Castle Super Beast - Csb354 You Have Six Days To Play Anthem

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 Silksong Act 3 Spoilercast Ends at 1:43 Backlog Beated 2: The Other Half Start Game, "When's Sequel"? What Counts As Filler? Watch live: twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://drinkag1.com/superbeast to get a FREE AG1 duffel bag and FREE AG1 Welcome Kit with your first subscription order while supplies last. Go to http://rocketmoney.com/superbeast to reach your financial goals faster. Go to http://hellofresh.com/superbeast10fm to Get 10 free meals + a FREE Zwilling Knife (a $144.99 value) on your third box while supplies last. Go to http://shopify.com/superbeast to sign up for your $1 per month trial. EA is shutting down 'Anthem' servers on January 12. At that time, the game will no longer be playable A German hacker known as "Martha Root" dressed as a pink Power Ranger and deleted a white supremacist dating website live onstage Microsoft CEO says people should stop calling AI 'slop' "We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium...that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other." PS5 ROM Keys Leaked: Sony's Unpatchable Security Nightmare (2026) These were $50 yesterday Stranger Things' final battle was directly influenced by Baldur's Gate 3?

Yo, yo. Good afternoon, Willie. How are you doing today? Not too bad. How are you doing? I'm all right. Happy New Year. No, happy new year.

I forgot that happened. I guess I just streamed during it. Oh my God. It's the, it's the Everlag. It's the Everlag is happening again. All right. So what do I do to do this? You literally just just exit the call and reenter the call.

Hello. Am I fixed now? Yep. That's all it is. For some reason. Technology is so good and I love it. Yeah, they're fixed. That's so good.

I love it. Yeah. Oh, man, I love it. I mean, it's kind of sick to be speaking desynced from yourself. That's a cool power. If you could do that in real life, you could fuck people up. I saw a ventriloquist on TikTok do that. Yeah.

Yeah. And it was, it makes people really upset? Was it the guy who said two words at the same time? Like, I don't know about that. a ventrolochist who had a video doing showing off like pronouncing hard words with like advanced ventriloquism and the last trick was he said the word at the same time as the puppet and it sounded like it came from two places you know and the trick was essentially each syllable he just like repeated from the two different he threw the second syllable and then went back to his own and threw it again but it was done super well that it sounded like

two people talking at the same time. Burn that guy. He's a witch. I mean, if you're... Burn him. Well, but then that's the last ventriloquists, right? If you're one of those people that is like holding on to like a super ancient or like antiquated skill, I mean, it's pretty impressive if you get that good with it in the year of our Lord 2026.

You know, I remember there was a, there was a, I think it was a top. humbler post from ages ago that was like, I don't know about all this technology because back in the day, you'd have some local priest out in Germany that had obsessive tendencies and he would go out in the morning and he would go into every brook and stream and Dale and meadow and catalog, every fucking beetle in his province and have this exhaustive like bug manuscript that people would find and use later for yada yada yada and now that guy just writes strategy guides for sonic games yeah there was there was a time in place that you could apply that to something useful and like granted granted i am part of that problem explicitly yeah no unfortunately when you

have to laser target your autism at certain things and you choose something not useful for humanity we all suffer we all suffer because like did you get the math one Oh, the math's a good one. That's a good one. But can you apply it to something besides a soul's boss formulas and watching for rolling rocks? Can you apply it to something that we will all step forward into the future? Can you put it into nuclear fission? Can you get that one?

Because when they do, it's incredible. And we all are like, you're the best. We would, we are morons. But hey, hey, what if you could play a horror game from 1998, blindfolded? Listen, listen. Hey, listen. Hey, listen. If you're, listen, all of you who are hearing me who are autistic, you have superpowers and it's

kind of incredible. And if you can just, if you can just hold that. That's not true. That's not true. If you can hold for those objectively false. Some of them do. Some of you do. That's, that's society. medically, psychologically false.

Okay. Well, I'll say it that it's, I'll say it everyone. And then for those that do, if you can target it towards really cool shit. You sound, you sound like Shane Black writing the predator trying to get super autism. Oh, man. Or the mass effect. I have said, I have, I have said a lot of whatever's on it. You sound like a buffoon right now.

Or the or the mass effect machine, machine, uh, the mass effect mission. Right. Right. Yeah. Just hook all the autistic. That's how we solve. No, don't know. Come on.

Stop. All right. well either way the guy who was doing all the cataloging is no longer a thing and I was reading a I was reading a discussion about how there's a someone popped up with a thing going like back in the day my parents used to say go outside and you're not allowed back in the house until sundown yeah and they're like say that all the time

and it's like it's not like hey you should go outside it was like the door is locked you are not allowed back inside yeah no it's like how'd my parents do it all? Well, they kicked their kids out of the house for about nine hours every single day. Nuts. Yeah, dude, you have me? That seems so insane.

I could do in an empty house. It seems. I could do a lot of chores. Um, and then from that, that led to the whole like, you know, here's the, here comes the, uh, 90s nostalgia video of like, here's all the pop culture and what, and times used to be simpler. And then the wartime simpler? or did you just not know about how much it sucked for other people?

And then the like, or you were a kid and you had less responsibilities. So it didn't matter what era you grew up in, et cetera. There's so many things going on here. But I will say time is explicit. Times used to explicitly be simpler because you didn't have the cursed rectangle in your pocket that told you everything that's bad in the world at all moments. You were also younger and literally had less responsibilities. Your parents were doing or whoever were doing most of the heavy lifting on

that you had much less on your plate to worry about on a day-to-day basis, so it felt, you know, simpler. Also, without the rectangle, you will have the fact that everybody... This damn cursed rectangle. So everybody's tuned in to cultural moments in a more shared experience kind of way, which means... Oh, yeah, you're talking about the diffusion of, like, pop culture. It means less, right? Pop culture, like, hit everyone in a more concentrated way. And if you go back before our time, back when there was, like, fucking three channels.

It was the most concentrated ever, you know? Yeah. So like you go back and you ask your mom and your dad or whatever. It's like, did you guys watch, uh, did you watch all the family or the Jeffersons or like Sanford and Sons or or, or, uh, happy days or whatever the fuck, right? And like, there's like a 50% chance. Anyone from that, that generation watched like a couple of those shows because that was the, what was the fuck?

That was on. I would love. Yeah. Now we're in the internet era and people like, oh, I'm a big fan of Castle Super Beast and you have to go through the same conversation every single time. What's that? Who's that? Huh. They've been around for 15 years.

Weird. Never heard of them. And, you know, when you, you, and I'm sure, like, if you take something like fresh prints and you just, you concentrate that to the time, you know, it's, it takes a larger chunk of the pie of overall people watching TV at this particular time. So there's that whole bit, right? But the other part of the conversation is like, so there's people who are like, yeah, yeah, everyone goes through this and we can go back to, you know, hundreds of years ago when they're talking about how, you know, we're all losing our way and things are terrible now. Oh, yeah, the kids got no respect. Right. There's all that stuff.

And there's people saying that, fucking, again, centuries ago. But there is, but then there's the part where it's like, the response. to that in the conversation was, I hear that, that's true. However, like, as one of the last people that grew up, as one of the last generations that grew up without internet, it is super weird and different now. We are actually super cooked in ways that did not apply to previous generations, you know, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle on this one. So there is a, there is a legit, like, nah, shit sucks now in an objective way. That is super different.

You will never go back to the time where the dumbest guy you've ever met can message you at any time of the day. Like before that, you'll never be able to go back to the time where you are forced to encounter the dumbest person you've ever seen every single day of your life. I mean, you can get them blowing up your phone 24-7, I guess. but no i mean like willie have you used social media in the past 24 hours sure you have seen the dumbest person you've ever seen in your life at some point maybe you just scrolled past them you didn't get a good eyeball yeah yeah yeah yeah they were there everything is everything is checking off the leaderboards as you scroll as you scroll you're just you're hitting the hot the all-time high scores like back in the day if you watched like a tv show about like i don't know

fucking how it's made and was like here's how carpentry and how tables are made. You're like, wow, that's really cool. But there wasn't like a guy sitting next to you going, actually, I'm going to say a bunch of wrong shit that Grock told me. You know,

and you have that every second. The part of it that applies to us, of course, is the version where, again, you're speaking into a microphone. Hello, this is my microphone. So you're getting, you're getting, uh, the amount of things I realized in life that like people just tell each other based on someone else told you a thing and you just repeat it. I just, I had no idea like until this situation, until this job, like how much of that you just kind of never gets fact checked, just gets said.

And then it's like, yeah, whatever. That's that's the, that's facts. So that means you're not a gossip. So good for you. Uh, but I heard. that you killed a guy one time. Ah, yes, yes. And I heard that from my own ass where I made it up.

No, it is a, um, I mean, that's one thing that like, it would be, I guess you can experience this on just using social media in general, but most people probably are not going to have this thing. Something that like part of what we do that is a unique brain, like, warping experience is reciting things that you have been told for your entire life and then instantly getting fact checked. The crowd knowledge to be like, that's not real.

Versus thousands of people track checking it instantly. I want, I wish other people could experience what that's like. It's rough, bro. You have to, you have to sit and stare at your soul for a second. And like, sometimes I'm asked myself by accident because I'll say something and I'm like, I am 100% certain this is true. But the response is like, overwhelming. It's like everyone is like, no, that's wrong. I'm like, is that wrong? Have I been wrong

about that for 20 years? And then you go and check and go, no, you were actually right. Actually, I was. It is everyone else's popular idea that is wrong. That's crazy. I should just go with my gun every time. I mean, that leads to, oh my God, I can't believe he's doubling down on how wrong he is. There's that. There's that. There's the, and then there's the other version, which is, I want a piece of corn for my Christmas. I do want to, you know, A single piece of corn seems skins. It's scarce. It's very, very strange.

It's very, very weird to experience it. And you then, you know, you then have to like, also, you know. The Bernstein bears. Yes, yeah. And then I want to say there's a middle phase of like, I'm just going to doubt everything I ever say, you know, for there's, I remember, I remember like 20, maybe 15 or so where I was Like, my brain was just like, okay, so everything I say from now on, I'm just going to say, Or I was, as far as I know, as far as I know, or I was once told.

Yeah, yeah. I think. Yeah. You pacify. You softened your language so hard because you slam into that wall. Then you just like, oh, those guys are believing anything. It was like, no, not anymore. And then you flip side it.

Then you come out the other side and you're like, I don't even give a shit anymore. Yeah. Those rats can't swim. They can't. Yeah, I'm not there yet because to some degree, it's like you, it's weird because like, you do, you must develop it like a carapace, right? To take all kinds of shit coming at you. And it needs to work on thing. The dumber the thing coming at you is the more effective the carapace is, right?

So when somebody goes like, hey, dad slop ends at oh, three nine. Oh, dude, that shit's so funny. That's just so funny with the dad's block. And then the same name quotes goes, thanks. Yeah, thanks for the time staff or whatever. And it's like, it turns out that was a different guy. There are two dickheads named Steven. That's so funny.

But the energy, the energy of coming across that is like, oh, that is just amazingly funny and hilarious to see that this is the same thing, like literally fighting game talk and like the birth of your of your children are on the same level of like Jesus Christ, shut the fuck up. I can't stand. I can't stand fighting games in the birth of my children. So that is amazing and hilarious, you know. But then when there's ones where it's like, oh, is that a thing or is that not a thing?

I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm then back to questioning everything about how I approach something. and then you're also looking at your own identity. Have you heard of the term, have you heard of the term audience capture? I have not, well, I mean, is it a, hold on, I have OBS right now open.

Okay. Let me see if it's in there. Display, game, image, media source, video, no, I don't know about audience capture. Okay, it's not, no. Unfortunately, it's not a button you click on over there. No. Man, that joke is only,

funny to people who use OBS. Amazing. Well, you can probably guess what it is, but it's the thing where you start sounding like the people that you talk to often because you basically, because whenever someone on a podcast

or on the internet or influence or whatever starts realizing what their audience wants to hear, they start leaning more in that direction and discarding who they are individually to become more of what the audience wants them to be as opposed to their genuine selves. It's like a kind of like audience flanderization. Yes. Like, but like to you. Waka, walka, walka. Exactly.

Exactly. Say the line, Wully. Right. Say fighting games. Say it. And and and then the, you know, the, the memories, I think when we started doing this shit to begin with going, um, fuck the meta and, and fuck. Yeah. Everything that we're supposed to do. were going to not do that because that shit sucks and then that somehow worked and it's like oh wow it worked okay it worked well enough

that it's still working now because for some people it they it didn't and they're gone you know by bro somebody came back to my channel a couple weeks ago and was like oh my god pet's still streaming oh what happened did he get cancer he looks really bad

oh my god you know and then every once in while you gotta be like hey what's what's out right now what's happening yeah fuck that we're playing wanted dead you know and i'm like i'm throwing that shit in let's go and and that that's for me that's because i want to know um let me ask let me ask the question and to be to be perfectly fair you know menita is like bro we're really playing wanted dead before kirby air riders and i'm like yeah you know what that's a good point man that is a good point that's fair but also yes we are bro, are we really going to play this panty fighter game instead of Smash brothers?

Yeah, I guess we are. We fucking are. Yep, yep. So let me, you said something interesting. And I would like to go into like a deep inside baseball thing because you described the carapace. Mm-hmm. Like I built up the carapace and I can tell you the day and date I built up that carapy. I was just looking it up in the background.

That carapest was built on May 10th, 2016. Because on May 9th, 2016, Best Friends Played Dark Souls 3, Part 12 came out. And that's the episode that I loaded in with the fucking dark, the Black Knight set and got the most intense. backlash I have ever received in my life about anything. Yep. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Yep. And I was like, oh, you spoke to me that day, but I was like all torn up about it. And then I woke up the next day going, this is stupid. Fuck this. I don't give a shit. It's a resolve is tested in the darkest dungeon sense, you know?

and I feel like simultaneous resolve and wrecked at the same time sometimes occur there's there is there is distressed resolve but that that's a big one yeah at some point you have to become the junkler or whatever the kids say at some point

at some point yeah I have there are there are many of which have been captured to to film and to to highlight real over the years. And they're still coming out to this day. To this day, we're still doing it.

And I'm going to get into some of them this week. But I started off with Wanda Dead there because that was one of the things that I popped in. And it was, um... So what is that? So it is an action jank from the people from former team ninja staffers. I like how you said that as like a genre. Yeah. The genre is action jank.

That's correct. It is bargain bin PS3 style game development. Put your brain in that place. I'm looking at footage, by the way, when we're talking. I'm seeing... Brought to you by former team ninja developers that are alive. And also, Naruto-Toboroto Shinobi Strikers. Okay, yeah.

I'm seeing... You know what I'm seeing? Like, like, it feels like that devil's third game, but also, oh, there's something else that reminds me of. Itaggy bones probably, yeah. A lot of people have been saying that. I don't, the thing is, I don't know anything about devil's third except for what you guys and Liam and stuff used to talk about. It's bad. I have very little reference point there.

It reminds me of that, what's that? Oh, my God. I can't remember. It's, it's, um, it's a game. it's an action game that's got a red-headed lady in it and it's by a company that we used to call ass to mouth A2M, yeah, wet, wet, wet, yes, it makes anything of, yeah, it looks like wet, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

So it's, it's right out of that playbook and this is, this, this would have been a mystery box or some other dumb jank through, you know, um, and again, as something where we've been, we've been enjoying our, our quality games for too long. I'm like, let me pop this fucking thing and see what's going on. And yeah, that's some action jank going on where the voice acting is fucking all god-awful.

The characters are trying so hard to establish themselves as a you know, an aliens-esque you know, little fucking Bravo team. And you got the alcoholic, you got the sleaze bag,

you got the cool mute guy who's doing ASL and then you got your main character who's got like Goku appetite and just every line read every line read is just I really can't feel my body right now oh man you know oh that was a chaos worse whatever the fuck you know um you didn't you didn't throw enough lisp on it and and then you get like one random cut scene where you just it just shows some backstory with the main character

who's like a, you know, super dangerous, freed from prison to work on the cop squad because one last job because you're the best and we all, you know, whatever. I mean, that's how big missions work. And you get a child sitting on a couch in this fucked up like scenario where, like, the crime scene is essentially the dad killed the mom

and the kid and the child is just sitting there watching TV like already dead inside from what's happened and then you take out the dad and then go sit with the kid and the kid does the best acting in the entire game so far like this one random child actor is absolutely crushing it

by comparison to the entire cast it's crazy and then yeah you know you got you got you got cover shooter gun play mixed in with sword and side arm pistol combos and there's just no reason to do the cover shooting because everything, the amount of time...

I'm watching a lot of footage here, and I have not seen cover shooting. Yeah, like, it just takes too long to hide between Rivalis and reload and shoot versus just running up and, like, doing a five-fit combo and cutting their heads off. Like, it's just, you know, no downside. And, like, everything snaps in a very, again, jank-ass way.

When you go down, your partner comes over and injects you with the drugs to pick you back up. but everyone else stands around and waits for you to peacefully get ready. This makes me think of like, man, we're fucking massive nerds. But I remember Mark of the Ninja, the Xbox 360 game? Sorry again. What? You remember Mark of the Ninja? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I remember there was like an article where they interviewed one of the devs and they're like, we used to have a like a really like complicated combat system in this game. But people would just use it to fight all the time instead of sneaking around and doing ninja stuff. So we just took all that shit out. because that's what we wanted the game to be. And I think about like the enormous amount of games I've played that had cover shooting mechanics where I'm like, why would I ever fucking shoot from fucking cover ever? And you get a whole skill tree of non-cover things, shooter things to do and go get up in there and melee shit.

And, you know, it's just a wacky, super goofy, again, PS3 Bargad era Japanese action jank. Is it a PS3 game? It's not, but it feels like it. It feels like it, you know, of the time. It feels like it's a dying breed. And it has what I'm calling the reverse Yakuza food scene where they have a full tray of like fairly decently modeled, like gross food. And some of it is meant to look appetizing.

Some of it's meant to be gross. But it's all like individual, like they have potatoes that are individually shaped. and like you and it's all like she can't eat it and there's like a fish head and jello that sticks to the thing and coffee that's too hard and it's the most unappetizing but detailed in how unappetizing it is food scene and I'm like why would you do the reverse bread scene here like you spent your time to make it gross

that wasn't in charge of anything that mattered had the ability to make one part of the game really stand out and they worked really hard on it it was impressively like gross And yeah, no, so that, that, that, you know, I just just jumped in there and said, yeah, all right, there we are. Jank through. No, Kirby, no time for that shit. No, no, no.

I played through the first mission, fought a fucking spider tank and called it a day, you know, we took a look to which some people are like full Jake LP. What are you going to go back? I'm like, I don't know, man. Like, I just, I just intended that to be a quick look. I love that no matter what you do, I have like a pre-made response to be like a whiny little shit about it. Yeah. Because there's like, man, well, you've been eating too good playing too many good games.

Arkham City, that's a good game. You should play more shit. And then the instant you play some piece of shit like wanted like won't look at binary domain. Yeah. But this shit shows up on the fucking channel. Oh my God. Do you even have any taste? And now it's like, okay, so you guys want you want to delay Dark Souls?

Dead Space 2 for this. This is what we're doing. We're hanging out. We're stalling for time here, right? I did look up, and I saw how long to beat said, like, it could be like six hours or some shit. So it might not even be that bad. Oh, you could have just done that in one day. You just get a pound of months.

You're done, man. Just do it. It might not be that bad. But either way. There wasn't, I did start, I did feel, though, like one running around, shooting and chopping and chainsawing with a censorship thing. popping up. There was some like all right, not much to say here. We're just

doing the fucking jackass shooter cover shit. I don't know if this shenanigans and antics keep up, but whatever. For now, I'm just saying quick look. We'll see what happens, right? And not as much to say about it, but I tried out sushi ben.

That was the game that looks like it's from the Mega Man Legends world of 3D modeling and rendering with... Right! That's... I remember why I remember this game.

This is the one that has that lady that steps on the guys. She's got the puppet characters that are the four simps that she steps on to get all around as her elevating control system. It's kind of impressive. If I had...

Like, looking at it, and I remember a bunch of tweets showing how dynamic she can walk upstairs without ever having to... She can walk... Or she can walk downstairs using them instead of her own feet. And there's a whole dynamic system of how to animate that. You kind of want the game to end with her using them in a combined mecha form, almost.

I can see it. You know, mounting up like a fucking persona monster, you know, and just like piloting them as a power loader. But either way, super fun, sick vibes, just great characters, lots of charm. Gameplay, extraordinarily minimal. it might as well be a visual novel. It's all vibes. Not much going on.

So that's fine. That's not a deal breaker. No. There was no unbeatable style like getting stuck. When I see popular user defined tags, I see anime, story, rich, comedy, cute, colorful stylized. None of those describe a jump or a run or a shoot or a puzzle. It used to be a, it's a VR game that now has a non-vr mode, right?

Oh, okay. So you walk around, you talk to people and like, Every once in a while, you do a fishing mini game. Okay, so it's just a cool, weird little place to chill. That's it. That's it. Like, the fishing mini game I saw was like, you just point the thing, keep it into the circle for a little while and then pull it.

You know, it's not much. No ball or gun? There is no ball. There is no gun. I'm, like, I'm becoming, like, madly in love with ball and gun. Ball and Guns pretty good. Like, I'm crazy. Ball and Guns pretty good.

And yeah. Crazy for me. ball and gun. And for some reason, just great voice acting on, but you can choose dub or sub on it, or Japanese or English. And in both cases, just they got quality voice actors doing an amazing job. In the Japanese one, they got like expensive voice actors, like Say You, they got Joji Nakata right off the bat and a couple other people that you would recognize just by hearing them speak and going like, oh, fuck, like, how'd you get them? You know, so, um, yeah, sushi ben, fun, fun little vibes right off the bat. But yeah, not much going on gameplay-wise.

You just want to, you just, if you want to go to a world that looks like it's a Mega Man Legend-style world and hang out there for a minute, check it out. Can we talk about Mr. Freeze? Yeah, let's talk about Mr. Freeze. That is. I would like to go on a micro rant before you start just a little bit. So we talked about when our boss fights going to, go the fucking way of dinosaur when are we sick of boss fights and that

article came out in 2011 which makes it crazy hilarious that dark souls and all this other shit but also so did that Mr. Freeze boss fight which is the best boss fight in that series wow that was when that happened

oh you extra fucking suck on the timing there amazing yeah so that was it was so good better than every other boss in that game. It's phenomenal. It's super cool. And, um, especially now, like, after the fact, kind of thinking about how it's like, oh, you like, this is everything that you can do stealth

and, um, like, everything you can do in like predator missions essentially is a viable option to do here. But it's not a predator fight. You know, but it's, you just still, but you have to think in that way to kind of start solving it. It is a predator fight, but it's against, instead of like 10 guys, it's one. Yeah. Really big guy. Yeah. And then you can't repeat your options, you know?

Super cool. Really love that. Had a thing where using the detective vision led to me not seeing the things getting frozen over after you do it the first time. So I kept trying to like zap him against the wall. Yeah. And then a screen popped up that was like, here's a bunch of things that you can do. That was essentially like a cheat sheet explaining how to fight him. which people had never seen.

I had never seen it. Yeah, apparently, so that's a thing. And it was like, and I was like, oh, is this like a Virgil

situation, is now selectable type of moment? Where, but it's like not, but it's not from losing, but from just trying the same thing too many times. And then it's like, yeah,

you have options. So, how far into the game is that fight? It's relatively early. Someone said halfway, but I don't know if that's true. Hmm. I can check this.

It's been two sessions. Well, I've got, I have, I have, I've started, I mentioned this to you before a little while ago, but I'll tell you, this is such a good, you just look up Arkham City. Yeah, long play. And then find it, find it.

And then you just scroll until you don't recognize it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you go, oh, okay, that's where I'm at. And then you just look at the chart and be like, this is how many days parts. I got to it at the end of two sessions of playing. I did a bunch of side quests, the second session and a kind of like half, half main line. so it'd be six hours of play.

It is half. It is exactly halfway through. Okay, yeah. So, so that we're keeping pace then. Yeah. So, like,

it's so smart, and I kind of wish they had this in Arkham Asylum or some variation of it, or that they had earlier, because, like, when I played through the predator sections, you can just do, like, two or three things and just,

like, ace those sections, no problem. Like, just scoop up guys off gargoyles, batterang, this guy and, like, sneak up behind. the rest and you got them. And there's like a million different little things that you're

able to do. And that Mr. Free Spite is the first time in both games that they're like, no, you will learn how to do all these things. You will actually try all these things at least once. So as I've been getting better at the combat and like, you know, trying to improve there and sort of, you know, do better here than last time, the predator sections are still somewhat elusive. I'm doing a little bit better on them, I think. But I... They're way harder than the combat section. So, well, I think I was kind of missing

the, anyway, I remember when I was thinking about it like, is this like Ask Creed style? And it's like, no, not necessarily. Because you get one dude you can take out by dropping down and doing that. But then I kind of was trying to use the mounts to take to grab the other dudes, which I remember doing an asylum, but in this case, it feels like, yeah, you can't just

keep doing that, right? They make it much harder to do perched um disd taked takedowns in those so then you have to get down i feel like you have to take out one dude like that they all get alerted and then you have to then get down and start sneaking behind and doing the other types of takedowns yeah um but all that to say that uh yeah as as as uh that popped up it was like okay here's the explanation and then there was a moment of like wait should i is am i better off not reading this or or so and then eventually as um after kind of going like should I should I know I don't know what's going on it was like okay I'm just not going to read it and I closed it off and it was way better than I did because realizing what the gimmick was there makes that fight like yeah that's phenomenal I thought that was the best thing I've experienced in the series so far super cool you're in this strange position with these these Arkham rock steady games where like they're right there they're all out in front of you and you can just go to them at your leisure you don't have to sit and wait for multiple years for Arkham City like everybody did but then you know at the end is suicide squad and the death of the fucking studio.

Can I just say though? Oh. Okay, but can I just, if I can just, mini rant a little bit. Yeah, give me a micro rant. It's kind of annoying how, like, about half of the discussion while I'm playing Arkham City

is about games that are coming after Arkham City and just what, about what I should do next. I just lost audacity. Hold on one second. Okay, crack it back open. Oh, what a, what a good window. we got here.

What's the date? It is the 6th. January 6th. What's so funny about that? Nothing. All right. Let me know. Hold on.

You're going to stop this. Turn you off. Yeah. Ultimately, ultimately. Windows 11's a piece of shit. Wow, wow, I'm back.

Cool. Ultimately, what I'm describing is something that happens with every series and so on. It's a degree. But it's very razor-focused hard in this one, where so, like, I just started this, and so much of it is about night origins, whatever's

necks, et cetera. And it's kind of like, let's just be in the moment for a sec, as opposed to focusing on every game that comes after this right now. Some games are just, like, way worse than others. But like, oh, man, I forget what it was. There was something a while ago I was playing that was like the first in like a multi-part series. and like the very first question every single day was like are you going to play like three sequels from now? Right, right.

And I'm like, can I just get through the end of this first stream? And I'm imagining watching somebody start Devil May Cry 1 and then get ready to announce they're going to play two. And then in your brain you're like, oh man, can't wait for three and four and five, you know? But there is that thing of just like, it's happening so much with this one. about like whether or not origins is good or I should or play night or you know whatever the

case is and I'm like oh it's crazy it's super super concentrated here we're like we're we're looking past the current moment immediately um that being said uh yeah Metal Gear is another franchise like that for sure uh it was Zeno blade i take that okay where I was three sessions in the Zeno blade and people were asking me what my plans for the Zeno Blade 3 DLC was. And I'm like, oh my God. Oh, my God. Can I beat this one and see if I like it? Can I do that? So I have to imagine that this excitement comes from like, oh my God, how good is that best part of this franchise that comes later in the other games. Yeah. But when you're not there

and you don't know, you kind of need to just chill and let the game play out, you know? It is. It is so, it's so like, what's the word? it feels like oh i know exactly what it's like because i've described this problem before hey man oh i'm thinking of getting into monster hunter okay get you bet okay i'm super good at monster hunter you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna i'm gonna go with you and we'll show you what the key quests are and we'll just rush right through those and we'll get you right to end game and then we'll get you right in an end game set and then you do end game monster hunter rating with me oh we're gonna go we're gonna go fight gogmasios and all that and then they do

that and you're like, I don't know what the game is. I don't like it. Yeah, I don't even know what is that. What is, what am I? Yeah, a million percent. You started playing an MMO? Okay, we'll get you to level cap tomorrow. No, I wanted to play my game. Yeah.

Now, I think, right, there are people who are the opposite of what you described, who are like, I don't even want to have that journey. I just want to jump on where everyone else is and be a part of the conversation. So get me there right away. Absolutely. it's two completely different ways to view something like so there's a huge proportion of people that look at any multiplayer game

and they're like oh well I want to play the multiplayer game with people and I want that core experience whatever happens to be and they're looking at an RPG or a hunting game or an MMO or whatever and they're looking at it like Rainbow Six Seed or Call of Duty and they're like why is there all this in between nonsense getting in the way of the thing that I want to do and that's not what made me love fall in love of the video games.

Like what, it's, it's the opposite of that, actually, you know, so, um, getting,

getting through these experiences and, and taking my time and going through it and immersing, et cetera, you know? Yeah. Like, I can say monster hunter is the best example. You know what gets people in a monster hunter?

When you leave them alone and they decide in low rank, I'm going to make a Royal Ludroth armor set within five hours of the game. And then my guy's going to look really cool and he'll look like the Royal Royal Roel And I made it. That was really satisfying. Right. Yes. That's the experience.

Not, oh, you got to build up your shit and get your augments so you can fight Gog. I will say that it is funny, though, that, uh, like, as somebody who likes to, you know, experience the content and, and listen to things like, again, let those thugs play out in the church and the conversation. Like, the amount of, um, um, um, um, Excuse me. A lot of people are like used to just ignoring all that tech, all that dialogue and are thus like, why are you spending any time listening to any of this? So slow. Exactly.

And the game, now that I'm running around the world, it's like, oh, it's endless. The chatter is endless. So you feel, I'm sure after you play these games for hours and hours and there you have them in your brain for the last, you know, 15 years, you filter out so much of that that it doesn't mean anything anymore. more. But I'm looking at it like, oh, is this an interesting piece of lore or is someone going to say something quirky about one of the rogues gallery villains that, you know what I mean? Is there some fun flavor text that's going to come from these two goons talking? And it's like, eh, just fly past it. Get to the next objective. Okay. So, you know. So there's a YouTube feature that I really like. And it really, it really sums up like a bunch of different conversations that

we've had over the years where you remember the joke of like, hey, uh, I really want you to play this. I'm not going to watch it though. Yeah. I want you to play it. Yeah. So there's the, I don't know if you've used this as the follow up to that, which is like, I don't get it. The people were like so excited for me to play this, but like, views are like, they're

average. It's not crazy. It was weird compared to like the amount of, of like manic adoration. Let me go on to one of my videos and do that little scroll thing where you get to see where people actually watch the video. Oh, they're skipping to big. moments. They actually just want a super cut of twist reactions

like a reaction channel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Best ofs, etc. That's actually, I, like, oh yeah, can you play through Zeno Blade 3 so that I and Zeno Blade 2 so that I can see your reaction to the plot twist at the 89 hour mark? Basically. And then I'll watch that. And then

I'll be like, oh, that was such a good use of everyone's time. I mean, literally with Wanted Dead, someone was like, please play through the rest of this. I'm not going to watch it, but play plays through it though. Yeah, you should do it. So, yeah. So, but that just, I just to, just to note so far that like the Mr. freeze fight is like notably strong, phenomenal, good stuff.

It is, it is the highest point of that franchise. Bummer. Bummer that that's not one step onto further things. So there's a lot of highs in that franchise. Arkham City is pretty uniformly good across the bar. But like that is like absolutely like the best fight they. ever did. No question.

So I was, I have to say that like walking into this going, I hope we're not, I'm, I'm not looking for another army of joke baines, you know, and while we are struggling against the joke ban aids, deep, deep, deep in the blood now, I do see stuff that pops up like, hey, here's the Raisal Ghul fight, you know, in the dream sequence where. It went by so quick for a second that I was like, oh, fuck, I didn't get a chance to, like, properly time the dodges. And then we got, like, another round of it with all the counters and everything. And I was like, you know what?

Yeah, yeah, I like this. This was cool. Like the dodging, the blades getting in the shot, and then countering everything, and then having the little, the group battle in your dream sequence was a refreshing not bane, you know? So anytime, even if they're going for it in swings that might not pay off, because I can see how like, like Solomon Grundy was, it was,

you know, it was, it wasn't anything much to, to write home about. There's something going on with Arkham City that, um, it's, it's,

that game is like the, the absolute pinnacle of the seventh gen video game. Like, it is all of its strengths and all of its weaknesses simultaneously. Like, including, including the part where you're like, why am I playing Catwoman when I start the game?

Oh, it's an online pass thing. This is... DLC. That's what that was. Right? But one of the things that they had more of is like, hey, you know what? This is going to be a 15-hour game.

Let's have like 25 completely unique encounters. Cool. With this Rogue's gallery. Cool. They don't all have to be bangers. They don't all have to be super mechanically deep.

But let's just vary it up and vary it up and vary it up. Yeah. Yeah. There's been quite a few of them so far. and no, and I appreciate the variety of what's going on there and it's not just like mount on the shoulders run the bull into the wall,

etc. I'm not a fan of that type of fight in anything where yeah you control the I don't like it. The big thing and smash it into the wall don't care. Done it like a million times. Yeah, no, kiting the kiting the bull into a

into a wall or whatever versus kiting them into your fists. Way more fun. And shout out to the fucking bat shark repellent on the ice where you just fucking Itman beat down a shark that pops up there. In any case, that riddler shit is I've found... It's what broke my ass, dude.

But it's joy now. Because I'm playing with Reggie and Reggie's dying every time he sees green. I'm getting powered up by the riddler. So there were two things that broke me. One was zombie genocide or a dead rising, which was like the jazz. And the full

straight right was like getting all the riddler trophies in Arkham Asylum and being like, all right. Because in asylum, it was like reasonable and pretty fun to do. And then getting to city and it's like, you want fucking, I don't even have many, 500. And then hearing about Arkham

night where I think it's up to like a thousand. Yeah. So let me. Okay. So I've heard multiple complaints. One of the most valid being it ruins the skyline. It really does. When you look out on the city.

It ruins a bunch of environments too. It's just riddler shit everywhere. Green fucking question marks, green paint. And then green dudes standing on top of towers now. No matter what you can't get rid of. it. And it's like, how could he possibly be doing so much? Okay.

Behind the scenes while the main quote unquote villain is the Joker. So let me, I'm gonna, I'm gonna look up. So in Arkham Knight, it's 243. Arkham City Redler Trophies is

for, how many is it? It's a lot. It's a couple hundred and then there's a couple hundred. And then there's a couple hundred. more for Catwoman exclusively. Odd. So I think

it's like up to like 440 or some shit. It's insane. It's absolutely fucking. The industry had to push it to the limits to learn where they are, right? And then pull back from there. And at the time, regardless, it's too much. Yeah. But this was this was an era when you were still seeing scores

for replay value. You know? This was a don't sell this at GameStop. There's so much more in store. if you collect all those riddler trophies. Hey Willie, do you want to hear something that you are not going to have to deal with in Arkham City? You can get the real good ending. No problem, no matter how many Ridler trophies you get. What was the fucking deal beforehand? Well, in Arkham Knight, the sequel to the game you're playing,

you do have to get all the Ridler trophies to get the good ending. The secret ending. So is it is it is it the secret ending or the true? I believe it is the secret ending that sets up something that will never happen. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, whatever. That's a bridge to another city.

But as far as also. I disagree with Ridler trophies being replay value because me scrounging the earth for dirt and puzzles is not the game that I want to play. I want to play Batman fighting things. It's dog shit. But back then, right, games were discovering that if you put fucking bullshit fetch questathon collectible things and then you put chivos on them, you're artificially extending the game. You're putting, you're, it's, it's, it's learning how to make anime filler, you know? So here's the part that I don't get. Have you taken a look at, at Arkham City or Arkham Asylum's arcade modes?

Uh, no. There is like a full, like game of each of the predator or the, the, the, the, the, the, the combat. Like, there are dozens of stages with like, oh, like the challenges. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a, I saw there's a challenge section where you can go in and do those things. Yes, that part.

Like, if you put like a veneer on that and called it like dead as disco, it would actually be like much larger than that game in its totality with all. Yeah. Just one, one thing. Like, that game does not want for replay value. If I wanted to just go fight a bunch of fucking dudes as Robin. Yeah, yeah. In that game, I could just do it right now.

And I thought there was even a section called downloadable maps, which was like there were shit. There's a ton. There was shit that came out after the fact even. Yeah, exactly. There is a ton of shit in that game. So you didn't even have to do these fucking redler collecting things. Yeah. I, again, I would hope that as a, I'm going to, so as of not the sequels, but the latest

iteration. Has a lesson been learned in suicides kill the suicide squad or so you know. The argument is is suicide squad or Gotham Knights the actual latest game? Okay. Well, like which one is it? One's made by Rock Steady but the other has the name. Oh, okay. Okay. Because I was going to say yeah. The answer is no. The answer is no. The answer is no.

I have a unique perspective today on that topic, which we can get to in a little bit. But the answer is no. Yeah, I'm going to say that the people making the thing are where the lessons continue, not the name. You know? They turn that game into a shooter, so... Okay.

Yeah. In any case... Do you want to play a shooter? No. Yeah, there are four playable characters in Arkham City, and two of them are the arcade mode exclusive. And I think that's Nightwing and Robin. Yeah, no, that's cool. And that all the more, like, anyway, whatever.

They could have done an infinitely better job of this bullshit. But like, just there's something about coming across a room with like four of them, one of which is pink. It looks like shit, dude. And then like he starts and then fucking Nigma starts talking and yeah, yapping about whatever. And then a green thug shows up in the dudes you're fighting. And Reggie is just melting off the couch like sliding onto the ground. I'm kind of like, this is this is actually kind of amazing right now.

How ridiculous they went with it and thought it was a good idea at the time. Very cool. Enjoying that. what else is going on I love going back to like a like a built up AAA like a super game of the year and being like was what was were we crazy or was it actually like kick ass like I went back to Bioshock one and I'm like Bioshock one is like pretty good

but like it's like it no but Arkham City oh yeah actually yeah no it was cooking Mm-hmm, mm-hmm Um Yeah, there is a feeling to To like playing a game that like Is old enough that Um

There's a lot of things that are Eh There's a lot that is Uh Two There's moments where too much is happening on screen Um Where I and again

Maybe it's just me But like The You know, the things that you can see getting made fun of where you see the Ubisoft Eldon Ring take on things where you're like here's your and you're a Batman so you're using your tech and so it's like

it's tracing the call and you're getting the subtitles over here and there's things popping up and then this Riddler shit and there's there's times where I'm just looking at the screen going oh my god there's just too much here and it's not to say that like playing as Batman you should

be full of tech and everything but just as a game sometimes it's like yo calm down, focus up, you know, pick a thing, stick to it right now, lock in, you don't have to open world in a million different ways and help me, the political prisoners over here. Oh, now there's a thing on the roof and, you know, it's just it kind of overwhelms a bit too much. And I think that you got to hope that in the future games, they clean that experience up as well, right? Part of why Breath of the Wild was really enjoyable. First time playing it, I think... You could call it a breath of fresh air. Sure. The, you know, the approach Nintendo took to their big open world thing was they made it a... It was open world, but it wasn't just like we shook up the box and emptied it on the floor.

You know, they kind of... Yeah, that was a completely different type of game. It's like a holistic, like systems-based, like open world. Like, it's a totally different, completely different fucking thing. And you could tell that. that they looked at a bunch of people doing playtest data, looked at their curve across the map, and then design things

according to that, you know? Yeah, like, like, Breath of the Wild is like an attempt to recreate Zelda 1, 20 years in. But let you go in any direction. And then, uh, tears of the kingdom is like, what if you could build a robot? Like, it's a much more like cynical

like view of that. Like, it's a sequel sequel, but still. And we, and I, you know, I'd like to say that we've learned quite a bit since then, but like, going back to 2011. You're kind of feeling the brunt of it. But yes, that's a lot of fun so far.

Continuing in Expedition 33, not much else to say just yet, but kind of fighting the painters right now. So we'll just leave it there. Popped in... That boss fight is the only hard fight in Act 2. And man, it is crazy. That is the only one I had trouble with in the second act.

Unless you start taking on. on things that you're not supposed to be taken on. Like if you walk up to Sprong in act two. No, I beat I thought Sprong was way easier than than in act two. Yeah. Wow. Because I, so I

went so what happened was is that somebody I said, I bet I could beat that guy and someone in chat said, I bet you can't. And I went okay. And then. Stubbering it. And then I went down there and I fought Sprong and I'm like, wow, Sprong has like three attacks. I bet

and perfect pair of this for 40 minutes. Yeah, it just takes a billion years. Yeah. Yeah. Is your brain going to give out eventually? Yeah. Whereas the painter's like her swoopy, swappy shit, I actually never got the perfect timing down.

It's interesting to watching fights with Claire and Obscure and Claire Obscure because. Yeah. Because like I, like learning to fight those, I definitely was able to just just like, okay, let me dodge or let me parry like one or two sequences of attacks here and then you're dead. But when you're fighting them for an extended period of time, there's so many fakeouts and bullshit things that you deal with when you're not one-shotting them, which in Reggie's build's case, he was definitely able to parry and do all the defensive stuff because he's got those reactions. But his build was not optimized so he wasn't killing things fast enough.

Silly, Reggie. were going longer. Having to play the game. Right? And so you're getting these moments of like, oh, you're getting super baited out by how close these moves are to each other

between these two characters, these two enemies. But the wind-up is the most obnoxious souls like, ah, wow. It gets a little silly sometimes. Yeah, those enemies in particular are like 10-second wind-ups on their swings.

There's a guy in the Thank You DLC that had, that it that takes the wind-up shit to the absolute like limit um it that like one attack is like i want to say it's like 30 40 seconds long yeah just like constantly like what yeah like the mean like the the attack can come out at any one of those those fake outs it's it's it's awesome it's yeah um and as you say it's the meme that character also is like literally spouting off memes from

Xenoblade and FF14 and a bunch of other stuff as it's happening. Like it's a absolute meme lord. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Commit to it. So yeah. I mean, at this point,

so whenever DLC comes out right after a game in its life cycle, it's just so funny because you will forever be able to see the moment that like the feedback caught up to the developers and now it's committed into the game. You know, not in the sequel, but

live here in the original thing. There's, there's like you, so the, the former super boss of Expedition 33 got mathed out to oblivion, I would say, with one-shot builds,

at which point they introduced four super bosses in that patch that are built to kill those people's builds. Like just like absolutely absurd. But the pictos included in the new area allow you to math those guys out to. In a new way.

Okay. Yeah. It's, it's really fascinating. It's fun to do. It's fun to do if you, if you, you know, if you're like, okay, the tools are there. Now you've got to learn new ones, but it's still possible. That's fun. Also, if you beat any of the super bosses, they all come with custom full team spectacle finishes.

Nice. Yeah, like the dualist. Yes. Yes. Okay. But like they all come with like enormous versions of those characters at their endgame states. Like taking the characters out, they are very devil may cry. other thing I wanted to mention

checked out the Dio and Yugi mods for DBFZ I saw that I like I dropped in while you were doing it That shit's nuts God man I was always you know singing praises for like some of the crazier shit we saw for Marvel And

in this case Kong Meng is the modder that made Dio and Yugi for Dragon Ball Fighters. And these mods... I'm really glad they did Dio and then not a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure character. Yeah, yeah. Like, that's so much more interesting. And you get the feeling that, like, this is a modder that, like, is almost, like, testing themselves with programming, you know?

And so it turns out that is the case because previous people that have done crazy mods, like Wistful Hopes and Tabs, MVC3, are, they then go on to, after doing incredible work with modding shit, they then go on to work on their own projects, make their own engines, do their own other games, you know? So a lot of the time you're seeing them kind of just like cut their teeth on these mods to then get creative afterwards. So this feels like that, because the first challenge was, can I recreate Dio from Heritage for the future, but with a Dio model that's more akin to All-Star Battle, That's tough right away.

That's a big ask. Inside of an existing Dragon Ball Fighters game with its own systems going on and ignore those systems entirely. And yeah, the answer is totally. Because instead of having a fireball button, Dio has a call stand button, you know? Perfect. And you can call the stand and his moves change or you can put them away. You can send the stand out to do attacks and then you can desync from it to then sandwich your opponent. own it for a bar.

It's got all these faithful things that he does from Heritage for the Future as well. So, like, you can do the full-time stop. It uses all seven bars of your super, and it slowly counts them down as if they were seconds. And while time is stopped, you can throw out the knives, you know. And then if you're fighting against a D.O. Mirror match, that Dio can exit with their own time stop. It pops your sparking to do so. And then when player one Dio's timer, it hits zero, they can't move anymore, but player two Dio continues.

That's a lot more. Ridiculous about a work. Ridiculous. You know? To put that into a, you know, completely unnecessary thing and just like you put the extra costumes in so that you can get Shadow Dio or, you know, him from the final fight, et cetera. Right. Amazing stuff. and then you're like okay cool

I've overcome that challenge what's next what if I did something completely original and batch it crazy here comes YuGio Yujio Yuji is so it is but it's also an extension of the stand mechanics they built for Dio in the sense

that there's an original mechanic introduced I guess although they have multiple people on the screen yes yes yes yes exactly yeah true true right so yeah now you've Yugi running around in the background like Pokemon trainer. Great idea. And then your, you know, your dark magician and every other thing that he calls out on his

card is coming into the fight. And that's very Captain Ginnu, you know, in sort of application because, you know, something pops up and then runs and flies at you for two seconds and disappears. But what they're doing gameplay-wise is they're taking the Aska-R-Kroits kind of card system where in Guilty Gear Strive he's like going through the deck and like everything while you're fighting and applying it here

but making it more Yu-Gi-o faithful and I kind of realize I love that now that there's two of them I love fighting game No longer an exception Yes it is now an archetype Fighting game characters that are playing

cards while they fight you are the coolest thing in the world I love these characters There's so much fun. Because there is a third character that could be added. There's a 2XCO character. I'm sorry, a lead character called Twist of Fate. That plays cards as his mechanic that you could have as well.

So the idea of like, I'm too busy focused on this to fight you. Leave me alone. I'm going to just spam and try to deal with my real objective here is a fucking 200 IQ brilliant thing. It's so much fun. It represents that man perfectly because he can't be bothered with the fight. He's trying to get his cards right, you know? And I remember looking at this kind of distracted way of playing. That's what Phoenix Wright is as well when they make Phoenix right to fight a game character.

But he's just a little, he's just, he's not there enough, right? It's a little too hard to get things going with him into his turnabout mode. and like going to dig through the ground for the evidence and stuff, it's like it's almost there and then landing the objection is a really cool activator. But the card system I find just like a, it just, it's way more, it gets right to the heart of it, the heart of the card, so to speak. You, you randomly have 30 cards to pick from. And unlike, you know, with Aska, where you kind of have to reshuffle at the end,

at the end of Yu-Gio, you spend all your cards, you're dead. So you can never get. to zero cards. And while you're going, you get the color of the card that's either like a creature card or, you know, whatever the different types are, you know, and you can set them to five, there's five inputs that are less like your first, second, third, fourth, and fifth slots. As you're digging through and sending your attacks out, every once in a while, you get an Exodia card.

So can you get all five? If you do, Exodia comes out and fucking kills whoever you're fighting. Right. So good luck. But in the meantime, running and searching for Exodia is a difficult strategy, especially because when you have four pieces

and there's one left, you can only use one special at a time to hunt for that card while running from people in a game that has a super dash that flies towards you. So each card piece, each Exodia piece gets harder and harder to get to.

Not to mention you don't want to accidentally use it, you know? So it's fucking, it's super fun to turn that into, you know, a fighting game mechanic that echoes the tension of trying to do it in the real card game. So just, yeah, successfully

done with that. Also a card that it pulls out like a berserker, I think, a warrior, an undead warrior or something, where it then randomly draws a card and if it's a monster card, it attacks again. And so you just

get a random chance of going up to like seven or eight times in a row each time it draws a card, you know? And you just have this like, do it's a yellow card. Attack again. Do it all. It's a yellow card. Attack again, you know.

So that putting all of that into this mod is ridiculous. Isn't exciting enough. I need to not know what I'm doing on purpose. It would have to react to myself. Hey, man. You know, in a world where, you know, weapon master is a thing. And, you know, where you can play as characters that are just, always random select every time.

Moku Jin. You know what I mean? Just, yeah. Design a fucking character that is like distracted with their subsystem. And then if you let me pull it off, I fucking win, you know?

Very, very insanely cool mod. And I look forward to whatever the fuck Kong Meng does next because there's more content coming to Dragon Ball Fighters. And I wouldn't be surprised from here. They go, hey, I'm going to make my own fighter or my own thing. You can see that if somebody wanted to do a full overhaul of this game to make it a Yu-Gi-o fighting game,

a fucking Jojo fight, and anything fighting game, a jump superstars. It can't, anything's possible. It just takes time and effort. And the last thing is, are you down for

a Silk Song Act 3 spoiler cast because I beat Silk Song. I sure am, Willie. I sure am. Okay. Put the title up there. All right. So it took a second,

but I was able to beat sink. Well, that game's fairly long. It is. They, much like Hollow Knight over delivered, Silk Song actually over delivered to the expectations of Hollow Night fans expecting them to over deliver. Correct.

Which is pretty crazy. The Silk Song, spoiler, is starting now. Ask me when I beat it. When did you beat it? It was this morning. It was this morning. It was this morning.

Because you, you got to lace and you got it to her last night and you either stayed up or you woke up this morning going, God damn it. I have like X amount of hours to beat this before the podcast. I'm going to do it. So which one of those was it? The latter.

Yeah, I knew it. I got there. And I would have done this. I got there and I was like, motherfucker, I'm right here. This is the finish line. You are standing on the finish line. On it.

You know, and got there. So, yes, act three of this game. So we pretty much talked about Acts 1 and 2. Pretty, pretty solidly at length. They're excellent. Yes. And so when it comes to this one,

all right, I have many a thought because this game over delivers, delivers, and under delivers in different ways simultaneously. You're completely right. It blows my mind how this game can be everything at the same time. So Act 3, I will just have, I have a short statement that I think will go right into the start of your feelings.

Act 3's existence is crazy and there was way more unique stuff in it that I would have expected. it is way, way easier on you than I wanted it to be. It sets up an expectation early where they're going to block off areas and force you to reroute your way through the game. And then they give you fast travel immediately. And I want to believe it's because they originally didn't give it to you that fast. And then went, this is annoying. I 100% agree that's what it was.

I bet you, right? It feels like getting the fast travel back again right away feels like a patch to like user feedback when the game came out. But before it came out. Because like it feels like people are like, I can't believe you want me to redo the whole game with all these new paths just to get to lace. That's it. That's it. Exactly. Right.

And so because the truth is, is that like the highs are so fucking high. They're pretty high. And the lows are low, but this game, when it gets annoying, I talked about this a bit with Great Grohl and like the run-up to that and Act 2 and stuff. It does stuff where there are moments where I feel that the design gets obnoxious. Yeah. And I can, I can, you know, I'll elaborate on some of those. But to start with some of those highs, you know, right off the bat, okay, go get the hearts.

right? This is the new goal. And I'm like, okay, I hope that what we have here are fights that are right up until this point, the lost sinner was my favorite thing. And I'm like, if we can get like a bunch of fucking sick shit like that, this is going to be the best, right? And where did I go? Okay, so one of the things that happens in the fight,

right off the bat was, the Pinstress mission pops up. Yeah. And then that's like, the Pinstress wants to fight you. After a big buildup throughout the game, let's go have this moment on the mountaintop, Mount Fay. You get up there. Get all the way back up there, fucker.

She's fucking dead. Oh, no. And then some people walked away and went, what the fuck, she's actually dead. You hit her, she gets back up. Hey, let's fight. Right. Little fake out moment.

That was wild, though, because I went, oh. Yeah. When I got there. you fighter it's super underwhelming yeah that fight did not at all live up to the fucking hype of

in the hut dueling with her and it was like man like because the duel you have with her she's basically just throwing darts from a distance and then dropping down and doing one thing and then and I was like oh that was but that's a bummer you know I was looking forward to that being a really cool dual fight.

Fortunately, there are others that deliver on that. But that one did not. Carmolita. Carmelita fucking rubs, dude. What a great fight. What a great fight. I discovered and started to use a mechanic I had not realized was going on for the whole game in that fight, which was slashing projectiles, causes them to pass through you because Hornet deflects them. Because man, that bitch throws a lot of fucking projectiles at you.

But not every projectile can be deflected like that, right? Some energy is just going to be energy and you just have to dodge it. Bullets or bullets. Like project like physical items. But things that are coming at you, which and you have to learn that in the fight right after this. But yeah, Carmelita, beautiful sequence getting inside the dream and taking her on in the scar arena, you know, fighting a bunch of the red ants and stuff as to as well. a little a little a little a little gauntlet leading up to her very very doable not that big a deal ultimately fine for just building up your resources and going but the actual fight with her is is

great it's excellent it's incredible you know and you're getting all of that with that juice flowing where you're like okay like like lost center right flow state every movement locking in dashing every second she's moving you're moving she spins back resets to the edge of the screen sets up the projectile she jumps in the air and you're going to get one of three different things happening out of that. And, you know, I love those moments of just like, you make the read and then here comes the second mix, you know? And there's sometimes where you're like, do I chance it?

Because two out of three times I have a counter ready, but one out of three times I'm taking a hit here. Right. Nah, fuck it. I'll just wait for a safer swing, you know? Carmelita was super satisfying. I fucking love that. I, it's up there.

I don't know if it's my favorite, but it might be, like, I'd have to, like, like, It's been, there's been some distance, but like, Lossilac Center, Carmelita, it's super high up there, amazing fights. Then I went over to Coral Tower, where the big fucking sword, crustacean dudes are chilling. And I was like, I want this to fucking deliver. And you get a gauntlet. And I'm like, okay, it's a fighting gauntlet. I'm down for that. But it goes and goes and goes.

And I'm like, this is starting to get long in the tooth. I get it. It's a big gauntlet. And I'm getting annoyed with it. And then you beat the third one. And then there's a shortcut back so that you don't have to do the three anymore. And you go, okay, okay, fine, fine, you know. I was getting pretty, I was getting frustrated with the gauntlet.

And, you know, during that point, you're kind of learning how to, like, deflect back the projectiles and manage everything perfectly. And, you know, eventually you learn how to deal with all these enemies. But then it just becomes, like, the combination. nation of the flyers and the ground pressure, because the flyers in this game always have the same thing, which is they move away when you approach them. And that one AI behavior of like input reading as you jump towards them makes every single flying opponent super annoying. It's the most annoying any day and ever. That's why you got your thread toss. Which sometimes works, but not when the world is full of spikes on any side, you know. And, yeah, so that was one where like, okay, you're getting on the cusp of that, right? Fought Nyleth, the plant wall boss. Yeah, she's all right. It, like, that was a...

The real fight is the dude before her. So that's the bit, right? I'm like, this is, this fight's nothing. Right before her, Seth is a, just a really cool duel. Not that hard either. He's not super hard, but a cool. guy. But he's a cool duel that you gotta get in. He's got to get in. He's got a shield

and he's re-he's counter. He's blocking your up of your setups. He's doing counters. Phase two dive bombs and he's got some good fakeouts. So I really, I liked the Seth fight. To the point where like, yeah, the actual, kind of like with the Coral Tower, the final boss of the run

isn't much because the run itself was meant to be you know, the real challenge. There was that. Are you familiar with are you familiar with the background to Seth? Nope. So Seth is a fan character.

Oh. Created by Seth Goldman who passed away before the game came out. Oh. I see. Okay. I was going to say, was that like a Kickstarter thing or okay. I believe it is.

Damn. Okay, well, that's awesome. Good stuff. I hit a point around this time where especially looking at how long this act was going and how I thought it was shorter but then it started throwing missions in

where it's like okay I'm just jumping online now there's stuff here there's a specific moment there's a boss fight I didn't do in that act oh yeah there's two boss fights I didn't do it that act okay Because the exact moment

I remember being like, I'm rolling my eyes, fuck this, is ridiculous, was I was getting the fleas because you need to get all the fleas to get your big upgrade for your pale oil. And one of the fleas is off in this location

where you're just like, what is even, you're in the wrong area, you're in the wrong room, nothing makes sense, Wisp fucking Thicket. Yeah. So do you remember

where Wisp Thickett was? Sure does. It's at the top of the city, yeah. That's where I'm like, this is obnoxious. That one's really hidden. This is obnoxious. It's silly. And we're revisiting this conversation, I guess.

So like I don't want to do the same conversation we've had every time. But you go, all right, either you go, this is a game where community is a part of this. Or you can make a game where you make secrets that'll be there for decades, right? If you're meant to find it on your own, it'll be there for years. or this is going to be a game that's discussed online, so we're going to uncover everything. Personally, I don't have a problem with a game that decides to have lots of,

to have secrets in it and things that last for years and you come back to it later. I think the fact that Punch Out has a special punch that people discuss, a special tell that people discovered fucking 20 to 30 years later is crazy, and that's a really cool piece of video game trivia. I think that secrets and things like that should be Easter eggs and should, ideally not be like really regrettable FOMO content, you know? Okay.

So I have two takes on this. One of which, one of the only times I can think of that streaming this game in its entirety will actually help dramatically because as I'm about to leave a zone, people are like, you might want to go back and get the flea there. Fuck. I'd be like, oh, okay. Fuck. So my actual flea searching scenario was.

quite low, quite low by the end of the game. The second of which, and I think this is actually very important for me, Willie, you don't have to get the 100% mark on your sulk song save file. You never do. You never do. Right. Yeah. And I didn't. You don't actually have to do that. I did because I wanted to. You did. Okay. I did not. And I was actually really disappointed that like the bosses in act three do not count for 100%. it's all completion of it's all items on hornet yeah okay okay yeah so i remembered i start so with wisp thicket i started to remember how i was feeling towards the end of hollow night

and i started to remember feeling like the feeling of the overstayed welcome that kind of starts to bother me where i'm like i'm enjoying this but like it i really like okay i'm i'm about good to go here and you don't have to do things it's optional absolutely there's a feeling of stuff that's like you don't want to miss rad cool shit that's the best fights in the game and the best moments in the game the best things in the game

you do want you you are okay with missing stuff that's flavor that's you know extra sometimes things like so Seth for example I learned after the fact that after you beat him he doesn't die right no he falls in the water and then apparently he's wandering act three I never met him again

because I just went to the end after that, right? But that's things where I'm like, oh, that's super cool. You can wander around and find that kind of encounter, you know? Or things like that or like, yeah, the ability to get unique dialogue, you need, you know, things where you use the dream nail to kind of find extra pieces of lore off of people, off of corpses and things like that. These are all acceptable things where you can be like, yeah, I'm not going to go get all

the lines of dialogue from everybody by playing music in every room. but I'm really happy to know that's there and I could go do that, right? But just straight up like a whole zone is fucking off screen here in this bullshit you would never look for it corner. Yeah, we don't have to see it. Right.

So this is where I'm grading the, this is okay to miss and I don't feel bad about beating the game missing it and this feels bad about beating the game missing it. So it's really tough because... Approach the credits. This line is different for everyone. Right.

Right. So I spoke to somebody at length about this who will remain nameless because I don't want to blow up their shit. And they got to Act 3 and they were miserable because they were struggling through Act 2 and they got to Act 3 and they were running of this problem where they could I can't stand this.

When I start talking about somebody and I go so and so will rename Nameless and people start to try and guess the person I'm talking about. And they're always wrong. They're literally always wrong. Like 100% of the time. It's infuriating. But they were struggling and they asked me for advice about like, okay, so how do I beat this?

I'm like, oh, well, luckily, you only have to kill three of four possible bosses. But yeah, they're pretty fucking tough. they're crazy, crazy strong. And they were kind of miserable about it because they were like, I just want to beat the game and be done. And I'm like, well, you could have just beaten act two and gotten the normal ending. And called it there. Yes.

Yes. Like that, that like act three exists specifically for sicko freaks who go, but I want more though. Um, yeah. And, and the thing is with Hollow Night, I just remember, like, leaving coming back, leaving, coming back. And like,

spiritually, motivation was draining out of me, unfortunately, despite really enjoying the game. I was, it was a cracked boat with a hole in it that was filling up with water.

So in this case, looking at it, I'm being aware of like, okay, I know where my limits are, but there's things that I do care about where I'm like, fuck,

some of these fights, I want to, you know, I want to make cleaner. So I'm like, let me go get my pale oil. and I fucking

I identified the courier's request as something that was more annoying than challenging to me so I said fuck that thing I'm not doing it and then in Act 3 guess what it's time to go do it

if you want to get your pale oil you should really done it well fortunately there's an in Act 3 there is a route that you can do with your traversal tools that makes it a lot less annoying another thing people can do

is go in and kill all the things first and then run it back up and not to down. You know, but either way, it was, that was one of those zones. Like,

I don't, this mission, I am the entire, like, do the stretch, run back to the place, drop off the thing, feels annoying and frustrating and not fun to me.

So I'm like, I'm not going to do these if I don't have to. Until I need to get that damage upgrade that matters, you know? So I, I'm in a very strange place for, uh, for Silk Song because,

uh, very similar. So Silk Song is much better to me than Holonite. Not because of any mechanics. thing. Where Hollow Night, when they added like the God song, DLC, whatever the fuck is called. Yeah. Yeah. Got home.

Got home. And it was like, hey, you want to just do a bunch of boss gauntlets? I was like, no. I fucking don't. Whereas when Silk Song, I got to Act 3 and that you want to do this, Pat? Yes, I do. I do want to go fight these guys? Yes.

Do I want to go scrounge up and find the remaining fleas? I absolutely want to do that. And my trip through Silk Song is 100% on camera. and I am in a flow state from second one to the credits. Like it absolutely perfectly matched everything I had to give it and everything it had to give back. It was ideal. Okay. And as a result, I'm like, I came to the conclusion of that that game is probably too hard and too obtuse.

because if a guy like me who is obsessed with video games and plays streams video games five days, six days a week as a career, is it the only type of person that's in a perfect flow state for the whole thing, then that means like 99% of people are not in a perfect flow state for most of the game. In fact,

they're probably highly frustrated or missed tons of stuff. So I'm going to say like right off the bat, if I were to be walking out of, of an area and someone been like, you'll actually go hit that wall, right? Or maybe don't leave yet. If I had a couple of those, it would have really taken the edge. Cut a couple hours off that edge. It would have taken the edge off of what I'm feeling right now because a lot of this frustration is like, oh, come the fuck on with that wall. Yeah. Right. Well, it's supposed to be a little hidden secret for you to play. Right. So here's, so here's another one, right? And, and this is holding,

I'm hoarding my memory lockets because I want my. I'm hoarded my memory lockets because I'm waiting to use them on the good one because the ones I've gotten so far are not the what I like and architect is good here. I'm going to unload on that but I still got some more to go and then you don't find that last one until eventually it was literally it's really really late it's great ridiculous right and so I get the last one I got shammon which like up the fucking you go get it off the fucking side and then now I spend the memory lockets and and Until this point, I had all the lockets, but I just didn't spend them.

So I spend the last ones on the Shaman, which are... There's five upgrades from Eva in a row. And then I finish off Eva, the last upgrade from Eva, which is the most amazing one. Fill your silk at the bench, you know? And I was sitting on that upgrade, but it's like, do you want to waste it on crests you're not going to use? Yeah, the Eva, the Eva stuff being tied behind using the lockets as you find them really felt like a miss... a misfire on what they think people will actually do. You could have just easily made it like on picking up the locket as opposed to using it, right?

Because if you want to hide a secret like crest, weigh the fuck over there or whatever, but now this other really important upgrade is locked behind that potential thing. And like, you know, the vibes of these crests change the game massively to such a degree where like if, let's say Beastcrest was the default, I would hate the game. right it's like it's such a different feeling with each of these that you're now putting other mechanics so the fomo is dominoing into other bigger dominoes of fomo that are like no this is not designed well this is an obnoxious bad way to do this you could have done this in a way where yeah no i think i think the way that the eva upgrades is like the only thing in the game that i would point as like i think that is like an objective miss it's a miss it's a miss um because i had all of them i had like i had like 15 and i just i was like i'm going to use them all on the next one that i that I'm like really like, yeah, this is the one. And I just didn't find it until Shaman. And then someone mentioned, hey, Pat, you should probably just use those because it

unlocks a bunch of upgrades. I'd only use the ones on Hunter. That's it. Sucks, dude. It sucks to just have that. Like, no, she's waiting for you to commit these points out. I would have beaten the game and 100% of it before getting those Eva upgrades. Had someone not mentioned it to me.

And the ultimate infomer is I don't know what the last crest is going to do. What if it's amazing? requires every one of these locks that I have sitting here. I think every, I think every crest other than which should have been on the map to find in the, in the, yeah, yeah,

or just, or at least, doesn't have to be critical path. It doesn't have to be critical path to me, but the idea of putting it behind a, a hidden wall in an obtuse location is, is fucking super frustrating. So,

um, anyway, so there was that, right? Uh, that, and I'm, and I'm,

so I'm starting to get this. this like push and pull of like, oh, God, I'm loving these parts, but I'm hating these parts. I got the cross summons so that I went and fought the crawfather. And then... Cool. That was cool. And the reward for that is, hey, currency is not an issue anymore. Great.

Yeah, currency wasn't an issue by the time you get to that anyway. Well, the stones collecting. Well, I was like stone collecting was getting annoying, you know? So for me, at least at this point, I was like, no, no, no, this solves my, my, stone problem. Then, what was the other one? Oh yeah, and so then I get, as I'm rolling back to, like, kind of say goodbye to the NPCs and see what's going on with their dialogue. A couple more missions pop up at the, what's, fucking, at the town.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Trobeo, Trobeo, part two. Awesome. Phenomenal. Great fight. locks it in. Great, just overall love that fight, brilliant, and just like walking out of that going, yep,

this is what I love about this game again. Like, I love Trobeo. You're pulling me, you're pulling me. I'm loving this part, you know? The automaton had a fight with that. Love the automaton fight. Sends in, you know, closing off these stories, two really great moments, you know, where I'm starting to wane, but I'm like, no, that was worth it for the closure there, you know? And then after those, I'm like, all right.

I'm ready to just go to the bottom of the abyss now. I don't care what's left. I've done it. You know, so then let's go hit it. And so I stopped at 90% collection and went down to the abyss. Took on lost lace.

Well, before that, before that, I have to say one of the things that I went back and checked where I was like, wow, this piece of music during the descent to the abyss is incredible. It's called Last Dive. Yeah.

Really good. I think the best song in the game. It's phenomenal. I was also like, it's also kind of like familiar. And I went back and last dive is the music to the first Silk Song trailer. Oh, cool. Okay. They used the last like bombastic piece of music in the game as the trailer.

Phenomenal. I did green prints already. I talked about that last time. I talked about self-song. So I got four hearts and I was like, oh, there's four. Interesting. Just in case you wanted to skip one of the suggested boss. Loved that, just to recap.

Thought that was an excellent sequence. Lore-wise. Then all this plot now jumping into the end of the game and you're going through the memories. Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff. It's interesting to see some of these connections and like, okay, these are the three queens. you know, that, uh, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, and, um, and, and lost lace is just a strong finish, you know, oh, yeah.

Great flow state boss fight. Just clean, fucking fight. Do, like, clean duel, clean duel with a little bit of bullshit. Clean duel with a whole lot of bullshit. And you have to eventually turn your brain off to the bullshit and just focus on where she's gonna be. So I, the idea it feels so good. It's so good. It's so, it's so, good and here's why because as it got more complicated in each phase it felt like you're having a one v one clean duel but the world is exploding around you and batch and bulls like the cliff sides are collapsing and you have to not like get caught up in it because you're fighting this person and like her muck and her and her abyss and her void are all environmental bullshit but behind it it's still a clean duel i love that aspect of it so much i think lost Lace is kind of perfect because it's, like Lace's move set is more or less the same as it's been

the whole game. Like she has a really dedicated move set. And her additions like the, the tentacle throw or the stuff coming out of the ground or stuff like that, these are the same exact moves that have been added to all the Abyss enemies in Act 3. Like none of them are like brand new. The bullets, It's actually two things that you've seen just matched together. Yes, it's with the void corruption, absolutely. So you've had your training on that to a degree as well. It reminds me there's a moment in the original trigon where Vash is having a standoff with brilliant dynamites neon, and he flips the coin up and they're going to draw when the coin hits the ground.

And like a bunch of cliffside rocks fall onto the deck and explode everywhere, but the coin doesn't hit so they don't move yet. And it's a bit like that where it's like, okay, the ground is exploding into all this avoid abyss attack that you've seen before and none of that matters because behind it she's stingering at you. That's

what you got to look out for. Yeah. You know? And I'm beating it by clashing against it to disable the hurt box or the hit box there as well. And then she goes into her parry stance, you hit the parry, you trigger it, but then you jump in such a way where you avoid both outcomes.

I kind of unfocused my eyes a little bit there near the end. Like, just like, okay, I just like, just like, I'm going to stop talking. I'm just going to unfocus and I'm just going to just react. Going to try and not overthink it. Just looking at her. Just focus on her. Just dodge everything and then throw hits in. And like I did it with Shaman, which gives you three of the silk spells, which really fucking helps.

But you have to ground heel, right? No air healing. I see, I know that it was like DPS. low, but I stuck with Reaper the whole time because I just really enjoyed it. Those big fat hits. The juggles and the fat hits felt great. And it's, I know that, and I've seen people say like, you're holding yourself back and you're spending longer in fights than you need to by using Reaper. Yeah, but I'm living. I'm alive. But I, and I'm just, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. And bouncing up super high, double jumping and healing way up in the air. A lot of fun, you know. Um,

so yeah, I did it with Reaper, Threadstorm. Um, and it's, I was using my cog fly. and ground spikes for a while there until I ran out. And then I was like, fuck this. And I put the down drill on. And then I saw, so that was the move. Like I basically was like, okay, let me bring the drill out. And reserved bind, multi bind, you know, all that stuff. Dice, et cetera.

And just like, it's a great finish into a super jump out of the abyss. Loved it. I'm so glad that I'd switch. Like, I was using architect. here and there. And I had the the poison cog fly like thumbtack shit going on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I was

like, I do not want to fucking fight the last boss with this bullshit. Because I know exactly what's going to happen. I'm going to get good at the first phase and then I'm going to turn all this shit on for the second phase and the boss is just going to die. And I'm going to rob myself of this cool ass fight. Which is why I switched to shaman for it. So I found that I started whenever I did that, whenever it get to the next phase or the last phase

and I would start putting all the cog flies out and filling the screen up with bullshit, all the damage would start going, but I would not be paying attention to the phase enough. My attention would get too divided, and it actually started making me play worse. Ah, okay. So keeping it pure and with the tools

allowed me to focus more on, because then I would start going for hits, because now I'm like, it's DPS time. It doesn't matter. I'm taking damage, get in there. Go, go, go, go, go. But when you're not doing that, you're like, no, no, no, not yet, not yet. No, there's your hit.

All right, back off, wait. How many of the, no, you can't go yet. Okay, now, right? And you just get, you learn to eliminate all the opportunities that are like potential fuckups and only go for the sure shots, you know? A little nice nod there at the end, too, as well, where, you know, as you make your jump out, you almost make it. and then it's not enough.

The void is catching up. And then, oh, shit. Your little buddy's here to give you an assist. Little ghost. Doing a little... Thanks, bud.

Little, little... Appreciate it. You know? And then out you go. Um, yeah. Yeah. That was nice. Um, and, um,

you know, for a character that, like, talks back to everyone talking to them, I just have to say that like, I immensely enjoy this type of experience. than having a silent insert your own dialogue type character. I must prefer a Hornet who's like, that's not me,

but I love finding out more about Hornet, you know, who has her own responses to things and Pochunkah. Hornet's weird. Yeah, I, it's a strange little freak. She's down to fight and waste time

as long as she can claim that it's to best her skills, you know? We can play your stupid little mini-game festival, but only because it'll show. sharpen my skills as the world is ending. Yeah. You know? But I just,

it just makes me want to continue to take any setting with any main character who looks like they're relatable, you know, Robbie Robertson man, as we just said. And then make the other person controllable. Make the person who's not looking like a regular guy. Make the one with the weird silhouette, the one that you're following. Yeah. You know, um, great game. Just, uh, let me ask you, Wully.

Now that you've, you've played this great game and you've felt. like, oh man, it, oh, the number's too much, but also not enough. Are you excited for the Sea of Sorrow D.L.C., which includes parts of the game that got cut, and you can see in the game's original reveal trailer. That fucking water trailer DLC shit can kick rocks. I'll get there when I get there. Oh, yeah. Are you?

When's it going to get there? Oh, no. Oh. When did I get to the Hollow Night got home and shit? You know? I really hope it's a new area and not a goddamn fucking boss. I like, I,

like, granted, I like playing as Hornet more than I like playing as the night. Yeah. Like, in terms of an action game thing, but like, man.

No, when we're playing lace song is when I'll let you know how that goes. It really does feel like it's building up to that, doesn't it? We're tagging. We're tagging the rivals in. Yeah. And I wouldn't mind that shit.

Lace is cool. Yeah. All right. Silk song, spoiler cast off. It's interesting how silent the game can be for so much of it. And then how it can just drop exposition like crazy. Yeah. You know, in massive dense.

Like if you're a lore digger, it's got to feel like feast and famine for the entire game, you know? but yeah no cool stuff cool stuff there there there that's just enough too that like you actually don't I thought you were gonna be in a situation where like

if you didn't play Hollow Night you're gonna be super confused by stuff but they did just enough to be like no you probably can get what that was and that's a that little shadow looks like that Holo Night character yeah and the characters in that flashback

are you know stuff that was from a different place and that's it anyway all right Done. That's a good game. I recently won, Silk Song recently won Steam's Game of the Year voting.

I don't want other games to be made like it. What do you mean? I don't want other games to have that approach of like, um, insane secret, obnoxious wall. This is for 10 years from now as development. I don't think the game was made that way.

I think the game was made, hey let's put a cool little thing here. I genuinely I don't I don't think the intention is oh there'll be secrets forever. I think the intention is that they put a bunch of stuff that you don't have to find.

Yeah, but you know gamers need 100%. I don't need 100%. I just want to enjoy. I want the cool experience and there's like I said, there's a threshold and I realize that my threshold for the

cool shit behind the walls was starting to detract, you know? And if you make it so that I can like be line to the ending, but the best fucking fight in the game is behind the wall that, you know, was, and like, what if I loved shaman? In the end, I didn't use it much. But if I ended up loving shaman, oh, it's my favorite by far, by far, by far. So that's a crazy thing to put at the fucking finish line and then so on and so forth. We're repeating ourselves. But I do prefer what Expedition 33 did in terms of like.

The finish line's right there. Here you go. These are the places you can go explore. And I feel like that's up when you're done. I feel like that's a song also kind of does that. But this would be as if Skiy had to stop at certain parts of the ocean that had no indicator of something being there. And then like go down and pull out what you mean. I guess you mean.

Pull out a secret map, you know. All right. Personally, I thought that was the perfect game I had played that year for me. And then in so doing was like, man, this is definitely not the perfect game for lots of people because I'm a sicko freak. Yeah. And the alternative would have been playing it on stream. You know, that would have been a different experience too. That might have been actually more positive in general just because of like finding fleas and shit like that is so annoying.

And even things where like sometimes you pick something up and someone might be like that thing's really good that you just picked up as opposed to sometimes where I pick something up and I'm like, eh. What's the point of this? It doesn't seem like it fits my build, you know? Like, you know what that reminds me of? Reminds me out a long time ago when I was like, man, Metroid Prime 2 is so good. Metro Prime echoes, right? And I kept running into people like,

oh man, I couldn't stand the like end of the game, go find the McGuffins to do it. And I'm like, oh, I already got all the ones that you could up until that point. So I only had to find like five. And then I found them like instantly.

And like that, that just play style difference just changes. the whole fucking game wildly. Wild. wildly different. So that's me. If you want to tune in for more, going to be continuing Expedition 33,

playing some more fighting games, and chilling over on Woolley versus on Twitch and YouTube. Yeah, that was a beefy skong. Spoiler cast in the middle there. All right. How's it going? Pretty good. We should take a quick break because I have one, two, three, four, five, six, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen,

fifteen, fifteen, fifteen, nineteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty, two, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, 5, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 games to talk about. We'll be right back. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. Oh, yes, sponsors, whom I love. Might as well do it now. Yes.

It's always time for sponsor. This week, the podcast is sponsored by AG1 Athletic Greens. Yes. So this is good. My wife keeps annoying me about not eating greens. Eating greens is important. It's good. And it, it sucks that like for something that you, you know, kind of, it's, it sucks that you can ignore it for so long. And it's sometimes you got to think about what, what's your input? Are you just eating candy? Are you just eating candy? Is it all candy going in your gut? No, not allowed anymore. Well, look, AG1 is a very simple way to get something that you need in your body. you're getting 20 it takes 20 seconds one scoop 8 ounces of water it's drink it first thing in the morning and you're getting um again all the greens that that you need you're getting your and it tastes great as well you're you're getting your nutrition for the day that's your multivitamins your probiotics your superfoods your antioxidants all in one scoop um something that you know when i'm i've been trying to get myself more healthy i've been trying to think a bit more about this kind of stuff and

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Thank you, Shopify. Thanks, Shopify. All right. Where are we starting? All right. So I've been continuing down on Beat the Bats. Beat the backlog is now at 50 of 102 entries completed. This last week just fucking flew by that shit.

So I'm going to try and go through these as succinctly but clearly as possible. In order that I played them, I have a nice little chart in front of me. So thank God that's there or otherwise this would be impossible. Number one in the list is Ena Dream Barbecue, which is free. So there's a good start. it is from what I can tell a weird as fuck walk around and see shit game

based off of a YouTube series super psychedelic imagery super gonzo like I don't know if I would even call it a plot um some very very light platforming for some very light collectathon

search around it's mainly just a thing that looks fucking cool and it's cool to hang out in and see weird shit and talk to weird characters. Vinny is voicing a character named Dratula, who's like a fake vampire. Half of the characters speak different languages.

Of note, one of the tutorial characters is the only character I have ever seen in a video game ever to speak the Quebec French. Wow. Like unmistakably Quebec. super weird. I felt very seen, which was very strange. So this is just all vibes, wild vibes.

It's a lot of vibes. I don't know. I didn't get that far into it. I don't know if there's like game stuff in it, but it's cool. It's really cool. And also it's free. You technically already own it.

It's apparently like three, four hours long. It's just a weird. Is that what we're calling free things now? We're just putting the Uno school of thought onto everything free. It came with your Xbox. You already had. You already own it. it's free. Yeah, okay. I have the oldest Xbox

known a man. Yeah, well, you should have it. Come on. Reggie just said there was a Quebecwa dude in what movie was it? We just, something. Anyway, whatever. The random cameo. All right.

But yeah, Ena Dream Barbecue, super cool. Nice animation. Free. You have it. It's got bunch of cool voice acting in it. You have Ena and Uno. You have it. Next up is a game called time flies in which you play as a tiny

little fly in a completely black and white environment and all you do is you fly around and buzz and do things and it looks it looked like a kind of like a little sandbox game where oh I strummed a little guitar by flying

past it or I tickled a person's feet by landing on it that kind of thing but then when you die after 84 seconds because you live in Canada and the average life expectancy of Canadian is 84 years. It changes your time in the game to whatever country you live in. After you do that, you get a bucket list. And you discover that the bucket list for this little fly is stuff like learn an instrument or make a revolution, or meet a fan, or tickle somebody's feet or make somebody laugh or these little things.

So you have to use your 84 second life to buzz around and see how you can pop up. possibly do all these little bucket lists in one life. Interesting. Okay. And there's cute little tricks like stuff you can do with clocks. And then after you finish that bucket list, you move on to a different environment with a different bucket list and continue on. It's very much like untitled goose game, but with flies. With flies.

Yeah. Okay. The interesting thing is that I did a lot of exploring in the first room and found like a secret puzzle piece. and said one of 12. So there's a, there's a meta layer on top of it. Okay. More,

or minutes. Yeah, super charming little minute game about how to be a fly and do silly fly things. It's really very, how many of these games that you're playing,

do you, like, scroll down and see, like, reviewed by 10 people? Uh, a couple. Okay.

Because not everything that, Pete, that comes in is, like, a huge hit. Some of it's, like, quite obscure.

I assume that most of what comes in is like, oh, this was a blind spot that we had to some thing that was popping off. Sometimes. And sometimes it's like an outrageous piece of fucking shit. They just want to go, ha, ha. Right? Even where.

Yeah. So next up is a game that I got off of GOG called Total Overdose. Why do I know that? Because you've seen it, but you didn't play it because it looked, it looked like it would have been bad. Yes. Because it is a max pain type of game, but in like, like Mexico. So total overdose is super ridiculous.

It's from the aughts kind of like era of like Grand Theft Auto. Max Payne. Right. Supposedly we played it on Mystery Box, but I can't remember. And it is a pretty decent Max Payne like knockoff that actually has way more gameplay depth than Max Payne does. Oh, wow. because you can do shoot dodging, but you can also do wall running, wall flips, wall dives.

There's a headshot mechanic. There's also an open world with you, with cars and vehicles that you can drive around. Spicy move. This was the origin of spicy move. Yes. It's got spicy moves. Right, right, right. Killer Mexico soundtrack.

It's super silly. It's super, super. like it was and as I'm playing it and I'm like consistently impressed like how much stuff is in it and how like individually successful all these little pieces are I'm like god damn it I hope this was made anywhere but Mexico anywhere but Mexico and sure enough the developers for total overdose are in Copenhagen Denmark yeah okay that they are outrageous incorrigible mexibos this is okay the Copenhagen's interpretation of Mexico

cool. So you get like, you get like a spicy move, which is you running around with like two guitar cases that just shoot a bunch of guns and all sorts of stuff. Madiachi. It's so much more impressive than I would have thought this, this game just like, it had, it definitely had the chops that like Max Payne and like, like, like maybe like Grand Thief Dotto 3 had in terms of tone and what was going on and how it actually played. But for whatever reason, it just didn't, just didn't get that groundswell it needed. And that company eventually went under, I think, after ChiliCon Carnage came out. Oh my God. Okay. But the flow of gameplay also is like Drake and the 99 dragons. Like running up the wall,

it's got that same flavor to it. It's, it's punching above its weight. Wow. It's super cool. local move next up I played clover pit which is a belatro but a slot machine uh oh

there's more than one of these it's pretty good it's got a it's also like buckshot roulette but a slot machine and so you're you're you're like you started up and it literally says let's go gambling

with the little voice line and everything. And so what you're doing is you're trying to hit certain dollar amounts by hitting the slot machine. And then you're going and buying like upgrades that, you know, give like vampire survivor or like blotro joker style upgrades to your slot machine. And then you keep going and keep going and doing upgrades. And I was like, I have to stop playing this right now. Okay. And then I stopped playing it.

And it was like, holy shit, 48 minutes have gone by. Okay. That's disgusting. so I cannot play Cloverpit can't do it I beat slots and daggers like I completed that yeah so this is

but it's a really good one of those okay it's a really yeah I glazed out like I straight up like like unfocused and entered the grandma zone yeah the danger is there yeah great game super cool but uh

slot machine oh yeah no dude I hit credits on Ballex Pit. Like I will fucking, like I, you know, I'll get sucked in. I saw, I saw someone describe it as a certified baby scrambler.

In my chat when I was playing it. And I was like, yes, absolutely. Keep them away. Okay. Ballotrol but, but thing is,

yeah. It's a genre that is, is, is, it's starting to grow legs. So next up, uh, page actually drop by for this one.

we played Road to Empress. Wully, have you heard about Road to Empress? Can't say I have. So Road to Empress is part of a new type of video game blowing up the charts on Steam. It is translated sea dramas. Oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh, wow. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Like full-blown C drama. Live action. Okay. and the video game is what? The video game is making choices

and the occasional very rare quick time event. Did they turn a show into a game? No, no, this is Road to Empress.

Okay. There are a hundred of endings. Many of them end with your doom and, and death. Is it like you are the mobile game where it's like

pick between the pregnant Empress and yes, it is, bully. Yeah, okay. It is just,

like that. Okay, okay, okay. I know I got it, got it, right. Okay, so Road to Empress, you are playing a lady-in-waiting slash future possible consort for the Imperial Kingdom and you go down there along with all the other hopefuls

and then what happens immediately? Some bitch drops her fucking peony brooch and says, oh, I should give this to you. It's your brooch, but guess what, Wally, wearing that brooch makes the consort of kindness go nuts because she's so jealous of all these young women.

So she has you branded with the broach as an iron and then you die. So then you decide to be like, no, it was actually, it was actually her brooch. And then you argue about it. And oh, no, now you both die. Are you in the animus? Yeah. Why are you glitching out? Then you restart and then you go on and you're trying to make waves, but don't make too many big waves

because all these women, they're all in fighting. They're all out to get you. And there's the prince and the parents. is pretty handsome, but that other prince is not. Yeah, no, no, the guy with the long hair, though, because like, yeah, the prince is hot, but the other hot guys is just hot too. So, uh, and it, it is like, hey man, you, you want to

watch some fucking C dramas. Whoa. Maybe play choose your own adventure. And the answer is, yeah, dude. I totally do. Scandalous. So yeah, no, Road to Empress is super cool. Uh, it's, it's, uh, it's awesome. Don't fall for the long haired prince. It never ends well. The game also has a

really, uh, so it has leader. boards. And I was really confused as to what the fuck the leaderboards were because it's a choose your own adventure game that has like death endings. It's like it's, you ever play like a space quest or Kingsquest? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, it's that level of like choice based fatality, but like in an FMV game.

Okay. So how can there be a leaderboard? And so the leaderboard is for every character in the game as you play through Road to Empress, you unlock like gifts or I think it's like tomatoes. and you can give gifts to the characters you like and throw tomatoes of the characters you don't like. And that's what the leaderboard is. The leaderboard is just a popularity chart.

Oh, the characters in the game. Wow. Okay. Okay. Oh, rotten eggs, not tomatoes. It's my mistake. But yeah, no,

it's super cool. It's super cool. I mean, I think the first FMV game I ever saw was like Gabriel Knight and then Fantasmogoria. And, you know, and an after night trap, I feel like we had a long power gap

so it might be time to return. There's others. China has discovered that Steam likes C dramas so there's more coming. Well, because after her story and what the fuck was it like something night or whatever the one

there's that one movie game that was something night yeah whatever. Anyway, I thought this trend was over with but bro I want I want East Asian telenovelas. That's what I want. Late shift. There we go. Interesting. And, and, and,

Road to Empress is definitely one of those. I played hauntie. That's H-A-U-N-T-I-I, which is a super charming, like black and white kind of little ghost game about escaping hell that has, it's kind of like a little baby Zelda. Okay. I don't know how to describe it other than that. It's very charming. It's very cute. I have a strong suspicion. It's not very long.

But I liked it. I thought it was pretty cool. I played a game called High Fleet, which is a sicko game for freaks. It is the dune game for people who play caves of cudd or dwarf fortress. So like the tutorial is like, here's how to chart your airship in this weird alternate history to the location now land it properly with like realistic thrust

mechanics and then go back out and then go to the shop and outfit your stuff while doing political maneuver. It's a real sicko game for logistic freaks. Name again? High fleet. Okay. It's for sickos.

And if you're a sicko, if you're like, oh yeah, I love these like low graphics like absurd, complicated, like in-depth mean games with no tutorial realization. Oh yeah, it probably is awesome, but not for me. No, thank you. Pretty HUD. Remember how I said Arkham City feels like the epitome of like the seventh gen. So I also played Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Oh. Wow. Okay. Yeah.

So I played the first Tomb Raider reboot and I didn't play the second Tomb Raider reboot. So this is the third one. Yeah. I threw in the third one. I don't know shit about this. I know that first one. We curated the fuck out of it. It opens up with like a dramatic car crash. Sorry, a plane crash. And then it opens up with Lara deep in a pit of very tight rocks as she has to like climb out of the pit and like scrape her her young body against the rocks and grunt and groan on her way out. It's still fucking injury.

It's still. Yeah, dude. Yeah. Absolutely. And then. And then I'm like, all right, let's go raid some tombs. And it drops me into like this like cut scene of like trying to figure out who some bad guys are at some party. And then it's like a forced slow walk and talk for like 10 minutes.

And I'm like, fuck this. I'm out. I'm done. Wow. I didn't like I played it for I don't know, like 20, 25 minutes and did not get to the part where I could jump. Yeah. I mean, Tomb Raider

remake one had that too. Like, there's some slow down fucking... Like, my tolerance for it is low now. Yeah, like I don't want 20 minutes of walk and talk

at the beginning. I don't like it. So then what was the rest the person hoping you would get to there? Like, what was... I put that on there. Oh,

okay, okay. You wanted to know. All those, I bought that whole trilogy for like $6, like a couple years ago. Okay.

And I wanted to see what the fuck was up with the third one. So your choices are just also influenced by what's on sale. Yeah, of course. Okay, okay, okay. Or what's actually just hanging out

on my steam backlog for realsies. Also, of note is that when, when Lara is crawling through the rocks, I was like, so she's not being horribly injured, but I described the camera,

the camera, like, you're a big fan of like, oh, the camera's talking to you. Yep. Like the camera's telling you something. Yep. And with the camera in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is telling you is that you are close enough to smell, Lauren. Like, it's in smell distance.

You know what I mean? Yeah. To actually get the whole character in frame. You're not focusing on anything particularly explicit, but you're so up in there that you can almost see the waxing. In an area that shouldn't allow a camera in,

like, you know, it doesn't have to focus on body parts for that to be a thing. I know the energy. Those games are like so degenerate horny. It's so weird because they won't admit it. That's the part. They think they're slick.

They think they're like because they're on the download, but they're not. Because the first one, there's two things going on is one. They played Resident Evil 4 and they went, you. Right? Which is a fair reaction. Yeah. And then it was like, oh, like what, like how do you establish the grit and how tough this character is, is to

start off with these crazy injuries and show how she overcomes it. He's a survivor. But then it just keeps happening and over and over and over again, you know? And yeah. It reminds me of when I was playing Bioshock Infinite, the DLC, and there's a scene

in which Elizabeth is like being threatened with like a lobotomy and it's like very close and very intimate and it's like tap, tap, tap on like her skull. And somebody in the chat said, wow, you would never have this scene with a guy ever. You would never have this like super close intimate scene. Like there's a weird under like creepy sex current to it. And yeah, all those Tomb Raider games totally feel like that.

Like there's totally like a like a weird undercurrent of like, I want to protect her because she's getting hurt so much. But you're the one who designed her to get hurt in these situations. That's you. Yeah, no, I feel. I feel like if there ever is moments like that, I'm popping the fuck off. All right.

So I'm going to, I'm going to, I see some folks saying what about Dead Space 2? Dead space, there's a difference between a person being restrained and forcibly attacked in a weird, intimate way and somebody doing something to themselves. context is very important. It's very important. Anyway, moving on. Love when the camera talks to you. Yeah, I played something called Shape of Dreams,

which purports to be like a rogue-like Diablo. But it actually feels like a Mova and doesn't have the juice. So that is the end of that discussion. Speaking of juice, the next one is Ultros. Have you seen Ultros? I know that name. It's the Metroidvania that looks like it's made out of goo.

Yes. It's made out of goo and slop. Yes. It is really weird. It is really, really, really, I might already own this, but I don't think I tried it yet. It has a super, like,

acid, psychedelic art style. It is a well-controlling, but not crazy, well-controlling Metroidvania that has you know, a bunch of goop upgrades. It has a really strange thing where as you kill enemies, you eat them and then you build up some stats

and then you cash them out for your core abilities like wall jumping and cowards and stuff like that. And then you beat the first boss and the game loops you back to the beginning and changes things on the ship that you're on and removes all of your Metroid vaney abilities again. Okay. So you have to do, I think, like, six or seven loops.

And every time you do that loop, you are building back up your kit. I truly believe that, like, if you showed Chris Nolan this trailer, he might just die. That's possible. I, there is, I really, definitely possible. So, like, this game is so unafraid of color. It's fucking, like, I applaud it. It's kind of eye-searing. I applaud how.

I applaud how much it loves the full spectrum of colors. It likes saturated color is what it likes. And everything's goo and mess and gorp. Every single screen has the full gamut on it. It has the full poland, you know? It's super cool. Moving on, we've got Knight Runner's Prologue. Nightrunner's Prologue also has a demo.

And it is a jank-ass CRT-style old racing game in like nighttime Japan highways. Crazy good aesthetic. Swag. Pretty good racing. Great soundtrack. super bare bones

super super bare bones free demo right super cool not a whole lot there that that's kind of it

okay but you do own it so you might as well try it out the next one that I put on the list and I put this one on the list because I have to know and I thought people would be interested in seeing me having to know. I put on Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta Snake Eater. Ah, okay, just to know.

Just to know. So I played it for about two hours and I discovered things that I did not know. So I originally looked at that and went, I don't get the point of this game. This remake seems completely pointless. Right? I had just replayed the HD collection version of Snake Eater and was like this completely holds up immaculately.

What you played on? PZ. Okay. I ran it at 4K. It looked gorgeous, etc. So I'm playing Metagosolid Delta Snake Eater and I did notice a couple of things. One, if you remember from the original trailers, they just used the same voice acting,

which was the right decision. and it looked like they used the same character animation. So it looked really janky because it was a very old animation with super high-end models. I don't know if they changed something, but they definitely smoothed something out because now that animation no longer looks janky.

It looks really smooth, looks quite good. So at the bare minimum, this is a, like, gorgeous-looking remake of Metal Gear Solid 3. And it does have the addition for the very old camera, like the top down camera, which no one should ever use, and the new one with new controls, which are more or less the same.

So in terms of why does this exist in terms of that question, I think I have a pretty straightforward answer that I thought from the jump, which is, Kojima is gone, and we tried to do something embarrassing and MGS survive happened, and let's never fucking do that again.

Let's just stick to what has been established because we don't want to have to write anything because we can't. Let's remake what was already good and just make it shinier. Yeah, but I mean, like, why does it exist, like, for me when I have this other version? Oh, well, yeah, sure. But, like, we want Metal Gear as a franchise to continue making money, but we don't have the ability to write new things into it, therefore.

Yeah. So it's also, um, uh, it plays like the new controls play like a cross between Snake Eater and like MGS5. Like it is not, uh, the same as MGS fives, uh, but it is a little more modern. fine. I like it. There are however two really massive chains. Oh, it also includes like a bunch of like every mode like Snake

versus the apes and Snake versus Bomber Man are there as well as there is a multiplayer mode. It's not as good. I've been told it's not as good as the original snake versus cards or anything like that but there is a working multiplayer mode that you can play. There are

two things though that really and I mean really made a huge difference in the early game. The second of which is that when you go into your camouflage meter, right, your little menu and pick a camouflage, it saves that camouflage to a quick list and hitting up and down on the D-pad just selects from all the camos you've picked and it tells you what your camo index will be when you put it on. Oh.

And when you hit like down, down to like select olive drab and let go, it will just there'll be like a one second load screen and your camera will be switched and you will just go throughout the rest of the day so that is a massive massive improvement you know style switching in DMC3

yeah wow but that's not the big one the big one is that I went to shoot a guard with the Mark 22 hush puppy and the Mark 22 hush puppy in Metal Gersol 3 Delta has bullet drop

and it has a lot of bullet drop. So from like 15 feet away, you wouldn't notice any difference. But as a result, you cannot snipe people from 20, 25 feet away with the hushed puppy anymore. And that one balance change

completely re-contextualizes the entirety of MGS3. Okay. And makes me much more excited to play it because the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the trank gun in two and three was ridiculous it was fucking it was crazy how good it was it like in two it just neutralized the entire video game in fact I would say in metal gear solid two it turned the franchise into a different feeling thing it became a

absolutely yeah a walk and sleep you know instead of a sneak yeah so it changes it to like oh I have to actually do a bunch of these areas like an a real stealth game instead of just taking out the binoculars and zooming in and then switching to the thing. As a result, I'm much more interested in playing it because that is a much more interesting way to actually encounter a bunch of the encounters in the game.

Does the drop-off also apply to like lethal guns as well? Okay, okay. If you want to do murder snake, yeah, all right. Well, because guns in that game, like silencers have have what do you call it like um durability they have durability and as and when you kill a guard their blood is there and then it's harder to hide them and there's there's like a whole bunch of different things and also that changes the the boss fight with the star so yeah okay the game totally has like objective value um even for somebody like me who's played that original to death

um as well as looking nice didn't run as well as i would have hoped um but what are you gonna do I played Risk of Rain Returns. Oh, okay. Which I don't like Risk of Rain 2 very much. Risk of Rain 1 is like the exact same game as Risk of Rain 2 just in 2D. Has way better vibe than Risk of Rain 2. It's way like lonely or like grungier vibe. Yeah, it's all right.

It's charming. not my kind of thing. It played well enough and I understood it a little bit better. Maybe I'll go back to Risk of Rain too. But yeah, it really feels like, hey, for people that love Risk of Raid 1, that old version is kind of really old.

Like when you turn up the resolution, your character becomes like two pixels tall and the game becomes like an unplayable mess. Risk of Rain returns as a remaster of the first game? Of the first one, yeah. Okay. That's cool. I played X Zodiac, which is a,

Star Fox clone. Yes, exodias, yes, exodiac. That I know. And it's a pretty good Star Fox clone. That's it. All information required is there. Yeah, this is, the pop this on the list a while ago.

I saw a good show that game is. Star Fox clone, but like with like I want to say like Sega Outrun, like background stuff going on. 3D what was it called 3D world stages 3D world runner like

3D world runner almost yeah or you know like there's even fantasy zone yeah sure sure there's a little bit that specific you're you're traveling along a checkerboard floor coloring thing going on yeah very cool yeah it's cool it's cool controls well looks cool has the same like kind of aesthetic that it needs to it's cool uh I played a game that everyone has been yelling at me I have mispronounced it's spelled

G-N-O-S-I-A, which I would pronounce as nocia, because G-N makes a silent G in English. I have been informed that it's not. It's G-N-O-Sia. Genosia? Supposedly. I might have said nausea. Just looking at it. Whatever. Sure. Okay. It is one of the weirdest fucking things I've played in this whole thing. So I'll start with the fact that I hate it. Let's just start there. Okay.

Like I absolutely fucking hate it. I hate it a lot. So it's a visual novel. And it is a visual novel on like a spaceship that is you doing a visual novel storyline of rounds of among us. Where there's one person on the ship that is a genocia or whatever, which is like an evil alienation. in presence and will kill someone in your sleep during the hyper sleep trip on your spaceship and you have to figure out who it is and there's visual novel elements to it as well as running rounds like werewolf or among us or whatever and um the first thing that I noted it's the only

it is the only visual novel I have ever played in my entire life that had bad controls what the what does that mean how you're like how how how could a visual novel have bad controls you click and or walk. That's so you don't walk. You don't do anything. You only click. So the game wants you at the end of discussions,

like, you know, at the end of the thing, they're like hit W to talk. So it'll just, it won't load up your choices. It will go, no, hit the W button to talk. So you hit W to talk. And then I'm like, some choices load up. I'm like, oh, cool, I'll hit W and A and S to move up and down, right?

No, no, W is to talk or not talk. Once you've hit W to talk, use the arrows up and down on your keyboard to move up and down your choices. Oh, is this, was this like a phone game? I don't know. That got turned into something, because I feel like you run into weird UI problems every time they try to take something. It's a port. And then you might be like, man, I'll hit Spacebar to move through dialogue or make choices. No, only enter, only the enter key.

Vita port. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And someone said that it has controller support. The controller support did not work when I played it. So I'll judge it against the controls of its native platform. I was playing it on the PC. Thanks. Yeah. Okay.

The dialogue didn't sell me. The controls for a visual novel was poor. The core concept. is interesting, but yeah, nothing about it sold me at all. The fashion on some of these characters is pretty interesting. Some of these characters are dressed in a cool way. They're kind of weird and out there. I don't mind some of these designs.

Nothing about it appeal to me at all. And I came away going, how did you do bad controls on a visual novel? That's wild. That's wild. Yeah. That's unbelievable. But as far as like some people wearing like space fashion goes, I'm like, oh yeah, there's some characters

I'm looking at here. Anyway. Genosha. I also got like a very strange reaction when I had that, which was I checked it out on Steam and the Steam reviews are overwhelmingly positive. And there are actually a lot of comments in that particular backlog video about how great the game is and how much people love it. And that's crazy. Because I hate it so much.

must be good to some degree. It must have like a cool story. But like my my first impression was, this controls like shit. I should rename, beat the backlog to first impressions are important. And if you make a video game,

you should have good controls. It seems like it's currently in the discussion because an anime just came out. Yeah, that is probably why. Moving on, I played a game called Majesty HD, which is a re-release of a very old game called Majesty, which is a top-down Sims-like, not quite RTS, which...

Majesty Gold? No, Majesty HD. Okay. I don't know. It's one of those. It seems like a classic and a bunch of people in my audience really, liked it. It is also like decades old and has no tutorialization and did not come with a manual. So I picked the first mission and could not make heads or tails of it at all. Like I put it on like my pass like criteria, but like I honestly can't make any real judgment on it at all because couldn't figure it out even a little.

Magistee Gold HD Yeah Yes Someone in my comments said Made this like multiple thousand word essay About how I was playing the game wrong To which I would say I don't know Probably because the game has no tutorial

Release date 23rd of March 2001 Sounds about right So Okay Um I played a game I played an RPG maker

game called super lesbian animal RPG. Have you seen this? Yes, I think I saw the clip of the kiss. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw, okay, so I saw that and I was like, is this Freedom Planet too?

No, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, all right. So it is the gayest video game I've ever played. And it definitely wears that on its sleeve. You are playing as

a trans lesbian furry who is dating her her butch lesbian girlfriend who they want to get into magical adventures or heroism in their gay furry world made out of pastel colors. On top of that,

the writing feels incredibly appropriate for the group of people and subject matter contained within. It definitely has like, young lesbian new girlfriend energy. Oh. If you remember that.

Okay. Okay. Okay. In your 20s, just like, just absolutely fucking like fawning all over. Embarrassing levels of fawning. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So the good stories are the ones where it like kind of focuses on how that naivete backfire is hard on. No, I don't know. This seems, this seems to just play it straight. Okay. So like, I think, I think the funniest bit is. that the core concept of your main character is that she only wants to be an adventurer or whatever is to be a paladin so she could heal her tougher girlfriend, which is like half of the MMO people I've met in my life. That's the story is your significant other gets into MMOs.

Like, oh, I don't know what to, I'll play a healer. I'll play support. Damn. In addition to that, it is a very competently put together RPG maker. PG. Oh, this looks great. Every single asset bespoke. Every single enemy is like a cute little pun. Every single screen. Even the company logo of the game dev is gay. Like everything is fucking all in on it.

The nominal. There's a line of dialogue in it where they will look at each other. They go, that's pretty gay. Like, it's on point. Yeah. Okay. It is on point. Also, the color palette is. like gorgeous. Insane. It's a very gay color palette, obviously. It's from the flags.

You know, assignment understood, mission accomplished. It is, it is the it is like the most like overstand. That's perfect. Yeah. There are, oh, somebody reminded me there are some sliders in it.

When you go to the options at the very bottom is sliders for if the game is art and if the game is political. on two on both sides yeah so you can you can go into the options and put like zero to a hundred if the game is political or not or if the game is art or not it's a little too political which is really funny um i don't know about that also like it like it like oh and there's also a ludo narrative dissonance slider i forgot okay oh yeah yeah no but it's also just like super charming and the RPG elements like really works. So one of the first things that I noticed in the very first battle you have with your

girlfriend is that they, when they're in the same party, they both gain the ability special ability kiss. Yeah. And if you kiss your partner, you get a 15% bonus to your stats for five turns, which is crazy. So it means before every fight of notes. Always kiss. Always kiss. Is it the same animation? Is it the same little, little MS paint? No, it is not. It's not the low MS paint animation. It's just like a first person

like RPG. But super charming, super cool. All gamers wanted was a way. All gamers wanted was a way to turn off the woke. And it's look, you've got an option for that now. So it's in there.

You can put that game at 100% political or not. Whatever. So that game's cool. I played a game called Fly Night, which was in some of the India Awards. I didn't know what it was. Fly Knight is a King's Quest game, but he plays a fly.

Okay. It is an old style Kings Quest game that does not believe in textures. Everything is super fucking flat. Everything is super old style 3D. And it's a solid ass Kingsfield game. That's it. It's cool.

I played... Somebody was upset with Frumsoft's direction change and decided to take it upon themselves. Oh, did I say Kings Quest? I meant Kingsfield. My mistake. I'm talking about the old from software games. I somehow knew that.

Yeah, you knew I meant that. Yes. I somehow gathered correctly. Yes. So you know Aspire Media, how they suck shit. ASPYR. Masters that are terrible.

Mm-hmm. So the legacy of Kane Soul Reaver remaster is excellent. It's like one of the best re-releases of a game I've ever seen in my life. It's super clean. The new graphics are like much better, but they're also like just layered on top of the old graphics. And you know that because if you click R3 at any time ever,

it will switch to the PS1 graphics. Okay. So you can like switch it back and forth during every cutscene. we um oh god i'm just i did qa for a bunch of aspire shit so i'm just trying to like fly through because there's so much they port i know and and and and and and i remembered being a mixed bag like but yeah no they it's it's it's super solid it plays it runs like the dreamcast version did uh all the voice acting is intact and all the sound quality is good everything's rock solid and the thing that like the thing that stood out to me that they really cared is that you must

remember the Soul Reverb one like CG intro where Kane throws Rosseille Oh dude it was a super super super high end CG cutscene right and the unfortunate reality is a lot of times you get these remasters and you're like oh well you know here's the upscaled version of the cutscene

no I don't know how they did it or how they found it they found the original file I guess because the cutscenes are clearly the original files being re-rendered at a 4K resolution like it is it is not upscaled it is like it is the real deal done good it looks great

yeah I have seen I think I've seen more of blood omen than I've seen of Soul Reaver I think overall that's nuts yeah I remember watching that fucking nuts because people were playing that a microplay back in the day and I was watching someone play a good like half an hour or an hour of blood omen

but I did pick up Soul Reaver one to remastered as a consideration for the future. Yeah, no, those those games are great. Soul River, there was a point where people like, is Soul River, PlayStation,

Zelda, and like the answer is like, kind of, if it came out more than never. Moving on, I played parking garage rally circuit. It's a very cute, very retro style game where you're doing time trials around a little parking lot and your little PS1 cartoon. car plays well has like has like ridge racer four drifting and Mario cart drifting combined

it feels really good uh the game's option menu is the old game gear option no game genie menu like with the purple and the gray yeah uh and you pick like between like four different versions which is like original hardware or like emulated on a handheld or the PC port of this fake game that never came out and these are all these little RC Pro Am cars a love Yeah, it's super cool. Love it. I played Scandal. Yep.

Did you try evil mode? I did not try evil mode. I played about an hour or so of Scandal. You played an hour of Scandal? Damn, how'd that go? British people have to stop. They're not just British. It's all over.

It's Europe. I'm well aware. I'm well aware it's all over. But like it gave me an excuse to call out British people in my chat for what the fuck is up with the phrasing of we went and got a Chinese and it's like four pieces of chicken

on top of fries. Okay, so for anyone who doesn't know, Scran is apparently the word for the food you buy at a stadium when you're going to watch a footy match. And there's a browser game called Scandal where you have to pick between two choices and you have to choose which most people

online agreed was a better value. Which includes the price. Yes, it's not just about which is more appetizing or which looks gross. It's what is more worth it for the cost of what you're getting. Crazy. That throws the wrench so hard into the works. The amount of the amount of British foods that are just like a thing on top of fries is like outrageous.

outrageous. And like, yeah, I see just say street food, but it's like it's not street food. No, it's not it's stadium food. It's particular to that environment. Yeah. Always at the, at the pitch with a footy game happening in the background. I saw American dishes. I saw Italian dishes.

I saw a lot of Brazil dishes. I saw some Hungarian dishes. And like by, by far the British stuff was like the worst every single time. Oh, dude. Unbelievable. Like gray hot dogs. and you're like, not the good kind of gray hot dog. Like, the one that used to be pink with the color is gone now.

So evil mode is it takes both sides and fucks with the color by inverting it, or sometimes making it black and white, or sometimes making it blurry. So stupid. So you can't fully see what the scrant is versus another obfuscated scre. Yeah. how many times how many different disappointing ways

can you see a piece of fucking craft singles dropped on some shit like take a sad meal and drop a craft single on it and just your heart will sink I got to see and sometimes you get to see like some of the worst things

on the site so like the one that I got that was the worst thing I saw that day was like a pink uncooked hot dog on top of a hot dog bun for like $10. I'm just like, yeah.

I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God. That's unbelievable. The dry, the dry, McCain fries, the super fucking frozen kind where you crack it open

and it's just like if you hear a snap because it hasn't been fucking cooked through. Unbelievable. I played a game called Pajama Sam. No need to hide

when it's dark outside. Couldn't get OBS to capture it. The fuck? It's an old game. It uses scum. Oh, yeah, you're fucked. My monitors would go crazy every time I load it up. Okay.

No, fuck it. I played a RPG called Russell quest. Oh, I know this character. Okay, yeah. Russell Quest, yes, yes. Have you played Russell Quest? No, but back in the day we were considering this.

Did we do it? We either did it or considered it for, uh, no. What am I? Is this from back then? I don't know, but we never did that on the channel, never. Okay. Was there a Kickstarter? I don't know.

I know wrestle quests for some reason. It either was a Kickstarter way back when, or we talked about it during the, the, WrestleMania era or something. So, Russell Quest is one of the weirdest concepts. It takes place in a toy box,

a magical toy box, in which all the toys are real and have come to life, like Toy Story. but the child that Owens owns this toy box just has a shit ton of wrestling dolls. Just a ton of them. And the beginning of like the narrator of like, hey, let's see what happened. And, you know, the story of the wrestle quest is a podcast hosted by Jeff Jarrett. Okay.

And I'm like, what? And then you go into it. And like the first thing you see is like this like 100 foot tall. statue of macho man Randy Savage. Yeah. And talking about how your your main character loves Randy Savage so much. And he's good. He wants to grow up to be just

like him. And it is this like weirdly official has tons of real wrestlers in it. Like Jake the Snake and Jeff Jarrett and these people. But also has a bunch of knockoff characters made up. That is like the most inside wrestling shit you could ever.

imagine. The RPG is like a Mario and Luigi style kind of action thing, but it also includes like when you fatigue an enemy by beating them up, you have to pin them and do a little pinning mini game or you have to psych up the crowd and you build up your entrance like a bunch of custom entrance stuff. Okay. Okay.

It's ridiculous. Instead of choosing classes, you choose how you get hype. Are you a technical wrestler? Are you a strong man? Are you the underdog? I think this game, I think I might have known about it either behind the scenes from a while back or that there was like a legal thing that happened with it. And then it got to the state it's in now. But there's some sort of backstory to this game for a while that I remember from years ago.

Your special moves are called gimmicks. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And one of the first things that you do is you play legally distinct Brett Hart. Mm-hmm. And his buddy, who's like a moose wrestler in fake RPG Canada. And you have been chosen to get heat over on the new guys and push them up. So you have to do the boss fight, but you also have to do. do the boss fight in specific way and like let them kick out so they can get the big finish

um at which point leads to them talking shit to you after the match and your buddy's telling them to like be careful or if you want to shoot we'll shoot and yeah yeah this is for like a subsection of freaks so years ago during russell mania uh we workshoped the idea of a wrestling game where you would actually have to sell as part of the game. I remember that. And this is the closest I think you're getting to that. By far. By far. This game is for smarts. This game is for smart marks through and through. Like the, there's in some of the little dungeons, there's like a Metroidvania thing where there's a table blocking your way. You have to get a, you have to get a gimmick coin for the type of table it is so that you can manifest a Lego character and slam through the table.

the right way so you can go like it's ridiculous yeah and the only thing that I could find that was like a downside is when I went to the steam reviews the game came out in 2011 and it has some serious bugs that just never got fixed because the game was never supported long term okay it is an old thing because I'm looking at this that says release date 2023 and I'm like there's no way because this this had legal problems a long time ago like anyway uh yeah that's that's that's cool um God. Hold on. Well,

maybe I was wrong about 2011, but yeah, no, there are bugs that never got fixed. Yeah, this is bothering me

because I feel like, whatever, it doesn't matter. There's a, this is, this sounds fun. That sounds fun. Nice.

So this seems like the kind of game that I get really, really, really, really, really into and then encounter like a soft lock and then be completely

miserable about, you know? Great animation, though. Yes, super cool. I played, Rido Cusanoha, the mystery of the soulless army.

Yeah. I started the game off and I said, hey, I would like to thank my colleague, Willie Madden, for manifesting this game out of nothing. That was really cool that you did that. So you're playing the remake, right? Yeah. Okay. Did you see how it's just a different fucking game?

I, so. It's not a, it's not an HD at all. We're going to, this is, this is by, so first, of all, Rido Cusanoha versus the Mysterious Army or the Solace Army or whatever the fuck it's called is a really good RPG. It has very significant problems. You probably

went on those problems at length and the number one of which is like the random battle shit in that game is fucking nuts. It's a lot. It's absolutely crazy. It's a lot. So they said, hey, we're going to make a Rida. It's called Rido remastered. All right. So what is it? So they said it was going to be a remaster. And now

it's out. It is not a remaster. It is a full-blown, exhaustive remakes. Secretly. Making 3D out of 2D environments. Yeah, the original game was all 2D pre-rendered environments. This game is in full 3D.

They have taken the battle system from the second game and put it into the first game. Yeah. And then added on top of that, so it actually controls awesome. Yeah. They took every change that the second game added to

quality of life stuff and added it here as like the right demon will come out when you need to talk to an NPC. You don't have to switch them in the menu. The game has full voice acting in English. I got a phone call. I got a phone call from a friend about, like, for

like a half hour, just yelling about how this is a secret remake and how crazy it is that they did this without telling anybody. It is nuts. They have taken what I thought was a pretty good but flawed game and they have just massively, massively improved it. But even though it's all in 3D,

they maintain all the camera angles from the first game. So there's a couple areas that, like, there were different pre-rendered backgrounds depending on which way you would enter them. That's in 3D, but the camera will just shift to give you the correct angle. It's super cool. One of the combat overhauls I remember hearing was the, basically sword and gunplay is now just meant to keep the MP up for your demons as they're fighting.

So there's two. there's weak attacks and the only thing that weak attacks does is increase your mag so that your demons can keep doing their fighting and then strong attacks which are your actual damage dealing moves that don't

increase your mag so you're just you're doing your support skills you're fighting you're doing uh you're fighting alongside your monsters and you're encouraged to use you know your different attacks or whatever to enhance them to stay out longer as opposed to running them dry and then switching over to your inferior style.

And then you have, then you have, way better. Like a dodge that will do like a, like a, like a, there's a perfect dodge to get behind enemies. There's the ability to hide your demons on your body to make them dodge Aeys.

Uh, you get two demons out at a time, which was something from the second game. Yeah. Which makes a lot of those fights a lot easier to handle. It's crazy. And I believe. And it was so,

uh, what my friend was saying is like, it's suspicious enough that it's like, okay clearly you know Abedon King is going to come because you did all the work for it Rastered came out this year you did all the work for it

the question is is is some crazy person secretly trying to push them into making another game I have to imagine the answer to that is yes because the work is there you don't go this exhaustive for nothing and what they should do

is they should make it a new PS2 game like it should not be a fancy like like modern game, it should be just another one. Mega Man 9 it. Yeah, absolutely. Super cool,

really impressive. I don't know why they didn't call it a remake. It's super weird. It's called a remaster. It's fucking strange. Like secretly better than what you think it is. Yeah. It has been rebuilt from the fucking bottom up. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe because they were, maybe somebody was not allowed to do that and

did so anyways, but they had to keep a secret from, you know, the powers that be. Yeah. I played a game that you're more familiar with the series than I am called Azer Stryker Gunvolt 3. Ah, okay. I heard good things about the sequels, including three, where you can do new shit now. I just played that first one. That's all I knew. So it controls fairly well. And I got to the second level, which has a cool, like, throw out little talismans to tag a bunch enemies and then hit an attack and you go, whoa, blah, blah, blah. Like you, you, you judgment

cut through them. You're playing as Gunvolt? Yeah, no, you're playing as some lady and Gunvolt's a dog that's with you. Oh, yeah, okay. Okay, well, that would explain where the gameplay improvements came from, I'm sure. Yeah, all right. And, um, did you play, what was

that Mecca game called? Damon X. Yep. Do you remember playing Damon X. Mackina and like, being like, I wish you would all shut the fuck up so I could play the game? we yap in nonstop just like nonstop

like unbelievable unbelievable how much and all of the dialogue in it is I'm going to start calling it proper noun dialogue which is the term the game is invented has gone to the place the game has invented

to do the thing the game has invented and like it all just reads jargon science Garg and sci-fi. Yeah, jargon-sci. It makes no fucking sense at all. And it's nonstop. And I got this feeling of like the gameplay is fairly solid,

but it's not nearly solid enough to make me put up with this like awful story. Yeah. So Inti creates back in at least Gunvolt 1. It felt like they wanted to do their own Mega Man, zero series thing. But they also wanted to really distinguish it and make it so that it's not just a bunch of bosses on a wily select. screen.

That's literally exactly what I want. Everyone has a ton of like anime lore and detail to this world that's living in full of, yeah, right? All of that I could look past if the game itself was was more fun. But then in the end, the main thing I criticized was Gunwolt's gameplay itself, the main character is passive and unfun. The girls gameplay is like fairly, fairly good. But I got to like the 10 minute mark and I just started skipping through cutscenes. and got mad that I couldn't skip through the dialogue fast enough.

Which was not a super great sign. So, yeah, I was like, oh, no, man. No, no, that was a pass for me. I don't know. You know, I'm just thinking, like, for some reason, the feel of things, like, tagging a bunch of enemies and then doing a big shock to hit them all just feels like shit to me. It just makes, it just completely un-funned.

Because then you'd hate that shit, because that's like the core gameplay. No, I know. That's, I did hate it. Back on Friendcast, I ranted about how much unfun I had playing Gunvold. Oh, well, that's the core gameplay. Yeah, tagging and zapping. Is tagging enemies and then doing a big hit. Hate it, hate it, completely unfun compared to shooting things and fighting them. But I also, I'm super down with that in like Missile, Bangayo kind of form, tagging things with missile and shooting them with a big atano circus and doing stuff like that's, like, it feels a bit better because sometimes you're engaging, sometimes you're not, but Gunvolt, it was just tag and zap. And I was like, every room sucks.

This whole thing sucks. Yeah, this is tagging slash. You know, now the music's playing. She's singing. Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't do it for me. I played a game called the Drifter. Okay.

Which is a one of the only point in click games I've ever played that I really, really, really, really liked. It is about a homeless guy going back to town to get to his mom's funeral. It has a super amazing pixel art style. It also has full voice acting for literally everything. Everything you examine, everything you use, every person you talk to has full voice acting and full narration, which, man, makes a big fucking difference. It controls well with a controller.

You hit the right analog stick and a little radial wheel shows up of all the things of interest in your environment and all the symbols on them. And then you hit right trigger and you just walk over and do. do them. I love this kind of pixel art. Yeah, it's great. Oh, yeah. It's the voice acting is not just very charming and also very well spoken. It is also Australian, which makes it very different. The drifter. Okay, very, um, old, um, indie point and click. Um, um, what's the fucking, whatever, Lucas, Lucas arts. Yeah. Like, I, like, I, Monkey Island kind of thing. Laura Bough.

Cool. Police quest. Has like straightforward, logical progression. It has a cool, like, little selector for when you go to talk people. The subjects are just pictures at the bottom. Little animated pictures of what you would talk about.

Very interesting premise. Somebody in town's killing a bunch of homeless people and your character for whatever reason is able to die and then redo events, like live, die, repeat, or something like that. Okay. Super cool, super impressive, super charming, gorgeous, cheap, well-acted, can't say enough good things.

There is a list of backlog games on this list that I am like quietly putting away for later. And this is definitely one of them. Yeah, old Sierra point and clicks. That's that's the time, man. Only a couple left to go. I played Voin, V-O-I-N. Is that a sound effect? Yeah, maybe.

It's an early access game. you do first person melee combat. It has really, really, really good first person melee combat. And it has a stage selector where you would go to like little Skyrim areas and do little open world things with really, really good melee combat. It is also extremely not finished. Fucking tiny build. Yeah. That fucking logo every time.

It is extremely not finished. But it's got a really, really, really good parry. in really good melee feel. Early access, 26 bucks. Yeah. All right. I played Gotham Knights.

Um, the other one. The other one. Yeah. The one that's not actually an Arkham game at all. Yeah. It's the one where you play as Backgirl or Nightwing or the shittiest looking Robin design you've ever seen or Red Hood.

Mm-hmm. And it, it, it runs really well. So the opening cutscene is a mess. And normally I wouldn't point that out. But the opening cutscene is Batman saying, I'm dead, right? Like I'm a dead Batman. You guys got to pick up the mantle.

And then you are watching, I'm looking right now. So this is 59 minutes. How long is this cutscene? You are, we're up to 13 minutes here. We are up to... The bat embargo lives. So it starts a 59 minutes and you get control of your character at the 1 minute 16. It's our one hour 16.

So it's 17 minutes from getting starts to gaining control. Walk and talks or just nothing? Full cutscene. And it's this cutscene of Batman fighting Raichol, ghoul and losing. But the cutscene starts with if you're seeing this, I'm dead. And then cuts to like a 13 minute scene of him fighting Raich and then a one minute scene of his funeral. And then a couple minutes of the four bat. kids talking around his grave.

Wow. And I needed... 45 minutes is what you give these games, right? I give them whatever now. There's no timer anymore. I give them fucking whatever. So some of them get fucking 40 seconds and others get two and a half hours. Oh my gosh.

So at the 17 minute mark, I got to play and I picked Red Hood because I'm like, well, this is clearly going to be the stupidest worst character. So I want to see what they got going on here. Gunman. Yeah, so he's using rubber bullets. I swear. That's what Red, that's what Red Hood. No, they are.

No. They're rubber bullets. I swear. That's the. Oh, yeah. Well, no. Okay. Well, he's using, he's using clean, friendly bullets.

Yeah. And the gameplay, he feels really bad and sticky and heavy. And the gameplay is like way, way, way, way worse than, any of the Arkham games because it's not made by any of the same people, but it's pretending like it is. And I played this game. So this is 59 minutes. I played it for

fucking I played it for half an hour. And it took half an hour to get to like the first punch and kick fight, which sucked. And I was then later informed that

the reason why I had such bad time was the red Hood is the worst playing of them all. You just picked that. Because the tutorials don't let you do the third person shooting that is most of his gameplay. I see. Oh, he's not doing Arkham's gameplay with guns?

No, it's knockoff Arkham gameplay. So there's attack and heavy attack and then triangle is your ranged attack. And every time you kill an enemy, I'm going to take a screenshot here. I'm going to take a screenshot of my own stream and send it to you because it really sums up

like everything going on. So every time you kill an enemy, you get a big fat like XP bar on the side of the screen. And damage numbers are coming off of everybody because the game also has like a gear treadmill. We're getting demolished. Because it's an online co-op multiplayer game.

Okay. Yeah. It's not the bat. So it's fucking, it's, it's shlock. Also, it's one of the only games that was never discounted on this entire list. So it was like 7999 fucking Canadian. And the game, like, you can get Arkham. You can get Arkham Knight right now for 2999. And you should.

Didn't we cover it on this for some reason? Yeah, because it was a massive bomb. Right. Okay. Okay. Because it was a massive fucking bomb. Right. Did you know, did you know that during the, the, the,

the Nolan Dark Knight trilogy there was a bat embargo there was a there was a whole bunch of Batman media that was not allowed to have Batman in it so they had to use other villains and characters and as a whole like thing you can go look up where they were from

on high the the DC decree was no Batman build up all the others okay okay it was yeah that game sucks yeah um and then I

played a game called Metal Garden, which I think would appeal to you more than it would appeal to me. Metal Garden takes place, it's very gray. It's like outrageously gray. It takes place inside an infinite superstructure. Like, um, there's a show or a manga you told me. Blame. Blame.

Yeah, it takes place inside that. Love it. Like just an infinite superstructure that everyone can't figure out how to get out of. Um, and it has one of the strangest, aesthetics because it feels extraordinarily like a source game mod, specifically a Half-Life-2 Source Engine mod. The way it moves, the way it looks, the way it shoots, the way the sound effects work, the way that when you go to a different level, it gives you like a little loading prompt,

like in the same kind of text. The menus all look like circa 2008, Half-Life 2 Source, you know, kind of gray box, very simple. It's an Unreal Engine 5 game. that's pretending to be a source game which is super fucking weird looks very slow looks very environmental

what's good about it it has a bunch of shooting in it it also has a really strange health bar where you have a health bar and when it depletes and gets to zero which happens all the time because it's quite difficult instead of losing your health and dying you gain an injury

and the injury is can't sprint or can't aim down sights or can't hip fire. And you need to heal your requisite body parts. So your health bar is actually enormous. But every time you lose like one pip, you end up taking an injury. It's just a really cool aesthetic in a really cool setting. It's not very long. You seem to be shooting.

You're shooting bloodborns. Yeah. Okay. It's cool. There's also some very obvious demon souls inspiration. Like there's these cat guys that use like these. executioner axe from demon souls and run at you

it's cool it's not that it's not it's not the world on fire but I thought it was cool I played nobody wants to die which you probably remember a trailer for it it was a guy sitting in a bar and the bar explodes

and then he rewinds time to find out who planted the bomb in the bar was this at a keely show or something yeah it was a one oh you yeah you might not have seen it um So nobody wants to die takes place in like 2,600

New York in the cyberpunk hellscape in which nobody dies and everybody lives forever and everybody just swaps into new bodies and you are a washed up a film noir detective who has to go solve a real murder in which someone was actually

killed for real zes and it's got a bunch of film noir trappings and a lot of interesting cutscenes and the guys going through like the body rejection hallucinations. And you're getting to a crime scene and walking and talking with your partner over the radio as you use your crime scene detection tools to fast forward and rewind time at the crime scene, use like an x-ray machine to look through clues or follow blood trails and stuff like that. Very story heavy, like very on rails. It feels like a game made entirely out of the

crime scene investigation parts from the condemned series. Okay. But with like a film noir thing. I was really cool. I was thinking of the crime scene investigation and remember me. Oh, I don't think I got that. Okay. It had scenes like this where you played with time forward and backward to recreate the scene.

It's got like a really cool little detail that like really set up just how interesting it was for me where you have to get your badge in the mail because you were discharged. And your badge number is 984. and then because you're discharged because you're probably suffering from like body rejection fatigue, your partner has to call in their badge for you to get the evidence. And it's badge number 116,600 something

because your character's 154 years old. Okay. It's a very interesting premise. And it's very like, it's this nice like film noir, cyberpunk thing where it's always raining and it's always nighttime because you're underground in a in a mega structure and the sky is just more structure and it's just always leaking

cool um very yeah blade runnerish very much so uh then i the last game i played was yesterday and it's called peepy strello and the cursed yo yo um we have talked a lot about fake PS2 games and fake GBA games. This is the realest fake Game Boy Advance game that has ever existed. I can't believe I spelled that right on the first try. I know, right? I know. You play as a little bat guy who has a yo-yo that basically plays like the vampire killer from

Castlevania as you are going through a top-down Game Boy Advance aesthetic little world. But yeah. Doing a bunch of really excellent Game Boy Advance style. combat and puzzling and all that stuff. Super charming, great music. Oh, it's new.

Feels like minish cap. Yeah, okay, okay. Like a really, really excellent minish cap. But a special note is that when you go into the game, you can choose how large the screen

wants to be, like for pixel scaling. and you can also choose do you want to play it on a fake Game Boy Advance or a fake Game Boy Advance SP and do you want the LCD marker to be on? And do you want the glass to be on?

And so I played it with the LCD screen and the glass on and you can tell that the human being playing the fake Game Boy Advance is in a soccer field from the reflection. Okay. And if there are scratches on the glass. See,

the funny part about this type of this type of part of things I was pretending that most of us did not just play these games

via emulation years later. It doesn't matter. You bought a handful of Game Boy games and you emulated the fuck

out of like 80% of them. And you got to play them with full color. I'll send you a screenshot of like what it actually

looks like with the fake Game Boy Advance with the scratches and the glass. It looks fucking perfect. Wow. It looks like a

like a photo on your phone of somebody playing a Game Boy Advance game. Nice. And then it cuts to like fully animated F of these every once in a while in this trailer. Yeah. Super cool game. Plays really good. Sounds really good. Has all this cool visual gimmickery has a cute little Zelda style

open world. It feels like a like a Game Boy Advance game that could have been aside from the fact that the visual fidelity on the animation and some of the sound and music is way too high. Like it has that shovel night thing where every now and then you're like there's no. They could do they could not have done this. Fuck off. Yeah. Yeah. A million. But that's it. That's everything. I will continue with this tomorrow and then might take a little break. Also, tonight, Tuesday, the 6th of January.

Paige and I are going to be watching fallout at 11 p.m. once again, come down to Pat Stairsat on YouTube and Twitch for that. Also, on Thursday, Bricky wants to know how to play 2XCO. Oh, shit. So I will be doing a beginner's little baby stream with, with Bricky on how to do 2XCO stuff on Thursday around 3 o'clock. Okay. You're going to, you're going to do well, or you're going to show him the ropes from ground?

Ground off. I, you know what? We're going to, I'm going to talk to him and see what the fuck he actually wants. Probably going to a private room and show him like some basics. So, um, to XCO got, I mentioned it a couple episodes ago, but they got Gerald from Core A to make a video for them on their YouTube channel that is like fighting game beginning basics. Oh, good. I'll tell Bricky to watch that beforehand. Also, I'm telling Bricky to do the tutorials before you even show. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. But like, there's a, that's a thing that, like, you know, there, um, there are some, um, FGC content creators that are finding fault in here and there. But for the most part, it just introduces, like, from the ground up the concept of like, what do you, like, what, what the fuck are these things? And, and, I think there's like a weird, like, tyranny of expertise that happens with stuff like this, or, like, a beginner's guide will come out or, like, a beginner's guide will come out or, or, like, I'll do a beginner's guy for like controller players and I have 14 and um like I'm pretty happy with it and I think it was like really good and like but with the comments just fill in with

like nitpicking about minor mistakes which makes it look like when you go to the video that oh maybe this isn't a good enough tutorial to no it's for for beginners it's for beginners so like that's fine yeah so there's a whole long conversation here and I can understand where the people are coming from on it, but to not, you know, fully dive in, essentially the thing,

the video's recommendation is it teaches you about, like, blocking and about, like, what defend, and defense in a way, where a lot of the time, when you're a beginner,

you don't think about that stuff. You just think about your turn, your turn, your turn, because that's what most video games kind of are, you know? And so that is something where, for some people,

they, for some, FGC, like, creators and everything, they'll look at it and go, yeah, but people don't want to pay full price to block.

I didn't pay $60 to block, right? So for some people, you're going to bring up this crucial piece of advice that'll help them understand and turn the noise into something that makes sense. But you're asking them to do something that is unfun that they might not want to do right away. Whereas for others, they're like, oh, thank you for explaining that. Now that I know that, I can begin to understand what I'm looking at, you know? And there's different types of players where someone is like, I just want to hit buttons. I don't care about this bullshit. where's the fun at and other people are like how do I start to make sense of what of this cool

shit I see people doing two different types of gamers you know yeah like I'm sure that there any tutorial video like Gerald is like good shit that very much so yeah exemplary good set and but there's always something you can nitpick and it's like well yeah but like I can't stand like so you'll say like basic thing oh so hey so usually when you block you you go up or down and then here comes like, well, that's not true. That's not true. Sometimes you have to block the other direction. It's like, well, we're not talking about cross-ups right now, man. We're talking about the basics of the basics for babies.

Yeah. Little babies. No, I mean, like, I feel like people are going to be arguing about like a couple of Leon Massey videos for the rest of our lives, you know, on the, um, uh, or videos or it's like um, uh, buff up, don't nurf down. You know? Yeah, but that's not like a hard and fast rule, man. You can't just buff up forever.

Even I don't think that. And I love buffing up rather than nerfing down. Cool. Okay, I'm curious to see how he, how he goes in. Well, he does, he has played Street Fighter 6. So, yeah. He's not like a little baby. But what you might call it?

Slam. He did the Slam, right? He did the Street Fighter Slam. He did not do the two X-Koslam. Okay, yeah. So, like, he has a leverless. That was the magfest thing. Which is not what I expected him to tell me.

A lot of people do now, man. Yeah. It's become really easy. It's really easy to put one in your bag or pocket and walk around with it. And just that leads to a lot of people going, yeah, I played keyboard enough in my life to be okay with something similar to a keyboard. Fuck it. Yeah. And so, like, I asked him, like, what kind of characters you like to play?

He's like, I like to play Chun Lee because she has, war crime normals. I'm like, okay, that is actually a really, really important detail that will help me a lot. That will help me a lot. So I was like, okay, so who should I recommend? One Darius, Maine coming up. If he likes simple characters with war crime normals, I will recommend the team of Darius and Warwick to him. One Darius, Maine coming right up. It's like, do you like to hit medium punch at any range and win?

Here you go. Grab Darius, grab Warwick. Amazing. Okay. Yeah, that works. Hey, based on your little backlog discussion, I'm buying maybe eight or nine games right now. So I have a Google Doc that I will send to you.

The Google Doc is otherwise a secret because it would spoil all the other games on the list. So I will send the Google Doc to you. And then you can ask me about anything that's in the must buy category, and I'll just let you know. Cool. Some of these, like, because I feel like I need another

category that's above must buy that's like no for real now now now yeah because like the the must buy ones are like wow this is great and some of those are like wow I'm going to play this on the channel as soon as this gimmick sequence is over so because it's crazy

I'm willing to anything that looks kind of cool I'm willing to buy just for to support the thing you know in a lot of cases but my internal little system besides the steam folders or whatever is I'll do a remote install on anything that I'm like No, no, no, no, right now.

You know, if I see it grayed out, it's like, yeah, maybe I can give it a second. That guy there in the chat has a great name for a fourth category, which is required reading. Sure, sure, sure. That's great. I like that. I still think ain't a cool news as movie reviews had the absolute best rating for anything I've ever seen in my life. For their movies, it was full price, matinee pass. Right, right, right.

That's what it was. Or like home video. And it's like for movies, that is just a perfect scale. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I remember talking back in the day, Liam and I were talking about, like, reviewing things. And like a system that we came up with was one where you use one word that's not a number, but it's just a word to describe the experience.

Okay. You know? Memorable. Somebody in the chat reminded me of a. ACG, which is Angry Centaur Gaming, which is definitely a name he came up with long before he became a super popular channel. But he has full price, deep discount. Sure. Sure. As his thing, which is the same basic idea. And it works really well. I love, I love finding different reasons to use things like that. Yeah, I think I might have

described at some point the, like, I want my character action game where your, your difficulty scales up from casual to business casual to business to formal, then black tie at the highest level of difficulty. Oh, that's cute. I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Let's get into the stories of the week.

There are... And they hacked the hack siege three more times. There's a couple. I don't have any follow up on that. Other than like literally since last week they hacked siege multiple times. I think it's been. been fucked up almost every single day.

Damn. Okay. Well, there's a lot of hacking going on these days. In fact, it's a big week for hacking. So Siege got hacked to shit. And everybody got paid on that one.

And then as of this week, brand new 2026, PS5 has basically been jailbroken.

Sick. Again? So if it happened before, I didn't hear. I can't even keep track. So is that on current firmware or old firmware? This is basic, this is old firmware,

but it's unobdatable and unavoidable with a patch, I believe is what the deal is. My firmware's up to date right now. So it's an unpatchable situation. The secret and the key to this whole setup, setup is if you can track down a copy of

the port of um fucking uh no no star wars racer revenge get out so like a physical copy the PS4 physical copy of star war star wars racer revenge if you can get that there's a bug in the

physical that you specifically can use to exploit and start side-loading in your own firmware and your own code. But Woolley, that's a rare game. Well, it was selling for, you know, 50 bucks or so as of two, three days ago. And as of this morning, it's now $500 used. Nice. There also, it's a limited run game. So there's less than 10,000.

copies. But the thought is from this, people will surely be able to, you know, set up a thing that you can load in from different ways or whatever. It's a key and then people are going to develop around it. But what a psycho, insane, goofy-ass way. It's always that way. It's always that way. Some bug on some obscure games somewhere that just got shipped and the compliance didn't

do their job. And you know what? To be fair, the compliance department, fucked up and missed a bug there, but Sony also missed it and let the game ship, right? There's a run that they're supposed to do to stop these things. And if they don't see it either, what the fuck then, right? So yeah, this is a weird new exploit. And from this, you can load, if you can load in your own firmware, you can do anything, right?

Once the moment you can get a jailbroken thing, you know, like people were showing off, like, trying to run some of the bloodborne PC emulation shaders and already like first order of business can we make bloodborne run better maybe second everything else

but yeah so this is new and I guess it's updating as we go we'll find out more but if you've got yourself a copy of Star Wars racer revenge for the PS4 physically you're holding gold so hold on to that shit

That's just silly Yeah so that that happened But that's not the only hacking news There's more hacking news Did you hear about the pink ranger Getting on board and deleting A bunch of racist websites live on stage I did not what? What does that mean?

A German hacker known as Martha Root I'm going to send you a link over here went on stage to at a conference and dressed up as the pink Power Ranger and that's awesome and got access to

three websites called white date white child and white deal which are exactly what they sound like therefore tell me she got like tell me because there's a funny thing here

right is that they got deleted but the way funnier thing would be like a list of names. Absolutely grabbed the list of names. Oh, that's so funny. Oh, wrong to do. Wrong to steal user information. No, no, no.

Still funny, though. Doxing is bad. I think even if nothing ever happens with those names, them having it, it's really funny. Even if nothing ever occurs, I think the fact that it's no longer in their control is really fun. So yeah, white date, white child and a white deal, you know,

for your dating sperm donation and business dealings, because if you want to keep it exclusive, if you want to keep it, you know, whatever. Anyway, so the Pink Power Ranger got on stage and kind of like the bit I talk about where we're dragging the files of Tricco straight to the recycling bit, Empting them live on stage.

She ran the script and you just saw all of the sites get deleted and the servers get wiped and everything off of them while giving the speech or whatever about it. Which is some crazy shit. It's just kind of nuts. So shoutouts Kimberly and your terectal. That's kind of nuts. That's kind of wild. That's how we're moving in 2026. Oh, fuck.

Couldn't even be the, you know, and it's like, and it's like it's mighty morphin too. It's like, can we, can we get to Space Ranger outfits or what? So, I can't. Oh, I'm just like these websites exist because people are just so sick of going out on a date and busting out like replacement theory. And their date looks at them like, uh, and they're like, damn it. Damn it, I've wasted my whole night. Or, you know, or just like your race realism statistics have been refuted

by someone wearing an Abare killer uniform. Like fucking buy. Anyways. I'm wasting so much time. I really need to just drill down and find like-minded individuals who none of one will challenge anything that we have

to see to each other even once. Yeah. I remember getting an update the other day about, do you remember long ago Prussian Blue? Remember that? Yes. Yes, it do. That's the two girls

that were raised to be the super white supremacist like singers. They loved it. They loved it. And their, yeah, and their parents just, queued them up for this crazy shit. So yeah, they grew up and went, this is fucking bad shit and like got the fuck away from their parents.

And it was like, oh, nice, happy ending there. One, good for them. Two, felt bad for them at the time because it was clear that there was like a like parental brainwashy. Nothing you can do. Nothing you can do. Like what chance do you have? Right.

Very slim, which is why the fact that they got out of there is like, oh, fuck. That's crazy. I did not expect that update. Good on you. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there you go. All right.

Beyond that, if you want to set your calendar to January 12th, very important. That's like next week, man. That is the next Monday is the final day you will be able to play anthem. So they're shutting down the anthem servers on the 12th of January. This is very important news. No, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. I do understand.

I do. No, but it's going away for real, though. And there's no offline servers and there's no way to salvage anything. And if you spent your money and you got the full price game in 2019, this is goodbye forever. Willie,

I'm gonna, I hate that you've put me into this position. I think it's crazy. It's way above and beyond that that game was still on. I think I think it's absolutely nuts

that that shit is turning off this week instead of like four years ago if somebody bought that game and they wanted to

get six years of Ironman suit flying going then power to them is what I say and furthermore I look forward to the fan hacked

servers to force this game back online I don't think so. So like, I know we talked at length about Anthem, but that was so long ago. That was seven years ago. And I remember one of the discussions that we had around Anthem, around Concord, around all these things is that your live service game came out and it bombed super hard. It bombed crazy hard. It's nuts how hard it bombed.

If you kill it within a couple, two years and don't refund everybody, you have a. killed your chance at ever making one of these ever again. Yeah, and no one trusts. No matter how bad it is, no matter how bad it bombs, right? So Concord gave out those refunds so that people would know that if they bought another Sony game that bombed

they're not going to steal your money. They weren't going to get fucked on. And this is the same way. Seven years? Yeah. You know what? Them dragging that fucking dead ass corpse piece of shit seven years of the future?

Keeps the good will. I guess, I guess those support stuff for a while. Keeps the goodwill. The asterisk is if it's attached to an IP that people love... Oh, then it's dead. It's dead and you're not getting shit. Then fuck you. No way.

No way. No how. This is never happening. But yeah, an original brand new thing, they kept the corpse going. They kept it going. There's something to that, you know? But in a world where we just described that Tepin is about to make an offline mode, just fucking what?

What, you're going to lose money from the fucking offline anthem audience? EA. Anyway. You know, it's a really good example of this in reverse. So Square Inex put out a state like a like a

like a survey like hey, what do you think of our games and whatever? And then in that survey it says, hey, what Square Inx games do you currently play on mobile? And it's like a multiple choice bar. Yep. But the only one that hasn't shut down now

is ever crisis. Wow. Because every single square in Xmova game has been killed. Because you see, like that's, yeah, it's that business practice of like, even if we will never touch this again, the possibility that we might be able to, at some point, is worth denying everyone the ability to continue to play it, even if they've spent their money on it. Because we need to own not just the rights, but the rights to offer this again in the future

and to deny everybody right now. Like, man, like Square Annex just kills every single mobile game as soon as it starts to dip and it's crazy. I can't like there's no hope for those games living on in the future. Even games that you would think would have enough stuff going on that they could be remade in real games like. So, yeah. Like opera omnia and stuff like that. Well, because like you talked about like Delta, for example, or like, you know, Risk of Rain and then Rido today. And these are all examples of games that were loved, and then you make a remake, and then like, you know, sometimes you hit, sometimes you don't.

But the main reason why we want stuff to get ported forward or to, at the very least, regularly is so that you have it on a platform available for everyone for new audiences who are playing their games for the first time on PS5 or whatever. Or to have it on Steam so that it's like in a place where you can play it currently. You just want to be able to have it on a current thing. I'm watching as 10 or less than that years from now Remakes are not just about that option of that instead of going back to the old thing you had But it's like no, no, no, the old thing is deleted from existence and the remake is literally the only way to play the thing You don't get to choose I talk about this with Page all the time and I know I've talked about it to you on this podcast

And I know I'll talk about it on my stream so it's like I'm going over a lot of things But it's like man, how the fuck are you supposed to do? to grow like the audience for Final Fantasy when there's one Final Fantasy game every fucking five and a half years and some of them bomb. Like hey how about the, you remember the 90s when like every single

fucking 13 months be a new final fantasy game that was numbered and then there were spinoff here, well there, what, and now we're in the thing about like, okay, hey, do you want to play that? Well, it's dead. Oh, that one's dead. Oh, that one's dead. Oh, this one. What about this one?

Hey, do you want to play Kingdom Hearts missingly? a game that has story content for the Kingdom Hearts? No, it's dead. It's gone. Maybe you can watch the cutscenes on YouTube if they haven't gotten copyright strict by now. So, fucking ridiculous. Sitting here waiting on Front Mission 3 remake to only hear about all the shit that sucks about

it. And then now it's like, okay, well, go load up. Play session one game. Just go load up the fucking disc. Go load up the ROM. You know, like, that's where we're at. But that might be the dumbest. I've ever felt waiting for anything in my life waiting like

four or five years to play Front Mission 3 again and it's like then the remake comes out and it sucks and then and you know and then you just get this this future environment where it's like no no and you have no choice you have no way to go back you know like that's gone forever

God I felt so stupid I want to I want to find out how bad I because I bought the first one on switch and I you know started checking it out but like I just... Sorry, I meant Kingdom Heart UX, my mistake. I get confused.

No. That's the dead one. Yeah, I still want to find out how bad and what's going on with it. Because there's even that thing where you're like, could you make it so that you can switch back to the original at any point? No, all right, well, no. Okay. Beyond that, I mean, look, there's nothing else.

I'll just let this one wash off, you know, let it roll over you. Microsoft CEO says people need to stop calling AI slop. Yeah? We need to get beyond the arguments of slopp for sophistication. How about that? You need to stop not sucking my balls, you old piece of shit. My suggestion is that you slop on the balls, actually. Oh, yeah?

The fun part about that word is that it can be used as an adjective, a noun, and a verb. It's quite useful. Everyone who ever says people all need to stop doing needs to shut the fuck up. And that's my opinion is that they need to stop opening their mouth and having noise. come out. So get used to it, he says. This is a really incredible break.

This is such a little microcosm of how nuts everyone who works at Microsoft is that they thought that the reaction to this type of statement would be anything other than people doing it more and getting angrier. People still work at Microsoft? Yes. Only the C-suite. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right. Okay, yes. That room, the one room.

the human room yes the human room ironically enough contains no humans only humans uh hey listen hey willie

it's about the tribe man the campus it's about the tribe on the campus man alright um I don't really I didn't really look much up into this one

so I don't know what the deal is but I did see a headline that said that um the Stranger Things finale was inspired by Baldersgate 3 what does that even mean? I'm going to guess it has to do with fighting Eldritch beings.

I guess. But this is a classic. I'm saying some like back and forth about whether or not the finale was good. Oh, everything I've seen is negative. I think. Yeah, me too. I've only seen people hating it. The only people that I've seen say it was good is when I put out a tweet that was like,

wow, add stranger things to the list of things that I'm glad I never got into because it ended poorly. I got a lot of blowback going Stranger Things has been good this whole time you don't know what you're talking about and that list I put out was huge there's a lot of shit I'm glad I didn't get into I think it started strong

I think I just It did that first season was great I just tapped out immediately after season two It lost all momentum quicker than I thought So do you remember there was a lawsuit alleging that they stole somebody else's ideas for the first two seasons? No. Was that?

There was. There was a lawsuit. And that lawsuit got settled or withdrawn and didn't go anywhere. But then apparently after season two, the show got really bad. And now I'm like, huh.

That's, oh my God. Oh, God damn it. So yeah, the list was Stranger Things Game of Thrones, lost Dexter, House of Cards, how I met your mother, Sherlock Westworld Heroes. and Doctor Who.

Like, man, I'm glad I didn't get into any of that shit. Okay. So, I stopped Doctor Who before it got bad, but that's that's just your coincidence. You never watched a single episode? Hey, hey,

Eccleson was cool, and I liked, I enjoyed the beginning of Tenet, and that's where I stopped. So, you know, I watched some Eccleson, I walked some Tenet, and then I watched some, um, some fucking torchwood, you know?

And like, and at the end of that, I'm like, also I would like to add, I would like to time travel and stop myself so I can add Battlestar Galactica to this list as a thing I didn't get into.

Bro, so I've brought the word up. I don't believe you. You have spent too long, and too much time in your life has been spent convincing me about how good that show is for you to look at it as a net negative now.

And then I finished it. And do you remember I finished the show And then immediately went, yeah, don't watch it. Do you remember that? I think I have never seen anyone defend that ending in my life. I've, like, a people, I've seen people cope shit away like you wouldn't believe. And I have never seen anyone go like, actually, actually the Battlestar Galactic ending, really good. You just didn't understand.

Not a single person. That shit is ass. So I can stand on Game of Thrones and tell you you can actually start and just stop it when certain characters die. Yeah, just you can you can straight up watch until I had walking dead to this list I'm gonna add walking dead to that list. Oh my God. Yeah. Coral. Coal. Things. Dude, it's it's the worst American accent I've ever seen. It's fucking crazy. It's stuff. And they fired Frank Darabon off the fucking show. Holy shit. I was right to stop. I mean, you make...

Once that little girl walked out of the barn after fucking three years, I'm like, I'm done with this shit. You make your money, you make your money. Again, tapped out season two, tapped out, or nice and early, you know, on some of those. Oh, man. I will still recommend seasons one to four of Game of Thrones, five if you're feeling fancy. And I will recommend West World Season 1 as a single bookended perfect thing. As a single contained thing. Just watch West World Season 1 and like...

Yeah, season one. Wow, what a great ending. And it doesn't even cliff hang in a way where you need to care. You can just end. It can just end right there. You can assume that what is what you're looking at is resolved by what you see and leave it alone. It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect.

God damn. Oh, anyway. All right. Let's take a couple letters. Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to Castle Super Beastmail at gmail.com. If you want to tell me how silly I am for not enjoying Doctor Who, you can take that letter and just shove it up your ass. Listen, I'll tell you one thing. You can hate the show all you want.

I sure can, Willie. I sure can. That intro theme is fire. Hey, you know, hey, Willie, can I, can I throw another one on the Doctor Who pile? I'm just going to go for it. Yeah. Every person that's tried to get me to watch Doctor Who is somebody that I was like, I never want to talk to you again.

You, there's not a single thing about Doctor Who that I could ever imagine you enjoying. Like, it is, it is the opposite of what you like about sci-fi. There's not a single thing I could ever see. It's just... You know what? I would rather watch Supernatural today than fucking Doctor Who. The sincerity overrides the science fiction, you know? Yeah.

There's only one thing I've ever heard about Doctor Who that I actually really liked. And that was the idea of a male hero that does not use violence to solve their problems. That's true. That's true. That's true. And I went, that's actually a really, really good idea. But it's shame about all the timey, whimey sonic screwdriver fucking. But it's because you have a device that can do anything.

You have a literal God device that can do anything. Therefore, it solves all the problems. And also how much you want to learn about Cardiff. I don't know, man. Because you're about to learn a little bit more about Cardiff than you thought. Like all the actors that have been Dr. Who's. David Tenant and

Cabaldi and Eccleson rules dude he's great I don't know which one that is but the other leather jacket leather jacket shaved head I'm talking about the the guy he's British

obviously he's the guy who was in the Morbius Matt he did the dance Matt Matt something Matt yeah sure

those guys are great I like seeing them in everything else Matt Smith Matt Smith no what a what a player

one name. Eccleson, the first of the new doctors is basically like the... See the bald guy who's really mad? It's the casino Royale style James Bond reboot, you know? It's that. It's that, yeah. He's, he's upset.

Anyways, leather jackets, though. And then the Daleks. If Doctor who has no more haters, it means I am like. You are an enemy of the Dalek. Dude, you know what? You know what the worst part is?

And I will, I will, I will even admit that I have been like uncharacteristically biased against Doctor Who. And it's because of the TikTok algorithm. Because I will, I will, like, stop and read, like, sci-fi stories off of Reddit and stuff like that in the TikTok algorithm. Okay. And then every time I make that mistake, it goes, I guess you would like Doctor Who. And Dr. Who clips come up.

And I go, what is the thing? this embarrassing ass shit. And like, I'll watch the whole clip. And I'll be like, this is fucking stupid garbage. Oh my God. I assume. No, it's not the whole, it's not the whole episode. It's different.

I assumed it was because you just hated the idea of whovians. You know? No, I hate that. I hate that a lot. Okay, okay. Yeah. So, um, so when I, okay. So when I see something British, uh, there are only two tones.

that I find acceptable to the human spirit. One of which is Monty Python level buffoonery. Yep. Like full blown. Yep. Like nonsense, as they would say. And then the second one is self-deprecating misery. So like the IT crowd or like the original office where it's like being British suck.

Isn't that funny? Yeah. Okay. Okay. You're, you're, you're, you're full on. Strange woman lying in pawns distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Yeah, like basically, uh, Matt Berry. Okay.

Is what I want to see out of England. Okay. Um. Kind of period. Like, kind of. I, there's, there's something to be said for your, your, um, what you're gonna call it. What's this fucking, I would, I'm just gonna call him stringer. Bell, but you know what I'm talking about.

Okay, yeah. Stringer Bell, but the other one. That's offensive. No, Idris' other character. His other character? God damn it. Luther? Luther.

There's something about the Luther approach to things. I just like Idris Elba, so I'll watch it. Yeah, yeah, you know. There's only one thing, like, I actually legitimately needed subtitles for the episodes of Luther that I watched because Idris Elba's like natural accent. Man, that's tough. That's North. Yeah.

And, and, um, um, Sherlock, you know, I, I did, I enjoyed me some Sherlock. That was, bro. I like, I like some Sherlock. Sherlock might be the shittiest garbage that I ever had glazed up to me. I've ever fucking seen. I had fun with Sherlock. I got halfway through the second episode and was like, wow, this shit is garbage, only to be told, we'll know it gets better.

And I go, well, how much, how many episodes are there? there are three that's a season yeah oh my god you see his collar was was wet because he flipped it up because that's what you do when it rains when you're coming from

from from downton street when it when when you see the bad people are holding out hope for a secret fourth episode oh my god and then and then Moriarty you know and then the fucking and then the relationship that they have and the obsession

fucking whatever. Holy shit. Oh, British TV. I appreciate the short episodes. I'll tell you what. Telling me to catch up on something and saying I've got four episodes to do is extremely doable. I love that.

That's great. It really is a pretty wild difference between American and British television, isn't it? Yeah. Every American TV show is just run into the ground on season 8 and every British TV show is like four episodes. Yeah, like, and that's the thing is, like, I remember someone, like, what that was recommending all this was like, just got a British, I got on a British show kick for a while. So I watched that and then I watched Misfits, you know. Took an afternoon. Yeah, took two seconds to get through it. And then also you're like, oh, Ramsey Bolton, when you see him, you're like, oh, that's the Misfits kid. Right. Oh, that's the Misfits kid. Right. You know? So you got a, you got a feel for it. Um, anyway.

Anyway Let's see Can you believe They make their kids talk like that British people I mean I will say this If you're putting all the weight On Monty Python

Like that is a load bearing franchise That's powerful That is very quite strong Also Do you know what else was You know what's fucked up Okay Okay

You know Mr Bean? Yeah Classic Who is not familiar With Mr. B I guess the kids now Okay. The kids don't know Mr. Bean.

So Mr. Bean, classic fucking, yeah, absolutely, was obsessed with that as a kid. Mm-hmm. Do you know how many episodes there are of Mr. Bean?

Like 10. 15. Yeah. Ever. In total. That's why it was so crazy, he got a movie. I,

like, I feel like there are, there have, I'm like, there must have been like 12 seasons of this show. Nope. You just, what happened was,

is that you never caught a full episode. So you always thought you were seeing different parts of different episodes, but actually you were just seeing full episodes split up amongst like 80 different watches. Forever.

It's crazy. There's only one season of 15 episodes that Rowan Atkinson was doing and then there's the cartoon that kept going forever after. But like any live action Mr. Bean is just like one thing. That's nuts to me

because it was on for so long. Anyway, all right. right. Let's see over here. Here's one from Dahl says, good day, Castle Super Boss. Off the top of your head, what's a hidden super boss that is well hidden, hard to unlock, etc. You can answer now before reading mine, but I don't think there's anything as nearly as obscene to unlock as the example I give.

In Damon X. Machina, Titanic Scion, there's a hidden boss at the top of a tower you can unlock by finding the entrance. And all you have to do is fly up to the tower to find the boss. There are no enemies or obstacles in the way. You just have to get to the top. But it takes anywhere from four to eight hours of real-time vertical ascension to reaching. To depending on your builds flight efficiency. That's the worst. Man, that's the worst.

Look up Damon X. Makina, Uranus Tower, if you want proof. That is... You kind of ruined the premise of the question. Yeah, that is obscene. If you're like, actually... Sorry, one sec. Mm-hmm. Four hours and 51 minutes

in this example of a video by a mere cat queen full climb plus boss fight. Four hours at the most efficient. Yeah, that is... That's stupid. That's ridiculous. Takeshi's castle level of vindictiveness for the player.

That's just nonsense. Like, if you're talking, like, unless you're talking about, like, content that was cut never meant to be seen, and then people pulled it out and found away, you know? Or, or braid with the fucking secret stars thing. Beyond that insanity, I was just going to say Akuma.

Fighting Akuma is... Yeah, that's pretty tough. And Street Fighter and not super, whatever. It was, you have to beat everybody and you have to do it. A lot of fighting game bosses are like absurdly weird to get a hold of. Akuma was the original crazy one with putting in your quarter, beating everybody, never losing around, doing it in under 20 minutes. And I think you had to get like either perfects or a high score without continues. and then you get to bison

and then Akuma flies in, kills him, and then you fight Akuma instead. And he's super busted and you can't beat him anyway. You know? Yeah, that's peak obnoxious, crazy on that. I can't think of anything that's like crazy obscure. I remember. So one that was obscure,

but we knew how to look it up to do it was Qlex in Mario RPG. Oh, I never fought Qylex. Kulex in Mario RPG, you had to get a bunch of items and trade them off that were like, it was not an obvious series of trades you had to do well I fought QLX but I fought QLX as an adult when we were LPing Super Mario okay okay it's not really exactly the same

yeah you do you get all this stuff and then you walk into a room and then the game turns us into Final Fantasy for some reason and then you just like what because it's the Scranx game yeah but obviously I think your answer is the fucking yeah no that's that's the win right there that's bad shit that's fucking stupid yeah no QLX is doable The Akuma one is like, go fuck yourself. And then this one is just like contempt.

Yeah. And then a lot of people in the chat are saying stuff like a lot of from software bosses where it's like, yeah, you want to fight millennia? Go fucking beat the hardest area in the game that's extraordinarily large and also hidden. But okay. So, but like, but I'm, yeah, I'm going to say that like if it's just really hard, but it's like user path to or something, you know, whatever. That's, that's okay. It's stuff where you're like, there's no reason you would ever look in this direction. much less jump there, you know.

Anyway, all right. Here's one from Kelvin says, Dear Woolly 2003 and One Piece Pace Pat. Hey, what's up? Last year I decided to read Naoki Urasawa's monster based on y'all's recommendation, and I loved it. Oh, that's so good.

Incredible story from start to finish, and I'm currently going through 20th century boys, fuck yeah, that shit's good too, and enjoying it as well. Recently, I was able to get my girlfriend to watch 2004 anime and while she really enjoyed it, she also had some minor gripes with supposed filler. She argued that anything not immediately progressing the plot was filler, such as vignettes and episodes that focused on side characters. I argued that filler was strictly non-canon material meant to pat out runtime so that the manga could catch up and that the vignettes

served as building upon the themes of morality and the value of human life being explored in the story. Also, I've been seeing sentiments similar to my girlfriends from other people. it's difficult to tell how many people are media literate and can appreciate the medium beyond hype moments in aura farming. My question is, is how do you define filler in anime? Is my definition accurate or am I off the goop? Okay, first of all, break up with your girlfriend. Immediately. As soon as you get this email response, do it.

It's already too late. So second of all, filler in terms of anime was like extraordinarily clearly defined. Yep. as as a runtime bloat, be it, uh, characters yelling and screaming, or recuts or flashbacks.

Anything that wasn't in the source material. Anything that wasn't a direct translation. Yeah. And not, and I'm not going to say like taking a fight and like adding a scene to the fight, you know, more so like, like in one piece is a really good example.

They just flash back to the fucking last episode over and over and over. Sure. Or, or like literal arcs of, of stories where characters that you've never seen before show up and do things, yeah. Yeah, so, however, I have seen this mentality

where filler is anything that is not currently related to the progression of the A plot. Fuck off with that. That's stupid. It is become more popular. And it's like, I don't understand

why we're watching the side character. I don't understand why nothing happened in this scene. But things do happen. It's just like, well, it didn't advance the A plot. And by advance, I mean, make meaningful progress towards an end goal. It is a very goal-oriented, mercantile way to enjoy any piece of fiction. It is not about like enjoying for what it is being presented to you.

It is about, I want to get to the end to know what happened. like nearly exclusively. To just get in on the discussion. The entirety of the Sasaki-Kogiro arc is filler. When Musashi is not on screen, everyone should be asking, where's Musashi? Also, for

a monster, specifically, literally every single thing that happens to monster crescendos towards the end. Like, I can think of, like, I can think of one episode of monster that has characters

and themes that never come back and it's the German couple that Tanya hitchhikes with to a castle about halfway through the series and that's just a cute little thing about how he's traveling around everything else is building up to something

eventually. Oftentimes too there will be moments in stories where the author decides to use something that seems unrelated to the A plot to establish a feeling, a moment, a thought, you know, a situation, a microcosm of something that the story is overall addressing in a larger way, and echo that again later, but it might seem irrelevant to you now, you know? So there's a really good scene in Monster where Lungay is trying to figure out where Tenma is, and he's standing in front of a fucking mirror and goes, I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor, I'm Japanese, I'm Japanese, I'm a Japanese doctor named Dr. Tenma. And it's like a really fucking funny scene to us.

And it lasts a while. And he doesn't actually, like he doesn't get a revelation about it. He doesn't like he doesn't unlock like a fucking, you know, you know, oh, this is that. Right. It's just like, okay, no, this is the fucking weird nonsense that Lungay is doing as he's trying to track down Tenma. He is a crazy detective and he's willing to do all sorts of weird stupid shit. And then that's the end of the scene. Um, that's not filler.

That's an important character detail that Lungay is nuts. Um, this is obsessive. He's like a Jean, he's like a Javert. This is, this is so crazy too, because it's not where I thought the question was going. Because I thought it was going to be about the quality of the filler. Because there's good filler and bad filler, right? It's, no, a lot of people are like, if this does not, meaningfully advance the core plot, I don't know why it's here.

They want, they want. they want narratives of expository dialogue and forward momentum exclusively which is really fucking boring it's really boring

I remember in my English class in eighth grade my English teacher stood up and went here's the core elements of a story setting characters plot and theme and we are increasingly getting into a weird

like societal thing where plot is like massively massively overblown as the primary driver of all enjoyment and fiction. And that's like what all spoiler culture is where it's like, oh, so and so dies at the end. Oh, you've completely ruined it for me. It's no longer worth watching. Right. Well, what about the performances of the actors and the setting of the scene and the direction and the music and the experience of enjoying the story.

Yeah, you are, I'm looking at, what the fuck, Last of a Season 1, Episode 3, you know, that really great episode of it, long, long time. That's all filler because it's not in the source material. It's quality filler. It doesn't focus on the main characters. It just serves as something to establish what's happening in this world, and it does a better job. Of that,

the original material did. Blue Velvet, a movie I don't even like, but it's a good example of David Lynch. There's technically a story in Blue Velvet, it doesn't matter. Blue Velvet is about the weird emotional state that you live in while watching Blue Velvet,

which is like this kind of like low level, threatened anxiety and confusion the whole time. I personally didn't enjoy it very much, but it's still great, and it's a great movie, right? Like, the plot is like, to lynch, the plot is like an excuse to do weird character shit forever. Sure, sure. The plot is like nearly immaterial. Yeah, I often shit on Wild at heart, and it's not because the events of what unfolds in the movie.

I don't remember at all. I just couldn't handle Nick Cage's performance. So, um, anyway. I'll tell you one thing. Mm-hmm. I can handle any Nick Cage performance. And in fact, I welcome any Nick Cage performance. He's, when he's good, he's great.

When he's not, he's great. There's times where I just, like, something hits you a little bit. Like, okay, that was immediately like, oh, Jesus Christ. Okay, hot, hot take on a cold take. on a hot take. All right? Yeah. You heard the recent

Tarantino, Paul Dano fucking shit. Oh, fuck Tarantino that fucking prick. That's a wildly personal and assholeish thing to do as a celebrated director. That's a crazy thing.

That's a crazy thing to just out and out say and blow someone up like that. I fucking hate this guy says one of the best living directors of all time. Out of pocket. What a piece of shit.

Out of pocket is the correct term to describe. out of nowhere that move thinking back on there will be blood that was an amazing movie and Paul Dano did an incredible job

and in the third act he does some weird shit that I didn't like and like when he said it I was like that's crazy dude relax I know what he's talking about I know exactly what he's talking about

for some reason at the finish line he starts doing some weird shit when he's been crushing it and the movie is like 11 on 10 but there's something to that statement about like what he does at the end that's super weird

you know it's an amazing movie but that one part I'm like I actually know what he's talking about and it does it is weird but yes that is that is out of pocket nonetheless. It's so extreme as like a,

like a viable like power in the like mentality of Hollywood to just out of nowhere for no reason go, I fucking hate this actor. That's crazy. That's crazy. That's like immoral. When you have, when you have sway over the thing.

Oh yeah. It's ridiculous. Um, yeah. All right. Some of y'all like the performance. I fucking, I found that shit got cloud shoes and I did not.

Let's take another one. Dear Tojam and Earl I'm Earl. Is there a dub performance that you believe fits the character better than the original voice? Uri Lowenthal as Simon or Sarah Weidenheft as power?

Sincerely, Ashley. I go back to the classics. I always remember Vash the Stampede, Trigun, Johnny Young Bosch. But that turns out to just be how good Johnny Young Bosch is, actually. I think that's the first time I ever heard him. And I was like, this dude, this is incredible. And then Golden Boy, where I'd say they're equal. They're not better, but Japanese and English Golden Boy are equal in quality.

And the dub for Excel Saga, simply because, it's like this is an impossible thing to dub. It's full of Japanese ass jokes. And you found not only the way to write it, but you have the lung capacity to speak at the speed that Excel does. Those stand out as incredible dub jobs. And this is dating myself because I'm talking fucking anime from the 20 years ago. I don't like,

I don't like Grandma Goku. Sure. I don't, I don't. I think, I think Sean and Vegeta are, are fucking way, better than the Japanese dragonball voices. There's a lot of like, there's a lot of like a woman that voice like kid

protagonists in anime that work really well, you know, Naruto and gone and stuff like that. Well, actually, gone, I'm not sure. I think I just pulled that out of my ass. But with Goku, as he gets older and becomes more and more of an adult, it becomes pronounced and extra silly over time. But yeah. Sure. Sure.

Yeah, that's the one. everything else that I'm thinking of is like stuff that I'm like not sequel like I could watch fully coolly in either language I could watch cowboy bebop in either language I could watch you know the all these classics chromarty um chromarty is a really good example I don't watch a lot of anime anymore um or you know stuff that's dubbed or subbed in general anymore um it's nice that it's at least at parody for a lot of it.

Yeah, I'm really curious to see if Chainsaw Man animated, like, is at all what I hear in my head when I was reading through it. Because I don't have sounds associated with the characters yet, you know? Anyway, all right. That'll, that'll do. Okay. Last quick one. One more?

One last one. One last one. Yeah, fuck it. Dear Thomas Wayne and Jonathan Kent, with all the content, statements and opinions you've put on the internet over the years, what are you most worried about your children finding when they're older? Nothing. I'm not worried about shit.

Not even a little. I'm sure if me being too thirsty in Hades is not somewhere in an unfortunate highlight reel, there's probably some Titty Fighter we played on FNF years ago, where I don't know, I don't remember how it went. Maybe. I don't know. I'm going to say some Titty Fighter from like eight or nine years ago on an unfortunate scrub lords. Mm-hmm.

That one. Yeah, sure. I'm not, I'm not too worried about it. Like, genuinely. I don't like. No, not. Okay. I mean, yeah.

Like, no. If anything, I'm fucking. Like, oh, what? I'm going to be embarrassed in front of my child? What? It's going to be today? as a serious answer get the fuck out of here

if anything my kid's gonna be hilarious if my if my kid ever paul's like dad I found some cringe stuff you said I'm like yeah I changed your diaper you know I knew since you was a little baby you don't know what I'm better you know

etc yeah what it's hey dad I can't believe you liked this anime that sucks no I'm sure there will I'm actually way more afraid of the other thing. I'm afraid of like dad, I found this like ancient band from the

from the oldies. It's called Lincoln Park. You've ever heard of it. And then I'm just going to just crumble into fucking dust. I'm like, well, there's going to be a time and a place where I'm going to need to see. Like, is she going to, like what's going to be the, the K-pop boy band or

Backstreet boys of her time? Like, what's going to be the move? What's going to be the thing? I don't know, but there will be something. You know? There will be something and I'm going to fucking. squint at it. Yeah. With my fucking Leroy,

gray dreads and, you know, I don't know. You know, I recently saw a study that broke down music appreciation. And that it,

it basically broke down that across all range ranges, appreciation of music peaks from the age of 17 to 20 and dramatically drop. from the age of 34 onwards. Yeah.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Every, like, man, they used to make really great music back when I was 20. But I also saw something. I also saw a discussion where a bunch of zoomers were like, oh, but actually our generation's music does suck. You guys had some better shit. Yeah, that is crazy. There was a, there is a bunch of zoomers that are like, no, no, no.

I'm listening to your older shit. And you know what? It kind of slaps way more than our shit does. And you might have been able to hear that from Gen Alpha if they knew how to type words. Oh, no. Or spell their names or tie their shoes. All right. All right.

And I know what you're saying. Pat, don't you mean? Like, isn't Gen Alpha like 10 years old? Yes. Yes, the kids can't read. And they'll be catching shade for the rest of this podcast. That's right. Oh, this new generation.

Oh, the kids Got no respect for their elders. Bye-bye. 6-7.