Castle Super Beast - CSB379: White Boys Can't Play Magneto

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Download MP3 | Watch Video Episode Full Timestamps: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRojR7jDLDhzQ9r8xrLymUOUfwfe28YSPTzQFsmuZ9iS3DrzGZsb8E_Bg-YzxagkQhT6ozDunn4KsFC/pub Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive NEW CASTLE SUPER BEAST "LEGACY" SHIRT & DESKMAT AVAILABLE NOW: https://www.orchideight.com/collections/castle-super-beast Go to http://buyraycon.com/superbeast to get 20% off The Everyday Earbuds Classics. Take control of your income. Start your free trial at http://shopify.com/superbeast Go to http://brooklynbedding.com/ and use promo code SUPERBEAST to get 30% off Docket: Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles Saying they're killing physical media like a week after deleting purchased movies off of accounts is an absolutely hysterical optics decision to make And the same day you announce the closure of the Vita and PS3 digital stores. PlayStation Has Clearly Learned Nothing From Helldivers 2, As Marvel Tokon Is Being Blocked In 132 Countries. Any country that doesn't have PSN won't be able to play the PC version Sony: switch out lever gates with ease on the FlexStrike wireless fight stick…MightyKeef - Reverse the disc-less decision, fuck nigga. Chinese game Love and Deepspace canceled a new love interest after furious fans mailed cow poo to the developers. The studio has now promised it will never add another romance option to the game again and issued a massive apology JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run 2nd Stage | Official Trailer: Streaming every friday starting Sptember 25th from 2nd and 3rd stage, 11 episodes in total, Jojo Fridays are (kinda) backl Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender | Official Movie Trailer | Paramount+ | Avatar Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games | Official Trailer | Crunchyroll Former Xbox president Sarah Bond, former Roblox chief product officer Manuel Bronstein, and Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick have been linked with a secret society called 'Dialog' organised by controversial billionaire and conservative activist Peter Thiel.  

Oh, yo. Hey, Willie, what's up? Yeah, no, you're saying that you got to check your vods every week to see what your life has been up to. I can't remember streams the day after I do them, man. I feel the same way. And I kind of think that the ability to go back and see, like, what you've done with your week, with this gig, in addition to simply having a weekly podcast is almost like fight. dementia because it's kind of running together a little bit it's fighting dementia and it's

creating a journal that your brain can use to like log every seven days and categorize them it does it feels like it's a little thing that you can put your brain around in terms of a grouping of time and you can then put together what was my week what did I do it it feels helpful in that way oh I've got new dimension news for you by the way you might want to know this interesting Okay. So as you are, when you become an aged person and are at risk of dementia, if you cook your own meal at least once or twice a week, you offset the onset of dementia's symptoms by about 30%. Wow.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. I've heard things like this, but it's pretty much anything routine, right? No. Because if you're bad at cooking and have no skills, it jumps to 67% decrease in onset. If you don't enjoy the taste of what you make.

If you are not good or practiced at cooking, because it's not routine. It's about novelty. It's about learning a new thing in your 60s and 70s. Wait a minute. What were the percentages? 30 and 67. when you're when you're cooking but you suck shit so you have to learn how to cook and you're old you're using your brain more which offsets dementia so like everybody like all like the you've

seen this with the boomers they hit like 40 and they are done learning anything new for the entire rest of their life yes correct yeah yeah and it's absolutely fucking baffling they have decided that i'm done and i'm sure you've tried to explain something to your mom and it's actually trivially simple but you get one step into the process and she goes, that's too complicated,

that's too complicated, I can't do it, I can't do it, just do it for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that. And that is baffling, but also I'm starting to feel that way in other aspects of life.

For example, I know this is something you wouldn't relate to necessarily, but when it comes to music, I thought you were going to talk about hair. No, the desire to consume and keep up with music, as new things come and change is so fucking, like, exhausting and just not worth the energy.

Well, I actually have a news for you on that. It's been statistically and empirically proven that the best music that ever came out was the ones that came out in between the ages of 15 and 25 for you. Sure, sure, sure. All music tastes like rapidly spike in the late teen years and then sharply decrease. It is just the natural way of things. And we grew up being told that the 70s was the best. And, you know what I mean? It feels as if, like, there's always that sliding scale of each generation.

But there's moments that take you by surprise and just ambush the fuck out of you. Like, for example, I'm going to put a bullet point. I'm going to put a marker for something I was going to come back to talking about routine. Yes, church. All right. Before I get into that, when you're talking about music, recently, the, city was just taken over suddenly overnight at the jazz fest i woke up one morning and found out that like place des arc the massive place downtown where everyone has big um events in summer festivals

was like overcapacity with 150,000 people all coming together to to watch a concert for a group called angine de potrin and i was like who what what like i yeah this is surprised because when an event that scale, with a crowd that big comes together, you know, if it was something like, oh, back in the day if Lady Gaga came to town or if like Bad Bunny did a free concert or something, you're like, oh yeah, okay, that makes sense. It's going to be nuts downtown. That makes sense. But then all of a sudden we're like hearing about this massive, insane moment. And I was like, I have never heard of this band. Who are these people? And then you look into it and what you find out is it's a kind of a novelty gimmick band where it's two performers, kind of like the white stripes. You have a, you know, guitarist bassist and then you have a drummer. They're in full costumes with a bunch of poca dots on them. And they don't speak like normal language. They speak in weird thing, weird sounds and other things. Well, and then of course, what it actually turns out is they're from Gatsino, which is La Region.

Right. They're from deep... That explains everything. They're out in the Quebec countryside, right? And something happens every year here is there's Franco Follies, Franco Fulis, which is the French music festival, a lot of French performers. It's very possible to become a huge hit internally in Quebec and not necessarily be known... And just never escape ever.

Outside in Canada or North America. It's kind of a bummer. Yeah, that happens. And I know people like that. I have in-laws who are... who are in bands that are like huge in French Canada, but not necessarily outside of it, right? You can sell out massive venues as well and theaters.

However, that doesn't explain these numbers. And so I'm like, yeah, I get like, okay, this is a new band from Gatino, but what's going on here, right? And then looking into it a bit further because it's literally all everyone is talking about, all of a sudden. And what you find out is, actually, experimental and they're doing like progressive math rock that is not only really

interesting when it comes to the when it comes to the notation like the notes they play are unusual notes and the time signatures they use are unusual time signatures so they're musicians musicians which then results in like Dave Grohl being like yo this is one of the most interesting bands I've ever heard and other famous musicians and and people in the industry bigging them up. And so they're actually a huge hit outside of Quebec,

like internationally now, but it's happened over the last two, three, maybe a couple months. They've been, they've been, you know, they've been doing it like from last year,

but they started to get bigger and bigger. And overall, I think just like it was a social media moment combined with the fact that this is their own backyard. And before they go on international tour and get picked up and swarmed with like tons of big name musicians,

they're here in the place where they grew up, not where they grew up, but they're in the big city of the province of where they're from. And then it was like, this is what leads to 150,000 people at Plastaisa. And good for them. Yeah, it's cool. It's very cool. And it's a moment that's happening. But I just woke up one morning and saw like crowd foot, like helicopter footage and drone footage of like an insane thing going on. I was like, what the fuck is this?

And this happened while not hearing a peep about who they are. are their existence in any way, shape, or form? You know, it's a bit of that, like, you will meet and hear about YouTube channels and meet people at mutual friends that are, you've never heard of their channels, and they have, like, 10, 15 million subscribers. You know, it's an insanely weird thing that just makes you feel the passage of time, but also, music in general is just easy to stop trying to keep up. It's very easy to fall into your habits on that.

Okay. I'm just thinking about my dad who like, my dad plays video games. That's good for your brain. My dad plays the same video game. You know what video game my dad plays? Solitaire. Yep.

He's been playing Solitaire for decades. And like, I feel like he's at the point where he has solved Solitaire. So, like, you're not getting any good brain juice out of that one anymore, Dad. Yeah. I mean, you might as well be playing 52 pickup. Yep. Good shit. Yeah, honestly. Yeah.

Willie is a fake Quebecer. Yep, I live in fake Quebec my entire life. I was born in fake Quebec. And that's, yep, that's it. It's not real. My life is a lie. I go outside every day and live in a fake world and do fake things. And I'm just not genuine, man.

I love that that person accidentally like drove headfirst into like a real point of derision. We're like, I am sure there are a lot of my Quebec welcome patriots that would consider you and I fake Quebecers because the language maternal is not the French, it's my way. Right? And I moved away too. Is it in place, sir?

Like, I moved away and married an American? Christ. Did I even live there? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we won't even get into the, uh, the other dynamics of it. But for the most part, it is interesting. Be aveni you at Quebec.

Don't you welcome to Revisal me? You son of a bitch. How fucking dare you? You know, my family's been here a minute. I have like unironically run into it. Oh, oh, nice to meet you. Where are you from? Verdun.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Oh, really? I cannot tell you. Shut up. No. But whoever that piece of shit was in the chat, it's exactly that energy. All right. Tangent point that I said earlier, when we were talking about routines and staving off the Alzheimer's and collecting the podcast is a thing that you have to collect your thoughts every seven days, I will say that back in the olden days, I would, when I was going to church, one thing that church was good for, you know, before having a podcast was every seven days. you have a routine place to go that's a community thing.

And there's enough time during that period to kind of collect your thoughts. And there was something useful. I've said this point on the podcast before. But there was something nice and useful about taking a second to just slow down and collect your thoughts on your week and put together what you did. And I feel like this podcast is kind of like that. So, hey, welcome to church. I think, no. You know what? No, I'm going to hold that for later.

Welcome to the Church of Universal Truth, where our opinions are really good. Very, very, very, very good. Not controversial, too. Remember, this is the episode after the title Black-owned business, right? This is after the block. So this is very important. People are going to be clicking it and tuning in and being like, oh, shit, I didn't know. You're super right, yeah.

Yeah. How does it feel to be black-owned, Pat? Fair. Had it coming? All things considered? Had it coming? Couldn't complain. Yeah, all right. Yeah.

Shall we let the people in on an exciting new secret? Let's, let's, fuck, I'm so fucking good. Let's exciting new secret, the people. Well, which will play a lot better to the video watching live audience.

It will play a lot better to the video watching audience. Thank you for comment. commenting on my drip, Pat. It is quite... Oh, man, that is... That is silky-looking. That is very, very shiny and nice.

It is a pretty silky-looking shirt. It's covering your boobs, excellently. It is. That's important. Let's take a better look at it, shall we? Oh, my God. Is that the Castle Super Beast logo? It is.

In silhouette on a gigantic, beautiful shirt? Let's get a better look. Here we go. Hey, wait. The gradient on it seems kind of uneven. What's up with that? Let me see if I can get a little closer to the frame. Okay.

Oh, no. I know what those are. Those are those disgusting titles that we keep getting in trouble for. And let me just click the post button right over here so that it's now nice and live. The text, long after we all return to dust when podcast is nothing but a memory, the unhinged episode titles will remain and there will always be a perfectly rational contextual explanation for each and every one of them. This is our legacy. The Castle Super Beast legacy t-shirt and desk mat are now available and you can get them over. at Orcid8.com

slash products slash castle dash super dash beast. Orchidate, wait a second. That sounds familiar. Isn't that Brickie's Brickie's outfit? That's Brickie. Shout out to Brickie.

Helping us get this nightmare shirt on you. I'm going to put a link over there. There will be a link in the description. There's a link in the chat and I've posted it over on the socials as well. You can check on Blue Sky. we've got a Castle Super Beast legacy collection Legacy shirt and desk mat You can get one or other

Also the clown Is back up for I would assume a highly limited time Yes yes exactly And so what we have here To just I explain a little bit more I suppose It's a really nice kind of smooth shiny t-shirt material And it's a gray on black

You know so the print is a little difficult to read at a distance. It's a little smooth. It's a little difficult. There is the text that wraps all the way around to the back from top to bottom. The entire shirt is covered in every single Castle Super Beast title. So, you know, you're going to have to get pretty close. Yes.

Before somebody is like, wait a second. Yes. And so the thing, the thing, right, is that one, we know you're all not cowards, right? Right. We know how you roll. And the details are quite clear here. And I went through a couple different versions of this. With like the logo itself, the dragon logo being made up of a couple different things. And I was like, how notable do I want that to be? And I think the negative space version is the best. Because when anyone... I totally agree. When the negative space version is as is, you see a very crisp and clean Castle Super Beast C logo. And when anyone is like looking at this from a distance, that's all it pretty much is. but as they get closer, if they're curious to get up and read it, well, it's on you, it's wearing on your body,

and at the very least there's a conversation you can have about how this absolutely, clearly, perfectly explainable title with great context can be heard if you listen to the full thing, but you always need to get that context, which it's always there, and you can tune into more from your favorite black owned business that is class conscious and progressive and all that good shit and all of it just every check bar every checkbox all of that right so get in there get in there everybody and grab a shirt um i yeah shoutouts to so uh lee for for helping with getting the final design together and getting out all together.

A vision came to me of a shirt that was all titles. It's a pretty great idea. I got to tell you, you really killed it on this one, bud. Thank you. Thank you. There's just, there's something to

the idea of like, okay, all right, you say you're a fan? Well, wear this motherfucker out in public and get close to someone. But, but,

and this is like actual like let's be real for a second here. There's also a desk mat which can stay at home on your desk. Yes, I can. And the desk mat is very nice and it's very smooth and it's perfect for your mouse or your card games and everything else. And that too has the logo as well as all the titles, which can be enjoyed from the comfort of your own home as well. So you have all the cool prototypes. Can you send me a couple? Yeah.

So I can wear it off my boobies. There you go. And then I have to stop wearing it Once the kid learns how to read There's there's you know I mean or or or or context Right context wait for context Also great great drip for a first date

Yes You're gonna you're gonna just weed out all problems You know that that thread about listening to the CSB As a red flag Could not have been better timed for this Because if your date reads a bunch of these titles and goes, what? Great. But if they go,

hmm, maybe not so great. Maybe. But also, like I said, context is everything. So enjoy, enjoy the legacy.

The important part is to just keep in mind that truly, as the description says, when actually listening to the podcast in the grand dusty future becomes difficult, to do, but somehow reading the titles is still possible. That's all that will remain, you know? What does this run up to?

What's the last episode that's included on this one? Is it 378? No, no, no. This was made before that. This was made before that. So it runs up to at least a couple episodes ago. I can't tell you exactly. where. There's a lot though.

There's well over 350 at the very least. So yeah. That's correct. I was torn between either that or the other description possibility was, you know, just straight up quotations about Hey Hunter, I listen to the podcast

you've recommended and there's no fewer than five to six mentions of sore bodily orifices in the first few minutes. I don't think that they'll be a good fit for our family-friendly event. I don't know what to tell you, man.

I don't know what to tell you. It's just, you know, it's just the... Yeah. So. I just don't know what to tell you. Anyways, yeah, so basically, I get in there. There's, you know, going to be taking those... You can get the bundle, and things are going to be shipping out in August.

Thanks, Burkey. Thank you, Bricky. All right. Shall I take the baton? Yeah, what's up, man? So what's up over the Madden household? I guess a couple different things. One, this is more like future.

I'm waiting to see it's going to be coming soon, but I've decided to go pick up what they call a cargo bike. A cargo bike? Yeah. So I was thinking about, you know, ways to get around with baby. and there have been some pretty cool steps forward in terms of transportation tech and something I've seen has been people...

Oh, I know these fucking things, yeah! People have been rocking bicycles with seats for kids on them and I was like, hmm, those are a pretty handy-looking thing to get around with your kid, but at a certain age, that doesn't feel as safe, especially if they're smaller, right? You want to wait until your kid's a certain age that can, you know, perhaps take a couple bumps. to some degree.

Yeah, before you want to just stick a seat on the back, I don't feel too comfortable with that. Maybe there's something. What you can do is you probably put one of them in those like bikes for dogs, you know, with the mesh. Oh, okay, okay, sure.

Put a cage, a cage fucking, yeah, right. Or I kind of thought to myself, surely someone must have come up with an idea for a front-seated thing that is more secure and has a large safety compartment for younger babies and kids to get around in.

And sure enough, yeah, like that exists. It's a cargo bike. And there's a couple different versions of it you can go through. And I was looking into like how to go about it and what's, you know, what's safe and and the technique that is required to balancing and such. And I went out to a spot where, yeah, they have a great place here in Montreal. Shoutouts to Allo Velo. They got it for me.

And as I walked in and the person there was like, are you bully versus? And I'm like, okay. No. Cool. Cool. Every time I've encountered that situation, they go, hey, are you? And I just look at them straight in there. I go, no.

Yeah, well, it didn't work. It wouldn't work because there was also someone I went to high school with that was like, hey, what's up? Then you double down. You're like, I don't even know who that is. Get away from me. I don't even know who the fuck that is. Actively run.

But it was cool because basically I went. in and after looking at a couple different versions. What they have is three-seater, three-wheeler bikes, where you have... Also known as a tricycle. It's like a tricycle, but the two wheels are in the front, actually. Reverse tricycle. Wait, no, that's a trike. That's a trike, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a trike. It's not a tricycle, right?

The, you know, kind of like the quad, but you have it in the front. What's cool to as well is these things are pretty advanced. I've taken a look and And seen, there was a great not just bikes video about them too, about other, they're like, if you have places where you got good bike lanes and a decent bike safety for transportation, you can take advantage of that, which fortunately, at the moment, Montreal has a lot of good bike lanes. So, yeah, you can get to. Has that one really good bike lane? There's that one.

There's that one, that way, that main artery. And then they've added a bunch more to. And, yeah, something that you basically. you know, can do is you get the, you can carry 500 pounds in like that front compartment with like a bench seat and everything, which is like, that's two people. So you can carry the baby and family. 480 pounds of oranges. Yeah.

You can literally, you can carry the family on the bike and go where you want to go and stuff. And so that's why I'm starting to see like what. Can you carry 500 pounds on a trike? Absolutely. See, the cool thing is that, well, one, I have a lifetime of carrying around this. That's true. These legs, I'm not confident in a whole lot about my body, but I'm very confident in my legs and my thighs. Your legs are so disproportionately muscular.

And I'm like, I've been overweight for a while. Oh, oh, like, I'm super overweight, but when I flex my calves, like, it is burn Horgarth dynamic anatomy in this bitch. My fucking muscles are ripped below the belt. And it's all from carrying this gut for my life. So I'm quite confident in my legs, you know, I am. But more than that, the thing of the two is they also have these as like e-bikes with like the uphill assist on them. So they can, they can help stabilize weight as well. So if you are carrying 500 pounds, you can turn on the thing that basically makes it so that it's like, it feels like you're riding a normal bike either way. Um, so that's cool.

And, uh, the three wheeler in particular, there's some technique to it where you got to get used to like, you can't corner quickly like you would on a normal bicycle because you don't want to like lopside because it's not made for cornering it aggressively. Because the weight is all in the front and you are, instead of a bicycle where you are the center and then you use the front handlebars to turn left and right and guide that, that main weight forward, you are trailing behind. the main weight and you are delicately it's like you're pushing a shopping cart that is full more than it is riding a bicycle if that makes sense. So the way that you

maneuver a shopping cart that's much heavier than you is the same technique that goes into writing one of these kind of like tric setups going but yeah that's cool and considering that you know this city is a giant fucking

mountain it is a royal Mountain, in fact. There is a whole lot of uphilling that you would want to be able to offset. So, yeah, got one of those. And we'll give some more updates as I get used to it and as we take it for a spin. But that is a pretty cool solution. And the more I looked into learning about them, the more I saw like a community of people that were like, yeah, fuck it.

This is my second car. Or this is the vehicle. you know like they're the there's the fact that they have them going like here's how you make it get through the winter here's how you use it literally on ice paths where they've cleared the snow off and you can use that and keep it warm and stuff

it's like that's a really practical solution depending on where you're at you know so very cool um so yes that was that was the first yeah I got to say the trike is like because as you were describing cargo bike and I'm like oh man I'd never be confident enough to ride a two-wheeled bicycle with my man

because I've taken some spills on a bike before and my little man I don't want him to take a spill but like a tricycle man you gotta be a brain dead maroon to fucking flip that thing so the funny the funny part is I walked in expecting to want to get a two-wheeler because when I was reading about it online and looking into people's reviews and everything I saw a lot of people saying trikes feel so different from bicycles that you might feel more comfortable on something two wheels if you've been riding bikes your whole life, right?

Yeah. And so I was like, okay, let me go try that. And they do have the cargoes that have the two wheels that you're more or less balancing on and you put down a kickstand to stabilize the whole thing. And I took one out for a spin as a test drive and immediately they were like, okay, this is going to feel like a bicycle. However, because the front wheel is really small

and it's not the size of a full bicycle wheel and also it's way in front of where the like cargo actually storage part is, you're going to have this weird feeling of like the handlebars are going to be really shaky. And they're going only stabilize once you start to get a little bit of speed going, you know. And I tried it and I was like, ooh, yeah, yeah, that's a learning curve. Right. And it does give you more nimble control to like, you know, weave in and out and you can you can take corners fine with it. And you can probably do like, you can go out of the city if you want to as well. However, a really good point that was pointed out was like,

do you really want to be learning how to maneuver this while also parenting at the same time? No, no. Yeah. I'm at the point where there's a huge variety of tasks right now that I don't want to be doing simultaneously while parenting. And some of them, I do anyway because it's good for them. Like when he was 18 months, two years, doing dishes together, awesome. Now, now dishes becomes a full step process of pre-scanning every dish for a knife.

Because it goes from, hey, pick that up, wobbly, pick it up, to what's this one? Is this a knife? And you're like, okay. No, I'm trying to extrapolate every task into the... See, Dada, I told you we needed to go left. Like, what is the version of that in the task, you know? So, fuck. But, but like this, the two-wheeler versions, they do have the e-bike thing,

so they can get the assisted support and all that. Overall, though, I kind of just, even a little bit of that wobble, I went, nah, okay, let's get the three-wheeler out here. And then that felt comfortable. And it is different, but it felt, felt safer right away because when you come to a stop, you don't have to balance and put the kickstand down. You literally just, you come to a stop and it's upright. You just get off, you know? Um, so yeah, more, more on that as, uh, as we go. But, uh, truly, um, yeah, this is,

this is that next level because apparently in countries where cargo bikes are like a main thing of, of getting around and a lot of, they're not more popular. Like, um, in Amsterdam, for example, um, they don't have the, um, they don't have the, soccer mom vans. They have the, what was the word? It was, uh,

it's, it was, there's a word for it that was like, cargo bike mooder kind of thing, you know? And it was just like, it was basically like the mother that drives around with the cargo bike. Um,

is the replacement term. And, uh, uh, that has become more and more of a, of a, a cliche, I guess,

uh, anyway. What is it? Backfayet. There we go. It's backfayet, mudr, is a term for, it's the, the version of this that applies to the Netherlands instead of soccer mom van. You get, you run all the kids up into the backfayet and did you go for a ride?

Which they said also is pretty cool because, because they're like, the view from one of those lets the kids see the neighborhood more and they get a better. internal map of things going on versus the back of a car where you're kind of just like teleporting from spot to spot there was a great series of videos a while ago that was like hey hey moms hey dads why don't you take your infant out for a beautiful day you know in the sun right and you know they'll see the world and whatever and this lady just uh you know took footage of her going to the park going to like ocean side going to a restaurant and then just put a GoPro inside the camera inside the the stroller it's like you know what that baby's looking at top of the fucking carriage

yep yep you strike the fuck up yeah and nothing yeah not getting anything at all 100% they're getting fresh air that's it no that's and some ambient noise it's still good for them but like let's be real yeah there's a whole there's a whole topic on the like you know the ways in which if you have a kid that jumps in the car and teleports from location to location they don't have a map in their head

they have a what you might call it they have a quick travel map but they don't have an actual like road map so yeah like if my guy you know if I had a heart attack and died on the street like my kid could probably get home even at his age

from like three four blocks away hell yeah that's fucking awesome Awesome. That's super cool. No, I mean, no, hey, hold on. I'm fucking dead in this scenario. Okay. Well, it's not that awesome. It's appropriate and, and solemn. Sorry, I was a little excited there. We could dial back. Got to jump the gun a little bit on that. Okay. Well, but that's, that's a great, that's a great trait regardless of the unfortunate demise that occurs within the scenario. Good job on that.

All right. Other stuff going on. have finally complete I have completed Mina the hollower Oh wow you've you've just screamed ahead On me on that one I was not too far From from the end with the final act And I decided to just push through

Which was very easy to do Because the final act is Fucking strong Yeah, yeah Yeah Yeah the game gets a lot better as I As I described the more you the more you go in The more you get the more it it

throws at you. And then the last stretch of this game is phenomenal. I really loved it. Um, it like, I mean, yeah, it like, it, like, for all the, for all the things that I was, I was annoyed with in the beginning and the platforming stuff, like they really perfect it is the best way I can put it. Okay. With the, they, they perfect the design by the end.

And this is all, like, not even seeing the new game plus stuff. This is just regular new game. Um, you get an amazing final area into an amazing series of like final challenges. Um, there is a ridiculously,

there is a real son of a bitch platforming room right before the final boss to. So like, it pushes everything you've got to the limit on that. even if you've got your trinkets, it doesn't fucking matter. You got to just be clean about it. And then, yeah, just an incredible, an incredible, like, finale sequence. So really, really highly recommend Mina the Hollower pushing through on that. And in addition to all the cool new game stuff plus, new game plus stuff we talked about last time,

going through that list of unlocked modifiers, because I had the big list initially that I was looking at. It's enormous. It's fucking absolutely crazy. It's psychotic. I want to say the list has been. maybe 500 or so different things on and off switches for ways to customize your game. And like it feels like they wanted to let give you, it's almost like they wanted to give you a use map settings button, you know, like a map editor almost, but it's, but that would have been

too far. So instead, they just made every possible fun variant you can imagine and then put that on a button that you toggle on and off because asking people to go in and draw the actual map. might be a bit too much, but mechanically... Maybe a smidge. And it is like... I am curious because I'm like, the new game pluses, I guess, are all different versions of those switches,

kind of like... Yeah, they're like not random toggles, but they're just like all over the fucking place. Pre-selected for fun, you know? If you don't want to go through the list yourself and actually fine-tune it. But without... using kind of gradients and and you know uh levels to it i've never seen a game with this many

modifiers it's it's the most i've ever seen you like dove into some nightmare game made it on a keyboard like dwarf fortress or fucking caves of could you would but for like a regular human game yeah no i've never seen it um and the other thing too is just in terms of build variety by the And the amount of trinkets and the synergy they have with each other, and then the amount of tools you can use in the synergy they have with each other, and the five weapons you get, well, you know, six, and then the different... Oh, yes, you saw that then. And then the different things they...

No, but I remember we discussed, but like... Oh, yeah, okay. And then the different ways you use them, like, gameplay variety, man, oh, my God. Like, there's just so much to how you can play and... what you can do, you know, I went, at first, one of the first consumable items you get in the game is the plasma dash, and I kind of ignored it for most of the game, and then I found myself coming back to it during the situations where I'm like, okay, don't got time for, like, I don't feel confident in a parry, I'm telegraphing this moment, and something's coming at me,

and I'm not going to dive into the ground right now, because there's too much other bullshit in the way, dash into the thing. It comes in real, like stuff like that comes back around and start finding new applications for it that are like really, really good. I also, some of the things you find in the game are, you find like a couple of different types of shops and one in particular that's really interesting is a NPC who will sell you trinkets ahead of the time when you're supposed to find them. Yes, that is a really interesting, like obviously for speed. runners like guy.

If you want a particular trinket that makes platforming or adventuring or healing better or whatever, something from that you get later in the game, almost like a ring. It is a ring essentially in a soul's game or one of the orbs in Hollow Night. He will

go out and find it and grab it for you ahead of time for a premium price that you pay more than obviously the free. Much more. Yeah, you pay thousands for it instead of just, oh, finding it for free. And when you eventually get to that chest in the game, you open it up and there's a note that says,

hey, grab this item for you, you know, but this is where it would have been, basically. And you can't buy the item and get it immediately either. You buy it and then it gets brought to you by the time you clear your next tower. So it's like you can get early access to like the best trinkets in the game. if you can clear a tower, get the money for it, and then, yes, are willing to pay the price, you know? It's such a cool idea.

It's such a cool idea. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And, yeah, in the end, I ended up rocking the summon item ability where you send out the little chained, astral chain kind of little creature. Oh, that guy's incredible. Did you get the poop that makes the fly?

from Isaac? No, I didn't. Interesting. Oh, there's a, hold on, Mina the hollower. Fly. Yeah, it's fly bait. Okay. You get it from midden.

That's super gross weirdo. You meet in the swamp. Okay. If you get a hold of them, you get a trinket that is a poop from binding of Isaac. Huh. Sorry, no, you meet him in the crypt. Okay. The disgusting freakazoid.

Okay. And when you kill enemies, do damage. It's someone's like binding of Isaac flies around you. That's interesting. That like follow enemies and do damage. Yeah. I mean that's I got the one incredible. Yeah. The one big fly is super great too. Because like if you have it out long enough and you, you know how you can increase your trinket usage? If you get your trinket usage high enough, the fly that comes out on the chain gets tough. It levels up over time. Yeah. Its color changes. And

And then it eventually... Super busted. And it eventually hits a maximum leveled up color. And when you detonate it, it does a fucking screen clearer, you know, bomb. So, uh, it, yeah, I just, I came, I used that for a good bit towards the end. And, um, I also pulled in the, um, yeah, the parry, the medallion, the plasma dash, um, the extra heels. And the intravenous kit is really, really good, too.

So you basically get When your life goes below 50%, It doesn't auto heal And it doesn't do the animation. It just happens automatically, right? But the downside being that you cannot wait Until an optimal time to heal your life, It's going to use it early.

So the trade-off is like, don't worry about heel timing, but you're going to go through them faster If you're not perfect on your timing. Anyway, Mina the Hollower, yeah, after beating that fucking great-ass game. And lots of fun little bits too that are, um, uh, the game is paying attention to what you do and your actions. And it reminds you of that wherever possible. Um, you know, there's a lot, there's a whole lot to

what your actions as an NPC, uh, your actions on, you know, throughout the game, lead to. And, um, different outcomes and things that come from that that are just kind of little fun extras. So, uh, go, go fucking, go support that. Go play that game. It is very, very good. That game's great. Also, this week was the third Avatar Fighters beta. Open beta.

Open beta, but pre-order required. So open for if you... Open-ish beta. Open-ish beta, yeah. Hey, I have a question. Yeah. Because I saw people, I have not put hands on it myself, but I did see people talking about it. Do you believe that game is

too hard for casual Avatar fans. This is the discourse that is coming to today's episode, and this is why I bring it up. We'll get there. Is that game fucked up? It is very fucked up, right? It is very fucked up. It's extremely fucked up. And it rules. Here's what's up, right? There should be different types of games for everyone that likes different types of fighting game. There should be games. I agree with that. right? You need to offer all kinds of ingredients when it comes to how tasty this genre can be. And this one in particular is like what ceiling? There is no ceiling. Your human limitation is the only ceiling. Got it. So because when I saw what they were doing for Azula,

like it Casula is a mandatory two character character. So let me let me talk about that and I want to, this is why I'm bringing it up because before we're getting into the FGCness of the, of how hard it is to do combos or whatever, that's not as interesting to our audience as the cool lore implications of how they implement, they work on the characters. Because last time I talked about this, I talked about how sick the systems with,

um, um, uh, God damn it, my brain is just awful sometimes. You're good, man. You're strong. Zucco. Zucco's honor system is incredible. It's such a cool design where you create a system in the game that, to recap,

it encourages the player to use all of their meter, all of their chi and burn themselves out. And after they burn themselves out, they gain back redemption and it makes and redemption makes you a little bit stronger as a character. And if you burn yourself out again or if you exhaust yourself again, you level up your redemption meter. You get better and better each time you burn too hot, right? Resembling the character's arc in the story where you are somebody who's impulsive and nuts and just fucking goes to the end and then you have to calm that shit down and then you come back better than you were before. Awesome. I also shouted out the system they have on Cora, where Cora has the ability to do a running round start drop kick that leads to an insane combo.

And if you land a first hit like Dragon Punch kind of reversal attack that is just an insanely ballsy move to do and you don't get hit first. you get rewarded for it. The game's like, awesome, you're playing like Cora. She's rash. She's also impulsive. She goes in. She does not have any chill whatsoever. You need to play this character with no chill.

And the cost of doing so is burning through your chi, right? She can extend a lot of her moves and do crazy damage to you, but she then gets super burnt out as a result, you know? So the game is like, play her the way she plays. She acts in the show. there is a a lot of the stuff with Toff The Toff is super duper awesome

She's like my fucking favorite She's armored She's got her rock She's got her grab She's got all this cool shit As she's earthending And yeah Saka has a move

Where he slips through your legs And hits you from behind And it makes him invisible Because it's a blinding move But if you do it on Toff It doesn't work Because she's already blind Idiot

Why would it work? Why would it work? Right? So, and he's already doing a tons of great stuff. Water tribe! He's a perfect mixture of like the times where he's being cool, but then the time, but then all his goofy shit as well. You know, the functional Dan, if you would. So they did a great job with all that. And when it comes to Azula, her implementation into the game is one of the most creative, interesting things I've seen with a fighting game character. because just being building her up from the lore from this from avatar she's a character who comes in with a focused mode where she is the azula you know from most of the show and she can do tons of she can play around in the air she can dash in and dash out she can keep away she can hit you from a distance and she can rush you down as well she can do it all she has very low health but

in exchange for that low health, she's like Akuma. In exchange for that low health, she can just fight in a ton of different ways. And she also has the lightning, which is her super, which is unblockable unless you are somebody

Ang or Zucco or later Iro. Who were the only ones that can catch that shit and deflect it. If you're Zucco, you catch it and deflect it. If you're, Ang, you catch it and you shoot it upwards. Right? That's great. Yeah! Really great.

So they actually fucking did it, right? Then, with her the way she plays, if you lose around, she's no longer focused and she goes into Fire Lord mode, where the hair comes down, she gets the crazy look in her eyes from the end of the show and is just go fuck yourself, rush down, nonsense, insane bat shit style.

And turns into a completely different character. She is a, she is a, like, she loses a bunch of her moves, and what's left becomes way better. She loses a bunch of her air mobility, but what's left becomes stronger. So here's my question, because this is the most interesting thing we could be. Is the first version of the character better, but only if you have super, super high execution? Yes. that's that that's perfect so if you if your execution is fucking perfect and unlock you won't lose a round so you don't play as the second version the focused version of azula is harder to play and requires better execution and better focus to play her that's that's that's ideal that's literally like a fantasy of the way the character should work and if you lose around fuck it i don't care anymore anything to win it's the coolest shit i've seen it's really super technical character into full-on soul bad guy gorilla mode that's it dragon install conditional

on on round loss and uh the game already has its own built-in system of like you get extra meter on round loss as well so then you get access to your level three's only on second round um people have said that like there's a character of lov who like played like this from um from um melty blood and uh who would even know about that well well i don't even know about that well also in terms of just like, you know, systems of the character changes between rounds, like there's, there's sources like that.

In terms of just like, like, dietic, just really perfectly lore accurate, the character fantasy to use the word, right? This is some of the best I've ever seen. Thinking about what the characters are and who they are lore-wise and turning that into gameplay, fucking phenomenal. And if you're somebody who's actually like, okay, that's too much for me.

I don't want to actually learn how to use two characters. So everyone has a variation list. They can pick from one of three styles. And if you're Ang, for example, you pick Appa and you get one series of like air or cancels from that. Or if you pick his little buddy, the little monkey, I forgot, you get a better air. control and better air gliders, right? I remember the little monkey man name. Oh, that's not weird.

So you get all these different support characters that change your style pretty significantly. Momo. Mommo, that's it. You get these support characters that change your style pretty significantly. And yeah, it

reflects who the trainer was or what they taught you. What this character did for the playable character in the show is in the philosophy of that support, you know? When it comes to Azula, you can pick her main mode, which is that allows you to do the systems I described, which is you lose the first round and then you switch over. Or her two other supports are Judy from Basin Se, which is the smiling lady that says there is no war in Basingsei.

And she's like, everything's fine. Everything's great. I'm totally okay. forces you to stay in focused mode no matter what. Right? There is no fire lord. I'm all calm. Everything's totally fucking great.

Yeah. Or you pick the mirror. And the mirror replaces the background character with just the giant mirror from Azula's room that's broken with a reflection of her mom in the glass. Okay. And that is what sits where your support character would be. And when that mirror is on the screen, you are always in Fire Lord mode. Okay. Isn't that awesome?

It is. That's super cool. Everything about that is a phenomenal attention to detail for this great implementation of the character. Fucking sick. So now with all that fun stuff, the game getting hands on for this. this you know this third round just like i reported in previous versions uh it is unforgiving and asks a whole lot if you are trying to be stylish if you want to do the crazy combos that you see people that are you know pro players are doing the sky is the limit and it it is do like there are

there was a moment where do i want the sky to be the limit i know a whole lot of players who do because they haven't been able to do so in 20 plus years, right? This is like, and this is, the thing about the sky being the limit is that it's up to the player how far they want to go. It's up to you how far you want to take it. But if you're somebody who enjoys pressing buttons, and we say this term a lot in like fighting game stuff, but what that really means, when you hear someone say, you love to press buttons or I really love pressing buttons. Look at this guy pressing buttons over here. Yeah, it means you like doing complex things and you enjoy

like not being passive when you play. You enjoy literally more actions per minute. You want better APM or higher APM requirements for when you play. You know, people who are, you know, people who play characters like Crimson Viper, people who want to do El Forte's runstop fierce, hitting buttons, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

Versus the slower samurai showdown-esque player. that is going to go for a weight and counter hit and then do your thing and then chill for a bit, right? No lame. You don't pick Honda because you like to press buttons. No, man, you pick Honda because you like to hold down the fuck back. So what you get with a game like this is a really clear return to what older combos used to be.

And to get a little more technical, after Street Fighter 4 came out in 2009 that game had one frame links which is essentially you have to sometimes manually time one... It's for psychos. Yeah. It's for fucked up psychos.

You have to time... It's one frame of one 60th of a second. You have to manually time the button presses to have that amount of space to perfectly continue your combo, right? It's doable with a lot of practice and muscle memory, but it's extremely hard to do. And especially under duress when somebody's trying to hit you or beat you in a tournament or just fight whatever. It's hard to do in training mode when no one's bothering you much less when you're in the middle of a fight.

But some people really love that. Some people are all about that. The Marlin Pies of the World designing the more complex characters for 2XCO. Just stop it. Just calm down. Love that type of thing, right? Sacco is another player from the back. in the day that used to just go crazy doing really advanced shit with Cammy and going nuts.

People who love doing long crazy combos and long demanding things. This game, what I was saying was that after Street Fighter 4, that was the last time that they kind of said, okay, one-frame links are going to be in the game and these are how you do some of the more advanced combos. they made it so that starting with Street Fighter 5 and a number of games afterwards followed suit, three frames is the smallest amount of time that you're going to have to be able to time. And sometimes they throw a buffer on that even then. Yes.

And three frames is much more doable, right? It's still tricky. I can do three frames. But you can do some practice. You can get it in your system. And after, you know, after playing for a regular amount of time, you can do three frame links and not have an issue with it. So that has been the case with a lot of modern fighting games because in the quest for being more accessible and for being like something that people who are beginners can get better at quickly, they made it so that these requirements were lower. And it's a subtle small thing that like you don't feel at beginner level play, but you do feel it at intermediate and above.

I would say at me and you who are like, I would say are intermediate and above, right? I start once I got to that range like playing something like you know Street Fighter 6 or 2XCO I'm like oh I can practice these combos in an afternoon and do them instead of blowing a whole weekend trying to get this runstop fear shit going on and just fucking get nowhere

like nowhere So sidebar I learned about myself personally when I was playing Blanca in Street Fighter 4 and Blanca's like one of his optimized ways to confirm to one of the best ways you can land his ultra on your opponent in that game is to do his crouching light kick three times in a row

and then go into his big ultra, right? And each of those light kicks and then the big ultra he does are all one frame links apart from each other. Yeah, fuck that. So you have to do three in a row and I remember like that was what all the best Japanese players were doing

and that's like the one of the, if you can learn that skill, you can be really, really strong with this character. And I learned it and I was able to do it at the meetups and regularly for about two to three weeks.

Yeah, and then it fell off because you weren't radically practicing it all the fucking time. And then it was gone. Yeah, I just straight up was like, okay,

I have the ability to do this if I'm playing like aggressively, which people who are like trying to, you know, play professionally and stuff are playing that level and they're playing that often. But like taking a break, taking a

taking some time off the game, that skill drops off the fuck immediately. And I learned that, okay, I can do this, but reliably when I come back to the game, if I'm depending on this skill to win, I'm going to lose. So I need more reliable things

that I don't take as much of a responsibility, don't take as much skill to do. I need something that I, a more clear bread and butter that I can come back to in warm up too faster. Because I'll tell you nothing feels worse

than trying to do something that hard at a tournament that you've traveled to losing because it was too hard in the moment and now you have to

fucking take a bus back home for six hours. I mean, this applies to any game that has any input requirements, but like for me there's always been

the balance of like, listen, this character's really good. But can I make the character really good? I don't know. Let's look. These execution requirements

are pretty high. Yes, they are. I could play the best character in the game, but in my hands, they're like mid. Because I can't do the fucking high execution shit. And I never could. Even at my peak of like playing fighting games all the time when I'm 22. Yeah. Like I did not have the execution ability to do one frame links.

C, Street Fighter 6 Blanca and the current state of affairs, you know? Not to mention though, that's definitely a case to have just like I'm, I fucking love this other character and she's dope as hell. But I did go and... I mean, I'm wearing a fucking Third Strike shirt, man. I never once got used to doing short-light short to confirm things. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Makoto is my fucking favorite. The best thing you can do with Makoto is... Fucking super hard. Land her command grab and then go straight into her off-the-wall super where she then can go straight from landing that super into building your stun meter up 100% and then landing it again. And it's insanely, it's very difficult to do. And I only learned how to do it properly for the first time last year when fucking

Chirithi came over and showed me how to do it and we actually went for it. Because I was like, yeah, I love this character. That shit is just beyond my pay grade. It's one of the things that like came up. I don't know if it came up with you during the slam, but it came up to me with me at least once for both slams when someone who's like a coach or like above is like yeah so you can do this it's not that hard and I have to

stop them and be like it for you yeah yeah like it's it's actually super fucking hard even for somebody you mean but playing games and fighting games is 91 100%

100% and I do also have to explain and this is something that comes upon I'm talking to Reggie often but I'm just like my combine it with my own like my own bad clutch where I'm just like

I have to do repetition to get it into my brain because my ability to like improvise is not is lacking I have to go extra hard until the muscle memory is in real real deep you know

so this is all a giant tangent from the point I was bringing up which is that one frame links were something that you know a lot of fighting games said yeah we don't want to ask the player to have to do these

or we want it to be easier to do the most advanced stuff in the game. And this is a game that basically, and Avatar basically went, no, we want everything there. And if you have the ability to go that hard and do really insane high execution things, then let, go for it.

What's interesting. And if you can't, then hey, here's a really cool avatar fighting game that has all these characters that you like. Yes. And spending a little more time, you also do not have to do those combos to get decent gameplay out of it. You can do simpler combos that are shorter and do decent

damage as well. I think there's a real danger in like a lot of competitive games that you need to be a lab fiend to achieve any degree of success. Yeah. Which is not true. Like, and I can, I can describe that in fighting games, but I can also describe that in shooters like Fortnite. Like you see the people who just turn into a skyscraper as soon as they encounter a gunfight.

And I can't crank 90s like, fuck, I can't do that shit. And it's like, use your big boy brain. or your big girl brain, and just work around that shit so that you don't have to do the super high execution stuff. Yeah, you do have to play grapplers. Just play. Just play up the grappler. All heart, no brain.

Yeah. The thing with it, the thing with it, though, is if you were somebody, okay, I got to make a tangent. I was going to make a point about, um. You should have a notepad. I'm going to make a note about combo scaling. But before I talk about that, uh, when you talk about playing a character that, when you play when you're somebody who goes, I know I don't have the execution,

what you have to usually do. And this is absolutely what I do is you have to, if you are able to play a simpler character that does simpler things and to be successful with them, you have to get better at defense, right? Yeah.

You have to get better. But defense is boring and cringe. Yeah. Well, if you're able to, um, even though you can't like do the insane combo that's coming at you, if you can block that crazy Sonic Fox mix up,

that's coming at you and then land your simple but reliable counter, you can still keep up and play. You can fight. This is real, you know? The deal is, though, is that, like, learning to get good at defending is a whole other place to put your skill set. And you have to be willing to work on one or the other, right? Ideally both, but some people go, I'm just going to do my combo.

I don't care what the opponent does. I'm going to do play a one player game all day. And then other people will go, I know that my ability to do that is limited. So like me, I'm going to work on my defense so that I recognize most of what your character is doing and how you're coming at me. And I'm going to be ready for it.

And even if I don't land the optimal amount of damage, I'm going to land enough damage that this is still a real fight, you know? Okay. So to go back to what I was saying, when you do fancy, crazy, long super combos in this game, especially with a character like Azula, where she's going, she's doing

magneto loops on you in the corner She's doing Marvel nonsense Absolutely And you know As they do say They do say that white boys

Can't play Magneto So Ray Ray did say that white boys Can't play Magneto Yeah yeah yeah That's that's canon That's canon Ray Ray said that shit

So We will see We will see how it goes With Avatar But I can confirm I saw Dacid bro doing some insane shit so I do believe white boys can play Azula I think that is confirmed

right but to do a lot of that stuff what's interesting is the damage that you get for going crazy is definitely better than if you're doing simpler combos but it's not so absolutely

bat shit out of the you know this world that like it makes it pointless to even bother playing. Because I was testing some stuff out with Toff. And after I played initially, got some matches and did some locals with Reggie and stuff, I went back in and I was like, let me try to extend some of these combos

to see what the numbers look like. And then let me do some simpler versions. And I found some simple routes that were like still really, really solid, close enough damage. And the amount of execution required to extend something gave you a little bit more in some cases. but it looked so much cooler and or it gave you better positioning.

So for example, I play a lot of 2XCO lately. I don't do anything optimized. Fuck that. I do the combos that are pretty good and I will not drop. Yep. So I don't drop them and die. Yep.

It's, it's, but what you're, what you see here is like, and this is like another sort of like more advanced idea, but. believe it or not, damage is not everything. It's not everything. Sometimes in games, in matches at advanced play,

you'll see people doing stuff that is not as damaging as it could be because they want to put a, they want a situation that's more advantageous to themselves, you know? If they were to spend every meter they have, every moment the second they get a touch to make you die faster, you will find that there will be situations where, you are now stuck without any resources to defend yourself and actually you left your opponent in a situation that they were able to get up quickly from instead of one where they're in the

corner and they have to guess and they're already like they ate a combo it wasn't as strong as it could have been but now the fact that they get up and they're forced to guess again is a way better situation to be in because you have the odds of landing a second combo as opposed to spending it all and just getting a greedy chunk but then they get back up and they're fine and they don't, they're not afraid of you. So like you, when you start to kind of learn about that stuff, you start to see that there's situations where some of these more advanced stuff people are doing in a game like Avatar and in 2XCO when they do limit strikes as well.

You sacrifice damage for positioning and other resources and things, you know. So all this is really nice and fun and refreshing for people that have not had a game asked them to do this in two plus fucking decades. So it's become a big topic of discussion online because people, that are big fans of that are finally waking up those synapses that have been cobwebbed over for a long time.

It's really fascinating to me because like we will never have a third strike again. And to those of you who are unfamiliar with what I mean by that as I wear this shirt, third strike parrying is a simple on the surface defensive

option that led to new players being so utterly dominated in a way that felt so unfun and so absolutely annihilating that they fucking had one match and I guess that shit's unbeatable and would leave and never fucking come back

to fighting games at all. But at the same time design-wise the beauty of the parry was that you had to put your balls in your fucking hand and walk into the attack. Right? But to a guy walking up to some guy

playing arcade mode and arcade, that didn't really matter much when you just get of course curb stomped like nothing else and we'll never we'll never see that kind of like well you gotta be X good at the fighting game to enjoy it to any degree

kind of ever again question very very important question would you the unknowledged the beginner noob who's about to get your ass beat would you rather get stomped out by somebody who is perfectly

parrying everything you're doing? Or would you rather get stomped out by somebody who's mashing kick buttons with Eddie Gordo? I'd rather get stomped out by Edig Gordo. Yeah? Definitely. What's the reasoning? I, uh, there's a, with Eddie, I'm like, what am I supposed to do here? There has to be a solution.

And with the parrying thing is this guy is reading my mind and I am bad. Right? I could be like, yes. This character is busted. Yes. And that instead of I am bad. I'm so bad this guy can just like know exactly what I'm going to do. Yes, these are, these observations are correct, but how do they make you feel that it chooses your decision, influences your decision? So in one I blame the other. In one I blame the character and in the other I blame myself.

And blaming myself hurts more. I'd rather blame the character. Oh, interesting. Because I'm completely in locks. step with you. But the difference is, is when I blame myself, I go, but now I can get better. And I'm motivated by that. So I love the idea that the person who they read my mind, I love the idea that I have to now think of a way outside of what they've put the box they've put me in, because that means that I personally have an XP bar to start working on versus the character

being busted feels like, doesn't matter how much time I put in, this character might be so busted that even if I get way better at this game, them mashing kicks is still going to be a problem. That fucking sucks. This feels like a waste of my time. It feels like nothing I do from this point. It feels like nothing I do from this point forward will change the outcome versus the person who is better than me motivating me to want to surpass that.

I will say there is a double version of this. And I know most people are not like that. I'm just describing why I find this interesting. It's a really interesting thing. There's a double version of this in which both are occurring simultaneously that I have seen once. Yeah. And that was Blaise Blue Calamity trigger when you would load in

and somebody would pick New 13 and just ping pong you from the ceiling to the floor from the back fucking corner. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was this character so broken, this character so busted. And then it morphed

into I Am So Bad they're reading my mind. Yeah, okay, okay. why aren't fighting games more popular? Quick, quake, I don't care anymore. I'm over here having fun. You shut up. I'm no, no, no.

I'm over here. I literally don't care anymore. I'm over here. I'm going to have fun with this, and you can come hang out and play if you want to or not. If you don't want to, that's totally cool too. But the fact that they're fun to play, and this is something that I'm, like, so addicted to,

that little moment of like, oh, shit, there's a mountain to climb here. I love that feeling so much. It gets me so excited, right? the the the moment that we're talking about with um uh uh yeah i mean walking up and you know popping that quarter in or so or whatever the case is like the other thought is oh well i guess i should be playing eddie gorder too right that's a that and then like which which he did for a little bit right right that's the other that's the other play that's the other play in the situation you know but um

whatever that whatever the case might be um um The idea that like at least one new fighter is going, hey, this is kind of the way things used to be. And it even, here's the weird part about Avatar as well. I don't know how balanced all of this really is. Oh, it remains to be seen. It feels like the answer is not very much at all. Remains to be seen. It feels like what they're doing is saying, fuck balance, do what is maximum fun with each of these characters.

And that is a, that's also a DNF dual philosophy, but DNF dual like, you know, repelled people for other different reasons. In this instance, though, it's tapping into like just a long lost feeling, you know, while also being an excellent representation of the characters, the lore, the bits, the things they say, the lines, They have all the little moments and stuff that, you know, really like are great for the actual, just the property avatar. You know, it's nailing both and that's what is just a real success here. And I think that like just for that, it's probably going to sit in a really healthy place because every, as we all know, even as a spectator thing, even as a, anytime something is really complex and has a lot of people that are doing cool shit. in it, there's an appeal to people outside going, oh, fuck, that seems cool. I kind of want to, I want to watch that, or I want

to see it, or I don't know if I can ever do that, maybe I can't. That's going to, that little pocket of interest will always exist. And, fortunately, if you are interested in checking it out, the game's fucking $30. Yeah, $30 is a nice price. It's a really nice price. For an IP fighting game.

For a really, for a game, people are going to be very excited to play. Like, I can see people, this is something, something we've talked about a while was like, how do you pull people off of Fightcade when you're re-releasing one of your old games? Well, okay, I have an actual response to that, which is like, yes, that can be hard, but also the amount of people actually playing FightCade

is necessarily limited as a full-on emulator. But whenever you're releasing an old game, people that are interested in that old game, those that your audience is up on FightCade, right? Those are the people that you're trying to reach. Because they're sick. Because they're sick freaks. In addition to some new folks.

And this is the kind of thing that like, this is the kind of game that can pull people off. Because it's D-Gen hours, you know? So. Yeah. This has, like, there's, as you describe some of this degenerate fighting game shit, there's like, just a, just a, a parat sieff of Sailor Moon energy on this of just like, just absolutely like, you know, is that busted? Yeah, fuck it. Yeah, yeah. Oh.

It's fun. It's fun to do. Oh, yeah. No. Yeah. Fucking Top 5C or just Kora's dust loops is what I'm going to call them. Cora has you in the top corner of the screen fucking you up like Saul bad guy in fucking, you know, older guilty gear games. Like, it's crazy.

So all of that is just like. And then the thought now is like every time you think of a new character showing up, like you're like, oh, you know, what's, what's what's uh... what's uh... aero gonna be like or iro gonna be like or um kuvir or any of these characters it's like you have that like the lore implication and then you go what is the D-gen sicko mode what stupid nonsense are they gonna bullshit this right how disgusting is um uh uh what's her name Lynn

uh Bay Fong how disgusting is her metal whip loop pulls shenanigans gonna be you know like probably threshish-ish full screen command grabbing you get over here from anywhere like absolute bat shit wild mobility with her zip lining across the screen but you get to think about the lore and then the like the most disgusting iterations possible so uh yeah this is this is this is real real fun this is real solid good stuff going going on with that and uh they're there we got to take a break in a little bit because this guy's got to go eat some food no problem just wanted to end off the conversation by saying

speaking of food that like you want to offer something for everyone and there's no other game currently like like Avatar so yeah where'd all the sickos go? This should exist I guess they stayed where they were there be

all right well while we're here in the middle of things apologies everybody I'm eating a scombe that's good you can take your time to do that let's take a quick word from our sponsors in the meantime This week Castle Super Beast is sponsored by Castle Super Beast. Go to the new shirt and desk mat you can get at Orchid8.com slash collections slash Castle dash super dash beast.

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That com, promo code Superbeast. Thank you, Brooklyn Bedding. Thanks, Brooklyn Bedding. Appreciate it. Yeah, there wasn't much else to discuss, personally. I got between all of the points with my week. The only other thing I was going to bring up is my steam machine has arrived.

Oh. I plugged it. Yeah, that was pretty fast. I didn't know you even wanted one. Yeah, no, I mentioned. After the discussion that we described, I talked about. No, I mentioned, no, I mentioned,

I mentioned that I was going to get, I was looking into that, to grabbing one. So how is it? So, so far, I have not had the issues I've had running SF6. So it basically, that was my main thing, was I'm like,

hey, let's see how this handles that. Because for whatever reason, you know, with my current setup, I just could not, for the life of me, after spending a very long time, figure out why I was getting weird hiccups with that. And yeah, this is something that I'm like, okay, took it for a run. Everything seems to be, you know, smooth running well. I know the

overall the CPU is better than a PS5 but the GPU is technically inferior it's a bit it's closer to like a 3060 I believe so yeah but it's not running Windows right so like it's not it's not

it's kind of its own beast mm-hmm so that frees up a lot ideally it's just running the Steam OS and yeah I mean not much to say about it so far except you know you boot it up and it basically boots up

its same OS as your Steam deck. And I've got to do a couple more durability tests. So, you know, I'm probably going to boot up something like cyberpunk and see how it handles that and stuff. I got the 2 terabyte one. So just to make sure that I can have, you know. Essentially, I'm thinking about it as like,

you know, the by choices were like a video card upgrade or grabbing one of these and anytime I want to run something on PC and I'm not getting decent results off of my computer this will be something I switch to and just have that alternative ready to go.

That makes perfect sense honestly. Yeah, it's literally just to stream the AAA PC shit that is my setup is just not playing nice with and for that purposes for those purposes I don't need a Windows I don't need anything I just need Game 2 fucking boot and go, you know.

And yeah, I'll, you know, more to report in after I do some more testing with it. But I will say I bear minimum. Yep, shit's doing what it's supposed to do. Can you imagine? Can you think, like, things are doing what they're supposed to do as a piece of technology? Is that not crazy? It would be nice. It would be nice.

I, yeah. unfortunately was not able to get my hands on the controller, which is the more interesting prospect. Yeah, that's what I actually really want. So I'm going to keep an eye out. I'm on the wait list to try and get one. So when it comes through, I want to test that out. Right now, it's going to take a good bit to dethrone the dual sense in, from my hands.

It would have to take a lot. I fucking love that fucking dual sense, man. Yeah. However, I have a dual sense that might have weirdly just, I don't know if it crapped out, but it had a weird thing. Because I don't even know exactly what was happening here. But long story short, last time the Avatar beta ran, if you left the game running, you could continue to play afterwards. And this time around, after I left the game running, I came back to it the next morning just to see. and the controller was vibrating and inputs were like not responsive and it felt like there was like a memory leak that was almost deliberately going to make you so that you couldn't play.

It was really weird. Oh, good. And I was. And I was like, is this something that you put in the game specifically to annoy the player and make it so that they couldn't keep going? And then there's an error message that kept popping up as well. So I felt maybe that was the case. But then afterwards, I was using the controller and other things. And I was like, no, wait, this is still a weird issue.

So I think I have a problem with my controller. that was just really unfortunately timed. However, there was an error, but a network error message does pop up in the middle of playing to get you annoyed, though. So, you know, that is, that is in fact the case. But aside from all that, yeah, I kind of was like, oh, something weird's going on

with this controller. And then I plugged it and put it in the Steambox and it was fine again. But something's iffy's happening with it. Might just be overused since I use it, like, almost every day. I mean, I have to replace one of these every about eight months. Yeah, yeah. They just die.

But we're wearing tearing them much more aggressively than the average person. Extremely accurate. Quite a bit, you know. So if I'm going to, I have a second dual sense, but I'm like, if I'm going to actively replace the main controller I use with like a steam controller, which is a big if. That's a fairly big if, man. I have to, but I have to grab it and it just, it just has to feel perfect right away, which this kind of did. you're right at the same time that feels like kind of like a mean like what's the word a mean task like it just has to be perfect the instant i show up but how many generations of controllers have

we been through at this point there are there are you know when you talk about standing on the shoulders of giants right you can see as far and get and come as far come as far as you can because you've been standing on the shoulders of giants that came before you. There are so many giants making a Puman pyramid when it comes to controllers at this point. We are so far beyond the Ness box controller, the Kaliko Vision fucking knobs. We have seen so many controllers and we've had so many good functioning ones

and we've come to a place where we know what a controller ought to feel like and should generally play like, right? You know what you want here. You don't have, it's not rocket science. have to re-rocketology rather you don't have to reinvent the fucking controller every time it's not in a nintendo like nunchuck situation like give us the good feeling d-pad put the stick in a in a decent spot thumb stick wise that has not that's not too loose on it right you want your analogs to not be too soft and if they have the ability to do the trigger versus click that'd be

great because some people want gun triggers some people want input as short as possible And like, now that we're adding the touch thumbpad stuff, I don't really care about the touch thumbpad stuff as much. It replaces a mouse, I know, for like operating the OS and everything. So my demands are much, much lower on that. But having used the Steam Deck touch thing, I will say I was like, oh, this is cool, though. The few times I do use the touchpad, like, this does its job. So it felt like the right version of that, even though I don't use it much. I don't know that I'd want to play a mouse-heavy game using it, though.

But as a navigate through the OS quickly thing, sure, why not? Have you played a mouse-heavy game using the deck? Not nothing mouse-heavy. I've played things that the mouse would be, like, helpful, but nothing that, like, the mouse would be, like, extraordinarily, like, mandatory, like, you know, a point-and-click game. Okay. Because it's just... Yeah, yeah, no.

It just... It's not the same. And I remember, like, playing that Switch version of Darkest Dungeon, just being like, oh, Jesus, fucking Christ, like, my kingdom for a mouse right now. Like, it just, it, they did their best, but holy shit, navigating through every selectable thing in that game is a nightmare and just not as good, not as fun. But we also live in a world where, like, after all the things we just said about controllers, We got the fucking Uya and Luna controllers.

That thing is such an outrageous piece of fucking dog shit. As actual offerings to the public. Like they really printed those and said, here, try this out. Unbelievable piece of fucking garbage. Just garbage. So, yeah. Not to mention Steam Deck control or Steam Controller 1, right? So I'm hoping that I can get my hands on it.

But like that is purely. for educational purposes, and if that ends up being in any way, shape, or form, unfortunately, not perfect, then not into the trash it goes, but like, yeah, you'll sit on the side and you'll be around for a night where we need four controllers quickly, you know? It's just unfortunate that it has to be, like, the law, it's perfection is, is like, it's not even the goal. I'm sorry that the bar is... Yeah, I'm sorry that the starting line is 10 on 10 required. I'm sorry that the bar is excellence. I'm sorry. Guys, I'm sure you guys are trying really hard.

It's kind of how I feel about it. Like, I'm sure you guys are tried really hard. Like, I'm sorry. It's just, it's just like, it's the difference between you're hitting a market that doesn't know it needs to be served versus pulling people away from something that exists. You know? And hey. I will praise and I'll praise and glaze the dual sense controller because that's the last bit of praise and glaze that Sony is going to be getting on today's episode of Castle Super Beast.

Hey! Look at that. You're completely right. Oh, boy. You can tune in this week to Woolley versus where we will be continuing Phoenix Wright. We are getting to the end of Justice for All and shit is popping. It's a very exciting final case. I do have to say I'm really, really into where it's going.

We will be continuing FF14 this Thursday as well. The Joe Guns fan art goes fucking crazy. That shit is nuts. It's extraordinarily impressive. We're now seeing people are reaching out and commission like furry, lewd artists to do incredible work. I, you know, I wasn't 100% sure. But it is, isn't it?

Oh, yeah. That is definitely a lewd artist. I went back to the source to try and credit them properly, and the source found me. The ground came up to meet me, as they say. And then we will be starting a new LP, and I'll explain a little bit. Yeah, we'll be starting a new LP, and I'll explain a little bit more about that, you know, on the day of. but things are, things are a bit weird. But yeah, that'll be starting tomorrow. What is going on with you?

I honestly can't remember. Cool. Like, I did, like, I've been playing a lot of FF14 with gals. And FF14 content creation, we had a discussion about this yesterday, which was FF14 content creation really just falls into like three explicit categories, which is fairly common for like a lot of long-term online things. One is, are you cracked? Are you like fucking super good?

Are you fucking incredible? No. Are you going through it for the first time? Yes. Yes. In your day, right? Yeah. Or are you arguing with a bunch of weirdos?

You better be funny. Why ordering food grade dirt for, pregnant women to see how it tastes is not a normal thing to do. Cracked, new, or funny. Slash insane. You have to pick one. If I may, I'll just say, like, Hina Bobina is a real earworm of a name, by the way. It's catchy.

That's real good. It's, there's something about hanging out with them and just being, I've begun. become the normal one. That, I'm the normal guy. What the fuck are you talking about? Isn't that fucking bananas? Huh? Are you sure?

No, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. Are you, are you just saying that, are they just being zoomers and you're just aging out into this position? I don't think that's what's happening. But if the age group were average younger, they would be normal and, you're. you're just... No. Is this just unc coping? No, this was like an entire discussion about, like, what's the weirdest thing you've ever

eaten? And Ecto is describing to me that, uh, what about dirt? I'm like, fucking dirt, girl? Just straight up dirt? She's like, well, I ordered it on the internet. And like, okay. Oh, my God. And I'm like, I don't know, maybe chewed on a pencil a lot in elementary school.

And he is like, no. Oh, man. Every, every week or a couple of weeks I'm ordering, you want to fucking hazard a guess? Just hazard a fucking guess. Random item. Non-food item. Chalk? Fuck, chalk. Chalk. Chalk with chock. Ecto was like, I love chalk. Chalk's great. And I'm like, okay, whatever you say, Susie, Delta Rune. Yeah. And then. I've got personal experience with that one, unfortunately. Texts me. It says, dude, chalk's delicious. And I'm like, oh.

Yeah. And then, no, Hina's fucking staple, staple non-food, printer paper. And I'm like, how much printer paper are you eating that you're ordering the packs? I don't know, like, one a week tops. And I'm like, all right, this, I'm, I'm the normal one. I'm the normal one. Oh, we've got, okay, there's things that have to be addressed by professionals there. Oh, no, that's PICA.

There's no addressing that. Just don't eat enough to kill you. Hmm. Okay. All right. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of stuff these days that is not meant to be edible, but is made to be not toxic if consumed. That's Plato.

Exactly. Plato's not technically toxic. Exactly. It's not meant to be edible, but it won't hurt you if you do, because we know we can't stop you. But what we actually did is we ran an encounter. called Occult Crescent, which also very much strongly lends to this, which is a giant open field with a bunch of random encounters and you build up a thing. It's very FF11-esque. Someone just said shin girl dinner.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, no, struggle mealing isn't enough. Like, I need non-food items to go in my tummy. Man, I love those gal so much. They are a riot. Hidden desperation technique. If you want to hear. or more arguing about if you want to hear more arguing about what is and is not actually technically food we're actually going to be playing more and we're going to have mint on the on the show in about about four and a half hours over our twitch dot TV slash

at stairs at and you two dot com slash pat stairs at so here's a here's a weird thing that I've never encountered in the whole time I've played any MMO I've gone in a new piece of content. It's called Occult Crescent. I'm just going to refer to it as OC for the future. And we all had a really great time. And I thought the zone was really cool. And I thought the encounters were really cool.

And I thought the way you leveled up stuff was cool. And I thought the new moves you had were cool. And I thought the rewards that you get were cool. And there are, I have run into three people, including one, like five seconds ago. That's just more like a cult dog shit. And I'm like, I can't. I can't find the genesis of the hatred. Like, do you know what I mean?

Like, I can't find where the hate is coming from. Where it started from? Where did it started? It's just not as fun as Baja. That's, okay. Okay, I guess the hatred is it's not as good as the last one that they made of these. Which I feel like that's a fairly weak version of that. that. Also, I had a fun, a fun experience where had some friends show up to help spawn an encounter,

only to have to redo it because someone's inventory was full. Twice. Is that a failure to... It's a failure to clean up your fucking inventory. which led to a discord stream of like all right fuck it let's look at this person's inventory and just opening up into like an ADD nightmare of bits and bobs acquired over a multi-year period of just nonsense and bullshit just flooding it does final fantasy 14 enable hoarding it i mean everything drops something or does it like actually force you to be better at choices and it fixes it Well, I mean, eventually you're just not going to get items going to your inventory because your inventory is completely fucking full. So you would think that would lead to, hey, every now and then I should really clean out this inventory. Nope. Nope, that's a personality difference.

Okay. So I'm thinking about when I started playing Baldur's Gate 3 and I did. Baldur's Gate 3 is the perfect analogy to this, by the way. Yes. The problems you encounter are identical. Yes. And I had, but I did not know playing the game because I have not, I did not have prior experience. experience that like this game is meant to let you pick any piece of shit up off the ground and it does single fucking item because I'm used to games where the things you pick up are obviously for a reason why would we give you inventory space to do nothing with right and then here you're picking up books and ropes and this and that and all kinds of shit that you're like am I ever going to use this and you're like maybe do I need this clay pot what why can I pick this up I don't know

But you've been trained by video games to pick up items, right? And then I, and then however many sessions in, it was like, okay, wait, what the fuck am I doing? This is stupid. The game is just giant and open-ended and lets you pick everything up. I'm just picking up quills and fish bones and... But then you start questioning, why did they make it like this? Why can I do things? Why can I pick up so much useless shit?

Because you can. And that's it. Right. That's it. Just because you... Because in the world's like, has... Having stuff is sometimes a thing you want to do. But yeah, that's where I learned that, like, you know, the way you were trained by every other video game was a, you know, you were trained wrong as a joke.

And now it's time for you to learn what this particular game wants you to do. So 14 then, I'm walking through the dungeon with you guys. And then it's like, should I greed this? I guess I could maybe. So we're not even talking about gear. We're talking about, like, random monster drop claw from five years ago. We're talking about beastkin blood that's used for nothing. That's like vendor trash.

Okay. Just flooding up that shit. Let me steal man your friend here. Have you ever had that moment where you walked up to a side quest and then they said, hey, can you go get me? Oh, shit. You've already got them. Can you hand those over?

I've had that many a time. How good does that feel? It feels all right. It's extra good when the game actually has like bespoke dialogue for, hey, could you go get those? Oh, you already have the five bear asses. Yes. Wow. Okay, we'll just give those here.

Feels pretty good when you're able to just do that, right? You're like, oh, yeah. 14 doesn't do that. 14 is like, have you activated the quest? The item for the quest will now exist. Oh. Oh, bummer. There are some things that will occur in, but by and large, yeah, no, it's, did you, did you start the quest?

Now the items will exist. Okay. Because even in 16, there are times where you go to, like, get something smithed or get something, you know, and it's like, oh, wait, you've got the component. Oh, oh, shit. Yeah, yeah, you had it over, you know? And I was like, hey, nice. I explored and got into a cool fight. with something that was on the map randomly.

And then a little while later, the game went, hey, can you go get that thing? And you're like, I already did it, you know? So that was nice, because it was, while I'm in the area, I did something that I wanted to. And then I got, you know, the demand later. But yeah, okay. All right, well, that is the most reasonable reason I can imagine

for doing this type of behavior. Yeah. Otherwise, I don't fucking know. Nope. Good luck. It's just, I don't know what to keep. I'll keep it all. Oh, I'm full.

And now I have to throw things on the ground to pick up new things. So every time you get a new item, it's like a panic state. There's an old attention deficit life hack about cleaning your house or cleaning your room. Are you familiar with it? Which one? Invite a bunch of people to your house and then turn your phone off. Now your house must be clean by the time they arrive. You have now created a sense of panicked urgent.

that will power you through the task. Yeah, that'll do it. That will do it. I have a particularly like that works, but it also kind of like upsets me inside because it I know that that as that feeling

that we're describing, it's also the catalyst for like my mom going into insane overdrive on unreasonableness. Yeah. Of the state the house needs to be in when company is coming. Like, you, those are, those are bad days.

Those are just not days. I, I, I, I want to relive. Mom, when you have guests over for dinner, they're going to walk over to my room, kick down my door, and go into my closet, and shame me about how I tidy things in my closed closet. They're going to walk up to the tub and rub it. and grab the speck of dirt

and look at it between their fingers. Then they're going to smell it and barf. Like fucking Ray Fines staring at the speck of dirt you know walking through the house. Like come the fuck on, man. It's what people do.

Yeah. Okay. It's what people do. Okay. Okay. So that's fun. We're going to be playing more of that. I'm going to be playing more of that with you on Thursday. day this week. In addition, I returned to beat the backlog where I messed around with some

miscellaneous games. One of which was Storyteller, which I said, okay, this is the last puzzle like 10 times. Storyteller is a really simple game. It gives you like a three panel or six panel or, you know, four panel, a little comic. And all it is is you place either the room, which is like the dining room,

or the ballroom or the gun room and you place the actors and so the actor would be like the butler and the Duke and the Duchess right and so the prompt will be the Butler gets away with murder and so you go

Butler in the gun room and then the little cartoon guy picks up a gun and goes eh and then you go the ballroom and then you put the Butler and the Duke together and as soon as you drop them in he shoots the Duke and then you put the, the, uh, the, the, the, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you, you, the, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,

have to put the graveyard scene and guy number two dies and you have to put guy number one there so he cries. Then you have to do a second wedding scene and a second death scene and then you have to have have the ghosts and it's fascinating. Is this trial and error with infinite tries? Yeah, it's trial and error with infinite tries. Okay, it's a puzzle game ultimately. Yeah, it's a puzzle game and certain characters will act differently. Like some one lady, if their spouse dies due to a foul play, will vow revenge and the other one will just cry and then it's like so if you need everyone dead at the end of the scene. You have to make them sats.

They kill themselves and put poison in the right thing. It's really great. It's a little difficult for me to explain with my words. No, but it sounds like a digital version, an advanced digital version of the game Mastermind. Do you know the game Mastermind? Where you have, you put, okay, someone has the little pips of a code, and you have to just put the pips on and off as the, on the player's side, going all the way up the board and trial and error on and off of a more or less binary code until they confirm this is right, this is wrong,

this is wrong, this is wrong, and then you go it up and up and up until you can beat it within the time frame. Interesting. Storytellers kick ass. It's awesome. I played a point-and-click game called Dropsy with a gross clown. I fucking hate point-and-click game so much. Like I actively hate them in their entire genre.

Like Scum VM style? Yeah. Like every LucasArts point-and-click game, every blank field point-and-click game, every Leaser suit Larry-click game. Um, hate him. Hate him. Hate him. Hate them. Hate them.

Awful games. Straight dog shit. Uh, the whole thing is trying to mentally intuit the logic of some guy in the 90s that you've never met. Can't stand them. Dropsy seems like a cool one of those. Dropsy seems like a cool gimmick and it has like interesting, uh, interesting art and it has absolutely no dialogue at all. So like the problem is that like you're wrong when they're working as intended, but you're right when you hit that wall. I played like, I get a shot to like 10 of those fucks.

Dude, I grew up playing the fuck out of like Kings Quest games and play police quest, paid Laura Bow, play. the indie games, played Monkey Island, all of that shit, and had a great time. However, when you grind to a halt over the obscure solution to some bullshit, or you have to pixel hunt on screen, Sam and Max or whatever, like, it is the most infuriating experience you ever have. I think it's been the maddest I've ever been at a game was like playing, like, one of the escape from monkey islands. And just could like, what do you fucking want for me? Leisure suit Larry.

Leisure suit Larry even. Like all of this shit. Yeah. When they're going good, they're great. But when you hit that wall of logic because of one programmer's like way of thinking, it fucking, it's the most infuriating experience. This is, I get it. I get it.

Yeah. I was, I was yelling about that with Broken Age. I loved everything. You were, aren't you? I loved everything in Broken Age. until I hit like two or three of those, and I just fucking, the rest of my experience was fuming

over how bad the click logic was for like two or three moments because you cannot continue to experience the game unless you figure this the fuck out. You know? Mm-hmm. Frustrating. Frustrating.

So, I'll reserve judgment on dropsy. That's not fair. That's not fair of me to, even judge it in any way because I hate the genre like by default

right? It's unkind, right? And I also played something called oh I think it's oh god I misspelled the title in my stream.

It's O T-K-O I believe okay take a look. O-T-X-O-T-X-O-T-X-O. it's a worst hotline Miami with bullet time that sounds like a lot of things unfortunately there's a lot of those going on yeah okay that's that's what the game is that's literally all it is

um it's I'm sure it's it's good but I like I just was immediate the music's incredible because it has to be um but it's like didn't do it for me at all. Is it hitting Hotline Miami music? Oh, no, yeah. The music's stellar.

Okay. The music's absolutely incredible. Okay, well, it understood part of the assignment. Yeah. And, yeah, that's kind of it. Okay. I mean, I play more pragmatta, but like, man, just like last week, I don't have anything to say about Pragmatta. Not much to say until you wrap it up, you know, unless you got a new kit or build that you're

enjoying, but overall, yeah, it's just clean. It's just clean. It's just real good. As for this week, going forward over at twitch.tv.tv slash pat stairs at and YouTube.com slash padstairs at. Tomorrow, I'm going to be doing a sponsored stream of Grand Blue Fantasy Relink Endless Ragnarok. That's going to be around 5 p.m. Pacific.

I'm going to be hanging out with you, Wully, on Thursday, around noon Pacific for some more FF14, as you're going to probably you're probably going to go, well, you'll hit the selves. And then, what am I doing Friday? Yeah, Power World's coming out on Friday. Of course, actually release.

Power World's out. It's out. Relic is cool. It's generous with the speed at which you unlock characters, and that feels good. It's also, I didn't really realize this until I got hands-on for it a while ago. It's like Monster Hunter.

It's a hunting game. It just uses like a different, like, action style. Yeah, and you're not... And you're not always fighting a giant beast, but there are many giant beasts to fight with your game. Much simplified, too, but sure. Okay, cool. And that's pretty much it.

Uh, right. So, to jump over to... the news. It's good this week, right? It's good news. Many things happen. After last week? Yeah, well, about that.

Guess what? Every single week, it's bad news forever. Oh, man. Yeah, so there's a couple of things that happened, but in this case, the old axiom about standing still

while your opponents in the video game industry trip over their dicks. Just kill themselves. Just commit suicide. Continues to be true indefinitely and forever. Sony says that physical disc production will be ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles. This obviously leads to everyone going, hey, go fuck yourself. Owning a physical disc is important because you don't want to be, you don't want to have shit, taken away from you that you own and that you want to be able to use for future proof reasons, right?

The audacity is doubled down, of course, because this is happening the same week that they announced that the Vita and PS3 digital stores will be shutting down. And this is also one week after they... quietly killed off a bunch of people's purchased movies because people who owned anything that had a license agreement with Studio Canal. So movies like Terminator 2, Moonlight, Hot Fuzz, etc.,

were deleted off of people's consoles, even though they purchased them from the PlayStation store. So simultaneously, you have them saying, hey, it's fine, we're going to be going all digital, and you're used to that because, oh, Steam and other things have been all digital for a while and so on, while at the exact same time you're watching them taking away things that people have bought and shutting down existing old stores so that you cannot access old media anymore. When I saw this announcement, it's the kind of thing that

you can imagine them just looking at the numbers and looking at something like Steam and going, yes, see, it doesn't matter. Who cares? If they were to say something to the effect of, again, to be as, to give them the most reasonable thing here, if they were to say, hey, everyone's buying digitally and physical sales are down. Well, yeah, obviously they are. No shit, right? So if they were to say something to the effect of, we will not be producing as many. The numbers are going to reflect the sales or something to that effect. That is a unfortunate reality, but one that I think is understandable. But I think every time you see an option like this pop up where you can take away the ability for people to own something that they can then use in the future to access a product,

you know that it's simply for the anti-consumer reason that we want an easier time selling this to you in the future, and that is made really simple by taking it away from you and making sure that when you think you bought something, you don't actually own it. It's kind of just, it's a move that is like, it's, while PC has not been pushing physical as a thing for a long time now, the fact that consoles still did have that was something that was good about it. It was a genuine... It was good, yes.

It was a genuinely, like, strong aspect to the, as an alternative to PC, that you still had the ability to do this. And as I've said many times before, but, like, you know, I still do have physical old things that I want to hold on to

because you never know when the fuck you might need them. I dug up fucking Steel Battalion the other day and popped that shit in and used it. You know? Uh, I never, want to get rid of things that I know I might not have access to again in the future, or rely on even worse,

the company to either decide how to port it, if they're going to port it, and whether or not they're going to port it, like in the format I played it long ago, or do some shit like they did to Front Mission 3 and have it all slopped up in garbage, right? You want the thing that you currently own to be the thing that you can enjoy in the future. Simple as.

What a bunch of stupid shit. So like, I've been having this conversation for like five days now since it happened right after the end of the podcast. It did. I'm really torn on it in a large number of reasons. One, it's incredibly obvious

that Sony just wants more control over your purchases. And we can now confirm this because a bunch of developers were like, wait, what? What? Including first party Sony developers. Kojima is is lamenting the, you know, the loss of physical media and everything.

Like nobody knew they were going to fucking do this. It was like out of nowhere decision. And you can still order discs, but the discs have to be for games that released prior to 2028 when they're going to stop it. And I feel like this is just a push towards the PlayStation 6 not having a disc drive. I think that's fairly clear.

And this obviously sucks for people who buy games on sale because physical release games are all. have much better sales than digital games. I can't possibly even pretend that this affects me in the slightest, as I have not bought a physical box for a game since 2012. Once. Okay.

I have been, I am a primarily PC player, and the last PC game I bought physically was New Vegas on release. Um, so I still, I still do on occasion, usually special editions of things or things, things that I particularly like care about or want a thing of. Like, uh, Street Fighter 6, I have physical, you know, um, there's a couple of, there's a couple of things from me from time to time. But yeah, for sure, the, not to mention the job we do, which is playing games a lot. Playing lots of games a lot. It involves owning 99% of them digital.

that that much is clear. We live in that world. For me, and making decisions reflecting the sales and or reflecting the market, you know, is, again, a predictable manner. But you don't want to assume, because you know that's not the case, that it's simply that input, output, it's just a matter of the reflection of what is sold. And when we know the reality is that it's about taking power away from the consumer.

It's about being anti-consumer. It's about giving you no option to play something after a limited period of time. It's about hoping that you lean into things like streaming services and or games as a service overall. And, you know, the ability to resell you the same thing you already own is gone when you are like, no, I'm just going to go pop in the old thing. Like, we know that. So this is always being done for shitty reasons.

And like, I just know, and I know that like it's not a popular option, but the fact that it remains an option is important. And I think that should continue to. be something. And I, and I, I'm always someone who, again, for the sake of preservation or for whatever else, I, I want games to be able to exist in a Cabin in the Woods scenario. I don't want it to be this thing that you must be online and you must be in this particular country and you must be doing so between the hours of this and this from this year to this year. Right. We're going to talk about Tokon in a second and how they're fucking making it impossible for PC players. What a slam dunk from every direction of this bad decision. It's so insane and stupid, but hey, guess what? Sony learned nothing from their hell of divers two situation because they're doing the same thing to Tokon and saying,

if you want to play the PC version of this, you have to do so with a PSN account, and the PSN account that is not available in 132 countries means no fucking PC version for you, even though it can and clearly would run, no problem otherwise, you're using the extra sign-up shit to lock people,

region lock people out for no fucking reason, right? And the willingness to do so, because to force the signups or whatever, is an incentive enough for them to make these types of decisions. It's absolute dog shit, and it feels like they're just speed running the ire of everybody in a matter of seven days.

It's kind of crazy. So, almost 15 years ago, Matt and I did an interview with, I think, somebody at the Toronto Star in the newspaper. and that's where I first describe the game industry as an industry of failure

and what we were talking about then and there was the Xbox One's online only plans and we're all the way fucking back here in 15 years Now, how to lend the game to your friend There are differences here, right?

The first difference is I actually believe Sony when they say like 85 plus percent of games are bought digitally I believe that that seems like a reasonable that reflects your life

and from a a pure number based like reality like yeah okay I can understand why you'd say oh most people don't buy physical games why not but the main thing that exists in a culture of I trust Sony not to actively fuck me over really bad

now I think games are a little bit more safe than film as Sony has a lot more control over games on their platform than they do films on their platform. Yeah, that's that that's already over by the way. Like owning owning content is like owning watchable content is like fucking done. I think I'm in a weird position where I'm I'm of the agreement that this is like legitimately terrible. Like this is awful. And also this is so that like you can't pick up God of War Ragnarok for 20. $24 because Walmart

has to clear the shelf space and they order too many copies of God of War Ragnarok. Or that you can't buy it secondhand after the fact. Right. And at the same time, one of the things that I've been seeing is that people say, well, this sucks because of this and this sucks because this. I feel like a lot of those battles were already lost and

most people didn't know it. So when people talk about preservation, right, this will screw up like game preservation. And in my mind, I'm like game preservation is already ruinously obtuse. Like, no game releases finished anymore.

The on-disc version of the game is a relic before you unwrap it. And, like, that does have some preservatory value by itself, right, as, like, the weird fucking unpatched version. Yeah, day one updates, though. But, like, day zero updates, day one updates, expansions, whatever. Like, that is, like, the only way to actually catalog this is to criminally infringe upon the copyright and just do version control yourself, which the company doesn't even go through the process of version control.

Sometimes they don't even go through version control when the game is live, which we've talked about on this podcast when people massively fuck it up. Fortunately, people are still willing to do it, though. Yes. You know? On top of that, the other thing is that the preservation. issue with games is such that games still exist in a in a non transferable medium so if you have uh because physical preservation of media has always been a problem like you look at film and how film in its original state just loves to burst into flame like classic film reels will just spontaneously

combust into five alarm fires that will destroy buildings so okay that's a problem. And you eventually hit the point where a film can be digitally transferred and shared and stockpiled and whatnot. And so now we have the ability to turn any film from any time to any way into

a digital thing that can be transferred, copied, file change, etc. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? With limited exceptions like, say, the old reboot tapes, which required specialized machinery to convert

whatever proprietary nonsense they had into a digital format but once you hit that digital format it's fundamentally forever it'll always be able to be transferred in software but the D1 tapes were like yeah there were three machines in North America that could right read them but you look at

the Ness and like yeah there's a lot of Nintendo entertainment and Famicombs out there those things have definitive shelf lives and they have definitive shelf lives post repair processing is. You look at, I'll use something that's near and dear to your heart, dreamcast games.

You want to play legit dreamcast games on original hardware? Assuming you have everything legit and every part pristine, that shit's just going to fall to fucking shit in a couple of years of regular use. So you have to be able to take

Nest games, Super Nintendo games, Saturn games, Atari games, Jaguar games, etc. And you need to put them into an emulated, accurate digital format, and there's no push for that because, well, a lot of companies were absolutely insane in the 90s and just burned it all and threw them all away, but also the idea of that they could keep them to their chest and then resell them to you later. Yes.

Now, the thing is, though, I will say that, like, it is true that, like, as the mediums have progressed, we've seen the limitation of things like a Ness cartridge that just literally fucking dies on you, or shitty GD. ROMs that are not reliable because the laser for them is so, so precise that any slight scratch means you can no longer use it. That shit sucks, right? But what ultimately matters in the end is if you digitize that data and you have it in a place that is off of a store that can be accessed offline, then it's preserved. That's what ultimately matters at the end of the day, is making sure that it is not in a place where the company walks up to you and says, I'm going

hold the iPad and I'm going to press play and you can watch it and then I'm going to walk away, right? Having it in a place where the actual data exists and can, and whether it's in a physical format or whether people have it stored online or whatever the case is, upload it to fuckingarchive.org

we need to have access to that. That's the bottom line of it and like even as a losing battle, it's a case where the principle matters, I think personally. I think that it's worth fighting that. And I know that

that shit gets also more and more ridiculous as we move towards games that are going to be fucking a terabyte worth of data. Sometimes you're looking at something where they're like, how are we supposed to physically put Grand Theft Auto on one disc or whatever? You know what I mean? Storage medium limitations is a part of this conversation as well. It's really fascinating how Grand Theft Auto 6 came out and said we're digital only.

And I assume they want to be digital only for all the reasons that are we don't want Grand Theft Auto 6 to ever go on sale under any context. And the PlayStation store changed everything about it to be like it's the Grand Theft Auto fucking show, right? And as soon as the disc thing was announced, the PlayStation store just reverted back to the original one without the Grand Theft Auto 6 promotion. Now, either that was Sony going, somebody realizing that like maybe pushing this specific thing with GTA6 is too.

much or the idea that GTA 6 is going digital only gave them the free pass to do this because that last 15% of people that don't buy games digitally are going to buy Grand Theft Auto 6 digitally so then they'll be in but yeah it's it's fascinating we've been doing this long enough that we're more than used to the of the hyper normalization of shitty practices just becoming like you don't bat an eye at them anymore right always going to talk about how the difference between micro transaction world that we live in where you're now like going, oh, the micro transaction isn't so bad versus 100, sorry, 600 podcasts ago when we were saying brood war's expansion packs are the only reasonable way to sell to the consumer again

versus like cutting piecemeal out of the final product and reselling it to them after the fact, right? Or Street Fighter Cross Tech and bullshit where you literally made it and then took it away from them before you sold that. Man, that one's still probably like the worst ever. Disgusting. And that'll always be disgusting. But it doesn't change the fact that, yeah, you wait long enough and then it doesn't matter because we've been doing this forever. And if you're playing mobile games, then you're already used to having zero control over any of the shit.

You're used to games as a service. You're used to booting up to a loading screen that doesn't work anymore. You're used to all of this being a transient temporary experience. It's garbage. But like it doesn't, I guess, again, it doesn't change the fact that like it's still something that you got to push for. resist the um resist the loss of your ability

as a consumer for as long as possible with these types of things you know I'm looking at a post where Sony puts up a thing promoting the new arcade stick they're releasing and they're doing some cool stuff with that or whatever and they're like hey yeah you can change with the flex strike you can change the the gate by just flipping it over and the first tweet underneath it is just

Mighty Keith going. Reverse the physical digital media decision, fuck nigger. Like just him. And everyone's like, he said it. Yeah. Get him. Get him. You know. Like people are rightfully mad about this and they should continue to be because yeah, we know that you fast forward a couple years and you have zero fucking rights. You have zero ownership over shit. And like the more aggressive they can get about this, the more they're going to take the worse it's going to get. but if you make it painful at every step of the way, you can get victories sometimes over this type of shit. I think it's worth fighting for.

I think it's worth fighting a losing battle. I completely agree 100%. And as I've said for many, many, many years that the game industry is an industry of failure. So all you have to do to surpass your competition is not kill yourself. Right? Not, not, just don't, just don't do it.

Just don't, just never kill yourself. Don't ever kill yourself. And you'll do fine in the game's business, right? So with Sony, pissing everybody the fuck off crazy bad with a long-term, god-awful decision, all right, Microsoft, what do you got for me this week?

Is it nothing? I wouldn't call thousands of employees nothing. I wouldn't, I wouldn't quite say that, no. Here they come with, hey, guess what? You, you listening are fired. Did you know? Did you know you were fired from Microsoft? I woke up that morning with DMs from people before the news broke going, I am fired.

I just, like, this was, it was rumored, but it was, the hardest confirmed rumor, I think, ever, given the nature of these things where they try to sneak it up on people. And yeah, is this, I think this is the biggest single culling event in the video game industry's history. Do you know why it's not? Why is it not? Because I split the layoffs into two. There's approximately 1,600 that got laid off the other day. And there will be 16-ish that get laid off within the year. So it's not the largest layoffs in

games industry history unless you use your brain. Sure, on technicalities. What the fuck ever. Anyway, Xbox has fired the most people in a video game layoff has a rapid. There is so much here

that I couldn't even compile it. They fired a bunch of people off the idtech, technical team, the people who make id tech game technology, the smartest people in the

entire games business. They've gutted Elder Scrolls online's team, including their cyber security guys for a fucking MMO. Every obsidian's getting cuts, I believe.

Bethesda proper is getting cuts off the fucking elder scrolls and fallout teams, but no numbers there. So here's how... There are five businesses. They're just cutting loose. So here's how bad.

This is how you know it's bad. Every time I look back at the story, the number increases. Yeah. The first number I saw was 1,600 employees being cut immediately. And then I looked away and I looked again and it said,

3,200 employees are parting ways, and they're being laid off in phases, and then I looked away and I looked again, and the new headline as of right now is 4,800 jobs. Wow. Okay, well, I guess. Our ending. So, like, we're actively doing the bit where I can't believe 6,000 people got fired. It's crazy that 8,000 people got fired. Can you believe 10,000 jobs are just let go like that? 20,000 redundancies out of this out of control. The people that I spoke to the other day were very blunt in that they were like, I legitimately do not know how X or Y studio is not going to just self-destruct under the expectations times staff remaining that they have been saddled. with. Like, they are, they are being expected just to continue as business as usual with

some departments being essentially empty. Just gone. Just see what, just, hey, keep the boat going and see what, what'll, when the, we'll deal with the water that's piling in and the people that are not rowing where they're supposed to be when we get to that problem. On top of that, they say that they want one billion players a day, which is approximately three, 150 times their current market reach, which means that that was a number that they chose because big number and not an actual real number. I don't know if you've seen the business world framing of this, but the discussion has been essentially that Microsoft has failed to establish itself as a major player in the

artificial intelligence world while companies like Anthropic and Open AI are increasingly tailoring their tools for business and productivity. Yeah, obviously, yeah. Yeah. So I saw, I think it was Chris Wolfhardt, who described it as the entire reason for Microsoft just cutting off their own pound of flesh is that the acquisition of Activision Blizzard went from uh yeah Xbox requires a little bit of money to keep going to you guys spent like 70, 80 fucking billion dollars on acquisitions

where's where's the fucking money at the end of the fucking quarter? Are you fucking nuts? I was reading a Bloomberg article today that despite the fact that Xbox spent 70 fucking billion grabbing Call of Duty essentially and Candy Crush, most people buy Call of Duty on a fucking PlayStation Yeah

Like that needle didn't move for shit Uh The closest thing to A bronze lining Um On this story is It like the fact that any studios Are figuring out

How to spin themselves off And save themselves independently As opposed to just being culled the way this usually goes is nice because, um, as we've known for a long time, if you follow the, the trail of EA and act of Blizzard King, et cetera, over the years, you know, and Nintendo to some degree, if you go back long, far enough, you know, you get acquired, you become second party, you get murdered, down you go. Um, you do too good, you do too well, you get too noticed, you get bought,

then you get killed to, to make quarterly numbers meet. Um, and there goes the end of a good thing. So I fully expected when this was coming around the corner that everything associated with Microsoft was going to be just burnt in a fire and no looking back on that. But if anything can salvage or survive, you know, by going independent or regaining their own contractual, you know, whatever independence. It looks like some of those companies that fucking got let go instead of shut down for no reason may have dodged some fucking bullets because at least they can get out of. there and hope to fucking make their own way. You have some competent teams of talented people that don't have to all go the fuck home

because of some larger bullshit that has nothing to do with them. Now I think that Double Fine specifically does not have long to live. I have seen Double Fine burn its way through every dollar they ever made and just not finish their

games multiple times in a row with Broken Age and Psychonauts where the Microsoft acquiring them is the only reason they were able to finish psychonauts. Doublefine doesn't know how to manage their books. And we're like relying on Microsoft owning them to not shut them down. So them being spun off means I think they have like one more project to not finish before they're gone. Whatever the cost is that's on them now.

So they're independent. As is compulsion. They're spinning off to be independent as well. while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are transitioning to new management. Yeah, we must reset Xbox, is the quote. What the fuck does the, what the fuck? You reset it while you were saving, Sharma. It told you not to do that.

I think I think fucking co-pilot made these decisions. Like genuinely. there appears to be like very little rhyme or reason to any of this. There are like specific pain points of like this is a ridiculous place to cut. People off the technology side of id software is like legitimately unbelievable. And then you discover that parts of Xbox were under 14 layers of management, which they even point out. and it's like oh that's why id tech despite being a

Bethesda company never got any of their incredible technology to other Bethesda studios or even technical support for other Bethesda studios because they were siloed in under five bosses

and if you went if you went across to help the Elder Scrolls online guys or the Elder Scrolls guys or the Garfield guys, well, you're not maximizing value over at fucking IDTech for Doom. And it's like, but you could get huge results if you just had the top people in the world. Help other people at their thing. Shut the fuck up and turn on the shadowing AI copilot to stare at you, do your job so you can trade it better. Shut up and train your AI replacement.

It is mandatory. nobody and no fucking AI is doing nothing with ID Tech man. Send in the report that tells us how you trained your AI replacement today. John Carmack, when he felt all that technology, was non-human. But that's not to say he was an AI. I mean, he was more than human when he designed all that shit. Also his brother and the crazy shit he did as well after the fact. Like the Carmack legacy of technological excellence.

like essentially dies here. Man, this is actually, and the funny part too, and you know, in quotation marks, is that... So this is right. AI will never replicate autism.

It can't. Too weak, AI. Too weak. Your power level is nowhere near what it needs to be. my God, so true. Right? It's just, yeah, this intelligence isn't artificial.

This is a different kind of AI. So this number is even bigger because you could, if you're counting the 9,000 people from last year. And the 7% of Microsoft staff were offered voluntarily retirement not long ago. I think we talked about that too, and 30% of eligible employees chose to participate. So there's ghost numbers that are also being padded silently here in terms of how many people actually walked, because the cut is just the people who chose not to take some of those packages. Plus, we're not counting, again, the slow gradual over a year ago numbers that were increasing to this. I would like to give a shout out to a friend of the show and cool person, Dad Asana,

for pulling a specific quote from the Microsoft statement that I feel cannot be flown past, which is quote from the Xbox team, whatever the fuck. We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio. In a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we. reinvested, end quote. Just putting it out there flat. They are the worst managers in the game's business.

Just god-awful picks, god-awful choices at every step of the fucking board, what to make, who to make it, who to buy. Just dog-shit morons. Just fucking buffoons. Well, now that we found out that some of those

management folks are members of the Peter Teele Illuminati group maybe they can get some management lessons while they're over there while they're at it. Side story, side quest to the fucking main one. Yeah, go ahead.

What do they even fucking make anymore right now? Dreams, hopes, memories, the idea of a game pass, a gun and a ball, a whisper and a prayer. Because here's the thing. It also came out that like,

Asha, I think that's her name. The new lady he was running Xbox is like, we're here to, we're like very tech startup. We're here to get messy and break things and, you know, all that nonsense. Disruption. We got to move fast and make decisions fast, right? And I'm like,

decisions in the game's business. business take minimum four years to do anything unless it's fire that's the only thing that can have a quarterly impact everything else has to be like super super long term oh no firing will take place while you have your lunch in your mouth mid shoot yeah so in the meantime ready fire aim us like there's only so many quarters you can just cut and fire like we're running into what what i i guess in my brain just titled this like the embracier group like hustle which is

buy company tell them to make something and that thing will make a lot of money wait what do you mean it'll take more than six months oh shit it costs money to run a fire him take massive loss um

and like and produce nothing yeah or even just or even just like um bank your entire like income and on this new transitional, like, absolute bubble that's not going to last. And when the chickens come home to roost on it,

just blame everyone else and say things like you're going to reset Xbox. Like, I don't know what this looks like afterwards, but this, they're talking about, like, we have to find ourselves and, you know, go back to the beginning and did all this shit or whatever. And you're like, are you even? a company after this? Are you just going to... Do you...

Is this a brand at all anymore? Are you just using the name to refer to what's left of your game's business? And then ultimately, again, maybe we can push AI harder this time, you know? So moving ahead with game industry decisions take a long time. Project Helix, aka the next Xbox, is from what I can tell, full steam ahead, despite the cost increase for components being... astronomical compared to when they made those plans. And so we're going to kick down, what,

$1,200 USD Xbox with fucking what on it? Like, like legit. Like with what? I have watched... With Steve installed. I have watched Microsoft by Call of Duty but not dare make it exclusive. And also Call of Duty suffer its big. year over year loss ever

as soon as Microsoft bought it Doom just took a massive hit like but it's software okay Halo Infinite which ran itself right into the fucking ground nobody's excited for the new gears of war

and once again the new Elder Scrolls like every year the Elder Scrolls game is four years away for like 10 years now. Xbox

I don't like Xbox gamers will have Uno and O.D. I and maybe Steam installed on their Xboxes. I saw a tweet

that was just flat out. I bet they were just itching to kill OD but that press was just a little too hot. Nuclear, nuclear.

That one was just a little bit too hot to touch. And the kid, And Kojima is, again, currently blasting Sony for their choices, right? So while, and look, Xbox is going to go on a spiritual journey, and at the end, they're going to increase the price of their existing models by $100 to $150. And then they're going to increase the price of GamePass, but also they're not going to put new games on Game Pass anymore.

I'm just telling you that right now. That's the only way they can back out of this GamePass shit is they freeze it. And the distance between new release going on Game Pass gets longer and longer and longer and longer and longer and longer. They have like mobile app store raced to the bottom of the fucking console market when the console costs $1,000. Like, insane behavior. And so the fuckers at Nintendo that shut down M-Vers and the e-shop and all that stuff

by just standing here talking about the latest Tetris 9th,000, 99, uh, Star Fox promotion seem the most like sane in video games by virtue of not tripping over their dicks. Yeah. Nintendo just standing around.

With no... Mario. Yep. And again, never forget the race to get everything off the e-shop as they were dragging it to the recycling bin. Never forget that they don't give a fuck either. But in this particular moment, in time.

What are we doing? Um, anyway. This shit's fucking crazy. And that was your weekly video game segment. Video games suck. Video games suck. You are fired. Did you know you were fired, though?

I, you know what? Man, I fucking did. Okay. I have an idea. Tell me your idea. We can bring him back. We can bring him back. what if we brought everybody back by offering a brand new love interest for everyone who's mad about their Xbox

what if we offered a brand new love interest Okay are they furry or furry adjacent Um They are furry adjacent I'm gonna mail you my shit I'm gonna mail my shit to you You're gonna open up your mail

and there's going to be my fucking shit. It's going to be a big old poop right there for you. Get ready for shit mail. But I just wanted to offer you a new lovage. Fuck you. You're disgusting bitch. Shit in the mail. Why are you mailing me your shit?

I didn't. Well, I, um, I, I, I think I described it on, on my stream as like, congratulations. Uh, Chinese women have shown that they can, uh, break the glass ceiling of in-cell behavior. Um, it's for girls too. And, uh, have completely lost their fucking minds. All right. Because love and deep space. Hey.

Uh, wanted to add a new character. Let's press the context button. Context meme. I just, I, I, I, I require context. Put on your context shirt. Uh, love and deep space. The, um, very, very, very popular Fujo game, uh, has axed a sixth boyfriend that it was going to be.

unveiling a week after they told everyone about the character because it led to a revolt where people were so upset that they sent their shit in the mail to the creators of the game as a developer other online abuse yeah all yeah you know what willie i should not have used the term fujo one of the issues with this new guy was that since he was muscular he looked too gay Oh. Well. In fact, implied homophobia and explicit homophobia is part of the issue.

It's interesting. Okay. So I didn't catch that part or the furry part or the edgy werewolf stuff or whatever. Atome. That's the word. Atome. Atome. Atome.

I did not catch that being the main issue and the main cause for ire. The main reason I saw that people were upset about this is because the game has five existing boyfriends. that were unupdated in their romance lines and quests and such and content. And it's been over 500 days since they've gotten new chapters for those characters. So I think the idea was, it's that thing where you talk about like, wait, you're spending man hours and resources and effort on the wrong thing. You're putting effort into a brand new character when we're all attacking. very, very, very aggressively to our existing boyfriends, and none of them have had updates in over a year.

So don't give us new shit. We want shit for the characters that have not been updated in a long time. Much to my surprise, I'm hearing about the homophobia, the racism, and potentially the fur issue? I don't... The fur issue. Yeah.

Um... But this has led to love in deep space writing a giant apology where they basically said they were sorry for doing that. They have decided to

cancel the new character. And in fact, they're never going to add another character again. Never. And, and they're, are going to just stick with the five that they got.

Congrats guys. You kind of ruined it for yourselves. I don't, again, as someone who's unfamiliar with the content rollouts in Otome Games in general, I would assume that a company saying we will not be releasing new content or not adding content to this. game in that way would usually be a bad thing. But I guess here when you're specifically talking about like, um, yeah,

if you're having, if you're having a, a digital romance with somebody and you require the game to update for that romance to continue, um, then when they don't do that and in fact give you someone else that I guess you think you are supposed to then cheat on your current boyfriend with, uh,

that's where shitting and mailing it starts to become, I guess, the only option to have your voice heard. Yeah, you're right. It was the only way. It's the only way. It was the only way. It's the only way. Yeah. So that's, uh, that's some stuff. Again, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't realize that this had any other angle to it besides, please update content in the things that we care about. No. No. Look at him. He's muscular and furry. That's a gay boy. We don't like that. Which is not what I would have expected from the Otome game audience.

I was like, okay. Well, here's what matters at the end of the day. It worked. Mailing shit worked. It actively got them to cancel the character and roll back the changes and not focus on new shit. I'll tell you what. It worked. If shit getting mailed.

to your office is stage one, I would, too would worry about what stage two is. Hmm. Right? I'm like, wow.

This is the bar. This is the bare, whoa. All right. Yeah. I, I can't. Like,

this, this, this story just escalates at fucking breakdown. X-speed because the first lines of it that I saw, I was kind of imagining, I was like, oh, yeah, okay. I can imagine if I were interested in a game where they kept putting out new characters, but then they didn't balance the original game or whatever.

I mean, lots of mobile games are like that, like tons of them. Yeah, I could see something where I'm like, hey, the actual thing you released needs more love, please address this instead of just putting out like new stuff and ignoring it, right? there's a reasonable version and then you're like oh and then it led to you did what now hmm okay then okay then and that's where it was at and now here today i'm seeing people are going like nah if you get in those reddit threads and start reading the posts it gets real dark real fast and it's like all right but it worked but it worked all right well um i'll tell you i'll tell you one thing Pure pressure does in fact work because when you see an apology like that, right?

We didn't even have to mail our poop to Netflix to get them to put out a trailer for Steel Ball Run second stage. And at the end of the trailer, they said Jojo Fridays are back. So look at that. We didn't even have to go that far. We just had to talk about it. We had to make a couple of titles. I had to say some shit like I need the white man's money to bring Jojo Fridays back. I believe that ended up on someone's desk.

I'm taking credit for that. And yeah, they put out a new trailer for stage two. So Jojo Fridays are kind of back, I put in brackets. Basically, with the trailer for second stage, they've announced that starting September 25th, there will be a new episode every Friday for the second and third stage, which will be a total of 11 episodes. Great. Good. Good thing. Good way to do that. Good. Excellent. They have heard and they knew that what they knew what was next. They didn't like the threat of what came next and decided to do the right thing. the fact that it's limited to 11 episodes stage two and three to me that sounds like

and then there's just a limit to how much you can produce how much high quality animation you can produce with a with a clock and time as a time space as a concept that we must deal with with right so knowing that hey David production needs to fucking do the best shit they've ever done Yeah, totally understand that But in the meantime Here's a new episode of Jojo All the way up to episode 12 every Friday Great, sounds good

We'll see how that goes And if it doesn't go the way we want I'm gonna poop in a toilet Why waste Why waste good negotiating material? What are you fucking Jim Norton? Get the fuck out of my face with this With this why waste it shit

I'm just saying a new bargaining tool has been placed on the table, on the glass table. And if we're going to learn from our love in deep space protesters, then we can get you. We got to mobilize. We got to get shit done, you know? By any means necessary, man. No.

No. I don't like this. I don't like this path. We're learning. We're learning. All right. I don't the, I don't really know what to do with this box or where to mail it.

But, um, hey, new trailer for Avatar Ang, the last Airbender movie just dropped. And that shit looks fucking sick. Looks super cool. And I,

um, I, I am seeing it for the first time and I am liking what I am seeing as I see it for the very first time. I got confused when I saw that trailer

because I had forgotten about all that stuff that happened. Yeah. How were people making like super well edited fan cams of this, what? Honestly, I had to like sit there and think about it for a second.

The leak shit that happened is not even like that's fucking garbage, that sucks. The fact that it's not getting placed in theaters is like real fucking trash. That sucks for the team. This should have been absolutely a theatrical release. Yeah, I totally agree. It's super deserved it. And now that it's kind of like, hey, you got to go Paramount Plus it, you're like,

eh. Ugh. Yeah. But all the, all the, all the, all the, um, bullshit aside of the, the thing of the production and how it's, um, being distributed or a way. whatever is going on. It looks pretty fucking cool. I have seen some whispers on the streets of people who were naughty,

saying that they felt in the end it was actually kind of mid. But see, I'm just looking at what I saw there. I'm kind of like, damn, this is one of those moments of like your, this is one of those like when you were younger, if you were watching Avatar going like, oh man, could you imagine? What if they did this thing? And then it's like, yeah, here it is. took a while to get here, but it's actually the thing.

Looks beautiful, I will say. Visually just looks absolutely gorgeous. Whatever happens, plot-wise, we'll find out, but it looks very nice. And, yeah, I'm not getting Paramount Plus to watch that. I'll just go watch my fan cams on TikTok. Yeah, okay. In 300 parts? Yeah.

No, no, no. People are, wully, TikTok has re-invigor. animated anime music videos for the format. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. For an entire generation that doesn't know that that was a thing beforehand. Yes, it's not an AMV, it's a fan cam. It's got the, it's got the old tracking graphic going on it. It's got the filter with the text, and it's got the music and the vignetting.

So it's not an AMV. Sorry, edits. They're just called edits now. Are you going to duo? Are you going to stitch? No. No. Okay.

No, no, no, the TikTok is me looking in. I can't, I don't want to touch any of it. It's gross. Something that also just popped up. Didn't talk about this before, but it is, it's something interesting. So young ladies don't play fighting games is, you know, getting animated and a trailer dropped for that. A couple weeks back, looks really, looks fun. I didn't read the actual manga, so I'm looking forward to seeing, like, how this, how this goes.

This is so weird, though, that like... Oh, it's out as first episode out today. Perfect. Right now. Awesome. Great timing. Super interesting is the fact that every adaptation of this has been updating the game that is being played. So if I'm not mistaken...

Because it has to be current. In the manga, it was super turbo that they were playing, I believe. then the show turned it into Street Fighter 4 like a few years ago, and then the anime is now showing Street Fighter 6. And is this going to be a tale where every time it gets released or updated, it's going to have the latest fighting game, the latest Street Fighter game? And then are they going to have to change the dialogue and character knowledge and everything to reflect the current game

if they're talking about frame data and tactics. It also makes the characters like different ages because it means the time that they got into fighting games means they got into fighting games with a different game. Yeah, yeah. That's so wild to me because it's not just changing the footage of the game out. It's like you actually have to change what they're saying,

what characters they're talking about, and what techniques they're referring to. Now, luckily, if you're using Street Fighter, you don't have to change that much because Street Fighter is Street Fighter or Street Fighter Oh, my correction. Okay, manga was fake Street Fighter 4. The live one was Street Fighter 5

and then now the anime Street Fighter 6. Yeah, okay, so it's literally all the way up the timeline. Yeah, this is going to be, this is, yeah, the main character is now in 09er. This is going to be so wild to see, like, if this gets brought back in the future again, you know, you just re-refer, writing the script every time, finding a hype level player to consult to make sure that what they're

talking about makes sense, talking about Jamie's drinks as opposed to, you know, gile down backing or whatever. Oh, guile is gile as gile, but still. I don't know that a media, I don't know anything that has had this kind of thing that they've had to deal with outside of time. All right. I can't. No, I think that's the danger you run on doing something that's current. as you're writing it. Right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, the Simpsons is absolutely

like locked in that 10-year sliding scale where Homer's teenage... Homer's a millennial now, which is fucking stupid and weird. I don't like it. Yeah. Young Homer was like, had a cell phone and was listening to

Nirvana and shit. Like, it was... It's super weird. But whatever. That's an infinite franchise. IP that wants to cement itself as like our characters literally cannot move from the date at the age and time of the place they're in, right, as opposed to this series ends and it comes back and then we refer to it and then we're using different things. Like when when

you're doing Darby the gamer in the future, you're still going to be playing some bullshit fucking old Super Nintendo with a stupid out version of outrun, you know, no matter what. Anyway. All right, let's take some letters. Hey, if you want to send a letter, send it to Castle Super Beastmail at Gmail.com. That's Castle Superbeastmail at Gmail.com. Say something interesting or ask a cool question. Make it a good one, please. We get bunches of bad emails.

We got one coming in from Jay, who asks, across many multiplayer communities have always noticed claims of certain times of the day or even entire weekdays are worth avoiding depending on the context of the game itself. MMO grinding, server ping, ranked climbing, etc. In my most recent experience, playing ranked climbing Marvel rivals, God help me, there's been a noticeable trend, but since every loss is a win somewhere else, anyone can have win streaks on at those times, or at least they can in theory. Of course, you're going to see the ones who complain being from the wrong side of those trends more often.

So how do you find this to be in your experience, or better yet? is it worth considering when someone has limited time to play or without hard data from the games themselves? If you are doing queued up content in Final Fantasy 14, every minute of time you get away from the Tuesday morning reset, the player base gets worse. It is a linear graph. if you are playing so i played f14 sunday night and that is

Monday is the only buffer remaining between you and the Tuesday morning reset and i ran I played a healer and I just ran a bunch of roulette which is just a bunch of random content and let me tell you that

I was chit chatting with my friends of discord and my behavior was unstreamable if how angry and the things that I said about the people in my party just those

stupid ass motherfuckers just the absolute most brain dead pieces of fucking shit the funniest part about this is that like The mirrors are very, very clear here.

But the difference is when you have a whole lot of bad players on a fighting game, it's awesome. It's awesome, dude. So when bad players are on your MMO or on your team shooter, you have a shitty team of people that you have to rely on. But in a fighting game, you're just stomping motherfuckers out. And it's always the deadline, and it's always really simple. Let's take like the 2XCO battle pass deadline.

You know, the battle pass is coming down, right? Versus like the FF 14 reset. The people that are grinding super hard one day before the deadline are the ones more likely than not that couldn't get it done at a reasonable time because they're they're bad. Like if it takes you up until Monday night to do your

weeklies in 14, you're either busy or dog shit. And if you're busy, that means you're probably playing a little less often, which means you're probably below average player skill by default

just because it's not a priority for you. So when I run that stuff on fucking Sunday or Monday, and I'm running with a random party. It is, it is the mouth breathingest fucking brain dead, dumb ass, don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, fucking idiots. But if I'm doing that the week before the end of the 2XCO battle pass, fuck yeah, dude.

Like fighting a bunch of toddlers, man. You gained a whole rank in that one week. It's really insane, actually. So this is the reality of the situation, right? you're asking, is it truth or cope, whether the time of day affects the multiplayer experience? It's 100% of truth. I could give you the days. And any game you know really well, you could tell people the days, the time zones, the breakpoints, etc.

So when it comes to fighting games, what happens is any time there is a spike in popularity. So immediately after the release of new content, new DLC character, etc., or on weekends, right? Friday night into Sunday where the attention goes up and more people have the ability to play, the more the number goes up, the more players there are, the worst, the overall skill level

is the easier time you're going to have dumping on people going through that game. Now, when you are logging in at 3 a.m. on a Wednesday night, you're fighting the D-Gens. It is the

witching hour, right? You are, are, if you are logging in on a Tuesday at 4 a.m., it's the Wazler hour. There's no one on, but those who live this lifestyle ready to fucking murder you. And quite frankly, these hours are the best time to, like, test if your shit is real or not. You know, if you, if you, if you want to know if your shit actually stands the test of time and can make it and is actually legit, then you go on during those, those deader hours and you get real matches. So here's a really good example is like this is the first week of July right now. Hey, guess what? First week of July, if you have a pre-made team kicks ass for fighting people online because you are fighting against kids that got out of fucking school last week, man.

These kids don't know nothing. But that's it. If you wait for these spikes of, you know, Ingrid drops or for the weekend to come, you're going to find yourself ranking up way. easier in a fighting game. Absolutely noticeable. And what's interesting, too, I'll say is if you're somebody who likes to look for casual matches and get like long casual sets out, like off of ranked as well, you will find good players on casual as well during those popular times because there will be a bunch of people just like, you know, trying shit out and practicing and so on. So,

You'll be able to find some, some better folks to play with in that situation, too, if you're somebody who wants to do it that way. When I went back to strive a couple times to, you know, get, like, ASCA up and figure out how to play ASCA a bit more and so on. Going into the parks during random weekdays, weeknights, you'd find, like, three or four people just chilling, and they were all gods. And they were all willing to do first to 20s with you. And it was awesome. But, like, yeah, you're getting stopped the fuck out until you learn. But it depends on what experience you're looking for. But either way, 100% the employed Darius hours, that's a real thing that will affect your experience in a multiplayer game.

It's just if you're not relying on other teammates, enjoy the free ride. Now, this is going to also vary in if you are playing a game that is worldwide or regional-based. if you're playing if you're playing certain games that will matchmake you for like a huge proportion of the planet then the hours and days aren't going to matter as much but like if you're playing something that's like

14 that's going to regionally lock matchmake you to within three or four time zones of you then yeah no you can ballpark like hey what's the latest at night Pacific that you're likely to even be able to complete something or earliest in the morning Eastern Or worst case scenario, awful case scenario,

ranked matches into X where it takes forever to find the next ranked opponent because you're not able to match up with people worldwide. It's doing the region only and then it's also having a hard time finding the right ELO for you to fight. Yeah. So.

Okay. Let's see. All right, we'll take one more over here. You know what? This is actually relevant. Let's hear it. Death of slash get into VR games. Okay. From Nico.

Deer Rasta Hat and Pastorat. I like that. That's all right. Sure. Alternatively, Mr. Undiagnosed and Mr. Every Banquet and their patch numbers in FF14. I don't know about that one. Stop, guys. I remember. from the Kirby's Epic Yam video.

You got to cut through this garbage and get to the question. Talking about the sadness of VR games, not picking up and overall getting to what the experience would need to be for you to get into a VR game. So basically, a lot of good VR experiences tend to fall into the category of either horror or cockpit games. Sure. And Alex also takes a while before it hits the ground and starts running.

But they basically just spend a lot of time describing the great experiences they've have and how much they love VR games. They're saying that now you've got a lot of the discomfort and other issues and price and things are going down. So it's becoming a lot better and easier to experience VR and to have better games. My question to you is overall, what is your criteria for getting into long-form VR? games. The tech is currently very comfortable, wireless, fast and objectively better in many ways, and affordability is decreasing. Is there a specific comfortable size or something you're willing to

wait for? Or what are the barriers left? Is it streamability, et cetera, et cetera. The person is desperately trying to figure out why you're not excited for VR. Oh, okay. I can answer that. I am prone to migraines and VR doesn't agree with me. And as you describe that VR is considerably more comfortable than it's ever been from a fairly objective basis. I'll take that. I'll take that premise. VR headset cannot be any significantly heavier than the headphones I'm wearing on my head right now or I will get sick.

If I wear headphones that push in towards my ears, I will get sick. So if I wear a headset that drags my head down more than a couple of hundred grams, I don't know, something more than two pairs of sunglasses, I'm going to get sick within 40 minutes to an hour. Wireless is good. Fidelity is good, all these things. Price is bad. It's still bad.

It's really bad. But it has to be that I don't get sick. And because the VR headsets are so expensive and software production is so sparse, I would have to go over to somebody's house and then go, yo, check this out. I'll try that out. And I put it on and have a good experience for me to even consider it. But I went through an Oculus and a PlayStation VR and a PlayStation VR2. and I tried the index somewhere.

I forget where the fuck it was. And they all made me sick quite quickly. And that's it. So that is 100%. I completely, I feel I concur with a whole bunch of that because I have similar issues. And in fact, I can say that this is extremely recent and relevant because here, I will pull the curtain back a little bit

and I'm going to talk about this a little bit tomorrow. The new LP that I was trying to start was going to actually be a VR game and a wild pick at that. I was trying to figure out a way to get Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Empire City, the recent VR game that just came out. I was trying to see if that was LPable. And that is a what, woolly? Why? Who the fuck? What reason would you have for pulling this weird shit out?

Right? And what I saw when I was looking into this game is I saw a basically a super cut of moments in it because it's hilarious. For some random reason, the writing in the game is super funny and like legit, like well done from this little kind of montage I watched of moments in it. And it was something that I would never consider otherwise. But then just watching that video on of like things in moment to moment in the game, I was like, this is a really funny thing. I would love to experience this short game and perhaps LP through it to get

most of these moments going, right? That's exactly it. It's a random piece of, it's a random, not shit, but it's a random game out of left field that just like looked really funny. So I was like, let me try this out. So in order to get it going, I had to go grab my Oculus

and plug this in and blow the dust off and get this whole thing going. The process of one, updating all of my Oculus Rift stuff into meta quest stuff was exhausting. Everything about the software, everything about the hardware, everything about the firmware, all was going through these weird,

not just branding updates, but like the whole way you interface with everything changed. And then the accounts that you made also had to change and migrate over to a new system, which was trying to onboard you through this whole crazy thing because I haven't looked at Facebook in a billion years about how to use the new meta thing. It was just horrible.

It was a really annoying, awful experience. And then even once that was done, the experimental thing I had, I remember at the time, was the Air Link thing. Trying to get that working properly, it still was not working properly after all this time. Getting a USB plugged in, it was not the right type. And so I just couldn't get the link going. So there's a number of ways that you link your Quest headset to your PC. You can do it through Steam link. You can do it through virtual desktop.

There's all these different ways. And I just, the hoops and hoops and hoops and hoops. Eventually, after doing a bunch, including changing some of my router settings to properly broadcast the right kind of 5 gigahertz signal because certain devices only saw 2.4, I got it working. And I was like, okay, I spent the night figuring this out.

I solved it. I updated it. You defeated it. I defeated it. The game is now running. and not running in the weird way where the resolution was too shit either or do random. It was running, right? And I started playing and I was like, oh, I feel sick.

How long? I got through the first level and a half. And then I was like, oh, this feels really, this is rough. This is really rough. And there's things in the game that have moments where you can climb on pillars, but you can quickly jump up a building by going. grabbing a window ledge and doing this and shooting up the building to just feel all the textures and window gravity and all that shit just go in your guts and all the safety comfort cage options you

could put on are not saving you from some of the more aggressive combat moments or aggressive platforming moments that the game has and unfortunately while doing that and experiencing what was going on with the game I was still kind of going okay but if this goes smoothly enough if the writing is good, if this, and it wasn't, it was taking too long to get to those moments. And I went, God damn it. I'm going to have to explain all of this. And I guess I'll just play that video tomorrow to show everyone what I was talking about. And then that'll be what it was. But I wanted to do an interesting VR thing out of nowhere. Also, the data would be good to know if Half-Life Alex would be even possible. Because I've done like a couple of VR streams in the past that did make me feel

sick and I was like limited time maybe. But this is also data for that. And realistically, I'm like, no, this shit sucks. And that was me pulling out an older Oculus that I had and updating and on etc. I don't know if they have it to the point where you can put on a pair of goggles or glasses that are extremely light and don't have any of these issues. But grabbing the thing that I bought a while ago and trying to use it with the current system was nightmarish and sucked. So that's why I'm not doing it. So part of the problem here is that the appeal is the flaw. The integrated in-body virtual, it's like you're really their experience is like a huge proportion of the appeal of literally every single VR game, right? That's the old, that's the reason they're VR games instead of normal games.

But that's the part that makes me sick. So I don't get any of the appeal. appeal. I only get a extremely limited on Rails first person experience. Yeah. I think people like you, me and Reggie probably will only... It's like 40% of all people. I think we're only going to be able to really handle the AR glasses that project over your life version of this that'll come eventually that are going to be like years from now. And also like that, that's, And that'll be the only, like, version of this you probably will be able to play at any decent length of not five-minute intervals. There is such a good comment that has just gone by.

Nice Drive says you need to really train baby steps to get ready for VR. I think H3 VR should be mandatory for all VR users just because it's full motion and has multiple locomotion modes to break your VR sickness. Willie, you just don't want it bad enough. You bought a device worth thousands of dollars, and you're too much of a pussy to push past the fact that the game makes you feel terrible and want to vomit. How could you not want to just dive it? And the funny part is I actively, because of my love of the game, Rez, I pushed through it, to play area X.

I remember that. I remember that, yeah. Right? And I pushed through it in this context to see if I could literally LP a game for y'all. That would have been a good short time. This is actually just a baffling point of view of like, get into VR. It makes me feel bad in my body. Yeah, well.

Hurt yourself. You hurt yourself. Yeah. Go. Do it. Like, what? No, no, I don't have to. Fuck you.

Why would I, like, like people. be like, hey, listen, this food tastes like shit, but if you eat it like a thousand times because your mom made you, you'll really appreciate it when in 10 years from now. And then you're like, can

I not just have a burger? No. No, I'm better than you that I eat the food that tastes bad and I got used to it. Well, if you really want the fucking the knife twisted or the katana for that matter, when you boot up a Steam VR game

like the one I'm talking about, and it's TMNT Empire City, the game boots up on your computer just fine, and it shows you the main menu, and you just have the camera on the floor all fucked up. And like, if you wanted to make a version of this that played with the controller, it would be extraordinarily easy to do. In fact, while you have the VR headset on, there is a mouse and keyboard WASD version of the controls that you can use that are default steam. They just simply are forcing the peripheral because they want to force the peripheral. But it could have easily have been a mode that you enabled for something like VR chat or super hot or games like that where you're like, you can play a VR mode if you want

to or don't, right? But instead it's like, nope, this is going to be hardlocked to only VR users and we're not going to make it work for anyone without it. Even though the game is running right now, I can hear it and see it and technically work around to make it work, but no. It's crazy. The amount of work you would have to do is negligible to just actively

map the controls to what you need to do because VR games are not getting that complicated with what they're asking of you either, considering the fact that you're getting fucking sick by it. You know, I don't really feel super I don't really enjoy the feeling I get watching my 3D TV with a curved

screen. It doesn't feel like, a good way to watch something. What are you just too weak to learn this superior way to watch film? Fucking... Let your eyes bleed for at least 10 minutes and then increase that to 11 minutes and go up by a minute every day until you get there. Here's the thing that really gets me, though, is that, like, for maybe this is a perception difference.

But when people talk about, you know, VR and being totally immersed, I'm like, if I'm playing a decent game that has like a good audio visual presentation and good performance, I already sublimate past my body into the fucking screen. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Like, I don't need, I don't need to have like a full body sensation.

I just, my fucking brain like floats out of my fucking body like a, like a cartoon ghost and, you know? I'm, I get that feeling. I'm more willing to take this on, but they have to make it not feel like you're going to vomit every time. They have to do it. They have to work on it further. They have all the tricks and the tricks are currently in play. And when I played like Eagle Flight with the beak to stare at, with the feathers going by, with the vignetting, with the teleporting

in place, all these little things help you feel not as sick, but they still are only temporary solutions to something that's inevitably going to make my stomach churn. And if the real like closing note here is there's awesome games like Sushi Ben, which, came out and look fucking incredible, but were VR only, but then nobody got to experience this amazing game that was like Mega Man Legend style art and super dope. So then they unvirate it

and then made it so that other people can just play it regularly. And it's like, okay, cool. Like now that's awesome. You're not locking it behind this thing for, you know, like the strict principle of the matter. Like if you're going to make it so that VR is a value add on top of an existing game,

that's great. Let people opt into it. But yeah, hard committing. I would like to hold up my hand for a second. There's a comment in here. Another one. Oh, boy. We're taking him to task today. Isn't this just what you guys tell me to do with fighting games to which someone responds with,

yeah, but they like fighting games and have a vested interest? Fighting games don't make you throw up. They don't make you physically sick. The inability of the brain to grasp. that simple concept and take it to the logical conclusion blows my mind here. You're talking about... If you're talking about your feelings getting hurt because you don't like losing, that's okay.

Sure, that's not what we're talking about. If you're talking about a game that physically upsets you to play, I talked about first-person shooters making me feel sick for a very long time until they... Stuff improved. And now I can play them okay. Why are so many people saying that fighting games make them feel ill? Like they make you feel motion sickness?

What are they describing? Are you talking about doing moves? Is doing a quarter circle just like it's hurting your hand or something? I'm trying to, I'm trying to steal man here. I'm trying to make this make sense. I'm curious as to like what could actually make you ill like playing a fighting game. Look, look. The things that are hard in a game in any other genre,

if you jumped on League of Legends and you got fucking stomped on. If you jumped on an FPS and you got stomped on. If you jumped on any other card game, Yu-Gi-o and you got stomped on. The people feeling bad about getting stomped on and not knowing what to do. That's all you're talking about. That's a bad enough... Oh, they have that thing where they feel the emotion in their body

and they're like, the game made me feel my body. Yeah, dumbass, we're talking about like literally physically not feeling your stomach churn. I get woozy and I get a migraine after doing VR for like 40 minutes. Yeah, it's not the same fucking thing. Regardless of whether or not I'm... enjoying myself, which is kind of a bummer by itself. Holy shit, babies, dude. Oh my God. Okay. Anyways.

No, yeah, whatever. Find your, find your, your, like... I can't believe Wully gets sick playing with a baby toy and will call me a baby for... Hey, man. Hey. I am not the baby. It is you who is the baby. It was a super sick dunk in your head, bro. In your head, you nailed it and everyone clapped and it was awesome.

And they're doing, and they're running around picking you up and carrying me. out of the stadium. All right. Okay. And yes, I know I still have to do half-life episodes before Alex. I'm aware. Yeah. I just...

That shit wouldn't make any sense. I just wanted to know if I could even consider the possibility. All right. I'm done. Have a good one, everybody. Take it easy. Hey, get the shirt. Get the shirt.

Legacy shirt, please. Thank you, Bricky. Go to the... Go to the orchid. shop get it