Castle Super Beast - CSB360: Parasite Eve The 3rd Birthday is in the Epstein Files

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

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Meow, we got a big podcast this week. Wow. We do. We do a little bit. We got a lot to cover. Caboos, can you help us with the day's podcast? You have nothing to say? Thanks, dog.

So do I just got to do the... What's up? What's up, man? Do I got to do the GIF forever? Yeah? Which GIF is that, really? Do I have to do my GIF? Do I have to bring the camera closer?

Yeah, bring the camera right in. Just shut the fuck. up, man. Just shut the fuck up. Just stop. Just don't, just don't say, just. Hey, yeah. It's so easy to just not fucking. There is.

You're doing your desync. I'm doing the, oh, I'll fix it. I know, I got it. I'm gonna do it. I fixed it. Is it fixed now? There we go. All right.

There we go. Ah, I fixed it. I'm so smart. It just, it costs nothing. You know, It costs, bro, it costs nothing to shut the fuck up. That's it, that's all. That's it.

You know, um, when it, when it comes to just who's meowing and meugenics, it's like, okay, if you recorded a bunch of shit 10 years ago because the game's been in development for super long, yeah, that was a long time ago. And the world has gone to shit significantly more than it already was. It's changed since then. Things have gotten a lot worse. over the last 10 years. And that's it.

And yeah, okay. That's cool. That I think everybody's like pretty much like, yeah, I can piece two and two together on that, you know? Yeah. The sun was in the sky and we saw that we did some revolutions around it. Time passed. And over the course of time passing, shit got shitty.

And here we are. Meow. That meow was from back then. And here we are now. Willie, no. Wully, do you know what I'm going to do? What are you going to do? I'm going to, I'm going, you know that, you know that ready made explanation you just handed me just now?

Sure. No. No. Not good enough. Not, okay. What are you going to do? I'm going to take my foot, put it right up my ass. Ooi, y, yoy, or mouth ass.

And then pull it out with a big smiley poop on it. It's like that, just, anyway. Just shut up. That's all. That's all. That's, it's the most nothing, nothing. But it's just like so. It's also shut up though. Yeah. In any case, I mean, now you want to talk about the real controversy this week. Okay, okay. What's, what's. Yeah, you want to talk about what's actually wildly controversial. Why can't I tell my cat meugenics not to step in fucking glass? That's bullshit. Wait, what?

When you're playing the Mugenics. Yeah. And you're like, I would like my cat to go here. Yeah. And you go to click on it. Yeah. The cat only has one choice of pathing ever. Okay.

Yeah, so sometimes if there's a dangerous pathing route to get to a safe tile, you have to spend an extra turn getting there. Yeah, a full extra turn getting there. Yeah, yeah. Because you can't, like I have four movement blocks. Can I choose the movement blocks? You can't go like that. You can't go left right up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes me nuts because I was fighting Fenrir. Okay. The boss that puts down traps. And I was like, oh, I was like my brain would go, oh, surely the kitty cat will move to the correct spot avoiding the trap that I know is that no. Yeah. No, that's one of those things you can't do. I fully expect that to actually be changed.

The other thing, so that, that's not. So, yeah, that I kind of. or less was accepting that. I mean, that's, that's kind of fine. The, it is interesting seeing the design, the philosophies of like keeping you in the dark on like lots of things, because the whole Isaac sort of a road of development. It is, it is super, you really feel playing eugenics that this was a game built by somebody who took like 28 years to put item descriptions into the game. I, you feel it. So everything in my like, you know, into the breach blood is like is coming out here and kind of going like, okay, I'm going to like without anticipation, like basically trying to to make the level of plays that you can make in that game because of the perfect information is not possible here. But you still have, there's still like lots I'd say that is out of your control with the way things go.

and I guess like that's kind of meant to be like the the nature of it. Yeah, no, when you when you have your run a huge part of it like once you're in the run it's like fucking deal with what deal with whatever happens. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, right. Sometimes you send the wrong cat into the wrong event and then the wrong thing happens and you have no way to walk away from it, you know? I had a fucking cat.

My main, my main fighter just go into the Amigara fault and die and disappear and die and my cat was gone from the party I had a I had a cat have a fucking ability where it did

it did damage it earned money every time it hit yes I got that one and every time but but it's damage scaled with how much money it had earned that match

cool cool okay and I got the crying dead baby that shoots two shots around. Oh, there you go. Okay. So that shit just fucking won the day for me. Oh, so one, getting to the boss of that same run I was just describing, the elongated Amigara fault cat that I lost came back to fight me.

So that happens, by the way, you know. But yeah, no, and then in terms of like the actual strat, like things happening, yeah, the runs I'm starting to get are starting to be like kind of, I seen a couple busted builds. You know, I had a cat that was a, um, a healer that had the ability to throw a shield down on the ground and then go pick it up. Mm-hmm. But also had a quirk that was like, whatever buffs you pick up for yourself apply to the whole party.

Oh, that's super. So just the whole thing was like, yeah, my team is healing every turn nonstop. as I just pick up my own buffs, and then everyone can just go nuts, you know? Insane levels of, like, broken abilities you can get together. There's one where it's just, like, nuke everything outside of a little circle around you and make it all blind as well. And it just, it takes a lot of mana to do that. And then I just put heavy mana dump into the one caster.

And then everyone just sits tight, puts up a phalanx, and then you just nuke the way, wave the entire BAP on the, until it's done, you know? It is a brave decision to lock, hey, what is going on with these party members at all behind like multiple tiers of long form upgrades? Yeah. Like, you're not unlocking more power. You're unlocking the ability to see what's going on at all.

Some abilities only make sense after leveling them up multiple times too. there are like ones where like you can you can toss things around the map and an upgraded version of that is like toss something onto an opponent and then it lands next to it including friendlies, familiars, etc. And the cat I had in particular was a tank that would also, okay, it had the ability to kick rocks and make rocks. I got an item that was basically like an axe pick that would like make rocks out of inanimate objects so I could fill up the field with rocks and then it had... Just shit it up with rocks.

But then it had a quirk that made rocks your friends and rocks became extra party members that would walk around the field and have a super long attack distance. So I had like a billion familiars and if you walk up to any inanimate object including giant ones and hit them with the pickaxe you turned the whole object

into a field of like four rocks. that are now also taking turns at the end of your turns to just pelt themselves. That's cool. It was insane, you know? So, yeah, the broken builds are going nuts. I'm in act, too. And I feel like if you do really good assigning the callers to the right cat with the right stats, you can go really far with them.

So far, I think the overall tactical gameplay is, like, really addictive. and really well made. It's, it's, the game's incredible. It's really good. I literally only have two complaints and they're fairly minor.

Okay. The pathing. Mm-hmm. And the sorting once you get like more than 10 casts. Sorting is a lot. Sorting is a lot. It was briefly mentioned before this,

but like run length is really long. It's nuts. You have to sit for a while to do a run. It's starting from scratch. You can save and leave. Not during a five. fight though. So,

yeah, or else. Exactly. So I say, I did the, the game's thing, which said save and exit, which was during a fight. I said, okay. And then I resumed it. And I got the fucking shadow asshole intro. Yeah, who's like, hey, you're not allowed to fuck with the save. And if I

catch you doing it, bad things will happen. But you get one. You're allowed to fuck with the save once. And after that, uh-oh. You know? So, I think that's fair. I get it. But I didn't do anything to, to interrupt it. I just followed the game's own logic to exit during a fight and then resumed my save and I got that warning message, you know? So that was weird.

However, I just saw I'm just like, okay, save an exit outside of fights and it should be fine. My, for me, the complaint I have is the home cat stuff is more tedious and not as fun as it could be compared to like going out and doing the runs. I think that you are correct. I think that it's kind of meant to be like, oh, you're sorting through a bunch of crazy cats, you know, and it's meant to be like, ah, look at these assholes like you're a crazy cat lady doing it and picking them up. Where's the poop, et cetera? But when it comes to sorting out which ones are ready to go and which ones are the ones that are retired with the skills I want and stuff, you can sort them by room and stuff, but it ends up kind of just being tedious and, you know. It feels like the kind of thing that is like dramatically improved as you get more upgrades. Yeah. And it takes a while to get them. Let's say like the rooms, right? Having more rooms is a big deal. The room upgrades are like the longest form upgrades in the whole.

25 retired cats to get the third room. Right. Um, still working on that. It takes a lot of fucking runs to get 25 retired cats that are also like that are retirees you don't want to send elsewhere, you know? Like, I'm in the weird place right now where I, I'm like, like, I'm doing okay through like the first act. and or chapter or whatever the fuck it's called. And like, in order to upgrade my permanent shit, I'm, I'm basically having to, like, start the fuck over every couple of runs because I got to send these losers out. And I can't, I don't have the stat. I don't have the information about what's good and what isn't on them to successfully breed them. So I'm just kind of doing fucking whatever. So, like, yeah, you can give, you can give kittens over to Mr. Tink to get to get your tips or whatever. And he locks a bunch of incredibly useful abilities.

but so far it well so I haven't done a bunch of that I haven't been giving kittens over because I've been just trying to you know get the good runs going it feels as if excuse me it feels as if you like lose like your your if you lose like let's say two three runs and you can be basically back to scratch that happened to me all and all your good elder cats didn't have babies anymore I lost three runs in a row. Okay. And I had like three retired cats that were the cats from my very first run. Okay. And nothing else in a couple of upgrades. Yeah. And when that happened, I was like, you know what? I am going to focus

on being reasonable and not shooting for the moon and build up my permanent upgrades by just shooting cats off. Because I'm not going to try and create the fucking Ubermensch when I can't see like who's inbred, what their real stats are, etc. Also, when you beat runs with certain, when you beat runs,

you unlock new extra strong abilities with those classes. So it doesn't pay to try to focus early on a particular Uber cat when you don't even have the progress unlocks to make better moves come along, coming down the line. It feels like the whole first act is like, get your feet wet, don't go too crazy,

figure out how to play the game because things are like somewhat reasonable, except for the caves, man, the fucking cave, bro. Caves, I found the graveyard

worse than the caves. I haven't been to the graveyard. Oh, okay, okay, the graveyard is worse than the caves. I'm probably, I haven't played all that much,

I'm probably going to just restart and just start upgrading all my shit like crazy. Okay. There's a boss fight. Oh, no, wait. I can just send off all my cats and just that's functionally the same as restarting. There's a boss fight or, um, okay, two things.

One, there's a boss fighter or two in the caves that have some gimmicks that are like, if you're not ready for them, you know, and, and to get, to get gimmicked out after an hour long run is wild. Yeah. No, there's some, you know, there's some, like. I ran into bosses that were like not a big deal other than the fact that their gimmick was specifically built to ruin my specific combination. Yeah. The run that I had against the bomb rat on stream

was particularly unfortunate in that like I had to just chase him around and like it took forever. But then I had a second run where like it was raining so all of his bombs just got dutted immediately. I had that run too. and I was like, oh my God, hilarious. Yeah.

What I will say is when it comes to your retirees, like you want to keep the good ones around for breeding purposes, um, and other. So hold on to your good retirees. I have like two retirees in my fucking house right now. Okay, okay. One of them is caboose.

You should. Hold on to That is yes So I'll get Hold on to More retirees What How the fuck

That was crazy I saw that clip And I was like What? That's super cool A little kabushi dog Yeah Yeah

Was there Did you up up down down Left right left right No no So apparently Most of the suggestions Were user submissions So

Caboos and Elmo were in there for sure. But like, not only is, but just, oh yeah, it was right away. But like,

but that's the part where I'm like, how? The odds are insane. Okay, well, in any case, that was incredible. Hey,

I want to mention something because I've played, I've been playing Stardu and I've played no man sky and I'm playing meugenics. And I'm constantly being given the advice, hold on to this thing that you don't know what it's for. Yeah. And I'm starting to like just ignore that advice as a matter of course. Okay. Well, because it's always unclear as to whether or not it's worth it or rather whether it's not, whether or not it is worth the mental effort of keeping it in the background. Yes. For an unknown length of time. Gotcha. Okay. Well, then I'll, I have, I had one of those where it's like, hey, hold on to this ribbon. And I was like, what does it?

Is it actually, is that a real thing? Okay, well, I will just, if anyone doesn't want to know about, like, I guess some, because the game's early, so everyone's still figuring it out right now. But if anyone doesn't want to hear about a, like, I guess, whatever, spoiler-ish thing about later. Oh, man, I don't know shit. Okay. Tell me. Well, all that to say is just, well, one, that ribbon thing, I think it's nothing. It's literally the objects that you get.

What is up with the ribbon? I don't think it doesn't. It literally does nothing as far as I can tell, whatever. It's cute. But me telling you about your cat. retirees is because there is a challenge that occurs outside of the runs. Got it. Got it.

That's it. That's all. Yeah. So I am now going to restart Mugenics. I have a sneaking suspicion. Getting back to where I am right now will be really fast now that I know how to play the game. Oh, for sure. I mean, especially like given, you know, when I, when I,

learn how to play the game with these games and I put a bunch of time into them and I move smoother and stuff. Like the first round going through it on Steam on stream I was kind of like like okay just getting a hang of the info and so on clicking around

took a minute now I'm like flying through it you know and feeling comfortable. I just want better sorting options for these cats. Yes. Yes. Yes. Even just figuring out who's ready to go is way harder than it needs to be.

So I'm using to do that. I'm using the the depart box to just help with sorting even when I'm not ready to depart. Dragging them to, like, clicking the quick button to go quickly get ready to go over here or send them outside

to the pipes or whatever. All of that is just like, this could be made easier. There could be more sorting options here. I definitely won't. Drives me nuts. Like drives me actually nuts. Because everyone's saying just Give me a list of the cats, dude. Yeah.

And I'm like, it's really annoying to be picking up and sorting up all these cats and me like, which cat is it? Which cat is it? If I wanted to be really, really kind, I could be like, I bet them, I bet the experience of, where's that cat while you're walking through your house and picking up all these weird cats is like intentional? Yes. as a cat hoarding scenario.

That's what I was saying. The fact that you have to click and drag them out of the way to go, real, real, that one, right? So you, you don't have to.

You can, like, hit, I used a controller for a bunch of it. You can click, like, square, and I'll show you the little profile. But you still have to go one by one.

You can just click through that. Yeah, yeah, but you still have to go one by one. But, but like, and it will show you which ones can go because it'll have the box icon highlighted.

So there's that. But the choice was deliberately clearly made here to not do something we, we've seen, sorted out in say, Darkest Dungeon 2 or Darkest Dungeon 1, where your whole party is just on the right side of the screen, you know, top to bottom.

And you're like, yeah, every cat I have could just be on a list right here and I can just go right to them. But it's, where's that goddamn cat? You get over here. If I want to be like a massive asshole,

I could be like, there's a lot of very clear pain points available in megenics that could be solved with relatively simple updates. You got to focus on those pain points. That being said, I don't know if, I don't know what or if is,

any of these things will change, though there is obviously support coming. Yeah, the charm of like, you know, tossing your cats out and out of the way and getting, you know, overrun with a big old house full of stanky cats. And like, also the fact that, like, there was a dead cat that was in there, but like it doesn't have an, a clear, it's upside down. But like, it doesn't say cat is dead. And you just have to go, oh, that one's not moving and it's upside down. so you know and like I clicking through the prompt at one point when like two cats got got into a fight I just wanted to click for the text to auto fill but it skipped the whole prompt so I missed that a cat had died and that you know it's this was this whole thing or is it's like okay you actually might be like one of those crazy cat ladies who doesn't even know that

under this pile of cats there's a dead one which again I do think is intentional I that thing I think I think they want you to have that oh shit oh fuck When did that happen? I have a strong suspicion that this game will be around for a while. What with it being the most played rogue like ever? Surpassing Hades 2 is kind of nuts. Surpassing binding of Isaac. That's nuts.

Yeah, the push fucking Gottwere needed to go on that. And hey, it will, it is the year 2000. You are browsing new grounds. It is tomorrow it will also be the year 2000 and you will be browsing new grounds forever. That's true. That's true. The appeal appears to be locked in and people are here for it. There's a strong suspicion that, for me, that the game will be receiving a disgusting amount of updates over time.

Well, yeah. You know, that, that, that, this, this is the long, the long haul. Special, I'm sure, get cameo cat things perhaps or, you know, here's, here's, here's, cat from fucking here's 808 here's yeah but I mean you can just throw on like an extra chapter

or two or three or four yeah or three or four or five or six you can throw on a whole extra map of buildings to go to do many things yeah for sure but overall the like again the tactical runs that part of it and everything is like yeah that that works that's sorted that's pretty good

and um you know getting a Finding the right synergy of good builds and all that is really fun. I did a three cat run. What is up with the free cat run? What is the purpose of that? So the three cat run is by not having a fourth cat, everything that you get,

EXP-wise, is split. So by having three cats, they get more experience per fight, and they level up way faster. So if you've got a cat that you think, is like this cat could fucking carry the whole fucking game by themselves. If you think that, if you feel that, right? And if you put a-

Feel that in your heart. And if you put a three-cat run on the hard path, they fucking just, they eat levels as long as you stay alive. As long as you can manage. Yes. What I will say is there appears to be a deliberate algorithmic tweak so that if you don't, maybe I'm just missed in my head, maybe it's just RNG. But my observation so far has been if you don't have a healer, there are more offers for healing abilities to be self-sustaining.

I wouldn't know that, though, because I've never not taken the healer. Okay. So, yeah, I did runs without healing. And I noticed, oh, my level up options included self-maintenance options much more frequently. or items that would let you heal back up or give you the ability to generate healing items, you know? So they make it so that you're not completely fucked if you want to do a no-healer run.

But alternatively, if you do a healer run, you know that they've got it covered, so then you just go all offense on everything else, you know? But yeah, three-cat run, much harder for sure, but like you're leveling up almost every fight sometimes. I did like a sequence of just like, bop, bop, and like, of course, those abilities start getting huge, you know?

at a certain point, you have more spells than your actual charisma can, uh, uh, or not career. Well, yeah, charisma. Then you're a, then your manic and cast, you know? Yeah. Um, but, uh, yeah, no, I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm really enjoying that. And, and I'd say to, uh, like, just starting out act two or so, it's that thing we're like, all right, now baseline enemies are, like, like, there's times, there's things where it's like, there's, none, you can ignore a bunch of these. There's only two real threatening dudes on the map right now or three and like an act two I feel like every baseline enemy is a problem that needs to be addressed and at this point if you've gotten this far with you through the run your cats should not be cowards you should have built some resilient fuckers that can you know push it to the limit and potentially get back up after going down or have some wild shit going on with their build they need to be broken at one thing um yeah um yeah i'm basically I killed the first boss of act two is where I stopped Oh, okay.

What is that? The desert? Desert, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But when you get, like, you get a cat that can, like, jump to anywhere next to one of your allies or, like, shoot anywhere next to one of your enemy. Like, you get these abilities where you're like, oh, the whole, I can go anywhere I want on the field any turn. And it just becomes this, like, uh, uh, uh, yeah.

Like, you start breaking the game in your favor. There's, with the thief, there's a skill that's called greed step. Yeah. And it's literally, you can auto-teleport as long as there's a coin on the ground to any coin. What? Yeah. It's like, it's a flash step, but for greed, you know? And so you make your fights based on flash-stepping to coins, you know, and fighting around it.

It's, it's sick. It's a really cool ability. I keep hemming and hawing as I play with my cats and I'm like HP is the best stat no movement is the best stat no manna is the best I'm like like as I like because they're they're all pretty well balanced because whenever I have a cat that's like really strong in one stat and really weak in the other I fucking feel it okay okay so if you're if you're

strength is decent, then movement is the best stat. If your aim is decent, then mana is the best stat, right? Like you want, like you don't need, if you have, if you can hit decently enough, then you need to be able to get there. And, um, nothing beats like one turn problem solving, you know, because, um, when you're talking about, again, like the three cat run, for example, the, um, okay. So you can, in these games, you can like, sometimes there's like a couple enemies left, like a flea or something. And you can go healing up your guys and like buffing yourself a little bit between rounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the faster you end the fight, the more rewards you get. And so it's actually more rewarding to end quicker than it is to go heal up everybody. So when you're able to take one turn to go, just go, bam, nuke that enemy, blast, that take that out and in like two turns tops you're out of there and all that extra leveling up all that extra life everything like you just start going and going and going and going and that first environment becomes a like a joke you're just flying through it basically you're doing the you're doing the first environment almost like absent-mindedly hoping for great pickups as you wander into the little question marks you know i think um i think that the way that the game handles

items is specifically designed to harm me because it's like I finished a couple runs and I was like, bro, you have twice as many items as you can feel. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, oh, time for some hard decisions. Yeah. And then I made those hard decisions, right? And then one run later, they're like, these fucking items are worn down to shit. They're going to just explode in like two seconds.

I'm like, oh, okay. And then the runs after that were. total failures, which put me back down to no items. Yeah. Don't get too attached because they're not going to last more than one or two, you know? And when they're worn down, that's a heavy priority preference for me where I'm like, I'd rather get rid of an item that is, okay, something that is very, very useful, you use it till it falls off your body.

But something that's like so-so, like versus something that is like a little less than so-so, but it's not worn, I'm taking that, you know? Yeah. It's the only game I can think of that I put like, oh, you get a lot of what are essentially potion and ether equivalence. And I'm like, I'm putting them on and I'm using them in the next fight. Run through your consumables. Because that's the only time they'll be useful is one fight from now.

Yeah. Run through your fucking consumables. Absolutely. Yeah. I had some juiced up shit where it was like I had consumables that were like giving you one strength up or so or like sometimes multiple like a five strength up for like for one match or whatever but then I had a cat that had a move called Falcon Punch

and Falcon Punch is takes one turn to charge it takes one turn to release the damage is stupid you know so you just you throw all that together and then on top of that you get you get a another one that was I got the same cat got um like I think like stew powered or something

stu super powered where it's like the dumber you are the harder you hit oh that's a good one and then also have you have you seen the over damage intelligence text no I don't think so so if if a cat

is low intelligence enough, their fucking text on their character is garble. It's dumb. Okay, I haven't seen that yet. No. I've been low, but I haven't been to zero. You know, but I... It's kind of unreadable looking at their abilities. Amazing. Can't even read. You're completely, yeah, illiterate. That's great. The things that then lean into that, of course, where it's like after you do all, when you go, when you overpower, overkill an enemy, they just explode with no corpse and the explosion does damage to anything around it, you know, like you could go crazy with it. So, um, yeah, anyway, no, it's pretty, again, pretty all in on the, on the combat stuff. Just, I want that house sorting to be, I think you can make it charmingly tedious without feeling like proper tedious. I think there's a fine line.

Yeah. I think a lot of the tedious maxing or tedious minimizing is based around the game's upgrades. So I think you're supposed to, like, it's a really fine line to put something annoying in your game only for you to be able to unlock the ability to minimize it and have the player go, oh, thank God. Yeah. Like I think, for example, the dragging them around to go clean up the poop and whatever is stuff. that like you can keep that in there right that's fine but just when it when your house is overwhelmed and you're trying to like get the right ones for the run you know and stuff it's like times like that where it's like yeah okay this is just this is not the charm isn't in this part you know and similarly

if there were some sort of mechanic where it's like you got to go pick them up to find the right one to be like hey you let me give you a scrub or whatever it is little caring for them things or whatever you wanted to do there's ways to kind of lean into that part but just when I want to do run. I want to like just be able to sort that out proper, you know. Um, but yeah, no, uh, that's it. That the, the, the, the, you know, progress has been, has been good and the game's fun. It's kind of wild though to like, you know, you hit that act two or so and, um, you go back to that title screen and it says like, hey, you've done seven percent, maybe, you know, if at that. So, so it's, it's very fascinating because like you look at Isaac right and you look at like the how long to

beat on Isaac and it's like 450 fucking hours right but that's after many updates you look at the how long to beat at this fucking thing and it's like 400 fucking today oh yeah like they slow roll one of the main mechanics of the game which is the mutation system i've i am not far enough to have received any mutation. They slow roll that at you because it's basically like it seems like they want you to be like comfortable

with how the game runs normally before you even begin to introduce any of that stuff, you know? I have a feeling that like once you have all of the permanent upgrades, even a total loss of every single cat in your entire stable is not that big of a deal because

you end up looking at because you're able to pick winners and losers immediately. That's kind of... Because you have the information to look at them. That's what I'm guessing. I'm guessing that as well. And like, if, plus, if you have a high enough appeal on your house, you're getting better strays anyway. Oh, I don't have shit appeal on my house. Nobody wants to fuck in my house at all. Oh, yeah. No, my appeal is... They're all miserable. They shit on each other. Putting... The other thing, too, is like...

Fucking disgusting. I've had some things where it's like a couple nights in a row. One cat tried to get it on, but the other one wasn't into it, you know? And then the other one's picking fights and stuff. and I just changed rooms. I'm like, okay, you go hang out with these people. And then it worked out. So I feel like there are times when it's like, oh, they specifically are just like, yeah, these two are not going to get along for whatever reason.

Separate them and make some space. But I do expect that the mutations and the house appeal are going to be your permanent progress, like smoothers, you know, over time. Where if you do wipe out your entire fucking house, then you're like, okay, well, it's fine. the next one coming in is going to be pretty good on the stats, you know. Also, despite all the, despite all the graphic content, it's, it's pretty, pretty chill and cartoony. It's tame, yeah. It's very actually tame to see.

I mean, it is kind of, like, the goofiness of, like, seeing the cat, the kittens slide out. Oh, that's, you know. The one that got me was, like, when the cats were boating and one cat just got behind the other, going to just squaw? Yeah, that's the one. Because I went, whoa,

man, Lou. Just full-on helicopter, you know? Yeah. The definition of doing tricks

on it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So, yeah, that was fun. That's a good game.

And that is a good game that's going to be around for a while. Please. Please. Please do something about the sorting and the that's it that's all I want

that's all I want I was going please shut the fuck well you notice what I didn't include I didn't say please talk yeah that's it that's it those boss

themes are incredible so I think the best part of the game the best part of the game is the music easy no absolutely by far and you want to fucking... The fact that the stage theme is like building up to the vocal track for like 40 minutes. Say the word, Pat. Light motif.

Is that a lay motif? Le motif. I think it's just the song without lyrics, actually. Well, it's the buildup to the song, and then you get sometimes your own cats doing the their vocals on it. Where they'll go, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow, meow, meow. And then you're like, oh, I can get a hint of what the vocal is going to be. And then you finally get there.

And then it starts going full ham. And it's like, yeah, I've been listening to this track for the whole run. And now here come the lyrics and the vocals are great. Super good. Super good. And every stage. It's an incredible soundtrack. I've heard, yeah, five of them now.

And they're all bangers. Each one of them is great. the desert like dude like you get to the desert boss and it's just Johnny Cash like it's just it's so fucking powerful

it's fantastic man best part of the game is the music easy um and the other thing too is I can like there's a distinct um there's a distinct

taste that you can tell he has about music where there's similarities in instruments and choir usage between Isaac Bumbo and his other games, you know, there's a bit of that, the repeating la la la la la and a bunch of people going you know, like he likes to use that a lot and that's coming back in here with the kind of the title theme being a little being very almost like Saturday morning cartoon tinkering like, bink bong bong,

dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig. You know, all these little noises and sound effects. It seems like that's a distinct McMillan move. And so here you're getting

the best versions of those things plus these great lyrics on the songs, you know? Yeah, every track I've heard is fantastic. Mugenics, Mugenics, good so far. Mugenics good.

Very good. Minor complaints, but other than that, yeah, no, it's an incredible game. Turns out the sequel to Eugenics, much better. Yeah. That first one, not great. Part two, though. Mm-hmm. Um, you can have that bit by yourself. All right.

Really? No? No, you don't want any of that? I don't want none of that. No, there's nothing, nothing going on with the redheads you want to fix? No. Well, the pain thing. Yeah, that's that's kind of what I was thinking about. Yeah. You know, um, what else is going on? Are you talking to yourself? Are you talking to me? Oh, that was, that was, I thought you were talking to yourself. No, no, no, that was aimed at you. Oh, it was aimed at me. Oh, let's see. Played me Gen X. I've been digging away at Stardue Valley. I hit the part of Stardue Valley, uh, that made my stomach turn. Oh. So I've been, I've been chipping away at Stardue. I'd, finished the community center bundle, which is like the game's overall meta progression. I've made myself a nice little farm. I've explored a bunch of new areas that I've unlocked, et cetera, et cetera. And then I spent a lot of resources and then hopped on a boat. And apparently the boat was added in an update to the game that came out many years after release. Boat to DLC.

And the boat brings you to Star 2 Valley 2. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And with its own... Perfect time to start again. With... And it's just like, Jesus, fuck. Start from scratch in a new location with new stuff?

Not from scratch, but yes. Okay. New currency, new NPC, new farm. Is it... Is it winter or tropical themed? It's tropical. Yeah. Okay, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Um, um, and it's, it's so enormous and massive that I looked at it and I walked around and I'm like, I am going to finish everything over there where I started first, please, before I come back to this, because this is something that was added many years later to continue onward from your completely fucking finished farm.

So if I can make an observation, the way that those feeds have been popping up on my YouTube list, the amount of your stardew things that I've been scrolling up there leads me to believe that this has... It's good. Sure. Yes. Leads me to believe that this has exited the like schedule-based formatting and is in the... I just want to fucking play this game and I'm going to hit the button.

It has entered into the... Well, it's 9.30 p.m. And the wife and baby went to bed early territory. Yep. I'm playing anyway. Might as well hit the button. I have a term for that on my show

and have had that for over a year. A year, whatever. Real metaphor hours. Okay. Where when I started metaphor, I was like, I sat down and was like, this is a long goddamn fucking game.

The only way I can reasonably stream metaphor is if I metaphor max it to the nth degree. So I was doing like a full day and then like eating dinner and helping put the baby down for his nap and then going right the fuck back in there until like 1 a.m. And that's how I did metaphor in the month of September.

Okay. Like the whole fucking thing in the month of September. Um, and, uh, Stardu is kind of on that. But like, it has, like I say this every time, it has the perfect pacing. Every day in game is like 14 to 18 minutes long. Okay. Like it is the, like it is always a perfect, perfect amount to get just a little bit done or, ooh, ooh, oh, I got that done. Or, oh, that has, like.

And as and just to coming off of the last subject, like, I do have those times where I'm like, I could go for a meugenics run right now, but you can't do a quick one, you know? You have to be like, you literally can't. I'm going to do a couple stages and stop is what you can do here. Yeah, you could do a Starry Valley day. And then you could do another Starry Valley day. And then you could do another one. And now it's, now it's one a. Yeah.

Fuck. I truly, no, there is something to be appreciated about whatever video game you're playing, the bite-sized chunk being available, you know? The one from the moment you start, when is your next, okay, I can stop. What is the shortest amount of time you can take a little snack and then be done, you know, or double down or so? It's funny because I've also played about 10 hours of No Man Sky this week. It was for a spot.

Well, four of those hours were. sponsored. Six of those hours of war for me. And so the amount of stuff they've added into that game there is no loop. There is

no amount of, there's no natural stopping point. There is just like a violently intimidating amount of shit that is happening at any given second all the time. it's very intimidating.

It is absolutely the type of thing that you have to sit down and be like, I need a concrete goal that I will make for me. So stupid question here, but like what is progress in No Man Sky? There are many type of progress. There is a main story quest. Tech tree plot events. Okay. So there's the plot slash main story quests.

slash Journey to the Galactic Center, like progression. There's upgrading your gun, your mining laser, upgrading your outfit, upgrading your ship, getting a new ship, getting money, building a base, building a better base, building resource on the base, upgrading the tech tree for the base, upgrading the tech tree for your ship,

upgrading the tech tree for your body, upgrading the tech tree for your hands, discovering language, discovering artifacts, discovering trash, discovering things under the water, discovering derelict freighters, etc, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And which are basically like 15 to 20 different progression. Angles. Sure. And all of them are just do whatever.

And so like, in so going for it, I had to be like, I need to. set like concrete goals for right the fuck now. So like when I when I finished my stream, which was like I got my feet ready, my feet wet, my concrete goal was like, I need to make a base that has a battery and a solar generator so that the teleporter never turns off.

Okay. That was like the very small goal. Does the game like shine the light of God on any of those things it shines the light of God on them a little bit of the beginning because you have a very small tech tree before you unlock it

but then fairly early you unlock the game's social hub which you can summon at any point in space and it brings you to a space station filled with other players and that thing just has every goddamn feature in the entire game just

open sitting on the fucking space station and I'm talking the NPCs and like it is just a wall of shit that I don't understand like every single NPC they're like you could do this and I'm like what the fuck is that I don't know what the fuck that is

okay because I would expect this is also to where I'd expect that like you know given the whole nature of the game being this open or whatever in other games you'd be like okay if you're upgrading your base eventually your base upgrade stops because it says you need to go get a particular type of thing that you can only get from now going to do another one of these features. So what it'll do is, that points you to go do that thing now.

What it'll do is that tech is relatively easy to unlock, but actually building the tech requires like, you know, this or that resource. And so what happens is that you can pin any piece of technology or anything to your quest log. And you'll like, you'll pin like, oh, I want a new solar generator and you pin it. And then in your quest log, it'll say, you need this much chromatic, metal and you get chromatic metal from copper and you need this much this and that and it tells you what type of places you could go and get them from but you need to go and find the types of places you could go and get them from because not every planet has copper not every planet has pyrite not every planet has a long distance transmitter or ancient fossils or fucking whatever or water yeah you're right yeah and so it's very much do whatever but like I thank God there's a fucking main quest

because if there was no main quest at all I would just like vomit from anxiety over the amount of fucking things they throw out you it has the feeling of a 10 year long MMO that you started like because you saw the cool new expansion came out no and and I think to like

you know like not sandbox but um like toy box kind of games. Yeah. Like there... Kind of make your own... Yeah. Like, there's a place...

Like, some of those obviously can blow up and go crazy. You know, Minecraft and stuff like that, you know. But I think, uh, even in those cases, you still need to have a little bit of, like I said, little light of God to just be like, okay, just tell me which, you know... So this game does, in fact, have a little light of God and it's the main story. Yeah. Just just a little bit. Yeah.

Okay. And the main story is like, why don't you go to three different planets in the solar system? Just go. Why don't you fall through a black hole and see what happens? You know, et cetera. Okay. And then eventually, like, so one of the main goals, the main story says, like, you got to build a hyperdrive. Right?

And building a hyperdrive requires this material, this material, this material. and it requires you to just straight up buy an item. Well, in order to just buy an item, you need money. And so then there's the like just make money, however, but go make some money. What's inside a black hole? And then there's a, there's a big, oh, it's a teleport. It's like, it's a hyperdrive times 100. Oh, sick.

Yeah, that makes sense. But it'll damage your ship. Of course, yeah. So you usually come out of it with a broken hyperdrive, which means that wherever you end up is where you're going to have to repair your bullshit. Cool. It's a fucking cool game. It's really, really overwhelmingly intimidating.

And it is nuts that they spent like fucking 10 years just doing update after update after update after update after update after update after update. Yeah, but that's, I mean, it is the promise, not the promise, but like they announced the game as being this go anywhere, do anything. Yes. No Man Sky today is what was promised to. people initially yeah yeah yeah which means that light no fire will get a fair amount of leeway when it releases they built it up over time um and i assume a lot of this mechanic and and like

technological complexity will be able to um fit into light no fire um this thing's making money huh making enough money to pay me to a campaign yeah okay because I'm just thinking about like for two sponsored streams because I'm thinking like without without any urging I feel like of all the things listed there I'm like I would like to

I would want to make my spaceship cool and I'd probably spend a lot of my time trying to make that a part of my the main objective and I'd be more interested in that than like space botany for example I think that adding a social hub really

hit the nail on the head with that because I'm just using the default chip. I found a broken ship that I could have repaired but it was so damaged that I was like I'm not going to bother so I scrapped it for cash, right? But then I went to the social hub right and in the

social hub I saw a junk ass freighter ass pile of garbage held together by duct tape which looked really cool a sleek metal triangle looking fucking

you know pristine fucking ship and a gigantic like proper like fucking 30 room spacecraft

that had been custom built and a jellyfish that you could use as a spaceship like a fucking alive squid jellyfish creature nice Okay. And by seeing that shit in the hub, my brain went, oh, what?

You can, oh, my God. You know, like, just like, oh, I didn't even know you could pilot a fucking mushroom. Organic spaceships. There are an option. That's, though. That's cool. Okay. It's cool, man.

Other than that, I've been playing 2XCO, which is not dead. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, but what is dead is my skill level. Hmm. Uh, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I'm used on this last week. And I can confirm it now. The player base is way stronger in season one than they were in season zero.

Yeah. Way stronger. I'm approximately the same level of, of, of strength that I was last time. Mm-hmm. I have gone from comfortable grandmaster player to Emerald. Okay. Yeah. People are just much stronger.

This is the march of time. Once the starting gates are open, right? People have either learned how to get better or people have dropped off, you know? So you're seeing the, it's starting to, it's starting to thin out and separate a little bit, you know? Yeah. Um, I mean, might as well, uh, hijack this section and put it all together. Oh, my God. But, uh, after, you know, the, the, uh, story from last week, uh, 2XCO minus 80.

Um, we saw an update where I, I'm like, I promise we're not dead update. Well, uh, the, the, I looked at the bullet point list and I'm just like, that is everything we talked about, isn't it? So there's two ways you can go about this. You can smell your own farts.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And be like, wow, they really listen to us because we're so important. Or you can smell your own

farts and be like, we correctly ascertained all the points that needed to be addressed because we're super smart. Well, I mean, realistically, from being there in person and chatting with the dude, it's like,

yeah, no, I think I have concrete, like, they're paying attention to what, a lot of people online are saying for sure. And it's been that way from the jump. And from well before it even came out, I remember when I first went to Evo and saw it and got a chance at it and

spoke to the community manager and stuff, like they're, they're actually out there listening and looking at stuff. And, you know, it's a little bit, um, that's one thing that I do, like, think is, is solid about how, you know, they're going about stuff. As opposed to, you know, one of the other stories from this week, which is, like, hey, it took a while, but eventually the Capcom e-sports team did allow the devs to walk in and say, you know, about five minutes of their piece about what the pricing structure would be for the Street Fighter League stuff and the Capcom Cup stuff. And they finally convinced them, you know, but anyway, we'll get there. All this to say that after people, after half the team was let go, some people started putting up their reels. And on their work that they showed off and stuff,

one person accidentally leaked a screenshot with Akali on it. And I think the strategy of we do fake leaks to then announce characters every time. It works for these instances because when real leaks happen, the same strategy is in place, which is, all right, the leak is out, reveal the character, right? I want to say it was less than 24 hours after somebody had a, just like, it was a, it was, and it was very accidental because it was a video of them showing the work they put into Blitzcrank. And then one of the second characters behind Blitzcrank for that one clip of the super was Akali, you know, and it was, again, this is someone who was no longer employed. Oops. So it was actually a mistake. They then took that down afterwards, right? So this is not accidentally with quotation marks. It was a mistake. the person made. But in response, the team went, yeah, hey, Akali's

coming, and so is Senna? So, it's really funny because I remember talking to you about characters that should come this year into 2XCO. And I said, oh, Akali's going to

definitely be there. 100%. And I was saying... The most popular. And then I said, you know who I'd like to see? I'd like to see Senna. And I sent you a fucking photo. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, okay. And I mean, the Akali one is a no-brainer because it's like, I've said this from the jump, but the KDA shit is like, you make money on that. You sell those costumes, you go, right? Senna was one that like, yeah, it works. Well, because the other thing is that it's a girl with a big gun. But, okay, they did Caitlin different. And here your thought is, are you going to do how are you going to do a third version of it? And from that. one clip looks pretty different.

Well, there's, there's two things going on with Senna. One is the, sorry, three things. One is the fact that the gun is, is so big that it acts as like a, like, a long range, like melee weapon. Like, she's got big fat normals. You can even see them in the trailer. She's got like blitz normals. The other is that her, her shit looks like a beam rather than a, than a projectile.

And the game has no beam other than jinx's super. And the other one is she turns into a melee. character, like ghost type of type of person. Was she or like, I think I saw, like she, does that turn into like a turret that she sits on in league or something to that effect? No, she's not that. Okay. No.

Well, in any case, like that, yeah, showing that often. The only thing I knew about Akali was when the KDA music video stuff went pretty big outside the game. That's the first time I'd seen or heard about the character. and then after that, like, it's like, oh, yeah, this is one of the very popular ones. Looking at her, I was like, oh, that's cool. She's like a, you know, Ninja Girl and stuff.

She's a booky, man. She's a boo. She's got the tools. She's got the thing and she's got the opening and all that. And I'm like, that's a cool, that's a cool ninja girl character. And then people, and then I saw the original design with the baggy your pants. And I was like, oh, shit, that's way cooler. So there's a reason for that, for the baggy pant thing. Because nobody likes the baggy pant change.

I think I saw somebody brought up an interview where they're like flowing cloth and shit like that is a nightmare in the way that they build the engine so like some of these things are like completely non-negotiable like Darius's

cape but they're trying to get away from it as fast as possible because it's just a fucking pain. Well so one of the there was an artist who worked there that did a more accurate baggy pant model that then showed off some of their work like as fan art after the fact or so

there's a bit of a bit of a confusing timeline of it but it seems like someone working there made a model that looked more accurate and then that was years later and then we can go back and see it and like yeah the baggy pot model does look cool and the hair is a bit different too as well but it's a bit of a problem here

because you know showing off this character and people being like, hey, could you fix the pants and the hair a little bit? Would be maybe a possible reality if some of the people who worked on that character were fucking fired last week. That is possible. It's one of the things I've seen mainly in response to her is like, ah, you know, the design change. And I was like, oh, she's fine. And the original was like, oh, no, that makes more sense. I will say 80 people is a lot more than are currently working on most fighting games that are active right now.

Is that true? I definitely believe so. I think Street Fighter 6 and Tekken are comparable, but I don't think anything outside of those games. I don't know that Guilty Gear has a staff of 80 on it right now. Do you think that's like there was like a magic number where they were like, how many fucking people are working on Street Fighter right now? And then cut to that? Because like fully half the team seems like it was a... Well, no.

Well, no, what you have in... This is more like pipeline game design shit. But what you'll have is phases that start up at a... There's a ramp up and a ramp down. And the... I'm sure at some point the ramp down to this number was in there. But the thought in many cases are in many... in many studios cases is the ramp down means that these people are not fired,

they're put onto the next project, right? So this was supposed to be a forever project. So everyone who's working on, um, on, on, on, on,

on, is not currently working on strive, but I'm sure a lot of members of that team went on on to work on Tocon, right? Or, that is, that is how you would usually do it. Okay,

pre-production's done. Okay, pre-production people, move over to the next thing where you can do pre-production there. Exactly. Exactly. Right. So that,

that's how this goes. It's like you, there's a live team. that is basically once the game releases, the live service team ends up being like, you know, much, much,

much reduced from the development team. And then after that, there's a skeleton team when live service is not shut down, but like there's not really new content coming, you know, they'll ramp up again sometimes, have a new piece of content to drop and then ramp back down to just like the minimums.

But that's often only possible if there's other projects to cycle those people over to. you know. In any case, though. I am so desperate for the numbers on this fucking game, dude. I want the numbers. Oh, but they don't, they don't do that. They don't do that.

Yeah, no, that's why I fucking want them. They, because it's not on Steam. If it was on fucking Steam, we could just, we'd know, like, that. No problem, right? But, um, but, uh, with that, uh, showing off with the, like, hey, here's the next two characters right off the bat. Um, and Senna is from, um, a different, uh, She is from the shadow aisles.

Yeah, from a place, another location that's not... She is the first character from where Thresh and Viego and all the zombies and skeletons are from. So people talking about her stage were excited about that too because it's like, I think that's cool. That means good things. It's a cool fucking location. And then... It means thrash is at the end of the season. Right.

Sure. If we're focusing on there. Thresh is the final character of this season. Because this stage must mean, must reference that. Yeah. Yeah, okay. And then also they, in the same thing where they addressed that part, they're like, okay, too, also we're focusing on local duo's couch co-op, right? That is still the weirdest part of this game's development by far.

They're working on prototyping it, I would expect it for the next season that it would exist. It's not something that I would use. Well, we went into that a bunch last week about just like this seems like the slam dunk over like advertise this. Everybody play with your friend's feature. You know, like go like two people sitting there together playing online. The most strange fun way to go about this. It's also like the best way to get somebody who might not be into it, into it is to play matches with them, not against them. And to insulate against some toxicity or against some bad feelings, against the stinging of losses, against making learning.

against making learning feel better. It's a force multiplier when you have someone in the room with you playing a game in terms of how good it feels. In fact, one can argue that the fact that these games and most games are online focused now when you had the... Okay, I'm just going to bullshit some shit. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just going to throw it out there. Be like me. All right?

I don't know what I'm talking about. But whatever. Willie opens his mouth and goes fighting games. Daddy, yeah, yeah. Okay. Magic the Gathering players, Yu-Gi-O players, card game players. We've been talking about you guys a bunch in recent weeks. I need your help one more time. I need you people. Okay. So for card game players that are avidly into it, the folks who are especially coming from the days of going out and playing against people in person, right, at events at card shops and stuff. And you know what? We'll throw in 40K as well. We'll throw in Warhammer players, war gaming, etc. For games where there was an in-person component and then eventually an online version of the game was popular and was possible and made it easier to play more often and do the game digitally. Did you notice a like, did you notice that community-wise or like vibe-wise when things are more focused online, there's a negativity tinge that enters the situation and makes it feel like, more hostile than when you got to meet up with people, IRL.

I think that's true of literally every single human interaction in the entire world. I think so too. I just wanted to jump over to an example that was a different genre to go that like, hey, you know, when you are getting into something with people in the same room, you get a much more warm version of that in a lot of cases versus when the online only introduction is what you have.

Hey, man, I tell you what, I've been called gay with a capital F more online than I have been at my local hobby shop. Wow. Yeah. Right. I mean, Yeah.

Which is, which is many versus never. Yeah. Well, I mean, the, the, it's,

it's a lot harder to ban evade in real life. You know, when you walk in and the store jingles and then everyone looks over at you. And goes, get the fuck out of here. You know? There's no online equivalent to closing your fist, extending your thumb to the side, croaking your eyebrow and going, get a load of this fucking guy. Doesn't work online.

So, so all this, all this to say that something that is great about online being the, you know, when a genre goes online, it brings a lot more people in and makes it more accessible, but a downside is that you get this vibe change with it, you know? And I think that having someone on the couch to play with you

does a lot to alleviate that, and that's a really cool thing that this feature can bring. So should have been there from the start. Glad to hear that they're doing it. Hey, did you catch there was a great, say jam video that came out after the podcast talking about um to x-ko in kind of but it was against

the thing of like well fighting games can't be popular like shooters because fighting games are too hard okay there's a hold on there's a whole secondary discussion around I know what you're talking okay I'll hold on to this I didn't see I didn't see the video um but this is there's a lot of the discourse has been around an article that came out this week um before that uh they said yeah ranked is getting touched. Yeso Echo is getting touched and the screen tearing came up as well. Okay. Can I say two things about that?

I feel, I'm in BC now, so I talk like this. I feel so seen and valid that I got to see in the blog post them go, yeah,

no, Yasuo Echo, still fucking crazy. If you, like, like, a match that you fought against a Yasuo Echo team that was in ranked that had screen tearing in it on console. Yeah. This big circle around this. This is the diagram circle as you go, wow, that was a bad experience. That's actually, we're, we're addressing this on the board right here. Yeah.

Yeah. It's quite rare for like a specific character or like team in a game to have me actually. go, this sucks bad enough that I think it's harming the game. I would leave that to like, Suggot in like Street Fighter 4. Like, this is bad for the game level shit. Um, so. I think it's wild that Echo and Yaso have been nerfed every patch of the game's life.

And I'm, I'm sitting here and going, I'm still fucked up. It's still crazy. That being, but like the idea that, hey, especially after last week's news, there's a very clear, like, yo, you got to communicate with people and tell them what's going on,

which they've always been pretty good about, so that's what you're doing there. And there's a little bit of like, yo, Tokon is like, hey, everybody! Come check out what we got going on over here. Here's the thing.

Two X-Gales like, hey, hey, you stop that. Hey, listen, Tokon, Tocon, you had the best pitch of any fighter I've ever seen. And then I played you. Oh, you must repitch me.

Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Yeah. I, so, I mean, look, if we can just, if we're here,

we're here. Seeing, I read, I read a comment that literally said, magic's in, the game will be peak, fuck the FGC. I was like,

How long are you going to play it for? Like, okay, okay. And no, listen, no, magic rules, though. So, so the trailer they showed off was a very smartly timed hype thing where they dropped Wolverine, which everybody fucking wants. He's finally a video game. Canadian. He's got his super armor. Canadian Wolverine has his armor and he's doing his own stuff.

And it's a different Wolverine. You know, so they showed off what you wanted there, Storms. And then magic, awesome. She's been getting pushed everywhere. Shout out Silyana. I liked her in rivals. She was sick and here she is. Leaning into the, you know, goth girl, a version of her face and look and everything like that as well.

And the, and then danger, another one, which is a deep pull of the walking incarnation of the danger room. That's weird. With Shiar technology. And I'll tell you one thing, as far as like making an anime character-ass design goes, that's a glow-up because the original danger, way less cool. Yeah. Like, if you just type Danger X-Men.

Oh, fuck. And go look at the original design. That's got awful. No, the anime girl is a fix. This is the original design is. That is gone awful. Wow, that is a massive glow up. Peak mid-aughts just forgettable comic design character, right?

So great picks there. Furthermore, they also showed off the assemble mechanic, which they were holding back up to this point, which appears to be a all four characters together assembling to do a big super, which is like, oh, now there's a reason for you to, like, have your team and get something out of it, because prior to this point, the incentive to have your whole team, it wasn't doing as much because it was very standardized when everyone's assists can do the same shit. Like, listen, man, I've played a lot of ArcSystem Works games.

I don't think that they're going to release a even mediocre fighting game. I hope not. But I would like more proof in my hands because that beta alpha, whatever the fuck it was, was rough. Footage, they sped up the tags and they made it so that the assists coming out don't just do standardized assist things anymore. They do more unique things. So it looks like they're paying attention to that as well.

These are all good things. And again, the characters looked awesome. Also, there was English VA in these trailers. So I guess the whole, like, we're sticking to the Japanese thing.

I feel like maybe they went back on that. I think that was always going to be temporary. Yeah, I thought it was part of the, like, aggressively manga design was like, no, we're going to go with the dubs

the whole way through. But either way, all good. I mean, great to hear Steve Bloom and everyone else killing it. But with all these... I know you actually already said this. Yo, they got magic in a fighting game. That's awesome, man.

That character's been getting way more play over the years. She was in Midnight Suns and rivals. She's super cool. Her kit is also just fucking perfect for games. Yeah, I never, you know, back again, back when I was watching the X-Men cartoon and, you know, Peter was going, I never thought that that would turn into this. So that's cool.

I'm super happy that she's getting a lot of play. That's a good reveal of four X-Men to like to drop there. Yeah, three new ones too. Still concerned the game will not be a fun fighting game. Still concerned about that part of it. And we'll have to see. It would be pretty wild for arc system works to miss on something this high problem. It would.

after after hit after hit after hit after hit and it would suck to have such like good stuff going on aesthetically with nothing going on gameplay wise that would really be a bummer but it's not like it hasn't happened before and the last thing i want to do is enter a world where we're looking at the marvel equivalent of jojo all-star battle oh i thought oh oh yeah i'm i'm invoking the that one. I thought you were going to say the inverted Marvel Infinite. Oh, no, no, no, no. Like, though I think what would really suck here is to have a game that is actually appealing enough to a lot of people just visually on cast and style and aesthetic that like on a casual level, you're like, look how cool this is. And people are like, oh, that looks fucking sick. I want to play that. But then when it

comes to showing up and people are like, wait, why aren't many people playing this? Why, what's going on? There doesn't seem to be much going, you know, why, why is it not being supported? Why is that, da, da, it's because the actual mechanics of the game are not as fun as other fighting games. And there's, there's, it's very repetitive and stiff and slower and weird, you know? And it sucks because I, it, I remember, that was the first, like, I learned so much about our internet fucking existence at that point where just the, like, like, it, I, I remember, that

Like, but look how cool the Jojo characters look. And they're, the love, the music, the love, the design, everything about what CyberConnect was doing was so faithful and awesome to representing Jojo. And they just couldn't for the life of them make a fun fighting game, you know? And they just, they changed genres the second time around and just gave up on that. But like, nobody who's just enjoying the cool look at, look at my stand, look at the world, doing an accurate the world. and then Jotero interrupts it and has a cool hype moment. People who are here for that don't want to hear about the unhype of the game itself not being fun to play. So now we're in this weird place of being like, I don't want to be out like the group is doing.

I don't want to be the guy who's like outside the group going, hey, stop having fun. And then everyone keeps playing and whatever or they're just doing the big thumbs up to you. Like, okay, buddy, whatever. We don't care. We're just going to have fun. You know, you don't want to be that guy. I actually saw that this past week. Mm-hmm.

So last week we made our yearly series of digs at a PlayStation 1 fighting game called Evil Zone, which led to a fascinating thread that I saw, which was, what is the deal with Woolley and Pat and Evil Zone? And it basically broke down to a bunch of people being like, oh, man, I love that game. That game was so cool. Why would they hate it? And the answer is because it plays like trash.

Yeah, it's a two-button fighter that's very bad to feel. But it's cool as fuck. Because that's the problem. Because Dan... Like, unique characters and the single player... Because Dan Ziver, the Toku Hero, when you go into his arcade mode, has a episodic, weak monster of the weak progression where it's like you're watching his anime going from character stage to fight each...

It actually fucking rules. It's the coolest shit. All that shit. Every character design coming from their own different anime and having the aesthetic of that and the music and voice acting to make it feel like they're clashing together was rad. And then these characters from a different anime and they all have their own different like single player structure. It's awesome. But then the moment you have to touch it and move the characters, you go, ugh. You know?

Right. So, Evil Zone is like the grandfather of every anime game that has the best graphic. and the coolest presentation. And you're like, oh, do you want to sit down? Wully, do you want to come over to the club space and fucking play Neurultimate Hero 3? Or do you want to just load it up and have us just watch all the fucking super animations?

Literally. I just sat there and showed you guys Nerutimate Hero Supers. Do you guys want to play it? No. No. But look at what CyberConnect can do when it comes to these fucking cutscenes.

They're awesome, right? that's it, it's the showcase. And it's been that way for a million years now. We're like, yeah, from the beginning of the CyberConnect games till now, I've been showing off just like check these fucking high-ass supers though. And so here we are. And I'm like, oh, no, this time it's not even CyberConnect though. It's Arcsis. And you're like, okay, this can, like, the thing is, and this is what's weird about it is that like, like, the game is, it's not like evil zone dog shit to play. No.

It's far from that. It's a functional fighting game, but it's just like it's going to get boring to play a lot faster than the others because most matches feel more repetitive because the characters are

more similar than they are in any other genre, any other game right now. I think we may be at a point in fighting game history where the game of old with sprites have fucked up our expectations

for every game going forward and I don't think they'll ever be fixed because they announced Marvel Tokon's going to come out as a four-man tag fighter with a roster of 20 and my brain went fuck off. Are you kidding me? We were making fun of 2XCO with 11

in a two-person tag fighter. That's technically worse. Five teams of four, yeah. Five teams of four. You feel the roster a lot in three, three-three-team, three-character team games, right? In Skull Girls, in Marvel games, et cetera. Anytime you're seeing these characters more often, you feel it. In four, on four games, I imagine you'd feel it more.

unless the people you're fighting are not picking those characters and sticking with their main the whole way through. It's strange. I don't know. Man, what is... This game might sidestep that if people don't switch off of their mains. You know, I don't know. But what I will say is, is that, like, I think every time Tokon made a decision that was not in service of what was fun, but it was in service of what would be different from what Capcom did, those are the bad decisions, you know? You can make, because clearly there's a lot here

where they're like, we're making a Marvel fighting game that's team based, but we don't want this to be Marvel versus Capcom for, so we're going to do things to try and make it more distinct. And some of those decisions,

a lot of those decisions seem to be like, yeah, but making it more distinct didn't necessarily mean that you made it more fun, you know? We'll see. We will see.

And, you know, they're, after a lot of radio silence, they're coming out and showing off, you know, a pretty high drop of characters. And I think they're going to show, I think the roster is going to be, like,

whoever's in those 20 looks like there will. I think it's going to be a solid. Solid pick, yeah. Looks like they're. I just think it should be, um, more than that. A hundred and 20% larger. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think it should be larger than that. I think, um, but, but, uh, all this to say that, uh, I don't know how drastic game design can change at this point in time. The tweaks that it needs to like make it feel less repetitive will help a lot. But I will say that like by what we, by still its standards, it has a long way to go to feel like, I don't know, as active as Marvel and 2XCO do, which are really solid examples I'd say. like, you know, fast-paced fun fighters in that way.

And, well, you know, I guess the other thing, too, is like, if you do bring out, like, good picks four at a time, each one of these seasons is like, you know, you're dropping a whole group on the game or whatever. Is that how it's going to work? They're going to drop all four at once? All four fantastic four characters at once in one piece of, or... Is that how that's going to release? Because usually they just release one at a time.

Or they'd announce it. a season, right? I imagine they could announce a fantastic four season. They could, or something to that effect, you know, or the Blade Morbius fucking vampire season or whatever, you know, um, I don't know, but, uh, that, it's Marvel. So again, looking at rivals, it's like, that could do wonders for that game in terms of just getting people to, to pay attention to it and stuff. But, um, I just, you know, Reggie and I were kind of having this conversation a little earlier too where he was like, people in sort of like people in the community around this were just going like going like oh yo checking out the trailer and shit and he's kind of going like okay i'm hyped to see magic but i want to also enjoy playing as her right it's not just looking at her and rotating the model around i want to be doing cool shit um and uh that's a question mark we'll see that's a question mark you know that's it that's it i'm i'm that out that playable Alpha didn't

inspire the confidence I was hoping it would and you don't want to pour water on excitement but like I can't stop thinking about how played a couple games one day and then you played a little bit and just I just got the text like

it? Yeah what was the text I said? It was fucking mean. It was like it was like something to the effect of like Tocon is woof or something I forget but like I was like

I'm scrolling We like you felt it immediately And I felt it and then we And then people I was playing We all felt it like oh no This has a lot going on aesthetically But fuck That was a while ago I'm not gonna be able to

Don't choke on the gameplay guys Yeah All right Um Well I want to briefly talk about the The Sage Jam thing And it was just a reiterate but he put out a great video

where one of the complaints of 2XCO and why it wasn't doing so well is like fighting games are just too hard right and he went to reiterate a point that he's talked about a lot which is like Deadlock can't even you can't even fucking go and

just download Deadlock other genres and it's pulling like 130 fucking thousand people a day that is the most complicated fucking game I have ever played my life Yes. Other genres are harder to learn.

But that's not... That game in particular is like fucked. But that's not... But ultimately, and the thing is, and as much as we can point that out or whatever, it doesn't change feelings, perception, and overall the issues to which there was an article that went around this week

that has been making the rounds called Fighting Games Have a Product Design Problem. I think that article was pretty solid, honestly. So I... I'm not... didn't finish. I got through most. I was, I think, just the last little part here, but everything I was reading in, and I was like, yeah, I get where you're coming from on this. And a lot of that does re, it echoes stuff that I had been bringing up for years, which is overall, like, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, more easy or making them more, you know, simplifying how, how difficult combos are to do, or trying to make the experience of getting stuffed out, getting beat down by people who know how to play. You know, you can try this over and over again, but you're going to get the same results every time. And like, the thing that feels, and it is true that like you're kind of like repeating the same action and, you know, you can present it differently. Like modern mode and Street Fighter 6 did a good job of presenting the same thing differently and people were willing to take to that. But Street Fighter 6 is also awarded a lot of privilege that other games in the genre

are not. And people will always work harder and try to play more at a, of of a game than you, when you have to fight somebody, you're always going to face people who've played more and are going to be better at it and will be able to do that. You've always going to encounter sweats. Nothing is going to change that. And whatever you feel because you fight somebody who's doing that is that doesn't go away, right?

So, but overall, the kind of build up of like all of this and how it affects the numbers and how many times people have tried to do the same thing, you can even, the excuses of kind of like talking about how it is, and it is true to some degree that like having a team around you, you know, the feeling of like not blaming yourself and all these things have been excuses and things that we've talked about for a while. But the core point of the article is that what matters and what makes people feel good when they play a fighting game is the, the, the core idea is you want to feel like an action hero in a movie. You feel like you're a cool fighter doing cool shit fighting people in like an action sequence, right? That's it.

That's the core design idea and philosophy that people are looking to achieve and to accomplish. And the more you lean into that and the more you build around that idea and not lose inside of that, the more you're going to be able to attract people with this. And so like, yeah, something I've definitely said for a while is you've got to make a good single player experience that people can jump into and enjoy because people buy games to have that single player experience. for in everything these days. That's what they want. The article describes like loading into like a dojo with like you that you picked a clan in particular and sometimes you go in and you might see other people

training and you can like choose to go spar with them or you can choose to go out solo or whatever. And I'm like, yeah, that's more or less a version of what I was describing where I'm like, I want a fighting game where you load in and on the lobby, you and you grab your boys or you know, you jump on Friday night. We're going to go play rank together. You give a place where people can train together. the online cooperative experience, et cetera,

making it fun to do what people do in other games where you play with a team of people, you know? It says a lot about MMOs and mobas and stuff like that. That doesn't really apply to fighting games because of the team aspect.

Because we always like, we always like drag on and make fun of people. You can't blame your teammates when you lose if you're playing a fighting game, right? Because it's just you. But it does in fact miss out on the fact of like, let's take League of Legends, right? League of Legends is a toxic shithole invented by scientists to get slurs thrown at you. It is one of like the worst social experiences you can have with digital content.

Unless you play with a five stack of people you actually know. Right. And then the game turns into a legitimately, completely, completely. different game. Right. I used to play Heroes of the Storm for a short time with all of my buddies from FF14, and we would be on voice chat, chit-chatting as we played Heroes of the Storm.

That was a dramatically different game at its core than queuing in to fight with randoms. But with fighting games, that's kind of your fucking experience unless you go to a local meetup. And so a big analogy that's brought up here in the thing as well is, well, there's two things. One, there's StarCraft II comparison that comes up where it's like StarCraft 2 was a flawed game from the jump. And for years, there's nothing that anyone could do to fix it except only Blizzard were the ones, were the only ones that could have made the game better, but they didn't.

And so what ended up happening was while the game was bad and kind of like on this like death roll slow across the years, Um, there were people who were making videos and, and a community around that of people that were kind of being, um, I guess like toxicly positive was what they were describing, trying to kind of, bro, I hate toxic positivity so much. And,

and the idea was to kind of be like, no, no, no, the game is fine, guys, there's good stuff here. We got to just like wishful thinking into being good, right?

And to that effect, it's kind of going like, so, hey, so for the content creators that are kind of like doing that with fighting games, going like, you know, just be positive about it,

even if the things, the products that people are getting are not great products, that's a bad way to go. To which I'm kind of like, okay, I get the point of that, and I do see how exactly toxic positivity, especially in a development environment, like Concord is like the worst shit ever. And when something is a bad bargain or a bad product for people to buy, even if there's other shit there that's good, you can't ignore that and just be like, no, no, no, it's fine if this doesn't have things that people would want to be willing to spend their money on in any other genre's case.

because you've already got your chessboard and that's all you need, right? Like, I get that, like, for people like us who are like, we like this core mechanic and that's all we are focused on in this way. That is, you can appeal by focusing on that, but you want to sell a game that is competing in the market with every other thing coming out these days. You need to make sure it's a complete product. So there's no point in just, like, gassing up something that sucks and that's a bad bargain for people to buy and spend their money on.

What I will say is, just like I was talking about with the magic and magic cards and Yu-Gi-o and games workshop just now, is that growing up in a situation and playing fighting games and growing to learn them in an environment where when you took losses, it was like, ah, fuck, you got me, right, with the person right there. So, that's just kind of like you're still having fun. Yeah, no, right? You can, ah, and then that guy can go like, no, maybe you can try this. And like literally, like the first thousands of matches in multiple different games over the years I played were in the room with people going, ah, and it just kind of was like, ah, fuck, and we're all smiles, right? Versus that same first hundred matches in your room alone, quiet, stewing because you just got beat and don't know what happened, that feeling is not the same, right? And because I know that's not the same, I just don't want to lose this thought because it's going to escape me. Yeah, I know, I know, I know.

I'm just like, because that feeling. Because that feeling is not the same, and I know that it's hard to find that nowadays because you're mostly going to be online playing in this way. I want people, my whole thing with like fighting games is I want people to know that the cool version of this does exist. Like, I want to share the thing that felt good about what I got into, you know? And like to make that happen online is harder. It takes more work, you know? I still think it's possible. And I also think it helps if you go to a local and see it in,

so you can know, oh, this exists and this online version exists. But fuck me if it's not harder to find that joy and encouraging thing that wants you, that you want to return to without the in-person vibes that make it fun to do, you know? So I don't know if it's my personality or whatever. I could play a set first to 50 in which I lost 50 in a row to a guy who is going

wow look at this dumb ass can't do shit and I would feel better after that about the game than I would losing like

three sets of ranked matches in a row to dead silence because at the end of the day one I can actually turn into like antagonism or like

oh man fuck this guy I'm gonna get better I'm gonna show him versus the thing people who watch my streams have actually noticed this where I'll be like man I'm fucking trash at fighting I'll be playing like master rank matches

in fucking Street Fighter 6th but and I'll lose like one match I'm just trash dude oh my God I can't I don't know how to play this fucking game at all oh my God dude like I was I was at Funzo the barcade in Montreal we were playing I was playing Street Fighter 4

and I was shitting on a bunch of geef players with Blanca because I learned how to do that matchup. And this one dude, PTSD won. Where'd you learn that match? Fucking asshole. Crotching fierce ass. Get the fuck away from me. And this one dude, PTSD1,

came in and we ran the set, and he was harder to fight, and he was doing shit. And at one point, he's like, oh, you think you know Geif? You think you know Geef? Let's fucking go. And I'm like, what the fuck? And I did, every time Geif tried to get in and avoid shit, I would upball the fuck out of him.

And he jumped. And I upballed at him. And in mid-air, he did the Ultra 2 where he does the fucking Siberian blizzard. He catches air-speed air super to catch the upball. And gets up and goes, where are you jumping? You know? And I lost my shit. I had to go get a beer.

I'm like, oh! And everyone was like, it was just this moment that would tilt you for the rest of the night was the highlight of that night. You know? I got my ass stomped. And it was so fucking good. You know, and that is like, that is hard to capture in this new world we're in, you know? I want to tell, show people that it is possible.

But fuck me. There's a difference between. It's hard. Playing 2XCO online and jumping. And the instant I hit the fucking up button, my brain registers, you just fucking killed yourself. Darius goes endless. versus in person playing, I'm not too excited

I haven't played it in person, but whatever, playing Street Fighter and hitting the upper, and saying out loud, I just fucking killed myself. The guy sitting next to me going, yeah. Right? Like there's a world of difference.

Yes, the noises that come out of Reggie when I do Galactica Phantom. to, you need to hear those in order for the experience to change, you know? So all this to say, all this to say, that overall the, the points laid out were pretty much correct there. And it's stuff that we had been, I've been reiterating for years. And like, yeah, you need to just, you need to make a game that has all the things that, you know, people who are veterans of the genre and people who have been playing forever

and like skill ceiling, et cetera. All that can be in there. all that is not, there is a red herring in getting too caught up in like that part of the game and that the experience when really you want to offer a game that has a compelling reason for people to return. World Tour is a step in the right direction as, you know, and you want to have things where people can play online together as a group. I've been trying to push that idea. But as always, the caveat between all these things is you can just throw the idea out there because remember there's examples. people can go, hey, them's fighting herds had the salt mines where you'd go and play an asymmetrical match with other people in a really fun way. That was really cool. Obsolver lets you join groups and you could do the Parry Guild or you can be even the Focus Attack Guild and you can go and just wander and fight or train or join different dojoes, etc.

But you have to execute it in a way that is good and appealing and makes people go, oh fuck, that's super sick I want to go play. Like it needs to be cool as well. Like it's not just the feature in and of itself. It's got to be unabashedly, nakedly, appealing and cool. And like, you need to have the execution of these things be done well. World Tour is, yeah, you know, it's cool on paper in a lot of ways and it does its job. But it's not the type of thing that is good enough to return to over a long period of time or nor to convince people to go sell the game just on that.

Hey, Willie. I want your armchair opinion on to execute. because I mentioned this last week, but I don't think I got your, like, thoughts out of it. Do you think that it would have been a better release if they put out a significantly worse fighting game that had a full single player suite and local online co-op and more characters?

Like, like a 20, 30% worse game to play. Okay, well, this is the next, this is the alternate version of what I asked last week, which is, what if we got a re-skin of Rising Thunder? Yeah. With more characters, right? Yeah. What would that be?

And I'm like, yeah, that'd be fine. Would it make more money? It probably, potentially. Um, but I, in terms of the longevity of the thing, like, I don't think it would have the legs if it just existed as a more or less kind of mediocre fighter even with the I don't know if they don't have the legs

even like if it just existed as a mediocre fighter that had the characters that it that people liked. You know what I actually really want to see? And Tokon might answer this question. You know what I want to see more than even money numbers for 2XCO? I want to see the fucking rank distribution. Oh yeah, that'd be interesting.

Because I want to see how many people are living their best life doing dailies in bronze based entirely on, oh man, it's Jinks from Arcane. So it probably looks exactly similar to the Street Fighter 6 stuff that we see. Cammy Cat is somebody who does stats for Street Fighter 6 rankings. And you can see the rank up, the amount of players, and you can see how. how like it goes up to a certain, or it drops off at a certain point, and then shoots back up with Master Rank where people get to that point and then stop. It looks probably the same in most of these games, you know?

There's a steady decline, and then there's a jump at Master or Grandmaster in this case. And then people are like, okay, I made it, I'm good, you know? And yeah, and I think that's also an important thing to do is to create a, like, because the journey through Ranked to get to that Master with like a stopping point for people, even, you know, if you'd like to, if you care to get to that point. It's nice because in a game we're going through ranked as the only real progression thing there is to do, you've created a goal, but that is still a replacement for what could be a really solid single player experience that onboard you and teaches you how to get better at playing against other people, right?

Like, it's replacing that. The stopping points for Master is a replacement for a, some sort of single player thing. But yeah, anyway, that was kind of the gist of what I kind of saw. And admittedly, I need to go continue and get to the rest of it. But it was kind of interesting to see, like, aspects of the discussion where, you know, they're looking at different perspectives that were repeated over the years, like, oh, no team equals no excuses, or no RNG is too brittle to the ego.

Fighting games are a doomed genre like RTS and arena shooters, you know, Hard games can't be popular anymore, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Hard games can't be popular is the craziest one. I mean, you're... Go play CounterStrike. It can fucking wash in fucking Counterstrike, man. No, there is a very clear phenomenon, which is hard games that have a crowd of people partying in the room next door.

People that are not as good want to go, what's going on in that room? I want to know, right? FOMO applies, and they go, I want to get good. I want to enjoy what other... Dark Souls is literally... that. A lot of it is that popularity breeds more popularity. Yeah.

And if the popular thing is the hard thing and people can, you know, see how to rise to the occasion, then they will. You know, there's a pathway to it. And you see them people doing that in definitely in other genres and other games, for sure. Anyway, I didn't mean for this whole tangent to fucking dominate the beginning of the podcast. I didn't even get to my week or talk about any of that shit.

I don't know. I'll tell you what, I got a, I'm going to piss my pants. Okay, no, go do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, I'm not going to go piss my pants. I'm going to go pee in the toilet. Okay, okay. Like a man.

Yeah. We tangented, but BRB, we got more stuff to do. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. Should, uh, yeah, sometimes we ramble and take too long to get here. I mean, it's possible, yeah. Uh-oh. Somebody wants. Somebody wants a bees.

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code Castle 50 off and you'll get 50% off plus free breakfast for a year. Eat like a pro this month with Factor. It's for new subscribers only. Varies by plan. One free breakfast item per box for one year while subscription is active. Thank you, Factor. Thanks, Factor. Okay. What did you do with your week, buddy? Well, we talked about Mugenics already, so that was out of the way. Big old chunk of it. And, you know, we are getting to the end in Expedition 33. Had to to take a brief detour to go read to go address the build because uh oh yeah you mentioned that last week yeah yeah so i i did i went and i and i basically like i did a full audit of uh of reggie's characters and set up and we we let's fuck this shit up now yep and so we had a nice little like

educational like here's how we fucking power play for the end game um and like it's one of those sessions that's not progress um based but if you're somebody who's like you like you like making builds in these games and like sort of like tweaking to optimize and play with the PICTO system and stuff you might enjoy it. We're gonna I'm gonna make their the episodes are gonna be like chunkier because I know that not everybody's

looking for non-progress episodes but if you if you have fun with like building and tinkering and stuff check them out you might like it it's a fun one of the only games I've ever played my life that doesn't just multiply the base number it multiplies the end result yes that's it

like anytime 50% more is listed, it's in your favor. It gives you the best math. Love that. So the only other thing to mention for this week is I had a stream go up. It was titled Down the Woolly Hole. I did not elaborate on what it was. Did you pull your ass out?

I mean, yes, but that's neither here nor there. We had a stream, did it yesterday, and I was joined by Foxcade, who came over. And basically, the premise of this is something that I thought about some time ago. But I've talked to a bunch about how I used to love wiki diving. You know, I used to just start on an article somewhere and just spend the night going through, reading a bunch and who knows where you'd wind up. but you'd learn a whole bunch. And it was cool. Those days are far beyond and, you know, I don't have the time anymore.

But, you know, deep inside me is still that person who went all the way down the TimeCube website until I found the truth of why TimeCube came to be, you know? Good old TimeCube. Yeah. Deep down inside, I'm still that person that has that curiosity. I just don't have the options or opportunity to do those types of dives anymore. And so I came across that there are, you know, there are internet rabbit holes out there, and people do cover them from time to time.

And from when I was just looking around, I can see that a lot of them tend to be, like, a lot of people tend to go down like creepy pasta-style rabbit hole diving and things like that. Yeah, it's a good old time to have a creepy pasta. Yeah. And it's not necessarily what I'm talking about. I like random topics that just keep going and you learn a bunch of shit that like just you never would have come across otherwise. I'm kind of shocked you didn't know about the cheese caves already. Okay.

So yeah, you saw some of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I skimmed. Basically, I went to your stream and I skimmed until I saw like a full white page. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I'm like, okay, what is this? Oh, the cheese caves. Yeah.

Oh, I know about the cheese caves. So I know about. I heard. I heard about government cheese, and I remember hearing that they were stored underground, but I didn't know the depths of all that. Listen, man, the government's not in the business of picking winners and losers, except for this one. Except for this one. Big fan of how it always, you know, like someone came along and was like, well, boy, what are we talking about?

What is government cheese? And it's like, it always comes back to trickle down crack in the hood. Don't you know? don't you know the trickle-down crack in the hood is why government cheese is going to keep agriculture going? Anyway, so what I came across was quality rabbit holes, which are not just somebody going, hey, here's this weird TikTok or Instagram account with creepy videos on it. What is this all about? I don't know.

Anyways, bye. Or just like... It's a long... long era away from what's this Marvel Hornets website? Yeah, yeah. But you know, we're far from there. This is, that's it, right? It ain't this.

It ain't that anymore. And sometimes there's people that like do like the first layer of something weird, but it's like, oh, this is not even worth investigating. It seems to just be honestly like AI gibberish or someone in high school just doing some random shit or there's nothing here, right? But every once in a while, there's something that is a quality. rabbit hole. And so I found quality rabbit holes. And there was just a list of like things that people were diving into and doing a write-up on. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. And before I read it,

I was like, hold on, this might be fun to stream. You know? And so I was talking to Foxcate about this. And he said, yo, that sounds really good. I'm down. Call me up. And so he came on, jumped on stream. And we went down some quality rabbit holes. We learned about many a thing. And yeah, those are going to be going up on the channel, you know, this week. But I just kind of like, I enjoy just the randomness of like learning about micronations, you know, of Australia and Molossia. And I had like, I had heard about Sealand and I told everybody about that. A lot of people didn't know about Sealand.

and then Sealand is like the top and then from Sealand you then go into all this shit including Kickassia which had to do with like Channel Awesome and all this stuff and things that I didn't know about that stuff but I'm just starting over here and then we just connect the whole through line of all these different

micronations that got created and why and where deep diving into yes the government cheese caves deep diving into the people who when you need to disappear from society in Japan, you can hire motherfuckers to come and erase you.

And literally, like, they're called the Yonigaya, which is like the evaporated. And they will hide you from whatever and basically move you into an unknown location and protect you with like briefcases that turn into shields and shit. And they do basically like, what's his name in Breaking Bad Walter, you know? And it's just that like there's a whole thing about people. in Japan who need to disappear, hire these dudes. Yeah, no, there's a, there's a, there's a, that's a, like a dragon storyline. Yeah, yeah, yeah, people who need to erase their names, right? Exactly. Yeah.

It was, it was great. It was great. I had a lot of fun with that. Fucking detour into, um, I should point out it's the worst, like a dragon storyline. Oh, no. It's the worst one. It's the storyline that's part of the new universe. Right, right, right. Um, uh, uh, uh, I saw a gif of, uh, Kiroi taking the shades off or taking the glasses off and being like, I remember my name now. It's like, it's kind of like a dragon. Yeah. Anyway, um, yeah, and all the way into the first American fascist plot to take over during the FDR era and install Smedley Butler.

as the American dictator back in the day, learning about that shit and going like, wait, what? And it's like, you know, you go down the breakdown of, so who are the people trying to do this? Oh, oh, the corporations that still exist to this day? Oh, Prescott, Bush, the DuPont Corporation, Goodyear Tires, you say? Huh, interesting.

Oh, JP Morgan Chase, what are they up to these days? The bank? JP? JP Morgan Chase? The financial institution? What happened? You know? And you're just reading and finding out like, yeah, literally this same group of companies just tried to fucking go full on out.

And it seems like they realized, oh, yeah, being obvious and brash about it is kind of dumb. Let's just slink back into the shadows and do it quietly. Yeah, man. We got the money in the time, you know. So, you know, there's a whole, there's a whole, that's one of them as well. And it was fun. I liked it. Yeah, just diving down these random topics and kind of taking moments whenever something

occurs to branch off and go investigate here and there. I also started with the curling, the curling touchback controversy in the Olympics going on where Canada was accused of cheating. And there's a whole, there's a whole. thing to, you know, multiple accusations of Canada cheating at the Olympics. You know, it's kind of like the audacity. The audacity.

You know, how dare you? How dare you? How dare you come at us? Sweden is the ones that really cheated if you think about it. I mean, really just. Are you familiar with the actual reasoning behind that line of thought? What happened? So the Canadians cheat at curle.

they do. I seen it. I've seen it. Just because you slow down the finger poking right before, I'll have you know. So, okay, funny. Okay, so to break K-Fape for a second, the bit was supposed to be, that is the most blatant cheating I've ever seen in my life. It's pretty blatant. I showed the video to Page, and she gasped.

Okay. So the bit was supposed to be, that's the most. blatant cheating I've ever seen in my life and I'm going to come in and just sandbag it, right? But in the process of reading about it, there's a whole part where they said, you're allowed to poke it before the line. And then on the video, he pokes it before the line. So you're like, oh, wait, hold on. It's actually a questionable call. Because they zoom in on the poke and everyone thinks the poke is the cheat, but the poking is not the cheat. it's about being before or after the line and it's like on the you have it right on that line

so it's like is it the beginning of the line or the end of like where is it you know and that's where the whole thing arises but the first time I saw that shit I was like that's the most fucking insane dirty cheating you're only allowed to touch the handle Wally you're allowed to no no there's a rule apparently we just read about this thing

you can do that but it has to be before that it has to be before the line you're allowed to do a second touch, but it has to be before the line. Right. So the question was, was it or was it not? You know? And when looking at the video with the slowdown, I was like, that looks way more blatant, just not knowing the rule. And then the rule turns out that it's that extra thing.

Anyway, Olympic cheating, you know. Well, hey, man. Russia can't have all the fun. The actual kerfuffle is the Canadian team is outraged at Sweden because, it's also against the rules to video record it for playback. Oh. Curling, the curling decisions are not made with video playback. It's one of those weird sports where they absolutely refuse to make calls based off of video.

Okay, okay, okay. Like baseball rejecting the replay for... Oh, man, yeah. And you think that's too traditional where there's like umps or... or refs that are like, nah, tech, fuck this technology.

It's, it's, it's, it's, destroying tradition. That's insane. That's completely insane. Just get the lasers out.

I don't know where you're seeing that you can touch the fucking stone again. Uh, all right. Let's see. Let me see if I can pull it up. We can take the detour. Because in the end, again,

I was, I was getting properly ready. to just pretend Canada was absolutely in the right, despite being blatantly in the wrong. But then we ended up zooming in and seeing that aspect of it. Let me go pull it up again. Let me see what I was looking at. All right. So there was an article about the Olympic cheating.

I have a link to it over here. And reject all. Thank you. You're never allowed to touch the bottom ever. Okay. So, ever. According to the world curling policy,

a moving stone cannot be touched beyond the hog line, but it is not a violation if a thrower double touches the rock before the line. This is the sentence I read yesterday that is informing my opinion right now. So here's the thing. You're able to hold on to or touch the handle any time you want before the line. you're never allowed to touch anything but the handle. Okay. Ever.

So what I just read is the sentence I read yesterday. It doesn't specify the details you just mentioned, but this is why I said what I just said. Yeah. I will, this is barely related, but as soccer also does not use video replay for cards. If you dive, you should have your, your legs broken on the pitch. Thank you.

I mean, okay. So the more taking a dive is part of the sport, the more I am in favor of your blood sports policy being implemented. Yeah, no, you know what? Keep it as part of the sport. Keep it as part of the sport. But if you get caught, but comes Jimmy Hammers.

But every once in a while in sports where you see like dives are common, you see one motherfucker that's like, nah, I'm breaking legs and going crazy. Like, um, God, I forgot his name in the NBA. There was that, we talked about it a while ago. The dude that was just jumping on top of people on the ground. Um, or I saw a replay of a highlight reel of someone in, uh, FIFA,

like, just actually kicking people, like in the balls and shit. And you're kind of like, what? Yeah, Draymond Green. Dremon Green, exactly. And I forgot who it was in, in, uh, soccer. But you're like, people take dives and like every once in a while someone comes and is like no no you're not going to take a dive i'm actually out here to goon and fucking in the hockey sense of the term goon

hockey knows what's what's up right you can dive in hockey but then the other team's going to be like i'm going to hate that motherfucker like if you you you can dive in hockey you can pretend to fall down on your pussy but then they'll go for you on the on the next go around and they'll get you And that's fine. Yeah, the original term, the sports original term of the word goon. I think it is, it is quite wild to see all this going on with like camera. Again, camera zooming in and all that shit is where the controversy is versus like the wild insane shit that Russia was doing just a couple years ago. Was it Sochi, I think, where it was like every single day, some new shit was coming out with like, like motherfuckers were showing up to the starting line with syringes hanging out of their backs.

Like, which do you think is more outrageous cheating? Because we have three main types of cheating that I'm familiar with, right? One is, that motherfucker is touching the rock. It's not what the fuck. Like mechanical cheating. Mm-hmm. Right? Then there's chemical cheating.

Mm-hmm. And then there's the one that I know China loves to do, which is in certain sports where it's advantageous to be smaller. Or that every single woman on this team, adult. And you're like, no, they're like, absolutely. Right. Sure, sure, sure. None of these are 10-year-olds. Sure, sure, sure.

That can jump super hard. I'm going to say the ones with the syringes and the penis inflation. And the- Oh, right. Yeah, you can do. Penis inflation Penis inflate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Those are, I'm going to say those are highest on the list. Those are highest on the list. What sport was that? That was ski jump. Ski jump. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Inflict your penis for a bigger jump. Yeah.

Add a little, and a little extra fabric on the wing suit in between the crotch. If you get, yeah, if you, if you, if you fuck with your crotch in your suit and in your real life, it adds to the height and the difference. There's like people showing the trajectory difference. You can get massive big air. Any amount of tightness you can put onto the suit by increasing your surface area gives you a wider air resistance, which lets you fly farther off the jump. And unfortunately, I think the ones that are close to like you're technically on the line level rule breaking or the ones where it's like,

We've talked about this before, the Ukrainians in the dugout stealing signs with fucking, with tech and fucking, you know, sign stealing in fucking baseball is the coolest shit. But it's so unhyped to have it be like, and now we have the sign stealing robot that is scanning you and you cannot communicate. So we must give our pictures psionic, telekinetic communication. You know what I actually just love about sign stealing? is that there is a way around sign stealing. It's when the pitcher just goes, I'm just going to throw the fucking ball.

Sure, sure. I'm just like, that's what I love about it. Yeah. Because at any given time, the pitcher can just go, I'm just going to fucking do whatever. I think the,

the catcher, I don't know why the tradition is such that the catcher and the pitcher have to confer over what the best... Because if they throw a fucking crazy-ass wide curve, the catcher has to get ready to catch it or it'll fly past the catcher and then the they can just fucking run for base.

Okay, it's not because there is a strategic thing where the catcher is like, I know a lot about who's coming, like, where there the pitcher is making the decision and the catcher is basically like tell me where the ball is going to go. Yeah, if the catcher doesn't fucking catch the ball, then

it's a fucking free run. Okay. I didn't know if it was something where like the catcher is also part of like part of the decision making process, like a QB or so and then you're kind of the play is according to that. Okay. Well, yeah, either way, like, yeah, there's wireless ways to communicate all that shit now. But using non, using machines and tech that was not illegal at the time or didn't exist at the time to like borderline enhance things to the point they're at now is like, that's already happening in a ton of ways. Like, I think, um,

where, like someone, I remember someone who's kind of describing the, the things that, like, LeBron's regimen and like the calculated, the, every thing. single thing about every inch of his body is like hypertoned and specifically configured to playing better, you know, and there's all these things that were just completely impossible in the past and stuff. And if you're using that and that's, again, technically not illegal, then it's going to happen anyway. Someone is going to lab shit that you're not labbing to get better at it, right? GSP had a person in his corner who took literally startup frames as a concept in from video games and from like fighting games and applied it to real life fighters

that he was going up against and would show you this guy, his jab will connect with you within this many frames of starting up or like this quickly. And they check the tape and go, he throws his jab out this quickly. You got to look out for this. He throws this kick out this quickly. You got to look out for that. And they would have frame data for his opponents. You know, that was not obviously there back in the day, but we get to this point. So Um, all of that gets way more gray and dubious than, um, the fucking abomination and the Hulk are on the starting line. And again, I can see the, the, the bane venom in the, like, flowing in before the ref shoots the pistol in the air, you know? Um, anyways, uh, that was, that too was a rabbit hole of sorts that we got into. So, uh, yeah, if you want to check out.

any of that stuff. It's going to be coming out on the channel as well. There were a few other random topics we hit on as well. But definitely had a lot of fun. I'm going to be doing that again. And yeah, always a fun time hanging out with Shane. And that's going to be pretty much it. So this week, I'm going to do some more Expedition 33. And then we have Thursday, where, I'm going to try out Romeo is a dead man. Hmm. Looks cool. I saw some Dempsey rolls.

Seems kind of sick. I saw the game over for that. And it's one of the most violent things I've ever seen in my fucking life. Oh, yeah. It's fucking crazy. And what I'm hearing is that the reviews coming in are extremely divisive, which is absolute. Absolute peak suita.

I've been hearing that it plays into the, hey, I made this shit bad on purpose level of suit of 51 design. God damn. Which could be genius. There we go. All right. Take me back. Let's see it.

Let's see it. Right. Might come back. I might show up next week going, what the fuck was that? Like, listen, No More Heroes 2 is like a very flawed game. And the end of it fucking sucks.

But I do respect a creator. who will come out and be like, I made the end fucking suck on purpose. That's cool. Yeah, I, No More Heroes is full of cool shit. I will say that, like, it, I remember, like, especially back in the day,

that felt more, like, I definitely know that, like, you know, like Matt loved it and stuff. You guys, you liked No More Heroes pretty much, right? I love No More Heroes. one. Okay. I... Homer Harris one is pretty great.

There's a lot I love and there's a lot I don't love and I always kind of feel that divisiveness in my heart when it comes to the franchise. You know, like I was never the one that was like at the front lines on it but there's shit that is cool and

and then there was also the um the the top down game that I played for a bit there that, oof, that was rough. Travis strikes again was pretty brutal. But all those to say that I respect the balls to take a wild swing, which he does. And yeah, I hear... Do you think...

Do you think a wild swing is less impressive when every swing is a wild swing? When it becomes... Well, now we're talking about M. Night Shyamalan, right? Now it's like, well, now it's your standard. and this is actually predictable in that way. Because No More Heroes and Silver Case and all that insane shit, it's like, wow, this guy's so crazy. Yeah, but he's crazy like the same way every time. There's something to the, you know, the Tarantino of it or the, you know, you're known for doing the wild thing.

And so it's going to be unpolished in a way on purpose. Yeah, I'm playing my Genius Cojumbo game. Do you think there's going to be a third act reveal? that fucking shoots way too hard into the sun. Yes, I do think that. For everyone that is saying that Travis Strikes again goes places and it's actually really great, I'll say that that first couple hours impression of it didn't do much to give that, to get that point across.

If it goes places after that, then cool. But I played about four or five hours and I did not. see it. I've spent an outrageous some total of hours in my life waiting for something to get good and I'm not doing it anymore. I, you know, I just... Because sometimes it does and the times that it doesn't, I'm like, oh, sick. I super wasted my time. Um, yeah, we don't. I can't, I can't be, I can't be wasted time. Uh, anyway, that's pretty much it. Um, so yeah, come out and then we're going to do some fighting games on Saturday as well. So let you all know.

Let's touch on some of this state of play stuff. There was a lot. Dracula! Well, yeah. Of course. There's money to be made, sir. No, no, Wully. No.

This is not a there's money to be made scenario. Really? It has been 18 fucking years since a side-scrolling classic Castlevania game. Order of Ecclesia came out in the aughts, man. Oh, okay, hold on. You scream, so Castlevania is back, but you- Cassilvania is back. But Dracula is alive. Is what- The Dracula from the Castlevania. You're familiar with Castlevania character, Dracula. I am, I am. And I, I, that's, I'm like, he's all, like, I take that as a given, seeing as, as,

is it is Castlevania and that it's like you're not going to ever get rid of fucking Dracula like I thought that for a second you were like oh there were games without him or something oh there's a ton of games without him oh really okay I didn't know that okay I didn't know that I there's a ton there's there's a bunch of them oh wow I didn't know okay yeah fair enough okay so the people who are saying mirror of fate by Mercury steam accounts as a 2D Castlevania no shut up that is all that is that is the amount of time I will spend on that conversation. It's been 18 years.

And they're going to put out a new goddamn real ass Castlevania game and it's being made by both of the Dead Cell Studios. Dead cells. Dead cells. Yeah, that's that. They just gave it over. That's pretty safe. Yeah. And it's like, wow, that part where they were like, hey, we're making a dead cells

expansion called Return to Castlevania. And it's the biggest expansion by far. And we love it. We love it. so much. Okay. It is kind of funny, though, when, like, because you know how, like, for example, like Prince of Persia, it's like, okay, we gave, we got two new Prince of Persia's as well, different ideas going on here, and they just kind of handed it off to people that

loved the franchise and were willing to do something cool with it. That's right. Like, it is definitely better than just letting it sit and rot to, like, get someone who's, like, in love with it and already made their own indie things that were love letters to. to then come in and do a cool idea here. Yeah. But there's that part where you're like, you're so far from where you were

that you as a studio can't make what you made back in the day. Well. So you got to get somebody who's like of the new generation of like talented creators to come in and save or make the cool new idea. You know? I talked about this because like imagine if Konami had not like fucked up and fired all those people and gone all in on Pichenko.

They would be like, the number one Japanese developer right now with how they like managed to start to turn it around but instead they threw away like decades of talent with every yeah with everything with all everything that they own with everything just threw it away yeah um and you know whatever classic greed etc they they fucking like before the industry even was crashing conami just shot themselves in the foot and and dived into the pachinko uh balls but

But all this to say that the idea of like where in that age where the company that owns the IP no longer has the ability to do with themselves but they can find... Well, they no longer have the people. Yes, of course. And Bloodsaint 2 is coming out.

And people and those people have gone on to either leave and do their own things or they've inspired a new generation of people to make their own similar things and those people can come at it from the other side and go, hey, I love this shit enough. My dream would be to make it officially. And they're like, okay, well, we're not fucking doing anything with it.

Here you go. You know? So, yeah, Motion Twin doing that. Castlevania curse of Belmont is fucking, it's fucking coming. It's the third curse game. They're all Trevor games. So I saw the description saying this, they say the protagonist is Trevor Belmont's successor. Yeah, it's Sonia Belmont.

Okay. Sonia Belmont used to be Trevor's mom in a game that never came out. And now it will be Sonia Belmont, who is going to be the Seifah and Trevor kid, which is why it looks so much like Seifah. So, well, they're playing games with announcing who it is, clearly, right? Yeah, it's going to be Sonia. Okay. Looks very cool.

And, man, it looks. great. So, really good rendition of bloody tears. So what was... That cuts before the primary thrusts of the song. The bloody tears version they have during that trailer is all the lead up to the core part of bloody tears that they cut,

which to me says that will either be like the first piece of music you hear in the game or the last piece of music you hear in the game. What was the last canon? timeline game timeline? That would have been is it Donnasarro? Or is it

because it's not order of Ecclesia in it's Donnasarra People who are saying order of Ecclesia Can't read by the way Okay They actually, they don't know How to read words

2005 It's Donnasarro Okay Um Um So So In addition to this

kick-ass-looking Castlevania game that's a 2D game. They said that for Castlevania's 40th anniversary, they have multiple projects

in the works. Judging on the things they have crossed over within the past is a decent start. And considering

the effort going into resurrecting Metal Gear and Silent Hill, it's not surprising that

Castlevania is is the third pillar of beloved IPs they're trying to do shit with again. So I'm like Konami still sucks as a company probably with everyone involved on the decision making process. But now they're making the things that I want again. By handing them off to other people and going here, you take it. I don't know. And it's like, you know what?

Fine. Fine. If you're going to hold the IPs and just give it to other people who give a shit, that works too, I guess. I believe that they will be making. Um, a prestige 3D action game, Castlevania, that will be the Demon War of 1999. I believe that is the game they will announce after this game comes out. Am I remembering you saying this back in college correctly? Let me check.

I feel like 20 years ago, you told me. No, you heard me say this back in 2008. Okay. Okay. When Lords of Shadow had been announced, but you hadn't tested it yet. Okay. Because I am hearkening back to I am remembering a time where, yes, I keep hearing about 1999 and the big crazy game that can take place there, but they never did it. you know what sucks dude you know what really sucks i really love castlvania i haven't played all

of them but the ones i have i've played a bunch of times i'm crazy about castlvania but i didn't talk about it nearly as much as i wanted to because that guy existed in our periphery yeah and bringing up castlvania would like activate him and he would crawl out of the sewer No, that's, you gotta just ignore that. You gotta just... Oh, you say that. I remember. Oh, that motherfucker.

You can't let, you can't let... It's not rondo of blood. It's fucking... Whatever the fuck it was. Don't die on me, X. Ah. Anyway. Yeah, Castle...

I just pulled back to that trait. like 10 times in the stream I was doing later that night. Yeah, no. I am imagining that like the dead cell dudes are kind of just like, okay, time to go back to everything I've doodled since I was a child and bring it all up and put it into the dream game that I'm getting to actually make. Holy shit, I'm getting to actually make this. And it's also, it's also cashing in on the aesthetic of the Cassafini animated series,

which was very popular. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a bummer to hear that, like, the series, the Netflix series, like, took a bad turn because the first ones I watched were so good. Did it take a bad turn? Everyone says the latest stuff on it was shit. I'm hearing a lot of negative.

I'm hearing negativity about the latest season. I saw people say it wasn't as good, but not that it was shit. Oh, okay. And, you know, not to mention the, the whole, background Addie Shankar like not involved involved

etc confusing aspects of it but anyway yeah that was a big one a couple other things from state of play as well there were a couple that was a lot of stuff

in that fucking thing Beast of Reincarnation the new game freak game it's so interesting to look at it and be like Like, okay, they spent, like, right away in this game, right? The first thing they do is they show you a couple of, like, the Sekiro Deflects, right?

Like, like, like, kind of parry moments. And, like, one thing is, it's like, okay, the parry is now mainstream in a way that it has never been before. Parry Slop, man. Parry Slop, we are now in the era. Like, as something that used to be so rare, and I would fucking pop off whenever I got a chance at it, I can't believe how many things are built around Paris now.

It's kind of weird to look around and see it everywhere. But no, there's some cool stuff in it, but it is kind of interesting seeing like camera movement and music that is reminiscent of near automata. And like night and armor designs that look a bit Eldon ring and golden trees and things. And then stuff that's also a little bit, what was? it was near and Eldon and and yeah a little bit of Sekiro in how some of those bosses kind of you know sequences are playing out

and stuff and you're kind of like yeah just a little bit of everything kind of coming together to this for this game so beast of reincarnation might be the recipient of my most uncharitable and unfair thought process I've ever had in my life against any game

word I'm watching the trailer and I'm and my brain is like legitimately going every single NPC entry in this is a Pokemon they didn't make good every every single rock and jump and piece of music is time they were like let's just phone

Pokemon in the anti-pokemon dollars and like my brain is activating this that is like the least fair shit that is super unfair that is super unfair. Toxic as fuck. Jesus Christ.

When I first saw it for a second, I kind of was like, I thought it was a game from China, you know? I thought it was one of those action games that were coming out of China that were like in that style. And it was like, oh, no, it's game freak action. Is that a term now? No, I just said it. Well, it can be because I know what you mean. The moment you said it, my brain completely synthesized the, the I, you said. idea and a bunch of titles filled up that folder and now I know exactly what that word means.

Oh, somebody just posted an art. I like Wu Slop. Wu Slop is better. Let's go with Wu Slop. I don't like that. Super Bro posted in the chat an article that basically points out that GameFreek is barely even making Beast of Reincarnation. They're actually just outsourcing it to like 12 different companies.

Ah. Okay. Well, calling them the developer is a little misleading. then. Yeah. Well, what did we see? There was, that there's Crimson Moon,

which it was that thing with the, the knight that had the hoodie on that looked kind of like a darksiders character and then a bunch of metal. That was a fucking darksiders game. I thought it was dark side.

I'm looking at the hoodie sword guy with the armor and then a bunch of butt metal starts playing. I literally thought it was fucking darksiders for a while. Butt metal with hoodie swordmen fighting the demons. And I'm like, this is super darksiders coded.

And then you see an angel with wings showing up behind them. And you're like, yeah, it looks like it could be cool. But it's not Darksiders. It's from a studio called Probably Monsters. And when I went to look up who Probably Monsters was, the only game listed in their credits is Concord.

Oh. Interesting. Fascinating. Now, what were you saying about? about Pokemon dollars? Oh, that's true. Well, you can tell they really didn't take a lot of work off the project to work on Concord. They kept all their eggs in the correct baskets.

It looks like a cool game. I don't know what's going on, but seems all right. I just, all right. Dead Are Alive is back. Zoom in on a fat pair of tits. That was crazy. Age 99, man. That was crazy, man.

Because it's like, here we are, Year of Our Lord, 2026, look at them jiggle. Wherever you go, there you are. They know what they're selling.

New Dead or Alive project and Dead or Alive Six last round coming back. And, I mean, realistically, immediately after a titty bounce, there's one other thing you need to see. And that's Ryu-Hyubusa doing an Azuna drop. That's correct. And you're like, yeah, okay.

That's not our life. We're good. That's trending two pieces. They saw a virtual fighter rise from the dead, and they were like, fuck that! Yeah, basically, basically. And you know what? I think that is also around. They looked at Tekken on fire and also went, hmm.

Right? So I think this might have been a case of Tekken is on fire and they went, hmm. And then Virtual Fighter fucking rose up. And they're like, oh, no, you don't. You know, Virtual Fighter have begun to move. We must answer in return. And Destranding 2, PC. Wow. Sure. God of War trilogy remake. the original Cratos. Apparently a lot of people owe their lives to Sony now. I don't know if you've been familiar with this over the past couple of years. But before Sony state of play, people would post that fucking photo of Cratos going, oh, my life, right? And they'd be like, my life for, so it will be Sony, my life for a God of War trilogy remaster.

Okay, okay, okay, okay. I feel like the way that trailer went with TC Carson Like I feel like a There is like the way he announced it was it was like This is it felt like he was pushing for something for a long time And then it finally got a green lid or something was the impression that that trailer kind of gave You know because it's just literally him just standing there just just what that says to me is that he is gonna re-record that fucking

Of course he is Of course he is And he's just like yucking it up for them to fucking tone down what an absolute piece of shit psycho Kratos is. I wonder if they will. I wonder if they will. I mean, like the tie-ins. He is the worst ever. The tie-ins to make it fit into the timeline and such are clearly going to be there. But toning it down, I wonder if they actually will. They should tone it up. Make it even worse. Make him even less.

Likeable. Just him in an alternate timeline fighting off his wife and child like endlessly coming at him and he's just doing combos to a room full of wife and children. I think we can, I think there's like a single question and anybody who gets a hold of them can ask them that will answer everything you need to know, which is. is the puzzle solution using Poseidon's princess the same in God of War III? Because that is the moment that the character fundamentally breaks as even a protagonist. It's like the most cruel and violent thing for literally no reason I've ever seen in a game. I'm glad you brought it up because I wasn't because I feel like the last time I did a bunch of people got on my ass for being like, oh, you're overreacting and whatever. And I'm like, okay.

the character I'm playing and I have no control over this action and it's mindlessly cruel. I was disgusted like I was disgusted by that aspect of the game creatively combined with the achievement that pops up that says I didn't do it I didn't do it but I wish I did I believe was the text that popped up it was the most fucked up thing that made me actively hate everything about that God of War. Like I, I, it's a weird thing that turned me the fuck around on it, like viscerally. And I did, I was, I wasn't going to go into that right now because some people get really sensitive about that shit.

But it was like, that fucking sucked and was gross. It just, God, what a shitty stupid thing to do it. So what's going to happen in the new game is he's going to go to do it and then be like, wait, no, I respect women. And find a rock to do it. Or she's going to help him and together they're both. going to go, and then open the gate together. Like, here's the thing. I think that part of the game is like disgusting.

And like I actually like like with oh and I think back on it. Don't change it now, you fucking pussies. Like yeah. You built a whole game like God of War 2018. The whole game is built on your memory of wow, Kratos was like the most awful piece of garbage that I've ever played as in a game. And the whole time you're in 2018, he's just wandering around going, man, I was like the worst person that's ever lived. And it's always your fault, you know, that's the thing.

But like, yeah, there's always those moments. And this is, whatever, there's a longer, weirder conversation about the bit. But I feel like there's the thread that's very thin that you kind of walk on when you play characters like that in games where in order for you to basically still continue to be like, well, I'm using. To still stomach the protagonist essentially, there's a part of like, you're doing it to people who deserve it and you also just don't give a fuck about innocent life that much, but you're not going out of your way to kill innocent people. You're just indifferent to their loss, right? Yeah. So like a really good example is God of War I, where you need a box to progress and it ends up burning a Spartan soldier. Cretus is callous and amoral,

but it is an absolutely necessary aspect of progression. This eventually leads to like him just, him just going for like cruel puzzle solutions just to do it? And then, and that's where you go. So the line we're going along here with, you have to then go, what was the intent of the people making that scene? What were they thinking about that scene?

and did they do that because they thought that the people who play these games wanted that, you know? Is this one of those elfin lied moments of going, we think we know what you want, gamer. We think you want this. Let's shove a fucking girl into the cogs of this thing to open the gate when you didn't need...

That's something that you're going to like, right? Chevo. And you go, what is this? What the fuck is this? There is an old interview that I will never be able to find, but trust me, it lives on in my mind. and it was about enslaved journey to the west

by Ninja Theory in which the journal was talking to one of the devs who was showing off the very beginning of the game where there's a guy

dangling off the side of the airship and he's like ah help me or whatever and Monkey just kicks him off the airship for no reason and the

the dev goes, this is one of the moments that we show how Monkees a fucking badass and doesn't give a fuck. And the journal was like, this actually just made me feel like Monkey is a psycho asshole and is

stupid. Like, going back, yeah, this I, this was one of the first moments I remember in games where I had this weird um, what's,

I don't know what kind of dissonance it is, but whatever. Writing dissonists. Whatever it was, it fucking, it snaps me out of it. No, so I don't know if it's a dissonance, but there's a weird trend in the 360 PS3 era of video game protagonists that are so unrepentantly unlikable and violent that the story wants you to identify with and care about. And like, I remember playing God of War. I played God of War one, two, three, and then one of the prequels, I think was Chains of Sparta.

And like, Kratos is like sad about his family. I'm like, your family is better off dead away from people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think echoes of this, you know, with whenever, like echoes of moments where, like, like, you fucking hitman. just like we're fucking cutting up these nuns, right? Or whatever, the, the nun murder scene, the sexy dead corpse nun scene and all that shit. Yeah, and I mean, I brought up Elfin Light because the same kind of thing. We're like, there's just, you have a moment of going like, going like, you know, does, like,

hey, viewer, are you excited by like watching the woman get killed? Are you getting a boner from that? Is that? I know you're setting me up. I know you're setting me up for to bring up the absolute. queen of that era. Nothing could top it. Fucking reboot Tomb Raider.

Oh, the pain porn? The fucking peak of jerking off while animating death ant scenes. Just unbelievable. Yeah. So that shit, anytime I'm seeing, watching, or playing anything where you get a moment of like,

what were you going for here? This is weird. I fucking, it rips me the fuck out. God damn, it's fucking weird. Yeah. And I can understand. There they are. Already the no, no, you know, okay, fine.

Cool. You don't feel that great. Makes me laugh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back in 2005, a video game came out called Resident Evil 4. And in Resident Evil 4, Leon can be dismembered and violently murdered in a huge variety of ways in a way that

you could compare it to Tomb Raider. However, one of the funniest things about it, and it was, it is actually really funny if you play R.E4 long enough is that almost every single fucking time Leon dies, he always has the shittiest death noise ever. He goes, and it's fucking hilarious when you're trying to, like, beat a tough area on professional. He just makes that fucking god-awful noise. It's stupid. It's like, it's almost slapstick. I did not get that vibe playing Tomb Raider in the Oates. I also did not get that vibe playing Resident Evil 3 remake and seeing the fact that there is a violent sex death from a bug in that game.

Oh yeah? A bug sex death, you say? Yeah, no, I'll send it to you. We can get your live reaction. Well, so what I would say about Tomb Raider is that, like, you kind of go in with a little bit of like, are you, you're established, like, what do you try to establish here when you have these moments and you go like, oh, you're trying to establish it's a survivor and that she can overcome brutal things that you would probably give up on and she's tough and she's strong and can, oh, and she's, it's the survivor trilogy, right? You know, a quote unquote. But there is a, there is a point in time. There is an amount.

There is a point you hit where you're like, are we still going for that? Or is something else supposed to be happening right now? You know, are you hoping for the viewer to feel a different way about this moment? For sure. Anyway, I knew,

like, I'm like, the Credo's conversation always kind of goes here because it's, it's such a weird moment in video games. But, uh, but like, you, you got it.

You got it from Hitman. you got it from, there's a couple of things out there. There's, um, uh, uh, the other one I fucking remember

feeling that on was, um, um, that first, uh, episode of Goblin Slayer or whatever, you know, like there's just,

oh, fuck, just, there's these, there's these moments of like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. All right,

so I've time stamped this shit for you. It's about 10 seconds long. We can get the live woolly reaction. And go. Drain Dimos kill attack scene. All right. and there it goes and oh oh hold that is this youtube or a different website that's youtube so i remember yeah yeah fucking break dude yeah that's that by the way that's the forced cutscene

the kill animation is actually considerably more graphic gotcha um Again, that was not source filmmaker. No, no, that was that. I played that on stream and was like, ah! Okay. Yeah. They know what they're doing. They, and I think it's rude when they pretend that we don't know that they know what they're doing.

I think that's rude to do. Was there? Oh, my God. Look what happens when you type in RE3 Drain Demos scene on fucking YouTube. You get the video I just sent you and then the one underneath it is on request

Becca skirt outfit and Drain Damos in R3 and it's her in a fucking schoolgirl outfit. Oh my God. Yeah. Well, there you go. Right. If you have, if there's anyone arguing otherwise,

the fucking search. algorithm. The algorithm has proved the point. Played for fools. What was the company that made the tweet that was like, oh my God, she's got the grippers.

Do you know what I'm talking about? I don't remember. There was some of it. I don't know if it was Overwatch or some official account that was like zooming in on the toes exposed on one of their character models. It was Overwatch, right?

Yeah, it was Overwatch. Going big eyeball emojis. She's got the grippers. Yeah. Don't, don't pretend. Don't pretend. All right. Where was that fucking, yeah, all right.

There was, um, Ghost of Yote Legends, the, the, the, the, as the last time that was really sick, the co-op super demon mythology. I heard good things. Yeah. I mean, basically like Night Rain before Night Rain almost, right? So, cool. John Wick game.

Cool. Hope it actually is a good fun to play game? That would be nice, wouldn't that? Because it feels like you can hand that off to a ton of companies that would just be like, yeah, just make a game where there's all these big kills and good enough, but then the actual game sucks. So, and gameplay-wise, that that's all they showed. There's a couple of fucking, whatever, punch laser takedowns, you know? Yeah.

Can a legacy of Kane defiance remastered? So they did Soul Reaver 1 and 2, and now they've done Defiance. So now you can easily and without hassle play the Legacy of Cain series from start to finish. All of it. Including the new Legacy of Cain game that was not announced at the state of play. It was announced simultaneously. What? Legacy of Cain ascendance.

Oh, I missed that. Yes, I also missed that. Wait, this is new? This is a new game. It's a 2D platformer. Okay. And it features the correct cast. Okay.

Of these characters. And it's like, hey man. Oh, I sent it to Dead Ass and Insta. Is this like, I guess this is canon lore? It is canon. Yeah. It is literally the first legitimately new. legacy of Cain content in the level. Wow. Wow. This got announced super under the radar. I got,

I was very happy the other day with my vampire media. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was having a time of it, man. Um, Crystal D putting it out, but yeah, who's, who's doing this? BitBot media? Yeah, I haven't, there's no, I have no background on that at all. Is this another case of handing it off to? Yeah, no, it's handing it off to somebody. I don't know who it is. It's canonizing a character from the god-awful comics, so we'll see how that goes. But the fact that these fucking guys are coming out in a game at all is crazy.

Weird list of games on this website. A lot of stuff I've never heard of, including the Rocky Horror Show video game. so nothing here that really rings a bell. Anyway, sure. This will be game in the year. Well, did Castlevania have a date? It's actually 2026. So there's two game in the years this year,

and they're both vampire games. Marathon and... Do you notice they started showing off Marathon now that they've made the deal with antireole? They sure are. Look, look at the game. They sure, you're allowed to look at it now. You're legally allowed to look at it.

You want to hear something really fucking funny? Like really fucking funny. They announced in the Marathon Discord that there was going to be like a gameplay stream from Bungy featuring like the lead dev. And then they unceremoniously canceled it because the state of play went longer. And then instead sponsored a bunch of streamers to play the game instead. So I don't know what the fuck the point of that marathon. Discord even is if they're fucking telling us to go to events that aren't real. The check cleared.

The check bounced. The check cleared. Open the gate. Yeah. Trailer for that. Sure. Sure. Hey.

We got fucking Concord and then we got High Guard and then we got Marathon. We're fucking swimming in gold here, boys. Um MGS 4 Finally free They did it That's crazy That's crazy

I didn't believe it Metal Gear Solid 4 Master Collection Volume 2 Alongside portable ops And ghost fucking Babel Yeah dude I'm really glad Wild collection

I'm so glad We can all Like gather around And many people can finally play the single most mediocre Metal Gear game that's ever been released. What was the fuck?

I should have saved it. Random B&B unit tries to do a lap dance on snake and dies. She used to eat cement as a child, snake. Holy shit. What a fucking perfect moment captured.

I think Gis for has its problems, but I don't think any part of its problems could fucking possibly live up to, hey, did you enjoy doing those levels? Would you like to never do the game's core gameplay ever again? Here comes the 50% mark. Like, absolutely fucking nuts. Absolutely fucking God awful.

It really is just, if you want to watch a fucking 40 hour movie of just all the all the fanfare of Metal Gear after you've gotten to the end of that franchise then you jump because look

it's not Metal Gear Solid 4 is not for playing it's for popping off when Rex fights Ray that that you know like it's not for playing we know this that goddamn cutscene with Big Mama it's like 40 fucking minutes right

I want to say like that sequence I want to say there's an hour long moment of no gameplay in in in GS4 I want to say an hour it's I think it's I think it's like 45 but like yeah

you know see what one man can do when no one can tell him to edit even a single fucking sentence for pacing. And look, let's be real. Slow walking through London is a cutscene. Wasn't it Prague? Yeah, through Europe, wherever, you know.

Yeah, no, it's a cutscene. That's a cutoff. That is a walk-and-talk that lasts the entire length of a level. Hey, man, you want to do the shittiest level, followed by an hour of bullshit, followed by the game's worst boss fight? What is going to feel weird in my memory, too, is like, like walking around in five in Panapain and in ground zeros like you can do you can genuinely do a fuck ton of shit just controlling your character totally and that's kind of cool and going back to four and having a like early primitive version of that is going to be weird because like going back

to going back to like one and two and three like you can do less but the game op presents you with more. Yeah. Hey, hey, hey, remember when they were like, look at, you know, hey, you got all the sneaking moves. You can hold up guards and all these cool ways and all that stuff. And then they gave you like a full 25% of the game with no guards at all. And then they gave you another 25% of the game where it's like, robots, you fucking dumb bitch. Robots. I mean the mooing, the mooing fucking gears. No, I mean those little hand, Freaks. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The little, um, mistral hands. Let's, let's just get the coolest location that's ever been in a game and just fill it with the shittiest gameplay we got. Hope you

have enough chaff grenades. Shut the fuck up. This is not for playing. It's for getting hype when we go through all the different Metal Gear themes in a hand-to-hand fight with fucking Osloat. And then the life bars start filling up. All right? We've been over this. It's the tech end moment where he holds up, where he goes back to the old style. Hey, man. All right.

Sometimes you need to watch an old man hang out in a van with his friend and his shitting monkey. Listen, the real crowd jewel of this collection, Metal Gear, Solid, Ghost fucking Babel is finally going to be available. And I implore everyone. to enjoy peak metal gear with with black chamber no man peak metal gear

is snake inventing Doritos and Mountain Dew to have the stamina to go fucking shoot Teagreggs or whatever it was okay Teagrex excuse me it's Teagrex and Ratholos yes wrath and also collecting the monkeys sure yes fucking peak metal gear

um but black arts viper should never be forgotten. Bro, I'm looking, you know when you have like a bunch of YouTube thumbnails open and your mouse is on one and like, it's auto playing? Okay. Every single fucking thumbnail of like the third act of MGS4 is the same color.

It's the same. Every single fucking one is the same like light brown tan filter shit. And you know what, Pat? fuck you, I wouldn't have it any other way. We got Kojima in his element at each moment of his life. And the story would not be, we, like, it is what it is because it had to be the way it was. Fart noise.

Yeah. Yeah. We needed tons of channels of TV shows you're never going to watch, filmed cycling through the loading screen so that you can watch money just burning away as we filmed cooking shows with David Hader and interviews and just nonsense

because we that's what Hideo's doing with the money Hey Willie What are having to Merrill anyway Oh rat patrol She fucking she got herself She got herself a nice hubby That that You know

Old Johnny diarrhea. You know. Johnny Diary? The guy who shits his ass? Yeah. Shits his pants all the time? Yeah.

She got her... He pulled Merrill? He pulled Merrill. Rat Patrol, baby. And when you... When you take the letters in rat patrol... Oh.

Spells come. Uh... Yeah. Hey, Mailing got her boat. Yeah. for her. All right. All right.

All right. Anyways. There was progmata. Never. Pretty artsy game looked cool. What else was there? Never. Project Windless.

Which one was that again? I don't know. I saw it. I watched it live. I don't remember. Project Winless was... Oh, it's the chicken one. Oh, the chicken.

The man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Rouserman. The mad chicken. Yeah, yeah. Craft in the AI First Studio. Yes. It crafted in Montreal, motherfucker. Right in my backyard. Go down to the fucking studio and ask them to see the chicken game. I could just boo them for a really long time and see what happens.

Chicken game looks all right. But if they let me in to see the chicken game, maybe I can, like, steal a fucking high-fi rush. Maybe. Maybe you can. You know, the build that they just keep there. Yeah, no, I think all of High Fire Rush is just sitting on like a USB stick on a table. And like I feel like if I got in, I could take it and then I will be the IP holder. Saros looks cool. Saros looks cool.

I'm really glad they're making like changes that I specifically called out they needed to make from Returnals. So that makes me really happy. Like what? So Returnals are an incredible shit. shooter. It's a dog shit roguelike. Uh, okay, okay, okay. Like, it is, it is an incredible shooter. It is a really, really bad rogue like. The randomization and the way your runs work and how long your runs are and what they expect from you, they're all shit.

Um, I respect the bold move. I kind of, it sucks that we, things are like this, but I wonder if it's going to, okay, I don't think this is returnal to, it is returnal too but it is like they did not put the word returnal two in the title you know and I kind of what it's like a weird thing of like I wonder if that's gonna hurt them at all

because shit looks dope and I don't I think things should be able to be titled whatever works best for the thing but you kind of wonder I think I think calling it Seros is fine because like returnal I don't think

returnal pulls enough to kill with a sequel. But any time anything can pull anything at all, corporate is going to say use the word so that you can pull as much as possible. So the fact that they didn't here, I'm kind of like, huh, okay. Though when I did see the word Saros, I kind of was like, what was Saros again? Was that like another one of the things I've forgotten? It's Returnal, too.

Right, right, right, right, right. But I have to see it to confirm. What if the sun was evil? It's like the sun is evil. Yeah. It's not your friend. Silent Hill Townfall. Looks pretty good, actually.

That trailer was very cool. I thought everything there was emotional and dud the things that you would expect a good Silent Hill to do of, hey, here's your protagonist. He did something fucked up. He sure regrets it. We don't know what's going on. That game is probably going to be about school shooting. Do you think that's what it was with the statue and the, this is our town, like all the protest messages and stuff?

No, I think it's about the fact that it takes place in Scotland in 1996 in a town very, very similar next to the area that had the Europe's deadliest school shooting ever, which was the UK to ban guns. Oh, there's a historical marker there. Yes. Okay. Okay. And that's why there's a weird, like, like obsession on the. pistol. The gun. Yeah, he fucking opens the box. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that as well. So what I will say is, you know, everything there is like, yep, that's what Silent Hill should be

doing. Here's a protagonist. There's some fucked up stuff. We don't know what's going on. And it seems like we got to, we got to see, we saw a couple monsters or whatever, but the like what happened here, what did you do? And what are you tormented by is the main point of the trailer there? So that looks good. real. This one's going to be tough. I'm kind of a silent hill person, apparently. Apparently, I'm a silent hill person according to the internet.

The game that you can play... This one's going to be rough. The game you could play blindfolded and fucking... Yeah. Listen. Yeah. Okay. This one's going to be really rough. The game's entirely in first person and has a melee component including blocks and the guy has a fucking IV

in his hand. Oh. Yeah. That you see literally all the time. Yeah. It's going to be rough. Yeah. I might have to keep my bucket nearby for real. I have given up on the third person thing in the sense that it's just like it, it's normal to more people than me. And a lot of things are just going to keep going that way. And I hate it, but what, oh, well, you know.

It's nice that at least Requiem is like, whatever you want, bro. Right? Because they showed off the, um, it is really cool. that camera shit works. They showed you, they showed you the part of it that was like, here's the, here's the view that works if you liked, uh, RE 7 and 8. And then as soon as it switches to Leon, it's like, oh yeah, and then the camera goes back to where it fucking should be.

So you can be either or on either character for that, which playing Leon and first person's going to be fucking, I'm going to have to try it. That sounds nuts, actually. Because the trailer made it seem as if it would be one character first person, one character third, but it turns out... But that's actually just kind of their suggestion. Which is incredible. That's a really fucking cool thing, you know? I think the coolest thing

about that is they showed off like a little gameplay snippet of like, here's what it would be like playing as Grace in third person versus first person. And in third person, there's a moment where she like trips like really bad and almost faceplants

but like catches herself, you know, when you're moving. And they showed the same bit in first person and it shows off that like you're actually moving at a 100% consistent speed even though it looks like she's about to fall over. It's it's purely animation trickery. Yeah. And like I get that the first person stuff is about immersion, but I think what you lose in gameplay fidelity is not worth it personally. But I'm also again, an outsider here. I'm going to I'm going to throw a hazard that the game is emulating first person shooters

because of its theming. They showed off that Townfall has lean mechanics and also that you can shoot a pistol from the first person perspective. I have a sneaking suspicion Townfall will be playing into that.

Also F isn't third person. Yes, yes. But no, that was a good trailer. Star Wars Galactic Racer. We're doing Yeah, sure. Pod racing is back. Racing games are basically dead.

The only thing I want to know is like when this takes place, because we see old suburbia in that older timeline. And I'm kind of just like... It takes place later. So, because it's not called Podracer, right? But I'm like, if that was a subalba, or is it, unless he was like... Was he frozen in carbonite or like... No, it's just later.

It's just later. But like, episode nine later? Time to race some... space cars, Willie. Or is, is Revin about to show up? No, Willie.

Yeah. Yeah, I kind of just want to know, is this like literally like two seconds after the Phantom Miss? It's 10 minutes after Revenge of the Jedi. Sure. Sith. Return.

Yep. Revenge of the Skywalker. Good not. Good enough. Revenge of the last Jedi Skywalker. Clones of the Sith. Yeah, no.

Um. And then there was Yakko Shinobi Ops, which looked like another, like, hey, what if you got your Tenshu, but more strategic? I couldn't believe that that wasn't actually a Tenshu guy. The main guy looks so much like Rick Morrow. Tenshu might be dead, but lives on strong in spirit. Like, there appear to be multiple options for Tensu fans that are not Tensu. I mean, there's one that's the most obvious, which is deflect Sekiro. Well, yes. Which is like literally a tension game.

But all this to say, no actual tensue. It really did look like him, though. Yeah. And then seeing the style of estate you were breaking into, I'm kind of just like that. So you put down the fucking poison rice. Yeah. You know. Anyway.

All right. So, yeah, beyond that state of play stuff, a couple other things. Again, we touched on a bunch on the way, but, hey, the other thing that I had been fucking shouting out for with Street Fighter 6, Capcom Cups, stupidity, where they're charging people 40 bucks to fucking watch the damn thing. And people going, no. Go fuck yourself, rightfully so. And then the devs of Street Fighter 6 being like, yo, the e-sports,

team just did some shit and we literally had no say in it and we're that sucks and we're trying to do what we can. And basically they had an announcement where they came out and, um, uh, uh, you know, uh, I think, uh, fuck off. God damn it. Nakayama, I believe was, uh, on one side and they had one of the e-sportsmen on the other side. And they basically went, okay, so we finally got in touch and we've been talking to each other. And the departments have decided that we are going to change what we announced. And they did a deep bow that was one of those we fucked up bows. That's like, okay, all right, fair enough.

Thank you. And I'm going to say the devs, you know, properly, I'm imagining, sat them down and went, what the fuck are you doing? But the announcement was, hey, it's not going to be 40 bucks. It's going to be 10 bucks. And it's like, motherfucker, people don't want to pay to watch the video game. You're insane. I'm not going to do that.

But Japan will, right? And so they kind of went, okay, so. But isn't the world Japan? So they went, it turns out that, like, we were not reflecting the rest of the world's feelings effectively into the situation. And thus our new pricing point reflects that. And it's like, okay, whatever. Price these nuts. Thank you.

So they're a lost cause. Capcomi sports just are committed to it. And you know what? As long as shit's healthy in Japan, they don't seem to give a fuck. So whatever. Classic ignorance and bullshit. The dev team on 6 seem to be making the best of what they can out of the situation by going, okay, so how about this?

If you glowed up into the battle hub, you can watch the fucking event. Like I said, you should be able to do. Yeah, so I think we were both of the opinion. this should have always been the case for literally everything. The most obvious thing in the world. You have a virtual hub in your game with screens around it. Let people go fucking watch the event there while they play the game to get the popular. Like, it's so obvious.

And so yes, they're testing out the implementation now so that you can go watch like some broadcasts and whatever. But the plan is for you to be able to load up Street Fighter 6, go into the battle hub and watch the actual finals taking place in the game. Which is, that's very smart. Great idea. thought of it. Yeah. Now, because of that, it also means then why the fuck would you pay the $10 to watch the stream? It does mean that.

That's stupid. They also said, hey, co-streaming is okay for not the top eight. So for the rest of the event or whatever. They're like, okay, cool. So the thing that people want to watch the most, right? Like, fuck them. So the devs are going, and if you do decide to buy the stream, here we've made a color for Rashid that you can get in-game as well.

So you're getting something as opposed to nothing. And it's like it really feels like the e-sports team is committed to making the stupidest possible decision they can. And the dev team around it is going, how do we make you not hate Street Fighter 6? Oh my God. Okay. Here. Here. How about this?

And how about that? And they're trying to cushion the landing as hard as they can. But holy fuck. This is like the most stupid we're not communicating moment that Calcom has had in years. And I know this. And people know this. But maybe people don't know this. Capcom is kind of unique in that every team is an island.

Yeah. Like they are the worst one out of all of them. Not just islands. They're competing against each other. Yeah. There is a team inside Capcom, for example. And you might have picked up on this, but I know it for a fact that is like

the future of Resident Evil is e-sports. And they're like four failures into that idea. And still, and fucking still. Raccoon City. What the fuck was it called? Operation Raccoons City. Or C. ORC.

Let's see. There's Raccoon City. There's Umbrella Corps. Umbrella tour. There's also Um, REverse. Yes.

Yes. Reverse. True. That happened. I forgot about reverse. Was there one more? I think those are the three. Maybe it's three.

And not count. Yeah, no. That, there is a group of guys that work there that are like absolutely fucking. resistance what the fuck is Reservable? Do I not know about Rez Evil?

Mobile? Is that some mobile game shit? Uh, but yeah, there's a group. Oh yeah. Whoa, fuck. Jesus.

What the fuck is this? What the fuck is this? There you go. Yeah. How do I? I fucking missed a whole Res. Oh, this sucks.

Oh, yeah, four, I was right. My heart knew it, but my brain didn't. Four! They're trying. They're trying very hard. And they're probably actively sabotaging the narrative team on the mainline series.

They compete for resources. Yeah. I mean, look, well, look, you remember how, like, Herada had that thing where he did, he had a tweet where he described how the sole caliber team and the Tekken team were, like, rivals, you know, with each other being like, we can't lose to them. Yeah, like, Capcom has their, like, actively hostile teams, you know. There are actively hostile teams. There are like heads of creative units that are like internally politicking against each other to get more resources. It's severance actually. It's like survival of the fucking fittest in there.

Yeah. You've got you've got macro data refinement working on Monster Hunter right over here. And optics and design over there on Street Fighter, we don't talk about the time that they came in and just butchered everybody. like it's just they are really going like into um if basically they're going into a thing where like whatever performs the best is going to get rewarded with budget next time around you know like i don't know how they got onomusha off the ground with how come back what team is making um because it says catcom but like you know what does that what does that mean yes it's anyway it's not surprising to see these moments occur.

And the other thing to consider, too, is that the e-sports fucking inception in Japan. Exo-primal. Somebody just pointed out. Come on. Does that count? Yeah, dude, because instead of Resident Evil, it's Dinocrisis. Yeah, absolutely.

Sure, sure, sure, sure. Does anyone not realize that this fucking, the same Capcom game comes out every four fucking years? But I'm okay with it being exo-prime. because they just tried some new shit, right? Like, we're not looking at exoprimal. I mean, admittedly, you're going hot, dino crisis. It's not new.

But, but, but, but the alternate reality is us going, why couldn't you just come out with some other game and not call it Resident Evil? Exo primal is like, like, literally Operation Raccoon City again. It's like a direct... But I'm just, but I'm just saying they did the thing that you always say that we always say, which is like, just call it something.

else. And they did. They legitimately said, yeah, it's its own. Dino Crisis's legacy is not fucked. I'm not going to give them, I'm not going to give them shit for going for the new thing and not trying to call it the other thing, you know? Bro, do you want to hear something wild about Dino Crisis? Do you know there's actually a fucking third Dino Crisis game? Did I hear something about this? No, no, no, hold on. No, I don't know what you're talking about. It's called Dino Crisis three. It sucks. It fucking. fucking sucks ass, dude. We played it on the channel.

Not you. It was madden me, but still. Wait, wait, wait, what? This exists? Yeah, it sucks ass. Xbox exclusive? Yeah, it's fucking terrible. I didn't know.

I literally thought there were only two of these games. Yeah, exactly. The only person in your life who would ever say the word Dino Crisis 3 to you is mad or me. Okay. Because no one gives a fuck. It's terrible. It's God awful. Wow. Wow. Okay.

Damn. Well, I guess I'll have to update my Regina appearance counter because I thought it was those two games and Namcox Capcom. Yeah, Regina's not there. Anyway. Did you know there's a third Parasite Eve game? Did you know that the third Parasite Eve game is in the Epstein files? You know what? You know what?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. All right. So that was really stupid on Capcom's part, and do not be surprised if they continue to make other stupid e-sports-related mistakes because e-sports in Japan has been corrupt from day one. You can go back to us talking about the Jesu and the entire esports.

Oh, man. You were talking about how corrupt e-sports in Japan was. 10 years ago. It's insane. It's insane. Now, I would like to point something out that e-sports in America also corrupt. Well, yeah. Just not as obvious.

Just better hidden. Yeah. Like slightly? Like a little? The other thing that was really cool and worth talking about, they showed off. So one, Avatar Legends. announced a new closed alpha coming out February 20th. So yeah, in a couple days, there's a new larger test for the Avatar Fighting Game. And they showed off Toff. And from that trailer and

maybe from whatever else, I can tell you, Toph Befong is one of the coolest characters I have ever seen in the genre. The design of how she... How she fights, how earth bending is, like, represented as a playable style in this game is fucking awesome. So you can see in the trailer a couple of different things. So she's got a bunch of armor on some of her moves, which that's what you're a fucking... Okay, makes perfect sense.

Right? Troph Bayfong from Canada. She's got her metal bending super as well, you know, little things like that that are like cool little touches. But in terms of just like making her metal, making earth bending work in this game, she gets the ability to launch a platform that she stands on like she does in the show when she's in when she's in the tournament in the top of the time. While raising up. So she can launch you into the air, lift her platform. up and do grounded combos while juggling you, right? Like she's on the floor.

Furthermore, if you pick the, um, I think it's the badger mole assist, there's she has different assist types or whatever. They're not assist. They just enhance certain moves. She can move the platform forward or backward while on it to continue juggling you better, right? Furthermore, she's the only character I can think of I've seen in a fighting game that has a ceiling bounce. She bounces you off the top of the stage back down for more combo opportunities.

And then she can put down Earth that puts a wall behind you, like Agonos, and puts the corner. And puts you in the corner so that you can't escape. So this is a game where everyone can fly, can use fire, wind, everything, water, and get all around. And like the mobility is crazy. Toph isn't moving like that. a rock. So she stands there and puts you in the corner, right? You can then put the, you can put a wall up behind the opponent and then drag the wall to you. Yes. And you can break them through the wall, which then launches them up for let's, so that you can continue doing your

combo. Instead of you dashing at them like every other in the character, she makes the earth move to pull you in, you know, so like a conveyor belt on the ground as the earth moves inward. So fucking cool. And like all of these are... What is this auto-perry shit at the beginning of her trailer? Okay, so that's the flow button. And basically there's a defensive button where you know how I talk about how the funnest thing is when Steve Fox has a dodge button?

Yeah. And how cool games would be if everyone could do that. This game has that. And you can hit that... Dodge slop. Exactly. And it costs your chakra to do so. But you can evade attacks coming at you.

but if you get thrown, you get fucked up. And something we know now, too, about this game that we did know back then is when you use up all your meter and you're in burnout, you can't do any of those dodges or fast moves and all in fancy movement stuff. If you get hit with a level three super while you're in burnout, the match is fucking over. Oh, you just die. It's an instant kill. Yeah, okay. That's super sick. Like, yeah, what the fuck you doing getting hit with a level three and burnout for, idiot?

Right? High stakes. High stakes shit. So, you know, that, that aspect makes it even more nutty. Like, I like shit like that. It was not something I don't think anyone knew at the time. Um, what an amazingly, what just a creative way to go. Like, she's super cool. I loved Taf already. Like, that's great. But like making her faithful in a way that is like using the best of making the stage and your movement and where she is. And that's something that fighting games don't do because it's too hard, you know? It's very difficult. Yeah. So that's cool. And, you know, beyond that, I mean, just, you know, topping off some of the other stories. Yeah, we are watching as I think from here on out, every update we get about High Guard is going to just be the slow shutting down of the project,

I imagine. It's crazy. They were just bleeding those devs dry, man. Yep. They... Two weeks to design narrative characters and the same lady that designed every character also had to be the head of the micro. transaction team?

All characters designed by the same person in the same, like, yeah, like two-week period or whatever, what they said there. What the fuck were they thinking? That's so much to put on one person. Sounds like they didn't have the manpower for the project they were aiming for on this. So most of the team let go. Kind of like what just happened to 2XKO, actually. Just like most of the staff is like, oh, at this point, I saw a post earlier today where it said the website was down.

So I think I think that's slowly going to be a wrap. And you don't want like you you want to encourage people to take swings for good ideas that could be cool. And I mean, look, now that we're looking at it in this way, like the, like the Jeff Keeley thing. didn't help in any way, shape, or form. I don't know if it did or didn't now, because it, you know what? But no, it didn't. Didn't help.

Because if they had hit, like, let's say they, I don't know what the numbers are, right? But I'm just going to make these up, right? I saw an article fucking today that was like, how high guards dealing with a 98.5% drop in player count. Yeah. If the game had just come out and kind of done really bad, at least it wouldn't have had that fucking

juju put on it because that's fucked. So the basic skeletal framework of a new studio trying out a new IP is something that we want to be able to happen in this day and age in the middle of this crash. We want that to be a possibility. And as a general on the table framework,

I am someone who wants that to continue to exist. Now when we look at High Garden specific, we see a gumbo of a bunch of stuff that, like we said, was not executed on properly and was boring to play and did not feel compelling. And like, there's a million things here that are just like, yeah, but this isn't good. So it doesn't matter. Like if the thing you're making isn't good, then nothing's going to save you on that. Right. So, um, like player, player count loss like that is like people tried it and they were like, no. That's the thing is because I've, I've definitely seen like, you know, some of the discourse kind of, kind of, going like, are people being too mean to this game? And it's like, I've not actually say, like, I'm sure there's a bunch of YouTube accounts that go, do, is Tagard fucked and whatever? If the game was good, then this wouldn't happen? My experience with most people is they had the exact experience that you and I did, which is we played

it for like 40 minutes a month. Nah. Like, like, I'm sorry that I can't feel this way when a game like high. Ruff that I just talked about is excellent across the board and still suffered for it. Wally, do you know who you want your biggest hater to be? Your guy who leaves the negative steam review with like 2,200 hours on the account. Sure. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Under 100%. 100%.

You know? And you're just, and you're not even there. So that's it. Like I'm just, I'm sorry that like I get the sentiment of that. But like, again, a perfect. good fucking game that was excellent across the board cannot survive in this environment. I'm I'm I'm I'm saving my pity for shit like that. I just you can't come out here like this with this type of thing and it just came out like an hour ago that it was a 10 cent game actually it was a secret 10 cent game wait what really bank rolled it yeah was that a secret?

Yeah did they not no what why why why? Why was that secret? It appeared to be... They don't want their name on it. Yeah. Eh! High Guard's mysterious funding was reportedly Chinese tech giant Tencent.

Yeah. So this makes sense as to why Jeff thought it was going to be like the big new thing. Because Jeff would have known, right? And so he probably thought the Tencent was going to like push it super hard, but actually, actually it's Wooslop. It's secret rooslop. Secret woo slop But wait, hold on Are we

You thought it was just multi-slop? Nah, man, it's multi-woo slop. But, wait, are we in the era of like Tencent knowing that their name on something is bad? And we need to hide that shit from you? That's crazy. This is the opposite of,

Secret developers back in the 360 PSP. Hi, secret tester on games who never got credited. No. No, you didn't secretly test nothing. Literally, the company was like, if you pay us an extra fee, you do not have to credit us. Our testers' names will never be known. May their names be forgotten for a fee. Was the studio I worked for.

Wow, they're hiding. name you would you would want to blast from the mountaintops your name on projects that you're fucking funding like that is crazy well because think about it right when you hear 10 cents behind it you would expect more support than

fucking nothing right weird and I mean I mean look we we would come we would have come at it with different energy we would have

I would have I would have that I would have actually been significantly meaner. So I guess they're right. I guess they're right. Oh, man, that's funny. That's funny. And you know what?

This is in a world where Marvel rivals is a good game that's fun. Wait a second. That was well done. Gaunt eyes in the chat points out, wait. So Jeff Keely gave a free million dollar. TV spot to a 10 cent game? While pretending it, oh, oh no. Because, okay, okay, no, hold on.

I don't know if we can say that, but pretending it was a, because it is a new studio that is a bunch of former Apax. Respond devs. But they were secretly bankrolled and so produced, secretly produced. Produced. Yeah, not developed. So, yeah, but that's, but that's, yeah, it's 10, yeah, yeah, okay, all right.

No, um, the, the meanness would have been off the charts. Yeah, dude. If that were, if we knew from the jump, that, for that is, I would have been so, like, you can look at the streams we, do, you didn't do a news stream, you did, you just played it. I did a stream of it. I was being like, eminently charitable. There is a, there is a, yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay, okay. So there is something, and, and, and, and, too, I remember, like, having this moment after best friends when I was doing my own channel shit of like, when you play an indie game and it's kind of, meh. And you are like, I'm, you don't want to shit on it too hard because it's not a AAA company, right? This is a doing their best. Small team doing what they, exactly. And that little thing inside. Now, back in the day, I know that feeling.

Y'all used to rip in ways that were wildly unforgiving. And I'd be like, damn. Like, I'm like, okay, you know. So, hey, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, like two things that were happening with that. One is, of that group, I am the only person who did not actually work in a game dev studio in any capacity. Right.

I was fully 100%. on the consumer, hey, I don't give a fuck side of things. And I'm still like that, right? Though getting to know a lot more people in the industry, I have softened some of my stuff about stuff that's bullshit, right? The second thing is, is that Matt and I would just totally amp each other up. It would go. It would go.

Right. Like, he's talking shit. Now I've got to talk bigger shit. I'm talking bigger shit. Of course. Of course. And listen, like, pay no pay no. pay no, um, um, don't pour one out for Ride to Hell retribution.

I won't. You know what I mean? Like, but, but other than thank you, Ride to Hell for producing a very good video game content. And also, and video games are hard to make is never a valid defense. All right. However, the deal is very much clear that when you are playing a game that is like a game that is, like, you know this is a small team and they're doing their thing. And you're kind of, you're aware that you're like, okay, like, I'm going to keep in mind

the limitations of what was possible for what they output here. Right? What are you swinging for? Et cetera. It comes across in your tone. High guard was getting that, but also like the silliness of the concept for what we expected of the dev team and then going and playing it and feeling the way it did. It was like, this is clown shoes.

This is dumb. This is unfortunately just horse guard, man. Right. But whereas Concord was like the absolute ridiculous butt of the joke because that was a Sony funded multi-million. Insane how high budget was. So Concord gets to live in the same exact space that Marathon gets to fucking live in all the way down to being Sony funded. You know, there's... The same expectations are there coming in, except Concord at least didn't fucking steal it.

Maybe they should. Because it's also a representation. representative thing. It is, hold on, because it's also the incredulous aspect of the industry that is like the highest budget games with the most cooks in the kitchen missing the mark as hard as possible, right? Like the idea of being so, you're so bloated beyond sustainable that you're just outputting absolute drek. So instead, what do we have? We have one of the largest video game publishers in the entire world giving a bunch of peanuts to like four. people. This is so weird. Yeah, fuck that game. Fuck that game.

This is so weird. How many indie darlings have secret triple AAA funding behind the scenes, but that are like, don't tell anybody. There's a reason why E33 blew everybody off their feet, and it's like the arguing about indie and all that, because like E33, like, E33 costs less money to make the fucking Hades too. right, which completely fucks up the perception of what things cost in video game dollars, right? Fucks it up.

Also, by the way, I did not mention it. I watched the Dice Awards, which again featured, hey, you know, it's a great idea for a video game award show. Let's serve dinner and drinks in the middle of the show. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's have the microphone be the room mic and not the mic for the presenter for some fucking reason. And let's give the best soundtrack award to Ghost of Yota. While everyone's chewing and clinking and yeah, yep, good stuff. We need funding disclosure documents to be made public specifically so that we can know how,

mean to be to you. I We need Funding disclosure needs to be public so that we may accurately be as mean as we need to be to the video game.

I know for a fact I have I have been fucking super mean I've been super fucking mean to games in the past and I've actually walked away going fuck was that too mean only to have someone

in the studio reach out to me and be like, I fucking told them so, fuck that guy in that department. That what all, like, dude, I mean, you, like, isn't that the, oh, the nipple rubbing level of excitement that comes from someone in the team reaching out to go, guys, I fucking told them. Like, oh, everywhere, all over the room, Randy Marsh, just. It's so good. It's so good.

It's so good. It has happened. And it felt fucking sick. Oh, absolutely. It has happened more than multiple times. Yes. Not even just on the video game industry either. Fucking.

Talking about reboot. Motherfuckers in my DM's going, bro. And I'm like, uh-huh. Uh-huh. Anyways. Um, uh, so that is happening. And then, um, with it's Jason Mamoa, hell diver's movie. They put out a fucking god of war game, by the way, as Kratos is a violent, angry baby.

A, is this some sort of side-scrolling new thing as well? Yes. Yes, it is. Okay. Is a side-scrolling Kratos, Metroidvania. Okay. So, uh, the lesson of, it sucks. So the lesson of the day is if there's a side-scroller that, if there's a new game in a franchise that you've never heard of, it's a side-scroller or a mobile game. Yeah, because it's cheaper. Yeah, okay.

Jason Momoa's and The Hell Divers movie coming out next year. Sure. Sure. I can't believe that franchise is back in getting a movie. I mean, like, I can't fucking wait to see people not get that movie. at all. Well, the question is, is, do we, are we going full Starship Troopers now? Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah. And it gets delivered completely straight without blatant irony. And then everyone takes it literal. I don't know how they're going to make that movie and not just make

Starship Troopers again. Well, that's, that's the thing is I think we are going to probably just hit that. But the, like, whatever the fuck planet Earth was, is going to be in 2027, um, It's going to be a place where you're going to need to probably not wait for the audience to get the joke about super democracy and fucking insane military postmodern commentary on things. It probably needs to be a little more than subtle. Before we move into emails, I need to ask you something. Which is more annoying? the guy who doesn't

Fight club guy The answer is fight club guy Okay well I'm actually going in a slightly different direction But I agree with you Sorry sorry go ahead I do I do agree with you Sorry go ahead

With a close second Being Patrick Bateman guy Oh I hate a fucking American Psycho asshole Boy you I hate a fucking Who those No, my actual question is, which is more personally annoying to you? Guy who doesn't get Starship Troopers or a guy who thinks he's blowing your mind by telling you that Starship Troopers is a satire.

Because that second guy makes me fucking nuts, dude. Easy answer for me. Easy answer for me. The second one is kind of silly, but at least they got there. Oh, I fucking hate that second guy so much. The first guy is the guy who's getting the tattoo going, I am doing my part. Yeah. I once again harken back to the section of Sacred and Terrible Air, the really good book taking place in the Disco-Elysium universe, where a director in the world makes a documentary

about Vidkintard, the super murderous child pedophile, just at the worst of the worst human beings ever. And he makes a documentary about it and all the absurd things the dude says. And he basically leaves him to speak his to his own words. And he cuts it and edits it in such a way that it is obviously meant to be like framing this to be the worst person ever, to make him look as stupid as possible. And it is almost satirical how self-parodying the character is, wouldn't with how dumb what the shit he says is.

And what ends up happening is the audience doesn't get that in the editing. They don't get that. That's what they're going for. And it ends up giving rise to a whole bunch of people of going, you know what? This Nazi pedophile is actually spitting bars and ends up powering a fucking whole movement because the director and the director sitting there going, no, wait, guys, no, I wasn't, it wasn't meant to be, no, you're not understanding what I intended with the move. And this is just a little sidebar in the book.

And it's just like, yeah. Yeah, that can happen, actually. So I'm going to give it to first guy because second guy got there. Yeah, you're right. Because while you were describing that, you know what popped into my head? I can't believe what a fucking bitch Skyler is. Why is she always trying to fucking stop Walt from doing fucking cool stuff for his family? That fucking shit.

Oh, my God. Does Vince Gilligan need to fucking sit in front of a camera and explain to you that Walter White's one of the biggest losers to ever be on a television screen? You and your... Are you just going to get your fucking

Walter White fucking Breaking Bad poster and put it right next to your fucking Tony Montana poster in your fucking shrine to massive fucking losers? With the tattoo that says I did it because I liked it and I was

good at it. Say my name. Yeah. You can look. That scene, dude, I saw the say my name scene before I ever watched Breaking Bad and then watching it in Breaking Bad.

He's coming off like a fucking weird loser. Like he's, he's like showing off in the most cringe fucking way possible. The entirety of the character, the Joker,

existing on the inner, should have been proof positive that subtle we're in a post-suttlety world. It doesn't work. You can't, like, we're beyond this. You can't hope that the text and the subtext are going to be delivered simply because you cut things in such a way that you felt it would be obvious. We're beyond this at this point. Let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send in a letter, send it to. Castle Super Beastmail at gmail.com. Send it to Castle Super Beastmail at gmail.com. If you want to send in a letter that's like, well, what are you talking about, about Fight Club or American Psycho? Don't send that letter in. We got one coming in from Peter Thiel,

who says, you guys should continue using Discord, actually. Nothing wrong. Everything's fine. I was joking, by the way, when I was making those pal into your comments last week. Oh, yeah, you were?

I was, I was... I thought you, because that was known at the time. So, I thought you were just like, right on the leading edge of it. Here we are. We got one coming in from Roblox that says, hey, please stop talking about our multiple lawsuits from parents angry about

their kids getting fucking predatored on. No. Okay. It's crazy they email us. All right. I think it's wild that the emails this week are so dog shit. You had to go with two fake emails before getting to one or three.

It's fine. Oh, no. All right. One's from Johnny Truant, who says, Dear Pinky in the brain, you've heard of hustle and scam, but I'd like to pitch you principled or insane. You got it.

Okay. Talking about moral rigidity here. At the risk of rubbing you the wrong way, as it's attached to your livelihood in some way, I decided to stop listening to advertising, basically, is what the person says, right? Block it all, et cetera, even at the network level. Podcasts can be a bit of an issue,

as I know they're sponsored reads all the time, and it leads to a bit of a conundrum for me. so the solution I've landed on is I skip past him. Sorry, but that also counts for your show, no offense. Here's the question I have, though. If I hear an ad break coming in and I'm otherwise occupied with both of my hands in such a way that I can't stop and skip that, if I'm in the middle of a set at the gym or carrying groceries home, I will quickly pause the episode, continue what I was doing in silence, and only once I'm free do I skip and continue listening.

It has definitely led to silences that were longer than the ad break would have been. am I a fiercely principled person or completely insane? Just so I get it, families have to eat, et cetera. What can you do? Be well. You're going through like a lot of work to deny yourself of minor annoyance, but I guess that's fine. I mean, not a big deal. Is the amount of work you're putting into dodging this now exceeding the amount of

of annoyance that you would gain? So that's that's the amount, right? That's the, that's the exact scale. There's a line. On the, in, there's like a math equation here. So I have one of, I have my own personal version of this that I can think of, right? That comes close. Anytime I open up a website that asks me about rejecting cookies and accepting all trackers, et cetera, I reject the cookies.

I reject them all, right? But the problem is, is that, uh, some countries make it so that you have to have a reject all button to easily click can continue. But in some countries or some websites, they have a annoying one that make it difficult to do anything besides click except all. And one of the worst ones I've seen have been that there is no reject all button. There's just the essential ones, but to turn off the non-essentials, you must manually go from the list of A to Z for every one that, every other third party tracker, right? So you have to take about a minute of your time going down the list, going off, off, off, off, off, off, off, off, off.

And then once you're done, you don't click accept. You click the save setting and then it brings you back and then you go accept. Right? Because both of those buttons are lies that lead to skip all this trouble and just accept everything. And I know that you've designed this in a hostile way to annoy me because of the extra time it takes. But I don't care. I'm going to sit there and click it off because I know you did this, but go fuck yourself. Right.

So it's an extra minute. But fuck you. You're being hostile with your design. So I'm going to do that. There's there's like there the, the, the, the, the, the email purports is like, it's both, right? But, um, and obviously there's, there's personal tilt for value. Right.

But there, there's like a line of like, well, how much annoyance to avoid annoyance are you encountering? And if the answer is. a ton than you're nuts. If the answer is a little fucking, you know,

like, yeah. Yeah. No, that's about it. I mean, like, I'll give me an example.

Well, I would, I have a very serious perfume allergy. Right? And so when I would get off at McGill Metro Station,

the fastest way to get to that best buy is to go through the underground city and go through the bay. Probably being, the bay had that violent, insane perfume aisle that covered the whole fucking front entrance. Oh, you mean like the Arkham City pipes shooting gas that you had to fucking roll through? Even people without perfume allergies was like, that thing was nuts. It was very strong.

It was very strong. So even in the dead ass of winter, I would go, I would take the street exit as soon as I could and then walk down the street and go to the best buy from there. How much of my life am I losing to that? I don't know, like fucking 90 seconds. But I'm avoiding a migraine. Because I have a perfume allergy. Right? Now, if the actual thing was I had to walk 10 blocks in the wrong direction and take like, you know, 30, 40 fucking minutes of my time.

Okay, maybe we'd be talking about something different, right? But it wasn't. It was like a minor trivial thing. Right. So this is this is what I'm thinking of when I'm thinking of like this person. I was like, okay, are you spending like an hour a day avoiding 10 minutes of ads? You've lost your mind. Yeah. Are you spending five minutes a day to avoid five minutes of ad? Okay, do whatever. I think the weirdest part of walking through the bay was when the ladies would walk out with their giant cloaks and hoods and start spraying their frenzy flame. so you joke

but the only time the only time I have ever like yelled at somebody in customer service was in that bay counter where a woman walked up to me and said sir would you like to try our new fragrance and sprayed me

yeah and I completely lost my shit because I could feel myself getting sick like immediately within seconds I remember and I just completely lost my fucking shit like what are you doing? I'm allergic, like the whole thing.

And she ran away. And then I was like, did I overreact? And then I'm like, no, wait, I was actually sprayed with a fucking harmful chemical against my will walking through a store. And that's why you have to ignore the ads and take out the perfumers first, then handle the rest of the group. All right. And one last one over here. Dear Thrasher and Ginger Rufus, first time, long time. I saw a supposed leaked list of Street Fighter 6th season 4 roster, probably fake,

but it's a Capcom leak, so it's likely true. No, no, no. I think I know the one you're talking about. It's fake. On that list was one character I was hoping we'd never see again, or at least would be replaced, like how Aki replaced Fang. What are some characters that you never hope to see on a character select screen again. Bonus points if Pat doesn't immediately say Rufus.

You're going to have to give me a second because I was like building up that whole email and now I have to like... Well, to be fair, they conditioned you with that opener. They did. They kind of set me up. That's, it's a setup. That's fine. They're not, they're not clever. They didn't give a name. Um, fine. I got one. Um, I say, uh, lucky Chloe is a pretty obvious but shitty one. Um, not just because of the level of, like disrespect to fucking smacking around Eddie Gordo and the fact that a character like that gets a fuck it. He gets an embarrassing storyline as long as this character exists. But there's something really weird about her where when you look at like the capuaristas in Tekken,

you know, like Christy and Eddie and stuff, like they're legit. They're faithful and they do a lot of respect to the martial art. And it feels like, you know, Tekken for the most part puts respect onto the styles represented by different countries and everything internationally. But Lucky Chloe is disrespectful to the actual Capoeira in the game because she doesn't... Disrespectful to Eddie Gordo. Yeah. And she, because she doesn't do Capoeira. She does Capoeira in style dance fighting.

And, like, it's like her own unique thing in order to make her do kind of these, like, more dancey, goofy moves and not have it be considered something, uh, uh, they wouldn't want to call it capoeira. because again, that would be blatantly disrespectful, but now you still are being disrespectful to it. So it's weird because you already had the accurate thing and then regressed and went backwards and shitty with this. You didn't have to do that.

If you went from the other direction where you had a silly, whatever, dance fighter, and then you got a legit caparista. I'd be like, oh, hey, yeah, we fixed it. We went this way. But you're regressing. So lucky Chloe, not only sucks as a character design and sucks because of the implications with Eddie, but it sucks because even the fighting style she's doing

is completely shitty and disrespectful to everything about what, Capoe was cool. What was the response to everybody hating Lucky Chloe? I feel like there was like, Harada was like, would you prefer this character? Maybe not.

It was like a big giant, muscular American. No, no, no, you're thinking of George Kami-Tami and Dragon's Crown. And Dragon's Crown,

and he went, well, artwork to your tastes has been prepared. It was a bunch of buff dwarfs. I think the funniest thing about that is that that art Like kicked ass It was super cool Even his homophobic

It was so stupid for him to say that But the art was great It was just yeah You know in a world where we got like Soros He should have done more A hundred percent You know again Grand Blue Fantasy versus gets it

With their old man in the fucking underwear flexing on you If I had to pick a character I never want to fucking and see again. I mean, a lot of the ones that pop into my mind are actually, um, like, licensed characters that never will come back again, like Yoda. Like Yoda, man.

Sure. Um. Odd job ass mechanics. And like, you know, bullshit like Dr. B. Like, fuck Dr. B. Right? I, you just, like, it was, that was back in a time where they thought the gimmick was funnier than the idea of you can't fucking hit this character.

Like, fun, that, nothing will ever, ever, ever make that okay. And I will say that at least Melty Blood learned and made, um, arc, uh, uh, Neco arc. Oh. Pitable at standing to standing height. Who's that, who's the fucking main character of the new King of Fighter saga? That's, oh, Shunei, Shunei. That is a great answer.

That's a really, yeah, dude. Yeah. I don't like Ash Crimson, but Ash Crimson has a bunch of shit going on. Man, fuck Shunei. Ash works. Everything about his shit is ass. Shunei, that is a great answer. Fuck that shit.

Yeah. Yeah. There we go. There we go. Like, Ash might not be for you, but Ash is a unique character. Ash is not stuff going on. Ash fucking rules. Ash crimson's great.

I don't care what the fuck anyone says. But Shunei is just legitimately uninteresting, chuny slop. The two-hand thing sucks. Fire a nice Todoroki shit. You know, a headphone, jacket, color designed protagonist of the latest Bayblade and or monster collecting not mainline series thing. I called them the Super Robot Wars OC designs. You know, it's a character with finger gloves and like a single strand of hair that's like a single color. When I was thinking about how much I hate Shunei, I bit my nail too hard and now I'm bleeding.

That's pretty, that's crazy. Fuck him. Especially when they nailed it so much harder with the other characters like Ilsa and Dolores, you know. Anyway, yeah, Shene, great answer. What a boring nothing design. All right, that'll do. Have a good week, everybody.