night. Yeah. Where I'm like, okay, I'm hitting the damage cap on average if I put roulette on. So now a single target hits that are big hits don't matter at all. I need that. I need that move that that guy has that does 13 hits in a row. Thank you. Right? Yeah. I'm just like, I'm looking at this shit and I'm like, you know, what you're relying on stops being the big chunk in single hit and now you need combos.

Or build up like stacks of status or something. No, no. Myelle, virtuous stance. She's got that big three hit you walk multiple hits and each one to max out, you know Phantom stars like anything that has multiple hits is gonna be super crucial and Yeah, this this weird like this weird thing now It's like starts to shift back over towards multi hit after after, oh, if I can hit 9999, oh, that'll destroy any boss. And then it's like, no, that's free now.

Now all that matters is extra hits. Or extra turns. Many extra turns. And then speed and so on, the ability to buff all that and cast Um, and then all of that is coming together while um We're talking about it and like I don't want the I guess don't get the wrong impression You don't have to do any of the shit. We're talking about

Right. In fact, not only do you not have to do, you don't have to do nothing. I ran a full dungeon with nothing equipped and no pictos on expert. Just my stats. And like I got through it. It was a lot harder, but like I just parried and dodged and played it like a regular RPG. This is that moment where like a Bayonetta item got used and we're like, what the fuck is that animation? Like what was that?

I bet what what just happened? You know, like it's it's just it really feels like the distribution of abilities in this game is is so perfectly tuned for you to pick up an item and go I'm sorry a Picto and the Picto will be something like I got I recently got one that was like returns 25% of your health on counter-attack and I see that I go oh what if my L was using the the the skill that forces every enemy to attack her? She could be at full health forever. You know, and just it constantly makes you just go, hey, wait a second.

That's actually, oh. But also, but also the like I have stuff that does like double damage here, double damage there, double damage on a stunned opponent, whatever. And it's like at some point that double is actually a worthless pickdoe Because I'm already at nine nine nine nine roulette is is the is the pickdoe of choice For every hit in the game until you hit damage cap And then it becomes a damage loss because you can't go higher than the damage cap for now So I used to be perfectly honest

I used roulette like once for that challenge that first challenge and then I immediately stopped using it and now I well it's the math on it is that it is better as long as you're not hitting cap. Yeah so I got I found a way to cap using other stuff and using a different build you know essentially so you know setting stuff up like take a shot and that adds your base damage up. Do this and increase your base damage, etc. There's different ways to go about it. But yeah, you really feel. Go ahead.

You feel like a game is like looking into your ass and just staring at you and listening to you and building itself around it. Because I had that moment. I had that moment where I got the whole team. And I think the way that they give you the whole team is incredible because right before they joined the team, the achievement for, hey, you got the whole team pops up. And I went, I am never, ever switching off this team. And the game said, guess what, bitch, you are switching off this team and the game said guess what bitch Switching off this team right now. I can't do anything about it

Fuck up, but so long Tweaking them so that I never had to change it every ah darn now a Like level like play your team and level them out accordingly You know if you don't like anybody, you can bench them. But for the most part, you know, keep yourself ready at the very least. Yeah, I, and like what, for me at this point, there's just like a massive open,

like go to the corners of the map and walk into random holes and see what's going on in there. You know, like- Stuff's going on over there. There's tons of just like explorable full on RPG asks, just yeah, what's that? I don't know. Just head to it, hit it up, see what's going on. And then you then, and upon doing so, getting constantly just hit with like, all right,

this is a Chra nevron. It's supposed to be a super rough challenging thing with a big reward. Danger. And I just killed it without it ever taking a swing. You know, and you're like, mm, okay. There was the demon wall boss that I fought that I was supposed to figure its gimmick out

and I didn't figure its gimmick out, I just blitzed its sword. Yeah. But there are still things in there that are like, we know you're a style beast right now, this is, we're still going to make this fight real. It's still doing it, but it's a very strange feeling, you know? And yeah, I get that right now at the very least. I'm kind of like, I'm I walked into like there's a I found the beach that is just like go fuck yourself level damage coming off of everything on it.

But oh, yeah. But also, you can do the same. And if you're willing to just sit there kind of thing, you just hang out with a bunch of like, yeah, this will be about a half an hour boss fight with each one of these encounters. But they're grunts. I've built all my characters so that their health values don't matter Yeah, sure so You can even build you can even build around the idea of like fuck health. I have pips

Right. I have that's what that's why yeah, you put shields up and go I'm allowed to fuck up three times That is my that is that is my range to learn the boss fight before dying. And if I die after taking three hits, that's on me. That's my fault. I shouldn't be taking that much damage. 100%. So first of all, we were not supposed to get that Picto. That pick toe is you had to do some creative running around two tough enemies to get that but whatever. We got it and I'm sitting there and I'm looking at this pick toe called in media res and I know what it is. I know what it is. I know what it **** is. It's like, okay,

listen, I've I've put this on. I have almost no health and I have three tries before I die. That's DMC four and DMC fives hell or hell counter health counter allowed. Where you have three lives instead of a health bar on those modes, mistakes you're allowed to make at all. Yeah. Um, and it's like, oh man, this is a very direct, oh man, oh it's good. But it's just so interesting because like, for a long time when describing these action games and stuff, there's always the threshold to beat the challenge,

to get through the game. And then there's to exceed with style, you know, to do it with perfection and to ace it or so. And so you like you to build a game around both of these things is a tricky dance, you know, especially for somebody is like, like, OK, you're not going to make it so that if you you're not playing the game in such a way where you're like, okay, you're not gonna make it so that if you, you're not playing the game in such a way where you're like, I have to be flawless in every run, but you could, right? You could decide to play this game in a way where you're like, I'm aiming for- You could no hit this.

You could no hit it. And you see the stats after every fight to be like, you sat here for 30 minutes fighting this thing, you parried all of it, you dodged none of it, and you took no damage, you parried all of it, you dodged none of it, and you took no damage, you know? Like, you can do that. So here's 20% extra XP for you. And everything in between the bare minimum to beat the thing and crushing it untouched is a variable difficulty that all depends on your burning soul. The fire in your spirit decides the dynamic difficulty.

What I have done is I have built out my party right now and I know I could fine tune them further. I know I could fine tune them further. But what I have done now is I have built them to every single thing they can do will just generate AP. I want full AP on every turn every time. I could fine tune it for burn. I could fine tune it for low health. I could find it, but I'm like, no, I'm going to keep this like state for as long as it works because I can't

keep outpacing it, though I have hit the damage cat wall like the game is yeah Yeah, numerically and said no you actually can't get that much stronger than you are right now Have you like for now for now have you? So you fought the dancer have you fought the things that hang out with the dancer That are like also in that same area like that have little little turrets okay because there's these there's I forgot there's something that hangs out right next to the dancer and it summons little laser zapping like funnels at you you sure I think we're thinking of a different area perhaps we are yeah okay Well, you will encounter more dancers, I guess. Yeah.

But the, ah, OK, no. But nearby that, there's another area, anyway. Gotcha. So yeah, well, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Yeah, I'm not worried about it. I'm glad you had some fun but all this to say that there is a

Thing that an enemy that popped up that's like I'm gonna summon some shit that shoots at you, right? And you can deal with the the floating threat and like fight go back to fighting the boss and handling it or fighting the enemy Handling it in its own way, but I kind of noticed something around after fighting a few of them and getting the timing down. There's the enemy when it's when the laser of the gun of the thing shoots at you, you can parry it and then the laser will shoot again. And then oh, it reacts to your parry. No, it like it gets a priority turn. And when you parry it, it gets to act another time.

Oh! So then you see a sequence where you're like, time to get good and delete this entire fight, right? Your perfection determines whether the fight even takes place or not. You know, you know, and it's like there's also a little side last night path on it. Oh, sorry. No, no, it's just it's just like you can have the fight or you can. There's a little side door over here.

If you feel like going if you feel like sitting here for real, real and just being perfect and as long as you're perfect, you're going to crush it. You know, I also discovered that there's a priority targeting system for the NPCs because one of the characters I have has a move that will drop them down to one HP and if I use it fucking that's the only character anyone's gonna attack oh I haven't noticed that yet oh that's what okay character anyone's gonna attack. Really? Oh, I haven't noticed that yet. Oh, that's what, okay, whoever's closest to dying takes in the most aggro. Yeah, there's the blue mage has a green move that drops their HP by 90%.

And after using it, they become the target. That would explain some moments. Incessantly. Yeah. But that means you can plan around that by giving that person the low health abilities and the parry abilities. Oh, I mean, at least three party members have an ability that's like drop your health to one and power the fuck up in exchange, you know?

Oh yeah, I mean, you don't need... What is health? Yeah, yeah. Why would I use health? What an interesting RPG. What a, what an interesting RPG. What a strange different like you and I have basically turned it into like dark souls, but with like more equipment and, and, and that's it. And if, and if anyone's hearing this, it's like, yo, I just wanted a final fantasy game. It's right there. It's right there.

We are sick. We are six. We are sickos Do not we're and you know and the games like do you want to play it sicko style? And I'm like I do that's it go stop do not listen to what we have to say unless you two are a sicko Fantastic like that like dude you can you can boost up your health value a lot and apparently the game has healing skills Yeah, yeah, no for sure I've been told by sages on the mountain that there are characters that can heal themselves and heal others. I mean, and I don't know how that's supposed to work when my characters have like 400 HP. There are wonderful abilities to like passively heal your team or do stuff. Also, you know, there's also like, hey, like you got these little

pocket healing items you can toss at your party. Yeah, so make that a status clearing pick toe. And that's and now you're clearing statuses, which is the real use. You know, that's like for the only healing skill I've used in the entire game, genuinely, is the one with that Sael has where you can heal everybody just a tiny bit. And I put the Picto on that if you heal somebody, it gives them rush. So I'm not doing it to heal them. The heal is immaterial. It's so that during my attack rotation, I can just put rush on everyone every turn. Okay, I see. No, I definitely have like the, I have used the heal in moments where I'm

like, I am on, like you're watching, the team gets wiped or something after like a thing and I'm like, I can get back up and finish this fight. I still have the resources to finish this fight, as long as I put all my focus into my biggest hitter being able to stay alive and getting through it. Hey, Myelle, how you doing? You still the biggest hitter? Yes. Not for me anymore.

Oh, yeah? Not for me anymore. Yeah. Her viability started to start to drop a little bit once I saw that she didn't have a 13-hit combo that she could bust out. The burn's still really good. Burn's nice.

Burn's nice, but. Burn's consistent. Yeah. You know what's inconsistent is critical hits and bonuses from them. Did you know that that's inconsistent is critical hits and bonuses from them. Did you know that that's not true? Oh, crit builds. I made one last week and now I've got a couple.

Yeah, 100%. It's like, oh, this weapon does really cool things every once in a while when you crit. And I'm like, every once in a while you say crit and I'm like every once in a while you say Huh? What if what if it was a hundred percent? What if I had more stains than I knew what to do with? Every time she comes up, you know, oh my god. I can't hold all these things Yeah, I started to get to the point of the game where Luna was getting weapons that just passively generate stains in the background I'm like,

okay, so I'm not using her a lot right now, but that shit seems like it can go some places. Yeah, critting crit builds are fun. High luck, high luck builds, you know, with a, with a well, no, no, that's the point. They don't have to be luck based. No, you can just make characters crit 100% of the time. Yeah, you can also just, you can put make characters crit 100% of the time Yeah, you can also just you can put the pictos on that just go like yeah plus this to crit I I had plus 24 to create at fucking 83 percent crit for hours. Oh, yeah, and it was like, okay Well, he's just gonna create every single fuck you can go over a hundred percent I mean it's yeah doesn't work it it allows you to to you know Yeah, you could look at it and be like ooh

It should it should give you a little pat on the back and be like okay. Yeah No, okay, so there you go that that's it all right all right so there You know what there was some stuff to talk about with that that game so fucking it's really sick I in fact you distracted me because I wanted to take care of business up front to be perfectly honest That's okay. No, I mean, it's just dope. And hey, maybe this is a good thing, progression-wise or so, but by padding out all these little extra things on the map that I'm doing, I've avoided some progress because there's just a lot of other interesting things going on. And like, it's not pushing. It's taking its time with product with like how much you're

allowed. It's allowing you to do a lot before like pushing into whatever further acts and things like that. You know, you can slow this down or speed it back up. It does a really good job of like big story thing and then goes, hey, maybe you want to go hang out out there for the next important plot beat then and the whole time I'm walking through this game There's little things where I'm just like I've played video games before I know that when I see a weird textured object or door Throughout the game on my way through it that I keep seeing it's going to ask It's it's going to ask you it I don't like, don't do it.

Don't make me go back to these weird assets. There are so many of those blue tree things everywhere. I swear to God, you feel it in your soul. I don't remember where a single one is. There was one or two that were like in the deepest off beaten path of a weird corner in a weird level. And I'm like, I swear to God, video game. And then sure enough, yeah, man, absolutely. I don't want to 100% you get to go back and find all those.

I'm going to look into my camera and I'm going to go, okay, guys, by week long break from Claire obscure. And when we come back, I will have gone down and gotten every goddamn single one of those, which is actually great Because it gives you an excuse to go back and all those blue mage abilities from the early parts of the game sure enough There's stuff back there. That's worth going back to get and check out exactly, you know little areas where and even like little activities you might not have done or You know money you might not have had I would like to point a finger Mr. Guillaume brioche for a lie he told in which he said,

it is a shorter RPG, maybe 20 to 30 hours, maybe a little more if you go off the beaten path. You fucking lied, Guillaume, you lied on me. You are full of shit. Even a cursory scrape is like, no, this ain't proper fucking RPG. You're a liar. No, but it's, you can, I get the feeling though

that if you mainline everything, it comes together quickly. I'm probably gonna play the game again and I'm probably gonna just go like how how how far can I get in a straight line before opening a menu? Good question good question. Just like just like you want to treat it like a souls game or a devil may cry game okay let's soul level one this thing. You know what's even awesome too? You know what I like? There are mechanics.

So there's like, you know, there's the super parry I've I've mentioned before, and it's really cool looking. And very cool. I feel like it's there for anyone that is like, I'm just not gonna parry, it's too hard, right? It's just not my thing. What if we give you a super slow, easy, really cool. Feel good, you too are allowed to feel good, all right?

If you can't get those parries off, it's okay. Here's a sick mechanic that pays off for using it and it makes the fight awesome, and it's a nice big like explosive moment, you know? But also, I get hit by those because I muscle-memoried my ass so hard on R1 that I've tried to use the wrong fucking butt. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there's, because there's that, but the animation matters too, you know? But that to me is just like, oh, that. So there's, cause there's that, but the animation matters too, you know? But that, and that to me is just like, oh, that's just great game design. That's a team playing through it, going, somebody who is deciding to just play this as a traditional RPG is going to miss out on this cool part of the game here and might feel like, you know, that's a bummer for them.

Let's make stuff that allows that to not be the case. And like- There's a little nudge, just nudges it over. case. And like, there's a little nudge, you know, nudges it over. Because I'm like, it's a super easy parry, but I'm still popping the fuck off when it happens in a really hype way, especially when it's like the final blow of the, of the fight, you know? Um, it's really well thought out. I think I s- I think I said this last week. I, it's been a long time since I played something that was just like,

It's been a long time since I played something that was just like... overwhelmingly incredible at all aspects every time I sat down. Like, I have not walked away from that game anything but sparkling with joy every single time. Unless I was walking away with like, D ennui and boohoo's. Yeah. Right. No, but it's just a joy. It's just a joy. And yeah, I mean, to say we've talked very little about the story because it's a very light, but it's light on dialogue, but it's so-

Fibes based. But it's so important, right? Everything that you say to everybody, everything that they exchange with each other is all learning about the world and exposition. But everyone has like great dialogue that I feel like is just very human and believable. The people react not like characters in times where I expect a character to say a character line and they actually just say a human line. I was like, oh, yeah, I appreciate that. It's that quality where you...

After a while, when you first heard like whatever, when you first hear Tarantino dialogue, when you first hear James Gunn dialogue, when you first hear, you know, Joss Whedon dialogue and stuff like that, there's that little like, oh yeah, like people do kind of like talk like that and you hear a bit too much of it and of course things can get, you know, flanderized. But all this to say that like, I appreciate that a couple of moments characters have had with each other, like thatung that I've liked from the beginning is continuing forward as well with people kind of just, like, having these little

exchanges and understandings and moments with each other and being like, ah, okay, hold on, wait, hold on, maybe let's look at this a different way and stuff, you know? I love it. I will say, though, I love, love, love the script and the acting in this game. I'm going to point a finger at a particular voice actor for being the only person to actually spoil me on something in this game's story. And I was like, Oh, you. So there's a popular uncredited in the marketing voice actor who decided that what they were going to put on their TikTok, which I follow a shot of, man, when you're in two of the

hottest games ever and zooming in on their different statues that they have. And one was Expedition 33's collector's edition statue and I was like, wait a second, you're in this game? I immediately know what character you're going to play. Fuck, fuck you, damn it. You cannot stop Dan Southworth from posting a Devil May Cry 5 logo on his Facebook page. You can't do it.

You can do whatever you, you can try. But when that game is happening and nobody knows that Virgil's in the game yet, he's gonna fucking post it. And you can just, Capcom is like, God damn it, Dan, he's like, ah, catch me. So, you know, yeah. You'll never, I'll spoil it every time.

Damn it, Dan, every time. You'll never stop me. Yeah, anyways. Great stuff, great stuff. Okay, okay. Damn it, Dan. Every time. You'll never stop me. Yeah, anyways. Great stuff, great stuff. Okay, okay. There is our- On the Housekeeper. Yes, our weekly Expedition 33 fucking suck off

because it's so good. It's, yeah. I mean, we're gonna be talking about the game for years, right? Might as well- We're gonna be talking about the game for years, right might as well be talking about the game till at the very least December of this year Because I see the clear front-runner for game of the year

as I play this um I I definitely do and I even see like So That thing we've touched it's like does Final Fantasy have to stop being Final Fantasy and the answer is no it doesn't you know this is I have like I like the change the new stuff they were they've tried but this is also really cool too you know this is closer to FF8 than any game they've ever made and it's closer to FFVIII than any game they've ever made, and it's closer to FFVIIs ideas than FFVIIs is in reality.

Have you found yourself, like, at any point after fighting a really cool enemy, sitting on the experience screen, because the extra layer of music that kicked in for the victory is amazing and it's only gonna happen here. I've let a couple of those screens sit to just hear the whole thing loop multiple times

because I'm like, oh fuck. It's the- It's kind of really good. The victory variation of the theme, yeah. All right, Expedition 33. Done. So no, what I was going to originally open with is the Twitch Vodpocalypse has occurred.

Oh, no. And what that means is there is no longer an ability to highlight videos on your Twitch over a hundred hours total. So- But people stream for dozens of hours a day. For decades in fact. And you know, the whole bit has been, it's also, it auto deletes everything.

And they have, and they've been basically putting in a thing where it's like, yeah, the highlight system is not meant to do this video archive thing, right? If you've been doing it, which we have, then that's nice. Which everyone has. But you're not supposed to. Well, they make sure to put out the thing that says 0.5% of streamers are over the limit on this or whatever.

All right. So for the least disruptive solution for Castle Super Beast, I've made a YouTube channel that's called the Castle Super Beast Archive, and it's at youtube.com slash at Castle Super Beast Archive. And everything that gets deleted after that hundred hours from the Twitch is going to just go over there. So quite simply, right now, like the stuff is, you know, there's the uploading and I said, like the episodes still have to be like titled and dressed and everything.

So, oh man, I used to be way fat. Oh, God. Oh, I feel it. Oh, I feel that is an incredibly unflattering angle to. Oh, I feel it. Oh, shit. Oh, I feel it. That is an incredibly unflattering angle, too. Oh, shit. But so as of Jesus, yeah, VeeVee, eh, you know, it's fine. Hey, look. Look how far we've come.

Oh, no. Yeah. I've seen myself in some, like, I'm like, ooh, is that a stretched out image? It's like, it is not. It is not. But anyways, that's not the point. The point is that, yeah, the older stuff

is going to just end up there. And as we record a new episode, there's going to be less space on the Twitch. So then whatever gets cleared off, you'll just go catch it on the archive over there. So everything else is pretty much going to stay the same. And yeah, that's at youtube.com slash at Castle Superbeast archives. CSB 002.

Randy no. No. Allegedly. Allegedly. Yes. How appropriate for me to see that today. And beyond that, there's a couple of times where the show got broken up because of disconnections and whatever. So I've had to stitch the parts together to get the whole thing done. So, you know, there's

stuff that's you're doing God's work over here. Some of it's going to still take some time. Most of it's is set. Breaks are going to be in there because this is the it's the raw stream edit thing. So there's going to be fucking breaks. I, ah, it's only so much we can do here. But in terms of the proper, we were never supposed to have to do this at all. Well, no, the, the, the MP3 is always the proper... We were never supposed to have to do this at all. Well, no. The MP3 is always the proper final edited thing that you will be able to hear. But just to say that if you want to catch those archives, they'll just be going up to YouTube now. And then yeah, Twitch is their policy, whatever they decide to do. Okay.

But that'll be what's happening there. And to some degree, tangentially to this, but the the That that'll be what's happening there and and and to some degree Tangentially to this but still related of course same thing applies to you know our respective channels as well So everything like we had C is the the CSB channel had like fucking over a thousand had like 1500 hours or so But like wooly verses had like close to 5000,000. You know what I mean? So my right now I like to go to the fucking content manager and it yells at me every time I open it. It's like, okay Yeah, you all yells hard. You are 3,000 hours above your 100 hour limit. There you go

So no, I that was definitely one where I'm like, okay make sure I'm not losing any history and stuff because it sucks to lose stuff forever even though the Twitch platform is encouraging you to permanently lose things. It's all ephemeral, man. But yeah, everything that's saved and backed up and whatever is is gonna continue existing. So Just a heads up for everybody there. And of course, you know more posts and links to follow Do you want to Jump in from there or should I? Yeah, so I've been playing Expedition 33 a lot. Do you want to talk about that?

No, okay after expedition 33 Comes I played a little bit more doom the dark ages And I quit on it. Oh I I Have I have created a habit in myself That is I have created a habit in myself that is interesting to me. I don't know if it's interesting to anybody else, but I was playing Doom the Dark Ages and I was like, this isn't...

When I played Doom 2016 and I played Doom Eternal, I was like anime sparkling out of my fucking eyes. I was like, oh my god, it's Doom, and they're like, oh mama, kiss it. And I just didn't have that feeling about Doom, the Dark Ages. And there's always the point where I go, well, am I older and shittier and jaded-er and whatever,

or is it not hitting with me, or is it a taste thing? So what can I do to figure out these emotions? Oh, well, I gotta boot up 2016 and eternal and fuck around with those for an hour or two. This is your diagnostic. You did this with Monster Hunter as well. Yeah, I did. You go back to look.

I spent like hundreds of hours doing this at Monster Hunter. Yeah, this is a thing you're doing you're kind of you're hitting the new thing and you're going something's off what quite what is it exactly and then you go is it me yeah yeah yeah and then you take a trip back in time to make the direct comparison and so when I loaded up 2016 eternal the thing that shocked me the most so for the difference between eternal and doom the dark ages is they are polar Opposites in terms of style and since I love eternal style. It is no surprise that I'm not a fan of dark ages style

Like double jumping air dashing weapon switching versus. I'm gonna plant my fucking feet and parry God That is that that is to functionally very different game. Yeah, I can see that But what I did notice when I went back to 2016 is That that game Looks the best of all of them, which was not something I was expecting interesting from a visual perspective Doom 2016 is the best looking game perspective, Doom 2016 is the best looking game because it has tight areas with like lab corridors and super intense lighting everywhere. So I would guess it's because you're making your way through the UAC for a whole bunch of it?

Yeah. Right? As opposed to just Hellscape? There's a lot of darkness and like moving lights. And the the levels in Doom 2016 are a lot smaller and they're a lot more considered and they're a lot more unique internally doom eternal has a lot of fucking Video game levels now. I really dig stuff like the super gore nest sure and I really dig like the fucking Like the third level in doom eternal has like Mario Brothers spinning fireballs. Yeah. Yeah, but I'm But there's also like Colosseum arenas, you know, like

And Dark Ages is a lot more like medieval and a lot the areas are way more wide like they're very very very wide, okay, and so like I wide. Like they're very, very, very wide. And so like, I just like Doom 2016, like it shocked me in its like portrayal. It was so slick and smooth and considered. And it also made me be like, why is Dark Ages not as in love with the fact that Doom is a goofy ass video game? And I remember that in the old Wolfenstein games in Doom 2016, you get secret levels that were the original games from the early 90s. Yeah, they made me sick.

Oh, they made you sick? Oh, okay. Well, I thought it was good. The old textures placed on the new environment, something about that just didn't hit my stomach right. And I look at it and I've like hemming and hawing over it and I feel like they did Doom 1, Doom 2, Doom 3 again. Like they did the exact same progression of technical and gameplay decisions in a row. The first one, then the second one, which

is more, more, more, more, faster, more. And then the third one, which is more, more, more, more faster, more. And then the third one, which is slow, slow, slow, but look at the lighting, look at the lighting. Can you see the lighting? I wonder if like, I'd love to hear the discussions internally on this type of thing, right?

Where you're like, is, cause think about the way you just described how Borderlands is going and how this is like a return in a way to Like that first one and a loop at this point And you have to wonder if there are folks that were like yeah Eternal did something that went way out and way different from you know hate eternal for the differences right people that Fucking hate eternal because it's so much faster and all the jumping and weapon switching. It's an arcade game.

And if you weren't signing up for an arcade game then you got something different. Then those people Doom the Dark Ages is going to be like their most disfavoritest. Right. one, Doom 2016 is a shining fucking jewel. Like, objectively, it's unbelievable how good that game is. And then after that, it's like, well, season your Doom game to taste. I want it faster with more weapons. Some people are going to want it slower with more defense. Though I did check one thing that I laughed really hard about, which is I went into the options for Doom Dark Ages and I turned the parry timing down to the absolute minimum. Oh, right. You can customize. And the parry timing on minimum is like, I don't know, it's like 10 frames. It's like what we're used to as a parry. Like what Expedition 33 thinks of as a parry. But, I don't know, it's like 10 frames. It's like what we're used to as a parry. Like what Expedition 33 thinks of as a parry.

But it doesn't decrease the parry sphere that extends off your character. So while the timing is tighter, the physical space that actually acts as the parry is the same, which means it's still super easy because you're parrying things that are five feet in front of your character's face. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. I see. I'll keep an eye out for that. So I bought it, but I haven't booted it up yet. Interesting. Oh, and that just reminds me that when we were talking

about Expedition and like I was having the stuttering issues and stuff, turning down the internal resolution made that problem go away. So that's a solid fix to that. Give me more frames. If you want me to parry, I'm going to need every frame you got. So was there a moment that made you go, that's it, I'm out? It was seven levels in a row that are more or less the same Doom Eternal style, Space Knights Dark Ages area. And then you get to an evil forest. And in the evil forest, it's the widest areas I've ever seen in Doom game, just absolutely

ridiculous. And I was going through it and I was getting the pickups and I just hit this moment of like, oh, I don't care. It just fell off me. The music wasn't hitting. I was just going through the motions and I was suggested we'll turn up the difficulty and I did turn up the difficulty and what that ended up with is instead it would be exactly the same exactly the same gameplay experience. But if enemies caught me between them and a wall, I would die in four milliseconds instead of 10 milliseconds. Okay. Interesting. Huh. Okay. If I had to say there's one objectively bad thing about Doom, the Dark Ages, that is the

only black mark, is that the music just isn't there. Okay. The music I would describe as okay. I'm already tempering my expectations without Mick. That's going to have to be the case. I also think, I think as well, too, when I'm thinking about recently, one, because there's like, one, there's always, there's tons of games to play. And two, obviously, your time is much more precious

for when you can jump into things. I feel like you have gotten more stringent with like, am I going to bother writing this through to the end? Because even like, you know, with Mon Hunt a bit earlier and then like with like Garrow and stuff, it's a little bit like, okay, yeah, if this is just not hitting like a perfect use of my time. I don't live in the world in which I get to go, you know what, I'll just bang it out over two 16 hour streams on the weekend.

I don't live in that world in my life. The drop cut off has gotten a lot looser, I've noticed in the recent months. Cause like, dude, I beat Elden Ring 100% in nine days. I can't do that now? What? Holy shit. Yeah, completely understandable.

No, just pointing out as well that like, externally too, there's a difference between Now when that goes to goes to school ah it's time. It's time for depressing ass sad boy hours Okay, sad like hey Elden Ring 2 we're gonna do it until my boy comes home because I'm Sad dad. Where it's like, hey Elden Ring 2, we're gonna do it until my boy comes home because I miss him!

Just like, you know? Time to run the random item build run. And again, fill the time. Empty nest gaming! Hey, what's up? It's your boy like comment subscribe Hate it damn yeah, oh That nest is so empty, but

I've gotten a little more stringent on it But also like there's a lot of stuff coming up death strandings coming up expedition 33 is happening the switch is coming Right and so like I'm looking at my schedule It's like I'm probably gonna end up streaming like 23 24 25 days in a row Do I want like 10 of those to be doom the dark ages where I'm just kind of not? Mid mid day. I called it doom the mid ages, which I'm pretty happy with okay. Yeah Yeah, oh night rain. Oh fuck me. I forgot about night rain, huh? But yeah, yeah, Jim

What was that? No, just just happening your brain. Yeah, just like empty That's gaming your loading screen as the twitch is pulling up is just the cats in the cradle of the Silves. Me and Paige went back and did Deltarune chapter one again. Hey it's still good, still charming, still great. We're gonna do chapter two this weekend, same as we did this past weekend. We'll just do Saturday or Sunday, bang it out. I would like it when chapter three and four of Deltarune come out on Steam,

I know that Toby is now working with a team of people that is helping him make the Deltarune because it's a little too big. I would like it if some of them helped him clean up the actual Deltarune application a little bit so that it doesn't crash your stream when you try and full screen it because it does that really hard full screen,

that really hard full screen that makes every app on your computer freak out. Yeah, I've got some bad news for you. Toby likes his applications running like PC games, like old PC games. That is an aesthetic feel choice. You know, there is, um, so what I'm doing is I'm running in a window and then I'm using borderless gaming, a wonderful app you can get off steam to great game to borderless window. Great app manually. Uh, But that allows you to discover that Delta Rune thinks it's a different application depending on whether or not it's the save game stream screen or the

interest screen or the game screen or whatever, because they constantly re-minimize because they're technically different apps. Why he makes the game like this. Because at the end of part four when the minimizing window is part of the boss fight it needs to have some special programming for like changing its window size. You know? Like fucking come on! Of course it's gonna do some bullshit.

Are you gonna use special K to force it? Okay you know what I will probably use special K. Yeah but then you miss out on the lore that comes from your windowless Oh, I am broadcasting here The lore is for nerds later because it's windowless full screen But what you're not seeing is the window actually extends and there's a character that's been there the whole time Just outside the frame and if you drag the full window back onto your desktop You will see that extra character that's been there the whole time Talking off camera

Speaking of special K. I Used special K this past week on the devil may cry three Crimson mod by I saw rage and friends one of those friends being friend of the show hitchhiker who's the person who turned me on to the DMC 3 Crimson mod I saw that that got released it's unfortunate that the switch version of DMC 3 is not just everywhere as a standard thing because of all those cool features we saw that got added to it. Well.

But here's the next best thing. I would say this is a dramatic improvement on the Switch version. So the Switch version has the local co-op, I think, and it has in Bloody Palace, and it also has style switching. In the DMC3 Crimson, it has the style switching mod that was built for it and it utilizes DMC4 voice lines and has special effects for switching between all six styles. It has a wide, wide variety of accessibility options

such as hold to shoot and hold button to crazy combo. It has a built-in combo break sound effect and flash so there's a very slight visual effect on Dante for during his combo what the break points for that combo. Ah nice, practice timing. Pointless for me and you but for somebody who's new that's actually really really good. That's great, that's great. I saw that there's a character switch as well? There's a character switch, there's also local co-op through the whole game. There is, oh god, there's arcade mode, there's air stinger, etc. There's every feature you could want and I, there's arcade mode, there's air stinger, et cetera. There's every feature

you could want, and I know there's every feature you could want, because I don't know what three quarters of the options that it turns on are. So it's like, better cancels, and then it has like a little exclamation, sorry Sorry question mark next to it on the new mouse over and it says a bunch of shit that I don't understand And then it goes adds inertia, and then it says adds guard. Oh, yeah Who let these fucking freaks These DMC for freaks have been let in I see These DMC 4 freaks have been let in, I see. But when you turn it on to DMC 3 Crimson and it automatically works and you just don't fuck with any of it, it feels way better.

It just feels like consistently much, much smoother and better and cleaner and great. It also includes a fun feature that I was talking to Hitchhiker about this morning because they're testing it, where they add the DMC 4 and 5 camera into DMC 3 and the behind the back full-rotate camera. I was actually going to ask that as a joke. Oh no. Word. That's impressive. In areas that are nice and wide. It works incredible in areas that used to

have essentially free like fixed cameras. Boy, you're not supposed to fuck apart. Yeah, you are. Oh my God. Like, you know, the very first hallway outside of Dante's office that goes to like the bar Okay. Yeah, like there there is no continuity. You just look through the world if you turn the camera just a little bit over here Oh, man, and I was talking to hitch about it because I fought I played I fucked around with a Nevin and I fought Cerberus And I'm like you need to Force a camera on these because that spinning camera on some of those boss fights that like kind of lock the camera Just completely fall to pieces. Oh, I mean her her her fight It's like the perception of the wave coming at you in the room is critical

So you need you need it to be pseudo law so they're working on that right now is crucial. You need it to be pseudo locked. So they're working on that right now. Like Cerberus to be pseudo locked and have it to be pseudo locked. And like the other thing is like the camera would be behind Dante's back when you go to do the light puzzles instead of the camera moving to above so you can actually do the light puzzles. I see. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So not made for it. And they were also chasing down some bugs where you would lose blorbs. Oh By going through missions and certain like shop bugs, so it's not done Okay, but it is really cool and it feels really good Okay, and within a couple of months it will be like the definitive way to play DMC 3 with star switcher That is more than the switch version. That's fucking great. All the fans stuff ever. It is a lot more

a lot way more playable lady very very broken, but yes Interesting okay cool very not finished. Yeah, you can turn it on but it's Work in progress doesn't even jump style like playable. I don't know I didn't I didn't I didn't bother turning it on because the option next to it says like very The classic move where it's like, okay, so there's a last boss of this fighting game. We've made a playable version He can't crouch block or jump but here he is If you want to just slide if you want to slide a sprite around the screen and press buttons to make

Big bullet-wave shootout then I guess you can do that. I See. So yeah, DMC 3 Crimson super cool very thankful to get reached out by It's always fun to speak to somebody on a mod team and be like hey somebody fuck this up and they go that was me I fucked that up. Important question. Did they replace the title screen with a sharp, cool? Yes. Nice.

Yes. Thank god. It's the same basic title screen, but it has a red background and higher res images. OK. OK. I could probably get it. The worst part about Devil May Cry 3 is that fucking title screen of all time of all time

It's it's just the most hideous horrible title screen. I've ever seen Dear God here's your here's your new title screen. It's functionally very similar But it has like a gradient at the all right all right, and we got a logo in there, and yeah all right We're fine. That's fine. Okay. You know? God awful fucking title screen.

Just terrible. Yeah, panning through little artwork in the future in for or like over Fortuna or whatever. I'll take anything. Just JPEGs. Anything but white background. Like you can see the dithering over the fucking PNGs Anyway

Sick very cool. I would recommend you personally will they check it out also parts of our audience that are freaks Right now it's for freaks when it's completely like version one and all bugged up It will be like for normies as well showing the flash timing on When to input stuff is huge. That's big. Yeah, and I was like I hate this Can you can you make it so you can turn it off and then they they were like, okay Here's a toggle so you can turn it off. I was like, I really yeah Well, I mean, you know at a certain point to like it's kind of like with training when you're doing them combo Trials and now you get the little rhythm beep for like beep,

beep, beep, beep, beep, and you're like, oh yeah, okay, there, I can hear that. So that's always a really helpful thing to learn from. Oh, also if you run this version through Special K, it doesn't crash every single time you alt tab. So that's fun. Okay. I like that. Nice.

All right, moving on. Me and Paige beat Split Fiction. Oh yeah, okay. You wanna talk about the other game in the running for Game of the Year? That big, huh? Me and Paige were sitting there in awe at one incredible finale, just absolutely inventive, genius, fascinating, mechanically interesting finale. And then afterwards, I'm just sitting there going, that must have been so technically difficult to achieve. Like, you know, we see a lot of games that have fancy lighting, and we see a lot of games that have, you know,

nice graphics. The levels that they put you through at the end of Split Fiction are so complicated from a technical level, it is unbelievable that it works and it got made. Interesting. It's so funny how, like, just when you're just looking at it from the outside without knowing who made it,

you could just pass over this game. Absolutely. Right? Just on cover and name and premise in that pitch, you know, but it's all in the bones of like, you know that who made it makes great shit It's about the Ferris and the Ferris the Joe Ferris. Yeah, Ferris Ferris. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I Wish it didn't have that effect. Unfortunately, I wish that it was like also as catchy on pitch You know compared to everything that I hear that it was like also as catchy on pitch, you know, compared to everything that I hear about it, but great.

Uh, it is, it is, it's so incredible. Like it's, it's so incredible. It's so amazing. Okay. I don't really want to say much more. Okay. Do you remember how when you remember the ratchet and clanking that came out a while ago? That was like the rift in time. Out of time. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. And they showed the action sequences where he would fall through his own. Yeah. Okay, okay, okay.

And it was like, but that was all like cut scene, more or less. The things that Split Fiction does is an order of magnitude more impressive than that. Okay In a way that I can't believe it's like just jaw-dropping You know it's kind of funny having these moments because like I had it with cyberpunk were like with the the montage things where Like if you don't like knowing a bit about how the sausage is made Allows you to go to point out to somebody that doesn't What they just did is really hard to do and is really impressive, right?

Or even in film when you see like a camera shot like like anytime you're okay. The classic is like you're watching Goodfellas and you end like you got the one shot, right? Oh, yeah, you know or Anything what's the big deal? They just walk through a restaurant. How hard could it be? You just that you get your cell phone out and you walk behind them, right? Scorsese like this. Oh, no. It's really hard.

And you're like, working with film, and the planning of everything and every moment in sync is so technically impressive. It's a huge. So yeah, in games, I feel like those moments are, it's easy to not, for those to be lost you know to not realize when something technically hyper impressive is happening so one of our favorites that we've talked about forever forever is like characters

handing each other objects characters being under under the covers the bread in the fucking bread the bread you know yeah like what's the big deal he just ate a bread like no you don't understand no You don't get how hard that is to do. It's really hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. It's really hard to do. Yeah, incredible. Recommend to everyone. And one of the other things, and this is... This is unkind to the developers,

but I don't care because it's their publishers fault. Something that comes to mind about Expedition 33 and Split Fiction is that they cost less than a regular game, and they are easily the standouts for me this year. Meanwhile, when I look over at the Doom and the Doom Eternal and the Doom the Dark Ages, Doom the Dark Ages costs significantly more than a regular game. And that doesn't affect how hard people worked on it, but it affects on how much of it has like an objective value. Like Doom costs twice as much.

You could buy Split Fiction and Claire Obscure with for one Doom the Dark Ages. And that is like just a really, really unfortunate comparison. The best, potentially the best game this year cost 50 US. And maybe the second best game this year cost 50 US. And we can all argue about which ones those are But hey Pat True fans will find a way to make it work Crazy Ken is back

Of the Randy Pittsburgh, but I guess we'll get to that a little bit. Oh Yeah, that's it for me as to what I was doing this week. You can go down to twitch.tv slash Pat Stairs at streaming seven days in a row until I run out of things to stream or the switch to comes out. So this week is going to be expedition. I'm going to be covering some on indie showcase on Thursday morning and then on the weekend me and Paige are going to have a beat uh Delta Ruin chapter two. Alright. Um over on my side. So yeah, we talked about Expedition already. Uh not much else to go into there. Um I did just want

to touch on one other thing that I I can I touch on one thing with Expedition thirty-three. I think maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I'm crazy but like I'm playing the game maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm playing the game and I'm looking at assets on characters and I'm just overwhelmed by, I don't think I'm supposed to immediately clock that as being the same asset.

There's this big mysterious thing and or character. I don't think I'm supposed to be able to look at that at a glance and go, oh, I know what that is. Okay. There. I'm not sure, but I guess we'll see. Yeah. Or maybe I'm just done.

Maybe. Yeah. Um, maybe I'm just maybe maybe maybe All right, so, uh, yeah one other thing I just wanted to mention so um you were talking about doom eternal and how much you love that game and how the Feel of Dark Ages was not bringing back what you enjoyed there.

Not the vibes I needed. Okay, so I have a game that is not 100% Doom Eternal vibes, but is doing stuff that reminds me of it in a completely different genre. Have you heard of Kill Night? So. Yes, I've heard the name. Kill Night is a twin stick drop into the room

and kill all the shit coming at you. And it's a bullet hell. Oh, last year. Last year. Mm-hmm. It's a, you know, not bullet hell, but just like, yeah, drop into the room and survive the twin stick. You know, you got your gun, you got your sword, you got your dodge, et cetera.

It's simple enough in that you're not doing, it's not a vampire survivor style thing where it's like, I just, you just want to move the stick around and then random pick up items and go. It is an active, you must play this game. It is requiring you to be a very, very cognizant participant. But what's happening for the most part is you've got a regular gun and then you're killing everything around you. And when you're the kill night, you are the kill night and you have a big old intro that is like the demons and the bride, you must face that.

And you're you're just you literally walk in and you jump into a portal to hell. As everyone puts all your holy sword on your back and And it's just, we're doing it, right? We're doing it. And you have your gun that you shoot everything surrounding you with. And when you run out of bullets, you get a little active reload Gears of War style mini game. If you actively reload in the right time,

you get your ship back faster. You get a little boost on your shots or whatever, and then you get back into it. You've got a sword. You swing around. You kill things with the sword, and you build up a sword meter that eventually, after killing enough things with the sword, you get a big sword super explosion moment, right?

That clears the screen and makes an energy orb around you. You have a shotgun with limited ammo and it clears things really wide and fast, but you eventually run out of ammo. How do you refill that ammo? You use the sword kills. Sword kills give you back shotgun ammo. Okay, what happens if you run out of-

This sounds like goddamn fucking modern doom is what you're describing to me right now. What happens when you run out of bullets on your main gun and you have the little active reload window? During that active reload window, if you swing your sword instead of pressing reload, you get an enhanced sword slash that kills things faster and buffs up that sword meter faster.

Okay, what happens if you press, you have an absorb button to absorb pickups around you for? Bullet strength and health and whatever or anything picking up on the ground You could absorb things and shoot a big orb out that breaks armor So an armor breaking orb will blow things up and And when an armor breaking orb blow things up, health drops on the ground. Okay. In the middle of an active reload, if you hit the absorb things button,

you quickly absorb everything in even faster and max out how quickly you can shoot that shit back to heal yourself. Okay. When you start killing things with the sword and you build back your shotgun ammo, which then you use to clear the screen faster to then absorb things faster,

you see what we're doing here, right? Every system is super duper synergy, like, synergized with every other system in a way that, like, as the hordes increase and come at you and enemy types are coming at you and requiring different things, you can feed your life, you can feed your damage, you can feed your DPS, you can feed your melee, you know, and you have to on the fly while being surrounded and running from the enemies, make the right split second

decision to survive and pick one or the other or the other. Occasionally, enemies that are extra tough will come at you and do a big flashing unavoidable attack unless you use the sword swing to parry it. If you slash and break through at the right time and hold down the sword button, you get a big slowdown moment where then you can kill everything faster in the slow time. You get a few seconds to get your bearings out. Or if you disarm things and go behind them and use the sword swing, then you get a locked in animation where you get an execution and that gives you better rewards as well.

And so now all of the ways you manage killing the horde around you feed into each other in a really smartly designed system. The rotation is really, really fun and really well thought out in this game. The visibility on this is way higher than I would have expected. Yeah. Because like, any game from this new, I guess the vampire survivor's perspective, a lot of them have like real readability problems. There's just so much fucking shit. Yeah, as long as you're in a-

This looks clean. Yeah, you have a big night with your guns and you're in the middle and everything's coming at you and they're all demons and the environments change as you go further in and survive longer and stuff. You eventually get overwhelmed and then you get back in there and you're going to have different types of guns to unlock, different swords, different builds, different whatever. You can see where it's going with some of that stuff for a completely different perhaps style of character. That initial one, and you can go through a couple of tutorials to just break down what

each system does. At basic, you can just stand there and twin stick your way through the challenge. You can run and avoid and shoot everything. But seeing how you feed every system into each other, you get these really fun moments where like Doom Eternal, a split second decision to use your active reload for a sword thing will then allow you to take out the sword required enemy or like parry this right thing. Or if you're like, fuck, I'm down on health, I'm going to go for that instead and sacrifice my DPS for a bit for that.

And you're just managing all of that while being immensely tight on the screen being filled with shit and surviving and bullet hell avoiding and dodging, et cetera. Super simple, super fun. Kill night is what it's called. And yeah, you just drop in and go. Everything about Doom Eternal's flow state

is concentrated heavy here into a twin stick setup. Take a look. I will report back more when I go a bit further into it. But just from the jump I can see very promising. So yeah, that's pretty much it though on my end. I saw someone in the chat say as I was looking at footage for Kill Night that I looked like a baby seeing an iPad for the first time.

Yeah, I can file Kill night under dopamine annihilator. As a genre, baby destroyers. Yeah, it, you know, definitely seal it away. But it was, you know, in going through all the advanced tutorials and seeing the the one where it was like during active reload, you can press different things for different outcomes. And I'm like, that's pretty good. What are we doing here? Yeah. Anyway, so this week, yeah, I'm not too sure. I don't think I'm going to jump in with a cyberpunk stream. I think I'm a little too busy for it, but I'm not too far from wrapping that up.

We are firmly in the end game. I suspect perhaps a cleanup stream or two, and then we're gonna hit that point of no return. So yeah, cyberpunk gonna be wrapping up shortly. Wow. Great stuff. Very enjoyable. Very good. And then I believe this weekend on Saturday, we're probably going to take a look at the

Capcom fighting collection too. I've already jumped around a little bit, but we have I have a friend, Ramy, who is a professed plasma sword expert. Who's going to tell him he's not? Yeah. So who's who's going to come out and go no I am like we have a professed plasma sword expert that's here to teach us about star gladiator. So we will we will probably be taking a look at that over at Wooly Versus on Twitch. They redid the music in CVS too, man. They redid the music in CVS too.

And forced EO as the online ranked mode. So, meh. That's a swing and a miss. Yeah. Yeah. That is a swing and a miss. Yeah. Yeah. That is a swing and a miss. I said it with all the previous collections, but it's like your goal here is to win over Fightcade users. Don't do things that Fightcade users are not going to enjoy.

It's also to bring a new generation some classics and have them accessible on a current platform. But like for the active online, you know, come on. Anyways, anyways. All right, let's take a quick break and we will BRB. Let's do it. Hey everybody, let's take a quick word from our sponsors. I love these sponsors.

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Pfff. Fucking video games am I right? Fucking video games! The only thing more fun than video games is talking about how the sausage is made. There are moments in time when we cover stories and I get blown away by things, but it's not often I can say that I get stunned, guffawed, flummoxed even. I would say it's fairly rare that we would describe anything in a video game industry, which is like, you know, it's business making toys, as disaster.

So for the last couple of weeks, you've been reporting on Marathon and Bungie. Midathon, yes. And how that's been going. And I, as somebody who's looking at this from the outside, have always heard cool things about Marathon, the original series, and Durandal, and Durandal, whatever, however you correctly spell it. And so this new version has- Whatever pronunciation I gave you, it would be wrong. And I don't know how to say it. And so this new version that has been launched

is one of those things where if anybody's a fan of the older series, they've kind of given up hope on the fact that they're going to get any more of that. This is a completely different thing. And it was like, OK. But then I saw that game trailer, and I was like, oh, this looks interesting at least from the- It does have a fairly unique part.

It's got that art style going and then you've got the gameplay elements where you played it quite length and saw that it just didn't have it, didn't have what you were looking for off of the people that made Halo and Destiny. And- Just missing that sauce. And then I saw that more story-driven kind of trailer or cinematic kind of tone trailer that was like... Won't be in the game.

Showing off some more of that whole concept. And the whole time, I've just been like, damn, it sucks to hear about all these aspects not hitting because this art style is so fucking cool and is definitely a standout. And I was preparing for a situation where I'd come in and then basically say something to the effect of, well, like, shame about this. You've called that like the studio is's probably not gonna be able to handle their next big release doing poorly, but at least somewhere, a really good art director

is about to have an amazing thing for their portfolio because this game is- And you'll get some cool wallpapers at the bare minimum. This, because this game is visually full of my aesthetic. I love that, the color shit and the way it plays with it. And so... Your aesthetic, huh? I couldn't believe it. Like the one thing, the one thing I've been like,

yeah, but look at that though. Look how fucking cool this world looks. This is your aesthetic? No, it's my aesthetic Um, you made this I made this. Oh boy. Oh boy marathon Has been accused of and has been proven to have stolen a ton of art assets from a designer, Anti-Real, who has posted about it and basically held up side by side screenshots showing you exactly where their textures were used, exactly where they're not just their design language, but like the, to the point where their name itself used, exactly where they're, not just their design language,

but like to the point where their name itself in the graphic design text has been put on textures in the game. The entire sort of aesthetic that you're looking at, when you go to, you can just go to the artist's website, you can go to our website, antireal.info, and all it is is just a bunch of posters, and you can just scroll the wheel down

and see stuff that got used as textures in the game marathon. And it's fucking crazy that, like, you've, in the industry, like, you definitely know that people will look at that and they'll create a style Bible for a game, and sometimes you'll look at the style Bible and see, like, oh, here's artists we were inspired by.

Here's stuff that we kind of, you know, took some inspiration from, some inspo on the wall or so on. But to then see the actual final textures just be the exact things dropped in. Like the posters that I'm looking at right now just transplanted directly over. And Anti-Real kind of pointing out that like, hey, no one ever contacted me about this and had a very atone that was essentially like, it's just tiring because it's like, I don't have the resources to like pursue this legally, you know, like it's I don't have the time to it's like it's just an artist, but just what the fuck, you know? And then everything after that, people follow up to different elements where you see, oh, the art director and members of the Bungie team have been following Anti-Real from before

the game was in development in 2018. From 2017. Right? So there's a whole trail there. There's stuff that gets to the nitty gritty where when you see a lot of anti-reels work, one thing that they've done is they've hidden Loss, the Control Alt Delete comic, references to it in their work. You know, it's a big meme and now- Here's a screenshot of the exact goddamn squiggles on a wall in Marathon.

If you know the Lost Meme, you know what the lines look like, and here they are dropped straight into the game. It's pretty blatant. And so it was so blatant that Bungie basically had to come out and speak on it, and to that they have said that there was a former artist that is responsible and that they don't work for them anymore, I guess, and that this is, yeah. So I have slightly more details on that. So the logic that they have is that they had an artist

that used to work with them who basically scanned all this shit in to get to like the base level texture sheets and then the general artists and the environment artists would just use the provided texture sheets to paper over the assets and all that. And people immediately went, but your fucking head of art and a bunch of your artists were following the place where this came from. They didn't notice that it was like one to one exact fucking thing. But also like, Anti-Real's name is on some of these textures, and it's been, like, scuffed up, like, looks like it's weathered, so it looks like old graffiti.

Like, it was intentionally hidden. I just, like, you look and the thing is, when you go to Anti-Real's site, you can see this is a professional, super sick designer who makes shit that is... It's basically what I wear when it comes to tech wear. Yeah, it's wooly. It's wooly. Yeah. My clothes looks like that.

I love it. Barcodes and numbers and geometric shapes and large, large, bold design blocks. And you, the weirdest part about all this is like, you could have hired this person to just work a masterwork of their design aesthetic for you original, but I guess the idea was it would be too expensive or we don't, we want to cut corners or we could do it ourselves or we could just steal it and hope we get away with it or whatever the excuses are, it just seems like the way that Anti-Real worded it when talking about it was like, hey, I'm open to working freelance for people. I don't know why nobody reached out given how much you clearly like my work. Um, this, the, the, the answer to that question represents a kind of ethical tipping point

in terms of benefit of the doubt. So I can't keep track of all of these, but I have been following this for a while. So the thing about plagiarism is that when people get outed as plagiarists, the eyeballs come out. Right? And you start looking at other stuff and you start finding, well, oh, whoa, oh, this, this too and this too and this too, and this too, and this too. And it turns out that plagiarism is a style choice rather than a, oh, fuck, I don't have time, right?

So of note is that we have talked about- It turns out- Bungie plagiarizing stories over and over and over and over on this podcast. And we missed a couple the top of my head They stole a fan artists rendition of the primary villain of the Destiny series For a cutscene upcoming in their thing from fan are promised oopsie oopsie oopsie They also took a fan artists rendition of the Ace of Spades as a Nerf gun and then put that into the game as a skin and then got caught and then said,

oh, don't worry, we'll compensate you and then fired their entire legal team. So now there's no one to comp it. There's no one to actually go through the compensating thing. They're currently being sued by a gentleman who alleges that they stole the Red War storyline from a fanfic he wrote, which may be valid or not, but they can't prove that they didn't because they deleted those parts of the game during the vaulting process and a judge says that that's not good, that people's YouTube videos of that content is not a primary source isn't good enough So instead of getting it dismissed they're going to trial over it because they can't prove it

And now we have this so is like the furthest reaching this is lots of assets This is possibly a significant amount of the total art style for the game the entire style Bible Which I'm sure this has it must anything this Pronounced and strong has a guide that they follow that is that everyone is looking at So what you're saying is there are five examples in recent time past of smoke. Yeah, I Also have to mention that somebody in the chat points out that destiny always called vaulting content. But that lawsuit has shown that it's not

vaulted. It's deleted. It's never, it's never coming back. It's not sitting away for a later revival. They deleted it. They can't even pull it up for a court case. So, you know, a pattern of being willing to just fucking take shit certainly does not bode well. And this is now led to, I guess. So one, it looks like, yeah, shout out to Jean Park got to sit down with Auntie Real and do an interview to talk about it. There's a quote that she says in there that really stuck with me is that as an artist, they got so tired of people stealing their shit and speaking up about it because they began to be known as a complainer first and an artist second. Oh, God. Oh, God, that sucks.

It sucks, man, because you're just that talented, right? This is, so okay, I just had a version of this conversation with a couple friends because this reminds me so much of, do you know Art J Germ, Stanley Lau? Yeah, I heard of him. I probably looked at him. Third Strike Online Edition character artist. So all the new Third Strike portraits.

Oh yeah, he does great stuff. Amazing stuff. Art Germ has been a fucking goat artist for years. And from back in the QA days, me and Shmup God Pat and stuff, our desktops would just be like rotating through his DeviantArt page, because it was incredible. And he'd have the best render you've ever seen of Chun-Li, the best render you've ever seen of Sakura or of Morrigan. And he just had like all these characters that are like

wonderful. There's a very distinct, bright, smooth style to them and it's powerfully lit. And motherfucker, if every single AI generated thing doesn't use his name in their prompt, right? Every generic AI thing you see these days uses bracket, uses comma art germ germ comma Stanley Lau as one of the prompts in there and now his work people see it and think it's AI generated because the backbone of everything generated is using his for

all the most popular prompts it fucking sucks to see reality catch up and unmake your entire catalog, you know, that you've talented with, with over the years have been able to, you've done such a good job that you've done too good of a job, right? And this is- You're now the bank to steal from.

Right? This, and you just, you can go look at it. Go look at Art Jerm's work and see how everything is just cribbing this. And so now this is it Right. Um The the anti real has done such a good job with this style That it is it is too good a job and you're to be known as the complainer first, you know

Fuck me that sucks So, yeah the the the follow-up then you, with all of this and for the whole game identity, the only thing, the only thing I was holding onto that I thought was interesting here, being just stolen and then there's a history of this behind the company. Yeah, when you were like, you know, how long does this company have? It's like, who the fuck knows? And so we have this article from Forbes now basically going, morale is in the fucking gutter.

The entire studio is worried about launch, and there's no talk about delaying or anything like that. But internally, shit's on fire because it's quite clearly understood that Bungie cannot make a major release like this Being released into a hostile environment quote unquote and flopping So we need to we need to pull back a little bit timeline wise because of note Before Paul Tassi posted that over at Forbes Which was in my opinion the the games like overall successes like nail in the coffin is the live stream

they did the day after the plagiarism accusations which had this stream which I'm going to send what I know I've seen it I've seen it I'm aware I'm putting it in there anyways you can look at plagiarism will make me a God says the Durantil. I also posted it. No, I saw you, I sent you a different one. I'm posting my Blue Sky link to it in the chat so people watching it live can get a look at what I'm talking about. So, of note is the backstory behind this stream. So what they were planning to do with this live stream was not have necessarily Joseph Cross, the art director on the show. What was actually much more important is they were going to show off more gameplay stuff. However, the level of plagiarism involved and the timing associated with the stream that had been delayed multiple times meant that they could not show any of the game at all because they have no idea how much of the games are assets are lifted and

what the fix for that is like they the the fix is you got to go through every texture in the fucking game and cross check it and audit it and bro that is a lot of work that is a lot of work or it's gonna take a bit or do you cut a check like you know what I mean it doesn't you cut it yeah no but it's like just do it yeah but like it's still stolen so instead what happens so instead what happens happens is they wheeled out Joseph Cross, the senior art director, the man in charge of the art department, to fall on his sword and read a prepared statement and have him sit there and explain that it was a former employee and they're no longer there. So he's not the former employee No, he he's the boss of the art department who has been following since 2017

Yes and he says that it's a former employee that that they let go a while ago that had essentially tainted the Texture pack with with this stuff even though and this is my favorite part every time Bungie gets caught they say that it was because of a unnamed former employee This has been used before a person that used to work here And we they're gone now Could it be who are they they're gone could it be someone who used to work but then comes back but then used to work but then comes back and then in and out for a while?

Could it be an in and out the door? It could get away with that excuse like one time. It's been their excuse every time. It sucks as an excuse. I mean, to be perfectly honest, it is kind of wild wild to just be like go on stream and handle this as opposed to just like, you know, getting rid of the people involved in, you know, oh yeah, so canceling a stream like that. They put them up there and he read the statement off of sheet of paper. And then there's lots of screenshots of the guy looking at the chat This is plagiarism will make me God and concord too and all this stuff and he's like

He's not a media guy and he's trying not to cry. Yeah And because my heart is black and evil and dark I think this is the funniest fucking thing I've ever seen in my life I think it is I think like telling someone to go out and die on camera because it happened underneath you is hilarious. It is the funniest thing that's ever happened. But from like, I work somewhere and they asked me to do this. That's crazy. That's what I'm trying to say. That's that's that's the whole that's the only part I'm like how was this the official? move

To be like no, no, no Officially go out there and just die on camera as the word of of the company like you this is it this is what we have to like that's you fire These people the HR company is handed under the right you don't send them out to die Publicly the HR department and anyone involved in whatever crisis management whoever they hide like that's what dude That's what the company look so it's insane. It's so insane. It makes them look so cruel. Like, okay, so the part where this person is, again, whether this ghost employee exists

or doesn't exist and this art team and everyone involved are following anti-real, so you clearly have... There's lies! It's crazy! You guys made a lot of textures look just like him! That's nuts, you did it from scratch! If you're what you're saying is the truth, it's very weirdly suspicious and doesn't seem believable based on the fact that there's this other part of the story, right? Either you are bad at your job and you willingly let it slide under the radar because you didn't want to know or you knew that those are the only

so blah damage control but as when it comes to like and so we walked out and Beheaded You know the traitor for everybody and spilled the blood and said feast Masses feast and let the crows pull it apart like he still works there that's in that's the craziest shit I've ever seen I can't believe that was the official move you know like just cancel the stream and put out a statement like I what the fuck we think of one reason why they would do it like

this and it's they want him to quit instead of firing him so that he doesn't get severance. It's exactly what it looks like. It's a go, it's a fuck you, this is your fault, right? You started this fire, you go put it out. Yeah, I guess so. But the knock-on effect of that is that when this is a company with a ton of people

who are working on a game who's like, you know, futures are attached to how this performs and everyone that had nothing to do Are you telling me that if I screw up something on that they're gonna put me on the live stream to fucking stutter my ass And explain it to the are you serious? Just you know and like and are the programmers over there just like going blood blood blood and the fucking QA team is like Like how is that the move? That's it. It's it's I don't I don't see how the thought was yeah This this will you know this will solve it somehow or so So the plagiarism stuff actually Distracts to some degree from a bunch of other shit that happened during

that live stream that also sucked ass not from a moral perspective or an ethical perspective but from a you really expect people to buy this perspective so the game has had two primary complaints one it does not have what's called proximity chat I don't know if you have personally played a game with proximity chat. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you walk up to people and then you can hear them and talk to them while you're close.

Right, this is like feature one of extraction game. You need to have the ability to proxy chat to your team so that it works like human players, and you also need the ability to overhear people. It is like the single most defining mandatory feature. It is a fighting game without a block. Lethal company and yes, all that's exactly there. And the second one is that man, on top of the proxy chat thing, the game is so stacked for

teams of three playing by yourself is miserable. And it's not free to play. So getting your team of like four, you got to convince your friends to buy the game and all this. And the response to both of those issues was to treat them as if they are either non issues or like, well, that's an impossible technical challenge or gameplay thing that we would have to spend ages prototyping. The proximity chat one is extra insane from Bungie because Halo 3 has proximity chat. Halo 3 was the first game I ever played that

had proximity chat. Bungie knows how to do proximity chat. They're already doing it. Them acting like it's something they would have to figure out is insane because you figured it out back in 2006? It's Halo 2 has it also? I didn't even know that. Yeah, so we're Zacy Zacy says, if there's no proxy chat, you can't tell that it's all bots. No. Oh no.

And on top of all this, it's like, they're not gonna delay it. The game is three and a half months away, and we have to see an internal audit of every art asset in the game. Holy shit. We're talking baseline features aren't gonna be there. And for Marathon fans, people that love the story and narrative

of marathon, when asked about, hey, are the four going to be P-H-F-O-R, the aliens in Marathon, are they going to be in the game to some degree? The response is, well, we don't want to, you know, everybody wants to get to the aliens right away, but we want to leave ourselves room to grow. And it's like you're, you're, you're like kneecapping your release so that you have like season pass plans later on this thing that no one gives a shit about. What the, what the fuck? But more than

all of that is Paul Tassie is saying that talking to people over at bungee that in order to make ends meet on this This has to be like top five selling game of the year They got to do millions upon millions to break even on this shit And it's not and moving that's not gonna have moving dates around is not a possibility I believe the description is morale is in freefall and the vibes have never been worse. So yeah, it's real simple. It looks like you cut the check or die. There's no in between. And when I say die, I don't mean die on arrival. I mean studio over cut the check or it's over

I don't see any other solution here. I there's no if there's no ability to delay and Replace the assets with your own original ones another thing will get to if there's no ability to get AI Perhaps voices to talk for proxy chat. Maybe Darth Vader will be the one talking when you run by a bot proxy chat, maybe Darth Vader will be the one talking when you run by a bot. I can't wait to hear what he calls me. Like, oh, actually, proxy chat's fine, actually. It's working great. James Earl Jones is right there. Listen.

So I would like to cut the check or die. I can't see a solution. I see nothing else here. Maybe I'm nuts. I would like to go back in time with you for a second to Destiny 2, because part of Bungie's mindset about the proximity chat is present in Destiny 2. They are like so, so hostile to basic social features at Bungie.

It is crazy. I don't know if they added it since I stopped playing but you know that destiny is like a an MMO where you raid Could you imagine that there would be like no in-game looking for group option of any kind? That you had how do you find through discord or forums exclusively destiny is the most confusing fucking thing that has happened like I've spent the last like 10 years listening to you and everybody talking about destiny and destiny 2 and I don't understand what this thing is like I know what it is but I can't is it popular you is it Like, I know what it is, but I can't, is it popular? Is it good?

Do people like it? Do they play it? Is it making money? Is it not making money? Is it not? Is it a failure? Is it, what is this? Like, what is this thing?

Why is it so, like, unclear? Why is everything about Destiny and Destiny 2 so unclear every time you talk about it? It is because they lie about it. That that's the reason okay It is popular okay, and it does make money. Yes, and it makes way Way less money than they say it does okay way less money than they say it does. Okay. When they spoke to Sony and got their like 3.4 billion evaluation or whatever the fuck it was, Sony just took them on faith that the numbers that they were providing were real.

Like one of the things that really stands out is that if Destiny was making enough money that it was doing gangbusters and it was something to chase after for their whole industry, Activision would never have allowed Bungie to buy it back from them. Activision is the publisher that runs things into the ground the hardest. They would have death gripped that shit. Yeah. Okay. Destiny keeps the lights on, but it's not a smash profit success. It's not like a fucking FF 14. This pays for fucking for spoken and foam stars kind of thing. It's

not a the whole rest of the company can burn down, War of Warcraft is still here type of success. I just the like but the absolute teeter-totter bipolar way that all aspects of the game are discussed is so confusing. You know, in conclusion, destiny is destiny then. Destiny is destiny. Totally unique thing. Wide variety of games and genres that you have not played. The only part of Destiny that you have meaningfully interacted with, and you've interacted with a lot, is classic Halo feels really good to play.

Destiny feels really good to play in a highly similar way that Marathon doesn't which is the weirdest part of this whole thing. I should specify that I did get Destiny 1 and I did play a couple hours of that and I on the on the pitch of the I saw the cool traveler art and I was like ooh a floating planet moon above the planet seems like a cool concept what does it mean and I and I was like, ooh, a floating planet moon above a planet seems like a cool concept. What does it mean? And I did a couple missions and I played it. So I know what Destiny is as a video game. What I mean is it's place in the industry and with people following it as avid players over the last decade is what it can feel. That's the part that I'm

baffled by. Everybody in the industry, it goes off of what Pungy says, which is Destiny is the most exciting and most successful thing ever and we're rolling in money. And then it's not. And everyone wants to chase Destiny. And tons and tons of games want to be the next Destiny. And they all fail because they don't make their games shoot as good as Destiny and then Destiny is doing okay.

You see, because when you describe it, because the first part of that, you had me in the first half because when you say that, that you usually go, oh that means that it's the everyone wants to do what it's doing because it's the best at what it's doing. They're chasing treading water. Right? It's the best at what it's doing and everyone's the best at what it's doing. They're chasing treading water. Right? It's the best at what it's doing, and everyone's like, damn, that shit's cool. We gotta get into that space of what they're doing because there's only room for the second

and third after that, right? Now remember, Woolley, let's think about this. When Sony hired Bungie, they did a couple of things. They said, we want to go live service. And you know're gonna we want we want to go live service and you know who's gonna teach us how to go live service? Bungie. So Bungie was the people that oversaw like 14 fucking different live service things come in and die. They were the ones who then also said hey last of us twos multiplayer mode. Nah, that's a bomb. Cancel that one.

Out of all the ones that got killed in the beginning, the one that would have been by far the best is the only one that died. And so the thing here with Marathon now, it's yeah. Like, hold on. Then Sony gave them like a billion dollars to retain staff during the merger. And then the what's his fucking Pete Parsons use that money to buy stock off the employees and then fire them and then went and bought out more cars.

And then when he was interviewed about taking a pay cut, he said, well, we're just not that kind of company. Baby, I love you. That's why I beat you. Cause I love you. Cause you're the only one for me. And if you ever fucking turn around on me, I'll show you what's what.

Like just what, even though we spent this much to keep them in place to then, like, I... I don't know how they didn't write a contract that mandated that they had to actually do that. Okay, but it is a abusive relationship of a fuckin' IP. Yeah! Like... You wanna talk about how fucked up Bungie is?

I feel bad for Sony management. They got fucked out of like billions of dollars. They got hosed, man. They got tricked. Poor little Sonys. Poor little board of directors. I know, like crazy. They didn't know what was gonna happen.

They got taken for a ride. It is crazy. Yeah, I'm, oh boy. All right, the unpack is nuts on this, but what I see here, what I understand here at the very least regarding Marathon is that the timing for the genre and what they're doing is not off. Even though it's using the name of a thing that people that are fans of, they hate that, that's not what they wanted coming back. There is like hitting this genre and getting the,

like getting a running start on it and it being actually like really good and fun and engaging in everybody talking about it could be like the thing that keeps the company alive and going for, you know, however long, right? These, these open ended projects that can last for decades. I have a bad news about that. So Cliff Lysinski did once say one thing that like was like genuinely prescient and genius where he's like every large genre or game has room for the winner and then the runner-up and a third weird place. Yep, that's what I was quoting earlier. Yeah. For extraction shooters, there was Tarkov.

Mm-hmm. And then came Hunt Showdown. Mm-hmm. And you're done. It's done now. Like, it is too late. But more than that, more than that, is that an extraction shooter is unpalatable to non freaks. The entire genre is based around the type of freak that is going to obsess on a game and goes, yeah, I lost every single thing I built up until this point. Ah, whatever.

Just let me get back. That is a hardcore. That is like an ARMA player. You know, that is like a Caves of Cud player. That is a Dwarf Fortress savant type person. It is for freaks. And they said, hey, you know what we can do? We can sand off these edges because we're bungee and we make games that shoot good and we can make it palatable to non-freaks and what they have made is a game for no one. It is still too vicious and mean and cruel for regular humans and it doesn't have any of the stuff for crazy freaks that the crazy freaks want for freaks and I know what you're what's going in many of your brains right now what about

Duskblood's that from software game of some way somewhat similar well unfortunately for people in the games industry from software has gotten to a point where they're kind of like Rockstar games in which the company's name is its own fucking genre. That is a from software game. We can. It doesn't matter what's inside. Yeah. It says from software on it and it has some moody looking sad people in a Gothic Victorian architecture. That could be fucking anything. Also, also night rain is about to drop and death's blood is coming.

Those could both absolutely tank and like they're fine Like oh what can we just coast on? Ten more years of Elden Ring sale sales guess we try it. We tried some shit out. Okay Here I'll say this though, right counter potential counterpoint If they didn't steal all the art and the game felt fun to play when you played it and you could play it solo That would have probably been Gone a long way these Wow. Hey Like if oh why is

You know and maybe and maybe also if like I don't know like if you go on and you know You go on a losing streak and every streak and everything sucks You just get nothing because it's the game where like you lose it all Slip and fall and you can eat shit forever like maybe if you think about that part of it where you find a way to design it where that people who are not the Tarkov freaks, but still want to get in on the show and on the fun There's have something for them But for the most part if you didn't steal the whole look and if the game felt fun to play, it might have had a place. And

if it's not that weird third, it's still something where, I don't know, the studio's not in dire, dire fucking trouble, right? There's a couple of other things that happened during this that were of note because so, Arc Raiders had an alpha alongside Marathon's alpha. And Arc Raiders got rave reviews and every day that that alpha was live, their Twitch numbers of viewers went up. Marathon, I streamed that the day of the day of the alpha release and got decent numbers. And then by the end of the alpha that the worldwide Twitch views

on that had cratered to like 2000 people. Like every single day that people watched marathon, they wanted to watch less marathon the next day. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It's just not hitting. Right. It's just not hitting. Because like, what if the game was good is like, oh, fuck it, right? Yeah, we'll be crazy. But like, the thought process behind why I even ask that is because I'm like, when we talk about the genre,

and I wonder, I'm like, do you have, like, is this something, when you look at the genre and go like, it's full, room's full, sorry, right? Do you have the example of the you have like, is this something when you look at the genre and go like, it's full rooms, full, sorry. Right. Do you have the example of the game or like, oh, that came out and nothing's wrong with it really. But it just wasn't the right time. And it didn't have the marketing budget or you know what I mean? Like, it's not the game's fault. It's just everything else about the space and time that it released into,

it can happen, etc. cetera. From time to time. I don't know, I feel like when you talk about Monster Hunter style games and stuff, I mean beforehand, there was the early era of I think Tokidan, right? Yeah, there were tons of those games. And they had limited success because they were cheaply made. And then later on we have Wild Hearts, which was there and stuff. they were cheaply made. And then later on, we have Wild Hearts,

which was there and stuff. Much less cheaply made. But in terms of sticking, in terms of actually sticking, yeah, people are saying Titanfall 2 was the example of what I'm describing. I'm like, if extraction shooters had that or so, then you'd look at it and go, right, this genre, being for freaks, has created a small space and a limited amount of

Money and time and resources and fan base that are gonna like invest heavily into it Can we unseat the throne? No, but you can't you can't But like anything you release that stole all the art and plays like shit is going to like fart its way into it like that you know it just There's one little extra detail that Anyway, that's the point. Sorry. There's two little extra details one of which is as you have worked in game dev particularly You have worked in QA on that stream they talk about

Weapon balancing they talk about revives they talk about you know all these types of nitty gritty things and They keep using this weird phrasing of like yeah, we're workshopping some ideas and we're playing around with this and Like I I thought I was not so I want to talk to some people and like it feels insane for them to be talking about a game that is three and a half months away and talking about like core systems and going, yeah, we're thinking about maybe completely overhauling this and maybe that. And it's like, how was this shit not locked down like

18 months ago? What the fuck? And I know the answer to that. Is it because of? The answer to that. Okay because of the answer to that okay like can I guess article from is it because is it is it I'm gonna guess that is it because of with something like destiny where you're like we'll play around with it in season one and by season three we'll probably figure that part of it out so that is what it is with a little underneath is that there is an article from 2024 in March, I believe, interviewing people working on Marathon. So what's the vibe around Marathon? Well, it will not be... This is from March of last year describing there will be no delay

ever under any circumstances because everybody feels that the reason why the date is so locked in is that the game just needs to live just long enough for the summer of 2026 bonuses to be paid out to the execs, which is the final payment date for the Sony acquisition, at which point they will all quit and just leave us hanging with the fucking whatever that we have built them. Fuck everything about this, dude. Oh, what? So the marathon appears to be a scam on being perpetrated on Sony by like Pete Parsons and the the the C-suite Oh, we can't even so they can get out with golden parachutes and they just need to they just need the game to continue to

Exist until the summer of 26. We can't even claim hustle on this You can't claim hustle. Oh my god. Oh. OK. Well, yeah, steal those assets then, I guess. Yeah, who cares? The game, I'm going to leave. I'm going to quit.

And I'm going to get my golden parachute and my Sony money. And on the way out, if you're a fan of the old franchise here have a Kick in the balls to just so Sony is so good measure Sweet in 26 and then by the end of 26 I feel that Sony is going to fucking absorb bungee directly into them under their management and Then marathon will continue to exist under Sony management until it is cancelled probably in late 26, early 27, and then Bungie will make whatever the fuck Sony tells them to

fucking make. And in the meantime, the streams will continue and each week we will progressively will cart out someone else tied to the cross and ritualistically. The guy that was behind the animation on the assault rifle you didn't like, huh? Yeah, and you'll do that little, it looks like a C with the little circle in it, you know the little marathon logo, we'll carve that into the chest. Jim Ryan over at Sony is responsible for what might be the single largest loss of money for that company in Sony Computer Entertainment's history ever. Over a dozen cancelled games

and then this fucking Albatross, they are going to get nothing out of this, man. They are in the hole on it right now. By billions. Billions! They paid three something billion dollars for us to be talking about plagiarism. So can you imagine buying plagiarism accusations? They cut the check to anti-real and it bounces. Oh man. Wow. Wow. I this fucking game. This is crazy. This is absolutely nuts. And from where we were just a couple seconds ago, you know, like one or two episodes ago on this to like, yeah, whatever, I guess whatever, we'll see. There's no stopping the train, as has been said.

They're probably, like, for all the panic and morale shit that we're hearing about, the part where anti-real's like, yeah, I don't have the energy to actually pursue this legally or resources, is like a bit of an unclencher for them because- So I don't think it is because- They can always change their mind, certainly. Someone could step in and- A bunch of people could be like, yo, I'm a lawyer. I'll do this pro bono and take my pay off of the winnings. There's always that type of thing. I don't know. I wasn't being sarcastic earlier bungee did in fact fire their legal counsel their legal counsel was hit with the layoffs

They don't have anyone who works there as a lawyer anymore ah Good they're using good good good good good good. This is good. This is this is good. Okay, Mm-hmm Well, can we get Saul Goodman? This is good. This is this is good. Okay. Mm-hmm Can we get Saul Goodman? I do have some good news coming on, you know marathon It might do really bad. It's probably gonna be really bad, but They did disaster, but I don't know if you even have this story on your docket, but I do have good news for Sony They do have one remaining live service game coming out after this. Are you familiar with fair games?

Oh, oh, flashback to dollar sign fair games. That's right. It's dollar sign fair games. Fair games, yes, yes. Correct. Now do you know what the two sticking points of fair games are in terms of like, it's cell here. Ugh, Jesus Christ. You dumb. Because it's funny, the only reason I know

is because it's funny to me. Yeah, I'm like, what event or award show was this revealed at? It was Game Awards and it was like a CG trailer. Okay. I don't think it's ever been seen. Okay. All right.

So, Fair Games is a Sony live service game and it's going to be hot. And you know how hot it's going to be? It's going to be like heist game, like Payday. Payday. It's going to be hot because they're using gen AI to design art yes yes yes yes yes lots of money and do you know what else is gonna save them money the head of the studio making fair games one Jade Raymond has quit oh from back in the Ubisoft days. This past week. I

remember that name. And so they don't have to pay her anymore. So that's that's money in the pocket. And fair games is definitely a game that is absolutely going to come out. For sure. Definitely not going to get cancelled. Delayed in the next three or four months. I see Jade Raymond left the studio five days ago and in February it got delayed till 2026. AI or yeah AI powered. So caveat is that anything that has that AI powered.

So caveat is that anything that has that word in it can attract outside investing because it's a buzzword to throw money at. Right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

But that, right. And I think the craziest thing after all of this is they're like we need a live service hit. What do we do is The squids are attacking super earth today They and hell divers to you can is just as successful as it ever was you can now go to super earth I did see that and it's like Anyone with eyes could have looked at helddiver, like these games in the states of development and be like, oh no, that one. That Helldivers one, that's the one.

And you could tell that because the first game was a success on its own on the PS3. Yeah, but really, using AI to get yourself masks Generated in your game. Why do that when all the kids are out here? Getting Darth Vader to drop slurs on him. That's what I say. I say clearly the kids are trying to To hang out with Darth Vader and watch him rank the races I and watch him rank the races. I have to admit a certain thrill in what you just said, because I'm curious now. I'm curious. I'm curious about the ranking.

I'm not going to look it up. I'm sure it'll be wrong. But I'm curious as to what the robot would thought. Well, it's real simple. Any way that you can get around something like ChatGPT's politeness features is the same way you can get around it for a Vader AI. Oh, yeah, totally.

So I think it sounded in the clip like they just asked them to rank the color on its own. And then the colors that they happened to pick, you know, were white, brown, and yellow, you know? So Vader can give his thoughts on that. And this AI generated thing is so cool. I love how every story we bring up that they're like, this is so cool. It's going to save tons of money is like a complete unmitigated fucking disaster that is assuredly lost.

Yeah. So, you know, you always get that bit where you're like, okay, like as soon as you see this, everyone's going to race to get their content because how, how heinous can it get immediately? Of course. Immediately. Right. But then the official, there's an official, there was like a, a, a, there's some, one of the, there's a stream that was like, somebody who had a model in the game that was like, essentially doing like, you know, more or less promotion, got slurred at in the process of using it normally, and got swear swore at and the list people have is multiple slurs swearing threatened to kill someone in real life, calling Pride Month for the delusional, going into, yeah, color racing, discussing Chun Li's ass, making a tier list of races, saying Spanish is a language used by smugglers. It just it has gone on and on and

Think Disney okayed that when they signed that well for fortnight well, so James Earl Jones before he passed did they they worked out all this contractually so that his voice would be used legally by Disney for Whatever purposes they've come up with their they've created their own deal where the estate is fine with whatever it gets used for. Yeah, apparently James Earl Jones and the family are all like, yeah, do it. Yeah, they got, they got paid. Which they, they worked out. I mean, okay. Yeah. Good for them. Sure. They worked out their money. They got paid, you know, it is, it is what they signed off on and so be it. This is, this is what we, this is what it is. Um, Fortnite rolled out a patch half an hour later to like tighten up on that stuff, but there's always more. The part then that comes after this is, SAG-AFTRA filed a claim.

And it's not because like there was like any legal issues for using it or, you know, because of the context in which it was used, because both of those things are entirely between the estate of James Earl Jones and, and Disney and whatever they- James was no longer a SAG member when he signed that contract. Also, you can't be a SAG member when you are dead, that you dead people are, you know, that's- You can't tell me what to do.

dead people are, you know, that's... You can't tell me what to do. Unless we have some new stipulations coming, I'd love to see Fran Drescher explain how corpses are members. But in the meantime, no. It seems that the main deal is that over the years, Disney has had to work with various SAG-AFTRA members who have been sound-alikes for Darth Vader.

Yeah, like Chad Vader. And that has been a known thing. And whenever you do something like this, you are supposed to negotiate with the union to say that, oh, we're changing the deal or we're changing the contract. You would have a heads up about going in a different direction or whatever would change as opposed to the people who have done this role before and the expectation that comes with.

To which Disney said, I've changed the deal, pray I don't change it further. Correct. So here we are. That was a good one. I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm

going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go ahead Correct. So here we are. No, for real. Chad Vader, day shift manager, the guy who played the Darth Vader in that skit has been the voice of Darth Vader when James R. Jones has not been available for

a long time. I think he was he was Vader and fucking force unleashed and a bunch of shit like that. And he should have been the person to negotiate through the union for this shit. It should be Chad Vader calling me a slur. Yeah, sure. If that's what Disney wants, Chad should get paid for his work as Vader. Now the problem of course is Chad would then have to sit down and record every single possible permutation of all the things we're describing. Money's money man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. The whole thing is often, it seems to be this is a soft launch to test out a Star Wars companion

type of character that you can talk to back and forth, which I'm sure Disney will then unveil at their park or in some other capacity or so, but this is- Yeah, don't use AI for that. Don't put- don't put AI Vader in a suit at Disney World, man. The deal has been signed and the man is in the ground and the money has already been spent. One day. That thing will be in the park for literally a single day. One day. Um, some little fucking kids going to walk up to him and he's going to start Mel Gibsoning out and that's going to be. Yeah.

You know, it's funny cause like, I feel like, um, recently there's just been a little, uh, oh man, and or so good energy in the air because I feel like recently there's just been a little, oh man, Andor's so good, energy in the air, because Star Wars fans are like, oh, we can breathe for a second. Star Wars fans can never breathe. You're not allowed to breathe. Never. Dude, so I kept hearing how good Andor was, and then for the first time, for the first

time I discovered like two weeks ago that Andor is the prequel to Rogue One and my brain just deleted any interest I could possibly have from that. No no, that was the trailer pitch when it came out It was related to that and but purpose is to give backstory to that guy in rogue But but according to everyone that I've been hearing about talking about it from Oh from a while back to now many people It doesn't matter. It's still some of the best Star Wars storytelling that so I totally understand regardless of what it's connected to It doesn't matter one of the things that I become annoyed by in Starcraft Star Wars is the desperate need for every piece to latch into another piece and fit nice and perfect and

like like they want to create a fucking movie universe in which every single thing that you watch naturally leads into the next one, like to the scene. So if I want to understand a new hope, I guess I gotta watch Andor, because Andor leads into Rogue One, and then Rogue One leads into the beginning of A New Hope, and it's mandatory viewing now. Yeah, so I guess, well, every time they don't, then they would announce something like when they had the big High Republic announcement, where it was like, we're introducing a new era and a whole new series of timelines and stories and things taking place. You make a big announcement for the fact that nothing's connected or so.

But at the same time, nah, I mean, if a thing is written well, if a good writer and someone who knows how to tell a story tells a good story, I don't care what it's connected to. I don't care where it comes from. If a good writer and someone who knows how to tell a story tells a good story, I don't care what it's connected to. I don't care where it comes from. Good is good. One of the first things was just like, yeah, it's connected to that, but it doesn't matter. It's completely solid regardless. I'll tell you what though. I've seen some clips and Andy Serkis is circusing the fuck out. Okay. Okay.

He's killing it. Andy. Andy circus is really underrated Because like I mean the Golem was his Golem was the big thing and then and then apes, right? He's just really good. But every time I just I just I'll always the problem is that in in the middle in between There's always that fucking Journey to the West PS3 game oh enslaved is always like I'm like Andy Serkis Gollum enslaved good god what a piece of planet of the apes and then everything else and there's just I love you like I'm like, oh Oh, there's always that I always remember that part. So, you know

Anyways, uh, yeah good stuff fortnight good stuff Vader I can't believe I remember the name of the girl in that fucking game, which was I can't believe I remember it's trip Monkey and trip let's go and the circus is talented though correct you are you're right beyond that only other things to touch on were that of course the most Kojima story possible When he dies he will leave behind a USB stick with game ideas for Kojima productions to continue Making games without him. It's kind of like a one they will work on it for four years Go bankrupt and all fade into the ether. I years, go bankrupt and all fade into the ether.

I just hope they're one sentence descriptions. Like, um, they totally are, you know, vampires, but you must go outside in real life to play. You, when you die, your save gets deleted. Like this, the simple, it's a USB key of like one sentence titles of the premise of a black mirror episode every time and The hill hill like hand them to the team on the deathbed and they'll look at them and go I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means Let's just make a metal gear type game

like at the wake, people will be reaching into the jar and pulling out these like small pieces of paper and have to figure out as he's just lying there smiling. So he's talked about a game he wants to make where the main character forgets things like core mechanics if you don't play the game for a long time because they have memory problems. But the line in the in the USB key is just main character who forgets things Jeff Keely will be the keeper of the philosophers legacy and it will be his job To get these story these game design ideas to the team Yeah to get these game design ideas to the team.

Yeah. Like, God, poor Ludwig just, I don't know what the fuck that means, but I'm gonna start writing music for it. Like, yeah, sure. Like, let's go. Anyway, no, he basically that's the idea. He wants Koji Pro to not be unable to make stuff if he ever does pass away. But he-

Well then don't die. Yeah, well. We've already done this. We've already done this. People who weren't following Metal Gear at the time don't know how embarrassing it was hey make a game where riding cuts things can't figure it out it's impossible it can't be done off it's hard I don't know what to do yeah in retrospect though it's almost like hey guys do that thing

you do but also make cutting a part of it. You know, it was like, oh yeah, okay, cool. It's impossible. Yep. Can't be done. Anyway, so there's that, you know, and speaking of things that can't be done, you know what else can't be done? What can't be done?

Shutting the fuck up. That's true. I've heard that shutting the fuck up is a lost art known to no one. Oh boy. Oh, here we go. This could be like multiple stories. I know which one you're talking about though. You're talking about Bionicle. Bionicle fan game, The Masks of Power, shut down by Lego after eight years of work. Now to be fair, to be fair, basically I've come to learn through, you know,

slop streaming and chatting with the audience quite a bit that a lot of the audience that's a little bit younger than us, super into Bionicle, got way into that as a formative core memory. I encountered a very aggressive Bionicle-based reaction. Yeah. It was quite interesting to find this out because I remember when it came out as a thing and I was like, oh, that's Lego creating their newest like, you whatever IP, right? And that's, I was like, right, it was like a kind of cooler looking thing. And there was a kind of like Mowdy inspired with the names and everything. But it was like, yeah, there was a

bunch of them. And there was also Lego Technics. I remember when they brought out the like, get your wrench out for the Technics, you know, I loved Lego, I love building them. And so they just had all these things. And, you know, I was like, it's just another one of those. And it turned out it was like, and there's a show and everyone got super and it's a big deal. And then diving into it with the Slopstream as well, people were like, rawr, you don't know. And it was the whole thing. I was like, oh, oh, this is sacred, sacred cow territory.

So with that, there was a fan game being worked on and it looked like it was everything that a Bionicle fan would want the game to be. It was a third person action game where you could do and use masks and do all the cool things that seemed to be what the show was about. Because it's a fan game, something that fan games do, you always know a fan game when you go to look at a trailer and it's like eight minutes long, right? Because fan game trailers never do the,

like the marketing- We're gonna show you everything. The marketing team at a studio will always be like, you have a minute and a half of player attention tops for a social media world. And sometimes if it's a highly anticipated super IP, you can get two minutes. But that's it, right?

If you hear a place that's a logo in the something, you're going to get two minutes tops following that. The thing every fan game is like, I'm showing you everything that I've been working on, and it's going to take you 14 minutes and you're going to take you 14 minutes, and you're going to watch all of it. And they're going to show off a whole level, and you're going to be like, yeah, they're proud of it,

because they did incredible stuff. And in this case, it's eight years worth of work dedicated hard to this project. And what the team involved seems to suspect is that LEGO has a fair play kind of system for people that are like publishing things that are how to not get sued by Lego while being a fan of it or talking about it or doing you know things relating to the brand.

And it seems like as long as it's sufficiently amateur looking enough, they're kind of cool with it as long as it doesn't look super duper impressive. But because Masks of Power looked like it was basically an official release, as it got time and closer to them releasing, they think that's why they got the shutdown order, because it just looked too high in quality, you know? Which it's an unwritten thing, but I can totally see that. I can totally see a team looking at like, OK, did like a 12-year-old and some of their friends get together and make a little whatever, right?

Versus when people Google this, is this like a looks like a real product that kids are going to get confused by? Nah, fuck that. Shut it down. It looks too good. So yeah, they did. They put out a walkthrough of the two-hour video or so, seeing all of it and explaining all that. And you know, I- I- I've- whatever. I- I- I- There's a video out there somewhere with- who knows? I, you know, I've said a lot of things over this- this- this career

I've had in front of microphones. People are- are- are dropping that left and right over all kinds of things. I can't say when it's relevant or not, but something that is clear is that the game shut down. That's it. Team is like, yep, okay, goodbye. And now completely unrelated on Steam, there is a project called Project Rustbound by a team called Unmasked Games.

And who knows what that will be. But it has a Steam page. And it seems like some folks that formerly worked on Bionicle Mask of Power will be working on this new project. So, I think this one is of like particular note because they were like, we're going to do this the right way and they got permission. And then they took too long and the permission lapsed. I don't know if it was explicit permission or if it was...

It was explicit permission from some guy at Bionicle and Lego. It wasn't a contract. It was a oh no that's cool don't worry about it in 2017. Okay. Like permission isn't even good enough, because permission can always be taken back. Yeah, unless you have it in writing and a long and a clear term designated on that, you know? But also, then you're like, if you get a shutdown order from the permission granted, are you going to then challenge it? Do you really want to go fight Bionicle in court and fight Lego in court over, you know? It would have been better to just shut the fuck up.

They should have listened to Wooly. Well, hey, Project Rustbound coming sometime. Take a look. A new original world from Unmasked Games. Totally original. There you go. I mean, to be like, any time, if I see within a week, a speedy new project has been announced, I'm like, OK,

well, somewhere deep inside, y'all fucking, you got it. You understand that every time you post about something and go into this. Or you're really fast or that. But hey, Nightmare Cart is still pretty great. Sure is. Yeah. And beyond that, I guess, is, you know, we touched on it earlier, but Nightmare Cart is pretty great, as we said, and how much did that cost?

It was, uh... Oh, fucking nothing. I believe it was free. 399. 399. Yeah, not bad. Um, Randy, I... just... Yeah, Borland's war was having like a lot of good swell of like good vibes.

You gotta just touch your tongue to your finger and hold it up to feel the to feel the pulse every now and then you know That's right Randy USB key gone missing Pittsburgh has something to say On $80 price tags for video games on $80 price tags for video games, true fans will find a way to make it happen. If you're a real fan, shut up. Now, the price. The price point he added is not ultimately his decision. That's up to take two.

But yeah, but do shut up. But all the more reason why it's like, you know, if something like that is happening and you're like, yeah, I'm not setting that price. But in the meantime, though, fucking suck up and learn discipline. Yes, get the Ken Kuduragi style, like a doctrine back out here in a world

where people are looking where every story is about like will GTA fuck over the industry as as people as publishers are along the side licking their chops hoping hoping that GTA just they're pre fucking up the industry before GTA even gets here. You know, is, is what we've been talking about for a couple, a couple of months now. And, um, just, it's just tone deaf to be like, yeah, nah, though, figure it out. Remember when Randy Pittsburgh said that he won the name gearbox from, uh, Randy Pittsburgh said that he won the name Gearbox from Gabe in a poker game.

And but you know what? That was a long time ago. I bet Gabe doesn't even remember that. So don't ask him about it. We got to be the Gearbox while Gabe had to be the valve. Totally happened. This is so, it's so like shut up. Also, you're the CEO of the company. So there's no one that can tell you to shut up. Yeah.

You know, I mean, it's just again, speaking of shutting the fuck up. Yeah. Like you could have just said nothing. You know, people understand certainly these pricing fucking this pricing bullshit is going to continue to be a problem for the rest of this, you know, hey, guess what? There's generation people that are just straight up not by Borderlands now. Or they're going to wait for it to on. Like, dude, okay, Borderlands comes out in September by the second week of December. No, fucking Thanksgiving. By November 21st, it will be $10 off. Do you think? Like straight up. Like literally wait until the fucking turkey sale on steam or at your local place.

I wonder. It will be 10 to 15 or $20 off. Which probably, who knows, maybe by that point, cloud obscured Expedition 33 will be like 35 bucks or 40, you know? Yeah. So one of the fun things about digital distribution, like one of the genuine like, wow, this changes things a lot and backwards compatibility is that if you're like, hey, I would like to play a video game.

Oh man, Borderlands costs $80. I sure hope Witcher 3, one of the greatest games ever made that lasts 195 hours doesn't cost 110 cents today. Like the availability of everything prices should be going down because now you have to compete with everything that has ever come out. Now you have to compete with everything that has ever come out. And yes, I bring up Witcher 3 because Witcher 3 is on sale right now for a sixpence. Or whatever the fuck. A shilling. What is it? It's fucking 559 Canadian.

I kind of want to give Expedition 33 more money. There's no way to do it. There's no DLC, there's no transaction, there's no extra shit, but I would love to, I kind of, maybe I'll just buy another copy. Buy a copy for a friend. Yeah, just buy another copy. I guess that's the move. I would love to give it more money. Yeah, OST, buy the OST. There we go. Yeah, great. I have been informed that plushes of SKA are coming. All right. So we haven't talked too much about him.

I love him so much. I love him. Okay, I like SKA, I love him. I okay. I like SGA. I love SGA some of the lines over worlds I There's a he talks so much. He just won't stop talking. I love him. Yeah, he will not I love also he sounds like someone on the team just used a voice slowing machine Absolutely someone on the team who can barely speak English. World's fastest bowl. Yeah, it's great. It's great. All too good. Let's take

some letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, go down to Castle Super Beast Mail at gmail.com. That's castle Super Beast Mail at gmail.com. Maybe write in about games that you would like to play rather than 80... Dude, I'm just gonna grab this for a second. When games are costing $80 plus tax and you can look at your Steam wishlist on a sale and just be like, how many of these do I have to buy to get to one of these? It starts to get crazy. Things, things, things you can do with $80. Yes. You know, is American that is to say that. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but you, a part of this involves, and this I think is probably might

be the hardest part for some folks is to divorce yourself from the cult of the new. You have to just let that part of you die. It's not that important. Now for you and me, it's a little more important than the average person because there's some things like, hey, Willy, do you know that you will spontaneously combust if we don't play night rain the week it releases? I know that! It's true, but like even even I, you know I told you I went back to FF14, I did the story content and I have not kept up with it. That's weird for me. I should be out there grinding my ass off in Cosmic Expo, but it'll keep. Just don't let FOMO dictate your life or your wallet.

Well the problem with FOMO is that it's designed to dictate your life and your wallet. Yeah. So fucking beat it. Like, I don't know what they like, you know, that, like getting, like that, that, freedom from that, even if a little bit, can go a long way, you know? Simply stop being affected by people's psychological manipulations.

Just be better than it. Or, you know, realistically, I guess, it comes down to like, you like you go well which like what what what matters to me from what's coming out? And what do I actually would like what what can wait a little bit or whatever the cases? I mean shit, dude if doom hadn't been sent to me via a review code. I wasn't gonna fucking look at it Like from our perspective the the new price thing is like well I'm not gonna spend a hundred fucking bucks to stream a game once that's insane That's fucking crazy. Are you serious? Mm-hmm? Yeah, it Really just depends on what you're you know, what where you're you're at with it and what you're what you care about the most

I suppose, you know to some degree but I just feel like when you get to looking at how there's so many fucking good games that are not gonna fucking bilk you for 80, that continue to populate Steam constantly, it's like, yo, we need to find ways to get that out in the public eye and make sure people know that there's great shit out there that's not that expensive.

You know, on top of that, and I've been, I even I have been doing this and I'm the crazy person that's obsessed with the cult of the new. It has never been a worst time in the history of the business to play games the day they come out. Like even waiting like a couple of days. Like Doom is a good example. I got the review code I got sent was the version that you could play early. They massive performance patch like Dave really gets better later and Baldur's Gate or like Baldur's Gate is like the this version but positive, right? But think of every game

that comes out and so I was a little fucky. Like dude, I like burned out almost on Kingdom Come Deliverance and then went right into the second one and then went hold on a second and I put out a DLC. I'm still not playing it. I'm waiting for all of it to come out. Same thing with Owlcat's Warhammer game. Like why play it now and get like a much worse version of the experience Well, I'll play it later and get a cleaner smoother more cut like it's I am I am playing cyber fucking punk You know That's the funniest one because they released shit during your playthrough it like they said don't worry guys. It's totally done It's done for realsies except for this fuck

Yeah, I mean, but just You want to talk about like? You know each shit you get punished for early adopting you know you get more stuff That's better quality later for cheaper in a lot of triple a game release cases. You know anyway castle super beast mail.gmail.com. Let's see, over here. Rick says, Dear Indigo Profewoolie and Patrick Become Human, what do you think- Oh, I win this. Oh, yeah. What do you think it would take

for the Quantic Dream Star Wars game to even get finished and actually be good? Thanks for the show. I think so for it to get. Sorry, after you, I got to do my thoughts. I think I think that like watching us over the years follow David Cage with a fucking magnifying glass has been quite clear that the quality of the team around him, the assets, what's going on has increased and increased and increased to the point where when we finished Detroit, we went, that's the best game they've ever made. It's not even close. It's like there's a good game in there. That's the best game they've ever made right. It's not even close. It's it's like there's a good game in there

Yeah, like it's like that's a good game It has like stupid story problems But Detroit become human is a good game and so the and so it becomes less and less about the Omicron the Nomad stole Soul style. This is absolute suffering second to second just getting into a fucking car and pulling out an item and saving versus that game where you're like this story is embarrassing and tactless and cringy and makes no sense and is awful but wow that's a pretty good asset those met that music is fine you know the technical is all there

there's no there's no issue there I think that if you have the team that's working on that that's that capable making Star Wars stuff and whatever, like your art's gonna be fine, your music's gonna be fine, all of that, Quantic Dream, they're very capable. It's the writing and directing that you need to rip out of the hands and hand to someone else. And here's the thing. So what we saw over time with Quantic Dream is they've clearly every game has built up

a larger insulating layer of managers around Cage to mitigate his level of control. Yeah, that's what they said in an interview, literally. And on top of that, Detroit had actors, like proper actors, going like, yeah, fuck it. We're going to do whatever. We're going to do it our way. Now we're going to do this way. And to great success and frustration.

But on top of that, it's Star Wars. Now, granted, we talked about earlier today that Star Wars may not have the most stringent content controls on some of their characters, but you still have to answer to them for your storyline. So are we going to see a force ghost possess someone's husband and then cuck them with their own body? Doubtful. Doubtful. Not impossible, but doubtful. I'm gonna say something. I have something I want to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, hold on. All right, I'm ready. I'm ready to receive what you want to say. I have a thought. I have a thing I want to say. Platinum games at its best is directly comparable to Quantic Dream. Because if you take them and have someone else involved with the story and writing and what's happening, and just give them the rest, I think you'll have a fine video game.

You know, I remember when you rolled your eyes at me when I said, do we even need platinum anymore? What you just said was so much meaner. Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. I can't believe Metal Gear Rising Revengeance was made from two teams that just couldn't do part of game development at all They just complemented each other. It's just the right way. I mean like like I near Automata like I'm like Quantic Dream Based on Detroit can absolutely do a Star Wars game. Who's writing and directing it? That's all I need to know. That's it

Who's writing and directing it? That's all I need to know. That's it All right, so what we need to do is have quantic dream build the game and have Make a story And we finally come full circle, this is our whole career, this is the whole thing. That's it. This is it There's no this is the Ouroboros The Ouroboros has ended. There's nowhere left to go. The two most flanderized things about us. Ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha. I'm now inverted and eating each other. And eating each other. Done. Yeah. Done and done. Ha ha ha ha! Dude, that would suck so bad! Where's my, am I lying though Pat? I'm a liar. No, you're not you're not no

All right And let's take one over here Sam from Minnesota Says hey, man. What's up? Hey Pat and Willie after some much needed spring cleaning I dusted off my ps2 and ps3 went back to some of my favorites back then. Demons, Souls, Folklore, Budokai. What's an underrated- Folklore mentioned? What's an underrated PS2 or PS3 game you'd recommend trying out? So if people say, I actually mentioned this a week or two ago, but yeah, no, if I want to talk about an obscure PS3 game that no one's played I usually bring up folklore

So I'm gonna have to fucking move my brain over a bit and just okay Am I the only one who every time I hear that it my friend, but it auto corrects to folks souls What's not what the fuck no wasn't that originally called folks souls? Am I crazy I Was it yeah, it was yes, it was originally called folks. Oh, yes. You are the only person who thinks that Well, it was a thing I Okay, I swear to God. It was renamed to folklore After a while while it was happening while it was in development the whole time they were talking about it was called folksoul

Anyway, I think that game's cool. All right. Well, I'm not lying. It's right there. You can look it up If I would like to point out a game that is near and dear to my heart very much a game that is near and dear to my heart very much that I have never encountered a say I you might have played it maybe but I've never encountered a person in in real life that's played it is silent bomber for the PlayStation oh boy yeah well you've talked about it a bunch so yeah silent bomber for the ps1 is incredible and I think I might be the only fucking person that played that game. Like it's it's so good. Um, hmm. You know what, man? Um, battle Fantasia was fun. I got no beef with battle Fantasia.

It was battle Fantasia is mostly interesting because it's like a preview of fighting games for 20 years. Yeah, it's it's it's got some busted dumb shit going on, but it's also kind of quirky and goofy, and it's got an interesting cast and art style. And I mostly enjoy, I had a lot of fun playing that. Battle Fantasia is a little hidden, forgotten one out there that I'd throw at you if you just want to blind pick something out of the wild. Cool. All right, that'll do it. By the way, there are people in the chat saying games, and I really need to point out something

that when we're talking about like, you know, maybe forgotten or less popular classics. First of all, if you mentioned a game that has a number in it that's not one, you're insane because it's got sequels it can't be that unknown and second of all I saw someone go oh man siphon filter are you insane that What the fuck? Folklore is the Japanese title for Folk Soul. Sorry, Folk Sorrels is the Japanese title for Folklore. Oh, that explains it. But I'm pretty sure on first announcement, they announced the Japanese name only and

then we found out about the thing afterwards. There was a transition point that I definitely do recall. If you want to get all semantic about it, you can fucking do that. That game's cool. Very unique. Takes place in Ireland or some shit. Yeah. God, I had another one.

I mean, name a video game. Well, a togi name, a video game, a togi too. That's a number. Why is that game never come? Why is that? I don't know, but the jumping is rad and you can play as a wolf man. It's sick. Man, you know what games underrated? Fucking no one can stop Mr. Domino. How about that? Sakura Samurai. Fucking super cool punch out like samurai game. Very fun. No one played it. It's great. And I don't know, fucking Dillon's Rolling Western. How about that?

Hey, what was that game that the 3DS had where you bought games with real money from a really pathetic old loser and you had to haggle him down for real? Oh! Rusty something. Rusty's real deal baseball. Oh Jesus. Okay. Okay. Might be the weirdest game I've ever seen in my life. Didn't play it. Yeah. I didn't either. I watched people play because it was fucking weird bullshit. 3DS got real weird towards the end here.

I love all the stupid shit that was on the fucking 3DS. It got weird towards the end. Kind of like this podcast. All right? Yeah. Take it easy, everybody. Hey, have a good week everybody. ["Skyfall Theme Song"]