Castle Super Beast - CSB365: The Quadruple-A Mind Prison is Doo-dah

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

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Howdy-ho? Hey, man. How you doing? All right. All right. And I'm going to use my caffeine and try to power up a little bit here. I don't have any caffeine. I drank all my caffeine yesterday.

You're holding endorphins in your hands. I know. I'm holding sleepy chemicals in my hand. I know. But I don't have any caffeine. I drank it all yesterday. I mean, well, no, I had a. I had a terrible cup of coffee this morning

that I made for myself. You ever make yourself a cup of coffee and you're like, man, I fuck this thing up. Not really. But I need the caffeine. Coffee is always plan B for me. Plan A is cold energy drink. Yeah.

I want cold beverages because I can drink them faster. Yeah, same here. So what's up, man? A couple things, I guess. It's been a bit of a week. Stuff's been going down. Are we fired? Well,

Everybody else got fired. Are we fired again? Would you consider this a successful podcast? I think it's a good podcast. Then, yeah, we might be in trouble. Oh, no. We might literally actually be in trouble. Oh, shit.

Wouldn't be the first time. Boy, thousand people, huh? Oh, there's actually way more than that. Because you're thinking of the Fortnite, right? I'm thinking of the Fortnite. Okay, so that and then PlayStation's closing Dark Outlaw games, which is like a couple hundred people. Okay, okay, hold on.

The story has DLC. All right. The studio was formed last year. I'm sorry, it's 50 people. And NACON? I didn't even hear about that one. Layoff Mondays or layoff Tuesdays for that matter. All right.

I mean That's one of those When's the video game crash going to happen? So that's one of the That's the you got to for every For every High-Fi rush was super successful And or rather

Did everything right and still Fucking crashed and burned You can't do anything possibly right No matter what You got to have this which is like The tent pole fucking video game of this industry and it still doesn't matter

but yeah no fortnight put out some bullshit like last week or two weeks ago saying we got to increase the price of v bucks to keep the lights on and it's like are you are you fucking serious by the way guys you're reading this note to find out and this is totally not related to AI remember remember you are not being laid off because of AI okay so just keep that in your heart and feel good about that.

I saw that one of the people who built Fortnite, like originally, one of the original team members was also laid off. And I see that and I go, oh, we're in that period of the creative endeavor where you look at, why do we pay this engineer three times as

much as these other guys? Oh, because he's been here since day one. He knows how every single thing works. That's ridiculous. Replace him with two interns. like part of the of the business naturally naturally yeah no you got to start going down to the like a like up fortnight building you go down to the scaffolding to the actual foundations and you're like eh i don't know if we got to waste all the material on this we can find something cheaper yeah and then they they fire that guy and then in a month and a half they'll be like how do

we fix this and they're like i don't know that guy you fired was the guy who built it he's the only guy who went in there and messed with it. No one here knows how it works. And now we're in no build mode because the people who built it are gone. I remember watching a guy talk about like the business practices of restaurants

and how there's like a there's a moment in time when a restaurant decides to kill itself. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it happens to every restaurant and it is like it is the the mark of death for every restaurant you've ever been to.

And it's where they're like, numbers are down. We need to cut staff during busy periods to have less overhead. And that causes quality to just immediately shit up. And then the numbers are down.

So then the only thing you can do because you already cut all the staff is raise prices. So now you have bad surface and too high prices. And then the franchise just goes right the fuck under. And behind this, if you're a trendy new spot that's made by somebody whose name attracted people there to begin with, you also are someone who knows that it eventually, even if it starts getting crowded and becoming a big hit,

and it is making that money, yeah, that dip is eventually going to be a problem. So it's better for you to pull out and create a new thing that you actually give a fuck about. And as long as the new thing has the attention on it, et cetera, you can put all your time and focus into that. And then this thing can just atrophic atrophy and then die off and eventually close even if it's got lines around the block or whatever the case is, you know, or better yet, you grab two sticks of fucking dynamite.

And you do like... Hey, so here's, hey, hey, Willie, I have an idea. I have an idea. You want to hear my idea? I'm going to make the most popular video game in the world that's ever been. Right? Then, I'm going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars

suing the stores that that game is on and I'll win to save some fees and then they'll kick me off their stores cutting me out of like hundreds of millions of people and then those people won't be able to buy my game on those services anymore and I'll go I won. Are you winning Tim? Tim Sweeney is so fucking stupid. I remember when there was a seafood restaurant that was near my my my my old department back in when I was in the projects and uh that shit went up in flames and after oh in flames yeah it it it was on fire and everyone saw it and uh and it was the kind of is it's this place that's like it even had like a little boat out front and everything you know it was like a little cute exactly

seafood shack and um after it burnt down um that police tape went up around and boy did it stay there for a while, you know? And it was like, this is longer than you'd expect because people who own this probably want to, you know, you got to get go with something. You repair. And then, yeah, sure enough, of course, you know, a couple of investigations turned out that we dropped some fucking explosives in that kitchen. Actually, it wasn't just a regular fire, you know?

There was a secret menu item that called for the fucking detonation of this building. and insurance was not having it. People's successful restaurants don't just burn down. What's up with that? You think it would be equally spread out? Like, I also, it's also something where I'm like, if you're trying this, there must be a number of these that actually work somehow, right? It's almost-

I can't possibly catch them all. It's got to be like, like, like when you hear about kidnappings, where it's like, oh, you don't hear about all the successful good kidnappings, right? No. Like full on sympathy for Mr. Vengeance style. It's like, no, there's so many good successful kidnappings where everybody gets what they want and the news never talks about it. Yeah, no, jail is filled with the criminals too stupid to get away with it. Oh my God, man.

Yeah, so we got to see that wild shit. And hey, these business practices, turns out they're not limited to the restaurant industry. I will say shoutouts to on Blue Sky 1 Kaden Jensen who basically was like Fortnite made $6 billion in revenue last year

Epic raised V-Bucks prices Epic Game Store bought in 57% increase year-over-year in game sales from 2025 Disney invested $1.5 billion into Epic and now they need to lay off 1,000 employees not related to AI Yeah, absolutely not. Fuck that, right.

Yeah, no, it seems like nearly every business is just like, let's see how big we can get until it falls over. And then we'll all just run away. The thing to watch is the press release that then goes, here's how we're implementing AI slowly in a different place, et cetera, whatever. And to see like, it's like, no, no, no, these layouts weren't related, but let's find out from the people that are remaining if they are being told that they have to work alongside these new initiatives, you know.

Anyway, yeah, that's a, that, that is happening this week. But beyond that, there was other stuff. Yeah? Yeah. Why would you get up to? I, it's with great pride that I can, I can announce here, I am the world premiere YouTube channel and Twitch streamer. of Goritaire.

I am the first person on the internet. I like dude, I love it. I love it. I love it. I do backlog shit and I load up a game and I'm like, you are the only person in the world playing this game. I'm fucking number one. So I expected that I would be the only one playing it. What I was also not, what I was not expecting is I'm the only worst person that has at that point, literally the only person ever.

I type in Gorotair. It's Gamatsu Trailer. Trailer. Trailer. Trailer. Trailer. Trailer. Trailer.

Hi. Gortia. The sole bad guy, guided side story game. It's a gorilla salt card game. It's guerrilla solitaire. Why? Well, because

Arc System Works is expanding, right? And, you know, they, we saw some trailers for Damon and Baby. Ishiuatari is working on his other stuff. Also, Ragnah, the Blood Edge from Blaze Blue is in Damon and Baby.

Of course he is. Reincarnated as Lord Blood Edge, which is some wild shit. But yeah, they're working on some other genres and other games and stuff. And so, um,

part of this, is the guerrilla solitaire game. And yeah, you know what, it ain't bad. The premise is pretty straightforward. You got a deck of however many cards, and you can decide whether you want to be mostly guerrilla cards or mostly banana cards. You choose your ratio.

And when you pull out a gorilla card, the goal is to play seven guerrilla cards in a row. to get to the end because a guerrilla society needs to have a purpose, you know, and it needs strength in numbers. But you have to feed them. And every turn, you must have enough bananas to feed each gorilla you have pulled out. The problem is that there are clearly not going to be enough bananas coming out each turn in order to feed all of your guerrillas.

and so this is where we get into the mechanics of hypothetical bananas. Hypothetical bananas? Is this like an imaginary banana? Correct. So every turn with the guerrillas, you can use the amount of gorillas that are active, that are awake, not asleep, to either search for more bananas,

pull out more cards, play more gorillas, or convert bananas into hypothetical bananas. And so these things are... What's the benefit of a hypothetical banana versus a real banana? It will keep the gorillas satiated, even though it may not actually be a banana. We don't know what it is they're eating, but they're eating it and they're staying alive. So that's good.

Cyops mind-gating these gorillas with fake bananas? There is one ability where you can get three guerrillas to stare at the moon, and the moon's crescent reminds them of a banana. and they're suddenly not hungry anymore. Would that not increase their hunger? No, no, they're satiated. I, oh man, I don't think that. You might be drawing gorillas, but it doesn't matter. The point is, anything can be a banana if you try hard enough.

The game is basically telling you. And so you can also, once you have your bottom layer of, you know, the seven gorillas, that's the goal to win, but it's hard to get there without putting gorillas on top of them. So you create a gorilla pyramid. And the gorilla pyramid, the higher up the gorilla that you play in the solitaire kind of, you know, hierarchical structure. The higher up gorillas have the ability to take one banana and divide it into many bananas. So this should feed one gorilla, but a higher up gorilla will say, no, no, this one banana will feed three. So they can divide one banana into three hypotheticals, you know, and keep the base strong.

It is absolute corporate fucking economic apes Apes together strong bullshit And you cannibalize the bottom To feed the rest as long as the ones on top stay where they are And every once in a while you can sacrifice a bottom gorilla And everything else falls down one tier To get more hypothetical bananas You sacrifice one bottom

And suddenly you have three hypotheticals You know So that's, you know? So that's it. That's the system. That's the structure. You learn it. And that's how you survive. Well, can I say something brave? Go ahead.

I'm cooking something brave over here. Okay. Okay. So this, this gorilla banana solitaire game seems pretty interesting, all things considered. It's also really funny in its core concept. Unka and Bunkah. Right?

But maybe I'm like really genuinely unfair because I've been a proponent of like, I want shorter games made cheaper by people who are paid more, et cetera. And then Arc System works was like, hey, we got a bunch of smaller games coming out. Like Gorilla game and Damon and Baby. And all I can think of is like, not like that, though. Or like. Like.

Uh-huh. Like. Like. Yeah. Or could it possibly be, well, not from you guys. though. Well, I gotta be honest, I genuinely kind of think it is not from you guys. Like

Arc System Works has like a really long history of hey, we want to try something new. And whereas any other dev, I'd be like, that sounds really cool. With Arcsus, I'm like, no. No, make a fucking fighting game. Hey, they're, well, they clearly

still are. They have a bunch of fighting game announcements they had this week. You know, but I'll get to those. But in the meantime, fuck it. Gorilla Solitaire. It ain't hurting nobody. And it's putting, and I'm out here charting new territory.

You know, I might be alone in this, in this place, but. So you're the number one, it's called Gore-Tare. Gory-Ther. Gory-Tia. You're the number one gory-ter content creator in the world, and you're sitting here talking to the one-time largest virtual fighter streamer in the world. Ah. I see.

Well, here's what I... We just got to get a nice wall of like Best at this. Well, the difference is this. Like, as long as I'm playing Gorater, then it's at its all time high. If Gore- That's true. If Gorrater has One fan, it is me. I am here.

I'm holding it up. I'm going to look for it on Twitch right now. And it's average maintains. Oh, bro, it doesn't even come up with a fucking game. Oh, there's a guy. There's a guy. Oh, wait. as oh yeah no you're you're crushing everybody in the goritaire game bro as long as one even close as long as one person is playing it then it is it's all time great greatest it's doing its best you know so um yeah look let them let them expand into doing all kinds of little fun side things and i will be the one that plays them and then that'll be that Yeah, I had fun with it. It's pretty hard too. It gets really challenging.

So I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's because apes are strong. Exactly, you know, and it's asking a lot of you. And then you start realizing, you're like, well, I'll just put more bananas in my deck. And that way, I'll feed all the apes. And then you're like, uh-oh, I have too many bananas. There's overproduction. What do I do?

So. You can't have too many bananas. You do have too many bananas because now you don't have the apes to pull forward. And they get a- You know what, bro? I'm living a life of too many bananas right now. Like you'll, you're, Dad, I want a banana.

You're like, here's a banana. And then he's like, oh, man. And then he's like, the next day he's like, I want a banana. And you're like sick. So what do you do? Make sure to stock up on bananas. I don't like bananas anymore.

Uh-huh. And now you're looking at like the bunch of bananas that are like super huge. And you're like, these are going to go bad in 10 seconds. Yeah. So you can do the, so here's the thing. So here's the thing, right? The weak half-hearted hand-out attempt is you take the bananas, you put them in the freezer, and then, yes, they start to age, but they get, but the freezing of them means that they can still be used in banana bread, right? And if you're willing to put in the work and freeze some bananas and pull them out later at a, God knows when, for some banana bread, then sure.

But are you really willing to do that? Are you going to make that banana bread? Or are you going to stare at the permafrost on that shit in six months? So like in the house, we have this tradition that happens once a week where there's like leftovers and we we diligently pack up the leftovers so that they can go bad in the fridge. Yeah. Anyway, in Gorotere, if you don't have, if you're missing one banana for one gorilla, the game is over. You may not fuck up even once. Oh, really?

Yes. Oh, because gorillas need. banana really bad. And the funny part is they actually don't. They need tons of greens. They spend 12 hours a day eating leaves and greens because that's how big they are and how inefficient their fucking engines are. They should just eat more bananas.

They should. They should. And that's why D.K. will go on a quest as soon as one is missing, right? Anyway. I think D.K. has like a problem. I mean, like, he's literally staring at the full mountain. and there's one gone and it's like

I will rip this earth apart to find it. How dare you? Like when I was going through like a banana and you get the banana gems and he's like oh banana it's like it's a fucking rock that happens to be shaped like a fucking banana decay.

Yeah. No. It's not even a real banana. I mean it's just a gem but they have to call it that to get him interested. You see. I like the idea that we're, There's a massive gas lighting system to keep things banana themed so that you'll be interested in them. Anyway, so that's your world premiere news on Gorater. Stay tuned for more Gorotere updates.

Gorotair will return. It will? I promise. Okay. Yeah, it was kind of fun, you know. And when I'm out here alone. so I feel a responsibility now, you know? The marketing team is relying on me.

Oh, do they call you? They did not. No. Do they know the game came out? Um, well, I mean, there's a trailer on the YouTube channel, so it got scheduled at some point. Somebody knew. Anyway, so what else happened?

Well, this week I also went over and, took a look at, yeah, well, we popped in to just investigate what was happening, you know, in the weekend show, get into Second Cousins. And, you know, we don't need to beat the dead horse too much. It's been a full week and all. But suffice to say that Alex is pretty fun. He's got a lot of cool shit going on. He has the sickest win pose I have ever seen. Have you beaten someone in round one with his level three? Uh, that, okay, so he has multiple variants of it. When you do this, four, right? He has, uh, regular that kills, regular that doesn't kill, critical art that kills, critical art that doesn't kill. Yeah. And furthermore, there is a unique wind pose after the round one use of it.

So when you do the round one, critical art that kills, he does the full like leg lock, the final prison. You hear the noise? Did, did, did, did, did. And then, oh, crack. And the person's down. And he peels off and stares down at them. And then just stares at them. And it's so sick.

I have gotten that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He just gets off and looks at your corpse on the ground. And that's it. I couldn't believe it. Wondering if you're related. Did he just, did he just get one in you? You know?

Is that the sound of, of the hitting the mark, you know? Anyways, what we did discover through just peripheral other people out there doing the Lord's Work in World Tour mode is that somehow,

even after covering the story as we did and going into the full bit. There was significantly more. Significantly more. I'm like, hey guys, just edit out that screenshot and we'll be okay, right? because one thing has become clear is there's a lot of people out here that are in disagreement as to what the worst part is and there's a lot of people out here going. There's a poll up on the subreddit.

I saw. I saw. And there's a lot of people that are out there going, I don't see what the overreaction is about, dda, da, da, et cetera, right? It's just insert which reason here. And then you still have the cascading others. And it's kind of nuts because you just the fact that you get a dealer's choice, you get the fucking omacase of You know, which reason you want to go with that bothers you enough I would like to I've been informed I need to inform you that

The Japanese audience is confused as to why we're making such a big deal about this And you can just take that joke where you will if you feel the need I just at the first at the The people out here are going, whatever. Just stop. It's not the hill. It's not the hill to die on. But anyway, you and me both took significant steps to get way outside our gene pools. What I will say, I mean, yeah, you know, what I will say is I was surprised by the results of that poll.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. and I mean, I get it all the way around, but like, if you're like, just looking at it, I was like, I thought the blood would bother most people, but it's actually the proximity. It's definitely holding her as a baby. It's the problem. And I'm like, the blood feels way more of a big deal to me than the proximity, you know? But it turns out most people, the, this is a real. This is a real splitting hair scenario.

It is. That's the thing. You know, there's no, there's no winning here. Where everyone's in 95% agreement. But what about that last 5%? Not zero sum, but whatever the other type of game is. Yeah. Anyways. So, yeah, world tour mode, huh?

Yeah. So in conclusion, you can go hang out with Tom and talking to Tom. He basically goes, yeah, you know, I knew Patty would have to leave the nest someday. but she ended up with Alex and I didn't have to worry about her anymore. Those are just about the best kids you could ask for as a dad. So you kind of you kind of botched it a little bit because the core of it is that she was going to leave the nest and he was going to be lonely. Yes. But now that she's with Alex, they're not going anywhere.

And so. So they're both going to stay. And so it's like in conclusion, Gill was right. in conclusion Gil, I'm trying to beat Tom up. The Illuminati needs to come back

and to quote Princess Zenmas killed this murder this nigga Tom again. Go back, Gil. I mean, wow, right? From the most

inconsequential, like Tom is like, you don't have to do this, Alex, it's fine, it was a fair fight. And now we're like, no, the Illuminati needs

to come back and fuck him up actually. It's the idea that like Tom is literally standing there going like I'm so glad my kids ended up together and he refers to them as my kids is like

at the very least we can all agree that Alex was failed by Tom on a fairly dramatic level Tom taught him wrong

never more has the world of Street Fighter needed the blesser of all souls, you know? And then there's the other part where it's like, if you are wondering, you're like, why, hold on a minute, something must be wrong. Let's go check the original translation. And that's do it. That crossed many people's minds. It crossed mine as well.

And it's like, it'd be weird if it got mistranslated like four times in a row. And then it turned out, oh, guys, no, this is a fucked up thing. actually, if you look at the original script, it was, it was fine or whatever, you know? And what you end up with is a fucking ballrog gondolf situation where the English translators

were holding them back. Oh yeah? Um, you know, Tom, he's my trainer, my manager, my adoptive father.

No, now it's the real deal. Tom's my father. And, um, and it just, it goes on to, I don't, we don't even have to get into the full script of it. But the point is, is the whole, I'm going to protect that kid thing. And it mentions staring at the same smile that she had as a baby, um, that you're, that you're going to protect now. And it's like the whole bit with that artwork, that artwork, it matches up with the line he's saying in the script. so it's actually so much more like, no, you can't back out of this.

We have bolted in and welded shut the doors, sir. I was talking to page about this and I'm like, there's now so much of it that like, let's say they retcon it. Let's say they just scrub this shit from their DNA, whatever, right? It's just going to come off like Alex, like got too much heat and is like covering it up. like Street Fighter 7. Alex is a playable character and he's like, oh yeah, me and Patty

were never together. That's just going to sound like no, shut up, man. No, she should be quiet. Or it was all K-fabe and it was all just, you know, it was part of the character. It was all a bit just.

But he's narrating to us like from a character perspective. It doesn't make, just like Vince and Stephanie McMahon was all a bit. It was all a bit. not based in reality whatsoever. This is the wildest cope ever.

This is, this is, I honestly, honestly, like the, the move is you just rewrite the story, you patch it and you move forward. They don't care also.

They also don't care. Clearly, clearly. But still, you just do it and it's like, yep, it's changed now. And whatever the weirdness and, like,

you get to make fun of that forever, but that's it. you just change it anyway. It's awkward, it's weird, it's stupid, but you just change it anyway. That's the only way, that's the only path forward. And yes, you know, maybe. No, Ingrid, the God.

Ingrid, the God can change the timeline. Oh, God. We're cheering on Ingrid and Gil. Oh, please, Ingrid. Save us. Fix this. Anyways, anyways. Just in case anyone wasn't paying attention.

there was just there were more details that just kept digging and you couldn't find this game this is not going to be the last time we talk about this because Code Veronica is going to be the next Resident Evil remake and that those that game's villains have a full blown sibling incest plot line sure but like the whole point is that

they're creepy rich siblings right yeah and they're doing the whole like fucking Lannister thing yeah we're twins yeah yeah so no that that that I'm like, to me, that's on point because you're like, that's establishing the, the weird, rich incestuous. Because they're evil. Exactly.

Totally. Totally. Totally. Yeah. You know, that's successful. By the way, you want to guess what her name is? Well, it's the Ashford's, right? Alexia, Ashford. Yeah.

Alex. Oh, sure. Right. That's two incestuous Alexes. Yeah. Yeah. You, you, you, you, you, there's, I feel like that trope of just like the, oh, dear brother, oh dear sister, ha ha ha ha, ha, being creepy.

It's like, yeah. No, that's exactly, Wully, that's literally exactly that. It works, it works, it works super well for establishing your villains, you know, because your choices are either that or the, um, uh, fucking, uh, what you might call it, uh, always sunny, um, the poils, the McPoyles. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Don't care for them.

Anyway. Um, all right. What else happened? I started me. Legacy of Kane's Soul Reaver. Bro, that game's good. It's pretty cool so far. That re-release is also super impressive.

Hit the button, change the version. Love that in every single remake, want it forever. Hit the button, show me where the old game would have been running underneath this, you know? Yeah, yeah, it's great. It's great. It's great. Because at best, then, it also serves as a re-release of the original game.

you know it's both it's a remaster that is optional you can just play the original by hitting a button and then you can see things like that first boss where you're like oh this model change added a lot and it for the best and it made it better you know um so aspire you know doing a solid job with that so uh i also interesting because aspire will like AI slop up and shit out a bunch of garbage except for these legacy of Kane remasters. These ones get like adoration. Somebody, somebody is probably real mad about Nasgoth and wants to, you know, probably wants to write that wrong, maybe.

So I've said before that like I've seen some blood omen original and more of that than Legacy of Kane weirdly. But I, and I remember like the old CG that was like pretty cool. for the time, you know, that like, that like pre-Blizzard kind of crushing it, like, um, post-reboot stuff, you know? But, um, with, with Blood Omen, um, it's a, it's a Zelda like and it's Diablo like. And I know that this has been, that Soul Reaver has been compared to, um, Okerunee of time, uh, it came out very similarly.

I actually, when I did the backlog thing of it, just a little while, I also brought that up. It's like, people thought that this, this was going to be like the PlayStation Z. Zelda. But I guess the, and because the original looked like, you know, like, linked to the past or, or not looked, but like the views literally top down with the dungeons and stuff. But the original game was, it's much more combat heavy and, you know, using your, your power. It also sucked. Shit, sure. Blood omen is rough. Old as hell. But the, um, my memory of it was that it was a lot more combat heavy and I was surprised to see, uh, so much of, uh, Soul Reverse. is actually like puzzle solving and combat incidental or on the way to puzzles. And even the- I don't know if you saw, but when you started your stream, I jumped in there going, oh, wow, this is great.

Oh, I'm so happy. Yeah. And then I said, I hope Wully has his fucking big brain on. Yeah. Because there is some diabolical fucking block puzzles in there. Well, the funniest thing is because you also texted me, yo and then the first thing that you do is the thing that they do which is are you going to do this and this and this one now

okay okay okay okay okay okay you just okay hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on I had I was thinking about this because I realized as I was doing it so here's the thing I'm also I'll talk about it later but I'm also playing kingdom hearts so I'm playing kingdom hearts yeah and every single fucking 10 minutes are you going to do the third one like not even the fucking second one. Like, you're gonna go through the 11? Yeah. Yeah. And I go, I don't fucking know. I'm doing it here. The reason I bring that up with you

for Soul Reaver, and I'm pretty sure I sent you a text about this. Yes. Is because Soul Reaver games are you almost unique in that they all end in god awful cliffhangers. Right, right, right. And like, all of them end in outrageous cliffhangers where the fucking level

just stops because they ran out of time. Okay. Yeah. No, I mean, what I will say is the fact that, excuse me, the fact that they're very short and very excellently voice acted makes that easy to throw on if I want to go see what's going on with the rest of the series. But we'll see, you know, as with everything, we shall see. But at the very... Have you played through Blood Open? No, no, no, not at all. Oh, yeah. you really don't need shit from Blood Omen to play Soul Reaver I believe you need to know that it's the bad ending canon

yeah no Kane was given the choice and he said fuck it I'm gonna live forever and thus dooms the world and that's that's what you're looking at if you continue after that you kind of need a little bit more Blood Omen information okay so you can do what I did which is go to the game fact board and find the plot summary text and just read that shit instead of playing through Blood Oman. I mean, so, again, I have like such, it's from such a long time ago my memory of that game. But I already did get linked to a, what was it?

It was like a summary of the stuff that matters or, you know what I mean? Like there's, it seems like there's like five things that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. there's places you can go. I think there's a video here. What was this? Yeah, I got linked to a blood omen story playlist

essentially to go watch. So in any case. Yeah, it's old and rough. But, yeah, no. It's kind of rough then, honestly. It is interesting to also be going through this game and kind of like, okay, here's your like, quintessential old

PlayStation like 3D crawling through these hallways these textures are moving and sure enough Reggie started feeling sick and like the motion sickness of old textures

and how long did you play oh three four hours? Yeah yeah we did three to eight you know normal session. There is a spiral staircase yes I hit that and felt it awful. There's a

horrible spiral staircase early. It lives in my memory so clear as the only thing in a video game to ever give me motion sickness in my life. It's crazy. And the camera's so bad that it like, their solution for... It spins so fast when you go down. So basically the game has a thing where they're like, we want to have you go between little caves and go into these little corners and go from a big room to a big room. And the camera is like they take they don't take control away from you, but they put it on a track that automatically locks into a curve around the corner so that if you don't touch the camera, it should still center itself behind you. But this staircase gets right up against like the center pillar and just starts spinning really quickly as you go down and you're right behind Razelle's head.

And holy shit, it's awful. It's absolutely fucking crazy. On top of that, you're getting the warp texture thing of like, you know, the camera angle is making them bend and kind of like look like they're distorting on the Z axis. And I'm somebody who usually, I'm like third person things. Don't make me feel sick because I can focus on the character. But a tight hallway is a tight hallway and it doesn't matter, man. It's still bad here, you know, for the same reasons Wolfenstein made me feel it and Doom made me feel it back in the day, you know. But so far, very cool, you know.

And I like the, definitely the novelty of the life bar and the realm system is interesting. I've heard about that too back in the day. The realm system starts interesting and gets like super complex as you're having to hop between like multiple times in a row to move objects and get to places and all sorts of shit. Yeah. It's super cool. Because when I heard about it and when I had friends describing it to me back in the day, I thought it was like, you know, like shadow realm, light realm type of thing. but you'd flip back and forth. Yeah, but you flip back and forth

and the environment goes, and it's super crazy for a PlayStation one game. But it also acts as death, and it also acts as your puzzle, like, you know, yeah, it's like Sekaro's,

die twice where it's like, hey, you die in the human realm, sorry, mortal realm, go to the spirit world. You get another shot before you get a K.

And then, of course, there's just your classic things where it's like, there's some portals to some sigils that you better fucking memorize, because fuck you. And it's a sigil.

It's fuck you. That's what you're going to remember. It's the sigils of the vampire houses and there's no text and fucking remember. And no, this was very much a case of like, yeah, go read the booklet. You know, and like, okay, yeah, true, true, true. So, you know, I did do that. And it helped a lot to get the breakdown of like, yeah, when you fight something, there's different ways to take it out.

And, you know, killing it is not enough, obviously. You got to absorb it and stuff. So, yeah, just pretty, pretty cool first impression so far. And I know again, I know those games are not very long, so I'm going to see where it takes us. It is also very cool to just kind of get hit with like, okay, so yes, of course, Tony Jay, the fucking goat. But also just like the sound of the sound of Disney Rugrats, fucking Darkwing Duck kind of just everything. with Michael Bell Michael Bell

is playing as Raziel Yeah Like I'm like that I know him as the fear From Metal Gear Cell 3 He's everywhere man The evil administrator In Star Trek Next Generation

Episode 1 Encounter and Farpoint That's a voice Timpleman is Kane Yeah No Like these are voices That are like

Baked the fuck in You know This was one of the first games I ever played on like specifically on the PlayStation because I played it before Metal Gear and it fucking blew my shit away

because it's not it's not just that it's like a plus plus quality voice acting and script by Amy Henning it's also like the music is fucking incredible and the sound effects is great all the way down to

like the scraping noise when you push that one block right yeah the the music is is like old idos PC game music at certain points you know definitely there's a sound

that like it's not just the fact that it's like MIDI instruments or so but there's a particular genre of like old PC game that like you hear when you listen to that soundtrack or when you listen to the soundtrack of Mech Warrior 2

you know like it just it's different from like there's that category of like 3D game soundtrack and then like before that was like apagy game kind of soundtrack you know what I mean like I don't know how to what the words are to describe it but it just fits right into that late 90s PC 3D thing um and uh reggie pointed out that like riziel is 1,000% a character on the cover of a 3D graphics processor absolutely 100% you buy your voodoo card and you see this fucker and you're like I'm getting a good card.

There's a lot about that remaster specifically that's super interesting. Like I watched that opening cutscene, which looks gorgeous. And it's, I don't know where they found it. But that is the, that is not a remade cutscene. That is the cutscene that they re-rendered at 4K. And then they included like, there's a, if you go, if you dive into the options, there's like a part of a human settlement that got cut from the game that you can play around in. And I was like, oh, that's so cool.

It's ported in as it was. Okay, yeah. So I wandered. It was not finished. I wandered over there and people said like, oh, yeah, that's a later thing, human settlement area. I found it. Nothing to really do there yet, seems, but it's interesting. Or ever.

Okay. but they put it in there. That's cool. That's cool. I appreciate that. I can see if Gain Soul River is one of the most like I can see where they sliced out a whole level games I've ever played in my life. Yeah, but and also, right, Aspire was also, there were the folks behind fucking Cotor 2's ports and clearly know that people want the cut content shit. They do. They do want that cut content. Yeah, so that was that was pretty solid so far. I'm going to come back to that later this week.

I fucking love that game. That game's incredible. Yeah, so the schedule is basically we, so Reggie is going to be busy a bit on Wednesday, so I'm going to be playing some other stuff. I'm going to check out the Pragata demo, and I'm also going to play Retro Rewind, the Make Your Own Block. Buster style thing. Seems like it might be

interesting. You're running a VHS rental store. And that's the deal. Is it a horror? No. I just assume it is. I hear VHS tape and I'm like, oh, it must be a horror thing. It's just design and run your store and

people are going to come out of games, you know? All that really matters for the economics of such a store is that you have a large porn section behind two saloon doors. Very important behind the doors, yes. Absolutely. And people, you know, if anybody doesn't know because they're too young, your local blockbuster and or local video

store kept the lights on with pornography. And you have it just in that back corner, but you're hearing those doors going, you know, it's where the milk would be in a grocery store. It was absolutely nuts like watching guys walk out of that and just like, don't look at me.

Don't look at me. Because I have to take the VHS tape up to the fucking counter. Absolutely. And fucking be like, I would like this one, please. Your choices were either that or go to the magazine rack at the corner store, you know. So take your tape. Pick which one. The kids nowadays don't understand how harrowing acquiring pornography used to be that you had to look somebody in the eye to get your pornography. Go into the forest and find and find the same. And find the stash.

Just start digging. And who knows what else is with that stash? Somebody in the chat says, uh, the Sitschuka, the idea of having to buy porn in person is insane to me. Guess what? It was insane to us then.

It was just a thing. Like it was not like, oh, that's just how the way it is. Like, no, it was very not good at all. Or ending E is just stare at the color, blurs on channel 63 and make your brain...

Is it maybe the Covney? Make your brain invert what you're seeing to make sense of it. I can't tell if this is a scrambled X-Files episode or a scrambled blue-ne-me episode. Yeah. You know, well, you'll find out quickly. Especially after in your house, WWF is finished. You know, so after watching one of those events. So anyway, going to be checking that out as well.

Yeah, basically the, we wanted to obviously wrap up Claire Obscure, but we're not going to get a chance to because we've got to finish early on Thursday. Cool reason why, though, the Death Stranding live concert is coming to Montreal. Cool. Alongside a little motherfucker named Ludwig. Oh, cool, you're going to hang with Ludie? Awesome. So he's...

for me. He's swinging through and gonna get it. Did you play Destraining 2? Didn't. So you are missing out. I know the my favorite joke. I know that I'm like going into this with that. No that's not what I mean like when I was streaming Destraining

2 when I noticed that Ludwig was in the chat I'd be like man Wood kid did a great job and he would just lose it. He would crash out super hard. duly noted Wood kid

Wood kid will be here but yeah I know Ask him if you can meet Wood kid Yeah Yeah Absolutely Yeah

Yeah So that's that's That's gonna go down And as a result I want to clear more space So that we can Have time for it

When we get there This Saturday is going to be get into locals, so mad. So the Montreal Airdashers spring overture edition. We're going to be doing some commentary on, you know, Street Fighter 6, going to be playing some 2XCO and just hanging out, popping in some fighting games, messing around, and talking to the crowd, getting the vibe for the situation. We've been having a good time with the locals experiment, and it's been working out. So, yeah, just chatting with people. If you've seen the previous ones, you know, it's a good hang. So

come hang out. That'll be on Saturday as well. And, I mean, lastly, did you check out? Steelball run. I'd like to tell you a story, Willie. Here's a story. Hey, honey. We should really watch that one piece or the steel ball run. Absolutely.

All right. As soon as we put the baby to bed. All right. All right, little man. Time to go. Everyone falls asleep. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Five days in a row. Yeah, okay. Straight up. Like five days in a row. Just like, okay, we'll get up once he's fall. The last, the last 15 minutes were kind of dicey. And Punch Mom was starting to doze off a bit.

You know, it's just, that's the nature of it. But we did get through it. Well, here's what I will say. Fucking amazing job so far. I'm really happy with it. The things that I wanted to happen happened. The domino pieces for some cool shit have been set in place. You know, if you're like going, oh, oh, okay, right?

I was really wondering how the pacing would go considering the length of the part. And what was it? They fucking, they edited and trimmed the chapter down. and honestly, the things they changed are all best changes for time. Like some scenes with like a couple of the characters backstories or a little bit of exposition about them were kind of trimmed off

and we might see them later in a more relevant time but for now they just kind of got the story going because, you know, Jojo is Jojo and Araki is going to take his moments to take two pages sometimes and just go, here's what's going on with Sandman, you know But instead they just kind of went like No, no, no, let's get to the meat and potatoes of it

And furthermore, I couldn't believe it But the first big thing in that show is It's the first leg. It's the first race, right? Right. And that in my brain was like a three-episode arc To start the story out with, you know, maybe How long is the episode? 45 minutes.

Okay. And they do the whole leg in one. They do all, they do this this big first race all in one episode and it's a 45 minute episode and it's fucking great man. Like they really

got the pacing down. Some of the stuff, like again, not just pacing stuff. There's a couple other things too with that early on. And I was like, okay, I don't know how this is going to play when it comes out, but they

tightened it up and made it better. Pocoloco is this other goofy character that they got rid of the shit that I was like getting ready to be like, oh, God, I don't want to see how they're going to do this. They fixed a bunch of that. I feel like there's moments of like, so one, the horses look excellent, and they, I think they work fine. Like, you're seeing that like, here they look drawn,

here they look a little more CG, but overall, it doesn't feel, like there's a clash of sorts. It absolutely is working. They also are handling the, like, the way they're handling stands in this. I'm happy with the decision because it's a slow roll, you know, more than a, just shoving it all, shoving it in there right off the bat. And I want to say there's this one, like, sequence right towards the end of that first race where the fucking art and colors just explode.

Like in that moment where if this were, if this were a um, um, um, this is where like the, the clutch final stretch starts happening. The way Jojo does that is the whole track starts glowing and lighting everyone from the bottom and the music like cuts out and fades and like you start seeing the

sky turns Mario Cho colors. The characters go into their different. Jojo color palettes. Like, it's just fucking amazingly gorgeous with how they're doing it. There's a panel of gyro. Oh, I'm all these horses. Man, they really, they really did do a really fantastic job. They do look drawn most of the time.

It's gorgeous, man. They're doing a smart thing where there's like a lot of shots of like your gyro talking where it's like the horses from the shoulders up. Just bumping around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Of course. There's a shot of gyro, you know, tossing the ball out at,

one point and it's a super detailed painted close-up and if you freeze the frame you can see that like the explosion happening behind him there's like speed lines but there's also like animated dot tone which is so much a far above and beyond the need for what this shows adaptation is and um it starts to resemble some of the really fun exaggerated stuff they were doing back in part two you know uh so yeah fucking david pro is just flexing with this point part and they did an amazing job and I loved it and you got the music stingers and everything being great

and it makes perfect sense why they're like we have no idea what episode two is happening what? Willie I was just about to ask you how fast should I watch it to get ready for next week? Well at least we ain't binging it right? We're not ruining the season by having the whole

thing out in one fell swoop so instead it's here's Jojo Thursday and Jojo What the heck? Jojo will working on it. We'd love we want to see it too says the team. Maybe I'm crazy

but do you not think it's strange that there's absolutely no plan? I think it's not first episode and then it'll come back in two weeks or a month or whatever. It's just I don't know. I think when you're playing games with net, Netflix and the money and everything that they do for these types of shows.

I do whatever you need to to make sure you can get there. If it takes some time, that's fine. We've been waiting a long time. So far, the execution of what you've done is phenomenal. And I don't want to see that botched. And if this is what it takes to ensure that quality, then okay. Because I feel like Netflix is a, I feel like that's running the risk of it just not happening. past a certain point. Well, now we go and here we enter into Uzumaki territory, right? Do you want,

no, no, don't know. Well, do you want, what do you, how do you want this to go down? Right? Because you know, like that. Definitely not like that. Um, and I don't think that this studio that's done such an impeccable job so far is willing to accept anything subpar. Right. So the idea of Uzumaki episodes two to four is just not something they'd be interested in putting out, I would imagine, I would imagine. Netflix, I don't know what the deal is happening behind the scenes and why this isn't just a normal standard production where they're like, yeah, next episode, next week, you know?

But what they did so far is fucking great, and I'm just like, just don't fuck it up. And if what we have to sacrifice here is quality, it's unacceptable. If we have to sacrifice time, I'll take it. But I just, you know, like, and I mean, it's at this point, clearly Netflix is like, no, no, no, we bought this, we want it. So the old days of, you know, crunchy roll or whatever the distribution would have been back then. It's like, no, no, no, there's there, they've, they've took this because this is an anime, a lot of people are watching and they want to have it. So I don't trust them to not sabotage this with their decision making, but I do trust David Pro to be like, we'll take.

the time to make sure it's going to be good. I also like that something they said in that interview as well is we kind of made, because they're taking longer parts, right? They're not half an hour. They're doing the 45 for 47 minutes. So they said, because it's dense as well, and they internally have made a bit of a rule where they don't want cliffhanger endings, right? They want it to be full arcs in the episode or at the very least episode endings.

And when I think about that in relation to this part, like there's some, there's some, to be continued, you know, but they, I think that is insane. They've stayed,

he basically says that like, their goal is to not have parts cut off on a cliffhanger in the middle of, whatever they're working on for this. I think that is so fucking crazy. That show, the show, not the manga, lived and died off of like a hundred and twenty cliffhangers in a,

a row. Okay, no, no, no. To be continued arrows are still a thing, but I think what they're getting at, like, cutting it off in the middle of the action is what they don't want to do, right? So do you mean, like, hey, we're going to go to Egypt and then they go to Egypt for three episodes, and then there's a six-week break? I think it's literally... Like avoiding that? No, I think it's, we're going to deal with the enemy, the problem, you know, and that will be the end of that episode. Um, and I think that, you know, the reasoning they're, I mean, of course, they're stating that like, that's, that's their intention. And I wouldn't, I, I, I would think that were insane until I saw them do that with the first stage. And I was like, oh, fuck, they did it. They made this dense thing actually smooth and it worked and they can press the time. And it felt great. So they proved that they can do it. Um, but I want, I want it to, the episode to end with. Oh no. How's Jojo going to get out of this one?

And so this is where... Ten weeks in a row. And so this is where I wonder if a secondary thing here is we don't know what the Netflix situation is going to be for production. Therefore, if we actually end on how's he going to get out of this one and it takes too fucking long, that shit sucks balls. Dude. Steel balls. Just... So by...

Can you... By wrapping up the fight or the enemy. or the thing, at least you get a proper place and you don't have to worry about the next part. You know, there used to be this way they would make TV where they would film like 20 episodes of the TV show and then they would air. And then people would come back the next year

and they would do 20, 25 more episodes. And they're never going to get better. So now the way that we get and enjoy What we like it's it's it's the reality of seeing how many times production and fucking The money and a fucks up and cancels or ruins things and again I said Usumaki I'll say it again I'll name drop it a second time you just you don't want your thing to veer off a cliff that there's no coming back from And we last time we talked about that it's like is it better to stop after one good one? one or have three garbage ones afterwards.

And I'm like, well, if you stop after one good one, there's always the dream that in the future someone can pick it back up and resume it and there might be the will to see it because you didn't ruin it, you know? So not to be the bearer of bad news, but when a situation... It makes me not excited to watch the show. I think what they put out ruled and I'm happy to see... Sure, but I feel like... they got, man. Willie, I'm really into fantasy novels. Should I start reading Game of Thrones?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what to say. It's just like, I'm, there's a bit of a wild thing where I'm, as it was starting, I was kind of going like, I can't believe I'm here watching Steel Ball Run start. I was talking about this 10 years ago and it's insane to be like sitting here watching it happen. but it's not happening without its asterisks of sorts and ultimately I think like the thing with we don't know like how the production's gonna go is like it doesn't seem reasonable and maybe I'm completely wrong on this

I'm throwing just pulling it out of my ass but it's I imagine if they started the show it's because they're like no we're we're making it but the pacing that we're going to go at here I mean hopefully not attack on Titan but the pacing we're going to go at is one that is, again, probably not fully in their control,

or at the very least, they're doing what they can to make sure that each time they drop, it's a contained thing, you know? Is Attack on Titan like the new, like, worst release schedule of all time? Like, it, I remember seeing, probably like a trailer for, like, Attack on Titan season three,

the final season part two. Yeah, and those things get super silly. The titles get insuffly. same, right? But I just remember, like, every time we have these conversations, I just go, I know, and it sucks, and I wish everything could be good. But when you tell me that the alternative was to either crunch the team into fucking

oblivion or put out a shittier product, then I will take time. These are not mutually exclusive properties. No, no. They, they. You could. just make it good now. And make it fast now? No, not fast, but you could plan it.

That's the part that's actually baffling. Not that it's taking forever, whatever. Not that it's excellent. The part that when asked when the next episode is coming out, the answer is, I don't know. Well, I'll say this. That's strange. I'll say this, right? Because they've successfully delivered parts one through six up to this point,

they clearly know how to do that. So I'm not inclined to believe that they're the ones at fault for this production, considering they figured out how to do this before successfully. I don't know that, of course. I'm just guessing. We're speculating behind one interview. But I would imagine that, like, the Netflix situation, which stepped in and kind of made things, you know, dubious to begin with, which we've all been like, all right, let's see how this goes. It feels more like that's likely what the problem is here, you know?

But I don't know. I don't know. I'm just like they managed to figure this out before and they did a pretty good job of it. I believe that if they had the ability to do what they did in the past and were not impeded in any new way, they would have delivered the same way they previously did. So if this is all Netflix and David Productions is doing what the fuck they can, I don't know what else to say. It's not their fault that shit's going this way. I mean, I remember a time when Jojo, I think it was part one, two, three, four, and five. had nothing to do with Netflix?

Yeah. They just made them? That's how it was. Should they not just do that and just make it? When someone buys production and when someone buys the distribution rights and when someone puts the money in, they get to call the shots on things. All right.

You know what they need to do? I'm getting impatient. What they need to do. They need to get the script for steel ball run. Yeah. what they can do is they can release the storyboards for the rest of the rest of the season. Okay. And just write the script in little

bubbles on it and they can release them in like little books. Little books. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That, that, okay. So if you just need the story. And you could actually save time by not even coloring it. Yeah, no, don't, don't even color it. You can color it later, I guess. Yeah. This is, this is a weird one because I'm basically like, I understand what you're saying. Yes, like the manga. Raccoon, are you fucking, I'm doing a bit, man. Come on.

I understand, uh, uh, ultimately. What are you are ultimately saying is a very protracted. This sucks. And I'm like, yep, but also what they made ruled so far. And I hope, I hope that that continues. And that's about it. There's those, you know what, actually, it's actually somewhat similar. Cause, uh, we've watched an episode of that one piece season two.

and it's excellent. We'll get to that soon. And then there's an interview from Netflix comes out going, we're planning on 12 seasons of the Netflix live action. And you're like, Oh my God. It takes you two years per season. You're going to have these characters in their fucking 50. Loofy will be in his 50s. Yes, exactly.

And I'm just sitting there going, no, you're not. You're going to have to Benjamin button him. by the time you get to whatever the fucking, um, also that's gonna take 30 years to come out. Whatever the time jump is. Um, yeah,

so, but that's it though. Um, steel bar run was fucking great. I have other things that I'm going to not say, but I'm very excited to see animated versions of multiple moments that are huge pop-off. and I hope that, you know, even from this first one, like the first couple seconds, the first couple minutes of this show, like I've said before, I'm like, this is a celebratory part. Jojo Part 7 is a celebration.

And right off the bat, you can see that when you just look at that fucking lineup of racers, you know? And I also love, too, that there's just a little like, there's something where, you know, I think you appreciate, too, that like, the stakes, getting lowered rules. It absolutely rules. And there's something about the insane time space a continuum at threat

being dialed all the way down to just run this race for some fucking money, bro. We got a race to run. There's a movie that you probably haven't seen because it's not very good. It's a Mel Gibson movie from the 90s called Payback. I have actually.

Absolutely seen payback. Okay. So payback, Mel Gibson's a career criminal and he gets stiffed on $1,800 from a heist. And the entire movie is him chasing around various goons to get $1,800 back. And every single conversation that the movie starts in is they assume he is robbing them for like a million dollars. He goes, I just need the 1800 that you owe me.

And the whole movie just constantly escalates and goes, all the way off the rails, because no one actually listens to what he's saying at all. I mean, shit, it's why the Guy Ritchie movies are so phenomenal. It's like you've got the lowest stakes in the world, you know, for all of this tragedy.

But no, I love the lowering of stakes. And that's not to say that, of course, you know, like any good part, things build up. But,

yeah, let's run this fucking race. God damn it. We're riding horse. And the tension is in, did you see, that Diego knows how to draft with his horse? Oh my God.

That's not real. It's so cool. Yeah, check it out. That's pretty much me. All right. What do I do this week? Let's see. I went back to Marathon.

Marathon. People don't like it when I call it Marathon for whatever reason. Well, you can go with Greek, you know, you can, you know, matathon. The bungee, the bungee shooter. And I ran a couple solo runs without streaming it, which meant that it ran really well, which helps. And I got into a match on Dyer Marsh by myself. And I saw another player, gentleman, and I iced him out and stole his shit. And then I saw a second one both at the same time.

And I iced him out and stole his shit. And then while I was doing an objective, somebody snuck up on me. and missed their shot and I got them and I took all their shit and I walked out just packed to the gills and then the extraction area that I went on to got locked down by some random event bullshit so I had to sprint the entire way across the map in the wrong direction and got out and then immediately after that saw a tweet that was Marathon is not about having a good time. it's about taking the good time from other players. And I was like, okay.

Sounds like you're adapting to the etiquette just fine. Locked into my chest, which is it is more about ruining this guy's day than improving my own. Now, what about Pat from last week? what about Pat of Hey the the why is everyone so agro? Why can't we just chill?

Why can't we all get along? Oh so yeah the reason why everyone's so agro is like Marathon has like a bunch of systems that are built to make you agro. I think it's actually a genuine like mistake. The I read a very detailed breakdown that basically explains that time to kill in marathon is very short. If you get like directly behind somebody and get the. drop on them, they're probably fucking toast.

Like there's the time that it would take for them to turn around to do anything, they're probably fucked. And meanwhile, and on top of that, the auto aim attacks them and they turn red. And there's a faction in that game, there's six factions, that all the quests are kill other players. Okay. So there's guaranteed a one and six chance that any human person that you see is out to kill you only. Now, so the correct answer is almost always shoot first. Now, I'm laying this alongside the previous discussion you had where you said, Ark Raiders puts you in servers with other people that are, that are less hostile based

on your, your style of play. And that ultimately you wanted an experience that was not always guaranteed to be hostile. So, uh, I have a, I have a concrete. answer for you. And I think it is genuine. I think it's something we talk about a lot in a lot of different games. I think we talk about it in fighting games, but not, maybe not in these exact terms. But I will quote a friend of the show, Gene Park, with this game rules when I win

and it sucks when I lose. And I had a run in which I kicked the shit out of a bunch of guys and won super hard. And that means for that run, that game was. was really good. I see. And that felt better than jolly cooperation. No, it felt about the same. But like, I got, I got the core appeal of it. So if I want to log in and kill people, I would probably hop on to marathon. And if I wanted to log on and play like a pseudo-m-mo co-op shooter thing? I would log on to play arc graders. Hell divers. There is, well, no, but the threat of being shot in the ass. Well, actually, helldivers,

I've been team killed more than I am. I mean, you can get rocked. Artillery is bananas. But yeah, no, Marathon definitely has like a very strong appeal for if you want to sneak around a map and be a complete psycho murderer. It feels nice.

The only thing that I'm like really, really unsure of is that there are like map specific objectives that the bungee wants you to cooperate with other players and an ARG that they want people to cooperate to unlock stuff on like the cryo map

oh there's ARG stuff okay I don't fucking know man that people are aggros shit in that game people are violent and insane how easy is it to lose all your shit and basically get reset not easy enough

so um there's a sponsor kit every day that you can just pick up. It's like, hey, I don't want to go in with any of my stuff. I'll just pick out, like a load out that's essentially free. And it's decent. And the quests give you tons.

Every quest you do gives you tons of gear. Okay. To the point where my box is full of gear. So having nothing and starting out, you get a pretty decent loadout to roll with. that. Yeah. Okay. And if you, and if you're just like, I don't want to risk anything, you can just pay like a trivial credit amount and get like a pretty good starting kit. Is any of it, is any of it like aesthetic driven, like destiny? There are, there are, there are aesthetics that you can unlock. Um, their battle pass thing is legitimately the worst I've ever seen in my entire

life. It includes like stickers for your guns, but each unlock is a different sticker. the same sticker for a different gun and their battle pass has one skin. Okay. And maximum full-mo. Not even. Well, it's all shit. So that's kind of the problem with their store situation is that every cosmetic in the game looks like shit.

So compared to like the default normal stuff. So there's absolutely no drive to do it. The only thing that I saw that was cool is that there's a specific skin for a gun which includes which you can only achieve by killing nine other people and then using the last

ex-filtration. So just having have like an absolute peak run and it's a show off thing. It doesn't look particularly great. It's just like oh that's very cool to have so that you can be like I'm the best. I don't know if this is naive to say but I think any time a battle pass has a time limit on it. There's that's that's automatically using I don't think there are time limits on this.

Okay. Okay. Because I think the arc creators one also doesn't have time limits. Any that does is using FOMO in my opinion. But yeah, no, it's a very interesting thing and I'll probably keep poking away at it. Very, very strange. I hope it does not have a cheating problem like Destiny has. Because Destiny ended up with a crazy, god-awful,

cheating problem and it's PVP or Tarkov or Tarkov and it's infamous insane like ridiculous cheating issue in the lean and apparently I was informed that Hunt Showdown has just added a solo mode so I might try that out in the near future

but yeah no marathon is is improved like it's almost like it got a performance patch, but it was just like, I didn't stream it. It's a bummer. It is a genuine bummer that that game just completely falls to pieces when you stream it. Like, lame.

I was going to say, I wonder if, like, Dust Bloods might be my first extraction. It probably would. Yeah. I think Dust Bloods is going to be an enormous amount of people's first extraction. Minus Mashmac mode. Yeah. Oh, yeah, no, Mashman mode.

totally counts. Like that is the core. It's a mode, but yeah, in this case, it's the whole loop. Let's see. I all speaking of falling apart, I played Crimson Desert. Yes. Yes. Crimson Desert is a game that for all of its pre-release was like, is this game even real? Okay. So I know about Crimson Desert because I know about Black Desert and I checked out that character creator and I was like, they're kind of related, but not really. I don't I was like, this is the best character creator I've ever seen. And then I saw the fact that you could actually hit stop and combo things. And I was like, that's really good for an MMO. And then I found out about the grind and the other things in the game that were basically just like, yeah, this is almost like one of those MMOs that kind of baits you with, you know, an initial first look that seems way, way more.

It seems more impressive than when you watch like some FF14 or some World of Warcraft mechanically. But then there's a bunch of grindy. money grubbing shit behind that, that sucks. Still incredible character creator, regardless for, that was very cool. Always kind of struck me as a very pretty but kind of obscure, not obscure, but like, a little bit, not really well-known thing. Surprised that Crimson Desert is now like such a focal discussion point. And I'm kind of wondering what allowed that to happen, given that Black Desert was,

like oh it's the trailers so they're putting out trailers like six months or every year um and it showed really well like it was enormous it had good graphics it had every time they showed it off they would have like a bunch of new features that they'd be showing off um it showed extremely well okay but it also showed like too well like it looked fake like it looked like a like the kind of feeling that we had looking at like Power World kind of thing. Yeah, well I mean the same thing with their previous game. This isn't really going to come out like this.

But like Pearl Abyss just never like I'm like they were lower profile than this. So I'm just surprised that word of mouth and pre-release hype led to such a thing. It just showed super well. Everyone's talking about it now. And early reviews came out that said that the story is terrible and that the controls are God awful. But the game has a million fucking things to do.

like a million different mechanics. Like, for example, I ran into puzzle solving, animal taming, archery competition, cooking system, learning system, mining, woodkeeping, a fully fledged, like, extremely large combat system. It really does feel like an MMO that got turned into a a single player game via like a wish right like just like i'm making a single player game what like make a runescape with a good combat system and make it single player what does learning system mean oh so

cliff for some reason doesn't know what anything is like he was literally born yesterday so when you pick up an item it'll go learning and it'll be like i've learned that this is a rock or i've learned that this is a fish okay i've learned that this guy's named jim it's fucking very strange. So completing a codex, I guess. Yeah, but it's a codex of like three, four thousand items. Every asset. Because it's literally every single concept, person, item in the game.

Gotcha. So you load it up and it's initially pretty promising. It looks very good. And then you go to move Cliff with your main character. and he controls very bad. He controls with about the level of weight as like Red Dead Redemption 2. Like I tried to do the spin the guy in a little circle thing and I couldn't get him to turn in a circle. Like spinning the stick only made him go back and forth.

Oh, wow. Okay. Like clunk. Yeah. Now I am to. talking about this as of the day that I played it, which was the first day. Apparently it has already been patched to fix some of these complaints, but I'm only, I haven't, I haven't touched it since. So take my words with a grain of sense. Patch to make it so that his movement on his movement is better. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. So if so, as I go through this, I will look down at chat and they will inform me if the complaint I'm talking about has been fixed. following that is an absolute god awful sequence of story events that actually don't make any sense at all. Your boys in the gray mains are all talking.

They're like a Viking kind of a bunch of dudes and they're all talking about, ah, this sucks. What are we going to do? Someone runs in and says, oh my God, I think it's Jan got killed. old and you know how one important character names have like an underline on them in some games i don't know who that is uh but they're dead now uh and then there's a massive fight and they're like the beginning tutorial fight is like pretty solid like you have a lot of buttons uh the buttons are um

splayed around your controller in a very strange way like you have r1 and r t for attack but you also have triangle for attack okay on top of that it looks like an improved black desert combat system Yeah. And then you die. You fucking die like horribly. Like you're stabbed a bunch and your throat a slit. And then you wake up in like the sky islands from tears the kingdom. Yes. Right. Where you toss. Where you can toss monies. You do some light platforming there. And then you pass out and wake up out in the world. And a guy's talking to you. and you just don't bring up. Cliff doesn't say anything or mention that he was dead at all in any way at all.

And then you go into town and then the quest log just tells you to talk to people and do five random things for no reason. Okay. And some of these people are magic. Okay. And then you go back to the Sky Island

and they tell you the world is at stake and give you a power and Cliff doesn't say anything. Are you holding a shield and a sword? Are you stabbing things? Then shut the fuck up and just sword and bored. It feels like people are talking to Cliff

like Cliff is going to respond to them and there's like breaks in the conversation where he would respond. But he just doesn't. And then they just keep talking. So the story is not massive like MMO like you're not any character vibes.

So the story is not poor. It's not existent. No, no, no. It's there. In fact, it's so there that you can't skip cutscenes but you can hold X to make the move a double speed. Oh, wow. Okay.

On top of that, I ran it on a wide variety of settings. And every time I went into an interior, the lighting would go completely crazy. Sick. It would like, the lighting would

macro block all over the screen whenever there was like a like a seam and it would go nuts. And I could not get it to not go nuts the whole time. And then as I started to

get into it and I started to get into some fights and like there's a lot here. but it doesn't feel good to control Cliff and all the menu, like I was fighting with menus for a lot of it. And like granted, a lot of it,

as people are pointing out, was me trying to fix graphical settings to make the game not have the lighting go nuts. Okay. A fair amount of it was stuff like, how do I equip this thing? Oh, I have to hold right on the D pad, and then I have to move the right analog stick on the radial over here,

and then I have to hit R2 to switch it to be, active so that it, when the helmet is on, it opens a menu when I activated it and then I have to go and click it. Jesus. There's a lot. It controls very bad and the story is very bad. And apparently, according to an insider, one of the things that, one of the reasons the story is like that is because the story was only written like three months ago. Oh, my God. What?

Like it was like Wait But The game existed That's why there was no cut That's why there were no trailers That had story elements in them Up until very very recently

So they just built the MMO Again And then Supposedly Oh wow Everybody was kind of off Doing their own things Making their own systems

And if that's how they made their last game And they like it makes sense to believe that Like yeah They kind of just built this out the same way and that is the lowest priority thing versus hey is the cooking system in

yes it is all right so I'm seeing some confusion in chat because people are saying the keyboard controls got improved but controller improvements are coming soon when I say that Cliff controls quite poorly and he's super heavy and people go but they patched it does that mean if I load the game up right now

on the podcast and try and spin my guy in a little circle he'll be a lot more responsive because I somehow doubt that. I did see people talking about there being like an early patch that addressed a bunch of people's concerns. Oh, the first patch that I read through the notes, there was a lot there. Okay.

There was a lot there. And they're also like speed patching it. So like one of the things I saw in the pre-release review period was people complaining that a bunch of the side quests, Sorry, a bunch of the quests had no dialogue or any indication that you would have to go somewhere. You would have to open up the quest log to figure out where you needed to go. And then when I played it on launch day, there would be fucking tickers at the bottom of the screen that said, hey, go talk to the guy outside and shit like that.

There is something I'm a little confused about and maybe I'm just too old. Like I look over and I see a gentleman who I won't name. says they probably didn't patch it to fix your absurdly specific circumstances. No. That feels like a very, like personally invested, like, butt hurt, pussy falling off emotion. Like me going, I really don't like how I felt the controls were very heavy. And people go, well, that's because you're like, bro, it's a video game. What do you want for me?

That is the least charitable interpretation of what you're saying, I think. I don't get it. There are people that attach themselves to this game very strongly right away. Which is weird because it's like, I don't think these are Black Desert fans. Which are far and few in between. That's like my whole thing. What I can say, I guess, is what I'm curious about is in Black Desert, you could like do combo. There's like juggling and

Yeah, you can do Momo here. Here. Like there's a there's a fist fighting system and you can do RKO's. Um, like this seems more of like like deal with the mob, cast magic,

et cetera stuff. But it does look like, uh, at least some of those big boss fights are kind of like soulzy in that there's like a big huge arena and one thing coming at you and you go in. Have you done a couple of those and like are those delivering at all? I did. I did not get to that.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I did a lot of wandering around and did a lot of fighting. I wish the fighting was more responsive. Overall, my takeaway is like this seems like a kind of game to come back to in like two years. Okay.

When they've just like absolutely done two full more years of development on it. Okay. Okay. And the story is probably going to still be awful. But I don't know. Maybe this is a bit of an aside. but like there's crimson desert and then there's like marathon that happened

and I'm like I feel like it's getting more and more intense when like a AAA game comes out and you go yeah I don't know I didn't really feel like it but you don't actually go in on it or hate on it at all and people just lose their fucking minds like that's actually happening like more

and more and more I mean look man if people paid their 70 or 60 bucks and you know and like now you're invested and here you go, you're down the road on this one. And, well, no, if they're enjoying it, they're enjoying it. But if what you're saying makes sense and is, you know. Oh, here's the thing. If they were enjoying it, why would they be mad about me, like, being, like, mid on it?

Because, like, well, after my Crimson Desert stream, I loaded up Kingdoms of Amelor reckoning for a compare and contrast. And I was like, ooh, normal menus, clear, clear directions, good performance. Well, the answer is because I've put my fucking Yankees hat on now, right? And you're coming at me. So it's kind of what it is there. Look, I will say, too, that, like, the stuff about this that seems the least MMO-ish are those crazy-looking boss fights and flying through the air and rider kicking and swinging and going nuts. You know, that's all distinctly very much not MMO.

But it also got caught with a bunch of AI shit all over it. Yeah, of course. That is, there's that. Which I was profoundly unsurprised. So when I was talking about the story, when I was going through one of the cutscenes in, when I was going through one of the cutscenes, I was like this whole cutscene feels like it got written by chat GPT. Oh boy. like like written like the like the storyline so here's what fucking sucks about how that got handled to right because like yep people found these uh assets that were AI generated and then came the response where um uh Pearl Abyss was like these were made for um pre-release you know prototyping and were not

meant to be in the final build yadda right and so I've seen some of them they're like hideous and got awful and like they definitely don't look like they were supposed to supposed to be in there. I saw a horse with like three fucking legs behind it or whatever like a weird shit on like an old... Yeah, that horse one's probably the worst. The horse one looks so stupid. So what sucks is now it's like between

their answer and you know previous ones are like okay so now the template has been laid down, right? Yeah, Expedition 33 absolutely set up the game plan for everybody else. Every answer is clear from this point forward. It is we used it for

prototyping, not for final release. least it was not meant to be seen. And we used it a long time ago because the game's been in development for six years before we knew it was bad. People were never meant to see this asset, you know. So whether or not that's accurate or not, that's going to keep, that's going to feel like a rock, solid, ironclad excuse for at least two or three more years. We've laid the gauntlet down and we have a framework to, you know, talk about, oh, you caught our AI assets. I mean, this is a little bit of, technically, this is a little bit of rock stars as well with the hot. coffee back in the day, you know?

Like, there it is. No, but you weren't meant to see that. Yeah, but there it is, though. You know, but I'm now just wondering, like, do we hit the fucking, do we flip the counter? Do we keep track now where how many times is this going to be the excuse that's used right off, right out of the gate? It's going to be the excuse every single time.

You know, it feels like it. It feels like it. We now have a template in place, which can also be AI filled, mind you. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, overall, it's fucking super weird and it controls very poorly, but there is a lot of stuff. Even from my limited time with it, I could say that Crimson Desert is just like a fucking chock full of oodles of fucking shit. It needs more time in the oven.

It needs a fairly significantly more amount of time in the oven. So, like, this is all, I guess, not surprising because when I think about how, again, from the impressions, I got, and then afterwards when people tell me about Black Desert, there were problems and, you know, that continued to exist there. And so I don't know that like the amount of attention that kind of came towards this, there was a lot of buildup and promise that I don't know

that were ever demonstrated that they could deliver on it, certainly, you know? It got kind of like lifted into a, I guess, a bigger, onto a larger stage. Yeah. but what they previously made still exists in the state that it did, right? Yeah, it has an extremely large map and it looks very pretty. There's a whole lot of running through big forests and it feels very uncohesive, right?

Like it really does feel like a bunch of people were working on their own little bits and pieces together with no cohesive vision. And some of those bits and pieces are cool. Like the combat system has a lot of cool stuff in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, again, that's kind of what I saw with the last thing, you know, but someone's like, what if you could play a shitty game forever? I saw a really fascinating. There's a writer kick in there. Look, that's cool.

You know. I saw a really fascinating breakdown between Paul Tassie's review and Will Borgers review. And they basically came down to, is a game really good for you if there's more. more stuff in it. Only if it's directed by Masahiro Sakurai. Right. So like my mental, my mental

idea was like what if it had no sauce, but it had every ingredient you've ever heard of in a bowl. But no sauce. Yeah. But it's all in there. And it just can't use them together. Yeah. It's all in there.

Yeah. Um, no, I'm, I literally, I'm like, if it's Sakurai, then yes, because what he's putting in will add value and be like extra that you didn't ask for, but it's still like, holy shit, I can't believe how much I'm getting out of this. And it's an enjoyable experience. Um, and I, but one of my earliest memories of like, holy shit, I can't believe this game has more. And why it's one of my favorites of all time is Kirby Superstar back in the day that just never quit. It never quit. You beat another thing and it's like, here's more. Um, So contextually, that can be good, but by modern standards, that's not usually what this means, right? Fortnite has everything in it. So there's a really excellent post that I'm looking at, which is the three hours for a 200-hour plus game is a hard take. I wish it was faster to onboard, but three hours isn't telling you anything. I would normally agree, except if I'm talking about controls that don't change, those

controls aren't going to change, right? Like that's my personal big gripe is the way the game feels to play doesn't make me happy. Unless, and then I get into the same stupid conversation I get into for like literally 100 different times, which is, are the controls going to change? No, but, okay, but I'm talking about the controls. you know another question i will be doing is probably every month checking in on the new fucking crimson desert patch to see if they if they make the character more responsive to control or have the lighting act a little bit better the other question is is like does this game do

things um do things better than other games or does this make you want to go play other games when you play it uh it made me want to play a kingdom hearts right right or which i went in the complete opposite direction of extremely, extremely, extremely small areas with very responsive controls. So that answers my first question as to like, how did that come about? So I'll tell you how that came about. One was I was planning to play a bunch of Crimson Desert. And then I decided that I didn't want to, which happens sometimes.

Oh, I just unplugged myself. Um, on top of that, uh, I have wanted to do kingdom hearts, uh, streams since before we moved to BC. Mm-hmm. However, there was a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, was that. was like, Pat, pat, we're moving to B. You can't play kingdom hearts right now. what if, what if, what if the curse. and then it was Pat

no we were I'm pregnant you can't play kingdom hearts right now what about the curse I was like Pat we have a new child what if you play kingdom hearts in the curse etc etc etc etc etc etc and then I was like

eh fuck it and she was like ah okay okay and uh because curses aren't real yeah and the title of the stream that I'm doing is that

I don't fear any curse and that I will live forever. Okay. Yep. Which she did not want me to put the title being, I'm going to live forever. No, bait that shit. Let's go. But yeah, no. Come at me, ghosts. I don't care. Tempt fate and then nort it.

So, I load up Kingdom Hearts. Guess what? That first session? Super cursed. Like cursed like a motherfucker. Like just absolutely crazy. I was in the pre-stream just chit-chatting. And my Windows audio codec bugged out. And I lost all audio from every source.

Amazing. Amazing. And I was like, this is literally the first time I've ever had this bug happen in my life. Had to turn the stream off, restart the computer. Okay. That wasn't super good. are the new ports.

Yeah, these are the new ports. Start playing the new port on PC. Okay. The cutscenes look really bad because they're in 30 FPS and I'm running at 140 FPS, but okay. Play for about two hours. Lose the fight to squall. Walk into a save point.

Game crashes inside the save point. Okay. One of the one of the most debilessing debilitating, scary type of crashes I've ever seen. I was inside the save point and I hit the button to turn on the save point and the game just bam to desktop instantly. Okay. Fuck it.

Download the PlayStation 4 version. Wow. I have the collection there as well. Let's just immediately redo everything I just fucking did. great. And from that onwards, return the slabs. Okay.

And I also saw that like you fucking hammered the shit out of it. Yeah, I've already, I think I saw nine parts. Last night I have passed where you and Matt were in the LP in two streams. Okay. Yeah, you did like 15 hours or so? I, uh, no, I did, um, 18? 18 hours. Yeah.

Something like that. maybe 17. I did a bunch. I did a bunch of Kingdom Hearts. Well, I will say that that is definitely a bin behind glass over here for me as well

at some point. I was definitely wondering, you know, when to pull that. Still got some other shorter things, but you know, I'm going to at some point revisit that as well. So the

The trick is, by the way, the game's actually pretty short if you stream it in 10 hour bursts. Yeah, that's not possible, especially with the co-host. It's just completely, completely not possible at all. It totally is. Like I saw the fucking, you know, the 80 or whatever, I'm like this. I, I don't, I refuse to be compared to the shit you do, man. I refuse. I absolutely that's crazy

I completely can't do that yeah you can my god but anyway at some point I'm gonna have to go figure out what the what the fuck is happening in this franchise because well I mean you are revisiting but you have already

played all of them okay so I'm I'm half revisiting half not right so I played Kingdom Hearts the original game back in 2003 or 2004, when the year came out. And then I played Kingdom Hearts 2.

The year it came out. And that is it. And I played a couple hours of birth by sleep. Okay, but not three. The year it came out. So 20-ish years ago. Okay. I played the not final mix version.

So loading up Kingdom Hearts 1 now, they fixed the camera considerably, though the camera's still pretty bad. The final mix stuff is actually a much bigger deal than I originally thought it was. Because I thought it was just like, oh, there's some new super bosses or there's this and that.

They actually like totally redid the entire leveling structure of the game and added like a ton of finishers and abilities that just didn't exist that make the game a lot more interesting to play and replay. Okay, so I will, it's a big, it's like a big royal or fest style update. Yeah, yeah.

It's a, the final mix is the, is the re-release that has all the new shit in it. Right. Man, Gamearts 1 is fucking awesome. Soros design looks like shit. And a bunch of the boss fights are complete garbage. I can't

I can't see it anymore. It's been, what do you mean? Like, I can't, the whole, it's too much a part of internet culture and the zippers and the thing and like I can't objectively see the design like with fresh eyes anymore is that like it's just two which one because there's a bunch of different ones okay I'm thinking of the Sora from them from the first game with that I'm the the with red and the big gigantic yellow shoes and the big and the big uh Disney shoes yeah yeah yeah no

he looks fucking shit he looks awful I he looks like a like a knockoff Mickey Mouse cloud cosplayer um like in the second game he starts wearing black and he's taller and he's better proportioned and it's like a night and day difference it's like when

gone fucking takes his shirt off although they also go I mean that's also where the series is I guess is starting to like you know the teenagers are getting a little older so it's getting a little darker and that's we're approaching that parking lot right absolutely

uh yeah the kingdom Heart's 2 design onwards is pretty good but that first one looks like fucking shit it's bad and then I'm playing through a bunch of these boss fights and it's like granted I'm playing on proud mode I'm playing on the hardest difficulty

so the game is and I'm playing with the XP curve set to dead of night I don't know if I'm I'll have to see but I feel like I might want my dumb goofy cartoony Disney shit more than I want my leather

X-Men outfits you know no he's not wearing leather he's wearing like a same version of the same outfit it's just black and yellow

and he's taller yeah and I and I do feel like by the time I saw the stuff from from three he just looks like a real person yeah

yeah but you know I also I'm also the person who thought that like a cloud with the

with the cape and the bandage on the buster sword was was cooler than the advent He looks awesome He looks awesome And then they

And then they fucking went with the other design And it was like, Oh, you bought you fucked up Because you had the coolest cloud Well, so they wanted Vincent in that game But they couldn't get him in For whatever reason

So they just made cloud into Vincent Okay Like that's literally what it looks like that That's the compromise Okay, I see So yeah No I'm playing on the hardest difficulty Which is called Proud

And the reason I'm playing On the hardest difficulty Is that I play double Make Crog games I can do it. But the other thing is that playing on the hardest difficulty means that you don't have to do mini games to get the secret endings.

So there's always the secret ending and some of them have the secret secret ending which is the cutscene that shows off the next game. And in order to get those on normal mode you have to do like every journal entry, get all the Dalmatians, do every mini game with a high score. and if you do it on the hardest difficulty,

the only thing you need to do is beat it. Okay. And they just give you the rest free. Okay. Yeah. So I remember when Kingdom Hearts 2 came out and people were playing it on normal mode instead of proud mode and they're like, it is unironically easier to get the ending on proud mode

because one of the mini games is so hard. Yeah. It's harder than the hardest boss on proud mode. Well, beating a hard boss that's really like, that does a fuck ton of damage and it's very difficult is at least more engaging than collecting shit. Yeah. Like, fuck that.

And I'm, I'm also playing you can choose your XP curve in KH1, which is very not clear at all. You answer a bunch of questions from a selfie and Titus and Waka, and they tell you that your journey is going to start at dawn or midday or in the dead of night. And what that means is do you want to level up fast until you hit level 40? Do you want to smooth XP curve or do you want to level up fast after you hit level 40? So what that means is that if you do that, and you put it on the hardest difficulty,

the game has a dramatic, inverted difficulty scale where the hardest part of the game is like the first three hours and the second hardest part of the game is the three hours after that. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah.

I mean, I don't know that other games have a choice like that, but I know that Devil May Cry games when you don't have your full move set are harder to style with and also you are limited and you are weaker. It's difficult, you know? So,

Kingdom Hearts 2 onwards has, uh, nor like, I think it's beginner, normal, proud and then critical. I was looking up critical.

And it is the most interesting difficulty I have ever seen. It, it slows down experience. growth, everybody does more damage to you. You do more damage and you gain less health as you level up. Like the statistics aspect of the game are diminished. You start with like end game levels of action points and a bunch of action game abilities.

And it's like, do you want to play Kingdom Hearts 2 like it's fucking devil may cry? Oh. interesting but you but like the punishment for fucking up is but it's a hard it's a hard action game now right interesting okay that's fun balancing yeah um i was definitely going to play that if if hold on if if i were to continue playing the kingdom heart series in the future which i may or may not do i don't know who can say i would play it on critical in the future like every single second i was playing Hearts 1, somebody would come in and go, why are you playing Kingdom Hearts 1? And are you going to play the Kingdom Hearts 3, Remind DLC? And I'm like, that is 12 and a half games.

Is there a, I guess, I would imagine like everything with a fucking Premier franchise like this, there's a consensus. So I'm like, this is the mode, this is the experience curve that. You know, it's Kingdom Hearts 2. Every single part, every single person has the consensus. Is, hey, which one's the best one is? No, no, no. I mean, when you're talking about the different experience curves, for one, that like, there is. Oh, there is an agreement. That was funny because I got a donation that warned me not to play proud mode because it was too hard. And that caused me to play proud mode because you, it's not, I'm a big man.

I'm a big man. I can do it. So is this like a switch versus set in Pokemon type thing? I don't know what that means. I actually have no idea what that means. You can choose between two rule sets and Pokemon, whether you can switch when somebody else switches. brings in there after you knock out one of the Pokemon or whether you're locked in place basically.

And Kingdom Hearts 1, it's literally just proud mode is like twice as hard. Like it's explicitly numerical. So I'm talking about the curves, the XP curve stuff. Oh yeah, no. So the curves is do you want to coast through the game to level 40 and get to level 40 super early and that's probably enough to beat most of the game?

Do you want to have a more normal curve? Or do you want to do dead of night? Because dead of night means that the beginning will be harder, but then you'll be able to rapidly get up to cap so you can go fight super bosses. Right. And so I'm saying like, is there an opinion on which of those you ought to be doing? If you are going to hit level 100, starting on the slow XP curve is advantageous. Because you end up saving a bunch of experience in the long run.

Okay. If you're just going to hit that minimum threshold. It's a fast, it's a, it's the level caps 100 and it, and the, the break point is at level 40. So faster from 40 to 100 is more valuable than faster than 1 to 40. And if you're going to hit level 100. And is grinding involved? I forget if the game. Oh yeah, I will be.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the natural curve of doing, of seeing, of going through things without grinding is not going to bring you near that. Up to 100. Yeah. So King Mart's 1 does something that the other games I don't think they do. And it's really nice, which is one of the harder things that you can do is you can go do the Olympus Coliseum cups where you run through an enemy gauntlet and then usually a pretty tough boss at the end. So I'm fighting the Pegasus Cup and it's quite difficult.

But you get to keep all the experience you earn in there. So I failed the Pegasus Cup like 10 times in a row. and every single time I did it, I got a level. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to just keep throwing myself at the Pegasus Cup until I win. Right. Right. Okay. Okay. Interesting. In general, hey, Kingdom Hearts is a 22 year old game. It's still fucking super surreal seeing Cloud and goofy hang out, man. It's so fucking nuts.

And it also, in terms of streaming it, I get to have moments where I'm like, Man, I fucking love Winnie the Pooh. Winnie the Pooh's great. I want to hug him. And then everyone's like, I also want to hug Winnie the Pooh. I feel like that feeling has inherently changed, though, now that Disney is like a buyout can Catamari. Absolutely.

It has changed very significantly to the point where if there's a Kingdom Hearts 4, which they said they'll be, I expect to hang out with Iron Man and fight Darth Vader as a boss fight. Exactly, exactly. I don't. I'm like, what the actual fuck are you people doing? Like Disney used to mean the mouse and the theme park. And now in my brain it's the container for media. You know, it's a giant folder.

Okay. It's also a fucking super solid action game. Yeah, it was fun. Like it's an action RPG. It's definitely more action than it is RPG. That's the, that I was surprised. when from playing that beginning of it just like oh you're swinging buttons

you're flying around you're doing air combos and you're basically psycho-crushing from enemy to enemy and absolutely you know and it has a voice cast that I'm like wow you guys really really absolutely fucking swung

for it on this voice cast Lance Bass and Haley Lance Bass Billy Zane almost every Disney villain reprising their role including like and Jafar and Ursula. Just absolutely. Haley Joel Osman is fucking Sora.

Wild. James Woods took time out from hassling girls at his local high school to come voice Hades again. Where he does a really good job. And then later on in the series, you get like Christopher Lee and Mark Hamill and Leonard Nimoy. Christopher Lee's in there. Cool.

Oh, yeah. You know who Christopher Lee plays? An evil-sounding ass old man? I was trying to think of a character I knew, but maybe I guess someone I don't. He's only in Kingdom Hearts too. Oh, okay. And you'll hear him, and you're like,

oh, that guy sounds like Dracula. Is it the old man that's a part of Organization 13? Yes. Okay. Yeah, I think I know what he looks like. His name is Diz. Sure. It's, it's like, do you get it?

Do you get it, bro? Do you get it? Is there an X in there or? No. man. Just dizz. Yeah, no, Kingdom Hearts 1 is fucking great. And very eager to get to those super bosses.

Though it's also one of those games where if you've played the sequel, you can be like, wow, they didn't know how to improve this shit at all. So they just cut it. Right? Like, these swimming controls, not good. Cut it. Mm-hmm.

The gummy ship? The gummy ship is probably like the most improved thing. Where in the first game, it is, it's just a waste of time. It's just a waste of time. And then in Kingdom Hearts 2, they just do like a proper Star Fox clone. Right, right. And it's a massive improvement. Never played chain of memories.

Apparently there's cards in that game. Yeah, the fucking game. Boy Advance card game thing. Yes, that is that is a card game. Well, thing. I do, I did look at that for a second. If you wanted to play that, the collection that, the collection that all these Kingdom Hearts games are on has the PS2 re-release of

chain of memories called Rechained of Memories where they completely remade that game into a PS2 game. Yeah, it's It's so weird to imagine porting a Game Boy thing or just a Nintendo thing out And it not being on one of those platforms, you know? Yeah.

But it also has critical plot That needs to be learned Crazy critical plot. You must play the Game Boy advanced game. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So that, man, that game is so strange. It's also like it's a game that would have made more sense to not exist on the PS2

because Kingdom Hearts chain of memories is, I forgot about Kingdom Hearts One. Let's do Kingdom Hearts One again. Like literally. Um, but yeah, cards, weird. The other goofy thing is that chain of memory,

sorry, re chain of memories is, is, it looks like Kingdom Hearts one, but it's, in the Kingdom Hearts 2 engine and you can tell. Oh, okay.

You can tell that it like, it's the old Sora model stapled on to like the new SORA. Using that, okay. Well, at some point, that glass will break. That is, uh, that is a curiosity. I, I have to, and it's not to scratch.

I think probably the goofiest thing that I was informed of. Yeah. When I was, playing through KH1 at Final Mix on the PS4 remaster is that they lost Kingdom Hearts 1 Final Mix

and that this game is a from scratch recreation with like the audio and I'm like if someone not told me that I would never have been able to tell because it's perfect it's so amazing it's absolutely perfect

the idea that fucking shit code can be lost and there's just like sorry we don't know where we put it our premastering shatted into a corner somewhere they had the they had the goddamn audio I guess I mean that's what happened with Final Fantasy 10 as well you notice how FF10 looks kind of weird in its remaster they have to read it's a completely new FF10 made from scratch

so that's the thing is like if you're like Like Blue Point style, you can take an existing game released and grab the assets to the best of your ability from the closed compiled thing. Yeah, you all the time in the world to do that in the unemployment line. Prior to that shit, a shutting down, being told to remake a game where you don't have the files for it, where you just got the closed final release and you've got to pull what you can. Yeah, they invented a bunch of technology for themselves to rip shit out of PlayStation 2. games. That's a possibility. So, you know, like, that is a thing, but it's still just insane for production to, like, not preserve that shit. And it's not the old days of like, oh, we literally have a limited amount of space on our, like, I want to say like in the Super Nintendo in Genesis

days, it was like, no, no, no, we need this precious space to develop art game for next year. Because we're also making so many games and whatever that we have to, like, you know, there's no way to save this. We can't afford. it. But everything about that era of just like, yeah, I don't know, it was on a burnt disc somewhere and now it's gone. Who fucking knows? It's just madness. Yeah, ridiculous. Cool. But yeah, so it was one of those things where I came off as like, I wish there were more games that fit the Kingdom Hearts template. Like this type of action RPG. The gameplay. But that is the same lamentation of, man, I wish there were some more cool action games.

Sure. Sure. Ironically enough, the closest thing to Kingdom Hearts 4 and 5 are FF7 remake and FF7 rebirth. I was about to say when I think about the type of game or you jump, but it does play fairly similarly. You do a bunch of action real time and then occasionally slow down to cast. That's just FF7R. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I

I Yeah, like I'm like I I don't I can't think of anything else that like gets as tight as or as close as that, you know? Um, cool. All right. But yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep trucking on that. I am probably gonna have that wrapped up by the end of the week. Are you just?

I'm probably gonna just blow through that shit by the end of the week. And these were the, the, the Crimson Desert. hours that were set aside to go ahead. No, what happened was is, um, what happened is, is that these are going to be normal crimson desert hours. They're going to be like, ah, we'll do it. And then I started the stream and, uh, I was like, oh, there's a lot of people here.

Okay. I should, I should just. Okay. I should just keep going. Yeah. Okay. And I was like, hey, I was texting the wife and my, hey, wife, there's a lot of people here. Should I keep going?

She's like, of course you fucking should. I'm like, okay. That's how that happened. That makes perfect. I understand. Also, I'm having a blast playing it. It's a proud is hard. Like, and the idea that later games turn even further into

like just character action games with Goofy and Donald is definitely a huge appeal. the ground that's the groundwork for FF16 was laid out years ago no no no no no I said FF7 R

played like this FF16 plays nothing like King of Hearts no no no what I'm saying is the decision to make this game not a turn based classic Final Fantasy style game yeah right

what there was there was a choice that was made early on to not make this a you know line up your party and you've got party of three sitting there but they're not casting one by one you know bro ff 16

like wishes it was more like kingdom hearts man that would be such a massive fucking improvement yeah how so so kingdom hearts so ff 16 uses uh the final fantasy i forget what it's called is it like the break system it's where

like you're you're building up like a stagger the stagger shit yeah yeah like 5th like r and um 15 uh and that works really well for for FFF13 and it works well for 7 and 7R it does not work well for an action game

like 16 because it just leads to the thing of well I I'm going to save every cool down for when they're staggered because it does twice as much damage whereas with Kingdom Hearts like enemies have very

cohesive tells they have you can parry almost all of their stuff and you have a parry and a dodge roll and like when you hit an enemy you've got them for one combo you're not you're not like softening them up to wail on them for 50 seconds you're you're back and forth fighting them constantly

like it would be in like a devilmate cry like you know you stagger Virgil and you're like I have eight hits on Virgil before he's coming back I guess I just, my expectations are not what you're describing when I'm going into like a game that's like Final Fantasy. My expectations are like, oh, you're leaning in at all to action. I'll take what I can get almost, you know? So I ended up kind of like, I enjoyed it. It was not in depth at all.

It didn't go to the lengths that, you know, other action games do certainly. But I kind of was like. Not Kingdom Hearts One. Kingdom Hearts 2? Yes. That is a that is a Top shelf PlayStation 2 action game But all this to say that in the end with 16

I guess I just had like like yeah I kind of had my expectations somewhat lowered for how in depth the combat would be And I was pleasantly surprised by You know the amount of things I could do And like how much How many moves were possible while cycling through everything you had on your kit, you know?

Yeah. So I, so I mean, I think back on 16 and I think about how like there is a huge variety of moves and a bunch of cool things you can do. And then I figured out that all of them were less effective than just stockpiling the most boring cool downs in the game and blowing them out on the stagger bar. Just doing the big super. And finding out that like, like by far. the most effective way to play the game is the most boring way to play the game was like a big bummer.

To do the big nukes. Okay, fair enough. That's, that's fair. It is the way to melt the bosses and life bars are crazy. I like to optimize the way my character moves and fights and damages, but I don't want, I don't want to solve it. I want to have to keep re-optimizing it the whole time through. And then when I got to 16 and you get Odin and you're just like, nuke.

Nothing is going to touch this shit. That's fair. The reason why I'm, the enjoyment I had, though, was just basically like, every time you hear me talk about, what's an example, recently, I was describing how Romeo is a dead man was a game that was very basic in what you could do and that, you know, you could shoot, you could swing light, you could swing heavy, you could dodge, and that I wanted a little bit more to the combat, you know? And what 16 was doing was what I'm describing is like, they could have made that a much more simple bare-down, you know,

list of things you could do with each icon, but having a move list and having a lot of different things, combat options was like, oh, thank you. It's nice that I can do this in this game as opposed to not at all. You pull out an icon for one big spellcast and then it

goes away, you know, type of thing. If you want a Final Fantasy game that has really excellent action combat that you have like a bunch of different options, your best option is to play Stranger of Paradise. Yes. Yes.

Definitely. Hey, I have to take a quick break. I have not fed this dog. You're right back. I am required if you'll exceed me. All right. Let's take a quick word from our sponsor. What we love.

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com slash Superbeast for your $1 per month trial. Thank you, Shopify. Thanks, Shopify. All right. So incidentally, you know, we've talked about some of the stuff going on with the, yeah, there was some AI-generated shit in Crimson Desert,

and we touched on the Fortnite layoffs as well. I guess tied to the AI discussion a little bit earlier, there was a couple updates regarding DLSS-5, which we talked about last week. Oh, that was in between. Isn't that interesting? So, you know, there were a couple of different back and forths. The Digital Foundry had a big discussion to basically say,

maybe we were a bit too fast and a little too dumb-ho about it. Digital Foundry said, we really should have waited to see what people thought before we said anything, which is like a massive coward statement. And then there's two guys on digital foundry who were like, we thought this shit sucked right away.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, no, you know, you had the poor take at the time. Jensen Huang came out and said, you guys don't understand. it's not an image filter. It's actually a generationally compute geometric

thing. It's a thing. It's totally different. And never mind that. It turns out that there are hallucinations. It's literally, they were literally just using a 5090 to run a fucking Instagram filter on top of fucking R.E9 footage. Which they were, that's all it was.

Expressly staying that it was not. that no, no, no, it's happening using explicit 3D scene data, et cetera, et cetera. And then, like, upon further examination, it's like, no, no, you are, that is exactly what's happening here. You are. It's exactly what it was. And then it shows. Everyone can tell right away, like that. And it shows more obviously in the Starfield footage than it does in the Resident Evil footage.

Yeah. But yeah, it was interesting too, because what I will say is that like, it sounds like they did a bunch of, they got the full ringer in that discussion on Digital Foundry. And some of the discussion points that came up that we didn't even get into as well was like nowadays, when you get people on the RE engine especially, you're hiring actors and you're paying for their likenesses and you're scanning their data and you're actively. actively having them do performance capture. And that's a very expensive and complicated process that also is like paying them for the fact that their face is on the character. And also, uh, after that came out, people who worked on RE9 came out and said, I've never seen this fucking shit.

This shit looks like trash. So we do not support it over at the RE9 development team. Every shot has its chaser. And, uh, yes, Capcom. And Ubisoft developers found out about the DLSS-Five footage when everyone else did. And furthermore, they also came out and doubled down to say they will not be using any generative AI content, Capcom specifically. They basically underlined their policy about it not being used for any assets in the game. but they do have it for improving efficiency

and productivity and development. So you can either you can either believe that they use it for whatever they want and they're just trying to pull the wool over your eyes or they're just saying that to appease the investors in Capcom. You yeah. Well, that's the thing is if you if you

exactly if you appease the right if you appease the us the players by saying no no we won't But then the people who are the investors going, but wait, what about bubble?

I thought I was giving you money because you were saying the keyword. You need to say the keyword more, actually. And then it's like, oh, no. So now you're trapped between a bubble and a hard place. Is that bubble doing today? Hmm. Oh, are you not up today?

Gore, Sora, you don't look so good. Disney exits open A-I-Dle after giant shutters Sora. Hey, Sora is just dead now. But what about all that face data? Wully, do you know, want to... So remember, we've gone over it so many times. But the thing that I say every time is that the what's going to get the bubble is that these services don't make any money.

Hold on. What are the numbers here? It cost about $5 billion to run SORA a year and they made $1.2 million back. That is an operating loss of $998.8 million. I don't math so good. Is that bad? It is bad. that is a higher than 99.

That is a 99.8% loss. A cool billion. Okay. Okay. So they're taking it offline for consumers. Okay. Because, um,

but, because it can't make money. It can't make money. But I was told like the nature of turning. the device on means it can't make money. But I was told the line would go up. That's what happened when you live in a speculative economy.

Okay. Well, Sora was the one particularly where you could specifically give it... Made video. But like you give it your face and permission and it has a bunch of... Yeah, no. So low-tier God

was like, I want to make meme video. of myself, so he gave permission to make low-tier God face videos. And so then he would try and scroll through the thing to find them. And all he would find is people making edits of himself, telling him to, like, take care of his kids. And then he didn't think it was that funny. Okay. I see. Yeah, because I did see a bunch of, like, I know like Jake Paul and a bunch of other people got their face.

And there's like, you can specifically, you know, um, Say, hey, here's my thing. Go use it. Interesting. Hmm. Just going to hold my tongue on the rest of that. But, you can, you can, you can hear the baby crying behind me, right? Yeah.

That's crazy. That's nuts. So what I'm also hearing is that. the, because like, you know how like Discord just had this bit and they're like, hey guys, fucking Peter wants your data. Or is that okay? And everyone said, go fuck yourself. Right?

Remember that little. So I just read that like Reddit is also, the attempt on Reddit side is going down and they're coming at it from a different angle. It was, we want to use base data to minimize bots to guarantee that you. you're a human. So we want to incorporate some sort of face data related thing as well, or at least it's a discussion point. And it's just kind of like, at the point where you got to find all these different places to be like, yes, we get it. The people who you want to keep track of who say bad, nasty things about you, you want to get their faces in the database. We understand Pete. We get it. I'm just kind of wondering like between that and the whole like Twitter exchange or whatever,

you kind of wonder if there's a point where you're like, are you guys actively making bots so that you can create environments where you can then walk in and be like the only solution is face data. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Oh, okay. That's not even a conspiracy theory. Oh, I was, okay. Hmm.

All right. Just check. And then the bots can be grandfathered in slash given a free pass in so the discussions look like they're more popular than they are. Got it. Okay. Woolly, there was, do you remember when, do you remember? you remember when TikTok was banned in the United States

for one day or like TikTok was off was and wasn't and then was again yeah it was gone for like 30 hours yeah yeah the the random U.S. Dick Rider political

comment that flooded every Canadian video just fucking disappeared for fucking 20 hours suddenly just evaporating suddenly suddenly suddenly fake guy from Alberta no longer existed

on everybody's videos in Canada. Fascinating. Fascinating how that works. Yeah. That and the other one were it's like, oh, your location is now visible on your profile.

Lit. Fucking the pants down ass moment of like, wait, from what? From where? Anyway, um, so the, the, oh, that, yeah, that thing, that thing, that thing. Fucking, that's when the left hand doesn't talk to the right hand. Oh, boy. Um, okay, so there, there was, there was that side of it. The, uh, other announcement as well we had this week was, uh, over on guilty gear side, 2.0 strive is happening. That game is, is making its money. doing well enough that they're still going with it, man. Holy shit,

Bridget Prince money. The success that Strive is enjoying after all this time is like, fucking, wow, that is a very healthy thing to see in the middle of incest gate and, you know, Tekin kind of wishes they could get some incest going on right now. I think Tekken would take incest and good gameplay

over the situation they're currently dealing with. It's brutal. At least Alex is still pretty sick to play. Alex is fun to play. All things considered. So over on Strive 2.0, what did they announce? Well, one, jam. Cranberry jam is back.

Hell yeah, John Crotterbury. I don't know what a cradberry is, but uh... Coorado better That's what my fucking name. Cranberry. Cranberry jam. Um,

and she's got a little bunny and she cooks and hey, guess what? She does a dragon kick and fucking mission accomplished. Hell yeah. Done and done.

Um, Cloudberry jam? Is that what it's supposed to be? Is that what it is? I didn't know that. Kuda do bit. Oh, it is. Curado berry.

cloud damn it cloudberry jam oh oh my god the rabbit cooks also yeah yeah it does it does um

and um I was wondering if they were going to like lean in and go like big old full on chef outfit but they kind of just they got the jacket and she's chilling

um they also And she, you know, she seems fine. That's all good. Jam's sick as long as she does her. Big hair. Big hair, dragon kick and Kikosho. You know, that's fine.

Full counters, et cetera. Motherfucker, did you see Robokai? Yo, it's Robocke. I'm looking at him right now. Robokai looks so sick. It's crazy. I love Robo guy. They gave him a body, and he's this goofy old man that's like,

ah, sunny boy. Yeah. You know, he talks like a complete old asshole. But my God is his strive glow up incredible. He's wearing a pinstripe suit. He's swagged to fuck. Is it just the one piece of concept art? It's just the one piece of concept art.

And his hair is now, like beforehand, it was the robot head with the, you know, the Kai hair and the mask. And now they have his hair doing like this quoth that's bait. It's like there's one piece of Robokai art where he's. upside down looking like swagish, and they basically made him that. You know, so he's got the cold distinct look. Yeah, they made the robot hot. Um, what a fucking cool, uh, design tease right there. Gameplay wise, I really hope that I know that they simplify a lot of the time, but Robokai's had some

crazy gameplay mechanics over the years. Robokai's been goofy as shit. Yeah, always these insane moves. And I'm sure they're going to, you know, bring back a bunch. But he also had a version of him, the Mark 2 in Isuka. There's a Robokai that basically is a story mode character that can go through the game and learn a bunch of wacky moves that the regular Robokai never learned. And like, I hope that they kind of integrate something that allows him to have this kind of system

of like wacky insane upgrades, you know, upgrade pathing while you're playing as him in the game. That'd be a lot of fun. Because, like, he, to go back and like, you know, pull from everything, he's ever had. Like, you can do some deep, deep cuts into some obscure shit. He had a pot buster. You could teach him where these big robot arms would come out and grab you, you know, like it's nuts.

So shit was wild. Speaking of wild, they also teased the season 2.0 or rather the version 2.0 update. Gameplay mechanic changes. A big one is, do you remember a wild assault by any chance? No. So they added a. two big things to the game some time ago was a big shield

that you could spend a part of your burst gauge to do or a big drive impact. Fly forward. Ah! Bia! And you spend... I never played the version that had that in it.

Okay. So every character universally could do, you know, Hadoken plus dust to do a like drive impact or like a big shield, you know?

And the drive impact thing was ridiculous. It was obnoxious. It was insane to deal with, and some people got better than others because you had different colored versions, depending on what style of character you had. And people hated it because it basically, it was busted in nuts. So they took it out of the game completely. They removed a mechanic that they introduced. Oh, now it's back to what I think of.

They're replacing it with a different mechanic, actually. Okay. So now you have something called counterblitz, which is when you get hit with a big counter. Full-screen thing. You can spend half a burst meter to bust out of it and do a, like, three or four-hit what looks like a wall-break combo or sequence, you know? And it's like a half-burst, I guess. Or is it on, did I get that wrong?

When you're on offense. Okay, excuse me. It is a counterbreaker. Okay. So you use that to call out their burst effectively then. And you, yeah, you've seen, this is the first time we've seen a mechanic get fully erased. Yeah, it's quite rare. You know, and then just like, sorry, yep, you guys didn't like that, are bad, it's gone.

Here's something else entirely. Street Fighter 6, take notes. It's okay to erase things. We can, you know, just, they have the words like, uh, uh, uh, uh, wild assault just kind of get changed into the new thing and they showed it off and just like that the memory is gone

you know so we can do that what do you want removed from SF6 just have Patricia just get oh that's see that's not a gameplay change can't change that oh oh okay that ship has sailed okay what if you just put all in a pull

I put everything on Tom you know just blame him he raised them wrong that's the just you can blame Tom for all of it They were like hugging and kissing and he was like, good job. Yeah. So yeah, Robokai coming up next and another two characters and then that big change as well.

Not to mention, you know, some skits, some other stuff. And the most important thing you can have with a new Guilty Gear update, new artwork in which that beautiful butch lesbian that you thought and retweeted turned out to be sole bad guy for. guilty year again. So there's a new piece of lesbian soul bad guy art. It keeps happening. It keeps happening.

That's so, that's so specific. Every time. So that's cool. We talked about Jojo already a little bit. There was an obvious but interesting thing. So Yoshi-P sat down,

talked about Final Fantasy. Talked a lot about Final Fantasy. And pointed out that people are having, younger audiences are having a hard time engaging with the Final Fantasy series because the release intervals are so much longer these days. And it's like...

There's a statistic that bears this out where remake and rebirth players, 80% of them were over the age of 30 years old. 77% of rebirth players.

That is a ridiculous uphill battle to get younger people to care about Final Fantasy again. And that's locked in from our childhoods, right? That's a... You know what the kids are into now, man? Fortnite and everything Mihoa puts out.

You know when those things come out? All the time? Every six weeks. Okay, but also the other second part of this is that you truly, because of the way the industry is now, cannot have a release schedule like you used to. So you got to have multiple games that, you have a game that takes the moment and everyone is on it. And then when that's done, something else takes the moment entirely. Right. Arc Raiders is what's here now taking the in the moment.

Something else will come from somewhere else. else and try to peel people away. And there's these big things like Fortnite in the background and so on. And there are some institutions. You know, Call of Duty has found its way of going about it. But back in, obviously, you know, the 90s into the early aughts, you had Final Fantasy games coming out every two, three years. Oh, no.

I actually ran the math on it. They came out on average every 14 months. So it's just like, for like 12 years. So there was a very good chance of people. getting in by just keeping up with that shit. And we talked about the insanity of going from six to seven and then going from nine to ten and so on, right?

In North America, it gets slightly more complicated because of like the missing entries, but like in general, like there was a new Final Fantasy game every single year you were in school. Yeah. Now here's the problem. It is obviously impossible to expect and or push for 14 months.

turn around on modern video games. And I don't know if that's true. Well, asterisk. You certainly can if you, A, crunch, or B, reduce your scope. But Obsidian released a buggy fucking pile of shit, but they turned New Vegas around in like 22 months. It feels. If you made fucking smaller games that were shorter and cheaper. This is the long,

this is where I was going. Also, RG puts out a game every nine months. And using the same engine and asset swapping. No, the, it's just, it's the,

hey, it's the story of the fucking podcast, but it's just like quadruplea bloat means that you don't get to have that type of turnaround that builds that type of, you know, love for a franchise over, time and such because it takes you that long to do the thing. And, you know, I would say that like, well, this, I mean, Final Fantasy is hardly the only franchise that that experiences that, right? Zelda

is a bit is another thing where it's like there's, you know, there's usually two Zelda games port per platform, but the life cycles that Nintendo has been going through have slowed down significantly. So like, you don't get to go through as many Zelda games as we grew up going through certainly. So anyway, all this to say that like, yeah, when it comes to like the ability to make, I guess, a sustainable franchise, if you're still going to always go for the massive, you know, the AAA size or the quadruplea size, then this is going to be a continuous problem. But the way that a lot of people that they're trying to capture now that in this article they're

describing, those people have grown up playing a thing and then have moved on to the next thing that came out and or the next thing you know um i i did a massive blue sky breakdown of like what years things had would have come out and the long and short of it is like if you played f f15 halfway through high school you might have been like cruising through university by the time 16 came out and like that's an that's an era of your life away in distance it's too much Right. Like an 18-year-old now has had like four Final Fantasy games come out. I was trying to pull up the quick list and it's like 97, 99, just going from from 7, 2001.

There are three Final Fantasy games came out in an 18-month period with 10, 1112. 2003 to 2006 with 12 9, 10, 11. Yeah, from 2006 to 2010 with 13. And then 13 kept going. You know who's actually doing a really good job of this extremely specific problem to video games? Mm-hmm. Is Resident Evil. Resident Evil has staggered new game and remake.

Mm-hmm. And they've been ping-ponging each other. There's an 18 to 28-month, like, turnaround period where there's like kind of always a new Resident Evil game coming out. Now there's a Resident Evil game either coming out this year or has been announced for next year for since 7. Now, Resident Evil, especially for the remakes, these are big, showy, expensive, but ultimately short game experiences.

Very short. They're games that are built on playing them multiple times in a row over and over. That's it. doing Resident Evil 9 insanity, which I forgot to talk about. Okay. And that's another, that's my fourth full run of the game. And it is a very, very interesting run of the game because they're also remixing enemy encounters, which has led to scenarios of me going into, because I'm obsessed with these types of games, right?

So I'm going through a hallway in a basement and I'm like, I have to run back to this safe room. So you know what would be really diabolical if they, if they spawn, the unkillable enemy in front of me, which causes me to have to open this door, and then a zombie that didn't spawn on the earlier difficulty spawns to come out of that door to punish me. And as I

was saying that shit, out that door he came. Interesting. Enemy remix, tweaks, bonus content, new game plus, speed run rewards. Right. It's a cheap way to add longevity to your game. But that being said,

Resident Evil is not a JRP, right? No, it's not. It would be interesting to see if, like, there ever could be a step backwards by anyone who's, like, escalated up in this industry in a way. Like, I mean, it feels like you just got to fall from race all the way to the bottom. Did Alcapath Traveler do well? I think it did. But, but you see, that's a new series that had to be created to do that, right?

Bravely Default did fine, didn't it? A bravely default might as well just say fucking Final Fantasy on it. coming back from the dead, though, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Like, you could just do a bunch of fucking game. Like, every game that Square Inix puts out that looks like it could be

an old Final Fantasy game, you could just call it Final Fantasy fucking legend, whatever. But the point of what I'm getting at is that, like, the name that we're talking about. Like, when you give it, the other things are like the other games like that, like Octopath and stuff that is like smaller and more reasonable

and is a step down in a way. like I'm curious to see if it's possible with the name, the big thing that everybody go, bra, that, trip, IP, you know, because it feels like you can. I don't think that name holds it like it did after 15 and 16 being mediocre. And then the other question, of course, is like, you know, can you take a step down in a way where what you do doesn't basically have a bunch of people that are like, wait, how is this not bigger and bolder and crazier than the last one this game sucks what a piece of shit, right?

Or to have it look or people just say like it looks like shit or whatever if you're going for something that is like dialing back from this cliff. What's the newest mainline Final Fantasy game that you played that you were like this is obviously a game of the year contender? I feel like it's FF10 back

in 2001. I really liked seven remake. I don't count it. It's a remake. I said new Final Fantasy game Some people might say 12 I personally disagree but I can see it But yeah you're talking about you gotta go

You gotta go back to the old You gotta go back to the older The previous generations Um Yeah so no but but Ultimately though It's uh When you have this kind of discussion about like

Okay Thus let's start Like if you go how do we put out more Final Fantasy games faster so that people can relate to this franchise. It's like that is... Make them. Let's make them. Okay.

And do we trust the way that people get told to make things quickly to be done in a way that is not going to present a billion? They're complaining about Final Fantasy brand awareness, but they also make a bunch of games that they could just call Final Fantasy. Octopath Traveler back in the 90s would be called Final Fantasy guidance. Right. But they ultimately don't. And that's why Octopath is not part of what he's talking about, what he says, hey. Yeah. So it's like people are not recognizing the younger audiences are not playing it as much.

Because if they did play Octopath Traveler, then they played Octopath, which is a different thing. Yeah. You know. So that's kind of the deal. Their plan to get the kids is release the mobile decidia game. Yes. Create a live service. Create a mobile live service platform and then hope that that can fight.

The Hoyo can do it. So can we. So can we. It's just the, when it's as simple as just make it good go, make it fast go, it's like, I don't trust the assholes to not fucking either crunch or there's always some, some bullshit they're going to go about when it comes to this shit. We talk about it every single week. It's like they can't do it more frequently without some horrible downside being a part of that,

if not just the quality dipping, then the amount of churn or the, the, um, uh, every other thing that goes wrong with every other major release we cover on a regular basis, right? To be fair, the person that's being interviewed who gave this statement was Yoshi P, who we know doesn't do that stuff, but he also made a kind of mid final fantasy game. And Don Trails also kind of mid. I just, when it comes to like, we don't get games as fast as we used to and people are not attached to the brand as much as they used to be. And like, how can we do something about that. I go, well, be careful about how you solve that problem because there's a lot

of shitty ways you can. If, you know, I have a solution. Do you want my solution? It's a genuine solution. I'm going to hold on my hand. Okay. So I've been playing Kingdom Hearts one and it runs well. And it's a PS2 game. And I'm like, just make more of these.

The PS2 could have been the technical end. I fucking wish. And it would have been better for everyone. Yes. And so that, what you just said, is what I was saying before where I was like, the step down, what would that look like?

If they made a game, that was what you just described. That's exactly what I mean when I say a step down. And I don't mean... Just make PS2 game. And I don't mean a sister franchise game, a new name, a new... I mean, like, literally call it the same IP name and put it out there and go,

yeah, we're actually, we're doing this. And it looks like something from a previous gen or so, or whatever the case is, but it's a sustainable release and it's a good-ass game. I wonder how that would be received. I would love to see that. I'd be curious to see if, like, there would be enough people that would just be like, yeah, this is fucking great rules, word of mouth is going to help and carry this forward,

or if there is enough of a, you know, larger audience, a casual pushback against something that doesn't look like it's current or whatever the case is, and then that leads to a bunch of other shit. I don't know. I would hope. Do you? I would imagine that considering how well indie games do and how much people are super down for shit that is. you know,

retro and solid, like that anything, that something could come out that would be received in this way. You know, and I think it would work, but I'd be curious if there were anything to point to

as an example. Do you remember the PlayStation the best collection? It was what greatest hits was called in Japan. Oh yeah. I've been making fun of that name for fucking 15 years now.

Square in X should put out a series of games called Final Fantasy PS2 that never was collection and just pretend that these are PS2 games that never got released

and just make new games and their PS2 games. Look, we found an old Final Fantasy game in a drawer. It's from the PS2. Someone just brought up Pokemon. Yeah. And there's a franchise that

stayed in its lane quite a bit for a very long time. Now there's a problem with Pokemon when we talk about these things. Because when you go, why don't you just do it like Pokemon, you're also saying, why aren't you as successful as the most successful thing that's ever existed in human history? Well, well.

Well, yeah, the, the, the, the, the ridiculousness of trying to, no, you cannot be that. You're not, but it's more so the point of, uh, how often will a Pokemon game get released and does it look like the current, how far from the, from the first gen Pokemon game is the current release compared to, um, how far? how far these other franchises are with the, you know, five, six-year gaps, et cetera. Bam, bam, bam. Right. And they pretty much are like, you know, they're not pushing the envelope that much.

In fact, I want to say that those, recently we started seeing some of those games where they're like, okay, this is a 3D game. Okay, this has some more action mechanics, et cetera, the stuff that we've been talking about. But for the most part, they kind of stuck to it. And it does fucking sell. It sells every time. It sells every time. I'm just thinking my brain. I'm like, this conversation is like actually stupid, like the whole conversation because it's like the game I've been describing this whole time.

I just had to say 360 game instead of PS2 game. And then they released it last year for $40 and was called Expedition 33 and it won every award. But that's the point. Like Expedition 33 is. And they made it with like no money and like 30 people. Expedition 33 represents, as we've said many a time, a perfect medium space that you can actually. sustainably execute on. Like just do that. With critical acclaim

and with the fact that shit's done well and it plays well and everything, you've got a fucking amazing legendary thing on your hands. Queryanax, do you not have a team that is as talented as these French amateurs? It's like a Tony Stark built this shit with a pile

of scraps moment. I think that there's a fear and it's stupid, but I think there's a fear of like if Expedition 33 was just called Final Fantasy, there's a fear of like, well, this is not bigger and bolder and louder than the last thing we did.

No, it's just better. Yeah, and it's not, and we can't, we don't have a million preload, um, uh, pre-order bonuses and we don't have a million, you know what I mean?

Like the bloat of the machine and the fact that there's all these people on these games with the numerical entry. That's this massive insane thing. Like, it, it comes with all. all that shitty bloat and all that shitty churn. And I remember talking to you.

The resistance would come with that. Ages ago about Blizzard and Square, that period where Blizzard and Square Enix were just like throwing every dollar they had in the world at the, we're going to have the nicest CG cutscenes between them, right? Like which Warcraft Cinematic versus what Final Fantasy Cinematic was come out? And Blizzard ultimately. crushed them in that war

because Square Nix would spend all that money on those cutscenes and then also on the in-game graphics and then Blizzard would get like four triangles together and say it was a troll. Yeah. Also

have a guy with a Jamaican accent talk over it. I mean also Blizzard like while Square eventually got there Blizzard made the MMO platform money maker it prints money that thing first. you know and then all they had to do was just sit on top of that and it's like i'm thinking about like

square next is that final fantasy has become trapped and it has to look like the best game that's ever existed and it's like the most successful game you guys ever put out accounting for the era in which it released was the game that had cool cutscenes and look like a bunch of little pop-eye freaks running around yeah yeah no it's like yeah we know this and it would take somebody that they'd be willing to listen to to go in and boldly be like, shut the fuck up. We're not doing this stupid shit. We don't need to. Right. But there's a prison that they have created of, we are AAA. We must can, we must be AAA. We are every time we're the bleeding edge. We have to do hold this the seat. And everyone who's like in that, whether it's an S-Asscree game or, uh, you know,

any of the cod fucking blobs or like anything that is is in that space. There's that it feels like there's just this invisible not real prison of we must always continue to be this bloated. This is what a video game is. And this is the only way that casual people are going to buy our game and talk about it.

You know what's really weird to me about Yoshi P talking about this is that Yoshi P, the way he handles managing the FF14 team and what they focus on and what they plan for and what comes out is extremely structured.

it's super, super specific to the point where people can look at a trailer and call the date of when stuff's going to come out. It's very, very regimented. And then they took like five, six, seven years to make FF16. And it has to look like the graphics have to be incredible. It has to be this and that. And it's like it's not even to his own production strengths. but because it's Final Fantasy 16

it has to be the biggest and the most peak and the gorgeousest. So the silver lining that I can envision here is that the quadruplea mind prison if it continues to

exist and destroy whatever is inside of it because none of this shit is sustainable and it all burns down then fine smaller games from smaller studios and indies and such that are coming up that are getting more and more known can then those can become series and IPs that the people the young set out younger audiences can attach to

you and like and they will execute and make things that are smaller scale that they can afford to make as opposed to trapping yourself in the fucking you know this stupid the stupid non-real pressure of like why you have to of making a game that's too big to to be maintained and then why you have to fucking fire a thousand people every time a game releases. It's just, it's like, the problem will fix itself, but the thing that people start playing a bunch of and caring about might not be the Final Fantasy franchise then if they move on to the Claire Obscure franchise, you know, or whatever the thing ends up being. there is also a like I don't like 14 month like turnaround thing that's like that 14 month is the Cotor 2 like god damn it well the 14 month turnaround for Final Fantasy was Final Fantasy 1 Final Fantasy 2 Final Fantasy 3 Final Fantasy 4 Yeah etc the 14 month turnaround also to me is fucking King of Fighters 11 or rather King of Fighters 96 97 98 and then you're like you got some fucking bangers out there but then not all of those were

were some years were way, way better than others. And on average, every three or so years you had a fucking good one. So, you know. I think the Final Fantasy development, like nonsense is really summed up by the difference between like the production of FF7 with all its cutscenes and FF6 where they're making FF6 and they finished it so early that they had like six months to do the entire world of ruin as a bonus. the game was going to end on the floating continent

and then they're like oh wow we have tons of time before our release date let's let's do a whole second continent whatever generation you're in whatever scale you're at I think people can enjoy be satisfied with and still feel attached to something that comes out every three four years I think that's reasonable I think back in a time when generation turnarounds were a lot faster too. You remember when there was a persona

game coming out? We're an SMT game coming out like every six months. Do you remember that? That highly specific period in 2002? One or the other. Oh, early aughts. I mean, fuck. Like, where they just, they were like, hey, it's Shinemogamy Tense. And we all laughed because it was

like a marketing ploy and it's super fucking worked. It worked really fucking hard. And also, that was a time when, what you'll call it, companies that were making games for arcades just simultaneously developed

multiple games on multiple fronts, you know, and like fighting game shit was like, yeah, multiple in a year from the, almost the same teams it felt like at times, you know, the insanity of the late 90s release schedule. Not something that necessarily should be emulated or, you know, brought back,

but certainly there's a happy, medium we can find of like, yeah, a couple years working on a project and not blowing it too big or going for a or making it too insane and also keeping it affordable and keeping the scale reasonable, you know? I think it's really obvious that management is where all the money in this business goes. Every time, every single time we see like, oh, how come this game took so long and cost so much money? it's like oh because producers and directors just weren't doing it or they weren't telling people what to go or there were some stuff from Sony forget which studio it was so feel free to take this with a massive grain of salt but they were like everyone had every every single change had to go through the director but the director would leave you on red for three months oh god uh the bottleneck otter so like i know that that specific

example, I might be misremembering it, but I know that that's a very common thing in a lot of places. Yeah, I... Fuck, what was I just going to say? I was going to say something about the... Not the turnaround rate, not the scale, but the... Yes, that's it. It feels like it would be easier to, like, to summarize here. It feels like it would be easier for massive publishing companies.

to have a person who takes a mid-sized game that's a huge success and then that person continues to work on more sequels or more in that franchise and keeps it the same scale than it would be to take something that bloats the fuck up goes uphill and then try to pull it back you know it's a really good example of this when they were interviewed after they won all those awards geome was like yeah the tendency for a a game to do this well is to staff up and make the next game really big. We're not, we're not going to do that. The next game will be about the same. Yep. They got knighted, man. You know?

Anyway. So that, yeah, that is an interesting, a YoshiP interview. All right. Let's take some letters. Oh, wait, hold on. Just a coincidental, but it appears that the time

for Mirror's Edge likes is upon us. Oh, I saw this, yeah. So there's two things going on here. So there's handline, which is just

Mirror's Edge, you can go look at on Steam where colors and visual like literally we are doing it's not it's not mirrors edge at home it is mirrors edge um you can go look at padline uh and simultaneously there is something called tacky on flow bro this this bitch using a fake PSP in the screenshot that's so fucking funny and and uh tacky on flow is also just mirrors edge but this time it's third person and you can see more accurate

cool glowing and wall running stunts and flips and tricks and shit oh this is the one that i saw yeah tachyon flow yeah yeah and i'm very very in love with tachyon flow has massive this shit is never coming out energy well because you're this is twitter game running in an in an experimental environment right yeah but i think it's hype as fuck watching all the the explosions and shit going on and the you know it's it's mirrors edge third person which i already love mirro's edge the ability to see the character just makes me love that even more. So I'm immensely excited for the possibility of this game. Wow, Panlines really.

They're not even pretend. That one's not remotely pretending. Like, Tachianflow is adding a little bit of glow and powers and her shoes are glowing and she's bursting into like speed runs off the wall and stuff. Panline is, it's just one to one to one to one. That's crazy. But Panline does look like it exists more so. Either way, welcome back Mirrors Edge.

fine, I'll do it myself. Let's take some letters. If you want to send a letter, send it to Castle Super Beastmail at Gmail.com. That's Castle Superbeastmail at Gmail.com. I'm looking at an article by Rich Stanton published January 24th of 2025. Tim Sweeney says Epic is losing billions fighting Apple and Google because it can afford to. jokes that, quote, we may run into serious financial problems after a couple more decades. Oh, no.

Stupid fun. Oh, yeah, no, Penny Parker's in Tokon. She looks cool. Thank you, Tron Bow. Looks cool. Welcome back. There's a chart to figure out if your character on that team is a Peter or a Parker. Yes.

That was, yeah, the, what was it, the amazing guardians? Yeah. Yeah. Ah, Penny Parker. Good pick. That's cool. Also, deep fucking random cuts with that trailer showing off. The promoter?

So the implication being that... Oh, the Galactica? The Galactica lady that shows up is a character called The Promoter, which means that the champion, this baldman with a big ponytail, will be showing up. The champion is such a fucking old, goofy-ass design. Just look up the Marvel character. Here, let me find a picture. Because he's probably showing up.

Look at this fucking dude right here. What do we got? This dude sucks. He's got tight red pants and a big blue shirt and a giant forehead and and Mary Jane Watson hair. That's awful. It's crazy. Yeah, Space Hogan.

is coming. Let's see what Tokon does to his design. Hopefully nothing. Never mind that danger glow up. Leave the champion intact. Castle Super Beast Mail at gmail.com. Your letter may sound like this. Hey, Pat and Woolley, a friend of mine I talk games with is a huge

Hollow Knight slash Silk Song fan and he's completely convinced that the key to the tens of millions of sales they made is the complete and utter lack of communication and marketing. His take is, and I quote, I maintain that if they communicated more, the game would not have been as well known. I personally don't think internet memes translate to sales,

otherwise Morbius would have actually done well in its theatrical re-release. I don't deny that Skonger's being kept keeping things in the Zeitgeist impacted sales, but I think that HoloNus being a generational quality indie game is the main reason for the continued sales. What are your thoughts on Team Cherry's almost total radio silence?

Does your friend think that it's raining because the ground is wet? Yeah. Like, are you fucking serious? Hollow Night developed, generated a fuck ton of goodwill from the fact that it was a great ass game, word of mouth spread, the quality and the timing of its luck as well, all worked out wonderfully as a 2D Souls life. And on top of that, they also developed a lot of goodwill from the fact that they were very generous about development and put a fuck ton into the game and gave away a bunch as well from this Kickstarter campaign all the way up to the final release. So it was a momentum of like good things to say about that game.

And then your friend needs less than causality, man. And from that, the tease that they were going to follow that up with more of it, you know, plus the fact that it became a meme. certainly adds, but there was enough of a rolling hill, rolling ball going down the hill of people loving Hollow Night before that. There's like a legitimate backwards understanding of anything. Like to the point what I'm like, I'm dumbfounded by the idea

like people knowing more about it would have, it's it's because it's $20. That's excellent. That's another part of the goodwill. It's also really cheap. And it's super long. Yeah. Yeah. All of this. All of this.

Rolling. Rolling forward. Did you think your full tummy made the food disappear? No, you ate it. It's the real total confusion of like root and proximate causes. It's my God. I'd be so frustrated to talk to this person.

The really affordable, really long, well made game made a good impression on everybody by having a ton of content and announced the sequel. And then people spent years meme in the sequel because it took forever. But yeah. Also like internet like memes and talking and this and that and discussion and podcasts don't mean a lick of difference to anybody like 99% of people playing games. like the

Solonite sold extraordinarily well based off of word of mouth as well as the fact that it costs $15 and looked like an excellent Metroidvania that you would see on the store Silk Song is carrying on the reputation Like you know what did more for Silk Song than anything is that when Silk Song came out

you saw the Silk Song banner on Steam and then the fucking service crashed because so many Hey why did it crash? Oh people are buying Silk Song. Now that does Oh, it must be really great then, huh? Now, to try to take this in any sort of charitable way, like there are good Metroidvania

of cheap games that are hitting steam that nobody has heard of and no one is playing because the nature of how much the industry has changed and how many great games are coming out every day that nobody knows about is a thing. And how many of those games are the sequel to Holo9? But even still, even still, word of mouth has not had the opportunity to spread for those things, nor were there necessarily a Kickstarter campaign or whatever. All the different things that come together to create the confluence of events leading to a successful game. Didn't happen for those games.

But that does not mean that it is equivalent 100%, you know, because of the aforementioned reasons. Let's take another one over here. Audrey says, hey, West Coast, East Coast, rivalry. Audrey here. when was the last time you actually believed the protagonist would lose? For me, it was the climax of pitch perfect two. The German Apex Das Sound Machine versus the Barden Bellas. I absolutely had no idea how the protagonist and her a cappella squad could comfortably defeat DSM.

Kizondite. Attack on Titan. It's like the fourth or fifth episode of Attack on Titan. And then in the seventh episode of Attack on Titan, I was like, oh, it's going to be like that. Yeah. For me, I would say Stone Ocean. Yeah. I'm flipping, I'm like looking, I'm reading the chapters going, but that's impossible.

But then you can't. But how are you supposed? No, but. But you can't, though. And there's no, aha, your stand and my stand are alike. It's like, no, you're just losing. Stop! Yeah.

Let's see. One over here. Paul from Ireland says, hello, man. Quick and good email. It's been 13 years. Has rules of nature, has the rules of nature, moment been matched or exceeded yet? No, not really.

Nah, not. I don't think it's fair because it also was like impactfully one of the first of its kind. Like I just with the lyrics, with everything coming together, you know, we know what you're going for

when you hit something similar, but that was the definitional one. What I'll give I'll give some flowers to a moment that to me I fucking love. I know it didn't necessarily hit for others in this way, but burn baby burn in disco elysium. I fucking adore that moment. Taking the boat.

Oh, right. Okay. Getting on the boat. Oh, I was going more specific. I was going for like the, I thought he meant the moment of specific like wanting to scream. Let's do it, you know, kind of thing. Oh, no, no, no. You're just talking about moment in general.

I'm talking about music and gameplay and events all coming together in a kism. Oh, yeah, high-fi rush came out. That whole game is that. The whole game, high-fi rush, the whole game is syncing the music and the moment together for sure. Like, but as- Yeah, no, hundreds of times. There's lots of incredible games that have come out. But in terms of, in terms of like, you're saying matching or surpassing, I don't feel like anything surpasses necessarily.

But I really, really love that moment in disco on the boat. And going through that track all the way into the piano theme you've been listening to for the entire game with those lyrics as you step off the boat to the final area. fucking masterwork of a moment. There's a lot. There's a lot of things. Everything happening with Devil May Cry, five, with Nero and all of that is

in the wake of rules of nature, and it's like taking that energy and nailing it, doing an amazing job with it, but it's coming after the fact, right? It's later down the timeline. It's not to say these things aren't fucking incredible, but just it's going, hey, we can do a sick version of that.

You know, I put it as a successor to those moments. Cool. All right, that'll do. Yeah, that'll do. Fuck out of here. Have a good week, everybody. No, have a bad week. Oh, my God.

Have a dude. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. I went to see my son on a stream break this week. And I was like, hey, man, I have to go back and I have to go do dad show. It's very important. And you know what he told me? He said, no, dad.

Dad show is not very important. It is dood. It is not very important. And you know what? Even though it keeps the light on, he's right. It's doodah. It's fucking doodah, bitch.

Oh, man. It was too the whole time.