Castle Super Beast - CSB363: Microsoft Going Their Own Way

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Older Twitch VODs are now being uploaded to the new channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive Zero Parades, Esoteric Ebb & the Disco Legacy Pokopia Leans Into the Ditto Nightmare Slay The Spire 2: Still Good, Needs Juice Marathon vs Arc Raiders: Extraction Etiquette $1200 Microsoft Helixbox Will Suck You Off Pickmon Pulled a Palworld on Palworld Go to http://rocketmoney.com/superbeast to reach your financial goals faster. - Go to http://shopify.com/superbeast to sign up for your $1-per-month trial. - Go to http://quince.com/superbeast for free shipping and 365-day returns. Everything we know about Project Helix, the next Xbox console Yakuza series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi's studio is reportedly facing closure after publisher NetEase indicated that it will pull funding for its debut title, Gang of Dragon."NetEase allegedly made the decision after discovering that the project needed an additional ¥7 billion ($44.4 million) in funding to reach completion." New Survival Game 'Pickmon' by Pocketgame Is Just Asking To Be Sued Into Oblivion Pickmon, an upcoming game that's been accused of ripping off designs from other artists and famous franchises like Pokémon, has also stolen one of my designs. They didn't even try to change something and make it a bit less obvious.

Yo, yo. Good afternoon, Willie. How are you? Not too bad. How are you? I'm feeling a little silly. I'm chilly. Which is uncommon for me. Because Paige and I were streaming in here last night, but we were playing a PS5 game. We were playing Shadow the Colossus, which means the PS5 was on. Heated up the room.

Which meant it heat. We were like, oh, it's hot in here. So I was like, I'll just go turn off the heat. So then I turned off the heat, and then we'd finish the stream, and then I thought nothing of it. Well, today is much colder than it was fucking. yesterday in general, so I came into the office. It's like fucking 12 degrees in here. Huh.

Because I had the heat off. You see, the PS5 tricked me. Over here, I'm opening windows because we're getting too hot. But yeah, no, that's, we're having the exact opposite. Shit's getting warmer. It's wild how a console can affect the, the climate in the room it is in. The PS5 is the most useful multi-purpose space heater I've ever used. Wow.

It's crazy how much heat that thing puts out. I have a full-scale PC right next to it that is fan-cooled. It's not like water-cooled puts out half the heat at tops. It's crazy. But maybe would certain games cause it to get that extra little, get a couple extra degrees out of it? No, it's like, is it on? Like, I had a, I had, um, I had the, the console like overheat and shut itself off playing Astro Boy. Wow. And Final Fantasy 16. Wow. I have not seen anything like, huh? Yeah, I was streaming Astro Boy and I'm like, do to do it. And then the PS5 said,

fuck it, I'm out. And I'm like, I guess that's enough Astro Boy. You got a decent ventilation system going on? Oh, AstroBots. This shows how much I guess about that. I assumed, I assume, I, I assumed you meant astral. Yeah, no, it's not the Game Boy. It's on like a coffee table, like, with nothing around it. It's like fully exposed to the elements. Yeah. So, yeah, we, there's a, I guess a bunch of things this week.

There is an uncommonly high amount of overlap today. So we should probably get a move on with some of it. How do you feel about the nightmare that is a human-shaped homunculus named Ditto? I love that Ditto is getting pushed. I also love this. Because this is something that's been hilarious and fun and kind of creepy for years now. And Pokemon has not leaned into it anywhere near as much as it could have. And I think that it's dope to see this happening here.

the weirdness of the human shaped like flopping around person pretending to be the trainer is great I love everything about how weird it is there's so many little tiny details that they're doing like a pretty good job in like general shapes but anything specific is like complete shit show well I like the hat is melting off because it's not it's just goo it's just more goo Joe Turo style. And I would even say like you know that they wanted to lean into the weirdness part because

the fact that when learning new moves Dido doesn't completely just transform and do the move. I'm a half asset. It comes out of the arms and yeah you get vine whip arms or like you know water barf and all that stuff. And it's like oh you're doing the creepy thing

that everyone draws the comics about you know. It's great. Love that. And that weirdness also applies to Pocopoeia's dialogue. Like, I have not gotten that far into it, but like I had a squirrelal chasing around a Charmander

who was like, bro, get the fuck away from me. Yeah. Like, you keep spitting water everywhere and it's going to get on my tail and I'm fucking freaked out. Can you not do that, man? I think overall, yeah, a big part of the bit here is

like having the Pokemon talk and you can understand what they're saying. and just hearing what the fuck they're up to or what their mannerisms are beyond just saying their name without having to be like meowth or a special exception, you know? Yeah. And it's like, hey, did you know that these hyper-specialized animals are fucking weird? Did you know that Venusaur talks with an Ada-a-a? I did not know that.

Venusaur uses Ada-a-a. That's weird. Yeah. Think about that. Think about that one for a minute. Let that stew. Whatever that means. How far did you get when you were playing Pokopia?

I had a moment of like almost sequence breaking because the moment I got, the moment I got the ability to punch the fucking walls open. Right. I just went all the way to the coast and found a magic harp. Yeah. Oh, that's, that's actually like kind of what you're supposed to do. Oh, okay. Well, then, yeah, I did.

I just went all the way through. Did you hang out with Slowpoke? No, no, I didn't know. I basically just found the Magic Harp and came back around. I found, just some of the beginner ones, you know, not much. Yeah, so we're talking about Pokemon, Polkopia for the Nintendo Switch 2, if you haven't picked up on that. I'm really thrilled that I played Stardue Valley like two weeks ago to completion. because it really, really helped me contextualize what the fuck Popopia actually is.

And now I have the pieces I need to understand the entire like village simulator genre from tip to tip. Because at the one tip, you have Animal Crossing, which is like nearly exclusively character oriented. Yes. Right? Yeah. I need this kind of shit in my house. I need this. and very little infrastructure, right?

On the flip side, on the absolute ass end of the world, you have stuff like satisfactory and factorial, in which the only character in that game is pavement and pipes and machinery. The social aspect is not. It's entirely infrastructure. And this, Pocopia lives on the, it lives on the, like, character side of that divide. But not as far as I thought because I did discover pieces that will lead to future infrastructure.

I need your help to make this island better, but I also want to make you happy. And so you're, you being satisfied as a part of the goal too. You're making friends and your friends are helping you work, unlike just pal-wording it, which it almost feels like, hey, we got to cleanse. the fucking pallet a little bit by having the labor that these Pokemon do be voluntary help and you're also making their lives cozier.

Like when did Pocopia start development? The moment the moment Powell World dropped. Because it feels... No, no, no, no, no, I'm sure Stardue and all that were from... But it actually feels like... Well, it's Dragon and Quest Builders 3.

Like, that's an existing genre that TecmoCoA makes that is literally this. It's just Dragon Quest instead of Pokemon. Okay. But it feels like the idea for this was like within the power world hype cycle of we would like a wholesome working with your Pokemon's. If this came at you pre-Pat's Pastures, you might have hated it. It did. It was announced before you started.

Prior to Pat's Pastures. And I was like, who the fuck gives a shit about this fucking Pokemon thing? You don't even fight. And I was saying, yeah, because I was like, no, that looks interesting right away. And I like the part where, like, it seems like a post-apocalyptic setup, you know, and the- I did like the ditto gross part. I did like right away. I was like, oh, yeah, the ditto's gross.

I like it. And so now with the context of just cozy, it all makes sense. So there are little bits and pieces. that I can see actually will scale up, not into like large scale manufacturing, but like definitely more than nothing. Like, uh,

did Scyther do anything goofy for you in your playthrough? Scyther, he helped me cut the wood up and, uh, yeah, that was pretty much it. Yeah. So like I need law, I need,

you know, chopped lumber to make things. And hey, how do I get chopped lumber? I hand it to, I had logs to Scyther. It's like, okay,

I found a, a block that, turns water pressure or so water flow on and off. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And oh, yeah. I found that.

Yeah, you found that. That's right next to the magic carp, right? Yeah. So the, so I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to talk about the thing that happens right after. Sure. Like, literally 10 minutes later. Yeah. Yeah.

It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. So you need to make it rain for whatever reason. And the tang of Lizzle. like, bro, you need a fucking slow poke in here. Slow pox can make it rain. Tang growth. I didn't even know there was an evolution.

Yeah. And so I'm like, I'm going to go down and you get the slow poke and the slow poke comes out of the ocean right next to where you found the magic carp, right? And you're like, hey, slow poke, what's up? And he's like, hey. And he talks like a, he talks like he's stone and he's fucking slow and his dialogue takes forever. And the sloth from Zootopia. Absolutely. And so the quest then becomes like, hey, you got to. to get slow you got to get slow poke to go talk to tan growth over at the busted Pokemon Center right and you're like hey can you come with me and he's like I really don't want to but can you can you just water the ground between here and there so it's softer on my feet and build staircases the whole way there please okay and then in one of loading screen tips it

says, hey, did you know that Pokemon move faster on paths that have been watered and restored? Okay, okay, okay. So you get to building a road from the Pocca Center to the coast for efficiency. For travel. And then you tell Slow Poked, hey, man, I got it. And he goes, okay.

And he takes like 10 to 15 minutes. to walk that incredibly small distance and like you can't make him go faster at all so it's like okay fine fuck it I guess I'll go put more decorations around Charzard's fucking patch of grass now now I feel like there's a also a fine line where there's an upper there's an upper limit on how tasks can be handled I think

I'm I don't know what the end game looks like here but I have to imagine you can only bring a task up to your Pokemon and ask them to do it wherever they are on the spot and that they probably do not want any part of this game to be picking up that Pokemon and putting it here on a line and having a task place where they're getting at it right especially when you got the little builders with the fucking wood in their hands are those dudes the assembly line is yeah the assembly line is probably what they're trying to avoid imagery of. So what's smart

is that the default layout of the area it makes it so that you need grass next to a tree to get a scyther right and you need a boulder with shade to get a timber. So just so happens the two perfect spots to do that are right next to the Pococenter

which is where you probably put your work bench down. So the two guys you get right away that are part of the manufacturing arm of your Pokemon settlement happen to end up sitting next to each other. But you can go further.

Like, as long as you meet their needs and they're happy, yeah, you can move these bitches around to wherever. You could absolutely get a line of fucking trees and throw the grass down. And create the conditions. Loaded up with fucking Scyther's and cutters. They just happen to live there.

They just happen to live there. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, your home isn't alive. But also, Scyther is like efficient because you can give him as many logs as you want and he'll turn it into how I'm ever many chopped woods that you want. Okay, okay. But this needs to be, like, they need to be free range no matter what at the end of the day. Well, you could, you know, you could do.

You know, you could do, you could build a house. Oh. No, you could spend the resources to build a house, and then you could make a row of houses, and then you could fill the interiors of the house with the things that they need and want. And that way, you can place them wherever you would happen to like. And their coziness can be maintained in a small, right next to their house. Yes, yes, I see.

You're basically making them just comfortable enough to not complain. Yep. And thus you have accidentally created the Pokemon middle class. Slash slash the surf state. Yes. And like I got a little further where like I got a hoot hoot and he started to complain like a lot because he happened to be next to all the other Pokemon. And his complaint wasn't that he was next to the others.

His complaint is that Hoot Hoot Hoot likes a dark space. But my Charmander and my Charazard and my Venusaur and my Driflun, they're all like, I want campfires and lights everywhere. So Hood Hood was miserable. So I just chucked him off into the cave where you start the game, right? But now that means that any Pokemon that likes darkness or caves or rocks is going to end up there. And so we'll have a secondary Pokemon settlement of the cave people. Okay. I also got a

Comby, you know, early. That was one of the ones that popped up. Yeah, a combi just gives you a bunch of shit he finds on the fucking floor. And that reminded me, I was like, oh, yeah. Like, all Gen 1 jokes aside, there was a bunch of cool ones I enjoyed in, like, X and Y, because Vespequin.

Yeah, there's 300. So it's definitely more than Gen 1. Yeah, Vespequen was on my final team in that, yeah, besides, like, uh, zangoose and chestnut and, uh, throw in sock you know but no yeah

it was a you know a little start like that was I feel like the goal was implied to be rebuild the Pokemon Center and then you get your full town looking vibe right at some point that's that's gonna be the

so like after you get the slow poke there like becomes this like very involved tutorial about raising the humidity of the area oh And it's like the humidity of the area is like, okay, hit those sparkly rocks on the wall to get more water into the area. Make sure to route the water to the horsey statue that's in the back there so there's more water. Bring the trees back to life.

Plant more grass. You know, these kinds of things. You got to get this place humid. But at a certain point, the Charmander and Tarzard are going to be like, this sucks, actually. It's too humid in here. I don't like it. I need somewhere drier. So now we need to create different spaces.

So now we need to create the fire ghetto. Yes, yes, yes, right. We need the segregation of the types. Yes. It's too wet in here. It's neat, yeah, natural environments, of course. And I got a little bit of a preview of where the game is going and like the very, very, very long thing. So if you feel like it, Woolly, as soon as you start the game and get the Rock Smash, you can go look at what the game's post-game.

game content looks like. Oh, just punch your way through to it. So, you know, did you find Drifloon? No. So, you know how you're, if you're staring straight to the Pococenter, there's like a wall that you can punch through to your left. Okay. Right. If you go through there, there's a bridge that goes way off into the horizon.

And in order to cross that bridge, you need to, you need to have rock punch to pick up blocks and then build blocks down so that you can cross the bridge. and when you go to cross the bridge it says hey you you as a new player might definitely want more experience before you go to this location do you still want to go to this location okay okay and it went fuck yeah i do and it's a different zone and you walk through and the post game zone is pallet town hey and it is it is it is like four times larger than the area you start in, like from horizon to horizon. It's absolutely fucking enormous. Okay. And it is completely flat.

Yeah. Yeah. And it is like there's a mountain area in the middle, but it's like it's a giant flat space. It looks like a Minecraft man. Okay. And this is where, okay, do you have most of the decks? Do you have all the technology? Do you have everything you want to do?

Build your fucking whole society. however the Ditto Restart Civilization Yeah That's crazy Like it's absolutely It's wildly intimidating

And I wanted to check something So I left and then went to go back in And it still told me Hey man This is for much later in the game Are you sure? So until you like beat the main quest It's gonna be like

Hey, maybe you're not ready for this Maybe you should know what the fuck you're doing And what was there was also a different, multiple different poker centers that had been fallen into disrepair. Right. I wonder if there will ever be any sort of hint or explanation, or do we just leave it to

the imagination? It's probably going to be some non-sense like the ending from one of the games took place and all humanity died or something like that. Something. You know, all humanity evolved right? And joined up in the great big polka ball

light in the sky. Or you know, they reached, you know, they reached enlightenment and they became energy beings. Yeah, no, one giant Pokemon ball, but one giant Pokey ball that looked like Ray Ayonami lit up and everyone turned into light and zapped into it.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, you know, humans and Pokemon used to be, we came from the same DNA origins. But yeah, it is a good feeling, satisfying, good looking, charming, feature-rich, good music. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, a lot going for it.

And on top of that, Ditto's fucking weird and gross. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It is funny jumping into that from, just in contrast, because I was playing another high-octane game. Oh, you're playing the baby simulator.

Baby trader. Space Warlord, baby trading simulator. I watched you play that for like 10 minutes, and I'm like, I don't know what the fuck is going on. Yeah. I was absolutely baffled. So, no, so, but the difference in just like,

firing synapses is massive to the point where like you need to be in a cozy mood playing Pocopia. If I'm, depending on the mood I'm in, I might be like sleepy, you know, going through it. But for something that you can just pop on, do a little tinker in here and there, upkeep a little of this or a little of that, maybe go find a new one. And finding, finding the Pokemon is fast and easy, you know, it feels like they have a I, like, loaded in my game save, like, I streamed it, and then I just later that night. I'm like, oh, I'm going to tidy up some of the spaces.

And I loaded in, and there were like three Pokemon waiting in the tall grass because they were night Pokemon. Okay, time of day. Right, right, right. And that's... Because Pocopia uses a real-time clock. Yeah. Okay. And so ultimately, that's another part of it, too, where it's just like, oh, discovering a new one, like, it happens so often and frequently that you're like, yeah, let me pop it and go see what else is showing up.

you know, which is nice if there's 300 of them to get. So, yeah, pretty cool so far. Well done. I just, it's one of those things that the only, the only, not complaint, but like the thing I have with it is I'm like, this should have existed

years ago, right? We should, like, Pocopia should be a franchise on its third entry right now. I actually totally agree. My, my, my, you know, blue sky, character limit thoughts on Pokopia after I finished streaming it

was I think that Popopia uses Pokemon, the brand, better than Pokemon games because it's like you get to actually dive into the nitty gritty of the Pokemon

rather than them just being like move lists with a piece with a graphic. And that's also what I liked about concierge and you know this the the the, the, the, the Pokemon stuff where it's just, like, it's almost like Discovery Channel, just like straight up focusing on them themselves and, yeah, hanging out and the, the, the, the, what's the word? Whatever, biodiversity or, you know, the flora and fauna.

Like, did you, uh, did you get a move from Magikarp? Uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Splash or whatever flop. Yeah, so like Magicarp, this absolute dog shit loser motherfucker gives you the ability to, you the ability to jump and it's the best that you could possibly get. It's an absolutely vital, mandatory part of your kit. It's part of your button.

Magic harp is worthless doing it, flopping around and it's the whole tutorial is a joke, but then in the end you're like, oh, it's literally a jump. Oh, thank you, Magic Harpy. It's a platforming tool. You've finished my kit for me. I love you.

It was great. Yeah, so Copacopia, solid so far from just a little preview there. It also very much follows like the Stardu Like when I got to the Pokemon Center And they're like, you need to feed the Pokemon Center These materials I was like oh okay

This is like the community center And then I got the first Like set I did the first like cash in on the Pokemon center Do you know what the second set is? The second set of items is You need to feed me 10 of each of these farmed crops. Oh.

And I like, oh, I have seeds. And it's like, no, you must till the soil first. Yeah, okay. Actually, create society. And then the Pokey Center will return. And with it, Nurse Jenny will just be alive inside of it as it's built. Oh, I'm pretty sure Nurse Joy is like a clone or some weird shit. The Jennings are sisters.

I think the joys are freaks. Not human. Not human. Ditto all along. Oops, all Ditto. Oh, did you fall off a high place? Not yet. So when you fall off a high location, you don't take any fall damage.

But when Ditto hits the fucking ground, they deform and go and splat back into a regular Ditto. When you're crawling into the water as well, same thing. Ditto just becomes Ditto, you know, and then has to turn back into human. The game never allows you to forget that you are a human facsimile. Don't get caught up. Don't get caught up in your human form. Like you're not a person. Every time you stare at your weird face and your eyes blinking.

So I love the title, the title screen in that game is made entirely out of photos that you have taken. Because every photo I take in Pocopia is me doing a selfie with the horrible ditto face on. Just looking really unhappy, just like, eh, well, I'm like. photo bombing real Pokemon. There's something kind of like kind of wild to imagining like humans discovering an island that is running

as if people were there but they're not and it's just Pokemon. This is some fucking Yoko Taro shit, right? Like to come years later and find an island where structures and electricity and buildings are functioning and not a human

to be found is peak fucking near. Yeah, we really weren't necessary at all, were we? Aw, darn. Anyways, that was one of a couple different things. I guess I'll just, yeah, I'll jump through some other games I'll playing. I mentioned Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator. That is straight forward to the point.

you need you need it is it is you need you you need to invest you need to buy low sell high

and when you feel like life is about to take a shit on that baby you short the fuck out of it so I was I watched you do a full baby and you were like

you were clicking like oh, do you want to know about the baby's health or like baby's income? Yeah. And then you watch the life events happen and they discovered farming and they started a farm. They got a co-op. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. And it was rising, rising, rising. Yeah.

And then they got shot by a security guard breaking into a building. Yes, yes. And then the stalks and that baby crashed. Absolutely. You didn't hit any buttons and then you came away with it having made money. And I'm like, I don't know what the game was. I don't know. Like, it's it, because, because the deal, the deal is real simple, right?

If you watch, if you, if you watch stock trading and you see the things go up and then, then, then shit happens and then it goes down, it's all nothing. It's all fake. It's all bullshit. And thus, investing in the simulated lives of alien babies, as they grow to like over 150 years old, mind you. Oh, yeah. is, you know, all that's left in this space warlord economy. And, yeah, sometimes, you know, like they'll, whatever, enlisted the army or marry for love and have all these things where their stocks are going up in that baby's life. But then they'll challenge like Monsanto Corp or, you know, they'll get addicted to a substance and start abusing it horribly and fall back.

And then, oh, but they might go to rehab. and then up and then down, you know, and it's real simple. If you buy low stocks and then the baby's life improves, then the stocks go up and then you can sell when it's higher and make some cash. Sorry, is the goal to short the baby right before they get addicted to drugs? Well, shorting, yes, so the mechanic of shorting, because this is essentially the deal. I mean, if you watch the GameStop era, if you watch the Apes Together Strong Deep Fucking Value GME Chronicles, right, the Robin Hood era, it's when you believe that the things, thing you're investing in is about to take a huge shit when you think it's

about to drop off the face of the earth, right? And you are essentially buying a promise at the price that the thing is currently at and locking that in for a period of time. And if that

shit goes way, way, way lower then you make out huge. But the problem with that is if you are you don't have to actually have any money in your hand. You can just completely you can lose infinite money or you can gain infinite money.

Whereas buying a stock, usually you're like, well, I'm spending the thing I'm holding to get that. But the infinite potential of highs or lows depending on how bad it gets or how great it gets is maximum profits. Therefore, you want the baby's life to get as horrible as possible to watch your gains.

Watch your, you know, better margins, better leverage. How much effects do you have on this? Almost none. Do you judge it in any direction? No, you cannot nudge at all, and that is what makes it so difficult, right? What you can do is use the, you have basically like alien, psionic researchers that can give you a portfolio on what they think the baby's life is going to be like. And sometimes it's low accuracy for how long they're going to live, or sometimes it's high accuracy for what the floor price is going to be on them.

And the consultants will basically give you a range that you can go, hey, for 8% of the profit you make, I'll tell you what the life expectancy is of this baby. You know, and then you go, okay, sure, I'll take that. And then you know right before the time is up when to get the fuck out. Because if you are expecting the baby to make it, 150 to 170 years And then they start

Fucking joining a terrorist organization Right Then you're like Uh oh you see the heartbeat starts getting more rapid And you're like uh I don't know if there's one's gonna make it You know and if you obviously are caught holding the bag When the when the contract expires the contract being the baby

Then you lose all your money So that's bad Well this sounds Like gambling. But it's not gambling, right? Well, hold on. I'm not in a casino. It's the stock market.

No one's buying me drinks. There's no chips in my hands. What are you talking about? Okay. My mistake. This is real economy. This is real business. That's right.

It's economics. And we're bullish. We believe this is going down. You and your bareth mentality can get the fuck out of here. I'm not fucking leaving. I'm tapping that bull balls and we're we're tripling down. And so what it turns out, right?

I, so the thing is, I was approaching it, like, like, I mean, approaching it like real stocks where you're just like, I don't know, maybe now, maybe now, that seems to be a bad event. So maybe now? And it turns out that's not actually what you ought to be doing. Yeah. I played it a little bit more afterwards for myself. And there is gameplay.

And the game is? There is. there is gameplay. And the gameplay, I was, when I streamed it, was not, I kind of discovered it a little bit, but playing the Steam page for this. Playing it a bit for myself more afterwards, I discovered that the gameplay is actually a lot of reacting to the event the moment it happens and instantly buying in or selling out on the just frame, right?

So if you, if the text pops up that says something catastrophic has happened in the baby's life within the frame it pops up if you can react quickly and hit that short button you can maximize you know um there is reaction time to this which you are you are which was not a part of uh uh what i expected because real stock market i mean you can you can try to react but oftentimes everybody's reacting with their with their well that's why woolly you would get a robot you get a robot react faster than you yes do it for you yes yes Yes, you set your... Or...

You would call your friend who works adjacent to the industry and be like, what's up? Now, of course, if you don't have... If you don't have the threshold for volatility, if risk is too much, then you can set your upper and lower limits so that when you automatically hit an upper point, it'll just sell out. Or if you automatically hit it.

You can hit, you can hit triggers. You can hit floors and triggers on the way up and on the way down. Now you're investing. Yeah, yeah, right? So you can put in a stop order that says, all right, I don't care what's happening. If it goes lower than this, get me the fuck out. You know? So you can use the robots to absolutely control and tighten the situation up.

But in the game, in the video game, what I discovered after streaming was just frame reactions is actually. how you are meant to win and how you're meant to play. And the faster you can read whether it was a good event or a bad event and go, ah, the better you do. And then, of course, you know, when you get, when things go horribly wrong, you've got a loan shark that can, you know, for at risk of your life, that can loan you some money to dig you out of a hole. And the great thing is that like you're playing as, you're not just playing as yourself, but you're playing as the investors at the terminal that they're investing in. And they're all different characters with different lives that are horribly fucking just the most

ultra-liberal nightmare, right? One motherfucker is a ghost that is already dead and their life is tethered. And they're like, ah, now that I'm dead, I finally am free to play the stocks the way I want to without this mortal coin. being in the way, you know? Like, it is, it is, it's crazy, you know? And, I mean, even when you do, like, the first character, it's like, you do well at, like, the ending paragraph of, of, like, their successful run is, as the lights blink, as the police

are pulling you away, you look back at the size of the boat you got and feel a sense of joy before you get shoved in the back of the wagon. You know? And the size of the boat you got is, it is like, that's your end. is like how much how good do you feel about the boat you got as you're being arrested 100% of the time Oh, I'm looking at I'm looking at this lone shark guy. He's like a T-Rex and it says debt, bailout and 10 grand, however, but next time he gets to kill you. Yes, yes. And when he does, you get a nice big prompt that says legally murdered. You know, so that's hilarious and such.

But I bring this all to you with a fair warning while I was playing the game. I texted you about this. It crashed. And when it crashed and I booted it back up, the save file was corrupted and it did not allow me to continue playing the game. When I went to click continue, it just kicked me back to the main menu. And when I clicked, there was no new, excuse me, new game, you were just stuck. So the game completely just stopped working. That, like, the A-class fucking, you know, unship-it level failure.

And I was able to solve it by going to the save, fold, finding the safe folder and deleting the actual save and, you know, doing it that way. And I'm just reminded how it fucking, it's so, annoying that like steam games, because everything's all over the place, saving is not universal, whereas on consoles it is. No, it's actually quite complicated. Right. Some saves are in your documents.

Some saves are in your app data folder. Some saves are in the game Steam apps folder. Whatever the fuck they want to do, they do. Some games are in Steam Steam apps folder in documents, but they're all labeled by number, and they're actually attached to the Steam Cloud Save Cows. So if you want to delete the saves, you actually have to load the game online, then go offline, then delete the saves, then go back online and make a new save. Because God forbid you start up the new save after deleting the files and then it updates with the cloud and then you lose what you just did, right? It's horrendous. It's dog shit. It's awful. It's completely not user friendly. And consoles have this over steam by fucking leaps and bounds and miles.

like when you go manage your save data on any system. It's, that's the game. There's the save. There's the date that it updated. Upload or not, delete, whatever. And simple save data management is just something that after all this time, PC Steam can't still can't fucking figure out. It would be really nice if games, if there was a, like, hey, come on,

can you save the save games in the God, in the fucking folder that the fucking game is in? Yeah. Please. Like, you still have to jump through hoops to figure out exactly what save your thing is, because let's see you have more than one. Some games have saves that are options. Some games have multiple save files that are like, each slot is a different one. You never know, right?

Again, it's handled differently. So you still have to go digging for the right file. But if it at least universalized the save data location, it wouldn't be as bad. But it's fucking awful. So in the end, I managed to do that. And then I ran it back and then it worked and it was okay. but that is absolutely fair grounds to refund that game. If anyone,

I'm like, I'm willing to anti-recond this if you can run into a situation where the game crashes and then if you're not willing, because I'm willing to go deal with the files and bullshit, but if you're not, then your game just stops working. Every time I have to find a save file,

I literally go to the PC gaming wiki. Yeah. Because it's faster than looking around for it. Yeah, or you run into the fucking discussion forums, you know? and it's not something we're uninstalling and reinstalling the game makes a difference

because your save file is not connected to that. You uninstall the game, you reinstall it, the cloud re-puts, you know, re-downloads your save

and it's still corrupted and the game still doesn't work. So something, even a clean wipe does not fix the situation. So, Space Warlord... That sounds like you had fun with that.

Space Warlord Baby Training Simulator was a whole lot of fun and then it wasn't. Kind of like, day trading. Kind of like. You know, it truly, in fact, and the fact that the game stopped working for a while, it's almost like they took the shirt off my back, you know?

The true Wall Street experience. We are not all going to make it. A congressional hearing has been held. You may not day trade until the saves are rectified. I did, you know, Reggie was asking, though. He's like, is there any accounts that we can follow, though, to like simplify this baby trading? And I was like, well, yeah, I mean, you know, space Pelosi can fucking, you just, you just, you follow that and your shit's through the roof, you know, you don't even have to make decisions anymore, really. Anyway.

But how do they know? I think just being in Washington gives you just an intuition. Space Washington, police. Space Washington. Being in space, you got to keep, you got to keep the gimmick consistent. Yes, of course. Well, what else are we talking about? What, Earth? Earth doesn't exist anymore.

Of course we're talking about Washington Orion's Belt. You know. Thank you. And, yeah, being out there just gives you an intuition for the way that the market fluctuates. It's simple. So, so, that was baby trading simulator. And, and I mean. Playing those two games back to back must have been some fucking whiplash.

The whiplash is insane. The whiplash is insane. And like the newscaster that's talking about how the market is crashing and how baby trading is the only thing like that he's getting off the table to fucking scream at the TV about why you need to short the babies and how regulations ruined everything. Of course it has, man. Like, come on. Yeah, good, good, good times there. Good times. Okay, so a couple other things this week.

The, yeah. So I had a time popping in Neo 3. That game is really good. And when my son goes to school, I'll finally play the rest of it. It's great. It is really nice. Really good. Yeah, it's really nice to feel just the way, the end wave of the quality of life that's been occurring for probably a decade now.

The menus just go and go and go. But also, you will find yourself drowning in the subsystems. And this is what it is to come later to a Neo game, you know, to find yourself at the life cycle that the previous two have won through. I finally get what people are talking about when they're like, don't worry about this, this, and that until later. because like there are like you know the for example neo three has the randomized loot right and it's like and now now that it will allow me to auto equip shit based on like defense yes i can finally see

what they're talking about and what it is is a one or two percent difference in my light attack stamina use doesn't mean shit compared to five more defense yeah and if you you don't care about like dealing because you know soul's game you pick up some armor after you getting through getting through an area and it's like you randomly drops and you go oh shit and it's a big deal to suddenly have your whole look be different and then have this massive change in your stat or whatever the case is you know yeah um but in this you're just fucking grabbing purple pink fucking blue whatever all the different rarities and um and and as you're Well's good. That's what it means. And as you're grabbing it, like, the fact that it comes flying out of the corpse and you're just mashing the button, it's like, okay, you can make an option to just automatically have that fly into you. And then... Which I did. Yeah.

And then when you go to your equipment, you pick what role do you want? We'll give you the best in slot for the role you're looking for. Do you want your equip load at medium? Okay, B or higher. Yeah. So what I did is I had it automatically fly in a moment. character and then I had it automatically set to B roll for samurai, A role for ninja, right? And then I set up an option that's pretty deep in there. You probably didn't even see it yet,

which is, I want you to just fucking dismantle every single white rarity item in the game the instant you hit a fucking shrine. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I will never like, because you play it for a couple hours and then you're like, oh, I'm never. equipping a fucking white item ever again. Yeah. And I can imagine the final layer of this is, and at the end of whatever background calculations you're doing automatically, put this glamour on and never change it. Yes, that is exactly it. Right?

So you're like, I have my look. Glamour unlocks or did you even pick the fucking item up at all? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you have your glamored final look and then you're just eating stuff. that changes as you play the game. So now people will say, and they're correct, that the games have had multiple of these features in the past, and they totally have.

But the one that ties it all together is just fucking put me at medium roll now. Like that means I went from playing Neo2, where I was doing like half hour, no, 10 minutes of inventory management after each level. to fucking nothing at all outside of me doing the first big, big mega dungeon and going, some of these demon weapons have unique moves on them. I will put this one on because I want to learn the unique move. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

Not even talking about the familiarity, but you then get into the whole, like, exactly setting the slots of each move what you want it to be. And then on top of that, you, the fact that I can go in and be like, you know what, I'm hitting this crucible and I'm hitting it a little underleveled because... Oh, the crucible? The cruish. The cruciable. That's how you say it.

I'm hitting this cruche a little bit under leveled because I'm LPing and I'm trying to move things forward, right? So what I probably would have done was on my own time was run around the first area and like, you know, see what every corner had and clean it up before we hit this. But in this case, I didn't do that. So I'm going in and I'm getting one combo fucking wiped out by the bigger enemies. Okay. Well, I'm stuck in here for now. So fair enough. Thankfully, at each one of these bonfires, the re-spec is free.

Instantly free. So, like, free with an item. Like, hit the fucking fill three button. That's it. So I'm like, yeah, never mind, actually. I'm going to pull my points out of strength and put it into deck so I can hit harder with my, into skill so I can hit harder with my Kisari Gamma. And then that'll help me push past some of these harder enemies, you know?

Just change your build on the fly between bonfires as needed with no drama associated for maximum fun. And it's like the characters, the challenges, the bosses, the move sets, that's all, it's going to be hard enough. You're going to be challenged by the shit you're coming up against, you know? Like, they're going to rock you. They're going to exhaust you. You're going to get your stamina broken and you're going to get ripped in half.

So like, yeah, make your build, use your points to the best of your ability. And if you also want to press R3 to get your soul gems out of your pocket and add just the amount you need to get the next level. To get to one level up. Phenomenal stuff. So Neo3 is really, really just feels smooth through all of that. And every edge sanded. And I haven't even seen what it's like to get back. I don't even know if a blacksmith is still a thing in this game or not.

Oh, yeah. But I'm assuming so because, yeah, there's a whole lot of blacksmith shitting that you do. So the primary use of the blacksmith is to fully smooth out a part of the game that you don't even really realize at the point you're at to smooth out. And that is, I would like to use a cassarigama. I have not gotten a pretty good cassarigama in a while. I'm going to feed the parts of all this bullshit I picked up into the blacksmith, and they will use the recipe to make the best kusari gama I have. I will now have a leveled blue or whatever appropriate kusari gama that will carry me until I get the next one off of a drop. Phenomenal stuff.

And as somebody who hates dealing with percentages below 10 in anything. I think 10 is the minimum. I think 10 is the absolute single digit percentages. I hate dealing with them. I want the lowest percentage I see to be 30. I'm telling you. Like I'm like and I'm most willing to forgive it when we're talking about crit because crits are crazy.

But most things when you're telling me that I get a two to seven percent, fuck off with that, right? So as someone who doesn't give a shit about any of that and we'll just completely ignore it. And who wants to just use the move set against the end. enemies and enjoy the combat for what it is. It's nice that this is here. It's background and it's as engaging or as limited as you want it to be.

Knowing that the strength of these games can be either the person who is struggling through but has an amazing set that can just let them eat hits and fuck up and drink and get back in there and you've got the ammo to bow and arrow everyone from a distance. and you know, like you just don't engage because you've systemed it, the encounter down, or to get in there and then use your perfect pulsing and perfect ninja parries and perfect dodging to cleanly fight through, you can take that approach as well. And like, I'm obviously like I like that part.

So automate the rest, please, you know? I think one of the complaints people had is that they had weapons that like Kasarama and they're like, oh no, Kassaragama is a ninja weapon now. that means I lose like half the stance moves, right? The ninja shit has so much going on with it that I don't, I don't miss the stances. And also there's now like a shit ton of weapons.

I mean, I bought the high and low stance, you know, for samurai mode. But I spent most of my time in ninja mode. The ability. It's very good. It's so much, yeah. One, you're staying higher on stamina, right? It's more efficient. Two, you've got the recovery...

You're faster. You're faster. You've got better defensive options for dodging, for rolling out. And then in the Kassarigama's case, it was the tech move that used your meter was a front flip that like damages and crosses up the enemy. And then you end in an air combo state, you know, behind them. So I'm like, oh, that's phenomenal for a big boss wind up. I'm like, yeah, fuck you. I'm spending the meter to get through you, you know?

You know, I have a, this is a very, very aside, but like tons of games have crit. And like certain games like hitting 100% crit is just like, oh my God, that's, I did it. Right. Like, you know, somebody in the chat said a 4% crit chance in like Hades 2 can like win you the game. Right. And I'm reminded of my favorite crit system of any game I've ever played and it's Warframe. So in Warframe, crit goes from zero to 100%. and if you get 100%, you get a yellow crit,

which does more damage than the normal hit. But if you get the crit from up to 200%, you can get an orange crit. And if you get it to 300% crit, you get a red crit. And at 4%, you get a red crit that has a bigger number at an exclamation point. And then at 400%, it has two exclamation points. And then at 600%, it's 3 exclamation points.

and it's like listen because you can get like a hundred percent crit within like an hour of playing the game so fuck it it'll just scale it'll just scale infinitely and how much do you want and the text just grows

the text grows and that's it more exclamation point amazing the game does that with status too or it's like do you have 900% status we're just going to start stacking the status multiplicatively on the enemy simultaneously hell yeah

Um, one of my favorite thing, crit things recently was I had a build, I had a cat in Mugenics that had a, uh, uh, the ability to, um, every time, it had an overpower ability. So you can, so it had like a, uh, what was it? Increased chance of crit. I put some items on that basically made it like, um, more or less guaranteed as long as it attacked in a straight line. It had like horse blinders on. Um,

it had a ability that made, it stupid. It took intelligence points off its stats and put all those points into strength. So every less point of brain went into more strong punch. And then it had an ability that was every point over, um, kill that you kill something with. Every overkill point. Every overkill point. It causes an explosion of the corpse to damage everything around you according to the overkill points. Oh, that's a good one. so you kill a fly with 70 damage on a single punch and 69 of that damage is exploding into the surrounding enemies. It was so fucking cool.

Phenomenal stuff. So yeah, good crit feels good. All this to say. Yeah, Neo's great. And whatever the fuck is happening with the story and the Tokungawa's and the dead. Yeah. So, hey, I'm actually going to call that a big, like, I'm going to say, and I know a lot of people who love Tecmo CoA and Omega Force will shit on me for it,

I have played a fair amount of TecmoCoA Omega Force games. And they have a really hard time making their stories like interesting because they, they have limited themselves to like a batch of years or even fantasy years that is so strong. ricked. Like, there is like a 100 year period in Japanese history that they have put like in fucking games. Okay, so there's a bunch of states. You see these states?

Guess what? They're warring. They're warring. They're roaring. All right. You know? Now, what's funny is that as somebody points out, Omega Force made Pocopia, but that's the Dragon Quest Builders guys.

Like, I, like, I've played Toakiden and some of the dynasty warriors. and you've played the fucking Zelda Warriors and like, it's all, it's, it's the, it's the fucking John Romero, it's pornography story analogy for video games. It's like that guy's there because he's a cool historical guy with a stag helmet, and then later you can fight him as a boss because that's cool. I mean, the commitment to even telling a human Japanese, like,

a nation origin story is like, at this point, you could just go full demon Armageddon like plot. It doesn't have to be at all related to Nobunaga or Tokugawa or any of the three. I finished like my second, I think it was a demo stream of Neo 3 and was asking people who had played more of the demo

and then I played way more of the game. Like, why did I travel back in time? Like, why did that happen? because your character doesn't speak or ask anyone about it and the cat that goes with you just goes huh weird and like that's it and it's like all I could think it was like cuz because it's cool

I don't know time periods all I know is that you got your little your little fuzzy animal buddies your little your spirit stand furry creatures and they are from another realm but they're heavily invested in Japanese politics. They're big on it. They're super invested.

They're dedicating their lives to the outcomes of who's going to take over and be this first showgun. Anyway, it's all what-evs. But, you know, as long as you see Hattori Hanzo doing cool shit, I'm like, hey, there he is. That fucker does Azuna drops. He rules. And you mean his grandpa and you think it's a different guy, but it is a different guy. and then you meet your own grandpa and you're the little cats like that's your grandpa and I'm like who but I'm black no no listen that's your grandpa it's fine it's fine it is fine um anyway yeah neo3 fucking fucking shit

yeah it kicks ass it's a good ass video game to fucking play I only had one real like actual complaint which is I'm a map scraper I like to scrape the map um and the game like really strongly incentivizes it by like if you if you scrape the map a little it gives you like the points to go scrape more and then it goes no okay now here's the here's the couple of things you missed right and so I scraped the map and I have like and that's all I had done so fucking over level like full 15 fucking levels above any new zone like I'm level 40 something and the next story zone is 20 oh wow okay okay Yeah. Like it's extreme.

My, for me, my only complaint, and it's just, it's not like a generalized one. It's just a personal thing is, I don't need that much small little consumable futzing beneath the under the engine. Oh, dude, I haven't used a single one. I don't need the, like, under the hood, you know, the amount of things, because you've got your Omio Magic and you've got your Yin and Yang placement. Rechargeable Omniomagic. You've got your soul cores, and then, you know, you've got an addition, and then you pick your, your animal, and then your animal is also your DT. And, like, that's a simple, you know. They just never remove a system.

It's just, like, it's all just, it's all just, it's all just, it's insane. Yeah, you, you feel like you're, it does feel like a mobile game, you know, menu. Oh, you know what? Is running underneath your, your soul's character. You, you want to talk about using the whole buffalo. and grandpa systems. So the other thing about Neo3, and I'm not going to even call it a complaint

because I think they're doing what they need to be doing is the setting is the setting, and the setting does take place an facsimile of a time in a real place, which means that Neo3 levels sure do look a lot like certain Neo2 levels, which sure look a lot like certain Neo1 levels. Zipangu.

So in the bottom, left corner of the first map, which there are four, I think. So that open world you're seeing is like one quarter. There's a cave. And I'm going through the cave and I'm like, wow, this reminds me a lot of that cave from Neo 1 and that cave from Neo 2. Like a lot, like architecturally, gameplay-wise, color palette, etc.

And then I got to the end of the cave and I fought the fucking Batgirl from the psycho crusher. It's literally the exact same life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, they are, they are, no, fucking, like, from software will like fucking throw a different, like, model on it, but keep all the animation rigging, like the, the tree spirit shit.

Here it's like, nah, fuck it. It's hero, it's Hino Enma. It's the bat girl. She doesn't have a cutscene. Okay, so at some point, look, I look forward to the fight on a boat with a giant demon in the docks level that surely will be in Neo3 wherever that is. But yeah, yeah, that's fine. You know, I got no issue with that.

I am curious to see if like, you know, after all this time and quality, wherever the fuck the end of this game's life cycle of quality of life ends up being. There's two DLCs coming. Mm-hmm. But doing that. Probably going to be open world maps. I wonder if. That's right.

These are going to be sick. Just to run around. Yeah, it is kind of crazy to just have a giant thing and not like these linear, not even linear, not even linear, but smaller dungeon levels, right? Because it used to be essentially legacy dungeons where each area. Yeah, now this has legacy dungeons. There are, like, you go to it. Like, there's a little island on the west side of the map that it's like,

it's got a special gimmick and it's a self-contained little zone. It's got that legacy dungeon feel, but they are smaller. But then there's the crucible. I wonder if we're going to see at some point just because this is how things happen. Neo 4, Williams Return. Well, William was in, too. The Engine Man. What's he up to?

What's going on? I don't know. Who knows? I don't know. But I feel like, you know, like, yeah, you've had your fun with your creative character. It's so fucking weird. Because Neo 1 is the only character that your main guy speaks. and so like that game has way more character than its sequels because William's a guy yeah yeah will he

what that white boy doing what's he what's he up to most interesting level in comparison of all the neo games that i have seen anyway is the first level of neo one where you're breaking out of the tower of london and all the weapons are like british arms and armor and the armor is british yes yes and you put that shit in your box. That's super weird. And everything that you... Compared to the Zipengu. And everything that you pick up in the London area,

you put in your box and you pull it out when you're in Zipangu, and then you fight like a Britman and Souls character across your Japan game. Just in case you needed British armor. Yeah. In any case. So Neo3 is great. Oh, the other thing about how big the game is,

and if it's easier if you scrape it, It also has massive. The game starts on new game plus plus energy. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. Okay. I,

like it's actually secretly Diablo. It's not a soul's game. It uses souls controls, but it's actually Diablo where you're beating the game and then you're running it on Nightmare, then Inferno, then Inferno 2, then Inferno 3,

then double nightmare. Mm-hmm. Well, I'm curious, like, is there a in the arms race between difficulties and builds you know do you can you get to the point of one swing one shot a boss you know does that even there's a paradise you could because i'm like does that exist in neo i know it exists in other games i i don't know if neo can get to that point you know it can i'm going to guess it does and then you go up a difficulty and your

Like, we expected you to walk in here with that build. Here's some new shit. We have noticed you've one shot all the bosses. So a new dynamic difficulty has been prepared for you. Like, Neo has New Game Plus existing as an arms race of its own mechanical systems. Okay, the bosses now have infinite life. However, if you kill them fast enough, then they'll die. The Bridget doesn't kick in.

Yeah. All right, all right. So that's good That's good Also this week I took a look On my own time At Slay the Spire 2

Yeah I also played Slay the Spire 2 Okay It's good It's good It's good It's It's Slay the Spire 1

But prettier So I was playing it And I was like Because I've only played A little bit of Slay the Spire 1 right And I was like I'm liking this

a lot more, but I legitimately could not tell you what is actually different. Interesting. It really just feels like a prettier, shidier version of the first game. The models have, you know, some nicer animation going on, and that's about it. And what I'll say is I enjoyed the first one, so it was very enjoyable. Oh, there's a co-op mode? Okay, I haven't really to check that that out. player co-op, which I will never play.

Okay. And yeah, the time has new characters. The timeline stuff that unlocks and as you do events and stuff is like a cool little like progression thing. I really like how so many of those photos are like

a child's crayon drawings. Yeah. Yeah. They're made in paint. Like as plays older. I love it. But what I guess I'll say is like I, Was hoping that the sequel game with all its success would, like, add a bit more animation, you know, to things? So I actually have an answer for that.

One of the reasons some of these games decide to go with a specifically, like, not low fidelity, but a simpler art style, is so that it is easier for. for people to make mods that integrate into that art style. Right. And also... And it's also easier to just make more shit. And exactly. You add cards, add cards, add cards, right? And the game is totally fine without any of that.

I mean, of course, it's just the thought of like, well, we know the project was super successful, so the hope would just be like a little bit of extra flare on that. Because it is true that, like, you know, sometimes in fights you'll get things like a special, like a familiar will show up next to you or your floating sword or all these little things that modify the actual fight. But it's really nice when you're playing like another similar type of game, let's say Darkest Dungeon, right? Yeah. Where each attack, each thing you're doing, you have a nice big like, uh, impact to it. There's a cool visual associated with the stuff. And with the cards, there's a lot of different cards. So it would get hard to juggle all that.

I don't know if I actually want there to be a different animation that matches to each card in what it says it does. Huh. But I do know that I'm looking at my own stream of the Ironclad. I would prefer more than the one swinging animation. Yeah, I would love... However, early access. Yeah. But to be faithful to the first game, that's how it was.

was too, right? Like, it was just one, like, the animations were nothing. It was just the cards you're playing. With a, the animations, it's a card game. And then, you know, there's a visual backdrop that has a little bit of like representation of what the cards are doing. But I would love

if the cards you played resulted in those attacks actually having an associated visual with them. Or even like slightly more. I know that. Silent has two animations. for their attacks.

But like Regent has won. You're sitting on the chair and... And I was like, I could go with... Maybe like just different sparkle. Yeah. Or like maybe some effect coming off this card. And I would never think of this the first time I'm playing that first game because I'm like, well, this is a brand new thing doing...

I don't know. It doesn't know how big it's going to be, how successful. Yeah. But this time around with time and budget and planning. and stuff. I kind of am just like, ah, more sauce. A little more sauce, please. Well, I mean, right now when I'm looking at it, I'm like, well, maybe if it does okay, if Slay the Spire 2 does okay, which according to early numbers, it is one of the most successful

games of all time, maybe they will have time during the early access period to add a a little bit more juice. And you know what? I will even say, like, if it's too much to create these unique animations per card, per character and such, even just letting the card itself do the thing, you know? That's kind of a trick that, like, a lot of the collectible card games like Roon Terror and Artstone do. So, like, let's take Ironclad whirlwind, right?

Yeah, yeah. Like, there's an effect where the character stabs five times, and then there's an effect on the screen where there's, like, wind going. like you could have the card physically spin. And the World Wind comes, you know, or Lava shoots out of the car. Like, let the card do the thing. If the card is the blade, you know, and I have no, that could be a super cool, elegant way to put the work on the card and not all into the character. But the point is, is that that's the only thing is like, I'm enjoying this, but it does feel like more sauce would be really cool and make it more enjoyable.

Now, that being said, I am enjoying it more than I did Slay the Spire. one right away and I played Slay the Spire 1 when it was done compared to this was an early access and I don't know why I think the cards are snappier and I think I think I'm better at card games than I was I think I think the pastures like style thing I think you've exposed yourself and learned a bit more and perhaps this time around it makes more sense well because when I played Slay the Spire won the first time I picked up every single card that was available and then my my decks became unplayable piles of shit. And then people were like, no, Pat, don't

pick up every card. So then I did multiple runs in which I picked up zero cards and failed. I'm like, oh, I understand. And this is where we first had the conversation about deleting cards being good. And you were like, I don't get it. And then we kind of went over the idea of

predictability and, you know, trimming the fat. Yeah. And then now I'm like, oh, I want to get cards that set me up and I just want to avoid cards that don't feed into whatever setup I'm going for. That's exactly it. However, it costs money

to delete cards, so it's not an easy thing to do. You have to spend money to trim or to add, you know? You can do a build that involves just adding to your deck and get good cards enough to make it through and win, by the way. You don't actually have to cut

cards. Here's the problem, and I discovered this when I played Rune Terra. I like mill decks. Like, I like decks. That's a term for just adding and adding and adding. A mill deck is you're you're milling through your deck and that you were just adding just a fucking million fucking cards. Okay. To your deck. Okay. Mm-hmm. I fucking love it. I love adding a million cards to my deck in specifically my hand. So like there's when I was playing regent there was, uh, I accidentally

stumbled upon, no, not, not Regent. I, uh, the silent. I stumbled upon a, that's not what Mill is? I guess I'm stupid. Um, I stumbled on a fill your fucking hand with cards build. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Draw, where I up to my sheds. Draw, draw six cards off of one card. No, it wasn't even that. It was like you upgrade your shivs and then I got the ability that was turn every card in your hand into a shiv. Oh yeah. Okay, exactly. Yeah. I have, yeah. Um, the other character I forgot was like, um, I had a card that's like turn every card into a rock, right? Um, and then upgrade the rock so that this. Oh, yeah. So that it's Rocks Plus.

And now I've just got like fucking 22, 22, 22 problem solved. Oh, Mill is to toss into graveyard. I actually also like that. Okay. That's the deep deck from Runterra. Sure. So I guess I do like Mill decks. Or you can go for heavy exhaust where you're like,

you've got a card that's going to exhaust as much as possible. And then you've got a card that's going to benefit from as much exhausted cards you have, you know. And even that is, decent because you're like, okay, well, it's gone for the rotation of the, of the rest of the, the battle. Yeah. So you're ultimately trimming the fat that way too, you know. Yeah, there was a, there was a set of conditions I saw with silence where it was like, throw a card away when you use this. I'm like, why the fuck would I ever want to throw away a card? And then I started to see cards that were like, play this card for fucking free. If you throw it away. I'm like, oh, okay. Yes. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. All right. Or it plays itself from the exhaust pile once you've played it. you know. The thing that Slay the Spire, though, has that, and both, and the second game does, that is, like, surprisingly weird about it is it's a very quiet game without much, not even just the sauce part now. Like, the overall fanfare is very... It's very ambiance. Yeah. You have a map, you click the map, the fight starts, you play your cards, you beat the monster, you go back to the map. you go back to the map.

It's not ambabastic. It's made for just fucking running. Yeah, you know? And I mean, there's games that are made for running. You can fucking roll through doors and shoot shit and fucking enter the gungeon and a bunch of these indie games and stuff at the time.

But yeah, it's just like very much like, all right, we quietly move up this map. We beat the big thing and the big thing kind of dies quietly too and then we move to the next. And it's It's a very restrained game, you know? But all that said, cards are fun. So, you know, the cards are the high priority here.

And it's, again, I have not seen enough to see, like, the newest parts of it. Because so far early on, unlocking, you know, the previous characters and playing similar builds to before, it does just feel like a shinier version of one. I'm waiting to see mechanically what's different. I really, really like the two new characters. Regent is a ton of fun. I like a secondary mechanic, but also the Necrobinder and Ostee. Did you play a run with her?

What did I get? She's the fourth character. She is skeleton. Unlocked her, I didn't do a run yet. Okay, so Necrobinder's mechanic is that you always start with Ostey, the hand, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. the bone hand. Okay. As a second character on your screen.

And Ostee starts with one HP. Okay. And Ostee will always take damage first. Oh, interesting. And her special tag is summon. And it's summon and then a number. And any summon that you add will add to Ostees HP. And Ostee will also gain an HP every turn.

And Oste's attack cards scale with their HP. So he's your, he's your, he's your, he's your, he's your attack and defense. Okay, okay. And so if you put block on you, the damage goes through your block first and then hits Austi and then hits you. Okay, okay. So you're just, you're just building up like this big fucking summon that takes all your hits for you.

And so I had a build where, like I had, I had, I had, austy attacks that scaled with Osti's HP after I buffed him up. But then he had a bunch of zero card attacks. And then he had attacks that were, free if Austie had already attacked that round. Yeah, zero cost. Let's go. Love that shit.

It was awesome. Super cool. It's interesting to see the sequel that like kind of goes so safe by the what was there before. Yeah, this is a sequel sequel. This is a invalidation sequel.

Yeah, yeah, this is a tech end. This is a replacing the previous entry. Whereas I just mentioned Darkest Dungeon, but there's a game where you're like, oh, this is a different video game for the sequel. You know, we're doing, we're changing up the formula entirely and, you know, whether you, you like it or not, like, you, you're not playing the same game here. Um, and yeah, I think, I think you can always find a happy medium or a place to explore new ideas, but, um, in any case, I, I enjoyed it, and I think I'll, you know, click back every now and then. Um, oh, same here, yeah. But it's a, it's a quiet

little, quick little run, you know. It's very clean. Yeah, we'll see where that goes. Offstream as well. I also... I am a bit annoyed that the game's main, like, huge, like, oh my God, feature is something but I just don't give a shit about at all.

Like, I'm not the biggest co-op person in general. Oh. But, like, a card game is something for me to play at 1.30 in the morning. morning before I go to get bed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's not a feature I'm going to give a fuck about, absolutely. So, yeah, there was that.

Something else I played off stream as well was the... I'll get to my week, relax. Yeah, yeah. No, we're going to get through these, and then we've got to take a break because I've got to feed this dog. And then we'll get to your real week. And then I have my slop discussion. I played a bit of Vampire

Crawlers The demo Did you do you play that I did yeah I talked to you about it last week Yeah we so we went yeah Yeah it's To move the fucking camera Yeah

I was Now I've had more time to think about it I don't like it as much as vampire survivors I was bored I didn't get far enough in I was bored I have to be real I played it

Yeah I went through I was bored I found the pacing of it was just like it was slower and I get what's going on but it wasn't really I just you get to the fight you pull the card up

you took the thing like I'm like yeah this is I don't know it wasn't grabbing me um each encounter almost being an the fact that it wasn't encounter like if I'm playing vampire Survivors obviously you just sit there and shit just

fucking happens but I'm down for the version of this, which is, no, no, no, crawl around the dungeon, get into a fight and, like, fight the thing. But it wasn't, I don't know. I just, it wasn't kind of fun enough. It was cueing up the attacks and wiping through the enemies as they were there and then going to the next one. And I was kind of like, I'm fighting, I'm going deeper into the thing. And I was kind of just getting bored of the, you know, the progression. I don't know. I think the progression needs to be faster. Yes, way faster. So, it feels like, So the card system is slower than the move of your character system.

So, like, to me, vampire survivors started when I got my first evolution, right, ever. Like, I think it was the blood whip, which was very early. And then I was like, ooh, the dopamine. And I did get an evolution when I was playing the demo. It was the Santa Water Evolution. Okay. Which made a huge difference. and I just started flying fucking through that shit.

Okay. But it is slower. I have a feeling that it has the same exact ramp that vampire survivors does, but I think it starts more slowly. There is, though, a difference. And I think that as a dungeon crawler, it's accurate to this because you're moving and aiming through these corners and picking fights. But the stop and start of picking fights reminds me.

of what I hated in high agro RPGs with random battles of like there is a pacing break every time and then all go go go play play all play all play all play all all all all all all all all all all all all all all all right where's the next one same couple of enemies it's a couple bats play all play all play all all all all all

and like I'm like I either let me just roll through this as a smooth like they're here they're dead. We move on. Or, oh my God, I'm dying back up. Like, let that kind of play out in that way. Because, you know, in vampire survivors, that's, you're not having a start and stop encounter. Now you're in the fight. Now you're out of the fight. Here's the next group of bats. And that little pace break for something that is ultimately, you're throwing the Bible, the bats die, the bats die, the bats die, whatever, makes it feel more tedious. Something I didn't really think about at all when you're just kind of like walking forward. and, you know, like, oh, maybe back off a little bit

because the bats are coming too fast. I don't know. It just, it didn't hit a point. And maybe I got to put more time in to see a nice big combo explosion and get the feeling of, like, you know, ripping through the enemies. But the walking around and picking fights and starting and stopping of the, and that's part of the genre, felt too tedious to me.

It just made me kind of stop. I yawned a little bit and was like, okay, I think I'm done here. You know, after unlocking a couple characters. So we'll see But at the same time I didn't enjoy persona Q You know I played a

I bought that I don't care for entry in obviously Yeah I bought that and went through it and I was and you know Made the thing and then you got you make the map and then you kind of discover and I was like oh Yeah this is this is kind of boring to me too Unfortunately and you know I like the pieces of what's going on here but I never finished it because I just, I got too bored and it was too tedious.

So, like, that's another example of something where I'm like, maybe it's the genre of crawling and encountering fights in this way? I would be interested to see how you reacted with something like Eye of the Beholder 2 or something like that, but those games no longer exist. They haven't been made in decades. Well, the one that's in UFO 50 was a lot of fun.

There's a dungeon crawler in UFO. O50 that was great. I forgot what it was called, but I enjoyed that. The main thing is that like dungeon crawling in that like perspective has been like, it's been dumped down to basically fighting and exploring. And it removes the third part, which is puzzle solving and the fourth part, which is interacting with the environment. So if you play like a very old TSR, like Dungeons and Dragons game of that nature, like I have the Beholder or something like that, there's complicated puzzle layouts, there's the old D&D system, there's clicking on hidden pieces of walls, invisible walls,

teleport, you know, all sorts of stuff like that. The Rimrock games did stuff like that as well. Whereas in Etrient Odyssey, I got the feeling, and Strange Journey. It's like you fucking move around the environment and fucking fight. So in UFO 50, I think Valbrace was the name of the game. And you are, you know, one, you're like, you have this kind of little punchout sort of a thing to it that's cool, right? With the fight. So obviously, it's nice to be able to see your character and dodge and move and attack.

But you're also, it's because it's a shorter game and things are tighter, it felt like you were having, you know, your encounters were more varied. you'd run into different enemies more often, as a result of the game being much shorter. And I think if I ran into, you know, 20 bats, and then eventually I got to the grasshopper and the skeletons, it would have been more tedious and I would have enjoyed it less. And if that's how these kind of games tend to go, then, yeah, it does just...

Oh, wow, Valbrace is like way more. I'm watching it now. Like, wow, this is way more about what I was talking about. Okay. Like, a true honesty. Yeah, you're picking your targets. Each enemy has different ways to do. Defense is a thing you have to pay attention to and what to target, what to hit, and how.

It's great. It's really, really cool, you know? But vampire survivors or crawlers, rather, right now represents just like the bad part of it to me. And so I hope that gets better and improves, or at the very least, speeds the fuck up and, you know, lets you just kind of like get going with it. So anyway, yeah, that was that. A couple other things, but do you want to take that break now first? Yeah, I got to feed this dude. All right, beerby.

This dog is hungry. And when he gets hungry, he attacks me. Oh. He's very strong. Whoa. All righty. So, yes. Next, and this is, I guess, all part of a larger discussion here.

I decided to check out. zero parades. Oh, good. So that I could see what was going on. Zero parades for Dead Spies by Zahum. Check this out off camera as well. And it is an interesting thing. It's definitely interesting.

It's an interesting thing to look at this. Because it, it, yeah, it gives me, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, this game. that is you know the history of it so you know what energy you're going to take going in. But as you're playing it, so we talked about it before, you mentioned, you can see the parts where, hey, look, this is the exact room from Disco Elysium you remember. Here's the part where you walk outside and there's a boat by the side and you have a conversation with a dude on a boat off to the left.

And here's the rooms and the scenes and the moments and here's the closed studio that's all in the dark over here and all the little bits of disco that are echoing something that you're already familiar with, right? And that's all there and you're like, okay, you can see what cleanly is just lifted and, hey, do you remember this thing? Please like what you're getting here. We're trying to remind you of the thing you liked. Please, please enjoy it, right? But then outside of that you go, okay, so what else is happening? You have a setting that's, you know, being established with, you know, the world and the politics, the different factions. They're all taking you on these journeys as they're establishing what each thing is. The character you're playing as is the spy that's a fuck up and is more self-serious than Harry is. But overall, you're going through this presentation that, you know, is it has the bits and pieces, but has these moments of like, you're going on a tangent here, and I know that this is lacking the soul

of, you know, what disco was going for, but Pardon me. But what is most remarkable about this whole thing, I played a couple hours of it, right? So I went... I played about 25 minutes. Okay. I went a good way soon.

I didn't beat it, but there's a lot to go talk to and figure out there. The thing about it, that's most that most remarkable is that it's fine, right, in that the assets are nice. The art is well made. The music is great. Yeah, I would say so. There's some voice acting that's not present because it's placeholder, but some that's there is good, too. Some of the tangents they go on are interesting.

Some of them are not. Some of them feel like you're being quirky for quirk's sake, but others are presenting ideas of a setting that might be interesting to learn about. It's all there. It's all competent. And if this were someone that you never heard of making a game, you would come into this going, huh, okay. Okay. Okay.

There's some interesting stuff here. Let's see where you're going with this. It is only knowing the history of this. It's a very strange feeling. That presents the problem. It's only because you know the story that there's an issue here. I think it, yeah, because I think it would be disingenuous to come in and go, what a piece of shit, right? Look at this garbage. Absolutely not. That's patently unfair.

That would be a lie. It is not. It is a functioning, fine video game that is an RPG that is echoing disco elysium style and trying to offer more of the product that you consumed and enjoyed because we are the license holders that hold it. but you and because it's just based on knowing the deal that makes that weird feeling ever present in it and like the fact that you're gonna something a thread you might not question

where you're like oh that conversation just seemed a little pointless or you're trying to be weird but you didn't really go anywhere or that that charm was kind of missing there you might not pull a magnifying glass out for those moments but because you know the story of Zahom here you are willing to do that

and put this under the micro Scope. And, you know, for all the creative people and the writers and the, on the artist, or whatever, they're all working on this, it's under the shadow of this stolen work and shitty energy. And I was bringing this up when I was talking about it yesterday, but it's kind of like when we talk about the AI art analogy, because the idea of objecting to it because look how wonky it looks and looks so stupid, ha ha, is the wrong idea. You missed the point. The point is not that because it's going to eventually get good enough to fool you. So don't focus on that.

It's the fact that a person didn't make this, right? And so here, this is going to be something where we know the deal and people we're talking to here probably as well. But I think that it'll also at large probably be something that people who've heard about this disco elysium thing that was a pretty fun game. Oh, here comes the next one. Oh, cool. We're going to play it. It'll make its money. It'll probably end up being just fine.

Not everyone is hanging on. Yeah. Not everyone is hanging off the news. and more or less, or getting into the dev stories behind the scenes. And, like, this ended up being a bit of a discussion with chat yesterday about, like, how much people know about this stuff versus just us diving in because part of our jobs is covering these things. And the average person doesn't know about disco leasing either. And it was, and so this was, the bubble we're in, it was perfectly encapsulated by the fact that Reggie walked in and sat down.

And it was like, so what's the deal with this one again, right? and I had to recap him on the deal with zero parades and he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, right. And he sat there through the entire Disco Elysium playthru and loved it. And it was just like, yeah, I don't know. This is the next Zao? Okay, that's, is it good?

And it's like, well, no, but it's like, that's not the point. The problem is that they was stolen and the people into credit. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, okay. It's a whole thing. We're going to talk a lot about theft today. So somebody who, you know, is other people that I know that I've talked to that I've told about discoly some other people that I've gotten in

might just as similarly kind of go oh yeah it's the new thing from those folks okay cool and just leave it at that and that's enough for the game to make its money exist be successful be a solid game whatever like that's that you know so we're in a world where like nothing about what's being shown to you is going to um betray in an obvious manner manner like the problem with the game. It's all going to be based on what you know about the story. So I've had two like thoughts kicking around in my head. The first of which is that when you play disco Elysium very early, I mean before leaving the

room, you know, but definitely by the time you get to talk to Kuno. You get this overwhelming sense. Like few games have ever made me feel that the people who are. are making it, they don't just have something to say. They have so much to say it is exploding out of them. Bursting at the seams, uncontained. Absolutely. They, oh my God, they have many, many things of notes they want to talk about.

And go, and if you and go see more of that energy reading the fucking Eternal Summer Manifesto, you know? And when I played zero parades, and to be fair, I only got about 20, 25 minutes in. Yeah. I got the overwhelming feeling that their bosses told them to make another disco alysium. Yep. Yep. That's true.

That was like my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

the, the core artistic, like, scream coming out of that game is, I want to keep my job and make a video game. So, while, and that is,

that is the case and that is definitely present and there. I played about four and a half hours. of it. And there's moments where you meet this like, um, angry hipstery old man that sells music and is going on about the, the majesty of this particular format that's so interesting to listen to, um, that you, that it's this, it's this, this self-erasing disc that is never meant to be played. And it's the ultimate hipster format of music that can only be played once. And it goes down there, It explores this whole idea of that, right? And that is related to the dude who you find who's zeroed out on the couch because, you know, whatever the music is erased.

And if you go into that, you have these moments of tapping into the inland empire and the spirituality of your character connecting to other worlds and other things. And, you know, it's doing those bits, right? There's other moments where you have characters who are being, like there's your authoritarian, but this time it's sort of blue authoritarian it's your red authoritarian on the wall communist there's not enough there's not enough bricks for to receive the bullets of the people

that we need to line up on them and then there's the cop who's just like hey man can't people just be okay with things being decent for a little bit things are fine you know and it has these things of like yeah there's characters here that may or may not want to say something and writers that may or may not want to say something

but above them all is the light bending money lender who is ultimately bending the light to make this whole world exist. And that is the foundation of the game you're playing is built on that. And you can't ignore that part. I foresee this game being a fairly good tasting facsimile of the best hot dog I've ever eaten in my life. Is that the word of the week? It might be.

I don't know. We're on U.S. Oh no, oh no. I'm going to say that the most likely timeline we end up with, and ultimately the one that will be the, probably the most depressing, but thus the most disco, is there is no real, there is no true successor. Disco is a moment, and it happened and it was a one and done. And what we're going to get, right, is you got zero parades for,

had spies over here. Zahum doing what it can to be like, hey, please continue to give us the money you remember. Also check out the Amazon series that's not going to happen and a billion other things we can do with this IP, right? You got Tangerine, Antarctic, formerly known as Triple X

Night Shift, and that's a couple of the people that were at Zahum going to found Darkmath. No, but it needs to be the whole... But we, and they're going to do what they can, but you know, who knows what that'll end up being. Similarly, you've got Hope Town with, and that's long due. That's a couple of

other people that are like former staffers and folks. And they've got Lenval Brown with them on that Kickstarter and it was successful. So they, you know, we'll see what that becomes. But who the fuck knows, right? Eternal Summer is out here screaming and we don't know if they actually have anyone around that can make a video game, but I hope they, they track one down because the energy is cool, but how to convert that into actual product is difficult. And then you've got red info, which is where Kervitz actually ended up, and their project is called Corinthians. You know, so this whole thing has exploded into all these places that it'll never be the same again, and nor should we expect it to. But if all of these things kind of come out and end up being disco-like games that are fine, I feel like that's the most likely timeline we're on.

And it'll just be this kind of weird like, oh, disco kind of became. A commodity. Here we are. It always was, but... I think what really matters the most is that... Joyst is correct. The most...

The most... ...possibility that could possibly happen is that all the successors of the movement all scramble and fight and scrape and kick and spit on one another fighting for the title of the true air. And the true air is likely, completely unrelated to all of them in any way, whatsoever.

Because there's no act. Tell me how much you liked esoteric ebb. Esoteric ebb is great. And esoteric ebb. But here's the thing, because I can see the setup and the tee off to slam dunk this and to go that that's the one

who takes the torch. And I go, no, not really. It's doing its own thing. It loves disco and takes that form, but it's also. My point. Yeah. Yeah. But it also loves Plainscape Torment.

And it's also just off doing its own bit. It loves Planescape Torment, dude. you know, it really does. It really does. And we don't need to force the mantle onto it because I think it's like, nah, it's very clear that it's a fan of the thing and it's doing something else, but it's great. No, that's my point. Like, my point is that the mantle goes to that which does not want it. Or care.

Right? So the most interesting thing about esoteric ebb is that it started out as a Plainscape Torment fan game in 2018. And then Disco came out a year plus later. So the writing of this game started based off of Plainscape Torment. But the structure was later adapted to disco structure. In fact, what I was saying is that I feel it's painfully obvious,

but you can tell this is a, living, detailed D&D setting that somebody came up with a long time ago, probably played lots of campaigns with their friends in it, and they have a Bible of this stuff, and they've been working on a way to turn this into a game, and then disco presented the container format. Here's the nuts and bolts of how to actually have this dialogue happen. And we're going to take these ingredients that already existed and put it through the Disco Elysium juicer to get. that way of interfacing with this world.

And it's an entertaining way to interface with the world. So it worked out great. So yeah, I played esoteric ebb yesterday. And it was definitely the most enjoyment I've had from, you know, this post-disco world. And I really thought that, like, you know, taking the classic high fantasy D&D setting of like the stats that you would know and stuff and adding the, you know, the voices in your head bit to it, the fact that you're this cleric and yeah, exactly, you're not pulling the helmet off. And every character you're talking

to is, what I will say is that this feels like a much smaller game. But as a result, every character is a fleshed out encounter discussion. It feels like in order to make the indie game version of a disco thing work here, which, you know, of course, disco was to begin with, but even smaller in scale, I'm imagining. You want each of these characters to be someone you're talking to for half an hour, you know? Yeah. So, like, Disco was the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the inspector game inside a city block. But, like, you know, depth of the ocean, but wide as a puddle kind of thing.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And Ebb feels like it's like, no, smaller, tighter, deeper. Yep. Even smaller. Because, you know, talking to, um, talking. talking to

Call Me Manana is not the same as talking to Kudo or Everard Right? Kudo and Everard are fucking Full-on experiences

You fucking ass In the good spot In the couch You can fucking hit that For an hour You know And sure enough Esoteric Ebb

It was like You wake up off the table You're in the zombie dungeon and it took like 45 minutes of just getting up and wandering around that basement before I got upstairs. And because we're also reading out the lines and doing the voice acting with each thing, it's taking a little bit extra long as opposed to reading through it. I spoke to a guy at Raw Fury.

He sent me a code. And I was like, I played the demo. This game seems really special. You should give Chris more money for voice acting. And the official response. that I gathered from Raw Fury was Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, at the, at the end of the stream,

at the end of the stream, the dev came, came over to the chat and it was like, hey, thanks for playing the game. We're like, okay, cool, no problem, that was great. Voice acting. So he actually, Chris responded and was like, it's expensive. It is very expensive.

That's it. Yeah, but, like that, but, very straightforward. But it saved Disco Elysium. Disco came out twice Because when I looked it up I was like Disco came out in 2019 Sure did

And that first experience with it Was me reading through Talking out loud for an hour Going oh boy I don't think I don't think this is going to work And I know We would like to believe

That the text only experience Is all you need for a game That's good to be successful but seeing it and having it go through word of mouth on different channels, on different Twitch, on YouTube and spreading, et cetera, with the voice acting and people approaching it more willingly made a huge difference in how much that game spread. So don't discount that. It was a massive deal when the final cut came out and then the game exploded because you could see the potential there, but a lot of people were just not willing to actually engage. It was huge. So as the primary form of game advertisement that currently exists,

you and I, it has actually become kind of astonishing for story-based games how much full voice acting adds to the word of mouth slash knowledge of the game's existence. Right? so like pentament is an incredible game that I can't I don't I never even heard of anyone streaming it because it's like it is just much like plane scaped torment much like disco much like ebb million fucking words and fucking endless endless endless oodles of fucking texts can't can't fucking can't do it me you and page all streamed disco elysium in 2019 and we got to the

like the body and all of us called it quits after like 90 minutes to two and a half hours with shredded throats going wow what a cool game and i think you know as i can i can see uh some folks might disagree here the more accurate uh uh descriptor on that is disco alesium without the final cut and without the voice acting would have been a profitable successful obscure game that was like people would talk about and And it would be not super huge, but it'd be great. And it'd be a darling. And it'd be like a sleeper hit.

I think the final cut is what brought it to a major, major level of, like, awareness and success. You know, it was a, the level it was at before was a moderate level of success comparable to other indie games that we like that other people don't really know about. Can I hold up my hand for a second? Somebody in the chat says, by the way, a large streamer, Joseph Anderson, who I'm a fan of, also streamed disco and pentiment without any voice acting. Wow. Have you seen a Joseph Anderson video? No. It's unshocking.

He puts out like eight hour, like video reviews of games like Witcher. Holy shit. Like that man can talk. That man also has time to save because he pisses in the sink. Okay. Oh, my God. So, like, I don't, like, yeah, I'm sorry. Okay.

I'm sorry. I got, I, I don't, I don't have the, I don't have the gumption. Um, so what I can't say is that I've, I've deliberately worked on the ability to do games that are text heavy so that I could be able to approach something like this and, and, and handle it. You have definitely, like, strengthened up your thrussy. I was, I was, yes, yes. It was, it was training. To be to be to be to be fair you do have the ready tag Yes from your buddy a hundred percent

Doesn't help no how did you approach it Uh which one? Ebb I played the demo for 40 minutes Okay and then I switched to a different A different demo gotcha okay okay Then I think I played life of Goldman after Okay because yeah yeah doing a full day of it like at the end we were like

You know yeah um And I was just tired enough that morning, too, that, like, as the different stats were kicking in, I'm like, I can't even come up with their keep track of voices on these right now. Like, eventually it settled into place as I got my caffeine and felt better. But the beginning of playing it, I'm like, oh, man, dude, like, I'm going to take, you take, I don't know, whatever, just bring it. And then eventually things settled into place. Somebody fucking say something. Yeah. And there will be times where it's like, you know, I'll be like, okay, like off camera.

I'll go like this and Reggie will go for it. Or sometimes it'll be like, okay, he's like, he picked Int and I picked an Inch character, and then he was doing a bunch of lines where you click on the extra context, and Int wouldn't shut the fuck up and started becoming Wikipedia. So I'm like, all right, let me save you. We'll alternate between Int lines because this nerdy, stupid build won't shut the fuck up, you know? And, yeah, we got the fun unintentional double-fash combo of big strength, big Int, you know, Fash is crazy. Fash is awesome and I'm the only one that should be allowed.

Me and Paige loaded the game up and we, she built a cleric and we ran through the intro and getting off the table and then I ran a different cleric that I did in the demo. It's, man, there's a lot of variability. There's 18 subclasses. You have all the stats, which they brilliantly give you each, you have a big text wall for the full description of what each stat does. But then if you want to just get to the brass tax, you've got a bold,

does this, does that, does that. And then an even further bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, you know, to get the feel of it. And then underneath, you've got these backstories that are all just like bonus points. And it's got 18 variants

because it's taking each that and giving you plus two plus one combinations of all of them, you know? I'm, wow, the variability of that. It is so much going into a builder that is I mean it's not Baldur's Gate fucking three You know what I mean? No, but it's definitely there's more like

Disco Elysium is a A Trotsky novel Masquerading as a video game Right? Esoteric Ebb has like Some fucking video game in there Yeah, yeah you get into fights, you do stuff Absolutely you get into fights There's a combat system, there's the spell system

there's subclasses. Something interesting, too, about disco and, because I was reminded of this while playing Zero Parades is that, like, it also is something that if you're not someone that read that read a bunch of books or is or so, it kind of trains you or gets you used to, like, pros. and the idea of like when you're going through text at large, sometimes scenes will be, sometimes you'll cut away to places and moments and things that you can't see depicted, and it's just describing it to you, you know?

And moments of world building are happening that your imagination is basically carrying you forward. But if you were, the movie of this is playing out simultaneously, elsewhere, you know, while you continue to stare at the current scene. So Esoteric Eb is not really doing that. It's very much in the present. But at least from the high it stat, what you're getting is every time a word is said, you're getting a Wikipedia on what the history of that race or war or...

Is that int? Or is that like the specific stat you're talking about? Int, that's Int that's doing it. Right. Incyc-int is encyclopedia. Of course it is. And a lot of the time it's bringing up, you know, historical context. And sometimes it's just, it's going into... Bringing up a bunch of bullshit.

Like, we know what the thing. Okay, shut the fuck up, int, right? And then, yeah, you've got the whole political element of like each stat is a party that you can lean in on. but it took like, I felt it, it took like three hours to get out of that basement and see the outside, you know, and that was four conversations later. Yeah. So that's the way this game is going to go is there's a dude up top the stairs, there's a person right outside the door and another person underneath that. And each of those is an Everard's length conversation you're going to go through. And if you're in the mood to have that joust, you know, then great.

Like, this is going to deliver all the fun of what you enjoyed about disco with this, this own high fantasy D&D style system. And affecting your outcomes and relationships and so on. But I feel, and this is just a guess. I feel like if you want maps and sprawling environments, this is not going to be that. This is not going to be that place. And my impression is that Planescape is like at times just big dungeon go, right? Not every moment is about conversing to the nth degree. Sometimes you're going to just walk past some zombies and skeletons and zap them.

I don't know how much this game is going to really do that, you know? It's a lot closer to Disco than it is to Plainscape in that respect. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Real fun stuff going on there. And the, yeah, I guess the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, they're left with, I feel like are, like, okay, every one you're talking to is a quirky D&D, uh, style, monster, character, erase, et cetera. That, that. A little bit of a send-up in a lot of cases. Uh, uh, in what way?

Like, they're, they're pastichees. Sure. I mean, they're archetypes. So yeah, like when you walk out and you see... Like the stats themselves are archetypes of the types of people. Of the types of characters people would play.

100%. So when you see cool buff orc lady, you're like, yeah, if you're playing this game, you're probably going to dig that. Like anyone who boots this game up is probably super down for handsome orc lady,

you know, and the bait that gets laid immediately after the conversation. with her begins. And yeah, we take that bait. That's fine. You know, we know what we're walking into. But what I was surprised by, too, is I guess it was like, you know, by the end of the session, it was like, oh, someone joined my party.

And, you know, like, you have Kim in disco and stuff. Like, there is a party. But I kind of was reminded, like, oh, yeah, like the cover of this game's art shows you a cleric and a goblin and another person. And, like, you're probably going to. A gang. A D&D party is going to go out and do a thing, you know? So, yeah, I'm looking forward to checking out a bit more of that when I, when I get a chance. But I'm also wondering if, you know, is weight maxing the right play here? You know, this might be a situation where weight maxing is the right move. I don't know. I think, I don't fucking know. I like, like, like, well, I looked up the How Long to Beat and it's approximately

the same size as Disco Um is. Interesting. And I'm like, and I'm like, Disco took a long time. Even though it says it doesn't, even though it says it doesn't.

Like how long to beat is is made by people who don't voice act the fucking dialogue. Yes. Exactly. They just read it. Or in some cases, don't read it at all. Click through, skip through, or quickly read, internalize, and keep moving. And to be fair, like, playing Baldersgate 3, for example, I know that no one, even on your own time, is reading all that flavor text.

No one is. It is impossible. New Linium is, you know. I mean, every book you pick up, every single highlight of every object and every journal, get the fuck out of here. You're not doing that. You're surfing on the gist. I got to tell you, I know at least, I know a couple people in this chat live right now that absolutely do for sure zies. Okay.

But they're non-human entities. Okay. I feel like the intended consumption at some point is like read until you're tired and then move on. Intent is not, intent is not of note here. there's a guy in here that's beaten Ballersgate 3 like fucking 14 times. Yeah, that guy reads all the books. Right, right, right. Anyway, so I'm going to decide how to approach this.

But what I will say is that, hey, this cool little fan thing that is doing its own, you know, send up of genres that it loves, and this creator that loves D&D, Plainscape, and Disco made a fun indie game that's worth checking out and buying. Esoteric. And boy, does it love the word esoteric. You know, instead of calling things arcane, things are just called esoteric. And like, I want to say we voiced that out maybe like 20 times yesterday. You know. But yeah, it was fun.

And I also say it was rewarding to fail through. Because that's the other thing I wanted to like kind of test is I'm like, okay, playing this on the streamer brain means content push means, you know, run in. run into failure and see what happens. And because you're playing a disco like you're also hoping that you'll trip over the wheelchair and give the double deuses on the way down.

But, and I can say here that it was definitely rewarding to fail through and it paid off for, you know, failing checks as well as succeeding in them. So, plus it was nice to see a lot of people in chat freak out going, oh my God, this scene

went completely different for me. Yeah, I know. That's always very, very, uplifting. It's like, ooh, that's exciting if I ever want to go through it again. So in the end, you know, disco epilogue,

who the fuck cares? It happened, and then now new things will happen. And let's enjoy the good ones. Don't understand. We have to be the successors. Let's enjoy the good ones and ignore the non, the nothings, and that's it.

I really do... It took decades for somebody come up with the successor to Plainscape Torment, and it definitely had nothing to do with fucking D&D. It was about drug abuse. I really, really hope that somewhere someone comes along and just... You know how we said producers do multiple things? They do, that's true. Right?

sometimes it's the yapper that does nothing and puts the name on the credits and other times... And comes in and goes, hey, I played a new game this weekend. I have some ideas. In fact, my nephew

has some ideas based on the phone games they've been playing. When are you going to put those in? Or there's the, can you turn all this energy? Can you harness it into a direction? Right? And right now, we have Summer Eternal,

which is a blazing hot inferno and we just need someone to contain it and make it a laser. Can we concentrate it into a laser? You know? I hope so. The most important thing a good producer can do is when somebody comes in and goes, I have an idea for a new feature

that I think I can make on my own time and they go, can you test it and do all the assets for it on your own time also? And they go, no. And then they go, then we're going to be late so get out of my office. No, you're not putting it in. I mean, I'm a fan of absolutely great idea. I'll get right on that. Absolutely. And that's how you end up in a situation where Negoshi goes, oops, we need $44 million.

Oh, no. Gang of Dragon. No. We'll get there. Oh, boy. All right, all right. We got to get a move on, though. So that I did a slop battle. Hey, we'll reverse us on Twitch and YouTube. Go ahead. I did a slot battle between the slops. I did it between arc raiders, the ethically dubious AI using video game that's in the extraction genre, and Marathon, the game that absolutely got caught plagiarizing designs and maybe other and had to settle out of court over it.

They are both extraction games. That is scavenger type shooters that have you scrounging up a bunch of materials, possibly shooting NPCs, possibly getting ganged by other players, and if you die, you lose all of your stuff. If I can, if I may, just from the, in my impression, overtly expecting hostility and getting ganged and shot at by other people. Yes. It has been my expectation of what this genre is. is the expectation of the genre. Okay. Is that other players are dangerous.

Yes. Especially on extraction, be it however you get out, because when you extract, you make a bunch of noise. And when you're extracting, that means you have tons of shit on your body. That people could use. So I played them. I played one, I played marathon first, and I played Ark Raider second. I was given a code for both. buy them.

And despite the fact that I have been wildly critical of Bungy, I would say I am one of Bungy's biggest haters. Like genuinely, I think me trying to portray myself as not one of Bungy's biggest haters would be fucking ridiculous. That being said, I hit a moment. And I'm sure you get this moment. I would say that both podcasts that we've been on. have been at the, at least in the top 10 of most anti-Bungy media that has been produced.

Sure. I hit a moment where, and I think you've hit this moment with other games or other movies where you're just like, I got to know, just, I got to know. Sometimes. I, I, my brain mandates understanding of the appeal. Like, I absolutely must know. Yes, yes, absolutely. You've watched me do that many a time. So, I loaded up Marathon and, uh, the audio visual presentation in terms of the style,

the splash screen, the background art loading screen, all that stuff. It's very first 10 minutes of Metal Gear Solid 4. It's very like... The TV channel? Like tuning in to like fake future TV. Okay. Kind of thing. It has a pretty cohesive vibe of like Corpo shit future.

I like the color range that they go with. I like the plastic look. It kind of looks like the future of Mirror's Edge. Oh, you mean? T-reels. Yes, I do mean T-reels art style. Yeah, okay, cool. Now we can get into the fucking weeds on that, which I have done so on social media,

which is like they didn't lift the whole art style. No, but they lifted cohesive parts of that art style that they then had to make new assets to build around because those were stolen. And now that they have been caught plagiarizing, it is not up to me to decide whether or not to give them the benefit of the debt on any individual piece because I know that some of these pieces are stolen. And I know that because there was a settlement out of court that I assume Antireal got a good amount of payment because they are now in the fucking credit of the game as a design consultant, which is the ultimate gimmee I got caught. Oh, fuck.

Acknowledgement. Yep. But regardless, in my attempt at judging the game. on its own merits, I made, I said my piece and I put it to the side. It's got a, it's got a cool unified future aesthetic. Okay. Was any of that part of the, because it had one before in Marathon Durandall, right? No, it, it doesn't link to that. No, I know, but I'm just saying Marathon existed. Yeah, yeah, I don't see. So I'm not, I don't know much about the before times marathon, but I don't see any similarity here.

not. Of course not. I was merely stating that like this choice in naming of the product, there was an existing thing, but whatever this is, whatever it is now. Anyway. I loaded in to the tutorial and the first thing that happened is that the game runs like shit. Yeah. Okay. It runs really bad. And it runs a very specific bad in which I went through every single graphical option on stream, including turning super sampling on at the highest service solution and putting it down to 720p with DLSS at 33% like fucking, like a resolution. So I was like running at like 400p. No, I had no dice.

Zero difference in performance. How about that? Zero. Okay. Only to then find out from somebody in the chat that the game doesn't like. OBS. Oh. And your

same system streaming, right? Yeah, which is a problem. Okay. So then I brought up task manager and set Marathon to high affinity and doubled

my frame rate. Okay. So off the bat, the game needs some more work under the hood. It is crazy CPU heavy. I wasn't maxing out my CPU. I wasn't maxing out my graphic

card. It has genuine room for optimization. Do you tend to benchmark and then tweak from there or do you go to Ultra and pull it down? I tend to turn everything on and if it's

stably above 70 I leave it. And if it's not, I turn on DLSS. and then I go quality, balanced performance. And if that doesn't work, then I start kicking down options. Okay. Usually the DLSS functions is plenty for performance, genuinely. So got into it.

As expected, marathon controls really, really well. It feels fucking awesome to move around in that setting. to shoot, to mantle, to run. Bungy makes games that control and feel really excellent. Like, it's, it's, like, absolutely. The next in the line of Halo to Destiny to this. Yeah. Okay.

It fit, like, the gunfire and the hit effects, they all feel really good. Like, no complaints. Looting and using the menus feels really bad. because Bungy is obsessed with their fake mouse cursor on a controller. Oh, okay, okay. Obsessed with it. Now, when you loot in both games that I played, when you pick up a loot box or a player,

you slowly reveal the items in their inventory. Right? So it's like you'll see the blank inventory, and then it'll fade in the item, and then it'll fade in the next item. It'll fade in the next item, right? So the fake mouse cursor isn't the end of the world because you have already moved it to the loot box to do it. But it doesn't like the interface part actually doesn't feel very good at all.

Correct me from wrong here, right? Yes. But whereas we will get shit every time we pick up a controller to play a first person shooter. Is Bungy not also in line with like is the, are they not like a company where the games they make are. usually expected that controller is supposed to work really well here because they make console shooters? They make controller games.

Okay. Yeah. Like, Bungy games are played with controller. Like, to the point where the server slam for Marathon had a mouse lag input bug that had gone unfixed. I, because I'm like, if any company is, you know, if you give a shit on a controller for a lot of different types of

FPS, as I can imagine. But like, now I need to remind you, Destiny 1 many years ago was the one that invented the fake mouse cursor on controller. I see. That's Bungy's child. And they will never give that child up. And I don't know why because it sucks.

But I would assume that their games more than any are like, yeah, made for that. Yeah, no. Okay. It's, um, after that, got into a bunch of matches. Um, is there, is there, is there, is there an early hook that they, uh, they, they, they, they drop on you? Yeah, the tutorial has some things happen. And then you, you know, the, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, a, uh, uh, uh, a, uh, uh, uh, a, uh, uh, uh, a,

weird NPC with a video package tells you a bunch of weird ass future shit and then gives you a couple little quests to do. But the main guts of it is getting into the map and wandering around and scrounging and, um, so thank God. They added solo play. They added solo cues. I can't believe those words are... It was one of the things that they fought against the most. but you can now queue as solo and you will get into matches that is other people playing solo. Thank God for solo cue is a wild sentence, but I understand. Well, here's the thing. I understand the context.

If you're playing solo cue and you're playing in a multiplayer game where people can rob you and everyone else is in a three-man stack, you're cooked. Like your options are highly limited. There is a character that you can play called Rook. which comes into late matches by themselves that are filled up, and they are explicitly a sneaky scavenger type. Oh, that's interesting. Okay.

Which is a cool idea. But you can play as a solo operator in a solo lobby, which I did. And I picked the shell that can turn invisible because, of course, I fucking did. That is what every single person who plays in the solo lobby picks, because there is a character that can turn fucking invisible. And I had a pretty good time Wandering around Very very interesting futurey weirdo environments

Hiding from map NPCs and dangers Seeing other players And trying to Kind of fucking see if they were chill or not And usually ignoring them But what ended up happening Is that I wanted to talk to somebody In the solo queue

in Marathon, you have a push to talk for proximity chat that's like global, right? And what happened was is I would see somebody. I would usually see somebody first. And I would go, hey, friendly. And then I would eat a fucking bullet is what happened. Yeah. And that happened significantly. and then I ran into one gentleman who was like, oh, hey, man.

And I was like, everyone is really agro in this game. And he went, yeah, it's nuts. Hey, do you want to go do a quest? And then we wandered off together to finish off our objectives, which are per run, right? It's, you know, I'll go extract this or get this item or whatever. And on the way there, we got snuck up on and killed by another player. who was not friendly and did not talk to us. You, I mean, open comms already.

Open comms. So I was like, I would be insane if I wanted to play this game with closed comms. Like it is absolutely vital aspect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I played it for about two and a half hours. I got a bunch of the quests done. ran into a nice person.

The game plays well. It has interesting systems. It has good reasons to hop in and wander on the map. It's quite difficult. The enemy NPCs are very tough. And the community of marathon players is the bungee community. And the generalized community of extraction players, which is other players are de facto dangerous.

They are scary. They are probably violent. Yeah, I just assume this genre is everyone is hostile and the friendlies are the exception to the rule. They are roaming violent threats and they are more

dangerous than the NPCs because they're people, right? They can do anything. And they want your stuff, right? So I came away with it with a fairly positive opinion. I will definitely go back to it if I see that there is a performance patch and it stops running like shit like I made it run better by doing the CPU affinity thing but like the game runs bad

and it runs inconsistently I saw you know that thing where people have worse computers than you and they go actually it runs fine for me I don't understand what's happening it's one of those things okay this was not the ending to the story I was expecting off of the narrative on of Marathon on this podcast that has been akin to Anthem and Fallout 76. I was absolutely adamant that I take this game on its own merits. And like just because I hate Bungy a lot doesn't mean I can't look at this with like clean eyes, which was makes it really funny when I have received comments since then about what a grudge I brought into it when I actually came away from the game positive.

It's like, oh, you've got pre-mad. You got pre-mad at the expectation of my opinion. That's so interesting. You're like a child. But yeah, it needs better performance. It needs better performance. And it is very still, like, pushing towards, like, three-man groups because the NPCs are very difficult,

and I don't want to play in a three-man group, so I probably wouldn't stick around. But, like, it is, it's, it's, it's, It's a lot better than I thought it was going to come out. Okay, okay. Yeah, I mean, well, the impressions that we were getting, you know, from the press events and the stuff that was going on beforehand, all were these really weird rough ones. At the end of the day, the old, like, to me, I'm like, hey, did Ante Real Cash the Check? Yes.

Okay. All right. Do your thing. I hope they crushed it. Right. I hope they got a lot of these. And what I will say is that it's not the same genre, but from, from. doing my, you know, friendly three-team, three-person Discord runs in Apex Legends, I know that, like, the fun of playing with a squad going through a game like this is, yeah, it's baked in. But instead of a circle closing in battle royale style, you just take it from run to run and go. I'm sure that can be super fun if the gameplay is actually tight and you guys are coordinating and so on, you know?

Now, I am like, and then I, you know, I gave my opinion at the end, I'm like, it's a shame about all that plagiarism stuff. that sucks. They shouldn't do that. And I will bring that up every time Bungy comes up ever again. To which some folks are like, well, what do you want them to do? It's like, I would like them to go one year of their company's life without a plagiarism scandal. Well, don't worry. They fired the artist. They fired the artist responsible. No, no, no, no, but they fired the artist responsible for doing that.

Yeah, they always do. They always fire the one artist responsible. The mysterious... Like five times in a row. Like every time. That's crazy. They always get the one guy. This fucking nuts. This mysterious member of the art team just keeps...

He keeps getting rehired. I don't know. So, I then loaded up Arc Raiders. And the Arc Raiders thing is twofold. One, they paid voice actors to feed their voices into the robot so that the robot can do voice acting forever. at essentially no cost. Is this theft? No.

I would consider it using scab labor, I think is actually the more appropriate. That's one way to put it. Sure. Sure. Okay. Is it gross? Yes. Is it theft?

No. It sucks. Arc fulfills like a very strange in between. Also, the machine that they use to make it is the theft machine. Mm-hmm. And did the voice actors sign up for that on their contracts? They did. Yeah.

Which is why I call it scab labor. So right off the bat, man, man, did they not need to do that shit at all. The voice acting in the game sucks and also isn't important at all. At all. Okay. Now, it's crazy. Now, you're coming into this game, which is, Unlike Marathon, Arc Raiders is the established current king of the genre.

That's correct, yeah. Yeah. Oh, also, Ark Raiders accidentally exploited a security, vulnerability, and Discord, and put everybody's Discord DMs at risk. Whoopsies. Yeah. So, ooh, ooh. These extraction games just can't be had without these caveats. So, start ArcRquiv.

graders and it's in third person so I already like it better. Fuck, I didn't know that. Yeah. You didn't know that? I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Yes. Start in third person already likes it better.

Step two. That's a big deal. Runs great. Okay. It's an Unreal Engine 5 game and it runs great. So right off the bat, that's two points in its direction. And I'm like, oh, this is already a much better experience. Solid tutorial.

like very solid tutorial. The tutorial has you get snuck up on and ganged by fake players. Okay. To teach you how that works. And then very, very similarly after that tutorial,

load you into a map with basically nothing on you. Hey man, go do this quest, do this quest, do that quest. Explore, there's people all over the place. And the arcs in this case are like a lot of drones and a lot of walking robots that are just populating the map. One of the most interesting things

is one of the controls is in Marathon, you can enable press right on the D-pad to talk, but you have to hold it. You might, so they don't want you talking while fighting. Doing anything else. Yeah.

Right? And on top of that, one of the things that I thought was really interesting in Marathon is that other players are kind of highlighted in red and the auto aim tracks them super aggressively so like the game is like pushing you like shoot him fucking fucking shoot him hostile baked in

when I was playing arc raters I went into the voice settings and one of the first voice settings that I was like that I got a look at was toggle to talk um with also with the deep hat Okay. So it's not necessarily hold it on.

It's like, do you want to have a real voice that you can turn on and just speak into the ether? The whole time. Yeah. The whole time. Like, yes. And so I was like, okay, got that. Ran into a guy within like a minute, like immediately, right the fuck away. And I went, oh, oh, hey.

And he went, hey, bud, what's going on? And then we continued to hang out on voice for the whole fucking map and shoot the shit. Huh. Immediately not hostile. And he helped show me where to find things. And we chit-chated about the marathon launch. The first person you ran into. The very, and then he was like, hey, man, I'll send you a friend request.

And then he sent me a friend request. And then he helped me extract. And it was very pleasant. and then I started a second match and it happened again. Wow. And a third and a fourth and a fifth and a sixth and a seventh and a seventh and a eighth and a ninth and a tenth and an eleventh and a twelfth.

Wow. Okay. Every single person I ran into for like three and a half hours was a chill, normal, good microphone. having human being who was playing it like a co-op MMO. Are you getting queued up with other people who are starting out as well, or is this just random? No.

So is it just the volume of this being the number one game that is... No. Hmm. But Arc Raiders have is aggression-based matchmaking. So there's a story about Arc. Basically, Arc Raider started out with no aggression-based matchmaking. And you just got put into a lobby, and that's what was that. The way people acted is the way that they acted.

And then Arc Raider streamers burnt out on all the content, and then we're like, we're going to just turn this into a PVP game and became super, super violent. And the game's population, as a result, got super, super, super violent. Okay. And as a result, the devs added aggression-based matchmaking. So when you start the game, you are being flooded into lobbies of people that don't shoot people. Interesting. So your first match is going to be a match with chill guys.

Okay, okay. And if you show that the game you want is a hostile shoot first, ask questions, later game, then you get placed with those people. After about three hours, I was like, well, let's see what's going to happen. So I shot some people. I ran into a guy with no mic and he was doing the little hop up and, you know, the crouch up and down to show me he was friendly. and I blew his head off and I took his stuff. And then I ran into another player

who was extracting and they were like, hello. And then I blew their head off and took their stuff. And then I loaded into another match and saw a guy at a very far distance and I ran up to him and shot him in the back

and took his stuff. And then I saw another guy very, very far away shooting arc. And then I shot him in the back and took his stuff. And I did that five or six or seven times. Mm-hmm. And then I loaded,

into a match and you can tell if you're in a shithead match. You hear it? So you can see it. So when players get downed, they fire a flare straight up into the air. So the flare shooting straight up in the air

is a vision of there's fighting over here, but there's also loot over here. Right? So when you load into a match and you see a thing, go up, can you see a drone flying around them? Can you hear a bunch of mechanized infantry far

away? Oh, that person died fighting an arc, right? But do you load into a match and you see flare, flare, flare, flare, flare, flare, and all you hear is gunfire? Yeah. You get the fucking vibe. Okay.

Of that match. And I ran into people who would shoot first on site. I ran into a guy who was chit-chatting with me as I was fighting an arc, I didn't even realize, but Chat saw he was trying to kill me with sniper fire in the middle of my gunfight, and I didn't notice because I was busy. Okay.

And then he snuck up on me and took me out. So in terms of- And that was also a pretty fun multiplayer experience. Now, if I go back and just chill for a couple of runs, it'll nudge me back down into the-churchase. Now this is where I'm not, I don't know enough about them to know this, but so battle Real you are cornered off into a circle where the whole point is kill each other until there's one left, right?

With extraction shooters, the round is just time based and then it ends neutrally or is there anything pushing the, the round end? So the way that it works is extract, so Marathon and Arc Raiders do it slightly differently. but in Marathon, there are points on the map that are extraction points. And they have a limited amount of time before they become unavailable. So the longer the match goes on,

the less places you can actually leave. Right, okay. So for example, the most recent, one of the few extraction things I did experience was Mashmak mode in Mecca Break, right? Yeah. And the, even if you were playing a non-hostile person, there's still a limited space for you to get shit out and for you to get out.

Therefore, around the extraction places, you're going to fight other people. Exactly. So in Destiny, sorry, in Marathon, the extraction points make a shit ton of noise and they are in defined spots on the map. right so you will encounter people there for good or for ill yeah

when you try to extract um for uh for Raraders so for Marathon I ran into for ill including one guy who was scared of me

and was invisible next to me waiting to secretly extract and then we extracted and I was like there was a guy next to me invisible

Okay. Cool. Now, but in, in arc, similarly, you run into, it's a big open room that is an elevator or subway station. You're going to run into a bunch of people when you turn it on, but people can leave simultaneously. But the matches are timed. Like they're, I think they're like 20 or 30 minutes. So in these games where you said you had peaceful encounters with people and it was mostly chill and people were friendly, did those games, did you yada, yada, yada, eventually we had to shoot at each other to get the fuck out of this? extract. No, we pulled the elevator and we waited for it to open up

and then shot any arc that showed back up and then everybody got in and somebody says, is everybody in? And then you pull the lever and you go down and everybody extracted. Okay, so there is... Or you could be a fucking psycho and shoot people in the back the instant that the

elevator starts up to loot their body in the one time of safety when the doors are closed. Okay, so PVP is 100% voluntary. You can all PVE, get your stuff and extract with no downsides. Barathon is a very PVP focused game.

The game wants you to be fighting other players like as a at the default. I mean the pitch showed that primarily. Yeah. Arc Raiders there's essentially like two games in there. There's a everybody's pretty much working together to do

a player versus environment style gameplay. And then there is a absolute scum fuck nightmare like murder hobo scenario and even though they have

I think they call them Carebear Lobbies and killer lobbies even though they have these what's interesting is that our creators has a reset kind of thing

it's like oh it's a prestige like in Call of Duty where you give up all the stuff you've earned all your money all your materials all your blueprints but you get like

a buff that goes on forever, right? And it's called an expedition. When the expedition leaves, because all these players that had all their items maxed out are now broke again, the game becomes more violent for a period of weeks because people actually need and want things more. And they lost their stuff.

Okay. Does, and, and I guess Marathon doesn't do any of that agro server. Marathon has a three-month reset. After three months, I believe all of everybody's stuff resets. But it does no agro-server matchmaking. No.

So it has no agro-server matchmaking, and it doesn't matter if it did because the people that are playing Marathon want to fucking kill you. And like, there's definitely appeal to that. It's very... Did you play PubG? No.

No. It had, playing, playing, um, playing marathon and playing arc raters on a shithead murder server feels like playing PubG. Where it's like, it's a big wide open map and you're scrounging around and you are just like listening super, super, super careful because everything around you hates you. So arc is the exception here in the genre. arc's social component is a wild exception. It is the only one that is like that And it is a result of their Aggression-based matchmaking.

Okay. Now, at all of this analysis, and there's a key question that you haven't answered, which one do you want? Oh, much, the Arc Raiders is a... Well, so bluntly, at this point in time, Arc Raiders is a fundamentally more complete

and better game. It has better, it has better, graphics, it has better performance, it has better controls, it has more systems. The systems are more interesting to me personally. And there are functionally two different games contained within, one of which is a co-op shooter against the environment and the other is a scumbag psycho simulator. Okay. Now, Marathon is solid. It is actually really impressive how far they built that game up from the alpha that I played. I am shocked

that they put it together from one to the other. But your preference is for the non-hostile, more cooperative PVE experience. Yes. Okay. Also, my personal opinion is that in the extraction genre, and this opinion

comes from ignorance of the extraction genre, I'm of the opinion that not knowing if the guy you are with is cool, is much more interesting than knowing he is not cool. That is more interesting. Right?

Like, oh, that's another player. That's an enemy. Is less interesting to me than a guy appearing to be chill and discovering that he is not chill. Now, I would have assumed your perspective on this informed by other genres would have been, fuck other people. I don't want to deal with.

that shit at all. So this is all very like, huh, really. Talking to strangers and, and really? It is the only game I have played since Bad Company 2 on the 360 that I have been like,

I want to turn the microphone on and talk to these people as a general rule. All the way. up to and including the guy extracting with us. And I was like, bro, what is that noise? And he's like, that's my baby crying in the background. Of course it is.

Of course it is. And I was like, wow, just like the good old days. And then I think he hit a bong and went, uh, hoo, uh. Yeah. And it sounds like no slurs. No. No one called me a name. In fact, my stream paints me as a degenerate psychopath because I am the only person who committed 99% of the violence scene in the game.

Down to the point where I was chit chatting with a guy and he said, hey, man, why are you so nervous? Or some equivalent. I'm like, oh, I shot a bunch of people last round. So I'm worried I got put into a psycho lobby and he said, ah, don't worry about it. And turned his back on me. Okay. Okay.

And he was in the process of literally walking into my character and being like, look at this cool gun I have. I have like the best shotgun and it's the highest rarity. Isn't that cool? And I'm like, yeah. And then he just turned around and walked away. Never mind. And I was like, I was like fighting with my heart very strongly. Never mind Pocopia.

This too is a result of the pastures. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Yeah, no, they're both good games. I happen to think that Arc is like an excellent game. Okay. Whereas Marathon could use some work. Interesting.

Twist outcomes for both of these of the Slop versus Off. Yeah. I really wish both games were not ethically compromised in a very significant way. Sure, there's that definitely. But who am I to talk after I play all those Capcom games? Or Sega games? Sure. It's fucking...

Continue or riot or at that... Industry. Yeah, no, we know. Overall, though, that is... That is... Yeah, I'm like... Because, again, there's things about that. I'm like, oh, I didn't know that that's what was going on there, especially with the, like, third person shit and stuff. But as, as, as interesting as this all is, I am fundamentally just not at all into what, no of that. I don't think so. I am the, like, people are like, he's it. I'm like, you couldn't be further. I am so not into any of this. I did have a really fun moment of playing arc raiders where I'm like, hey guys, hold on, hold on. Let me, hold on. Hold on. I'm generally.

a cope. I'm generating a cope thought. And that cope thought is, well, I waited until after it had already sold millions of copies and won tons of awards. I didn't contribute to its enormous popularity in success. Therefore... You done? Just give you a thumbs up if you're done. That is in fact actually the totality of it. You're done. Okay, I assume we're done. All right. Yeah. Cool. Whatever the fuck the rest of that was. Oh, it was.

It was exactly what you thought it was. It was exactly what you thought it was. Jesus Christ. Okay. All right. I got to take a literal 60 second. Beer B.R.B. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors.

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Thanks, Quince. Thanks, Quince. Okay. So anything else or should we get into the news? Because there's a couple things to touch on. Just the news. I've got to get out of here relatively soon. Exactly.

So one, what happened this week? They announced Project Helix, the next Xbox console. Unsurprisingly. Why would I buy an Xbox console when this monster can is an Xbox? This plushy is an Xbox. This PlayStation 5 controller is an Xbox. Believe it or not, this Nintendo DS copy of Hotel Dusk Room 215, that's an Xbox. This crippled ass dog is an Xbox.

That's fucking crazy. he's got Uno So Unsurprisingly After the leadership changes You know Like one into the other

They're like hey Let's tease the new console Probably let's get some Good PR going What with everything You know That has been The the AIification

That everyone is expecting To come To this brand I'm just going to say, I understand new management, let's tease something. Fucking weird decision when they're still putting all their games on other platforms. Well, that's not going to... There's no like...

Is it a weird? Why would I get excited to buy the fucking next Xbox? Well, it might not be a weird decision when you hear the details of the console and can anticipate to fill in the blanks on what the rest is going to be. All right. What do you got for me? I mean, my guess would have been pretty much it. but like, okay, so what we know, 2027? No.

What we? Straight up. Wait. No, wasn't I reject your premise? That's not going to happen. Okay. This ram shit, just no fucking way. Right.

They're going to miss it. The, yeah, so I think that everyone basically saw that whole shake up and went, okay, this brand is dead. And they're like, no, we're not. Here's what we're working on. And so they put out this. You got, you got 2027 is what they're saying. they're already saying stronger than a PSX is what they're aiming for. Yeah, no fucking shit.

It better be. Price points between a thousand and twelve hundred bucks. And if the rog is coming in at a thousand, then yeah, expect it to be more. And of course, and the pricing you're looking at is because is this a console or is it a PC? It doesn't matter. It's too expensive. It's a helix. You see?

It's both coming together. Here's what happens is basically you're getting a Xbox that is going to play Steam games that's going to play other company launcher games as well. Thus the library doesn't have to be an exclusive Xbox related thing. Thus, you're basically you're challenging PlayStation, but you're challenging... You're buying a Steam machine made by Microsoft. Exactly. The Steam machine is also your competitor.

There's so much appeal for me of that. Well, only the Helix box is going to have whatever litany of AI features that are going to be proprietary to it. This shit is so fucking. So yes. I didn't hear the price that the price of these things has to come down. Sony put out their own statements being like, hey, kick it. up the price like 10 bucks has hurt sales more than the money we made off of copy sold. The volume for video games, guys.

The bubble must grow, you fucking fool. You absolute buffoon, the bubble must grow. We have committed the entire Western, the entire market, the entire U.S., the, the end of everything is standing on. AI right now. We have committed to it, right? Missiles are blowing up AI in across the world. AI centers as like strategic points and targets is how important the market is with this bubble, right? That price is not coming down. This is what we're pushing. And again, what about polls that show the average person? The average person hates AI. What about that? We've built

We have built a system of shorting babies We're not going back now We're already here All right We're already We've decided to put the whole thing On the quicksand, man It's too late to question it

It's too late to pull back We're committing, we're all in And you know what? You know what? If we sell enough of these fucking 360s We can get the money Before they red ring, you son of a bitch if we get the money before they red ring

then everything will be fine we'll just replace them later and we'll win it won't matter it doesn't matter if there's a time limit we sell now no but it does because video game consoles make their money off of software sales

attachment rates who cares only only Nintendo makes money off the box attach this to your asshole and sit on it the whole the entire business model of your standard console is lost leading into software sales.

So you need software sales. Because your, because your, because of your, your, your platform holder fee is a percentage of software sales, you actually need to make a high volume of software sales. Oh, oh, you're just pretending like I'm a nagging wife. Oh, I'm sorry.

Or, Microsoft. Or my box will have steam on it, so all the games are. The same box will have steam on it. And all the games are already there. but you will come to my Helix Box because the co-pilot AI features

will not be available anywhere else. Well, did you see the reviews of the Xbox Rog thing and how, like, I think, like ran into the fact that everything, every part of the Microsoft interface was like a completely broken fucking piece of shit and would like brick the fucking console at random.

I mean, At a certain point, it's just literally Blu-da-da-l-da-da-da-da-da-la. I can't hear you. Why people have nostalgia for blades is that every single interface refresh that Xbox has ever done has made it a more unreliable piece of shit.

Oh, yeah. Oh, no, the funnest thing was booting up that Xbox one and seeing that it looked like Windows 7 and just fucking dying. Like the Metro style shit that was being pushed or whatever. like, and, you know, there's no backing down. I think this is what it is, man.

I think you're going to have a PC that will, yes, have Xbox exclusives if anyone wants to bother developing one. Or you can just install Steam or install fucking Epic Game Launcher or GOG or whatever else is available because other games launchers will work here. Thus, their libraries will work here. And we're just going to push fucking co-pilot and shit. shove it down your fucking throat and you will learn to love it. I'm going to see the steam machine release at a similar price point with similar specs, but it's made by Valve and it will be an open platform and it will sell out instantaneously no matter what it costs. And it will become, you will see threads that will be the most depressing shit ever,

which is like I can't, I can't find a steam machine. should I just get a helix instead? The Microsoft helix box will suck your dick. Hey, Willie, I have a question. I have a really important question. This is genuinely $1,200. This is a vital question to this argument. Are you ready for it?

Hit me. I'm going to spend, so we're talking $1,200 USD. I'm going to spend $1,600 plus $1,800. Oh, CAD? We do in the CD. convert on this? I'm going to spend $1,700 on this new Xbox.

And part of the appeal is that it has all the storefronts that you would expect out of a personal computer, right? That's the appeal? Yep. Will I be able to play Ghost of Yote on it? Well, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Because like if I can play all the games on it. When is when, when, when, when, when Ghost of Yokohama is coming to the PS6. Perhaps you can enjoy a port. Oh, you don't even have this story on your docket?

Sony's quitting. Oh, the last, oh, no, we did that last week. Oh, no, that's part two is that's the, no, Sony's quitting. Part one. Part one is, yes, we will have Yote when the sequel is coming out on the PlayStation. Yeah, but they're not doing that anymore either.

Oh. If you want to play a Sony, game or Nintendo game, you need to buy a Sony platform or Nintendo platform. We have Yote at home. Please click, please click the, hey, hey, co-pilot, find me

a samurai game. And then it'll make one for you. Assassin's Creed Shadows. It has been prepared. You know, when you search for something on Netflix and it knows what you're looking for, but it's not there, it'll auto-complete it and be like, oh, I know what you want.

It makes that sense be straight to the high seas every time. It's like, oh, you're looking for this thing that we don't have? That might be the worst interface thing I've never seen in my life. You are showing me, you're auto-completing to show me that you don't have it. Genuinely unbelievable. It's like, yeah, I know what you're looking for. But hey, how about this? Copilot has prepared a samurai game for you.

Look, please. He runs at four FPS. and it's going to get taken down by lawyers in two weeks. But yeah, here it is. It is currently generating. It has generated a slop AI fucking game for you right now. Please enjoy it. I can't believe they would spend the money on the RAM to put out an overpriced console

in the situation they've created. They are better off doing nothing until Sony makes a big. big fucky. So new person, whatever, new direction, new thing in charge, how do we turn this thing around? How do we turn this thing around? How do we turn this thing around, baby? Phil and Sarah left this new person a big old fucking

bowl of shit to eat. I mean, it was... They have left that place in a dire fucking state. Or, or it was on the it was on the chopping block and this is say no wait, hold on. How can we AI this? Right? Because, you know, I mean, we've watched this weird, like, zombie Xbox, like existence for this generation kind of last and be this, like, weird thing. We're like, oh, yeah, they're around, but what are they, what's going on, you know? And, um, this attempt appears to be the, we'll save it by turning it into something that it's just not.

right it's a it's a particularly locked line of PCs and they'll be and again they'll be all in on can i get the Microsoft OS off the device entirely go fuck yourself okay so you son of a bitch so why would I buy this thing instead of the steam machine you you'll be lucky if booting it up gives you anything besides a logo that talks to you in a voice and a microphone to tell you what you want it to do. Like genuinely, they're setting themselves up to compete with an explicitly, identically priced better product. I mean, fucking why? And you know what? Valve games are going to be exclusive to fucking Valve and you know it.

You're not going to play deadlock on a fucking Xbox through that bullshit. You're going to want the fancy steam controller with the, with the thumb hat. Oh, okay. It only works on the Steam. No, no, no, you see, they can't make it exclusive, but they can give you incentives, right? They can make it better. They can give you incentives to pull you away, which is ultimately, and to be real, this is

the Microsoft future that they wanted, right? This is them going on their own into the, hey, guys, consoles don't matter. Let's do the, everyone can play anything thing, right? The question is, because it's going to be backwards compatible as well, that's part of the, that's part of the thing. Of course, you know. So it's just like, what is development for the exclusion? Helix going to look like at all?

And is there any reason to actually bother? So here's the part that all this stuff is super fascinating because Xbox said, hey man, who cares about exclusives? Let's put everything on everything. And part of that push

was that large scale, like multiplayer populations could create a scenario in which games functionally only existed on one place, right? Hey, did you want to play on an anime fighter online back in the day.

If you're playing it on Xbox, you're a buffoon. Because everyone who plays that's going to be on PlayStation, right? Yes. So, hey, let's do crossplay as a big incentive. So the fact that our multiplayer games aren't dead on

our own system isn't a problem. Right? Yes. So Sony's also going to do that. Sony, the news coming out of the PC port thing is that Sony live service games that use multiplayer are still going to come to PC because having a gigantic user base for that is more important than getting them as an exclusive. So something like hell divers or something like that, right?

Okay. So we've done the crossplay thing. And they're like, what do games even need to be exclusive anymore? Of course not. And then Sony goes, yeah, they do from you. and Nintendo goes, I'm not listening to you fuckers at all. We're doing our own thing, of course. Mario is going to be on a Nintendo until this company burns the fuck down.

But if Sony, and I wonder if the timing is at all relevant here, because if Sony is going, well, PC is not really our opponent. They're off to the side. It doesn't matter. We only care about Microsoft. They're a place we're going to port marathon to so that we have more players in the, in the lobby. As long as you don't show up on an Xbox, that's all we care of. about and Xbox is like, well, ha, we are a PC. So now what? And then Sony's like, well, I'm out.

Fuck you. You know, like, I don't know. Because Microsoft going their own way, yeah, sort of, but their own way is like following in the shadows and sneaking up behind and trying to still be in the same space and picking up the crumbs. I don't know if it was on this podcast or if it was on my stream, but Microsoft is giving massive, like showing up to the key party alone energy. We don't have our own exclusives, but if I can, if I can, if I can, if I can, if I can, if I can, if I can, if I can, how about you get the fuck out of here? You know, if I can enjoy some of yours, you know, I mean, hey. Or alternatively, they come back with their keys and everyone's like, don't even drop that in the bowl, man. Just that's brutal.

Just get out of here. That's brutal. brutal. That hurts. Halo Infinite. No thanks. You already gave up your banjo. You already gave up your your master chief. You're letting us play Indiana Jones over here for free. Why would, why would this analogy? Yeah. All right. This analogy is going to get off the rails. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So you know what? And then you can even take it further. Like, well, is Joanna going to come around? No, no, we canceled. We canceled perfect dark. Dark is dark as hot. Well, then you need to get out. Dark is zinc. Dark is the only reason we

even hung out with you is so we could hang out with Joanna. But you don't, you guys aren't even together. Oh, get the fuck out of here. I think honestly, it's, you avoid, you avoid losing. How can you lose the generation when you sidestep it entirely? Right? Yeah. There you go. That's what Stadius said. Big think. Yeah. Anyway, what is the, like, of all the things, of all the details that we got or whatever that's being guessed, it's just what's not being said, what's going to be the biggest, like, watch the push, just be everything about this. You boot the thing up and it's a search box and a circle that, that you have to talk to. You know?

Sony is so confident that this fucking thing has no market threat. they have started testing motherfucking dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing. Yeah. Yeah. That is how unthreatening this shit is.

They are getting ready to fuck us over years in advance by doing surge pricing on fucking video games. And right now the dynamic pricing test is how much of a discount you get. Right?

So you know what? If that's true. Okay. But surely it's going to stay that way, right? And not be about how much extra you pay. So they have to be really careful because Steam has experience with this, right? Have you noticed that a lot of PC games on Steam come with 10% discounts for the first, like, a couple of weeks? Okay.

The reason why that is is because we have decades of teaching people not to buy games anywhere near their release date. In fact, games on Steam go on sale like six times a year. Right, right, right, right. But hey, it's 10% off. Now I might as well get it on launch day. If they do dynamic pricing, the longer you wait, the bigger the discount. They are just going to cause the situation of it's not on sale. Fuck this.

It'll go on. If I don't buy games long enough. If you take, yep, it'll go on sale. Yep. This is what Warframe does this. If you take, it's a warframe has daily rewards and sometimes the daily reward from Warframe

is a 50% off coupon on the store or a 75% coupon off on the store. And wouldn't you believe it, the longer you've been away from Warframe, the higher the likelihood that one of those good coupons will show up. Oh, wow. Okay, that's, that's, ugh. There must be,

free money. There must be somewhere on this planet. I imagine a country with a law that is really fucking strict about, hey, you walked in and this is the price you pay and you walked in and this is a different price you pay. There's got to be something about that. That country is probably ours. I was going to say Australia, but I don't know. Australia, Canada and the EU are the most likely to actually do that. There must be. There must be some fucking level of, are you in insane. That's the most anti-consumer shit of all time. Now, that doesn't mean that they can't do dynamic pricing in the regions that it's not against the law. Of course not. And you know what sucks is when I first heard the term?

Which means region locking will come back. Well, when I first heard the term, I thought they were, I went, oh, good. Because I assumed that meant that if you're buying the same game in Brazil or, you know, anywhere around the world in different countries, that the price would be. dynamic according to the currency it's in and that it would be it would be um accounted for and not be like you're paying the same amount in exchange rate u.s dollars you know what it's going to be but that's not what it is at all it's going to be like hey pat stares at PlayStation network account i see here that you own seven god of war games we will never put the new god of war on sale for you ever because you clearly really like it and you're probably going to get it eventually.

And it'll say, hey, you bought six of these the day they came out. Why would we offer you a discount? You fucking bitch? I will say that as soon as this came out, I saw that like, because it sounds so fucked up immediately, and then

it was like, no, no, no, wait, hold on. It's discounts. It's not from full price upwards. And it's like, oh, they know how to couch this immediately to try to find some sort of defense on it. But again, this is intense. And because there's surely no way it'll ever be for full price and above, right? You know what you do?

This is, so I am under the assumption. Sony knows that kicking up the price of games $10 or $20, depending on region, has hurt sales. What they can do is they can offer lower prices that are actually the old price of videos. Oh my God, if Canadian games become actually Canadian $59.99. Only the ones they deem Less likely to buy Oh Jesus Christ Fucking Street Fighter 4

Ever since then Yeah okay All right well moving on But that's part of it And by the way Watch the fucking PS6 Price come in at Price's right rules

And just clear like It will be $999 as long as we're cheaper than that thing. They're cutting off their nose despite their face. They're pricing these things out of the range of like five to ten year olds, which will then ostensibly grow up into freaks like ourselves that spend lots of money on games. And somehow that will be cheaper than the chip that's fucking in it by the time it hits your house from walking from the store. Anyway, whatever.

That's a whole other thing. Um, we touched on it a little bit earlier, but yeah, so gang of dragon, rough times. Um, apparently the, they're, they're pulling fund net ease is pulling funding and Negoti's studio might be shutting down based on the fact that they needed to, uh, re up on, they asked for more money for development in order to reach completion. Um, and they asked for an addition seven billion yen at a, uh, a time when NetEase has been shutting down tons of international game development operations. Yeah. So net ease is actually the secret embracer group, the Embracer of China, in which they offered tons of people, cool deals, new studios, infinite funding to make games for them. And then a couple of years ago, they're like, nah, fuck that, actually. This costs a lot of money. Let's just cancel them. Well, between Squeenix and Capcom, and all these different companies,

there's always a, like, an international fund that you're like, let's fuck around with the planet and see what else. Let's get a couple studios around the planet to fuck, and then eventually be like... So, for example, Netis is the company that closed Visions of Mana during my sponsored visions of mana stream. Ah, okay.

The company that was willing to send out the ad money to pay me, but not the studio. Yeah. No, they, and there was like a list of the, of the different things that they shut down over the last couple years as well. Again, you play around, you get into the international market and then, you know, when it's like, no, none of this is working, they pull back from it entirely and then usually, you know, consolidate and focus at home. Visions of Mata 2024 Grasshopper

manufacturer as well was listed here what bad brain Vancouver based world's a whole lot

of other games are on this list but either way Yakusa no matter what they're doing with their new Kiwami 3 universe or whatever it's like

well if if the competition is fucking dead here's what's weird right this is it'suno of the not it'suno uh negotii of the former like a dragon team right made lots of yakuza games super weird guy to come out and go we went massively over over budget actually put out like 20 games in a row under budget on time What? What happened? They had to start from scratch without any of the existing assets. Oh, it's been decades since I made a genuinely new game.

Infrastructure that they had because Yakuza's been running on the same thing for a long time now. Alternatively, it's possible the Like a Dragon team occasionally received a little alley-up from some friends of theirs in the community that were personally interested. at seeing the Like a Dragon game succeed? Perhaps. Friends, old friends of Sega, perhaps. It's impossible to know. Perhaps also getting Madong Siak and big actors to do stuff had a cost as well. It's possible that a similar friends in China were not as interested.

But yeah, yeah, I'm imagining that a big part of Yakuzza's under budget, magic has been because they were building the same thing and kept using the engine that they had to switch it up, like a K-O-F game. I gotta tell you, man, Gang of Dragon probably was gonna be really cool. I could not have been more disappointed to hear.

Here's the new game from Negoshi. It's the same fucking thing again. Like genuinely unbelievable. It's the same fucking thing again, and it's the same fucking location. I can't believe it. The depths of his soul are screaming spite, anger, and also I'm never going back to Monkey Ball, you fuckers, you can't make me.

Yeah, I don't know if that's true. You can't make me. I'm tanned up. Happier when he was working on Monkey Ball. He did. He did. Before he turned into quote this weird tan yakuza baby. Pre-crisis, man.

Pre-crisis, negotiate. All right, moving on. There is something kind of insane. And yeah, maybe we'll, I'm sure we'll be trying. We'll be getting into this in the future a bit more. But when a world, when PAL world can PAL world Pokemon, who PAL worlds the PAL world? Oh, this fucking thing. Right?

Who watches the watchman? This fucking thing kicks so much ass. If the courts can decide that pal-worlding a Pokemon is okay, then who's to stop you from pal-wording a pal-world? In comes Picmon. This fucking somehow. Like, you know, when- This fucking thing.

You watch the, you watch that, the, the, uh, pal-world bit and you're like, this is insane. This is blatant. And it's kind of hilarious because look at them, um, fucking putting guns in their hands and having the slave shops and all that, that, uh, that, uh, that, that, that, that, wild commentary, um, et cetera.

Well, this is all of that, but without any of the little extra bit and just the full on, oh, we legally can steal your assets. What are you going to do? That is a mammarrest. That is a mammarrest.

You can't stop us, right? I think the craziest one is that the big crystal on the logo is like a one to one lifted copy of the limbs of Limesa Lominsa Atherite and FF14. Like it is, it's crazy. of it to the side is a Charazard with a little bit of fur on

its chest. Just a little bit. With Link with a gun on it. Right? Now, the insane thing here is that Picmon, as this game is called, it's the developing company. Also the fucking name, dude. Oh my God. It's called Pickmon. Which I remember when

Miyamoto announced Picmin and I was like, word, bro. Really? Really? Pickment? All right. Anyway. Pickmon. And the company's called... Oh, my God. It's actually. Wait, the fucking developer's name is pocket game. Holy shit.

Pocket game, not pocket pair, not game freak, pocket game. The absolute lack of fucks to give. And this is inevitable. This is inevitable because the pathway, right, once you legally open the door, it's done. It's done. There's no reason to give a shit, right? And here's the thing. You could almost wonder about like the social experiment that is like,

Like, what is to stop me from ripping off the rip-off, right? What reason is there to give a fuck? Here's how little, like, there's, the integrity couldn't be any further in the basement. There's a fucking, um, uh, uh, uh, there's like, yeah, there is a, uh, one of the Pokemon on, on that box art that you see in the trailer is not even being stolen from Pokemon or from Powell World. It's being stolen from fan art of Pokemon. Yeah. Right. So you're seeing this...

Oh, that's just red Raikwaza. Oh, man. What was it called? Mega-Maghanium, a grass fairy type concept of Pokemon. That was just stolen from fan art. And it's the exact, like, exact fan art. They're going and they're grabbing concept Pokemon that people have posted online and putting them into the fucking game. Just fucking steal it. apps like zero fucking scruples no fucks given no integrity whatsoever that's the most blatant model from

overwatch literally road hogs model theft maxing is at like this is i'm shaking my ass at you and i'm wearing a checker jumpsuit i dare you to arrest me copper i dare you what are you gonna do pig it's crazy like they're baiting jail with this i'm not i I've never seen it like this. They're touch. They're touchdown, touchdown dancing, end zone with the football going, uh, uh, uh, in the jail, out the jail with Picmon here. It's, it's never been like this. This is the, this is, oh, man.

And honestly, honestly, between that and the, the actual stealing of fan art, lock them up. Yeah. Arrest these assholes. Shut it down. Next to Bungy. This is crazy. Lock them the fuck up, man. What are we doing here?

It's in, they're just, like the asset flip is, yeah. But picking the target that's currently under lawsuit as well is just wild. All right. I got to get out of here. Yeah, I got to go do a stream with peach saliva over at Twitch. com TV slash pet stairs at in YouTube. We got a beat shout of the Colossus and blindly in the blind in half an hour because everyone in the house is getting sick.

And if we leave it a couple days, we won't be able to do it. Awesome. We'll get to the rest of it next time. Take care, everybody.