Castle Super Beast - CSB384: Caveman Super Beast: PICKLE OPTIONAL

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

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Hello. Hello. How you doing today, Wolves? Not too bad. How are you? I'm all right. I'm nice and well-rested. The little man only woke up at 8.40 as opposed to his usual 630 to 7.30, which meant I got like a full extra hour and 20 of sleep that I usually would not.

Nice, nice, nice, nice. It's so good. It's so good. I am violently adjusting to this start time. It is. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it, dude.

I was like, you told me the whole, we had that whole talk about what it was going to be. And I don't know if you remember the look on my face, but I was like, mm-hmm, yeah. This is a schedule-based violence that is being enacted on my life. Well, enacted upon is an interesting phrasing. More like brought upon yourself is more accurate. Well, actually, well, I mean, really and truly it begins with like when she wakes up and when she has to have her day start. Oh, that's how it's going to be for another... Yes.

Yes. 17, 18, 19 years? That is being enacted upon me unless you would suggest that the creation of the person who's doing this is then was a decision that I made at which point then, I suppose. Oh, yeah. No, no, that's it is. It's all self-effective. That is the second that you and your wife shook hands and were like, let's zygote all further after. After effects are on you.

The contract was sealed. Oh, boy. Well, that's happening. Oh, I've been doing this for ages now. And yeah, guess what? Guess what? You're going to get a little used to it. I'm going on like three and a half years of this.

You'll get a little used to it. Yeah, I mean, there's stuff going on that, you know, is in the middle of the process so I don't even, I feel like I have to like see the full spectrum of it before I almost like make an assessment and comment. But she is adjusting to the, to the changes that come with the idea of daycare. And like, you know, there's some days where it goes really well and she has fun and plays and has some friends that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's other days where she's just crying. But I have noticed that she is now back at home crying harder. than before.

There's a new level of like, oh, right? From, that comes with the, where are you guys? And alongside that comes like moments of like tighter hugs even, you know,

and you're just like, oh, oh, the attachment is going crazy with this realization that like, sometimes there is life away from mommy and daddy. And fuck that sad. Also, yeah,

somebody in chat, correctly pointed out that they're also picking up micro behaviors from other children. Right? But on top of that, like one of the things that was like really important to me in Page is that even when he was like a little guy, um, is that I would come out to the office to go to work. And every time I would do that,

he would completely lose the shit because down, and like eventually, they get you, they must learn that you are going to come back. Yes. Um, but now, now we're in the new version of that, which happened around two and a half, which is the active, thoughtful ask of, I don't want you to go to work. I want you to just stay here and hang out with me all day. And I'm like, fuck, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, like, the calm, let's reason through this. Come on. I know there's a way that I can convince you to not go to work today. It's like, oh. Yeah, that's bad. I got responsibilities, man.

The idea that other kids could be teaching this crying harder behavior is kind of fucking be up a bit, though. Other kids teach all sorts of things, like biting, throwing tantrums to get their way, coughing directly into your eyes. Yeah. Well, she didn't have to learn that from anybody. Yeah, no, a lot of kids know that right away. Aim for the eyes.

Well, it's not even, it's just like, it's coming out of my body, and chances are, you're standing in front of my face. So enjoy that. Anyways. So what time did you get up this morning? Well, that's the problem, is not early enough. Because with this switch up, since Punch Mom's doing the drop off, I basically was like, okay, you know, you're going to be getting up, taking care of the breakfast and getting

her out of here and stuff. So just leave the whole house a mess. I'll wake up. I'll make my breakfast. I'll clean up everything. And then I'll get over to. getting ready for work, for stream, for podcasts. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And doing that and then coming to sit down, I was like, oh, no, there is not enough time. And I'm also, I haven't had the caffeine hit my body yet. So the answer is just not enough, you know. I've had four cups of coffee. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's because, because, right? And it's like, yeah, the old, you get to this point in your life when you're, we're juggling these things.

And the only option is I guess I'm just going to have to get up earlier. And then the next day, eventually, you'll be like, yeah, this groove is working until the day that it fucking doesn't. And then the answer was like, I will now have to get up 15 minutes earlier than that to account for spillage, food disaster. Um, yeah, like, like, for, for me, it's like peanut butter mishap is like my number one source of morning delay. Right. Is, hey, man. Um, you just got peanut butter all up in your hair. Okay.

Time for emergency morning bath. Yeah. Can't let you go out like this. And I, and I've also noticed them like, okay, I, I, I'm starting to hit the return of the unplanned, like, at, like, late evening nap. where I'm just kind of like wait where I'm like. Wully, that's known to most people as going to bed. Yeah. So I don't mean to alarm you, but the late evening nap.

Late evening nap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is known as going to sleep for the evening for the vast majority of people. So I wake up and then I'm just like, what happens? Whoa. I didn't even have my night. My night hasn't begun. That's crazy.

You have been on such a. psycho nocturnal schedule for so long. You just described accidentally falling asleep once the sun is down as a nap. I mean, you're, you will have to change. So, well, okay, first of all, first of all, um, no, like this is admittedly, I would be saying that if it were like after 10 or something. But if I hit like, I don't know, like eight o'clock and I'm like eight, really? Yeah.

Where you're at at your specific time frame, you know what? 8 p.m.? Sure. Super awesome time to go to bed. You know, fortunately, fortunately, again, the fact that I do have a night, nocturnal fucking shift means that, like, it works, it works well for our day shift, night shift set up, and that's all fine. But yeah, I can tell when my body's like, hey, man, I don't know, dude, you might not

have it tonight. And I'm like, fine, fine. And I call it, I call it, you know. I hit bed early. Grab the baby monitor, et cetera. But it is not a fun adjustment that the mornings are going through right now. In any case. I think I saw it a while ago and I think I repeated it here, which is having children turns you into a morning person the same way that finding a bear in the woods turns you into a jogger.

that's great right it's like yes you you are doing it but you're doing it out of mandatory necessity not out of like the joy of it like no you must awake at these hours that's excellent it's very yeah no when when when he was that age and we're a little younger i remember me and page like getting him to sleep at like 7 30 and like okay he he he was a good sleeper too he like he'd go for for hours and we're like what do it fuck it And we would just climb into bed and pass out within about one second because we were, someone was getting up in three or four hours. Somebody.

But at any case, that's all fine and dandy. So there we can hit the timestamp for end of baby talk for you fucking psychopaths out there. Oh, don't worry. I'm going to sneak some baby talk in there. For you absolute monsters. I don't, I don't care for the fun of. properties of human life. I don't, I just don't care for it.

You know, listen, do you know how I, I, my, okay, my soft cope on that type of thing. Hit me with your soft cope. My soft cope on that, my, my steel man for, for that person is maybe this is just somebody who's had a rough personal experience and does a lot and needs to just check out of things relating to this topic for. a moment. I mean, that's, that's possible. If I, but, like, that's not what's happening. I know that's not what's happening. That doesn't jive with the tone.

Especially every single, I know, I know. But I'm just like, let me, let me just give this, this person that, and then we're just going to move past it. Because, um, in, in most cases, I imagine that person would exactly have a tone that's a little more like, eh, or even just no tone at all, because they wouldn't comment. But, but the people that are out there just fucking And, who, anyway. So here's the thing. Even when I, like, didn't want kids and didn't want to hear anything about kids, I was never in that place that I see many people in, which is stopped talking about your kids. Also make your children leave this public space.

That is strange behavior. Like, your own personal choice and all that, great. But, like, you know, old man sitting on the porch, like, the kids are playing in the park going, all this noise. like, bro, what do you want? Do you want to live in the children of men scenario where the earth is crumbling? Do you want to live in a place where everyone is your

age or older? Like, it's fucking weird. And now that we've continued chatting about it a little bit, my plan is complete. Does this part where we talk about the weirdos in dad-slop conversation, how count is dad-slop? Do you have to cut out the part where you're getting shot at? Or do you cut out

beforehand and then consider us shoot against you, actual podcast content you want to listen to. That's the decision you have to make, time stamper. Listen, it's been a hell of a week. Crazy shit. Crazy shit is up. Oh, I've got a story

or two if I can tell you. Oh, my God. Yeah. Okay. Oh, hey, you know what? So let's continue. Abyssal Jaguar in the chat points out that a child did cancel a flight recently. Yeah, that was in my neck of the woods. That's over in Victoria. There was a kid who had a flight canceled

because mom and dad tried for like over an hour to get them into the seat and then the whole family had to be ejected. Right? Hey, guess what? If you have a child and you can't get them into that seat within 10 minutes, you're not going to get them into the seat because attempting to overpower them failed. You need to leave.

That's the parents' fault. That is 100% the parents. Okay, so that's where I go. All right. After that time has elapsed, and it's a reasonable amount of time. As parents, you go, hey, sorry, this is not working. Can we get rebooked? Can you guys help us with that?

Right. And I feel like they, hopefully, if the airline is understanding of that part of it, where you're like, this is a fucked situation. Canceling the flight is obviously horrible for them and everyone involved, but you don't need to get to fighting against everybody being dragged off the plane, right? So ideally you would be able to stand up and leave. Yes. Right?

Stand up and leave basically and just go like, hey, can you guys help us with the rebooking of this so that we're not completely fucked here? And then cool and then move yourself from the situation. That's the best you could probably hope for there. You don't need to be getting duct tape. You tend to have like a very like you, you tend to have like an understanding of how difficult your child is. to get in and out of seatbelts before you get to the plane? Yes. Yes.

Like my guy will go, no, don't do it. And I'll be like, come on, man, we got to do it. And he was, no, and he like pouts for a second. But the wishful thinking of being like, I just need to do what I need to do when people, it'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine, right? That sort of. What are you with that sentence of a child canceled a flight recently, I thought like, did the kid call up and get on the phone and be like, yeah,

I've got the three numbers on the back of the card. Oh, no. Can you rebook us next week? I thought the, I thought the angle you were going on to was the child called up the airport and was like, yo, Victoria Airport. I saw that video you made in college where you said all that shit. And now the entire airport is canceled. Oh, no. Oh, geez.

Oh, the airport. Oh, man. Okay. Well, here, I'll grab the business. Tom for a second. Your boy was in Times Square. Yeah, I saw that. That's fucking crazy, bro.

Was that like a rotating thing? Or was like the three that we were like just there like perennial like entire time? It was a it's got the it's got the like rotating spot of the the podcast that it's showing. Okay, good. That means that's not just up east for you guys. That's up east for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah. There's other shows there that were, that were, um, there's one that was called, um, uh, not actors on actors on actors, uh, artists on artists on artists. It was called and I was like,

what is this? This is a really strange name for a podcast that was like next to us. And it turns out it's, okay, do you know actors on actors, which is an actor and interviewing an actor? I assume that's how baby actors are made. Okay. So, so like it is a, there's a podcast that is making fun of this trend of actors interviewing actors, just talking about how incredible the performance was and how they reached in and how did you, what were you channeling? Oh, it's like a kind of like behind actor studio kind of thing. When you, when you, when you played the character of Bam, Margera, what were you channeling inside?

Yeah, it's a little bit of that James Lipton energy and like you're just shooting that back. forth at each other. I was like, that's a great idea for a podcast. That's really funny. But yes, no, in any case, there it is. Got a versus Wolves banner up. And this is the cherry on top of of Mamdanistan. You see, this is the time that we are taken over and it's already gone. It was up for a few days and it's gone now. Well, that's like the most expensive ads. spot in the entire world, right? Like, yeah, like, it's, it's the peak of, oh boy, I hope people fucking see this shit. I sure hope they do. I'm wearing a stupid vagabond hoodie. So that's, hopefully someone sees that and it's like, uh, what are these kids about? What's going on over here?

Um, is this a rap group? It might be. It's not quite, it's not quite run the jewels, but, uh, run the wolves is a bit. Anyway, um, no, that's super cool. And, um, yeah, shout out to Patreon. Thank them, obviously, for throwing that in there. And, you know, I got, and some folks walked by and took some screenshots. And, and, yes, you know, NY Crownless King out in New York went and got some of the first photos. A friend Udo as well went down there and got a pick. Very cool.

I know that that's the kind of thing where people would go down there to be like, hey, there I am, take the photo. But, again, as the borders remain. closed and Titans are roaming beyond the fields. I'll be, I couldn't make it down to New York

to take the fun photo. Did you just, did you just say screenshots about real life pictures? Did I say screenshots? Okay, well, they ended up becoming screenshots when they were when they

they took some photos that basically became screenshots because what is IRL even? You're losing your fucking mind Jesus Christ Yes they took some photos in video Yeah that's that's cool

That's exciting And also something that I could I show the family And then go like hey look see Look look I'm doing it It's actually super real It's real Yeah yeah right

And then they're like wow Okay okay Is that the podcast Where you're gonna tell people About how you came back to Jesus because of the Bible. So that's what happened. Literally the same weekend.

And they're like, oh, what's it called V5 Wolf? What? What is this show? Oh, you have a show. Oh. And the episode this just dropped is the Amazing Digital Circus versus the Bible. And I'm like, no, don't go look at it now. Not this one, guys.

No, don't look at it now. They're actively, okay, like, you should see the text. message string of my mom going, so if I type in Patreon, I'm going to find it. If I type in, how do I find it? And I'm like, uh, yeah, no, it's just that's where people post stuff. No, it's good. You don't need to worry about it.

Like, oh, that photo with you guys in the standing there. And it's like, there's the thing. And I'm like, oh, yeah, here's the photo. And it's like, no, but you guys had the logo. And I'm like, what logo? There was no logo. Here's just me standing with the, it's the worst possible time. That's so good, dude.

That's so good. I'm so happy for you to get to enjoy this highly, like, highly strange, inopportune scenario. Fuck, man. Like, don't look now when we're clouding hard. See, this is what happens when you embrace your godless devil ways. The, the material world and the devil's playground rewards you. And on top of that, then they're going to have to hear about our Jack's analysis. and that's a whole level of confusion.

Oh, that's a whole thing. That the church isn't ready for. So either way, I'm just like, this is, can you tune in next month maybe? Like, can you just skip this one, please? Oy, oh, yeah. Anyways. So that's a whole lot of fun. And, yes, it is, it has also been fun watching the various reactions.

to two unks and a bunch of V-Zomers in the same screenshots because I feel like every time like a clip or TikTok of that pops up and then you just see you see a bunch of like really well animated V-tubers talking with their great rigs and everything is super sick

and they're doing the bait and like I feel like these fleshy guys yeah well people that are used to watching their V-tubers interact together are not ready for the jump scare of just like real flesh Oh, gray hair, bald. So anytime that cuts into the screen shot, it's like, what the fuck?

I was streaming with Hina and Ecto last night, and we received the most backhanded possible comment, a compliment ever, which was basically that they had dodged all the streams because they weren't interested, but then they watched the podcast, because of course they watched the podcast, and are like, oh, wow, this is actually great, and now they have to go back and watch all the videos that went

up, etc. And it's like, oh, you, you like, clicked on, like, no. But then when you were forced to actually engage, oh, yeah, actually. Yeah, yeah, no, I, I, it, it was, it was great. And, um, hey, I think,

you know, we're, we're, we're doing all right. at this this guest thing and also the assumption that it might just be a one-note topic for having a room full of people turns out is not the case. You can talk about many different things when people are around. There was a, yeah, no, it was, I would say a hearty discussion of many a subject matter besides 14 with them

and same thing for the specs episode as well. Um, but yeah, that's, that's what's going on. Uh, anyway, onto the week. Um, what do we got? We finished off Phoenix Wright to finally. We're done. Finally. Yes. Um, that's a really goddamn impressive case. That final case is really fucking strong. It's really strong. And like, oh, it's again, we just, we'll just forever be talking about, though, the big top into final case insanity of this because I don't know that the series ever has this level of whiplash ever again. I'm going to assume not. I haven't gone through all of them, but nothing that I went through came anywhere close to, wow, this is the worst to, wow, this is the best. phenomenal, phenomenal strong finish on Phoenix Wright, too. And, yeah, and like really hitting different notes from, like, in the first game, you know, you hit some pretty strong villainous pieces of shit with like their aura is the main

pull of what's cool about how those cases go. you know, your, um, your, your, your, your, uh,

von, your karma, you know, like, like, Towers, mountains. Um,

but in this case, like, the case itself, it's not the mystery of that. The villain is great. I love, I love me some fucking, it's a,

the dopeio and all that. But, um, the, the actual, like, conversation that Phoenix and Miles are having with each other,

like, psychically. is so much cooler and more interesting. Yeah, it's through their gay expressions when they're looking into them, hmm? Maybe. Guilty.

Guilty. Yeah. I mean, it's there if you want to, if you see it. I'm like, it's kind of, you know, I feel like the,

when he's moping about, sad about his, his rival being gone, like that, that's a heavier hand. Because there was a lot of pushing in the first game about it. I was like, yeah, kind of, maybe.

This time around with that, I'm like, okay, I see a little bit more of what you're getting at there. You know, there are friends as kids or whatever, right? Yeah, well, I mean, I'm sure this will continue as the series goes on. That being said, it is, yeah, it's just great fucking game. And it was funny because as I was recapping the big top, I'm like, man, that was so bad. It was really annoying, and I was thinking about it. I was like, I forgot how many details I hated. I already started like healing over the damage like fucking like James Howlett.

When you described it to me, I, so like over time, I played that case like 10, 15 years ago, it just morphed into a bad clown. Like it was just this amorphous thing. And the only part that I remembered like really vividly was how mad I was as to how the murder actually occurred. and how like flagrantly ridiculous it was. Like. But then when you started describing all the other stuff, I'm like, oh yeah, that was also terrible. The gameplay.

This also. And everyone's saying that, yeah, yes, Shutakumi was blackout drunk when he made this part of the game. It just, it makes so much more sense. But anyways, all that, all that aside, it's a, yeah, it's a fucking great game. And, excuse me, took us as long as you finish it. If you get to Big Top and you're like, I don't want to come back to this. You're out of the series forever. And then somebody asks you how you felt about it, bad game.

Yep. Like bad game. That is a ramp off of the entire Phoenix Wright franchise if you stop there. Absolutely. And I mean, again, I know that people say that this is the worst, but the idea of even getting close to being this bad again is also kind of scary. There's some cases that are like mediocre, but like I would not, I would not worry about that at all. Right. Like that one's the, that's just actively terrible.

Okay. But yeah, beyond that, I think all things considered, just yeah, we had a great time with it. Again, lots of fun voices and stuff, which, you know, are, we ended up wrapping up a bit over. the how long to beat time frame for one of these games. Slightly. I took a look. Yes. I took a look at how long to beat and then I cross-referenced it and I'm like, oh, you was yapping. You was yapping your fucking asses off. Takes time to fucking voice act. Okay. Guys, I need to take a quick break. I'm receiving some emergency texts. My wife is telling me she is trapped in plants in the backyard. I have to. to go free her. If you'll excuse me.

I have to save my wife from plants. Dude, I went out there and she and the boy are out there picking blackberries and she had her arm just fully into the blackberry bush. And you know when you can see all the little thorns like touching the skin and you move your arm? So we had to like

gingerly pry her apart from the vines. And as we were doing that, my son walked over with his spray bottle and sprayed my fucking pants with water, so now it really looks like I just pissed all over myself. Shout out to Ironwall Havoc for saying, Page versus Zombies. Yeah, no, no, it's, oh.

Thank God she had her phone, like, in her hand when she was doing it, because she was, like, one-handed going, help, help, I'm stuck, help. I'm in the backyard. That is convenient. Um, all right. Well, in any case, yeah, Phoenix Wright 2 is good shit. Then we continued with Dark Souls 2, Scholastic Edition. Yeah, where are you at in Dark Souls 2?

So Reggie pushed through the Bastille and got to the Ruin Sentinels and hit that wall. That's a pretty for real wall. That's a pretty real wall, yeah. And I did inform. I did let him know how much of a wall that was. was for me too. That's a fucking real wall. And, you know, but it's one where like similar, like, we have similar instincts in that you're like, okay, well, if I can just improve myself, I can keep going at it and eventually get that. That's correct. Yeah. You know, and there was that

kind of moment of like, you know, okay, can we improve the build? What can we do? And then eventually he decided, let's go elsewhere, right? Let's go check out there. So I'm like, yeah, you have options ahead of you for where you want to go. But in the background, a bunch of people were yelling, like, why making him do that now? You can go to Normans' War. and it's actually meant to be, because it leads back to me like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let him do what he wants to do, you know? And then he eventually wound up back at the wharf,

and the wharf fucking sucks. The wharf sucks, dude. That's all there is to it. And it is a, it is the zone where you're doing it, and because these games like you to explore and hit everything, it's the classic,

okay, there's boxes, there's treasure, there's stuff to get through here. Yeah. But at a certain point, it will test your patience, and you'll just be like, I don't care anymore. don't care anymore. Get it over with. I just want to find the boss. Get to the boat.

Exactly. And yeah, we hit that point in record time. We just fucking, we got to that point where like the hollowing started to occur and it was just like, okay, never mind the, the, like, the nudges in a certain direction. Let's just be like, yeah, you want to drop down there. There's a gate over this way. If you can make it past these fuckers, these guys are assholes. Be aware of that. And then just pushing through it because it, it, it, it puts. pushes you to that like, I'm so fucking done with this area limit. And, you know, I guess you just, you have to be ready for that mentally. I think a lot of people who watch a lot of soul streams forget that you really don't have to scrape up every item.

Like, you can really, like, genuinely critical path, like all of it for all of them. And you will get most of the things you really need. just right then and there. Not to mention, you don't even have to fight the flexile century. You just watch fucking Lukutel and whatever that dude's name is, do it. And they just do it. But that like, you know, it's that kind of not completionist, but like main plus extras kind of approach that we have to things where you're like, yeah, but there's a cool thing over there. And what if I'm a big fan of main plus extras?

Main plus extras. Yeah. Nevermind completionist. Fuck that. But main plus extras is the natural way that I think we like to consume a lot of media. And it's enough to get the main point of what's going on, obviously, and to see some of the cool other stuff, you know, and then stop wherever your own level of enjoyment fades off.

But some of those extras are time wasting terrible, you know, sometimes. And some of those extras are sick as fuck. So you don't know which extra is which until you do it! But you don't know which is which. Um, but, uh, yeah, so that was, that was kind of it, though. We just, we did the wharf and then hit the, um, the left side of, uh, Hades Tower of Flame, which, yeah, that zone is so weird now with the, with the Hades Knights walking around, you know, um, that, that is like, the, that, Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 2, Scholar

for Sin is like the weirdest, two variations of a game ever. It's every, every area is weird. And some of that is good and some of that is bad. And some of that is really good. And some of that is really bad. I think Hayes Tower left side is actually pretty good because it just stop. Whatever it is, it stops you from getting that ring that breaks most of the game's progression. So they replay, they change the location of a bunch of stuff too.

Which, which are you talking about? You said you went to the left side of Hayes Tower? Yes. I'm talking about the Holloway. ring. Oh, that's on the right side. That's on the right side? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You go right side, you go down towards

old Dragon Rider, and then it's just right in front of the fog gate. Oh, my God. Oh, man. Yeah, but the difference is now there's a fucking, there's a fucking Hades Knight sitting on it. Oh, okay. But yes, no, the left side is just

spear knight and big boy into dragon, and then for some reason, Ornstein, you know. Um, and it's one of those bits to you where, like, like, walking into it, Ornstein pops up and I just think Reggie, he just didn't react to it. It's just like, oh, yeah, okay, here's a knight. Let's beat him. I was like, does that dude ring a bell at all? And it's like, oh, he looks kind of like, I guess he kind of looks like. And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's the guy.

That's Ornstein. He's just right there. It's cool. He's a really cool guy, but it's like, why? I don't know, but he's there. you know but yeah in any case it was it was all fine and I think

the change to the way the Hades Knight plays out is I like I like them being outside of that zone but I do understand that it's like oh you want to have the difficulty kick up when you beat the first boss

so they could have done something like they stayed they were still outside the zone in their various locations sitting around for whatever lore reasons but maybe after you beat the old Dragon Rider, they come back or something. You know, I don't know how you'd want to do it. They also kind of wander on their strange paths, but it's very different.

Yeah, but we kind of left off right around there or so. And it is also very strange to just be like, yeah, I don't know. I guess there are some points in adaptability, you know, whatever. Like, just thinking about that's that distribution in a really, really different way. Adaptability isn't the end of the world. It's just like a mandatory buy-end. and unless you know that it is bad

so what adaptability could have been is a stat that you don't actually level up but it's a number that you see increase as you buy into other things sure right because there could have been a lot of things yeah because agility is that agility is going up as you buy as you buy into other things

and I don't know like it like for anyone who just wants to see the numbers you know the idea of like here's a stat that you watch increase without your actual souls going into it would probably communicate something a little more effectively

about eye frames on your role and drink speed. We can talk about a hundred different versions of this across 100 different games but like overall I think that your character's core functionality

should not be gated statistically or move based wise. Right? Yeah, I agree with that. For example, me and Garrett just went through the EMC5 again. I don't think you should have to buy air hike for all three characters, for two characters. I think that's ridiculous.

It's, and like defensive options for making things, like certain types of attacks available in certain ways. Yeah, I do agree with that. I think fat roll, skinny roll, mid-roll is totally okay based on how you want to defense your character up, but I think changing the eye frames on the role is a level of granularity that's, it's... Well, to a lot of people, they're not going to understand or feel it, they're just going to get, oh, why isn't the roll as good? You see the same animation, you see the same animation, but it feels worse is, is not great. Like Dark Souls 1 had a really simple thing. As you roll, if your body is touching the ground, you can get hit. If you're fully aerial, you can't. It's really easy to understand. Even from

like an intuitive, like, feel-based level. And what I would even say is, let's say you were, let's say you absolutely were like, I have to have this in the game, I won't let this go. Then I would say design it so that it is a direct, visible, and tangible gradient. So there is a role,

and the speed of that role and the distance of it, you're seeing, like, make it visually, and the fat roll all the way to the fast roll, all the same level of like speed and distance increase, you know? across a direct thing so that you don't see like the same level of like animation but then your eye frames ended half a fucking year ago um anyway anyway whatever we're getting into the

nitty gritty on it but um that was that uh spent a little more time playing some of them fight games uh jasmine is i touch on it a little bit last time last week but um she has the coolness of a character that I would absolutely main or switch to it. But is just lacking in a little bit of like you know something

about her system is it's just not like her. She's like an abuki like right? She's not even no she's a very straightforward protagonist character she's very straightforward in Street Fighter 6th. She's showing up and she throws, she comes at you with the knife and she stabs you and then she does an

uppercut and she makes her knife stronger but she's not doing a ton of like super there's not there's not a big well of like depth to kind of like figure out with her you know when you do her trials like all the easy intermediate and advanced trials are like very very simple they're not that hard at all

that explains what they meant by like she'd be the new main character is that she's easy to pick up and play yes yes and I think I think she is also a direct decision to go against what they just did with Viper and Alex being very complicated characters for people to pick up and play, right? So the ease of use change is a very understandable decision to make.

I just wish that, like, they did a little bit more with her knife or so. And what I'm, like, yeah, down-down inputs definitely suck. What I would say is... Yeah, I'm going to have a little bit to talk about fucking down-down inputs in a fucking second. What would be... I feel like there's a little bit of a hint of something fun with her when you you throw the knife out like a boomerang and then you do the demon flip

where you jump across the screen and do like a left right mix on the character. When both of those things are happening there's like a little moment of like ooh there's some fun that you can maybe create a mix up here with her but I think when I see a character with a knife I kind of go like damn if she had some of the

stuff that Maya and Killer Instinct had then we could be cooking right because you might know too much maybe but what I feel like we're going to have a different, like a slightly different version of this in the Tocon conversation. I think you might, I think you might be cursed with too much fighting game knowledge. You know too much of what you may or may not be missing.

Sure. Sure. And, you know, that comes from fucking loving the damn things. But I don't know what to say except, like, I know that the coolest looking version of a character holding a knife. or like a boomerang is what you see Maya doing in that game or Saka doing in Avatar

where they hit you with the thing, it bounces in a way or comes back and then while they're attacking you they catch it, you know? That's a really cool thing that's stylish that would be fun.

And whenever you would like, you know, I remember trying to pick her up and learn how to do it and I learned a little bit of Maya and K.I. Never fully committed to it.

But those moments where you're up close and then you knock them with the knife and it bounces back and you flip backwards, catch it and then come back in. Yeah, that's cool. It's so cool looking. Yeah, you know,

and I think that would be something that like the carambit could be for a character like Yasmin. And I think too as well, you could have that be in a place where you don't need it. It could just be a stylish fun thing to add some extra little mix

and fun to her while keeping the grounded nature of her kit, you know? But it's just, yeah, a little bit of that bummer is that I have the rule of cool first and foremost, you know, and if a character comes along that has like a kit that I think is awesome, but I just don't like the way they look,

then it's just not even in the cards at all. They're not even up for consideration. I think there's nothing more disappointing than, like, it's disappointing to be like, oh, this character's kid is cool, but, you know, I don't think they're cool. I think what's way worse is, oh, this character's so cool. Ew! Ew! I don't like the way they play at all. Oh, gross. That's just killer. It's mean.

One of the most famous examples of that was Angel in King of Fighters is like a cool wrestling girl character with all these references. She does the people's elbow and a bunch of other fun stuff. But playing as her is the weirdest thing in the world that feels like nothing else in that game. And people just gave up on trying to play her. because she has a bunch of weird diagonal tech inputs and stuff that just doesn't feel like it makes sense for the system, you know? I also liked Guy Tendo, who's the Bariki One guy, and he plays very weirdly, but I forced it, and I eventually learned to work within that system and figure it out. But yeah, they're doing too much, you know?

Anyway, um, whoa. Just checking. Just check in. Oh, we got the transitions. Hey, buddy. What's up? Oh. Okay. Well, no.

Fuck you. Why are you switching back for? I know, right? I was just like, oh. He's just being a baby bag. I love you. I love the dog so much. Anyway, so, uh, yeah.

I liked, on the other hand, I liked silver, but like, he was so broken. I feel like I couldn't actually enjoy playing as him. He was so insanely broken. It was nuts. It was just, like, I hate that. It's like, Oh, I love this character.

I love this aesthetic. I love it. Oh, it's a completely busted secret character. Fuck. What if you got the craziest version of Akuma that ever existed? Yeah. And so that was that. You know, put some more time into Tokon and just having a blast with that.

I really love Toff and just her being, like, the whole thing of playing around her, like, talking shit to your opponent, where you can set up the wall like Agatos in between you guys and have her just do a full taunt. And it's like if you don't break the wall in time, you have to get shit talked to. It's just a whole lot of fun there. Very, very, very cool. Speaking of Tokon, how are your feelings now about it

compared to your feelings like last week or two weeks ago? Because you were like kind of sour on some very specific points. Yeah, yeah. So I was going to come to that. So Tokon spent a good bit more time with it, trying to, trying to, I really, I want to get it, you know. Well, first off, first off, hey, kudos on the patch. That is a very fast turnaround for a problem that should not have existed to begin with. Let's backtrack.

So Tokon on PC was quite poor. It had pretty bad micro-stuttering. the micro stuttering would affect rollback so you would be playing it and all of a sudden rollback would jump up to like eight fucking frames. Horrible optimization. I did not have that problem and I spoke to Seajam and Diaphone and they didn't have that problem, but Max definitely did. And part of the problem on PC is that even if you did not have that problem, if your opponent

did, it was. would still affect your match. So matches in general on PC were like pretty poor. Yeah. They patched it. Someone in my chat was like saying like, hey man, works on my end. And I was like, cool, what are you running? And they're like, oh yeah, I got a 5080 in here.

Yeah. But here's the thing. And this is why people kind of figured it was optimization. It wasn't just performance. And when I say optimization, I don't just mean the game runs well. I mean, like there was something wrong because people with really high-end computers were having that problem. them like Macs, right?

And people who were playing it on their laptops had no issue. So it was definitely something off, right? And then they put out a big ass patch and said, hey, we figured it out. The game was, for some reason, constantly over and over and over checking your audio devices to see which audio device to use. And that is a bug I have dealt with before. FF14 had that bug where you started the game on one sound input and then your other input changed, like your default audio change. It would lock out sound for the entire time the program was on.

And that was like very famously accidentally had on like a live letter. And they spent two and a half hours troubleshooting it without looking at chat because everyone in chat had encountered that bug once. And everybody knew how to fix it except for the dev. because the devs always play on their work PCs that are custom built for this highly specific non-QAable scenario. And well, QA is supposed to sit down with various PCs of various strengths

and give you a full report on how the game runs on the lowest of low ends and the highest of highs and everything in between. Like a weird mixture of a low-end CPU with a high-end GPU or vice versa. So I know why I didn't have the problem. I don't have the problem because every sound device that isn't the singular monitor going to the mixer has been disabled in Windows audio settings. There's no devices to switch to.

So when it would check it mid-match, it would be instantaneous so there would be no check. But somebody like Max, who's running just this fucking super professional gargantuan virtual audio cable setup has like dozens of fucking sound device. to scroll through, so he'd get super huge stutters. Furthermore, if you're somebody who plays on a controller or on one of the newer sticks, or if you're like us where sometimes I'm playing with, yeah, so I'm playing on a, I'm playing on a controller, and like Reggie's going to play on a stick, you plug in both. Those are all new sound devices coming in as well. That's why you gotta go and disable all of them manually.

Exactly, exactly, right. Now, this is very reminiscent of the strive fucking server ping issue at launch. That shit was crazy. Yeah, so they have made these. types of fuck-ups before and it's just like, come on, you know. And of course, that, I feel like that's not the only thing because people were encountering a number of other things, including one. Yeah, there's a couple other bugs with like teams disappearing off your saved list and stuff like that.

So there's a bunch of that. Someone, I saw the post that was like, open up the fucking epic game store and that will improve performance because it active, some of the stuff it's looking for gets loaded in by the store running in the background as opposed to when it's not running. And people are like, I don't understand, but yes, I can confirm you that this has improved my performance, which is also bad shit crazy. But either, but so yeah, four days later, they did go in. They got the emergency patch out yesterday. And, you know, this is a lot of, like, some events have been switching over to console. People have basically been like, yeah,

you got to play PS5 or it's not going to work. Some people have refunded a lot of negative reviews on it so far because of that. We'll see what ends up happening because, like, that's a really bad like out of the gate feeling and a whole lot of people do not have the choice to switch over to a PlayStation because they don't imagine they decided I'm going with PC fuck that you know I uh I have my anecdotal evidence as to how this has affected the game um the first day the game came out it was super easy to get matches then once the performance thing started really bug people specifically once max said um I'm calling I'm thrown in the towel on PC version matches just fucking evaporated.

I tried it yesterday morning, and I got one match in like an hour. This morning, however, I got like four or five matches in like 25 minutes. Like basically, as soon as they fixed it, like people were like hopped back on. I assume a lot of them to try it again. Yeah.

Max uninstalled after that horrible online match. And then Diaphone also just basically went like, this, I refuse to play under these conditions. This is insane. That's interesting because I was in Diophone stream and he was like, works fine for me. And so something must have happened in the time that I had spoken to him and the time he gave up. Yeah, I think he just like he was playing against somebody who like it just the rolebacking and the nonsense on their end was just so insane that he basically went.

Like, all right. Oh, the other thing is that the matches I got this morning all had zero one to rollback frames. Okay, okay. They were all like super solid. But yeah, so that that has just happened over the last 24 hours. Something that has been annoying that I haven't seen anyone talk about. I just noticed on my own is every single replay that I tried to watch has broken. Oh, well. Every single one.

Luckily, no one cares about replays. Except me who I'm looking back. That's only for those fucking fighting game nerds. God. It's so, it's super frustrating because like any time, like I had a couple of replays that broke as soon as I tried to pause them and resume them, you know, there was one or two like that. And then I was like, oh, let me, what, what happened here? And then I started watching more. And then I was like, oh, no, some of them are just broken from the start. So, yeah, that sucks. And this was not with an update. This was

like same version replays, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. My training settings, my team settings, getting evaporated randomly was also pretty annoying too. I don't know what happened or why. That's the case. So far, I've been looking at, I checked out the episode. and I really I'm enjoying the story and how they're doing that. It's like, it's very much you're watching the comic play out, you know, you're watching the visual novel. The actual

gameplay of it is just whatever, one round on... I mean, you can skip it. There's a button to just watch the shit as a movie, yeah. I didn't even notice there was. But I think it's just simple in that like the writing being fun and the character interactions being fun is making it, you know, enjoyable. And it's also like

decidedly manga style, which is living up to the branding of these characters being like manga adaptations or anime adaptations of Marvel characters. So you're seeing Loki with the sweat drops and Deadpool, you know, with the love dot tone behind him and stuff like that. And I believe that the reason why the people are saying that the writing and the episodes is so fun is because the person behind it also wrote those cool Darth Vader comics that I read a while. Oh, okay, yeah. And, like, just, it's handling the whole story and doing a pretty good job of it. So that's a whole lot of fun. Yeah, I basically, in terms of how I'm feeling with it, I think that I'm like, I'm alternating between having moments of, like, of really enjoying it and then having really annoyed, frustrated moments with it, I think. It's just what's happening.

I am seeing cool stuff with the, with the teams and, like, possibilities that are opening up with, some of the way that you can play. And a lot of that, of course, is like, you can, a lot of that is based on the idea of, like, characters being made, um, lacking in different ways where if you, you have an opener character to get a mix going,

to get to get the first touch, and then switch over to somebody else to do the damage or to, to take it home, right? You've got your Hulk coming in to do insane damage or, um, uh, Sonic Fox. rocking Green Goblin, just doing absolute insane guess for game while the

gut while the grenade is bouncing on you moments. And I'm seeing that stuff and I'm seeing some cool ideas coming together with how people are playing around the team. I'm having, again, these moments of just like frustration where I go to do things and certain buttons don't work or certain things don't come out when I want them to. And I guess that's just, that's just, you know, still happening to a degree. or like the timing on wake up is still a bit of an issue. So, but I feel like the directional inputs for Shore Yucin motions

was also changed in the patch yesterday. They fixed it. They fixed it. Because I went from it being kind of awkward and like not getting it half the time to getting it 100% of the time like anything else. They fixed it in between the beta that we played when I was talking about it, just not working where you have to hold down forward and then the release version. And now I'm doing it.

I'm like, great. It comes out when I was. wanted to know, you know, so that that was addressed. And, yeah, I think the overall is like, yeah, there's a healthy mixture. Certainly there's stuff where I would say like me trying to, the timing of trying to, you know, I, I, the more I getting to the specifics of this and I'm like,

I saw, you know, kind of discussions around like, oh, me talking and getting into the nitty-gritty is the exact kryptonite of people going, oh, I'm going to love this game, it's great. So I don't even know how to talk about it. I don't really know. I saw my favorite comment about Marvel, Marvel Tokon in regards to our discussion about it,

which I like cracked me up, which was listening to Wolley's complaints was the moment I knew this game was going to be a smash hit. Sure. Because to be fair, your complaints are like, they're like fighting game player, like deep in complaints. Like normal human who goes, Oh yeah, Iron Man, woo!

Like, they don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Like, at all. Like, on a base level. What I can say is, um... There is a way to play the game that is where I don't feel like, uh, uh, uh, some of that is by... if I just auto combo and turn the brain off and just hit the button, make the thing go and just play... Just kind of playing randomly in a way without really thinking too much. much about what I'm doing or why is like yeah I can you I can I can let that happen and there's that's a

way to go about it um and it's it's I'd say it's akin to going like you know full items and wacky pokey floats with things um I actually think that's a really good point I think smash has a on ramp to playing the game for funsies and playing the game seriously and I think token is the first two D like side scrolling game in like a a decade or more that also has that on-rant for absolute new players. And the reason why I know that is that when I was streaming the other day, Page loaded up Tokon when the baby was asleep and fucking did some online sets against randoms.

Okay. She put her fingers on it this weekend and was like, oh, cool, and was like overwhelmed by the tutorial, but then was like playing matches. And she's like, oh, we got to set up my PlayStation account on my, on her Steam account so that we don't screw up each other's matchmakings. And like, that is from the bottom of institutional knowledge of fighting games. And just, I'm just raw interest of just seeing and wanting to check it out. Like, was there was there a, was there a, was there a ghost writer skeleton moment or was there some sort of pull? Or was it just?

Yo, Robbie! Listen. The very first thing she did, the very first thing she did was walk over to Ghost Rider and switch him to his blue sands under tail colors. Okay. No, that being said, here's the catalyst here. Here's the criteria. Hey, Paige, would you like to be on my Tocon stream? And she had seen the game and was like, yeah, the game looks really cool because it does.

then we sat down and did the tutorial, at which point I said, forget about half of the shit in the tutorial. All you really need to actually know is how to move your character and mashing one of these normals gets you that strength of combo, which then led to that,

which then led to her picking up, oh, hitting square and X does the overhead if she wants to do the overhead or the jump. And she was in that place that tons and tons of people who want to get into fighting games are at, and it stops.

them, which is they know what they want to do. Like she knows she wants to call the assist and jump in, and the assist makes her safe, which is something I never thought a new player would ever think about. She wants to throw. She wants to do the launcher when somebody comes in, right? But the gap between wanting to do that and being able to do that at all is enormous. for even like Street Fighter 6 on modern mode, it's huge.

And so this is like auto combo plus the one button specials and like a more unified combo structure for every character. And you can play as just one character and just get your assist meant that like, yeah, she grabbed a hold of carnage and had Robbie on assist one and has been playing carnage with Robbie on Assess 1 for a couple of days as she learns the rhythm and the

mechanics of how to play a fighting game. I didn't have to do a whole lot. The game offers a really smooth ramp. And this is exactly what I was talking about when I'm saying like, you want a buffet for everybody. You want a table that can pull people

over and that they can see, ooh, oh, okay, and just fill their plate up however they'd like to, right? That's, this is exactly ideal, I'd say, especially, like, being pulled in by a cool character and then hitting, um, hitting the system and then kind of going like, I understand, I can wrap my head around what this is asking me to do and like not getting filtered out by the, the challenge of that, but also not necessarily, I guess, I don't know how the online experience would go with like, um, the feeling of like, oh, losing versus like, oh, I want to overcome that or not. I don't know. There's some swearing. Okay. because like yeah because there's the next level of friction is

when you get you know bodied by somebody being like I don't want to play this anymore is a feeling that like you know some people have to get over with just the the feeling of loss right? So the main thing so we played a couple matches after our stream the other day

and that was rough for one reason and one reason only it was like two days after the game came out which meant that the rankings had not actually dispersed and populated. So you hop in at Silver 1 and she was running into like iron guys

and then like platinum guys one and then the other. So it was like complete stomp because she has like decent instincts. And then like guys would just combo her into oblivion with like touch of death. And she'd be like, okay, what the fuck? Right. Now that the ranks have propagated a little bit,

I expect the crowd is not as dense and you should be seen and hitting people that are more competitive for you. But what was really interesting was that the thing she said is, like, I have to practice to relax my hands. Because she and you both do the same thing, where you get excited, you get intense, and that controller starts to fucking creak with the plastic.

But if you do that hard enough, that can lead to like missed inputs. Well, actually. And also hand damage. Surprisingly, or not, I don't know, but in fighting games, I'm not gripping the controller that that tight. Oh, because you're relaxed, because you're comfortable.

I'm pretty comfortable and pretty relaxed. Yeah, exactly. I tighten it up for moments where I have to do like split second input, like split second supers in this one gap here. Like I got like, ah, double quarter circle forward punch right in the super tight window. I'll get tense for that moment, but I'm mostly relaxed. I'd say what I'm playing. But yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this is, that's fucking great. And what I would say is that I'm feeling a healthy mix of like, yeah, stuff that is new system, different. You just need to allow for a new thing, which I broke this down in the same way last time, which is there is currently uncomfortable, but with time you'll get used to what this game wants as opposed to what the past is. So letting go of the past and like embracing the new. there's stuff like that where like the the biggest example of that is when people get up off the ground

and you try to throw them quickly or you try to land a button on them right away when they get up and like the invincibility of like how invincible they are means you still can't hit them right that is a thing where I just go like oh okay okay okay

you gotta learn to just you gotta wait you gotta wait I feel like the way that Marvel Tocon's been built is the way that a lot of you'll talk to like a nerd linguist about language, or they'll say, well, language is descriptive, not proscriptive, right? Language exists to describe things as they are.

It's not meant to be a set of rules to follow to impart meaning. Linguists versus grammarians. When we get to Tokon, Tokon is prescriptive. There is a way that the game wants you to call your assuctions. assists, there is a way the game wants you to do your combos. Like, there is a correct way to play Tocon even right away, like, day one. So if you want to, like, zoom into the stupid, fucking nitty-gritty shit for a second here, I can give it, I found out a bit more about one particular point of what you're describing,

about how it wants you to play and why. And an example is, when you call an assist in the middle of a combo, I remember how I was saying, like, I had a hard time kind of getting a mix going after I, like, you know, dashed in with a character, did a combo, called an assist, and then wanted to, like, continue the pressure. They made it so that when the assist comes out and hits you, the amount of stun, block stun that the opponent is put into is like zero.

It's inventimal. It's like two frames. It is a, ha! It is a quark of a moment in time before they can act again. It exists for the period of the hit only. And so what it turns out is, like, after you call your assist in to do something after you do, if you attempt to move at all, you're late.

You cannot even move. The only thing you can do is your fastest button that will reach them, maybe depending on what you've set up. It's interesting because in most fighting games, when you call an assist, the assist is a special move, right? In a combo, in Marvel Tokon, when you call an assist, it is a normal.

It is functionally the same as a, you threw out an extra jack. Yeah, so that's kind of what it is And thus as a result Like, you know, again, raw tagging is a bit stronger If you do a really long move Which a bunch of characters are designed to have time wasting moves That are covering for you to bring in your

To switch over if you want to If you don't want to switch and you want to stay playing the same one person You're going to have a lot harder time using them Because then you can't do, let's say, light medium heavy fireball and then call your assist you're not going to have enough time

to do anything after that you have to do light medium heavy call your assist and then do the fireball and then switch over while that moment of happening with the two this is one of those things that I actually really

like because it's like it's the difference between viable and optimal and it's like like, is it better to be tagging in and out? Yeah. Is it significantly better? Absolutely. Is it mandatory at all levels? Absolutely not. Something that... Like, I've been playing... Me and Page have both been playing Carnage, like, nearly exclusively.

And until I have what I want to do with Carnage, like, on lock, like, to, like, a nice, intermediate level, I'm not switching out. Because I just want to learn how to do. do what I want to do with carnage. It is interesting. There's a version of this beginner, like, level play, though, that we're describing that online, what it's amounting to is tons of people who are, I guess, afraid of neutral, because you're experiencing a really complex, like, system for the first time. It's brand new, but also you're realizing that you don't have a lot of defensive options.

So really... No, it has no defensive options. options. Right. Right. Nothing. So what the game ends up looking like for a number of people at this phase is actually I'm going to call my assists out and not engage with you at all until I maybe get a stray hit and then I'll call in an assist to do, and try to call it an assist to pick it up and do something, right? Essentially just being like, I'm not fighting until one of my assists gets a lucky touch. Yeah. And then I'm going to try to capitalize on it. I think being able to mash

assist button and get like all three assists firing out like a wall of denial is kind of hilarious. It's really nuts. It's really funny

that you can be a neutral and be like, I don't want to deal with nothing right now. Here's a wall of magic lava. Here's a doom laser and also some guns coming at you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in any case, that's kind of what it is. And I'm, And I'm saying too, it's like, interestingly, like, because I want to, like, dissect and know more, I'm spending more time with the frog that is Tokon trying to figure out the ins and outs here of also, like, my feeling about it and my tension points. But, yes, I'm oscillating between enjoying parts of it and then being immensely frustrated with what it's doing. And, yeah, more news at 11 as I look further. in, I suppose. I think you are at the optimal skill level to be frustrated. I think like Paige is a

complete beginner, like learning the beginner stuff and like getting adapted to it. And it's actually very easy to approach the beginner stuff in this game. Right? Just no problem there. I am more intermediate and but I'm also like kind of a child sometimes. So I knock the guy through the the wall and get meter back. And I'm like, ha ha, that was cool. Yay. In addition to the rest of it. You are an advanced player, which means you are running into these, these like

little, like, eccentricities about like the assists. They're like, why doesn't it work like that? Oh, why is it like this, right? But you're not diaphone. No. Or say jam. No. Who see those annoyances

and go, well, yeah, but I'll just I'll just be better enough that they don't affect me at all. I think so. I think so. Yeah, I think there's definitely a skill level that can come from being where I'm at. I see what you're saying.

Yeah, I think that's a fair point. I mean, you're the optimal point to be able to feel the frustrations, but I don't have, maybe power through them in a second. I think so. I think so,

perhaps. And, you know, and I think what it helps too is like if I get to like play against like a long, long sets with some really strong players to kind of just see and get more information watching replays, for example. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which I tried to do, which the game said, no, no, no, we don't work. But that's the kind of thing where my way of figure, of going, my way of pushing where I'm at a little bit higher to get out of my frustration points involves doing more research and stuff. And like, that's kind of the phase. Did you see that, that Rufelmonger found an anti-Infinite system in the game?

Oh, yeah. So, uh, apparent, if Green Goblin hits you with the EX Goblin Batarangs from full screen, he can just do the projectile over and over

into a pseudo-infant. Because every time you hit the button to throw one out in the three-hit, it's a different angle. And so there is a timing to just ping-pong somebody from the absolute end of the screen. And he was doing it and saw that if you do it for long enough,

new meter or a new warning comes on the screen this is combo timer oh wow wow wow and it and it blows it out even if like even if like it doesn't do the the regular combo break that's funny um so like no they have like even if even if they didn't the kv pink glow thing is happening yeah even if they didn't find it internally they built in a system to be like okay people are going to find infinites we have to have a system to prevent infinites and like the one that the fact that he found one that was like a full screen projectile carry forever unless you break it yourself like okay good good

because that game could get real ugly if people were discovering full screen projectile yeah for sure and I've been I got hit with like some like you know Deadpool and then what Star Lord assist into

jumping like beam like you can get projectile combo for a very long time if they have the right for it, for sure. What was I going to say? There's something that interest, something else that's happening around the discussion with this game that's been kind of funny is some people that were basically saying to me, like, the irony of you not grasping the system is the same as when you are talking to people

who don't play these games. and saying why don't like... And basically saying, yeah, overcoming the learning process is frustrating is the same thing for what I'm trying to learn these games from the ground up. So can't you see that you're doing the exact same thing when you're complaining about how this game plays and what's different about it? Right. And that is, unfortunately, a false equivalence

that is not something that's immediately, I'd say, obvious, but the difference I would say is that there are things that are new and unique to the system that are like that require you to learn its ropes as I mentioned with time. But there are other parts of it where the analogy I give is like if you're learning how to type, right? And you're and you are trying to improve how fast you type over time. In a lot of cases, there are points where you'll be like, fuck, I can't type that fast. But I can see that like it's me to that needs to come back and learn how to put my hands in the right keys and move them quickly and get, and do this all over the place, right?

But the difference is if you're playing with a Dvorak keyboard, then you have to learn the placement of where the keys are. And that is just, that is as well on you to learn the new placements. But what if occasionally that space bar didn't do space? What if occasionally that enter button didn't do enter, right? What if there were moments where some of the keys like got stuck or didn't do what they were intended to do when you pressed them? And like it's not the same type of overcoming the experience frustration.

There's two types, basically. There's a kind that comes from knowing this is more complex and I have to catch up to it versus this thing is not doing what its function is describing it to be, you know, in some cases. So like you kind of hit these, there's two kinds of things here. And I try to break up which is which in these moments where I'm describing the game in order to get a better understanding of what it is exactly and how they're going for this design. And why certain characters work, you know? I see the distinction you're making.

And I think to the person you're describing this to, that distinction is fundamentally completely pointless. I guess, because at the end of the day, it's a problem that I have as well, which is I don't like being the new guy learning new things. things anymore. I always want to be the guy who knows how to do it.

Okay. Even if it's brand new. Let me fucking caveman sentence the feeling I'm trying to explain as I'm worried. You know there's a doctor I follow on TikTok who does videos entirely in caveman speak. They're incredible. It's a very useful way to get the information across.

Oh, okay. So woolly is willying. Don't worry about it. All right. New thing, feeling bad? No problem. problem. No, hold on. I love this. Use a burger too.

Yeah. Oh, fuck. I just, I had it for a second in this gone. What I'm trying to say is basically new experience needing to become familiar is fine. But if the thing feel bad to do, then frustration is not just unfavorable. familiarity, it's also bad feel.

Unfamiliarity is one problem. Bad feel is a second problem. And learning involves both of these things. And unfamiliarity, I lean into and I go, I'm all for unfamiliarity. And I can, and, but bad feel. Oh, this is getting very far away from caveman. You're using real words again. Learning curve.

Learning curve okay, bad feel bad. Okay. Unga counter. sometime feel bad because unfamiliarity aware feel bad subjective

aware no self, no difference understand less advanced caveman no feel bad feel good for same reasons feel bad

Me like Assist restrictions Make simple Caveman do assist Uh Learning curve Okay this is falling apart No no no no no no no

All right all right All right all right Uh Learning curve feel good Um Yeah Learn Learning curve

Master bad feel Yeah bad feel. Master bad feel, still bad feel. Understand bad feel. Use bad feel. Good. Still bad feel.

Understand opinion. Problem. Bad feel subjective. Yes. Like, bad feel subjective. And not know so much experience. Learning curve, no learning curve. Yes.

Not able to understand bad feel think contrarian right right you go what bad feel see nothing

good feel actually what bad feel see nothing everything good everything good see nothing no bad feel yes

100% subjective woolly eat burger burger burger tastes good me will he go farm to table

when Me go, I don't know, farm to table What farm to table? Um, like no Burger good, why burger good? Texture? Taste? Sweet, good, good, good, good. Whole reason.

Whole reason. Why burger good? Because burger good. Yes, burger good. Yes. You think better than me? Burger many reason to be good? No, burger good one reason.

Burger good. Burger, burger good. Somebody asked why am I so good at this? I talk to a toddler all day. This is the language coming at me like literally every single day for like a year. I don't have the practice yet.

I don't have the practice yet. You'll get there. You're rolling into that in a couple of months. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No need wag you. No need. No need, no need medium rare. No need medium rare.

No need. No need. No need. Burger good. Yeah. Why bun squishy? Hair? Who care about bun?

Burger hair. Hmm. Me love hair burger. Hair. Add protein. Extra protein hair. Hair gross to me. Me think hair gross.

Characterization of hair unfair, honestly. Mm. In burger. Hmm. More? No. No. No.

No. Order burger. Burger come with mustard. Did not ask for pickle. Pickle. Yeah. It came with pickle.

Pickle. Did not ask for pickle. Wish could take pickle off, not allowed. No, no pickle. Other people love pickle. Yes. Burger down street. Yeah.

Pickle optional. Yeah. Burger down street. Shut down in six months. Dead burger joint. Pickle optional Let me Let me choose pickle

Optional Pickle No save burger Burger joint Nine year development Of burger Doesn't matter Doesn't matter

Just talk burger Just burger No business Doesn't matter Just burger talk Burger talk Good until no burger From other place

Doesn't matter Pickle choice Better than no pickle choice True And True End And

and pickle choice better end okay this has been good we should do this more often this works really well actually that that actually really that actually really worked out i'm actually really happy with that i think i got a pee i got to pee real bad help me help me we have a breakthrough in communication i have to go this is a breakthrough moment in communications of on castle super beast communication is harmed by prepositions i truly believe that we have made some some serious groundwork on on on on on how to get points across i really i'm i'm i'm immensely happy with i am shocked chuffed at how effective i'm

super chuffed at that and i that is the like that is the the the wording that negotiations should be it written in internationally we need treaties written in caveman well because the the guy I follow on TikTok, he's like, he's a doctor and he gives like nutritional advice and he's like carbs, energy good, protein, energy good, soda, bad. Need creatine? Not working out? No. Electrolites, salt. No. Like just the, like, no one could misunderstand the health advice. Like, it is so easily understandable. It's so funny, though, just talking about that. that thing you're describing of like where I'm standing and the optimal place for frustration is because I was watching as like again Sonic Fox who

straight up was like this game is ass guys this game is fucking dog shit come on right then is doing the craziest green goblin shit I've ever seen and they're responsible for looking at it and going okay well the

limitations are here I will find the upper limitations and I will live on the ceiling and show you. I will show you what life on the ceiling is like. Listen, listen. Sonic Fox is a crazy character and I love them and they're also a frightening professional fighting game player. But they play Nether Realm games for fun. So, so listening to Sonic Fox about what game is trash or ass, I have to sit there and think about Mortal Kombat 9 and injustice and MKX and shit like that. Sure. But I bring it up because, like, the power level of having what I'm talking about, but going so far beyond, allows you to go, all right, this is silly, but let me show you.

Let me demonstrate to you in a way that you can do nothing about it, how this is silly. I think there's a real, like, the bell curve of fighting game players starting and ending with, yo, I'm just pressing buttons over here. Yeah. Which is like the funniest thing ever. Um, no, it's, it's, it's fucking, it's incredible. Um, okay. Um, moving on from that, uh, the week is going to consist of some more FF14 tomorrow. Guess what, Willie? It's the summer event tomorrow. Starting tomorrow. Oh. For you. Oh. What, what's happening? It's in coast del Sol. There's a platforming challenge as well as some, minigames as well as a free

mount. That's an inflatable pool muggle. Is Titan still a ravaging problem that needs to be done? Yeah, sure, whatever. He's, he's whatever. Gotcha. Okay. So yes, Wednesday this week,

some more FF14. I'm going to put some more time on Dark Souls 2 as well. And yeah, when we have, now the Phoenix Wright is done, there's an open slot, so we'll be talking about what to take a look at. But no news

just as of yet. However, this Saturday, get into locals. The Montreal Kizuna is happening. So the UMAD monthly event is going down. Going to be there playing some games. Are you just realizing? Are you just realizing now?

I'm just realizing that when the Twitch and YouTube bubble pops and you switch to like Passport Bro content, you can just keep the name, get into locals. You just realized get into locals. This is very late. Yes. This is late to it, but get until

X, Y's local singles. Yeah. Correct. It just had to hit the ear of very certain. Yeah, this has been the thing ever since it started. We were going to be going down to the UMAD event.

There's a basically like UMAD is happening. The big big tournament is happening in two weeks time. But next Saturday is a smaller pre-U-MAD kind of like hangout. So I'm going to go over there, have some fun, play some local games with everybody,

get a feel for what's happening with both Avatar Tokon and 2XCO and stuff like that and see what the scene is like. What I will say is like I have a very long, I have a potentially equally long, like, I can have an equally long discussion

about what's going on in Avatar and everything like that. There's no point in really getting into it. I feel like, you know, like, that's just... But, like, there's a lot happening there that is crazy and, like, shooting above what my capabilities are. And suffice to say without getting into a long list of nitty-gritty that I feel, like, I feel wooed by something that is basically, like, too complex for me.

And I'm like, and I'm like, I'll show you too complex. I can do it. You know. And I just want to reiterate that the trial system in that game for learning combos is really, really well done. And I wish that other games would copy the same thing, which is you don't just have the demo of the character doing it and then the thing that you get to try yourself. You have an in-between step where time stops after you press the right button and gives you a chance to learn how to time to press the next.

button. So you actually play a step by step game to do the combo and then it gives you a grade at the end, you know, like DDR style on like how quickly you did the sequence. And then eventually after learning it, then you're like, hey, cool, you did the combo. So really, really smart. Yeah, there is a there is a time stop mechanic basically where you do, all right, press light. All right. Pass stop. Now press medium. Okay, now press heavy. All right. One, two, three. Cool. you know, and then you get to do that and then you eventually go, all right, now you're ready to try the real thing. So it's a fun little

way to rhythm game and create a little like kind of like combo puzzle system mini game inside of the game. Anyway, that's going to be it. Come check out Woolly Versus for

more of those things I just talked about. And Woolley versus on Twitch and on YouTube. Speaking Burger? Okay, I'll speak you. Yeah, let's do it. All right, all right. We have an American audience.

They need it. New burger system fun. Burger system say, get bread, get tomato, get beef, get lettuce, put together burger. Do quick? Usually just order burger, get burger. Usually just order burger, get burger. But also want to get burger. Uh, want to make burger?

Get bread. Get tomato. Get the... Get burger in... Your... Uh, fuck. Uh, get burger your pace. Okay, okay.

Make burger fast, make burger slow. No difference. Make burger. Learn make burger. Order burger or make burger. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Make burger fast.

Make burger slow. make burger. Learn make burger. That's good. It's good. It's a good way to do it. It's good. It works every time. All right. I think my favorite thing about talking in Burghries is that when

someone in your audience that's like from the States is like I fucking hate that this actually made me understand what you're talking about. Because they don't want to have to be spoken to in burgeries, but they need it. It's the only way they can get it. It's cavemen. And I think it'll work for not just the fighting game discussion.

All right. He passed me the baton. Sure thing. All right. This week was fucking huge. I did so much. We had the girls on the podcast. We also had the gals on the regular 14 show.

In addition, me and Garrett over a grinding gear ran a double LP of Double Make Cry 5, which he had never touched. And the last time he played DMC3 was like, I think the year it came out. That was a blast. and that was super fun What's it like learning about Nero in five for the first time? He never played four either.

Yeah, so this is your first exposure to Nero. So he watched the little the breakdown you know, the little lore breakdown and was like when oh the big reveal of who Nero is

he was like, gasp really? I can't believe it. Sarcasm. Right. So that went really well. He did a lot better than I expected. He crushed it. We ended up having a stream where all we had to do was Mission 20. Okay. Because of the way the scheduling work. I also guested on Garrett and Kyle's show Ever Cold On Cold Ones, which this was the inaugural episode, which was Garrett from Grinding Gear, me from Castle Super Beast, Jesse Cox from everything. Jesse Cox related on the internet

Sly from State of the Realm and it made it me JP from EJP. And we were going to talk about some general fan fest stuff and whatnot and also have beers which was the plan.

Hence the time. Got about 20 minutes in and my entire neighborhood lost internet. Oh, fuck. So spent a couple weeks. building this up and Garrett organized everything and got everything ready and I just got to sit here in this chair

fuming very upset listening to the goddamn uh what do you call it the god awful distorted radio bullshit that comes through the tech support line yeah uh got to tech support spoke to tech support yo is there an outage is it me what's going on and the guy on the other end says oh sir you uh your account is showing up as canceled no service what

this is the part you know when you're out in public or you're on the phone with somebody who's just doing their job and you want to freak out and you want to freak out really bad but you can't you can't

no no so I'm I like like yeah I had the one moment of like what and then I like dialed it back and was like what what do you what do you mean what do you mean so here's what happened I have an internet service out in the west I use Shaw that was bought by Rogers

right I'm sorry I just remember something I completely forgot to talk about with my week but go go ahead sure I you know and now it's Shaw with Rogers So they're all integrated. So when I called the Shaw line, they eventually closed because they're not 24 hours. And so then my call got booted into the Rogers Tech Support line, which is East Coast only. So then when I got to it, the guy looking at my account using my phone number was looking at my old phone number service that I canceled like five years ago when I moved out to BC. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, yeah.

When I switched phones. Okay. But the end result is he's looking at my old records going, man, says canceled. So cool that everything is under one roof. So good. And then I'm like, then I start to, then I start to kind of freak out because of course. And he's like, oh, sir, are you out in British Columbia? And I went, bro, I had to read you my address.

on this call and I ended it with British Columbia. So, oh, that's part of the other system. I can't see that system. I'm like, so is there an outage? I don't know. I'm like, cool. So I had to call my neighbor and be like, do you have internet? And he didn't have internet.

Oh my God. So it was like, okay. Yeah. So is there a point where you kind of just go like, I'm going to get on my phone and call into the Discord? I know because I don't have good reception. Okay. Okay.

Right? And I, you know, it's a video podcast in 14, in 4K, you know. So two-ish hours later, the internet came back. So I jumped back in and I've never felt the rush to fucking, like, show off more when I thought that podcast had 20 minutes to go. right this this massive super collab yeah this massive super collab with all these people and I'm like this shit could end in 10 minutes

go Pat harder Pat as hard as you possibly can and then I did and I sure did and Garrett was like oh it's getting to be about three and a half hours we should call it a night and like no No. No. And I just kept yapping and yapping and yapping and yapping.

That's what happened. And yapping. Okay. And then Sly fell down and almost died. It was a whole thing. Then we end up talking like, you know, a lot of people don't do it like we do. Well, you know how we go off topic and they'll send the whole podcast off topic? Apparently people don't really do that.

all that mom's because like they kept trying to steer it back and we're like me and sly are like no we're talking about shining force and shimugamitense over here we're we're set we're putting the timeline chart into the fucking chat which blew jesse's fucking mind and eventually jp had to leave and jesse had to leave and you know we were we were goofing and winding down so the six hour push was from like you coming not exactly not exactly and then Paige goes, yo, girl DMs in chat. Because she'd been watching the show, and Girl DM was like chitch chatting. And didn't know this, but Garrett just has Girl DM on Discord. Cold call. All right, Girl DM, you're now part of the show. Get on in here. Let's just speed run everything we've talked about.

Gotcha. The whole time. Then Paige hits me up with, yo, Pints and Chat. All right, let's cold call Pint. Okay, now Pints in the call. Okay, we're back. up to five people. We're going to just do the whole show again with new people.

Jesus Christ. Holy shit. Okay. Okay. And I feel bad for Garrett because him and Sly were the only ones that ran the whole gamut. But Garrett was like running it. And Garrett started with whiskey because I think he expected like a three-hour show, not a 620 show. Anyway, it was a blast

Because my Vod went down You can't see the whole thing on my show You gotta go down to grinding gear And go check out Garrett and Kyle's Vod of the thing But the whole thing is up I think they propagated it out to audio podcasts It was a great time

I hope to see everybody there again in the future Very strange scenario To get into a show And meet like 80% of the game's entire English language community in one sitting. Like there are like four or five people missing, but like got like hit like almost every every point. Like missing Happy and Shen and a couple other folks, but like yeah, that's damn near

everybody. And everybody's got their, um, their, I don't know, hot, ever cold takes. Yeah, but honestly, like that was barely. that was that was that was that was barely a factor like like i think i think sly and i talked about smt okay more than we fucking talked about ever cold the ramble yeah yeah the yap yeah cool cool um i if i could just steal back the baton for a second yes sir um i just forgot because as you were talking about technical problems i remembered oh yeah the fucking disaster that I did a, I jumped in for a charity stream where the FGC Collegium.

I fucking saw this. FGC Coliseum was an event that ran this weekend and they basically had a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, long drive to fundraise for Wings for Life a spinal cord injury research charity. and it's a cool event and they pulled on a bunch of people. They had, you know, L.I. Joe and St. Cola and Vicious and all these people on the couch just hanging out. You know, just a bunch of FGC people sitting down playing a bunch of random games and skits and doing things and taking challenges, et cetera. So we, Esteban asked me to come on and basically I was like, oh, let me come on and let me pull on the return of, pop-off report news because it's been eight years. It's been a long time since we did that. It's one of the first things I did with Reggie a while ago. So the return of pop-off report news got it all together.

Fortunately, still had a bunch of great pop-offs to go through. Great. And the way that it was set up was, um, the team over there was like, cool, what we'll do is you'll patch the call in so that we'll jump on the stream together. We'll give you, um, a video Ninja Link and then you'll get their side and then we'll be able to broadcast with yours and everyone will see to get it yeah yeahda right

effectively it's like you send us your camera of the couch I add that to my layout I resend this group layout back to you you put that up on the stream and putting that popping that into OBS under normal circumstances

sure great popping that into OBS stream elements running not the same situation results in a number of things breaking open and not working in ways that I've never seen before. And this is while multi-streaming to YouTube at the same time. So they're basically- tech support while having both of them go on at the same time as become intolerable. The only solution is turn the whole thing off and hope people come back. And that is, and the actual nightmare of it is video ninja in particular. Like I got to use it enough to see how it works. And I'm like, oh, there's a part of this that's really simple,

and then there's a part that's really complex. The basics of using it on the website are very simple. The plug-in and how that works with OBS, complex, and depending on what you're doing potentially about idea. But the long and the short of it is that it made it so that the click to start streaming button cannot be clicked anymore. Literally, I can't even click the button to go live. you know, so I'm like, what am I supposed to do with this?

That's a problem. Right? That's a problem. And then after like, I kind of, and there's that thing where you're alive and everyone's sitting on the couch waiting for the moment, because now there's a room of people over there waiting for it. And I was like, okay, and I'm tech solving it. And clicking a bunch of things and setting things up and they're all going. And eventually I'm like, okay, that part works, figure that part out. And then I go just pull out this whole plug in, just uninstall it, remove it.

Let's just go back to what we were using that worked and everything was fine before. do that and then it does that but it fucks up the stream settings and the process and part of that involves people being unable to hear us so we're just like

ugh I think yeah so we were supposed to do an hour I think it was about 20 minutes maybe of floundering and eventually I mean that couch cleared off and I don't blame them because it's just the thing that we were given to use

Jared just fucking broke everything and sucked. How the fuck did you get two instances of your stream on Twitch on the same channel simultaneously? Because the stream elements, the stream elements like multi-broadcaster allows you to put out, if you want to, a vertical and a horizontal feed at the same time. So if you want to have a feed where people on their phones can watch the vertical layout simultaneous, you can do that. I've never seen that. Yeah, you can do simultaneous YouTube and simultaneous twitching onto the same channel at the same time. It's crazy. But it's an option that's out there if you fucking, if you're nuts.

It's an option for no one, man. Yes, it's crazy. But that's out there. So that's how you started to see the same stream duplicating itself or whatever. I solved it eventually, and we had a great stream, and we were able to come back and do pop-off report news, covering everything from Hayao doing those amazing third strike fucking stretches and poses and cool things to some of the best pop-offs, including Majin Obama giving up the N-word for Lent and all these classics.

So, yeah, we threw that up on the channel, but Pop-Off Report News is there. And I've wanted to bring it back for a while. This was just a great excuse to do it. And the eventual thing that worked, which is me and Reggie, doing the news while Esteban and Vicious are on the couch, commentating going, oh my God, I was there for that. Let me tell you what happened when the pop-off was there in person, because I was literally on mic or I was filming it.

So that's up on the channel now. That was a stupid fucking horseshit tech nightmare. But we got some golf. That's ridiculous. Oh, hey, by the way, before I forget, I mentioned hanging out with Girl DM on Ever Cold Ones. First of all, check her Delta Rune stuff out. She's streaming Delta Rune right now.

She'll probably be streaming it afterwards. I went to her Delta Rune stream and saw what I think is the newest level of technology for streaming I have ever seen genuinely incredible specifically for us because nobody likes backseating and nobody likes spoilers right oh hate those uh and I believe that Girl DM has created a genuine like she's breaking new ground in how to deal with it. Uh there's a pinned message on her stream just says no spoilers no backseating if you do either you will be banned or owe me $35. Just straight up. Did you spoil something?

Give me 35 bucks or perish. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You can stay, but you must pay a tax. That's some strong tech? Like, incredible, incredible. That's strong tech. Wow.

Okay. Okay. In these times that in these talks, In these times, that spoiler is going to be fucking expensive. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wow. I would love to see the, I would love to see the, I, I'd love to see the messages coming in from people that are like, begrudgingly like, here's your $35.

You know, you know what would scare me, though? You know what would scare me? People, you start the stream. Start. $35 comes in. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. The malicious compliance.

Oh, no. No, it has to be after. It has to be after. The malicious compliance of that would be horrible. Subhuman in chat says she had a whole thing for her Dark Souls 2 LP, where it forced backseaters to play a copy of her safe file on stream and get fined if they are bad. That is genuinely unbelievable.

We're going into lawyering tech here, basically by consuming this content, by watching this stream, you agree to these clauses. Oh, that's so good. Forced legal clauses. That's really good. By reading this, you automatically consent. Aside from that for my week of the nightmare and then triumph that was ever cold once. I have not had a fall in mood and spike in mood like that in ages.

like just the doldrums of despair to like, yeah, let's go! Like in a long, long, long, long time. Did the end of that become a booze-fueled mess? They're a little bit. A little bit. A little bit. Just a smidge.

Just a smidge. I drank beers. some others started with like harder alcohol probably not expecting it to go quite so long I guess I assume if there ever is a second one or thus and therefore

that people will like modify their goals yeah yeah like anyone who's done it before you got a pace you got to pace the night let's see what else not a whole lot honestly aside from all that stuff

I played Fields of Mystery came out and Fields of Mystery is a Star Do Like that looks like a Shojo anime and I have not gotten very far into it other than man it is just such a cozy feel good ass fucking beautiful game Fields of Mystery That's it

No mystery Mistria Mistria okay okay Yeah yeah I believe you probably looked at a picture or two of it before when I mentioned it like six months ago because I found out about it and it was early access but it was like it was like four months away and I'm like well I'm not going to start I remember this girl yeah yeah yeah it's finally out and it's awesome it's it's it's probably like it's not quite as expansive as Stardu is because Stardu's had years and years and years and years and years of like post game development and stuff like that but it is probably like the best looking best feeling most feature complete of those types of games ever. That's a Zelda font, right? That is a Zelda font.

It bears a suspicious similarity to Link to the Past specifically. That's a fucking Zelda font. Like the trees are just like pink versions of the trees and Link to the Past. Okay. It's great. It's really great. If you have any interest in it at all, pick it up on Steam, play it for 90 minutes.

If it doesn't hit, you know, try it out. It's really good. As for Pat's, week. Tomorrow, I'm streaming 14 with you in the morning, and I'm streaming 14 with the girls at night. And then Thursday and Friday, I'm going to be doing Xenoblade stuff,

that's Zeno Blade 2. And on Saturday, I might do some beat the backlog in the afternoon. I'm not sure. Over on the Peach's Live show, Paige is doing Mass Effect 3 now. She's doing that later today at 3. And I don't think she has like a full schedule planned out,

but there's going to be, there's going to be Mass Effect, and there might be more Chinese dramas because she was crazy on Road to Empress. She did like the entirety of Road to Empress in like a single stream. She like she fucking just devoured that shit. It was just kind of mentally prepared

for that sentence to end with just Chinese drama to be like, wait, what? Yeah. We're picking beef now. There's something going on. No, no. Sea drama. C dramas, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah. You can see me over at twitch.tv.tv slash pat stares at and YouTube.com slash Pat Stairs at slash live. And you can see page over at twitch.tv slash peacheslava and Twitch.com. Sorry, YouTube.com slash peatislava slash live. Okay. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. Um. And this time it doesn't have to be single player mode. Uh, which is probably they. Hey. All right. What's up, boost? how you doing Caboose Caboose

Do you love our sponsor You fucking better Caboos Do you love sponsor Oh You love sponsor Look at that tail It's going

I mean well you're gonna love this one Booce Hey this week The podcast is sponsored By ourselves I am no longer asking I am demanding You head on over

To Orkidate and get yourself the legacy edition of the Castle Super Beast shirt and the legacy edition of the Castle Super Beast desk mat, which are currently available. Do you want a desk mat, caboose? It's got cool words on it. They're real cozy. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you, those of, so people have been getting their desk mats.

The shirts are on the way. There was so many, the volume order had to be increased, so there was a delay in, They're like, holy shit. I think Bricky was not expecting this many people to fuck up the shirt. I spoke to Bricky. He was not expecting. Yeah.

So, gonna take a second, but we're gonna get those all out to everybody. I think my desk mat is almost here. It's taking a bit to, to page. He's on the chair, but the chair has the blanket.

Okay? He's got the blanket. And, yeah. I mean, hey, you can, Boos can piss all over that desk mat and fucking,

it'll absorb, tell you. That would be appropriate, but he doesn't do that, dude. I bet you to... It's just a tiny little baby. Sure, but I bet you there's a title on that, DeskMot, asking for it. Yeah, you're probably right. There's probably a podcast title like, Boose, please piss here.

Anyways, please go check that out over at Orchid8.com and check out the Castle Superbeast collection where you can grab one of those or the Pat Clown shirt also up. This week, the podcast is... also sponsored by Raycon, and that is your wireless listening solution. If you are trying to get yourself into some earbuds that don't have the wires, all the annoying twisting and pulling and all that stuff that comes with it, you want to get that out of your life. You also want to get into a wireless pair of earbuds that is not too expensive, but still

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Thank you, Raycon. And this week, the podcast is sponsored by Warby Parker. I've been rocking these out, and these shades have been destroying the sun. The sun fucking hates it. The sun out here is crazy. I could use some of those, man. Yeah. Warby Parker out here with the glasses that are stylish, nice, not too complicated to

get your hands on either. Buying glasses can be really complicated, can be really overpriced, and I don't need to fill out spreadsheets. I'm not looking for anything that complicated. I just want something that will protect my eyes from the sun when I'm going outside, especially, you know, we're enjoying these summer days with the baby. And it was nice to be able to just go check out on the Warby Parker website. They've got the virtual try-on feature where you basically can look and see.

see exactly what the pair of shades you want to get or a pair of glasses you want to get will look like on you. And it works really well, really quickly. I saw exactly what you're seeing now with these shades on and was like, yeah, let's go. I'm down with that. And got my order just like that. You pick out the style, the color, whatever, whether they're prescription or sunglasses, and whatever you're looking for and you can try them on right away. Great pair, high quality as well. I've gone through some really cheap sunglasses in the past and these are a solid pair that I'm going to be rocking for the foreseeable future. So yeah, if you have a prescription, their prescription glasses start at $95 and you can actually get the quality and stylish frames that

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Right now, you can buy a pair of glasses and get 20% off of any additional pairs at Warby Parker.com slash castle. That's 20% off any additional pairs when you purchase one at double. W-A-R-B-Y-P-R-B-Y-P-R-R-B-R-R-E-R-CASSL. Thank you, Warby Parker. Okay, doke. We got some news. There's news.

We got some news. I have news. Caboos is awake. Oh, my God. Crazy news. And we're back. Listen, let me just say, this cut-in tech is kind of like generational. It's just, it's just, it.

It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, like, normal feature on OBS. You just add the scene transition to, to Luma wipe. You got to get, you got to get a couple versions where you do like the Star Wars Circle or like the clock. You know, the fucking, the star, all the different I movie transitions. I wish I had a star wipe, but I don't. Yeah. All, everything, George Lucas using those star wipes. Oh, yeah, by the way, I have, I have poor news for. us.

He's talking to Garrett on the DMC thing and he knows some people that work on OBS. It is not pronounced OBS. It's pronounced OBS.

Fuck out of here. Yeah. Fuck out of here, Mr. Jiff. Yeah, I, this, Wully, I did the whole conversation. Oh, fuck off.

You don't get to. No, but the Obs developers say that it's OBS. Oh, boy. boy, yeah. And just like Jiffs continue to be the way that people say it to this day.

You are open broadcast studio or you are OBS. Fuck out of here. It's too late. You idiots. That's insane. By the way, it's not VLC. It's Vlch. It is Vlick. This has been known. Vlach player.

Anyways. You want some fucking breaking news? Yeah, it was breaking news. is ma. Gact has been seen on his reels wearing a Genesis outfit with redemption playing in the background. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's happening. Yeah, dude. He's backed. I was talking to some friends of mine and I think they said that the director of Revelation was like, we want to get all the FF7 stuff in there. Okay. So now the question is do you get aged? Gacked with all the lines on his face and everything as your G model, or do you go for some new idyllic rhapsodious?

No, it's going to be the idyllic Genesis Rhapsody. But Gact is, he wants to be in harder, though. And the world has changed, right? This is something. I, like, there was an era, because people are lost in the story oftentimes. And here's all you need to know. There was once upon a time where a long list of anime and video game properties were starved for attention and anything remotely mainstream would be like a gift that they couldn't believe they were being bestowed. And Gact putting his attention on you was enough to fund the creation of brand new media in whatever franchise it was.

So there was a time- It's like Prince asking for a giraffe. Exactly. right? There was a time when all it took was Gacked liking you to be like, you know what? I want more Gundam Zeta. I want more Fist of the North Star. I want more FF7. And they're like, yes, sir, right away, sir. Oh my God, I can't believe Gact is fucking with our shit. That's amazing. We have to put him at the forefront of everything and then allow the self-insert. And that's what the error was. And thankfully, we've grown past it. So we don't need, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. if Gact cares about your thing or not, but the inclusion of Gact and the self-insert of him in all media, I object to on principle,

and yes, that includes Bougin-Gai. Bougingai was a better franchise before Gact was in it, and it didn't exist before Gact was in it. So, all this to say now, that, like, the G-man being inserted back here,

like, do you, do you zoom in and emphasize it? He's going to be the super boss. He's going to be the post-game super boss. That's what he wants. That's what he's going to do. Is there any redemption? Is there any redemption? I can't.

For me, it's going to be him eating one of those fucking dumb apples in fucking Turbo HD. Fucking Benora White or what the fuck they're called. Bro, have you seen Loveless, though? Do you like Loveless? Anyway, look. I think the best part about Loveless is that fucking Sid goes to see it at the end of the game

and he fucking just falls asleep. Like he's like, I'm gonna go get cultured and see a play right before the world ends and he just falls asleep in the odds. He's like, I guess it was good. I don't know. Oh, boy. Okay. Well, that's breaking.

And he's the one that's leaking it on his Instagram. So. anyway back to other news yay EA is going to be one it has been sold so the deal with the Saudi

PIF fund has completed and with that and the buyout that is financed by debt comes $700 million dollars in annual costs and then $170 million in organizational efficiencies so there will be mass layoff according to...

So I can actually... I can actually break this down very simply. EA got bought by the Saudis and their various partners and they had to take out a big loan to do it. And then when they bought EA, they gave the loan to EA to pay back and it's like an $18 billion loan,

which means the interest payments on EA to pay yearly is approximately $1.8 billion. dollars. EA's gross revenue a year is 1.5 billion. That's not profit.

That's revenue. That's before costs. That's before salary. That's before everything. So they are going to have to cut like $800

million and still make the exact same amount of money every year. in perpetuity forever, which means EA has taken a gun, put it in its mouth, fired it, and the bullet is just traveling very slowly through its head. AKA, EA is done. EA is functionally a dead company right now. But this is not even a story in that it's like, oh, the thing that we talked about eight

podcasts ago is now happening. That's it. We reported- This is exactly what happened of Red Lobster. and toys are us. They and now and in the process people got some

fucking bottomless shrimp at least. Yeah. You know? No, they announced that when the PIF was going to do this that like how much of it

was going to be debt and how much of that was being leveraged off the total costs and such. We talked about the fucking $55 billion thing that was going

like it's crazy. And you know it's yeah, what are we looking at? Like the the large The largest entertainment sector in the world is video games. And this insane, like, you know how we talked about the COVID fucking brain rot of assuming that that level of growth is going to always continue?

Oh, the number went up really high. We're going to get better than that. I'm like, no, you're never going to get better than that ever again. Ever. Yeah. The insanity of the fact that, like, the market dropping drastic numbers, I think some 67% from where that point was at. No, no, sorry, 30% for 7% from its peak

and then continuing. There's a fact, there's something that happened there too that is looking at deals like this and going, how does this seem like a big, how does this seem,

this seems so stupid on paper. How is it actually going forward? Right? There was a point in time where essentially when that growth happened and people were looking at tech and tech bros were looking at tech and going,

every tech company grows this way. Video games have software, thus they have production cycles. Thus, that's tech, right? It's treated the same as any other Silicon Valley company. And it's like, no, that's not what it is. It's entertainment. It's a completely different. It's actually much closer to the movie business. But that's not how they saw it. They evaluated it as tech from the outside. And this is how you started down the path to begin with. Don't worry, Wully. E.A has announced that even though there are obviously going to be layoffs. So they haven't announced layoffs. They've announced cuts. they have said that they will be able to keep quality of their products high because any displaced employees and or staff

are going to be effortlessly replaced with full AI development. Yes, of course. And so we're going to be able to cut costs down to nothing and make games for free. And the games will still make shitsillions of dollars. And basically it's like a free money machine forever. Well, look, again, when people and people come in with the expectations that are laid, based on assuming the industry is something that it isn't,

then you have a really, really useful thing. You can lie, and with that lie comes more outside money invested into the situation. And as long as you keep that lie going, then you never have to worry about the consequences. Except that's going to last, that's going to last like two quarters. Like the lying part of the process is going to last like two quarters because the amounts we're talking about are so high. They're so high

And that's a problem for the CEO Two quarters from now Yeah by the way right now Light my fucking cigar I want to point out a guy in chat Zero 2 yelled out all cabs Death by a Thousand Cuts Bro you're like a French peasant

Watching people get loaded into the guillotine Yelling Death by a Thousand Cuts No man This is a big Big fucking cut This is a really huge motherfucking cut. It's the fucking Iron Maiden.

You're calling a thousand cuts the Iron Maiden, my dude. Like, holy shit. Yeah, so EA is just functionally dead. They might finish out their existing projects, but any new project is going to be under the

scorn of, will this game, not even franchise, will this game make a billion dollars? So I'm waiting to see what we're going to experience. when a number of projects are killed mid-production, but they grab the bones of what was made and ask AI to complete the rest.

Oh, it's going to be sick. It's going to be awesome. That's going to happen any day now. You're going to be playing through Mass Effect 4 and you're going to do like the mission, the main mission at the 60% mark. And then all of a sudden the game's going to just be like bad. Like missions are going to be slow and bad and poorly written.

Or the game will just repeat itself a second time. It'll just start from scratch and just go all over again. The good old Capcom special just have them go through the game backwards. Switch the character up and do it backwards and then lay up. Let the AI fill in the blanks. Boy. All right. Well, you know, these, unfortunately, this level of criminality and the sheer scope of it

is very difficult for the caveman brain to understand. Yeah. Now, somebody said, I'm crazy for thinking the company is going to go under because they own all the sports games. The sports game franchises are being propped up not by the popularity of sports games. They're being propped up by the profitability of gambling. And there are only so many people out there gambling on sports games. And even for those people, you can't just raise the buy-in cost infinitely. You can't make it cost $100 for one roulette wheel spin, one, one arm bandit spin. You can't do it, right? It will cut people off. There is an end game here, and the costs they're dealing with are astronomical. It's like you have to pay one Ubisoft quarter's worth of cash in extra. every quarter

Also We're also in the world Where the news story That all the orphans chained up To laptops in the basement Of the bedding company Have not yet been discovered Oh that's true

That is true So we're like once that story kicks And hits public I think things are going to change In the landscape a little bit But we're still in the timeline Where people don't know about The orphans in the basement chain

To the laptops Yeah I am being told Off camera by the dog that he is hungry. So I will be back in five minutes. Beerpy. And we're back.

And we're back. We just got a fucking trifecta speed run of baby first mama finally happened. Also sat up on her own. And a certainly

humongous deal over on my end at the very least. She has just started giving out like hugs. Like I want to hug you thing. And only mom was getting those for a little bit now. I just got my first one. And it's kind of insane, dude. It's kind of nuts? Yeah.

I'm freaking out. Oh. Oh. yeah yeah that's good for you man that's

yeah that's drugs like it was like it was like it was like a second it was just like uh and then it's like wait wait where's mom

where's mom where's mom and it's like okay you know still good still good still good still right now all day oh fuck yeah no

get those chemicals man get those chemicals oh oh punch mom just watched me like break apart and freak out I just like lost my shit.

Oh, boy. Wow. Um, what? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool, cool, cool. Cool. That's insane.

Video games or whatever. Fucking fucking video games. Bullshit. Um, I swear to, like, that was all in like the span of like the last couple hours.

That's crazy. Yeah. Everything is, everything is leaps. in development. Like a bunch of, a bunch of, like, you know, the neurons form separately. And then the one pairing connects goes, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. And then then just zoom.

We've been getting all kinds of, like, you know, babah, dad, da, bye. Uh-oh, you know, all these types of things. Like, all these, all these different expressions and noises and words and sounds. And just we couldn't get mama. And we finally got one of those, you know? Um, and then, yes, the, the, the, The not just I'm holding onto you, but the I'm going for a hug is a, like, completely different energy. And fuck.

I was, yeah, I mean, at one point, we were during one of the Fantasia movies. I forgot who we were watching, but I, like, one of the photos on my phone background came on. And I was just showing everybody. And I don't know why I was just like, fuck all of you. Eat shit. Look at this. Fuck you. What are you? What are you? Who cares? You see this shit?

It gets agro sometimes, man. I don't know. All right. Okay. What were we talking about? We were talking about... She's sitting up and saying mama now and giving hugs and just in a couple of years. She will not save you from brambles. she will actively not help you. I'm, I mean, I'll take, I'll take what I can fucking get. What, what, do brambles, is that a thing that's where, we're, do that, do they grow out here? Out in Montreal? Oh, sure.

I don't know how often or how, what type. I, like, I grew up with the, the red little poison cherry things on our bush. is nearby. That's that's the shit that I learned right quick. Like you're going to... We had that discussion yesterday. Can I eat these? No, it's poison. You will

get sick. Do not eat that. And we had a crab apple tree in our backyard too as well, yeah. Okay. I was saying that these complex discussions of investors consortiums and the millions and billions and billions of dollars of debt are very confusing for the caveman brain.

Sometimes the news needs to go back to a story that the caveman brain can recognize because it's from a time of the past. The Pokemon Company is facing a class action lawsuit after a former executive was arrested for secretly filming people inside of the company bathroom. 89 videos were filmed in office toilets. So it turns out that the factory is still making this kind of guy Yeah This kind this kind like

This is a different type because we talk about like the the fucking Ubisoft like actual Like fucking Rapist Criminals and all that crazy shit And we're just going back to a time of like Old-fashioned honestly Old school on the bus Fucking cane with the mirror underneath it levels of just filming the toilet

exact guy over at the Pokemon company. It's truly an homage to yesteryear with this one. You know? If anyone's, if everyone ever, if anyone ever wondered why the Pokemon company or why their decisions were so slow

to be modern and with the times? People were busy, man. People were busy. But like, their fucking crimes and their boners are also of, year, why do you think their gaming and dev decisions would be more contemporary? I thought you were going to talk about how the Japanese Patent Office is like super sick of Nintendo. Oh.

I don't know if you saw this. No. Basically, the long and short of it is that the Japanese Patent Office is, quote, exhausted by Nintendo's repeated attempts to file new patents in their lawsuit against Power World. basically like daily or weekly Nintendo is trying to file new patents about how they actually own riding an animal in video games or like having an inventory

and like every single one is getting denied over and over and over and over and over. So what they've learned is the mistake and the fatal flaw is something that they can correct for if they go crazy now and cover all their bases so that legally they'll have the grounds to basically squat on patents, you know? Yeah, the problem is, is that, like, they're throwing down so many of these patents that at some point it's the same people in the same office denying them over and over, which means you're eventually going to end up with, like, personality bias of another Nintendo fucking patent on my desk.

Get the fuck out of here, right? Which shouldn't apply to the law, but holy shit. It does. Speaking of legal, I guess, precedence with gaming here, a pretty crazy story, actually. In China, there was a Beijing court that ruled in favor of a mother who sued a company because her late son had 87 online gaming accounts, and the conference. and the company in question where the accounts were made, Chang Yu, basically said,

yep, well, we, anyone who passes away, we own everything on that account, we own whatever money was attached to it, we own everything there, too bad. And the mother basically was suing so that she could inherit those accounts so that she could help pay for expenses because she's very poor.

Right, yeah. Obviously, it doesn't matter why, but the background is that, Yes, she's very poor. And the idea that she could sell these accounts to people to help fundraise and such would be a big deal. And they tried to shut that down. So the court ruled that, fuck you, you can inherit a game account. And while you're not inheriting ownership of the account, but someone's next of kin can own an interest in the financial usage.

of these accounts. So this is a precedent, at least in China, for like the ability to, yeah, not have the company just steal your money afterwards or make it so that there's nothing you can do if someone's account, if someone has an account that after they pass on, you know? Pretty sick. Pretty cool.

I, it gets into, you know, further details of that kind of thing. But yeah, if you're looking at a case like that where you're like, there's tons of monetary value here, obviously that could benefit the family. This is the equivalent of essentially like the bank being like, nah, fuck you, this is our account. Get out of here, buy. You know, so. And I know that that's something that I'm sure internationally will become more and more of an issue as we move forward in time.

Other thing that just happened, somebody was looking around outside in good old Ingerland and they looked at the scene, the street stage in Street Fighter 6 where you can see Big Ben in Cammy's level and went, okay, hold on, is this actually a real place? And is there anywhere near Big Ben that kind of remotely even looks like this? And they found the exact building in street. And it is a gay bar called Royal Vohal Tass. Cavern. Of course it is. So that's what's happening. Super sick, actually. Good reveal here. Capcom knows ball, apparently. And there's a screenshot of the exact building and angle of that stage. That's awesome. That's fun. That's fun. A couple other things going on this week as well. There's a Sega versus Capcom fan game we talked about, the one with no hit stop, but has a bunch of, like, crazy picks that only a fan would choose. That has a demo that's currently out. And I believe the build they're showing off has, uh, where was that? Where was that? Roster. Okay, you've got, um, Ryu, Batsu, Mega Man X, Morgan, uh, Lynn Kurosawa from

the Alien versus Predator games. And then on the Sega side, you've got Vice, Alex Axelstone, beat Sonic, and Sakara from Sakara Wars. So, yeah. Again, you can see the picks that are specifically made according to what a fan would want, as opposed to what, like, Sega would be more officially.

As to what would be popular. Like one of the things that I think about Tokon is just like, thank God it's finally goddamn carnage. Like I'm so sick. Carnage deserved. It's always fucking venom. Yeah, it's crazy that carnage got shafted for so long. Vice, Mr. Cutlass Fury from Skies of Arcadia is absolutely a fan pull, as is Lynn Kurosawa. Anyway, I can check that out.

And then to this week as well, they revealed the new Overwatch hero, Dimon. Have you seen this character? I've seen a little bit of demon. It's Lily, right? It's Lily Pichu. Oh, the voice actor? Oh, cool. Okay, I didn't know that.

What I will say is, I've seen this kit of, like, a character that is in a mecca with slashes and all kinds of, all the shit I want. I wanted a long time ago. Very cool with the idea of a character jumping into a mech that is a meck that I would like to control. That's not quite the divest. style, but more of a Gundam-ish kind of robot design.

And then you look at the mech and the design from the original character and then the drop-off to what they actually put out. And it's crazy. Here is the original artwork and then what they ended up with. They really just like, they just took all the fun out of the design. Did you, I don't know if you saw that, here I should have to send a picture. Oh, the link you gave me is broken. Whoops, here's another one.

Let's see. So like you got the, the big, which is which? The left side with the weapons out is the original, and then the right side is the current, current new version. They basically had a more of a hearty mech with a big. body and they had like a lot more kind of chunkier but complete with yeah i like the the older one the new one is streamlined so that you can see the costumes and the and the skins that you're going to buy for the character but as a result it turns it into this weird like half exo squad looking suit that's just nowhere near as cool looking you know um i i think that the the design

forcing you to emphasize showing off the character more kills some of what makes makes it cool. And they also gave it some more like kind of heroic edge with the shoulder pietys and top angles and stuff. But yeah, you're just out there getting shot with no protection for the pilot whatsoever. It's a kind of a design thing where when it comes to mechs, it's like this is clearly, I feel like this is clearly so that we can sell you a skin and you're going to see the character wearing it.

And we can't. Absolutely. And we can't. And we don't want people to, we don't want the idea of the cool meck. locking that skin that we want to sell you. Where you're like, but you can take the fucking mech off and you can alternate between it on and off.

Just make the design. Ah, right. No, skin purchases like an enormous amount of visual design nowadays. And it compromises the actual design. Make the mech have a cool skin.

And then make it a cool Mac. But that's hard, dude. That's like a whole model. Like, come on. Anyway. It's just, it's the type of character gameplay-wise that I find rad as hell. And I'm super down for like a jump in and out of the mech dash boost slash. And then on foot you have a, what you call it? Chain gun.

But just the idea, but just the like, we're making the actual design worse because we've got to sell you cosmetics is such a bummer. Anyway, whatever. Nintendo has said that they sell 38.5% of their games in physical editions That is wildly unsurprising for Nintendo.

That is probably like orders of magnitude higher than it is for any other, anyone else, Sony or anything else. But yeah, obviously that's just that's a number coming out which says they're not going away anytime soon. It's because Japan.

It's because Japan likes physical media. That's it. And I think too as well, just the whole nature of, like, children sharing games, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely. That they're marketing for. I think so. We're talking about the EA thing. I think when we talked about the Sony cutting physical thing earlier,

I think that Sony cutting physical games, is one of those things that, let's just cut costs. Look at the money will save and cut costs and everything will be exactly the same forever. They'll change, they'll adapt, whatever. I think they're going to, like, lose big

on that gamble. Like, I really do. I think that those people that primarily buy physical, some of them will switch over and some of them will leave and never, ever, ever come back. I definitely think so.

And I think do as well that, like, as the proposition of just hunkering down on your PC gets more and more viable and better and better for people. Like, it's active, like, the idea of like, oh, the PC can be our non-competitor. It can help us sell some of these games if we pour older things or whatever. Yeah, we'll see as time goes on. But, like, it definitely, I can see people walking away from the next gen and deciding, yeah, fuck that. I'm just, I'll wait to see if I want to pick one up and then never get a reason to pick one up because they're happy to just buy everything that exists on their Steam account. someone in the chat says people aren't going to abandon their consoles.

I'm not talking about people abandon their existing consoles. I'm talking about Sony having to sell them a new console that costs almost $2,000 and also doesn't allow physical games. And all the games look the same but cost $20 more also. Yeah. But I do think this is a situation too where like, as we have described in a number of people like us too. It's like there's a lot of people that don't, that don't get physical, that have not had physical collections be a part of their thing for a while, but we can understand here

where this type of decision goes once you take that away and what we effectively get is just a something resembling with these, these Uya level, like you're, you're not getting the actual, you're not getting anything that will be protected against time and against shitty anti-consumer policies as they roll out from the top down in the future. You just, you lose all access to that and anything that's at least helpful for future preservation. Anyway. Yeah.

There's, there's obviously the, the finer details to follow with the whole EA breakdown thing. Bloomberg's been going in on that reporting and stuff. But whatever, we'll follow and talk about that as it kind of comes. We'll follow it as they fire entire companies. But that's literally it. The only thing to do is just be like, oh, yeah, here's what the number is this week. Here's what the number is next week. Mass Effect is now being made by 40 people and one robot.

And the robot hates you, by the way. The robot apps. The robot hates you with every nano-angstrom of its being. Should we take some letters? Yeah, let's take a letter. Good one, though. Only a good letter. Hold on.

Come here, man. Oh, my man. Oh, okay, come here. Caboosa's going to help with letter time. Oh, okay. Oh, you're getting fat, you fat little bitch. All right, we got a simple one over here. Sam asks,

Hey, guys, I'm interested in making a fighting game, and I've been playing through various series for inspiration. Lots of incredible mechanics I immediately jell with, but some core inputs bring me to question why they started to begin with. The biggest one I have is this. What's the purpose of medium attacks? light and heavy seem pretty obvious but I guess I want to know from y'all

what are the philosophies behind these attack types and if I should include mediums in my game? You know, that's a funny one. That's a funny one. Damn it. I'm teleported back in time. Yeah. A long time ago.

I go back to, so there's you, but there's also playing games with my brother back in the day where the only buttons ever pressed were lights and heavies. Because why else What else do you need? Damage and speed.

That's it. I wanted to be faster. I wanted to hit hard. We don't need anything in between. And years, years later, if you come to find out these. One, in general, the main idea is the more things, the more kits you have, the more tools you have in a character's kit, the more you can do. So it's just better off. But mediums are about range.

That's what it is. So typically a jab will be very fast, very weak. A heavy button will be big and slow, do a lot of damage, but it's harder to hit because of how slow it is. And a medium will be... We'll be medium! In between those two, but in terms of what this sets it apart from the others, usually it's that it's further reaching,

and you can use it from a further distance away to try to get a hit. That's it. Now, not all games have mediums, right? Like somebody in chat points out, the Tekken has left arm, right arm, left leg. Yes, limbs. Right leg. But then that game has mids.

It does. And not only does it have mids, but Tekken has mediums in the sense that some attacks are slower than jabs, right? Or some attacks are slower than the big heavy hits. Yeah. It does have them. You just do them in different ways that are not emphasized by the controls. Yeah. And if you talk about like Virtua Fighter,

like everybody's down forward kick is like a nice wide kick doesn't do all the damage in the world but it's like very useful for poking for like damn near every single character in the game in king of fighters there are mediums but there's no actual medium button but what you do is a you press forward plus light and you'll get a special light command normal that's like a little bits it's a little bit slower in some cases but it can be cancelled into other moves so it has a utility of being a combo a combo button you know it also if you have special moves it allows you it have more varieties of special moves. Yes. Yes, that too.

So there you go. It's choice. People have tools. They have choices and that you can use different ones for different situations. Yeah, very simple. That was a good email. All right, we got one over here. It's Alex. Howdy. Recently, I've been messing around downloading 3DS games off the H-shop, and I came across one called of Mice and Sand. It's odd. It's an odd mix of far loan sales, which is a side-scrolling adventure game about

maintaining your vehicle, more in-depth fallout shelter with a relaxing soundtrack. It was published by a game called Circle Entertainment, who do mostly handheld ports and surprise, surprise, developed by one Arc System Works. I know they do more than fighting games, but given what they most heavily associate them with the logo, it's a weird 3DS pixel art sort of colony game that caught me off guard. Do you have any games you can think of, or you're flashbanged by the company logo outside of the genre you notably are associated with? Nothing I can think of on the top of my head. This spice and sane game is really cool.

very very interesting um arxist definitely has been a logo popping up in weird places that's and they've been trying to scratch out as well Damon and baby and stuff like that I think the one that got me the worst

that I was like what was like loading up minish cap and seeing a Capcom logo yeah the Zelda Capcom games are really weird like what the fuck yeah absolutely um

I think that, like, when I see games like Sol Cresta, you know, like the Kimia Shmup and stuff, I just have to assume this is one person on the team's pet project that wanted to make it internally, and they didn't want to bother anybody else. They just kind of solo it. What was the game, the Schmup, where you play as the president of the United States and you're an anime girl? We'll fight for our people. Liberating Valkyry? What

What the fuck's it called? Yeah It It Who made that? Liberty Maiden Liberty Maiden Liberation

Madeon Liberation Made it There we go Damn What a poll Let me check Who made that I did not pull that

Chat Chat helped us with that That was Grasshopper Level 5 Yeah Yeah there we go That's one of those ones You're like

What? What? That's a cool concept That's a cool premise This is really sick, but when? Why? Akira Yamaoka? Okay.

Yeah. Liberation maiden. Fight for my people. Every once in a while, it pays to take an experimental, stab at something and see if it just hits and pays off. Maybe you can do well. Who knows? All right.

And let's take one more over here. Dear the Pat Who laughs, an absolute woolly. Amen. The Tokon Talk reminded me of other genres losing their sauce, potentially. Marvel rivals opened up hero shooters to a wider audience. However, in order to do that, they made a game that closer resembles team deathmatch. Your KD is what matters the most when it comes to gaining Elo and not how you play as a team. This causes players to ignore the objective.

Not try risky plays. Oh, okay. Not try risky plays that could win the game, which makes playing tank a nightmare because KD becomes the main focus. Sure, more people are playing, but they aren't playing a hero shooter, which makes me wonder how new player friendly can a game be before it's just no longer what it used to be. I did not know that. That actually explains a lot about the way matchmaking in fucking rivals works. That explains a lot. I, it's...

why I go into a fucking match and like everyone is hanging out outside the objective on both teams. Like, what are you guys doing? So they're using a, they're using a different metric to choose. They're using, yeah. So like in battlefields, for example, your points are like nearly exclusively based around like objectives, right? You get points for KD, but you also get like way more points for objective. If the Elo and rivals is just looking at your KD, that means this is essentially a death match game

that has objectives in the background. So if you're a player who's really good at staying on the point or keeping the payload moving or whatever the case is, that's not necessarily KD related, but you're being a really great teammate for the game mode. It doesn't matter as much. That's weird. Now, I can understand the internal logic

because if the enemy is dead, they can't defend the objective. right? Like, if you're alive and the enemy is dead, then you can just take the objective. But at the same time, like, hmm. Some people are saying that this might not be true. It's possible. The chat is currently saying,

or kind of asking if this is true or saying that this is possible. We do occasionally get emails that lie. Yeah, so to the person who sent this, Is this true? Because if this is the case, then that certainly is like, I've never heard of that. And that's kind of crazy that that is, in fact, what's happening with your ELO. But, um, I think complaining about ELO is like a, like a kind of a trap, honestly. Because as soon as you complain about ELO, you always discover that you are in fact actually bad.

Okay. Like, I mean, no matter what. It's based on a role. I could see that making sense. if you are playing a DPS, then surely that's what's going on. Obviously, if you're healing, then why,

that's what matters more. Because, yeah, you do see things tracked like healers and their percentage of, of healing, you know, that certainly matters. You're not going to care about Jeff's KD ratio. You're going to care about how alive he killed the team.

Exactly. Yeah. Or damage blocked, you know, if you're playing a Rinehart-style tank or something to that effect. But, Yeah, I guess it's hard to guess to answer this without knowing the reality of this situation.

However, what I would say when it comes to genres like changing and losing their identity, I just think that what you're looking at over the course of like multiplayer games, especially for that's what we're talking about. Drawneers are just gradients. And over time, trending features pop up and get implemented. And then the quality of life gets improved over time. You know, when people were playing RTSs, MOBAs came from that, and then all of a sudden, mobile mechanics

become more fun to focus on than regular RTSing, so that becomes the focus of the design. And some games still do a little bit of A and a little bit of B, but they start to gravitate towards the newer fresher thing, right? Counter-Strike coming out of mods as well, and then, you know, taking modes. I mean, obviously,

Fortnite is the big example with the fucking Battle Real. But like, I think you just have to look at genres as these things that are actually gradients that change over time. And they're not as static as, especially with games as we would like to think they are. You know, a couple generations ago, an RPG was an RPG, a platform as a platformer, etc. But nowadays it's way more common for something to kind of be a little bit of everything, sometimes to its detriment, Rip Highguard. but like if you if you see the biggest game being a hybrid mix of the three other things that are very big hits at the moment that's not uncommon you know there are these weird malleable things exactly that just kind of putty into what people what the kids are having fun with these days right no i'm trying i'm trying to think but i'm not getting anything good all i'm thinking about is like all my brain actually just went to

Marvel Tocon and how much arc system works loves wall breaks in fighting games, which didn't used to be a thing in fighting games. And now, like, I saw a thread about, like, we should ban stages that don't have wall break because it fucks up your okey. I mean, wall breaking exists if you go back to fucking fighting vipers, you know. And then that's... Yeah, but you didn't get Oki on wall breaks on. that that was just like a kill hit.

Game over. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I just, you know, I think that's like the other thing when you see a game like an Expedition 33, right, where if this, if Claire Obscure were made two, three generations

ago, like, it wouldn't have necessarily had these action mechanics or you know, these, these the systems, I could see a much more restricted version of that game. Depends. It depends. It depends when Giam got into Devil May Cry. Did he get in the Devil May Cry into 2001?

Because if so, probably three. Probably three. Yeah, probably. Probably. If I had to guess. If I had to guess. But yeah, the, the, yeah, then you have your brutal legend examples of like, oh no, like Jack of All Traits Master of None, right? This clearly backfires in a lot of very visible I will fight you on the idea that brutal legend is a jack of all trades. I said master of nine. It is a jack of like one or two trades and says it's a jack of five or six and it's an anti-master of many. And if it picked either one of those lanes and stuck to it, it probably could have been an interesting fun metal game with fucking Lemmy and Jack.

Oh, fucking. Brutal Legend is like five or six mediocre games like mashed together it's crazy how unfocused it is If you could take the assets

and just put them into something else entirely but just reuse the designs models and fucking you know voice acting anyway no but that's exactly

but that's exactly what I'm getting at right and you have these these platforms games like Roblox and Minecraft and stuff that are like not even really games in the traditional sense at all. They're just open platforms that you kind of

log into and do whatever you want in. So yeah, you just have to kind of accept, I guess, the idea that genres used to be something when you were growing up with them but they're just something completely different now. And that ultimately will continue to be the case. And the biggest hits are going to be whatever catamari's

everything. the hardest. Yeah. I wonder if Grand Theft Auto, if GTA 6 is going to, like, like, it clearly has its, you know, big crime plot that that's what they always do,

but then the GTA online aspect of things being insanely profitable and long-tailed is great for business. Like, I wonder how much those games are going to be, like, less focused on what GTA has been about and more just, like, trying to make them

second life kind of platform. I think you'll see like a fair amount of it. GTA is really interesting because you described it. The biggest one is the game that Katamari's everything. And like a huge amount of Grand Theft Auto's success has been absorbing tropes and like straight up plot lines and characters from dozens of movies that the developers just assume the audience hasn't seen. And they haven't.

So you're like, you play Vice City and you're like, oh my God, Vice City. so incredible. I've never seen anything like that. And that's because you haven't watched any movies. Right, right, right, okay. Anything Michael Mann's done. Right. But it does

feel that like when you put out a game that big, yeah, it can't just be big crime story, shoot, bank, steal the money, have the big betrayal and credits, you know? Like it has to continue to be something that can update with the new

guitar hero mode. I would foresee Grand Theft Auto 6 online to be like where a lot of the time building this game went into considering GTA 5 online is like a gargantuan

freak beast that no one in this circle talks about at all. I remember getting in an Uber to go to Magfest from our hotel from our Airbnb and there was like a 70-year-old grandma black grandma driving us there

going oh you're going where are you going oh magfest oh is that for video games yeah yeah oh I can't stop playing Grand Theft Auto 5 on I'm playing it every day and I'm like holy shit I could not imagine this level of fucking casual market penetration this is unbelievable

like it's weird because like I do feel well no whatever I'm outside the the market here but there was a time when the appeal of a sandbox game was its existence in and of itself. And then you go around.

That was a long time ago. Yeah. And that itch has been so thoroughly scratched by things that are not GTA, you know, included. Fucking just causing your way around some stupid physics island and, you know, whatever you decided to. You have to go get STD checks if you use the hookers too often. And you got to take your pills on the right time or else your character has like mental deficient. from the clap. But like if you,

if you saints rode it up or or fucking sleeping dogs, you know what I mean? There's all these places to scratch that it. So like, I would assume I feel almost now it's just like, yeah, that in and of itself is not going to sustain your attention

necessarily. A good story mode will, but once that's done, what are we doing here? You know? And the answer is we're getting into role playing and recording our skits and throwing them up on TikTok for fucking big bucks.

RPing. I still don't get it. I have sat and watched people do an RP thing for like hours. And the whole time I'm like, I just don't get it. I don't get it. Look, why are they playing pretend in these roles? Why are they doing all these rules? You used to play pretend out in the park with your friends.

And now we're playing pretend with the cops pulling you over. and I'm going to read you your rights and you are going to just take the ticket or create a chase, but we're doing it in the video game. What is to stop me from just going in there and just being like, I'm a criminal and just shooting every player on the server every time I see them? Well, yeah, that's what you did when the park. I'm all playing a psycho criminal. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. It's the park you ran around in as a kid, except it's the video game instead of the real park.

And now you're the cop and you're the robber. And now you're the cowboy. and you know but now we can film it and put it on Twitch that's it you get banned and if you play bad with others if you play bad with others

then you know the parents or guardian comes and takes you off the playground they kick you out and say play nicely you get another shot and if you don't play nicely then you can't play with everybody

don't understand what like maybe this is maybe this dates back because I remember being a child I hold on I remember being a kid, like a five-year-old, and someone telling me about their imaginary friend and me being like,

I need to get away from this kid, they're crazy. They're seeing people that aren't there. Like a child. Like, oh, my God, they see them? Oh, no. Oh, no, they're crazy. See, the funny part is, I bet you that some of the people that are like the biggest in this space probably echo your sentiments. However, when they do it, that number on the bank account. count goes up. So shut the fuck up. What are we talking about? I don't know. Hey, how many let's plays did you watch before you

started doing them? Me? Yeah, Mr. B-tong and? Oh, I didn't know. Mr. B-tonging was after. Oh, okay. The trespasser. I watched trespasser. That's the only one I'd ever seen. The trespasser won, right? Maybe a slow beef fucking thread.

You know what I mean? And that was it. Fuck out of here. Now, people in the chat are saying this is, but I've played Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons is like an explicit game with defined rules about how you're supposed to roleplay it. This is just people making up their own stuff on a random server with like absolutely no systemic logic to it at all. When the actual GTA online experience is about doing missions and earning money. It's theater kid energy. It's theater kid energy. It's just, I don't.

It's just, it's just playing around. It's just, that's, you know. it's just theater kid stuff that's that's that's all I can that's all I can say you know you're fucking grabbing your toys and you're doing this with them and then you're like hey look it's fucking it's zubel

and then here here oh look hey it's you know hang out with the fucking gummy goo and then you're gonna you know all right that's a podcast that's a podcast goodbye this is now this conversation has now tainted my next

stream because it's going to come up and we're going to get trapped. No!