Castle Super Beast - CSB376: I Couldn't Stop Your Bimbo Jo Guns Mods

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Download MP3 | Watch Video Episode Full Timestamps: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQJ9zKs8wJ5KHGWdOiIQfwbzLX2xnSpEguJCrCsCadg7cfktSeUDn-yariTv1hCSyA_EZ5w0EsR_c9J/pub BEAST SLAM Her Full Name is Josephine Gunhildr It Has Never Been Worse Than Turnabout Big Top Xbox Sacrificed Senua Nintendo Wins Big Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive Visit http:drinkag1.com/SUPERBEAST to get a FREE AG1 Pro Shaker in your AG1 Pro Welcome Kit. - Take control of your income. Start selling for $1/month at http://shopify.com/superbeast  - Go to http://heroforge.com/ and use code CASTLE to get 5% off on all orders of physical miniatures.  - Our listeners can buy one prescription pair and get 20% off any additional pairs at http://warbyparker.com/CASTLE — and using our link helps support the show. #WarbyParker #ad Docket: Xbox is closing down Hellblade creator Ninja Theory.Compulsion Games and Double Fine are also in 'active negotiations' about spinning off. Carcass Clad reveal trailer - PC Gaming Show 2026 - A horrifying co-op tank game where you fight enemies who armour their vehicles with animals. What else did you expect from the Mouthwashing developers? Wishlist it now on Steam Nakyama interview. 10 seasons is planned for SF6, TIfa has been in development since 2023, Bosch and Yasmine were planned as a character since day 1. Yasmine is the main character. Placeholder AI assets in 1666 Google says artists who upload music to YouTube have already agreed to let the company train AI on their content, according to a new lawsuit filing. A new court filing claims that when indie artists upload music to YouTube, they grant a "broad license" that covers the AI initiatives of parent company Google. Palworld lawsuit nears end with Nintendo reportedly poised to gain almost nothing. TPC and Nintendo could reportedly come away with as little as $30k if they win. To put the potential $30k settlement into context, Nintendo's most recent annual report stated that it had made a $40m loss from patent litigation in its last business year. BREAKING: Ubisoft is shutting down its studios in Winnipeg and Belgrade and making further cuts across its global publishing business. Ubisoft Barcelona is also facing restructuring. Layoffs are currently pending consultation and could impact up to 380 employees. Pokémon Go Scans Quietly Trained the Navigation Tech Now Headed Into Military Drones. Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned by Niantic Spatial, and they helped train a camera-based navigation model that a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to put into drones and other military robots. Most of the players had no idea. RGG Studio Head Talks Tupac's Controversial Stranger Than Heaven Inclusion Say hello to EA Advertising, which will let your favourite brands 'integrate' ads to 'enhance' your experience  

Wully, are you okay? I'm fine, but... Are you stuttering? That fucking, that frame rate just went to shit. All right. Oh, no. It's fine. Oh, don't worry about it.

I will literally fix it in post. Don't. He'll fix it. He'll fix it, everybody. How are you doing, man? Doing all right. Doing all right. How are you doing?

I'm doing all right. You, uh... It's hot. It is. It is. Uh, let's do it. start like this. You didn't...

Yeah, let's start like this. You didn't tell me there were sweets on the line. Yeah, no, I didn't. Why did I tell you that? That would empower. You didn't tell me there were sweet. So I, over the week, or last week,

I snuck a cookie from the cookie jar quite literally. Nick, if you need your sweets, talk to me and we can set something up so I can guarantee you some sweets. No, no, no, no, no. can't say that. No, you can't say that. You're going to fuck it up.

Boy! You're going to fuck it up, Willie. No. What's going on? Anyway, yeah, so I stole a cookie from the cookie jar. Who you? And I hate it. And now I'm in trouble. So, uh, I got to beat you in the tourney.

Wait, was there, is there a, is there a, is there a literal cookie jar that a literal cookie was? Yeah, as a literal little literal cookie jar. As the proverbial, the proverbial, the proverbial cookie jar couldn't be. then who? The proverbial and the literal. And I gotta beat you 50% of the time or more to get in. Problem being, you have the best team in the Seajam Slam. I think, uh, like easy. I think we got some fucking beasts. And the craziest part about it is that the bottom, we are bottom heavy. We are fat bottom girls. because I was like

I was like okay three you you beat my pairings my duo's three times and we took one off you right and I'm like when it was just you and me I felt like it could go either way maybe you were a little better but like

when Gary was in there it's just like it's scene two go to a different team scene one It's actually insane. The entire, like, like I said, the bottom half of our team are just ridiculous beats.

Gary Zizzix, Frodan, and Dethy are sweeping. Sweeping. I think. And Gary and Froden won every single match they had together. And then Frodan and Dethy as well. And the thing just talking about it is like, you, like, when we're chatting it up in the fucking. Spector's chat, right? And what you have to understand is, Dethy has never played a fighting game before. And he,

this is the first fighting game he's ever played. And he started 10 days ago. It's, it's just the spirit of the fucking, the fight within, man, the approach. And like, the level of going into it going, okay, I got it. I got this. I got this. You know, and it's just a constant, like, I'm going in and I'm here to learn. And when I fuck something up, got it. download move on to the next.

Like he is assimilating the data and he plays team fight tactics and like it's fucking crazy to watch. Frodan is... I wouldn't have thought that that would have applied or cross-pollinated in any significant way. It's kind of a bummer into that.

The format is set up in a way where we all get to team up with everyone on the team minus one member. And like Frodan being on such an insane rip and I don't get to play with him. And so we have haven't had a chance to really interact, you know, to play together much because we're trying to focus on, you know, on the team, you know? And, yeah, and then up top in the meantime,

like, yeah, so Diaphone and Zane had some struggles in the fucking God bracket with the coaches. And then, yeah, that God bracket is fucked up. It is super fucked up. And because you and I got to dip our toe in there for a round. It's fucked up. Yes, it is. And I'm, and I'm also not pulling weight, You know, doing my best, but still, I, hey, I mixed up Sonic Fox with a crossover, and we won the round. I'm going to just take that. Take that. Take that all day.

Take that all day. All day and all night. Absolutely. This, the way it felt at the end of the night last night. So for anyone who's tuning in who doesn't know, we just played in the Say Jam Slam day one yesterday. And I have never felt more exhausted at the end of anything I've ever competed in. or played than this.

Because, like, the analogy is, okay, so we were expecting four hours, it went six, right? Dude, I'm going to stop you right there. Say Jam. I love Say Jam, and he runs a great event. This is the second time. Every time he's like, okay, guys, we're going to make it. It's going to be like four hours. It should move through the rounds quickly.

And it's like, you're wrong every day. There was one last time we had to cut a whole round. day two and we still went like three hours long. But I did, I participated in his test run. So he did a couple of test runs to try it out. And I was in one of them and it went four hours, right? It was a casual, it was a casual night on the training week. He's like, hey, he wants to jump in. And then they didn't. We're like, yeah, that time, that checks out about right, you know? And then it just, it just happens to be on the day of shit's just going, you know? Now, yeah, no, it happens to be on the day of, like, I was watching some of the coach matches and some of the advanced matches. And

they were like running down to like one second on the clock on every round. Like people were fighting for it. Yeah. And exactly. You're also going, you're going way more defensive. You're going way more precise. You're locking it down a little bit. You're being a little less foolhardy in some situation. So it takes longer for the set. I felt like a combination of, remember when we did that six-hour parking lot, meet and greet? Yeah. So I felt that the drain of the, of the, of, that, right? But then mentally, I've never been through anything like this because you can do what I've done long sets with really good players, right? And you fight one person and learn everything about it.

I've talked about this many times. Yeah, you don't have enough time to do it. You're doing like one set. And then like later on like in 15 games, I'm fighting Shine again. But I forget who Shine is. Because it's all high level matches and you have to be on all firing on all cylinders in each different. set you're doing, your brain is maximum activity at all times, and then you have to change, change, change. And like, I kind of, it was just this thing of like, I was trying to come up with an analogy earlier talking to Punch Mom. And what I said was, okay, when you start fighting against somebody who is, you know, not as not,

doesn't know about the game as well as you do, imagine you have to play a game of hide and go seek with somebody. And you're like, we're going to play in the house, all right? and then you start playing and then you don't know where this person is at like in terms of their level but you eventually realize oh they don't know about upstairs

oh they don't know about downstairs oh they only know about the kitchen okay no problem I can turn my brain off I can stop thinking about everything else I'm just going to look around in the kitchen to find them and then it becomes but then you run into situations

where you think they don't know about upstairs and here comes upstairs well now imagine this six hour run with all these really strong players who are literally the best in the world, and the whole time you're like, oh my God, I have to check the whole house. I have to check the whole house every corner of the house. And they're like, bitch, I'm on the roof.

And you're like, you can get up to the roof? I didn't know you could get to the roof. I didn't know you could do that. So it's so exhausting. And then you fight the next person and you're like, oh my God, do I have to go get the ladder to check the roof? And they're like, nah, I'm hanging off the edge. I think the format also for Seed Ones like was like perfectly.

designed to like tilt us because like first round was I think what was it was it co-coach and Ced 1 right and then okay that's the the

some tough matches to start the day and then it's one and four which is a very fucking weird it's seed 1 and 4 is a weird fucking bracket to compete in because seed 1 is going nuts but you can't you can't just live on seed one.

You have to tag in. And then you're like, what are they got? And then invariably you have seed one versus seed four. And then seed four is new enough that they sometimes pull out stuff that shouldn't work because seed one is like, oh, who would do that? Who would do two supers and rock? Absolutely. Right? And then after that, after we've run fucking 10, no, we've run 10 sets, maybe 15 sets depending,

into the death pool with the primary coaches. Invert your brain. That's when I was like, oh, so long of matches. It was like, okay. And the different, go fight Sonic Fox, go fight cloud. Go fight super nude. The feeling of being the lynchpin anchor to hold the game down and then switching to being, just don't fuck it up for them.

Just don't just don't fuck it up for them immediately. Be a really good assist. Can you be a really good assist? Can you be a real. good assist for two straight rounds. Now let me ask you this, Pat. This is what I want to know about your experience. How about those fucking duos? How about playing this game duos?

Isn't that fucking different and crazy? It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it is a coin flip as to whether or not it's really good or really bad. So in neutral, like having a duo partner to, toss out a assist at like a slightly off timing to fuck people up and catch the like because I'm running thrash right so I'm doing his back assist to scoop up from full screen right so I'm just watching out what would be a really annoying time for the scoop to come out right being on duo for that fucking rules because that's my only job is to focus on when would be a really annoying time to do this in in the mix

duos can be out infuriating because I'm trying to help or my partner's trying to help and they push your your opponent out of the combo. Yeah. And save them with the assist. And I did that myself and I had that done to me. And when I did it to my partner, I was like, fuck. Fuck. I just lost the round.

I literally pushed the opponent to save me. It's crazy. It's crazy. I Yeah I That is the part of it So it feels like when you're playing with a duo Like it is

To me it feels objectively worse All the way up until the high level Where you're both perfectly drift compatible And then when you're both just Breeding each other's minds and doing everything In sync right When you got that like Sonic Foxxen-in-Zem Or the twins

Like when you're at that fucking You know that's when it surpasses all else right? However, however, no matter what level it is before that, it's always more hype. It feels so much worse, but it's always more hype. It's both at the same time. I had a really, really good experience with specifically duoes with Lotus and Sage, because they were both playing Ari and Ari's, I don't know what to call it. Is her backus, her fucking Vigida. Like DBFZ assist That thing just is incredible in all situations

Every game where you get that Amaterazu, Vigita, Ari, anything that's a diagonal fireball pin you down. Oh no, I beefed it. Don't worry. They came in to save me from my own mistake, right? And similarly, those two guys when I was doing Thresh's full screen back assist to scoop somebody up off like a, you know,

they'd be jumping in, you know, Sage would be jumping in and I would scoop the opponent and fuck up their 2H. And Sage would just pick the whole fucking thing up. Just like, oh, they got popped. Okay, here it goes. Bob, Bob, Bub, bump, bump. Bouncing off the fucking walls. And it's like, oh, that was guy.

No. And so that's the cool thing, too, is like, like, of course, with the coaches and that high level play is like, you're playing in a way where you're just like, fuck it. I'm godlike enough that even if you fuck me up, I have the reactions and skill to pick up your mistake and keep the combo going, you know? Yeah, what was it? K-7 just said. He's like, yeah, just throw it out.

Just throw it out. it's good. And if you hit them I'll pick that. There you get. I'll just grab it. And I'm like, okay. And he played Yasuo. So yeah, no, he could, he could just hit down H in the air and he would just grab anything and just scoop it up. Diaphone and Zane, same thing. You know, just like,

okay, that was not where I expected you to throw that out there, but we're rocking with it. It's okay, you know? Or use it to create a reset is the other thing, right? Where like, Zane using Ari, just be like, okay, pop them up with the tentacle. Try to get a hit in. Okay, didn't quite work. All right, it's fine. Dash crossover. It's a mix now. You know. Yeah, it's such a weird feeling. And so I know that like,

um, I feel that my level of confidence in this game and where I felt going into this was, I'm like, I feel like I know how to play two XKO. I feel like I know how to play. I know. I, yeah. And I feel like I could play this one. You know, I, I, I have some bread. and butters and some little tricks that I can do. And I'm kind of like, you know, I should probably go like rank to my proper to where I feel like I should, until I feel like hardlocked. I just haven't put the time in on that. But like, regardless of that, the moment you have little things like this where you're like,

oh, I cannot push block you out the timing that I want to because I'm so reliant on me learning when to push block by opponent and then blow them up for a certain thing. Or I can't do the bread and butters that I'm used to with, you know, Vi, Vi up front. and all that stuff. And like all these things that I super relied on get taken away from me. And I feel like I'm like I'm starting over again, you know? And this week for me has been like rebuilding from the ground up. With essentially taking the format for what it is and realizing that like, okay, this is duos.

This is what it is. And so I can do my best to not be like, I can do my best to be a good partner. And, like, I know where I have to brush up on the fuckups I've been making and stuff, but overall, I'm playing a lowy and trying to do, to use her strengths, which are not in neutral. I'm not fucking covering the screen like Ari or Thresh or Echo or any of those, you know. No, you're an obstacle. You're a piece of shit smearing up the screen. I'm here to support the team and to put the tentacles down. and fuck him up. There was a moment.

There was a moment. I forgot who I was playing with. And I'm like, this motherfucker's going to just double forward assist again. All day? Fucking first thing in the fucking round. And like, sure enough, here you come. And even though we're literally talking about how you're going to double forward

assist in a row, I think you and your partner still tagged us. So that's the thing too is what I'm playing by myself with her. I do forward assist into back. assist, get a little tentacle whip going, and then I do, I'm, yeah, get the whole, and then I do a left right, you know, but because I'm just, because I'm playing with another person, forward, forward, gives them enough time to just, like, see it, confirm it, and then take you to the corner, you know, and then a couple other things you have to kind of do to just be like, all right, I'm, we're working together. Don't try to go for the sickest high execution shit you can right now, do what's

reliable and what your partner can work with, you know? There was both, but I will say like what's sick is, um, in just kind of trying to, uh, uh, clutch things out where possible, we both made the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, two XCO Intel highlight reel on that. Um, yeah. So, uh, they're over on the, that account. They posted highlights from the, the, the, the, the, the main one going to, uh, box box with the sick, what if I would.

win. What if I win? Boxbox comes back with one pixel and takes out both characters in an insane, insane comeback story. Um, and that's the highlight of the, of the first night for sure. Can you, what, what's, what's that, uh, it's, it's two XKO Intel is the name of the account. Two XKO Intel. Is that like an underscore? I don't think so. I think it's all one word. Um, I'll figure. And then, uh, it's your clip of, um, what did you do? Um, what did you do? You just, yeah, you had a sick comeback. You had a little bit of life left. And you were fighting off like two other opponents at like, I think like half life or so. And you took them both out, right? And it was like, it was, yeah, it was a clutch. It was a clutch highlight. For me, it was me and Dethy in a match where I was in the middle of landing a happy birthday.

Oh, I remember this. Yeah, okay. Which match was that for yours? So it's me and V. No, wait, no, it's me and five. So it would be me and Zen. Where I had like a single fucking pixel. Yeah, and then you just brought it back.

And then the third one was me and Dethy, where I had a little bit of life left, and then I landed a happy birthday. And in the middle of doing the happy birthday, Dethy jumped in and did the super assist, which is not what I wanted. Right? And I went. But if that's obvious Like that makes sense as to why he would go Oh sure sure sure And like generally speaking

You know On comms it's been like hey When a combo is going Let's not interrupt But sometimes you're just like oh shit I thought it was blocking right Right yes So in the middle of doing the combo

He hits the super assist and it's Darius Headless blah And I'm like Oh fuck stop Improvise.exe Don't do anything wait Where are they in the corner Super tentacle boom

boom finish it off you know and I was like yeah okay you got to be ready for those moments after your partner jumps on to just be like that's not what I planned how can you clutch it um oh there it is oh I see I see you just going hmm wait wait yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of commos in this game or states that you have to use your fucking brain to not do anything like thrash when he does the box in the corner in the top right corner there's a there's a there's a a range where you have to wait for them to fall before headless or anybody's beam super

works because otherwise they'll they'll hold the whole super will go off before you fall. You know that champion is pretty fucking strong. Thresh. Thresh. Thresh is okay. Yeah. I was talking about this during the slam and I was like I can't like the choices of characters we've chosen

to bring into the slam are so emblematic of our personalities. Woolly goes okay, I've been playing Allowie. I've been playing Alawi the entire length of the game. I'm clearly the most comfortable with Alawi. I'm going to focus up on my strengths. And I'm saying,

man, a bunch of people don't know how to the unknown factory. Yeah, okay. A bunch of people don't know what the fuck they're doing against Thresh and they don't know how to deal with this bullshit. So I just have to get faster. Faster. Yeah, yeah, yes. To beat other people's match knowledge. And so you're focusing entirely on your

own strengths and I'm focusing entirely on other people's weaknesses. It's This moment now when the character is new is the time to take advantage of not knowing the matchup, absolutely. And like there's a couple parts of them that are bugged. Like the fucking hold lantern like S2, like teleport to deburse, that thing doesn't scale at all. Okay. Like it should be scaling in the end of long combos.

And the interesting thing about that too was like, I mean, you say that and I'm like, I am doubling down on my strengths, but also like I. I had an initial thing where I was like, okay, if I run Vi, like, I won't have the damage. It won't be as much of a support game. It'll be like two juggernauts on the team interchanging with each other. The other thing is a lot of people are playing. Right. Like you would have definitely had to also play in a... So there's that, there's that.

But like, really, I also am just going, oh, my Vi relies on her assist calls, a whole bunch. and the things that I don't want to be doing is her advanced like electric combos and then dropping them in the middle of a fucking competitive setting. I'm not fucking, that's my instant tilt, you know, is god damn it. I went for the harder thing and dropped it as a result. And then towards the end of the set yesterday, the night, I felt my brain leaking out of my ears. I straight up felt I'm like, oh my God, I'm tired. and there were moments where I'm like okay yo like I tagged in Gary and he's like I got you you know

and I'm just like I'm fucking dying right now this is crazy how exhausting it felt but overall it felt like Vy would have been able to get through some more of the zoning bullshit would have been able to get in your face and do the scary things like Box Box shows you know if

and Box Box plays a Vy that never does her S1 her plays a really weird vibe he never does the lunch punch right? He plays a really clean, just go for the mix in and out, Bob and Weave, and I love it. No, no, he plays, I'm gonna go over the fucking air throw. Yeah, absolutely. But he never,

he never does her main move, which is the lunge punch. He never does it, right? It's crazy. And so all this is like, it's tricky, but overall, yeah, personally I'm like, okay, I can be a way more effective teammates, like I said, with the tentacle wall, you know? and that's how that ended up happening. The other thing, too, I wanted to point out is that, like, with the team and, you know, our current lead and such, the coaches...

By the way, congrats on currently being number one points. Thank you very much. Congrats on your second place. Number two ain't bad. You know what? It must have felt... You must have had the exact same experience I did where, you know, round one ends. Everybody meets back in chat.

How'd everybody do? Four one. three, two, four, one, et cetera. And everyone's like, yeah, this feels really good. We had an experience that's actually not like that. We came back going, oh, man, okay, that didn't go as expected. We got, we got like half and half there. How did it go?

And we had the rest of the seeds going like, yep, light work. Wanted all of it. You know, and we're like, oh, fuck, let's go, right? And what was happening is that the coaches, Diaphone and Zane, who are fucking just goats, man. And, you know, Diaphone is someone who's like his channel and his tutorials and stuff. I've been watching forever and trying to fucking, I've been studying the notes on that. Yeah, I lost his Thresh guy.

There you go, right? They spent most of their time training the team more than with practicing with each other. They really put in that lab work, you know? And it shows, man. It's paying. It shows because you see how the team is doing as a, as a, a result of that. And so, you know, they're going to be locking in now and just fucking going

hard to play with each other to survive. It is the most... The God's here. Interesting thing about the format is that when you get your five or six players, okay, top players are already strong.

Medium players are already medium. New players are new. The best return on investment is get those new players up as high as they will go. Because they have the biggest gap that they can achieve in like one week. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And a little bit of knowledge goes so much

further in those seeds. Like you and me have been practicing here and there and like I picked up a couple tricks. I picked up like this or that. I now have like more consistent B&Bs, etc. But like I improved like what? 5%. Yeah. Like no. Somebody like Dethy or Zen can go from

child hitting the controller to oh shit, look at this. Um, I have, no, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I've learned a fuck ton. I've learned a fuck ton with the way this is going. But, like, that perfect, um, the most of what I'm working on is just, again, trying to overcome my whole thing where I have to, like, my repetition, I have to do reps to get good at something. I'm not, as opposed to just being able to clutch it out. Whereas someone like, Gary has all clutch and is like, never not ready, you know, and, uh, is just, just, you know, um, is just, in that perfect place to be on a duo because whatever is happening he can pick it up, he can take it to the corner he can reset it, he can figure it out, you know? It feels like Gary's the

fastest warwick. Like I don't know how to describe that. He just seems like he is literally always dashing. He's a Marvel player and he knows how to stagger the fuck out of you. That's what's going on. Yeah, yeah.

Marvel is his main game and you can see it in the way he moves and the way he resets and in the way he makes fucking growling noises while he's going in. And it's all heart, you know? And then what's funny too is the way you see like that shows when you're watching when you're watching his play style.

And then when you're watching Shine, who is a fucking God. Shine is absolutely a coach tier player in this seed. And like in Street Fighter, it shows that like you're like, this is a Street Fighter player. And you see it in the way he plays. you know, the identities

of the main games that people play comes through. I feel like, yeah, Shine is one of those ones where I'm like raising that eyebrow like, okay, if you say so on that seed, but I know that like, you know, again, depending on what game we're talking about, he's, you know, he's won a couple of events here and there.

A couple, yeah. So, like, for me, I'm just looking at this spreadsheet and I'm like, I'm always torn and maybe you've been torn about this as well this always like hurts me in my chest. It's like round robin is better. It is statistically more interesting. It has more matches.

It has more pairings and interesting matches that can happen across different skill levels and different brackets. It gives you a better idea of like where every individual person's strength is. So like, you beat me 3-1, but I won more sets. I don't know what that means. That's weird. You're better than me, right?

I, I mean, I think it means, I think it means that in duos with these characters, these are the strengths and weaknesses. Right. So, but you just get this crazy, huge. amount of data and it's super interesting. And I don't care. A bracket is better. A bracket is

better. And that's why I'm so thrilled that this is round robin into round robin into seeding data for a bracket on the third day. Right. Right. Because a bracket is elimination. It's double elimination.

It's just more exciting. It just is what it is. But I think this perfectly, this format that the slam has, you know, even reinventing itself and coming back. This is perfect for someone who's like, you know, a streamer that is interested in the game that doesn't know too much about, you know, playing and coming in, wanting to get more matches. And like, because there's multiple round robin days too, like they give you that first week

of like, hey, go coach, go learn, go play and practice, right? And let's say there's somebody that's on a team that's a big streamer, that is like not really is busy and is not really grinding or taking it too seriously, you know? They come into that first day. They end up feeling, oh, shit, that was a lot of fun. But also, man, I didn't pull my weight and I felt bad for like my losses. You get time to go back and practice and bring it back around again. And you have that chance to be like, oh, I see now what I was supposed to be doing during that training time, you know?

And that's because I know that these, a lot of, a lot of channels and a lot of people get invited to participate in events like this, but they kind of come and go, you know, here and there. And then it's, it's, you just kind of don't think about it again. But this gives you an opportunity to like come back around, you know. So for me, like it's, so I, for my training, you know, what I learned from yesterday, right? for myself, what I learn is, hey, fucking stop dropping shit and choking under pressure. That's my number one. And I don't like, I don't know how to train that other than go to day two, which is when the fucking, when Cloud 805 is fucking rushing you down is yes, well, don't panic. I don't, okay, fuck, I guess I'll try harder. And the second one is I needed more combos for when my lantern was already out. Because my lantern was already out and I tried the same B&B that I always did, it would drop because it's in the wrong fucking spot.

Hey, Pat. How's that lab? It is unfortunately necessary in this situation. You're fighting the best in the world. It's just... I'm fighting the best in the world on a timer, on a very... short timer. I don't care what your philosophy is, man. You gotta go hit the court and you gotta start. Yeah, when it's me versus ranked in the world in my chill hours, that's one thing. But when I'm

like, no, I have to win. No, I really do. You gotta go hit the court and you gotta land buckets. It's just what it is, you know? And, and, and you know, you can do so begrudgingly, but you still must do so. Yeah. Also, man, nobody has any kids. Because like everybody, like, at some point, people are roasted me for having, oh, yeah, I know you're a dad, but, you know, can you hit up the, the practice at this point? Look, we, the hoops that, because, you know what, how much time we have to practice this week, Willie? At 2 a.m. tonight and an hour before the event tomorrow. They, they don't know the insanity that, of what we're fucking ex-shell dancing through. It's, it's insane. It's madness. It's

Complete madness. And I'm like straight up like, okay, guys, hey, I'm on at any given moment, if my character stops moving, it's because there's a baby crying. That's because. Yep. And I'm going to fix it. Like Paige, Paige pre-cooked a week's worth of soup. Man. So that during any given situation, soup me up. Okay, I've been sued. Yeah. No, like they're in the, in the general chat, in the orientative. you know, mocking each other for being unks for being over 30. I'm just like, I'm like, can they hear the sound of diaper changes happening right behind me?

Listen, the important thing is that despite all that, we're not free against our other seeds in our, in our, you know, tier. That's what matters. What matters is not like, so there's the two, there's the two goals. One, when, obviously, win. That's the number two, don't embarrass yourself. Don't, don't embarrass me. Yep, it's that, right?

It's that it's that old fucking soprados wife's style just like, don't embarrass me out there, all right? If you're not going to pull your weight, that's one thing. But don't get me killed. And I can unfortunately say that I managed to get the coaches killed at least twice yesterday. I absolutely there's one that I remember I used Thresh's Ford assist and I just pushed them out of a fucking Yasuo comma and I was like oh I we just died I just killed

okay so I had such a bad one and it was just comms it was just comms because we were talking to each other and this is the other part is like getting used to the to the communication right some people were constantly talking with like me and Deithy are talking constantly um me and Diaphone it's like medium me and Zane pretty much silent, right? Yeah.

But there's a moment where it was like, essentially, I said something to the effect of like, he had burst and I said, and I had super assist. I was dead. And so I said, let me know when. Right. And I was talking about burst because it was like, when do you want me to pop this on your next touch? Or do you want me to save it for the end? Yeah, right, right, right.

And that, I'm not specifying, he thought I was talking about super assist. And just like that, I fucking popped the burst at the wrong time and completely just threw the game away. And it felt awful. I don't know who, I think it was with K7 and he was like mixing somebody up in the corner. And he's like, okay, when they get up, use Thresh's multi-hit assist. and so the problem is the both of Thresh's assists hit twice and multiple times

and so despite the fact that he was in the corner and he wanted block pressure and I should have known that I used the back assist which caused a happy birthday yes so okay this is the other thing too where game knowledge means that if you're seeing a character that you don't play

you'll still be able to say things like, okay, when I use my 6S2, you do this, right? And like, and I'm, and that's the thing is like, do you know the rest of the cast's success two? No! So then, yeah, yeah, so then you have to describe the thing. I've never played Vi once in this game. Right, right, right.

I was describing how, like, um, Jinks has a really fast round start that beats something that I was doing. And I said, I said her hammer. And I'm, and it's like, wait, no, it's not the hammer. Oh, that could be a lot of things. It's not the hammer. It's the rocket shoot that she does. But I was just like, yeah, and I'm like, I don't, I legit.

I'm like, I don't know what the input is on her thing because I didn't fucking look. But that's it. That's 100%. It's game knowledge, you know. That being said, day one was a blast. Really, really cool. Yeah. And I want to say, too, as well, really, really fun.

I saw comments where some folks were saying, my fun, RPOV, my stream was like fun to watch because Reggie was there for, like, commentary with chat while. Absolutely. He was there to hold the controller while you went in the bathroom. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. In the help desk when I was like, hey, is this cool? And you're like, oh, I see what's going on. Big bro's growing grabbing the controller. And I'm like, yo, hit him with the Snoop Dog. Hit him with the Snoop. Yeah. Hit him with the snoop though. Yo, just have me lighten up, lighten up while the combo's going. Fucking Joseph Joe Star. Let's go baseball shit. But, but like, straight up in there, like, most people, most of the time, folks are streaming and you're in there and like you might be quiet playing or you might be zizzix just growling and

going nuts but like having someone to just like you know do the do the commentary talk over and something is a fun watch too so that's a lot of fun um great day one so far and uh yeah let's see let's see how the rest of the week goes we pulling out that fucking subway slammer baby we pulling them out it's so funny that escape containment i'm explaining what the i'm explaining what i'm explaining to members on my team. I'm like, okay, so you know persona. Okay, so there's P5 and then there's a mobile game with P5. And in that game... Did you see

SK's match for Biggest Blender? No. What happened? So I forget the teammate, but she waited too long to do the tag swap on point and she ended up just raw tagging her teammate

in after round start and he just instantly died. And then she got a perfect by herself against the opposing team. So it's both the biggest blunder and up for biggest combat. Holy shit. I made that mistake once in training. But like, fuck, that's insane.

Yeah. The like holding swat switch sit down thing. And okay, this is actually like, that's a blunder. But I'm going to blame the system on this. and Riot needs to fix this. I feel like it's not consistent if it's a tap or a hold or when it comes out. It is a hold, but it doesn't matter in the sense that like you want to switch on the point for like a moment of like mix up, right? In previous games like Marvel versus Capcom, you would hold it on the character select screen, right, and change your order there.

Or Capcom versus S&K2 for example. Hold on. Excuse me. And so what would happen in what the problem with 2XCO right now with this exact issue is when we sit down as a duo versus a duo on the cabinet, we can't choose whether we are sitting sitting down in anchor. Like you have to sit in the particular seat, which isn't always perfect. And just let us on the character select screen swap who's playing point. Squeen. Yeah. Let us swap who's on point and who's anchor while you're picking your characters.

it seems like such a weird oversight that you're stuck in that position. It's a little strange. Or when you go in, put that little screen in where your controllers go one over or two over, you know? It sucks because, you know, instead now, for every set, I'm holding down the swap action on the round start. And it's like, this is easily fixable with the game having an option. Yeah, for my purposes, what we ended up doing is that we would base it on the other team. pardon me, if the higher seed was starting, our higher seed was starting. If their lower seed was starting, our lower seed was starting.

Right, okay. No point in having someone to get melted. I feel like it is, I feel like you're opening up someone to die by sending in seed three against the coach as the round. Yes, yes. If you, again, coach diff, it's just what it is. If you don't have the setups, if you don't have the knowledge that you're going to hold it. But can you survive in the middle of the round? long enough to like get some good shit going, do some damage, let them heal up, get clutch,

and then bring them back in. That's what matters, right? That was cool. Yeah, I'm also, I have to say, I'm glad that my, I'm glad that my super parry into level three dash forward was right when Sejem was watching on the, on, that was on the big event. So, uh, So day one's in the bag, went really well. Well, I'm very happy with how day one went. And I'm sure you guys are very, very happy with how day one. Couldn't be happier with the team. Personally, all I see is my shortcomings.

Yeah, that's how it is. For me, for me, I'm like, I didn't embarrass myself in the continuity of my team's performance, right? And it's like, nobody, just nobody wants to be. the weakest person in their seat. You don't. You don't. You don't. On their team.

Yeah. Right? It feels bad. It sucks. Feels bad. Hey, that's where I'm sitting. Feels bad. You are not the weakest person in your seat.

Well, I mean, by stats, you know? So, oh, statistically. So that's why we're going to get those brackets going. So, yeah. Wednesday is going to be more round robin for more points. for more points than the first day, and then that will be used as the seating data. But it looks like, Wully, if everybody advances at the same rates and performances are the same, we might be meeting in grand finals.

Maybe. Maybe. But that is a theoretical possibility. But points are worth more on the second day, and people are coming for our heads because we are higher up, so it makes sense. Well, some people are going to, there are a couple people. that are like box his people are going to come yeah yeah yeah and and

Froden and Dethy are going to have their tapes being played to an audience and Gary as well like make no mistake that our teams are absolute targets for you know tech and and blowing up because every time someone wins on us it's denying the lead a point right it's an important play

yeah so strategically it makes sense to focus on taking down our our teams um yeah I also I want to give a shout out to Dezia for making me the most, like, pissed off of any person that I fought the whole day.

I fought her a lot. Like, she's also in Seed one with us. So I fought her four times and every single time we're like, God, fucking damn it. This jinx is so fucking annoying. Oh my God. So that's what

Elawi is struggling against zoners all day. And that's... I have an anti-soner and I'm still struggling with her... And I like, for everything, for every one of those moments of like tentacle bliss that you're seeing where you're just like, oh my God, this super is fucking insane. Oh, no. Yeah.

I got caught in that corner a couple of times. Like, I guess I'll... I guess I'll die. Everyone can get cooked by it. Any coach, anyone in that bracket, all the players can get cooked by the tentacles. That's... Is there still not like a guaranteed way out? Because I remember it was like wait for the tentacles.

to fire off once and then push block it. Not if I don't fuck up. If I don't, if I'm airtight, you're holding it, right? But the, just hold it for 10 seconds or however long, right? And then if I bring in someone who can, who can hold it down better while it's going, then that's all the more. But the, um, the flip side of that is when I'm getting zoned out, trying to make my way across with chains and bullets and shots and fucking everything coming at me,

Elawi's not Her strength is not there You know I can wreck it through some of them And pray For some good assist coverage So I'm going to play to be my best teammate You know Beyond that

That's not the only thing That we got to talk about this week Oh there's actually a fair amount of stuff To talk about this week So I would say that Hello World Meet Joe Guns Joe Guns

I gotta ask you Where did Joe guns the name come from? I just, shit, I just thought about, is, is it literally just, I just thought about a cool name like Josephine or something like that? Joe, for short, I always thought that was fun. I like that. I think it's nice. And then, yo, check these guns out. That's it.

She's going to punch shit. That's it. Okay. And, uh, I'm glad that, hey, guess what? She's a hit. Turns out a lot of people are saying things like, I've never seen a design. design like this with this face and this type of race. So the character creator is not powerful, but you have an uncommon,

you have an uncommon race with the least chosen face option. Awesome. Most people tend to go for the very humany, like very normal looking face options with an uncommon color palette that matches the default costume particularly well. Like A plus. also I've been told to suggest that you should have a woolly art tag on your social media so that Hina and Hina and Ecto and the girls

they told me yo get a got a fucking art tag and I'm like okay and then I did it and then everybody just started retagging all of their shit together because I've been sending you all the art that I can find there's much of Joe Guns okay um that's a really so not not like hashtag Joe Guns but like hashtag Woolie versus Art or something like that. Hashter. Like mine is mine, I got really lucky. Mine's is Pat Stairs Art. Oh, nice, okay.

Which is very, like, that's that's, that's, Wully Farts? That's right, yeah, Wully Farts. Yeah, do that one. That's the one. Hashtag Wally Fart. All right. We'll figure one out there. We'll get one going. Wully versus Art might be, it might be the deal. That's, you know what?

Man, that also perfectly works. The, I, something that only It only happens every once in a while, but like when you do hit a really fun character creation and you start to see it flowing in, it's always fun, right? So the two peaks have been the Cotor

and Mass Effect characters, right? Pockets, fanny pack, and then Red and Blue Shepard have been massive fan art hits. And then the second one were the Docapawn characters. were just big, big, you know, art moments. So this is now a really, I got to say, you know, in terms of like giving me positive associations with the experience so far, you know, as far as the seeds go,

fan art is fucking, that's a tasty little, little berry inside of the little, inside of the seeds. I'm like, ooh, look at this fan art, yo. Some sick, like, fucking cat girl or hroff gal, hoth gal. Rothgal, because cat girl is a different thing. Indeed. You got two types of cat people.

Okay, I don't... Sexy cat people and dangerously cheesy cat people. Here's something that sounds fun. I don't know if this is real or not, but I'll credit Exodus the soul banish for the following comment. Ironically, there is a well-established lore character in the Hrothgar that was their reigning queen, Gun Hill Deer. So technically, we could be looking at a... Jolene Gunhill Deer as the warrior of light.

Yeah, absolutely. So I can be Joe Gunnildeer as a full last name and Joe Guns for short. Run it. Canon. Canon. Why not? Joe Gunhill Deer is her full name and it's Gunnardtier is her full name and it's Gunn's for short. Done.

Yeah. And then that lines up with gun breaking actually. Ah. That's like the genesis of the Gunbreaker class. That's super cool. Which is the, you know, Squall Gunblade thing. fun. Yeah, so 14 has been

going and we're going to come back to that this Thursday. That's Thursday. The only day of the week. Literally. Because the fucking slam and everything else is taking it. Yeah. And so we set things up and, you know, there's a lot of customization going on there.

After you, so you gave me that initial, like, here's a bunch of shit to know going in that I used. Like, you know, how, well, you want to do your interface like this or the the fucking the the frame rate fucking fucks your stream up if it's over 60% 60 frames um then min came over and just sat down and like showed me he's like okay here's the level of customization you can put up and stuff and it's a lot it's crazy so i was able to further refine some things so it's like even if i put names on or off i can set the resolution so make it so that the names themselves are smaller when they do appear for example

um having the little um icons for my items being broken or not broken. Like, I don't need that in that place, moving it away, you know. And it's, it's just like the decade plus of feature creep in terms of like literally every detail. It is a lot. The one that I found really cool was like the different chat boxes. So I have it set up now so that like I have a main box that is filtering out everybody except for people on my friends list. and then I have a second box above that

that's just NPC dialogue so that I can quickly read back if I need to if something pops Yeah if you miss that ideal That's how I'm like that's perfect you know And then even just like the things like it's like oh yeah Like you can set up a cross world link shell and these things Cross world link shell is very useful for our highly specific purposes

Which is you want to get Mothman and man and me And creepy porpoise and some of my people like Val in there for general like does anybody want to do this i'm coming up on this does anyone want to because there's a huge like second ring of and no matter what server they are on they can jump in to do an event okay yeah the the the biggest downside to the cross a whirling shell is it caps out at 64 so like it's it's objectively like not useful for a whole lot of things but it is useful for this. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.

Okay, so yeah, stuff like that I'm gonna be figuring out as well, even though being on a free trial account, I can't set it up, but I think he can and, you know. I can set it up, he can set it up. Yeah, free trial account has all, everything the free trial can't do is because they don't want bots to harass people.

Which like, yeah, that makes sense. But once you pay, your free is over. So, that's the, the dance we do. Once you pay, once you pay, your friends can just give you things. But what, hey, did you get the, did you get the free trial so you could play FF14? Because all your friends play FF14? Well, you know, if you paid for a subscription and bought the game, your friends could just give you 10 million gill and all the items that you would ever want and all the glamour items that you can ever want to make your character look certain. But as soon as that happens, of course, then they're

going to fucking, they're like, oh, Square knows that you have money. Okay, hold on a minute. You know, let's see what we can get going. Yeah, free trial is done for you. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. For us up, Dethy. I see he's in the chat over there. Yeah, I see, hey, Dethy, how you doing it? What's going on? Hey, guess what?

Montreal. Yeah. Isn't that sick? From Montreal. That's crazy. So, you know, I mean, whether or not, I mean, you're going to see more of Dethy in a minute. Whether or not he knows it or yet, you know.

I don't want to, I don't want to see. I had enough Diffy during the fucking slam, okay? Deffy, I got this. Seed for Miami. Quotes quote unquote yo every single time no matter what the situation. I got this. Don't worry. Headless.

So yeah, FF14. I guess the other thing too is getting the look of, okay, I will admit for the gameplay, for the controller hood, like things are big and those spells at the bottom are like these fat, massive things taking up the whole screen. Those could be... And they have the names on it. So what I do for my cross hot bar is I make it like half the size of what it starts and I turn off all the names

because I know what all those icons means. Yes. Right? Because when you start the game, they're all on. They actually cover your fucking character in half of the game situations. Yeah.

So we got a better resolution going for that too as well. So yeah, overall, I think Thursday, we'll see how things go a little bit smoother. And hey, I feel like level 0 to 15 on a bonus server in one sitting. It ain't bad. That feels like it's moving. It's not bad. Now, there's two things about that.

One, you're not up to level 15 in the story. You're actually outpacing it dramatically. Oh. Right? So what they're so because of the bonus server shit. Like, right? And they've made it super fast. So what ends up happening is you're going to go into like a level.

level 15 dungeon at like level 21. And you're going to be like, why can't I use all my stuff? It's like, because the dungeon caps at 17. Right? It doesn't want you to go crazy on it. But that means that there will be no point that you have to be at, oh, damn, I got a fucking, I got a, you know, when you're playing through the new expansion, sometimes there can be like an awkward level. Like between 55 and 56, there's actually like a gap that the main story won't. cover. So go fucking do something. But the way that it works nowadays, particularly since you're

on Dynamist, yeah, you're going to fly up that level. The other thing is that that road to 90 buff only lasts 90 days from the day you started. Oh, the star? Not in game time. The server star buff? Yeah. Oh. We'll last on you for 90 days. Oh, you have to do it in three months. Yeah. Don't, dude. Oh, well, they Ow, they fucking set you up to no life this game, bro. Okay, so here. Oh, my God. It's so devious.

Brennan hit like, I think 70, whatever in like a month. I think he got to Shadowbringers. I don't know if you're familiar with an artist that follow us, Simsy Fart. He got to the end of a Realm reborn in between last week. stream and yesterday. Fuck. Right? Like, so, but by the math, by the numbers, progression-wise, right?

Could you say that if I go one to 15 with one sitting, then that means that I can go 15 to 22 in a second sitting? Yes. And then we divide by two every time. more or less yeah more or less what's going to happen is that if you get to the end of a realm reborn and you do the 50 quest

called a realm reborn so it's one of the things I love about the game is that the final quest of any given game or patch is the name so when you get to the quest a realm reborn it's like there that's it that's the finish line you're going to be like

level 60 you're gonna you're gonna fly past that shit. And the thing is, is that ultimately I have to say, like, right now, especially not knowing anything about this, I'm like, I don't really care about the number. I just care what the number lets me do or not do. Yeah, the number will allow you to do more things, period.

All right. So, yeah, that'll be Thursday. The tour of the FGC retirement home slash get out of fighting games to get into FF14. Yeah. So right now you're in the midst of what I would call introductory MMO tutorialization. The next show on Thursday, we will be getting you into what I would consider the plot. Ah. Like the actual...

Fancred. Like gut of it. Yeah, what about thank you? Some guy. I like him. I don't like him. Fuck him. But he's all right.

It's complicated. Very few opinions. It's weird because I've known this character for like 13 fucking years. I actively don't have opinions on much of anything yet. I collected some bare asses and called it a day. I was going through some of the comments, and I saw somebody actually explain what the game is in a way that I have not been able to,

which is that 14 is two games. One is eight-person co-op, rabbit, and steel. yes which is your raid environment you're the the the the fucking do the math

do the polka run your rotation thing and the other thing is like a fairly old fashioned like large environment traditional JRP which ranges everywhere

from mediocre to some of the best stuff that Square Annex has ever put out right and and it's one and then the other staple that

end and then one and then the other stapled at the end. And I know that you want this whole experience to happen so that I have better context for your podcast conversations. No, I want this to happen because it's a fucking kick-ass stream and it makes everybody

happy. Of course. Right. That goes without saying. It doesn't hurt that this fucking 6,000 people showed up. I don't know, man. It doesn't hurt. But No, it doesn't hurt.

But the part that I have gotten from outside of here, outside of this show, with people I know that play it, is mainly, it's not, hey, Woolly, come join this social experience available for free, up to Shadowbringers, et cetera. I think that's a huge ask. It's the, yo, this story, this lore, the plot of this game is actually fucking amazing if you can get to it. Yeah. So there were stuff that happened in you in that very first stream. I don't know if you overheard me. I went, oh, wow, I completely forgot about this. Something about the flashback.

Yeah. And like, and the reason I forgot about it is that they pulled from that like nine years later. Okay. And I was like, I did not even correctly interpret. Like that they, that was even a callback. I was like, I, and so I'm, I'm, I'm, looking you go through it. I'm like, wow, they actually did call their shot to some degree on this. That's crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's always, you never, I feel like it's, you can tell when

something is pulling from the past because it always intended for it to be this way, versus we just improvise some bullshit. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. They say they planned it all out. I don't know. You can feel the sloppy versions versus the elegant version. No, but like some of it, they nail it really hard. And I'm like, I don't know if you plan that. That, mm, you nailed it, though. I mean, like, like, you know, I talk about, I talk about, um, the basement.

We talk about the basement often enough. Yeah, the basement. As a really great one. But it wasn't, but if it was just the basement, it would be like, okay, that was awesome, but it could be a fluke, right? But Attack on Titan also has things like the town crier, the madmen, right? The town crier and the priests and the madmen are super telegraphing from way the fuck far out before anyone gets anywhere in that story. You know, and it feels intentional.

You know what else is really nice? I'm looking at the newest, but 35 minutes ago, one quiet Viking is making an all right. and complaining about the character creator. The wonderful gentleman who made my get out of fighting games to intro. I had to walk him through a bunch of that intro because he didn't know anything about the game.

And look at this. He's in the character creator. I've been getting that shit all the week. Okay. She's going fine. Fine. Yeah, yeah. posting a photo of like their character in the starting area. People are finally giving. I was, I broke the will and spirits of many. It was you. Well, if I doesn't know

anything about MMOs can get it. fucking, and give it a go, why not? It's free. Mothman came back from the ether to see what was going on. It was crazy. Yeah. And on top of that, too, like, some people were like, wait, like, basically, some of the people I know that play socially were talking about how, like, the characters that are, like,

you can get characters that look and have sick things going on with that game, but you've got to get mods going. Yeah. Right. It seems. Yeah. Which is against the rules. And you can only see them on your side.

And you shouldn't do it. But if you're streaming and you have mods going... Then you're cooked as soon as someone reports it. Right. Okay, okay, okay. Because it's against the rules. Got it. So that's why some people have had their entire statics band over a screenshot with a pixel

designator for their hitbox. Because that's against the rules. Sure, sure. I So Cosmetic versus actual cheating Is two different things But

Nope It's against the rules So if you really wanted to Which you shouldn't You would use two separate launchers One for streaming And the other for not streaming But then you run into the risk

Of turning on the Not for streaming one While streaming So So my advice to you would be don't break the rules. Watching my old roommate on World of Warcraft 3, running all the mods to get his like UI and hot bars and stuff,

there is an entire... Absolute kryptonite to me. Absolute kryptonite. Oh, did Dan talk about this? Why is it rude to be bad at Warcraft? Yes, Dan did talk. talking about. Folding Ideas has a video called Why It's Rood to Suck at Warcraft.

And it is an hour and a half feature film describing the long-term nightmare that wow modding got into where it became a insane arms race between encounter is tough.

Okay. Well, what you're supposed to do is download the mod that shows you where to stand and what time to hit your buffs. so the encounter becomes easy. Okay, well, now, because everyone's using these add-ons, because add-ons are absolutely supported throughout, now we have to make encounters that are difficult even with the add-ons. So here comes add-ons that tell you where to stand.

Here come add-ons that tell you what gear to get beforehand. All right, well, now we... And so on and so forth. And so when you're like, hey, I want to play a raid, and you do it and you don't do it perfectly because you don't have a robot in your ear telling you what to do. People are like, what the fuck?

You just cost us the fucking thing. It's a fucking mess. It's like legitimately a nightmare. That sounds horrible, man. In a multiplayer context, especially like this. Because I see some people trying to give me shit right now even like being like I don't like, that just sounds like shit I don't want to do

where you're saying, hey, get into this and immediately you've got to mod it to shit to make it functional. like I don't do not mod final fantasy 14 it's not just against the rules it is unnecessary yeah I don't like the sound of this for this type of experience mind you you know yeah um like there are things where it's like okay we're going to be playing mass effect we're going to do some goofy LP shit and we're going to get different uh shepherds going whatever fine run it right ultimately asana set it up and goes here drop this folder there and go but yeah drop But in this type of context with wow, I just remember like, yeah, I was watching my roommate play.

And I just remember being like, yeah, I, this is something that is not drawing me in with the fact that there's a bunch of shit in the background as well that is being held together with duct tape and twine, you know. There's also like a long history of FF14 mods crossing the line into like psycho behavior. DPS counters. So one, no, no, no, I mean psycho behavior. Um, like, not like annoying toxic gamer shit. I mean like, okay, so you installed your big teddy food a mod to make your character look a certain way. But because it replaces certain, uh, character model, like it just swaps them out, you're now taking photos of other people's characters with the mods you put on them and sending them to them. Fucking don't do that.

Yeah, okay, okay. And there was also, there was also a mod that, like, like, tracked your fucking account ID. So even if you changed your name and changed your, your, your shit, they could still, like, e-stalk you. And it's like, no, fucking, God damn it. You can't stop them from fucking making bimbo jo guns, you know?

Like, it's just going to. You can't stop them, but don't do it. Be quiet. That's, that's it. Like, Yoshi people put out like a. statement that was like Square inix has mandated that these are against the rules but also hey how about you guys shut the fuck up and do your dumb bullshit in private and stop posting it on message boards and streaming it um simplest thing in the world yeah but you know what's better than all of this willie you know what's the best you know what my favorite part of all of this is is checking out the fucking anime villains in your youtube comments writing Manifestos, dog. It is my favorite thing.

I have had such a fucking blast reading these dudes. They are so mad, dude. It's crazy. So here's where the deal is. For me personally, I'm not taking anything seriously, as you can see by this whole bit. And I'm just, I'm going through it. and I've many a time have said like,

I've made it not a secret that if I could turn people off with a button, I would press the button, right? So just let it be known, however you're feeling about this, that like if I could go beep and make you go away, which apparently there are ways to do, but anyway, regardless.

Yeah, anyway, whatever. But what, no, no, no, but here's a thing. I don't disagree with people in my chat and in the comments who are wishing that things, were more chill. I don't disagree with the people that want the experience to be more calm and not as insane and not as ridiculous and over the top

and, you know, a lot of that stuff. Like those people, I completely I get that. I totally agree. What I think though, I think that the extremes of Sephiroth posting Yes. Did you come up with that? No, no, but that was whatever the, with the music on the thing.

Yeah, that sounds nuts. It's fucking wild, dude, right? with the right but and and but allow me to say that equally as nuts are the people that are like calling me an asshole for not entitling them to some kind of like overwhelming greeting ritual in a game that I'm learning about oh yeah no right silly like there's some people came through made new like accounts to just be mad that like hey they were waiting in the line

popping champagne and I didn't run through it how and like I'm such an asshole and you're like that was the funniest thing you could have possibly done Okay, bro. Like, you're in the wrong place. You're, you're, you've been logged in a little too long, and you're on the wrong channel if you don't understand that that's the energy you're going to get the whole time here. I don't know what to tell you. There's a term for this.

And it goes beyond parisocialism. It's specific. I don't know if it's specific to 14, but it's definitely present there. It's called a dopamine vampire. It is somebody who is ringed out all the dopamine they can get, because they've just played it so much. And the only way they can get it is watching me do the intro to End Walker. Doing, but doing it the same thing.

Right, yeah. It has to, because it has to be the same. Yeah. Whatever that is, it's like you've got to watch them do that. Yeah, that. It is, it is. And those extremes are batchet. Necrosis, right.

what happened because we were at the top of the 14 streaming during the time we streamed it that is where all the vampires came in because we were the number one for quite a while during that afternoon the vampires that go I need to see somebody play god I don't know who I don't know who they are I don't know why they're on Kukulin but um I'm going to go over there and sell my I need the juice erotic role play services. Yes. Yeah. Also, when you're just,

there's little moments, too, of just like, when you're like, yeah, bro, if you look behind you, and I'm like, I'm booking it down Main Street in the cabber pans,

and it's just like, R. Swarm. Now, I think somebody pointed out, you could actually turn down the amount of characters displayed in, like, the technical options.

So that, like, that's for performance, but you could use it to just turn that the fuck down. It's weird because, like, I'm the kind of person who's like

I want to see things in the games I'm playing so there's a part of me that does like I don't like turning it off but I know anyway it's weird there's a weird push there's a weird push and a weird push and natural and I'm realizing that I'm realizing that

and so I'm torn between like wanting to know what part of this game and experience and even the madness wanting to know about the madness but also going all right I guess my, and here's my preference for how this is going to flow.

And I have to kind of like make a call on that right, right, right now I can see, but I'm still going to just feel this out. I don't know. Someone suggested play with a larger stream delay so that people have it a harder time. I don't know if that would work. That being said, the swarm will dissipate over time. It'll never go away. And at the end of the day, but cutscenes and dungeons are instanced.

just pushes them. And that's all that really matters, right? Yep. So, there you go. So there's a little 14 update. So yeah, Thursday, we're going to be going back to that. What else wills? Aside from getting into MMOs and also getting into fighting games again. Also, like once fucking Thursday's done, it's like time to fucking jump back over to the slam, you know, and see what the fuck's going on. So, yeah. Every single stream I have this week is titled Get Out of Fighting Games to some degree.

Yeah, some version of it. Yeah. I'm just, I'm slamming all over the place. I have progressive thumbnails for the, for the slammer coming. And, you know, what big dog, wet dog memes can we get going with Gary? You know? Yeah. Don't tell them what I said about it at the end of my stream yesterday.

Let me. No. What? Tell me about the big top. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Okay. Okay.

So, do you remember when everyone overhyped Rockley versus Gara, and it was the only thing that actually delivered on the overhype in the history of fucking. Absolutely. Yeah. No, I understand. Right? You're like, You all overhyped this, and when I watched it, it delivered on the overhype.

It wasn't enough. You actually undersold it, right? Yeah, yeah, 100%. Everyone talking about how bad Turnabout Big Top is in Phoenix Wright 2, Justice for All, nonstop all day as we played it, we're just going on about how horrible, how this is the worst case in the game. It's the worst case in the series. You undersold how bad it is.

Okay, so here's the thing. It is the worst case in the series. I think that is a factually true statement. What people telling you that, what doesn't get across, is that it's like more than like twice as bad as the second worst case in this series. Like, I, like, it's the only one I can think off the top of my head of, wow, that case is fucking terrible. And you know what the cherry on top is? When I asked musingly to the air,

what do the developers of this game have to say about this? Because surely they must know how people feel about it all this time later. To only hear back from everyone, Shue Takumi in interviews has said that it's his favorite case in the series. That's so, that's... Isn't that psychotic? Isn't that deranged? That's wild, dude.

It's the most deranged thing you could have told me as a little cherry on top to this case. So we finally finished it after all this time. And I mean, it took three, maybe four grueling sessions. I forget how long. But it's a big chunk of the episode so far. Every part of it is awful. The characters are awful. The story is awful.

The twist is awful. So right away, you're like, okay, we're going to the circus. This can be really annoying or fine, depending on how you feel about clowns or whatever. Sure. You're going to be a bunch of clown characters and circus characters and stuff, and that's fine. But that's what you would expect. You know, immediately you're like, okay, here's this. And then you're like, okay, some of these are annoying, right?

This girl is pretty annoying. this ventriloquist not great and then you have the little the weird factor of going oh god damn it she's 16 and everyone's like running after her right this is just like product of time

and bad it's a GBA game was made in 90s back when that was in phone unfortunate product of time means that everyone here is just chasing after the 16 year old and like later on in

the case when new characters get introduced, they're also chasing after her. There is a, like, last, it was the style. There is a last minute character that gets introduced in the case that's also going after her. And he looks her age, but they instead just said, no, actually, he's in his mid-20s. And, like, you didn't have to do that, or his early 20s, rather. You didn't have to do that. You could have just said they're the same. Like, there's nothing. He looks young. You know? No, it doesn't have to do that. The length of the investigations in this case are infuriating.

They're really long because it's the third case out of four, right? So it's crazy long. It takes forever to scrape through every room of the fucking tent and the, uh, yeah, da, right? And you're, you're pushing through because you're like, okay, you know, the investigation pacing of this and eventually you find things. Plus, the new mechanic with the psyche locks is slowing. it down even more. Whatever. Holy shit, when you get introduced to the anti-gameplay, that is like, the clowns have their own rules. And the rule of clown is do not press their statements. If you press the

clown statement, you take damage. I completely forgot about it. And you're like, well, hold on a minute, Wully, isn't pressing statements the entire mechanic of the game? It's like 80%, 90%. Why, yes, actually, it is. Pressing statements and then presenting the correct evidence. And now you go, no, stop playing the game. And these are all jokes. Just go into the hard evidence and just make wild accusations.

Cool. All right, fine. The logic of the game is just should be... This is going to be real trial and error. So it was annoying doing that and hitting the thing where the game said, hey, stop playing me, right? All of this is just we're like fucking rubbing our eyes and just getting so drained on the case. And like, you know, the voices we're having fun with because it's fun to do some clown shoe shit and it's fun to do some, you know, all these different characters or whatever. Me and Reggie are having a blast with that part at the very minimum.

And then the actual twist occurs in the case, dude. and like, I, for all the things I was telegraphing, it could be. And then I'm like, no wait, think about it being dumber because this is a Phoenix Wright case, right? So I'm ready for, and I'm going to spoil Big Top in description, obviously here. It's a fucking super old game. All right. I was very, very ready for two things. Oh, can you give me a second?

BRB. Okay. So I'm going to spoil. Big Top. Oh, no. I was ready for the case to be a one where you have a perpetrator who is actually different from the others because he doesn't panic and he has no tell pixel. He has no like crack frame, which I think is really cool.

I like the idea of someone who's just like stalwart and believes in what they've done and is trying to get off but doesn't have the guilt at. or at the very least is not showing the insanity that we've gotten from everyone else so far, right? Right, where they have this massive generational crash out. Love that about that. And I was ready for them to have a pretty elaborate sequence where, you know, they got a statue, they got a rope, they got a cape, and then they did this big bong and pulled it all back up, right? They committed a sky crime and then yeat and then everybody saw something that they couldn't explain.

and then that was the end of the night, you know? And like, but then you're like, wait, but that doesn't explain the cape and the placement and all that stuff. And so you're trying to use everything you can. You're like the weather, the when Mo woke up. And then the game has the whole thing it always does, which is bluff until you figure it out, right? You're not supposed to know, so bluff and then Phoenix will. Fake until you make it. Yeah.

Phoenix will turn about. right and it has the cutscene of the fucking statue dropping bonking him of the victim on the head and then you see the cape go and land in the most insane cartoonish way possible and it's like that stupid fucking sequence was supposed to be one that we were going to infer in any way shape or form, fuck this whole thing. Like, you wasted our time with the worst characters, the worst gameplay, the most annoying sequence,

the shit won't end, the whole time the creeps are showing up out of the woodwork, and you're like, dear God, just get this fucking thing over with. And when it finally comes down to it and the gameplay is being taken away from you,

they have the gall to make the thing you couldn't figure out and piece together a complete loony tunes moment in a game where you are expect some level of Looney Tunes? Yeah.

I fucking went. I walked. I walked. I hit the, I got up. I had to take five. You know? I had to take five. Like, we both just needed to stand up on that. It fucking sucks, dude.

It's not good. And it's so bad that it actively makes me hate the entirety, the entire IP of Phoenix Wright more for its existence. Knowing now that the next case is going to bring it back and that there's going to be other good shit coming, I'm in for the long ride, but this drags down the average and it feels bad. So the worst part about this discussion is that you're completely right, but that next

case is pretty great. Okay, okay. The stinger was cool. The stinger was very cool. I don't want to. to overhype it, but it's pretty great. So it's, you'll never forget your time at the big top. Okay.

But the Stinger, it'll make it hurt less. The Stinger was phenomenal, and it felt really good to see it. But I will, like, there was a moment in Big Top where, like, I don't know, somewhere in the crash out, I had a, I had a feeling that I had to explain, which was, I'm, I'm playing this like on stream and you know experiencing it and we're going through this and I'm and I'm I'm feeling it but there's always a level where when things are being insane and horrible I'm I'm able to laugh at it from a content creation perspective sure like oh this is so right and you know what bird demic trash shit and to be on I will credit the old channel I'll credit best

friends and everything from the past with when when we came in to bugs and bullshit because of our because of our QA background especially where finding a bug is awesome we would celebrate those moments whereas other channels would be like

oh oh oh that wasn't supposed to happen whoops sorry everybody let's restart it and you're like no look at it look at the shit it's so bad get a fucking magnifying glass out write that bug up it's great take lunch You know?

And so that celebratory thing, there's a part of me that still can do that. But this case was making it so that I'm like, the worst possible thing is starting to happen where I'm checking out. I feel checked out. It's so bad that I'm not even being entertained by it. I'm actively like I don't care anymore about what's happening on the screen. And that's the death now, man. Mm-hmm. anyway.

So Phoenix Wright will continue. Not this week but next week. It's wild to me because like your experience with Turnabout Big Top is in front of this big audience. And it's in front of like it's being recorded for posterity and you're like a 40 year old man. And my my experience of Big Top Turnabout was sitting next to you. more than 20 years ago with my DS light, gone, man, this fucking case sucks. While you were talking to somebody about like Gundem or fighting games or some shit.

Wild. Wild. That is his favorite case. Favorite. That has to be like a defense mechanism to like, to throw people off the scent. You know, that's, maybe. That's it's Suno saying, yeah, actually, DMC2 is my favorite devil make try game. No, he would never say that. But do you know what I mean? Like, it's just to

just to keep him off the fucking scent. Um, anyways, uh, that's pretty much what my week has been and will continue to be. So, uh, the only other thing is tune in for the slam, tune in for 14. And then on Saturday, tune in for the slop stream. We coming back. Uh, let's see. What I do this week? Well, a lot of what I did this week is what you this week. Like a uncommonly huge proportion. In addition,

I also, I got Hino Bobina, ecto, mint castella, peach saliva, my darling wife. We also had a guest

by Barry out of nowhere. We played a game called gamble with your friends. It is friend slop. It is a friend slop game about gambling in which you pile into a truck

and everyone is set to a casino floor and said, all right, you have to hit quota for tonight or else you're going into the ditch and getting shot. And that's that. Okay. So you start with $1,000 in cash for day one. You got to make $1,200. You just have to get it up to $1,200.

You can go over to like the little horsey racing mini game. You can go over to the big wheel. You can go play blackjack. You can go play craps, etc. But all of you are gambling simultaneously. and all your totals are in the upper right corner of the screen as they go, which basically leads to the following situation over and over and over again. Holy shit, I won big.

We beat quota. Oh, my God, stop gambling. Everyone stop! Oh, my God! Get mint away from the cracks table! Oh, my God, we're in the red. We're the red. Okay, now we have to gamble harder.

No, double down. Everybody goes next bet. Okay, okay. And is this a casino in the Godhead style with multiple games that are super duper fixed? No, no, they're real game. They do not appear to be super fixed. In fact, you can bring in things to fix it. You can bring in, you know, you have a metacurrency that you can buy to decrease losses by 25% or max out a bet for free or just bring in a gun.

and if you bring in a gun, you'll hit 33% quota for every person you shoot. So the reason I brought in a gun was so that when we actually hit quota and Mitt just ran to the big wheel and just went maximum bet on the big wheel. I could just blow her away and then pick her body up off the ground and drag it to the exit. If they won't stop gambling. Yeah, understood. Mm-hmm.

Uh, yeah, no, uh, total blast. Page is also going to be, uh, streaming with the girls tomorrow night, probably later in the evening because the slam went a lot. Page's streams have been fucked over by the slam because Seajam said it'd be like three to seven. Fuck, like it? No, Seajam, they are not. Subway slamming everyone else's streams out of the way, man. Yeah. So Page's stream is supposed to start tomorrow at seven o'clock, but that's probably not going to happen until, like eight or nine, but she's going to be streaming with

Hina and Ecto and I believe Eros. And they're going to be playing the Outlast trials. So check that out over at Twitch.tv slash Pete's saliva. Played that. I also did a sponsor stream for something called 33 Immortals. That is a weird game.

That is a very strange game. it is a rogue light but you are rogue lighting in like a kind of like a Haiti-style

environment but it's one big map it's a one big giant huge map and you load in and it just it just fills that room with like 30 plus people

you don't talk to each other you have emotes and you can point at things but you are all running this enormous rogue-like map together and then you don't talk to each other.

You are waiting, you're basically building up enough personal strength so that when challenge rooms open up, you can go in there and you beat the challenge rooms as a team of six. And then you get your relics to beast yourself up. And then the whole run is like 30, 40 minutes. So like you're doing this big map clear where you're building up strength, then you're doing like a miniature boss fight. And then you're getting stronger. and you're doing more map clear until you can do another mini boss fight, etc.

And then at the end of it you fight a proper boss fight called an ascendance. And then everybody who beats that gets to go to the real stage boss. So stage one's boss was Lucifer. And then it's a 33 V1 boss fight

that plays like an FF14 raid in action controls. Okay. Like there's even there's stack markers. There's get out of the A-O-E, shit like that. And it feels like a moba, but co-op instead of, like, fighting.

But moment-to-moment gameplay is like co-op Hades, like you're going through a room and you clear the room and everyone gets a reward? No, not a room. It's a big map. It's like one, just giant map.

Okay. For most of it. And you're usually rolling around with teams of six to ten or something like that. It's super interesting. We beat it. My chat and I beat the first level,

which man I had five gift codes to go away. Are there like builds for the whole team? No, no, you're building your own character. You're picking your weapon. And then you're picking your, you know, your trinkets to go in with. And then everyone is rolling on their own relics. But there is a stat called empathy. And the empathy stat, you can choose to level that up.

and that makes your co-op stuff better. So everyone's super ability is unique to their character class and synergizes. And what happens is you hit the super ability and it puts a sigil on you and then makes a geometric shape. And then multiple people have to get into your geometric shape and activate it. And then you get a huge buff or a huge damaging attack or something.

But you must work together to activate these things at all. Okay, okay. So like the tank gets a bubble shield. but the tank cannot give themselves a bubble shield. They need to give three people, including themselves a bubble shield. Cool. I like the concept. That sounds interesting. Very, very interesting. Particularly since, like, one of the big pushes was there's no chat.

There's no voice chat. No communication whatsoever. You just start a run and you're just... Okay, journey style. With dozens of other people. It's been a while since I've seen something like that. Okay, you're just connecting to whoever The only thing that

You can go in with a team of four And there are like emotes like Come over here or do the co-op But like there's four emails Okay Right very interesting game Very cool And aside from that

I've been playing a lot of A lot of Tucco Did you check out a lot of 14 Did you check out the climb? I checked out the climb a little bit The climb needs to be about 10 times harder. Yep. So into XCO they added Slay the Spire mode basically. There is a single player PVEE tower that you can go at and every time you beat a level, you get like things that

affect your characters build that are like, you know, pretty game breaking competitively, but for Pea like super nuts shit. Every hit does poison. That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep doing the same move and it lets you do more than like fill the screen with tentacles or whatever, right? Or, hold Perry. Yeah. Just hold it. Taunt has armor for the entire

duration of the taunt which is like, yo, you should put that in the real game, honestly. Like, let someone taunt and let them armor through it and then they lose all their life

if they want to, but fuck it, they can do that if they want. And it's, but it's a really cool idea. And it's a nice thing that's like helping the game, you know,

which is getting really hype right now, the double drop, the stages, those fucking break glass for the bikini costumes because we want money. god damn right and then um they're putting pvee stuff in there as well and the climb can also be used to do your daily challenges which is super useful for a huge man gives you XP and it it gives you

cosmetic colors as well exactly there's like specific colors that are locked to doing the climb um some good colors are locked in pink and purple mm-hmm the only thing i can tell is that like you said yeah there's three difficulties with it and right now they're all pretty piss easy if you're like... They're a joke. If you're kind of able to do a combo, you know? So...

Yeah, like, they need two more difficulties. And like, somebody in a Dova dude in chat asked, do you guys want as an K boss difficulty? I'm like, I think the top difficulty should be fucked up. I think... Because you're using, like...

You're cheating. Rogue-like, like, modifiers on your, on your character to make super-pusted fighting game characters? Yeah, no, the final boss should be fucked up. Yeah, and like the difficulty is also affected because you're healing, you don't,

you carry the same life between sets. So you don't lose, you don't heal back, you know, whatever damage you took, you go into the next fight, staying damaged. But I picked up stuff where it's like Vise charged punch is unblockable,

you know? And it's like, yeah, that's crazy. If you're going to give me that, make the computer insane. Like, you know,

give me the general, like, whatever. Like, like, it should be, um, like the hardest difficulty in that mode

should be like, the final ship in FTL. Sure. Oh, did you play? No, I played FTL once, but, uh, Oh, so the final ship in FTL is like outlandishly overpowered. Okay. And it's like you had to get there with just every single thing going right.

Yeah. Just right. I mean, honestly, the difficulty of Slay the Spire is the right model to go with. Yeah. Because, um, your characters are starting. with the same deck in that game. So it is fixed, you know? The difficulty of your encounter will change.

But if you can adapt on the fly, get a little bit of luck on your rewards, you should have a final boss that is like, oh, fuck, okay, do I have what I need to handle this? You know, like it might go my way, it might not. I got some cheap stuff too, but you should be, yeah. And I think if they can get that balance right with it, they'll have a really fun mode on their hands in lieu of a like proper single player campaign of any kind of. I think that the climb is an excellent first draft. So Rune Terra also had, like Rune Terra is now a rogue-like card game.

Okay. Like, it is fully switched over. Okay. And the climb shares like a lot of like design DNA with it. So like I fully expect there to just be like more cosmetics that go along with this as well as. lots more modifiers and higher difficulties. To their credit, I believe that on the 2XCO subreddit,

the person who's working on designing the climb has a post that's actively like, hey, please give me feedback on how you guys like it and what you want to see changed. That, yeah, it screams first draft. Seems like, okay, let's put it out there, do what people tell us to do on. There's an active discussion to just be like,

yeah, throw this and throw that in. And I can't see there being much that that team would not be allowed to do because it's PVEE, who the fuck cares? Just go go insane with it, you know? Have as much fun as possible. It doesn't have to be fair. It can be complete nonsense.

Fight four thrushes at the same time. Fucking. And maybe, maybe at some point have like one insane color that you can only get by, I don't know, you know, by doing the dumbest challenge and throwing your fucking body at it for a while. Uh, cool. Anything else?

Ah, not really. Okay. Uh, this week on Twitch.com slash Pat Stairs at and YouTube.com slash Pat Stairs at live. Uh, I'm going to be playing FF14 with the V-Tuber gals tonight at 7 p.m. Pacific. Tomorrow's the slam. Thursday's FF14.14. Woolley. And Friday's the slam.

That's what's up. Uh, we'll be returning to, um, the Kingdom Hearts 2 data battles next week. we'll be returning to maybe pragmatto next week I don't know pragmatto I don't know

I haven't really decided yet I'm doing this week by week you got five days of woolly coming your way buddy damn bro that's a lot that's too much that's too much

is Mina coming back probably not probably not oh delta ruins next week Jesus fucking delta room yeah well the fucking delta

I have to deal with seven days of woolly so Oh, no. Just waking up and looking to the mirror going, oh, again. Fuck. Let's take a quick word for our sponsors. Let's do it.

This week, the podcast is sponsored by AG1, which I have been turning to quite a bit, actually, these mornings, because I'm getting the greens in my diet that I've been skipping out on. bro my diet has gotten so bad lately do you know what my breakfast is what my toddler doesn't finish oh yeah yeah we're getting there already punch mom just grabbing the leftovers and i'm like oh don't do that and then i saw some meatballs and i was like that's a waste of good meatballs man um no but really the problem is is that like nights like yesterday where i fucking play for six hours i got to the end and I was like, I need to eat a better meal and eat better throughout my day to give myself the energy I need later on so that I don't fade and have my brain leak out of my ears. And at the very least, I know that one of the things I can do is getting my greens going,

getting my proteins, getting my vitamins, getting the stuff that I might otherwise ignore. And yeah, AG1 makes it real simple with the AG1 pro as well. you can get just one nice scoop that you shake in your bottle. And like I like legit do enjoy the fact that I'm like, this is easy to do because it tastes good. It tastes really good while you're getting the vitamins, the minerals, the energy, the things you need. And I know too as well that like probiotics,

whole food ingredients and stuff like that are beneficial. I've had doctors tell me that like, yo, listen, you live in Eastern Canada. and you're black. So that means you're not getting... Those are two true things. These are two true things. And this means you're not getting as much sunlight as you need to.

And it means that a lot of people that are in your profile need more vitamin D than they think they need. You know? It's really funny because I live in Western Canada and I'm white, which means I'm getting way more sunlight than I need. Way too much now. Yep. Yep. The doctor said, you're black in a disco-alusium way, but the check passed this time. So, finish off your, you know, get your diet right and get a real simple way to take care of that so that, you know, what you eat later on still matters, but you know that you've checked off your morning important stuff.

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This week, the podcast is sponsored by Shopify. If you are getting your business off the ground, if you're starting up your online business, if you've been running one for a long time, you already know the deal. It gets complicated real fast. It gets difficult. People might start asking to return things. People might be buying things in far away places that you don't know how to ship to. Your site might break. You might find yourself running into issues where you're like, you don't know who your audience is or where they want to buy stuff or what's going on. All of that is made way, way easier with Shopify. The number one checkout on the side of tons of brands and businesses. around the world. It lets you set up your own design studio so you can use their templates to get a beautiful online store. It lets you use their 24-7 customer support. So if you ever get stuck

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It is HeroForge. Oh, shit. I love HeroForge. HeroForge is awesome. One of our favorite sponsors. If you're running a tabletop game and you want to get miniatures printed out or made custom for your characters, for your monsters. Or maybe you just want a pretty toy. Or maybe you just want a pretty toy.

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Last but not least, this week, the podcast is sponsored by Warby Parker. and as the sun has decided to attack us, as is custom, every year. Every year. Every year the sun attacks us around this time of year. And so actually, I got to be honest out here, the sun attacks me for longer than usual. It does. It does. And while I'm trying to get my aforementioned daily dose of vitamin D taking the walks and so on, a good pair of shades.

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Thanks, Warby Parker. All right. The week... Yes, yes, pointing. I would like to start. You ever get like a perfectly timed comment? on a video and it just like couldn't be more immaculate and perfect so i covered the microsoft show i covered it right looked away from this company for one second while we were busy slamming and uh you know

one day ago there was a new comment on it this was yesterday right uh what time was that uh this Well, I can't see the time specifically, but it was in the early day yesterday. And it was time stamped to me, oh, no, it wasn't timestamped at all. It was just like, man, what an insane amount of negativity. Quote, holy insane amount of negativity. You know what? I was fairly negative at the Microsoft show. And maybe that's me just being a massive buzzkill and a meanie or, and a meanie.

Maybe it's because I started that show off, literally saying, wonder how many of these are going to get canceled. That was one of the first things I talked about during that Microsoft show. And here we are fucking eight days later. I believe that one of the only things that stood out that I pointed out last week was, hey, cool. Senua got announced Hellblade 3 Which is dope Because I

Not I thought that that fucking deserved it And immediately after announcing it What's happening? Ninja Theory is being shut down Yep Alongside Oh people are like

Oh did it get cancelled? Oh no The studio's getting shut down Ninja Theory is getting shut down and then compulsion games and double fine are in active negotiations about spinning off. It is crazy to me that Microsoft's like Motus operandi is so like scorched earth internally toxic that for like a high five, what was the high five rush? Tango. Tango GameWorks, right? They're like, instead of being like, maybe we can sell it to somebody. They're like, no. Close the doors.

Fire everyone. Burn it. Knowing that the game is just dropping or has not even dropped yet, someone just said they sacrificed Senua. Like, you are, you know all of this is happening and you're like still announcing shit and putting it out there. And of course, everyone's getting blindsided by it. It's complete bad shit. And it just kind of reminds me of like, do you remember when those emails leaked in 2020? And in them, it was like Phil Spencer and them talking about how they're like, yeah, we're going to be buying Nintendo soon.

I do remember that. I very much remember that. Like, so let's break this down, right? So if anybody remembers Phantom Dust, that was a game that they announced at an E3 many years ago with a CG trailer that no one working on the game had seen. people working on the game were like oh that's weird we never had anything to do with that CG trailer and then a month later the company got shut down and then they found out that the decision to shut the company down

had come before showing the CG trailer at E3 which meant the timeline of events was we're probably not going to close this company hire people to make a CG trailer to push the game for E3 fire them afterwards even though we've already made the decision. So Senua's Sacrifice Maker Ninja Theory getting shut down one week

after showing off their new game at E3, there is no way on this earth. That decision was made this week. No, that decision was made probably a month ago or more. But they're at, well, let's still put the trailer in this, though. What if we drop a trailer during E3

so that people can say we won. Remember winning E3? Remember that concept? Who won E3? Right? Who won the announcements every year was a big thing. So let's put out lies so that people can say we won. And then afterwards, when the closures happen and the games get canceled and all the shit wraps up, people are not paying attention to that anymore.

They're mainly just paying attention to the big show with all the announcements. So. Yeah. But that's all. that matters. People who watch game announcements do pay attention. Oh, no. That's the problem.

The average person won't forget. The average person isn't waiting up at Sunday morning to watch the Microsoft show. What actually ends up happening is you get sometimes there'll be these in-betweens, right? So I'll say someone like Reggie will be like an in-between where he'll hear about an announcement and then years later be like, whatever happened to Phantom Dust. Yeah, they canceled it And you'd be like, what?

When? You know? Immediately after they told you about it. Yeah, well. And it's not like you're booting up your Xbox and it's telling you, hey guys, Phantom Dust is canceled. Press X to continue.

I think that the closure of Tango after Hi-Fi Rush kind of salted the earth for them forever. Because like even if the king came out and did well, you still don't have any guaranteed that the studio is going to continue but also the Phantom Dust also salted it

for announcements. Microsoft has done like multiple years back to back where a bunch of shit they showed off didn't come out. Yeah. And I don't mean like they didn't come out that year. I mean like they were

actively cancelled. So every one of their sub-studios and subsidiaries is sounds like are currently in the how do we detach, how do we coyote ugly ourselves away from the situation to survive. And apparently, according to three people with direct knowledge of ongoing discussions, yeah, every single one of the individually owned groups are like trying to restructure,

spin out, and try to survive individually, right? I saw a lot of discussion about this after the fact, and a lot of it seems to point towards like the complete lack of funds going into the company with the Activision Blizzard King deal. Yeah, so Microsoft, like Microsoft, not Xbox, isn't giving them the faucet anymore because they just bought the biggest fucking game company ever. The assumption would be that, well, now that we have

Call of Duty and all the shit, we're going to make them shit zillion dollars. But they're just cutting everything. What you acquired is massive amounts of overhead and staff and studios and debt. And you've got to- So now you've got to make it all up right now. Nothing new to all. Yeah, exactly. Because it's like where, okay, so, you know, this whole thing about exclusivity has been like,

we're moving away from that and so on, et cetera. Okay, cool. Right. It's great for people who want to be able to buy things on whatever they want. But how the fuck are you going to make money? How are you going to keep these studios open? And, you know, never mind. confidence of, again, as we will always point to the sign on Hi-Fi Rush, you have a successful

game that is made on an affordable budget, that word of mouth spread with zero marketing, success by every single metric of the day, and it does not matter. It does not mean anything. It is just a byline to be discarded when it comes out. You couldn't ask for a better product to build into an IP after the fact and fuck that doesn't matter. So this paints a very schizophrenic view

of Microsoft's sorry Xbox's management. So okay, we're shadow canceling studios after showing them off but we'll make a decision about what games to keep exclusive to

the platform the night before the presentation to the point where the studio making it doesn't know and puts like other consoles as stuff in the in the in the in the preview material because of vibes like it's they're just doing whatever over there they're just doing whatever I think they just got coticed I think I think I think I think Bobby got in there. He got himself paid. He got his boys paid. And he fucking took off and did his bit. He did his bit and he's out. And we're seeing this like, you know, this, this like kind of corporate narcissistic projection where they were like, hey, we might not always make the fastest decisions, but we'll make the good ones. And then all the shit comes out like,

didn't you just turn gears into an exclusive like last night? No. Then why does the company, why are the videos have the logo on it? Oh, we didn't tell them. We thought consumers should know first. Okay. Okay. Like, wait, that's not true. And allow, so here we go. Part two, right? Let's just write into it.

You want to talk about keeping the knowledge buried. Hey, guess what? It's Castle Super Beast, so we're going to have a lot of shit to talk about regards to shutdowns and firings and all that. What's going on over at Ubisoft? They're shutting down the studio. in Winnipeg and Belgrade and making cuts across Ubisoft Barcelona, layoffs all over the place, right? Sure.

Yeah, Ubi's not doing great. 380 employees kicked out to the curb. So that's actually not notable for Ubisoft. It's just another classic. Oh, UB.S. In the Stirling affectation. here's what's interesting about it the news of the studio closures

were embargoed to news outlets and they specifically tried to embargo the news of closures and layoffs before the employees found out or before anyone else found out about it they they're all that stuff was there were companies and there were news outlets

that were made aware of the fact that it was going to happen and they wanted to use almost like game embargoes a do not report this do not let the word spread out that's financial news you can't under fiscal penalty or under potential legal penalty

like the saddest shit you've ever seen is like not only do we have the classic like employees have to get jump scared by their firing by their pink slips as usual but you have the, and actively we are going to legally pursue people or try to create an intimidation system where people who know about this must shut the fuck up about it in advance. How do they enforce that? I have no idea.

Embargoes only count if you sign them. I guess it's the implied embargo of, well, if you want to be in our good graces the next time. Who gets a fuck about being in Ubisoft's fucking good. Graces. Whatever's left of the fucking family. Yeah. Right? It's,

it's, it's, it seems completely batshit insane. Because yeah, you have to sign something. And again, maybe the implication, maybe the fucking dentist system

of, you know, being like, well, if you don't make me happy now, we'll see what happens the next time you want something from over river. Who the fuck knows,

man? It's bat shit, dude. So that's all fun. That's all fun in games. Continuing in the uplifting, we can talk about the fact that, hey, the... Sorry, I just lost it.

Where did I click on? There we go. 1666, Patrice Dezile, Panache Games. Okay, so, hey, guess what? people have found placeholder AI generated assets in the game and they came out and basically said

same thing as Expedition 33 these were meant to be placeholder these are not meant to be in the final and they will be they'll be looking at them and removing them and being more diligent about it in the future and so on and da da da da it's like all right cool this is where we are right whatever

I think the expedition excuse is kind of genius because like it only exists in a highly specific point in time and every day that we get further away from the point in time that you were just messing around with this stuff before it became a global catastrophe is further away. Oh my God. Yeah.

And that being said like I'm just going to be under the assumption. that every game is caught until it's not. That doesn't mean that I'm going to be pointing my finger and going, yeah, I bet this is like, no, I think that's the wrong thing to do. But I cannot possibly be surprised. Like Capcom keeps dancing around a bunch of different statements about what they're looking into, about using for whatever.

Oh, you've got to be, everybody is now dokes sitting in the car grabbing the steering wheel, right? Like, a million percent. That's the status quo at this point. Like the only game that I currently play that I'm pretty sure doesn't have any is actually FF14 because Yoshi-P fucking hates that shit and he fucking hates the Square Inix corporate telling him what to do with like NFTs and stuff like that. So and just, you know, fights it at every turn. But still like, yeah.

So there was a court filing where a number of artists basically were trying to fight against YouTube. for training their songs on Google AI. And Google just went, by uploading your music to the platform, you've given us rights to train AI on your content. They have a broad license that was in place well before this, that allows them to do whatever they fuck they want with it. And it's like, yeah, this is not a surprise.

That's probably accurate. This is not a surprise, nor should it be, you know? And even, and the thing is that, I guess the only thing to say here is like, you know, as it becomes more of an eye roll to talk about these stories each week. Just, you know, the idea of, keep in mind that something like Mid Journey only gets to the level of popularity it gets to because it steals. And then once it has to apologize after the fact legally, it's already gotten its name out there as the one that everyone needs to use to make everything look as if ArtJerm made it. And that's good enough as for publicity when it starts so that even if they go back afterwards and have to change it. It doesn't matter. They already got the word out there. They already got what they needed.

So, yeah, just assume. You have to assume it's all there in there anyway, right? You have to assume that when you're going around playing Pokemon Go and enjoying catching them all, that Niantic is going to then take that data later and sell them to war drones. Yeah, yeah. Always fun. Sucks. That's what this is. This is a pile of bullshit.

We're basically all, like, we're just sitting around waiting for the Open AI and Claw and all them to be like, all right, well, we've got to turn on the real costs. We have to wait for Uber has destroyed the taxi market and can now give you the real cost part of game development where all of a sudden it goes from, wow, look what you can do. It's so cheap. Oh, my God, this is so much more. expensive than a person.

Yeah, but you got to wait for that on the entire fucking market, not just games. Yeah, you need to have that be the whole market and then all the projects that went cost overrun because of it come out and have their profits eaten by the... It's like, it'll be a bit. It'll be a bit.

Yeah. But anyway, for anyone who is curious about that, you can go look up. There's a story on how Nyantic Spatial is a part of Nyantic that basically does defense contracting shit and sells data for drones and so on and hey you know here we are right hey look Can't get away from Lockheed Martin no matter what I do

thank you TikTok for scanning my face and uploading it to the Uyghur Muslim containment app thank you CAPTCHA for training the auto driving you know like it's just that that's that's what it is so um meanwhile uh over in uh another courtroom it looks like after it's all said and done oh this is so i said oh man did you see this before i said big deal i did big deal guys the fucking lawsuit of the century pal world versus Nintendo. Nintendo is reportedly

looking to win fucking stacks in this case. How many stacks, bro? $30,000. How much did it cost for them to litigate this? $40 million. Stacks!

The PayPal The Pal World lawsuit is nearing its end and Nintendo is reportedly positioned to gain almost nothing. They can come away with as little as $30,000 if they win.

To put the potential 30K settlement into context, their most recent annual report stated that they had made a 40 million loss from patent litigation in the last business year. Okay. So I went slightly more into detail because some people are like, well, it's never about the money. It's about the message about, you know, you can't copy Pokemon. So here's what Nintendo is actually going to win on. the only part of this patent lawsuit that they're winning on

is hey motherfuckers you can't throw a pokeball at a monster and then fucking throw a polka ball and have the monster come out that actually infringes on like a very specific patent for throwing a pokeball out right and Powell World saw that part of the patent and I this is my internal they went oh fuck okay they got us on that one so they took that shit out as soon as the lawsuit went

and they changed it to like summoning them with like a device on your hip or whatever. It's been gone for a very long time. So that means that that Nintendo's win is specific to sales of the game that

had that shit in it in Japan only prior to this point. So like yeah no the the patent law lawsuit has shown, yeah, you can totally copy Pokemon as hard as you fucking want,

actually. These fucking barely legally distinct designs and all this shit just don't have the fucking Pokemon. Absolute clown shoes fucking. Now that's a turnabout big top case. Power world's hit 1.0 in a couple of months. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah. Excited to jump back in. Uh, it's, it's, it's, again, you send that... Oh, July 10th. Oh, that's not a couple of months. That's next month.

Damn. It's kind of insane to have, like, all the ground swell and everything and then just drop a thing like 1.0. It's just so weird to think that... Oh, yeah, that game never actually, quote-unquote, came out. Well, I mean, the early access period, the games come out multiple times now. Yeah. Like, for example, I am still getting emails from Alcat. You're like, hey, buddy, do you want to check out the new Rogue Trader DLC?

And I go, absolutely. I'm going to punch the code in and let that shit sit there and wait until you stop emailing me news of new season passes. Because I only have time to play a 140-hour game once. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I can't. Well, a much shorter game is on its way. Finally, we've gotten word of what's next from the people that made mouthwashing. A trailer for something called Carcass Clad.

If you haven't seen it. I have not seen it, well. Okay, so this was at the PC Gaming Show, and it looks like the mouthwashing art style. but you're in a co-op tank and you're doing the roles of different people inside the tank, the driver, the gunner, etc. And you're fighting against people who are strapping animals to their tanks as armor. It looks fucking insane. And also, the people in the game appear to only be speaking in French or Russian or whatever language you don't understand. And it just looks stressful.

I don't know what to make of it. It looks like a crazy, stressful, but really fucking cool co-op thing going on. Excuse me, finish? Okay, I, uh, I was, I was, I didn't get to hear it clearly. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think, I don't know. This is not necessarily the, going to be the short narrative experience. that we got from mouthwashing, but I think the impact of this multiplayer thing,

who knows? There's a lot of question marks, but it looks pretty fucked up seeing a... Two to three hours per session. How committed are you? That's crazy. How committed are you to being a part of a three-man tank? That's nuts, dude.

Like, that's so long for a co-op. with sessions. Like, I need to know, like, okay, there's the person driving. There's the person who's manning the gun. Is there a person who's reloading the gun in the back who never gets to see outside? No, it's the commander. Oh. They're turning the map and they're handling, like, distances and shit like that.

Okay, okay. Because the idea of being in a role where you're just staring at the reload and just doing that feels psychotic. Use the periscope to identify in range targets, listen to radio and chart safe routes, locate items and potential threats. Oh, yeah. So the guy in the chair. Oh, no. A couple tank perverts have, like, sat up in their chair. A couple tank perverts are getting locked in.

Get locked in as we speak. No. The diagram of just sitting forward in your chair, paying attention. Sounds interesting. beyond that as well, it looks like Nakayama, one of the directors of Street Fighter 6 is out there doing a bunch of interviews talking about Tifa and the new upcoming season for year four. And we got a lot of interesting information between talking to Max,

talking to, yeah, just like all the different magazines and websites that he spoke to. And it kind of consolidates to, to one, 10 seasons or a 10 year sequence implied was their development plan for Street Fighter 6 from the jump. They are not looking. That's quite, what's the word? Ambitious?

Ambitious, thank you. Yeah. Oh, I couldn't remember. Yeah. They wanted it to be a platform that lasted about that long. And so this is not a situation where they're like, Six is in the middle of going through a really big moment. Let's jump, drop it off and switch over to seven, right?

They're not thinking about seven or anything like that right now. I think, I don't think it's too long. I think it's very possible if they keep it exciting for that period of time. Now, I'm also coming at this from the, from, you know, I'm a fucking boomer who remembers when old arcade releases cooked that long, even if that's not what the developer wanted. with the fan base regardless, right? There was a time when these things just sat there and developed and developed and developed and developed and like you never got your updates with the frequency you'd get them now.

I think you can totally, with any type of game these days that has a decent online suite, release a live service vibe to a thing that's not actually live service, you know? Yeah. You just got to, again, you got to keep it interesting over time, enough new content for people to come back to. And this is the kind of game where people are in the middle of enjoying it. Why the fuck not? Tifa has been in development for Street Fighter 6th since 2023. So they were working on this way back when, or at least the discussions, I suppose.

It's got to get the sweat just right. I have to imagine, you do, you do, or Italy will notice. But I imagine that like the moment you're watching like Clive walk into Tekken, right? There's a, there must be somebody who's like, okay, guys, we don't have. the sign. We don't have the contracts and the papers signed yet, but start working on that shit immediately, right? Yeah. Start making your cloud, start making your Tifa, start making your whatever, preemptively, and when the time comes, we'll already have some homework ready to go. And then you can show it to them and they'll be like, wow, this is so impressive. I'm so glad that we signed with you.

Look at that. Something else that they announced was that Bosch and Yasmin were planned since day one. That, so, okay, Bosch being planned since day one might be the least surprising shit I've ever heard in my entire. The moment World Tour started, I called it, right? It's, it's, yeah. I think everybody did. He looks so over-designed compared to the rest of the World Tour characters.

You're like, you're trying to get Bosch over. 100%. I'm actually shocked it took him four years. I thought he might be the final character. But now I think... I thought he was going to be the first character. I now think the final character is probably going to be John World Tour, you know?

But yeah. But Yasmin as well was planned from the jump, so they wanted to get the Filipino rep in there. And she is also the, like, main character of year four. And... Really? Yeah. So she's being pushed as, like, the main character

of year four. And something that he talked about was with the new characters they design, they come at them with an approach that is each of these could be a main character in their thing.

Sure. Which is really interesting. That's cool. Because it's a way of looking at a character design that there's a way that you design for the box for the poster

that's different from when you're just like nah that's a freak go nuts you know there's a type of design like I guess somewhat restraint and somewhat like normalization that occurs when you make somebody

that you're like I want this to look like they could be the new face of something and that's good because that's probably how you maximize appeal with whatever the theme or concepts that character represents are. Yeah. So for year five, I want all psycho weirdos.

No returning characters. We're doing another. No, you can have a returning character, but it has to be like G and necrose. Yes. Okay. Okay. So, uh, uh, uh, G and Q mixed into one character with a broken mask. Right? Oh, wow. All fucked up. And then Fallen Ballrog. the claw

Vega version from Cannon Spike that lives in the sewers who had his mask his face disfigured and now he's just a serial killer with two claws

oh my God sure 12 and 11 flopping about all messed up and yeah okay run it urean but somehow

his thong is even smaller yeah No, man, it just goes all the way up to his shoulders Like a fucking straight up Borat style Hakan But when he grabs you oil No, just Hakan

But let me Weird enough Let me cook, let me cook When he grabs you oiled up Your character gets oiled up too Visually Visually Yeah

Man I forget where I was talking I was one of the stage slam things. I was like, man, Abigail rules. And I just had like the whole room just go, uh, what? Everyone turned on me. That is an FGC war crime that you committed. Including Say Jam. Yeah, yeah, you committed a war crime. People were like what he did to that. Not just because of like the big ugly, but also because of what he did to the game like meta-wise competitively as well. Made it awesome. Made it kick ass. I don't think, listen, listen, we know

and understand to some degree that at some point it was nice that we got a Canadian in there. However, however, Abigail is not wolf? No, he's not. He's that fucking weirdo

from Final Fight that walked around like this. Nobody's wolf. That's not, like, you know, that's come on. I would take Sasquatch 10 out of 10 times as a Canadian rep over Abigail. Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe. Yeah, yeah, Yasmin was planned as the main character.

Tifa's been in work for that long, yeah, and then a bunch of other stuff too. So it's like I, it feels like you have to kind of go chase him around a little bit if you want to get all the juicy details on it. But looking at a character like Kimberly, I'm like, I can see Kimberly being main character energy in a particular way, you know? I can see that. I can see that with like Menau. I can see the thought process of like maximizing their designs. And that's why I think they're all bangers, you know. The the asterisk I put on the new cast of Street Fighter 6 is, I think Lily is also a winning design.

But her costume three is better than her default. And that should have been the one that they went with. Her default's really bad. I really strongly this. I don't hate it. But the hair and the look of her. her alts were like fucking fantastic, you know? Anyway,

beyond that, there was an update to the, the ghost of Tupac situation. Yeah, a somewhat surprising update in multiple directions. So RGG Studio has been talking about this whole, you know,

resurrection of the grave Tupac in Stranger Than Heaven, which is super weird. And they basically went, yep, so we talked to his family as well, I guess. So they specific- Not just the estate. They talked to his living family. So it looks like they wanted to do that. The character's name is Amaru, his middle name.

and yeah you know they're just kind of saying oh and it's one of those things where they're also saying like yeah and and and they're writing it obviously they're writing it around him or whatever the fuck but it's like okay so you know whoever the relatives are in this situation I guess I would imagine his sister and I doubt they're reaching out to Asada Shakur in Cuba or whatever but like they're saying that hey we spoke to the family too

So, all right. So of interest, of interest on this. Still, because a weird fit, I don't know why, but what, because I saw this and I was like, huh, weird. And then I had people clarify that like all the hologram Tupac shit

was also like, okayed by the family. The mother at the time who has since passed away. Right? So, yeah. A Feni Shicker was in charge of the estate prior to this. Yeah. So like, yeah, no, everybody

that has the say-so is just cool with Tupac's Accor Digital necromancy So I They get you know Yeah

All right Do your thing You know Everyone's gonna be Feel weird about it But do whatever I think What I'm taking this as

Is a sign that Once death row games Start coming out Snoop Dog is probably gonna Do this more than once Yeah, probably Um Also

That interview was super strange Because they said that Well we're putting Tupac in our game But what we're imagining it is Is if Tupac was alive And he was 30 years older Looking back on his time Yeah

Yeah yeah And it's like What? And so he's gonna be What are you fucking talking about? All they're saying is it's the Okay, okay So, I ain't mad at you.

He's in heaven, right? Rapping from the afterlife, talking about how, you know, he ain't mad at the game or he ain't mad at the people that shot him or he ain't mad at everyone for the life he lived and all that, right? For the thug life, this is what it is, right? I ain't mad at you. And it's the idea, like, they're going to be basically saying, we're going to do that thing where at the end of the movie, you see.

see Elvis walking up the plane, looking back and breathing a sigh and just being like, and thinking about his family and whatever and having all those moments, you know, and having all those last minute hits. And then the plane flies off into the sky and then Elvis went to heaven in the plane and totally didn't die shitting on the toilet. You know, and it's just we're going to have him, you know, reflecting on his life. just being all like wise beyond his years and maybe he'll be like never go to Vegas you know I saw I spoke with somebody on blue sky they're like I still

understand why they're doing this and I'm like they're doing this because we're talking about you're talking controversy farming controversy farming is absolutely real yeah yeah yeah I believe like like it is become a it is become a multiple week news cycle item about did you know that they're putting Tupac should Shakur and to Stranger Than Heaven. And to which like the response to that is like, well, isn't that just bad

publicity? Like, no. The average person will hear that go, oh wow, cool. And that's it. That's it. That's the end of the discussion. People that think bad publicity is bad for publicity don't understand how stupid the average person is. I mean, sometimes

it absolutely can be. we have said as such on this very podcast that no sometimes bad publicity is just bad publicity uh yeah like you probably don't want to be in the motherfucking epstein files that seems like a that seems like a loss but it's definitely clear it's definitely clear that like um perception wise there is a the fact that it's him and not you know bunta for example or uh as we we talked about um you know like any like someone who's associated with the genre then doesn't strike people as weird it doesn't become as much of a story with Toshiro Mufune's

likeness in, you know, Onimusha. I think that, yeah, someone kind of pointing out going, something to the effect of like, if they made a game that was like a dragon, the rose that grew from concrete, you know, that would be,

which is like one of his title of one of his books. It's like, that would be a weird thing too. But you're like, I can see the fictional depiction of a dead character when it is specifically about them and their life in the same way that a dramatized movie or anything else depicts these things. Like there's a Michael Jackson movie out right now. Right, right.

As opposed to the, like, we are using your likeness to audition for a role in our story. So, anyway. And also, we don't have to pay you the same we would, a regular actor for the stunt casting because you're dead. I just want to know how they're going to take the voice credit. How is that going to look in the credits? Is it the double indentation? There's somebody out there that will be like, there will be like so and so as Tupac Choucour as.

Either that or boss, your job is to go in and voice Tupac Shakur and to never be credited and to never be known and to die a hero. You know what I mean? Like that's the only way I can see. Like maybe that'll be it. Like you are meant to not be.

known. And that it's just fucking Matt Mercer. They should just have. They're going to go through this, all this shit. I would like the character's dialogue to be made out of exclusively

of like comments, yelled out by him at a concert, stitched together in a very unnatural way. Well, with crowd noise and everything. Well, here's the thing. Fortunately, he has recorded he recorded so many studio sessions before he died, knowing

that he might not be around, where he basically would go in and do a full album with no beat behind him so that he could be, his voice could be used later. So they could grab a bunch of that. And yeah, for everything. Yeah, but I want it like Resident Evil One stitched together. Sure, sure, sure. But for everything that doesn't work, then just get Ben Starr in there, sounding like Ben Starr. Don't put this on Ben. No. He opens his mouth and Nolan comes out, you know? You just hear Troy Baker. Matt Mercer again? You hear Troy Baker

describing how thug life means the hate you give little infants fucks everybody. Right? I need to hear that in his voice. This timeline is fucking stupid. All this shit sucks. Yeah.

All right. Oh man. Somebody just said get Robert Downey Jr. there's a voice um i didn't i didn't really even have time to fully look at this i just saw this pop up right before we started but um EA is creating a um EA advertising uh branch to look at integration ads for things like sims and other in-game play experience ad placement um which seems to be a direct result of all the insane amounts of debt they have from the $20 billion buyout. Yeah.

So that's cool. Well, we make money off of ads in the sports skims. So why not make money off of the ads and the Sims? That's popular. Anyway, let's take some letters. If you want to send in a letter to us and we can read the letter and maybe answer a question in there, send it to Castle Super Beastmail at gmail.com That's Castle Superbeastmail at gmail.com.

All right. Let's see over here. Neryl asks, Hey there, Fathers of the Year. Wully mentioned last week that the, about the terrible feeling of watching your favorite fighter get replaced since we all know character.

Well, it's not exactly. But since we all know characters are just functions, clearly, what other kinds of flakent replacements make you sad outside of fighting games? The biggest one I can think of is the battle rifle taking over as the main gun in Halo 2. Yeah, Halo 3 brought it back, but the younger me always pined for my mid-bullet hose, my mid-bullet hose in my early Xbox live days. Thanks for all you do. Halo's so weird.

I feel like every Halo game picks like a weapon, and everyone goes, this is my favorite, and then the next game, they're like, no, that shouldn't be your favorite weapon. It should be this new favorite weapon. That's an insane thing, because as somebody who doesn't really play shooters at all, I picked up the battle rifle in Halo 2 and went, oh my God, this feels awesome.

I love this gun to the point that I made a note of it. You know, someone who should just be picking up the pew and going, this one does a bomb, and this one does a laser, and this one zooms in, and this one is a shotgun. I went, oh, this battle rifle feels fucking awesome. I like the way this shoots. And that's a feeling I'm not familiar with.

It stood out. So I feel like that's a wild take. You know, this conversation is making me sad again because I, much like we used to both play sports games. I used to play a lot of online shooters, right? And the first thing that it comes up with is that, um, There was never a mode that Call of Duty ever made that was better than Gun Game in Black Ops. Gun Game is literally the peak gimmick mode in a shooter ever.

Is everything chasing that high or just doing its own thing after that? It is just the best most fun mode. It is incredible. If you're not familiar with Gun Game, very simply, you start with a good game, a regular good gun. And when you kill somebody in your free-for-all lobby, you move over to the next gun, which is a little not quite as good.

And then you get, oh, you have to do it with a shotgun. And then you have to do it with a sniper rifle. And then you have to do it with the knife. Interesting. And only somebody who gets all the way to the end, ends the game. First is the winner. Oh, wow.

That sounds like it can go long. whoever's doing the best is being brought down. That's cool. By getting shittier and shittier guns or have like highly specific ranges. And so the match starts to even itself out. It's awesome. It's the gameplay equivalent of our own design, which was fighting games winner takes a shot.

Yeah, that was a bad. Winner takes a shot. The skill level evens out. it should have um so this really sick doing that uh uh that was yeah those were the good old days yeah uh i i this one's kind of not a hundred percent on but like as somebody who like discovered what gundham was by seeing gundom wing like a bill like a bunch of other kids over here years ago yeah me too actually yeah we all did right and then discovering that actually

This is the Goofy Boy Band Spinoff series to a real serious war fucking story from the 70s and then

find and then This is the the pop version Yeah Yeah And then and being like I was not there in 1979 but I want Gund to be this

you know Yeah And then it's like Yeah but that doesn't make as much money as these colorful characters and these boy bands, though. So what we're going to do is we're going to pull a Sonic the Hedgehog,

and we're going to keep making this money with the pop bands and the, and with the pop look and the Gundam Seeds and that sort of style. And then we're also going to make another one-year war spinoff story for you, so you old heads can sit here and go, all right, fine. You know, now that you mention the Sonic, the Hedgehog, I don't care for Shadow Knuckles is the rival

Interesting Interesting I Never cared for Shadow The instant Shadow has rocket shoes To go faster I'm like this dude sucks Yeah but he's darker and edgier though

Right So he's hitting He's hitting that Christian deviant art Fucking spot Perfectly on the bullseye I think It's really funny Because like okay

Knuckles is the right but then he became the bruiser, which then take him out of the contest for speed. And then it became like, oh, but who's going to actually challenge Sonic speed-wise? And I saw something interesting the other day. Guy who cheats. When they both got the emeralds, yeah. No, yeah, there's, Knuckles becomes King DDD, right, in the equation. I saw something that, well,

like, was it a trope? I think a TV trope that was like, um, butchered by translation or something to that effect. And it was basically, um, Sonic, it's, it's in, in English, Sonic going, uh, all right, let's race and see who's faster. And then Shadow is like, hmm, like, like, uh, barely a challenge. Fine, you're on. And then the Japanese translation of that line being like, a contest to see who's faster, huh? Sounds interesting. And it's like, oh, he didn't talk shit at all. He actually just went, okay, yeah, let's race Sonic.

And I kind of wondered, I was like, wait a minute, has Shadow's whole edgy personality been just a translation issue? It's possible. It's definitely possible. Is this a thing that has continued over time? Because that's a completely different tone of a line, you know? And if he's actually kind of chill in Japanese and just agro Kirby with the mad eyes in the West, That would be really funny.

You know what it reminds me of? People pointed out with the Kingdom Hearts 4 trailer that Sora is like getting like actively more miserable in his art on the health bar in every game. Oh, interesting. Like in Kingdom Hearts 1, Soros like got this big grin. And in Kingdom Hearts 2, he's got like a like a smile. And in Kingdom Hearts 3, he's like, ugh. And in Kingdom Hearts 4, he's like, ugh. Yeah, because, you know, angry.

Listen, Prince of Persia. Sands of Time was a moment that happened to video games. And Warrior Within and the evolution and everything afterwards. That was so fucking embarrassing. It is, but it's the, it is the era distilled smoldering with generic rage, right? It's, it distills the era into a moment. It was that moment that someone realized, what if M had to focus up? You know, the first time, the first time games realized they could do that.

Terrible. Hate it. Anyway. All right. And one other one here. Hello, Say Jam Slammer and Slam Slammer. Oh, hey. None here.

So I was watching the watching Willie's training session in a duo with Dethy, and it was fascinating because Dethy was doing great. great. His decision making, his neutral, his combos were all on point. And then after the session, he asked why he couldn't throw opponent right after hitting them, how to hit confirm a medium button and how to mash DP during a block string. And I- Those are good questions. And I straight up forgot that people might not know that. And it came naturally to me because I've been playing them for over 10 years, but the best part was that he could probably still beat me in the game. Do you think that this is one of the problems with public reception of fighting games? games, the general public not realizing that there's many high-level concepts involved that actually make the experience more fulfilling and interesting once you get to them. What are other examples of certain high-level concepts in games that didn't completely convey themselves and stumped you? Much love and thanks.

Yeah, so fighting games have like an enormous, enormous amount of technical knowledge that is just nowhere to be found ever. But at the same time, all genres have this too. and being good in all of these main headline games of their genres requires deep understandings of the engine and where things and how things work and when animations and interactivity starts and stops. And all the most popular genres, I would say,

it's a bit of the classic thing we say from time to time where it's like in those genres, whether it's league, whether it's a team shooter, like you cannot know that stuff, join a team, and that team will carry you win or lose, and so you can still see

results favoring your fun because you don't feel the inexperience as hard as a game where you're by yourself. I think that's a part of it, and I think it's not everything because I know that the discussion often gets skewed for fighting games in this way,

but the truth is is that the technical crazy shit, like people that are really good, at shooters that are really good, at mobas and tactical turn-based RPGs are also working on this insane APM level, you know? And in some cases, it's way harder to get the grasp of those. But it's not a game where you have other people with you while you're playing, exception being the current one we're playing, you know? I think the worst game slash genre I've ever encountered with this problem is old Monster Hunter games. You've talked a lot about this, yeah.

Old Monster Hunter games have a wealth. Like somebody pointed out when we're getting ready for the FF14 thing, which is they brought up the Monster Hunter video that me and you did forever ago. And I'm like, that's a different situation. The reason why I had to yell out all this stuff at you is because there were a bunch of core mechanics you didn't understand. but more importantly, you didn't understand those mechanics because Monster Hunter mechanics are never explained ever, like at all.

You had to be there during trying. Some of them have names that are never, Affinity is never explained in game ever. And it used to be back in the day where they were explicitly made more obtuse so that you would pick up the fucking guide when you went and bought it at Yodabashi camera. external

was fucked up it was like legitimately designed to require a guide like it's interesting when you know games have like games had things that were like holy shit did you know this secret thing

existed there was tech inside of uh fucking Mike Tyson's punchout that no one knew about for 30 to 40 years uh And the difference between old, old unknown secret tech in games versus, yeah.

Versus mandatory, you cannot overcome this challenge if you don't know about it, but also it's unexplained. Yeah. I'm trapped. I've trapped myself. You appear to have trapped yourself. I'm literally, I've literally caught myself in a cable. That's, I can't get it out. I can't even stay up.

That's okay. The podcast is over. Stay trapped forever. Yeah.