Castle Super Beast - Csb346 Funko Haters Lend Me Your Hate

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Older Twitch VODs are now being uploaded to the new channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive Castle Super Shills What's Up With Arc Raiders? Boxjam Recap Praying For Funko's Downfall  Don't Tell Marathon it's an Extraction Shooter Games That Eventually Delivered on Promises Watch live: twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Visit HeroForge.com to start designing your custom miniature and dice today and check back often: new content is added every week. Go to http://shopify.com/superbeast to sign up for your $1-per-month trial period. Secure your online data TODAY by visiting https://expressvpn.com/SUPERBEAST and find out how you can get up to four extra months. Go to http://hellofresh.com/superbeast10fm now to Get 10 Free Meals + a Free breakfast for Life! Funko Pop Sounds Like It's In Serious Trouble With Massive Debt Funko Pops Might Not Last Another Year, As It Reports $1 Million Net Loss "FromSoftware was a business software company, but when they saw PlayStation was a CD ROM game system, they thought 'oh, we can become a video game publisher'! That's how they entered into the video game industry." The new Steam Controller Gambit: Le Diable Blanc | Character Reveal | Marvel Rivals Grand Theft Auto VI delayed to November 19, 2026 "These extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve." Hi Fi Rush Director John Johanas on removed Soundtrack - "FYI this is likely publisher transition related and the soundtrack will be back on services soon. Just not sure when. Please stay tuned! Don't panic!" Elden Ring Nightreign DLC expansion coming by Q1 2026, FromSoftware owner confirms Former Marathon director hates calling them 'extraction shooters,' but Bungie's forging on with the "dumb" term  

Shill. Yeah. Welcome to... How's your shirt? Welcome to Castle Shill Beasts. Yeah. What's up? Not much.

Have we mandated or necessary amount of shilling? There we go. Hey. How you doing? I'm doing great. Hey, Kaboose, do you want to kiss, Wully? Oh. He's allowed.

There you go. They kiss. They kiss now. That's, that's... I mean, I am not white, but... I will accept that. You thought that dog was really cute when you were here. You were sweet on him.

Yeah, I know. Just busted little legs. Y'all aren't beating those allegations, whatever they are, whatever they may be. He's just a little baby. Hey, man, my toddler the other day, I was like, hey, buddy, can I get a hug? He's like, no, I do not want to hug Dadda right now. And I was like, oh, I'm going to go hug the dog. You know, excuse me.

Jesus Christ Oh hey I want to try something cool I want to try something cool on the technical end of the podcast today Okay, I'm gonna do it I'm gonna do it without telling you first Let's see if this works It does oh okay Wait

What Okay Well This footage might get flagged aggressively I know I know I just wanted to see if I could do it No I'm just gonna keep it in it Yes No I did have a

on the docket that, yeah, there's a state of play that's going to be happening. So you're going to have a up now in Tokon news. That guy just got announced. Is that to be expected? State of Play, Japan? Yeah, it's going to be a Tokon,

Bandai Namco, which could be from software stuff. This is one to watch. Okay. Bro? Um, where was it? I saw, I had it open. Okay, so it's, I got a YouTube link. I just send you that. No, well, it's not that. Just the, um, list of confirmed topics. Uh, R.E. stuff. Tokon stuff. Bamco stuff. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Uh, hmm. Let me see. Let me ask you, how's the shirt feel on your boobies? It feel nice? Feel soft.

Yeah, the material is soft. It's, um, I, I, I always get worried about the sizes on these things because it's always different. Every single place is a different. Exactly. And, and sometimes it's just lies and I get it and I'm like, absolutely go fuck yourself. Um, this is a good plush, by the way. This is a good. The quality is good. The quality of, the quality, it's very high quality.

The very, very high quality shirt, very high quality plush. Good, good quality all around. I was quite satisfied with, with, yes, everything they did on that. I didn't realize it said getting the fighting games on the back. That's awesome. Yeah, they got the details in there and everything. That's fantastic. You know, it's, you know, they did like the Docapon King as well, and they did like a little Potemkin back in the day. They did some cool shit.

Like, no, they fucking, they pulled it out. Someone in the chat asks, is the shirts over? That shirt is over for. Woolie's shirt that he is wearing with his my goofy face as a clown. That shirt is over forever. I'm sorry to FOMO all of you. I believe this doll is also over forever. The doll is over forever.

I believe there was a like threshold for like, you know, if it does like super crazy good, then like you can bring it back. And I think... Wow, the next time we do a merch run, you guys should really hop on that stuff because once it's gone, it's just gone forever. Yeah, I think there's like this sounds like there's hoops, but like for now, as far as I know, gone forever, ever, ever. Unless we bring back a merch battle pass.

I was, I was really, I was, you're gearing up. I was going to suggest a merch loot box, you know, a specific merch currency. And, you know, you could lock in the type of shirt you want to hunt for. and you get better odds, you know, overall. So that if you... You're just doing low-grade rip-off LaBoo-Boo-hmm. Yeah, well, you know, if you, if you buy 10 shirt pulls and you don't get the shirt you want, then we got to have a pity shirt system.

Nine plain white T's. Someone will find a way. Like, we joke now, but fast-forward a couple years, someone will find a way to, like, turn real-life gacha mechanics and pity system shit. into a monetization. I saw the most violently depressing gatchification of anything I've ever seen in my life the other day. I saw a website that you could input your bills into

and then run a slot machine and then the payout would be that they pay your bills. Oh my God. Okay. I mean, it's the gatchification. I thought for a second you were going to talk about the new dissidia because I just saw like one story about that. which was like it's the most pay-to-win thing that's ever existed oh yeah i remember uh people on my timeline were like oh it's so they can sell the costumes that's why they're turning into like you know cool

hip japanese people in japan in Tokyo and then it's like yeah yeah so it's why it was like like you you start boot the game up you you pick cloud and then you swing and everything you do is super weak and useless and you you lose every battle you can't do shit and then you pull pull and then eventually you pull for fucking Clem Hazard and now you act now it's O.P. and busted and kills everything and one shots at all. And so you go from

being unable to win to now dominating everything and that's all based on what you buy and it's just like cool. All right. Well, that's the goal of the game. You know, you did it. Cidia to Odessum is like such a good game and for them to just fall it up over and over and over.

I mean you just release like a P like duodecim with like two extra characters like how about hey fucking just release that game like in general just just re-release it but but we have a team that has like boiled beakers and stared at tubes and realized exactly how much fomo they can attack in your brain you know it's way more effective to make you feel bad about not playing a game than it is to make you enjoy playing one i think it is it is a genuine like horrible thing that you're taking these beloved characters And in order to make you feel good, you have to, like, force them into, like, this FOMO or, like, timed gambling thing.

By the way, I'm really enjoying my Wully Doll a lot. I'm really enjoying it a lot. I think you are enjoying my T-shirt a lot. I think it looks really good on you. It's warming. It's warming the cockles. Where is his stick? His little accessory arcade stick.

Oh, that's right here. Okay. It's just, it's like, what I'm, like, you know, moving him around, you know, he can't have it in his hands because it doesn't stick. So when he's sitting on, on the, on the, thing here, then he has a stick. Horrible business practices. Hey, um, uh, you want to, do you want to like do a, uh, okay. So you know how. Okay. I can tell I'm going into a long conversation when you're figuring out how to ask the

question. All right. Let's do it. You know how Vitti created one of the best moments ever on, on the friend cast where we were like literally what are you talking about? What I, what is, a battlegrounds. I changed the trajectory of my life to keep that happening again. Okay. I played League of Legends so that I know what the fuck people are talking about. Okay. So would you like to collectively hear

with the audience all together now, and they're probably fine because, you know, they're gamers, capital G, but we're out here being fucking weird. So would you like to collectively together discover what exactly an Ark Raider is? Oh, I know what an Ark Raider is. Okay.

I mean, I know exactly what it is. Well, I mean, besides watching some footage of it and seeing it. Oh, you actually tried it? Okay. Because I watched some footage of it and I was like, okay, this is the hot shit. This just dropped on, you know, right on Halloween. And I like the little graphic design thing with the logo with the rainbows. That's a nice little logo. That's fun.

And, you know, I'm seeing all the PVPVE stuff and all that. And there's parts of it where, okay, so I'm. I was talking about it, you know, on the chill stream yesterday, for example. And the big final, like, conversation point is like, and here's the AI voice acting, right? Yes, which is quite poor. And it's like, that's just, that's lame. That sucks that that has that. I can give you a breakdown, a synopsis.

I can give you my personal history. I can go for it. Where do you want to start? No, well, it's more so just like, and I don't want to, like, get this. off if I'm completely like, you know, maybe you have to like look at and touch and actually interact with the thing to, you know, draw the conclusions. But I guess I'm like looking

at the soldiers and I'm looking at the tech and I'm looking at the robots they're fighting. And I'm not seeing anything that seems particularly like designed in a super interesting way artistically, I guess. It feels not generic, but it does feel kind of like, you know, a

strong vision for a sci-fi concept art you know, design would like make bolder things kind of stand out, I guess. And so there's nothing about it that's really grabbing me visually or like setting wise. And for the, for the level of hype, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, attracting. It doesn't seem reflective of that.

But maybe that's because the, the gunplay is really tight or something. Okay. So I, I can, I can solve this for you. So first of all, Ark Raiders is, uh, visual aesthetic is the halfway point between nothing. And by nothing, I mean modern military. like your PubG, your Call of Duty, just realistic military stuff, and Starfields like NASA Punk, right?

NASA Punk, that's the first. That's what they called it. And I like, that's like, I actually dug the Starfield art style. I like that. It's a shame they didn't do more with it. Okay. But it's just like, it's modern plus with a little Mad Max. It is not, it is not fantastical.

It is not, what do you call it, striking. See, the problem with the, right? It is intentional that it looks normal. For appeal. Yes. It looks normal for appeal because not, like anything really interesting would put off people in some direction. It can be polarizing to go extreme with your visuals. something I always wonder about is like

when it comes to guns, right? Are the guns closer to reality? Are they like future reality? Okay, they're not going into it. Because obviously like a game like Destiny can make guns their identity and go into the extremes, right? Yeah, you're having, I can't remember,

but it's either you have an AK-47 or you have a Bay K-48. Yeah. And you know, and then there's the world of like a Titanfall slash fucking what you might call it whatever the 3V3

and apex where guns are like yeah if you're into guns like these are still fictional but like there's enough going on here simulation-wise I don't know it's got a weird sidebar to that where it's like there's people who love guns and there's people

who know a lot about guns and then there's the video game depiction of of guns and then there's emulating not the real gun but emulating a video game depiction

of a gun. Okay. Okay. So like you're you'll get a gun that has nothing to do with like the M16 or M14 in real life at all and there's no design elements at all about it in any way. But it's emulating what the M16

felt like in Call of Duty Right, right, which if you're familiar, you feel that and go, ooh, you know? Like I was playing Tormented Souls 2, and the fucking nail gun, which is a pistol, has like the M1 Garand Ping when you fucking run out of ammo in your clip. Okay. Like, what? Now. For a nail gun? Now, I say this as somebody who, if I remember correctly, I played Halo 2 and picked up the battle rifle and immediately enjoyed the feeling of that.

immensely. So I'm like, I battle rifle in Halo 2 is one of the guns that people go, I want the gun to feel like whatever the fuck the battle rifle is supposed to feel like. Yeah, that's, that was a, that was a moment of like, oh, I get it. I get this in specific, you know? Speaking of the battle rifle in fucking Halo reminds me the most of the M16 in Call of Duty. Okay. Okay. So, so on and so forth. So I think when I look at a game like Tarkov or so, it's like it's modern day. It's It's fairly realistic. So, like, overall, the aesthetic is understood that, like, you're not really trying to do anything besides just simulate realism and a military look, and that's it.

But the moment... Like, they want to have robots and non-human movies. So they have to do it a little bit. Yeah. And so... And the moment you put your toe into the sci-fi thing, I go, oh, well, now I'm comparing you to sci-fi. Just real sci-fi.

Yeah. And I go, like, I'm not seeing anything that is not, that's particularly inspired about about the robot design. or the way that looks, you know, the little spider tanks and the fights they're getting into and stuff, you know? Yeah, and so it was kind of, it just, it was a bit of a, like I was going like, hmm, like, what is it in particular that people are latching onto with it, you know? And I, okay, I can tell you. The loop. I can tell you.

Okay, so there's a lot. So I played about an hour of the playtest, and then what happened was, is I put it on my stream schedule. I was like, oh, this looks like a cool, hot noon game. I am going to go cover it today later on my stream. And then I was then informed, hey, go back and read the Steam page a little more carefully, which I did and discovered that it's, one, the same people who made the finals. And two, in both games, they use artificial intelligence generative voice acting. And they specifically do it in a really strange way where they exclusively pay voice actors

to feed their voices into the robot. so that they can then use the robot. And I'm like, why not just use the voice actors? You're fucking paying? It's super weird. It's fucking strange. What a weird future. Okay.

And I'm like, oh, no, I'm out. But in the hour that I played it, that... Silence would be better. Anyway. Yeah, I totally agree. Before I found that out in the hour that I played it, what it was was a slick, well-produced, controller support

extraction game with like well thought out like controls and like a focus on like being able to play the game solo so basically it would be the first extraction game that is like

a real video game for human beings is how I would describe it so so multi-platform and I'm seeing lots of conversation about yeah it's not people are are not necessarily getting into fights.

And yeah, the fact that I guess controller supporters thing means it's not automatically mouse and keyboard as well. So it has a broad appeal. Yeah. And you can, okay, okay. It has a extremely broad appeal. Specifically, Arc Raiders is interesting

because we're going to talk later about Marathon a little bit. Arc Raiders was the game that when people were playing the Marathon Alpha, they'd be like, well, the fucking Arc Raiders Alpha just happened. Why the fuck don't you have X, Y, and Z that the Arc Raiders Alpha has, and then the response from Bungee would be like,

well, we're not doing it like that. And the response to that would be, but why, it's better. It is kind of weird how new extraction games can't escape plagiarism. Just can't. I'm of the opinion that if they were willing to jump through all these hoops to get AI voice acting in their game,

that they definitely use generative AI in other places. Oh, absolutely. They're not going to get caught as easily. Absolutely. So that's why the voice acting part is the part on the Steam page that they admit to. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is, there's a bit of a litmus test there, I'm sure, and, and again, with the previous game. I think I was seeing as well, like, the recent, like, Hoyo was, like, hiring, like, you know, they're actually hiring AI developers on the team. And then there's, oh, yeah, but me, Hoyo's way into AI.

And that, there's, there's NPCs that have, like, that are AI generated dialogue that are talking to you in one of the games. I remember talk I remember I follow little Caribo Yeah yeah Caribo yeah I follow him on yeah he's reporting on the Hoyo stuff and he's super Super intense on all that voice acting stuff and as a result I've been able

to keep like a lot better informed on it And the long and short of it is that Mi Hoyo was like super crazy anti-union anti-voice actor and just really nuts about it and people said well they never well just because they rip off their voice actors and break up their unions doesn't mean that they'd use

AI. I'm like, of course that's what that means. Oh my God. That is the next logical step. That is the next step. It's right there. It's the number one thing you want to do when you're any of these companies that are embracing and talking about the potential in the future and yadda yada

is that you're trying to just fire as many as possible. I want to make the thing without any labor. I just want to put money in and get all the money out. That's it. on um okay so so that's kind of yeah the appeal is that it is it is the fortnight to all other extraction games is pub gm-hmm where it's like hey look it's well put together and it's like a regular

fucking video game for people and kids can play it on a hack together pile of shit and kids can play it with controllers on their consoles and you can play it cross-platform as well and yeah yeah yeah okay okay that that's for all for all intents and purposes from my personal experience, well, the way I see people talk about it and its own reviews, it appears to be a fun, well put together, quality made game, except for the part that it uses, like, wildly unethical processes to actually build it. So it's a hard pass for me. And one of the things that's getting increasingly frustrating as I watch the scroll here is that when people go, oh, it's got AI, okay, hard pass to which some folks will say, well, the millions of

of people enjoying it. They don't care. I'm like, you seem like you care. You seem like you're invested in everyone giving you the free pass. You can enjoy anything you want. I'm not even telling anyone. I almost never tell anybody to enjoy or not

enjoy or whatever. Everybody's personal buying decisions are their own. But there seems to be like this personal investment in people who do things that they know maybe they shouldn't do or maybe shouldn't support. And they're desperate. desperate to get you to admit, well, you would do it too if it would. No, it's, it's, they

doth protest too much, you know, like, it's, it's a preemptive, defensive thing against the, the argument they know is coming slash they feel already. I, I saw that with, um, the, the hoyo stuff, there's been a turn, um, apparently, initially, um, a lot of the fan, the fan base was like against it, but, um, when it got introduced into, let me get this correct. Is it, um, uh, petite planet, right? Petit planet. Um, then it became like, yeah, according to the, the, the, the, the fence of it is, this is a good, the defense of it is, this is a good use of it. You can't stop it at this point. You might as well embrace. And it's like, yeah. No, I have to do nothing. But that's that, but that's, and, and you're kind of just like, this is, but this is

this little like, like, the, the, you can't stop it part of it is like, yeah, that, that, that, that is going to roll forward. But yeah, you can still point that out. and I can still tell my mom, hey, when you Google something, you can type minus AI in the Google search to not see that thing up front or click the link at the end of the Google of the AI thing to at least see the source on what you're reading, please. That's one of the things that I've picked up over all these years. And it's like, it's something like when people go, it's just the future. You're just going to have to deal with it. If it was just the future and I'm just going to have to deal with it, you would not be spending so much of your mental energy trying to convince you. me that it's the future and I just have to deal with it.

It just would be. Right? Like this, this concept like, well, you have to start. It's going to be like this anyway. There's no point. Okay. Fuck you. So, so when it's everything all be sad and then I won't have changed anything.

Okay. It's, it's this dumer fucking attitude to get people to just not to do anything. I don't like, well, I have a lot to talk. You know, I'm just to roll right through. I have gotten a weirdly insane amount of blowback for me going, hey, when is the final patch for this game so I can start playing it? I have had people blow up my fucking DMs and social media going, you can just play it right now.

You just play it right now. It's fine. It's fine. Don't worry about it. It's like anger at me going, oh, no, I'll wait like six more months until it's fun. And all I can feel is somebody going, I wish I had waited, but I didn't. And now I want you to say that I was right to not wait and just go for it. I had another game fucking fall apart on me this week.

I played Tormented Souls too. I've been streaming it. I really enjoy that game. There was a patch that came out Monday morning that put a soft lock into the game. and I encountered it during the stream. That put a soft lock into the game, Wully. Oh, fuck. Okay.

And they're like, well, if you run into the soft lock, redo the section over about an hour or roll the patch back. I'm like, I'm not going to take three shots at this hour and a half long sequence because you put a soft lock into the game. They're like, well, this patch fixes other stuff. and but you know maybe we've put a soft lock in the cemetery yes you did you did put a soft lock in the cemetery well i want you to read you've done a million you're the qa fucking genius i would like you to read this fucking this fucking note that came out with this fucking patch it's fucking ridiculous during the beta period we were made aware of two instances of persisting soft locks in 1.3 too sometimes the main cemetery tomb tomb tiles puzzles does

not trigger correctly after it's completed. Ensure that you save the cemetery in the cemetery office immediately after entering the cemetery area for the first time. If you encounter the soft lock issue, reloading the cemetery should clear the bug. Okay. That section's like an hour long. Yeah. That's at point.

It's like an hour away. No. What do you fucking want for me? How do you put out a patch that has this kind of note on it? Not to mention that, well, okay, in a console world of like, you know, saving after a something that is unavoidable happens, then you have an unintentional loss of data, and that's a flag anyway,

so this would have to, you couldn't put that out there. Save points in that game are used like encrybans. Yeah. You have limited, it's ridden. This would be a guideline violation, depending on the console.

Yeah. Crazy. Now, and I guess it always comes down to just like, you know, also do you feel the FOMO or are you patient? Are you down to wait? Are you okay? Oh, I kind of feel the FOMO for Arc Raiders. I kind of was looking forward to it.

It looked cool. But I'm like, oh, fuck it. I got a million other fucking things I can play. That's also the current state of things. There's no shortage. Rowning in fucking games at all time. There is certainly no shortage. So that, yeah, every time you come across one or two of these little things,

we're like, eh, this is a sketchy detail. Why do they have to do this or that then? So Kingdom Come Deliverance 2's final DLC, and it's like probably second to last patch came out today this morning. The game's on sale for 40% off. So in Canadian dollars, you could have bought, the gold edition or whatever for 120-ish or today now that it's gotten a year's worth of patches and functions correctly for 60 bucks. It's gotten like out of control and this is kind of off

topic but yeah no you I can't stand oh well you're gonna have to eventually well that means I don't have to now so to take a step back there I will say that like you know while the while the thought is that right now, every time, you know, these kind of stories are discovered, somebody somewhere reports on it or you hear about it or so. People are, devs are just going to get better at completely hiding any usage, you know, of generative AI anywhere in the games. They're just going to mask it completely. Like that other game with the clones there that we're talking about, you know, that you're playing the other day or things where were they, the subtitles, the translator stuff was off and they're going to oh the altar yeah yeah stuff is just going to generally be more and more hidden and it's

like we're not stopping the thing that's going to let us fire everybody and save all the money just because you feel bad about it we're just going to get better at making sure you don't find out you know that's the thing i expect so in the sense that it's inevitable you will 100% be encountering you know this in the future just like completely masked you know Yeah. Also, like, it's, it's so frustrating because, like, I see folks say, oh, I'm not going to buy this because of X, Y, or Z. Your reasons for not buying something could be myriad. It could be it's too expensive. It could be you hate one of the developers that is working on it. Like, personally, it could be that you don't like the color palette. It could be a moral issue with generative, like, whatever. Nobody is owed your disposable income. ever ever I am I look

disposable I look forward to the eventual Mihoyo message that says please stop thanking this NPC every time it talks to you we would really appreciate if you kept the conversations

brief and to the point yeah anyways but yeah that's what's going on with arc writers oh the other thing is that like arc writers sold four million copies and I think there's like 700 million, 7,000,

shit's gangbusters. It's popping off to which people go, see, see? It's like that, I don't play things because they're popular. I don't watch movies

because they're popular. I mean, that's, I do so because I think they look good. I think anyone sitting here listening to this is well aware that that is not a guiding principle. You know, it reminds me of,

it reminds me of like when I was like in high school and you'd get like NPD numbers. in like a game magazine and some people would be like well obviously smash brothers is the best fighting game of all time look how many more copies it's sold than street fighter oh my moral combat the best always sells the and like like like like like they want to use like popularity metrics they're oh the saddest the saddest posters are the online the active players the steamspy posters for what would like fighting games and literally the group the the the subgroup in the

FGC of people that like they go to find how many active players of like fucking I don't know KOF 13 are on right now and use that to fight against people who are currently on Juniel, you know? You know my favorite of that is? They'll be like, I'll just pick a random thing. Which are three player counts down 80% since launch? Yeah, it's a single player game and it came out four months ago. People bought it and they beat it and then they stopped playing.

What the fuck? Not everything has to be fucking forever. concurrent players, man. Just like jerking off to the number of concurrent players is crazy. It's such a sad existence. I've totally disconnected myself from every sentence of in-person community in the place that I live because my personality is so vitriolic and disgusting. So I'm going to pretend I'm part of a fucking hive mind because I like big budget call of duty.

And that means that I'm part of the in-group. Imagine, imagine if the console warrior, versions of us in elementary school could have gone back and saw the exact numbers of Mario players versus Sonic players at any moment and take that into your recess

fights. Toxic information. Dude, that, oh man, that's awesome. That's awesome. Oh, yeah, you know what? Somebody in chat pointed out, Hell Divers 2 is like the absolute funniest one of like dead game and we're so back.

game we're so back yeah I don't know if you see the hell divers numbers they're like a fucking sound wave like they are up and down I'm guessing they release content that people want to check out you know and then they come back and look a lot of big burst of people play it and then they fucking get tired of it or

the game gets broken or something and oh it's so over okay okay all right there you go that's that's that's the that's the that's the that's the end of the magnifying glass on our creators yeah no Willie Vinnie has caused me like it's like completely reoriented the way that I viewed games and games media.

Yeah, that was a big one. Like, that will never happen to me again. So it'll keep happening to me. But the differences, I'll go, why all this noise about arc readers? What's going on over here? You know, I'll, I'll tap my stick and ask the kids what's going on as a, you know. Hello, hello, hello, hello, what is going on? See, here's the thing, well, you don't have to do that for that much longer.

because you have a child now. So soon, you just get to skip that process. It'll take about like, I don't know, seven, eight years. And then she brings it to you. But you're just going to skip that process. Like, hey, little baby, Willie, what is up with this? And then they'll just tell you. Yeah, okay.

And they'll roll you their eyes, right? And they'll be like, oh, what I, okay. So little zeitgeist machine. There you go. Because you'll be like, is it skibbity? And then they'll just throw up on the floor from embarrassment. Like, Dad. God, Dad. Skibbities from before I was born.

Oh, my God. Six, seven, duh. That's also from before they were born. Yeah, well before. Needs to be sway. Fetch. Good old sway. I prefer fetch, you know. But yeah.

I saw, I saw, I saw a funny meme. Stop making Fetch happen. I saw a meme that was like, uh, it was a picture. of, it just said, like, I've created the ultimate meme that multiple generations can never understand. And it's a picture of the character six from Blossom and then the character seven of nine just next to each other. There it is.

And you're like, oh, this is indecipherable. You will never know. Yeah. Yeah, that's what's up with Arc Raiders. And there's a big controversy amongst mouth breathers that New York Gamer gave it a bad score because I think it's a morally repugnant game. Oh, that's it. Okay. That's just another version of how could they give?

What was it? Was it Skyward? Which one got an 8.8, a game spot? Was it Skyward? It was Twilight Princess. It was Twilight. It was Twilight. How can you?

You give it sounds a game. 8.8 out of 8.8. Shut up. Go outside. Breathe real air. Eat something that isn't a Cheeto. Fucking stop it. The weirdest thing was like, I haven't heard.

And so when I first heard six, seven mentioned, I heard about it in reference to Scrilla, the Rapper from, you know, like, as in like the, from the song that it originated from. And, you know, I thought that, like, that would come up more. But it seems like it's just evolved past its origin points and is just, it's become. I don't think it has an origin point. I'm, I think we're past that. I'm pretty sure it does, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter anymore. There's, I think, I think memes now are stripped of.

their meaning by end of day. Okay. Like before they become popular. At this point, yes. Because there is a rapper named Scrilla and he's from Philly and he has a song called

Dut Dute. And in that song he says, he starts the 6-7 thing. And I'm pretty sure it took off from there. But I don't think that like the generation that's using it is aware of the fact that that's where it started to begin with. Hey, Wully.

You don't have TikTok on your phone, do you? I don't. Okay, so I have a, you know, this is tangentially related because TikTok is how I learned about the 6-7. And the reason I learned about it is because I'm on teacher TikTok where I see teachers complaining about the kids and how they don't. As you begin to raise your tiny baby into a tiny toddler into a child, you're going to have moments of that where you go, could I be doing a better job? And the answer is like, maybe. Maybe you're not perfect because you're a human being. Now, then you need to go on to teacher TikTok and have them break down how their group of sixth graders don't know how to tie their fucking shoes.

Oh, God. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And just like, just center yourself and like, oh, you know what? Doing fine. Doing fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, no, there are going to be there, you're, there's going to be things in life where you're going to be that version of the, dad that's like, all right, grab the wrench, we're going to the garage, you know, and for me,

that'll probably be like, we're opening up this PC, you know, if it, just, just, just to know, just in case you might have to, hey, look, you're not doing much building of PCs these days, but you might buy a new video card, right? That's a realistic thing that'll happen. So wouldn't you like to know how to put that in, you know? So like, let me show you how to clear the static off, sit down, and safely do this. you know, at the very least. I feel like there's going to be those moments coming up. As opposed to teaching you how to change a tire or some useless shit like that. Yo, box jam.

Box jam is over. So, so. It occurred on Saturday. Primary objectives complete. Yeah, the primary objective was to remove. Kenny from the tournament. There we go. I got to do myself personally.

No coaches involved. No. Good shit. Well done. When we went up against K7's team, me and Shumi, Havi and Shumata and Shumee and Shumina took it 3-0. Coach didn't get involved. The third match was me and Shumi versus Peter Park and Kenny.

uh, stomp them out. Like, fucking get out. Fucking leave. Sick. Go home. I, I, I, um, yeah. No, there are, there are a couple of those, couple of those moments in particular, the, uh, cloud giving you advice and just, no.

No. No, I got this. So. Those two? Absolutely. So also, I don't know Peter Park from Adam. Uh, I'm sure he's a good guy. I don't think we ever actually spoke during the entire thing.

Um, but. I'm also glad that my match was up against him because Peter Park in that general chat was the most violent Timo hater. Oh. Of anyone in the whole tournament. He was posting

he was like crashing out like the day before posting photos of like Mineta from Heroaca being like losing the fucking Timo feels like getting beat from this motherfucker. And then I grabbed that photo and then put my face on

and went get ready for tomorrow. So it was Kismet. It was Kismet. Yeah. No, and then the tertiary objective of, you know. Of fucking win. Is, yeah. Unfortunately, was not successful.

There was a back and forth. It was not alive back and forth. But I started off the Sajian, sorry, the box sham slam going, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing in C-2. I'm just a little guy. I'm just a little birthday boy. I don't even know how to fucking play fighting games. I don't know what the hell Sage Jam's doing.

Oh my God, I'm going to get killed. To which Say Jam then responded on his show. You are the top placed seed two player. What the fuck are you talking about? To which I respond. Then why didn't we win, Say Jam? Obviously, your seeding needs work. Because you're a good fighting game player that just doesn't care about learning it.

You just want to, you go in. Oh, Willie, I got... That's it. So everybody, everybody in Team Cloud got way, way stronger over the course of one week. In fact, almost everybody in the slam did. Like, I would say everybody jumped at least two full ranks. And not like Emerald 1 to 2, but like from... Like, I'm in Master now.

There you go. Which is a big jump from me scrubbing it up in Arbor. Yeah. But a little optimization. here and there and tightening up recognition, you know? I still have to fill out my feedback form about like how I think. And it's like, I think this is going to be controversial. I think you should only allow one fighting game streamer per team.

Okay. Okay. Because some teams had five. And the argument was, well, they play smash and Tekken. It's totally different. But they're still career fighting game streamers and professional players. So I thought the original slam kind of thing was like going for general streamers and FGC coaches as the pair. And I believe that kind of was the spirit of sort of how it started.

But at a certain level, you are appealing broadly to a lot of different folks out there. And, you know, you got to pull in a mixed bag. And there's a lot of FGC streamers out there that are not necessarily like competitive players, but they got followings and they're more casual and they're in there. But they kind of know what they're doing as opposed to this is week one touching a stick, you know? Yeah. But what I will say is the brilliance of the slam format. And, you know, of course you know this because you've been in this experience before.

It's been a long time since. But you guys in the room hanging out while each other's playing and chatting and talking over your match. matches, that is the homies hanging out at the event while your friend is playing in their set. Absolutely. And you're standing behind them. Right. And you're encouraging them and you're having that social event and that. And showing that off online to people on a stream is so fucking brilliant because it's an amazing

part of fighting games that is not seen at all by the general population. Oh, and never. Never. So, like, we streamed practice sets. and we also streamed just hanging out after. Like I, you know, we got eliminated in about three hours. Me and Javi and Cloud just like hung out on fucking voice watching the rest of the tournament for like four and a half hours. Yeah, yeah.

Just shooting the shit and talking about like the game's balance and whatnot. And now we're now a big old group chat and we're going to have a peak stream later this week. There you go. With, uh, with, uh, team yappers. I will say Cajam was right about one thing. That group of people had like, more than twice as much chatting compared to all the other teams

combined. Okay, okay, okay. Like most people's comms, we're like, that's good, go in, stay out, go for the super. Meanwhile, we were just like fucking yapping the whole fucking time during all of my sense. So you do that thing, which I've seen you do a million times

when we walk into a party where you're just like, I've got a rolodex of ridiculous stories and I'm going to fill every blank moment of dead air with them. Every single moment. Let's just go. Yeah. When I run out, then I'll breathe.

Yeah. But to let people know, like, that, you know, if a tournament is happening and it's like a two-day event and it's like a Saturday and a Sunday or whatever, you're playing and your friends are playing for, you know, maybe half an hour or an hour. total, but so much of that time is the hang. So much of that time is just like watching and, and, you know, talking about tech and playing and shooting the shit, you know, and yeah, some of that is like, did you see Leffin's new video? Oh my God, I hate him. There's, there's people talking, people getting into all kinds of shit, you know, it's, it's literally like, that social aspect of it is huge. And, um, that's why I was talking about how my number one feature I want for the next generation of fighting games is like so one two x-kio has the plus invite your buddy

button right there but i want a game that like really is like get into a comms group with multiple friends and find a way to play online together while you watch each other rank up you you you lab you just chill because this is effectively people are looking for the hang when they jump on to extraction shooters when they jump onto any other genre it's yo friday night we're home. Let's let's fucking kill some time. Let's show who's where we drop it. I'm playing peak twice this week for this exact reason. That's it, you know? So that that's a brilliant aspect of the slam that comes through. Oh, I think the slam is like the most entertaining tournament from every perspective possible, all variations of it.

I think it's fascinating. I think bringing in people who don't know boo about a given game and seeing like, like, all right, let's see how fast these coaches can bring these people up. And the answer is pretty far, pretty fast. God. Imagine thinking your game is above this. Imagine thinking your company and your game is above this tournament and format. And you don't need the help. You don't need the fucking whatever.

Anyway. Also, I got to say, in like one of the most positive things I've ever thought in my brain about other people in a while, I was getting ready. I was like percolating in my mind about like who to give like the special shout out to for like MVP, right? Like, oh, who really? And I'm like, nah, man. Like Cloud is an excellent coach. He is a really chill vibe and he is an absolutely excellent coach.

He knew exactly what to focus on with each person. Simple, clear, direct changes that you can see. immediately that would improve it. Havi over at I-Hart Justice, he is an excellent mid-match hype man. Absolutely fantastic. And not too hype that it'll scramble your brain. But like when he can,

when he realizes you have the combo locked in and you're not going to drop it, that's when he goes. Incredible. Cloud also, we were like, oh, sorry, coach, you did great. And his response was, I could always have carried harder.

as the coach on the team you can always carry harder and I mean look you know there were those moments where like ah like sometimes uh an errant push block or um you know a bad burst would happen or even it'll kill you it'll kill you you'll kill your partner or even or even or even like a bad double down super or something you know but like it's like and i would say that in each of those instances it was like okay cool uh that's not what we wanted but improvised we'll work around it you know yeah and you just you just you don't uh you don't uh you don't dwell on it. No.

I have to give a big shout out to Shima da Tiger, which we started calling her because she came in at Ced 3 with Yasuo, and I feel like she exited after beating like seed ones, like professional fighting game people in 1v1s with dead assists. Like absolutely meteoric increase. Like amazing. I had the most like upward momentum of anybody. And I have to give a massive shout out to Shumi as the only person in the tournament who played Blitz and made it work.

Like she learned her blitz shit great. That's sick. Assist grabs. Perfect. Like Shima is better than Brian F. Who I discovered over the weekend because you texted me that that Brian F is not a black man. Evidently not. As it would turn out.

there as Brian F loaded in with the default character. And I went, I didn't know Brian's black. Uh, yeah, I'm pretty sure on all of his thumbnails, that is, that is a white gentleman with, uh, and not like, and he's got, you know, he's got the coiffed hair and everything. He's, he's, he's, he's quite white. Yeah. As far as I can tell. He does the, boom face on all this shit. So anyway, um, yeah, no, uh, Brian four. yeah Brian four Absolutely What a great experience Absolutely fantastic

A little disappointed We didn't do a lot better There are two takeaways One Man fighting game players Can't be seated correctly Like in general Like anybody that has like old experience

They will transfer it into the new one And the second thing is after playing Hundreds of matches of 2XCOO Over the past week I really like that game that game's balance is bad. That game's balance is fucking terrible. The four horsemen at the top rule over everything.

It is crazy. It is nuts. How free those four characters get things. And I play Timo. I know. I stole wins. I did not deserve. So it's quite interesting because you got to watch

the full spectrum of skill, right, with this event. Absolutely. And yeah, the lower skill level play you're looking at, the more viable every character is, right?

Yeah. Every character is winning at low level. And then as you go, as you climb, it's the differences start to, start to become apparent. And at the top, 100%, it is the four heavenly kings.

There's no ways about it. So one of the things that comes up is like, whenever, are you even good enough to care about tears, right? Because a lot of games, like, top tier doesn't matter until you're in the 90th percentile of players, right? Yeah. So that is valid in some, because there are times where, and this is, it's funny, because you will see complaints about things, about characters that admittedly the people, sometimes people are like, you're not, you're not dealing with this right here. So, for example, like the two ex- Yeah, the burrito doesn't exist in Emerald.

Exactly. I was about to say, you're not dealing with the burrito. set up, right? Like, there's a, there's, and, and the 2XCO subreddit will sometimes, like, show you, because it's, it's an interesting peer, peek into low level discourse based on high level discourse on YouTube videos and tournaments. And then, you're seeing this weird, like, you're not encountering this tech. Bro, I love the 2XCO subreddit because there are some fighting game people there. But like most of the people on that subreddit are like league play. players and like it is a subreddit of people who like legitimately don't know what they're talking about and are getting mad about it and it fucking rules it's so sick it's so sick how no one on that subreddit knows what they're talking about and so when a topic becomes like so little there and it is right it's like okay even beginners even people who don't really play fighting

games right so like let's take echo right at top tier, Echo has everything a character could ever want. He has everything. Yep. But even in that tournament, you know what I got to see? That shit manifests at the bottom tier two because TimeWinder is a fucked up move. It's the strongest move in fighting game history. Right? And so like I think a good example of like how balances your fighting game isn't how close individual tiers are in the in the spread. It's how fast do you notice these difference at low skill levels all the way up to top skill levels.

Like Yasuo and Echo and Ari and Timo are relatively high execution, but the reward you get at low execution from Echo is crazy compared to what you get at low execution for like Brahma Blitz. It's nuts. I always

love to and it's like, you know, like that like these moments where in the middle of the post on the Reddit, as we mentioned, it's like the person refers Should I spend more time in the practice range? You know? And you're just like, yeah, like, okay, like the counting meme. You're counting with your thumb versus counting like this in, in glorious bastards, you know?

No, it really, like, it is, it is quite interesting to see, like, how the vibe around the character. Because, like, again, Timo's another character where, like, he's annoying, but, like, at, if you're, not doing some of those insane extended loops and like the the mushroom uh double mushroom commos and shit like that you're not seeing all the crazy damage if you're not seeing the double down super tag you're not seeing this absolutely you know but like so i i went from being middle player to like good player right above average and like i played timo the whole way through and i also play blitz so i get to live at the fucking edges of the fucking spectrum on both ends of it right i'm playing a character that is so bad they're like legitimately busted like parts of their their moves don't

work and the other character who might be the best in the game right you could argue you make the argument right the amount of of free shit and conversion and payoff and damage and ease of use of use and neutral i get from one of them compared to the other is like it's like they're from different fighting games it's like ones from alpha and the others from third strike and it's it's crazy There's something too that really affects this discourse too, which is like perception around things. So literally before we started this, just this morning, I saw on the subreddit someone saying, change my mind, combos in fighting games are stupid and a waste of time. And unless you're a high level player that can do this stuff, they should just be automatic.

What's the point? And the long and the short of it was this was someone who's playing Vos. and basically was like, this is really annoying because it's required when you use her to do these perfectly timed dash electric uppercuts. Extremely long combos. Dash electric uppercuts. And if you can't do them, then what's the point?

And I read that and I was like, those are extremely optional combos that are not required at all. In fact, because of the timing of that uppercut, I don't do them. I literally do light, medium, heavy, or outa, laura, launch one, two, three down, super.

Like, I do not do them whatsoever. I could learn Timo mushroom loops if I wanted to spend all the time. But instead, I chose to learn a much, much easier, like, ground bounce loop that brings them all the way to the corner. And you know what? I'm happy with that. It does similar amounts of damage.

I don't get the mushroom pops from it. But like, now I have you in the motherfucking corner, which I like to put people. So it's fine. But the perception that this is a required thing for this character and this is just what you've been told from looking at other people's combos or from you just you've just or you see other people doing the combos until you just internalize that and you went down a path of already dumering you know about like this

thing that you can't do and it's like you're you're doing the advanced combos here that you that are completely unnecessary and the damage difference is negligible you know so it it's weird when you're putting these extra chains on yourself at any skill level that you don't need to worry about, you know? No, I'll tell you what, though. I, you know, hey, you know, balancing is hard. They really got to take their time. Nah.

Nah. Like, you, hey, listen, we have met, you know, and I have met and hung out with some people on this game's balance team, right? They're smart people and they're part of the community. They're part of the culture, right? you you motherfuckers can't look me in the eye and tell me like yeah no time winder's fair plans to change it like you

you absolutely fucking know better don't you even pretend and FYI for anybody that's like you're seeing people echo meaming when going my time my time the my time stuff is not the time winder that's a different move

my time is his forward assist where he just comes at you insanely quick which is the best to sleep in the game. So that it, like, that is. Right. Privileged for multiple reasons, mind you know. Um, so I, I, I've said this a couple times and like, you know, I would love that like, because yeah, it does certainly feel like Marlon Pye cooked his characters a lot longer than. Marlon, how come you, you put out Timo and Yasuo and they, like, yeah, like, Yasuo got nerfed massively still, like, top two. Because his nerfs made him find alternate routes that did more damage in the end. he had so much combo freedom

you know despite the fact that this game has been in development on and off for six to nine years I don't know how much whatever some of these characters are dramatically more complete than others yes yes cooked absolutely

top to bottom like like Willie I would like you to tell me when I am supposed to use Blitz's spinning arm move forward when your assist is on screen covering you right and then when and then you can do a million other things when my assist is on screen and then when you can do a mix so if you have that you have the thing going then you're tagging to your other

character and keeping the excuse me the opponent busy and mixed you know like i have never seen another blitz use that except by accident yeah it really is just good luck you know um but um yeah I think when it, what I'm, I'm going to go back to what I was, I said a couple times on this where these super privileged characters, I am, because people like are having fun with the, the doing all the moves and the character identity and everything, let them do all the things they want. Just make them die faster, right? You get, make him die faster and you know what? Don't like, you get less mistakes.

By himself should not be able to do 80%. That's it. That's it. Like not by himself? Come on. Give Yasu everything. Give him more and make him make, he gets one mistake. That's it. You know, Timo's got the low life, you know. Yeah. So that's there on him. He dies faster.

But you want your gods to be gods? Let him be gods that fucking are glass cannons. Akuma. That being said, this all kind of boils down to, again, game doesn't have enough characters. If there was like twice the roster, yeah. Like, like the top tier problem looks way worse because you can have all four top tiers in one match. Yes. And

also, and this is the other this is the other, um, kind of like the fucking concurrent players posting, um, top eight posting where you see a top eight and it's all one character. And, you know, echo and five of them are echo yes.

Echo yes and occasionally an Echo Warrior or Timo, you know, like, yeah. And then the distribution of Challenger players over, like, you see how many are... Half of all Challenger players are Echo Yes. You get down to 50 and below and you're like, okay, now we're starting to see some of those other characters work into the pairs, you know? Need to do something. It's really bad. Now, granted, games in early access, whatever. But it's incredibly fun. Yeah. And so speaking of Challenger, we had Hayate, who, who is on that top 100 list, uh,

pop over. This is, uh, you know, champion, uh, nether realm player. So he's,

he's, he's, he's, he's used, a, a fighting game or two. That's fighting game or two. And he's used to the shit.

Um, he grew up in the injustice zoning wars, you know, like he's, oh man, big, right? The games where fighting or fireballs don't clash into each other.

Um, that's so, so upsetting. It upsets me deeply. Like, spiritually. It makes me mad when two, when fireballs just go past each other. It's weird. Anyway, so he's super good. And, uh, yeah, he's, he's looking to compete in this. And so he came over, played some sets. And we just got to see a touch of a taste of like,

oh, yeah, this is what like top eight is really going to look like, you know? I've seen some crazy matches online and some, we've seen some grand finals and stuff. But just doing a long set and kind of getting a feel for how insanely oppressive he plays Yasuo Ari. And she is currently, like, we know she's good, but no one's really complaining about her that much. Like, if you, people who invest in Ari right now, stonks are going to be fucking high because. Oh, yeah, because she's not going to get touched on this next hour. So we're going to go from the four horsemen to Ari and her disciples. She is obnoxious in a lot of ways, but not as bad as the other three loudly, because the other three are loudly more annoying, you know?

Dude, I can't believe. I watched the whole tournament. I cannot believe how many sets were decided over Yasuo jumps one foot off the ground and hits down. Oh, that's that fucking spin. The fact he can get like every move in his arsenal off of that, off of like an instant double overhead. Like, what the fuck were you fucking thinking? I mean, like, Marlon.

And like, what are you thinking? And people have to understand that, like, we have. 30 years of conditioning where if someone jumps at you and you block their their jumping attack, you assume they're going to land and then you try to block a low attack right after that, you know? What chance? Like, bro, if you taught like a person day one, hey, do Yasuo and jump and hit down H? And like, it'll hit like 99%.

What, what fucking shot in this earth do people in gold have against that? Like, no, seriously. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, it's oppressive. Yeah, Reggie, I see you popping off. Enjoy your Yassau while you have him. He won't be here for long, but we'll see.

We'll see what they do, how aggressive they get. I got to say, though, 2XCO has a fucking, like, underneath problem of their balancing that is fucking unique. Because all, all, like, translated characters. So, like, hey, can they nerve timewinder? They can only knife timewinder so much before they make that fancy cinematic cutscene make no sense. Yeah. And on top of that, it's like, why can Yasuo just do level one into level three for fucking, well, he can do it in league? It's pure.

Well, they can do it in league. It's 100% accurate. That's it. You know. And yeah, let that, let that be a guiding principle, you know. But there's no canon reason why the samurai and the child shouldn't die faster when I, when I fucking hit them because it takes work to get in there. Okay, listen, Yasuo has an Akuma color palette as part of his default costume. You know.

What are we talking about? He has demon flip hops. Like, you knew what you were doing. So, yeah, no, I will say, though, so fighting, fighting the Hayate and stuff, I kind of, that's where I looked and saw, okay, the comforts I've had in the way I've been playing and the little differences where I'm like, this is optimized, but it's too hard, so I'm not going to do it. It's like, no, no, no, that's the difference between winning and losing.

So if you want to improve, you probably need to switch that up. And I probably need to change my fuse, you know? And so I'm kind of like going back to the drawing board a little bit and trying to figure things out. But I'm running into an issue now where I've gotten comfortable playing on pad. And it is, there is, this hasn't been relevant in a long time. Fighting games have been omni. you could play on any controller.

It doesn't matter for a while now in this generation. But there is a thing to tagging and pressing special buttons and holding them. And that is just, it is easier if they're all right underneath your fingers. And I've made the brave decision to say no. Yeah. Well. Not going to do it. So what I, what I saw was Hayatee, he put his tag button on a, on R1, or L1.

and put his special button on X. And I'm like, yeah. That's the Leffen moves. I think it makes sense because it's going to be too hard to try to bend your thumb to hit triangle and X at the same time for certain setups. And, you know, like, and no. Or just, or just don't do it. Yeah. Or just don't do it, you know.

We'll see. But, and the other thing, too, of course, is like, I do want Juggernaut and Scymm. side winder, and sidekick to be viable. They were in, they were, they were, they were super busted and crazy at low levels. And then they become useless at high levels because assists are so good. But I do like the idea that somebody that wants to just come in as one character and play a street fighter character in a insane Marvel game can do so if they're sick enough. I have this is very unlike me talking about games. I do not usually subscribe to this. I am very much. hey let's buff some of the weak people and have an unbalanced

fucking Marvel ass shit show dude I want them to nerf fucking everything I want the you want it down is nerfed I want the fucking top four nerfed you want it down everybody oh my god everything in this game is too strong absolutely

every good option is an incredible option. So, Super tag is so fucked up. Freestyle based, like, burst baiting is fucked up. These are super strong. This is, this is, this is a controversial opinion because I'll tell you right now that what people are eating, what the FGC is eating up and what people want is they're like, I want to find a way to make you block seven mixups in four seconds. You know, guess what? I can't. They want the freedom to express themselves to go back to the player expression term. And guess what? And most of you can't either.

Like guy working on a diabolical fucking mix-up, you're probably also going to get mixed up by the same thing you created. It's a lot. Okay. Well, and to be fair, then that player can just pick Darius and go, ah, down DP. get off me, you know, and you can do that, right? There is a character who's there who just says, I don't want to guess, shut up, leave me alone. And then they have to play around getting baited for that, you know. Anyway, yeah, that game's great.

And I do think that the 2XCO team is brave to say the phrase, the game right now is the worst it'll ever be, which I understand why you would say that. That is the wrong way to say that. you should say this game's always going to improve or whatever well okay so an official team so it's not necessarily true we know lots of games that were absolutely at their peak during their launch period um so so first of all the fucking trolls also in their news announcement said hey backdashers right like so uh they're embracing it but um no i think the thing an official news update is not going to say hey guys remember how Marvel 3 launched remember how every Street Fighter

game's first version felt remember version 1 of every game ever it's always fucking whack Did any of you guys play Street Fighter 4 Release release You know Yeah I just like that's the thing Is you're always thinking about

Don't think about ultimate Marvel versus Capcom 3 Think about the one with Sentinel Right think about about that insane bat-shit vanilla release of the game. That's what you're kind of comparing this to. And when you look at those games, you're like, oh, we're doing a lot better by comparison. I got to say, though, there's like not to be a shit and we're now theory crafting a fake discussion, right?

I don't think that sentiment is even valid for the devs to feel themselves. Okay. No, I'm serious. Okay. Because they're like, remember how fucked up Marvel 3 was? Yeah. To my brain goes, well, yeah, it's hard to balance 30, 40 characters. Okay.

Okay, okay, okay. The Marvel 2 thing. It's tough to balance a list of 16 to 25 characters. Luckily, luckily, you guys only had to balance a left. You don't, right? Marvel 2, nobody says shit because why would you try, right? Why would anyone in this world complain about Marvel 2's balance? What are you stupid?

Did you just want Jill to not exist? Yeah, she sucks, but look, she's in the game. There is a real, there is a reality, though, that, like, unlike every other genre of video game, fighting games have this, like, they have a loss where back in the day, you put the game out, and then the arcades were balancing the game for you, and then you would tweak according to the results from the machines and then get your final version eventually. And now you don't have that,

so you don't get to gather that data. You know, location testing is no longer a thing. You got to just get a bunch of, you know, good players involved in the studio beforehand and hope that they can find stuff and help you balance and tweak. But, like, it used to be a communal effort in the arcades beforehand, you know, that's completely absent now. The early access build of the game right now is essentially arcade testing the balance of the game right.

Essentially, essentially. And to add on top of that, like, man, fuses are hard to balance. I mean, look at CVS 2. They had six fuse equivalents. They had six grooves. They also had like, fucking 70 characters. I don't know how many it had, but it was like. I bet it's hard to balance the fucking CVS2 roster across the fucking grooves.

I bet that was tough. Roll canceling gets discovered, and like half the players are like, thank God the game is fair again. Because otherwise without it, K Groove was too busted. You know, anyway. I am watching the November 18th patch

with rapt attention. I really love to XCO. I think it is a great fucking fighting game and I'm having a blast. but the changes they make as a response to the four horsemen situation in the near term will give the expectation of what kinds of changes you can expect across what timeline. Yes. And based on the way they described it, they're like, you know, they've talked about their

patching philosophy, which, you know, I generally do support. It is annoying when a game keeps drastically changing too quickly as soon as it comes out, right? that doesn't feel good. That's obviously a balancing act, right? Because like, games have ruined themselves doing that. But then we also got like multiple years of vanilla sagas. Yeah. You don't want, exactly.

So Nether Realm is the example of going too far too fast where every, every 30 days, it was a different game balancing wise. And then you don't want to have exactly years of that. And now old OGs are used to the, uh, letting a game cook for a fucking half a decade, you know, before a version change happened. but that's not the world we live in anymore. It just doesn't apply. I have to point a finger.

So I recently watched Leffin's discussion about the upcoming balance changes to which he goes on this long fucking spiel about how, if anything, they're balancing the game too fast. And like, we don't know if these characters are actually the best. Maybe they're not. Maybe, maybe, you know, maybe it's like Wesker, where everyone thought he was. top tier, but actually, Wesker's not even good. And I'm like, I think retconning that to Weskers

not even good is insane, but whatever. But I'm like, I don't want to hear any work, okay, remember last week or two weeks ago, I was like, I don't want to hear anybody just criticized Silent Hill F unless they've actually beaten the whole game. I don't want to hear discussions

about balance timelines from people who came from Smash Brothers. Okay? Don't want to it. I don't want to hear what you think is reasonable guy who comes from the community

that gets a new game every five years that acts as a balance update and goes, nah, no, I want the old busted one still. I don't want to hear it. I think there is a reason there's a reasonable amount of time to let a game cook and find

counterplay for things. But I think everybody with eyeballs can look at backdash, jump back, fucking timewinder and go, nah, man, come on. That's right. And also like, okay, I'll take it a different thing. I've played Echo in League, right? And I like what Echo does in Arcane, right?

Running away to TimeWinder people is not part of Echo's like fighting game fantasy. Echo is supposed to be zip-zap, zoop time shit mix-up God. He's not supposed to be a fucking long-range zoner. He's a better zoner than jinx, man. And there's stuff that, like, it's like, okay, you could deal with, like, you could deal with this by like Dash Parry, but it's really tricky on the timing. But Parry's already strong, so you can't really adjust that. Whatever the case is, what I will say is, do you remember Rising Thunder? I sure do.

I really liked Rising Thunder, and I remember loving how they handled patches. They're balancing and how they went forward with things and explaining every note and why. I gave an Apache award back in the day. Yeah, I remember. So this is, if they follow suit, which is the same people, if they follow with the same balancing and the same approach they took to Rising Thunder, I think it's in good hands, you know? I think that as long as they don't engage in what I call League or Rainbow Six siege-style balancing,

that they're going to be okay. Are you familiar with the overwhelming deciding metric on balance changes in league? And Siege is. Please don't tell me it's DLC is O.P. No. Because that's a fighting game classic now is DLC is OPE. Ever since Yon and Yang,

DLC is top tier and then we'll deal with it later. But for now, fucking spend that shit. So that's not the overriding principle, but it's a factor. Right? No, it is pick rates. Oh, pick rates. So Lee and C.

will see people with high pick rates and high win rates, and they will buff them until those rates go down. And they will see characters with bad pick rates and bad win rates, and they will buff them until those numbers go out. Regardless of whether or not the characters popular as shit. Yeah, okay. Or cool or whatever. It's they're just,

they just have two levers, and they're looking at a fucking popularity meter going, uh, that's hilarious because, it's crazy. That's hilarious because meanwhile over here is Ryu, like, struggling for his life each time and then at some point later on getting juiced the fuck up, you know? Um, wow, just going off of popularity. Ugh.

Yeah. No. Please, please, please. That's, uh, that's horrendous. And, and, and I, I mean, I have to imagine, too, that, like, the fact that you have 100 in whatever fuck characters where there's hard counters to every. everything means you can let bad balance kind of stink a little bit longer because you can be like, oh, well, just the item system that you can work around it a little bit. Right, right. So it's just like, oh, well, just pick the hard counter. Yeah, it sucks and it's unfair or whatever. But there's a,

there's a, there's a rock paper, scissors system in place. So just lean more into that, you know? Well, the other thing. And this is one of my favorite parts about league that's the funniest is that I remember even a couple of years ago watching some videos by some League of Legends content creators. I don't remember them this is a long time ago, but they were like I as a permanent league streamer

literally cannot keep up with the balance changes because they do like minor changes across like 170 characters like every two weeks and they're like I can't keep track of it. It's too much

and it's too fast. and it's too granular and changes get rolled back two weeks later, it's crazy. It's nuts. The experimental live patch system they talked about is going to be interesting too, because it's like we're going to find ways to push live patches without the game server going down. Great.

Great. You know what I want? You know what I want? I want a social media update every single day. Change the properties of yes, woes, fucking whatever. Blitzes. between round one and two. Every single day.

I want the Smash Brothers picture of the day for changes in a fighting game. I want every morning. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Every single fucking day. Keep it interesting. I used to work with a dude who was a competitive player in Dawn of War. And like, I was getting him into Third Strike and he was showing me Dawn of War tech and stuff.

and like the lists they would put out are just these encyclopedias. And like if you're a competitive player, like it was, yeah, it's the kind of thing where no strategy is ever going to last longer than a couple weeks tops, you know. And you, you, the idea of effectively just letting the whims of what a couple people are doing with the best, whoever's winning is currently displaying the best tech or whatever. but like what's undiscovered is almost like not considered. It's like if it's undiscovered, then it doesn't matter. And in fighting games, they don't really usually think about it that way. They go, oh, well, someone might eventually discover that, hey, Morrigan is really fucking obnoxious if you learn how to do her soul fist a whole bunch

and you can lock down anyone no matter who you're fighting. My God. But, well, I just, I, I'm trying to find the quote of somebody on the dev team in the patch note saying, yes, so I was offense is just too. too honest, so we're going to have to work for it. And do you know what I fucking found out? I found out an archived

fucking thread from December of 2013 on the League of Legends fandom titled Yasuo is disgusting. Yasuo is overpower and play it a certain way. The fact that he is maniless and has a free shield

makes him incredibly difficult to kill in Lane. See, they nailed it. They nailed it, man. Like a hundred percent accurate renditions of these league characters. At least with Timo, all I've heard is he's annoying as fuck, but he gets his team killed. So anyways, all right. Moving on.

Let's take a quick break. Yeah, I gotta use the rest of it. And it will be RB. All right. Quick word from our sponsor. sponsors? I love sponsor. This week, Castle Super Beast is

brought to you by HeroForge. Oh man, I love HeroForge. So, okay, I saw, so first of all, if you're getting into, if you're setting up your tabletop game, and you want original,

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your custom miniatures for your tabletop games or custom dice and whatever other needs as well. Check them out. Thank you, Hero Forge. This week, the podcast is sponsored by Shopify. That is the go-to. So if you've got like a t-shirt, for example, you're trying to figure out how to sell and you're not too sure how to get that off the ground. I don't know. Or a plush or any other type of merch.

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Thank you, Shopify. Thanks, Shopify. ExpressVPN. My favorite VPN service. It's not even close. So simple, so easy. You click the button. You're online.

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Thanks, ExpressVPN. Thanks, ExpressVPN. And this week, the podcast is sponsored by Hello Fresh. And look, it's a service that is, it's quite simple. In life, the first thing you need to do is eat. You need to survive. That's true. Food keeps you alive.

Eventually, mom's not going to hit you with the boob anymore. You're going to have to get real food. We're looking at that right now and we're trying to figure it out. Well, you know, while my baby is not yet there with the solids, HelloFresh has a service where they bring the food to you, right? Getting food to keep you alive is the number one thing that our ancestors needed to do. I'm a big fan of eating food to stay alive. It's crazy.

We really had a big struggle staying alive in the past because we couldn't figure out how to get the food, you know? And now we can get the food, but it's really annoying. It's an, ah, I got to decide what I want for dinner every night? Why don't I just give up and eat crackers? And it takes time and it's expensive. and then by the time you actually do it, the thing you're eating doesn't even taste that great. So, you know, why not just get them to bring it to you? And it's also going to be healthy because they've got dietitian approved meals and

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Yeah. It's fucking awesome. Oh yeah, that's awesome. Okay. They're going. It's just been going for like 25 fucking minutes. This is great. Every time I see that little PlayStation cat, I just think of the nenderoid. Yeah. And then I think of Street Fighter Cross Tekken. We're just doing a quick check here. All right. Still, works. So bloodborn shows up.

Or, there we go. Or Tokon. There we are. Tocon's going to be there. That's been a guarantee. Okay. All right. So I guess we should start talking about my week because I had a week. I did things aside from the slam. Yeah. I did not. I have a human experience for you that you won't experience. It's not going to happen to you. Okay. I can guarantee it. Okay. So toddler sleeps in our bed with us. Right. So does the dog. Two, three nights ago, The dog woke up and then vomited all over the kid's feet.

Oh, okay. The feet's not bad. Yeah? Except the kid didn't wake up. Oh. So now, now we get to play the fucking game of, all right. I'll get the dog out. I'll wipe up the dog.

Oh, no, the dog barfed in the hallway again. Okay, I'm cleaning that up. Okay, you get the baby. Pick up the baby. Don't let the baby drip the dog barf on the floor. The baby's waking up. He's very upset. He doesn't like to be woken up.

He's like, well, how, okay, no, don't worry, baby. We're cleaning your feet. The wipes are cold. Oh, this sucks. This actually sucks. Okay, well, you're handling, okay, the dog is fine. Now you're handling the baby.

The baby is upset. Okay, let's grab the sheets. Changing your sheets at fucking 1 a.m. Rules. It's fucking good. It's a chore. That's the right time for that chore. Okay.

Okay. Back on. All right. Okay. Now the sheets are back on. We'll deal with the dirty sheets later. We'll put them in the laundry, right? Okay, now let's get the baby back to sleep.

Is it worse if the dog barfs on the kid or if the kid barfs on the dog? Oh, yeah, I can just watch that dog in like two seconds. It's not a problem. It's way, way worse. The dog barfs on the child. And then, and then it's like, do we let the dog sleep with us again? Yes, we do. Okay.

Has to be there. And then it's like, then the kid is just like, caboose, barf on my feet. Like, yeah, dude. Yeah. Good, good word use. Excellent use of your words. Yeah, I was just thinking. I was like, like dog might kind of not even let you know that he got barfed on because that might be gone by the time you check.

Yeah, he doesn't, he doesn't care. Damn. So that was a fun experience. Okay. We're also, we're also in the prelude. We're in step one of potty training right now. Step one of potty training is, hey, do you feel that? feeling go sit on the potty fully clothed with your diaper on but like okay go do it right and so

what happens when the child sits on the potty and does a shit on the potty whether or not goes in the potty or not that's not what's important right what's conditioning getting there yep all right here you go here's some m&Ms straight up oh just bribe candy reinforcement that's new I didn't know I didn't know about that okay but get this we're like is it working this morning one of first things my son said to me was I want to go downstairs so I can poop on the potty so I can eat a chocolate M&M. Wow. Okay.

I'm like, okay, first of all, your language, that's incredible. Really advanced. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You are talking a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Second of all, the deal has been cemented very strongly. right away. Incentives can make all kinds of progress steps leap. Yeah. Which has now led to the hilarious side effect of him running to the potty sitting on it going

running up to me going, I did it. I pooped on the potty. Can I have a chocolate M&M? And I'm like, pick him up. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. All no. Lies. Lies. I can't fool me. And he, but I did it though. No, no, you didn't. You lie. You lie, little child. Oh, man. Just every time... Kids are so funny.

Everything about kids is the funniest thing that's ever happened to anyone. I mean, every time, like, she gives a big burp and we're like, yeah! Because she's like, she learned how to do it herself now, so she's able to, like, pull off and be like, br-h-h-oh. And we're like, wow, let's go, you know. When your baby burps, like an adult, it's like, whoa. Yeah. And like it also sounds like it feels good, you know. Yeah. Well, I mean, when you do a big burp, it feels great. So no, I'm just like, I, just a time in your life when burping and farting and shitting were things where everyone around you would applaud. And it's like, yeah. Go, go, go. Dude, it's awesome. Incredible. What a time, you know. It's this, this is the good stuff. That being said, I am kind of afraid of his language.

development. It's really high. It's really, really high. He's conjugating verbs correctly. As long as chocolate's involved. So no, no, in general. Like, say, say mom goes into a different room, right? And you would expect a two-year-old to go, where mommy? Right? Like, that's like the assumption. No, I get, where is mommy? I don't see her. I don't know where she went. Let's go.

like okay all right also do you know what he's he asked if he could go to the PIRK uh huh and I'm not saying he said I want to go to the park he spelt it out because he knows that you

to go to the PARK because you spell it out because you're using the tech where you don't want to say the word because too much excitement comes from that but now he knows how to put that together parts of this shit are already falling apart Like all the all the tricks and lies. Oh man, it's all it's all cooked.

Damn. Oh, it's tough. This is scary. This child thing is tough. And they're so strong. And he's not just like honing in on language. He's honing in on your language. Yeah.

He's about to start. And me and page are yappers, right? So like, he's about to start calling shit egregious. I don't do that. No, you don't. But once upon a time that was. that was a parodyed word and it was assigned to you and then you've stopped saying it. When's the last time I said Dreadnought or Choginga?

A long time. Ten years ago. You know what he has started to do and it's definitely me and Page. Like he stole it. Like where else, right? But he he'll be like upset and you'll be like, hey man, don't worry. It's okay. And he'll go, it's not okay.

Damn. No. No. No, it's not okay. I don't like this. Wow. Okay. All right.

You're right. It's not okay. And he goes, yeah. Man. Oh, it's crazy. Well, the problem is teaching the power phrases too early. Like, too bad is a wild one to grasp the context of. That was a lot.

Because that is so applicable to so many things. All right. Yeah, that's parenting update. I'm afraid of my child. He is too intelligent. Okay. Again, yeah, not much going on over here except for like, you know, we jumped up diaper sizes and holy shit, do you rip through these things? You can never buy enough.

And anyone, any like in-laws or family or friends come in a visit. And sometimes some people have been nice, been like, oh, is there anything we can get or whatever? Divers. Yeah. They've shown me like I saw Like like like um You know like a one of the in-laws was coming and I was like oh here's like a little like pack of different parental things like here's some cute onesies Mom themed and dad themed and some boots and then some stuff and special soaps for mom and I'm like no no no no no fuck all that

Just size one diapers please that's it don't even worry about it we're good on literally everything else now Locale the way it works is that as you go through sizes, you will be doing it less and less. Right? So now I think we're doing like, he's on the verge of verge of potty training. So it's like six usual on average a day depending, right? Okay. But like that first batch, it's like 14 to 20.

Okay. I got a question. So you know that like, you know that like baby dance where they just, do this automatically. Oh, it's my favorite thing about infants. It's the best shit ever. That's just inherently automatic, right? Every baby just has that baked in. It's the most adorable

shit ever. They don't see that and learn that. No one teaches it. They just babies just know how to do this thing where they crouch and have their hands. Well, it's because it's an easy muscle contraction to do. And like they don't know nothing. Yeah, okay. Right. It's our default.

It's our default dance at Tauntassette. One of the weirdest things is that when my boy started to dance and he was like let's and I said let's dance let's do a dance instead of bouncing up and down like almost every other baby does he does the twist oh shit he like he like he like hips and throws arms back and forth there you go I'm like okay all right not flossin though right no not yet okay flosson's gonna be old and dead oh super like annihilated it'll well it might come back around by that point you know like that's that's the bit it might come back around it's true um okay

Well, speaking of old and dead, fucking... Us. Yeah. But make no mistake that my soul, you know, as I shuffle off this mortal coil, the last thing I'll do is check to see whether or not Funko Pops are still alive. Because it sounds like, and I wish I had some champagne to fucking pop on this, it sounds like funco Pops might not last another year. It's possible. It's possible. They're in serious trouble with massive debt.

And then you look at the numbers and the numbers are bad. The reports are coming in. Funko Pop is dealing with massive losses reporting of up to $1 million in net losses. And you're like, wait, that's it? Like what? Funko Pop's like the kind of thing. where they're basically the costs of the licensing and production and shipping are so high that their margins are like razor thin.

Well, because the whole bit is we're going to use Tony Stark to also be a fucking Dr. Strange. And that's also going to be Dante from clerks and shut the fuck up. It costs nothing. Buy it. I kind of am amazed that they bullied people into thinking they were relevant just by buying shelf space in game stops. Yeah, well, I mean, perception is reality in terms of marketing, right? If you keep seeing it everywhere, then you're going to assume that, like, no, this is cool

and this is everyone wants this. All right, distracted viewing. Team Ninja. Anything interesting here? No, it's a fatal frame two or three. All right. It's a fatal frame. All right.

Great. No, I'll let you know. I'll let you. Okay, okay. What, yeah, like, like the, the, what always amazes me. Like I said, it's just like you shove it in people's face long enough. And then eventually, I do remember when, yeah, people back at the offices would be like,

oh, I got my, you know, you got your favorite or you got your one thing. And you just put them in your mental catalog of Rube. Did those games ever come out? Did which games is that? Funko Gears of War and. Yeah, I did. I think it did anyway. Did it?

So they. I actually, you asking me that makes me go, I don't know. because like they tried to make video games and I have an emoji or an emote dedicated to it, but I don't know if it ever actually was a thing. Funko Gears. You know what? I don't care anymore. Anyways.

Yeah, I'm kind of shocked you cared at all. I just, I just, I'm waiting for them to die. So like, we'll, this will have a, you know, a follow-up story. But in the meantime, I appreciate the report on the losses. and then continuing speaking of L's there are some well you know what this one I guess we'll have to wait and see but there are some leaks about the new steam controller

and there is a let's see there's a report coming in here so somebody who saw it and had images of it is not able to show those images, but they are able to AI slop them up. So they basically went, yeah, it's an AI slop photo, but it's trained on the image of the real controller so that I could, because... I mean, that's exactly, this, this slop photo is exactly what I would have expected from the Steam controller too.

Now, let's see if they learned their lesson last time around. Okay. So, have you used the Steam deck? I've used the Steam deck and I see those thumb pads. Okay. I've used a steam deck and I remember holding the steam deck doing like I'm probably not going to use this in its portable form a lot but they should make a controller that is literally just this without all the fucking guts. So it seems to be and there's a million fucking games I would love to play that are mouse and keyboard only that you could totally play with the steam the new steam controller. The difference between that and the original fucking two circle thing that they put out is night and day.

And yeah, Al-abject piece of fucking shit. Terrible buttons, terrible build, terrible plastic. But at the same time, I'm also like, okay,

I can see that they want to put this out there because they want to have a game that they want to have a controller where you can have a cursor in addition to all your standard twin stick, you know, normal functions and stuff. I see myself likely just sticking to a dual sense regardless.

Like I'm... Oh, absolutely. This is so you can play games that don't have controller support of any kind. It's a sub, It's a suboptimal controller, but it has the extra mouse feature for you. In any case, we'll... And like those touch pads as mice are excellent.

I... Yeah, well, they're accurate, but I just... I don't enjoy using them if I have the option of using D-Pad stick, anything else, etc. But when you don't... This is for your options are this thing or a mouse and keyboard on your lap on your couch. But the other bit with the steam deck is the touch screen itself is also a mouse if you want it to be, right? So you don't even have to engage with that. You can just tap the screen.

But yeah, we'll see. And then alongside that came the weird. So, you know, we've been talking, hey, how has high-fi rush been blighted this week? Well, it's a... Oh, it's fucking god-awful. Its entire soundtrack has been ripped off of everything it was on. But why? Well, the update has been...

They contacted Jojo about it. And director... Apparently, he does not like that Nick. Oh, really? Yeah. As a Jojo fan? Yeah. Damn.

Well, that sucks. Okay, I'm sorry. That's what someone told me and they seemed legit, but... Okay. Now I'm doubting it. Well, noted. That's what I said apparently, right? Yeah, you did.

At the start of that. All right, I'm good. I'm good. Notable Jojo fan director, John Johannes, said that, FYI, this is likely the publisher transition or publisher transition related, and it'll be back on services soon, not sure when. So that makes sense. Don't panic.

They got to transfer from Bethesda to Crafton. So this is not, as much as you see this and go, I don't know what's happening. but I'm sure it's so AI related and we can blame it. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, so I use those songs for my loading screens. So, so that's important.

They're incredible. Um, all right. All right. We also got to see, uh, the new reveal, uh, rogue and gambit's wedding happening in Marvel rivals and they showed off Gambit's gameplay trailer. Yeah, and also Cyclops is in there. He's in the lore trailer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then they got some shipping going on as well. Gambit's sick. Gambit's always cool. I'm shocked that Gambit is cool. I feel like Gambit's hard to fuck up because, yeah, he's always dope. I didn't see anything. I was kind of hoping there'd be a cool, like, I saw the four cards on his UI, and then he kind of like, you know, has a butt of a,

of support, like, zoning things he's doing. It's not zoning, whatever, arranged things he's doing. I was kind of hoping that there'd be some sort of system where, like, you're pulling out decks of cards and you have to hold, like, a hand to poker hand. You're nuts. It'd be so cool. Like, it didn't have to be super important. It could just be a background thing.

We're like, oh, on the chances that you got a royal flush, like, some dope extra thing could happen, you know? The cards don't matter too gambit. No, no, they don't. They're just for checktiles. They are. I'm just thinking of fun gameplay things. It doesn't actually matter.

I'm not saying build Aska R. Croix. I don't want. I'm going to say something fucking controversial. That's not fun. That is not a fun idea. If there were some, no. If there were a, if they were a minor element of his gameplay that was affected by, the hand of cards you pulled out,

I think that'd be cool. Yeah, no, there is. It's whether or not he pulled out one or two or three or four. And how many them he shot. I'm assuming that when he does his royal flush super

in Marvel versus Capcom, he's actually holding a royal flush and throwing it at you. How many cards are in a royal flush? Topps. 12? Yeah, well, no, the last, no, but the last,

No, but the last five he's holding, you know, I mean, that's, that's all you need. He throws the whole deck at you. No, he holds, he holds the last bit. He holds it afterwards and he goes, see him, I'll share. But then he empties the rest of it, you know. Oswald is, well, anyway, characters that throw cards are cool. That's true. I'm wondering how much they're going to commit to rogue, because like rogue in any video game,

It's like, do you go the hard way? Do you go the hard way? Do you do this Marvel? Or do I've got your power? Like, you can go like big punchy strong flyer or you can do the, oh my God, she actually takes and steals your abilities one by one. Yeah. Her alt should just be she can steal other people.

Kirby? She can just Kirby you. Well, that's Loki though, right? Oh yeah. Loki can also. So you got to do something to differentiate her from Loki. Damn it. Loki stole her shit.

Yeah. She's got to have a more interesting kit. We'll see, but that's cool. She's hotter than Loki. Says you. Is that part of her kit? I am saying that. How quickly do they introduce X-Men Evolution Rogue as an outfit and how much do you have to spend on that shit?

You want to sell cosmetics? You immediately know what's number one on the fucking. list. I don't think that is. I think X-Men... I think that's number one-on-one Willie Madden's list.

No. I think X-Men Evolution rogue haircut is big on many a list and I bet you it shows up. It would be bat-shit stupid crazy

for them to not make it. It'd be insane. It's the number one thing any fan of Rogue wants besides Rogue herself in her normal outfit. All right. what else is going on?

The world is shifting and everyone is diving out of the way of November 19th, 2026. So GTA6 delayed itself for a couple of months, ruining everyone's plans once again, every developer's plans once again. And the reason they did this is to supposedly make sure the game is really, really good. But what it actually is, is they just fired a shitload of staff who were trying to organize a union. And those staff were in some cases in important positions. So they actually will have to take longer to make the game. Correct. In fact, there are insider reports about, you know, what's been happening with the staff. And they basically confirmed in short that,

like, yeah, everyone singled out were everyone that were a part of a union discord that was discussing, you know, how to get that going. So now apparently it's not because they're a part of a union. It just so happens that every single member of the would-be union was also leaking classified

information about the game's development. So actually we're going to double down and imply that everyone who wants to join a union is also a criminal. That's how untrustworthy they are. Yeah. I heard, hey, look, Pac-Man is in Sonic. How about that? Oh, you're way behind. They're doing a Digimon D.L.C.

Oh, there it is. What, um, I heard someone say that, uh, uh, Grand Theft Auto is the most successful franchise of anything of all time. Like, in terms of... No, it's a Pokemon. With a bullet. Oh, yeah? Pokemon's the most successful media idea that's ever existed. Huh. It's in the trillions. Pokemon is so far ahead of everything else. Shut your fucking mouth.

The Big O is back in Super Robot Wars as is Camin Rider's Skull, and that is hot shit. That's cool. That's hot shit. That's not a robot, but I don't give a shit. That's hot shit. That's fucking hot shit. Damn. That's good.

I like you. Yo. Oh. Count up your stuff. SIDS. That's good stuff. Okay, that's dope. Ah, doubles there too, and of course they're hanging out together. Yeah, all right. That's sick. That's very cool. Um, GTA versus Pokemon. Hold on in a second. What are we looking at here? Willie, if you wiki like entertainment property as Pokemon is the number one entertainment property of all time in human history.

It's bigger than the Bible. I guess if there's more of them and each one is, is massive. But, I don't imagine that GTA is like averaging out each entry per. No, man. Dude, they make like billions on every. Just the value of the IP as a total as a total. Okay. One GTA is bigger than one Pokemon, but there's like 12 Pokemon every year.

It's so hard. Think about Pikachu dolls by themselves. No, but it's just so hard when there's multiple entries of a franchise that's forever versus there is a nuclear. bomb that drops and every title that drops is an industry clearing event, you know? The impact feels massive because it's like the big number game is dropping and you're not getting spinoffs and other things. So impact feel, you know, how many movies does Grand Theft Auto have? Right, right.

Actually has a ton that they stole from. They also, I mean, they certainly could have. I imagine they could have turned GTA into like a super multi-year annualized nonsense franchise thing. Yeah, they just hire Michael Bay and put the rock in it and it would just be like, it'd just be like one of those fucking things. But I guess there's a limit to what you can do

once per generation. GTA is closing in on Pokemon and tournaments of total games sold from how old is this article? Oh yeah, absolutely. For game sales, but GTA doesn't have merch and

the brand, the brand, brand, brand, brand. sure shit sure sure um okay uh what doesn't have gta go actually they should put out a phone app called grand theft auto go i think that would be really fun head out to real locations head out to real locations head out to real locations and pretend to steal people's cars just see what happens um yeah uh what's is going on with marathon. A pair of things I can't tell you. I wouldn't even know. I wouldn't even know what's going on in marathon because I, even if I did, I couldn't tell you.

Well, should we call it an extraction shooter? Sure. Call it an extraction shooter. Apparently, uh, apparently they hate the term. What? Are you fucking stupid? Former marathon director hates calling them. extraction shooters, bungee's forging on with the dumb term.

That's the name. That's the, what you call it a Tarkov like? Is that what you want? You call your fucking game? Wanted to rename the extraction loot, uh, uh, uh, shooter label for Marathon. The genre doesn't even know what it is. Uh, you don't know what your game is. Okay, so I, remember, Willie, I want you to lock in.

for this. This is the same development team that has refused to call Destiny an MMO to this day. To this day. No, we're an online shooter content experience, whatever

the fuck they say. Maybe perhaps a a hunt showdown like. What do you want to call it? What do you want to fucking call? Like, okay, what's the new term? Do they they even offer a new term? I don't think so. I think I think they were trying to figure it out.

This is like some fucking the Xbox all in one entertainment system. One fucking nonsense. I do know they haven't pulled out the art yet. That's why the new Marathon Alpha is under such strict NDA. Because you can't show it because that shit's still there. Okay. So Sides says the genre name is so bad. I hate the genre name extraction shooter. When I was working on marathon, I was working with marketing, dying to be like, can we create a different name for the genre? Because extraction shooter is so dumb. It's the only genre where its name is a mechanic. He suggests... That's not! He suggests comparing Haldives 2 to escape from Tarkov. They're clearly very different games. but fall into the same extraction shooter category.

It's just a problem. I cannot stand the name of it. So when you say extraction genre, it should hit your spot. I think it's really the fact that the genre doesn't even know what it is. You as a player, how do you know what you're going to get? I think that's one of the real issues with the genre itself. That is, so video game genres are terrible. That is the new worst take in video game genre discussions.

extraction shooter is the only game genre in which the title is a mechanic is the first person shooter is a mechanic like are you have you lost your fucking mind um like there is a broadness to genre as we said

the game genres can get stupid and there is a broadness where like what encompasses a souls like does it have to have a corpse run or does it have to have really hard bosses? You know, does it have to have slow builds that you can combat, that you end builds and stats that you build up in that way, or, you know, bodfires and so on? Platformer, fighter, racing game.

Yeah. Every genre is named after a mechanic. No, I just, as I'm scrolling up and down here, I'm seeing that, like, there was no replacement. name proposed. Oh, so it's the same thing. It was like, we should do something different. Okay, what do you have in mind?

You should think of something different. It's like when your wife says, oh, we should really get on the dishes. And you go, okay. Passive language. I got this. Yeah, yeah, there we go. That's what we, you know what we should do?

Yeah. All right. So, um, I'm like, I was like, would, is this, is there any extraction in night rain? Hmm. No, I guess. Not really. No. You just, you just survive.

Yeah. Night rain's a battle royale. It's just a PVE battle royale. At the end, you get extracted back to the, to the castle, though. So anyway, um, there's DLC coming in quarter one, 26, um, they said. And I kind of was like surprised that like, I thought they were going to have a constant drop of cool shit for this game the moment we saw it. It's really surprising that it's been dead quiet. And they're kind of wasting the opportunity to put a bunch of shit everybody would

love to see frequently into the game, you know? Uh, so that would require, um, things to be put into the game. It would. I'm suggesting they put things into the game. That is, I don't know if, I don't know if that's fair to talk that way about a company that their own stockholders just described

as a impairment loss due to loss of value. Did you pull that one up today? I didn't. I pulled up the... There's a Sony stockholder meeting where they described the acquisition of Bungee as an impairment loss. Oh, no, no, I said night rain.

I'm talking about FromSoft. My mistake. No, no, no. Night rain's forever. No, no, no. From Soft, might as well shit gold in your mouth. No, no, no. Okay.

Yes, no, not the impairment loss. Although, let's hit that before moving on. Um, uh, what is Destiny 2 selling worse than expected, forcing Sony to record an impairment loss of $204 million? So that's very, very conservative. It is, they're going to, they're going to upgrade that as the company disintegrates.

They fired like half their staff. Yeah. This is, the acquisition was in 2022. $3.7 billion. Is this the fastest it's ever fucking just evaporated? Oh, it started immediately. the very first thing that happened was Sony gave them money to retain staff and then they fired half their staff so that they could give themselves bonuses

and Pete Parsons literally said yeah I used it to buy cars so like we don't and like like this is all just talking about current products without even discussing the state of marathon launch and what the fuck that's going to look like um that's um that game's gonna get delayed again. Well, yeah, because the entire company's existence rides on it. Like, it is literally, if that thing does not immediately do something for them. The only reason is still being valued to $3 billion is the Sony copium of, well, this is the really important live service game. It's going to make us Fortnite money. And it's like, bro, this thing is going to make fucking anti-dollars.

I mean, okay, so what's the clock got to run to after launch before you're not morally obligated to give everyone their money back when it shuts down. Well, luckily it's a free-to-play game. Okay, okay. No, it's not. Well, what about, what about, what about- no, but hold on, there's micro-transactions. Every time I fucking think about it,

I remember that they're going to charge money for this thing. Oh, my God. Is it not free to play? No. It's a full-price. Every single person has the same conversation about this game. Everyone assumes it'll be free to play. And then they go, no, it's a fully functional person.

just retail games, $40 or whatever. And people, I'm not gonna fucking, it's 70? It's seven, no, no, it's not. It is not $70. You lie, chat. There's no way. Anyway, the game's fucking cooked. It's fucking cooked.

It's, it's, it's, put it back in. 6894 USD. That's crazy. That's absolutely unbelievable. That's absolutely outrageous. Um, and you got your season passes. All right.

Well, okay. Season passes for a game defined by losing your equipment. All right. Anything going on? We should be checking out? No, not yet. All right. Interviewing the Tokon gang, but not showing anything yet.

Okay, doke. I have my finger on the button. Okay. Well, in the meantime, with, I was talking about Night Rain and Frumsoft and I was saying they announced Night Rain DLC coming in the beginning of next year, Q1.

I'm fucking shocked. But I'm also... I can't fucking believe it, motherfucker. Oh my God. But I expected a drip feed of more stuff over time. That's not how Frum Software does their shit. But they did do drip feed stuff, right?

They did have the super bosses and the patch that updated the first player mode and the and there was another thing. that they released a patch that also added more quests in the game. So that has been going, but it's been fairly much. This is not how they do their stuff, but this is also the first time they're trying a full-on live service, you know, like thing. Like, it's a lot of firsts for them. So, um, apparently in an interview, uh, uh, Shuhay Yoshita revealed that, uh, I didn't know this from soft.

Oh, Tokon trailer. Tocon trailer. All right. Let's see what's going on. This is for the closed beta. It'll look at the closed beta this time around will include Ghost Rider and Spidey Man. Which nobody got into because it's the PlayStation beta system. Yeah. They should just give me the baby. Oh my God. Did you see Spider-Man's Timewinder? I did. I did. Cool stages.

Yep. Yep. And now you can do a DP into tag and continue your combos. So yeah, they heard a lot of people. Maximilian spoke about this a good bunch, but combo variety was not as open-ended as people were hoping. It was a little too stiff. Oh, the X- Mansion looks pretty cool. That's a cool stage. All right. That's a bunch of characters we'd want to be able to play as. I saw Silo. Oh, a very classic costumes. Cool. Okay. Um, nice. And then your online lobby as well. Which everybody loves. Uh, yeah, the ability to like tag more frequently. and get combos going off of like quick pickups is is a big help as well as not waiting till the the end of the assist for you to be able to take control of the character because it is true that

like you kind of think in most games when you see them on screen tag and you go to them but then in tokon it was limited to that window so that's good um all right looking cool does that deconfirm every background character now does that mean uh for now that mean yeah because like Timo is in his own background if he's not there. Gile is in his own background if he's not there. It doesn't do it. But like, you know, I don't think you'll see Colossus.

Cylok, Iceman, Colossus, or Gambit soon. If they're in the background of the stage. I mean, or Beast or Angel. I mean, X-Men Next Dimension made Professor X playable as a fighting character. They should put Professor X in this fucking game. They're not cowards. And they should have it. He should have, um, it should be.

the new Professor X with the Cerebro helmet because everyone will be like, who the fuck is that? Sure. But just, yeah, I just commit to it. Just put him in there. I fought an amazing, I forgot who it was. Somebody came in as an amazing Professor X in the street fighter six fucking freak match world

world tour shit. I want a full on bed man ass character. Have the balls to put Professor X in a game and have one of his super's fuck up the opponent's control. Well, but we've... Have the balls to do it.

Fucking up your controls isn't that novel anymore, though. Like Valentine does that in Skull Girls, you know? We can do, we can go, we can go wilder than that. You're right, Willie. One character did it. No, no, no, no. Mixed controls. That also happens in dark stalkers.

Like, like, there's a couple examples of, of, like, characters where your shit gets fucked up. Inverted buttons and all that stuff. I would, I would like, like, something, I would like more devious things like your health is now a lie actually

or, your meter is incorrect. You thought you had a meter, but you didn't. You know, something about your resources or changes and you don't know what it is. You know, just some shit. Get it, get up into the mental mind. Um,

I was going to say uh, yeah. So, they say, they sat down with Yoshida and apparently from Soft was a

business software company which their name makes way more sense yeah oh hey straight up the the night rain

deal so you were talking oh well there we go is getting showed off right now right now okay let's see what we go it's going to be more characters obviously yep yep show some bosses man I can't wait to Start playing that game.

It was, yeah, no, no, it was cool. It'll still be there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you can play it solo. It'll be there when I feel like it. And I heard, I did talk to some friends who said, like, there are some cool, like, spoiler things if you continue through it, you know, like some. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Well, that's a rad. You've got the drag lords out here, dog. That's a rad looking tree. Okay. Well, audio podcast, but we're just watching the fucking... The Night Rain trailer. What's that freak alien bug? Astell.

There we go. Yeah, no, this is the kind of game that they can just keep adding fucking model rips to it for years. It's just Dark Souls All-Stars. There's so much they could rip to put in there. And to be honest, the modding community has been doing this. Is that Artorius? Hey, it's that boy. Let's go.

Yeah, that's cool. Nice. Yeah, okay. Oh, wow. It's called the forsaken hollows. Wow, that is Dark Souls All-Stars, isn't it? It's, it's soon. It's in like three weeks.

You have to put, that's it. Like, each time it drops, there needs to be a... Oh, that's the wrong. there needs to be a boss that is like or a character that is the all right that's the show it's the leader of the pack so yes artoria showing up is 100% that if there's no sif it's gonna be pretty sad there there that's not gonna be a sift or even like a little little little summonable siff maybe you know in the area um that's hot

I I uh I feel like this is a very clear case like we know of it, like, it's the team that, you know, started doing side stuff during Eldon Ring and they wanted to try out a bunch of different experimental stuff. But watching the modders just drop fucking slave night versus, you know, Ornstein and Smog matches and, you know, and then now dropping those into versus Orphan of Costs and seeing what happens and so on. It's like, this is, this is where that came from. Like, you have to imagine that. that like a lot of mods dropping bosses and nonsense into each game and whatever, just kind of went like, well, why don't we just sell that?

Anyway, is it over? It is over. It is over. They're telling us how great the PS5 is now. How about that? It's so great. It's so great. Is it great enough for you to go out and buy the fucking handheld little streaming thing

that lets you stream your games now? Because they just announced that you can stream your things now. Whatever. Okay. Wait, they can stream what? I saw an announcement about the, I don't even remember what it's called. Oh, it's the PlayStation Remote Player. It's the thing they're showing on the screen right now.

And there's a new feature that lets you stream some games and it's like you couldn't do that before or something? I don't know. I didn't. I thought you could stream it to your Vita. I didn't look at it. I have to say. I forgot it existed. The portal, the PlayStation Portal.

Oh, you can buy a special. TV to work with your portal. PlayStation Portal is the most widely used device for remote play. Cap! Fucking fucking cap.

Humongous cap. The Nintendo Switch 2 is the most. Anyways. Yeah. That was pretty much it. And then there was whatever was going to happen off of state of play. So.

Yeah, very little. Nothing, nothing shocking. Okay. Let's take some emails. Hey, if you want to send in an email, send it to Castle Super Beastmail at gmail.com. That's Castle Super Beastmail at Gmail.com. Also, Willie, this is a great podcast. We do a good podcast.

We're doing really good about this podcast. Good, good, yeah. I was pissing earlier. And as my stream was going, I'm like, it's a good podcast. It's a good podcast. Yeah. You're doing good. Thank you.

It's good. You're good. Every, every, yes. Um, uh, so, uh, let's, let's, let's see what we got going on. Uh, who that? All right. Kevin, aka Cooper Press, what's up? Says, Dear Awesome Dad's 1 and 2.

A couple weeks ago, uh, Wully talked about how the multiplayer in Symphonia failed to deliver on the vision and he was super right. I wanted to point out that it took forever, but it. a later. What a great, hold on. What a great way to fucking do an email. Remember when you talked about that? First of all, dead on.

100% really smart. Moving on. Good way to start your email. Moving on. We're not even dwelling. We're just, we're getting into the meat. That's all preamble.

Yeah. I want to point out that it took forever, but a later entry, Tales of Zilia, absolutely delivered on the co-op multiplayer gameplay with Symphonia-style real-time battles. Not only did they fix everything wrong with Symphonia system, but they even added stuff like combo tech,

super moves. That is cool to know. I didn't know. They did that. It was so cool to sit on the couch and call out to my siblings who need to pop their alts depending on the situation. Do you have other instances of promises that were delivered way later? Way later? Um, I mean, I play, I've played some MMOs and like, FF14 is a really good example of like they'll say something in like 2012 and be like we'll get around to it when we have time and then like it'll fucking do it in like year of our lord 2025 like they literally just announced in the next patch for 14

you're going to be able to glamour like items from tanks onto healers and healers onto tanks and that has been like a technical slash, maybe we'll do it, literally since the fucking beginning of the game. Like since almost day one. The two best answers just popped up. So, yes, the entirety of No Man Sky. Yeah, that's correct. It delivered.

It delivered way the fuck later, but it got there. Makes me actually super excited for Light No Fire. And, yes, Dante's motorcycle, cavalier. That was a crazy one. Because I remember reading the interview with Itzuno, and he was talking about how, when they gave the cutscene direction to, what's his name? Kitamura? No, that's the director versus the cutscene director. Yeah. They were like, we want every single thing that Dante does in these cutscenes to be something he can do in the game.

And there are only two things that he does in those cutscenes he can't do in the game. And that's one. One is ride a rocket. Which Nero can do later on. And fight with a motorcycle, which is something he can do in five. Like it took them like a decade, but they're like, no, no, no, no. Those things are the only unfulfilled promises. is. Yeah. Like, like, very rarely does it do, do people do the, like, you know, surfing on the, on the enemy fucking setup. But it's there that you can do that shit.

Or, like, situational, you know, spinning on the stripper pole stuff in the area until you get a weapon that'll do it. But, uh, yeah, Cavalier is the delivery of a dream that was meant to be from a decade earlier. Um, that is, that is, that is the ultimate, I'd say. All right. Let's see here. The title screen for Night Raines D.L.C. makes it look like there's like a full batch of new characters coming.

I mean, it's not like, if it's bosses, they should be dropping them 10 at a fucking time. Yeah, no, no, but I meanly at playable characters. Oh. No, no, no, sorry, those are the existing characters. So then it should be just primarily bosses. I don't have like an info sheet on. Night Rain should be a game with a billion playable and a billion characters and a billion bosses. It should just have insane content because it's just like...

Every yearly expansion should add 30% more. You know, you're making original new characters that have just unique builds from everyone else. They have fairly simplified systems compared to a regular build in the game, in the original game. Like, there should be tons. You know it's fun. Four from software, and I feel really good for them. And I'm really happy for them. This shit comes out in three weeks, and it's being announced today, and is a DLC that adds more bosses and characters.

There's likely going to be no information about this at all other than, like, the review cycle. And they don't give a fuck because it says from software on the box. Or, you know, it's part of a product that says from software on the box. No, we're good. We're good. I mean, there's probably shit that they're not going to spoil in any of the things until you, actually encounter it. Oh, I didn't even... You need to fight a fucking armored core. You need to fight fucking white glint in this shit.

I didn't even get to the point of the story I brought up earlier, but they were a software company and when Sony announced that their main medium was going to be the CD-ROM and not the cartridge, the thing that ultimately fucked over the FF7 situation for Nintendo, was the thing that made from Soft go, oh, we make CD-ROMs for software all the time. We can make games and publish them really easy because we're already set up for that. That's the start. Why don't we just become a game developer instead and we can... That's such a weird way to think about that.

And we can make games easy because cartridges are expensive and hard, you know, straight up. That's so weird. The existence. Well, I have all this canvas around my house. I guess I ought to start. I might as well become an artist. Yeah, that's it. They had...

That's so weird. They had the ability to print CDs, you know, easily. So they said, all right, fuck it. Let's do that. There's only one company I can think of that has anything close to that story. And it's bioware. Right. Because the doctors ran a biotech company.

And they're like, well, we know how to do technical stuff. And I love Dungeons and Dragons. I wish we could just stop being doctors and make RPGs. I mean, and to be fair, it's like, we don't know what software from Softmade. You know, get the fuck out of that Hannafuda card business as soon as possible. That's some crazy shit. But I hear it was, is like the switch to the CD-ROM was not only, it didn't only bring FF7 to the table, but in the future, it created the existence of the entire Souls bit. Yeah.

Oh, by the way, there was one piece of news from the Sony thing that I didn't mention. they are releasing a Japanese language-only region-locked PS5 that is a significant price cut down at 350 USD. Yeah, I want to say we, did they hint at that or was that? I'm not certain. I feel like during tariff time, there was a discussion about like Sony releasing a Japan only. I mean, hey man, it makes perfect sense.

You know who they don't have to fucking fuck with on economic trade themselves? Right. They don't have to. Yeah, Nintendo did that. Yes. Okay. So we talked about it when Nintendo announced it. All right. Let's see. From P.K. Hello, old men I've been listening to since high school. What are some of the worst feeling buttons to ever whiff? It's been feel... I've been feeling this recently. A lot of the characters I remain in these in games have pretty poor antips.

high air options. For example, Jamie's DP and Street Fighter 6, Gold Lewis 6P. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think like outside of the genre as well, not just fighting games, but

the worst feeling whiffs any time you hit a heavy slash button in Samurai Showdown, that is awful. Your character stands there and goes, oh, fuck. It takes forever. There's no satisfying crunch.

But I'm going to say when this is the like when you take, when you get the hammer Kirby ability and you risk it all on a hammer toss which gets rid of the hammer entirely and then you completely miss the boss. It feels dog shit terrible. I'm going to say

every single attack or jump on the Dreamcast. Every single one. Oh, boy. Also, okay, that's not fair to vary it up. Also, moving your character on the Dreamcast. It wasn't perfect. It was fine. Oh, this is, this is the, this is the, this is the, the fucking Siren Song of Cope.

Not fuck you, it was great. It's like, well, you know. It had, it had the best possible library and the worst controller for it. That's the thing. I love going to a restaurant with great reviews to eat off a dirty, and half a four. And that's why I also bought the PlayStation to Dreamcast controller converter. Yeah, no, that was.

that was the I brought that I brought two of those out and plug them in and shut you guys the fuck up for once crazy I would you were like shut the fuck up here's a PlayStation controller here's a dual shock two

shut the fuck up you know and it worked it did its job I know it's a bit topical but I'm going to say blitzcranks down h anti-air is god awful I watched that character's fist, clip all the way over enemies and miss.

Doesn't even get blocked. It just misses. Gave him two anti-airs. They're both terrible. What the fuck. By the way, doom and gloom about 2XCO's balance. Once again, I said that game sucks unless you can play Blitz Dimo. If they make Blitz good, that game's balance is great.

Ah, okay. In a vacuum. That's all you need. In a vacuum. If Blitzcrank comes out on November 18th as a good character, that's all that matters. That's all that matters. Balance is great. And I don't want to hear any discussion otherwise.

No matter what happens to Yasuo, no matter. No matter what happens. Okay. There we go. Honorable mention to really painful whiffs when you charge up a Kameha in Eldon Ring. and you just fucking wharf it that's bad too. I will actually go a little further

from software has this problem a lot but there's a lot of games that don't let your character actually look straight up and then you have to deal with enemies that are like high and it looks like you should be able to tilt the camera high enough but you can only actually

vertically aim like fucking 40 degrees or something like that That feels god awful. Lock odd that flies over your head and fucks with the lock, the camera. Okay. And let's take one over here from Cam, who says, Dear Pink and Green, story driven games often have lore dumps where a bunch of exposition is dropped on the player once.

Both good and bad games do this. What makes the difference for me is how the information is presented. For example, I enjoy listening to NPCs completely. complaining about the world they're in. A couple of basic examples are Mass Effect 1, the famous argument between the Alcor and the Volus, and Eldon Ring, Kenneth Height, straight up trashing Godrick for being a punk-ass loser. I feel NPCs being honest about who they are in the world they live in. I love that when they're whining about something. What are some of the best ways lore dumps can be presented that I've grabbed your attention? I think,

I mean, a lot of... The lore dumps so, like, okay, you've obviously got the Xenogers disc two shit going on. But, like, as infamous examples go, I love... I'm gonna... Like, like, Indivisible starts with a... of a flashback to using the ancestors of the characters. And you get to use them for this one kind of... flashback fight and see what they were like in combat.

And I think that shit is dope. I like that as a mechanic. And if that, whatever that's a thing, you know, like a brief moment where you get a special playable character for like this kind of thing. The calm flashback where Sephiroth is on the team for one second, you know, in the context of them going and having that moment of sitting down and talking through the moment, talking through the story. And then you get into a fight and Sephraoth is standing next to you.

the first time that happens, you're like, oh, fuck. You know, I love that mechanic of just like, yeah, like the, the situationally limited character for the lore, especially in, in the visible's case, like, they were particularly cool, like, busted with their powers and shit. That's dope. There is a series, like, nothing, nothing in fiction and nothing in media, nothing in art is ever, like, hard and fast rules. But there's, like, a series of, like, really quick cliff notes. that you can do to not fuck up your lore dump. The first of which is your lore dump should re-contextualize things that you already had a chance to try and parse together.

One of the worst lore dumps I have ever seen is from the Silent Hill movie where two-thirds through the movie, they realize that they haven't actually provided any meaningful information to the viewer whatsoever. So they have Alessa just break down the entire backstory of the film in like a 12-minute, like, Montage. God awful. Yeah. God awful, right? Like, it's not, it's not re-contextualizing anything. It's not working off of anything. It's just going, here's the story. Here's what the story is. Ideally, you would have something like Metal Gear. When a character in Metal Gear lore dumps, they're actually giving you the background details for, like, what was actually going on during events that were in and of themselves, interesting, and they just add more. Also something Metal Gear does all the time is they set you up with a system where they go mini surprise, mini twist, right?

Right. Like the start of the lore dump recontextualizes something and reverses on it. Then you get all the background. And then the end of the lower dump hits you with larger twist. Right, right, right. It sandwiches excitement with the meat being exposition. On top of that, um, Um, I'm thinking of Shadowbringers FF14 where you get lore dumps from a character who doesn't enjoy talking to you and is tired of having to explain things to you and is like just like, yeah, whatever, it's like this.

And it gives you like little enough information that you actually get like a big reveal, but you go, wait, fucking what? What do you fucking mean by that? But it's a character who's like disinterested in this. Oh, okay. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. There's a character in Shadowbringers who basically explains to you in like about 10 sentences

why they don't believe your life has any value and how murdering you isn't even a big deal. And like you get a little back and forth on like why that is. And then they get tired of explaining it to you because they don't think you have any value and just drop the conversation. So you got like a really, really big, like dump, but like it left you wanting more. Yeah, and nah, fuck you. Instead of being bored. That's pretty good. I wish, Cojima has, his directing style has changed, you know, and the new stuff with

Death Stranding is very different and much more cinematic than it used to be with the old Metal Gear games. I would love if he directed something in the old style. one more time, you know? So, it'd be really sick. I think Metal Gear and Death Stranding are really pitch-perfect things of where it works incredibly well in Metal Gear and it works incredibly poorly in Death Stranding. The telling itself, like the actual speech and discussion and dialogue, has to be interesting in and of itself.

When Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, or 3 goes on a Jojo's Bazaar adventure style tirade about the state of world geopolitics. It's the state of world geopolitics that is directly or literally applicable to today. Yes. So it's like an interesting conversation. You're thinking of the real world and bouncing off of it. When the same thing happens in Death Stranding, it's about something that is so fucking pie in the sky out there that unless it's ramping up the novelty every single

sentence, it kind of runs together because it's about a society that you have difficulty connecting with. Right, right. And it's, and it's also a collapsed setting. So everything being different is not a surprise, you know. I had a thought the other day randomly, but remember the old artwork of, so before snake eater came out, there was just a bunch of concept art of characters for like hypothetical future Metal Gear stuff.

And one of them was ride in with the baby. Yeah, I remember that. Do you think, and like, and do you remember, there's the dude we went to college with who literally every word out of his mouth was a lie. And he was like, oh, the co-johnami guys came here and told me all about the future game where Ryden had to protect the baby. And it was every single thing. It was bad shit. It was completely bad shit. That being said, I've never seen anything like it before or since.

It's fascinating, really. It's like, how do you get through life where you, you were incapable of telling the children? truth. I don't know. Well, what we discovered is that you get through life by burning every bridge you ever cross. Oh, oh, okay, okay. No, not that guy. Not that guy? Not the guy.

Not the guy I killed. Yeah, you killed it. No, no, no. The other dude that you didn't know as well, but he, everything out of... The PlayStation guy? No, no, no. This guy. I don't know who that is. Oh, shit. Okay. I straight up don't know who that is.

Oh, you weren't around for that. Okay, there was a dude. from the Well, that's really weird actually. There's a dude from the comic book Club Spaces that was like every single word out of his mouth was a lie. And that's great.

He went on this and you knew two of those guys? Multiple. Oh my God. That must have been insane. And every, every single word. It was insane because like, okay, one, oh my God. Okay.

So one, he told this insane thing about how, yeah, some Kojima productions employees like came to Montreal and were in a class and he spoke to them of course you know

and he said he told the story about how like this they told him what was going to happen in the next Metal Gear game and it was going to be all about Ryden protecting this baby and I'm just like

did you just look at the artwork of Ryden holding the baby and just go oh that's that's you just anyway and funny enough I mean this is the person as well who I who introduced I didn't know about Vagabond he showed me that book so I'm like okay

kudos on that but then also believed that he was a true samurai and when they would have the martial arts exhibitions he always talked about how he had his insane sword skills and uh they were like they're like okay yeah sure dude whatever and then one day he was like I want to join in the the exhibitions because people they want to get people to join the martial arts club and so you know there was like a couple people in different styles and he came with his bocan and they're like okay he says he does stuff so let's let's go and he went up and he just swung the bocad around and everyone cringed to the floor for five minutes and we're like all right and thank you and like the thing that he always he always lied but he never had to like ever confront the results everyone just kind of gave him the leeway

and in this case he did that and like you kind of realized oh he truly just lets reality be whatever he thinks it is he's not just he he he's it's it's not a lie because he that's it's it's not just saying it and then hoping that you believe it and then hoping for the the the kudos or the social credit that he gets from the lie he's saying it and it's manifesting in his brain so he's like no i do have skills in uh uh uh uh you know, whatever fucking sort, you know, different sort styles and training, then went up and just did nothing. And it was crazy. Anyway, wild. You are like describing the, the archetype of guy who is currently brain damaging himself with AI psychosis. Oh. Oh.

Like the personality type that is just like a, like built for it. Immune to reality. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No. Anyway, so. all this to say that that artwork of

writing holding the baby, do you think that was just an idea that then got shelved and re-shelled and then reused as Death Stranding? Because feels like a Kojima bit. You know, well, I got to tell you, I got to tell you, it's so weird when we think, when I think back to these types of people who, yeah, so it's, I ran into a guy from Konami. They joined the Csseap class in French

Canada. The reason why that's so nuts to me is because you and I, depending on the social situation, will do that because that did happen. I'll be like, hey, Wully, I was talking to a guy from Capcom this morning or from Bethesda and you want to hear this shit and you'll be like, sure. Yes. Yes. Now, yes. Because it's real. Yes. And the difference, the difference in like the way it's presented is now like so obvious in hindsight. I mean, he literally

described, and I would ask the follow-ups and it was like, yeah, no, they were in my class, they were learning English, they were a bunch of people from the Kojima Productions team. They happened to be in Montreal. I was like, why are you here? I couldn't believe it.

And anyway, I ended up talking to them about Metal Gear and about the next game and they told me what it's going to be about and it was just like like i'm not i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go into how you can tell super easily because that will just empower people to fake it harder but like there's so many markers of this dude is so fucking full of shit that you and i could just tell at a distance from 20 years ago just like wow this is a completely fake fucking story like right off like we're two sentences in we are two sentences in we are two sentences is in and I'm just kicking my feet up going wow

this is a I can't wait to hear this bullshit it just it felt like you know recess playground lies my cousin works at Nintendo my uncle works at Nintendo right it felt like that but the dude was like we were in call we were like in our early 20s and he was like

late 30s at the time he was like as old as we are now like he was older and going back to college or whatever and was just still in recess lie mode. It was crazy. It was bad shit, dude. I can't,

you'd probably recognize the face or the look or if anything. I'm surprised you didn't know the name, but yeah. No, peak, like you can call it Chuni, right? You can call it Cheney. It is,

but when you're 40, I don't know if the term Chuny applies anymore. It's, I thought you had to be in middle school. Middle schooler syndrome. You know, we're older now, right? And you think about people that you used to know and maybe you see them on social media and you're like, wow, you just completely cashed out all your growing up points like a week and a half before I met. You have literally not changed your maturity level at all.

it's fucking freaking me out that was 20 years ago and you're still like the exact same dumbass that you were back then fuck that's crazy yeah anyway I'm just I didn't I'm thinking back now I'm imagining imagining being as we where you're at now in life and being like I'm gonna go to Dawson college actually I'm gonna go sign up and I remember that guy the guy whose name started with F. You remember him? Oh. No, I didn't know him.

Oh, you didn't know that guy? I didn't know that guy. Okay. That guy was like 35 years old. He's like, just got to get another undergraduate degree so I can go down to, you know, engineering. Well, okay, but like if you're somebody who's like

I'm changing up in life, I'm going back to school later in life and I want to get a change in my career or whatever, sure, that's not even what I'm on about. I'm just on about the idea of I'm going to go join the anime club near my 40s and just hang out with and lie to the anime club kids. That is what I am describing.

I'm going to skip all my classes. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to hang out in the club spaces so I can hit on 18-year-olds. That's what I'm describing. I see. No, no, I'm here to get another engineering credit. Okay. 20 years too late. Okay.

15 years too late. What's that Spacoli line? You know, I keep getting older, but these college girls, they stay the same age. Oh, wonderful. Okay, good stuff. There you go. That'll do. That'll do. That's a pod. Have a good week, everybody. Bye-bye.