Castle Super Beast - CSB385: No One's Ready For a Battle Poop

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Download MP3 | Watch Video Episode Full Timestamps: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQXzUWeL7-kPfvD63XJEQDoLYOUTIG0ZABPETWD7Czvy9RPxhs_Jny13GyOTCka4M3iXHq_WrvW9iXl/pub Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive New Steam Controller Review Durability is Just Ammo for your Sword XenoLIES How Asterdam 1666 Just Lost Everybody Rooting For It Super Bosses: I Love This, Now Get It Away From Me NEW CASTLE SUPER BEAST "LEGACY" SHIRT & DESKMAT AVAILABLE NOW: https://www.orchideight.com/collections/castle-super-beast Visit http://drinkag1.com/SUPERBEAST to get a FREE AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in your AG1 Pro Welcome Kit. Head to http://factormeals.com/castle50off and use code castle50off to get 50% off and 1 free breakfast item per box for a year! Exclusive $35-off Carver Mat, Aspen, and Walden frames at https://on.auraframes.com/SUPERBEAST. Promo Code SUPERBEAST Docket: (Aftermath) 1666: Amsterdam uses so much GenAI they've essentially forgot which are AI assets Twitch now uses your channel to train generative AI by default. You can opt out of some training It's on by default because if it was opt In nobody would opt in Twitch isn't sure whether Amazon has used Twitch creator VODs prior to today to train its AI models. ︀︀The opt-out will apply to your previous and future content, so it will not be used to train future models. Saber Interactive has denied renewed claims that it replaced a former Lead Writer so it could "use ChatGPT" in the development of the recently announced title, Rideshare "Stimulator." In a statement to PC Gamer, Saber also acknowledged previously undisclosed genAI use elsewhere in the title. this CEO comment is how you know with 1000% certainty Stella is right  Hey everybody. I've seen the statement by Matt Karch, the CEO of Saber Entertainment, and all of the truly horrendous things he said about me. I think it should be obvious to anyone who reads that statement that he's lashing out because he did not want people to know there was AI use in the game. Invincible VS Developer Reportedly Laid Off "Something Like 75%" of Staff Tokon got cracked in less than 2 weeks and not only does it run better than the retail version, it also works on Linux. What was even the point of Sony shooting itself in the foot with all of that DRM? Not entirely so it turns out you can terminate the Playstation SDK in task manager and the game and online will still work you just won't be able to matchmake against PS players. So the PSN login BS is just for crossplay nothing else Retail version of the game is encrypted and decrypts the game in real time in 64kb chunks on 1 CPU core. Kingdom Hearts The Series announced for Disney+ Kingdom Hearts 4 - Official Coco Showcase Trailer | D23 2026 https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1vrklpn/comment/p4dyhik/  

Hello. Hello, good morning. So I'm now at that point where to remember what to talk about, I just place physical objects in front of me. Oh, really? No, but it certainly helps to walk up in the morning and be like, oh, yeah, okay, right. Right. Unlock the keys to your memory palace. Yeah, it certainly helps. No, that is a joke. But I do have at least. two objects in front of me here that I wanted to talk about.

The first of which is this. It's a new Steam controller. Oh, nice. Yeah. This thing came in, the mail, and I feel like it's not often that the days of, it used to be like every couple years you're like, oh, new controller, let's test it out. You know, and that has not happened in a really long time. It feels like we kind of just slowed that down with the dual sense and Xbox. We hit the wildest shittiest batch of controllers for a while, like the original Steam controller

and then the Ool-YAH. And then the Luna and everything in between there. But all of this was happening alongside Xbox 360s, you know, that was fine. That did its job. PlayStation got to the point where we're like yeah we know what it is you're all used to that your hands are molded around it so those things are not changing too much

but the elites and the more like limited edition versions of these controllers were still like you know they're adding rubber and metal and all these other elements to it and you're like okay but does it feel good how does it work after a year or two when the dust is on the rubber part and it's starting to peel yeah you know so like that

that dual sense pro that thing I held it for a little bit and I could tell within like a couple minutes that the rubber on that would turn like grimy as shit So I've replaced it a couple times now It's still my preferred controller But I really hate that the rubber plastic lining

At the back separates And I'm going to say that for every one of those Like fancier versions of these controllers Whenever they add a rubber to plastic lining It always starts to peel at some point especially if you use it regularly. And the standard additions, which are just plastic the whole way through,

you don't have that issue, you know? So there is a different thing that happens with them. It happened more on the earlier versions. So the tiny little, tiny little, I don't what to call it, like matte finish on these, that's actually little tiny PlayStation symbols.

After a while on the first batch of PS5 controllers, you would actually wear that plastic down with your fucking hands and it would become completely smooth and in the so everybody, if you don't know this to people, when you see a new batch of controllers that have new colors, it is

a revision of the manufacturing process. Like they are different. They are usually upgrades. And the white ones and the red ones and the purple ones and the green ones for Sony that shit doesn't happen anymore. Like it

retains more of its matte like grippy like textured finish for like way fucking longer. Um, so the other thing is of course the standardized rear panel finger buttons on these controllers is becoming more of a thing.

And I like I said, I just don't like them because I feel like I would accidentally hit them at times. I like when they're optionally removable. And so this controller has them on by default and they're there. and they're not removed. So does the switch to pro controller?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So these are, these rear panels, I guess they're starting to be here to stay. My hope is that they remain optional buttons that, like, can be, you know, de-programmed or whatever the case is, because they're not in a place... Just left blank. Yeah, they're not in a place where I'd like them anyway. If I wanted to have functional toggles, if you, like, the modern-day controller is a 14 button, like, it's a bit of a nightmare, but we've got, used to it. And what I would say is if I had to get used to additional inputs, I would do what

the, there's a hoary pad that that has came out that has this. And I think to some degree the switch as well, but like the inside of L1 and R1 having, if you want to reach a little further over, I can do with a button over there. Not an important button. So that's funny. I can't deal with that Interesting. Okay. Because when I hold the controller, the, the, the first knuckle, like the inside of my first knuckle is at the edge of the bumper. Like my finger physically, I have to like pull my palm off the thing. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'm so fair enough then. That's not a universal thing. For me, it's like my fingers, but my fingertips are naturally resting on the edge of the inner edge of the R1. Exactly. Right. Like the buttons are here. My fingers are. all the way near the middle. So, like, I could easily take a button here and here if I wanted to, but it wouldn't be, I wouldn't want it to be an important button. It would have to be, like, a menu option screenshot, whatever, you know.

I played Destiny 2 with Xbox ProPad a while ago that had the rear bumper thing, the back buttons. Claw buttons. And those things are, like, nearly universally made for shooters. and it really it does like within like a five minute learning period

dramatically improves your level of control because jump and reload and maybe crouch slash slide mean you no longer have to take your right thumb off aim. Okay. And that makes just the biggest fucking difference in the world

because you get to now jump and slide and reload without having to lose control of where you're looking. We've spent a lifetime fixing getting our dis-textivity in our pointer fingers and thumbs really accurate, whereas the rest of your fingers are just fucking mittens. Oh, I use my middle finger all the time. Sure. But the, you know, so this would take some getting used to. But I have yet to play a game where it works for me.

That being said. I look at the steam controller and I see a deadlock controller, is what I see. So that's the thing, right? So to get to the features on it, the touch pads, which are, everything on the face of the controller is essentially just, yeah, they took it off of the steam deck, put it on to a controller, and you've got the two thumb pads here. And the smart track pads are wonderful. These are the best way to mouse in a game. Without a mouse. Without a mouse, definitely.

Yeah, they're fantastic. They're stellar. Better than a track ball, better than any kind of analog stick, better than the plate PS5 touchpad, any of that stuff. This is fantastic. And it has all these little points of tactile feedback that, like, it gives a little slight rumble every time you move over a little and click with it. And that just works wonders for making you feel accurate to where you're sliding your thumb.

Having two of them, great. You don't even need the second one. you really only need one. The option, the other one is just, I guess, kind of there if you end up with, you know, a twin-stick game where you want to use both thumbs. But I haven't seen anything that needs it. That's really good. The other thing that's really good, in fact, the best feature about this is, so I have it wired and plugged in right now. But what it's actually wired into is a wireless dongle.

and this wireless dongle is a charge. Great. So this sits wherever you want it to. Whatever you have it to plug in the fucking. And then you just click it on and then it charges and it charges and it's good. Or you take it off and the puck is sitting there.

How's the range slash level of interference on it? Well, I haven't tested that in the sense that I've been in my room and it's in the studio just working fine. Okay. Well, because the reason I say interference is because I've had dongles that just, like, didn't want to be near other electronics, which is, like, a very self-defeating fucking scenario.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And that's why I have a Bluetooth... Can I actually... Where to go? Yeah, I have a Bluetooth... Like, my Bluetooth thing is actually attached to a USB cable...

Um, right here. Okay. Okay. On the desk. Sure, sure, sure. Like, so that it is... is one foot away from the controller, specifically to avoid interference.

I haven't noticed anything so far, but I'll, I guess, with more testing, that'll become clear. What's nice is that the puck itself is where you plug your wire in. So this controller... Yeah, Xboxes, the Pro Controller did something like that. Yeah, so basically that means that, like, it asks you to plug a USB

directly into the controller to update the firmware on it, But after that, this never gets wired into, which means you don't have to risk any weird port bullshit, bullshit, exactly. I had, you know, I had controllers in the password, like, yeah, the wire going in on a weird angle at one point, or it potentially falling once meant that the inside receiving part bent. And then now that controller is just fucked on the wires. So this is really nice. The puck is a great addition. Very, very smart. the yeah the the the the the dpad and buttons are they're not my favorite but they're fine like the steam decks ones are fine they feel is it is it just a steam deck just more or less more or less exactly steam deck without the screen is the feel of it the buttons again it's that feeling of like they don't feel like cheap they just feel more plasticy than the um your PlayStation buttons would you know and

I prefer The way the steam deck feels Aside from the fact that it weighs like two pounds Yes Yeah this fucking huge Yeah this being a light steam deck without a screen on it Is exactly that's great And

Yeah And yeah Standardized thumbsticks as well No real no real complaints I do Like something about the The The

PS5 controllers Specifically the elite ones where's that that I liked is that you can set the trigger threshold to have a cutoff point of like a really really shallow medium deep or like full gun trigger and you can't do that here so it's just kind of a large soft thing and I like being able to set L2 and R2 to like instant tap as opposed to like full press analog you know so that's missing from this ultimately um the biggest flaw and complaint I have with it and probably the reason why I would not use this for fighting games. I would use this for, you know, anything long for, you could play like an Eldon ring with this or something or so, but just is that the D-pad and the buttons are really, really high. And they're like slightly uncomfortably high,

which is exactly what it's like when you're holding a Steam deck as well, I find. I find that they're too high up. I much prefer when the D-pad and buttons are more centered in the mass structure, if you look at it. Like, they're making room for the touchpad, so they shove everything up into the first third of the real estate on the face of the controller. And most of these controllers we've gotten used to Xbox, PlayStation Nintendo, would have your D-pad and buttons at least in this, like, lower second half, or second third, you know. So that's the biggest weird part of it. If you are able to get used to that, it's ultimately fine. But if you're playing a thumbstick game as well, it's more or less fine because that's centered.

But if you're going to be using the D-pad, you have to realize it's asking your thumb to reach way up on the pad higher than I'd find comfortable. But everything else about it's pretty solid. Just anything that is a super high Twitch reaction D-pad game might not be the best. controller for that. Pretty good though. Pretty good though. It'll have its use cases here and there. And like again, these charging options and shit like that.

I want to see that standardized on everything. I thought we pretty much were just like, okay, the controller's done. We're good with it. But like, no, this has some features. I want to see backported onto stuff going on PlayStation and any other controllers we get from now on. I don't think Nintendo doesn't do like an elite Pro controller they just do their

No they don't need to Because this thing's incredible They just do what they do This thing's stellar And I have been massively bummed out That You can't use this on PC It uses some kind of

Weird extra Bluetooth standard That causes it to freak out When you try and hook it up to PC And while I was having that thought I typed in to Google Nintendo Switch to

controller on PC and found a Reddit thread of a community driver that allows it to I was about to say I was about to say like I'm sure somebody I'm sure somebody's out yeah but it was it was from a couple months ago it was actually like fairly recent as far as things go okay um yeah and of course the the biggest thing right now is that you can't get one of

those fucking seam controllers. Like, they're just hard to get. Yeah, I've been waiting on it since the first day they went for sale and I have heard no news. It's not going to replace your current preferences, I'd say, but it's not an inferior

like option, you know? And if you do have, and like what I will say is, yeah, if you do have games where you were waiting to use, games where a mouse is facilitating it or helpful, and you're waiting to use it on your couch,

this is going to solve that problem. Like, FF14 with this game, with this controller, probably a fucking dream. Yeah, MMOs and non-native controller shooters. Like, I look at 14, I look at any MMO, I look at Guild Wars,

I look at Deadlock. Like, that thing looks like a made-for-dedlock custom controller. Because Deadlock's biggest problem on controller isn't movement, or even using, like, your abilities, it's aiming and navigating the menu super fucking fast. Exactly.

So in 14's case, I can easily just see it's like, you have a controller in your hand to play the video game, and the moment an MMO menu needs to happen, you just use the mouse thumbstick, and then you're good, you know? That feels like an easy, ideal use case for it.

Especially now with fucking looking at samurai and all these different triggers, which I am I'm going to go back and look at the layout you suggested in FF14 for Samurai and see if that's truly what my heart desires.

I had such a great experience after that episode went up. I got to see something I haven't seen from the FF14 playing community in so long because I've been streaming it for ages, right? And my setup for my guys is my setup, and I put out guides online, here's some ideas on how to build it. But because I showed people in your audience how I build my things, and I recommended to do a certain way, I got to have a universal MMO experience, which is every single person who saw the way I set up my bars went, yo, the way Pat makes his bars is fucking gross.

why would he put oh that's not how i do it and then they all start to explain their bars to each other and all of them go oh why why would you do it like that and everyone's supposed to have a disgusted response to everyone else's controls like sitting down is somebody else's MMO like interface is supposed to be repugnant just like there are people out there that have their their job bar dead center of the screen so that when they're looking dead center their pips and like the first

samurai yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah dead center of the fucking screen offset to the right because well I gotta know when it's up yeah I gotta know the instant it's up and I'm like that's the ugliest shit in the world I would rather not play the fucking game if you put a god of the interface element in the middle

and listen in any single game where there's mastery involved I can guarantee you there's people who are like take the entire user interface off and just give me numbers in the corner. You know, I'm sure there's those people, right? There's the people who want the, um,

the old fucking, uh, World War II plane interface with the levers and numbers and just, I don't want anything smooth here. I just need to, I need my training to guide me through this. But, um, when it comes to,

I guess the idea of a three part combo sequence, having different endings and cash out points. I can logically think of ways that would, ways to arrange that on the board that are more like, more optimal to the way I think. Exactly. Yeah, I can do that, you know. And then especially, you also get the thing of like basically what happens is that 50, 60, 70, 80, 90,

100, 110. Yup. You change your bars. again because you unlock, you know, a new wrinkle and you go, fuck. Yeah. I don't have a good place to put this fucking thing. Yeah. I got to redo the whole thing.

So that's the, what, what sucks is not knowing how frequent the weird other stuff is going to get used because that's where you actually have to go, well, is it a big deal if this is really out of the way if I'm not ever going to really use it. And it's like, well, you might use it sometimes, you know. And then you know to as well that whatever you commit to, even if it's like, okay, we're doing a thing where this is going to matter for this dungeon or whatever. Your brain is going to permanently lock that in place, you know? There are some things that I could fix that would be better and I can't because I've had them in that spot for like 10 years. Yeah, I could see. Like, it's too late now. I could see myself like forever wanting a triangle button to be my healing option.

or whatever, my up-up iPad thing, you know, or whatever. Like the one that it reminds me a lot of when Leffen and those guys are posting their 2XCO, like, controller layouts, and they're like, put Dash on X or whatever the fuck it was. And I was like, I have already played a hundred matches with a very standard control scheme. I can't even complete a round by switching it over. It's too late. Yeah, I've already, so my both, token. on an avatar, my button layouts

have been affected by my 2XCO layout, right? Where Dash and Parry end up on the controller there have then informed where I want Dash to be on those games. R2 and Dash are now synonymous with for me. Oh, for me it's L1 and Dash. L1 is always dash now. Okay, yeah. So it's just becoming somewhat standardized. Not to mention too when a lot of these games have like a, you know, three

button, three attack button layout and then like an optional fourth one below. So, um, anyway, that's all kind of getting standardized. But yeah, this is a good controller. And, um, I guess moving into some of the week there. Um, how much did it cost? I mean, uh, so I got it off of somebody that, uh, had, had an unopened version. And what did? I mean, shipping was not fun. It was a little bit extra on that. Let's see. Yeah, okay, I paid 90 for it minus shipping.

And the... What was I going to say? Yeah, okay, so there's that. I guess talking about some of those things. Yeah, so we were talked about 14 a little bit there. Yeah, I can see how switching over to samurai is a little bit more engaging. And I didn't really get to do much with it so far, but seems interesting. Let's see if I can find a cool colored sword.

And then I can play dress-up. There. So samurai weapons, because they're, like, it's a goddamn sword. Like it's a simple single bladed sword, right? Yep. They, like, so a lot of, you know, like when you have a machinist and they have a gun, right? There's like a million different styles of gun, right?

With the samurai swords in that game, they're all like different style of color and length and tang and shit like that. But when it gets to the really shiny ones, it's just like how many different cool colored glows do you want, man? Yeah. And the answer... You want this glow that's like fucking blood red? You want this glow that's like bright green? The answer is I don't want it glowing at all. I just want it tinted.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you can... You can fucking die damn near all of the ones of notes to... It's not a color wheel yet, but it'll get there. Although this is also so funny because it's like in a game like this, you're never going to see that. It's like... It's the type of... Oh, yeah, you are.

Absolutely. In the middle of... zooming out fighting a big thing with a million other exploding things going on you're not really going to fucking see the detail like that it's like it's almost like gloves or or boots on your character like so as someone points out in chat that's why the glow the glow is not there when you're zoomed in and getting a character profile the glow is there so that you can see the goddamn thing when you're fully zoomed out so yes you make the shine so that it shows Well, that's not what I want either.

So, yeah. Also, there's a, there is a huge proportion of an MMO, which is on route or non, uh, non, uh, non urgent gameplay where you're just like, man, look at the, look at the dolly that I dressed up. Look at my, look at my. Oh, yeah. Oh, I saw, I saw that post where someone was like, why all this noise in Kukulin now? and they're sitting there on the beach trying to enjoy a quiet time, and then they pan the camera over to a crowd of people going, yeah,

and then everyone's like, yeah, streamers, streamers, what are you going to do? Like, sorry. Sorry, we ruined the vibe. Took your bonus, bye-bye. It's like when we're on a Bryn Hilder when I do the F-F14 with the gals, and like coast to del Sol on Mondays and Wednesdays on Brinhilder. just becomes packed with the idiots because that's just the spot that we happen to go because it's easy for everybody to get to.

Some of the people in that discussion were also saying that prior to that Kukulin, I guess, was known for some big ERP lane or something. But like server culture is basically, like, it was so weird. Because I saw some folks going like, oh no, we're going to lose server cultures when you know, the regional matchmaking comes in. Oh, and I was like, who gives a fuck, man? Who gives a shit? Huh.

Like, if you can tell me that my 10 minute cue will get cut in half by allowing me to matchmate with more people in North America, great. That's worth literally any trade. Yeah, that server culture, that's a weird one, but I'm also new to this. So I don't know enough to feel even qualified to speak on. but like, I have a, what? I think games that have PVP that's for real, right? Like, world PVP, server culture actually matters to some degree. So, like, when you played World of Warcraft in 2004, 2005, whatever, blah, blah, blah,

and you were on a PVP server, yeah, it really mattered what fucking server you on. Because if the fucking name of the server had a hoard name or an alliance name, you were going to be having a big, good old time or a really miserable one. So this is the thing is, is the name? of the server that people are clicking on indicating an aspect of this culture or is it just something developed by people over time?

And if so... No, it's just developed by people. I mean, there's dedicated role play servers, right? Because if you click on a thing that says this is a hostile come here, get yourself fucked, battle zone, hell earth, you know, then like, yeah, you click on that and say this is the gaming

experience I want, that's fine. That's what they're handing it to you. And then this is the Animal Crossing place, you know? Yeah. But if it's just like, no, the names are random, you know, gods, characters and lore, and then you go there and then things have developed a certain way, it's like, well, yeah, but I guess that can change over time, who knows, you know? In any case. No, it just ended up happening to that way. I don't know how the Gilgamesh equals the raid server happened, but like it just became a thing very quickly. And then as soon as

became known as the raid server, then people would move to it to do rating on the raid server, and then that self-perpetuated for the entire lifetime of the game. Yeah, I think the idea of like server culture developing is a very natural normal thing here. What's surprising to me is the idea that like you, someone would want to, well, the idea of being like, oh no, you're changing, the gentrification of the server culture. It's like, yeah, it's a digital space that, I don't know, I don't know. after 10 years, things become the kind of soft codified. I can't understand 100% here.

For example, like most server culture things that I'm aware of are like negative things about your particular server. Like Ultros has a guy that always pulls hunts too early and it's a massive pain in the ass. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I think there was also a guy who would like just be notorious for just paying to get mounts and Party Finder. just like as soon as the new encounter would come out. He'd be like, I want them out. I'll pay anybody any amount of money to not roll for them out when it drops.

So people on their- People know the guy's fucking name? Jesus, I can't even remember. So people on servers are talking shit about people from other servers and generalizing their attitudes. Yeah. And also, you can use like a market board scraper and find out that, for example, everybody on Leviathan sells things cheap compared to,

people on the other primal servers. So if you want to buy something, you go over to fucking Leviathan to get stuff like 20% off. Server nationalism. Yeah. Wow. Okay. But yeah, that's going to go away now that

we're opening up the borders and giving everyone like matchmaking passports for party finder and shit like that. Yeah. Well, okay. We'll see what happens with all that. plus, anyway, I do want to go in and, like I said, change up that layout. But I did see some of the discourse as to, like, is it or is it not confirm that AEOE stuff is going away, thus this layout is pointless? So they showed the pallidon bars, and the pallid and bars, and they were like, this is it.

And it didn't have a goddamn AOE on it. And then they also said that, like, your single target moves would do AOE damage. So to me, that says dedicated AOE abilities are gone. Simplify. Or your your moves might turn into

AOEs, like your 1, 2, 3 combo might turn into the 1, 2, 3 AOE combo depending on proximity to a bunch of enemies. Yeah. Okay. Um, right. So that's a little bit of F-14,

and the controller talk other things going on What items do you have in front of you to... Well, I mean I guess another one is I got a UMAD pass over here. You mad?

You mad. Bro, you're already fucking rocking UMAD? Jesus Christ! I will not... How's Prague going? Yeah, I will not be making it to this year's you met unfortunately. It is...

Oh no. The timing is not great. However, other fun things, like this month's monthly I got to go to this weekend. We went to the

Kizuna, it's called. So there's just a little like before the big, big church tournament happens, they had a little monthly gathering first event for Tokon and first event for Avatar. Good times.

Fun. Got to hang out. get some games in and uh yeah got got fifth place in avatar and in tokon in both games so whatever um i will say that uh token i was like okay am i going to enter this up to the night before i was like am i even going to enter and i was like sure let's go for it right also they put in a redemption bracket which is if you uh if you get go oh and two you can enter a second bracket afterwards to place to play some more against everyone else who went out own two. Oh, okay. Which is a fun mechanic.

I like that. And I was kind of just deciding what do I even want to do here? And I was jumping around the cast a bit. And I went, okay, let me just try some new shit literally the night before. And grabbed, like, it's just threw Black Panther in there and just starts to seem like, can I do anything with Black Panther? And I got like one combo. And I was like, okay, good enough. I'll take this in tomorrow and see how it goes.

And I will say that playing in person with other people at this event is the most fun I've had with the game so far. You know, it really is nice to not be dealing with the actual games online in any way, shape, or form or the performance or any of that stuff. I mean, there's quite a few stories about what's been happening with that and we'll get into it a little bit later. but suffice to say that like sitting in person with somebody where all of that is not an issue certainly helps. Also, Jimmy Bones who pops over to the getting to fighting game streams from time to time is like all in. He's big on it.

He's very, very token-pilled. And, you know, showing some stuff. And I was like, okay. So I see these things here. I think I'm just going to, you know, know, continue having the, the hot and colds with it. But I did have a lot of fun getting, yeah, just kind of like taking my one, my one character, one combo thing into the game.

And it worked out a bit, so that was fine. The weirdness of, have you seen any of the champion, by the way? I have seen a little, I fought him a couple times. This is very weird. So they just put Broly in the game. Marvel's own Broly is now a thing. They just, they took this old Marvel fucking loser and they turned him into like human, not human, like untransformed and then Super Sayan Broly. Especially when he's like maxed out.

Like the shirt comes off, his hair is doing full Dragon Ball and he's got the belt on. And it's very clear what they're trying to do there. Um, it seems like, I'm sure, and I feel like Marvel's like, yeah, we don't give a fuck. This character might as well have never existed for us. So do whatever you want with him. Um, but you got no assists when you play as him as well. So, but you're also your own assists. Yes.

So, you know, fucking get nice with it. Um, and yeah, Snake Eyes was doing really, really sick things with it. Diaphone started playing as well too and I saw, I saw some of the stuff. So that's interesting. Um, the, I also saw some people doing some ridiculous insanely cool shit in Avatar that I'm like, I could never. I just looked at it and went, yep, that's a category of, oh, I'm not and I will never. And that's okay.

But I appreciate it from a distance. And it was kind of fun seeing too as well because this was the same weekend where CEO is happening. so we got to see what some of the top players are doing there was a dev tester called 1999 Honda Civic that was playing against all the fucking strongest

competitors and just dusting every single one of them with Saka and a boomerang it was pretty fun to see Tokon surprisingly or unsurprisingly a Spider-Man for every team yeah

that's just Spider-Man people like Spider-Man Spider-Man, he's got a movie out, so he automatically gets buffed. And the next character that gets their own solo movie out, the patch will come out, and they'll buff them too. That's how that works. Yeah, it was just a whole lot. It was just a fun, fun, goofy time seeing, you know, a high-level play in these matches and what's going on there. And I think, surprisingly, you know, the, for anyone who was looking, I was expecting to see all Kyoshi.

and Toff all over that top eight, and it turned out it was just a lot of Zahir and Azula instead. Interesting stuff. Anyway, there is a game called Shot One Fighters that I got to try out. This is the... Did we talk about that? We did. Oh, yeah, please! Anyway, Shot One Fighters is the Slay the Spire fighting game.

So essentially, you have a character that learns a new move between fights and they come out and you progress through like a chart, a Slithspire path and stuff and your character gets better as time goes on. Very kind of basic so far, but kind of, but interesting. It feels, I'm going to see if I can take a quick look at it if I'll have if I have the time in the next couple. days or not weeks, but I know there's a Kickstarter that just dropped for it as well. So taking a look at that at the build, it feels like the system is currently still like, it's got some hangups to how it feels when you're either getting completely destroyed by the CPU or you have insane moves that you pick up by the cards that just dominate everything. Like it kind of feels like essentially, because it's a Slate the Spire style game,

if you get a really good move you kind of just keep doing that move and that'll get you through it otherwise or you run out of resources and then you have to try to build it back up but a game like you know when you have cards

you're kind of going through a deck you run out there's a little bit of there's a randomizer to it so you have to do the best with what's in your hand but I'm finding game you just do whatever you just do the best thing you have as much as you get over and over exactly exactly

so things like that you feel like they're going to need to you know, kind of figure out a little bit. But otherwise, I really like the visual style of it. Then the character designs look like a lot of fun too. Take a look at Shot 1 Fighters, yeah, over on. I think the Kickstarter's up now.

And, yeah, what else did we do? There was a little more progress in Dark Souls 2. We pushed... I loaded in your stream the other day. and I saw you go from the trash intro to gameplay within like 15 seconds. Yes. And I saw you were in the shaded woods

and I just typed in the chat. Is he at that part of Dark Souls 2 where you get to the end of the wharf and the end of the best deal and the end of whatever? Like those fucking four paths and all the bosses just stop you at the end of them.

And chat was like, yes. That is exactly where they're at. That's the place where he was at, but it didn't exactly become that because, well, for one, I mean, like, you know, daycare hours. I'm starting, I'm starting gameplay a lot faster than I used to. But for Flexile Century, he called in Lucchiteal and a summon and just watched them destroy it. Like, they did all the work. But that just puts you back in the Bastille. Then you get put back to the Bastille, exactly.

The Ruined Sentinels were a wall, and then... And then, yeah, we pushed through this time around. When I went back, I kind of forgot what it was like, because I remember the first time playing through, and then I did it again myself. And the second time through when I was going through Scholar, I, like, I did that whole Sinners Rise so quickly that I, like, I kind of forgot what changes were happening there.

And the actual Lost Sinner is like a joke. It was real, I'm like, I'm trying. I have to go back and see... They are now. After, after, after, like, the Eldon Ring fucking sword gang. Yeah, no, Law Center is quaint nowadays. I would love to go back and see what I struggled with about it, because, boy, did I just go through that, like, nothing? And then watching this time around, I was like, I wanted, because, you know, it's a place where you got to summon Lucichel for the story.

and Reggie kind of like, I was like, he's going to go in, let's see if he can, you know, go in and then he'll summon on the second one. And he starts swinging at her and I'm like, oh, she's like dying really easily and not doing much. And I was like, there was no second phase

that activates here, huh? You just swing around in the dark and then she just dies, you know? And yeah, I mean, I know post-Eldering and post-all these skills, it's, we just know a lot more now. But it really, I don't know. for some reason in my head it was like a wall at a time and it really wasn't it was the approach that was the problem i guess but anyway so that that was the where we're at

and then part of that also involved pushing into the area beyond the where the shaded woods is where you unlock your your pyromancy girl and then you go I remember that area the shaded wood like the post shaded woods tile set where you find the scorpion lady

I remember when I first got there ages ago I was like, oh, this, this, this level seems really rushed. Mm-hmm. Like, this, this shit seems slapped together for real. So I'm going to look and see how it looks with better lighting, better textures and such. But at least the initial, I mean, that's got to help. Yeah, the initial push-up, we kind of were just like seeing a little bit of it. And then I was kind of like, okay, you should probably 180 because there's boss weapons

white down the road. There's a straid waiting for you and he's got some good shit. So we kind of did that instead. And yeah, it it's, you know, it's going back to DS2, but like, you know,

Reggie has watched all of Eldon Ring. And Eldon Ring is every trick they've ever done, ever coming back again. So, you know, I still remember. When you know that Eleventh. elevator part up to the frozen area and if you drop off the side you end up doing the invisible pathway dungeon with the little guys shooting at you from from little alcoves and it's like

this is catacombs plus blight down ambush plus invisible path dungeon and I'm like oh you guys are going to just run every trick you've ever done like every single gimmick yeah it's it's it's you're like I'm just kind of going like now that we've played Eldon Ring, you've seen it all. Now you're just going to see it in fragments and pieces, remixed and spread apart across the rest of these games, you know? But they're still working. You know, they're still doing that thing. And not to mention the fact that like build making is weird and stat things get, you know, things like adaptability and vitality and vigor and all that just being all over the place. at least this game makes it so that like it's not 100% the same experience like it's it is weird

um okay there's pyromancy but like yes you do need to scale your nerd stats if you want it to be good even though requirements aren't there um i don't like that pyromancy is the non nerd magic yeah should be except that's what they decided to do you know um it was like the thematic purpose of pyromancy is the whole reason it was like important is that you didn't need any any special abilities to use it was it was the democratized magic for the common man and for and that works for lore reasons because of the fire and all that um what i something i i really now that i'm looking at it i kind of despise is like the idea that you have a stat that changes something as like subtle as your eye frames on a...

Oh, it sucks. On the same animation role seems so just... It's obtuseness for the sake of like challenge and fun, and that's just a dumb variable mechanic that need... That should be visually more elaborate or like not... It shouldn't lie to you about what your role looks like and then how invincible it is, right? I think you and me did not even encounter the biggest problem with adaptability, which is we're people who would either talk to somebody who would know or like look up what the fucking stat does from a nerd that would break it down.

I think there's a huge amount of average-ass normal people that read like the adaptability slash agility stat and went, I don't get it, and then just played the whole game with an absolutely dog shit role and just went, wow, this just feels way worse to play than Dark Souls 1. Why is the role so bad? Not knowing what's up. Yeah. I would say that like, with very few exceptions, a different, if a role or a dodge or anything like that is meant to have a different level of invincibility, it should look different and feel different. you know, when you see the fat roll tumble,

you go, yeah, of course I don't have eye frames on that. Why would I? I just had this thought that would be really funny, which is, you know what adaptability should have done? It should have made your existing role take longer. So, like,

if your invincibility is every millisecond your character isn't touching the ground, if you jacked it all the way up, it should just be the slowest, role ever where you're just in mid-air for a second and a half. So what I was literally saying in the game

was like you, the way you do this is you make the animation actually like stretch, exactly, actually stretch out if you need to, you know, if you want to have it be an exact variable from zero to a hundred or whatever, then fine, this is your role animation and you are slowly

tweaking that the whole thing together. And you can still have the, you know, the you're too fat to roll thing, sure. But ultimately, that would make more sense because at least visually your brain would understand. Yeah, of course. Such an insane thing to do design-wise. Anyway.

Your core defensive ability should not be tied to inscrutable statistics. Like, and then there's stuff were like, yeah, like, okay, because he started swinging, you know, like, not sword and board. He started out with power stancing and then picked up a hammer and a shield just because it takes stats to get to the power stans.

Oh, he's, what, is he using the blacksmith hammer? Uh, yeah. That thing kicks so much ass. In early game especially, because you're fighting a bunch of armored assholes. You could carry that thing the whole goddamn way through all of it. That thing is incredible. He dropped two twinkling on it so it's plus two now and it's like, yeah, that thing's really good. And, and

guess what? The struggles against the fucking centuries and the sentinels and anything armored. All of that goes away. You're fighting a bunch of, all the Hade Knights, all of that stuff. I'm just thinking Ruin Sentinels is a really good example. And a lot of games

when you fight a multi-boss, you do get something that you don't get from other bosses, which is you hit him with a big hit. You see that health bar off of one of the boss. I mean, he's just go, oh, like just like crazy.

20% off of one swing and you're like, oh, yeah. The first note, the wall was when the sentinels were each like 30 hits to kill and now they're like 10, you know. Yeah. But then the other funny thing is like picking up like the old whip and going, ooh, these numbers are great. 220 damage. Let's go. And he walks over to the big boys in the tower, whips at him and like, yep, they go down nice and quick. and about three or four of them in, the whip breaks.

Because it's like, yeah, you're whipping armor, and this thing has dog shit durability. So, um, one, that's the wrong enemy for this type of weapon. But two, enjoy dog shit durability because this game actually made that a thing. Um, and, you know, and this is just like, yeah, I throw durability on the list of just like, game mechanics that are always bad, never fun, food going rotten over time, you know, just... As a violent, anti-consumable guy, I will have a hot take here that is a genuinely hot take.

I think maybe, even though I complained about it, the only game I played that had worthwhile weapon durability was Breath of the Wild. because it was the only game that had durability that I had to actually engage with instead of just being like an annoying little piece of busy work or something that would actively fuck me at random times. So durability in Dark Souls 2 would fuck you at random. Yes.

Like you'd be playing the game as normal and your fucking weapon would just explode. Yes. And you'd be like, why? Why? did it do that in breath of the wild every other game's durability is just like a money sink or like a

material sink sure the punishment and the way you deal with the problem is much more forgiving in those games than it is in this one you know but yeah either way either way there is like stuff like that I'm just like

I still remember them going look we fix the durability bug and then they showed off like a scenario that did not replicate the durability bug correctly at all, and then the game patch shipped, and it still had the bug, and it took all the way to, like, Scholar of the first sin to come out for the fucking durability bug and DS2 to get fixed. Fucking ridiculous.

Yeah, I just, I still, even, but even in the context like Breath of the Wild, I'm still just like, no, I hate this mechanic. I hate, this is not fun to me. I don't, like, I can, I can deal, strangely enough, I'm better at handling when my character has a bunch of bullshit that's happening to them. Like if your character is getting hungry or if your character is getting tired or, you know what I mean? And all these little extra things, I can deal with more than my consumables and resources

on me all being individually degraded. I would much prefer, like in a fear and hunger style world, like, I much prefer dealing with my character's own, like, meters as opposed to my equipment's meters. So you don't play a shift ton of shooters. No. And I remember vividly, because like, so weapon durability, if it's real weapon durability, not just like, you know, oh, you lost 1% over the last hour, you know, is just turning a melee weapon into having ammo. Yeah, okay. Right?

It's just having pooled ammo. It's functionally the same. And I remember when I took a look at clips of you playing Halo, you never integrated. at least from what I saw, the obsessive, compulsive need to reload your gun every single second, which tons of people who play shooters do? No, and the reason why is because I had no reloading discipline or thoughts at all. I would play games and when I was out of bullets, I would reload. And then a number of people went, dude, that's crazy, you need to stop.

and basically they pointed out in one of the first games I was playing every time you're not in action reload and I was like oh okay so that's then I just you want to be prepped up so that's what durability is

right so that's what I internalized is just like click the button whenever action's not happening but you're not smithing your weapon every time you know and then you have you have Monster Hunter and Resident Evil 4 remake where

you straight up reload your fucking knife by sharpening it. So, okay, but Monster Hunter feels good because you're making the knife sharper. Yeah, but also, because making the knife sharper in a monster hunter fight

is, uh, this is going to take 10 seconds. Sure. I need 10 seconds of safety. And that's 10 seconds of I'm not healing and I'm not doing damage. Like I must maintain it. Like, the context matters. Yeah, but so does the psychological

element of like, oh, I'm tramping in this fucking knife. The feeling of I'm making sure that it's better versus I'm keeping it from being bad. Like, it's just like a psychological trick of like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Feels way better than keeping it from being bad. I don't know if you remember Ali Sadiq, the comedian who did the Mexicans Got On Boots story, the guy who went to jail. But like he just, just talking about he's being in prison and like he's like okay people are going to come for you so you better get yourself a protection knife and like there's one point he walks by the cell where the dude is sharpening his knife and he's just like oh that's sharp that's my knife yeah my knife gonna be sharp as a motherfucker you know and you're just like there's something about like you're making it better that's like I don't find that at all that's great but putting back is yeah improvement is better than maintenance but if I have pieces that I'm like fucking duct taping together You know, feels horrible. XP, but applied to durability, right?

It's totally that. It's totally that. Yes. I am absolutely manipulable based on making me feel like I'm going above 100%. Anyway. Like there's a gun in Destiny 2 called the Ace of Spades. And it has a very simple gimmick. And that is for every head shot, it's a six chamber revolve, six bullet revolve.

and for every headshot you get with it before you reload, it buffs one bullet. So if you get six headshots in a row and then reload, you get six superpowered bullets. Yeah, okay, okay, right? And you could have just had a fucking handgun that did more damage. Yes. But instead.

Fuck that. But instead, here you go. Yeah. And if you, and if you, if you're even going to do the invisible balance of taking the base weapon swing down because you're like the advanced swing, the debuffed swing is actually what we want the real number to be. Sure, I'll live in that world, you know. But we did, but now we have a world where it breaks and you do zero, right? So I think Warframe probably has like the best version

of like keeping, keeping something, improving something over keeping it stable, which is the way they do crits and damage numbers in that game, just have a numerical dopamine effect that's really extreme. So if your damage numbers get high enough in Warframe to keep the screen clean, it goes from, you know, 1400, and as soon as you hit like 14,000, it just becomes 14K.

K. Okay, okay, okay. And so you want to see that K, but then you have crit, and you can stack crit in that game to completely absurd degrees. So at 100% crit, every hits a crit and every hit is yellow. And then at 200% every crit is a super crit and it's orange. Yeah.

And then at 300% every hit is red. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the difference between shooting your regular gun and shooting your gun where it's all gigantic red numbers with 25K, 40K on it is ridiculous. Shooting a beam at something and watching the white numbers turn yellow to orange to red. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. These are all things that make things feel better. Not that that's what fucking Frumsoft is trying to do.

No, in fact, they're trying to obfuscate that to such a degree that it's making it fucking weird. But as someone says, but bringing up Monster Hunter, I'm like, oh, my brain inverted the formula entirely. And I was like, yeah, sharpen that fucking knife. No one's different because of the context. Writing matters. It inferred it the whole feeling. Anyways. Something else too.

So yeah, that's pretty much that. This is just a little side bit, but for anyone out there that happens to enjoy Muse, as I do, they just put out a new album called The Wow Signal. And this is just an alert for anyone musically. The new album they just put out, in my opinion, is the best thing they've released. since like resistance or the second law. If you fuck with music at all, if you fuck with their music, they're like if you like what they used to do or what they do, they put out a new one.

That's fucking incredible and super worth checking out. If you are a fan of the way that they used to sound a while ago, if you like plug in Baby and that style of riff, they have like the sequel to that riff. If you like the era of Knights of Sidonia or hysteria, they have a ton of tracks that are like that style. as well. And if you like the uprising slash madness modern era,

they've got that style as well. It's like a covering of all the styles they've done throughout their career in this new album. It's fucking great. The wow signal. Just putting that on there. If you're paying attention or not, worth checking out. Night Shift Superstar, Cryogen, and a couple other tracks are fucking absolute

bangers. Little PSA for anyone paying attention. Yeah, so that's pretty much it for me this week. Like I said, we're going to do a quick 14 stream. We're going to be back in there with, we did some Dark Souls yesterday. And, yeah, it's going to be a short week. And then this weekend, we're going to be off.

Next week, got a cool special stream coming up. going to wait to announce a little bit more. Okay. We're going to be doing a special get into fighting games. And I'm going to have perhaps a game that we haven't taken a look at in a minute has got some cool new shit coming to it. If anyone's been paying attention to For Honor, there is... No.

Okay, there's some cool shit happening in For Honor, and we're going to be taking a look at that. I'll let you guys know more once it's ready to go. All right, that's Woolley versus on YouTube and on Twitch. Can you excuse me a second? I need to use the washroom. BRB? Yes, sir. So I have been playing some Marvel Tokon this week, and I have been playing on average,

one match a day. And the reason I've been playing one match a day is that's all that matchmaking will fucking give me? What the fuck is going on with that fucking game? Like they put out the patch which

improved the performance like very significantly but then I fucking turn it on and put everything to absolute max broad settings and sit there for like 10, 15 fucking minutes. and get one match, and it's decent, it's a good match. And then I'm like, I don't want to sit here for another 10, 15 fucking minutes to get another match.

And if you're lucky, that's the thing is you want to get match with somebody who's got a decent setup as well. Because if they're not running it at 60 FPS or so, then you're going to feel that. Yeah, I haven't had that problem at all since the last patch. Instead, I've just had the problem of like, is the match making it broken? So I took a look and I asked around and I'm like, okay, is this a PC thing because people are, turning off cosplay. Apparently the matchmaking takes forever on the PlayStation

also. Yeah. Like it is it is just slow as fuck. It's really weird and it sucks because these are the situations where you're like well you might as well go casual because at least you can rematch with the person casually if you get a good one

and just run a bunch of sets. Exactly right? You know which is kind of like if you yeah you're like you get a connection with someone that's good and their skill level is approximately where yours is, please don't go. You know, please stay here, which is that, you know, the, the situation, like in Avatar, you pretty much, it's all casual right now. So that's what it is. It's just really fucking unfortunate, man, because, like, even after that patch, fixed a bunch, you're just running into this stuff, you're running into,

I mean, I just, I saw, like, you know, Sage, I put out that video where he's like, you know, getting a slowdown between every wall break, like, massive spikes of rollback you're seeing on the numbers, like, happening. Just, it's becoming a, issue in regular play. Why wait this long to get a bad match? And then shit where people are like, hey, well, the cracked version of the game has better performance because like people were saying, oh, of course it does. Well, because the thought was like, oh, this people are saying it must be the DRM and the shit that's that's something has running and the anti-cheat and all that stuff that's fucking things up. And then it's like, no, the patch came out and it approved that's not what it is.

Y'all were jumping to conclusions, except now here's the version where. It's all things. A bunch of, it's all contributing together. And when you think about how Strive launched and what happened there, you're like, they're just doing this, they're running back the same problems again.

Instead of doing what they did with Dragon Ball. The high-end specs, that's always been the DRM and all that shit on top of it. The random spikes of super intense CPU usage, that was an audio fucking driver bug thing. But the thing is that these are all simultaneously happening, and the solutions and fixes are all also simultaneously, like viable because when someone's like oh yeah run the epic game store in the background that'll

fix it and a bunch of people like oh it did help right but then now you're seeing the the um what is it like i saw the someone was talking about oh yeah so the cracked version has doesn't have a bunch of problems like that and also it's running on linux um so i guess that was sony's bullshit after all and then someone said no not entirely because you can terminate the PlayStation SDK and the task manager and then you won't be able to matchmake against PlayStation players. So the PlayStation login is for crossplay, right? That's part of what's going on. And you're like, all of these problems are all contributing to making the overall feel

worse and solving each and each of them individually makes the problem a little bit better, but they're all happening at the same time. On top of that, you go on to the actual, like, native dedicated PlayStation version, which obviously doesn't have a huge amount of this. and the matchmaking is still like borked and slow so that's a that's a different beast and I remember strive had that problem too and it took four years to fix it

strive had that problem and like strive was doing dumb things on pressing the start button by just like contacting the server a billion times in Japan and trying to ping a response there's a bunch of really dumb things that were happening there that it took them a while to fix

and it's weird because none of that was happening in Dragon Ball but I guess that's Bandai side of things where they just handled what they did Arxist did what they did on that and like for whatever reason they didn't use what they were doing on Dragon Ball over here

you know this this is more reminiscent of the strive problems early on don't know why we're still having these issues don't know why you're seeing games that are launching like totally fine without these problems and it's becoming more and more standard fair to be like yeah we have good rollback we don't got to think about all this bullshit.

So the only thing I can think of is you would assume when you're looking at a game in the same genre released from the same company that improvements would naturally carry over. But I remember two games that had a very similar problem. It was Total Warhammer 2 and then Total Warhammer 3 and then it was Destiny 1 to Destiny 2. and the difference was is that they had the main, both games had the main team that would

design the boxed release essentially. And then they had the live team which was the people making all the DLC, all the seasonal content, all the patches. And all of the improvements that the live team

made, well that's the live team. That has nothing to do with the main team making the new game. So when Destiny two and Total Warhammer 3 came out, it was absolutely baffling because there was tons of old problems that had been solved for years

new again. I just like teams not talking to each other is like the most infuriating thing. And that's why it feels like it takes generations of like releases to finally consolidate

all your information. It feels to me like Street Fighter six is they finally consolidated all of their information and put it all into one product, right? Because that game happens to be doing, it's doing really well, and you don't have any of the issues we're describing with any of these other games. The only thing we're describing is people being like, man, I hope they shake things up a little bit, or Yasmin's not as interesting as I thought she'd be, you know, which is like, those are great problems to have in the face of the fucking $90 game doesn't work. I can't play it online.

fuck this. Frumsoft was like that for a really long time. Like every Frumsoft would come out and they would like backtrack a cool thing they made in the last game. And that was because they started making the next game before the last game came out and all those decisions were locked in place early. And so it took like like anything for any like good decision to become like in shrine. It had to be like two games in the future. Yeah. So like people were asking like, hey, I don't want to go back to a hub to fucking level up my character.

since Dark Souls 2. But because Eldon Ring started like prototype development like after fucking before three came out. Because like it has to take a whole cycle. Because you have two designers with opposing philosophies in some instances and they put them out there going, this is what our vision is. I'm sticking with it. And then they've had it. And then now there's time for feedback to come back and go, actually that was terrible.

Everyone hated it. You know? But prior to that phase, there's still a whole lot of like no. I don't care. I'm sticking with this. To go back a million years ago, we used to talk about something often on the Friendcast was the era of setting your buttons in fighting games in the mid-aughts, right?

Oh, I remember this. In the mid-Otots to mid-2010s. And it was a philosophy that says, hey, we want you to set your button, by scrolling to each button on the controller and choosing what function you want that button to do. And sometimes that features combinations of things that you might not otherwise be able to quickly press,

but this is a good thing that lets us do more and it is orderly, so this is the way we've always done it, we want to stick to this. And then the American branch of Capcom is like, for the love of God, every player on every controller and every stick just wants to press controller config and go one, two, three, four, five, six, done.

Everyone wants this. It's we want to not think about setting our buttons for more than 10 seconds. Please, every fan game does this, every indie game does this. There's no reason to have to scroll through this list and do a fill out of fucking punch card exam and fill it into the Scantron

for letting me set my buttons. And when talking to people internally at Capcom and whatnot, it eventually came through that it was like, yeah, it is a argument. that is being had and the people who want to stand their ground on this feel like philosophically that they must represent things this way. It is the right way to do it and to change it. That was the argument on the Witcher 3 team about the way Gerold's

inertia was supposed to be when you moved Gerald and Witcher 3 where it was just a back and forth over and over between two people on the design team as to whether or not Gareth, I just forgot his name. Gerold should have to like start running and like build up momentum or if he should control like a video game character.

Yeah. And that's why the good control scheme in Witcher 3 is listed as alternate. Okay. I mean, because one of those guys won and then all the reviews were like this game's incredible. Why does Gareth control like shit?

And you just have these moments of like someone who had other good ideas also has, I don't know, like weaponized OCD or something and will just, they see this as a, this the thing that they like, they see compromising that as a loss, even though the world is screaming at them, please for the love of God, you know? So like, it's one thing when, um, um, quality of life is slow because like it just takes a while for them to find out that this is a thing people wanted. But when you're finding out that people are holding it back because of their own hubris, it fucking drives me crazy.

I can't stand that shit. So yes, things like this here, you know, or even like, again, last year of like, like, you know, seeing games like Marvel Infinite and Street Fighter 5 and all these things where it's just like, why are you guys solving this problem on one game and then the next thing you put out? Like what, what, how is this not shared information that is standardized, you know? So now, yeah, with the token, it's like, hey, Arxis,

if the thing you put out is worse in any way than the, the thing you're currently supporting or putting out, your teams are not talking to each other and you're fucking up drastically and this is, and this is unacceptable. Your thing, you should not be stepping backwards from the current level of progress that you're at on any of your other products in the same space at the very least with the same, um,

uh, teams and development cycles, you know, um, yeah, that's, that's, that's dog shit,

man. Um, I, uh, uh, yeah, you know, and I,

and, and, and, that again, like, you know, seeing people having the discussion of going, like, should I get the PS5 version to not deal with this bullshit? And it's like, guess what? No.

They're still bullshit for you to deal with even on the PS5 version. You get like 80% of it off. Like all the performance shit is gone. But hey, I can't get fucking matches at all in this fighting game. Kind of a big deal. And it's, and the idea

that like you've already spent that money and you're like, do I refunds? and go do that. Like, this is, this is horse shit. This is, this is terrible. There's,

I mean, this might be extreme, but I'm like, there's almost grounds for like, if you are a PlayStation owner and you have a PC version and your shit ain't working, there's grounds for them

to have a campaign to be like, hey, we're sorry, here's the, here's the better version you can switch to, no problem. Oh,

they would never do that. I know, I know, I know, I know. It's, it's your different platform holders. The money goes to different places. It doesn't,

obviously business doesn't work that way but to the end user the thing I bought doesn't fucking work that one does give me that one you know it's just that simple I hate that we're still talking about this shit dude anyway

oh my god cool yeah token's fun when you're allowed to play it is where I'm at right now fun I also Aside from my usual stuff I played a bunch more

Xenoblade Chronicles too Streaming that game has been on experience That might be the strangest Run through a game I've ever played Sorry I just remembered one last thing about Tokon Gov So have you had

this is I guess just getting used to the game as you play it have you had the thing where you go for a an X move but like you didn't have bar so then you or like you just you were you're going for a combo that you kind of had said in place you but you did the input and then you didn't have the meter so then nothing came out no okay because it's a thought I'm having that how that works

nothing yes if you do the special move and you don't have the bar nothing comes out instead of giving you funny. Instead of giving you the, like, heavy version of the move that's just unmetered, you get the, you get zero. And I'm kind of like, ha. And I, there's other games, so there's like BB Tag and there's like Melty Blood and stuff like that where, you know, you have a button that's dedicated for EX moves.

And I kind of, I kind of wish, really funny. I kind of wish that we would just get the heavy version instead, you know? Yeah. And it is funny because, like, Melty Blood's now releasing a new version of the game that's just Street Fighter 6 edition. It's got fucking It's got burnout and drive impact and Everything else and the modern mode and stuff

But yes, okay If you, I was just curious because I'm hitting that in Tokon and I'm going Ugh Fine Anyway, you were saying sorry So Zena Blade streaming Xenoblate 2 Chronicle 2 is like one of the strangest experiences I've ever done

The game is obtuse to a fault And usually when you say that When you say that you're like ah it's a little um imperceptible it has a have i talked about xenoblay two on this podcast at length at all i can't remember we've discussed a bit about gatcha bullshit okay fuck that ignore that who gives a shit that's like such a non issue compared to all the other issues um the game has maybe the worst tutorialization i've ever seen in my life um i'm not comparing it to stuff like

um, dwarf fortress or you know stuff that it, it's like throw you to the fucking wolves or whatever. Uh, the tutorials show up and they give you a brief description of a mechanic.

Right. And, um, once you have clicked through the tutorial, it is gone. It can never be seen again. Oh. So hope you remember it.

Oh God. So that's, that's really bad. That's, really bad to start. Okay. Quality of life and a bunch of indie games has been an option in the settings to reproc tutorials. Second, I don't know if it's the original writing of the tutorials or the person who

designed the tutorials did a bad job or it's a translation issue. But sometimes I'll read a tutorial and I will look over at chat and chat will just be saying that is not true. I will read the way the tutorial describes a system and it gives you like advice and then I look over and everyone who's leading the game is like that's not true

that is a lie. Don't listen to it. Is it trying to hand wave through a complex system by just generalizing and it's a lie of omission? No, they'll give you advice but the advice is like objective wrong. Like it's not a good way to use it. And on top of that, I have a couple of examples

for how the game like fucks on you with its tutorial. So you do your auto attacks and as your auto attacks build and you use your skills, you build up a special meter. And the special meter has

level one, level two, level three, level four. Right? And that part's pretty simple. And what they what the game wants you to do is use a level one special with character one, use a level two special

with character two, and then that'll chain, and then use a level three special with character three, and then that'll chain. So it goes, you know, an escalating series of specials. And, um,

the tutorial pops up and it says, use your skill. But because I was reading the prompt, my character's skill level went to level three because as you do your skills, right? And so I used a level three special first and instantly killed the enemy

and the tutorial just turned off and allowed me to continue. So... And it's gone forever. And it's gone forever. So my brain said, oh, I guess since I did a level three special in order to get the next chain,

would have to do level four. So, you know, to ascend it, right? And no, the way the tutorial works, it's actually saying special one in the chain has to be one, two or three, and special two in the chain has to be two or three, and special chain and three. So it has to be minimum. Yes. But I saw it once and then fundamentally broke the tutorial.

So I spent like hours going, why won't my combos work? because you're starting with a three. On top of that, there's a type of status effect you can do. It's in all the Xenobl games where you do like break and then topple and then launch and then smash, right? And so like somebody inflicts break and then break allows you to inflict topple and so on and so forth, right? And so Rex has a cutscene where he's got a little anchor, like a little anchor, like a little little like a wire shooter on his arm.

And a character has a cutscene that teaches him, hey man, you can use that to topple guys, right? And so they have a cutscene where Rex shoots the anchor out and wraps it around a monster's leg and yank, and he falls over. And that's your tutorial. And it upgrades that move called Anchor Shot to have the topple property, right? And so you're going into a fight where it's like, all right, buddy, you're going to learn how to do the combo system

that is break, topple, launch, smash, right? So I didn't have Anchor Shot equipped on Rex. I had taken it off because the move is bad. So it then said, hey, use Anchor Shot to topple the enemy, but it didn't re-equip itself. So I couldn't. I couldn't affect the character with the status that the game was telling me to do. Were you locked into like a tutorial moment?

Yeah, you're locked into a tutorial fight. So the game's like, use topple to knock him over. And I'm like, I fucking can't. The ability isn't equipped. Why didn't you re-equip it? So then I go, okay, I guess I fucked up by taking that ability off. I will now put Anchor Shot back on. And on the next enemy, I will topple the enemy, right?

And so I'll have one party member break, and then I'll use, use, use topple, right? So the next enemy resists the status effect so now that I'm trying to do it RNG decided that I couldn't. And so it was like a boss fight and a half later.

Now, why would you have this equipment for that long before it explains any of what you're describing? There's like 10 hours in the game. That's crazy. That's crazy. The other thing is that Xenoblate

likes to put super high-level enemies on the map wandering around to scare you. You'll see the first area of any one of the games and it'll be like a level 80 big monster just roaming around and you have to avoid it, right? In Xenoblate Chronicles 2,

for whatever reason, those things have really large paths and enormous agro ranges. So there was a part of the early game where I had to cross the map. And every random battle for an hour would trigger like a level 45 bird to fly over and kill me. Okay. And I was like, are you, are you, are you, are you, are you, is it, is the intended route to, to be like, run away from this? And so, so here, here's the logic that, that, that occurs.

right so the game unlocks and allows you to engage with like a huge proportion of systems like I did the first dungeon and um and then the game gives me the combo system uh the basics of the brake system it gives me like an item system where you can buy a bunch of items to like give yourself buffs um it gives you equipment for your blade which is your secondary character gives you the upgrade system for your character the equipment for your character and the equipment for your blade as well as accessories for your character in your blade. And it just kind of gives all of that to you and says, go nuts.

Okay. And then it puts you, like, you know, it's like, escape the town kind of situation, and then you end up in a camp site in the middle of the map, right? Mm-hmm. And every single time I try to fight something around that camp,

enemies would, like, do the, like, the death cry thing and summon more enemies, or like other enemies would like wander in and attack me in the middle of fights and like it looked like I was level appropriate but I was just getting like stomped out for like an hour and then it has you go on a random fetch quest where you have to just go to collection points

and hope you get a special type of wood and I'm like oh what's happening is I'm not I'm not like optimizing my characters and I'm not doing like a good job building my party and I'm, et cetera. No, they just want you to run away from all those fights. They just don't want you to engage with the other fights in that area that they put that in. And I know that because I did a boss fight later and I trounced the boss fight

because the boss fight didn't have a bunch of random enemies show up to attack me 30 levels higher than my character's level. Okay. So this is a really very difficult, frustrating process. My biggest question is, this is Xenoblade Chronicles 2, is any of this on the basis happening on the basis of they expected you to have played the first game? And this is just being dropped on top of it going. I did play the first game. Yeah.

But is the thought process almost like, you know what you're doing. We're just going to sprinkle some of the newer stuff in? No! Okay. Okay. Dude, so here's the game. When I'm doing main story stuff and boss fights and shit, the game is incredible. Like, A plus.

when I'm interacting with its open world or like any optional content it's like pulling to it's super hard and when I when I downloaded the season past like bonuses you know that thing or it's like oh here's some items here's some

upgrades it changes the game's options so once you download the season past DLC and you go into gameplay you can you can switch the difficulty to custom and you can change enemy health and stuff like that. But then there's another option that's just like turn off enemy agro entirely.

Oh. And I'm like, that is a fucking insane option to put into a game like this. Just fix it. And I played like multiple streams in a row just cursing this

where I would be trying to do something and enemies would like one shot kill me from off camera. Wow. And if I tried to fight them, they would summon other enemies. And I'm like, how are these random battles? Like, the random battles are all way harder than the bosses. And the only breakdown that I can find that makes any sense is from chat,

which is people saying dev on this game was super rushed because they had to work on breath of the wild. Like, they lost teams to work on Breath of the Wild. And. But that's not even. an answer in the sense that, okay, it was badly made, but like, what is the intended user path? Go grind in a hut for a while?

Because random battles take a long time and give you very little experience. So then no. So the intended user path appears to be be lit. Run. Run from everything. And then do, like, named side quests for experience and bonuses.

I mean, this is. It's remarkable how uneven it is. And I got to I got to the end of chapter three the other day and got super mad. So one of the other things that gets super

fucking weird about this game is it has ten chapters. Each chapter is written by an alternating writer. So all the odd numbered chapters are written by someone and all the even number chapters are written by a different person. And it flip-flops between

like peak, Zeno shit and anime of the week goofball stuff like flip flop and I got

super pissed because I was right I was ready to fucking throw it in I was like if I was like if this game

does not fucking blow my shit off by the time I finished tonight I am throwing this in the

trash. I heard all this. And then I beat the third chapter and it blew my shit off. Okay. And I got super fucking pissed. Okay. Okay. I heard everyone say the Zeno things are all good. The varying degrees of good. Okay.

That's not true. No? No, it's not. Okay. No. Um, that's not true. Zeno Gears is a great game and it's very flawed. No, no, no, no. sorry, sorry. When I say the Zeno things, I mean Saga. I mean the Xenosa. No, well, Zeno Saga is

not good. Okay. Zeno Blade 1 is really good and Xenoblate 3 is really good and Zeno Blade 2 is deeply flawed. Okay. It is, it is, it is, it is

ping ponging between a two and a nine on any given moment. That's crazy. It is crazy. It's legitimately nuts. and it's nuts in a really specific way that pisses me off because the game is mandatory. Xenoblade 3 has a storyline that starts with like a war between two factions,

and one faction is made out of all the Xenobledone races, and the other faction is made out of all the Xenoblate 2 races. and when I started Xenoblate 3 a million years ago before putting it on the shelf, all the zones are a Xenoblate 1 area and a Xenoblate 2 area mashed together. And I don't mean like thematically. I mean you literally see the architecture jammed together unnaturally, which means that two is like super mandatory. Like it's it's absolutely like a very core part of enjoying the third.

Um This isn't like, ah, I'll just skip it and you'll get the gist of it. Like, no, no, it's not.

So I'm, I'm like suffering through trash to get to peak. And the peak is fucking great. For the, but then I go back into the trash. For the most part, um,

the Xenoblade games are all usually new characters and settings each time you start one, right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Except for the, the fact that,

uh, I happen to know, that all the characters eventually come back and interact at some point. Yeah, so I'm saying minus where things go or whatever reveals occur. When you start a new Xenoblade game, you're starting with a new character in a new setting, and it's usually a reset. Yeah, okay. So, yeah, it's a weird fucking game.

It's an extraordinarily weird game. It is impossible to understand game. And so in this type of scenario, where I'm playing an older RPG that just got re-released, and it's got a bunch of complex systems. right? And these systems are very poorly explained. The usual gist of it would be like, well, I'll look over to this friendly box to my left, this friendly box full of nice people who know things, and ask them for advice. The advice has never been more useless.

So the usual thing of, hey, chat, what's up? and you get nine garbage answers and one good one, right? And it's up to you to figure out which one the good one is. I get 10 answers and 20 of them are wrong. And, you know, someone had the advice of like, you know what you need to do. You need to have the expert in chat, the one person that you listen to, right? the guy who really knows his stuff. I have like five of those

and they're arguing with each other. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Big fan of that. And it's like, oh, cool. And so the actual end result of this is, hey, do you want to understand the way this game plays?

Go look up a Chugga Conroy video explaining the way the battle system works. And then when you're further in, you can watch a guy who has a series of videos called Enil about how to play Xenoblay 2, but you can't look at it now because it's filled with spoilers. And then someone in the chat goes, don't worry, Pat, I made a Google Doc for you to understand.

And I go, I don't want to do any of this fucking shit at all. do any of these experts are any of these experts going hey i've got a thousand hours on record my advice is don't play my advices shut it down no that no no no that's that that would make anyone happy okay all right um so yeah um what a miserable way to play a the game that has a great game inside it it feels like when i beat it and understand it all, I can go back and play it the good way because I'll understand everything.

And none of this is even remotely mentioning the gotcha. Oh yeah, that system's actually like very trivial, all things considered. Interesting. Fucking weird game. Fucking so strange. Absolutely. baffling. Yeah, I

I, I on, like, after, because I know you've been working your way through them and a lot of this is a blur in my brain now. Now that there's this many of them and I've, I've actively, I don't know anything about most of them. What's good and what's not good and what has the stupid music and the robots in it. And like, I just, I just don't know anymore.

Oh, also, of real note. So you know how the characters in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 specifically dress super racy and super sexy? The Smash Brothers weapon girls. Right. Yes. So not just them, right? A bunch of characters dressed super hot in that game.

And it's very like anime booba, right? And that's fine, right? Um, it's actually very distressing how the writing in that game doesn't match any of that shit at all. It's actually like sexless and chaste and sweet. Okay, yeah, yeah. But everyone's titses and asses are out? Yeah, like near automata. actually. It's weird. It's fucking strange. I felt that. I felt that with near. Like,

fucking lingerie is out, but everything is just really innocent, pure, and sweet. It makes it feel so weird. Like, it's just like this happy go lucky, like bunch of gang, but they all just woke up and could only find a bunch of hooker outfits. And that's just how it is. It's super strange. Yeah, that's a... It's absolutely fucking baffling. That's kind of an anime thing, I think. I feel like that's a thing that happens from time to time where the art design and the actual tone and world and setting

will just be very different from each other, and characters will be, again, just booba out, but like that's not a part of what anyone's talking about. It's just the way things look because that's the appealing design and you kind of just learn to roll past it. Maybe I got like too old. but like, like, the Rex and Pira will be having like a, like, a sweet conversation that is completely, like, genuine and, um, and like, like, like, like, like, like, like, sweet and like non-adult at all. Mm-hmm.

And the camera will pan over to, like, the two-inch dip from Pira's, like, outside her pants, panties into her hip bone with the fucking, like, the, the, you know the dip coming off of her fucking side of her ass and my brain goes girl you look really uncomfortable like it's it's so past titillation yeah that all i can think of is like man you look miserable in that outfit yeah i i i just i feel like this has been a thing for a minute of just like the the, the, what is it?

The the gap or the lack of congruence between adult themed like outfits and designs and characters and adult themed writing. Writing, yeah, I feel like this is, anime

has just ignored this for a very long time. You've got your fucking, whether you're darling in the Frank's ass like super mounsel. print outfits. Kill a kill with just like actually being naked's part of the plot there, to be fair. But there's, there's, I feel like there's, there's, there's, I feel like there's, there's, there's examples of this throughout the years that you kind of just, yeah, your brain

is supposed to just treat it as something else entirely. Everything that fucking shift up makes, you know, the, the, the, the, Niki and, and stellar blade and stuff like that, um, I get the impression that the, the, the tities and the ass are completely separate from the actual serious plot going on. on, you know, and that I'd be surprised if it ever got addressed there. So somebody in the chat just said, oh, is Zeno Blade 2 the super horny one?

No, it's not. That's actually what I'm talking about. Just the artist. It's almost distressing how non-horny it is. If you actually want to know what the horny Zeno Blade game is, it's Zeno Gears, the only game in that series that has a bunch of characters have adult sexual relationships.

But like, and that was 99, And those characters are all dressed like in cool, old-fashioned anime outfits. There's a whole lot of creators out there that are down with like, yeah, the art being horny, but the characters being chased. Weird, strange. It's a, it's a, it's a thing. And it's like, it's, it's like, it's incongruent to the point where I'm like, I, like, Pira, you're, you, you, you dressed your, because like, there's a, there's another, you know, there's another, you know, there's another. character and smithra, right? So, like, Pira, like, chose to put the fucking enormous booty short whale tail situation going on. And it's like, but you're just like the sweetest, most chaste,

like, shy person. Like, this is, this is at the point where it's actually, your character is weird now. Like, it's strange. I mean, I feel like sometimes you might get, like, let's say there's a character. in something like this that has a like a magical transformation or a henshin, they might like react to like the plug suit and go like, whoa, what? And they're like, never mind that. Defeat the enemy and it's like, oh yeah, sure, okay.

And that's kind of the end of the thought, really. But you're supposed to just assume that hey, man, we're trying to sell copies. And that's the end of the thought. So somebody in the chat is taking like possibly the most bad faith argument possible, which is like what women aren't allowed to dress outside

their personalities? Hmm. Uh, fuck off. No, it's, what it is, is like, it's just blatantly obvious that the art designer, like, just boob them up outside of their characters for, like, visual appeal. Yeah, these are independent design elements that were not. It just feels really cynical. And, and that you could, you could potentially, like, change this design it in any way,

shape or form to be more or less. And we know that. Because every alternate design these characters have had is not just better looking, it's also sexier. There are two sets of new designs, one by the Smash people and one by the Xenoblade people. And they are more attractive, more tonally consistent outfits. Yeah, man. Look, dude, you get, you hire a designer that's known for, for, for, sexy art to show up and do their thing. And then you have the writers in the team making the game

separate from that. And then they go, cool, that's what we're going with. That's what we're shipping. It just, it reminds me of every time that they're like, oh, they're censoring this outfit when bringing it to the west. And they would hold up the outfit and it would look like trash. And it would like, it would just look like garbage. Reminds me of like when you see those, fucking idiots making their their AI fucking women and they're dressing like Tifa and Aeth in like a white bikini

just the fucking boringest unsexiest fucking child's idea of what sex appeal is just fucking embarrassing but the other funny thing is when we end up with the like you know

you will be ashamed of your words and your deeds when you read find out why quiet is dressed the way she is. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I remember, I remember a while ago, mom made a post about grand blue fantasy, uh, grand blue fantasy versus where there was that girl with the has the whip that was in the base roster and there was an animation where she puts her arms up and like all of her armpit musculature was like perfectly designed. Mm-hmm. And mom was basically like, oh, the person who did this was like a freak. Was like just like in there.

Just a freak about it. And that feels so much like more honest. Well, the thing was just gooning up these characters to have their boobs out. And to be fair with with, uh, Grand Blue, they've got the old man buff, fuck fetish covered. They've got all your anger. covered. They're doing, there's something for everybody. I've described, um, fucking, what's his name? Um, Beelzebub and the other one. Belial, I think. Oh, I don't know which one of them is which, but I know that those

dudes are just naked. The sluts, the slut whore men. That's crazy. The characters that come in rubbing their fucking nipples around one fight. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. Yeah, yeah. He's such a whore. It's amazing. Like, they, fall on. Like, Jesus Christ, guy, put it away. Uh-huh.

And, like, I've, and like, that is the, like, the fact that the character's attitude matches exactly the way he's dressed. I'm like,

yeah, yeah. Accurate. I think there's a really good, like, like, when you're writing, when you're drawing, when you're drawing,

writing the art of these characters, what you're covering says more about the attitude than what they're showing. And I remember, I forget who posted it. I think it might have been, buttons a million years ago, but basically described like

guy at the beach in swimming trunks waist up completely exposed like half naked, right? Guy in identical outfit but with like weird shirt that covers everything from his shoulders to his fingertips

but cuts out like a triangle of his tits? Yes, yes, yes. Hoare. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's what you choose. It's like what you've decided to cover is emphasizing what you've decided to show. Yes, midriff on display only versus shirtless entirely, 100%. Selective emphasis is more salacious than just out and out, out and out nudity in some cases.

Yeah. I'm so pissed off at that game, dude. I'm so pissed off. Because it got good. Because I was ready, I was ready to fucking throw in the towel. And then a character got into the literal goddamn Xeno Gears robot. Wow. Okay. The first view of a fucking robot in the fucking game just walked right up to the,

might as well be one to one. And I went, God damn it, that's a big robot. I'm back in. Now you have to know. Now I have to know. But again, X is the one where you actually are using, like, where the robots, like the gameplay, right? Yeah. Bro, X, I want to like X so bad.

You get the robot in chapter like eight of 13 and the game thought it was going to get a sequel and it didn't. So the epilogue for the new version is the game's like new ending years later. like X is the strangest thing the majority of that game is without the robot yes oh sorry chapter 6 of 13 halfway through okay okay

Jesus yeah no it's yeah man okay anyway so that's going on with me I'm gonna be playing more Zeno Blade this weekend over on Twitch.tv slash pat stairs at and YouTube.com

slash pat stairs at also tomorrow morning I'm gonna be doing some FF14 with Wully versus And that's Yeah, that's it for me Oh, and Dustbloods fucked us over Because they're assholes

Yeah, I'm gonna stream dustbloods And then they're like, you're not allowed to Fucking show footage of dustbloods Oh, did that happen? Did they say no? Yes, they said no, you may not. Well, never. So I had to change my whole fucking week around. Damn. So now the only thing y'all can get is me playing it and then talking about it next week on the podcast.

Yeah, I was hoping to squeeze in a, you know, some time on that. But fuck. Okay. Lion Kun in the chat says, Pat, you couldn't stream Eldon Ring or Night Rain either. Is that why I was invited to a specific preview event to do a hour-long preview of Eldon Ring? And then they sent me a code to stream it a week before the game came out. Is that why I wasn't allowed to stream Eldon Ring? You stupid fucking idiot. So this is, this is clearly, this is like, this is a network test, not a show the public test. This is not a get the, get the promotion for the game out test. It's a full-on, like, does it work situation? Damn.

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Thank you, ORA. Thanks, ORA. All right. This week in just absolutely exhausting fucking stories. You know, I want to say that Patrice Desilet was someone that was being rooted. for. This story sucks. Everyone was rooting for Amsterdam 1666 because after getting fucked over by Ubisoft left and

right, there was a real clear like, oh, this dude has worked on and made some cool stuff. He worked on Assassin's Creed and he did all this great shit that we kind of are looking forward to seeing. And this game has been chased and he's been chased around and had shit shut down for such a long time. It's a bummer. And you kind of wanted to see what would come of this. game, and we finally got to see a look at it for the first time on the Keely show the other day. And now we're getting an article from Aftermath, because after people noticed that in the

demo that came out, they saw some AI generated assets. They're kind of going, what is the extent of Gen AI usage on the game? And the quote we're getting back is, I can ask the AI to give me 75 different variations of one thing, but I cannot have 75 different illustrators come with variations in three seconds. This is the world in which we're living. And while we're this small team and building the game, we put it in.

We didn't realize anymore that it was AI because we're so used to seeing it. I think so the attitudes on AI generation have moved a little bit even from the most diehards. Like, for example, Capcom and Square and everybody

out in Japan and China are using it to some degree somewhere. and at some point you have to throw up your hands if you want to enjoy any of those things but even under that context this is like the worst answer I have seen

so far so far hey how much have you used I don't know we use so much of it we don't even know what's what we made and what other people made the original title for the article

was Amsterdam 1666 uses so much Gen AI they've essentially forgotten which are AI assets. That's crazy. That's it. And again, the fact that this was a game and a team that was, again, being rooted for because of how long and how much this is going.

I felt bad for him after he got fucked off. And you kind of wonder, it's like the fact that this game has been radio silent for a decade plus, is it only due to the fact that a bunch of gen AI assets were created that it's able to get to the point that they're putting this down? out? Was it just like sitting in limbo and then they were like, oh, cool, this will solve the problem and then just started fucking generating the rest of it? I think the original quote actually really sums up the mentality like dramatically, which is I can get 75 different ideas from an artist, for an AI artist in like three minutes. And the overall response I saw to that from artists and people in production was like, bro, why do you need 75 different versions? in three minutes.

And then... Like, what, like, that's... Yeah, right. That's unusable and worthless. And furthermore, you then look at the versions that went out and you see the paintings of like people with these weird buttoned outfits that make no sense, with things that lines and drawings and everything about it where it looks weird and is not... It's not just fantasy.

It's like there's nonsense going on in this, as a bunch of hallucinations and shit is want to do. being generated and the thing you chose has all these mistakes and stupid things in it and then you're like so you had this whole 75 variation choice the thing you ended up going with and are using here is still fucked up and

looks like shit and now what you're basically saying is to you it makes no difference so if the end result of what people are seeing you the team cannot tell the difference between what's human created and what's AI created why the fuck should we care about your taste and your reasoning here?

A big shot into the sky of exactly what everyone was afraid of slash hated in one big thing. Because people would say, why should I bother engaging with something that you didn't even care about enough to make? But then it comes back, well, they worked really hard on this part and that part and they only used a little bit in this one. But now we have a guy going, man, I don't even know. know how much of this we made anymore. And you can't, and they can't tell while the audience can.

And it's like so, you're, like, why should I trust your decision making and your ability and your overall fucking you're just telling me your taste of shit is what you're telling me. You're telling me that you guys making this, you can't tell what you're generating

and what you're not generating. Well, yeah, it's crazy. It's absolutely. he thinks he's saying what he thinks he's saying is like it's just so good the technology is just so good i can't even tell the difference between our world-class artists and the the robot um and what i'm hearing is i have lost all discernment possible despite being a story long-term like a professional in the industry. One of the people that should be able to, at a glance, just be able to have this light unlock, you have done it to yourself so much that you have destroyed your ability to discern anything. It sucks, man. It's like, you know, yeah, Patrice Desilay had a

fuck ton of people looking forward to whatever this was going to be for a long time. And it's, I've just seen the universal response here being like, cool, one less thing to care about. And the most crowded holiday season, I think I have ever seen. And like, after spending a decade plus of your life and time on a project to just burn all of that to nothing, that's fucking. that's crazy it's so sad and crazy

that you just dove in to this degree yeah I it kind of simplifies a lot of people by going okay well that's one less thing done and done moving on

80s 1666 comes out um two days before that Star Wars game and the Metal Gear Solid 2 collection the Metal Gear Solid Collection 2 and it comes out a week before Onamusha and Don Walker and two weeks before Wolverine and except like it is it is trivial at this point in time

to just go gnaw yeah um so that alongside and it just it just fucking it's the same story every week but it just gets dumber and dumber you said that was the dumbest quote you've seen so far. So far. I can, I can,

I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can one that up. Oh, really? So I didn't fully

follow and hear the ins and out to the story until like last second, but, um, I saw people talking about saber interactive and, um, ride, oh,

this shit. And I was like, what exactly is going on here? And I don't, because I'm like, I don't really know the, the team or the game or anything, but it seems like that,

none of that matters. all that you really need to know here is that the company fires its lead writer on a game so that it can use chat GPT to replace them and then goes on to obfuscate that and lie and cover it up as much as possible and then also generally have undisclosed usage of Gen A.I. elsewhere in the game.

And I think from those accusations then they got the CEO to answer what was going on. Why did why did the lead writer get fired?

We need to cleanse. We need to cleanse from this. Check out. Boos pulled a blanket over. What? He pulled the blanket down so he have a blanket. Oh my God. That's crazy. That's adorable. I wish I could do that from this story.

Yeah, oh, okay, back back to this shit Okay, so Stella Sacco is the lead writer Or was the lead writer on this project Um A ride share stimulator And Um This week in video games reaches out to Sabre Interactive

And gets the following statement from the CEO Stella who I had to ask Claude because I've never spoken to her or seen her We've already said we're using AI for certain parts of the game and we'll update the Steam page once we have finalized the feature set. Let me clarify the entire story script, where to win an award would go to someone who can walk up on stage and receive it. It was always our intention to reveal this until Stella violated her confidentiality clause and revealed this before we were ready. This is. So let's put AI aside.

Let's remove that entirely from the discussion. is that's going to muddy the discussion with people arguing about AI use. Doesn't matter. In this, in this trivial, right? This is,

this guy is engaging in like the single, easiest, targetable, narcissistic trait you can see in anyone. Who is that? I don't even know who they've ever heard of them.

I don't care so much. Then you get two sentences in. Yeah, I know who they are. are and they suck and they're unprofessional and they're bad. Okay, you need to, like, this is, this is Sopranos level fucking CEO talk here. Stella who? Stella what?

Huh? I never heard, never heard of her. I never heard of this guy, but also he sucks and I hate him. God bless. We look at our use of AI in this particular game, which will be a lower price title as a plus for consumers. So now you got to get You got to make sure that you close off the sandwich with hey Hey, hey though it's gonna be cheap and affordable

So what are you complaining about There's a there's a real like there's a real like Hutzpah to Unfounded complaint sorry no Unverified complaint Right Hey I worked here this sucks This is how it is but there's no like

objective receipts, right? They're not posting like a video of something being an asshole. They don't have like a email paper trail. And just by the reaction of the person you're talking about, I'm like, oh, yeah, everything you said is true. This person's obviously a complete asshole. That literally, like everything, all do all doubt is thrown out the window with every single one of these sentences.

It just gets, as far as Stella is concerned, she was replaced by someone more talented and was terminated for a variety of reasons for a few months later. What I can gather, she enjoys controversy more than I do. I'd frankly, in retrospect, have been happy to replace her with AI. At least then we'd be dealing with someone programmed, to be honest. Like, absolute piece of shit. You know, so, and then she says, hey, everybody, I've seen the statement by Matt Karch, the CEO of Sabre, and all the truly horrendous things he said about me.

I think it should be obvious to anyone who reads that statement that he's lashing out because he did not want people to know there was AI use in the game. So it's a case of not only like, not only the shitty fucking firing and all that being covered up, but being mad that she revealed that AI was in the game and being disclosing that at all, which was something they didn't want to come out. I mean, what is like that level of full on just traditional word goonery, right? absolute like mafia tactics and

bullshit is that's the dumbest that I've ever seen I can't believe you're saying that or typing that out or speaking that into a microphone I think there's like a multitude of arguments happening right now there's people having the predictable no one cares about AI

argument in the chat and that may very well be true for the average consumer but I can tell you who I know cares about AI and AI disclosure. People making AI products. They don't want to disclose

it. Every time it comes out that they haven't disclosed it, they always throw a fucking shit fit. There was a whole thing where Claude, the fucking AI that guys referenced to, started to watermark its outputs

so that you could see that it was AI. And people freaked their shit because the entire premise of the technology is to get away with looking like you did it yourself because that's what everyone actually wants. It is a product built not about doing something for you, but about you doing something for someone else with low effort so that you didn't have to actually do it. And if the fact comes out that, yeah, by the way, you actually just, you know, and just,

and busted it out, and you didn't actually work on it at all. Pretty much everyone hates that under almost any context. It's kind of amazing watching people in the chat like fucking diving in front of the bullet here. Yeah, it's kind of like, all right,

sure, man. Do your thing, bro. Anyways. Like guys in med school aren't using AI for their papers so that they can become better doctors. They're doing it because they don't want to write their fucking thesis or do their exams.

It's always nice when, like you said earlier, it's just like, there's questions, you're unsure, you know, there's which side, which way. Chances are you can believe a story like this of like someone got fired over some bullshit. Chances are you can believe that's what happened.

And then you walk up to the car dealership and you hold up the microphone and you catch the dude slipping out the back with a briefcase with papers flying everywhere going, what, huh? Get out of here, you? Running away as fast as possible.

It's kind of amazing. Good stuff. I have known people, and I'm sure you've known people, that they'll start telling you about this problem they had with their friend, and their friend was so unreasonable. Their friend was so unreasonable I don't know why they acted like this.

And the story that they're describing genuinely describes a very unreasonable, mean person that's just out to get them. And then they tell you the second story about a different friend. But now it's also their mom. And now it's also their sister. And now it's their boss.

And then you interact with them for just long enough for them to blow their shit at you for nothing, for nothing. and you're like, oh, everything you say is complete garbage. You're completely fucking full of shit. This is how you go through life.

It's incredible. Yeah. And you're just used to hoping that like your friends or whoever you're talking to is just going to blindly take your side on whatever your shit is because that's the way it's always been. No, I was just a...

Someone was just talking about how they were on a plane and this lady is just being a... complete piece of shit, like getting in the flight attendants face over, like, over like nothing, just kind of whatever, just yelling about like bag placement and this is that and, you know, being a horrible, horrible passenger or whatever. And it didn't escalate to the point of like getting kicked off the plane or anything like that, but they just kind of went through with it. And then coming off the plane afterwards after, you know, turning and yelling and getting in the face of other passengers and stuff, she,

they were at the baggage claim, and she was watching as that person was talking to her family who were meeting her there about how horrible the flight was and about how mean the flight attendant was, and about everybody was just being such, they were just getting at her, and they were, you know, being horrible. And, you know, and like, just recounting the complete,

fabricated version of it to which they walk. It's terrible. Oh, my God. Why would they act so, so inconsistently? It's almost like you made the Zosurban. story up. To which they then the person grabbed their luggage and just walking by the lady talking, just leaned into the family and went, that's all bullshit,

that's not true at all. She was the aggressor the entire time and then walked away. Reminds me that old lady that died at that Tim Hortons. Do you see that video? What happened? So there's an old lady who went to a Tim Hortons

to get her pickup order and was mad that it was taking to long, some, you know, 70-year-old grandma, and her first reaction to the lady at the cash going, hey, can you wait a second, was to just start throwing hands with like a 20-year-old who, like, beat her ass, and then she sat down and then had a heart attack and died. And it was a story that was blown up on TikTok, and I was going through comments and everybody was like, what is happening here? Why did this old lady start a fight with a random person? And the answer is, old people who are just used to getting their way and flipping

their shit their whole lives are now old and can't beat up random people anymore. But it's worked all the way up until now. It's worked all the way up to the age that you're at now. but now you're old. You're kids that don't want to listen to you? You can't beat them. You're old. Jesus Christ. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

girl working out of Tim Hortons. That's crazy. I didn't hear about that. Um, yeah, there's a, there's a whole rash of boomers just going nuts lately because, um, no one has to listen to them anymore because they've hit the age. where they've aged out of being physically intimidating. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Anyway, I mean, taking it, like, I've seen the, the, I've seen that, that escalation of, like, when, when the world no longer has to listen to you, it goes a lot of different ways. And taking a swing at the person is one way. I've seen, uh, people just drop trow and just take a dump on the spot. Right. just in protest of not being listened to.

So it really just, it runs the gamut, you know? Yeah, no fixing that. If that's how you got everything else in your life up to this point, I kind of, I'm amazed at the... Well, I mean, it's fixed now for this particular situation. Sure, for this particular instance. Yeah, man. Like, a battle shit is just...

No one No one's ready for a battle shit, dude. That's fucking Uh, anyways. All right. Um, moving on. Oh, hey, can I take a quick break?

I gotta feed this, don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure thing. Excuse me. Uh, right. Oh, I have a part of my week that I forgot to talk about if that's all right. Mm-hmm. Uh, I have now hit the level of learning permit slash driving proficiency

that practice. driving with wife in the car does not include panicked screaming. Okay. Does not include Oh my God, oh my God, slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down. Like, does not include that anymore.

This is good. This is good. Yeah. It includes, hey, hey, that's a little fast. Hey, yo, oh, no, that spots too tight. Good shit. Et cetera. That's an L with like a different color around the border.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. So that's nice Nice Which means I can now be the designated Arrind driver For the foreseeable future Cool cool

That's uh yeah Good stuff Yeah Man Um No the The um It has that been your experience

Where just the wife is just like Oh fuck It's gonna crash It's been okay Um It's it's been No it has not been that It's been quite

It's been a good bit chill. Though right now, I'm mainly just again becoming this fucking cargo bike mom, you know. Yeah. I'm doing a bunch of that.

And it's fun because she enjoys the fact that you can actually see outside and, you know, take it all in as you're going about it. It's a more engaging ride. So it's a lot of fun. And yeah, it's fun to also. take a couple of like trips where, you know, Punch Mom and Baby will jump in the front

and we'll just like go down to the park and chill have a nice time. So no, no, oh dear God, oh sweet Jesus, Lord of Mercy. Just, just yet, just yet. Anyway, I don't know if you saw, but pretty much like, yeah, just a little bit ago. as we're starting here, some dusk blood whispers and rumors and leaks are starting to go around. A lot of blood-based characters. Yeah, they basically have a description of like the cast so far of if you don't want to find out about it until later than, you know, tune out. But it seems like they've got 14 playable characters or classes.

And they're all a bunch of freaks. They're all bunch of weirdos. Everyone's some kind of horrible blood monster. person with a fucked up past that did some horrible shit and now every time they walk a swamp appears behind them or some

shit um yeah whole like like this cast of 14 you're reading about here you know none of these are all people that are like oh that's bad this is this is

probably a fucked up person and this game is probably going to be just like there are no heroes here type of thing, you know, reluctant or otherwise. I, you know why I'm really excited to play Dustblood this weekend? I don't know what the fuck that game is. Don't know what it is.

Don't, like, they've described it, and the descriptions don't help at all. What are these characters going to be doing and is extracting one of those things? I don't know. I don't know what any of this is going to be. but it might just be the Canehurst show. Yeah, no. The word blood is like in every single one of those character descriptions all over the place.

Yeah. Blood eater, rare blood hunters, killed his sister, blood spatter. And then there's also a lot of rot and swamp, foul rot and candle snuffing. Can I just say, if we're going to talk about breaking news, I'm watching something that is just the absolute peak of leaked footage for anything. I'm watching a minute-long clip of Grand Theft Auto 6th gameplay that's leaked out. And it is a guy doing donuts on the highway

and like beating one guy with a wrench and like doing everything he could do to not show anything cool at all. Like, it's so wild. How it's always that. I mean, that sounds like GTA, sure. Yeah. Checks out.

That's who gets access. So fucking funny. That's, that's who gets access to the games early and then films it and puts it online. That's the same clip ends with driving up to a helicopter and then it cuts. Yeah. No, the same, the same mind that's like, oh man let me show the shit

out of line it'll be so fucking sick is the same one making the decisions of what to play and how to show off what they're show at what they're seeing. I don't think we'll ever be oh you can see my reflection that's fucking window. That's crazy we're so we're so far from

a non-descript barn with a CRT in the middle of the frame dude that's been the best ever it's we're so far from that you know the level of security that you will never think to achieve ever with your leaks as opposed to just like, no, my uncle literally does work there.

And now he's fired. Damn, that's crazy, bro. Anyways, we also saw, there's some, some Kingdom Hearts stuff. They announced Kingdom Hearts, the series. Do you mean the television series? The television series for Disney Plus? That's nuts. That's crazy.

Does this also imply that the television series will be, own story and events that are canonical and important? I don't fucking know, man. Will they take place between the dark road and melody of memory? Maybe. Hey, by the way, do you remember when we talked about Missing Link and how the games were just going to continue as if Missing Link was like a fucking thing that came out and happened and people knew about?

Ish. In the Kingdom Hearts 4 trailer, there's like a, like the first trailer they put out has like a, like a stinger of like, um, Sora going,

no, Sigurd to like save somebody. And I'm like, who the fuck is Sigurd? Oh, he was going to be one of the main characters of missing link. So like that trailer was cut with the assumption

that that character existed. That you knew who that guy was. Oh boy. So already. It's already happening. And yep, Coco is going to be in it as well. That's cool.

Yeah. All the modern stuff. People are correct. That does mean Mexico exists in Kingdom Hearts. And everything that goes along with it. Can you give me a second? B or B. Yes.

Cool. You good? Yes. You shit your pants? No, no, no. Good, good, good, good. All good. Today's a good day.

Winning. Pats clean, still winning. So yeah, KH4, the series. I can't fucking wait to see a Kingdom Hearts TV show, dude. Do you just go full Pixar style and call it a day.

I don't give a fuck. No, fuck it. Live action. I want it live action like the WB. Oh my God. Yeah. Like the fucking Flash or fucking Smallville or shit. Talking to,

talking to, what you can call it, Donald and Goofy in their Disney outfit mascot. Yeah. Good. Perfect. Yeah.

Um. And, you know, bummer news, but rest in peace to Hayden Penetary, the voice of Kyrie, who passed away as well this week. Just crazy that that happened with the timing of everything else going on. That fucking sucks. And, well, I think that's it as far as that subject goes. I did see as well, unsurprisingly but skybound entertainment

the the Invisible versus team laid off 75% of their staff so yeah not not not you know

didn't sales didn't didn't equal the numbers they were hoping for etc and there that goes quarter up I think specifically the the dev team besides the publisher um and sucks man because i feel like the the

people that made k i absolutely do deserve uh better but and they also deserve a better project i think that's a talented team that could make some cool shit but like you know it's it it doesn't surprise me that the results were what they were with like just kind of how the game sort of looked even though it played better than it looked. But that's what's happening. You know, back in the day, there was enough leeway to go around that you could just bomb a couple times in a row

before the team disintegrated, because that's what you did. You made games. And now everybody is, I mean, shit, we've been talking about it. Fuck it. When's the video game crash going to happen? when's it when's it gonna happen and then you come to this podcast and me and you are being like it's been happening for years this is just another one of them like yeah i think underperform the whole team with fucking poof but at the same time too you'd be looking at a company

that was like putting out i guess multiple things and yeah you'd you'd tank a hit and and or and or there'd be different performing products or so but if you're looking at this you're looking at a team that was put together from a previous team that left another project that ended and they put out one thing here. This one thing didn't, lightning didn't strike. It didn't fucking set the world on fire and that's the end of that. And it seems increasingly more and more like, yeah, you get, you get one shot and that one shot might not even be tied to how your game performs and how successful it is to begin with, really, as we've proven many a time. But

yeah, that... Congrats. It was a big success, but it was not as big as a success as everybody thought it was going to be. So, like, I can't wait for, like, take two, for their stock to crash after GTA6 comes out

because it didn't sell two billion units in a day. Yeah, since you didn't buy three copies for everyone in your family, it's automatically going to not be profitable. Failed to meet expectations, you know? There was supposed to be two copies

for every human being on Earth. Yeah. Anyway, that's pretty much the deal. I mean, I actively am like there's like always eight other AI stories that I'm just like, I don't fucking care, I can't. I just don't give a shit. Yeah, we're going to go through a whole thing, probably a whole generation of it.

maybe a little bit more. It'd be what it be. It is what it is. But whenever there's a wild CEO comment like that, or just Patrice Desilade losing his fucking mind at the very least, we're like, okay. Yeah, that was outside of the norm even for the shit news. Like, I think you can go back to like the moment he left that company where I think

we were already recording by that point and just following like, oh, man, can't wait to see what Amsterdam's going to look. look like this sounds like something cool. Wow, they keep fucking... All these things get in the way. And then just to unceremoniously wet fart yourself out of anyone giving a shit.

Anyway. Let's take a letter. I love letters. That's not true. Send a letter to Castle's Superbeastmail at gmail.com. That's Castle's Superbeastmail at gmail.com. Let's see. All right.

Let's take one. over here from Jacob who says, Dear Players of Lupe Fiasco's least favorite Street Fighter 2 characters. This is true. A couple days ago, a couple years ago, I got into trades and I have not had as much time

to play video games during busy season as I would like. As an HVAC technician, we're really busy during the summertime. You make sense? When Delta Rune Chapter 3 and 4 came out, I was working a 50-hour work week and despite knowing I could, I decided not to spend my weekend trying to beat the super boss of Chapter 3.

What are some of the optional challenges you knew you'd enjoy overcoming but still chose not to do? Oh, I've probably given up on beating lingering will in Kingdom Hearts 2. Look, I was talking a persona about it, and I'm like, oh, I'm not really looking forward to going back and getting the rest of those data fights in Kingdom Hearts 2. And he was just like, man, should just shut the fuck up and go fucking watch the goddamn 358 days cutscenes. I mean, to me, there's far and away an absolute clear answer here, and that is Simo, the Divergent Star. Oh, yeah? No, you know, that whole section of the barrel tower? You know what that, you know what that's for? No. You know what that shit is for? That shit is for nine years from now when I go through E33 with the boy for the first time since I beat it.

Sure. And then once we're all done, I'm like, okay, so I'm going to finally get on this fucking shit again. The Expedition 33 super bosses are the sickest shit ever, and I am not doing them now. There will be a time. There will be a place, but that time and place is not now. I think there's a lot of bosses that the more interesting discussion is bosses that you like, yeah, I did it. I worked really hard for it. And it just totally

fucking wasn't worth it at all. Which is a lot of them. You get nothing for it. Or you get something for it and it unlocks something and you're like, cool, I'm never going to use this shit ever. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, in many cases, the deal is you beat the super boss

and you get an item that breaks the rest of the game for you. Yeah. Right? Because it shows that you've overcome the battle system to that degree that you should be allowed to just cakewalk. through everything. Or, you know, your, your, your, your, your metaphor thing where you get a little bit of extra story and, and such.

But ultimately, yeah, I'm going to say, I'm going to say the, the special go fuck yourself DLC in Expedition 33 is, it's the coolest shit ever. That's a great pick. It's the coolest shit ever, but no. Um, yeah, that'll do. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that is also my answer. because like I took a swing at the dualists. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For an evening. And bro, I made like fucking anti-progress. Like I was doing worse than when I started and was like, okay, this could take a bit. So that's the thing is just looking at the Divergent Star is like you sit there once or twice and you start to then map out what your evening is going to look like. And with this one, you go, how many evenings? Because it's not going to be one. Especially with limitations being what they are. You're not going to sit there and no life this game the entire weekend.

You're not going to, you know, it's going to take a fucking minute. What are the, how many tries? And, you know, this is having done, millennia and Moog the hard way, mind you. So, yeah. Oh, I gotta go. I suddenly have to go. No, we're wrapping up. I'm done. That's about it. All right, have a good week, everybody.

Bye-bye.