Castle Super Beast - CSB327: Hollywood Is Mine For The Slammin'!

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Twitch VODs are now being uploaded to the new channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive The Whole Subway Is Mine For The Slammin'! The Whole Boat Is Mine For The Slammin'! Kojima Brings Receipts For Insane Japanese 3D Skin Texture Problem Expect More Games To Get Caught Using Undisclosed AI ArcSys Showcase 2025: The Camera Zoom to Disappointment Ratio Watch live: twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://shopify.com/superbeast to sign up for your $1-per-month trial period. - Download the Rocket Money app and enter my show name Castle Super Beast in the survey so they know we sent you! - Click this link https://boot.dev/?promo=CASTLESUPERBEAST and use my code CASTLESUPERBEAST to get 25% off your first payment for boot.dev. ARC SYSTEM WORKS Showcase | 6.26.2025 | English Broadcast - Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons, Damon and Baby, Double Dragon Revive, Demon’s Night Fever, Dear Me I Was (Hotel Dusk Team), Nenpact Capcom Spotlight | 6.26.2025 - Monster Hunter Wilds, Resident Evil Requiem, PRAGMATA, and Street Fighter 6. Persona 5 X players are obsessed with the Subway Slammer, but what's his deal anyway? Fans slam The Alters after discovering evidence of undisclosed gen AI in images, text, and translation | Eurogamer.net Randy Pitchford makes people mad again by warning that Borderlands 4 will take even longer to get deep discounts than Borderlands 3 did After revealing he was ordered to destroy his copy of Fallout's source code, OG lead Tim Cain says we're losing game history because companies "take authority but not responsibility" for preservation  

["Sailor Moon Theme"] Alright. Hey man, what's going on? So how about those car seats? How about those fucking car seats? Are you having a good time? Yeah. Are you having a good fucking time? Oh yeah. Just get that level going and then like get the level

on each side and then did you force it in hard enough? Is it secure? Is it secure? No it's not. Did you get one that uses the prongs to lock into your car? It has the option for both. Yeah. Okay, because the prongs are the shit. Yeah, so that's it. The option was to, if it had no prongs,

or if you didn't have a middle or positioning thing, then you could be like, all right, let's go with the actual normal seat belts. Do it the old-fashioned way. But the prongs are way better and more secure for sure. But the setup on these car seats, and I remember, so as I've been kind of getting prenatal classes and stuff and learning more about it, there's been one of those things that's come up, has been like,

hey, have you installed the car seat yet? You know, and it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, not yet, but yeah, we're gonna do it. You know, type of thing. Oh no, we got time, don't worry about it. And just took the opportunity and like, you gotta get your entire body weight on that sumbitch and like fight it into the seat.

It's quite impressive, which makes sense given that you're like basically anticipating massive shock impact, you know, security. But yeah, the amount of like, hey, you should go do that in advance and not while you're on the way home You know now make sense You know what? Yeah, cuz I don't know if you remember but me and Paige were

We caught the car seat and then the next then two days later We went to the hospital Okay, and so the car seat was sitting in our car in its box while the baby was arriving. Which meant that the day after the baby arrived, I got to go through the awesome process of assembling the car seat and installing it in the car, in the hospital parking lot. Yes. This. Looking like an insane person.

Well, so no, this is basically what I was warned against because not- I was very stressed. There was a couple other, we know other people that were in the same situation where they're like, oh, you in the, in the parking lot of the hospitals where you're installing the car seat.

And it's like the, the the like after it was done and set and safe, like full sweat, full body sweat, hot like it's it's all it's a full workout, getting that all in there and securing it off and back on and making sure it's all in. So, yeah, you like doing that in addition to everything else going on. They're just like, this is a bad idea. So this is this is the warning to do it well before you have to think about it. You know But yeah, no that's good man good for you guys that's smart move mm-hmm Hey, let me tell you you're not

It's not a good. It's not a good decision-making slash instructions following slash Rigidity testing mood no decision-making slash instructions following slash rigidity testing mood. No. The day after. No. This is not the time to push it to the limit. No, and yeah, so with that, got those in and got a couple of those gates, you know,

for the staircases and stuff. Child stoppers. Exactly, you know, kid the staircases and stuff. Child stoppers. Exactly. Kid container, just lock them down. No, you don't. So that's going to be. Now, granted, that kid ain't going to be going nowhere for quite some time.

For sure. For sure. But my thought process is do the stuff that takes energy while I have it, and don't save it for later when I don't. Right? I wish you a very good baby who sleeps through the night. That is a genetic, temperamental, in utero development dice roll that has no basis on what you were like as a kid or what Pudge Mom was like as a kid.

Completely random. I wish you the best of luck. Yeah. Yeah. No. We will find out. But yeah, I know that's kind of a part of what I've been, I got up to. Had a short week to be perfectly honest.

What happened? Went to a Montreal Twitch meetup. So hey, you know, shout outs to that, to Castle Runs. And I ran into some other friends, Father's Gaming Challenges, someone that I've streamed with a bit in the past as well that was there. And Sony, this old Samus player from the melee days, a million years ago that Reggie introduced me to that was around.

I saw some old faces, so it was nice to kind of just say what's up to some people. And get a little official Twitch water sippy. Oh yeah, how's it taste? It's like hydration, it's it's it's high. It's like hydration. It's good. It's good We took a look at ultimate Sonic Smackdown Which I talked about a bit last week, which is the 3v3 update to the sonic fighting game

That was made by the throne for too long. And each time so I played this game on getting to fighting games twice in the past and we'd bring over Uncle Jimmy aka Jimmy Bones to come over and play and each time we have it's been an absolute blast. It's been a great time and we got in there and shit talk was abound and plentiful. And we, and this, the initial, the initial, like the demo that they have is a, it's five characters right now.

So they're, they're, you know, converting everyone over from the original game, which had, I want to say like 20 something, you know, to this new sort of 3v3 rollback layout. Although it seems like you can also do 3v2, 2v2, 2v1, et cetera. Pick your own team size. And yeah, no, it's just, it's a, like, whatever they touch, Arkforged, it just, it becomes a dirty Marvel game. It's, you know.

Watching footage of it right now. It just, it gets a dirty Marvel game. It's, you know. Watching footage of it right now. It just, it gets so disgusting to just be like, how are you supposed to block that? You're like, shut up, deal with it. You know, get motivated white boy, you know, like it's just, it's great. Yeah, just instant fun right off the bat. And in this case, they also threw in some of the other music

from all the different soundtracks, including Unde undefeatable that first boss theme from Sonic Frontiers which is like a super banger track so yeah no nice to nice nice to you know again have another contender to the throne in the form of Sonic the Hedgehog and and his his crew I watched footage of mecha sonic which means this game is good in the form of Sonic the Hedgehog and his crew. I- Watching footage of Mecha Sonic, which means this game is good. Yep, Mecha Sonic is my main, Mecha Sonic is the goat. I am collecting tears with Mecha Sonic.

Mecha Sonic is so sick, it's crazy. Gets away with absolute shenanigans. There is a, like, you can do a spin ball. And then at the end, there's a, he can do, there's a command grab, or there's an anti-air command grab. So you can put them in like the spin ball blender. And then if they decide to like stand still or jump back, you can call it out and be like, no, you don't.

Ugh, you know, I'll fucking love mecha sonic so much oh wait hold on mecha sonic or metal sonic you're right there is a difference um mecha sonics the larger spike your more robotic one metal sonic is the one that looks like a metal version of sonic mecha sonic is the coolest fuck one from Sonic 3 and Knuckles. Metal Sonic is the lame one from 2 and the cartoon. Okay, Metal Sonic with the, yeah, with the goofy little proportion. And Sonic CD. Uh... Yeah, it's Mecha Sonic. It's Mecha Sonic.

Yeah, no, Mecha Sonic's the fucking cool one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um... Mecha Sonic, it's Mecha Sonic. Yeah, no, Mecha Sonic's the fucking cool one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Robotnik is there, Eggman's there doing sentinel summons, calling in the little robot animals to help and to extend combos and shit like that. Edgy Shadow is just teleport-virgilling all over the place.

It's great. Yeah, they're busy over there because basically, I mean, I've summarized a couple times, but like they're literally like not only making their own game, but they've been called in to help a bunch of other indie fighters get their shit working as well. So looking forward to it. I we also took a brief look at Andy Bogard Who's now out in city of the wolves and he is as sauce lists and as boring as he ought to be and? That's Andy Andy is not Terry Andy is meant to be dry Seasoned fucking chicken breast I Gotta tell you I legitimately fucking thought

you were gonna say as soft, as boring as the game he is coming to. No, I disagree with that. But they always change him up and try to make him a little more violent with his ninja techniques and stuff and he refuses to marry Mai, et cetera. But it is just a very clear like all the charisma went into Terry and Arnold Anderson Bogard just he picked the wrong master

you know. And the thing is too is like I guess if you were If I were just walking by the franchise and looking at the two the guy would like the fiery shirt and like the long hair You'd think would be like the big favorite the Alan Shazar Of the you know what I mean you think he'd be like that guy, but Andy would be cool. He didn't speak I Mean that he does speak Interest is fucking weird it is it is it is of the although the little like you know duo brother whatever rival kind of pairings and such it's like yeah like he Joe and Terry are like you know wisecrack in street talk and all that shit you're just kind of like Andy was the one that got made fun of right? He got he got he got flicked in the nose as a kid and like that. He's ever rather he got teased

boring or homeless hmm But homeless and charismatic though. Yeah, see right stuff And on top of that and then again and you you get my my is there She's down for life, but you just you refuse to give to give her the time of day He just won't do it. Oh God No, those the idea that like because I saw the the artwork in Street Fighter 6 of like the wedding happening

And I was like, oh did it happen in another franchise? Did it actually? And I think it was a dream in the end, you know? But the idea that they would celebrate it elsewhere was fucking crazy to me. And they kind of stopped, but the escalation of their intros over the years in the King of Fighters games, where at first it'd be like, hey, Andy,

and he'd be like, oh, whatever, let's fight, you know, and then eventually he'd be like, hey look, Andy, it's a baby, and he'd be like, what the hell, and then it'd be like, ah, it's a ninja trick, and then he'd be like, okay, and then she does it again, and is like, hey look, it's a baby, and he'd be like, okay, I'm not falling for that, and then she puts it down and it starts walking towards him and goes,ada and he goes And has a super detailed like the screamer Intraanimation all before the fight in like whatever like 2001 or something like that like How would that baby have even happened? Well? That's the thing right? That's that's what he's wondering He's like how is this possible?

With a ninja drink and shovel cattle Andy is horrified because this because this could not have physically occurred. Oh boy. Yeah. I want more updates on the dynamics of this insane nonsense relationship. You know? And meanwhile, like, Mary and Terry are like barely in the same frame at the same time like over the years there's been like two

maybe three instances and you know that they're just smashing you know late night you up swing by on the motorcycle get the hell out of there I'm just sleeping in an alley come find me yeah behind the pow-pow cafe under the pizza box the pow-pow cafe dumpster to see if they have any old fries and on the dog her dog can go find him by smell and be like yeah there he is all right quick late late night hookups and then fucking get outta there before anyone sees. Anyway. Yeah, that lore.

Good stuff. It's fucking stupid. It is dumb. Yeah, so I've been, you know, whatever, busy with house stuff otherwise, but we did get to the end of act one of expedition 33 Right on Reggie like it. He loved it He really enjoyed that and right right on time right exactly as I as I calculated at the end of the session too

like we pretty much got there right within the hour that I was expecting to and It hit and obviously, you know going into act two of that where you know no spoilers but just to say like it's a big first crazy moment in the story and to immediately go like and now we take a break and everyone's like that's how could you do this to him that's insane and he's like I'm in I get it you know I don't care about the audience but if I was Reggie I'd be like I'd be like that's that's yeah yeah no and I and I, I'm in, I get it, you know? I don't care about the audience, but if I was Reggie, I'd be like, I'd be like, first. Yeah, yeah, no.

And I mean, we did discuss it beforehand, but it was one of those moments where I'm just like, if it were anything less significant than the birth of my child, we would continue. But now it's clear that like, this is why I picked this thing and this stopping point. But yeah, that's all yeah, that's all fine. That's all fine.

And- I don't know what though, that Act 1 set of cutscenes? I went back and rewatched them. Man, those were completely incomprehensible the first time around. Just absolute nonsense. Crazy. And now- Love that.

Oh wow, they're just- Yep just yep Love oh, it's all there Love the the the rewatch experience on the same so fun So yeah, that is that that's pretty much all we got up to besides You know other stuff some some in-laws came through the in town and we hung out and had a good time So schedules a little bit spotty but some mid-laws came through in town and we hung out and had a good time. So schedule's a little bit spotty, but we're going to have... I would imagine. About to get spottier.

It's about to get spottier and we might pop back up every once in a while for something if there's like a sponsored stream coming through or so. We'll see. But for now, on the books, I've got two more left. And this week, we're going to be doing tomorrow, a sponsored stream of Mecha Break, which which officially is releasing from its open to now phone final form. So we're so gonna jump in there. I'll be doing a stream of that on Wednesday. If you see anything cool or get any pro tips, you can send my way, I would appreciate it.

There you go. Hey, don't buy this, buy this upgrade instead. Yeah, I mean, go to training to try out the mech that you'd like to, you know, or kind of like preview some of the mech that you'd like to, or kind of preview some of the mech types you'd like, but I don't know if, I feel like you'd like the... I want the one that's like Epyon. Yeah, okay, you get the Epyon.

There's an Epyon for you. I was like, I don't know if you want the grappler. Yeah, I want the drill on its fucking arm. Yeah, okay. There's a couple of sick ones. But yeah, Mechabreak is, we're gonna take a look at that. And I'm also going to use that day to, like yeah, we're gonna check it out for a couple hours and then I'm gonna switch it up to a different game, which is currently in an open

preview right now. Looks fucking crazy. This thing out of nowhere called a mitreya so how do I how do I spell that I will drop a link over here oh that's much easier actually and yeah it is it is a action it's a character action style superhero assault spy like like, follow up. Yeah, and it's like taking all the lessons from assault spy and going to the next level with it.

Imagine a character from the world of My Hero Academia air comboing through a city in the sky doing character action shit. Looks super. Oh, see, I thought the number one takeaway from assault spy is that a guy with a briefcase is a really cool idea for a character action character. It certainly is.

It certainly is. And if I had time, money, and the ability to do so, I would expend heavily on that idea. But of course, you know, one... There's also the idea of like, yo, hey Pandora, are we ever gonna make an entire fucking subsystem character around that concept? Because you certainly could. Look at, this thing looks really cool, Might Raya. Yeah, just looks like a solid action game

right now in a little play test. So I'm gonna take a look and see what's happening with that. It's doing a bunch of fun things I enjoy, which is like massive text on screen when when shit happens, you know. So there's that. Yeah, it's kind of tricky because like I know there's this and there's another game that like was super wooly coded that got set my way, which was a dead as disco, which I want to check out at some point as well. I need to... That's another... It's literally rhythm, dance, floor, combat type of shit going on. And...

That looks very interesting. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. On to the wish list it goes. Super sick. So we're going to be checking that out. And then on Thursday, I'm going to be joined by one Foxcade who's coming over and we're gonna say hi to Fox for me. Mm hmm.

We'll do. He's gonna come over, sit on his on that couch and he's going to teach me and Reggie how to play Yu-Gi-Oh! On the way out with at the buzzer with the ball in the air and the and the we're gonna learn how to play Yu-Gi-Oh! master duel. So that's the online version. The online version. All right I have I, okay, so here's what you do. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You reach into your pocket. Mm-hmm.

You pull out, let's assume this is a wallet, it's a phone for visual. You take your wallet out. You open your wallet. Okay. You take your credit card out. Oh, okay, I got my Ridge wallet right here, yeah. All right, yeah, okay, then you hold your credit card

in your hand. Okay. Then, in. All right, yeah. Okay, then you hold your credit card in your hand. Okay. Then, in your left hand, then you grab your fist, okay? And then you just punch yourself in the dick and balls as hard as you can a couple of times. Okay, full. And then you put your credit card back in your wallet and you have learned how to play Yu-Gi-Oh! Master.

Gotcha, gotcha, okay. Now, does that, do I win when I do that? You won after a fashion. What you did is that you got all the good parts of the experience and you didn't spend any money. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, okay, okay. You got the core of it. Because it looked like to get to the beginning, to just enter the game, so to speak, to enter the door, there was going to be at least five bucks required to get some sort of set deck and jump in and just start throwing things at each other. There's a real joy There's a real like joy

Followed by a real like sorrow in my heart that the most fair Least predatory card game that's ever come out was the one that went dead broke which was ruined The one that gave it all away It's like by making card acquisition fair and fun and easy and fast, they went broke. Mm-hmm. Whatever, I've said it so many times over the years, so everyone knows, I'm just repeating myself. I know that the nature of having an ever-expanding go-collect-them-all system is what makes people want to buy

and expand their collection and customize and do stuff. But I just, you know, the feeling that you kind of like essentially like have to. Yeah, it's a it's a well, I don't know what the exact wording is, but the economy is based on your your continuous, you know, buy in participation of the system is not I just I wish that wasn't the case with with these games, you know, the-in participation of the system is not, I just, I wish that wasn't the case with these games, you know? The closed card deck systems, the CCGs,

I believe they're called, definitely just sound way more appealing to me as they don't force that purchase option. So, there was one of those that came out a long time ago called Artifact by Valve, who makes good games, and it was a massive failure. Because. Yep, I understand.

People want to buy the packs. A lot of new cards. Yeah, and you want to get the little opening pack feeling of like, oh, a rare, and that rare is worth more, and you want to have a secondary market where you can sell that to people who are collectors. And there's a whole economy system that people legitimately enjoy here that is,

it is predatory, but part that is like it is predatory But part of the part that is predatory also means that there's scarcity that that scratches itches that make it enjoyable So both things are the same thing and you can't escape it. Yeah, this is nature of how it goes So for example I'm gonna send you a photo here Of what card games are about. Okay. Let me just load up this link here.

Okay, here's a... Yeah, I'm going to copy paste this photo for you. Okay. All right. So, this is a photo. Could you describe this to the chat, you know, for the audio listeners in particular. I see, okay, I see plastic gloves are holding Yu-Gi-Oh cards, or Magic the Gathering cards. And they're looking at one and then they seem to be, okay, there's the player is in full-on clown makeup in the corner and she appears to be cosplaying perhaps

a character or so and she's holding up her phone playing some magic. And in the bottom left what does it say? Box 4, Zero Emmets. Okay, so that is friend of the show Rebecca Ford, director of Warframe Yes, who does not play magic the gathering okay? But does play Final Fantasy 14 okay, and is a massive massive Emmet silk fan okay? Who did a stream in clown makeup? Where she's like I'm just gonna keep opening these fucking packs until I get the Emmet silk card

Did she slowly put the makeup on as none of them showed up? No, I mean she started with the makeup. Okay, you started full because, like, slowly putting them on as you continue to not get one sounds like a way to go. Yeah, all right. And she got her Emmet Selk.

I believe she got a hollow Emmet Selk. And then finished the stream by going, gambling is bad for you kids. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, I just, And then finish the stream by going gambling is bad for you kids Yeah Yeah, I mean look I just I feel as if like everyone when I think when I have these thoughts I feel like I'm like imagine walking into a casino and going to someone at the slot machine Who's sitting there just doing the thing and? Going like hey

I want to change in the slot machine Oh, I and or I want to change this to make it to make it more fair and so that you don't burn this much money But there's a you know what you're getting in from the beginning and there's a cap Oh, you know I want I want to contain contain this and I and the look they give you as they just piss straight onto the floor Is is what I'm thinking of like my colostomy bags full but I don't want to change it. That look of go fuck yourself and I'm relieving right now in front of you. When the Final Fantasy Magic the Gathering card stuff was going on I got to see my algorithm sent me some people's TikToks from the Magic the Gathering world and one in particular stood out to me which was a guy going people had been mad at him that he paid like $300 for a single card on eBay.

And he was crashing out because he's like, you people are morons. And he pulled up a couple of videos of other content creators who had spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars trying to just get the same card, but doing it the right way. Which is by opening card packs. And now he was actually smart for only spending $300 on the card. And all I could think of is that like one, he's completely right. And two, everything about physical card games has become completely insane and predatory

to the point of you can't get in there. It's for sickos. I mean, we've been over the years. Every other day there's a Wizards of the Coast fucking thing of just how insane they're getting and all the bullshit that they get into. But in this instance, I think the plan is to just go in, start with whatever you can get with a default, and he's got an account that's full of all kinds of stuff, so we can learn that. And I'm not going into necessarily,

I think you can get a free set deck right off the bat, and then we can look into it and see about getting maybe another or whatever the case is, but the plan is to just learn Learn to what the game itself is as opposed to what to buy and how to you know You know how to how to feel horrible about your about your own poles Only thing I know about you yo is pot of greed lets you draw two additional cards. Yep. Yep And no no that is not what pot of greed does oh Yep, yep, and no no that is not what pod of greed does oh

That that is an anime exclusive. Oh shit Wow well you also know about Exodia you know and then the right hand of the forbidden one and the left hand of the forbidden one And I download you go master duel on my phone Yes, I can Yeah, yeah, all right. Let's have a very let's have a very interesting podcast in two weeks. Okay Yeah, yeah, we're that's that's the plan and it Yeah, I think you again by starting out you get a couple of points to like pick a thing or two and then you just You know dive in.

Do you have a weakness somewhere for this kind of thing? So I like collectible card games. The irony, of course, as somebody who loses their mind when they see a card game in a game, liking collectible card games is strange. I really liked Hearthstone for a while, but I never got any good at it. I really, really adored Runeterra. I loved Gwent in Witcher 3. I'm not smart

About card games like I don't I don't I'm really bad at building decks But I like I did okay when I was playing Marvel Snap and like all of the collectible card games that I played did one of two things Rune Terra died It just like they just came out and said hey We're just gonna fucking not update the PvP anymore. Right? It's like essentially a dead game And then snap and Hearthstone both had this thing where the longer I played and the better I got to it The more I was like, the better I got to it, the more I was like, well, you gotta get this card. This card's mandatory to get your deck rolling.

Okay, how do I get that card? Well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can grind out X amount of millions of fucking bullshit. Or you can buy the treasure chest of 8,000 gems. Maybe or you can buy the treasure chest of 8,000 gems Yeah, you can buy the treasure chest and like the way that like I specifically remember Hearthstone was about liquidating cards. You didn't want into cards that you did and the rate was just it was terrible Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah burning copies Marvel snap every update

They made to it made it made cards you wanted that you didn't have access to further and further and further away and rare and rare And rarer because if you didn't get a fancy card during its battle pass when it came out It would just get fed into a pool But the pool to pull from would just get larger and larger infinitely. Right. So, like, aw. So, you know, I mean, obviously I had my tep end phase where it was just like, you know, at maximum slop, it's like, is the sliding JPEG of the character I like moving and the

voice lines are playing? Okay, yay, activate neuron, go. You know, and that was a activate Neuron, go. And that was a weird one, because again, it was more timing based than actual set card player or whatever, but for the most part, I was like, yeah, if I'm interested immensely, certainly in the theme, I can carry that forward into playing for a while

on something, but the other game that I ended up playing a bunch of, which I talked about back in the day, was the original Yomi card game. Besides the fact that it's like, okay, yes, it's fighting game themed, which I have that familiarity, one thing I did enjoy about it was the fact that each character was a normal 52-card deck deck like playing cards. So when it came to like trying to think of like the odds of something popping up, you know, it's like, oh, if this is going to be, you know, like an ace or a jack or whatever special move I'm looking for, I

kind of just you're already familiar with like expectation of how often those things will show up in odds in that way. So like, it felt like a bit more comfortable right off the bat in two different ways going into it. And so I was like, yeah, I like that this whole deck is one whole character and you just got to learn that. And, you know, it worked well with other card game and other fighting game knowledge as well. I really wish I liked Tepen, man.

I wish Ruin Terra just existed as itself but with the Capcom cast. All the pits and pieces and flavor of Teppan I'm like yeah. But the live timing stuff, the live timing stuff that I could definitely understand how that would turn people away especially if you're like I'm playing this to do something turn-based I don't want to worry about that element. Even though if you're like I'm playing this to do something turn-based I don't want to worry about that element even though if you're playing online against other people do you always have to have a timer though? Yeah the timer is like slow. Yeah. The only problem I foresee a problem already with me

playing Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is that like the art's kind of sauceless. Oh yeah? It's pretty... My expectation is the... The anime art is what my brain is expecting. So anything... It's anime, yeah. Yeah, that's pretty much it. That's all I'm setting up for.

Which you know, that type of art was very pretty. Those versions of those characters are shiny and they got some cool stuff going for them. Marvel Snap as well, had a couple of those. Marvel Snap had like a really wild variance between good looking cards and the rest of the cards. The other thing, so yeah, we're going to take a look at that and I believe that is not the only plan for the day as I've I have been informed that we will also switch and the last thing We're going to play before I go on break once we're done with Yu-Gi-Oh master duel is

something called Let me get my glasses on the bridge of my nose here. I really hope I know what this is. Uma Musume Pretty Derby. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Really? I'm shocked. I thought for sure you were gonna say persona 5x no no we'll talk about that in a little bit though So we're gonna play the horse girl game really there. There are horse girls They're barely horses as far as I can tell they're just girls with like little headbands on with ears attached to them That's why it's wild what counts. It's wild what counts as a spiritual animal these days in anime. It's crazy.

Like you have, you don't have to commit at all to anything. Back in our day, we used to have furries that were dangerously cheesy. Right? And now, now it's just like a hat. Or there needed to be like, you know, you needed to have like, okay

You could still be a human face But you needed to have some cat like features going on the eyes and maybe the little nose had to be a little bit cat-like You know, you have to kind of commit to some whiskers here and there and you're like nah This is just an anime girl But we're throwing some some little some ears on it and calling it a day and I'm still saying that's cowardly shit cowardly shit. It's really funny and I mean really funny that Persona 5x and Ume Musume Pretty Derby came out simultaneously out here because my timeline so there's a lot of people that I follow on blue sky that are like anime nerds. I guess fucking dweebs

And I've seen nothing but two things for like a couple days now one is people absolutely crashing the fuck out over their pretty derby horses not doing what they want or their pretty derby horses not doing what they want. Or people just memeing the fuck out of the fucking subway slammer. Yep. And talking about the king of the subway.

Oh yeah. And he'll slam you. Oh, make no mistake. The whole subway is mine for the slamming. Ah, he's gonna slam it! Oh god, yeah, so We're gonna get it. We're gonna get it. We're gonna investigate these these horse girls and see what the fuck is going on But yes, the subway slamming is real and I mean listen we talked at length

You're such an asshole you have assignment you I'm now going to download both of these fucking games on my phone. Because now I want to be able to talk to you about this stupid shit. Yeah, you need slop exposure, right? I need to know. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. There you go, I found it. All right, slop exposure forced.

Forced onto your fucking phone. Oh, I don't like that. That sounds like a tag. Mm-hmm Slop underscore exposure Horses are being exposed to slop I mean that's what that's what they eat right you put it right in the fucking bridle trough man Well trough guy or a bridal guy well do horses eat from a trough because I know this can eat from a trough Pigs eat from a pig's eat from a trough in my brain horses

You got the bridal and then you put the thing with the with the you know, the the oats going right? That's what I was thinking more along that line. So Feed bag etc Wait, no is bridal bridal is what you bite right? Okay, no, that's the bit. That's the bit never mind. Okay. All right well Favorite if Willie was his whole was a horse his favorite part of the it would be the bit Well speaking of the bit um I mean if we're subway slamming we I mean if we're subway slamming we

Slam we got a slam right now because let me tell you something when People started talking about this fucking p5 the mobile game p5x Well, cuz they announced it and people were like this is a mobile gacha thing and then it's like oh But it seems to look like a full-on pre p5 game and then it released in China I believe so like with Punishing gray raven and all this stuff you get that like and chase victory You get that early preview when it's out in another region and then so now it's getting translated and coming out over here And yeah, like we talked at length about how Kamoshita in P5 is the... The peak of that game.

...absolute most reprehensible villain and nothing you do afterwards comes close to like taking that fucker down, right? It's actually strangely like... It's strange how the peak comes so early and then dealing with the world and politics afterwards is like yeah, but and persona 5x is exactly the same Because now right if you haven't heard in this new spinoff the first boss of the game is a subway pusher and The kind of guy that just slams woman over the barricade into the subway and is like, I'm like, oh my God, what a perfect, modern, extra-hatable person. But also he loves slamming people on the subway.

And he's super into it, and this is a real thing that people do, it's a real problem in Japan, but it's a real problem everywhere, right? Yeah, it happens out here too. It happens everywhere, yeah. And it's this new, crazy ass, hateable form of like, like you're looking at like,

you know, there's people that, there's just these fucking psycho, like cases where just, people are just shoving people, swinging, punching, getting violent randomly at, you know, out in the wild. These ones where someone just shoves someone into the fucking train is so anger inducing

and frustrating. How much about the genesis of the Subway Slammer do you know? I spoiled myself on his details. So if anyone is trying to save the backstory of the subway slammer, you can make sure to wait for the game to go dive in on that. But I went to go find out more and then like, yeah, I read the reasons why and the backstory, and it's still one of these cases where I'm just like, you need to find these petty, low stakes piece of shit villains in society, because never mind government reform takedown, everyone hates that guy. Everyone is like, oh, that piece of shit. And then he slams, he loves it and he disappears into the crowd. And the idea that you you're just like we're still don't know where he went He's at large. You're like fuck these people

We you know These are the people that everyone loses their mind that and like they like no now you can't everyone's paranoid You can't have nice things everyone's gonna you got to lean back You're looking around and nobody knows what's going on You know that type of asshole is the perfect villain for a persona gamer more than this There's so much more going on with the subway slammer Then you would expect so the back. Oh his Genesis Yes, I do and I don't know if we should spoil it for people that want to save it for themselves

If you want to play it small scale no, I'm not gonna talk about it. Yeah, so small scale. Yeah, Petty Hilarious, which is the funniest fucking thing in the world Okay, so don't listen if you don't want to have it spoiled for who free for the backstory tune out now. All right about it So it's simply because he's a coach For baseball or or or so and like a nice baseball player and and a nine year old baseball prodigy girl like the home runs him his pitch his pitch and it's so embarrassing as a professional

TV and it's televised and he gets he gets owned so hard he can't handle it and breaks and now he needs to get revenge on all the women and then it's like women did this to me. Mm-hmm It's women's fault and now I got a slet subway slam all the girls for embarrassing me in front of the nation In baseball how dare they it's so crazy They eat so crazy What like that like oh you all if you don't get the subway slammer by such-and-such a date

Uh-huh that like this will happen The fucking the the world series like no no like you know in a persona game. It's like yeah the calendar day Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, so in the subway slammer. It's your character like imagines What if they knocked a woman down the stairs and she dropped her baby? Gotta stop we gotta stop the subway slammer before he kills a baby He imagines that and you see him envisioning the plan Wow And you see him envisioning the plan? Wow The advanced slam the grand slam What oh my god? Oh my god?

It's like wait wouldn't the footney escalation be like what if he killed a woman is no no We need to we need to kick it up and all my fucking got pat the word slam and the baseball Connection are the whole reason why he's slamming I didn't realize it down to the subway the grand slam There's more Willie and this is not about the subway slammer so the so first of all persona 5 the phantom x I'm probably gonna check it out now because we've talked about it. I have to know It's a year behind and with some games you'd be really mad about that.

However, with the Gacha game, it's actually really, really great because you can see, hey, what characters are actually really strong. You know, what character should I save up for whoever? And I guess it's about saving up for Makoto. But what you also get is like, well, how did the Chinese and Japanese audiences respond to the subway slammer?

Yeah, is is they fucking hated it. Yeah hated the subway slammer and thought the fucking subway slammer was dogshit and The writer for the subway slammer is apparently also a massive pussy and fucking got fired of pussy and fucking got fired. Whoa. After getting mad about how people hated the subway slammers. That's crazy, because I'm so compelled, right? And furthermore, with no context,

except for what we've seen getting named and released, because we're spending all this time talking about him slamming, I'm assuming that he's slamming people into the tracks, but it seems like people are getting pulled out, right? Like no one's getting slammed and hit by a train, right? That's kind of the idea. So you're like, it's like you're not doing,

it's like it's attempted murder, but you're doing it in this way where people have a chance to get saved. You're just fucking everybody up and scaring them and ruining everyone's day and just being horrible. And you're like, it's that extra petty level on it, you know? Like you're diabolical enough to do that when it's minutes away from another train coming,

but you're gonna slink into the shadows like, ah, it slammed another one. You know? For Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal ends up becoming the main writer of the storyline of P5X from Palace 3 onwards. Ah, okay, okay. So the Subway Slammer is just a brief shining moment of what could have been.

I mean, incredible, incredible, you know. And yeah, the shit's going nuts. I mean, I, you know, Dead Asna sent me a clip of Kamishita. Wait, did Dead Asna also send you a bunch of unsolicited information about persona 5x I saw Kamoshida walk up and and and Argentine back break the subway slammer And and leave Joker speechless this morning. Yeah, yeah, you know so they're going nuts over there But I just I can't believe the perfect parallel of an opening villain that like you you nailed it And I just as this is something that I'm like, okay for all that I loved about metaphor, which is high concept

Right, which is high and grand scale metaphor could never this level of pettiness is persona And I really really hope we can find ways to find this exact type of individual in Society right now in the current context and fucking spotlight that asshole. I need more of this energy. I love it What what yeah, I mean I'm gonna play all three of these games this week I'm kind of wondering like did somebody you did that writer, did someone just kind of, were they looking at the news and just being like, like who's a piece of shit these days? Who's a real, who's fucking grinding everyone's gears?

Like, can we get a boss that is a porch pirate that's just out here and going like, yeah, I'm stealing a bunch of random packages, but that ain't enough. I need to start stealing people's medication You know I need to start getting in on the stuff that looks like it's really important Can we just find these exact fucking just oh you You waited for the medical equipment that was going to that house to steal grandma's pills

You know what I need if we need to have a persona villain that is guy who passes the school bus Can't wait to zoom School bus scooter I Love I love scooting can't wait yeah It just drives around looking for school buses to scoot by, you know? And just close calls with the kids who are crossing. Oh man, one day he's gonna hit one of those kids Yeah, that this this is the energy I need. I need like fucking pathetic asshole in society

I love it. I love it, dude Great great. Wow. This is a glut of free-to-play stuff this week for you. You got Mecha Break, you've got fucking Subway Slammin', you've got Pretty Derby, and you've got Yu-Gi-Oh. Yeah, also Might Rayo is the other one. Yeah.

Is that also free to play? Yeah, the playtest demo's free right now. Oh gee, oh, well that's not what I mean by that. Yeah, no, it's not what I mean by that. Yeah, no it's it installing bullshit on your phone that's gonna make it get so hot that it hurts to hold it. Games. Games that make your your your your fucking warning to temperature message pop up. Yes. So we will be taking a look and uh fucking blame Fox cage is all I can say on that one That's gonna be

Yeah tomorrow and then Thursday over on wooly versus and then again, you know if you see us pop up at some point randomly again, you know, don't be surprised but That's that's the plan for I love this. We're talking about Yu-Gi-Oh! And already I have a guy on Blue Sky saying, hey, just a heads up, starting up Yu-Gi-Oh! now with no experience is the same as starting up Marvel vs. Capcom 2 with no experience. The tutorial in-game is representative of the game as it was played in 2002. A million years ago. Amazing.

It should be ignored. You should watch a YouTube video instead, to which I say, no, I'm not going to do that. OK, yeah. I mean, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it via Sherpa. And the whole goal is to just literally find out how the game itself is played.

Which, you know, inscription with its homages was kind of fun at that. So I'm not completely in the dark on it, but um In terms of trying to get serious and competitive and be like I want to get in now for the meta It's like okay. Yeah, no, this is the guy that would be me being the guy from last week going I don't know what a fucking what what the rules are. What's the best card? What's the best deck? That's all I want to know right now, now, and just being like only caring about that. That'd be insane.

Do not set your expectations for me being like, oh, what kind of deck, am I gonna be a Control Deck player or this or that? No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just like what beats what and how do the point systems work and how does it flow? Control Deck is fun because you can feel, like I like playing a game in which even with no voice chat and no way to communicate

You can feel your opponent getting fucking mad as shit Mm-hmm just super fucking pissed like playing a control deck and like rune terra and just like somebody throwing it down a card down And just going no you don't get to play that card. No, you don't get to play it. No, you can't, no, no, no, you're not allowed. No, you're not allowed, fuck you. Is just. I mean, look, I don't know that you'll see me pick between being a Timmy, a Johnny, or a Spike. You know, within the one stream.

So. Hey, Yu-Gi- you go players, is there a Timo deck where I can just flood my opponent's deck with AIDS? Because if that's the case, that's what I want to play. It's my favorite deck I've ever played in anything. Wasn't there a fourth name that got added to that? Wasn't there like Timmy Johnny's something? There was like Timmy Johnny spike and I feel like there was like another oh the yeah, I don't know anyway Apparently there's been a lot. Okay

All right. Well all that going down over on those Vorthos I believe yeah, that's the one that that's more master that I believe that's that's what I've heard before You were a Spike, weren't you? I don't know which one these are anymore. Timmy likes it when the big explosions happen. Johnny wants a bunch of complex setups. Card interactions. And then Spike just wants to fucking win.

So it's not about win. It's like I want, I want, I would really prefer if all these collectible card games were actually just sets of constructed decks for you to play against each other. Like, Like when I was playing Rune Terror, I was playing a lot of Azir, Aurelia, and I built that deck according to the Azir, Aurelia fucking template, but I would have been just as happy if I went into a mode and it was like, pick a deck, like pick a fighting game.

And pick a fighting game character. It's like, what kind of deck do you want? And they just gave it to you and I would just play it. Yeah, I mean, look, we can really just, you could look at this and go like, Timmy is going to take Gustav and he's going to build that overcharge to 10 and he's going to use it.

Johnny is going to get in there with the forced pictos that make your whole, you die and upon death you cast and then you resurrect and then you stay at one life And then at one life you're doing extra damage and then all those things feed into your your weapon system Which feeds into your stats which feeds into your build and your and your your your know your AP and then there's just like Yeah, literally what is the meta? What did they nerf, what did they buff?

Okay, that's what we're playing over on Spike, right? Anyway, Wooly versus on Twitch and on YouTube. That's what we're up to. What is going on? So, Mean Page watched a Netflix documentary this week. Yeah? We thought you might actually like. It's called Trainwreck and it's about the poop cruise

Okay 2013 no not trainwreck the Amy Schumer movie, but the trainwreck poop cruise That's correct. Yes, I saw the thumbnail for that it was it popped up in my in my Netflix recommends I was actually going to say it's a pretty fast watch. It's a 50-minute documentary about a cruise in which the electricity went out. Okay. Okay. I have a very crucial, important question. How much poop is actually depicted in the poop cruise documentary? There is no poop depicted

Love is merely implied lovely. Okay There is at one point a video of some off someone's phone of them standing in what appears to be sewage Okay, but it's not like there's two turds floating around. Okay, yeah, yeah. Because look, I mean, at the end of, you know, you take me through a Shawshank Redemption and I'm going, oh, but I get it. That bit's rough. It's rough, but for the narrative, you know, we can deal, we can deal.

But like, I don't need the footage of like panning over a boat and just having blurred out brown shapes. I'm just like, I'm good, man. Okay, lovely. You know, most of it is told to you via the narrative and the story. There will be more than enough poop in my life in a minute. All right? I don't want to get trapped on a cruise boat.

That just seems like a horrible, horrible nightmare. I don't like to get trapped on a cruise boat. That just seems like a horrible, horrible nightmare. I don't like it. No, I do have, I've never been on one, so I do have that curiosity. And me and Punch Mom have talked a couple times about, you want to just be humongous pieces of shit and just go do a stupid piece of shit cruise. You want to just give up for a couple days and see what happens. And there's that inner curiosity to just give up and know what it's like once, you know?

I might do that. I might do that because I've never done it. And I kinda wanna know. But then you, yeah. You wanna just be a massive piece of shit for a little bit? Put the horror stories. You're on a boat, no one can stop you.

But the horror stories are very, very like this. Yeah, basically if it goes bad on a boat. It's really bad You know like ever a minor problems become major problems very quickly mm-hmm I I the energy that I saw from that thumbnail was very If you liked fire festival you're gonna love hearing about this disaster Like they the the narrative actually builds up really strongly to set up, set up, set up, set up, set up tipping point. But yeah, it's a nice, easy, fast, clean watch.

Okay. Which just has a lot of like, ugh. Oh my goodness. Can't believe it. Yeah, because you know, like there's a couple of times that the times where you hear about cruises I feel like for me when that pops up is like, you know, there'll be this type of story. There'll be the the air of circulation Got gave everybody

COVID back in the you know a couple years ago and then there's the drunk dude takes a dare and Dives into the water and everyone just watches and you're just like that's it that was that a shark fin bye and it's just like yeah there goes a Darwin Award I suppose that's fucking crazy but in seconds. Is that a shark fin? God I hope so otherwise he's just gonna swim for like a dozen hours and drown. It's like they're not stopping they're not doing it like they're gonna let hope so otherwise he's just gonna swim for like a dozen hours and drown.

Like they're not stopping, they're not doing it like they're gonna let people know the coordinates where it happened and maybe toss a preserver overboard but you're cooked. And then also I feel like back in the day I used to hear stories about like, yeah I don't know, you know old couple went on a cruise, took out a bunch of insurance beforehand and then, you know, off the boat. Just she just fell. She just fell. You know, we got into a got into a fight and she just fell. And, you know, there's nothing that can be done about it.

That's just how it is. Yep. So thanks. I'll see y'all later. You know, just what are you gonna do type crazy shit? So that's whenever I hear the cruise stories, those are the things that circulate in my brain, you know? Don't fall off the boat, guys. Don't do it.

Let's see. Yeah, so I watched about the poop cruise. Was it a boat slam? It was not a boat slam. This whole boat is mine for the slamming. Dude, like watching the subway slammer just lurking in the middle of the subway platform, like crouched down in the face.

Just like, oh, I can't wait to start slamming. It's like, oh, this fucking world. Dude, like yeah, just Brian Batt Brian Battler just shoulder charging into people. It's great. It's great. What else I got? Okay, so I have played a high amount of Death Stranding. You have no life, then.

I have played approximately 22 hours of Death Stranding 2 Since we last left Okay, you're in it now. So a couple of things first of all Thank you very much to one Ludwig for so a friend of the show. Yeah coming on and chatting with me How'd that go for a couple those early streams very appreciated bud also shout out to me Being a stupid idiot. So Willie, I have my monitor directly in front of me, which the computer is plugged into. This monitor feeds its audio into this mixer. So audio comes from a PC game into the monitor into

the mixer, right? I have a PlayStation set up there. The PlayStation has its HDMI port go into this monitor, which then outputs the music into the mixer. So everybody can hear everything, and then the mixer leads back into the PC, right? It's just a very simple loop, right? So I'm talking with Ludwig on fucking Discord, and then I go to switch to Death Stranding, and I discover something really

stupid. Now that I've switched the HDMI input, the monitor is only inputting the PlayStation. Correct. But, I'm using the headphone capture from the PC. Yes. So, I run into the scenario in which everyone can hear Ludwig but me. Yes. Yes. This is the same problem I had when you would call in and I'm playing Helldivers on PlayStation

over there or when anyone has to do a Discord call while we're playing a console game while I'm also hearing Reggie sitting next to me and we're mixing all of those together into the thing. It's a super complicated setup. So I'm given the task of having this prestigious guest on my show and having to solve it immediately, which is when I messaged you and I messaged you on Discord, I was like,

will you help help me send me Turtle Beach headphones, please? OK, OK, OK? I fucked everything up. I'll tell you later, and it's later now So I start sweating Profusely and I start panicking and I start like min maxing and so on by the way as my favorite part of this Ludwig couldn't get his computer or his laptop to work with Discord also The composer audio man To had to call in with his iPhone oh my god. Yeah, that is one way to do it mm-hmm Yep, discord on phone is a thing everything was just falling the fuck apart

Okay, but I did solve it. Okay. I solved it by just using the monitor and video output of AverMedia, of my capture card. Of the card directly. Okay. Put it on here. So yeah, you, right. Had some panic solving, Panic tech support solving.

Because I have a couple extra steps involved with mine, because I also have the local capture going, it's not just about the stream feed. There's also a local recording for editing for YouTube later and local audio on the side. What I ended up doing is essentially getting a secondary mixer to take the full call and add it in at a lower volume to the main feed. And you have to basically just, there's a separate device you can get for that for Discord calls. That sounds really fun and reliable.

Yeah, I mean, well, ever since I rewired the whole setup to get it in there, and now it's fine, but it's like But then we also add the thing of like if Reggie's gonna be playing on his own screen next to us or something like that You know then we're Yeah on top of that I'll just get all the technical stuff out of the way because it's Death Stranding on top of that. I went ahead and You know a little while ago, somebody made a snide comment. I think we talked about it on the podcast, where somebody was like, I can't

believe Woolly and Pat are still streaming at 1080p, like we're old-ass dinosaurs. I was like, man, who the fuck needs more than 1080p? That's ridiculous. Well, I went and futzed with some settings in the Twitch Enhanced Broadcaster beta and I am now going to be streaming in the future at 1440p with four times the bitrate that I usually use. And it's really good that I did this because when you get to chapter five in Death Stranding 2, there is a sequence that I can only describe as the bitrate annihilator. There is, I swear to God, the worst bitrate scene I have ever seen ever while streaming. It is genuinely unbelievable. I have ever seen ever while streaming okay genuinely

Unbelievable it is just a nonsense mess of particles for like half an hour I Mean thinking people are not designing their game chapters with streaming bitrates No, it is it is a vampire survivors level of visual mess on screen the whole time. Jesus Christ, okay. I happened to be walking into it

with a newly upgraded stream and hey, it managed. It handled it? Okay. It actually handled it and I was like wow, cause then I did the petty bitch thing, I'm like okay, well I'm gonna go look at other people's dreams of this exact moment And it's like yeah, no It's it's a vampire survivor scenario where it just turns like people's cameras stop working because the bitrate just can't fucking keep up

And so the bitrate on the camera just all of a sudden puts your your face cam down to like two frames a second Okay, okay areas um yeah, so there's a couple games. Okay, okay. It's fucking hilarious. So there's a couple games I've played where like, oh well I mean Elden Ring, right? Some boss fights in particular. Yeah, it's like hey, you want some soup? Mm-hmm. You want some fucking soup?

I wanna say Lord of the Frenzied Flame was getting kind of nuts with it. Interesting, okay. Yeah, I did, so over on the, I mean not on this setup over here, but over on the gaming setup, I did tweak things massively to hugely increase the bitrate output,

and I'm able to get it stable, putting out like 11K. You know? Yeah, that's what that was before. In order to not have your shit turn into garbage on Death Stranding Chapter chapter 5 you need 20k Oh my god, okay, you need it up there out of curiosity What is your CPU usage on OBS?

percent four okay, I see I have it tops out at 8% I have it down to 1.5, and I'm doing 11k right with Super duper light light light footprint. I mean you usage is gonna be standard across the board if you're using like n-venk That's like your code or like AV one because that's all GPU But if I have to double that oh my god, okay? Well You know, I guess well, I guess we'll see ultimately but there is a limit to what's possible with our hardware our setups our Bandwidth and there's a million little things to consider for sure, you know, I've also switched to MKV Good for immediate not losing your footage

bad for losing your footage, bad for compression right off the bat and potentially using quickly, because you have to convert a massive, massive multi-gig file into MP4. I have to convert shit, man. I'm uploading parts of my Death Stranding playthrough before my stream is over. Okay, well, because I edit, because I have edit as a step,

I have to get an MP4 done beforehand. So yeah, MKVs. Yeah, so what I do is that when I take a break now to go piss, I stop my recording and start uploading it in the background and just set it to public and it just goes live before the stream is over. I mean, fortunately, OBS has a built-in system or option where you can remux. Yeah, the remuxing.

And that takes care of a lot of the issue. But this is also why I just, again, I capture on a completely separate device entirely. So, yeah, I mean- I don't need to edit if it's all just good the first time. I haven't encountered too much of the like, you know, LOL 1080p what the fuck kind of conversation, but I can say that like, I don't know what's possible with

my setup here. You know, there's all there's basically a deal where, well, there's moments where you know, there's also like, you know, punch mom working from home and stream uploading and multiple things where it's like, this is not a, isolated, pristine, you know, undiluted internet situation, you know? We make do. That being said, yeah, I was curious. Did any like tidbits from Ludwig or? We talked about like a wide variety of topics, not necessarily like specific to Death Stranding.

Did you ask him about the Laurier? Testant. No, I spoke to him about that when I was streaming Expedition 33, because he was in the chat for that. But one of the things that happened is that... So when you have the music man on your show, everything that comes out of your mouth is like perfectly designed to make you look like a stupid asshole.

Correct. It's just the way that it works. Yes. So, Lootie and Woodkid did the music on Death Stranding, right, so Woodkid did a lot of pieces and Ludwig described that he did like a majority of like the in-game music So like tension music cuts some cutscene music

Wandering about music action music, you know the game soundtrack right the score so I'm doing like a VR mission and I'm like wow man this this this this fucking music's great you did a great job it's like well wood kid did this one okay well okay good yeah and then later on there is in the first chapter of the game, there's a big marquee action sequence. And I had my trike, my tricycle, my motorized motorcycle tricycle. And the game was like, hurry up. And I'm like, oh, I don't have time to fight these guys then. So I just eyeballed it and hit a ramp super hard

and just literally flew over the encounter entirely whoa and and like landed in the cutscene that ends it okay and then I hear Ludi in my earpiece just going God damn it Oh no! Oh fuck! I'm so glad I can have the composer of the game soundtrack here. He's just fucking super pissed that I'm skipping his music. That's super real. That's what it's like when you watch someone play your shit man. Yep. Oh fuck. It's video games. It's an interactive medium. Isn't it crazy? People play them. You never know how it's going to go. And we got to have this fun little moment where, you know, so chatting about how like, Ludy helped pick out the voice actors for like,

Dead Man for example, because like, it's English speaking guy on staff back in DS1. And then we get to one of the preppers that we run into. You know, there's a bunch of, the artist or the musician or whatever, right? And this guy's called the Boca. And he's a white guy in Mexico. And he's like, yeah, I'm trying to style myself after the Japanese style Porter, the

Boka. And he's like trying to like enunciate it super hard in Japanese every time. And I can hear Ludwig just like trying not to vomit and just getting super upset because he was on a contract basis for Death Stranding 2. He wasn't like in the studio and he's just going like, I could have stopped this. Every time the guy says it with this super thick bad Japanese delivery, he's just like, fuck. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. I could have. Just sticking your hand out. My other favorite part about having Ludion is that I'm asking questions to the chat.

I'm like, oh, do you think this is a good route or this route? And Ludvig's just like, man, I don't know. I never played it. Yes. I never put hands on this game. It's not what I'm here for, bro. Yeah. I did the music.

Mm-hmm. Do you have ears that's me yeah it's it's really fascinating whenever I you talk to people that are in game development and there's like a huge swath of people that are like yeah I don't know how it plays yeah yeah I wasn't part of that I did the voice acting or I did the narrative or I did the whatever. It's not like everybody going out to see the film release and going, oh, that was me back there, what have you. Just super weird.

Or the classic, I beat the community manager at this fighting game at the press event. Like did you? Yeah, because that happened to me with Dave Lang. fighting game at the press event. Like, did you? Yeah, because that happened to that happened to me with Dave Lang. Well, there you go. I ran into Dave Lang at E3 when Divekick was on the show for a while and I just trounced the ever loving fucking shit out of him. And that was like four rounds of Divekick. And I'm like, all right, Dave. Hey, man, I know you're trying to

make the game look good and you're not trying to discourage people. But like, okay, you can, you can turn it up. Like let's have a match. And he looked at me and he's like, we are having a match. Yes. Yes. This is, this is, I, this is the real thing. And this is, this is what I got. Yeah. You know, or like, you know, I mean, the bit with like challenging Harada to Tekken and stuff, but there's always been these over the years stories of like developers from like, or from anime games or like people on the battle planning team will be there.

And like sometimes summer down, it will go to salty sweets and mess around and get games in with players. But when there's been, one thing they don't want is the situation where like a really strong player or like a top placer is like Oh, I beat the guy who's in charge of making this decision Therefore you should be listening to me and I think your decision suck and here's why or whatever the case is

You know and and like that whole discussion getting awkward and shitty Means they kind of like steer clear of a bunch of it, you know Yeah and shitty means they kind of like steer clear of a bunch of it you know I want that yeah so that's that's that's cool that's cool so I'm maybe a third of the way through the Death Stranding 2 maybe maybe 35 40 percent and there's two things that are happening at Death Stranding 2 sorry three things there are three things happening one is is. Climate change? Hey, no, no, no, no, I don't mean like that. I mean like, did you like Death Stranding and would like more Death Stranding?

Right, okay. The second of which is the story thinks that you, the player, are stupid. Like, do you remember when Snake would just repeat questions back to people so that they would have an excuse to answer you? Of, uh, of Metal Gear. Yeah. Yeah.

Death Stranding 2, coming off of the absolutely baffling Death Stranding 1, has decided to instead have characters talk to Sam and you like you're a moron. OK. And I say this with all, you know, I'm not that far in the game. Maybe I'm wrong. Might be the worst attempt at bread-crumbing a twist

I have ever seen in my life. Okay. Like, genuinely might be the worst, who could this character be, I have ever seen in anything. To the point where you figured it out on the podcast Look at your chat go. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah Like Mike be like yeah And more and more and more and more like what's going on hit those set sandy points baby let's look at what could be happening um as for trucking and game playing this is this is the game that Metal Gear Solid 5 was supposed to be

like it is so you're fighting way more mules and brigands they're called brigands now but you're fighting way more mules and brigands, they're called brigands now, but you're fighting way more dudes, you're sneaking into bases, you're tranquilizing guys, they're putting helmets on. It feels like MGS5, it plays like MGS5, but you're just trucking alongside your MGS5. It is much more aggressive. There's a much larger focus on dealing with enemies than trucking.

It's still mostly trucking and climbing. But instead of 90%, 10%, it's like 70%, 30%. Are you trucking slash building the network as much as you were? Okay, okay. I've built a beautiful set of roads. Beautiful fucking set of roads. Excellent roads.

They've done a couple little tweaks that have made a massive, massive fucking difference. Okay. The first of which is that you can carry the personal carriers, you know the little robot like floating things. Those can come with you on the zip lines. Oh, nice.

So you can take one of those with you on a zip line. Hell yeah. The second is that there is a second type of road that you can build now. Ooh. So you have your proper highway, which is for your triking or trucking needs as such. You have your battle skeleton or your speed skeleton,

you know, just to truck it as you would. You have your little, your floating disc that you can throw things on. There is now the sequel to the road, which is the train. Yes. You are now also building monorails. Roads needed a sequel.

And the monorail is the hidden missing step in between the foot and the road, because there are now a mechanic where you will find mines where you can, for example, the material requirements are enormous and become super gigantic. So you'll go to a mine and you'll be able to be like, well, I'll give you 4,000 chiro crystals for 4,800 ceramics. It's like 5 ceramic, which I'm gonna need to finish out the road. Oh, like ore mine, right, okay, okay, yeah.

Yeah, and so then you will build out your monorail out to the mine, and then you can use the monorail on the mine to ship huge proportions of materials back to like a main distro center. And now you can also ride on that monorail as if it were a zipline. And now you're like satisfactory-ing basically. Basically. It's all pre-charted out. Okay.

But like for example, you can point a zipline to a monorail and then you can combine them and they become part of the zipline network. It's a literal monorail like one? It is literally a monorail and then you can combine them and they become part of the zip line network. It's a literal monorail, like one? It is literally a monorail. Okay, so this is interesting because I guess when you think about real history, a lot of the times connecting a nation is based on can we get the train out there, right?

That's always been the history, you know? I mean, America and Canada, it's always been like, oh, we built the rail out west, therefore now the country's connected. That's where society can go. Mm hmm. Okay. Okay. Interesting.

And yeah, it's like basically the monorails, so they do something smart because roads always use ceramics and metal, so there was a massive premium on those. Monorails use special alloys and resins. So there's a better use for another half of the materials that you're gonna end up picking up. Okay, so now Kojima is the kind of motherfucker that could spend a whole bunch of game design focus on being a train conducting, you know.

No, it's very simple. The train goes from point A to point B. You can bring your materials. You can bring your vehicle. Okay. You're not... It links up to the... It links into the Zipline network if you're making a Zipline network. But is it only major drop off points?

Yeah, it's from mines to major distro centers. Okay. Okay. They'll link up with different parts so that you can use it to navigate. To be perfectly honest too much Train freedom could just invalidate the entire video. There's there's very there's no train or road freedom. It's build it or don't yeah Aside from that the story is better paced and more understandable But it's losing it's losing a little bit of the novelty of the absurdity

of Death Stranding, because it's not brand new. And they have replaced that with an ever-increasing cast of zanier and zanier characters. The blank man system for characters in Death Stranding is Maximum Kojima out of control Okay, it is You are you are essentially assembling like the X-Men as Part of the cat it is it is Sam the boss It is Sam the boss, Cobra is building the Death Stranding Cobra unit.

The unit, sure, sure, sure. Of an increasingly weird group of stupid people. Now with all this, from the way you're describing it, and from that story about Woodkid being like, Kojima saw the playtests and said, nah, too many people like it, change that shit, right? What you are describing does sound like a very conventional sort of sequel, where you're like,

they built off of what they established and were making it a bit better. And when you think about Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, those games barely resemble each other. three, four, and five, those games barely resemble each other. So, as somebody who recently went through 1-2, 1-2-3, right, and came to the conclusion that Kojima's just remaking the same game over and over and over and over and over, he is still doing that. Okay, okay. Like, you're going through

like there's there's there's a very specific prepper called the inventor that I was talking with Chad about it and it was like this is literally a swamp in Metal Gear two just recreated in the Death Stranding universe like the entire encounter is the same. Okay. So so Metal Gear is about sneaking and infiltrating and being Snake, that's obviously a thing that you're doing in all of those games, that is the same thing, right?

Yeah. The setting in each case is violently different and completely different feeling from each other game and what they do and what's going on with a lot of that feels like you're jumping around a timeline and jumping into different perspectives to get a very unique experience for each one of these sneaking missions.

So in this case, continuing to be Sam and continuing to port and build out the rail is our build out the road. I'm surprised it's not way more different of a, like, an entire premise, I guess, right? You start the game in Mexico and go on from there. But the nature of Death Stranding's, like, setting means that everything's gonna get ground down by timefall

to look like a certain kind of prehistoric type of thing. The map is way larger and it's much more open. And that's super cool. But it seems like a fairly standard sequel. I would say that the storyline is... this is the most Genius Cojumbo. It is ping ponging between absolute, dumb ass, stupid shit that has me rolling my eyes and like really, really fascinating like philosophical meta commentary and really, really like sweet, emotional fascinating like philosophical meta-commentary and Really really like like sweet emotional like resonance

back to clown nonsense Within like a 30 second loop. Okay, like it is it is it is back to back to back like tone of whiplash, it's like Like a dragon game, but faster like the the whiplash side side quest into mainline, okay? But you're saying as well. It's making it easy to understand Yeah, the actual plot of sequence of a to B to C is clearer and more understandable because you're not dealing with the back and forth of Amelie and Bridget and all that extinction nonsense.

And stomaching the abstract of the world itself. Things are a little more clear. Okay, like I will describe a minor Element that I think really genuinely sums up the clown shit. So you saw that Luca The the Italian gentleman who's playing not solid snake is taking Cliff's role in this game right as Ghost-man military antagonist. Military dude, yeah. The sequence that you deal with the not solid snake is incredibly similar to the way you dealt with Cliff. There's a portal, you fall into an action game level, you fight the skull unit basically.

So I load into this fantastical, incredible sequence that looks gorgeous and I start to describe that we're going to go fight Luca Babadabupi while he's cooking the pizza and chat starts to tell me that that's offensive to Italian people, which I say I don't care, that's hilarious, shut up. And then when you shoot him, he goes, oh, mamma mia, and disappears. Yes, yes, okay, right, right, right. And I'm like, shut up, shut up, no way. Literal mamma mia, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, kefai. He cook it to pizza, right? And it's like, it's this super serious action sequence That's really gorgeous and super threatening and dark and spooky and then you shoot the boss and he goes. Oh mama mia Right right he's away Oh Madonna Like pizza tower noises start coming out of the boss as you fight him yeah

Okay, it's so it's so fucking funny, and it's like that. It's like that back to back to back to back to back like also It's so it's so peak cojumbo That I was able to do it, and I'm sure you're gonna be able to do it, is as you're playing through it, you are going to be able to tell

what people are going to say before the camera even pans to them. Now, it was a highly specific Metal Gear reference that I joked about encountering before walking into a scene. and as the camera started to zoom in more and more on the Character I'm like there's no way they're gonna. Oh, they're just gonna say the names of these things out loud They're just gonna. Oh my god. It's just right on the nose. Okay, so the sandy senses are still fucking really going Really sandy they're going yeah, okay, okay, okay? Great great great also by the way when you start the game like the very first sequence is like you going through like a sandstorm

Yeah, sure like we were right sure sure sure right about sandy yeah But the final thing by far the most different is that playing this game as the man I am now in 2025 is Very very different as a parent with a baby Yeah, years ago. It's a game about you hanging out with a kid. That's not fucking why I broke the tutorial because I'm a dad now Right So the very first thing that happens in the game is that you open up in front of a vista that looks kind of Like the Grand Canyon and the game wants you to go down the ridge

To you know go forth to wherever you're going, right? And Mr. Norman Reedus has got Lou, who's a little older now, and he's got Lou in a little baby carrier on his chest, like I've had with my little baby man on my chest. and I started to scope around the edges of the area. And for a less steep path? Five, six, seven minutes around the edges of the ridge because I'm like, well that's way too steep to carry a baby down.

Of course it is, that's crazy, why would you do that? Also, Lou in the carrier is front facing. Yes. And I'm like, Lou's too young to be front facing, Lou should the in the carrier is is front-facing yes And I'm like Lou's too young to be front-facing loose right backwards should be Especially when you're going down ups and ups and downs and hills, but that's not good for the shot or the camera or the mo And so I got stuck go down the fucking slope dude. I'm like it's not safe Okay, you don't get it I'm like, go down the fucking slope, dude. I'm like, it's not safe. OK, you don't get it. It's bad for Lou's neck.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. No. Yeah. Not wrong. All right. Yeah. There you go. Um, I'm very much enjoying. It's a video game. You interact with it. I've been splitting my time there in between two forms. One is let's truck out to the next four, five, six

shelters in Distro areas, meet this character, meet that character, have a story moment, meet this person, hang out with Heartman, et cetera. And then the streams I've been doing late, late, late at night is like, Hey, all right, it's time for infrastructure. It's it's time to build these fucking roads. It's time to add some zip lines. It's time to build up these these stars. It's pretty convenient that the you know, you having the you have the pole BB in the

in the artificial womb thing as like a weird interesting unique Mechanic the first time around and then you know flash forward a little bit and it's like oh, yeah carrying a baby on your chest Is like a normal thing. That's that makes sense. That that's what you do as a parent. Um, I'm going to Enjoy seeing how they figure out how to have a teenager strapped to Norman's chest in the in the in the future and What the mechanics will be around that? Did you see any of that puppet shit yet by the way is that happened yet defined puppets you mean doll man Yes, yes, just the existence of doll man and everything about doll man That's that's who I mean doll man shows up very early doll man is is a core part of the gang

All right And on top of that have you played God of War or seen God of War? Mm-hmm God of War. Yeah, Mimir. Yep. That's Mimir. Yes doll man is Mimir Doll man hangs out on your belt and goes on adventures and there's a reason why that is it's so that Sam has somebody to fucking talk Talk to weird shit is happening Just talk back at him and be like so he's not just muttering aloud to himself Yeah, no, Mimir was there for dad and boy to have a third dynamic to what's also weird Is that Mimir's actor is also in the game Alistair Duncan is playing a character in the game?

Which is super weird because Alistair Duncan also played a different Metal Gear character named Senator Armstrong. Oh, weird. Damn, I didn't know. Good range. Nice. That's pretty fucking weird. That's pretty incredible. Super strange. Nice. Okay, cool. Overall, yeah, if I had to sell Death Stranding on one thing, I would say that the most impressive thing by far is their new progression. So, in the first game, you would get stars from delivering to people, right? And after a couple of stars here, a couple of stars there, they'd be like, here's a new type of grenade, or here's a new type of people, right? And after a couple of stars here, a couple of stars there, they'll be like, here's a new type of grenade,

or here's a new type of boots, right? Everybody has something for every star. Like, I have more upgrades and items and toys to play with now than I had at the end of Death Stranding 1. Do you get all of them if you do it best the first time? No, in fact, you can only get one star per trip maximum. Oh, okay. If you travel to a location

and you are just packed with cargo, split it up when you deliver it and deliver it multiple times so that you can actually pass the single star threshold. Whoa. Okay. Okay. Interesting.

You unlock so much fucking shit, it's crazy. I have holographic grenades that will show BTs to human enemies and scare the shit out of them. I have an electrified bola. I have a sniper rifle, I have a battery pack for my fucking backpack that solar generates battery power. I have a sticky gun that you can mount on your truck

that automatically grabs cargo near you on the road. Like just nonstop upgrades over and over and over that automatically grabs cargo near you on the road. Okay. Like, just non-stop upgrades over and over and over and over. Which sounds like a good way to deal with the sequel feeling of like, I had so much shit I could do by the end of that last game and starting from scratch I have nothing and that feels bad. Right? Yeah, no, you get tons and tons and tons of shit.

Fairly quickly, I imagine. Yeah, cool. Yeah, that's a good way to do that It is really it is it is And it always feels like a really good value going to deliver to out-of-the-way places because even if it's not good for you Like, you know, I'm not gonna use a decoy grenade. I don't go fuck It's still interesting and could be of purpose to someone so interesting and could be of purpose to someone. So one other thing that just crossed my mind, by getting through the first game, you ultimately

get to a point where you're not scared of BTs anymore. They're just in your way, right? They're trivialities. But the first time around, you're crawling, shitting your pants, afraid of the invisible and not sure how the, you're using the, you know, the detector and it's all just... Yeah, the photodeck, yeah. So, like, that completely changes entirely and the feel of the game changes as a result

of that. Now, going in with the trivialized BT kind of concept, are there, I guess you're talking about fighting more humans or so? So they're not. So they're no longer trivialized. the BT kind of concept, are there, I guess you're talking about fighting more humans or so. So they're not, so they're no longer trivialized. There's two things. One, you run into BT boss fights more often. The second of which is you run into BTs themselves

less often, but they are scarier and tougher. There are new types of BTs. And by types I mean like the way they interact with the environment and catch you. Yeah. However, I have dealt with human mules and brigands more often, like in general. And I have recently gotten to the third enemy type Which is not humans nor BTs Okay, okay, which um is very different. Yeah, then the others

That's kind of what my what my curiosity was was like like okay the tension got released from this type of enemy Do we got new shit to kind of like yeah, the new of enemy. Do we got new shit to kind of like recreate that tension? The new enemy type is really intense. Okay, nice. And is also flagrantly the skull unit. It is like, the way they move, the way they act, the way you can like counter their sword strikes in the same exact way that boss could in MGS. But like it is the more that I play it, the more overwhelming. It's like, oh, my God, this is like the finished MGS five. But with infrastructure and trucking and more ghosts.

Yeah, I mean, like Kojima has had the opportunity to quote-unquote, you know, finish MGS5 before in this context, but like, taking ideas certainly I can imagine are things that perhaps never got fully realized and carrying it into this new... Oh, sure, but like, I'm just saying, like, playing it, like, dude, this feels like a fucking sequel to MGS5. Like, it feels the same. Like specifically, like, the way that you, like that, you know the FOB system and upgrading that and The way you would kidnap dudes front, you know the Fulton shit. It's just like that

But instead it's trucking and it's you're stealing the materials off of their bases instead You're you're rolling in to steal all the their seramics. You are doing like a sneaking mission and getting out You're rolling in to steal all their their serenity. You are doing like a sneaking mission and getting out Yeah type of thing okay, okay? Yeah And if you just and if you take out everybody at a base the base will be weakened for a certain number of in-game days And if you don't take out the base after a certain amount of time the base will get stronger Probably the weirdest thing about dealing with people is that lethal weapons are just not available to you anymore You can switch them to lethal, but the assault rifle and shotgun and grenades that I have are just

default non-lethal. And they work against BTs too. You have a much more unified armament. like armament. I mean, yeah, well I'm assuming for plot reasons, right? Yeah, no, they just made it so that they figured out how to make synthetic piss blood and put them in your bullets. Sure, okay, but you're not trying to cause void outs? No, no, no, no, you just, you have rubber bullets for everybody for oh, yeah Yeah, okay, and the rubber bullets are also covered in synthetic piss and blood so they also can shoot ghosts perfect Okay, all right, so it changes the way you deal with BTs dramatically because in the first game

It was like stealth kill them or throw grenades at them And in this game. It's like no open up on them with your fucking anti-ghost shotgun Fucking shoot him Okay Yeah, I think I think I'm what's probably gonna happen for me with this game is I'll be playing it on my own in the gap I think there's an extremely When would you be doing that because there's a very different game here for you this month or next month? Well, basically what I'm saying is that I think it won't be on camera.

You know? No, no, no. I know that for a fact. But I'm just saying, like, emotionally, this is a very different game for you in the month of July or the month of August. Whether I'm holding a baby while playing it or not, yeah. I don't know. Because there are some parts of this game's narrative that affected me dramatically more

because I am the version of myself that I am now rather than the version of myself that I used to be. Well, realistically, I think it'll be a gradient. I think I'll probably start it beforehand and finish it afterwards, you know? Yeah, probably. Very cool game. Very good. I like it. I think it's very cool. I cannot wait to build more infrastructure. Like ping ponging also between like, man, you know what, Sam? That's great and all, but you need to get a thousand metal down the fucking road so we can get this highway all the way out to the fucking ocean.

But are you building the infrastructure of Loo's mind? Are you? No. Okay. There's no dad mechanics that you're... Oh, there's still some dad mechanics. They're very similar to the first game also Higgs Boson Higgs Higgs is the fucking

Beach slammer this motherfucker is This motherfucker is my beach for the slamming Dude like motherfucker it's my beach for the slamming Do like He's like from a different fucking style of game or story he is so stupid and he is so bad and dumb and like interactions with him are nonsense yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah perfect perfect like he fits he fits more in a devil may cry than he does in a fucking destiny I've got jonkling, but I just won't ask them.

I will say one thing about him, about his Jonker shit. Hold on, hold on, I accidentally hit my headphone wire out. Oh no, you can't hear me. Oh no. Give me a second. There we go. Jonkle away. Okay, do you know that drill tweet about wearing my V for Vendetta mask and then pulling it

off to reveal my Joker makeup underneath and everyone in the courtroom groans my shit Okay, that that is like Like Sam meeting him is like Wonderful hell yeah, okay Sam meeting him is like Wonderful Hell yeah, okay. All right. All right that game is so so stupid like it is it is Peak stupid I Hope

Honestly, I have no there's no real. I'm open for whatever. This is going to be But I hope there's a cool. I feel like it'd be sick to get like a nice like Ludens outfit You know yeah, that'd be fun to like rock also Well, I don't want to call it cojumbo Hollywood maxing Has hit the absolute apex. It can't go any higher because people are showing up without lines just to be in the game. Holograms at...

Like I was doing just a late night trucking stream. Oh yeah. I was delivering animal rescue paint to the animal rescue shelter. Yeah. And someone in my chat just goes, is that the entire band churches on the hologram? The whole thing.

That's it. I was about to say, just like you go deliver something and then a second person on the hologram is Timothy Chalamet just going Yeah, on top of that on top of that like I'm doing a mission It's like rescue a dude and I was like, okay get the guy and he's unconscious And you put him in your little backpack and it's just his face showing and people are my chat are like is that the director? of Rrr

What that has no lines? people on my chat are like is that the director of RRR? What? That has no lines and is unconscious as a fucking. Wow, wow, okay. Like it is just, hey I'm delivering, I'm delivering stuff to this fucking base. Is that that big Korean guy from train to Busan? Oh God the star fucking doesn't stop dude Hollywood max star fucker. Let's go. It's

All of it Yeah, yeah, and I'm sure because that's the thing is you have to imagine all of these meetings there's a little like we do the we do the The the the pretentious discussion whenever we get we put it out in the air And then it's like can I do it would you like to get scanned? Let's do a 3d scan of you You know and that's kind of that's basically what the meeting is about is like I'd love to have you as a face In this game, so let's do that whole thing. And we need to hang out for the whole day.

And it's like, OK, what time is the scan? The scan's at 8 PM, but we need you on set by noon. There's different people that have different levels of inclusion. So the director of RRR has no lines. Yeah. He's literally just an unconscious body. And then you have a bunch of characters that are like,

Doll Man is also a movie director, right? And he's not voiced by himself. He's voiced by a voice actor, right? And you have characters like that. And then you have, every now and then, you'll run into a random prepper in a location that gets a wildly disproportionate amount of screen time for no reason

And it's because and it's because they're a musician and they want to sneak their music video into the game Oh my god. Hell yeah. Hollywood is mine for the slammin'! Did you see the, um... Did you see the incredible comments by Kojima as to why he doesn't feature Japanese people in his games? I did! That is wild! Why?

That is... Why is it, Woolly? Why does he not feature that many Japanese people? Oh my god, on some Ubisoft fucking, like, Assassin's Creed shit, apparently it's because the Asian skin texture is difficult, and the engine has not been optimized to... Alright, I'll clean it up for you. Kojima was asked, hey, why don't you feature a lot of Asian or particularly Japanese characters

in your newer games? Right? And he says, well, you see Asian, particularly Japanese people's skin is so smooth and perfect. Technology has a difficult time depicting it without making it smooth and doll-like and CG-like because it's just too good. What the fuck is happening, dude? All right, so I'm gonna stop you right there.

All right, so here's the, I'm so glad that that interview came out the three or four hours before I ran into the game's only Japanese character that is walking around and talking. So first of all, I laughed my ass off because it's not like there's entire studios like RGG that spends their entire budget just creating old man Japanese guy skin yeah so is Peco the only Japanese character then is Peco the only Japanese character that okay I forget her name but there is a lady who plays the character of Rainey ah okay just ranting too and she was the actress who played yuki is it yuki or yuki ko anyway

um the the girlfriend in Deadpool 2 okay the the the Negasonic teenage warheads girlfriend I think was Yukio could be and someone in the chat has it it's Shioli Kutsuna so he describes that she's in the game because she's from Australia and lives in LA. And thus actually fulfills all the criteria for English speaking role, yadda yadda, right? talking too fragile, despite being scanned in with the same technology, does look CG and doll-like next to Leah Sedoux and Elle Fanning and Norman Reedus. Like, her skin is perfect. Like, the actor's skin is perfect, and her face is perfectly symmetrical and she kind of looks Unreal Pat next to the other characters Pat. Are you saying that he has a point and there? Oh My god

Okay, Kojima, I guess we'll have to hold off on the Japanese actors for now When the when rainy is talking to Sam because Is a weathered looking nearly 60 year old white guy who'd never stayed out of the Sun. He's got like noticeable Moles on his god damn it got a lot of wrinkles like he kind of looks like shit now Which is awesome and the engine picks up on that great, but when he talks to Rainy she looks noticeably less real than Sam does I? noticeably less real than Sam does. I mean... It's hilarious.

Oh my god. Like, but as you just described, right, so we can get like Kuze in there, like he's got textured, old man skin, ready to go. Yeah, but he doesn't want to do that. He wants to cast the prettiest actress he can find. Yes, yes. We need to have those little Photo shoot cute moments. You know ready to go so oh boy I saw one of the chat got a photo of said actress and like yes

No, she's a person that has like immaculate perfect skin without a single blemish mark wrinkle. Yeah, yeah, but he doesn't he doesn't want I don't want to cure cancer. I want to make dinosaurs Okay, all right Sure the game is so fucking funny the these These characters are so weird fuck Yeah, I don't I can't believe I Believe you're saying wait a minute hold on let him cook On that on that fucking woman's anatomy is harder in Assassin's Creed type shit, and you're saying no wait

The they actually have a fucking point here, okay? Well hold on let me let me get let me get a fucking photo of this character Yeah, here's here's a really good example. Of like, actually, you know what Norman Reedus fucking looks like in Death Stranding? Okay? Right? Here is what Rainey looks like in fucking Death Stranding 2 in the engine.

And it's like, hey, she looks exactly like her actress But because she doesn't have a single mark on her face. She actually looks unreal The lighting is weird The lighting is hitting her face a little strange. You're not damn it fuck Fuck like hey, she looks kind of plastic the Decima engine wants your characters Oh, no She actually looks and blemishes mmm

Oh my god, okay, and they haven't figured it out yet. Yeah, here's I'll get you What the hell Well, here's a I'll get you a hell well here's a shot of rainy in the rain right and it's like you can literally see what I what like I don't know I will then just make it different I don't know what to say do a different get the artists to try again in a different way. This is crazy. This can't be. This can't be.

This can't be. This actually can't be the reason I refuse this reality. Do it different some other way. Fucking figure it out. I don't know. Change the tech. Start from scratch. What are we talking about here?

You know? They eventually got the Kinect to detect me. You know, they figured this out. These new cameras with the extra ISO settings and whatever working great so that you can stand. So really, Kojima says that technology has not advanced far enough to realistically scan in a Japanese person and find a flaw with them at all and then he put a character in his game as proof that It can't be done

Picked one of the prettiest Japanese actresses he could find in this life like it's so it's so fucking funny, dude that it It's so fucking funny, dude. Literally, it took until recently with the whole camera ISO setting thing where if you and, I don't know, let's say your significant other are very different skin colored and you're taking a high contrast photo outside and it tries to grab one or the other

and the camera just goes, I don't know, man. Here's, you do it it's like do you want to be married to the son wearing glasses or does your wife want to be married to a floating pair of teeth yeah it's just and it's you you open up the settings and you do it because the camera says I give up right that we finally started getting a little bit past that point Back to the fucking drawing board. I don't know Koji, but do it different. It's crazy All right all right, okay that came so cool. It's also so stupid. It's so dumb mmm, all right and What's the what's the plugs on that?

What's the plugs? Oh, yeah, you go down to Twitch.tv slash Pat stares at streaming that a bunch. I'm going to stream Mecha Break on what is it? The third Friday is going to be more Death Stranding and Saturday I'm going to go back to the backlog. So I had anticipated playing the alters this week because I thought the alters was really cool and I still feel that the alters is really cool. However, I have pulled it from my schedule and I have made all of the videos I recorded of the alters unlisted because it turns out 11-bit got super motherfucking caught using chat GPT to translate that game into a bunch of languages

and then hit it from the Steam Disclosure and then put out a big pussy apology. Let's get into that after the break. Yeah. All right, that's on the docket. So let's- But yeah, I'm not gonna keep streaming the alters. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back

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Oh, right. So, yes. I mean, right, you started talking about it, so let's go straight to that. What do you think about this Hans Mollmann in dog form? Oh, you hate it? Oh, good. There was more than just subway slamming going on this week. There was fans... So there were much... there was much subway slamming.

There was, but the Altars developer, 8-bit studios, is also getting... 11-bit studios. Excuse me, 11-bit is also getting slammed because folks discovered some AI subtitles and flavor text in the game. The flavor text specifically literally has the prompt to chat GPT. Yeah, it's like, hey, translate this or show a bunch of whatever. And it's like, Whoa, that's obvious. Well, so what what will happen is you'll see in when chat GPT answers are copied, you'll see things like, sure, here's a thing you're looking for on this thing. It'll answer you and then actually put the thing you're looking for in.

So if you are not paying attention or you're just kind of quickly going about copying and pasting without using proper translators, then you get exposed like this, where... Yeah, Crunchyroll got caught doing the same thing a couple hours ago. A couple hours ago, huh? Jesus. Yeah, that's a fucking anime episode aired, and there's a fucking chat GPT prompt on the fucking subtitle. Oh my god.

So, I forgot, a while ago, I basically was talking about, I was calling that we're gonna very, very quickly just enter a realm where it's gonna be like, you are going to be using things that have it in it and just not know, and it's gonna not be about like, oh, these people are using it out front or whatever. It's gonna be like, no, no, no, they're hiding it and trying to keep it secret. And you're gonna occasionally have these moments

of they fucked up and it got exposed, but it's going to get further and further, we're gonna further and further enter a situation where you're like, they're already using it, it's already there, right? In this case in particular, what's noteworthy about it is that you need to tell Steam when you use anything generative or live generated in terms of AI on the

Steam distribution agreement and so that'll it'll be published and it'll be a part of the Steam page for it. You know, larger companies they will do that and they'll put that out there you kind of just have to fully expose it so that everybody knows it's a part of it. They did not do that here and when people started contacting them about it, it obviously, there was a while where they were not answering and people who translated for them then came out and were like, yeah, we didn't know anything about this. Right. So they kind of spoke to one of the Korean translators, they spoke to, you know, some folks that worked on the team that were saying,

essentially, they worked on the original script and handled translation. But what people are suspecting is that there was a update or something that happened after they were done with their job that introduced new words that needed translation. And instead of going and having the process done by contacting all the translators for the new text, it was just a quick shove it in the prompt and see what happens and then update it yourself in the build. And then you're doing that and like up until this point, you had not made the declaration anywhere on your Steam page.

And so the idea was like, yeah, we could just do this quickly, hide it, no one will ever know and it'll be fine. But clearly not really because if you're not proofreading, if you're not checking, human eyeballs aren't finding it and you have these moments where there's a screenshot of the computer generic text that at the top of what looks almost like a DOS prompt, it says, yeah, sure, here's the revised focusing purely on scientific and astronomical data, and then in the Brazilian Portuguese translation, there's subtitles that read, sure,

the text translated to Brazilian Portuguese is, and then the actual line So yeah, you should not be one hiring people and then If you're gonna cut a corner afterwards, you know not fucking follow up and and and at least tell an Update that you're adding this to the games declaration page and to hide it from users because you know that this is the kind of thing that will happen when they find out about it obviously is implicit in how you're kind of like taking a while to answer and get around to this shit.

So that's shitty. Don't do that. So, hot on the presses of this is a follow-up that there were two textures that someone on social media found from Expedition 33 that in the Lumiere area where they have like newspapers pasted on the walls they suspected were gen AI, couldn't confirm it but suspected and those textures were hot fixed out of the very first patch the game ever received. So this is the part where we rationalize why we're not mad at Expedition 33, but I am cutting the altars off.

And it's very simple. I can't confirm that that thing in E33 is AI, it's gone, and I don't feel that that was, like I don't know until I know for certain. But the second of which is that it's really easy to not take 11-bit at their word Because they also had a bunch of generative AI Promo events for the alters that I didn't know about where you could talk to the characters through chat Oh shit like that that company wants to do AI stuff and actively promotes it I see okay

So what kind of like we didn't know we didn't know at it. I see. Okay. So what kind of like we didn't know. We didn't know at all. I'm like, I don't believe you. Okay. So you're going on deniability here. Bush came out and said that one of the fucking unreal engine textures that they used or whatever the fuck turned out to have been AI generated and they didn't know.

And that's why they cut it out. I would be in. I would be in I would be inclined to believe that and Part of that is because I really like that game. I'll be very honest, right? but More importantly I look at 11-bit and them going. Oh, we didn't know that was the wrong call. I'm like you funny you knew you like you just love AI and you got caught. Well, what you described of that game last week also sounded phenomenal, right?

Like it was a very excited... The thematic core of the game is about how the unethical use of technology to copy things is maybe going too far so it's really genuinely astonishing that this is the scandal we're talking about with the alters because the alters is like a fucking cautionary tale against gen AI run amok mm-hmm just ethical use of tech in this instance where you're like from the jump the whole thing about what you're using in that game is evil immediately. Yeah, I mean, I'm reminded of the studio that made,

what is it, Genvid that made Silent Hill fucking whatever Ascension and how they have a ton of like all these like AI forward like like Announcements and and things that are all about it and then it's kind of like no no no this wasn't used What made using it and you're like, but you guys are so excited about the technology. What do you mean? You're not it. This is not it. It feels like it. It looks like it. It smells like it. It quacks like You know It looks like it, it smells like it, it quacks like it. This is also the same week that, I don't know if you saw, but Microsoft is coming down and saying, hey, AI is no longer optional.

And it's like, well, why are they mandating the use of AI over at Microsoft? Oh, is it because they can't get any of their engineers to use it because it fucking takes more work to include it than it fucking does it? Oh my God. A ton of people doing different jobs use it as a reference point already in a ton of like,

use it as a insert your code or do whatever key or cleanup and then spit it out elsewhere. Forcing it to be mandatory makes me immediately think that Microsoft is like, we need you to feed ours and make ours better so that we can replace you. Like it's a very clear-cut case of if we're hiring you and we want this to replace you then if you tell it what you're doing often enough we can eventually get that info. So start fucking using it. Feed it. Fall in on the next big thing until it crashes. So they can say that, it's so they can say,

hey, look, all this good new stuff we made was made with AI, but every time that happens, it's actually not very good and people turn on it more. So that's. I mean, look, for me, at the very least, the way I kind of look at this is like, we are going to We are not we're not going to we are already in a world where I guarantee you there are tons of things that you

currently like Will have or will be using AI in places and you just won't know about it, right? I'll have spent the time to correctly hide it and that's it and we will continue forward into this world where you're just going to need to understand that somewhere there's going to be shit that like if they slip up and fuck up and you find out then oh we know about it and then you get these things. But otherwise they know that they don't want to declare that or tell people about it because of this exact like fuck you kind of reaction. But it's already out there and it's already a part of the things you're enjoying.

Just know that to be the case. Right. So here's the thing, right? At the bare minimum, I just wanted to say that if you decide that that's your line in the sand or whatever your case is, I just think I'm like at the bare minimum, the studio in these moments, just fucking admit it. Don't play coy. Don't lie and twist and wring your hands. We get it.

You hired the translation team and they came out and they put out the word on it, right? They basically described what happened and said themselves, like, yeah, it was a lot of words, the count is high, there was a placeholder texture that was not meant to be seen by people and then there was this extra stuff where the movies that got licensed added extra words to the script that weren't originally there. So they didn't hire back all the translators and localization team. They just were going to do it through the prompts instead. And it's like, if you're going to do that,

then put that in the thing so that people know, right? If you're, if it's a, if it's a decision you're making based on budget and cost and all these things, you're gonna cut those corners. People are gonna feel, some people will be okay with that, some people don't give a fuck, and some people feel that that's shit and hate that. Let people know that that's the case

so that they can make their decisions. That's it, you know? The more you pretend like you didn't do it, is like that's a way bigger problem because you actively know some people that would have their purchasing decisions affected by this and that's why you're trying to be duplicitous about it. So I think you're completely right and I think that people who go, oh, it's totally pointless.

It's like, no, the purpose is to complain so that they have to spend the resources to hide it and they have to spend the resources to fix it and those resources end up costing more than they could possibly save using the AI in the first place so they stop using it and I have a small piece of insider information I guess I have a friend of mine who works at Microsoft, who is watching the show right now, hello, and decided to reach out for an internal statement about this topic. They say that everyone here fucking hates AI and copilot. Every single slack is filled with AI mishaps or telling people how to disable copilot. The union has has specifications against AI in their contract and Microsoft is trying to figure out ways around it. out ways around it. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is not so much a we want to increase efficiency thing as much as it is a, hey, this new intern that you didn't know existed is now sitting behind you shadowing with you for the day, the week, the month, forever. They're going to shadow and your job's fine. You're fine. But just make sure that they get copied and CC'd on everything you're doing, make sure they can see and if they ask questions

about what you're doing you explain to them why. All right? And they'll be sitting behind you, don't worry about it, it's fine. That's company wide, you know? Gee, I wonder what they're up to. In that AI is like kind of useless, but what it's really good at is sounding like it's really good for things and does that in just such a way that it just cracks the brain of the C-suite executive class.

Oh yeah, I mean. And thinking, oh my God, we can replace everybody with this fucking thing. But it's not just that, it's not just the appeal of, sorry, go ahead. And what I have been seeing, and I follow a bunch of people in tech, it's like what happens is they go, hey, we need to replace these people with AI because AI doesn't cost

anything. Oh my God, it's basically free. And then they do that or they start that process. And then the remaining staff have to spend all of their time trying to fix the AI output until it becomes clear that the actual method of generation isn't reliable for anything and you'll always have to increase. I'm going to go on a real tangent here, right? Okay, I'm just going to make a mental note of what I was going to say. So artificial intelligence in terms of generative work for coding, art, et cetera, has the same

problem as slavery. So slavery is not just ethically wrong and morally wrong and an affront and a stain on human dignity. It's also really bad as an economic form of work. Part of the problems with long-term like chattel slavery is that you need to increase the amount of labor you are associating to keep the slavery machine running. Longer and longer and more and more time and more and more resources have to be ascertained to guards and maintenance and and keeping the system from flying to pieces

because the system wants to fly to pieces. Oh, so when you... No one's having a great time in slavery, historically ever. Pat, every time you say thank you to your field slaves, you're wasting time and resources. That's true. Exponentially. Stop saying thank you to your slaves. Yes.

Now, that's precious time. But that's a different discussion. But yeah, basically the slavery system is constantly falling apart economically because you have to get more and more and more and more resources into keeping the system running, right? AI is like that. As you scale problems up for AI, someone has to maintain them, but it scales infinitely. If you have an AI output a whole video game,

you need a fucking massive team of people to go into the guts of that fucking thing and just pick it apart and try and fix the millions of errors that it created. The larger the scale, the more maintenance you have to do. And so we're going to see people fire their workforces to replace them with robots, and then the robots will have to have entire teams hired to fix them to put out shittier output

than they had before. The problem is that the ability to resist this trend is nigh impossible because oftentimes there will be something that is either a really efficient way to either, you know, take, if you can, if you can outsource something from where you're currently paying people to somewhere where you can pay people less to do more, great. And if you can pay them nothing to do all of it, wonderful.

And the only thing better than that is just not paying them at all, completely getting rid of them. There's an infinite downward scale in that way. So that's what your C-suite interest is, right? The fantasy of getting value for free. Right. But that doesn't always necessarily reflect what's going on in terms of what investors want to do or what's a trend in the market. But here, because this is also really great for getting that cost down, but also it's

like as a whole it's a brand new tech that has a buzz around it on the outside because it has these different applications. Just using the word, just saying you're using the word is now mandatory in quarterly reports, right? If you're not saying it, if you're not implementing it somewhere, someone in the call will be going, when are you going to start using AI?

How come you haven't started doing it yet, right? So it's the Venn diagram overlap here that is a perfect thing of like, it's a massive attraction grabber for C-suite and investors perfectly perfectly the overlap of what they both want is pristine and asking people to resist that is like it's impossible you're not gonna get it right we not fucking happy games and had no costs yeah of course right there's no no cost, it was only profit.

Right, so, and again, you have it on the, you know, whatever, like art, writing, music, whatever voice, all the things, right? You can do it on all fronts. Now, the thing that happens often, and this is kind of what I was first talking about a while ago, was like, the argument where you see, basically you're like,

look at this soulless piece of art, nothing. Look at this thing with five or seven fingers, right? Look at this weird, all those problems with the quality and even to what you were just describing. You cannot expect that that will stand in the same place because over time those things will get corrected, right? The idea that you will always be able to know is, that's a, don't get caught in that, you're not. There will be a point where you will not know, there will be a point where you will get fooled

and be like, I like this thing, this thing was great, whatever, and you just never knew, right? Don't set yourself up for the idea that I will always know that this has no That this has a human element missing to it that will Disappear over time as we go into as we go into the future I promise you right to the point where as we're talking about today It's already the case there are things we are playing and watching and getting into and that are already using it But just not declaring outright that they are.

So, put yourself, set your expectations accordingly for that and expect that you're going to encounter these like mind sweeper line minds on things, not just the things you hate that are garbage, but the things you already like and things that appear to be good initially. And that will increase and become more difficult to perceive over time. So one of the funnier things is that country music has a ton of AI-generated shit for it. Sure. Oh yeah. And one of the reasons for that is something that Paige has been saying for years and years

and years is that country music is the single most formulaic style of music that's ever existed. I saw an article about this, yeah. It's insane how every single country music song is exactly the same fucking song. And so as a result, AI has actually done like a pretty decent job at like emulating a bunch of fake songs that don't exist. But there's a problem with that. And the problem is, it's really simple. When you feed AI generated content back into the AI plagiarism machine

It starts to freak out and die like the whole the whole like AI forever system Where there's no cost only works if you keep feeding New new things into it. Oh, yeah Yeah, you actually get to a point where the thing works fine, and you just start feeding itself into itself Yes, it's gonna fucking fall apart. The model is learning on previously generated content as previously generated content becomes more and more of what it was trained on and eventually that training amount increases in percentage year after year and the slop becomes unrecognizable and completely inhuman

as you fast forward in time exponentially. 100% AI incest. becomes unrecognizable and completely inhuman as you fast forward in time exponentially. 100%. AI incest. We're in the CEO perfect future where AI has replaced all the artists on a movie. You'll have a couple years of that and then the movies are just gonna start eating each other and generating complete fucking nonsense.

And now you've destroyed the movie industry. So good luck getting people back. It's so stupid. It is literally AI incest. It is inbreeding and the output over time is gonna get worse and worse As there's nothing external entering that that that

Environment now granted we have we have the mouse woke up and is suing mid-journey now And we'll see how that goes because that could totally change the scope of this conversation dramatically well I mean yeah but because the mouse wants their fucking money but mid-journey was also being sued by a billion artists whose names were ripped from deviant art and fed directly into it because some hundred thousand people could look their name up and see where they were in the prompt. You know? Absolutely. But the mouse.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The mouse is the mouse. Oh, yeah. In terms of economic power and legal strength, the mouse is infinity times all of those people together. Oh, yeah. The difference, I suppose, is that they're much more in line to cut a deal, make an agreement,

and be like, how do we get in on? This behind you know no Because those types of things Want all of it? So we want to do it our own we want to do it ourselves But just take the Netflix thing where you're like we will be a part of your service where everybody's paying attention And while we're on your service We will be making our own until eventually

we rip everything off and launch our own version. Which is, I mean, the ace for the race for AI models that are like GPT competitors and all that, and then the DeepSeek and all those things that are currently happening, like yeah, of course they want their own version in the end, right? Any lawsuits you're seeing are basically just like preamble to them making their own

version of it, right? Just back on the whole thing with the country music, there was an article I remember that was like, here are the genre, there's like a list of genres that had like the most predictable, like words that were used the most in the top songs over the years. And like, yeah, I think they kind of just had a giant list of like, it was like, it was almost looks like a, not a pie chart, but it was like a bar graph or so. And it was just like, song, like how many of the top 10 songs are top 20 or top 50

or top 100 in country, contemporary and all these other things used like truck, right? And it was like fucking 70%, like how many use dirt road, Daisy Dukes, you know, like all these little bits and like, and like, yeah, and there's a couple of genres and that's one in particular. I think R&B was another where it's just like, oh, this is 100% ready to get fed to the robot because you're already listening to it.

Because people have just been doing the robot, but manually. They've been manually doing it already. Country music has just been like, I'm sitting down and I'm going to be the gen AI. I'm going to just scoop up all of the country musics that exist and I'm sitting down and I'm gonna be the gen AI I'm gonna just scoop up all of the country musics that exist and I'm gonna just spit out my truck and my dog my truck couple of beers you know it's it's yeah yeah so that that's been the case for a minute um but anyway you know I just I just think it's this is a very just like you know this is going to keep happening right and set your expectations accordingly

for the future we're entering, where you're not, like I said, you're not always gonna know, and they're gonna try to hide it, and you're gonna get these stories where, oh, someone fucked up, look at that, here's an embarrassing thing, right? And you know, you have these cases where, like, I mean, shit, look at the literal week to week story we've been telling about

Marathon, right? That's not even AI, that is a stolen. That's old fashioned theft. Direct theft from the one artist, right? You were able to pick out the one who got their shit stolen and you're like, uh oh, we gotta hide all this footage and this fucking game is going on the shelf and we'll figure out what the fuck's going on.

But I guarantee you, yeah, this is just, expect this to be, to blindside you consistently and expect that you will not be able to catch every single instance or every time. I foresee that what we're gonna see, I foresee the downfall of AI is going to be really simple. And I feel that the downfall of AI is going to be due to a labor shortage. I feel that we're going to see a bunch of companies go all in, like all in. Suffer like disastrous effects because they're going to put out dog shit. So

there's a non-AI example that I can bring up from the phone industry service. So I had a buddy of mine who works at TELUS right and he described to me that when Bell Canada outsourced their entire customer service department to India in the 90s, just the cheapest Indian guys with the most bare-bones script you could ever find that it tanked the the city it tanked every phone call you would make to every phone service for decades because it taught people to get on the phone and get super mad it it literally trained the entire millennial generation that if you have a fucking problem and have to pick up your phone that you're going to get super fucking pissed off for like an hour. And they then eventually lost a bunch of business because of that decision.

Because if you wanted Bell Internet or something and you had to fucking call them, you'd be like, oh, fuck, this sucks. And you would go like Videotron or fucking Char or something. And then they rolled it back. But that cultural, like I don't want to call my internet service provider feeling continues to exist in us. I- Because of this thing they did like 20 fucking years ago.

I see the analogy. they did like 20 fucking years ago. I see the analogy. Unfortunately, I think your timeline is correct. I think your outcome is wrong. And I'm gonna disagree with that. Simply because you are correct in that the quality will go to absolute unrecognizable dogshit. However, I don't think that spells a downfall.

I think that just means that people will get used to dog shit and dog shit will become the norm. Oh, I don't know about that. That's a very unhopeful view of the average person. I think there's a, depends on what the space we're talking about is, depends on whether we're talking about like, it's usage for movie trailers versus it's usage for background code

versus for like gate, like all these, there's a lot of places it's being used in society and whether it's trucking or fucking stocks, there's a lot of places where you can go, oh yeah, it's doing a lot better in this industry and here it's fucking garbage, and everybody knows it and hates it, and it's never gonna work.

But I think on the whole, you're gonna see industries where the quality going down, becoming the norm, and then eventually becoming what a certain generation of person is just used to this level of dogshit quality, it's just like, yeah, that's what it is. Especially if there's big enough money to sustain the dog shit existing long enough,

you can just wait out people's eventual exhaustion and habits till you're like, nope, that's just how it's been for as long as I've known it, it's always been this shit. I think that that only makes sense in a context in which cost is not a factor so we're we're I'm gonna limit this part of the discussion to video games okay right um I guess all games are terrible now fuck isn't like the like isn't the give-up when games are gonna cost like $120? Right, right, right, right.

Like people aren't just gonna, I guess it's terrible, here's $130. Like no, they're just gonna not. And notice how there's always the, when we talk about games, we talk about AAA, AAA. We talk about quadruple A, we talk about the OO's and the EAs and the fucking act of blizzards. And then we talk about the indie studio trying to make something that's much more sustainable. Right. And, and even in this case, we're talking about a small the alters a fairly small game, you know, we're talking about expedition 30. Like these

double experiences where they're like, is there a creator there that's going like, oh, I can get some shortcuts taken care of, you know, versus the Microsoft version of this, which is you must start using this because the future is now and get the fuck on so that we can, you know, fire you in a minute, right? It's like, it's like different ways

of pushing it in a way. I think that, you know, in the way that a movie trailer kind of gets cut for putting up the annoying little habits, anything that gets more annoying over time as technology has learned, as the internet in particular has learned that annoying you is a great way to market to you I've hoped that there would be you know pushbacks against annoyance based Browsing but it feels like it's actually a long-term Locked in commitment now where you're like no things that get you upset are all we're trying to make you see

Things that are annoying and based on your you know You just scrolling by and getting your attention showing you something weird and all these little dumb things that have been like what the fuck is that? Is now just like it's become norm. It's become the slop, right? the fact that google research results are like completely dogshit because before you even had the AI part of it you had the Quora farming and before the Quora farming you had the seo generated pages which were putting up Quora farming and before the Quora farming you had the SEO generated pages Which were putting up non answers and just hyperlinking the keyword you had to feed you a thing that you're like I asked a question and I'm not finding out and then on page three might be someone and with an actual answer for what you're Looking for yeah, you know like people will gamify that shit

And if the big corp is doing it and and successfully making money off of that Then there's gonna be a bunch of people trying to emulate what they're doing and gaming the system, which is why things like algorithms and YouTube, why they have to keep changing that up. We don't know how that necessarily works over the years because there's always gonna be someone trying to do the lowest amount of effort to get the highest amount of return on it,

which means you're always gonna have some version of this in your face. If there's an alternative group of people that are choosing to reject it and make their own shit over here and you can support that, that's fucking hot. That's fire, that's optimistic, and I would love to see that.

But I bet you there will always be a giant, for the most part, turn your brain off and ignore it, never going away ocean of dog shit that we're in for from here on out. I don't see a complete collapse and reversion. But I'm guessing, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I know EA and Microsoft are going all in.

So I'm expecting some real good data on that. It would not shock me to see Elder Scrolls 6 use a bunch of AI-generated garbage and game players, at least the vocal ones, have been extraordinarily hostile to it and every single time a game comes out and gets caught with it, they get shouted down. It is, if you're trying to sell AI To the gaming audience with something like elder scroll 6 That shit better knock it the fuck out of the park so you can say see see yeah I don't think I don't think but Thesda is

is In a good place to knock that shit out of the park and sell this concept Let me one up you there replace the game you listed with Grand Theft Auto Yeah, right imagine if there's any part of Grand Theft Auto that they did they can then champion up as something that AI was responsible for Imagine the fucking fault like the aftermath of that costs are down so the game's gonna cost less money right and It'll come out faster right and then we can play and it'll be more affordable right right

Man we're in this process games increase in price and one of the stories we have this week is that the switch is gonna the switch one is gonna increase its price in Canada next month and it's like Like there's only so far you can cut costs and increase price Before a consumer just goes fuck it, dude. I'm just gonna buy weed instead I can get a can of weed from the weed store and just Blaze for fucking four hours off of drinking my cherry cola

for like $8 I'd rather do that than go see most fucking movies I am Anticipating and the British Columbia now by the way that's mark my words as a complete fucking internet fool with a microphone in front of him there will be a game or perhaps a movie or some piece of media that we enjoy that'll come out and be critically acclaimed and beloved. And then- And someone will be like,

ah, I used AI to make all this shit. And you'll find out way later and it'll be way more of it than you were comfortable with. And there's going to be a very, very fucked up conversation afterwards where a bunch of people will be like, that is a humongous bummer that sucks fuck that thing and then there will be another group of people that'll be like oh well I already like it though and hey we're

already there and it's not that bad so I guess it does work and you're gonna have that discourse occur and it's gonna get fucking garbage. It's gonna get real shit here real quick when you're like, oh, we already gotcha. You found out after the fact, now what? You know? Just wait for it. I don't know. I don't know.

It'd be awesome if it didn't. The chat says imagine if FIFA does it. Listen, one of the things that we've been talking about, about the acceptance of slop is people go, well, what about Madden and FIFA players? I'm like, Madden and FIFA players don't have any brains. The people who are buying those games every single fucking year are doing so out of an addiction to sports. Like and and if there's enough of them to put money into the system and basically be like, yeah, I don't care to the people who are going, don't that sucks.

I'm putting my hands up for for audio listeners. Hey, Wully. Yes. I have a question for you. I might not have an answer. Let's say you're have a question for you. I might not have an answer. Let's say you're running a video game company and you're not going to use AI to cut costs, right? But you need to make more money this year than you did last year because you have an ongoing game.

Infinite growth. You need infinite growth, right? Well, what happens if everyone in the entire world who plays games has heard of your game and everyone who would ever get into your game is either out of your game or is already playing your game? Where are you going to get that extra money? How are you going to get that extra money? are you gonna get that extra money when complete global saturation has occurred everyone in the whole world knows about your game what is money you can't drive down costs more you have to charge more right but let's say you already charge too much where can it come from can it come from gambling do you have the League of Legends story on this week I don't hit me up riot is going to start allowing and

endorsing sports betting on riot game wow official oh really you weren't Riot Games. Wow. Official. Oh, really? You weren't putting enough money into League or Valorant? Why not get into sports betting on eSports? Officially sanctioned, endorsed, and integrated by Riot. Why we're opening betting sponsorships in eSports and how we're doing it responsibly. So I don't know if you remember this, Wully. Woo! This I missed. Three or four years ago, whatever it was, when we were talking about League of Legends,

maybe it was two years ago, and the spin-offs like Sunken King and 2X KO and stuff like that, and the spin-offs like Sunken King and 2X KO and stuff like that, and Arcane. It's like everyone on the world who plays games has heard of League of Legends and decided whether or not they want to play it or not. The actual advertising of League of Legends is over. It's a known quantity. They have gotten everyone they will ever get into League of Legends, especially since people who play League of Legends tell you, hey bro, don't get into League of Legends, this game sucks. So they gotta get the money somewhere.

Yeah, there's a couple of veins you can tap for monetization and, you know, I've talked about how monetization experts will consult and show up on a project and be like, oh yeah, here's how you can squeeze some more blood from the stone. And fuck, there's one of them. How do you turn inward, right? If there's no money outside, there must be money inside. Right?

I bet I can get more blood from this stone. Oh yeah, if we can make the people that are already here just feel it a little bit more That's a line going up Mm-hmm. That's reliable definitely and if you're if you're and and You know the part of it that I always yeah, what if it evo? You could use your riot sports betting to put a hundred dollars

on who you would win who would win in the fucking top eight or blah blah blah blah to KX KO it's disgusting you disgusting um so there i'm looking at i'm just kind of scanning over the article here. And — Oh, that article is complete shit. It's fucking nonsense. What I kind of want to know is what it used to be in the past. And before was it simply, this is not allowed? And it's not —

No, what it used to be is, hey, let's take Evo for example. What it used to be is, hey, Wooly, I bet you J. Wong's gonna win Marvel this year. And you go, I'll take that bet and I'll go, what do you wanna do? Put 50 on it? And you go, okay. And then we shake hands and put 50 pucks into a little pot and wait. And that's it. It exists between you and I as individuals.

What fucking Riot is talking about is fucking, 2XKO sponsored by DraftKings. Go to fucking DraftKings to fucking set up your bets. So this is specifically announcing it for League of Legends and Valorant teams is what is what I'm looking at here. And basically the eSports teams for League of Legends and Valorant are opening up sponsorship opportunities with betting brands to generate additional revenue for financial health. That's the phrasing that I'm seeing here. So yeah, I'm going to infer then that prior to now, you weren't allowed to use those companies as sponsors.

Yeah. Okay. Right. Which is this is the first part of what you saw with Counter-Strike where Counter-Strike had all these fucking third party betting websites to run your skins on and they would have guys who would stream and they would stream, oh man, I'm doing so good on my betting website. By the way, I didn't disclose that I own this betting website and that I jury rigged all of the roles to make it look really, really, really good. And that's why you should go to it. Well, now I'm just kind of wondering like what the inter what the like

internationally every country has its own laws on this stuff that in some cases are much more exactly stark than others. So that's not a clean thing you can roll out without hitting into some countries laws on get the fuck out of here. No, you don't. We do this podcast every now and then someone's like, you guys want to sell cigarettes? I'm like, are you stupid? We can't do that Insane it's a Canadian podcast But yeah Yeah, oh

Hey good news about vaping it's a it's more toxic than cigarettes Good news this week. It's substantially more toxic than cigarettes, okay? because of the lead Humanity's friend led once again oh Lead has to come for round two letter lead poisoning really yeah And Gen Z dodged the lead but here comes gen alpha with disposable face Boomers and alphas connecting in the middle with the fucking Dylan you son of a bitch Get this new study gen X is the most land poisoned wild Wow Wow

Huh? Explained a lot from their parents blowing it in their face From sitting in the back of the car? Yeah, yeah, okay. Because they lived in the peak of the gasoline, the lead to gasoline era. God. I'm sick of lead, Wooly!

I'm done with lead! I don't care how sweet it tastes! So I was trying to remember my point from, oh yes, that's what it was. It was that when it comes to these situations where you're like, how do you find new monetization avenues where there were none in the past? I always love when you factor in outrage and go like, yep, we know that this will take this will there will be significant blowback, kind of like unveiling something crypto related.

It's like there will be significant blowback, but if the profits can out fucking flank the outrage, then it's worth it. I wanna see where's a cape, man. That's a cool dog. You're lying, you don't wanna see a Superman dog. You hate Superman. Hey listen. Hey listen. Don't be full of shit. I'm excited to see that Superman movie because Nick Kuzholt is going to throw the fucking most pants shitting baby tantrum about Superman.

He's going to lose it and cry and just fucking go, fucking hate Superman. And I'm going to be there for it. And that's why you want to okay I'm gonna be like that's me this is me I hate him okay so a couple other things real quick I would say two big ones one there was the Capcom spotlight event and they showed off some you know stuff going on with Monster Hunter they showed off nothing stuff going on with Monster Hunter. They showed off nothing, man. My takeaway was, hey look, it's the Resident Evil outbreak spin-off details or so. And they showed fucking nothing, man. Yeah, well, you're right, because those costume four characters were wearing nothing.

Yeah. They sure did show off nothing. You can see Cammie's fucking gyno info. It's real slim. They know what the goonslop bucks are coming in hard and fast. And I tell you what, there's already been edits to Luke being like, why are these shorts not banana hammocks it's crazy so I have something brave to say about the Street Fighter outfit fours a bunch of bathing suit outfits are really cool when you're getting ten costumes a year hmm when this is the only costume these characters are gonna get for an entire year if you're not playing a female character that you're desperate to goon on

or you're not playing a male character you're desperate to goon on it's like kind of a wasted thing like yeah, what are you gonna put Zangief in guys? he wears a fucking, like he wears shit all sounds spoken like a fucking broke boy who don't want to spend money on the goon The the like it is I want I want those real costume fucking things to come through But boy is the money gonna be generated from costume for the only one of those costumes I think looks good as Jamie's. I think Jamie's costume looks by far the best

I'm imagining I'm a man. It's like you get you there's There's probably get the amount that you can you look at some of these characters You're like you can you can reveal even more on some of these dudes. Urien set a trend that... Urien's basically naked. He's basically naked, right? I just think that costume four will pay for costumes five through 10.

Okay, make them faster then. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Get that, get the team that's doing the world tour assets to jump on board and and fucking do it agreed but yeah, that was it and they time they showed off some more pragmatic and and so on and Then that was followed up by the Arc System Works showcase. Oh boy. I watched that. Oh boy. That was so exciting Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I did. Okay, so There's like There's there's the bit and then there's the then there's the real right

Really the worst direct I've seen in like five years. Okay, so so joking not even doing it not not doing a goof So here's a bit So the bit the bit So the bit is as follows. Anytime you watch a live event and you're just like, what the fuck did I just spend my hour doing? Just picture me catching a dub. That's a wooly, that's wooly enjoying life. I'm on a beach sipping a margarita.

Wooly was flying kite instead of doing this. Right? Oh, he was delicious being smart. I am J Am Jay Cole. You know I am chilling Every time you're like what the fuck was that just think of me right here all right, okay? Second oh man. I'm so glad I just saw the exact comment. I want to respond to yes, sorry after you. Oh, no no no go ahead so Jimmy Chams in the chat says, sucks when a company tries new shit and the universal response is, ew, stop.

So, that is a very common response to this kind of thing and I completely agree with you. However, very importantly, is that people weren't going, ew, stop, because that shit looked fire but it was different. People went, ew, stop, because everything they showed looked like dog shit. I was just going to this part of it, okay. So then there's the real, right? They showed off a couple of things that were legitimately, depending on what you're looking for,

interesting and might be great games. They showed off a visual novel for older Japanese women who can't read. That's a weird game. Made by the people who made Hotel Dusk. Weird, weird idea. I don't know why they're advertising to women who can't read.

That was a really, really strange angle to pitch that game on Dear me I was right. I am also a fucking bubble bobble mark I love bubble bobble I I have told many a times about how that was the game that my cousins had and I had to fucking Run and do chores and buy shit from the store and whatever to get more time on it because I fucking love that game. Bubble Bobble's great. So.

I also like Bubble Bobble. Yeah, right? You will never hear me talking shit about Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons or whatever. And then Daisuke Ishiwatari comes up and then he says a very noble, understandable goal that is essentially in line with what we've been describing, with what we think games ought to be,

which is, hey, we want to make quality mid-range action games, the industry has become very difficult, and we want to be able to move with the times and figure that out. So we're going to be trying out things that are not fighting games and trying to expand, right? And you're like, that's cool. This is a this is absolutely a reasonable noble thing that ought to be done.

Great. I applaud that. What's happening is you have the expectations of, you know, everything that Arc is known for coming in, where they don't do themselves a favor. So you mentioned the quality part, I'm coming at it from a different angle. People, one, they showed off Tokon, so everybody's already got that in the- That's the last thing they showed off.

That's already at the front of everyone's brain, is you showed off the sickest looking fighting game announcement, right? You showed off some crazy shit and everyone's like, bah, right, locked in for that. Then you have the thing that they ought to have done, but they didn't do, which is if you're not going to meet those expectations, you can tell people in advance,

like Nintendo does, not in this Direct, you know? Nintendo will sometimes, literally before a Direct comes out about something, they will tell you, oh, it's not going to be about the Switch 2, you know? And like straight up, set your expectations. We have some shit we want to tell you about, but if you're waiting on the big megatons, that's not going to be this, right? That would have been a really good idea. New Daisuke Isshu Atari Project, but what it should have said is new dice game ishiwatari project bracket

not a fighting game. Not a fighting game right right and so this is the mistake you make by not being forward about that element you know not reading the room on that. And then there's a there's another factor to this with the disappointment that I feel because this game Damon Damon and Baby, it might be good, right? It might be great. It might be a really fun game.

I don't know. We'll see when it comes and drops. But there's something that I realize it happens specifically with fighting game fans as well. When you show a game that is not a fighting game during a time where fighting game fans are expecting to see one, there is a direct correlation between how disappointed people are and how zoomed out the camera is on the game you're showing. Okay, so, dude, not just this, but this is something, you know, we don't do the let's watches together anymore, but I'm sure you remember

me doing this. When you're showing a trailer, and particularly an announcement trailer, it is the first taste, it is like the first bite is with your eyes, right? It is the first thing you're ever going to see, this is going to tone set it. So it is definitely the media person's responsibility to put out the most banger trailer or screenshot or whatever possible. And so when you load in to this super zoomed out Damon and Baby and then it does that smash cut with tons of screens and most of them are running like garbage. 15 frames per

second. Super super terrible as you're zooming away is like this is the worst first impression you could possibly get So you're obviously made bad on purpose You're obviously early in this game's lifecycle and you're showing it off to like prove it exists and kind of introduce the idea But you're having those issues with it and then you have that thing that yeah what we talk about at game show word shows and stuff where you're like a And then you have that thing that, yeah, what we talk about at game show, word shows and stuff where you're like a new mobile game of some kind with some characters that are doing some sort of magic with their weapons. And I can't see them because there are tiny little glowing things

moving with a cursor around them. And I'm just like, can you get a cloak? Can I see the character? It drives me crazy. It's so fucking zoomed out the whole time. And like, there might be an up close model at some point with a bull shot, but in some cases they're like no,

we're not gonna show you that. Go download it in the fucking iOS store today, you know? This was also like right after they had a game, they had like a five minute thing where a guy came up and said this game's gonna be really crazy and then showed the logo and said thank you. Right, right, so yeah, that was the Demon's Night Fever, Embrace Being Evil, which were like, we got an art style.

I feel like they didn't have enough to actually show, maybe. It seemed that way. Well, when we take 5, 10 minutes to spend on Double Dragon Revive, which has been, we've been like, I'm going to go ahead and say, yeah, probably. We've been watching that one. And you're like, Double Dragon's such a amazing, hilarious franchise, because it must, the rules,

like God himself has declared that Double Dragon must alternate between dogshit entry and banger, right? It has to, it has to ebb and flow, right? There must be a balance. And so we are currently on the flow part where, oh boy, oh, do we have to watch a bunch of this Double Dragon Revive shit. You know, and, you know, as there are, there are, we know some folks that are massive Double Dragon fans that might be very excited about this game. I can think of one.

And, you know, shout outs to you. But for the most part, yeah, you're filling out the time while people are going where the fuck is BlazBlue, where the fuck is Tokan, or the fuck is all the things I'm expecting to see. So when a new game comes out, if it's, let's for example, you show off, and it's not a fighting game,, you show off, it's not what, it's not a fighting

game, but you show off a brand new game and you see a really big, bold, strong, cool character design and then it goes to third person action and then they start doing stuff. You go, okay, this looks cool, you know, but there's still a little bit of something, it's just not what you're looking for, but you're still getting a little bit of what you enjoy here versus just the complete dot on a map and lighting effects are flying out and blowing up things and points are happening. Which sucks because I definitely believe Dice Cake could be cooking something cool, but let's not forget too that he was cooking Oure and overture was like the true guilty gear Until it wasn't you know this is the real sequel he was ahead of his time making a mobile when nobody had a mobile

So here's the thing right it's like hey, I'm gonna make something that's not a fighting game It's like all right wow me because the last thing you made that wasn't a fighting game is one of the worst fucking pieces I've ever played my life dice gay I should have ever played my live Daisuke. He might be cooking. Oh, this looks super cool. Might be cooking. Let's wait and see. But like hot on the expectations is not the time for it.

Yeah, they should have just straight up told people, hey, not in this direct, you know. I hope they learned from that. And I hope they don't do these, right? Arc System Works Showcase is not an established thing. Like, you know, we're starting to see from all these other companies. So the absolute palpable disappointment from everybody,

on top of a message, which is good, which is we wanna make, again, mid-range games, it sucks that that gets diluted because that's absolutely worth that's an effort worth being like yeah good shit but don't fucking doing it like this guys don't don't do it like this. It says it says a lot because I'm thinking about like oh no it's because they did a new thing and people don't want double-a I remember when Capcom showed off the trailer for Konnitsu

Gami, which is a very clear AA weirdo game. It's like a fucking tower defense game in Japan that was one of Capcom's cheaper games. People went, oh, that could be cool, because it showed well. By the way, that game is great. Konnitsu Gami is incredible. And when people saw Damon and Baby out of any context, they went, ah, not because it's new, but because the trailer they showed looked like ass. Yeah. No, I really, I think this is a case of your marketing team and your, you know, your outreach or your, your, all the people planning for this and how to announce this and how to tell

people what to expect and what to show and showing off something impressive. All of that failed and that needs to be, you need to make a first impression even if we support the idea behind why you're doing what you're doing, right? Like I said, the Hotel Dusk team making a visual novel is fucking sick. That's cool. Why did they make a visual novel for people who can't read? Like I keep saying it over and over and no one is... Like I've been saying that like every time I talk about this game and no one is willing

to engage with me On it. I don't know why it's like Why are they making? Like it was it was so weird. I Mean rotoscoping is cool. I think it looks pretty Asks, why do I keep saying that it's because it's a game that has no text. It has no text It's all but it's all it's all novel that has no text. It has no text. It's all visual novel that has absolutely no text at all. Yes, it's rotoscoping and it's, I guess, an emotional silent story, which there can

be awesome, compelling silent stories. In fact, there is a really good comic book collection of stories called Flight, which puts together a bunch of stories from artists from many years ago at this point. And there's a couple of those that are wordless and really, really cool. I like stuff that finds ways to be interesting while being narratively putting a little weight on yourself like that. But this is just like, this is an interesting thing that would probably have gone over really well in the middle of a Nintendo Direct, right? That could have gone over really interestingly in a Nintendo Direct that's been going between

a couple of cozy games and then the latest Donkey Kong Bonanza amiibo. You'd be like, hey, check out this new interesting visual novel. If you played Hotel Dusk back in the day, you might be like, oh yeah, that's cool. They can't call it that. Okay. Well, it is a... They're not allowed. It is a... There's no words. It can't call it that okay. Well it is it It is a

Words it can't be a novel It is a it is a visual It's a visual visual. It's a visual story. It is a visual tale Anyway, so yeah, that's just that's that's the issue right with it with it Set the expectations of the audience Pop up. Yeah. Look, I mean, beyond that, the only other things

I thought were just kinda like, you wanna raise your eyebrow here, is a classic case of just, you know, silence is an option, Randy. I'd like to call this segment silence is an option, Randy. I'd like to call this segment silence is an option. Right? He's so stupid, man. He's so fucking dumb.

So, you know, Borderlands 3 gets a massive 95% off discount and if that gets- Yeah, every sale, it gets kicked down like $4. And so, you know, letting people know about that, it's like, oh shit, the game is three bucks. bucks it came out in 2019 so it's been out for a while but if you're somebody that wanted to get your hands on Borderlands 3 for as cheap as possible it's currently three fucking dollars right cool so yeah he announces that and basically tweets out you know sales like this and Borderlands

3 showing up on console subscription programs took over five years from the game's launch to happen. So take advantage while it's here. It's not even true, it was like that last year, dude. Oh yeah, okay. Stop lying, Randy. Well, either way it was like, okay cool,

and people were like, oh shit, look at that, that's great. And then following that that and to set expectations It'll even it'll be even longer before this kind of thing happens on the next cycle with borderlands 4 you're just like like you didn't have to be like Let me drop some disdain on the poor's You could have just been silent on that. Even if that's the reality, even if that's the truth, there was no reason. There was no reason to say that.

So I can tell you what the reason to say that is. So Randy Pitchford comes out and says, hey, the game's going to be $80 or $100, whatever the fuck the price was, right? And then when people got mad at him, he's like, well, that's not my decision. That's not my decision. I didn't do that. That wasn't me. And then the publisher saw the backlash and went, yeah, okay, it's going to be 70. They kicked it back down to the price of a normal game. And what that means to me is that Randy actually was part of the fucking decision to kick it up 10 bucks so they'd make more money. And now he looks super dumb. So hey, how does he not look super dumb to say listen?

We're not gonna be charging extra, but you know It's gonna take a really long time to come to well price So I think that it's I mean I go a little more Akam on that one And I kind of think that it's like I don't want anybody who sees this to think that they should wait before buying our next game. You know? I think the thought is simply, hey, if you're waiting for a bargain, you should buy Borderlands 4 right away.

And then this is what comes out. This is what that thought turns into. Which to me says that Borderlands 4 has to make tons of money. And the best way to do that right after release, if you haven't hit your numbers, is to put the game on sale right away, like a Tomb Raider for example. Like, listen, we gotta ship this amount of fucking units, we gotta make this amount of money.

Fucking cut the cost two months after the game comes out until the numbers fucking go. So I feel like it's actually more likely that this game's gonna go on like fucking 30% off on the winter sale. Either way, that has been silence as an option. Just shut the fuck up, Randy. Every time he speaks, he's actually taking a sale away. Even just one. And then just as a curiosity on the other side over here, there's been some revelations

coming out of Tim Cain who was the lead on Fallout back in the day. And basically he's described how the process of finishing projects at Interplay was one where they directly would tell their employees to delete original source code. They specifically did not want it to be preserved. They specifically gave instructions. And this was their, they basically had a scorch earthed policy so that they could avoid IP theft. He had local copies of some stuff he'd worked on because he knew that some companies were more insane than others with it.

But overall, yeah, there's a bunch of companies where their entire policy was once the game is out and done, fucking delete the code. No one will ever have access to it. There will never be a preservation of this. A lot of people that wanted- That seems stupid to do. A lot of people that wanted and were actively,

that wanted to preserve things were threatened with potential lawsuits by not doing so. So this is one of those bits where you're like, it depends entirely on the company and how stupid they are, obviously. And I mean, this is from the past. This is literally from Fallout 1 era. But we've seen and heard about this entire concept and so on going forward. All I can say is if you're working at a company that's this fucking stupid and you're like, if you're in the pre-mastering department,

like write a letter, call a meeting, do what you can, you know, it might not go well, but give it a shot. Because like the people in charge of pre-mastering in particular are the ones that are like handling this and managing builds and directly going to be responsible for security of where those that code goes after You know Different phases and such just just give it a shot for the sake of for posterity literally for posterity, you know Posterity literally for posterity you know

Yeah, I it's it's that's the we always thought laugh at the craziness of the stories where they're like oh, yeah We lost the code And here it's the like no we were told You know Jesus Christ interplay ran itself into the ground because their decisions were super good. Oh, yeah Yeah Ran itself into the fucking dirt You know and then years later when somebody has to do a remaster of something they're basically like doing it from the outside in and If you're a really good company, then you're dedicated and love the thing then you'll put the you know

You put the work in and they get it done, but boy does it suck I Mean shit, what was the I was thinking of what was the there was another big remake I was in a blue point game or so where they're like oh, we don't have the source code But we just had to build around all fancy tactics was the tactics. Yeah, okay? Yeah, there you go. there you go right there like we lost it and and like it's so obvious that it was destroyed Because Yoshi P was like listen. We don't want to blame anybody just sometimes you lose things back in the day I'm like oh, yeah, okay Should we just lost it sure buddy that that blood that blood-borne port

lost it sure buddy that that blood that blood-borne port yeah yeah blood-borne I know I'm so certain no well where it no what you what you need to know is every day they're deleting one file they're wiping one file from existence, slowly but surely. Bleed it out. Let's take some letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to castlesuperbeastmail.com. That's castlesuperbeastmail.gmail.com. All right. We got one coming in over here from Colin. Dear letters and numbers, what are some weird instances of magical thinking that bug you?

For example, after the announcement from last week, well, I guess a little before that, I decided to check the Wooly Will Figure It Out podcast before the inevitable fatherhood episode, only to discover that he stopped at 12. Make another episode fast, so that fatherhood doesn't become episode 13, please think of the children. Okay, also something something,

Matic the Gadgering X cross Final Fantasy cards cost way too much. They do, they. They do. They sure fucking do. I don't have many of them, but there's one that stands out. I think of one big problem with magical thinking that you have. Okay, well, I mean, I'm open to it, but the one that we've touched on many a times is real simple.

If you're setting the volume on the TV, it has to be an odd number, an even number, or a multiple of five. I think everyone knows this. Similarly, similarly, if you're setting time on the microwave, you know, I kind of follow more or less multiples of five on that. But you know, you want it to, you turn up the volume and you get that number on whatever the volume is, just even or multiple of five on that. But you know, you want it to you turn up the volume and you and you get that number on whatever the volume is just even or multiple of five just put it

in the right place where you can you can arrest magical thinking but I have a question. Sure. If you walk in to a room and you look at your microwave and the microwave says like 002 on it frozen in time. Do you walk over and be like fuck and hit the clear button to set it back to the clock cursing under your breath that the person who opened it up so that it would have two seconds to go so the alarm wouldn't go off but then never cleared it Is this too specific Not only do I clear the time on the microwave I have gotten a microwave that has muted buttons and no beep so that we can stealth that shit it is Absolutely not cool to leave that number on So someone in the chat says is is this a secret page story?

And it's like, technically, but this is actually every person I have ever seen use a microwave in my entire life. Opens the door with like two seconds to go and then closes it and walks away to not hear every single time I ever seen someone do it. It makes me so crazy. If you're standing there and you don't want to hear beep beep beep You know then you're like okay, but and you just leave it on water, too

Yeah Mute setting mute you know mute setting on that What's yours? No, there's no There's the big one. Not many. Let's just not even bother. I have a... I know somebody who has a magical thinking pet peeve and it drives me crazy because whenever I say, wow, things are going really great, they go, shut up, oh my god,

and start running around knocking on wood. Mm-hmm wood mm-hmm Whenever I go wow what an amazing day. It's like nothing could go wrong. I just I see every alarm go off in Paige's head Today's been a really great day actually I'm having a really good day so far, okay Today's been a really great day actually. I'm having a really good day so far. Okay Yeah, I mean I'm trying to even remotely get to something that would come in like third place and it's it's tricky I'm Like I'm just I'm thinking like oh when I open the fridge I like when like the Cans or bottles are like like you know on the shelf

Organized to one side a little bit more, but it's not magical. It's not a big idea. Yeah, I'm like I'm like I'm trying to I'm really I'm trying I'm like no there's that volume number one is really that's the biggest That's the biggest one Thinking is like I have to wear my lucky socks or else I'll lose the playoffs You know that's like all right like full-on belief in sorcery I mean some days I'll match my underwear with my outfit if I'm feeling particularly fancy no one's gonna see it I don't yeah I don't know I don't know I don't know all right well anyway there you go um this is a podcast for adults thank you we don't yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. All right. Well anyway there you go This is a podcast for adults. Thank you. We don't have magical ideas. Mm-hmm

All right Let's see. Hello castle super dead What are some games where certified freak status is appreciable, but it's for someone else Factorio door fortress net hack Fortress, NetHack, these are for a kind of person that I know isn't me. The closest I come is football manager. Try as I might, I'm always left feeling like, damn, some freak out there has to love this, but it ain't me. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say

the big one for me is Disgaea. Going into the item world to level up your items only to discover a better item and then go into that item world is so unhinged and disturbing to me that I just, I don't know that I can interface with the game at all. Literally every management game.

All of them. All of them? All of them. It's for someone. Yeah, not me though. It ain't for me. Alright, and one last one over here. Hey there blue eyes, white bovay, and the dark magician. I want to tell you a tale from Russia. Is Kaboose the dark magician? I mean, is dark magician strong? Well, he's not. Oh, I love you. I want to tell you a tale from Russia where in 2007, a 10-year-old writing prodigy took the literary world by storm with her high fantasy novel set in the rich magical world of Agra Mont, an ancient land plagued by an evil demon king. The author Valeria Espirande became an overnight sensation, apparently appearing for regular interviews on national TV, and then sparked debate as to whether the schoolgirl's debut work could be comparable

to the likes of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. While obviously at 10 years old, her writing style was not as standard as an adult writer's, people were blown away by the richness and depth of the fantasy world she had created, and big things were expected from her future. Turns out, Valeria was unfortunately not a literary genius or expert world builder, but she simply ripped off a well-known video game by the name of The Legend of Zelda, The Ocarina of Time. Her book had no hint of originality or plot in lore lore. It was not an original fan fiction story set in Hyrule, but a complete scene-for-scene clone of Ocarina of Time, complete with characters named Princess Elda, Gonandorf, Lord Vabu Vabu,

and Salia. The similarities between the two works were not noticed due to Ocarina of Time's relative obscurity in Russia at the time and the lack of overlap between serious literary scholars and video game fans. Needless to say, Valeria did not quite reach the literary potential shown in her youth. Hustle or scam. Now, I mean, look, let me transport you back to a time not too long ago when a work known as diesel was. That's an enemy Stan. Right. When diesel was brought to the masses and diesel with Stan's stained users and, you know, these battles as a Western comic book simply was not ripping off Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.

It was knowing that Jojo would never come out in the West, so they were going to copy the story and homage it so that people here could appreciate how cool it was. That's all. If this girl's 10 years old, like this is the parents fault. I'm going to fully just blame the parents on this one for pushing the media campaign and going as you know, as nuts as possible. I don't know. I mean, the argument that you're like, it'll never come out here, therefore I'm gonna steal it, and then everybody can appreciate it, fucking sucks. But you get a bunch of passes from me for being ten years fucking old. You know? But whatever, what everyone else around you is doing in light of this, is absolutely fucking to blame, in my opinion. Right? That's how she did she plagiarized the old-fashioned way didn't need no AI to do it

Hmm you don't get a robot to steal for you. You can do it yourself even a child can do it could have been a prompt Also the the idea that like it would get to the point of being like on TV and shit and like yeah Just no one noticed nobody caught it I mean like if if ocarina was a hard thing to get at the time, you know if shit was like, you know Prohibitive then that's how it go. You know, but god damn it man at least like Turkish spider-man and and you know, but god damn it man at least like Turkish spider-man and and Was it or was it Turkish Star Wars? I think Was pretty good too. Yeah, like and and and

I want to say it's like Kenya Devil May Cry, you know like I that is Ghana Ghana Ghana, okay. Okay, so Ghana and Devil May Cry and Turkish Star Wars, they take inspiration, but then they go to a different direction with the work, you know? And I think that's what's crucial. That's what you can say that, that's a thing that you can say with your mouth.

Yeah, they're inspired from the same source, but the creators wanted to ultimately, they had a different message they wanted to express. So, you know, they get originality points on that. Yeah. Someone said, children can't scam fucking disagree. That is patently untrue. Absolutely not. You know, if I could hustle back in school with my soda cans then scamming was always an option a hundred percent Come on now hundred percent children can lie therefore they can scam See you next week. Oh wait

We got confirmation of that thing! Oh, buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh bu Why does that layout even exist? That's for when we have a guest. Such as next week, that layout will be used for next week's guest. What guest would that be, Woolie? I believe we have confirmation here that we can announce that next week we will be joined by Mori Calliope. Yay. Looking forward to it. Hell yeah.

See you guys then. Thanks for watching!