Castle Super Beast - CSB355: You Can't Minmax Aftercare

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

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Yo. Yo, what's up, man? Looks like Skelmo's having some trouble over there. Yeah. I forgot that we knocked him over and we just didn't fucking move him. Okay. Did you know that hands are the most interesting things on planet Earth? I did actually know this.

They're complicated and they do things. They taste great. They taste really good. You can fit your whole hand in your mouth. It's kind of nuts. It is pretty cool. I was watching as fascination with hands is like all the rage. That's what's popping off right now.

Holy shit. Look at my hands. Look at my hands. Look at my hands, though. What were you saying? I'm checking out these, I'm checking out these paws. And that has now come. There's now an expletable.

to be found where whatever is going sometimes if fussing is happening and it's like medium level fussing I could just be like you look at your hand just hold it up it's like I remember that exactly thing and it's I think my favorite part my favorite part is that like at the age your girl is at like object permanence really bad oh yeah really bad object permanence so like I'm getting mad again. I'm getting mad about my hand in my mouth. Oh, I popped it out. Guess what? It's your hand. It's back. And they're like, oh, shit. It's my hand. Yeah. No, I remember that the test for object permanence is if you leave and walk away, are they looking in the direction that you walked away in when you return, you know? And like, if you're, if you walk, if you exit to the right, are they looking at that place to expect you to return from there? Yeah. But no, right now it's just hands. Hands are fucking in. Stonks and hands are high.

We're popping off, staring at them, looking at them, doing fists. You can also test object permanence with your toddler with three-card Monty. Oh. And if they fail three-card Monty, you just take their crackers. They're like, you lose. Do you even have to do the Monty, or can you just, or is it simple enough to just put the cards down and flip them? Well, ideally, ideally they could get really good at it.

Yeah, get the cups. Yeah, no. It is, it is it is, it is, it is, it is, it is all the rage and, you know, and even, even some steps towards like getting the clap going, you know, like the, it was. All those early claps are really funny. Well, so it's crazy because, like, I just decided to start doing like, um, um, um, you just decided to start doing, like, um, um, because she popped off. When I started clapping, she was like,

whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what is that? You know, I got, you got, you got a weird noise.

Yeah. You got the, you got the wide eyed like, and kicks like, stimulation. Yeah, the little useless kicks. I love the useless kicks.

And so it's like, okay, how do we, how do we turn this into something? So it's like, okay, I can clap, but you can clap too.

And, yeah, you can clap. And, um, you see like, and like, perhaps like,

perhaps like, moving around and she's doing stuff or whatever. and... Ameless flailing. And I was trying to, like, I was putting her hands together, she kept, like,

putting fists bumping. So I was like, okay, uh, clap, clap, clap. Yeah. Two fists together. No. Yeah.

No. Right? And doing that and having the sound come out only on the times where I was like, yeah, when I would grab her hands to go, like,

to move it together, she started opening them, you know? So it was, like, oh, you can actually sort of get the gist of like, you have no coordination, but you understand that step one is you have to not be making a fist for this to work out, you know? That's cool. I didn't have the, I didn't have the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, concept. So, what I ended up doing forever was just, like, grabbing the little man's arms. So I'm going to clap your hand. for you. Yeah. Well, on the beat. Yeah.

And eventually, you will just latch on to this. Good. Excellent. You did it. Yeah. And similarly for like when grabbing the, like the little shaker, you know, like almost like shaking it like a Maraca. And yeah, I'm just like shaking it on the rhythm or shaking it one, two, one, two,

and so on. And then like, okay, now your turn. I let go of her arms. and she kind of just goes like and like there's a big like charged like and it goes flying and it's like okay but you got the idea

you know you don't have the control or the precision or the ability to keep it in your palm but the idea of flailing your arm to get that kind of sound going is like it's the seed of the beginning of what you're supposed to do there and that's awesome

so we'll get there we'll coordinate this this junky interface. Every day is just a tiny little miracle. The interface is tricky, you know? You're piloting a body that you don't know how to use yet. Nothing makes any sense. So I have to say, like, one of the things that really helps, like, my own self-esteem, like genuinely, my own perception of myself as an adult human man is like watching somebody

learn something that you've taken for granted for, like, your whole life, you're a whole life. You're like, oh, man, whatever. And then just like, you know, like for example, this morning, uh, I was doing the dishes and I put the load up the dishwasher. And I'm like, okay, buddy, put the, put the, I give him the, the tab, you know, the, and the tide pod. And I go, put it in the thing, put it in the thing.

And I'll close the flap and he has trouble closing the flap because his like little hands aren't strong enough to like make it latch. Right. And I'm like, I can close that. No. problem. Yeah. Because I'm an adult. Yeah. Oh, I mean, the ultimate, the ultimate in skills that you took it, you take for granted is, you know, when you lie down and you go to sleep? Yeah. Yeah, that. Actually. That's a crazy skill. Just going to sleep is a wild skill. Turns out, you have to learn how to fall asleep and not knowing how. And not knowing how. is that's your default state. There's getting tired and going, I'm going to go to sleep now is a learned and acquired skill.

What are you going to learn it? Yeah. Yeah. I've brute forced my way to the next stage of that, you know? Wully, you know what? You know when I learned it when my kid was about six months old? Yeah. Yeah.

And I remember looking at the, I remember that period in which I was, was looking at the clock at 7.30 p.m. going, I could, I could, oh, 90 minutes. I could go to bed. I could go to bed at 9 o'clock. Yeah. I could do it. No, you see, I looked, I looked at my, you know, my layout and I saw that I have, I have battery saver mode. So it doesn't apply. It doesn't apply to me, you know, but until she learns that she's got that too, which you, she might discover sometime, I don't know, around college when you get. fucking insane overnight assignments to work on. No one ever gets insane overnight assignments to work on in college. Wully, we just left

them till the last night. No, that's not how illustration and design worked. Oh, really? Yes. Let me remind you that it was legally, it was not legal to offer more than nine courses per semester and they still gave us 14

by dividing the classes in two and you'd have a Tuesday and a Thursday class listed under one name, but it was actually two teachers with two sets of homework that were grading you for 50% of your grade. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah. So you learn how to do,

you draw fast then? You draw, you draw everything and not necessarily fast. It depends. But the point was, here's a fucking 3D class. Okay, now here is a line drawing, illustration class.

Okay, now here is a painting class. Now here is a spray paint and commercial design. design, graphic design, fucking typography, et cetera, et cetera. And it was just like too much. And you had assignments that were overnight fucking 20 hour pointillism fucking challenges. So that broke my sleep schedule. College broke my sleep schedule and it never recovered.

I really didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I kind of slept like a normal person until I got to like, like, I mean, like gamer hours are gamer hours, you know. But for the most, but the ridiculous full-on nocturnal. systems were full on were activated because of college, you know, and anyone who like got into the program and then graduated from it kind of needed to sacrifice. You know what that reminds me of? Yeah.

I don't know if you ever seen this, this, this dank meme, but it's, it's just photo of the guy on their first day of engineering school and photo of the guy leaving engineering school. Yeah. And it looks like bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, young dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they look like a 40-year-old man who has never bathed. Yes, no. First day entering the Oval Office, last day, et cetera, you know, or just negotiate monkey ball versus.

It's crazy. The absolute before and after is wild. Anyway, anyway, learning to just actually let yourself fall asleep. believe it or not is a skill. And I guess when you think about it, like, when you're, it's weird too because for me, right before I fall asleep is when my brain is like super active and I get like ideas and stuff and I want to write notes and write things down. But like trying to like it, when it looks like she's like, like I'm falling, I'm

drained, I'm falling asleep and then she's going, no, I want to stay awake. Yeah, yeah. like that is the default versus like giving in you know right yeah giving in is actually oh you might actually have a fomo baby as well i think i think she wants to know what's going on oh man that that baby's awesome but they're just like go to sleep ah no nah how about nah though yeah that's rough so we're we're seeing, we're experimenting. And we're pushing it a little bit here and there. And then whatever our sanity can maintain, you know?

So I'm at the explicit phase right this second of my little guy will walk up to me at 8.30 and says, I want to go to bed right now. And I go, oh, okay, okay. Let's get your PJs on and we'll brush your teeth. All right. You want to go upstairs? Yeah, I want to go upstairs. I want to go to bed right now.

Okay, we're up. We're in bed 845. And what that means is that actually what he wants to do is sing Christmas songs to me for two hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're actually, that's the thing is like I've, that's, yeah, we are looking at these moments where it's like, what do you, what do you need right now? What do you, what do you need? We can't, how do we, you know, we're getting into fucking, uh, Star Trek dual music. we're getting into that with the baby. Like, how do we solve this? And like, we don't know. And the thought is, oh, I wish you could just tell us what you want. And then we immediately think, no wait, every story you have told has been the words you say me nothing. It does.

We are in a phase right now where my guy will look at me and go, I don't want to go outside. And we're inside. And I go, okay, buddy. we don't have to go outside and then he will stamp a foot and go, I do! I do want to go outside. And I'm like, what?

Oh, fuck. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you can't follow through. You can't follow through. But you said to me. Fucking words.

Fucking words, man. What do they mean? Yeah, I just, I'm praying for words to know what you want, but then I have been the mistake of believing them. So now, this morning, this morning, he said, Deda, I don't want Piva toast. Yeah. And I'm like, okay. So I went and made some peanut butter toast. Yeah, you did.

And he was like, oh, no. However, a couple days ago, he said, I was like, do you want Piva toast? He went, no, I don't want Piva to host. And then I made it. And then I put on a plate. And he went, I don't want. want it. I don't want people to toast dead dead.

No. And I'm like, I'm just, I'm just guessing. You might as well be saying nothing. You might as, you're just, are you just, are you just, are you just, are you just, are we just pushing boundaries to find out what happens?

Are we just trying to figure out? Right now we are. Yeah, okay. Right now, right now we're in a boundary pushing stage. Yeah, we're just trying to learn what, where the walls are. Yeah. Okay. I can,

I can, I can frame it in that context. and make it make sense, I think. Anyway. Those boundaries can be as simple as don't jump on the couch or, you know, whatever. Don't throw the ball inside. And then there's... But I want to is the actual... Is the actual, like, the phrase that comes out.

I have, um, I've prided myself on being like the one who can, interpret her noises and like levels of them and kind of like translate that into language a little bit and go like, okay, I think that noise means this because last time she did that, this is what solved it, you know, and I'm able to pick up on those, those things. And now we're getting new, new noises that I'm just completely like, what the fuck does like, what is that? Yeah. What is, what is, what is, what is grudge gurgling mean, you know? So, as, soon as you real as soon as you lock in what all those mean they'll be replaced have new ones or be

replaced with the same noise but with the word lie next to yeah yeah yeah yes yes yes for sure i believe that there's just you know i mean there's there's a couple that are just like i want to hear the sound of my voice bah yeah all right yep anything else how we do it has your girl figured out yelling on purpose. I believe so. I mean, filling the silence.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like a bark. Like, a bar. There's been a couple of those,

for sure. Okay. Because they'll, they'll probably get way into that at some point. And you're like, is something wrong? Yeah, no,

she's dropping a couple of random like, Bha! And it's just like, yeah, no, we're here. Yep. Okay. Just,

I know. Still around. You are. live. Thank you for letting me know. I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, sometimes you can interrupt those sounds by just going, yo, hand, hand, though. And, ooh. Ooh. Hmm.

Anyway. Babies are cool. What's going on? Um, hmm. Okay. I played some stuff this week. I'm trying to think, do I have anything like? Any like fantastical, cool scenario or God blighting me this week?

I'm like, no. Had a fairly chill week. Did play some cool games, though. Mm-hmm. I beat Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 after like three and a half months. What's the hour count's comparison to the first one there? So the first one says 84. The second one says 124, but that number is wrong.

That's the save file number, not the real number. It's probably closer to like 140. I also did not finish the last DLC for Kingdom Come Deliverance, too. It is, it's kind of a weird problem where they give you this like Monaster. quest and you're like oh what's happening with the plague at the monastery and then you figure out with your gut like what's happening within like five minutes and then they leave you to discover it even though it's very fucking obvious you're ahead of the story and you're just catching up for a while that sucks I hate that feeling uh the other thing is that the the third dLC came out like a while

after the game and so you play through it and you're like wow I have every my my Henry completely maxed out head to toe every single fucking stat every single fucking item possible so every single like sleuthing or lock picking or dialogue challenge crush it instantly no problem

so it's just not super compelling the final sequence of the story for KCD2 is some of the best RPG stuff I have ever played in anything it is absolutely fucking fascinating.

It locks you in for a while. It locks you in for like a long time. Like you walk up to a doorway and you get a full splash screen that goes, hey, hey, are you really sure? Point in no return? You want to go. Because as soon as you walk through this door, you're going to be busy. and you go okay and like the last like 20% of the game's story

like a good like I'd say 10 to 15 hours of that game's narrative is like you're completely locked in it is it is a linear series of quests and those quests are awesome they include a heist a siege a chase like all sorts of all sorts of shit all sorts of like all sorts of quests where you're like wow

they're totally not going to come back to this character ever again. Really stellar. One of the best RPGs I've ever played. I did not encounter. I encountered one bug in my entire time playing it, which was sometimes people who sit at tables will teleport two feet up in the air

and sit at nothing above the table. That sounds like some Skyrim shit. It's very much some Skyrim shit. Aside from that, it was a rock solid, extremely like bug-free, chill experience. I cannot possibly recommended enough. Somebody in the chat asks,

can I play KCD1 and then KCD2 back to back without burning out? No. Absolutely not. No fucking way. Leave a couple months. Please. You will go nuts.

It's, it's, it's, way too much. It's way too similar. The Born Identity Marathon. Watching those movies back to back is a waste. Oh, man, it's the same fucking movie three times. That's what I did. I watched all three. I watched four. I watched four in the same day. I just, I did them all in one shot and I went, this was not meant to be the intended

viewing experience. No, no. The other thing, and you start to feel it in the, in like the later, the later bits of KCD2. when you are doing your final batch of side quests, I started to get the thing that I was kind of worried about. The general content is fantastic. Main story content is much better than side content,

but side content is great. However, in the realm of historical fiction, in Bohemia 1403, with human beings in the real world, you do eventually run out of things that you can say and do that fit within the context of the real world. Because at the end of the day, the guy's been skimming off the top or the guy was running a scam underneath the silver mine or it was actually bandits or it was actually scavengers from a burnt downtown. like there's only so so many resolutions to any given

side content that you could possibly do right right right shoutouts to games that hit you with not only hey we should probably finish up everything we want to do before we walk through this door but also the hey before we head over to that castle

we might not be back for a while like even earlier in the game I like when you get little mini like you're gonna be locked in for a minute. It's not the end, but just so you know. I think yeah, 16, FF16 throughout a couple of those.

I like the heads up. You also run into a very, very strange thing because it's historical fiction and a lot of the people you run into are real people, which means like there's a plot armor around a bunch of characters because they must live past the year 14-03.

Oh, the Assassin's Creed problem? Yeah, it's the Assessant, like, you live. Yeah. Like, I know you live. You're famous. Fucking Borja. You're like a famous guy, and I know you don't die here. Pope Borja can't die now.

He literally cannot. So you're out of this issue, like, some of the guys you know are nobles, and you're like, okay, well, you're fine. And then some of the guys you hang out with are, like, one word name. shitbags and you're like oh okay you I don't know like in particular there's a guy who is a very famous Polish dude who has a missing eye

but he doesn't have a missing eye in the game so the whole game you keep going like is this one he's going to lose his fucking eye is he going to lose his eye here? No not this time Oh, not this one.

It's the Nick Cage bit because, like, he, Nick Cage in, um, in, uh, what you're call it? Um, Captain Marvel has both eyes. And then it's just like, oh, the whole movie. Cool. Oh, what's it going to be? Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh. Uh, okay. Um, yeah, no, the game is, the game is like absolutely super, super, super stellar. Nick Fury, Nick, Nick, Nick Fury, not Nick Cage. That. I only, same. It's fine.

They're Knicks. The only thing that I, like the most minor of complaints I would ever have is that, as somebody who freaklined it in that I did literally everything, they really streamlined the second game a lot. Like the first game was like a lot of shit-ass peasant farming and you were like miserably garbage for like a long time. And I did everything in that game. and still beat it with like a bunch of skills like not really maxed out.

If I were to tell anybody anything, even if you get good at alchemy in KCD2, do not brew the fox potion. Because the fox potion, if you brew it at a high enough quality, gives you a 50% experience boost for a full day. And so I brewed a hundred of them. And then every single. day I woke up and drank a fox potion and then at about the game's 65% mark I literally redlined everything single fucking skill and I was like man I bet I would have had a much better difficulty progression of this game had I not used the item that they gave me to become super strong yeah um so you said there was uh uh uh the safe file was like

missing some 20 hours of play there. Yeah, because it doesn't count the times that you reload the save and fail. Okay, so that was that many in terms of just like. Like Steam says 180. Okay. Sorry, it seems as 170, but I have to remove 20 of that from my first time when I played it at release. It's probably closer to like 150. And then, yeah.

That means about 35 hours across all that time was just like, how do I break into this place? Nope, I failed. I fucked it. How do I fight these guys? I failed. I fucked it. I do like that the game has alternate endings if you decide to break it. So, for example, there's a large-scale military camp that takes place that is the army of the invading King Sigisman.

If you just decide to say fuck it and kill everybody, the game ends. It gives you a splash screen that goes, Henry of Scalots killed the invading Sigisman's army solely. and then everything was completely fine. You robbed yourself. Ever after the end. Sure. Okay. All right.

I mean, like, is that not what old fallout used to be? Yeah, sometimes. There's also one where there's a single quest in the game where you can hang out with Sigismund. And if you sneak a weapon in and manage to kill him, you get a different, like, game over that goes,

hey, you killed him. Good job. You saved Bohemia. The guards immediately killed you as soon as the deep. was done, but you did it. You saved everybody. No, uh, Nero on mission one. You killed Urazen. You saved the day. Congratulations. You're such a big, strong champion. Game over. You're the best. Ever. You fucking idiot. Oh, yeah. So that game's absolutely astonishing. Um, it is a, it is a total triumph. It's one of the best

games ever made. It is my default recommendation, um, for anybody that's like, I would like to play an open world RPG. My statement would be like, you should just play Kingdom Come Deliverance. Really? Yeah. And I would say that even with people who are like, well, I didn't play the first one. And I go, that's fine. Over like Witcher 3 or... Easy.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. The other thing is that, so they did a really, really, really smart thing. Because like there's a million quests you can do in Kingdom Come Deliverance 1, right? There's a bunch of things that happen. and how do you catch people up and how do you account for

like all the different variations of events and the way they catch you up is that in the very beginning of the game Henry is injured and Metroided loses all his gear, all stats. Ah my stats. And you go through a like, I'm horribly injured burning hallucinatory flashback

of the greatest hits of Kingdom Come Deliverance 1 Sure. Here's my village bringing down. Here's that. Here's that. And then throughout conversations, throughout other characters, you know, little dialogue prompts, they'll be like,

hey, have you ever been part of a siege? And you'll have like three options. And one will be tell a story. And then he will just tell a story of the Talenberg siege or whatever. And for anything other than that, the game just assumes that you did every side quest in KCD1 and got the best answer and got the best resolution.

Okay. Is it actively dissuading you from going back? Like, oh, don't ignore our old shit. You know, they ask, have you ever been in a monastery before? And he goes, yes, I was in a monastery. And I had to find a killer. And he tells like the whole fucking breakdown of what happened in KCD-1. So basically, if you're playing the second game,

you didn't play the first one. Every single time Henry starts telling a story, it's something that happened in the first game. Pretty much as he tells. So Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, what you're saying is it's the perfect time to start to jump into the franchise. I would actually say yes. For somebody who is, like, I would actually say genuinely yes, because what happens is that if you're like, I don't know if I like this. Well, KCD2 is a without qualification recommend like genuinely.

Like I have no qualms recommending it to damn near anybody. And if you burn through that whole game and you're like, I love it. I absolutely love it. I'm like, well, would you like to play the origin of this story on hard mode because the game's harder because it's meaner? Wow. So you can, yes. Like, just play the first game as the second game sequel. You can actually hit the marketing line on this one.

Interesting. Yeah. Okay. Okay. It's, it's really excellent. It's, uh, like, it's one of those things. I could go on and on, but like the thing that's special about it is just the uniform quality of all its little. component pieces.

Like, for example, say you do a lot of murder. I did a couple times I did like many murders. And my reputation was very badly damaged. So you go to your local Catholic parish and you can either pay an amount of money into the indulgence chest, which is

crazy. I did a lot of murder. I did a lot of murder. The fact that that shit's real. The amount of the indulgence chest wanted was pretty high. Or you can do a pilgrimage. Martin Luther had a point.

And the pilgrimage, there's a, there's a similar Martin Luther situation happening in Czech at that time. Yeah. Yeah. A guy named Jan. Sure. He was basically yelling about the Catholics being Simonists.

And basically, the long and short of it is that you can be like, well, I could do a pilgrimage. And they will give you a location at the absolute. ass end of the map. Just as far as you can fucking possibly go annoyingly far away. And they will go there and do three hellmeries or whatever. And so you go down there, you spend the 10 minutes it takes to ride out there. You find the location and you get the prey button at which point Henry gets down on his knees and recites the entire Lord's prayer three times.

Wow. Okay. And it takes a while. And like that will like aid your reputation gain. There's there's real things like that. Real Catholic gameplay extending. Absolutely. Your side quests.

That's that's impressive. Okay. So yeah, KCD2, that's Kingdom Come Deliverance to, is incredible. It's a 10 out of 10. It is a systemic,

fascinating, incredible open world game. It is like the only historically, historical fiction game I can think of. at all of the top of my head historical fiction is not a super popular genre in video games

oh we're not going to be talking about SIV or no SIV is a historical fiction I guess all those World War II games would be historical fiction I guess um yeah I guess they would

I mean again the stories people tell about their SIV campaigns sounds like historical fiction to me but I don't know man I don't know not the ones my friends tell me Um, or there's that World War One one that's also, um, apparently really depressing, but really good. This war of mine? Yeah, that's the one.

Wait, this war, wait, hold on. Was it World War I was. Or was it two? No, no, hold on. Isn't this war of mine about like, I'm not sure. Kosovo? Oh, I'm not sure at all. Or I'm thinking of something else.

This war. Yeah, no, this war of mine is about Kosovo. Okay, all right, well, then... I'm thinking of... I can't remember. But yeah, there's a World War I... There's a World War I adventure game that I thought you played.

World War I adventure game. I don't think I... Yeah. I don't think I played a World War I adventure game. Unless, no, no, not at all. The only... The last, like, war time game thing like that, like the saboteur?

Like, which was like a Nazi-occupied France. I guess that's technically historical fiction. Yeah. I, I wouldn't include Assassin's Creed because of all the magic. Yeah. I don't think that falls within the purview of historical fiction. Valiant Hearts is coming up, but I never touched that. Oh, yeah, KCD2.

Good, good game. Super good game. Excellent game. Can't talk enough about it. Okay. I also On a laugh, on a lark, I decided to

throw down and try out some indie game called Star Do Valley. Oh, this little small thing. Mm-hmm. So, hey, big ups on you for giving them some exposure. I supposedly,

I looked at it and it was like, maybe they could use it, but I was like, I don't know, I've been playing, you know, when you, you beat like some absolutely gargantuan single player monster and you get what I can only refer to as like the, the post game clarity. Sure. Like, you need, you have, you have a cozy refractory period that you're in right now. And you're just this kind of like, oh, I, I, every time I sat down to play something. It was this for X amount of months.

And now you need some cuddles. I don't know. You were hitting it hard, and now you need some cuddle time. I just need a nice, fuzzy, warm blanket. There you go. So I loaded up the Stardue Valley. And the first thing that I was confused about what I loaded up in the show. Oh, no.

What's up? What a weird frame to pause on. Actually, well, hold on. Let's see what just happened there. What a strange place to... Wow, you're back. Hold on. You're back.

You are back. I seem to be having a minor internet foible right now. You turned into a robot for a second, but then you returned to us. Yeah. My bad. All right. The first thing that I was like a little confused about when it came to Starter Valley was that the amount of people that showed up to that stream was like three times as much as usual.

Oh, well, yeah. And I was like, and I was like, huh, for this little indie farming game that no one's ever heard of. And in that ensuing discussion, I was like, oh, this thing sold 41 million fucking copies. that's that's a couple they sold a couple Star Dew Valleys apparently

one or two well a couple um so you know somebody in my chat says you didn't know and I guess is this not a bit

hold on stop pause no it's not a bit I sat here waiting for us to get to the you're not this is not a bit you did not know Star Do Valley was Star do no I thought it was like I thought it was like the indie little baby

So I said I think I summed up I think I summed up just how out of touch I was When I said I thought This was one of those cute little indie games That's based off of like Minecraft or whatever That like did okay Like Terraria

And And then In the process of saying that out loud I was like, wait a second. Didn't Terraria sell like hundreds of millions of copies and is like the seventh best-selling video game of all time? Yes, yes, Terraria definitely is. So it turns out, Pat,

a lot of people really like Harvest Moon-style gameplay. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, it's kind of a big deal. So you know what else should have really like tip me off like really bad? What should have tipped me off really bad was when you know you click a game on Steam and it'll show like your friends have wishlisted this or your friends play this. Like when I click on Star Doe Valley, I get this this fucking image that is like, hey, did you know that 13 of your friends on Steam play Star Doe Valley? Mm-hmm. Did you know everybody plays it?

Did you know? Well, did you see that? Confuses me is like every, like my entire list of people that I know who play FF14 also play Stardue Valley. It's never come up. It's just never come up once. Because people are just hitting the farm,

you know, and chilling and killing down time. Yeah. And then when it says overwhelmingly positive, the bracket, next to that says 373,660 reviews. So apparently it's like top 20 bestselling game of all time, supposedly. So what brought you?

It's about, okay. You know what? Hey, how popular could it be? Hey, hey, hey, I have my blind spots to. We don't know what's going on sometimes. What brought you to the valley then? What, what? Um, I saw that there was a Nintendo Switch update.

Okay. And I was like, you know, I heard people really like that game. And I somehow purchased it at some point and didn't realize it. So I was like, I'll get this a shot. And I'm also trying to find, I'm trying to find non-baby scramblers. Yep. Right? Because beating KCD2, if the kid happened to watch 10 minutes of it, it's like, oh, it's a guy riding a horse through the countryside.

Like, what was the name? Eddie on the horsey or something? Henry on the horsey. Henry on the horsey. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. So, like, oh, Starry Valley looks chill as shit. That doesn't have any, like, wild, like, flashing graphics or whatever.

All right, I'll give that a shot. And you know, I'll give it a shot on stream. Why not? Let's see what happens. That game's really good. Have you ever played Harvest Moon? No. It's very fun.

I've... Is this not also a blind spot for you? I have not played Star Doe Valley, but I've played Harvest Moon Game Boy Color back in the day, and I spent a good amount of time making my farm, and I had a good time doing it. So... I was chilling in Alabama.

I had nothing else going on, and hanging out with my family. I was just playing some Harvest Moon. Past the time, good. So there's a certain joy. to having a blind spot that's so blind that even the explanations are also blind spots. So, like, I'll be like, oh, okay, so what is this like? And people are like, Harvest Moon.

I'm like, I don't know what that is. Like, I don't think I've ever seen Harvest Moon. You definitely have because, like, it's in, it's, there's a statutes. you forward in smash brothers melee kind of thing like well okay you know all I didn't know it was harvest moon sure okay it is it is a

yeah it's a thing and I don't think I'd ever seen Star do Valley like moving and then someone was like well what about Terraria I'm like I played Terraria for five minutes and I didn't really like it I've never seen anything past that what about Minecraft I don't like Minecraft

I don't get it so like this was like the first game I had ever played in my life that was like, dig a hole to put a crop in it. This is, by the way, just so you know, this is game so big that like entire streaming careers have been built on it like. Yeah, I know I can see that.

As a thing, right? Like, yeah. I can see that. So what I did play was satisfactory. Okay. Yep. Which is about, you know, automating. Yep.

The destruction of the earth into minerals. Yes. But what satisfactory does have is 3D graphics, and what it does not have is any social component whatsoever. Right? So I'm streaming in Stardue Valley, and time jumped forward, and then it was six and a half hours later. Sure, there you go.

That's correct. And I was 15 days into spring, and I was trying to figure out what Penny, the girl that lives down at the trailer, park likes for gifts and I couldn't figure it out. And I got in about 10 floors deep into the mines. And I was like, oh, no. Oh, no. This game's like a time vampire. Incredible, incredible. Like a time vampire? A little bit. Yeah. Have you, have you crossed animals before? Have I crossed an animal? Have you animal crossings? Have you animal crossings?

Yes, I played Animal Crossing. Okay, okay. So you have some basis. I had one really massive problem with Animal Crossing New Horizons, and it's a really big problem that I really hated, which was I would play Animal Crossing. And I'm like, I'm in the lockdown in the pandemic. And I'm like, I'm having a good time playing with my Animal Crossing. And then I would play it for about 30 minutes. and then the game would be like,

well, you're fucking done. You're fucking done for the day. I mean, you could like do some bullshit, but like, you're functionally finished. Play it tomorrow. You did your tasks and yeah. And I'm like, no, I want to sit here and blow my entire evening, Animal Crossing.

And they're like, no, play it tomorrow. I'm like, no. So playing Stardu, and Stardu is just like, I know, fucking go till you fall asleep. I'm like, oh, okay, all right. Okay. I learned some interesting lessons and kind of had to, I kind of ate a little bit of crow.

So I loaded it up on the switch. And I was like, you, I think this game has stuff in it, so I don't want you people to backseat. I will freak out. I will not tolerate backseating in my cozy farming game. and before I even hit start someone in the chat's like what you're playing it on switch what about mods and I'm like you are starting the backseat before the boot people okay I can't so this is one thing where I'm like I know about Starry as a phenomenon from the outside I can't tell you anything about it from the inside.

But the whole point of what was fun about harvest mooning and stuff was making your farm, setting up your posts, planting the stuff, making a pleasing little formation. And, you know, and then you harvest. And then you got your, you got your cows and you got your farm and you do your whole bit. Yeah. And setting it up and doing the, the, um, the mundane work was the point. So I don't know if anyone coming. in with a min-max screaming

attitude here is like it's defeating the entire purpose of why you're starting the game to begin with. Yeah, you can min-max this shit to death. I found that out even within a couple of minutes. Within a couple of minutes. Just like I'm looking at the math and the energy and the time and the dates and the birthdays.

I'm like, oh, okay. It's like going, it's like getting out on a boat with your fishing rod and a couple of beers and then like someone pulls out the fucking underwater X-ray camera and and the fucking sniper dart to lance the fish and put and yeat them back into the boat and then to just drag along the floor and scrape up the rest of what you don't catch. And you're like, we're kind of here to just chill in the boat and throw the line.

So it didn't like that. I then went into town and talked to the townspeople and then was like, oh, I wonder what gift he likes. And the very first response is, using the Wikipedia on this game makes it really easy to da da da da da da and i'm like i i immediately understood that like attempting to

do it all will lead to madness like absolute just insanity just crazy people behavior right the game itself directs you to its wiki no no it doesn't know a person in chat

direction. Sorry. Okay. I thought you said a person in town said that. Okay. No, no, my mistake. Okay. Um, and I'm like, no, no, no. So I, uh, I finished my stream and I was like, wow, that was absolutely incredible. I cannot wait to play more of that. Then I went home, bought the game on Steam and installed a couple of mods for it. And we'll continue on stream with a restarted playthrough on that. Because how are those mods then? deep enough into the game that there's at least one thing that I'm like, okay,

this is something I have to change, which is, um, I need a button to just put all the fucking shit in my inventory into these fucking chests because I can already see that's going to be an enormous, like, quantity of my time is organizing shit in these fucking chests. And so the mods.

So like, so yeah, hey, yeah, I guess I should have fucking, just fucking bought it on Steam. and just fucking play it there. Okay.

So, real deal, I'd like to apologize for calling you out so bad during my stream. I guess you were right. Damn. That doesn't mean you're a motherfucker, but you were right,

you were right. Any other mods? Catch your eye there? So I hit it, I put out the call. I'm like, hey, Stardu freaks, which I know are around.

There we go. What do you, guys suggest and people suggested a bunch of shit and I would look at them and I go this is for sick freak freaksoids like somebody suggested try the automate I was about to say surely there's a there's a there's a the game plays itself fucking mod yeah no put put take the automate mod what the automate mod does is if you put it next to a beehive and put a chest down then the beehive will just spit all the materials from the beehive into the chest and then the chest if it touches the thing it'll just automatically make out? And like, no, you can't. No, that's, come on. You can't.

Hmm. Like, like, the automate mod is what you install on our 380 once you've created your 500 rows of fucking bullshit and you're like, I need to get more out of this crap or on your second play through. Right? Um, no, the only ones that I, I put in is I put in one that it, uh, just, I can just dump all my items into chests more easily. Uh, and I put in one. Uh, and I put in one, that just if I hit a button on any given character, it'll just bring up their statistics. That's it. There was one that somebody suggested for me

that was called UI Info, and I turned it on, and like, this thing is like, how do I put this? It's objectively incredible work because it's like, hey, it tells you if the day is lucky. Hey, it tells you how much health this fence have.

It tells you, blah, blah. And I'm like, all of these things are things that I should be checking myself with my eyes rather than having a but now you've got the side of the screen so it's fucking

it reminds me of um binding of Isaac has like an item info tab that you can turn on uh there's there's this clip of Northern Lion floating around where someone's like why the fuck don't you have the item information tab on

it's like I'm just I'm just kind of free balling it have fun. The whole thing is to just chill and have cool vibes. But if you have to optimize and if you have to fucking min-max it, you're going to be playing Stardu Valley and then you're going to become Monsanto. Like at some point, your farm becomes giant corp field,

infinity. Like, like right now, fucking farm nutters, man. I'm just restarting on Steam. And I've just got my like little patch of dirt with my cauliflowers and my beans. Just. If you have to, you know, if you have to install the, the corporate farm corp level of mods, at what point is the relaxation happening?

Well, some people want to be sicko, nasty freaks, right? At some point people want to, like, and so like, if I wanted to play a fully automated machine factory game, I would play my fully automated machine factory game called Satasactory or Factorio, which are like, Like literally that. Like that's what that shit is. I mean, we, we established that this is your refractory period after big old insane RPG. So, um, you can't turn after,

you can't min-max aftercare, man. Yeah. So the only, the only issue that I ran into, because I was like, I was fully on like chill maxing and cozying and being like, maybe I'll go to the mind today.

Maybe I'll, maybe I'll, I'll grow some extra broccoli or whatever the fuck, right? And you unlock like what is essentially the main quest of Stardue Valley. We're just filling out requests for the community center. And it gives you just like a absolutely fucking disgusting amount of things to turn in. And it is for like the long term. I think it's for like three years.

I think it's like So three years would be 12 months Which would be like 500 600 700 days which I believe would be like 80 to 100 hours Like of get one of every type of fish Get one of every type of Crop Chivos All these little tiny things

And like it just slams you with all of these suggestions And you're like oh my God that's a lot of fucking Jesus Christ That's a lot of fucking things that I could And like as soon as that happened I felt like a tiny, like, voice in the back of my head, be like, make sure to use the most out of every single fucking day. Like when you get, okay, so sometimes that list is, uh, daunting and I look, you look at it and you almost go like, okay, fuck this. I'm just going to do my own thing. Or other times, it's a idea generator. Like in vampire survivors, once you start seeing the list of things you can accomplish and achievements, you're like, oh, I didn't think of that.

let me go try this, you know? So you can use it positively. That's what it's supposed to be. Okay. That's, it's supposed to be, like, there's a one, the one that like broke my brain was like, it's, it's like turn in all these fish. And it's just, it's a fish tank that has like ocean fishing, river fishing, cave fishing. Just like, ba, ba, ba, ba, blah, blah, blah, right? And I'm like, oh, my God, there's so many fucking fish.

And I've only got like two fish. But what's actually telling you is, you know, there's different fish in the ocean that there are on the river. Okay. Go to different places. right and so it just ends up being like like playing Stardue Valley is like well water my crops in the morning until I get sprinklers

then clean up my yard until I'm out of energy and then go talk to people in town see what the fuck is up call it a night maybe go looking for flowers etc

um that games so that got me the path. And the path is, as soon as I talked about Stardue Valley, in came people going like, well, did you know about everything else? I mean, there's Stardue Valley, right? Yep, yep, but there's also fields of mystery. Mm-hmm. That's right there. And but did you also know that there's also well, Grimshire? Did you know about Grimshire? The farm nutters rose up. Mm-hmm. Did you know about story of seasons? Well, okay, so Pat, now it's time to just go back to the cozy direct and watch it unironically.

Because there was a cozy direct specifically for this purpose. So I've done some digging and I've discovered that Stardue Valley is the harbinger of the entire cozy genre. Yeah, absolutely. Star Doe Valley is also a lot older than I thought it was. 2016 It's yeah It's way older And it's like it's extraordinarily

Charming and chill art style Led to the cozy thing But here's the thing that I don't Like Star Doe Valley has an energy meter And a timer And goals and combat Okay Like

I like Well the fact that Like a lot of the cozy games that I saw were like What have you sat around and drank tea And thought about warm blankets. And it's like, no. I, like, I need some kind of goal. So it's one of these games, too, where it's like, yeah, I took a look at the developer there and it's like, oh, there is no Stardue Valley 2. In fact, there's nothing else. There's only this game. And that is more than

enough for them as a platform to exist and make their money and continue to support it for as long as they fucking want to. So, apparently there is a Star Dew Valley 2. It's called Haunted Chocolatier. The other companies and other people making their things. Yes.

No. No, that's concerned date. He announced it four years ago. Oh. Um, it's not out. Oh.

Okay. It's just in the works and it's taken its time. Okay. It's just taken forever. And it, it's like, of farming, it's running your own shop of chocolate.

It's the same fucking game, but two. And then for people who are like, no, I want Star Doe Valley farming to, Fields of Mistria is like literally that. It's like literally

made by what appears to be Star Do Valley superfan mega freaks that are like, what if we made Star Doe Valley, but just, just better enough that people go to our game. And apparently that's like, so like you look at shadows of mystery, it's shadows of mystery. I keep wanting to call it shadows of mistara. Welcome to the D&D world. You look at field of mystery and like the cave diving

combat thing looks exactly the same except instead of one sword swipe, your character has a three hit combo. And I saw that and I'm like, oh, they literally just took literally every single mechanic from Stardu and then went, well, what if there was like a three hit combo? You could do a little bit more. Yeah, okay. So the, the true time tested, uh, I'm seeing me with the chat just go, oh, a three hit combo. Yeah. So the time tested theory where Nintendo invents the genre, um, A fan comes along and perfects it and creates a new thing. Nintendo pretty much stops caring about it, moves on. And then from that, there is all the derivatives.

And then this becomes a new giant place for audiences to hang out, right? Cart racing, Smash Brothers, fucking farming. Also, I don't know if you saw, but Mistria also looks like a Game Boy Advance game, like Sho manga. Like very anime. As does. Well, as does Haunted Chocolatia, which I do. just looked up there.

So yeah. And I'm like, oh, okay. So it once, once I beat Star Doe Valley, the fucking mystery will be right there. That's great.

So yeah. So I feel like my third eye is opened. And I'm like, wow, there's actually a lot of compelling gameplay to these cozy farming games. And do you know what it made me feel like, Willie?

Mm-hmm. All the games that I've played across all the genres that I've played. And I'm playing this, Stardue Valley and I'm planting my crops and I'm going to check on town and I'm like, I am a fucking gun and ball gamer. Fucking ballers gate three. You are sword and spell gamer. Yeah.

Right? Gamers when they have to play a game without a fucking sword or a spell. Or a punch button. Oh, boy. Yeah. Like, there is technically combat in Stardu Valley. It's extraordinarily simple. And it vainly just exists to break up the pacing.

Yeah. So, um, you, the thing with all this realization, though, is, and I think it's important, is you got to be in the mood, right? You have to be in the mood for this kind of cozy vibe, chill, laid back, light gaming experience. 40 and I have a toddler. So guess what? Some chill fucking vibes planting some crops.

Sounds awesome. So I've put, there's games that, like, I put me playing into the breach, darkest dungeon, and, um,

fucking, uh, Slay the spire fit into this category because it's the, I'm just going to sit on the couch with the one hand playing with the mouse, just brain off. for a minute game. And that mood falls upon me temporarily, and then I'm down, I'm out of it,

and I'm in the mood for something a little more active, you know. But yeah, you have to identify when you're feeling that particular way and go for it. But I don't know how your factorial or satisfactory stuff went, or what made you dive in and out, and at what point you'd feel like you're out. Oh, so I can tell you. that's the moment you're done really simple yeah it's very simple so um i played fact i played said i'd never

got into factorial it's just on the list over here threatening me uh i played satisfactory around update three like four years ago and then i'm like wow i put like 60 hours into this game in like two months i'm gonna just wait till the fucking full things out because it's in a very incomplete state um and then 1.0 came out like 10 days after zangiv died and i'm like I'm not in the mood for this. Okay. And just haven't been back to it. And then they added controller support recently.

So at some point, at some point in the next 60 days, I'm going to come on to this podcast with bloodshot eyes and go like, pro, I swear to God, steel screws. I need a better recipe for that shit. I need to make that out of wire or something. My fucking,

my fucking throughput on these fucking conveyors is, shit. I need to get up to the mark three. My, my, man, getting an oil production facility down compared to coal is so much work because you have to deal with the, the, the verticality of the fluids and the fucking pipes.

Because I was trying to identify an exit ramp, but when there is none, I don't know what to offer you there, you know? No, no, the ramp is, Stardue Valley until I've burnt out into satisfactory until I'm burnt out back into fields of

mistria because it's out. The other thing, and this is like, this is one of the sickest things. Like I did some digging about like, okay, so this, Sturdy Valley's 1.6 right now. It's a nine year old game and it's a version 1.6. How much did they add in those

oh man, a lot? Like a lot. But those patches are like really far spaced out. So they have this real energy of like, hey, remember last year when you went completely insane playing Star Do Valley on 1.1. Well, we add all this stuff for 1.2.

So you know what we can do? You just start your fucking farm right the fuck over. Just start it over. Just start the fucking thing over. And apparently 1.7 to Soonish, which I don't know what fucking Soonish means in this context, because Soonish means very different things for many different developers. It means many different things. If you're playing a game nine years later and it's on one point.

six or whatever, you're playing a sequel. You're not playing the game that came out. You're the amount is like that. There's no way. There's just no chance. Okay. So, yeah, so

the other thing is like, on one, on one hand, like, I absolutely, I think devs that continue to support their game for years and years and years and years like this, even single, solo player game, whatever. But at the same time, I am kind of like, oh, I don't want to beat Stardue Valley.

And then the 1.7 update goes, hey, look, we added a bunch of stuff to the beginning of the game. So it's smoother. I was not under the impression that you could beat it. I thought it was a forever cozy. That's just, it's, I mean, you can, you can ring all of the juice out of it. Right. I thought your brain was the upper limit, really. I guess so.

people are saying that's the dumbest shit ever yeah is that not how that works i think you just go until your your pillow is fucking cozied out do do when they add more stuff into and then is it is it just all to the end of the game and then you load back up your your your progress and you look at your what you've created and then your fill pillows fluffy again and you're like i'm a kick back and just fucking do it and it's literally forever i don't think these things have an end you know so I actually got to look up I was like okay well what was actually

you know what fuck it I'll just do that right now Star Doe Valley 1.6 all right what kind of shit did they add you know what's fun when you look at a patch note and you go I don't know what a single one of these fucking things is right

not a single goddamn idea how long to beat Star Doe Valley 98 hours apparently 170 completionist whatever the fuck that means oh my god this is a lot oh

what festivals have map and dialogue changes every second year what okay all right all right well

okay there you go I mean I mean realistically realistically it's until the next shiny sword and spell and punch game comes out so and then you go oh and then you go range concept to me which is like a game that is always updating and always improving and it's like

when do I get in get in now and like if you feel like going back in two years it'll be better yeah but like I think like Star do valley will only be like done when a haunted chocolate tear comes out and then Concerned Apes, all their energy goes into that. I had a similar experience to that this week, actually. But, well, I was going to say if you have anything else this week. I also played Quarantine Zone last check. What's that? That came out yesterday.

Devolver sent me a code. You might have seen clips of that. Quarantine Zone is a very jank game in which you are the guy at the Zonk. zombie checkpoint making sure nobody's sneaking in zombie bites. Oh, that's a fun idea. Papers, please, zombie edition.

And it is super jank. It's really jank. It has some visual bugs and that's, I like that idea. It looks kind of ugly. And I kept, I kept running into a situation where I like,

don't know if I screwed up or if the situation's just bugged out. Um, however, um, basically, uh, people come in and you examine them for bites, strange rashes, whatever. And then after you do a couple days of that, you then upgrade like, oh, you have a scanner where you can scan through their clothes to see if they're hiding bites or whatnot. And also new types of symptoms are coming in. Um, and then you get a temperature reader. and then you get a stethoscope. You get something to measure like their breathing. And you're going through,

you get a hammer for reflex testing and so on and so forth. And so each examination is taking like longer and longer and longer as you're trying to check for all these symptoms. And yeah, you know what? This guy's got a weird rash. He's pale. He's got conjunctiveitis in his eyes. He's got absent reflexes.

But none of those are 100% certain for infection. And let me... So you can go sit in the quarantine pod until I can check you tomorrow. And let me guess. His family is right outside. God, my family is outside. I just need to get through. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That, like, the emotional tug of this is clear. Um, I'm watching someone playing it and I'm seeing a fucking helicopter gunning down zombies footage. which is not at all. Every couple of days in fact it'll rush the barricades. You have to shoot them off.

There's also like a base building mechanic. Okay. Okay. We're like, hey, you got a bunch of money. Do you want to upgrade

quarantine so it can fit more people? Yeah, fuck all that. No, no, no. Focus on the fucking the, the investigation though. Like,

so the investigation, yeah. You like, oh, do you want to upgrade to get like a better, you know, upgrade your base in general? Or do you want to add

so, for example, there's a temperature reader and it'll measure pulse and it'll measure, temperature, right? So like 37 to 40 degrees is pretty high for temp, right? But 42 degrees and up is like, no

human being is walking around at fucking 42 degrees Celsius. That's fucking ridiculous. So normally when you'd shoot the, you'd point the temperature reader at them, it would just give you the number, right? But once you upgrade it with your research points, you can get not just the number, but you also

get like, hey, does this guy have a of 210 and have a temp of 42 to fucking degrees Celsius, the device itself will light up red and go, okay, dump this dude. So saying that it's a jank-ass game is important. And, uh, it is. Yeah.

I have a very, very crucial question here, though. Does this imply then that when people are bitten, but not turned and they're going to rush the point or be desperate that you have to just gun down or take out people who are not turned but just really desperate and fucked up. This is a mid-game change. So, spoiler warning. For most of the early game, the only thing you have is your eyes and maybe the temperature

and maybe your hammer for, um, like reflex testing. At one point in the game's campaign, they go, listen, some people are coming in and they look fine, but they'll turn within like five seconds. So go get a pistol so that if somebody goes nuts in the quarantine area or in the line, you can, you can take them out. Okay. Yes. Um, but it's not, I guess the question is, is like, are you shooting at people who are not zombies that are trying to get in? No. Okay. Because that's a very different game and that now you're the guy who's checking Ellie, right? Getting into the fucking base before, before Joel.

And this is a very different video game experience if this is what you're doing. I played the game yesterday and I got the gun. And I let somebody in who I thought looked super legit. And then in the upper right corner of my screen, it said, poor inspection, which meant I had actually missed like multiple things. on their person. Okay. And so I panicked and shot them

before they even reached the save zone, at which point I got like a minus $1,000 bonus because of an unauthorized liquidation. And then I panicked and shot all the guards and game over. And I was like, I've been, I've been playing this game for five hours. I'm going to go help the wife in, get the groceries. Okay.

So it lets, so you can't just do it on a hunch. You have to confirm it. And then, okay. You have to go through the paperwork. Yeah. There's so many, I have so many questions about, like, the ethical line that it takes you to here. Because obviously, there's no ethical line. Like, if anybody comes in with, like, a weird symptom, whether or not you think they're sick or not, you bring them to the lab and you dissect them with further organs so you can test them.

Okay. And it's, it's, like, played goofy. No. Okay. Because, like, papers please, obviously, it's, like, what I'm describing and the, like, those moments are the whole point. of the experience, right? No, you don't, it's not, it's, it's not, it's, I mean, I mean, you zap off their body parts with lasers, but like, they're alive.

Mm, okay. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, and I'm, yeah, I'm watching footage of it and people are, like, shooting rats and somebody's coming running at you and being a zombo and like, I'm like, okay, I, I can see what's going on here, but like, you see what I'm getting at where it's like, oh, if they they wanted this to be to fuck you up with someone who, who's like, no, no, no, my kid's fine. My kid's fine.

Leave them alone. They're okay. And then you have like, the voice acting is terrible in the animation. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The crux of the game is the actually, like, really satisfying process of going down a symptom list and trying to figure out, like, how to do it. It's the same kind of gameplay loop of like mortuary assistant. Okay.

Or something like that. It was like, listen, we have done a lot of work to make these, like, boring ass mechanics actually really interesting to do. Okay, because yeah, that, like, the description of what this idea is sounds nightmarish, and people are saying there's another game called, no, I'm not a human. Yeah, no, that game actually has, like, some emotional pathos to it. And to be, and I'm like, I'm not even saying that's what I want, because, like, this could be super horrifying and fucked up to just be, like, executing people that are, like, otherwise

normal because they're desperate and really just want to get to safety. Well, the real people who get fucked up are the people who have like ongoing suspicions, suspicious symptoms. Who I'm like, well, I can't leave out a quarantine. I can't figure that out. So I put them in a quarantine. And then quarantine's got like, got like four guys in it. And then I wake up in the morning to check on the guys in quarantine. And I met with three corpses.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm like, well, you will be fine. Yeah. Yeah. Because I had to be sure. Okay. The, the serious.

like actual whatever emotional emotionally wrenching version of this that people are describing here I'm like no I'm not a human yeah got it okay but yeah no

that's great I'm gonna be also pathologic three just came out which is also that okay I like depending on like because I'm just thinking of

anyway I might have to like stop playing a game like that depending like depending on how bad that God I feel like I might have to Oh you I would expect no Emotionality out of No out of quarantine zone at all Yeah okay okay

At all But no I'm not a human or pathologic Yeah maybe That's been it for me The rest of my week is very busy One decision can turn you into Dio in part one turning the mom, but not the baby.

I am going to be watching the fallout episode tonight with the page at 11 p.m. Pacific. Tomorrow at 5, I'm doing more backlog games. Thursday, I'm going to do the Resident Evil showcase and more Stardue Valley. And then Saturday, Sunday, me and Paige are going to go through dispatch. All right. Oh, has Paige dodged it entirely? Yep, 100%. Ooh, cool.

Okay. Nice. I think she's seen a photo of Invisigirl, and that's it. I mean, the malevolta train can't be stopped. That much is going to be clear. I think that's marked out. In any case. Cool.

Okay. Oh, and that's over at twitch.tv slash pet stairs at and YouTube.com slash pet stairs at. Okay. Let me know if you want to hit that walk now or. After, but, uh, walk. Or hit the break. Do you want to take a break now or later? Uh, you know, I should feed this dog.

Okay. Yes. All right. Be happy. See you guys a second. All right. Let's take a quick word for our sponsors. Boy, I love sponsor.

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S-H-O-P-I-F-Y. Dot com slash Superbeast. Hear your first Cheching of the New Year with Shopify by your side. Thank you, Shopify. Thanks, Shopify. Okay. got up to a couple things this week. First thing, I decided to play some Absalom.

Been hearing great things about it. Yeah, been hearing great things about it for a while now. And I was feeling like, you know, let's get some couch co-op going. Let's keep the couch hot two controllers. Let's play. So, you know, plugged it in, got Reggie on co-op, and we jumped in. And yeah, this has been a one that's been, you know, I've been hearing good things about it. And it makes sense because dot M you did a pretty good job with Streets of Rage 4.

And this is kind of like, I guess, you know, taking off from some of the lessons they learned there. The future of a scrolling beatem up, you know, because beatemps can go in a bunch of different directions. Character action was one of them, certainly. There's games that go more action-heavy like Shinobi or, you know, Ninja Guide in, um, rage bound, for example, when you, when you, uh, but, but like the old scroll, the old school scrolling arcade, um, formula is, is intact here. And it feels really, really good in Absalom. One of the ways you can do that is by aggressively having not one, but two immediate parry and deflect systems. And it's not only a, uh, a parry, but it is a dash that leads

into a parry. So, you know, you have your movement tied to your deflect, tied to your defense. It's all kind of within that same idea. And they do, it's one of those things where you have one ability that does multiple things. And I always love that in game design, where you can find one button to do multiple, to just like integrate and simplify the system with. Bold art style looks really cool. It looks really cool.

I like the light rogue like elements. to it. Yes. That's the, that's not crazy different per run, but it's a nice reason to just vary it up a little bit. Yep. And if you've got any Hades familiarity, you're seeing stuff that you see right off the bat in Hades. You're seeing an element on your weak attack, an element on your heart attack, or an element on your dash, for example. Um, upgrades to that stuff. You're seeing the permanent run currency when you come back around after you die and so on. Um, um, Um, they, I, so far we've, so the, the two characters you get introduced to are Galandra and Carl. Galandra is got, uh, she's got a sword, does a bunch. She's kind of like medium-paced, you know, half character. Um, and does a couple of like rising slashes and, you know, just hits hard, has some charge attacks, etc. Carl's got fists punching little dwarf or no, no dwarf. Yeah. Um, and, uh, then towards the end, um, um, and, uh, then towards the end, of the run I unlocked a third character, Sider, who is essentially chic from melee in a mask. A little bit. And air combos, grappling, and like prosthetic limbs to do cool extended shit tools,

dropping bombs and snatching enemies into the air, or you snatch or you pull yourself over to them, et cetera. Very, very just like... I got far enough to unlock the frog man. Okay, yeah, that's the fourth. I didn't see him yet. Frog wizard. Cool, beat them up.

You know, very just nice sense of, again, small progression when you go around each time, you take branches left or right and you cross the map and then you, as you go on, it's like, hey, you unlocked a bridge over here. Maybe next time you do a run, go south and revisit that bridge and see if you go somewhere different, you know. Things that I liked about Shadows over Mastara, or Shadows Over Mastara. I keep forgetting if it's over or of, but the D&D beat them up, you know, where you just, yeah, you're, you're leveling up and you're progressing with these characters. You're getting a nice sense of just combo juggling going on. And there's an anti-infident prevention system. So you, by doing repetitive moves, you scale your damage down. and at a certain point they

kind of explode out of your hands and go flying across the screen and I'm not sure if like styling is the way to keep your combos going longer or if it's just like a hard set thing but there seems to be some sort of system in place between you and like if you're playing co-op

juggling your enemies back and forth and kind of extending your combos I guess if you delay it properly or get the right upgrades, you can do more damage before they explode and go flying across the room, you know? Yeah, just it's also, you know, lessons learned from like, what you might call it? A dragon's crown and a couple of other of the more modern beat-em-ups where you just, you want your simple attacks to be. like you want things to be very cancelable.

You want your ability to dash out of things as soon as you start them. And you want airplay to be a big part of what makes your combos fun. You know, like juggling the body longer to build up enough mana to do another special, you know, and just, yeah, having a real sense of fun with like,

you know, every group that comes in. It's what made me like Sen Goku 3 more than any other beat him up I've played like back in the day. It was the fact that you could just, dash cancel out of everything, get like the first couple hits of something going, and then just, yeah, essentially 2D character action your way across the screen. Fucking bosses up and stuff, you know? Love it so far.

So, like, there's, I have like a minor issue, but it's not with Absalom. It's with like every beatem up I've played in the past like 10 years except for Dragon's Crown. Specifically only Dragon's Crown. I don't feel this way. and I feel like it's a problem with me because I see like we follow a bunch of people on social media that are like beat them up

freakazoids like Dino right who just do all this crazy shit but like I loaded up Absalom and I like did the basic bread and butter into like a launcher

and then would bounce them off the wall until they were dead and it was like very simple and I got near the end of the I got like like I got like I got far enough to get the frog guy anyway in a in a in a run and i was just doing like my b and b and b and b and b and b and to dodge like like and i feel like at as i play them i'm just like when am i going to get like

10 more moves oh like i'm always like why like i have my my side combo which is like five hits and have my air combo and I have like maybe my in absolute me of your L2 and R2 which are like special moves and I'm like like when am I going to get like my Dragon's Crown like Amazon like level

here's your jumping attack which is the spin here is your hold button attack here is your up down here you know I mean so in this game there's two answers because in one run I unlocked the second special for like for both characters

so the default I had, for example, with the main girl, Galandra, was like a rising burning sword uppercut, right? And then after dying the first time, I had the currency to unlock a second special, which was like a drive sword blade projector. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. And so I got that pretty much right away. And then while the actual run is underway, like Hades, you're, picking up a thing that says, okay, when you get lightning attached to your strike button, every time you hit something, you do your five-fit combo, you build up a chain lightning that's going to hit multiple things. So the variety comes from the run modifiers that you're picking up between rooms like Hades. And then combining that with like, oh, you picked up a big upgrade, which is now you have an air grab. So after you launch the enemy up, you can do a fucking borsed dynamite. at the end of your combo for it as an ender. Yeah, no, I got all of that.

And I'm just like, I would then finish my run and then I would start without those. And I'm like, I want more moves. Like, I had the same problem with Streets of Rage 4. Okay. Which, like, is gorgeous and had incredible music and had really good game feel. I think. And I'm like, and I see, I'm watching a combo video of Streets of Rage 4 right now. Yeah, yeah.

where they're doing a million things and I'm like yeah but I only have like five moves. Depends on the game I guess ultimately in this one I feel like what the from my first impression what it's kind of asking you

to do is you just wail on dudes and like be ready to parry them and then from that you know get a launcher going and then keep your juggles you know, keep your juggles tight

and then make sure you don't drop the combo and just make sure you can parry everything coming at you, right? In River City Girls, you had a pretty extensive move list. You got a crazy huge amount of moves. And there's a fuck ton of stuff you can get going. So there was a lot to those combos. And I feel like...

Like, I loved getting like, I loved River City Girls. You got this massive arsenal of things to do. And I think, so Streets of Rage for, they wanted to, not make it not feel like streets of rage. I used a double negative when I shouldn't have there. They wanted it to feel like streets of rage. They didn't want to do too much,

right? And kind of like making virtual fighter have focus attack, drive impact, flashing rage boot arts. You know, there is a feeling there of like, no, you got to keep this to what it is. And I think that Absalom was kind of going for that. They're going for something

somewhere in between that and Hades, where it's like, the comboing is, you know, it's fun, it's what's happening there. The run pressure is building up. The variety of the builds you're making are going to change things drastically. You know, you build up a run that maybe is focused on throwing weapons instead, you know, or like, I saw someone describing that there's stuff that like, like, when you throw items with, what's her name? The third character.

They're cider. Like, you know, she has buffs that make weapon throwing stronger, right? So picking stuff up and making that more of how you play or a character that's going to be. I'm not sure what the boons are going to be necessarily. But taking different approaches, Hades-like, I think, is more what they're going for, as opposed to the River City Girl style of like, you have a billion moves, go nuts, you know? Yeah. Yeah, the other thing is that I feel like I got really, really, really fucking far in Absalom within like,

three hours. You know what I mean? Like I, like, maybe the map is lying. Like, maybe like the left to wrap map, the left to right map is lying. But I got really fucking far in like 90 minutes. And I was like, oh, like, hmm.

It sounds like maybe the last level is like crazy difficult. So I don't know what happens. Like we got to the under king, didn't beat him in like three or four runs. But I, I, What I've heard from others is that like around the eight hour mark, like the story and the events in the game start to open up and kind of become something much more than it starts out being. So there's a, there's some sort of like next level of what this game is that people are really enjoying that happens a bit later. People in chat are saying that the map is not representative.

Okay. Yeah, there we go. I was playing it, it looked like I got like 75%, 80% through the map. Yeah. And I'm like, when you get the frog dude, I'm like, this can't possibly be it. But yeah, I think, but some beat them ups, the goal is do combo. Some beat them ups, the goal is string together combo on different enemies and survive. This is almost like when I was describing the difference between Shinobi and Ragebound, right?

Shinobi. Very similar, actually. Yeah. Shinobi is you can do a bunch of stylish shit. one fucking dummy that is not going to attack you. It's waiting to be styled on. And then ragebound is throwing a bunch of one hit enemies at you.

But there's so many of them, holy fuck, don't get overwhelmed. Yeah, I felt, I felt like a stupid asshole playing those games back to back. Because when I was playing Ninja Garden, I was like, man, I wish I could do more to these enemies. And then I was, when I was playing Shinobi, I'm like, I wish these enemies would do works with me. Yeah. I mean to be...

And then I'm sitting here like, I guess I just want to play devil make cry is where my brain was at. I liked what I liked rage bound a lot and I felt like you could do a lot, but you had to... The comboing and the string is how you move from enemy to enemy, you know? You kill one, you get a charge,

you take out the next, you bounce off of that and you kind of, you string it all together in a sequence of like, the combo is how you're killing a bunch of one hit, things moving through the stage and not how you're styling on one enemy, you know? And I mean, not everything needs to be that thing that we're talking about necessarily. So I'm like, I'm okay with that considering what Ninja Guyden was. And, you know, considering what even the, for someone that didn't really play the Iigaki ones,

I know that that too is a game where you're not styling on dudes coming at you. You're fucking killing as fast as possible to not get overrun. Nnegeki ones. Like, you can stop, but like, no, it's kill them. Kill them. Styling is an absolute detriment to your survivability, you know? So, yeah, I kind of think about those cases. And in these games, the mobs and individual can't really do much to you.

And when they have armor, you've got to switch to your armor-breaking moves and go for it. But I guess almost like Arkham City Combat. that. It's really good. You have a surrounding group of people. It's very sticky. You have a surrounding group of enemies and then someone that comes up with a shield is going to need you to deal with that shield. And then you can't just turn your brain off for it necessarily.

And then again, yeah, keep your parry timing tight. But this is one session of it, you know. But yeah, what you're describing is ultimately like a, I think a different goal from, say, River City Girls. Or Double Dragon Neon is another great example. of like you have a you have a medium sized move list that expands according to your picking your groove and um you know once you kind of get into the hang of the swing of things you can do you can do more than that first impression gives but it's not giving you like yeah you're full on dante i'm just kind of a horror for new moves i love them too like i just want to be always unlucky Like when I was playing Grand Blue Fantasy Relink, I'm thinking back that I was like, okay, this game's got some stuff. Okay.

And then I went into the upgrade and the very first thing you unlock is if you jump and hit X, you can do a launcher. I'm like, oh, there's moves in here. There's new moves to use. Oh, wait, this game's good. Like, eh, I guess I just, I guess I guess I just, I guess I guess I'm just a dumb slot for new moves. You move slut.

yeah a little bit you fucking combo horror oh no I don't look I don't mind it I enjoy what we got going on there oftentimes it's like when it depends on what the goal of the game is where do you want the game to feel good you know and so far

I remember playing devil make cry four and you remember when you started playing as Nero and there's a move that's back forward swing your sword I'm like Oh, there's like a bunch of new things you can do with this. Yeah. Yep. Mm-hmm.

Um, oh, I'm, as, as somebody who is, you've, you've heard me pop off about that in, in many examples, I, it's the thing that made me love, um, uh, said it was sacrifice right away was like, oh, you got access to your move list, right? Or even going back to, um, uh, going back to, um, uh, going back to, um, Symphony of the night. You know, frame one, dark metamorphosis. If you know the input, cool. But yeah, but if it's not the design, if it's not the goal, you can still make a fun game that focuses on, you know,

pushing through the crowd, handling the crowd, and playing defensively while getting overwhelmed is a different style of game, which is also, again, what kind of like what Batman is doing. In any case, though, I mean, you're the best part about Arkham City Combat is, like genuinely, is that when they go, hey, Batman, you want to fight a dude? They put, like, twice as many enemies as they did as they did in Arkham Asylum. Oh, yeah, the rooms are overrun.

It's crazy. Like, you're stronger, so you beat them down at about the same speed. But, like, I remember having this feeling about, like, two-thirds through Arkham Asylum, where I was like, I got, like, pretty, like, was, like, jelling with the combat. and like, oh, you're going to fight some goons, Batman. And like, oh, I really wish that. I wish that encounter was like five times as long. I, because, like, I loved the fucking feeling of the play. The fact that the Razal Ghul fight, like, cuts away all of those sand, like, dudes you're fighting before they let you beat them all is actually a bummer.

I wish I could fight the 30-40 dudes. Yeah. The thing is, though, is... I'm Batman. But it is a... But that's a game where... It's, it's your, the punch lasers have never been more sticky. You are, it's very sticky.

You are sliding into place for a counter half a mile away. You go really far. You go really fucking far. And I was saying this is like, okay, I am taking the game on its own terms. My preference is a game that is actually not that sticky and lets me do everything manually. That is my baseline preference, but I understand what it's asking and then it's going to raise the challenge according to, okay, because your combat is so sticky, you don't ever have to really care about how far or how close an enemy is. All you're really thinking about is who's coming next, right? Who's swinging next at you is the priority list?

The distance is, I mean, if there's like someone with a gun further away, like that's where it works in. but within a solid fucking 20 foot circle, you just have to go like, oh, here comes a knife guy, okay, you know, here comes a dude with a stun baton.

And like you're just, you're listing your priority order that way. Here, and then that's what you're kind of getting out of these like, swarm you beat them up is, here comes the dude who's not going to care about, who doesn't have hit stop, you know?

Yeah. Here comes the flyer who you're going to have to jump to eventually. knock them down or someone who's on a mount and then you can jump on top of the mount and take it from them because otherwise they're going to rush through you and so on. And it's pretty hype when, you know, you're fighting a boss who's like damage sponging at you and they're going to take three massive swings and you're on your last pixel. But the way to survive it because you're not getting out of this is to fucking parry, perfect to parry, perfect to parry. And then get in there, you know, like that's, that's pretty hype. So that's kind of where Absalom is trying to

put all the juice and then, you know, use that to like side evade, get a hit in, go pick your partner back up and reset the encounter, you know. Yeah, very cool so far. I want to come back to it. I was drawn in by the first taste and I'm going to be playing some more of that in the near future. I'm going to look up what the map looks like. I want to see how big the lie is. Oh, that's, that map is a big fucking lie.

Okay. Yeah, all right. There's a, oh, that's, come on. All right. I'm curious, because I'd said it a couple times, but does what we're describing or what you mentioned, what you were just talking about that bothers you, do you feel that with Hades at all? No, and I saw somebody mentioning in the chat with like a wildly disingenuous argument about like just to bother Pat as to like what the Souls games are incredibly basic in their combat, which is like, Hades isn't like, Hades, for example, is not specifically about combing things. It's because you can't. It's survived the wave.

It's about the 400 different permutations of your standard sword swing. right and like with souls like souls combat does have like hundreds of different move lists so if i loaded into a uh a beatem up and it had as many different move lists for basic attacking as like a souls game or elden ring had for weapons i'd be like wow that's absolutely fucking astonishing i can't believe it but uh no i don't feel like that for me for the beatem up purposes it's because it's a side scrolling so your your overall kit is relatively limited because the plane is limited, right? But when I think of a beat-em-up move list that I really, really like, I think of River City Girls, and I think of Dragon's Crown. And part of the reason I think of Dragon's Crown is because it has six characters that are all completely fucking different. And they all have their own move list on top of them.

I'm going to throw the terminology here, which is that the Hades is asking you to survive the wave, not do combo. River City Girls is asking you to do combo. Absalom is asking you to survive the wave. and you can do some comboing inside the wave. I think that's the deal, you know? And then again, Shinobi, do combo, ragebound, survive the wave.

I wish Shinobi and ragebound kissed. Yeah, that'd be nice. I agree. Then I realized that that is like modern 3D Ninja Guiden. Like, that's literally what that is. Does? Again, are you doing combo in Ninja Guiden? Yes, no, you are.

Yeah, okay. Comboes are built to kill people, not to do the stylish. I guess bosses, you must be wailing on them, right? Because I just, I feel like every time I see Ninja Guiden footage, I just see like motherfuckers getting beheaded, you know, with like, descent strikes. You're doing flying swallow, you're doing a zuno drops. You're doing combos for area of purposes. For every head that goes flying, like three more dudes are coming through the window.

You know, and I'm just like, ah, like, that's what it seems to be to me. It's a different type of combo system because enemies are just so more aggressive in the Ninja Guidance that no one's going to give you like a free pass to do like, I'm going to combo him in the air, then I'm going to do roulette, and then I'm going to do the dash. And it's like, no, you fucking kill him because his three boys are jumping at you right now, immediately and shooting rockets at you. I think the original appeal of like old. beatem-ups was survive the wave

and then like the comboing stuff came in later. Well, you know. I mean, a huge appeal of the old beat-em-ups was like, look how big that guy is on the screen! Yeah, fucking Hagger! You could see the muscles and Hagger! Yeah, like...

For sure. And then it's like, wait, when you jump and then pile drive that dude into the ground, anyone underneath it also takes damage. Ooh. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that that was it.

Absalom's great. We returned to strive. And you were talking about games that you can check out of and then check back in and see a bunch of patches. Yeah, I've watched. I clicked on what the video, make them play a movie. Make them watch a movie. Make them watch a movie. And so I clicked on a random spot and saw Lucy open up the hacking interface.

and start going through quick hats. And I'm like, man, I don't know what's going on with this fucking game. Strive. I don't recognize it at all. Strive has been active in the background. Whether you're paying attention or not, shit's popping. Like, so on the gameplay, like, on the, the, just the baseline level, um, ranked mode is a thing that they're just like, yeah, fuck the towers.

Proper ranked exists now, by the way. Oh, fucking, thank God. You loaded up and the first... If they had added that multiple years ago, I might still be playing this game regularly. No, probably not. And I'm going to say myself too, you know. But I think the ranked mode was sorely missing initially.

I like the idea of towers, but once Celestial stopped having infinite towers, then it falls apart, you know? So I also love the idea of towers, and the Guilty Gear towers really did a great job. of making me understand the percentage distribution of skill in fighting games. Yeah, yeah, yeah, seeing how many people are spread across. I also think that the towers in Guilty Gear, like, significantly empowered my own toxic ideology of that I am shit at fighting games.

Because I hit the top of the tower immediately, like within two days, but then struggled to break into Celestial. Right. Which meant that I was shit. Floor 10. Which meant that I was shit. Because I'd be playing against other people in floor 10 who were garbage. And I'd be like, wow, I can't even beat these garbage people consistently enough to get to Celestial. I'm fucking terrible at fucking fighting games.

I'm God awful. And then I go to Master in Street Fighter 6 and I go to Grandmaster in 2XCO. And I get up into those ranks. I go, I guess I'm bad still, but good enough to hit this. Base cam. I'm like, then I look at, that's top 5% on both of those. Yeah, you see the distribution. I guess you're shit, unless you're top 1%.

Okay, okay, listen. Listen, stop, stop, shut up, stop. Okay. Base camp at Mount Everest is pretty fucking crowded, all right? Now, whatever a system comes into play, where there is a graduation into another tier, something that fighting games have been doing recently, which is a pretty smart move, is your initial ranking system is not a real ranking system because it heavily rewards you for winning.

So the amount of points you get for winning is double the amount you get for losing. Therefore, if your win ratio is 50%, you are still progressing, right? Now, it will put you against stronger opponents. Yes. And you still have to maintain that 50%. And if you hit...

Which means you are getting better. Yeah. Now, if you hit, you know, Diamond, whatever, or, you know, Diamond 3, And people in Diamond 3 are just like consistently stomping you and you can't win against anyone there, then you're not going to travel much further. But if you're getting that 50-50 that the Elo is trying to put you in, you're going to keep moving forward. And in Street Fighter 6, you're going to hit Master. In 2XCO, you're going to hit Grandmaster.

And, you know, the idea was you could make it beyond floor 10 in to strive, right? And that's the thing is to that like, by not by keeping. you at floor 10 and not having you hit celestial. You didn't give people the ability to go, ah, I beat the game, I hit the credits. Now I can walk away satisfied. Bro, I hit Master with Geif and Bison. But then when I loaded in a master rank,

I would go from 1,500 to like 1350. Right. And my brain would there go, I'm worse than the average player. Oh, yeah. I'm like, I'm like below average. I'm bad. I remember there, so that's not true, but there, I remember there was a new, there was a.

That's what it says, because 1500 MR is normal. So there was a place, there was a discussion a while ago where people were trying to figure out what MR equals less than Diamond 5, right? Is there a master rate that can be hypothetically, you know, is it, I, I, is it, I, I, I, I don't know if they got an answer distribution-wise on that. And so I don't know what it is because I would go down to $13.50 and occasionally I would be placed against Diamond fives. And I would kick the fucking shit out of them. Like it was a joke. So maintaining, listen, maintaining 15 is like that is something that a lot of people are unable to do.

Because the boost that you get for winning more points. The fact that you're getting a 50% ratio, a win ratio, but you're still. moving forward, starts yanking people down the moment the Elo is accurate. The moment you're scoring is correct. You win the same amount as you lose, you know? So anyway, all this to say that Strive didn't give people that little

off ramp and so on. But the other problem too was that in Celestial, or in Flortan, any of a place, you go to a, you go to pick a fight or you go online and then somebody sees you and's like, no, I'm not going to that. I'm dodging a ranked match, you know? Well, the penalty for losing matches in Celestial was to force

you out of Celestial really fast. You did have that. 2XCO does have the like as soon as you queue up, you can't choose who you're going to fight, thank God. So no people, no one can run around and avoid you on the fucking floor 10. Like, get back here, you.

Like, no, I'm not fighting. You know. But all this to say that the ranked has been completely replaced with just a, the towers are still there, but now you can just click ranked and it goes cool. You're going to get matched up somebody much like for 2x. K.O. to add that also.

I don't, I'm fine with that in 2X because you're hitting and you're getting ranked up, you're getting matched up with no, I just want the training mode like rank thing. I just want, I don't want to have to run. Wait in training while ranked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't even want to do training mode

because I have a moral opposition. Opposition to it, yes. But, but like, I actually just want to have the game run in the background and immediately put me into the match. That'd be great. That'd be great. I'd like that. I'd like that. Going up to a cabinet while no one's on it should ideally put you in training mode and then cue you up for matches. You know, that'd be fun. Um, but anyway, so yeah, they added that in strive. That's pretty cool. Other stuff, um, you know, beyond that has been the, so 3V3 mode that they added a while ago has never been more clear. This is token training. This is, this is how we learned to what token was going to be and we experimented with our system. One big life bar, et cetera. Um, but. Um, but. Um, But then, yes, Lucy and Unica were the two characters. I'm watching this footage.

I don't know what the fuck is going. I've been watching the footage the last time we've been talking. And I'm like, I don't know what the fuck I'm looking. Unica, new character, she's got a big old gun. And she's from the anime dual rulers. So she was a tie-in with the guilty- She looks like she's a fucking Edge Runner's character. So she might be having the Edge Runner's colors.

If there's colors on everybody that makes them look like cyberpunk. Yeah. But anyway, you have, I was looking at her going, okay, here's a girl with big gun. I'm expecting, you know, Saki from Tatsunoko or just big old zoning chill out back here and beam you. And that's not what she is at all. She's got a fucking stun dipper. She's got a greed sever. She's got a DP.

You know, she's got a bunch of shit that like Saul and Kai do. and she plays like a protagonist, you know? So that was much different from what I thought, and I was like, oh, that's way cooler than I expected. And yeah, she ends up being a lot more fun, you know, with a, her system is basically like everything I just described there. There's, you kind of... She looks like how I would think Senna would play into X-K-O.

from Lee okay I don't know who that is I'll get a photo all right the and yeah she ends up being pretty pretty fun to use

she has a nice little like load up her gun with a charge and then improve some of your moves and keep the pressure on so you know pretty solid but like ultimately like hefty slow swings

but then you do one of her superes which is essentially a dragon install and oh yeah that's a that's girl with big gun sword thing yeah i see it um and then you you make them watch a movie right like you get this full on just flying through the air moment and then inside of the the anime cutscene you have to do your own dust loop and uh it's essentially like a dust launcher but it's a super version and you have to juggle correctly with the right timing

on each button to get the optimized damage and then do a big finisher if you've got the meter for it and there's nothing they can do they can't burst out so truly if you want to swag on them you're making them watch the movie you know well that's a cool looking

fucking super it is I'm just imagining I'm imagining that the hundredth time in bracket you might get pretty sick of watching it if it lands but fortunately it's you can't combo into it so you're not going to see it that often, you know. But yeah, it is a one-player game for the next, like, 10 seconds when you land it. You can also see, too, as well that, kind of like with Street Fighter, each character that they introduce, there's more and more detailed win and intro animations going on.

Like, they're cranking that budget up and flexing as hard as they can, you know? So like, I remember it was why I'm like looking at it and like, okay, you see like Slayer shows up and now he's fucking, he's pulling out Sharon and they're sitting down and they're, you know, inside the cape having a whole elaborate hang out and sip and tea. And then Abba comes out and Abba and Paracelsus dive into space and are floating together in love or one-sided love for that matter in their whole, it's just, it's getting so elaborate with these wind posts, these wind quotes and poses. And then by the time you get these characters out, you know, Unica is doing like tons of detailed facial expressions and animations. And she's riding her bike up and things look very just expensive and cool. And then Lucy is like,

hey, this is a guest character for the first time in the series. Time to fucking just crank it all up. So her, um, her Blame the Beast's intro moment stops Guilty Gear and it turns into CyberPyore. And it turns into CyberPy!

and you hear the music, like it does a record scratch. The music starts playing and you see her do a like hacker dive into the world of Guilty Gear and land in our reality before it resumes the fight intro. It's the most expensive, detailed looking shit ever and it's like really nice animation. And then same thing for like her win pose is her pulling up the hacking thing and like looking for data and then the camera cuts to overhead and she does a big like fish eye look at you. And then she expresses herself in like three or four different ways and then relaxes. And you're like, oh, you guys are just showing off.

You're just flexing, you know, for cyberpunk, like, what you can do. Yeah, they are. It's crazy. So, yeah, Lucy is pretty sick. She's pretty fun as well. The main thing being her super. She pulls up the hack window. And then she can load you up with contagion.

poison damage over time, um, reduced meter gain, increased risk. Uh, the next hit is a counter hit or, that's me. Yeah,

the next hit is a big counter hit is a, is a great one to pick every time. And you stack them until you hit like overload and then you, it's done. So you pick a bunch of weak ones or a big one, you know? Uh, and then one of them is,

um, slightly turn invisible, but not really. It seems completely. worthless. Like, I don't understand the point of it. And then, yeah, they integrate her as a cyberpunk character by doing like, you know, the cyber whip stuff.

And like, when she hacks you, she whips you once and you kind of get hacked. And then the second time, you stagger for longer, so more combos are possible. Pulls the gun out, shoots you with it. You know, just standard, kind of fast moving character stuff and like a couple of like whip charges

and mixups left here and there. But just overall, a case of like we want to anytime to get like with my and Terry Bogard guest characters need the carpet rolled out for them you know and yeah they definitely did so here

with Lucy like she's he's really I from cyber from edge runners like I don't really like Lucy that much as a character like personality wise I have my issues with her but like the implementation here is

super well done so Arsus has shown off that they're, you know, able to do it all the way. Really, really, really cool implementation. And the fact that this game is in year five or whatever, it's coming up on its next season. And they've got Jam and Robokai on the horizon. Like, it's still going. It's whether you're paying attention or not. You're going to make Robokai weirder more is the question.

I fucking hope so. After. I still, I still miss original Robokai when he was just. evil cop evil goofball and then he kind of like he becomes see becomes slapstick as the versions go on but like the version of him post you know uh uh exert story is old cranky old man you know uh and and that has never been playable so we we need that version of him um i'm hoping that he's gonna get some sort of install that puts him inside a gundom body or some wild shit whatever the fuck is going happened with his floating head.

Yeah, Strive is cooking. It's still doing its thing. We got to Act 3 in Expedition 33. Oh, yes. Okay. So it is not much to say because like, no, not. We said between the two of us, we said all the things earlier.

Yeah, and ultimately, Reggie just went, holy shit and then we kept playing that's crazy that's nuts all right and that's it you know so we'll continue we continue

um yeah and then I guess the only other thing for me this week two things one I checked out last night shoutouts to Foxcade who

invited me he grabbed some tickets to a near piano solo concert that was taking place here and Montreal. So there, it was supposed to be last week and then like there was like a pipe that bust and it got delayed till, you know, yesterday or so. But so yeah, me, command grab James and Foxcade went and checked out. There was just a piano solo concert.

Super talented pianist came out and just crushed it. doing what he basically introduced it and said I'm going to be doing songs from all three near games and everyone kind of went

Are we We're talking about reincarnation We are talking about reincarnation Yes You know So yeah Just did a great fucking incredible job

because I'm like, I have two, if not three demands here. And you hit them all. Emil crushed it. Kinei theme crushed it. And way to the world. And those, and like when you're hitting way to the world on piano, like he's doing an unbelievable job with it. But I'm like, this is where I'm like, ah, I wish there was like one accompanying.

I wish. Like vocalist for this piano solo concert had more instruments. Just for that moment. Because there also is a full orchestra, but like that was touring elsewhere. And, you know, I think Yoko Taro is like actually at those ones. But, you know, this is a, this is a smaller kind of a smaller scale thing. But it was just, it was very nice to hear these covers. And hearing them go through like, yeah, copied city and a couple of the good stuff from

Automata and classic near as well. Grandma and so on, you know, just really, really sick. You know, great show, bought some merch. And then came out for the encore and did Song of the Ancents, you know? So I left satisfied with that. But yeah, you're hearing, you know, the songs being played and you're just, you're filling in the vocals in your brain with like gibberish language or, again, way to the world, you know, you're just like, ah, only for that one.

Anyway, really, really good time. And, uh, just. Just a random shout out to this short little comic I read. There's a comic, there's a little manga series of like single panels almost called Girls Who Get It. And I was like, what is this? This name sounds a little presumptuous. What's going on here? And it is just a short little manga series about girls who are talking about really specific details.

of shit they love in Gundam. And, like, you see, for example, they're just describing, so one page is like, okay, so you just, it's an arm,

it's a drawing of like a mecha arm, right? And it's like, you see the missile, uh, part of the forearm, opening up and launching the missiles. And it's like,

opening up like this, just in a simple little like, like lever. No, no, no, no. You got to have the cover burst off. And then the missile,

shoot out. It's way more dynamic that way. And the other girl's like, hmm, I agree. Yes. And that's the comic. Okay. Right. Or like when the arms come out, you see like the mecca arm like like the sleet. You see like its arm shoots out and then when it turn it shoots out open and then turns over makes a fist and goes that's like a power pose. It's super hype. And then the other girl's like, yeah. And that's it. You know? When when you have a heavy arm style shoulder rocket release, You don't have all the flaps opening up like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 in a linear fashion. Have them opening up alternating.

So you get one and then two and then three alternating. And it's way more dynamic and looks super cool. And the other girl's like, yeah. And that's it. It's just hype details about Mecca and Gundam that you could have, like, when we're getting into the finer nitty-gritty of it, like, what makes that shit rock? And I'm just like, these are conversations. I'm absolutely, I've had and I'm down to have and I appreciate it. So just they get it.

They get it in ways where I was like, oh, fuck, oh, that's, that's, you're getting in there, you know? How sick is it when the robot is damaged towards the end of the series and like one of the helmet is cracked and part of the visor's cracked and there's really like battle damage and then there's like rain falling on it and it's really dramatic. Isn't that cool? It's a sad beat up robot. Yeah.

It's super cool. and then sometimes when the robot's so destroyed that it can't possibly keep going what's keeping it going the plot engine the secret energy that keeps it like as long as it's dramatic and looks cool the robot can stay functioning that shit's dope yeah that's really cool

I love it this really feels just like an excuse to talk about like gondom shit I love it but this is this is the shit these are real conversations I'm having with like Josh for years ago till now, you know, like it's just, yeah, you know when the robot does the cool thing? Yeah, that's fucking cool, bro.

And it's even cooler when you don't just do, here, I'll hit you with one, because you can appreciate this one, right? Sure. The Inezuma kick, right? Which you've seen in twin function. A million times. Exactly. You don't just land the kick.

You have to slide on the ground afterwards. Absolutely mandatory. Isn't that cool? It shows off that the kick is so strong that, like, They're either cratered, which is not super fun, but they slide. It's just like every vicious drag character along anything is incredible. If Broly is there or a Broly sized character is there, they need to grab the normal sized person by their head

and drag them through the building on the side. You get it. That's it. Isn't that cool? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Let me hit you with one.

All right. When you see the laser charging up, okay? It shoots direct at the thing it's trying to blow up, or it sweeps across the ground, and then a second later, the whole horizon goes, Yeah, the VALA4 explosion, yeah. Isn't that cool? Yeah, all right.

Pat, who gets it? That's cool, I get it. That's all we're doing here. I love it. I love that shit, man. I'm all, you know, I've talked about the Atano Circus till I'm blue in the face because it's a way more interesting way of making missiles fucking do shit. And, you know, you don't understand what you're seeing the first time when you're

checking out Macross. And then the second time you see fucking Aska shoot to the corner of the screen. And you're like, how is she jumping so high? Yeah. Shit rules. So that's girls who get it. It's extremely short, but I just, I like that kind of content. I approve of it and I appreciate it.

I'm going to be continuing with Batman Expedition 33. And this weekend. Now that's a cool game. That's a cool game. That's a cool game. Batman Expedition 33. That'd be cool. Uh, you can't...

But Batman can't gomage anybody. That's the rule is that you... It... It doesn't work. French Batman. Are you sure you want to unleash that on the world? Le Batman. Uh, anyways, uh, we're going to be continuing with all that shit.

And we will also be, uh, yeah, this weekend, I'm going to decide. Uh, more fighting games or... I might do something else. We'll see. But that's the plan over on Woolley versus on Twitch and on YouTube. Okay. What's going on? So right before we went live today, like right before the Caitlin gameplay reveal trailer came out. She looks cool. I... Vegas reflector. That's not what I expected.

Look, Reggie sent it to me and I just replied with the yawn emoji. I just kind of, it ain't. She has the hit scan thing going on. She does not have the hit scan thing going on. Well, it's, okay, it's delay and track, right? Because I was, the whole like, okay, it's not a hit scan bullet thing. But then what I saw was a sniper and I saw if you hold down sniper skill, she then follows you and then releases and it hits you immediately.

So does that not seem like it? It seems that's it doesn't have her super is hit scan But like when you hold her her all of her all of her specials have projectiles Okay when you hold S one and she tracks you and releases it looks like an instant shot So I don't know That's what I'm talking about that's instantaneous yeah that's I'm talking about the charged one right? Because she can she has like six different projectiles she has multiple shots and they can all be charged

into what appears to be hit scan to me. And you can then roll forward, roll backwards, aerial, et cetera, take a second shot, throw out a cupcake trap or aerobolas and then mix... And dive kicks?

Yep, dive kick can be cancelled into airbola. And then you... And she also has an Aegis reflector. The Aegis reflector, the Aegis reflector looks like the coolest part of her kit. It moves... Yeah, by far. It moves.

Because it's Agis Reflector. Everybody loves Agus Reflector. But then she can shoot through it to amplify the bullets, which is dope. She can also bounce you off the top of it. Yes. And she's got to, that, okay, specifically that Agis Reflector and Aegis Reflector, and that one kick she does that crosses you up, that kicks you backwards. She does one air like roundhouse kick that kind of kicks you in the opposite direction

that looks pretty cool. And it seems like she can combo you by. kicking you back into the shield, you know, so, um, that seems, that seems interesting too. But ultimately, yeah, I, I was not really, there's not much that speaks to me about what I see there. Like it's, so, it's Caitlin. A couple podcasts ago, we talked about Caitlin and one, probably me. I probably said that like, I don't get why Caitlin, like, yes, she's an arcane character,

but, ugh, right? Since then, I went and took a look at league statistics. Would you believe me if I told you that for the year of 2025, Caitlin was the single most popular League of Legends character? Because of the meta? Some of it's because of the meta. Sure. But some of it is also, she's just super popular.

Sure. she's the number one most picked character in League of Legends So somebody has been making threads of every single character from League of Legends Going should this character be into XCO And I find Like at first they got banned

Because they were being considered spam And then it was like no No let them cook It's the best thing on that to a Spino Subbride It's so fascinating right Because I saw stuff where I was like Who is that?

I don't know what that is How do people feel about this And I remember the day I saw Garin. And I went to look at the straw pole and I clicked show results. And I saw an overwhelming number of players going absolutely must. It's not a question of if but when. That's right.

And then people in the comments going, Garin fucking rules. Yep. Love him. Because that's up right. It has tons of league players. And I was like, wait a minute. I'm just going off of what. you tell me and what the scrolling

words on the side over here have to say in these moments and as somebody who played league for league and is very familiar with at least the roster and Rune Terra and all that. That list off that subreddit is super good.

It's really, really, really accurate. Like the top three being like Erelia and fiddlesticks and Azir, yeah. those characters should be in the fucking game like this. So then what weird fucking pocket dimension have you pulled me into where we talk about

the other guy that's Soldier Man, the good version. Oh, Garan? Yeah, no. Like, oh no, here's the pocket dimension. This is me as somebody who understands the league characters and also who plays fighting games. If Garin is in that game, it sucks because fuck, Garan. He's so. boring. He has so much overlap with Darius's kid. I can't. He is so much. And yet I can't believe the overwhelming

amount of people that were like, I need Garon yesterday. Yeah. You know why, Wally? Because basic people play fighting games. Well, shit. And what about league then? Oh, only basic. The most basic of bitches, yes.

Only, yeah, man. So it was like, that and then um what did i see too i saw mixed results for hymerdinger i saw oh no that hymerdinger is not in mixed results hymerdinger right now is character is so disliked i may quit playing the game he is in that it got pushed okay side i think um was it rumble or the other one hymer Dinger would be like the worst thing to happen to 2XCO. His kit would be so fucking annoying and shitty. At the time I looked at it, it was mixed between people going, fuck the stupid rat and others going.

Timo with a different kit could actually be fun. He would be raccoon on drugs. And then also fuck arcane, you know. Yeah. And what's it? P and Z too much P&Z Piltover and Zon

Yeah yeah yeah Absolutely absurd So so anyways Anyways Yeah those threads are awesome I'm so surprised by the outcome And I'm glad that they didn't get banned All this to say though

Caitlin The alt costume Hey top hat's gone Fixes the design right away That costume is The most improved costume Over the base kit Of any of them

Like Echo's outfit is incredible, but Echo's default look is pretty good. So, yeah. So she's just, now she just, like, she takes the hat off and she turns into, to quote someone in one of the comments, she turns into like a snipe sexy lady, you know, you know, alongside John Shootman, jail, Jane Heal woman, bomb crazy guy, turret placement, and bullet spongely. You're cast from every game. Oh, sorry. made a mistake. The top three right now on that list are Fiddlesticks, Eri, and Akali, and I would not be surprised if those

three got in this year. I've been saying for a while, Akali, because you've got to sell the outfit. You got to sell the fucking... Well, she's also part of Diva. KDA? KDA? KDA. KDA. Yeah. The

Yeah, so you got that. Then you got the move list video that came out as well. And I like the idea of putting down the Aegis reflector and then using your second super to shoot through it and get like a really big bullet. That's cool. I'm imagining that's going to do a fuck ton of damage because it cost you two bars.

And, you know, then her level three was she, she shoots you and then she shoots you. And then she does a big shot. It's like, yep, okay, there she is. No big. I think they did as much as they possibly could with the visuals on her kit, considering every single move she has in league is shoots a gun. So I think it speaks volumes that when Timo came out, they had a big sit-down video showing this is how you cook with Timo and they did all the memes and went crazy on the reveal trailer. And then another like, we're going to talk you through the bat shit like mechanics. And then here is a silent Caitlin shoots.

She rolls. Oh, so I actually do have an explanation. Her trap. League players either love or hate Timo. Caitlin is kind of like universally beloved in league. They don't need to sell you onto them. Well, but I just mean to say that the walkthrough of her moves, like you can either do absolutely nothing like they did or you can do a in this

behemoth typhoon and walk the player through it a little bit or you can throw show some people getting hype like with Timo at at setups. And you could have somebody in the explanation of the move they, video going, ah, you got crossed up, which is always fun. Oh,

they also, uh, they also put out a season one, uh, change list of things they're going to add, um, preview, uh,

every, there's way too much on that list to go through. Uh, it's all good stuff. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's a big,

um, like every single one is something that I've either heard somebody say to me and I've gone like, yeah, they should do that or something that I've said to someone else and someone said back to me, yeah, they should do that.

Shoutouts to Yehosi, um, posted, balance changes up and all of these intro quotes have been like trollful so this time she's going hello wind wallers you know like just yep backdashers wind wallers upbackers whatever you want to call people it's really funny to see that every single change this game has ever made has had a side effect of making time winder weaker and i think it's still probably godlike the greatest projectile in fighting game history.

It disappearing when you hit Echo will be a big change. Let's see if that actually helps. Also, he can't rewind out of whiffing a throw, which is wonderful. That's stupid. That's stupid you could do that. Yep. A couple other things too.

Yeah, Ari doesn't get a free air dash after doing an airfire ball. Great. So everyone chill. Just take a hammer to her knees in the air, please. Get down here, you fucking stupid fox mutt. I like how a lot of these changes are like we understand that this thing this character can do sucks for everyone playing against them. It's really interesting when it's not even like, okay, I think there's a case study which is like Happy Chaos in Strive where they've nerfed Happy Chaos and made and like done a bunch of things to make Happy Chaos less strong. But it doesn't matter because it's just annoying to fight.

it's not even about like how viable it is it's just it feels bad getting shot like that for the whole game no matter what and and like i think you kind of take balance into that into account with that happy chaos actually fight a match so i'm going to watch something as you describe oh it's the worst feeling thing in the world it's gunman in a fighting game but actually not just not in the fighting game way oh this sucks you get a oh my god You get a cursor over your character from the other side of the screen and you cannot move. And then while he's not shooting you, he's reloading or rolling away or putting up a barrier that stops you from getting to him and then rolling to the other side of the screen. And each time you get shot, you get sent back to the edge of the screen. And by the way, he can do a super which targets and locks on to you and then hits you immediately from wherever you are if you're open. it's the most annoying thing in the world. It's like zoning is, you think of zoning as a linear, I have to work my way through an obstacle course,

and he's not that. He's got a mouse cursor that he's shooting you with in the middle of the fighting game. This looks... It feels so horrible. So I have a better idea of what people were saying they didn't want to happen with Caitlin. Yeah.

By watching this non- The first version of it was Elfelt when she came into Strive had that little tracking cursor and they got rid of it completely. But Happy Chaos represents the most annoying character in a fighting game to fight against, even if he has, even if he dies in three hits. It's just up. It doesn't feel fun, man, you know? And like, and I'll compare that to fighting against Naoto in persona, which is the most fun. thing in the world. She's laying out traps and rolling around and you're chasing her, but you can navigate through it and work your way in. And like, it's not just, I'm going to

click on you with my cursor and you can't move. You know, it's such a- So what I'm getting from watching this Happy Chaos video is that more characters in guilty gear should just pick up a pistol. So again, they had to change Elfelt to not be this and then turned that one moment part of her kit, which is a tracking cursor into his whole design. Yeah, I'm surprised you haven't seen it. It's horrible. So thankfully, that's not what Caitlin is, you know? Anyway, anyway.

So, yeah, Patches isn't coming, et cetera. She's coming. And I just, I felt the silence of that walkthrough for move list was like, okay, guys, no more arcane characters for now. There she is. Yeah, moving on. So what that, what that means when they say no more arcane characters. characters for now is that we are safe from Jace. Why were so many people in that thread pumped for Jace?

Because they like Jace. So apparently in-game Jace is a lot of fun to use and really hype or something. People are... Yeah, I just think he's a boring, lame-ass nerd. A lot of... A person who's watched three episodes of Arcane. So whatever that Garin feeling of Generic Man thing is, Jace is another hammer-looking genericman.

and the feedback in that thread of should he be in it was another not if but when. Like, listen, I'm horribly biased. If it was up to me, I would fill the entire remaining roster with skeletons and monsters. Sure. And I could. I really could. It would be super easy. If you explain to me that, like, yes, he's a generic dude with a hammer,

but there's something interesting about his move set, I'm willing to look twice, you know, but when you have hundreds to pick up, from, why not get the most interesting visually and mechanically, you know? I saw there's another one who was like, there's a character who people were like, this guy's really cool and I like him, but he's too new and everyone would get mad that he skipped the line, so no. Are you talking about set?

Maybe. Does you have like a black guy? With like a dread or something? No. I feel like there was a black guy with like short dreads or something. and people were like, he's cool. Oh, Cassante. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess so.

I guess so. Yeah, he's very new. Yeah. So they're like, he's cool, and we like him, and he'd be fun, but he's way too new, and it feels like skipping the line, so fuck him. No. It does feel like, he's very new. And that's just like, oh, time matters.

People who have been around longer earned it. Thresh has to come in this year. Like, there's no skeletons in that game right now. Even if there's a, like, a perfect fit, but he came out. Yesterday. Where's my skeleton, Zach? I agree. I agree.

Um, okay. So we got that trailer. Though Thresh won't be next because now we, because he would also be a body zoner. And that's like five zoners. That's too many zon. It's going to be riven. It's going to be riven. It's probably going to be riven.

Yeah. Um. And then it might be Thresh or might be, um, I don't know. Viego. Viego would be cool. Whatever. And it's the, uh, seeing the conversion of their move,

of their kits into like a more elaborate sense of what they do is a cool process though. Because I went to see Garren, not Garren, what Darius does as a character. Oh yeah, they nailed it. It's way,

but like it's way more interesting into XCO. Like his level three being the whole like spinning rise up into like, you know, down versus the, totally disagree. Everybody's level 3s and 2XCO are less interesting than what they do in league. I thought they did, they made

a very generic slamming axe move into a... No, no, not from a visual perspective. Obviously, it's more interesting from a visual perspective, right? You mean mechanically? Mechanically. They're literally all more interesting in league.

Okay. Because the thing with Darius's alt in league is that every time you do it, it gets better. Okay, okay, okay. So, like, things like, yeah, I see what you mean. And Timo's alt is, is blinding dart, which is something you were not, would not be allowed to do. So, I know it's not as alt, it's as fucking, you know what I mean? So there's stuff like that where I, when I saw like Warwick has like the blood hunt thing where he can track your scent down, I'm like, you don't have to track people down in a fighting game.

So how do you make that work, you know? No, you make it part of his fucking bloodlust goes up and then he can. run through projectiles is what you do, right? But yeah, the application of that in a game with a giant map where he can find you by smelling you is like pretty cool, admittedly. But sometimes you've got to take your liberties, right? What they did with Allowie's tentacles, I think is fucking cool. That's a nice application of it.

You know, where they come out, they support. They don't auto whip for everything, but they extend what she does to make it a little more interesting. different kits different people are responsible for making each character and you can tell some go nuts like Marlin Pie

you know and others are a little more restrained so for example let's take Knoxine guillotine right so in 2XCO it's level 3 super that is invincible just like everybody else is level 3 super right sure um

in league noxying guillotine is he jumps towards the enemy, which he normally can't do. He has no movement ability. And he dunks on them and does a huge amount of damage based off of their hemorrhage stacks. So how much bleeds on them? Like builds up the thing. And if they die from Knoxian guillotine, he can do it again.

Okay. So not like that move is about like ping ponging and just dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk, Dunk, dunk. Whereas in 2XCO, it's a fucking level three super. Because, yeah, what is the application of you get your super back if you land it? You know, like in a game where you're supposed to die twice, right? Because League has like a limited like core move set and it, which is basic attack and it has, you know, four abilities. Like all those four abilities usually have like a lot going on with them.

Whereas in the fighting game, it's literally like, hey, what's, what's, what it's the level three suit? or you're fully invincible and yet, yeah, yeah. You know. And like, you know, I, I, I, you can always do like a special state out of it. Or you can get a bit more creative. But yeah. Yeah, so like Warwick gets his bloodlust for free. Exactly, exactly.

When he does it because of he was, he was tracking during the cutscene. And that last little, like, off the wall slash killed thing he does is a reference to the Warwick reveal trailer where like he's hunting to grunts down and then like murders them at the end and like that's the same shot you know uh anyway anyway that's cool um speaking of getting your super again i was just i was trying to remember it's like in in um rivals where you fucking land the alt and then again again it's awesome again um in fact actually that's like that is that's what that move is oh that's what they gave uh bucky yeah uh like that like that movie like that Okay.

Like Bucky's alt and Marvel rivals is Darius's. I see. Okay, that is really hype. The Winter Soldier again is stomping is cool. So like that, that's what that is. And it's like you compare that to what it's doing in the trick scale, which is nothing. No, no. That you're, okay, I get it.

That is hype. And speaking of rivals, you see the fucking cheeks on Deadpool? No, man. Deadpool reveal trailer came out just today as well. And first thing he does is, turn around after posing with his guns and sword, and he's caked the fuck up. The booty jiggle is like Rufus level. It is, it is my, it is my physics on the, on the jiggle.

You thought venom twerking was wild shit. Get a load of deadp-costing. Get a load of Deadpool's ass. And it's, I don't think, and apparently it's not his win pose. Oh, wow. It's not his win post. It's his character select pick, like, intro thing. So like you're always going to see it.

Boy, is he fucking stacked. Anyway, Deadpool's nuts because... God, I wish I could cue with console players by just forcing controller. Like, oh. So Deadpool is a dualist and a vanguard and a strategist. He's all of the roles.

He can be anything because he's Deadpool. And you pull out a comic book. And while you're in the middle of the fight, he walks around upgrading his abilities to customize whatever you want to put stuff into. And you see him with a thought bubble, just walking and just reading the fourth wall, breaking the fourth wall,

doing that, of course. And then on top of that, while you can play him as tank, DPS, or healer, you can also style with him. And each time he gets a kill, it's ranked. And if you kill stylishly enough, he gets his alt faster. So they just

They gave him all of it. They just did everything. And it feels like, I don't know how you balanced that unless the plan is for every single team to have a Deadpool on it from now on. I'm not sure. You know, maybe he's subpar in all roles,

but just, it's a game where you can switch characters, right? I remember seeing people say that about Rogue, too, because Rogue has the ability she's supposed to have, which is steal a move from every single character on the fucking roster. How do you balance around that? I...

I don't know. I... Well, it's... I don't know. And this is again, and the thing is, rivals is a game where after dying,

you can go back and change characters, right? Like, that's something sometimes. You don't want to waste alt, of course, but it's baked into... So how do you... I'm not sure how competitively the,

the, you can be anything shit is going to work. But it didn't seem to... Like, in the trailer, they show off. They always show off, like, the optimized moments. you see him in his tank mode he's throwing out like a his stuffed animal and then like that has a big shield on it and then he tanks all the damage of a Punisher super you know um it's ridiculous yeah so i don't know but it just that is proper that is probably what Deadpool should be in a game like this is he can do whatever the fuck he can do anything um looks cool um

I can only imagine him having the most cosmetics of fucking more, like, you got to sell Spider-Man outfits and then you got to sell a million different wades. Oh. He's a popular guy. I forgot. Just to go back to Caitlin for a second, the most important detail about that trailer, we saw her sweep. It was not the rich girl sweep. No, it's not a white woman normal It was just a normal ass

She throws her leg out sweep But she's she's only half right But she's still rich Yeah Okay There's the white woman sweep And there's and but I've also heard rich girl sweep So

Oh okay Well as far as rich girl sweep criteria goes Is M. Bison A white woman or a rich girl? Eori is a rich girl Eori is a rich girl. Eori is a rich girl So I'm, they did, they missed the assignment there by not giving Caitlin the rich girl sweet.

But anyway, yeah, Deadpool's cool. What else did we see? There was a teaser for a fan game that came out a couple weeks ago. Sega versus Capcom the next level. And here's how you know. Here is how you know it's a fan game because, um, it's a fighting game. Yes, correct. It's a fan fighting game.

Here you go. Here's a link to it. I think it sucks that whenever I hear a fan game and it's blank versus blank, my brain goes, man, it could be one of three genres. And like oftentimes it's not the one I want to play. Oh. Like I wanted Namco X Capcom, but second. versus

Camco. Napco or Capcom the fighting game. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what I hear versus, I assume first and foremost

fighter and then we'll see what else it could be after that. By the way, it's not Namco versus Capcom. It's Namco X Capcom, right? Yeah.

M. Anyway, so you can tell this as a fan game because the cast includes Sonic, the hedgehog, X,

Ryu, and vice. Yeah. As in fucking cutler Skies of Arcadia, Cutless Fury, VICE, which is like, a fan is putting vice in a fighting game. That is not Sega.

He was on the Dreamcast, dude, that counts. Oh, my God. Let's ignore the fact that it's... I mean, I love it. I fucking love it. I think that's Sky's Arcadia rules. Shadow is in there, too, you know. But you look at this, and it's like, it's a 3D fan game, and it's, you know, high,

and it's got all the stuff going. Looks pretty. It looks like they're using some assets that are like kind of Tatsunoko looking-ish, but their own original stuff. There is a very clear thing that also indicates

a fan fighting game and it happens every time. It happens every time. I'm excited to get hands on this and play it. It looks pretty cool. However, fan games,

you can tell because the Dragon Ball fan games do this and a bunch of Muggan, games. In the race to make a hyper fighter, they make games that have zero hit stop, where every animation just snaps into the next one. So nothing in a combo feels like it has impact because the whole point is make it all cancel as fast as possible.

And it doesn't matter if the combo is legible or not. So you watch the footage of like this combo for Sega versus Capcom the next level and you just see the characters just flashing into their active frames and the and like the buttons you're sliding across your face across it doesn't like nothing is hitting in a way that feels like impactful you know um there's actually such a thing as like too fast in these games and i'd say it's when you don't have any hit stop or anything to make it feel like feel feedback to the combo you're doing. Let's see if I can pick up on what you're talking

on. The fast, when you do... I can see what you're talking about. Right? Right away. And it's like you go to the fastest like Marvel versus Capcom moments or the fastest Dragon Ball or 2XK or any of these, any hyper fighters, any anime fighters that go like really, really high

speed, even Fist of the North Star Arcsus, right? At that breakneck speed. Hits have impact to them. And It has a really specific rhythm at the top speed And there's a stagger coming off of the person getting hit That is like, yeah, it's there you feel the button you press

I mean, they're amateurs, you can't be too much I know, no, I know, but it's just I'm like it's the it's the hallmark of every fan game is the feel It just goes so fast through every single button that you don't even it doesn't feel like anything's landing It's kind of like when you do like Like it's a little bit of what Ibukey does in Third Strike where you just kind of go like fucking magic series but you know. So it's one of those things. No hit stop. I'm watching the trailer and it appears to be that their solution of this is like, what if we shake the frame more on hits?

If we shake the screen on hits, it'll feel really impactful even if there's no impact frames. And that all like that, you know what this is? So I moved out and I was like, I'm completely by myself. I got no one to tell me what to do. I could do whatever the fuck I want. And then I did a bunch of single man bachelor nonsense. And then it was like, I now understand my people told me not to do that shit. I should probably get my shit together, right?

A million percent. There's a reason why we do these things, you know? Going at breakneck speeds, yeah, sure, it's all fun and hype, et cetera. But when the game's not legible and it doesn't feel like anything's happening because you're lacking the juice, behind each hit, that's less fun. So fan fighting game creators, I implore you to pour juice on your shit. So Woolly Madden tells you, indie game creator,

to delay your game by 18 more months so that it can get DMCA after you've already announced. Well, it's second. So they're probably fine. Well, first of all, if I already know about it, then it means you failed, right? We've established this already. So we're working with lost time no matter what.

We're building back from the red here. That being said, Sega and Capcom, ah, the fun. Sega has ages where they're actually willing to have a fan game community thing go supported. And Capcom has let fan shit roll in the past, though not always. Oh, don't, don't, just don't do a Shining Force game when a new Shining Force game is coming out, or they'll copyright strike literally every playthrough that exists. And don't you dare stream Street.

Fighter League. Don't you fucking damn. Look at the timer only. You see that Cloudflare is thinking about boycotting Italy over shit like that? No. What happened? Okay, so what's happening is that

Italy, known footie lovers who like the footie ball, that's, you know, you kick the ball. They have like one company that has like a monopoly on the paper view for footy matches that suck. and has shit service.

So tons and tons and tons and tons of people pirate soccer games. And the company has figured out that, oh, you know what we can do? We can we can use, because Italian copyright law is apparently like the most insane copyright law of all. Crazier than Japan. Okay. Yeah. So they, so like they have likeness rights to like, you know, famous pieces of art like Michelangelo's David or whatever. but not like the direct

like you know imagery they have any likeness of the art that they have so they've sued other European museums for like putting up a picture depicting it in any way okay okay like it's insane regardless uh what's been happening is that said pay-per-view soccer company

is like constantly going through the courts to get like cloud flare to like band certain IPs that they suspect have been causing, you know, pirated broadcasts, but they're doing it so much that it's breaking tons of infrastructure

across like various European networks. Because they're like just ban it all. Just ban every IP from this fucking area. And so Cloudflare keeps losing their court cases to not do it. So they might just be like, we're out. We might just have to leave Italy to continue

providing service to the rest of Europe. I mean, look, all I'll say is, if you haven't watched your sporting event of choice through a Russian proxy server, have you even watched it? Are you even a fan? I question. I question your fandom. I watched Monster Hunter on a Russian guy stream at one. Yeah, you did. 96p. Yeah, you did. And I was like, how is this the only guy in the whole world that has this? What the Fuck. I've watched a bunch of shit just getting looped through the wildest, craziest.RUs I've ever seen, only to full screen it and just fucking enjoy. So, um, anyways, uh, we got, uh, uh, that going on. Um, up. Oh, they can see my face in the reflection. Oh, man. Oh, shit. Wow. Oh, you could totally see my face. That's Crazy.

Thank you, Devil May Cry Leakman. And then, because we're still talking about video games, hey, how's Ubisoft Halifax doing? They're cooked. Oh. Last we heard, they unionized. Yeah, now they're cooked. Two days after unionizing, Ubisoft shuts down. Halifax Studio and says that this was totally planned a long time ago and was totally going to

happen and is just, you know, it's just for streamlining operations and reducing costs approving efficiency. 48 hours later. So, yeah. You know, here we are. Guess what? It's the Walmart move. It's the McDonald's move.

It's all of that stuff. If you're working in the video game industry and you are a part of any unionizing effort and uh... be quiet or you can't be quiet forever you have to do it and eventually like you have to declare it like and let it's a there is a requirement to do to let them know um it's just more so like the the the um this they're the they're properly intimidating people to the point where like you understand the stakes you're

playing with are if we're a big fucking studio we'll shut the fucking thing down the crazy part is ubi soft who are like check your watch you know what I mean like sorts of financial nonsense in order to not get bought out or both go big the light is flickering right now

and they're still shutting shit down on the way out thing Willie think of how how how much the light would flicker if there was a union yeah yeah so um

and of course it's you know what do you do with that is you send a message just about everywhere else that like no we'd rather shut down the Walmart than even then take a week of putting up with this right oh you be soft uh yeah that's 61 employees uh and it would this was the uh GMW uh the game and media workers Guild of Canada so so what they have to do is unionize at the second year of a large project Oh, Ah.

So, well, the thing is, though, is they ended up canceling the project that they were working on, which was an Ascrete game. There's like a mobile game that was in the works. Assassin's Creed Rebellion. No, wait, no, that's the wrong one. Sorry. The projects that were ongoing, they just straight up were like, no, no, no, shut it down, move it, et cetera. It's worth it. We don't care.

Beyond that, it, it fucking sucks because it's like, just you have to imagine a number of employees are like, okay, am I willing to walk, right? Am I at the point where I'm willing to,

where conditions need to improve or I'm willing to walk, then you have nothing to lose, right? But not everybody is in that place. And in a lot of cases, some people are like, yo, I have,

I have stability requirements, man. You know, so like, what's funny is that somebody in the chat goes, I can't believe this is legal. And different countries have different rules. But you know what the most interesting thing is? Is that this behavior is not legal in France. They can't do this in France. If they want to lay off a whole company like that or a studio, they have to prove that they're not making enough money.

They're not making a profit. Demonstrably through a number of, there's a number of worker-right things that they have to go through. Yeah. It's why Battlefield is always this weird outlier in EA because like part of the fact that they're out in Sweden dice has an extensive long-running union.

They had a union before they got bought by EA. And Canada, depending on where you are, Alberta ain't going to be one of those places that's going to have as many protections. Oh, they don't even know how to write their own names in Alberta. They can pull up some

fucking oil and do that coal thing super dangerous thing real fucking rig pig in it though guys we pulled all this oil out of the grounds they can rig pig it go broke ah we're so smart um I uh yeah

it really is though just like a bit where you're like okay you can now basically get you can get people who are at the point of being willing to quit but anyone who's neat who is less desperate than that is, you know, being intimidated out of unionization efforts, which fucking sucks.

I need to make another point about Alberta, and it's my favorite point about Alberta. I will semi-regularly talk shit about Alberta because it's fun. I think one of the most interesting things about it, I have never in my life had someone go, Hey I only know Not once I only know about Alberta mockery Because I know two people from Alberta

That went yeah fuck that shit You know Straight up I learned the term rig pig from someone who's like God I'm surrounded by I'm surrounded by rig pigs And I was like Wait what is that term?

You know And like and the little V Has told me many a story About just like Oh You know. So yeah, no, I'm, I've heard. I've heard.

I think, I think my favorite Albertan thing is a BC thing, actually. So when we moved to BC, we saw that there were all these ads that the province of Alberta put out in BC going, wow, the cost of living's crazy in BC. You should move to Alberta. And some people did. And all the, the total result of that was jacking up the price of. of housing in Alberta to crazy levels everywhere anyone wanted to live

and getting like almost no like percentage wise people to move there. Like all they did was fuck up their own housing market. Sick. Awesome. What a great campaign. Okay. So we had that pop off.

Here's a wild one. Um, there was, ooh, that is, that is, mm-hmm. Oh, chat's good today. Mm-hmm. Hit me? Oh, Gilroy Goldblood just says literally all my relatives in Alberta are those racist white guys with Filipino wives.

That highly specific guy. Like passport bros? Yeah. Ah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

not my wife though right yeah yeah okay that's different yeah it's different totally it's different because I own her right

she's mine mm-hmm um so over in uh Thailand uh there was

an e-sports uh athlete named Warrison Narafat, who competed at a regional tournament and got to the highest placement of Arena of Valor, which is a popular mobile game that has, you know, lots of competition and lots of events behind it from Tencent. And apparently has been discovered to have never played a single match.

and every single stream or all footage of her playing was through a proxy with someone else playing and winning the matches. And I... That's good shit. So, okay. That's good shit. So you got the first version of this

when we talked about Snoop Dog reaching down to light up while the game continued to play. without him. Oh, hand on the controller, which is incredible stuff, right? I think that, like, I think pretending you're playing a game is of specifically more use to people who are not blazed out of their fucking gourd. But here's the, here's the shitty thing about this. This is no, no, no. I'm not going to say hustle on this. I'm calling this a scam because, uh, going through the tournament circuit, she has basically, want, not only like won prize money and like gotten to, uh, like literally like the joint teams and shit like that got sponsored, but like a lot of players who actually play

the games were like, what the fuck? Because there's results of playing against this person are now skewed for within the entire bracket. Everything underneath gets fucked up. What's the name of the game? Arena of Valor. Um, and everyone that has basically a, uh, been coming out afterwards that was eliminated by this person during the season or that we're getting medals during any of the events or whatever. The whole thing is called into question and it turns out her boyfriend is the person that was playing and he was... Maybe they shouldn't join a tournament

for this fucking T-Mu League of Legends game on your phone. You play whatever... Guys playing a fake video game. game complain about fake players. I don't know what the e-sport situation is in Thailand, dude, but I'm not going to assume everybody has access to all of it. Like, you play what you got around you in some, you know, I'm, I'm sure there's there's not perhaps limited choices, you know, but real money, obviously, real events

and real sponsorship shit. And yeah, basically it turned out her boyfriend was a former, um, player from the game that retired or so, but then was either, it was either doing proxy connection and controlling the matches or was doing screen share. And the way that they discovered is because her hand movements while playing were not making sense with what was happening on screen.

Why not just have him compete in the tournaments? I think it was, yeah, I think it was a combination of like trying to get, sponsored by being like a face, you know, combined with the gameplay and having like a stream and building a fan base based on that. And I believe looking through it as well, because there's an Olympic, there's a national Olympic committee for like e-sport stuff.

And I think some of them might have been Women's League stuff as well specifically. Okay. So, um, okay. I believe so. So, um, yeah, anyway, it is a, I mean, in the end, after getting like disexposed, the, the, whatever, she got fired and, and the whole thing was shut down, et cetera. And then now all the questions, all the competitions are brought to question, so on. But just, uh, this was apparently, uh, something that went on for a while and her entire career was able to, like, go on. to the point where she always gave excuses apparently for why she wouldn't show up face to face for an event or why she couldn't play in person and so on.

But just based on fan base and reputation, she was able to get signed and like build a career for a while doing this. Okay. So I was, I'm looking up, I'm looking up some Thai legal stuff. And I was going to offer a hustle explanation for this. because I was going to be like, how long have they been dating and do they share the same primary residence? Because if they are common law married as boyfriend girlfriend, then that money would have hit a joint bank account. And so it's a wash anyway. However, marriage in Thailand is recognized as valid only when registered according to Section 1457 of the Thailand civil and commercial code. there is no common law marriage in Thailand.

Sorry. Also, if the rules of the event are you must be playing the game, we're done here, right? Because the same thing that happened with the Canada Cup event with a quack bot, like it was his girlfriend's entry that he played under. It was like she entered and then he took her place afterwards and fucked up the whole bracket with like knuckle doing everything, you know? Well, see, if, so here's the thing, was that, in that Canada Cup thing, was that guy also playing under his own bracket? Yes.

Okay. See, if he was only playing under his girlfriend's bracket and they were common law married and had to joint bank account, I would have let that slide. Because the only thing that changes the name, not the actual competition. Yeah, sure. No, he entered himself and then he lost and then, and then went and played again is what happened there. and in this case the the dude like retired or stopped playing and then continued playing

via I'm just saying if there's one entry on a bracket married couples might as well count as one person as long as they only get the one entry on the bracket um I'm trying to get to I don't I'm trying to get to as much more information about it

but it if it is a a women's league thing and or if it is a... Oh yeah, no, you can't do that. That's... There's that part of it. Or you're being sponsored on a team, but it's, like, who's getting sponsored? Is it you?

It's not you. It's, et cetera. Well, it's the family unit being sponsored. It's the family unit. In that context. Listen, you, you're writing full attorney on this. You can, you can go for it. But I don't think Thailand's having it, man.

Yeah. So, I don't think Thailand's having it. So yeah, yeah. Cheerio, a former arena of valor professional player confessed to being the remote player. Yeah, all right. Why confess? I mean, people do this all the time. They get caught and then they spill the beans.

The gig was up. I mean. And you're going to lie, lie until you're grave. Never admit it. Okay, but like his girlfriend is getting lit the fuck up, like online. Well, she's not going to stop getting lit the fuck up. Nah, but like, if you're trying to, if you're trying to salvage what's left of this relationship, if you want to, if you want to not, if you want to get off the couch ever again, you might need,

you might need. Wasn't it her that screwed up? Why would he be in trouble? Well, they, they ran the fucking scam collectively. Yeah, why would she be mad at him for her fucking up with the hand motion? Oh, oh, so if she's successfully. Yeah, no, this is her fault Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She blew it up by not being accurate. He should dump her. Right. He should dump her ass. Right, right, right, right. And he should get... For fucking up the scam. And get the prize money. Got it, got it, got it, got it.

Yeah. Got it, got it. Okay. I won that prize money, actually. Well, legal action is being pursued against both individuals and investigators are tracking... That's why you shouldn't have confessed. Nothing! Shut your mouth!

Investigators are tracking IP addresses to build evidence. That was a ghost playing the game. There's no shot. It's cooked, man. It's done. Don't confess anything. Talk to a lawyer.

They were like, this was, they were already fucking seizing computers, man. It's, it's, never say anything. Talk to a lawyer. This story should be such an Such gets caught. No information because they have retained legal counsel. At the end of the day, I don't think you go to jail for lying about a tournament. I think you just...

No, you go to jail for fraud. For the money. For the money. Yeah, for the money. But, uh, uh, uh, yeah, anyway, investigation ongoing, etc. But I don't think anyone at that point, um, was getting away with it. Furthermore, I would imagine that, like, I don't know. Like, if, like, suddenly someone comes out, if someone comes out of nowhere and is absolutely destroying it and wins Evo online and they happen to be Mena's roommate and they win with Blanca. And, you know.

Is Mena also in the? the tournament? Well, no. That's the thing, right? Because you see, because you can say, oh, if you live with the best blanket player, then of course, you can just watch and learn. And that makes perfect sense. But Mena's not there. In fact, Mena is home. He's sick. Okay, well, no, but if Mena is also in the tournament, not okay. If Mena is in the tournament, that's not okay. If Mena is not in the tournament, he's at he's home. And the roommate is playing anonymously. It happens to look a lot, a lot like Mena. It's someone else. What is the, I don't understand the point of them doing that.

But, uh, if there, if there's, if there's a, if there's a, if there's a, if there's a, and a, a, a judgment, then they should have to kiss in front of judges. And then that, that can be solved. And then the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the not Mena player gets offered a contract and to get sponsored and, and to get sponsored and signed to an org and is now on a team and is running multiple streams a week. officially as a top player. So here's my, Matt. This is my, I'm up two minds. I actually only, I want two versions of this. I either want, as long as the person's not doubling up in the tournament, I don't care what name they put on a list. Right.

Okay. So what you're describing is essentially the, it's a online tournament and what I show on my camera shouldn't matter. If I put a V-tuber up, I agree. Then who cares? You're seeing a person, but it doesn't matter. but that ends up not being the case. And if it's a thing where it's like,

no, no, this is a person. They've signed their name. This is who they are. They claim... Hey, look, I'm going to sign up for a tournament. I'm going to put a picture of the dog. Yeah. And the dog's going to play the tournament.

Who gives a shit? Right. The caboose the game playing dog. As long as I did not also enter the tournament as well. Right, right. On the other hand, donate a file of blood to the T. Upon entry.

and your file will be scanned on your local match at every pool we got one of those machines that spins around really quickly everyone upon sign up offers a vial and the vial is taken down to the FGC philactory chamber for sorting and management

I mean I'll have you know that again this is this is arena of valor but to make the point with uh with nema d r over here with the roommate uh yeah yeah you you i think i think the moment you accept a sponsorship and then become your own celebrity uh on the basis of who you are and then and so on and then you take the money and you you common law bank accounts i don't i don't it's not It's not a guarantee in every situation.

Depends on where you're coming. Honestly, at this point, I think they should have just, they should have just cheated. If they were going to, if they were going to cheat by the letter of the law, if not the spirit, cheat in the spirit, too. You were going to get caught. You might as well try to get all that shit and get out of the country before they caught you.

All I can imagine is if this story blew up like this now, there must have been people for probably years who watched them play and went, what the fuck something's wrong here, and it just failed the sniff test for a really long time. I'm sure this has been an open secret. People are highly suspicious of everybody who's at a certain level of good at games.

I bet this motherfucker's cheating. It's like... And well, but if you're, okay, I was about to say, if you're sitting in the room and your hands are in full display, then how? And then, well,

the answer is if you pull out a fucking hit box with eight extra buttons on it and, and no SOCD and like a billion other weird things, then, yeah, it turns out maybe you are, like, people started calling the hit box the cheat box. Yeah,

I remember that. I remember that. Yeah. Like, fuck, there's no neutral inputs, you know, I don't know.

Anyway, the uh that's that's wild news that's a wild ass scam that was pulled off for a minute there um all right only other things uh hey discord is is filing for to become an IPO yeah they're going public and let the what's the new discord everybody let the inshidification commence what's the new discord hit me up what's the new one get me an invite all my friends it's going to be three Breads. Can't wait for literally five years of documentation on every game that's come out in the past 10 years to evaporate overnight. That's going to be cool. Can't wait for the migration of all useful tech for a game for like the fourth or fifth time. Always love when that happens. Did you know?

You know what I really can't wait? I can't wait to have to keep Discord open as it's a piece of shit malware on my computer so I can check. in the stupid shit people are saying in the Marathon Creator Discord. Did you know all your friends are on... I'm just kidding. That's not going to be around next year. Did you know all your friends are on threads? They're on threads, by the way. I have been told this...

Your friends are on threads. A picture. And I'm like, I have no friends that are on... Pat? Your friends are on threads. They're not. They want to see... Your friend just made a post on threads, and they want to know what you have to say

right now. I have to say, get off threads. I don't care about that. X, Y, Local singles are on threads in your area. Man, local singles. But I'm married. That doesn't appeal to me. Horny grandmas are on threads in your area looking for you.

That also definitely doesn't appeal to me. Right now. No, thank you. They're lonely on threads. Oh, I'd be lonely on threads too. Nobody, none of my friends are there. Oh, fuck. Yeah, so that's going to happen.

And you got your AI round up if you want to fucking. Yeah, no, I don't even give a shit. Good, good. I agree. Games Workshop says no AI, so that's cool. But evil company games workshop. But then in Define Print, they say we're a lot, like some of our people are still exploring. our high level execs are still exploring with it, but for now we're saying no, because

we're protecting our IPs in the same way that Disney said no until they said yes. I'll give you a breakdown on that Larian AMA disaster. Sure. Didn't clarify shit. Sure. They said we're not going to use it in the concept art, but then later said, but we might use it in the game unlike what we said last week. And I've said before, I've said before, like, and basically because what they came out

was like the only way we'd consider using it as if we trained it all ourselves, which I was pointing out, which is I'm like, if there is an ethical example you're trying to find, that's one way you can do it. However people who work there, well, people who work there are then confirming, no, this is not how they're using it. The people, like there's people that are behind the scenes that are straight up going, that's not what's happening internally at the studio right now. also here's a fun one you know that the um oh i can't remember the names of this so this is going to come off

really shitty but there's a the the artist can echo for uh for atlas the the smt artist yep right he was like i want to make a card game that i will train the ai to make new cards based off of my art style and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to feed all of my art that i have into this thing and I'm going to train this AI thing exclusively on my art style and then turn the machine on and it just spits out like Kazuma Kineko versions of frozen characters

over and over and over and over and over because your art style isn't enough data for these things to work to look when you're like oh I'm going to grab this training model and train it only on my stuff it's also been trained on billions of other things.

The ones that end up being end user facing and everything are based on, yeah, billions and billions of data. You personal individual, if you want to train your own data set, even if your stuff is exhaustive, the best you'll come up with is stuff like the original Will Smith eating spaghetti nonsense. It's not, it's when they say we would train it only with our stuff, that's a lie. It's just a physical impossibility. I think what the only thing you could do will just, this is a completely different, this is not AI at this point. But I remember when Gabe from Penny Arcade was describing how after years and years and years of drawing Penny Arcade, he basically just created a character creator software with his, all the eyes he's ever drawn,

all the mouths, all the noses. And he kind of just like puts the assets into place to make the comic strip. you know, absolutely. Or like South Parkers, well, or whatever. And that's why Tim Buckley was ahead of the curve. Control, Alt Delete. Yeah. He had that shit on lock since day one.

Here's the mouth. I'm just going to copy, paste it. There it is. Done. The visual bit. I'm holding my mouth open at the Control Alt delete angle. I remember telling you once that I was like, I've read every single Control All Delete comic for every single day for like multiple years.

And I don't know why because it sucks. And you just look me in the eyes and said, doing that. You should, you really should have stopped doing it. I was just kind of in awe every single day and how shit it was. But then you told me about the fuck thing where they took away the second and third panel so it was just the first and the fourth and then it, oh yeah, that shit's amazing and it made the comics so much better. There were some amazing ones, the best of which, that's bomber man. The bomber man example is the greatest. I can't believe it. Control alt delete. That's the first, that's the first one he ever did too. Holy shit. Like, come on. Uh.

A bomber man sitting in the, and with the FBI staring at him, cut out panels two and three, no text? Cut straight to be the FBI beating the shit out of bomber man and comic. Yeah. Garfield, well, Al Garfield's pretty good, too. That's pretty good. John's just insane. And, yeah, Cy Games is doing whatever. Who cares?

Cy games is like, we love it. So. Mobile, Mobboggi game company does shit bag shit? Wow. Um, from the people who brought you child's gambling comes unethical business practices. What do you want? So, uh, the rivals of Ather Steam Workshop beta got announced. And, um, in the 3D rivals of Ather game, you can now go make your own custom characters, which is, that's cool.

That's like, like, uh, like, uh, usually a lot simpler and you, people can access it and throw their own shit at there. But here they're like, no, no, no, go get your 3D model, do your own thing. Make your character go. Pretty, pretty incredible impressive stuff. And Armando, the new character, which is a template for you to fill over, has been dropped into the game as well. And it's a little cute, little fluffy white thing that's called Armando. And you can go check it out. Yeah, anytime a game goes like, yo, we're going to make characters and do stuff.

but here, make your own, go nuts, hit the workshop, have fun. That's cool. Your only move is hustle fucking became a completely different game after they allowed custom characters and shit just went nuts with it. All right, let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send a letter in, send it to Castle Super Beastmail at gmail.com. That's Castle Superbeastmail at gmail.com. Okay. Dear pedigree and stinkface, I'm drunk. What are some things people say as an insult that perk up your interest in the subject? For me, I have a couple, half of which are from you guys. If someone says, feels like a PS2 game, seven on ten, shitty robots or mechs, or mechs, or feels like devil's third or wet.

Okay, so it feels like a PS2 game is like a massive compliment. So it's kind of interesting that they put that there. Basically, this is describing me talking about wanted dead the other day. It feels like... Yeah, yeah, these are all from there. No, I can appreciate the... If you tell me a game feels like it's from the Xbox Live Arcade era, right? If it feels like an Xbox Live Arcade vibe.

Oh, I like that, though. I love it. Yeah, it's a quality of jank that I'm super down for, and you'll get my money. man, I got to tell you, I saw somebody in the chat say it insists upon itself. I fucking think that's the fucking greatest diss of anything I've ever seen in my fucking life. I, like, I have not watched Family Guy in many, many, many years. And every now and then a clip surfaces. It insists upon itself.

And like, and like, this has come up a couple of times. I actually agree with fucking Peter. Like, I'm actually right there. I'm like, I don't know, man. Godfather. Godfather's so up its own fucking ass. It's a great movie. It definitely exists upon itself. It's a great movie, nonetheless.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, I watched it way later after hearing about everything. And with fresh eyes to it, I was like, damn, no, that was good. Still haven't watched three. Um, Italian. Oh, it's so sad. Shut up. I don't give a fuck. The old country.

See, here's one of the things. Like, you mentioned offhand, and I mean offhand. Like, you barely mentioned it that, like, when I was, when I was, like, talking shit about, like, mafia stuff and how much I hate mafia stuff and how much I would love it if they, if they all just were the pathetic shitbag losers that I know them to be. And you mentioned that that is kind of what the Sopranos is. Yeah. Which made me a million times more interested in the Sopranos. The Sopranos is not about how cool these mobsters are. It's about how fucking sad they are.

It's great. You know, I'm going to say something that's going to make me look really stupid. I have been massively failed by dumb idiot with Tony, not Tony, with Tony Montana poster on his wall. Riley, yeah. with that, like, that guy. Yeah. About how cool Tony Soprano is.

Oh, my God, no. Oh, my God. No, he sucks, dude. Like, okay. The fact that they actually all suck ass makes me so much more interested. Like, there's actual slapstick ass moments of them farting around and, like, being out of shape and being just fat and lame and, like, getting old and try to keep. it together and it's just not at all like there's a whole arc dedicated to uh chris multisanti the the young up-and-comer one of them yeah okay yeah him about he's like he's trying to get into

movies and he's trying to be like a big a big time producer and like he's he's trying he can't understand why things are good he doesn't understand what a good film or a good movie he's got terrible he doesn't understand arts and he's but he's got money And he needs to launder it. And he's into movies. So maybe you just fucking just do what I fucking tell you and make the movie good. And he's a dumbass. He's the dumbest, most ridiculously insanely stupid dude.

But like, and it just follows him failing as hard as possible in trying to get his money clean in the film genre. Holy shit, dude. They're so pathetic. wildly tangential. But you know how my household has been going through a Walton Goggins-esque revival? sure yeah yeah yeah the ghoul and then there's

a what's it called Island Paradise that's not it the fucking the one where they go to the resort I can't remember the fucking name of it

but we watched the third season of that and then there's the religious one God I can't remember shit right now righteous gemstones

Righteous White Lotus and righteous gemstones right and then Paige also watch the show called Justify Oh yeah that's big

that's popular the fucking villain and he's cool as shit and all those right and then I bring up man the Shield's a good show but I don't think you'd like Gawkins in there because Shane is a

weasley sniveling little pathetic fuck he's and she's like huh really I'm like he like if you told me Shane from the Shield would go on to be a cool handsome like fucking actor

I'd be blown the fuck away because Shane is such a disgusting little fucking coward shit fuck loser it's incredible okay one of the best episodes

of the Sopranos is two of the old gangsters going grabbing this dude and they're going to bring him out to the forest to fucking do him in yeah and then he breaks away from them and like fights back and runs into the forest and these old fucks have to track him

in the winter and they're just and they can't do it And dude just gets away and they're like, fuck. And they just suck. They're just old and shitty and they suck and they can't do it. And he gets away and we never find out what happens because they're lame and they're shitty at what they do. And that's the end of the episode. It's the best shit ever.

Oh, man. The whole time it's like, whatever happened to that. It's like, no, he got away. That's it. They couldn't do it. It should have had a little bit less gobble ghoul. I mean, the gabagool is in there, but right after the gabagool, he fucking has an aneurysm and passes out and falls down and hits his head. And then goes to the fucking doctor's office and gets his therapy session going.

And just like, how the fuck does Capicole become Gaba ghoul? How is that? Capacol, capacol. Okay. No. When you go to Jersey. Stop it. Well, the deal is, is you go to Jersey and then you want to be really, really attached to the Rootsman.

So you got to, you know, you got to start bringing them out as much as possible. But then actual Italy is like, what the fuck are you saying? We don't understand. Do you have any living family that has ever even seen Italy on a map, sir? And you just, and you go off in a direction that, like, people from Italy are like, we, we have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. And also, another one of the best episodes ever is they go to Italy and then Italians are like, what the fuck? You know, and you have like, you have, um, Polly Walnuts. One of the old dudes sitting at the fucking.

Poly Walnuts. He's got the little. That's fake. He's got the wingtips on the side. Polly fucking Walnuts. Oh, T.O. I can't believe this guy. It's the guy that's always with their hand.

Yay. Hey, oh, whoa, right? And Polly Walnuts is trying to have his espresso outside, you know, in Italy, feeling like I'm in the motherland. I'm back home. This is where I'm supposed to be. You've never been here. And he holds up the fucking espresso and he looks at the Italian people from Italy and he's like, commendatory. And they just look at him and almost like spit on the ground.

Like what the fuck? What? And just go back to what they were doing. And he's like, eh. And then just kind of wanders around Italy, trying to find himself and realizing you have no relation to any of this. You are not connected to it. And he just stands around doing the horse staring at the ocean thing going, man. And then goes back home and is like, and then goes back home and they're like, oh, how was it?

And it's like, oh, it's the greatest. Yeah, everyone has to go back to the homeland. Everyone's got to go back to the old country. It's the best I'm so mad That you just offhand Mentioned the horse staring at the ocean thing And I knew exactly what you were

It's so good dude It's so good They're all the saddest fucking losers Ever trying to be mobsters It fucking rules God damn it it's so good Oh, shit. Like, oh my God, there's...

There's so many lame... There's a dude who gets, like, there's a big, like, boss, dude. There's a big, important person who gets taken out because he slips and falls, and, like, his head lands behind a tire that's backing up, and it just happens to... He just falls like a dumbass. It's a freak ass out. Fucking banana.

peel shit. And oh shit. Damn, what happened? He fucking just big mobster cool guy slipped on a fucking banana peel and just shed everywhere and got fucking, like, it's so absolutely pathetic, you know? Anyway, um, yeah, yeah, it rules. Um, there you go. Uh, let's see over here. We got one coming in from... No name given. Dear Tall Dreadsman and Short Ginger. That's me. Kydden here.

You too. Longtime fans since the first shirtstorm in the old channel. Lately, I get bored whenever I hear my friends talking about the best sword, great sword, katana spear, etc. in games. Oh, man, you should. That's a fucking boring conversation. What I want to know is what's the best knife you've ever had to use in a game? Oh, my God.

It's a bit of a simple. answer, but I have to give my vote to the dagger of time in Prince of Persia for its unique designs and ability to rewind time platforming when fighting enemies to fix your mistakes. I have a very clear answer for this. It's the fucking sear kit. Yes, sir. In Titanfall, you pull out the sear kit, you take your data knife out and you stab that shit into things and you hack with it, and that's it. It also is the knife you stab into the wall when you're hanging off the wall in Titanfall. So.

It's a knife. Sure, the circuit. All right, we'll take whatever. Summon sword, there, the summon sword that goes around Virgil's finger when he is the taunt. There, done. That's a knife. Sure.

We'll take it. Shadow says, hey, analog, Pat and digital woolly. Shadow here. Last week you talked about high fleet, the old-timey... I did talk about that. Skeu-omorphic interface, where you have to actually pull out a virtual pen and ruler to annotate your map with enemy fleets. I really like this kind... Yeah, it's cool stuff for freaks. I didn't like it, but it's cool.

I really like this kind of stuff instead of using standard UI design. It can be really immersive if done well. For example, Duskers is a horror game about remotely piloting drones in derelict spaceships. Instead of having a point-and-click control scheme, like an RTS, you type into a command line in real-time to open doors, move drones, activate equipment, etc. The whole UI looks and moves like an old monitor and drone cameras all look like LIDAR, etc. Are there any other examples of games you could think of that use skeuomorphic design? Isn't it really fun to say?

That's cool. That sounds fun to say. The number one that I can come up with off top of my head is Shevary 1 and 2 in which you click the mouse or whatever to swing your sword horizontally but if you also

move your camera more or less or in the opposite direction you can fuck up everybody's parry timings. So if you swing your sword and it's going to go from left to right and you turn your camera to the left your sword will

arrive super late to their parry. Um, so, uh, the deal with skeuomorphism is that is things that are designed to look, uh, like a real life counterpart, but, oh, that I misunderstood the question completely. In a virtual context, right? So, I don't really care for it. Uh, I like a good HUD that does that. I think it's cool. Um, Apple does that a bunch with, like the, things to, like the way like a calculator, that's the example given when you look it up. Like a calculator looks like a real calculator in a digital context. And or television sets back in the day were designed to look like furniture so that people could look at it and imagine it in their living room with all the wooden shit around it and stuff.

So things that. Well, yeah. I've been sent an animated gift that I need you to tell me if it's real about the Sopranos. I'm watching Tony have a panic attack and drop a glass because he's looking at an Uncle Ben rice box. And he's like, his vision is fading out. Is that real? He 100% has that moment that is super real. And Tony fucking passes the fuck out and gets these headaches.

All right. I got to watch. I gotta watch fucking Sprana. A million percent real. And you see him doing the blinking thing going like, uh, uh, uh,

that's crazy. That's fucking crazy. Um, yeah. Oh, so many moments, dude, so many moments.

Anyway, um, uh, uh, what was the word? Skeuomorphic. Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah. So designs that are like that. I think one of my, one thing to fucking rules that I love, obviously, is a Steel Battalion. Like you have a literal insane panel in real life with you.

That's not skeomorphic design, though, because you actually do have it. But the game representing that visually with you, it makes that feeling as accurate as possible. So when you look at the HUD in the game and you look around your full menu, you look around your full meck suit, And everything is all the knobs are there and you're switching them.

I feel like that feedback is phenomenal, you know? Yeah, I think that's cool. Anytime it feels like it matches up with what's what you're experiencing in the game. Anyway, all right. I think this dog's loud. Dog, are you good? He's grumbling. All right.

That'll do. that'll do that'll do hey if anybody's listening to this live me and page are gonna be streaming fallout in seven hours apparently episode five is the big one so go check that out there comes the big one all I hear is Gianni just

taking the biggest shit every time someone says that from now on did you see it the shit that he took no no like he didn't he didn't he didn't leave one in my did you see it I'm referring to farting on my roommate's door

will I. Oh, okay. Sorry. Okay. No. No, I thought like, no, he did not leave an upper decker in my house if that's what you're... I'm going to go stare. I'm going to stare at the ocean. All right. If you feel, excuse me. Man.