Castle Super Beast - CSB368: Your Child Is Updating With New Content As We Speak

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

Download MP3 | Watch Video Episode | Full Timestamps Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive Finessed At Twitch Rivals: The Akali Gentleman's Agreement It Was Always The Yellow Hat Man's Fault Bridgebourn: The Best Parallax Sprites I've Ever Seen Invincible VS: Stiff & Samey, But There's Stuff Kingdom Hearts 2 Proud Mode: Donald & Goofy Are F***ing DEAD Go to http://drinkag1.com/SUPERBEAST to get an AG1 Flavor Sampler and a bottle of Vitamin D3+K2 for FREE in your AG1 Welcome Kit with your first AG1 subscription order!  - Sign up for your 1$-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/superbeast Docket: Sony Is Making an R Rated Bloodborne Animated Movie With YouTuber JackSepticEye Big Crimes at a TCG Expo NINTENDO is reportedly circulating false information internally as a deliberate strategy to identify leakers. Rockstar Games confirms it was hacked by malicious group — 'ShinyHunters' takes credit, gives until April 14 to pay ransom or it will release confidential data Mom: Do you guys want a giggle? A $10,000 BOUNTY WAS JUST SET BY @maximilian_  FOR THE IMPLIMENTATION OF ROLLBACK NETCODE FOR ULTIMATE MARVEL VS CAPCOM 3 New spoiler pic from the set of 'Daredevil: Born Again' Season 3

Yo. Hey, good afternoon, well, how are you doing? Not too bad. How is you? I'm okay. What is going on? I'm, we're in a, we're in a no dad-da mode right now.

No-da-m mommy can do it. No-da-da-da, I need mommy. Oh, I wasn't, so I wasn't sure. Why am I even fucking here? I wasn't sure if you're communicating the ideas from him or if you were saying like, I am in no dad-d-d-moded. No, no, no, no, no. He is in no-dad-da-d-mode. Dada ain't shit this week.

I see. Well, this week, I mean, as, like, literally, as of today, sounds have formed that are neutral sounds. Not quite. Neutral, huh? So this morning we got B. Bha, Bha, Bha, Bha. Oh, you're in the Gougu Gaga thing. We got Baba.

And it's like, that's almost a thing. And to which Ponschman pointed out that if we spoke Arabic or Turkish or so, then that would be dad first, right? Just say that you do. Yeah, I would have won if we spoke. any of those languages, perhaps even what, Mandarin and a bunch of others as well, but we don't. Therefore, technically, Baa, bud is gibberish to us. But depending on where you are, you can count that. And I would take that as a free win, right?

You're either getting Ma, Ba, or Ba, right? Like, it's one of the plosives or a me coming out first. Well, me is usually easier to say than a plosive. It's literally just like your mouth opening while sounds are coming out. But yeah, no, I'll take, we will take those. We take those. We got a bab, web, bab, bab. Don't you worry, bud, in just a few short years, you're going to be hearing like, no, daddy, you stink.

And you're going to come on to the podcast and cry. Like, I'm trying not to cry right now. I mean, I'm already, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm. I'm preloading up some, some, I got, I got my, my mockery names preloaded up. I'm, I'm a type, one. Oh, do you? Yeah, I'm going to tell you one that we use on a regular basis for certain situations. Mm-hmm.

We call, we call, oh, oh, right, right, right. We call her. Oh, you can't do that. We call her that. No, you can't do that. We call her that. No. Yeah.

She's going to, you're going to teach that kid to roast your shit. Oh, it's happening. Yeah. No, big, big preemptive mockeries are occurring. This will be a house of roasts. It's early ammunition, you know? It's kind of awesome, though, when they just get your ass. Yeah.

Like, they get you. And you're like, oh, fuck. But that also means that they will be able to go out into the world and get the asses of anyone else around them, including teachers. and friends and you know, foes alike. So, yeah, you got to,

you know, if you're putting some verbal bullets in the pocket, then you got to make sure that they're used responsibly, I suppose. But there is something, there is something to like, I want a quippy kid,

you know? Well, I mean, my least favorite quip right now is he will occasionally call me Pat to throw me off my shit. You can't let the damage show. It's like, mm-mm.

And he'll do like a like a sassy like tilt and like throw his butt out the other way, like a full rotate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pat, I want some milk. And I'm like, no. This sucks. The damage, the damage. You can't let it show. Um, I don't know what's going on.

I just noticed that my camera's flickering. Yes. going a little crazy there. I'm gonna, okay. This feels like a more involved fixed than we can handle live right now. Well, let's see if you degenerate into like a snowstorm.

Yeah, I suspect that this is one of those. Have you been using it and nothing has changed about any setting at all for a long enough period of time? Let's fuck with that. Let's just, on occasion, on occasion, it's literally a simple, Did you know that gravity affects your cables, and it's just a little,

and a bit of bitty wiggled out because of time? Just a little bit. HMI in particular. But this is an audio podcast, right? So who knows and or cares about any of that stuff? Well, I like to be able to see you when you're talking, see when your eyes are big. The amount of people that are shook on Spotify, just being like, I have not seen their faces in years. I can't believe this is what they look like now.

It's so sick because I have the chops now once we started to. to do the Spotify video. It's like you've just been listening to this shit and you haven't like even glanced half once. Oh, I mean, I listened to the hotspot and the giant bomb cast for like a total like eight or nine years. The only time I'd ever see them is when I watched the live ones from E3. Fair enough.

Fair enough, I guess. Yeah, it's just, it feels like the medium has, has become something else these days, you know? Like, I don't need to see your face to hear like your god-awful takes. No, no. I just need that, oh, I disagree. Oh, it's making me mad.

Yeah, but every once in a while, the dreaded visual bit kind of happens, and, you know, that's becoming more and more inevitable. So here's the thing. You definitely have that in reverse, and so of eyes, when you run into, like, at a con or on the street, somebody from the chat, and you're like, no. You've, you've, like, it feels like a, it feels like the name got put into a tube, and the tomb formed a full human around it. because then you think about them and you're like, oh no, now I don't see a random name.

I see a human being. Gross. Yes. I mean, like there's always the, again, there's always the caricature in your head, you know, like the version of me that is going to be run into at a con. I will always have a copy of Marvel on me at all times and I'll playing it when you run into me. Right? That's, that's the expectation. Anyways, anyways

Let's see I had a bit of a week Did you? Some things occurred What? Let's take it from the top There was the Twitch Rivals 2XCO tag throwdown

Congratulations on your big win Thank you very much You know we put in Not as much time as we needed to But still managed to clutch it out And I got to say You know, Bricky was awesome just, you know, didn't think, didn't know if we could do it, but we went all the way

to 14th place. So that's cool. Oh, like out of what? Like 100? Out of like 16. So, you know. Not dead last. That's cool. Hey. That's all that matters. Hey. So, so, here's what I will say. There was, we, we jumped on and we're like, okay, what time are we going to get to practice. It's like maybe a little bit the night before, maybe not, but that's about it because he was busy and I was busy as well. He's always busy, man. Yeah, yeah, of course. And so it's like, okay. We got these babies running around. Of course. And so then it's just like, okay, one day of, let's just see what we can get going. Two, in the discussions happening inside the Twitch Rivals Discord, you know, a certain gentleman's agreement was proposed by one

say jam that uh you know perhaps everyone of the coaches which i had been uh set to be a coach even though i'm like hey i i might not be in the right classification here but regardless uh of all the coaches it was that hey why don't we all play akali since it's akali day one that's that's and we're like that is such bullshit he tricked you so he tricked him so so so so So that's not, that's not, not intentionally. That's, but it, I was unfortunately bamboozled because there was a proposition that was, hey, why don't all the coaches run a Cali? It's a Cali day one. And a bunch of people in there were like, yeah, that sounds great.

And I'm like, what a hype idea. That's really cool. We're all going to get a chance to show off the new character on day one. Fuck it. Let's go. I don't know how to use her. I'll go figure something out. did the night before and kind of was like, okay, let me get it one or two combos down.

Cool. All right. Let's run it. And then, uh, apparently at some point, uh, the day of, there was a, uh, an update where someone went, wait, hold on. I'm not actually expected to do this, are we? And then it was like, oh, I guess not, but I guess some people might or something. And it was kind of just in this, you know, this, this, this nebulous state of source. And it's like, I think some people are going to do it anyway. So I was like, fuck it. I, I, I, it's a new character. Let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's show off what she can do on day zero, no less, you know, and, and. Did you show off what she could do, Wully?

I got one round on Sonic Fox. Okay. You know what? You know what? Hey, that counts. Hey, you know, oh. You got fucked on. Oh.

Oh. That, that is not. That's fucking bullshit. It is not, it is, this is, listen, this is not, listen, this is not say Jabs fall. However, the gentleman's agreement was put out and some agreed to it, including me, and then there was a reneging of sorts, and I think that muddied the after effect. No, no, no, that's not the issue. Okay. The issue is, hey, I am a professional fighting game player slash full-time fighting game streamer.

we are all obviously professional fighting game players slash full-time fighting game streamers, right? Right? You can, everyone here can pick up a character in a day, obviously. Look, I think that a cool idea was proposed and it wasn't fully accepted by all in, like, after a period of time. But if we're running the bit, then yeah, I got fucked on. If we're right in the bit, then absolutely. Like, well, you're a fighting game Oficionado old head variety guy.

What I will say is... Your past week of streams wasn't four days of Invincible and 2XCO. And it was really funny because we were talking to... At Evo, we were talking about like streaming and stuff with Zafferino. And he's like, oh yeah, you know, you can just kind of run this sort of that up with your stream and you know it's not that hard to get back warmed up for a tournament you know you kind of run this for the week of and everything and it was a point where i remember i was like oh you think we run fighting games every single day and that we're a fighting game channel we're not

we do it once a week and sometimes we miss those saturdays and he kind of went oh there was a moment of oh shit i thought you were like one of us i thought you were up here at the peak of the mountain with me but you're actually here uh casually fucking browsing at the the bottom, you know, and I, my mistake, okay, would you like to, uh, perhaps rescind your, your, your entry? Um, no. Like, this is like me looking at you going, well, will you stream Resident Evil? So you could just hop into any Resident Evil game with me and we just co-op that shit right now. Regardless, regardless of any of all of this, right? Here's what matters is I said, yo, Bricky, how do you want to do this, right? Do we commit or should I switch back and run one of the

characters of one of my mains or whatever. And Bricky said, fuck it, we ball. Right? Let's go all the way. So, well, that's, he's a good sort. Yeah. And I was like, you know what? Let's do it for the hype. And, and, and the thought was maybe we would see a couple other, you know, people doing it for the hype in that bracket. No one did it for the hype. The diaphone came and said, that money is mine. Everyone fucking played for the cash, bro. But, uh, I, you know, we, we ran into. I think literally every time there's any money on the line and somebody goes, hey, guys, I have an idea. Don't listen.

Don't listen. And it's not like it would have made much difference. But it was really funny. And in the end, yeah, so we did it. I was, I was Akali Hugh and Bricky Ren, Darius. And yeah, you know, it was, I was like, okay, can I do some, can I do some day one combos? and I'm like, I got a day one combo or two down. She's, uh, she's cool.

It was fun. I was messing around with her and I find her, her, oh God, I don't know how to describe it, but her like launcher loop. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To be super awkward. The timing on her, her loops. I really like her whole kit. Yes.

I think like as like a scrub ass guilty gear character. I actually really think she's got tons of fun stuff. But her combos are just really weird and hard. To do the advanced stuff, like Marlon Pye wants, you know, you got to really fucking get your fingers in a pretzel. I do, though, it's interesting to see a character like her where she can teleport, she can left, right, fuck you up, do all these amazing little confusing ninja tricks. But in exchange for that, her assists are dog shit. She's not a good partner. She's a point character.

Yeah, yeah. You don't use her for her assists. you use her for the fucking baked in smoke bomb mix up stuff her like standard assist has like some value on like wake up because like it can it'll it'll meaty super easy but like it like i've i've been doing like a combo and i want to extend it with her her assist and like it misses a point length and and so compare that to somebody who comes in and fucking body checks you off the wall you know or somebody like blitzcrank who's just like so you want to extend this to hell, go for it. So is this what it means to be mid lane? Is that what the idea is here?

I don't know about that. Okay. Because a collie never helped nobody but a collie in league. Yeah. So I was going to say, if you're a character that's not really playing well with others in league, is that is that what the mid lane is for? Like, you don't rely on teaming up. Some of the assist mentality was based off of because like Darius is a bruiser, but he's a top laner, right? Okay. So if you're in mid lane and Darius comes in, oh shit. Okay. Yeah.

Because Darius is a fucking amazing assist, right? When he shows up, both of them are super good. And like Timo by extension, it's like when Timo comes into your lane as a bonus, you're not like, oh, I'm fucked. You're like, fucking, this is so fucking annoying. Okay. Mushroom down. That's like an interesting idea. So the mid-laners convert into characters who are solid on their own,

but don't really necessarily add much to your assists team-wise. Yeah, okay, keeping it accurate, right? I think it's crazy that Akali is not a mix-up character. I think that is so bananas that Echo and Yasuo get to keep their, like, mix-up king fucking spot. No, she's got mix-ups in the sense that, like, once the smoke is out, she can teleport behind you and like really make it hard to deal with her left right. Sure, but she's not like floating fucking time wander on the fucking screen and crossing you up and fucking over double overheading you in a fucking hop.

Also, I notice that like when you do her actual teleports, like if the person is just kind of mashing jab, they'll just jab in the direction that you appear in because it's not so fast that you're going to get to act first, you know? That being said, man, she's so, like, like cool to watch and well animated. Should have been in the game to start. Fucking, she looks great. And they agree because they're putting an extra character into the years rollout.

They're doing an extra sixth character. Yeah, yeah. That is actually the last thing I would have expected from a game that fired half its staff. Seeing like that, every time she's like, yo, the line, fine balance and death goes so hard. And then kind of finding out that it's like, oh, she didn't have that much. much sass back in her original voice lines in the game. She was kind of a sassy ninja girl, but... Well, those lines were fairly limited.

Yeah, it seems like a lot of this kind of was developed after, right? So, uh, interesting. No, just the, interesting to see the conversions. Um, question. Yeah. Because this is, this is what's been kicking around. So to X-Kho announced that they're going to have a sixth character this year. And, uh, new fuse.

And a new fuse. So here's the question. Is that a sign of, Wow, I just saw your camera glitch out and it was you from like last week. It was you with like non-purple lighting. What the fuck? Okay. All right. That's crazy. Okay.

Then it's the, it's the camera itself then is what that's telling you. That's nuts. Yeah. Is it because, my time. Hey, they've, they tightened up the fucking work, you know, schedule or whatever. Or is it because. because, well, these are all the characters that had work started on them, and we're never going to get a fucking season two.

So let's put them all out in this year. So, I mean, that's the, that's the, whoa, this game isn't canceled, like discussion, a version of it. And I don't think that doesn't seem to be what it is. I think the big. I hope not. No, because that big announcement was like, we got a new, we got new stages, we're doing an extra character, we got a new fuse, we're doing all this stuff.

And I think the point of that big look at all the. extra new shit that's coming this year as well was to specifically signal, hey, we're making new things actually. This is not the race to the end of content that was planned that people are thinking it's going to be. I think they're specifically trying to signal the opposite to say, no, we've started working on new things because we don't want people to think it's like racing to end of service, you know, because that is a perception because of the, I would like that to continue

just having a lot of fun with it. Yeah. But no, that was a, that was a, a fun little event. And, you know, again, a gentleman's agreement. Moustaches. Gentlemen's agreements only work when you're dealing with gentlemen, not fucking shitbag fighting game players. We! We lived by it and we died by it, you know?

We went down with the ship. So that was fun. Um, and it's, it's, it's fun too, because like, yeah, I can, the thing is, because as you say that, I'm like, okay, just the way Bricky even talks about, like, picking characters in these games and stuff, it's like, he's looking for the most disgusting shit possible. Yeah, no, the very first thing we, we just, we discovered when I, when he had me to, like, give him the basics was he wanted somebody with big gross buttons. Yeah. Why he's running Darius. War crime normals, right? So, um, in any case.

good stuff, fun event. The other things I got around to were starting out Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney 2, and Justice for All. Justice for All. Justice for All. I'm going to keep saying, and it's too bad. In fact, they did the weird thing where, yeah, like the logo that used to say Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney, is now Ace Attorney, Justice for All.

Yeah, and it's going to be Ace Attorney. From then onward. So the words Phoenix Wright are not actually part of the title of the franchise. Well, then, because then you got the other games that are actually Apollo Justice or, you know. Right, right, right, right. Okay, so the Ace Attorney can be multiple people. True. I love how it's Ace Attorney.

Not many of them are particularly good attorneys. Mia Faye was a good attorney. Yeah, she seemed like fucking legit. And we're finding out, I guess, about her past and stuff. Okay, we did the first case, which was with Wellington. You know, your tutorial crash-out villain. And it, like, I will say, like, the only thing I'll say there is like, okay, you got your kind of posh douchebag character that gets introduced right away. And it's so satisfying when you see those moments where Gantt or,

what you'll call it fucking other dude Von Karma who are crashing out and having a frame of like frame of like right that of guilt but with this dude

you're not on that level you're nowhere near that level and you're sweating and panicking just turns you into a fucking goofy animeiac character where he starts to and get a shit-ass cartoon And it's like, oh, you don't look cool at all.

Like, the last guy leaned back and did like a sole bad guy, dragon and stall, like, oh, lightning shock frame, you know, of rage and turned into a kuma. And you are here just melting into a puddle on the stand. Unfortunately, you're running into the issue that you have if you play them anywhere near to each other, which is you're going from the fucking peak, like final boss battle into, some shit bag who didn't pay his parking tickets and that's why you caught him you know like it's it's uh the quality of the villain did is also the quality of justice that is invoked right and there's even and when you have those moments of like you think you got me but i got one left in the chamber

like that little like you're squeezing through the cracks and narrowly escaping thing it's like you got a tall order to beat the last two from that first game, you know? So I can't wait to see what this series has in store, but I can say for a fact that like the... I can tell you conclusively that that tall order is absolutely met on every one of its final cases. Okay. Like people can argue about like, no, this one wasn't so good or this wasn't wasn't so good. but like that final case is always a fucking showstopper. I can,

but I can see the energy for this game is a lot of excitement, but also some trepidation and hand-wringing and some, oh boy, oh boy, I can't wait for this case. And me and Reggie are kind of just like, what the fuckers, what are we in for here?

Would you like the non-s, no, no, no, leave it a, it's fine. It's fine. Fine. There's an energy about this game that's kind of confusing and dark. There's some incredible cases in this game. Okay. Okay. Yeah. This. There's some incredible cases. So we will see where we go from here. I also was quite shocked to see the new, one, two new mechanics. One big is here is your stand justice for all.

The lock. Click clink. Ah, yes. Cyclocks. Right. And I'm like, we're out here in the world putting people on the stand. That's a way to gamify the, the investigation mode. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's like, okay, that's pretty sick. You can also do, the game also does some cool little tricks with cyclone. Okay. Yeah, I saw one or two things that seemed to be like kind of interesting and hinted at. I think Cyclops stay around for like a long time. I think that just becomes part of the formula. Well, it's considering the fact that the whole magic bullshit was like present in ever since the first case, but always like a weird aspect to the world. Now it actually is like, no, no, no, magic is part of this game world and it's nuts. Oh yeah, no, you always got a spirit medium or some bullshit just to cheat. never just the law yeah um and then the second thing which is huge is you can now present people in the

case as evidence as um objections right you can present people uh um and and not just evidence and so that opens up a whole lot more uh in terms of how you think about these questions and their answers that was something that was like not explicitly mentioned in the tutorial but like there was a moment there where someone kind of mentioned, by the way, you can do this now. And it's like, oh, shit, that's big, you know. Um, yeah. So that's it. You could start so far. Started on that first case, um, or second case, rather. Uh, so we got to meet, uh, Morgan Faye as well, the, uh, uh, uh, uh, fucking lady hype beast with her, with her robes and such. Um, and yeah, no, just, you know, Well, not much, not much else to say until we progress further.

But good shit. You know, it's a weird detail. So I played these games a long time ago. I played them back when we first met, like in 2003, 4, 5, right? The only detail I remember about any of them is who the culprit is. Interesting. That's it. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So like I could go back and play, you know, Justice for All and be like, I know it's, So and so. Fucking how? That seems impossible. So even now, it's been one year. And I remember the main piece of evidence that was used to like turn the case around.

I don't remember the twists in terms of how we got there. I know that it wasn't Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. You kept the piece of, of, you kept the cut out of leather with the handprint on it. Right? You, basically there's one item that's the, the turn. about moment item.

The fucking video camera footage. Yeah, I'm like thinking about Case 5 and Ace Attorney 1 and I'm like, my brain's just like, Lana likes to eat lots of cookies. Sure, sure. That's what I remember of Ace Attorney 1, Case 5.

The Blue Blazer looks a whole lot like a vase in mid- air. It looks like a vase in midair. Yes. you're combining the blue badger with blonde blazer no yeah uh and and because i was playing i was playing fucking uh dispatch and i kept calling her the blue blazer over and over and over and over um no the blue badger

blue badger yeah okay okay it's a badger um I when you I wasn't thinking of of dispatch I was thinking I think that's Owen Hart, actually. If I'm not mistaken. Wasn't he the Blue Bomber? No, Blue Bomber is Mega Man. Wait, hold.

I think Blue Blazer. Wasn't he the Blue Meany? No, Blue Meany is another weirdo. I'm pretty sure Blue Blazer was Owen Hart. Blue Blazor was Owen Hart. Yeah, okay. There we go. Blonde Blazer, Blue Blazer, Blue Badger, Blue Meany, Blue Bomber.

Blue Bomber. This is tough, man. Blue Lagoon Blue Noe We're like Where are we going here? Blues clues Although we're not there yet

No Took a little moment So Unfortunately Reggie's feeling a little under the weather And You know Taking a minute to deal with that Also like I don't want to

Like this is fucking Phoenix Wright voice acting is is demanding. So we want to be in tip-top shape for all that. So I took a minute, did some solo streams. You know, there's some, there's some doctor shrank nerds in our chats and in the, the CSB chat. And I would like somebody to reach out to me and explain why I can talk about bullshit

for like five hours straight, no problem, not a yawn, not a, not a, not a parched throat, not a cracked lip, but if I have to read something, someone else wrote for X amount of time, I'm coming off scraped and raw and fucked on. And I,

it's, I don't understand. I've gotten, like, me and page have gotten distracted during, like, a pre-stream and just gabbed for, like, three hours. But, like, I'll do, like, an hour of voice acting reading,

and I'll be like, oh, where's my water? Oh. So I think it's a combination, after doing a bunch of long talking and long reading streams, I can say that it feels like a combination of every extra like every extra meg of RAM your brain is dedicating towards a task like reading. It becomes exponentially more tiring to do the rest of the things you usually do. Like all your automated processes continue. But like the part where there's a big wall of text that you have to get through, it adds.

a lot of extra stress to it. And then I would say that you're also talking in a way that allows you to breathe naturally at your own pace and stop when you want to. But when you know there's like an upcoming long, you know, glut of words to get through, you kind of are like forced to stop and then push further than you would want to naturally. So you don't take as many breaths as you would if you were in control of what you were going to say. That reminds me. I have a piece of parenting advice for you. So you may say the kid may become infatuated with

Pete the cat or Curious George or Pig the Pug. Big fan of Pig the Pug Books are great. So you'll be at the bookstore and you will see a compilation of eight Curious George stories

all in like a big hard cover and it'll be like I don't know like 30% off compared to buying eight different Curious George books. You'll be like fucking six. that's awesome right so that's what you're gonna you're gonna pick up you're gonna like i'm gonna read this girl do curious george book before bed and that's gonna that's gonna sleep her up and that's great but what you forget is that the child have eyes so when you read you know curious george

and the dump truck which is book it's it's story three of eight well the final page of Curious George in the dump truck on the opposite side of the fucking book has Curious George goes to a costume party. So you're like, and now we're done and the child has the speed to go. That one! That one. Read that one now. Oh, no. And that's how you get fucking like trapped in a loop.

Those assholes. And this gives you the, oh, no, we're done with Curious George. It was like, we have read four Curious George's back to back. You need to go sleep. No, no, that one. you're like, no. The nefarious design of not putting a blank page before you advertise the next. They know.

They knew. Oh, you son of a bitch. Bro, bro, me and Paige, we've been, we're georged out right now, bro. It's a George, it's a curious George household right this second. Oh, God damn it. Like, it's absolutely crazy. How many times in a row you can read the same goddamn curious George story. Also, the man with a yellow hat is a fucking.

fucking asshole. Oh, God damn it. Okay. The man with the yellow hat is a piece of shit. What do you do? First, he kidnaps George from Africa. He steals George. Okay.

Okay. And to sell him to the zoo. That's how curious George gets to America. Okay. And then George breaks out to go live with the man with the yellow hat because he loves him because he was nice to him. So that's a bad start. But more than that, Every single curious George story is the man with the yellow hat takes curious George to a chocolate factory or a fucking firehouse or a department store.

And then goes, George, you wait here. I'm going to leave you a capuchin monkey completely fucking unsupervised for like a half hour. While I go fuck around. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Every single time. And then George gets in all sorts of wacky hijacks.

And then man with yellow hat shows up at the end and goes, no. George, what have you done? Oh, I guess it all worked out in the end. But, like, it's irresponsible. I don't remember the other details, but I do remember he is regularly left unattended. So that hijinks may occur. Like, the thing that gets me really bad is that there'll be these moments where, like, you know, the department storehead will come over. I'm like, that monkey ruined my display case. And, and everyone's like, well, he helped pack the other gifts for the children. So, oh, it's all fine. And I'm just thinking about, like, if I'm in a store and a man left an unattended fucking monkey in my fucking store, I'd lose my fucking shit, man.

He's eating things off the shelves and touching people. So we're not going to get into the logistics of walking around town with a giant, Titan red dog, are we then? They get into the logistics for that a little bit. Because I have always looked at Clifford with fear and a sense of dread because is what do you do? They had to move, you know that? They used to live in the city.

Yeah, and it's a puppy, so it's full of energy. And you're like, you're telling me that's not going to trample and ruin neighborhoods. Like, yeah, no. Clifford does, in fact, do like a really significant amount of property damage throughout his books. The fuck. I'm sure millions, you know, adding up. It's kind of insane. Like, that's a terrifying.

No, no, no, no. Wully, that's okay because Clifford had a year. as a movie star. And he's got a good heart, and that's all that matters. But the idea of being trampled underfoot by this giant red puppy is kind of insane. And I've all, that's all like, if we're talking about what the fuck is going on in this children's book, you know, at least a Dr. Seuss world thing is like, yeah, well, the laws don't apply here. You're in Seuss world. No, no, you're in the fantasy land where the, where the undesirables that Dr. Seuss didn't like don't exist.

It's just the who's. But whatever the logic is of everything, it can be like, it can be upside out and that's totally fine. But if you're trying to put this giant red dog in my neighborhood, what the fuck? How am I supposed to feel like I'm not going to do? They had a city apartment. I don't know what their dad did for a living because he must, they upgraded to a home in the burbs just so clevering to have a dog house the size of their house next to their shit. and then then there's just fucking

Cayu Kiyu's a piece of shit I would never allow my child to watch Kauu it's a like you have this this monkey getting up to like unattended antics you have a giant

Titan red dog and then there's just this shit kid Kiyu's a piece of fucking shit Kaiu like incentivizes children to act badly like your child will pick up bad behavior from Kai

I thought Kai, it's funny too, because I didn't, like, I remember when I thought Kai Yu was just a French only thing that only we knew about. And it was everywhere. It was everywhere. Yeah, well, because the name, you know, you'd think, but. I remember, like, a lot, I just saw people talk. Lots of people think Kai Yu has cancer because he's bald. Because he's bald. And I think the reason why they think that is they want it to be true. Because that means we'll live in a world without Kai Yu. Yeah. I think, I think. think the idea was probably like, do you have a child that is that is shaping up to be a nightmare? Um, well, here, show them some cayew.

And, uh, that will be relatable. And then you can try to curb whatever is going on there. But what if you, what if you in fact just make them worse? What if instead you just had your child character model good behavior like kindness and sharing and all that good shit? Yeah. No, I'm going to have a moment to reexamine a lot of this literature and see where we're at now. Bro. Versus back then. I'm going to bring this up every time it's even tangentially related.

Arthur was right to punch DW. That shit was so outrageous. Like, me and Page rewatched it, like relatively recently, because I, our memory was like a little off. DW's behavior is so out of fucking control. She breaks into his room, throws his model airplane out the window, and it smashes to pieces.

Then when he's like, what happens? She goes, you're playing stupid. It doesn't even work. Like, it's absolutely unbelievable. Arthur,

Arthur, it's funny because, like, that's when I, yeah, I didn't end up watching it. Like, I feel like it was,

it started, later for me, so I didn't, I didn't watch much of it. But, uh, I've heard this and I've seen, I've seen the child, the terror child, his sister, be an asshole. Um, whenever I hear DW, I end up thinking of dark wing duck though and, and what the little girl would, would call him. No, DW didn't, wouldn't have done that. Um, it's cool. Anyway, um, moving along. A couple other things this week. Um, um, um, since I had a chance to do some solo streaming,

popped in the Invincible versus beta. So that happened. Yo, that game looks like trash, dude. Ah, man. That game looks like fucking trash. So I watched a good bit of your show. And I checked out a Diaphani's breakdown of it where he's like, here's how every character can do a touch of death.

Yeah. And how Omneman has like a fully safe on block, invincible reversal on frame zero. So it's all this fucking Kusoge nonsense. So mechanically and stuff, because because the deal is that like anyone, everyone that has a touch of death, you can break anything in the game. But you just have to not get called out for it. Right. But excuse me, to go back to the beginning on it, like, I love, I really like Invincible. I think I had a good time with the show.

Um, I love K.I. And the team, they make, they made a great, good ass fighting game. Uh, and everything coming together here, it's just, like, apparently the creator of Invincible was the one who specifically said, I want to make this a fighting game. Yeah, Kirkman wanted a fighting game. which is like, oh, you picked that yourself? Well, then I can't even, I can't say anything. Like, I'm like, you wanted that for your, for your idea, for your IP, so be it. You're allowed to do that. And that's cool. I like the fact that- I disagree with that.

Well, I think that like, basically, I'm like, it's more than just, hey, someone picked this and it wasn't a good fit. I feel more like, if the creator chose that, then it, it, it, I'm like, ah, all right. I, I feel more. Then it's on him. sure sure but I give it I give it more leeway because it doesn't feel like someone misusing things or whatever the cases it's like you you yourself picked it right um the and here's the thing is too like the flying brick problem that we talk about of like the characters are all like very samey with their costumes and their movesets um is it's there but I realize that like that doesn't have to be the end of it in the sense that like Dragon Ball fighters you know, has a lot of martial artists that have a ton of inspiration from the manga. But you can do a lot with how you design their movesets and what you do with them to make it more interesting and unique for each character.

And did they do that? What's a bigger problem? What's a bigger problem is actually the fact that the animation itself is very stiff. Right. And there's a lot of attacks that feel like they have no, like, tweening to. them, it's just a lot of snapping into the final keyframe, whether it's an uppercut,

a left hook or a right hook. As a lot of characters doing this kind of like chest out pose, a left hook, a right hook, and occasionally one of these, and it kind of snaps into that, right? And like, I know that like Nether Realm

games are like the comparison point for like, yeah, it's like NRS style animation. Nether Realm has like these, they're shitty awkward kicks and stuff. This doesn't have that going, but it does just have a lot of like not smooth moments when you're going from normals to specials to supers, et cetera. It just feels like you're snapping one frame into one frame a lot of the time. It really looks like like a old style 2D fighting game that doesn't have enough key frames for its punches and kicks. And the thing is, is that like in terms of how

it looks visually outside of that animation, I'm super willing to give like a lot of leeway in the sense that Power Rangers Battle for the Grid is not an amazing looking fighting game, but it's a pretty it looks fine, you know? It's clearly like not a super high budget one, but everything that's animated

is animated great. It's moving in a way that doesn't look too stiff. Everything's smooth and there's a lot of cool shit happening between the characters and, you know, there are power slashes and swords pulling out their weapons, whether it's the, um, all the different Ranger weapons and the summons of the swords and stuff. They, they got

style, you know, they move around and do things. And that could have been a thing where it was stiff because you have a bunch of characters all in their Ranger outfits, you know, with their weapons kind of doing, you know, you could have had the exact same problem there, but instead you didn't. And they made the game a flow and made the animation flow in a way where it doesn't feel stiff. So this has that problem upfront and it's always going to be the case that like it bugs me to look at, right? And also, um, it looks really, I'm watching like Max's stream right now, right? And it looks like when characters tag in and combos are happening, everyone is overlapped and all of their effects are

overlapped on each other that makes it look really messy. So tag games have this thing of like screen clutter and thus it makes silhouettes of the shapes of the characters very important. It makes colors very important and it makes like energy outlines. More or less the same silhouette. And it makes colored outlines very important to 2XCO, Dragon Ball, a couple of these games do things to try to make it more visual. But here, yeah, you have a lot of characters in Viltramite outfits that kind of slam into each other and look very similar. So you have that clutter issue for sure. But here's what I'll say is I was also kind of trying to figure out the gameplay a bit moving around.

And I was like, this is a little bit slow. I'm not quite getting the movement. It's not feeling as snappy as I kind of want it to. and then Max showed up and went, yo, okay, go into training mode right now. Okay, you're using Allen, pick Allen. All right, I want you to jump and press dash and the meter burn button.

And I did. And he opened my eyes to an aspect of this game that I couldn't figure out beforehand, which is movement and the way this feels to play is there, but it costs resources. So it's like drive meter essentially. Yeah, it's a boost, I think. And you press the boost, yeah.

So you start moving around with boost, and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, shit, like you can go. You can do a lot of fast, crazy things. And it actually, like, for the flying characters, it opens the game up massively, you know? And like, yeah, basically the max was just like, free your mind, you know, like, here, take this tip.

And I didn't realize that that, was there. And it made it feel a lot better to do that. You basically had the characters who could fly able to do a lot airborne, a lot of airborne stuff. And then the ones who are on the ground could do more of it on the floor, but like they're more limited because they're heavier big bodies and stuff, you know? So that was a big moment that kind of opened things up for me. And then he also showed me two or three other little tricks. Like there's the way combos work is, um, You can do like, you know, a very easy standard. Stronger buttons, you know, you do a light into a medium and medium to a heavy, all that stuff.

You have a standard progression, et cetera. But it also has a killer instinct style combo system where you can do like a punch into a hedokin back into a punch, back into a hadoken. And like it can do like you can essentially do what amounts to like a killer instinct combo. it has a lot of freedom in terms of how you can extend things and when you use meter in the middle of the combo or use your assists or tag out or whatever use the mechanics,

it takes the limitation that would force the combo to end sooner and it lets you extend it and do more with it. So I'm like, okay, so if you use the mechanics and use this meter system a lot and stuff, you can move a lot faster, you can do more stylish combos, is you can kind of improvise and do things in a much more open-ended way, gameplay-wise, right?

And then the other way, they kind of, the things you just talked about, like touch of death and stuff, like what they allowed to happen is you can do crazy wild, tag into each other forever-ass fucking combos. But if the person you're,

if you're on defense, you can do a combo breaker by calling in your partner to break you out of whatever you're getting hit by. So then you have this K.I. kind of system where calling, in an assist leads to the person who's doing the combo, potentially anticipating that and trying to break it in advance. And so you have a nice little mind game to the way things are working there.

It's very much like, what if they made a K.I. team game? How would their whole design philosophy expand into having multiple characters on screen? So I was like, I understand now. And he kind of, from just those little things, I saw, okay, there's some cool stuff here. And if you like the K.I. sort of combo system and you and um and you know the whole like some of the the the even the the the way that meter works in street fighter six where you've got drive that lets you move or drive that lets you do Xs and stuff like that this is kind of like that too so i towards the end after kind of like like learning about that and going and playing a bit more and testing it out i was like okay there's some pretty fun stuff happening here mechanically but it's like you the visuals are still

the visuals, you know? And I, and I thought to myself to, in advance that I'm like, the guys who who made K.I know how to make a good ass fighting game. I don't have any doubt in my mind it's that the fun is not going to be there. Because like, fucking Hunter Hunter, Nen Impact, it's like, yeah, guys, who knows, right? That's up in the air, right? There's, there's been some, some misses there. Here, they, they know what they're doing. And when I started hearing from people like, that are like, yeah, gameplay-wise, this is super sick. But you have this visual issue as well as the characters not being distinct enough from each other. That's going to unfortunately always be what people have to get through to get to this gameplay part that I'm talking about.

But I'm happy to know that that's there as opposed to, like, visually, it's not interesting to me. And also the gameplay was lame, you know? this doesn't look anywhere near as fun to play as killer instinct it's like yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna have to

well like balance is obviously a part of it right so like when I when I beseech the sage diaphanes on the mountain um and their their

proclamation from Olympus is that this game has the most broken shit it's like a like an impact level of broken shit diapahone what's that Diapahole

no maybe um i will never pronounce their name correctly but how do you pronounce an underscore i don't know yeah um and like but like i'll take your word for it right like it's sick to play and like there's all this cool tech in it and like it's fun to play i need to see the full final version but there's interesting ideas let's say let's say like good game to play like i'm hearing like hey do you want to play a game that's as fun to play as killer instinct which shittier graphics and a much more boring roster. Because like, so I don't,

I have no love for, I don't know anything about it invisible. I see like clips on TikTok of like, like, aura farming bits from fucking teenagers or whatever the fuck. Um, like 60% of that universe is Superman. Like 70%?

Yeah, yeah, capes. Heroes and tights. totally. Like, but like just, just,

strong man guy who's strong so it can fly so yeah because the the the the the you know the bit that the the the story is built on is like what if justice league but fucked up shit right yeah which

also I mean you're that energy is also in the ether right now because of the boys you know and homeland are existing so like it's interesting that they're these are both things that got adapted now years later from their their original time frames which were what if evil justice league and yeah and i'm well aware that like it's a it's a

like it's kind of a send upy i mean because like they're called viltrumites right yes okay so they're the mustache people like literally sure because this you know that divot on your fucking lip that's philtram oh interesting i didn't know that literally the race of the mustache okay Okay. And also, if you have a mustache in an old Cape comic, that meant you were the evil version of the guy. Clearly. I mean, some of them don't, but most of them do. But like, I'm watching footage here.

I'm watching Max. And it's the guy who Seth Rogen plays that's Orange. Alan the Alien. Invincible and his dad. And they're all just meat men throwing meat man punches. Yes, and it's like, it's the most boring shit I've ever seen my life. Yeah, you're not going to get past that thing where when you look at a bunch of these other fighting games and even, you know, I was kind of trying to like, I was almost like acting this out when I was talking to Reggie about it. But it's like you have like any of these like, whether it's looking at strive, looking at 2XCO, you know, and you know what?

I'll even say looking at Nen Impact, which is currently on. the on the thing. You're like a lot of moments of character silhouetting is being awesome. You have these moments of like a big stylish upside down. Echo is turning upside down and flicking the fucking time winder back at you. You know? And like you have these really just these moments where even if normals and buttons are kind of like snappy because the game is fast,

when people are doing special moves and supers and things like that, they're still like a whole like smooth animation to things. that kind of like flows, you know? A lot of, a lot of love is put into that. And it, when you look at a fan game or a Mugan game that is trying to do like, what if everything versus everything go raw? They kind of struggle from this, they have the same problem of like, oh, you gave none of these animations any, like, attention because you just care about

how many fucking fast, crazy, bra hits you can land in one thing. And so, like, you're watching, yeah, we were showing that thing with like Vice versus Ryu or so, and you're kind of like, okay, you just did an air combo and Vice did like 15 different buttons and they all were keyframe snaps flashes into each other and it looks like a raging demon or something like is going off, you know? You got to take a second to think about how cool things look when they happen. And when you, when you let things squash and stretch and flow into each other, the impact means more. It took time, I would say, too, for like some of Dragon Because like Kailer Instinct, you know, the first season was a lot like gameplay-wise and visually stuff.

Like things improved a lot over time. It got way better towards the end. Watching the way that Ultra Instinct Goku flops and flips around and fucking swags on you all over that game is like exactly what I feel is missing from this, you know? So I'm glad you brought that up because as I've been watching this footage, my brain went. I feel like there is more just even visual clarity differences of like watching the characters fight between three goku's or three Mortal Kombat ninjas of the old style that were just the same sprite colored different colors as I am between the fucking bricks I'm looking at on the screen here. Yeah. I don't know how to describe if you if if folks like if person is looking just going do dude just shit on the shitty game it sucks an open ass dump on it I'm being honest about what I played and the truth about what I played is it looks like shit I don't like the visuals I don't like the fact that the roster has a samey super Superman problem but I also discovered that the gameplay had more going on with it thus I'm going to talk about the good things about what I saw in addition to the bad.

I'm going to be honest. I'm not going to lie to you. If you just want to hear me fucking flanderize everything, then turn into tune into another show, dude. But like, this is why I'm going to be real about it. Um, but, uh, this is why I started with like, uh, this is on Kirkman. So like, ideally telltale would continue to exist. And they would have gotten that kind of thing. Or like the folks over dispatch would have would have done that.

But like, I, I feel. I feel. I mean, I feel. I mean, lame ass licensed fighters again. Well, so no. I mean, a really solid point here of,

of just like, yeah, the legacy of like the MVCI thing, right? We're Marvel Infinite. It's like, oh, gameplay was fun,

but visually it looked like shit. And you're like, yep, we're still here. And, uh, Here's what I'll say is a game, when you have to fucking monkeys paw it, a game with, that looks good but plays like shit will die infinitely faster than the opposite.

It'll catch attention initially. Yeah, it'll sell 10 million copies and Ed Boone will get to present awards. But you know, you can look at your net impacts for that. you can look at a random anime fighter of the day, whether it's a My Hero Academia game, A Kill a Kill game, and if you want to fucking start some shit, we can talk about a Jojo fighting game, right?

You know, I'm just thinking, if we're going to get stuff that's like, kind of Kuzogi, can we get stuff more along lines? I just, I remembered something I had to go check, but an X-Men Mutant Academy 2,

you're in a wheelchair. And he would do fucking floating spin, combos on you. He would. And then I think the opposite issue is where you have a game that looks bad but has a good thing going on behind it. And now you run into this like Rumbleverse and and, you know, well, this and the infinite thing as well, where it's just like, I don't know what you expect to, I don't know how to make it sound any other way except like this thing that has a good quality on it. It bothers me that there.

that it's being mired in this bad that is up front on it. But it was genuinely surprising that I was like, oh, I didn't realize that this was going on here. And I can see why some people were going, oh, there's some fun stuff mechanically happening here. So I think what's going to probably happen with this is I think people are going to play it in the community at the very least for a bit, you know, I think it'll like, whatever the rollout is and whatever their support time frame.

for it is. It's not like a K-I thing where it's direct Microsoft or whatever. This is like skybound and they can just choose to be like, okay, we tried, we made our money or we didn't, we're out. But I think that like at the very least it's going to get a little, it's going to get a season

or two of just like people kind of fucking around with it mechanically because there's stuff going on there. And there are people that like play these that are like looking past that visual. problem, but in terms of this being well received at large, or even by the Invincible fan base at large as well, like, I don't know, you know? I mean, I think that we're also like fighting game fans and players that are looking for a specific type of thing out of that genre.

I would, it's hard to say whether what is being shown here is exciting for someone that doesn't care anything about the genre, but just loves Invincible, you know? But I will say that those people showed up in fucking rage quit and they got their money's worth out of that demo weekend. A highly technical like sweat ass tag game

for the average TV viewer is maybe a mistake. Because like, oh man, I love if it's, I can't wait to play the fighting game. I think like they're going to just die. If the

alternative is some games should be made shallow and bad. Yes! I'm always going to say that I prefer a game that I personally find interesting to engage with.

You know, I always prefer... I want video games to be released that I enjoy personally. Obviously, but like, there's, this is just the 2X scale thing again, right? It's like, do you think that maybe going for the fucking most

visually confusing sweaty, degenerate form of fire. Yeah. The moment you have to sacrifice the interesting visuals to get there, then that's the thing.

Is that a real comparison? Is that a fair thing? Because yeah, are we looking at Dragon Ball Sparking Zero? We're like, look how fucking sick this looks. Who cares how it feels or plays, right?

I don't know. I don't know. But I can't say personally that like, I want the team that made a previous game that I enjoyed to make another game I enjoy.

but oh man is it just not the sum of its parts here but it did interest me at the very least enough to be like you know what when it releases i'm curious i want to because i want to play um cecil who is um you know your boy yep uh i want to play as him as normal man with a very expensive tech keeping up with these these supermen and i want to play as conquest who is the broly of the of the of the of this world, basically. And I'm curious to see how that feels, because as a fan of those characters and just, you know, the fact that they might, they might feel a little bit different in this type of setup, I'm curious to go in and see if the mechanics

are rewarding to me and such. But, yeah, I don't know that this is gonna, like, particularly last. I just don't think it's gonna die as fast as something like NenPak did, you know? I kind of worry about a, injustice issue where

man look we do have a varied roster but all the really good guys are invincible and his dad and the the wharf Battle Beast yeah I mean I don't

I don't know that like I was wondering if we were going to see like 15 invincibles on the the character select screen and at least with this demo so far they have in shown that to be the case. So, hmm. Shouldn't that be, um, the, the assists for, um, Angstrom. Um, yeah.

Yacoub. Yeah. Yeah, Coob, yes. Yakub will, we'll, will show up and have all his assists. You should play like Garganos and have the invincibles come out of portals. So that could be a really interesting character to design game play wise if they commit to it. And I hope they do. Um, I would also love to see, uh, there's some fun, if you know the lore, there's some fun picks in there. There's, there's, there's, there, there's, the, the Invincible equivalent of Dr. Strange is a

character called Seance Dog and it's like what of Dr. Strzda, in the world of Invincible he reads a comic called Seance Dog and it's just Dr. Strange as a dog casting spells and being your best friend, you know.

And like there's a, I guess a when it, when he, the reveal to that in the story, there's a twist to it. That would be super fun as well. if they included that in the character. You know, I would love to see a Seance dog. And you could have some characters that are like quirky, weirdo picks that could be fun with it.

But anyway, that's what's up with this, right? It's just another contender to the Marvel Throne is around. And I wasn't super excited to get into this demo. I wasn't planning on jumping in initially. But I left with some un-eyebrow raised going like, okay, okay, You're cooking something. You're cooking something. But yeah, I also do think, too, that if you have a game where you know you're looking at a very similar looking roster, you got to go extra hard in making all of their animations and all of the way they move and everything they do really unique.

You've got to double and triple down on that aspect, you know? But that's it. What if? No. Okay. Well, sure. Also, The rage quitting.

Yeah. I mean, I collected at least two or three. It's quite fun to just pop on and be like, okay, some folks are here that, you know, this is not their genre and they're here to play their characters. No, no, it's their genre. You're just playing like a bitch. You're the only way to play the game with other people besides training mode is to go into ranked online. You can't engage in any other way. So everyone is forced into the situation

And motherfuckers are just getting salt as fuck Super mad That's smart Actually I just realized They may They skipped out on the animation In the fighting game To make it more accurate

To them skipping out on the animation in the show Ah Ah When the animation is bad in the show it's an homage to those moments. Right. I didn't piece that together. Yeah, you don't even have to be sweaty

to get a rage quit online. Oh, man, that's awesome, kind of. If you just grab a character and do like, fucking light, medium-heavy launch, light-medium-heavy super at a bunch of times, and then they die,

you'll watch your fucking game freeze up and then you'll get spit back out to the lobby or whatever. like, you know, people are out here just like, and, and it's just, yeah, it's funny because when you rage quit in a beta, it's like, it's just, it's extra bitch for sure, because it's the consequences are not even lasting in any remote way shape of form. Yeah, but if you're top 20, you get to be in, uh, in the credits. Oh.

Right. And that, yeah, that's where Diaphote was fucking raging hard because it's like this ad, this dude and that's number one is just raging, rage quitting on everybody. There's, there's nothing. There's nothing. no fix to this. You can just make the game punish the quitter, harder. You can make fun of them. You can make their head explode,

put them in rage, quit jail, etc. But it doesn't, in terms of like, oh, what can we do to, you can't. People hate losing. It feels bad and they're just going to you know, they're just going to do it every time. Because if you did this in a, so, if you did this at a, you know, a pool hall or a soccer field, you would be

socially ostracized. Till the end of your days. You know, like you would, that no one Whatever, ever forget. You remember that time you threw a tantrum like a baby and fucking threw the ball down the fucking lane? And ran away. Yeah. Yeah.

There's just, there's no accounting for it. And I've heard people talking about their looking, yearning for the days of your on, you know, call a duty and such where you'd be like, I loved getting on and getting toxic on Mike. That was how I got to stress out after I got home from work and school every day. You know, it was like, this is what games are to me. They are a means to be toxic. Do you know what people don't talk about with that level of toxicity? With those old Call of the Newy games? I played those games during the height of their peak toxicity.

And one of the things that they don't talk about is that Rage quitting is a problem in those games too. And everything, I'm sure. Yes. Hey, it's six on six. Did you guys win the first engagement? Cool. Did you lose the very first class? Three people left.

Okay, enjoy running out the clock, getting stomped out. I can remember tons of Overwatch matches where that last slot on our team, the game was looking to find somebody to fill it because we did one engagement and lost it, and the person just left. And, you know, they're like, oh, we're looking for a replacement, but good luck. My favorite thing is about this kind of thing. Hey, I'd like to quick match. I'd like to quit match.

Okay, I've been loaded in. I'm loading into six minutes to go, and I'm replacing a guy who left. Can't leave fast enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not picking this shit up off the fucking dirt. Fuck you. Fuck you for putting me into this bullshit.

Also, enjoy the mark on your, your fucking record as a result, too. I will say, like, for Marvel rival, like super awesome that for anyone who disconnects unintentionally you literally fucking turn your computer back on and load the game back up

and it's like you're cool you can rejoin you can rejoin ranked matches that are still underway if you accidentally disconnect from them for any unintentional reason I've had power go out and just get right back in that's awesome love that part but this reminds me

that end rates quit in 14 you know you'll queue up to do like a dungeon or something and there's an option in there that says do you want to fill right do you want to matchmake for people who have dropped

and matchmaking for fill is a devil's gamble because you can like walk you can you can you can fill in and people are at the end the end of whatever they're about to do and somebody just

disconnected and you walk in and you spend four minutes and you get all the rewards that you would do for 60 minutes. Or you'll fill in and it is 70 minutes into a 10 minute thing. And you're like, oh, this is actually unwinnable. This like, these guys just can't do it. And then you're like, well, I'm going to just leave and I'm going to take my fucking 30 minute penalty. I don't give a shit.

Good luck on the next guy to fill for you. And now you're talking about the ethical reason to rage quit as opposed to the unethical reason to rage quit. There's the moment. So a standard dungeon in FM14 gives you 90 minutes to complete. They take 16. Okay? That's a pretty big fucking gap. Sometimes you'll fill in and 70 minutes will have elapsed.

And you'll go, oh, you'll do the poll. You're like, oh, this is just not going to fucking happen. All right. What's your step? Vote abandon. so everyone you know everyone does the vote and then you all leave right and then the guy who is always the problem always invariably the guy who's the worst or who won't listen goes no man we can do it i ain't leaving right yeah yeah um i you know i wasn't actually going to linger this long on

this game to begin with i was going to just mention it a couple things and move on but If we're on it and going here, then the only other thing I have to say is, like, when it comes to rage quitting, because it's just an inherent thing with just the nature of online gaming with people, you will never solve this problem. So all you can do is design for, do all the punishments for the person who does it. And just design your game that it can withstand someone being a huge baby, pooping their diaper. And then making the game go, okay, someone threw a tantruman was a huge baby and they pooped their diaper. or so you win and it's okay we don't shut the game down and go

we don't know what happened it's over no no no somebody quit we detected that we know what happened okay it's cool you won they lost whatever right just allow the game to elegantly handle that thing because I think um I think it's Mortal Kombat that like their head explodes as soon as they rage quit

their head explodes right so um if you did that it wouldn't be as annoying because it wouldn't be like that low-tier god style you ain't getting my fucking points you know it wouldn't be this thing of like you actually nullified the whole game we played and now like you you won by being a huge baby right you would at least make it that the person who did that takes their penalty and if their ego is whatever then let them let them do what they need to do but the person who was on the other end the game should be robust enough to handle this type of thing now that that's the only thing you can do um it feels

really silly that we're in a situation where that's still being addressed. And I know a big part of it is games with like high response time. Like, you know, you can't, you want to have direct character player to player connections and everything with the rollbacks, it, et cetera. It makes it harder to have a server side verification of what exactly happened. But we know that it is possible. So just in any game in any genre, if someone rage quits or disconnects, allow the person who's playing to not have their whole experience nullified as a result and I'm fine with it you know um you know a game I never encountered a rage quitter in once hmm was the first version of strive and in my heart of hearts the reason why that is is because it took so long to get back into matchmaking

oh my god okay no one was willing to rage oh wow okay I thought I could take like 10 minutes to get back in yeah right okay so you'd be like you all far out and then you got to sit there and stare at that fucking strive. Yeah, checking your R code. Or how about chess? Because you just forfeit the match and handshake, right? Like, that's what that is. Anyway, I took a bit of time yesterday to check out some demos that I've been curious about.

One of which was called Bridgebourne. Have you heard of Bridgebourne? Bridgeborn Here. No. So B-O-U-R-N. Here it is. Take a look.

Oh, Bridge-Born Ultimatum. Got it. It's an ARPG. And I... Oh, there's no E. Okay. Oh, my God. You take a look here at this game and you will see, you know, a party

running around, you'll see a life bar on one side of your bottom hood that's a liquid filling up red. This is a Diablo. And then you see the liquid of your Emanna on the other side in blue. Exactly. Your hot bar in the middle. Hot bar in the middle, right? It is quite diabling. And that's all cool.

What might not be so obvious is when you look at the way the camera moves and when you look at every time it zooms in, and zooms out, right, as you check out the trailer or so. Nothing you're seeing is 3D at all. These are all sprites, and this whole game is 2D using parallax effect. Everything you see is parallax sprite scrolling. Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah. That is incredible.

I've never seen a game with such mastery of parallax scrolling. as this. Like, it has dynamic lighting in certain moments when you see you're running through caves and stuff. But like... Okay, I'm watching them run away from the camera in 2D with just using parallax. This is very impressive. It's incredibly impressive. There are moments where you are in like a like a, like the Grand Canyon almost.

And like you're seeing lifted up, you know, walls and and then you zoom all the way out from that. You can play the game. like map view and you can go all the way into your character filling up like the full screen to all the way out to looking at the planet basically like the fullest map ever and it's all just like a seamless scroll because there's no models there's no 3D nothing being loaded in it's all just sprites um yeah i i i've i've never seen anything look like this or do this effect it's it's absolutely staggering with with how it's doing this visually um gameplay wise as a diablo clone. I mean, I've never

played Diablo, but I can just go off of what I got off. You never touched it, huh? Never touched it. That's crazy. Yeah, I wasn't allowed to. I mean, yeah, you're using one, two, three, four, left-mice button, the right-mouse button. Yeah, wasn't allowed to. Some of those games are really good.

Mm-hmm. I know. I have queued up the possibility in the future of taking a closer look at them. But for now, You give me a phone call when you do that. This one is it has the, your full bar, you got all your different abilities, you know, here's your shield sword, here's your dash and such. But there was another aspect to it where I guess the sauce, quote unquote, would come into play, is you get your spells and you pick up a whole bunch of, there's things that are very Baldur's Gate about it, right?

So you get your spells, you get your party member And oh there's the parallax on the Grand Canyon. Wow, that's really intense. Yeah, go go look up. Go look up Bridgeborn on Steam if you're listening to this and take a look at that trailer. You get a you get a party member, you're party of different characters and one, anytime the fight's happening, you press down on your D pad and then time stops and you are now in tactical mode. So you're, you're, you're, you're, you. are switching to each character and you can queue up what their next move should be. So now I'm doing the Baldra's Gate style fight of you do this, you throw this over here, you go this way and do that, and then resume. And now it went from the full Diablo thing to now not like kind of like simultaneous turn based. Oh, real time with pause? Real time with pause is possible while you're fighting.

Wow, real time with pause is a very unpopular control method. Interesting. Okay. It's, you can do it here. I like Real Time with Pause. It is remarkably unpopular as far as RPGs go. Pillars of Eternity does that. So, Balders get one and two do it. Plainscape Torment does it. Icewindale one and two does it. Pillars one and two do it. Okay. Now the pause is optional. You never have to ever pause. But realistically in those games, you must pause because there's too many things going on. Yes. And so a good example.

is the second person who joins your party is a like basically like a perfumer oh well like Cotor is real time with pause oh yeah yeah perfect yeah true true um Cotor never feels like it though because none of your button presses directly correlate to an action right like yeah that's the thing that the difference between selecting your action from a list it always cues up into the the the background list of actions exactly whereas in this there is a a slash your sword button. There is a hold to block button. It's really interesting because usually if you have real time with pause and you want a

different control method, people go to turn based. So like the Pathfinder games are real time with pause. But if you're finding something that's like, oh man, this is for real. You hit a button and you turn it turn based. I can tell that this game is made by somebody who is like loves all of the above and wants this game to have a little bit of everything and then some, right? So you have those moments where you're fighting And then you can yeah you hit down

You go you pause the you pause time And time is not stopped completely It's doing the FF7 remake thing Where things are moving slowly Like real slow And you can queue up But you don't have forever Because that monster is gonna fuck your shit up

In you know in a second And so you cue up You do your spells and another big part of what's happening So your second party member that joins is like a perfumer. So they have poison gases that they can throw. They have like exploding shrapnel. And they have like reagents that react to things that you combine with.

And now you have them throw a reagent down and then you cast fireball. And then your fireball reacts with that. And now you're fucking detonating and you're doing double texts constantly and stuff like that. Right. The game has a system in place where pretty much every element or, like a type of every element or type of status

interacts with every other element or type of status to create some unique effect. So lightning plus fire creates a massive explosion, right? That sounds like a very divinity original sin kind of system. Oh, okay. Yeah, you

throw the reagent down, but then you throw poison on it, and now it's a healing gas for you and your crew. You get all these little like you know, things where you're now, you're using the synergy with your team and what they're casting to work with what you're casting. Or if an enemy casts something at you, like lightning's coming at you and you fireball it, you detonate it midway through. And if you counter it early enough on, the area of effect of that explosion is a pretty effective counterattack. Right. So you can

countercasting with this particular spells to like have optimal, um, shutdowns, you know? Okay, So it has that going on. You can then just press left or right on the D-pad to just fully take control of anyone on the party as well. Sure. But of course your character has way more shit going on. And when you go to like level up, you, you know, you kill every, basically you cast spells and they use mana. And when you run out of mana, you can still cast spells. but

fucking, what were they called? Like, death, almost like death eaters basically appear and come after you, right?

Um, and the more you overcast, the more appear, reapers. And you can basically desperately use your last bit of mana to get one cast out, but you risk stronger

and stronger reapers coming after you. And you can fight them off, as ads in whatever the... So if you're fighting a big boss and you have to cast a big spell or you have to dash or get away or do something to teleport out of danger,

you can get more ads coming on the screen by overcasting. And if you have confidence in your ability to fight them off, spend, overspend your mana and make the fight harder and just fight them off and go, right? So you're basically, there's a proposition you're kind of facing of making the fight temporarily harder

or you can run from them eventually build your mana back up and they'll go away, you know? But it's an interesting sort of system of like, you know, it seems as if by going further and further into like overcast, I think stronger and stronger reapers begin to appear to, right? So yeah, it's like I like that just hitting zero is not just zero. You have an awareness that you need to keep in mind. And sometimes mashing results in accidentally summoning reapers when you didn't want to. and you're like, oh, fuck that true, don't do it.

That was interesting. Then you get the leveling system where you build up levels as you kill things and whatever, attacking things rebuilds your meta in general. And you then go to like a, you know, essentially like a bonfire, essentially a tablet. And you sacrifice extra mythical or magical items you've picked up. to convert those into particular types of stat increases that use your levels to cash out. Yeah, every single one of that action RPG like Diablo style genre has some kind of labyrinthine

like cash in to become stronger. But is it, but is it normal that you go from level five to level zero by choosing to increase these stats? No. Because you literally drop levels back down to zero if you want to by spending your experience to give yourself more damage here.

Extra crit. You want 11% chance of getting a lightning after effect on every swing. Okay, it'll cost 10 levels to do that. That's kind of like a prestige. and you drop back down to zero and start again, but now you have those stat increases. That's weird.

Very, right? Isn't that? And so I'm like, I'm putting this all out here because I'm like, I don't know how typical this is, but this. That's not typical. This stuff is really unique. It is interesting, you know? And I, yeah, I basically found that, like,

I died to a boss that, you know, ate my levels because there's a corpse run. And I was kind of thinking, like, Well, fuck it. I might as well just level up and go back to zero with better base stats if I'm going to just risk it all on this corpse run anyway. You know? Um, so you have an idea. And then of course, getting back from the, the path from zero to one is always much shorter than the path from five to ten or five to six, right? So you kind of have this like, what type of stats matter to you to sacrifice your level progression in order to get this buff, you know? Uh, I thought that was. something else unique about it. And then lastly, also it's got four player co-op so anyone, people can jump in and take control.

Oh, that genre is mandatory to have four player co-op or higher. It's absolutely required. Is that divinity that was doing that? Or pillars, I forget. So again, divinity is a turn-based RPG. I'm talking, we're talking action RPGs of your Diablo like? Yeah, no, that's, if you

put Diablo, grim dawn, path of exile, Titans Whatever Mandatory You must be able to play with other people It is absolutely required It seems like

The type of thing That can really benefit Especially from like Hey put a reagent down I'll blow it up You know Or cast something with wind And I'll do my

Earth attack And then like they'll fuse together And create the after effect Of double tax It's just that the Like it's a grinding genre. And

it's very much it's, it's like the reverse of a podcast. It's a podcast game. Right? They're all podcast games where it's not requiring enough of your brain

in any given moment that you can't just chit chat and hold a conversation. Gotcha. Okay. So they kind of, if they didn't have co-op, they would all die. Well, I mean, this seems like, I mean, it's kind of goofy and lighthearted in its world and tone. But I can't see these types of games being like, if this plot is compelling enough and the world is interesting, then you can just have a narrative that drives you forward, certainly.

But it feels like, again, here, I really feel like I'm at the end of a series of fans that have, of these genres that have pumped a ton of systems and subsystems into the thing. because the last thing I saw that was like, holy shit, is a literal custom spell shrine. And you go into it and you go, okay, take your base ingredient, fireball, add a detonation effect, the grenade from earlier, right? Shrapnel. Every time you cast this fireball, shrapnel will explode inside of the fire as well.

Okay, cool. Slide how often you want it to cast from every point one seconds per second, cast per second, to one cast per second or more. It's going to cost you more resources to create a spell that can auto cast much faster, much crazier. And you can choose the rate of fire, essentially, for this. spell. Okay. Now choose the thing you want to happen once the detonation is complete, you can create a third after effect, such as an earth spire shoots out of the ground. And you can then choose when it shoots out of the ground, it's going to obviously combine with the fire. And whatever the previous thing I said was that would occur when Earth met with fire, like let's say a, a ground lava storm, right?

Shoots out in directions. Yeah, this has like noita slash like magica stuff. There's a lot of influences here. Pick from the drop-down list where you want that effective lava to travel to. Do you want it to go to the nearest enemy to go in a full circle, to go in the direction that you were shooting the projectile from, to come back to you, literally choose the direction. that you want that after effect to then travel back to, right?

And that level of insane customization and sauce is so that you can allow it to further detonate and combine with other things that your party might be doing. So for example, there's a teleport dash that lets you get from one blip to another point and it's like, that's really useful, it gets over gaps, et cetera. But if you choose to use this like running dash, Instead, you can spread the smoke or the poison or the reagent to spread the effect over all the spells I just described so that they start recasting on each other. And if you ignite it all, it all comes together in one big insane cacophony and a fucking

nuke goes off. And it's really expensive to do the kind of spell that I just described, but you can put together everything in your inventory and it creates one final item that you can put on that quick bar and go, it's going to cost your whole fun. fucking man a bar to use this, but you can cast it. And all the materials. And your materials, but you get one cast, here you go, use it. Oh, by the way, you can cast it again, but a fuck ton of reapers are about to appear on your

ass. That's super cool. That's a really unique system. I don't know. I've seen any, like, I don't know anything about these, right? No, no, no. That's, that's, that's, um, there's a lot of bits and bobs and complicated systems from other genres being jammed into like your standard action RPG like loot game.

Okay. You're describing something that is significantly more complicated than most of the games in the genre. Yeah. And I can see that like there's even like, so the basic level of this was earth pops out of the ground like earth bending, water bending, fire bending, etc. That type of thing. Just that your usual casts.

But then there was stuff where it's like put down a, I forgot what the word was, but it was like a proxy or something. And it's essentially like a fucking pylon from the protas. And it would zap a beam of energy between it and another one of itself. And you combine that with the elements to then, you know, create a... I imagine like a fire line or like do whatever you want to disrupt the effects that I was previously describing. Or you could put a thing down where it's like it creates a line on the ground. and if any enemies cross it, you teleport to it and automatically do a big slash on them.

And I'm sure, again, you can combine this with every element, with every direction, and every other option I just described. So I just lost... Warp in fucking slash. Electricity shoots out in all directions. And I have... I tell that electricity to bounce back towards me, you know, and whatever, whatever. Customize your spell. Sit there and figure it out, you know?

It's really cool. You're frozen, I didn't realize. God damn it. Oh my God. All right. BRB, let's see what's going on here. Hi. How you doing?

Nice to see you. Thanks for sticking around. Well, you're seeing me and you're seeing me alone. So, uh-oh. What does that mean? Yeah, unfortunately, uh, it looks like, major internet issues are happening on the other side of the country. And yeah, router's dead.

So we just got to wrap it up for now, unfortunately, and have a pre-mature end to the podcast. So we will, of course, you know, I don't know what's going on. Hopefully things work out well. and I'm just, you know, we'll stand by to hear what else is going to happen with Pat and the schedule for the rest of the week. That's a doozy. That's a bummer. Sorry about the technical difficulties, everybody. In the meantime, I'll just be ending it here, and this will just have to be the awkward, fucking preemptive end to the cast. So, yeah, obviously, stay tuned to, you know, Pat Stairs at for the updates on when or what's going to be happening with the stream and the schedule over there. And to Woolly versus for what I've got coming up this week on the schedule.

I'm likely going to just continue with more Phoenix Wright and Legacy of Kane. So catch me over on Willie versus on Twitch and on YouTube. everybody. Yes, we have some sponsors and I am going to, ooh, God damn, that is, that is, that is some issues. I have,

this podcast is sponsored by some sponsors who you need to hear about before we end. So, Cheers for that. This week, Castle Super Beast is sponsored by AG1. That is your daily health drink. That is a solid solution to if you're out there and you're like me and you're trying to figure out how to get more greens in your diet. I love meat.

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You're getting the benefits of it. I really like the taste of it. You got a lot of different flavors to pick from. And there's a flavor sampler. You can, you can try out to see which one you like the best. But it was quite nice to know that something that tasted this good was also good for you. So, uh, yeah, get in there. Go to drinkag1.com slash superbeast to get an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 for free in your AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's a $72. value. Yours free only while supplies last. Go to drinkag1.com slash superbeast. Thank you, AG1. And also this week, the podcast is sponsored by Shopify. That is your go-to solution.

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Shopify. Thank you very much, Shopify. Appreciate you. Thank you. And yeah, thank you. Thank you all, everybody. We're going to call it there, and we will be back once we have sorted out what's going on. and then we can find out the biggest mystery of all.

What the fuck happened in Pat's week? Did he have a week? Who the fuck knows? As far as we're concerned right now, he did not. So time has stopped. We'll see you next time, everybody. Peace out. You know, sorry to disappoint, if I may.

Just we'll have to just, we'll be empty. We'll be ending the podcast preemptively with a solid two hours of podcasts as opposed to your usual four to five, whereas, you know, most podcasts out there last about 59 minutes and 10 seconds as far as I can tell. So, uh, sorry to only offer two hours of podcasting this week, everybody. God damn it. You know, we could fucking, we could, we could, we could cut any one of these episodes into four or five. Do you know we could do that, by the way? Are you aware? Go find another podcast. They record for 59 minutes, y'all. We spoil. you just so you know just so you know we spoil you god damn it all right that's it take care

where was i yes you're talking about bridgeborn so bridgeborn in conclusion pretty fucking cool um bridgeborn is a land of extremes the name is unfortunately a little bit of the slot machine going on with the with the title uh however mechanically uh that was insane parallax scrolling sprite uh majesty that i've never seen in a game before um real time with pause awesome love that ability switch between your team at any time co-op and that spell synergy shit was nuts um and also choosing to level down in order to increase your stats these are all really awesome unique things that come together for a really great first impression of a game. So yeah, Bridgebourne is cool. All right. Well,

man, let me tell you some bullshit. Fucking, my fucking router just fucking died. Wouldn't even power on. So I had to pack that shit up and fucking grab a cab and haul my ass to the local fucking Rogers thing. Can I have a new router? And they're like, maybe. I don't know. do you where's your photo ID we need to make sure it's yours so that I come back here and I had to fight a fucking application to fucking install it just turn it on I plug the internet into the fucking router just turn on so remember how the show started with me describing that the leaving a camera in place and never touching it or doing anything to it still results in

occasional flickering because fuck yourself yes which is not doing anymore by the way oh good I fixed it wonderful well did you even fix it or did it just stopped doing it? I actually fucked around to do stuff and try to fix it. But hey, technology, right? You stare at it and it breaks sometimes. That wasn't even an old router. That was only like seven months old.

I remember the last time it exploded. Yeah, that was the network. Okay. Which I had no control over. So at the very least, this time I was able to go, oh, it's a dead piece of fucking equipment. I'll go get a new piece of equipment. Now I've got to mail the other piece of equipment.

Is it a hybrid router motive? Yeah, it's everything. It's one of those all in ones. Yeah, okay. So that sucks. I just decide a new Wi-Fi password. And I'm like, I don't want to decide a new fucking Wi-Fi password, man. I know my old Wi-Fi password.

Yeah, I also, I rather the splitting be separated as a function from the like raw internet because then you can just be like, okay, cool, there's a problem with this. relay or whatever the case is, this port, some bullshit, but I know that the plug in from outside the house is fine. Putting them together, yeah. Anyway, here we are. It was really easy because the thing wouldn't

fucking power on. Oh, the lights, no lights at all. Yeah, it was like, it was like, it just died and the light was on. I'm like, oh, I'll give it five minutes, so I unplug it. And I, you wait, plug it back in, no light. So I'm like, oh, this thing is fucking dead.

Absolutely kaput. Yeah, okay. This is not a technical failure. This thing is for the heavens. Well, that's actually easier to understand then, you know? Well, yeah, because I knew what the problem was. Right. But I was terrified. I was terrified that what I was going to deal with was go down to the shop.

Hey, can I get a replacement order? Router. Well, you have to call. And then we have to ship it to you. Yeah. And that can be five to 12 days. I'm a huge fan of like calling the. the support for your fucking service and you're talking to the tech support person where you know more

steps ahead than they do. Always fun. You know, and you're like, no, no, keep up. I already did steps one through four. And we, you know, yet held the reset button did the whole thing. See that third light. Okay. It's blinking. I know exactly. What are you going to? It's you guys. It's you guys. What is the number say? Give me the service number. Give me the fucking service number. Let's go. I was calling customer support so often and there were so many guys coming out to my house. When the internet trouble started, like really bad. Oh, your camera's doing the thing again. Back in October through October, November, December, January for like a good six-month

period that like one of the guys gave me his fucking cell phone number. Oh my God. Oh, my God. Okay. That's a normal. Usually. Wow. And I would call him up.

a week, once a week, and go, how's it going? He's like, we've tracked the issue five blocks this way. And I think we're, I think we're, we're coming in. And like, you remember my internet used to be like super spotty

like six months ago. So what it was is there was one node with a fuse or something out inside one of those mega, you know those telephone poles that have like 400 boxes attached to them. there was like one fuse in there that was off but it wasn't listed as it wasn't reading as off in the in the fucking you know diagnostic so every 30 minutes it would cause everyone in my neighborhood to go down like on my street and so they had to like they had to like go to the the box near my house wait 30 minutes check each box every 30 minutes ago did it go did it blip on this one to do it blip on this one to blitz and then they traced it out of my neighborhood to find the junction.

And then they had to have like 10 guys just stand by a big pole and go, okay, monitor these ones. Did it go off? No. Monitor these ones. Did it go? And eventually they found, oh, yeah, there's a little something flickered. Thinking about the internet in terms of machines instead of in terms of programming or digitization is scary. The analog

shit. Yeah, the analog part of the internet where it's fuses and semiconductors that can just fail at random. I don't miss the era when we were rapidly speeding up from dial-up into DSL, into cable, into fiber, and every time a new type of service

or a new version of it came out and you're getting like pulled around by all these providers and kind of being upsold on whether it's Videotron or Bell or all these fucking companies. And there was always a like promised with a speed and some sort of new thing that was a carrot. But there was new problems you never knew existed that were going to come with this upgrade, right?

I'm going to say something controversial. Mm-hmm. There was one upside to 56K modems. From the 28.8s? No, just general, like dial-ups. Okay. And that was, we had like a hundred years of expertise on telephone line infrastructure to demand.

To solve the problems. Sure, sure, sure. Hey, is there a problem with my phone line? Don't worry. A guy will be out there in 20 minutes and replace the whole phone line and you'll be good to go. Also, you have a landline because who the fuck doesn't? So it's all good.

I don't know even one person with the landline nowadays. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But our first dial-up was 14.4, you know, like we, or whatever the case was at the time. It was just like, each time you'd be like, hey, we got the new one. It's faster, et cetera. But here comes brand new shit, brand new problems, including like, oh, it's faster. You switch over to cable here and it's faster, except during peak times when everyone in the neighborhood is also on it, in which case actually slows down.

use my internet the most during peak times. Why should it matter what other people are? Oh, because everyone is sharing the same pipe. Okay, cool. And I got one for you. There's this new way to raise your kids. You barely have to do anything. Just give them the educational tablet, the iPad.

Yes. They'll learn how to use technology and they'll become super smart. And you don't even have to discipline them. just give them the iPad and they'll be quiet. We have not yet seen anything wrong with this new technology. There's definitely no problems as a result of that. Oh, man. Yeah.

I even, so I even just recently redid like a bunch of my cable setup in here, simply because like the cables I was using were still like cat five and not like six or seven or whatever. Like there was a point where I just like, you know what, let's just get the better cables because these were. or the old ones I've been holding onto forever because I knew I had this one trusty fucking 60 foot or whatever cable

I would drag out to Lanz whenever I needed it. But that shit's like 15 or however billion years old at this point. Anyway, we So I got stressed out so I made myself an oversized

cup of coffee. Uh-huh. Did you know that no matter how much coffee you put into this jug because it's one jug. This is technically one cup of coffee. This is one cup of coffee. It's just a big cup.

Is that Irish coffee? Is not just coffee? No, man, it's just coffee. It's just coffee. Yeah, okay. All right. Well, excuse me. That's how that works, man. One container, even. One container of coffee.

I was going to bring up another thing just after Bridgebourne. I decided to check out the demo for the Eternal Life of Goldsman. That is the best animated thing I have ever seen in my life. Point blank, period. Not game, not interactive medium. Period.

Yeah. Once upon a time, I remember, like, it used to be like, yo, Fantasia, have you ever seen it? It's fucking insane. Disney went hard and went nuts and the level of mastery over just the, the, the, the water animation. I think Van Tj is so impressive because they went nuts on it and it was like what fucking 38 or some. Yeah. Life was black and white when they did that. You know, it was it was bad shit. And then there's all these other little things that go really hard over the years of classical animation. And in fact, like we've dialed it back. We've gotten simpler with animation because

we were going way too hard back then. So they're seeing the levels here in Goldman that really are, like, I kind of freaked out watching that intro, seeing how hard it went, because you're like, okay, the animators are flexing. They don't have to flex this hard, but now, after a few minutes of playing what is the simplest gameplay in the world, it is fucking ducktails. It's crazy how, you know, inside where you go hard on animation, you can go full cup head, where you're like, this is for freaks, this is for people who want to fucking feel the skin of their teeth like on every single run. And then there's this which is just, yeah, it's platforming, man.

I assume it's going to ramp up. For sure. For sure. But at the very minimum, it's the most basic platforming with the most insane level of detail. And it gets to the point where I'm like, this is so insanely gorgeous that I am now concerned for the health of the animators. And I am concerned that their effort is at detriment of. other things in their life.

Do you know what I mean? You ever see? I know, I know. But sometimes you see something where you're just like, this is so insanely lovingly done that it makes me wonder if it's done because the person doing it is like, I have to do it like this. You go to a nice restaurant and you have a meal so good that you're like, the cook must be a drug addict.

They're the home life sucks. Like they have to be on cocaine. They're neglecting. they're neglecting a wife and child in some way, shape, or form to master this fucking meal. Sometimes you got to make a good video game and the wife and child just got to

look at you through the window, say, come on, please come inside, don't fight that bull. I'm sorry, I got I watched the karate master two knocked down blow trailer a few days ago. I always think of your description as the game you play when your wife is crying

to come home and not have to fight the car or the bull or whatever. Knock down blow. I mean, it really does look like you, yeah, there's things in your life that you have chosen to ignore in order to perfect your animation skill to this level and show everybody. They could have just taken a while and be very talented. What an insane detailed, like every aspect of it, everywhere you could have taken a shortcut, You went, no, no object on this menu is simply going to just exist.

Everything must be hand animated, hand rotated. Everything that could be a 3D object spinning is hand drawn to spin a cane to show you different parts of a cane. You know, every transition when you go from one island to another, there's a tree. It's not just like the quality. It's like all the little pieces that would never, ever, ever, ever, ever be animated in anything else because who cares? Animate it. because I don't fucking care. And shut up, woman.

Get that kid away from me. I have to draw. You know? There's a thing. There's a tree that like is like upright. And in like any other video game, it has to fall into the water. And you're like, how many times have I seen something get hit in a way where it goes like this? It just rotates and falls into the water.

Or it gets hit like this and drops off screen. Or it just flashes until it's gone. But in this case, the tree has to kind of spin and fall towards you and show you new angles of the tree that you did not see before with frames that did not exist before, specifically because you have to understand every aspect of the tree from the back front and side. Because fuck you, I don't care. Shut up. Leave me alone. I need to get this frame right. Stop that baby from crying.

Look, this is a dark narrative. It's about to work! There's a dark narrative to go down here, but it's so fucking pretty. See, it's funny that you mention that because Goldman had, like, I played the demo right up until I got a taste of the in-game dark narrative. Yes, yes, yes. I got just the tiniest taste and was like, okay, there's something. So I went, I went. More real than usual.

Because there's always like, oh, here's the behind the fiction. There's the behind the curtain kind of Wizard of Oz kind of thing. But like the discussion being had about a mother telling her child to shut up and stop talking about that time, I called you an accident. Oh, man. Like much, much more intense than I was expecting. And the mother is cast as a like mean mom voice. It's not like a nurturing something. It's a sad, it's a tired, aggressive,

mean mom and you're like, I don't know if you're just mean or exasperated from taking care of a sick child, right? I don't know and I can't say enough to fill in the blanks on it. But right now, you sound like you're being very mean to your kid who's sick. And on top of that, every time the world of the lore, it goes more in depth and goes, here's a berry that's attached to another berry that has a lore to why it exists. And here's a type of game that, and it's zooming in and zooming in. And it's like, my brain doesn't want you to zoom in, it wants you to zoom out. Like, you're talking about this, the island and the lucky ones and the person who went missing and, you know, the relationships between the characters on the island. And I'm like, no, no, what the fuck is going on with this narrative outside the animus?

You know? And there's even one point where you meet the Frenchman where like it literally interrupts and goes like, oh my God, enough with the talking. Like, what was, what happened next? let's get to the next exciting part, you know? And it's almost like, yeah, kid. Like, actually, what is, let's find out more about you and this top layer of the game. Because the more you zoom in, the more I want to zoom out.

I know this is a segue, but you mentioned the animus. And all I can think of is, hey, remember when we're building up this meta narrative and building it and building it and building it and then just quit, just quit it? Just quit. And then, and then we're like, shit. There's nothing tying this shit to, uh, and they started it the fuck back up all half-assed. What an unbelievable fucking fumble. Well, this is what happens. What an unbelievable fucking fumble.

Well, it turns out when you have 1,400 cooks in the kitchen and about half of them hate everything to do with Desmond, and a lot of them are listening to the players that also hate everything to do with that. aspect of the game and just want to focus on the past. And the others are like, no, this is the most important part of the game. We need to lean into it. You end up with whatever the fuck happened with that ending in three. I was an animus true believer, by the way. I was too.

The fucking, the modern hook and the fucking, oh, we're going to build it to a game in the modern day? The truth. That was the explicit promise. The truth. Dot AVI at the end of Assassin's Creed 1. got me. One hundred percent got me. You're building up this little glitch of like two seconds of footage, two seconds of footage here and there. You're hearing about the Apple of Eden and the

fucking pieces of Eden and the weird shit. And you're like, what are we doing? What's the back and forth that mattered? I liked four, which is after they botched it, the first game back, after they fucked it up, they took a weird angle where you go test Assassin's Creed 4 and Ubisoft. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, in the lab. But they're evil, which is no different from the real world. I just, I remember that hit of seeing like the two characters escaping, crawling around whatever, and then they go, Adam, Eve. And you're like, oh, you know, what is this lore? And it seems so much more interesting.

And then you fucking abandon all of that. I even had, there's a moment in that dog shit that they went with three where, you know, the fake ending where they go, this is what could have been if you, if you Desmond decided to leave a message for the world, right? There's a moment in this, that whole cutscene where I thought it was interesting where they went, it doesn't matter, no matter how much you understand the past, if you try to write a Bible for the future right now. If you tried to write a message to the people of the future, you can't say anything that would not get twisted into evil in the future, no matter what you said. You could try to word it however you want to. You can put as many stipulations as you can. You will never defeat human evil and you will never defeat the inner greed that will warp this into someone's machinations and authoritarianism in the future. And we know that because we fist fought the Pope a couple weeks ago.

The porches, you know, and all that. And, you know, even the little, like, I'm like, it wasn't anywhere near the level of it, but like the, the, whatever, talking past Etsio, your whole life was to just have this weird alien talk to someone else who's not you. You know, you're like, okay, okay, sure, you're setting that all up. And I never played anything after that fourth. So I'm just like, I don't even know what they did with that. at testing the animus thing at all. Like, you know what, man? They absolutely, the, the writing was on the wall that they didn't believe in their own story.

When Assassin's Creed Brotherhood came out for Etsio, because the big reveal of two is your whole life is a trick so I can fucking teleconference with someone in the future. With someone else. Yeah, yeah. And like, oh. Yeah. But also you did. tons more. You did two more games of really important stuff because the player loves you, Etsio. You super, you're cool. Everyone thinks you're the best. I have to imagine that at some point

the game plan was that a game like watchdogs, for example, was actually going to be, this is just bullshit. I know it's not. But I would imagine at some point they were like, we're going to make a game that's this, that's modern day Assassin's Creed all in real, real modern day mechanics. Right. And you got a hint of it because there was Desmond sneaking around taking out the guards in the modern Italian villa for two seconds at the end of the game, right? So you know that they wanted to build up to that. But the more they did that, the more people were like, we could not want to get further away from modern day. So, you know. I don't think I ever told you this.

But I always had my vision for where Assassin's Creed was going to go, which was the, you know, the, the games in the past, and then three or four or whatever would be the modern game, right? And then at the end of the modern game, Kweilak from the year 2,800 stops their Desmond simulation. And you do your future Assassin's Creed game in fucking space. Or we warp or we go back to Persia and we jump into the Prince. I mean, yeah. I think that like in an alternate dimension, they would have, instead of being cowards, they would have gone straight to Japan, right?

Back on like five. Right away. France? No. Japan. They would have went straight to Japan. And then maybe even the Russia one. And then you go to your,

because the mob running on the fucking Kremlin is such a cool idea. And it only worked in that comic book. And then what? I'm going to make a call for emails. I usually don't do this over Castle Super Beastmail at gmail.com. Because I legitimately can't think, we've talked about that one for years and years. right? There was the comic books and the little baby spin-off games that were like Russia,

Japan, and India, I think it was. I can't think. Oh, and China. China, China, China. I can't think of any game series that decided to say, hey, you know the coolest thing that could ever happen? We're going to put it into a book to make sure it never happens in the real thing. God. That one's the worst. AC Russia being relegated entirely to a comic book series is shocking. Yeah. No, like, let's

workshop. I mean, okay, we're off of we swear. Goldsman was incredible. We're swerving segments here. I don't have any, I have much to say, it's incredible. I can't wait for that to come out. Alternate reality timeline. Assassin's Creed 1, Altayir. Assassin's Creed 2, Etsio. Right?

Assassin's Creed 3, Etsio's come. We did this. This was done. We go right past Connor Raton Haggatan to Black Flag. Right? So Assassin's Creed 3, you go straight to Black Flag. Then, four, you go to Japan. Five, you go to Russia.

But now we're going future heavy on the outside the anime stuff. Right? Right? And then you let and then the next one, full modern, wraps up the story. Call it a day. Yeah. I think the single best writing that was ever in Assassin's Creed ever, I think it's a, it's in, it's in the British one, was a, a file you can find of animus engineers arguing with each other about implementing cars into the animus. Mm-hmm. And describing how driving a car is so automatic for most people.

They don't actually form memories of it. So every time they try and put it in the animus, the thing just completely freaks out. Their cognition shuts down. Yeah. It's like, oh, that's why Assassin's Creek games don't have fucking cars. Not just because it would suck, but the in-universe robot can't do it. Even though horses completely serve that purpose for people. Yeah.

Yeah, no. You have that Russian one. Yes, you have that Russian one take place while jumping back to World War II if you want to even, right? Do the things that people get excited. Everything that people would have an excited thought about going what periods of history would be interesting to jump into and play as and be mechanically fun while soldiering into the modern day thing. Give people exactly what they're thinking of and deliver on that. And, you know, if you need to, you have a franchise that you can then do other things with. or whatever the case is.

But that's where you don't have to do this reboot now, where we start trying to salvage the series again. Is that the series I was the biggest fan of that I now hate? That you're all in on? No, there's a different one. It's the destiny. But Assassin's Creed is close. It's close.

Yeah, I, the highest high to the lowest low, and then ultimately not paying attention. It doesn't help that if you stop... The apathy is the cruelest end point. But every time you look away from it, like two more come out, right? That was the thing at the time, was you're not paying attention, and then like a handheld one and a console release and a half just dropped on you. So I know you came back and checked out the Egypt and Greece and so on, but like, I just, you know.

They were solid, but they weren't solid in... Enough. It was always just the fucking, I was so in and you dropped the ball so hard and made it so uninteresting. I loved AC4 so bad. I gave myself frozen shoulder. From just going too hard in. Yeah. I just went too hard on it.

You invent, I didn't know that I needed fucking sailing in my life. You know, I grew to enjoy even the boring parts of, um, Wind waker and such, but like this little section of three where you controlled a boat for two seconds was such a fucking pop-off. Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something.

When I was a child and my dad would take me fishing, I was like, man, this is boring. There's nothing to do out here. And now that I'm 40, the idea of going out on a boat and it's really boring and there's nothing to do out here,

man, that sounds fucking lit. I'm telling you, Man. Sometimes the boring stuff is the best part. Dredge hits different in the 2020s as opposed to how it would have hit in the yachts. That game came out exactly when it needed to. Anyway, the... I have continued playing some Slay the Spire,

and I think I answered some of the questions I was having last time about what builds work and what don't work. that will change too because you're playing like the first variant right I am I haven't done like the prestige runs and stuff yet but I did beat the game with the Necrow Binder

and I did so realize like with a Doom build and it seems like instead of trying to find like it's again you have to just lean into their best types of builds to get your best odds

with the characters like I was like Doom is one of one setup but I wanted to find others And it was like, no, no, just run Doom. Doom is the best with her. It'll make it all possible. And then I went back to the defect and was trying to set things up. And I had a pretty solid setup with them, which is you have a card called Uproar, which

plays two damage and then grabs a random attack from your deck and uses that. And then you just delete it. So here's, okay, here's a case for teaching you how to delete cards. Because I know you said you were like struggling with understanding how and why. I always struggle with delete move. And for certain, for like for the defect, for example, when you go to a shop, deleting a card is the most important thing you can do. So here is an exact case for why you'd want to.

The defect with the robot, the robot with the little orbs and all that stuff, there's a card you can pick up randomly in random common fights called uproar. And what it does is it'll do two, it'll do five damage twice, and then grab a random attack from your deck no matter what the value is and play it for free. So you see cards that you can buy or pick up that are going to be five cost cards. Insane damage to all enemies gives you a ton of resources. However, you need to somehow magically get more points than your turn even starts with. Right.

Okay, cool. Don't bother. Just put these cards that are unplayable in your deck. Delete every one point attack from your deck. And every time you play uproar, it's going to grab. either another uproar to do the same thing again or one of these super cards that you can't otherwise play. So thus deleting every basic attack and leaving yourself with only super attacks makes the whole build work. And then all of a sudden you're flying through the game

like just crushing things. And before you know it, you're going uproar into uproar into uproar into nuke. Fight over. You know, so like things like that are like a really good tutorial in fitting out your neck. Good shit. Also, there's a boss called Queen. Holy shit. Fuck the Queen. It's an Act 3 boss that just is insane because it makes it so that you have an ad that gets stronger with every swing.

It buffs every turn. It's got like a ton of HP. And it makes it so that you can only use one of your cards per the first three that comes out every hand. It's so fucking brutal. No matter how good your deck got built out, thing is just a fucking menace to fight. I hate it. Um, yeah, a redo of the collector, essentially, right? Anyway, um, so yeah, Slate the Spire. Fun stuff, but, uh, still, still finding my way around the ropes, but I kind of get it a little bit better now. Um, this

week I'm going to be playing either more Phoenix Wright if Reggie's feeling better or Legacy of Kane. But if not, then I'll be doing some more one-off. checking some stuff out that's, you know, demos and or just single player stuff that I wanted to take a look at. So keep your eyes peeled on the schedule for what's going on Wednesday and Thursday as well. Actually, no, sorry, Thursday's off. It's just going to be Wednesday. And then on Saturday, I am doing a sponsored stream of Pragmatta.

Oh, my goodness. I've heard good things about that Pragmata. It's quite cool so far. All caps, by the way. Pragmetta. All caps. Very important. All caps.

Do not use minor caps. Oh, does that imply? Don't do it. I see. Are you going to be using all caps in the near future? Absolutely. On my sponsored stream of pragmata, all caps, on Friday. On Friday.

There you go. Maybe there was a reason I fucking crashed out so hard. My fucking router died an hour ago. Okay. Okay. I'm like, no! Today! Yeah.

I asked them to kick it forward a day because I usually take Fridays off, but there you go. Well, hey, so the best thing about it is one, I like Capcom games. You like Capcom games. The second best thing about it is their money. And the third best thing about it is it's reviewing extraordinarily well, but also we both played the demo a bunch of times. It's actually, it's got some juice. Quite good. Very enjoyable.

I think I saw someone say that it's the biggest flaw they had with it, because I think the review embargoes up. The biggest flaw they had with it was that the story plays it safe. Yeah, sure. Which is like, okay. I saw some people say that it's actually like a really like uplifting positively oriented dad game, which all other dad games are not. Dad games are overwhelmingly like sad revenge focused.

Well, to be fair, death. Stranding is uplifting, but first it has to terrify the shit out of you before it gets uplifting. I played that second one. Okay. To this, I say, 6.7. Okay. That's, that's...

At least the first time around, they had to scare the shit out of you, and then it got uplifting. I think that Death Stranding 1 is a significantly better game than that Death Stranding 2. That being said, um... Hey, what if the baby could hack and fight back? Oh, my baby can do that already. Oh. Okay.

Yeah, he's super good with his numbers. Are you? My baby better than all babies. Okay. Is your baby doing Bioshock pipe puzzles while mid, mid third person action? No, that's too, that's too easy. Okay. Pragmatop.

Coming up. I don't know how to pronounce it correctly. I got to be honest. I'm going to say pragmatic. pragmatic. I'm saying pragmatia. Yeah. But then again. But then again. But practically. Yeah. But I've also been saying

Rezell. Reziel. That's a biblical term. So, you know. It's the tree of knowledge. You should know that. Oh, fucking. What am I? I'm a cabala up here? Yes. I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. Separat with a T. The, um, yeah, I, like, it's like, they say it every cutscene. What the fuck? And it's like, yeah, a couple times there. So, you know, not, so this reminds me of it. I mentioned this just the other day of a very specific annoyance I had from a guy named

Patrick who used to be on the giant bomb cast. His name was Patrick Klepp. Or, he's alive. His name is Patrick Klepp. And he was talking about Tomb Raider. And every single time he talked about Tomb Raider for multiple weeks on the podcast, because I think it was during the reboot series, he called Laura Croft Laura Croft. Laura, yeah.

And got like audibly pissy about everyone correcting him. And he's like, whatever, it's like the same name. No. It's not. It's, those are both real names. also your name is Patrick there's a bunch of ways to to fuck up the pronunciation

of the name Patrick Patrick is that you Patrick it's funny it sounds more normal to me because my brother growing up always said Laura Croft whenever we talked about your brother's a dick

he always just that's what it was we played PC games in DC would say Laura and I was like I guess that's what it is your brother doesn't know how to spell and then now all I hear is the reboot Lara You know, but, uh, yeah. Um, is, what, is, Razel, Raziel, Raziel.

Raziel. Raziel. Raziel. They do say it like every cutscene. But, and there aren't as many cutscenes as you remember. There should have been. Everybody thinks that this is a huge, intensive story game. It's not. You're pushing blocks for four hours. It's, it's. And then there's like two seconds of 30 second cutscenes for, you know, it's a bummer because like the, the, the direction of the voice act.

is just so, so good. But yeah, no, there's only like 40 minutes total, probably. There's not, people remember a lot more story than there actually was upon playing it now. It came from the era of the back of your working designs, JRP Box said almost an hour of anime cutscenes on the back. I mean, I realize that, like, in the IDOS era, there, this, I think I'm repeat. repeating myself, but like swimming through fucking water tubes and pushing blocks equals gameplay. That is what a video game is. You weren't, there was no part of you.

Explorating. Yeah, that's dungeon. That's explaining. You're doing Indiana Jones things. Whatever Indiana Jones does, that's what a video game ought to be. This is the definition of an adventure and who are you to complain otherwise? Until now where you're just like, bitch, you're going to have me push a block one square at a time from the third room. back to the first room and then rotate it because it was the wrong orientation by dragging it back

to the second room. Yeah, dude. And this whole thing. Fucking get good. This is, this is hours on the clock. And even if you had the answer in your brain and you could have solved it in about 60 seconds, the dragging time minimum requires you to do it for 10. You know, like, I, anyway, I don't know how. Bro, I am about to crash out. I have, I have, I, I, I, When I turn this computer on, Steam loads up with it in the background, right? Because I'm always using stream. Hades 2 is updating right now with more story content. Yeah, it is.

Of course it is. You absolute. Many characters will have new things to say at various points of the, during the story. Pat. You, Matt, fuckers. I have bad news for you. Your child is updating with new story as we speak right now. there is new content being updated to your child right now in the background the next time you go

things will have upgraded no you know what sucks dude you know what absolutely sucks shit when when he says a cool new uh like okay so he was eating his Cheerios and some yogurt in like a baby dish and i was like hey man are you all done he's like yeah da da I'm all done and then he like picked up his little thing and lifted up and went, I made a mess though. Wow. And I'm like, wow. Okay. And then I ran, I ran to tell Paige. I'm like, Paige, Paige, Paige, he said this. She's like, oh yeah, he's been saying that lately. I'm like, oh, is that when I'm doing dad show? She's like, yeah. I'm like, oh, yeah. That's an incredibly aware statement. man.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I know. I mean, just now, I got a little shout that, like, hey, she's loving the chicken. And I'm like, oh, cool. Nice. You know, there's some meals that, you know, I want to see the reaction to you. I'm so excited. In three-ish years, there are going to be the most depressing ass fucking dad streams of all on

dude's first day of school. It's going to be like, and the whole schedule is going to switch to accommodate, right? It's going to be like nine to two or something. And it's just going to be like death stare at nothing. Just, uh, yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, literally we're just discussing how daycare is coming up at some point. And what that means and the implications of,

Oh, so she goes over there, huh? You or the wife need to have a discussion with the daycare because there is a unwritten rule about daycare, genuinely, and you need to ascertain whether or not your daycare agrees to the unwritten rule. And that is really simple. It is, oh my God, I'm so proud of her. she's asking, she's saying please at the end.

It is up to the daycare professional to not say, oh yeah, she did that yesterday when you weren't here. No, everything happens for the first time with mom and dad. Daycare people, for fuck's sake, unless it is a safety issue or fucking whatever. All first steps, words, concepts, etc. didn't happen at daycare. see it. Just lie to me. There is no benefit to hearing that your infant

took their first steps at daycare. Yeah, okay. Who the fuck does that help? Just lie to me. That's pretty good. All right. Yeah. Now luckily, I got a couple of these things for one of the babies at school. That motherfucker solved some

calculus while you were away. What? You didn't know? No, man. That can backfire because there are daycare stories of children who can complete tasks and or speak languages outside of the view of their parents. And then they will fake not knowing how to do those things because they don't want to do it. I saw a fucking baby race the other day. You know, baby races where they like you crawl, right? And I saw one where it's like, oh my God. Oh my God.

this one kid is standing and walking for the first time in the middle of the race. Look at him go, even though that's illegal. You can't have walkers or whatever. But no, but it was the first time ever and totally not rehearsed even though this kid is hoofing it and basically doing the Usain Bolt at the end. He's fucking breaking records and doing a spinneroo-rooney.

But wow! Oh my God, the first time at fucking cheating pieces of shit. like asshole parents bro you can't even have this one thing be honest and earnest with everybody you have to fucking you have to cheat god anyways um can't wait for them no one's gonna kick a baby out for cheating dude yeah well whatever i i the um i thought you're gonna say the rule is like um when you get the update that says like uh what happened to date and it was like oh well well little Timmy over here was being a little physical and, you know, lashed out a little bit. You go, oh, okay, cool. So where's he at?

So we get what? We get. You're not quite there yet, Wally. You're not quite there. But you're about to encounter. We get our equalizer, right? You're about to encounter a cognitive dissonance, which is. They're just kids, man.

I could. I could do it. They're just kids. I could do it. How could you judge a two-year-old? Right up until that two-year-old that you're not going to judge gets within 10 feet of your two-year-old. If I practice like a fucking little piece of shit. If I electric wind godfist low enough to the ground, I think I can get some nice depth to it, you know? you don't want to whiff overhead.

You want to get nice and deep before you come back up with Adoria. So I'm just like, how low, how low do I need to buffer that step before we come back up? You got to get like at least knee height. Otherwise you're just, you know, it's error otherwise. So yeah, we're going to see. There are some, there are some toddlers at my local place that I would fight if I lived in a world with no consequences. You know, again, I just, I want to remind everybody of what happened in Tatsunoko versus Capcom when Street Fighter's very own celebrity, Alex, would land a stun gun headbutt on roll.

He would jump across the screen, grab the child, and then take a knee. He'd get nice, nice and low, and then just do a little, just some chops, just get some flash chops on the child. Alex Street Fighter is not big on. societal approval or boundaries. On norms, you know? Yeah, no, Alex does not care for your social norms. Yes.

Roll got flash chopped. Just real nice and low. Like a bunch of times. A bunch of times. Yep. Yep. Everyone gets it. Everyone gets these hands. Everyone can catch them. Yeah.

My wife just discorded me. You guys talking about beaten kids? Yeah. Doria. Yeah. So the policy will, you know, the policies of the very of the daycare will be written on the wall. We'll find out what happens. Anyways, that's, that's what's going on.

Let's, we should thank our sponsors. Already did that when you weren't here. Oh, that's very smart of you to do that. Nah. That's very smart. Because when I texted you, the shit. It was fucked. There's a definite possibility

I wasn't coming back. I ended the show and called it done. So this is a bonus show. So this is just some weird bonus shit that people were not expecting. That's why half of the comments are people going, wait, why are they back? Can I talk about my week a little bit?

What did you do? So I did mainly two things. One was I checked out the demo for a cozy game called Neverway. I would highly suggest you look at some screenshots of Neverway as I describe this. Neverway is out of Brazil,

I believe. And it is the trailer for it showed up a while ago, and it looked like a monochrome, like cozy star do kind of game. You know, you're doing your crops. You're engaging with townspeople. Love these colors.

But the description is, after quitting her dead-ed job, Fiona starts over on a farm and becomes the immortal herald of a dead god. Make friends, fight through horrors, and pay your debt in this nightmarish cozy RPG. Nothing about the face of this main character or the energy of these screenshots appears to be cozy. So it's the cozy gameplay rapper, right?

Over something very different. So right off the bat, I don't remember these people's names. I am sorry. It is the pixel artist of Celeste. and the person who did the soundtrack for Hyper Light Drifter. Oh, cool. So this is a very strong audiovisual pedigree right away. Disaster piece and cold blood.

The game is in monochrome, but what colors the monochrome are changes per scene, right? It's like extremely strong primary color with an accent. for nearly everything. So the prologue is out, is what I played. And the prologue is you are so depressed, you have not been to work for five days and you are fired. And your job

is to go down to work and get your stuff. And on the way home, you get the, the status effect tired and disassociated and trip the fuck out and have a psychedelic episode on a train,

at which point you'd decide, I gotta get the fuck out of here and decide to move to essentially a Stardue Valley style like frontier rural area and kind of homestead it. And that's the very, very beginning of the prologue. And then it kicks you into a second part of the demo, which is later on at an unknown time, which is nearly exclusively gameplay. but I thought it was going to be planting crops

and talking to townspeople and shit. No, it's hyper-light fucking drifter. I'm looking at combat right now in the trailer. Okay, it is in a bafflingly VR-style environment. It has a dash and a hook shot. It has a three-hit combo on your sword attack. It also has, I learned a new ability where if I dash, it leaves shadow clones behind me that attack for me after two seconds. But then I have to gather enough materials to do my woodworking in order to fix a bridge like you would in mystery or stardue.

You know, cozy can be inserted into any genre. It's just a series of management. It's just the progression trappings and the good vibes on building something up. That's it. feels good looks good sounds good very weird concept like very much like i don't know what is happening i don't know if this is real i don't know if this is fake etc super exciting looking um your main character is like canonical depressed and often gets like the depressed status and there's all these little touches to the cozy end of like do you want to go to bed if you just go to bed you get crash out

like it's not sleep it's crash out in the original parlance of the term and the downside is you gain a random negative status effect the next day unless you walk over towards your dresser

and change into your pajamas doing that takes five seconds but then when you go to your bed instead of crash out it says sleep what crashing out used to mean yeah which like so very Very, very, like, little bits and pieces.

Very cool. I'm expecting it to be a 60-40. So the way Stardue works is there's five pillars and one of them is combat. Right? In Stardu, it's farming, foraging, farming, foraging, mining, and then animals and then combat. Right? and no fishing in combat my mistake and i expect that to be similar but instead of it being split 8020 of everything in the combat probably like a 60 40 because the combat in this game is

really involved and really excellent in my brain farming fishing foraging and uh like money those are all the same thing because it's it's going to a resource and collecting the resource and waiting for it to replenish. You would think, but no, they are different. Okay. So, yeah, no, Neverway looks extremely promising. Yeah, this looks great. The devs are also very nice, because when I was talking about it, they hopped on on

social media. We're like, oh, my God, thank you for talking about our getting, you know, that kind of indie, indie-like appreciation. The new thing where... I'm definitely going to cover it when it comes out. Well, we're in an era where back in the day we would just pop in a random game an LP and nowadays halfway through they're like hey the devs are in the chat and you're like

oh and then you mentally rolandex the amount of shit you've talked in the last hour and hope it's zero I have been playing a game and gone what fucking idiot did this this or that and I hope they're not in there

when I do that because that's embarrassed and you're you on that right and that is that is hey to some degree I have to keep it real that's brand right? I will say that I automatically put some kid gloves on for indie games. I just do. I always have... They're trying their best. I always have. I'm like, you're not a giant studio. You're doing what you can. So shortcomings are reasonable given the scale and size. Honestly, I would have to agree that for indie games, I also put on... Let's say, let's say I put on one kid gloves. Sure. Unless the whole point of the stream is to look at this jank-ass shit. Yeah, and then it's like, Come on.

And then our tone has been set from the jump. I got to hit my numbers here. I got to talk some shit. Anyway. So yeah, Never Way looks super good. Like very, very impressive.

I also played a game called Kingdom Hearts 2, which people like, people over the years have liked. Speaking of indie games. Yeah, speaking of indie games. Maybe, like,

well, the Kingdom Hearts 2 is like the peak moneyed game from a peak moneyed era of a peak moneyed company, which is 2005 Square Inix on the PS2. Hold on a minute. Did Kingdom Hearts cost more than Final Fantasy proper? I don't know about that because the Disney stuff makes it really complicated.

It does. But they invented their, so Square Inix invented their lip syncing technology for Kingdom Hearts 2. Yes, they did. Yeah. And they use it a lot in that game. It's also a game that you can really So Kingdom Mars 1 is like this as well And you're playing two and you're like they have they

They use every part of the digital buffalo In a way that's super impressive You go to a world And the world's like cut scene Go down this You know essentially big broad hallway With a couple paths to you know Fight enemies and get to the end

Cut scene Go back across the fucking same room You just did cutscene, go down the other path, wide open area, get a little lost, do a battle, cutscene, specialty encounter,

right, defend the area, grab the item, like there's a good one, for example, in Pirates of the Caribbean, you can only damage the pirates in the moonlight. If they're in darkness, they're invincible because the curse is on them. But in the moonlight,

They're the skeleton form, so you can, you can fight them. Cutsene, boss. End of world. Off you go. Like, the levels are more, are usually, like, really fucking small. Like, five, six rooms. Huh. Top.

Okay. Like, you saw, like, I saw, I saw Agriba. I saw Agriba, and I saw Tarzan. Okay. So, that is, those two are actually, like, pretty. appropriate for like the whole franchise. It's like... Yeah, you drop in and you spend...

You spend some time doing a bunch of stuff in this fucking jungle. Yeah. But the actual amount of rooms is fairly small, right? And they use that to vary it up. Kingdom Hearts 2's big thing. I'm not gonna... It starts... Do you remember that period after 2001

where every single time you started a game, you didn't know if the character you were playing as, you were going to play it for the whole game. Oh, that was a period, huh? That was like a bunch of fucking games. Are we actually starting the game, or are you trying to be a fucking clever right now? Are we doing a little, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Kingdom Hearts 2 has the second best one of those. Okay. The first best is obviously Metal Gear Solo 2. because, and I'll give it to that just because we didn't know. It was actually completely unknown at the time. But on top of that, KH2, this is the final mixed version.

I've not played it since 2005. And I definitely didn't play it right after playing Kingdom Hearts 1. So the first thing you notice, if you look at any screenshot, the camera's been pulled way back. Like in KH1, SORIS shoes were almost at the bottom of the screen. Now it pulled way back. Why? Because you need a wider camera, because you're

going to fight way more dudes. The focus on more moves, more types of enemies. There's now something called a reaction command, which is if the enemy's doing a special goofy thing, you hit triangle and you respond. It's very similar in effect to Nero's Devilbringer so that Sora can have a bespoke reaction to every single enemy in the game. A context button. Yeah.

They redid how magic works. in KH1, fire was a shot, Blizzard was a different shot, lightning was a dropping shot. Here, some of them are shot, some of them are like spin around you with flame, all sorts of different things you can do it.

They replaced arrow, which was damaged down shield with reflect, which is just a parry. It's just a parry. It will parry attacks and retaliate. And on top of that, just the general feel and the amount of moves is so

massively improved. It's like a DMC 1 to DMC 3 kind of jump in feel. And the best way to explain that to a guy like you is that one of the first abilities you get is tap square during a combo to hit your launcher.

Nice. Okay. And then you can jump up and follow them with your air attacks. Are you still psychocrushering from enemy to enemy. Psycho-crushing. I feel like my memories of KH1 were like you swing a bunch on one dude and do a couple

things and then you spin Psycho-Crusher over to the next one. Oh yeah, the aerial spin. Yeah, yeah, no. Not really. Okay. You're juggling a lot more guys. And what are Donald and Buffy doing? So Donald, I'm playing on Critical, which is the hardest difficulty.

It does a lot of things under the hood, but the long short of it is. it's the hardest difficulty, but they give you so much AP that you can turn on any ability you want. So it turns the game less into an RPG and more into an action game. So as a result, Goofy and Donald are dying. They are dying. Okay. They are dying instantly in every fight. Unless I put Goofy inside me. So Kingdom Hearts 2, one of its big mechanical changes is something called Drive. And what Drive is, is hey, is Goofy be alive and you have a full drive meter, you can turn into red Sora, which has

two key blades, Goofy will leave the party. And for 30 to 50 seconds, you get to play two keyplades Sora. That's what that is. I've seen the artwork of that one. He's got more edge. Yeah, do you want to play as

that's Valor? Do you want to play his wisdom? Okay, Donald will disappear and Sora will be replaced with a version, with Blue Sora. And Blue Sora's ice skates and his default attack is him holding the keyblade like a gun and shooting magic. And all of your spells have been massively improved. And there's more forms past that. It's much more mechanically complex.

It's a much, much better action game. And the final mix version really nails that home because the final mix version added, Okay. Like 25 extra bosses. Whoa. In one like Coliseum type thing or just like spray? So everyone that got killed in chain of memories is back as what's called an absent silhouette. So for example, I was in the pirates level and you get off the boat in a pirates level and there's just a floating icon in front of you.

And so it goes, what's that? Oh, it's an absent silhouette, right? And then you fight it. And it is the boss that people were complaining at me for 90 minutes last night. Dude just leave. You can't beat her. And I'm like, no, I'm making progress, though. I think I saw the second phase.

I see. They are all super bosses. Everything that was added was all like fucking super bosses up there. with like a Virgil. And it is every single member of Organization 13, some of them twice because they died in Jane of Memories, as well as Sephiroth again and some other super bosses on top of that.

Without cards to... No, yeah, you want to fucking fight them? So there's a clip of me fighting Sephiroth that was going around when I did KH1 in which I'm like, all right, let's go. and he swung his sword once and it hit me and I instantly died within one second. That happened again yesterday

where I was like, I can take this bitch and within 40 frames of loading into the fight I got hit by lightning and died. Like these are absolutely crazy level super bosses and I beat one under level and I don't think I can get that second one. But there's just top. tons of shit in this thing.

I know about the final mix also added hundreds of puzzle pieces. They're just collectibles. But then when you get the collectible, you have to actually make the photo that the puzzle pieces make. And one of them's like 50 pieces. And I'm not good at these types of puzzles.

Slide puzzle? No, just a regular puzzle. Okay, just put the pieces. Okay, okay. So yeah. And on top of that, like, the... So if Kingdom Hearts appeals to people around our age,

honestly. Most people got into it around KH1 which means that as the games kept going and new movies kept getting inserted in by Disney then you know some people started to fall off and like Kingdom Hearts 2 has

Tron and Lion King and Beauty in the Beast and Mulan and it's like no these are the ones man like like this these are the good good picks Yeah

It's a great fucking game It's an incredible fucking game Did you get through it? No Okay I've spent I've spent As of now I have spent a full stream

Split between two bosses I couldn't beat Because I bet I could beat them at level 20 When you're actually supposed to beat them at level 50 But I thought I could do it No I'm not even a quarter through KH2. Why, I mean, I guess this is one of those questions, but why is Squall Leon? I don't know.

Okay. I don't. So squall is Leon and Cloud is Vincent. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, the second one I heard is just like they wanted it to be him, but then they said no. So let's just mix the two or whatever. But I was just like, what was the actual? reason for the name switch.

One of the funnier things, like genuinely, is if you look at, if you look at, what's her name, Ufi in Kingdom Hearts 1, which I'm pretty sure you saw, she was supposed to be Riku.

Oh. That's why her outfit is wrong, and it's much closer Riku's outfit. But they didn't put Riku in because they didn't want to be confusing because there's a different character named Riku in Kingdom Hearts. He's the most important person in Kingdom Hearts.

Right, yes, that would be a problem. You can't do that. Right, right, right. Yes, no, obviously Squall's name, Lionheart, like, that's known. I'm just saying, like, Cloud is not calling himself strife. Yeah, I don't know. Like, why is he using that as his name is the thing?

I guess you play it and you find out, so. What's weird is that Leon's an adult? but cipher's still like 14. Oh, yeah. I feel like I've seen the models, like have the weird proportion changes for them and stuff. True. Hmm.

I don't, I have questions. I wonder about the, the final fantasy aspect of these games. But whatever, I guess you find out eventually. You do. Yeah, no, A plus shit.

And also, man, there's, it's really great to do his stream and just be able to sit around in a big group and be like, man, I fucking love Winnie the Pooh. Winnie the Pooh's so great. I wish I could hug Winnie the Pooh and help him get some honey. He's such a good guy. He's cool.

He's cool. Oh, you don't have any love in your heart for Winnie the Pooh? I do. I just love Tigger more. Yeah, okay. Well, the whole, the gang of the 100 Acre Wood, there are a good bunch of guys. Absolutely. Yeah, E.

E.O's the shit, you know. Fuck, Eeyore. E.R's cool, man. I, oh, man, I fucking hate Eeyore. Eeyore in the modern world is on the fucking Reddit getting blackpilled. You just said the gang at the 100 acre wood and then immediately fucking, you immediately want to. I don't include him. All right.

Well, in any case. I don't know, poo. Maybe it's the foids. Fuck you, Eeyore. Shut up. Go outside. that don't put that shit on my boy that's too late i already did put that shit on eeyore and the kingdom hearts one shit that i did that i did that already that is no one could stop me that

like eore is not fucking manosphere pilled all right we need to chill his tail represents his manhood stolen away by females you ever been to romania see it's fun it's fun Because you set up the stupid bit we do, which is combine a with B. So now you have to go forward. Even though I disagree with the bit, I'm still trying to find ways to work piglet into fucking. Oh, piglet just has an anxiety disorder.

Yeah, well, you know, and I'm trying to see if I can work that into a Kermit voice. And then just push it, push it to the logical conclusions because that's the same stupid one bit. There's one bit you do here. But yeah, KH2 is a good game. It's real good. And this week I'm going to play more of it. Shocker. I'm going to play more of it tomorrow on Wednesday and on Saturday. Thursday, I'm going to be playing Rondo of Blood, which I've never beaten.

Not even close. Just out of nowhere? Well, not exactly just out of nowhere. See, next week's my birthday. I'm turning the 4-0, which means I'm going to die soon. So as a result, I'm going to do a 24-hour stream, and I'm probably going to do a fucking run-through of symphony. of the night just go I see the whole way through

well you know I've been 40 I'm still alive for now also you keep forgetting that I'm older I saw that thread strangely yeah I know what the answer is why do I forget every year it says because I'm balder and wrinkler and I've all

and I've always been balderer and wrinkler than you I'm 40 bro always Um, well, hey, look, good timing on that because, um, I mean, the new shit they're showing off with, um, Belmont's curse looks pretty fucking safe. Did I tell you that when the Belmont's curse thing got announced, like every time somebody asked me if I had seen the new Castlevania for like a full week, I would go, have I? And then I would stop the stream and pull up the YouTube video to watch the trailer again.

Yeah, okay, okay. The, no, the new one with the commentary over it with them just going like, yeah, we had the audacity to set this one in France. Yeah. You know, I was like, yeah, and in the meantime, like all this, in, you're in the meantime, while they're talking over it, you're just seeing dead cells in Castlevania world happening. Yeah. You're seeing dead cells level ups and, like, platforming and I'm just crazy cool looking shit in the background. But it's different in a very specific way. So, like, there are some Castlevania old heads that are wrong that are like, I can't believe Sonia hangs.

in the air when she throws the whip instead of just falling according to her old momentum. It's like, yeah, because that's better. Because that's a better way to fucking use the whip as platforming. Shut up. Oh, man.

I have none of that in my soul. I have none of that, dude. But I do. I have lots of it, but I'm on the other side of it. But I understand, though, because to be fair, it's like, you know, when Mega Man X when X got his dash, right?

The dash is head first. And Mega Man's dash before was feet first, like a football slide. That's right. That's right. And instead of soccer sliding, he's dashing forward. And it's like, well, that's not what it's supposed to be. That's wrong. That's incorrect.

And it's like, no, but it's fucking cool. It's cooler. Because he's a more dynamic. It's cooler to lean your head forward and anime dash forward. So shut the fuck up and just take it. It's fine. It's sick. it looks awesome.

And you just accept that. And now when he dashes, yeah, the head forward is that that deletes all the first time you dash head first through a boss door as X and it slowly moves forward while the whole screen scrolls over. You're like, yeah, fuck the soccer slide.

We're done with that forever. So. I'm gonna be dramatic here. I don't really care about the soccer slide from classic Megman. No, but it was when you never had any movement, it was like, oh my God, holy shit, movement. Right? It was the thing.

But yeah. But this. This and then the shadows, and then the first time you kick off a fucking wall, are you kidding me? Shut the fuck up. That shit's insane. Kicking off a wall in Mega Man X is so good.

God damn it. That fucking game rules, dude. That it altered the course of Hero Academia. I'm so mad. It's so awesome. Mega Man X is the shit. Isn't it really crazy how you look at a game like Mega Man X X and you think about the wall?

and you think how like nearly every single game to ever have wall kicks after that is just aping Mega Man X. Forever. The first try. First try. Hold kick off on kick, kick, kick, kick, kick in the fucking tutorial level. God. Someone sent me a thing going, you talked about X3 the other day and the shitty zero system in that. Here's a mod where someone changed it and fixed the game so that you can play a zero as much as you want the whole time.

you're starting as him. And they edited the whole intro cutscene so that after they both jump up and take down the giant machine, the X zooms away and you just stay as zero the whole time. And I'm just like watching it. And I'm like, I got time. Fuck it. Yeah, let's go. Run it.

Let's just watch this run. You know, God, fucking damn it, those games ruled. And so that's all this to say that if you do the thing that's blasphemous or wrong compared to the way it used to be. But it rules, shut up. Who cares? That's what it is now. As a Castlevania person, right?

There's a really specific type of developer interview that you get pretty rarely. When it's just asking some basic questions, but every time they answer the question, they answer the question perfect.

Like they say just the right thing. So, hey, in that interview, hey, how does the whip feel in Belmont's curse? And the gentleman says, well, we wanted it to feel like Super Castlevania 4. Yes, that's the one. But not as wiggly. Yes, that's the only problem with the whip in that game. You know, you nailed it.

That's the perfect answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. Which is why they got the gig, right? Yeah, that's why they got it. Yeah. Nice. Okay.

All right. That's it for me. Go down to twitch. dot TV slash Pat Stairs at the YouTube. dot com slash Pat Stairs at slash live. I'm going to do streams. They're good. Also check out the Progmata one on Friday.

It's going to be fun. Yeah. And it's also got to have its conditional little shorts to go alongside it too. So, yeah. Have you done one of those yet? I mean, that's a yes-no, man. That's a yes-no. Yeah, no, but it's part of the thing this time.

So, hey, let me tell you. Oh, maybe you're not enough of a shit bag to do this. I haven't done them yet. But like, because for No Man Sky, I had to do one. And so right in the middle of the sponsored part of the stream, I was like, okay, guys, guys, I'm going to record the TikTok, okay? And I just, I just did. the TikTok. And then I cut it out with the Twitch clip thing and then exported it

to TikTok. You know what? This is the move. This is the way. Yeah. Okay. I see that. I see that. All right. News stories. There's a couple things that happened this week. Let's roll through them quickly because we Bloodborne fans continue to eat a gun. It's crazy. It's crazy. Before before any news

of anything relating to playing the game ever again happens, Sony is making an R-rated Blood-Born animated movie with Jack Septic Eye, which, uh, oh, I mean, there's a blood-borne movie happening before the game is back. Like, listen,

what? If this movie does not release with some kind of patch at least, so, it's time to pack it up. This is what I'm, this is it, right? If you want to,

if you want a glass half full of this, which, you know, I'm an optimist, I believe, right? Here's what you do. You go, the new brand-related product is going to give the company an excuse to do something. And that something might not be the thing we all want, but it certainly might not be nothing. And realistically, I suspect it would be more likely that a bunch of blood-borne content would drop into night rain, then I think it would be likely that they would actually fucking update or release anything that we can play. I would sooner imagine a bloodborne night rain pack for everybody

for the promotion. Yeah. Bruh. From the iconic film coming upcoming movie, you know? Brutot wav, man. That's how I feel about that. Fuck. Fah! With the echoes behind it. Yeah, yeah. What is that? I don't know, but it's funny every time. It's a, yeah, anyway, TikTok. So there's that. That's good news, I guess. Fucking bullshit. On that note, if you are attending a card game expo,

fucking watch your back, protect your neck, and keep your head on a swivel. Because apparently, there was a big event where a few vendors came outside to discover that GPS tracking devices were placed on their vehicles and after contacting the police they checked all the vehicles and noticed a suspicious car

in the parking lot with no license plate and as they approached it it sped off, jumped two curbs and fled into the night. That's not good. So people are out here trying to get at these Pokemon cards, y'all. Crime. Crime is happening

for these cards. And I'll say it again. Do you remember when Super Potatoes got raided by whites? Oh, in Japan. In Aki. Yeah. Yeah. In Akiha. And the whites descended upon them to fill up their eBay listings. Right, right, right. That's a recession

indicator. Right. Criminal tracking of people that may have high value baby cards. that are not cash. Recession indicator. Things that you can translate value into that are not cash, that you can hold stock in. Yeah. The Americans, it's a sign of the American economy that I don't know what to do.

I'll hustle babies card games. Yeah. Like the fact that there's just, we're now in an insane world where it's like one real terror that exists is, you know, like women have to check to see if air tags are being dropped into their luggage. And thankfully, there's a thing you can use on your phone to scan the area to see if air tags are nearby. By the way, if you don't know about that, you should know. And then right second place is now people with a lot of Pokemon cards. Yeah.

if you know if you have a particularly good showing at the tournament fucking you know don't leave through the back a bunch of shit all right what other what other crimes are happening sending any good emails lately forget to take off some of the attachments oh you don't know about this one

what happened so you know there's that new avatar movie about Ang and the gang when they're adults yeah Would you believe it's just out now? The whole thing leaked? Yeah, because somebody sent an email with a Google Drive link in the email. Oh, my God. And then if I remember correctly, somebody hacked the Nickelodeon YouTube account and uploaded the whole fucking thing.

Oh, wow. It's the animated adult okay. I've seen some clips. Holy shit. It's really good. Didn't this happen recently with something else where they were uploading it as a copyright protection for YouTube and then

instead the whole thing went up Yeah, that can happen. Yeah, like something happened recently where like they just, they are, they had to upload it as a thing to look out for to scan. But they accidentally uploaded it to go live. Ava, it was Ava, right?

Yeah, exactly. Holy shit, man. Whoopsie doodle. That's a fucking poopsie. Well, speaking of leaks, if you hear any Nintendo leaks, such as there's a Luigi's Mansion movie coming, or a new classic Star Fox game on the Switch 2, or a Okerina of Time remake, or a new 3D Mario delayed until 2027, these are all fake leaks Nintendo is putting out there to try to identify who's leaking what

internally. I got to tell you. Okay. Yeah, no, no, read my mind on this. Go ahead. Okay. you and I spent days over time and I've talked to I talked to fucking people way up at Capcom USA and I've talked to people at Sony and it's so fucking funny that they were never

ever able to find out who was leaking Capcom stuff they still have not found out who's leaking Capcom stuff the last time I spoke to somebody they're like it has to be someone in the Sony brand team because we can't audit them and they all share information with each other fuck and it's

so fucking funny that they tried this they tried this thing and it got to a different company that they had to tell things and that's where the trail went cold they never found it I will take this over the fucking

the alternate version of leaks, which is like, oh, ransomware is happening. Like hackers fucking took everyone's passport. Apparently that's happening to Rockstar right now. Exactly. Rockstar is literally getting hacked by... That's not fun. I want somebody on the inside. Yeah, there's no, there's no dirt with that.

That's just people's livelihoods is getting fucking put at risk and doxing, you know? And like for Capcom specifically, there's like a really, really clear, like, throughway how to get the leaks out. I work at Capcom I message Dusk Golem Prove that I work at Capcom tell Dusk Golem, then Dusk Golem goes and says hey this was coming out for

Resident Evil over the next couple of years So that's it To me the funniest thing about Nintendo's defense here Is they're using fake news That everybody wants to be real You are deconfirming things that people are genuinely excited for and saying we are not making a new classic

star fox game on the switch two we are not doing a okarita of time there is no luigi's mansion movie and there is no 3d mario what if their master plan is that three are fake oh oh ah three lies in the truth yeah so uh i'm kind of shocked that we haven't seen more game companies just flood the channel with complete nonsense. Flooding the zone is a tactic. Like, it helps.

There is, and you've described the problem adequately. The problem is when you flood the zone with rumors, people get mad when the rumored things that kick ass don't happen. Everybody wants to know who's coming to 2XCO. How about 15

different character leaks? simultaneously, all coming from the official channels. And then one of them happens. And who knows about the rest? And then you just make it so that the second character that comes out after that big giant leak list is someone that was not on that list at all. Right?

Someone that was nowhere in that 15 drop second and then everybody loses their fucking mind. Yeah. Run it. Um, genius. Brilliant. But also, if you report on the fake leak, they send the Nintendo Ninjas to your house to fucking kill you. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the Cap cops are out there, you know. Cap cops are weak. By modern standards, yes. Back in the day, right now, they would have Maximilian in the triggers, in the sights. But he's getting away with shit like putting up 10K for a rollback bounty on Marvel 3. Well, back in the day, if Capcom knew that I knew any of the stuff that I knew, they would have shot me. And now they're paying me to talk about Pragmata next to me. You're damn straight. You're damn straight.

It's also because, like, okay, we know a bunch of Capcom stuff, but it's also like the juiciest, you know? Like, the tea is so sweet. Is the sweetest, dude? The sweet tea is so sweet. Every time, every time I catch the fucking drip of what the, of the Kafka tea, it's like, ooh. Oh, it's so good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nothing like, I heard dirt from other companies at times where you're just like, oh, yeah, okay. Such and such is a jerk or this, this, that, whatever. And like out here, you're like, what? He tucked the money. What? What are you talking about? That's crazy, bro. That one was crazy.

And he got away with it? Oh, fuck. Oh, man. So, hey, you know, talk about put your fucking money where your mouth is, bro. You know, Max has successfully done this in the past, and it's time to do it again. Marvel 3 has been relegated to the community. of people connecting on Parsec long enough. So a bounty is out there.

If anybody can work some net code in to make the game run on rollback, there's a bounty for 10K out now, announced on TNS this week. Uh, fucking awesome. Just Max, what a, what a champ. Love that you love the scene and the game that much.

And here's the thing. Um, this type of thing is absolutely possible because I don't know if people remember. but about five years ago on getting to fighting games, I had a dude on my stream called Fizzy. And he is known for being the one who created Slippy, the melee emulator that lets you play Smash Brothers with Rollback. Perfect rollback.

And that is the standard of like online play. It is a perfect in caps. It does, it runs better than anything. And he just, yeah, you can absolutely develop around an existing game framework and do this. So, you know, I saw some people like going, like working on it, trying to get there, trying to set it and set it up already. Awesome. Love that. Do you mind if I make a snide comment about Max's bounty? Sure. Max spent all that time and money and social capital to fix up and make Marvel Infinite look real nice and real presentable.

And then went, can somebody fix Marvel 3 so I can play that instead? No, no. I mean, yes, but also because it's a different awesome game. It's, you know, and now that you've got the community edition especially, it's like, yeah, we need a fucking way to play that thing without having to parsec it. But sure. It's like, I got my wishes. The thing I wanted was done.

You know, you spent all day modding Skyrim and then you start to play. And now back to Oblivion. I don't even, yeah. Now back to the wall. No, I think it's fucking, I hope this, this happens because it's a really clear case of like Capcom's not going to fucking do it. You know? Well, they're going to compete with fucking themselves? Well, at this point, if there was a thought towards it, they look and they see the reddest ocean of like every other tag fighter trying right now.

And they're just like, nah, I'll come back later. We got two XCO and Tokon, you know, punching each other and their weaners. I mean, it's a bad time for Marvel to come to walk back into the room with the pizza. Now's the time for Capcom versus Capcom. With the pizzas. Yeah. Also known as honestly Street Fighter 6 right now. We'll wait for the next season.

I mean, again, that leak list from way back in the day said Tokon is not Marvel 4. So anyway. You know, some of those things didn't happen. Apparently the FF9 remake just didn't go. It's just not going to happen. Or it went until it stopped. There's rumors that it's like. It's not that it doesn't exist.

It's that it's not getting released. Do you have any other news you want to talk about this week? No, not really. I mean, we were also talking about leaks. There's a screenshot of something from season three of Daredebel Board again. And if anyone cares, there's some stuff there that's interesting. But, nah, not much. The only thing I got is that a 14-ton shipment of steam controllers just landed stateside.

So the new ones. That shit's going to get just shadow dropped. Okay. Any fucking day now. There was a... I'm very excited for a steam controller that has the steam deck shit on it. Let's get the hands on and see what's happening. Yeah.

Yeah. That is a contender for a biggest glow-up of a controller. But I'm so used to the dual sense at this point, though, that I'm like, you know, I'm satisfied with what I've got. So here's the thing. It's going to take a lot to pull me away from it. This touchpad on the dual sense, it's okay, but it's in an awkward spot. The projected touchpad things on the fucking thing on the Steam Controller 2, man, that's going to help with a bunch of games that just don't quite work perfect with the controller.

And the reason why they're pushing this thing is Deadlock. Okay, okay, okay. This is the Deadlock controller, for sure. Also, now that I'm two generations deep on it, I can say that elite controllers that have rubber backing actually suck. Because the rubber... Once you have them for a while. The rubber always peels off. It peeled off on my...

And also, they get really gross because your hand sweats. On the Xbox Elite, it peeled. And on my dual sense, it peeled. And I'm like, oh, this feeling is great for the first month. And then it starts to get a little grimy. And then before you know it, it's starting to just come off as a separate section. and that sucks. So those need to stop.

Here, one other thing. Shoutouts to Mom out on Blue Sky, but a little game that you can play here. I don't know if did you play the game? I play some games sometimes. Probably not this one. I didn't see it. Okay, so Mom has a little thing saying,

do you want to giggle? Here, I'm going to send you a link to a game on Steam. It's called Dude the Dark Army. Before you click, as soon as you click on this, scroll all the way down to the bottom. Don't look at the screenshots or any footage. Just scroll all the way to the bottom. All right.

Conjure and then read the AI disclaimer, right? There's an AI disclaimer on this saying that the game uses it. And then you go scroll and you read that. And it talks about everything that is that the game uses to generate. Once you've done that, scroll back. Conjure a mental image of what the game might look like mechanically and visually with that long disclaimer. All right, all right. And then scroll back up to the gameplay footage and look at it.

Toss me the store page or the link. It's right there. Oh, wait, hold up. No, you said to somebody else. Yes, I did. Here you go. Okay. Scroll down.

Okay, I scroll down. Okay, here's the developers describe blah, blah, blah. Of course we used AI tech to speed up our business processes and produce higher quality and better performing games. We used Claude for Code Development, ChatGBT for Visual Production, created the games cover art with ChatGBTbt. It wrote the game's overall code architecture With the help of Claude These AI significantly sped up our work But absolutely do not think

The developers produce this The game without any hassle Only a single prompt That's thought is completely wrong What actually happened is we gave these AIs Some of the tasks We would have done ourselves And did them in stages to speed it up

Even with this process It took six months Of course All right So I'm expecting Open world I saw a guy with a gun Yeah, yeah.

So I'm going to, I'm expecting like a open world boomer shooter that just looks like shit. Okay. Oh, my God. If you want to play along at home audio listeners, that's dude the dark agent on Steam. I mean. I know for a fact, like four people over at New Blood could be. bang this shit out in one day. What, bro?

One hour. One hour. Well, no. They still to draw the assets. I mean, like, do you? I genuinely think that like Samansky could put this together by end of day by himself. This is a 45 minute fucking code and compile in my brain. This is, um.

And these fucking, this thing is like, this is crazy. We needed. AI to do nothing. Just hang it up. That's wild. Hang it up and walk away from the dream, you know? Like making a complete piece of shit has value because you learn things when you made it. And the effort is worthy in and of itself.

But making a complete piece of shit that took literally a thousand times longer and also you didn't even do it, you just wasted everyone's time. You probably harmed your own brain. Fucking crazy. Remember, creatives were gatekeeping output. They weren't. Man, you could just, you could do a thing. Castle Superbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's... Castle superbeastmail at gmail.com. All right. Jonathan says, Hey, Pat and Woolley, I've been recently enjoying one of my favorite games, Soma, and I've marveled at how actively stupid Simon is throughout the story. To be fair, he suffered some traumatic brain injuries. But he's told time and time again what the deal is, and he refuses to understand. Who are your favorite stupid protagonists? I'm sure. Okay, so first of all, the thing with Simon is that I have met people that would not. be able to correctly encapsulate what's going on in Soma. Right? And I know you have, and I'm pretty sure everyone in the chat has heard that as well. I've met people that would not be able to get it. My favorite stupid protagonist, without a doubt, especially right now, is Sora Kingdom Hearts.

Oh, yeah. There is no dumber than I can imagine. aggressively brained it. Absolutely unbelievable. Again, it's like you have to have bigger heart than brains in order for it to work. Well, luckily he's in a game

called Kingdom Heart. Yes, that's why Kira works and so on. But should I tell you that Goofy is the smartest person of that trio? That's crazy. That's awesome. It's dire, man. That's awesome. It's dire. Well, I'm surprised Donald is a mage to begin.

with considering he's so angry, you know? So, not really. I would have thought they would have made Donald a more aggressive archetype considering... He's not a fighter, man. But he's all mad and shit, you know? So? And he's a...

Black majors are mad. And he's a sailor. He's an angry sailor. That doesn't scream mage to me. How does a sailor shoot a gun with his gun? But he's also... Magic is the closest thing you can get to him shooting a gun. An angry sailor is going to pop-eye his way through the solution, you know?

Because Donald's a pussy. Well. Donald talks them. Also, Brandon is a Daisy in Kingdom Hearts, too, and she talks normal. So what the fuck is going on with Donald? Yeah, I just, I would have, you know, the, again, the, the, the, the fucking sailor that's stomping on his hat and going, blah, blah, blah, blah, is going to, like, fucking deck somebody. Oh, you know why?

Do you know why? Do you know why he's a mage? Why? Because dragons and finally. Fantasy use magic and the male duck is a Drake. Thus, it's a fucking joke. It's a, it's a, it's a pun.

Okay. Yes. Sure, sure, sure. Um, I don't like it. My favorite dumb protagonist is Harry Dubois because the reasons why, you know, are much more complex.

It's not about him being dumb. It's about the weight of the fucking world. Yeah. On his shoulders. Can I give a shout out to whoever you're controlling in a Metal Gear game? Not the character, but whoever the player has latched onto becomes the dumbest bitch around. I speak in questions. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, all right. We'll take one over here. Oh, someone in the chat said, Kratos. Oh, man. Kratos in those games is so. Stupid. Cratos is not a favorite dumb protagonist.

He's the worst dumb protagonist. Yeah, but he is so stupid. He's so dumb. In an upsetting way that makes you actively root against him. Oh, he's dumb as well. Not many games have made me root against the protagonist. It's kind of insane. I remember before God War 2018 came out,

we had a really long talk on the podcast about the only way it's going to work is if the game spent its entire runtime dogging on cradles and being the dumbest piece of shit in the world. And then it totally did. And then it did. And then it actually did.

Yep. He's like, God damn it. I suck. And it's like, yeah, man. Okay.

Just checking. Yeah. Um, and I think the moment was, I think the first moment in the trailer everyone got it was like he gets angry and then calms down talking to Atreus and you're like, ah.

Oh. Yeah. Uh, let's see. Over here, we got one. Oh. Yep. No, I got another one. Okay.

In FF7 remake, there's one moment in the game where the girls leave the party. And Cloud and Barrett are left to their own devices in the second to last level of the game in which they are trapped inside the Shinra Tower. Aerith and Tifa and Red find a security camera. And they look at the boys. and the boys are standing in front of the biggest door you have ever seen. It's like 10 times the size of like a vault door from Fallout. And Barrett and Cloud are kicking it and just clanging their sword against it. Like, yeah, boys.

Boys. Boys. Boys. Boys, boys, boys, boys, boys, boys. It's so fun. Boys, boys, boys, boys, boys, boys. Like, Cloud just clangs the sword on it and it bounces off so Hardy almost falls over. And Barrett, like, is.

kicking it with his foot. Yeah. You got a faff near that door down. It's the only way, man. It's so fucking funny. Boys! They get collectively dumber when left around each other.

Yes, yes. Here, there's another one. Like me and Paige are watching One Piece, and she's like, why are they doing that? I'm like, because every man on the ship is an absolute fucking moron page. Nami is the entire brain for the entire crew until Nico shows up. Then they can share the brain.

Yeah, yeah. Good bit. Here's one name not given. Hey, I feel and ill, so keeping it simple and clean. What's the worst case of getting to finally play the bonus campaign slash DLC epilogue level where they let you play as the rival or companion character that was cool,

except they actually sucked to play or it was half-assed. For me... Metal and your solid VR missions playing as the ninja. Oh, fuck. I wish you could do more. Okay, I can try. They, yeah. I finally get to play as the ninja.

Oh, cool. It's in this fucking floating bullshit. And you use the punch button to swing the sword and you barely get to do anything. It's just a, it's just ninja's combo. It's snakes combo, but he's got the sword in his hand while he's doing it instead of getting to swing. And then you never get to actually properly use the sword until the end of two.

Yep. For me, it's the end of Jedi Survivor. You play as Deborah Wilson's character for one level, but she has one style, and it's an awkward mashup of four moves. Oh, yeah, she's not good. She's not good to play. From the normal main characters kit with animations that look more composed, rare, slower. Also are slower. A good example of would-be power fantasy that actually makes you feel like you got nerfed. Yeah. I have two more. Elizabeth and Barry Let's see is the worst playing shock character. She just doesn't have lots of the stuff that even Booker had in the other game. And Virgil from the DMC Devil May Cry bonus DLC, where he is a shitty character in a shitty campaign.

The first time until they fixed it. Yeah. Definitive edition, they did more. I mean, I've talked many times about Onimusha and that last character switch over to, what's her face at the end where you're just... Hey, bro, wouldn't it be so cool if you played Onomusha? And you constantly switch characters that were less fun to play. And it was called Onomusha 4 Way of the Sword.

Don of Dreams. Don of Dreams. Don of Dreams. Don of Dreams, whatever. Way of the Swords the new one. Whatever. O'Sha has three good games. Yeah.

I mean, hey, I got one, but it's like almost intentional in a way. It's not quite the same thing, but playing as Dorman. Shout of the Colossus. Like a couple weeks ago. Yeah. It's like, very awesome. It's a,

it's a sick moment of like, oh, fuck, here we go. Oh my God. I suck. I can't do anything. Oh, wow. I'm having a really hard time

hitting these little guys. Oh. This is awful. This feels bad. He's getting away. They're getting away. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Oh, shit. I see. Yeah. It's almost like, in like, in like, SNK games when they have like the boss become playable and they're like oh they didn't even program a crouch this character was never meant to be controlled they have less than half of the

moves that a regular character does and every button just does one of their spells or whatever and that's it i think the coolest version of that that i ever saw was when people hacked apart dark souls one and discovered that the bosses and dark souls one are actually attached to a controller's move set? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All the attacks are coming off of one of their, one of their inputs. Like, they're, they're acting as player entities. They're, they just have different bodies and different hitboxes. That's so interesting. Um, and last one over here, uh, pumpkin spice pepper says, hello, Donald, Goofy and Sora. Um, in the fishing JRP game boy game, legend of the river king, a young boy is tasked with catching a legendary fish that could cure his sister's illness.

Once you make your way out to the second village over, you're made aware that. that a bear has been terrorizing the area and the game tasks you with killing the bear despite the fact that you're an unarmed prepubescent boy with no actual superhuman powers that hasn't fought anything more dangerous than a bee or a snake at this point. What's the most insane thing that would be asked of a player character if it wasn't in the context of a video game? I mean... I can just say the like a dragon series in totality? The ask, but I mean, the he, He's clearly got the capability. You fight some stupid, stupid shit in some of those later games, Woolley.

I mean, I go... It really strains the reality of the scenario. Shinji getting in the robot is still the most insane proposition of anything. It's like, child pilot this fucking war fighting plane. Get in and go now. And it's like, you're dead. man, why the fuck would this 14 year old get in there? Like, that's insane.

It's, that's ridiculous. And the fact that big burning shonen anime were all about that energy, um, was always insane to begin with. I think that proposition is nuts. Most, most like, kid get in the robot,

Gundam or, uh, um, you know, brave, Yusha ass things are just like, you, imagine saying that to a,

imagine taking a 14 year old and going, get in that tank. now. You know what? Alone. Go. Captain Britches in the chat is very correct in saying that Ethan Winters in RE7 and RE8 is the only

fucking regular dude that you ever play as in the Resident Evil series been thrown into that. He's not a military guy. He has no formal firearms training. He's not a cop. He's just some fucking guy going through. it fighting a bunch of bullshit.

Fair enough. You learn eventually. Hard times, whatever. I'm gonna go with Heather Mason fighting the devil with a samurai sword. Killing God. Yep. Teenage girl kills God with a samurai sword and no

training whatsoever. But the Mason bloodline. With a little help from plan B. It's just the Mason bloodline, you know? That's it. Uh, yep. Oh. Hinoco Silent Hill.

Hinako is so strong. And there's that pipe, dude. And there's no reason for it. She's got a blood-borne dash because she does track in high school, but that's it, man. She's so strong. Okay. There you go.

I think that about does it. All right. We got to get out of here. This has been a technically long podcast. Again, as I said, I said in the stopped time between of them, I'm like, oh, no, unfortunately, your five-hour podcast has been shortened to two. Meanwhile, every other podcast you listen to is 59 minutes and 10 seconds. Yeah, that's true. We spoil them, God damn it.

Yeah, we do. Well, we're gabbers. We can't help it. And then you're going to hit that trim silence button to speed shit up. You fucking jerk. Don't listen to this at four times speed. That's for weirdos. Too late.