Castle Super Beast - CSB387: The Hypest You've Ever Been For Elder Abuse

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Download MP3 | Watch Video Episode Full Timestamps: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQJVenQfpu1jJqHwNdI96dydy40Dm6DmCBeIa6V6ROXJqPkboUJ-L6OnFIMT7GsB9o6fRaIbh8qrkWk/pub Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive Zero Company - Zero Active Devs MGS4 is a Time Capsule Game The DLSS5 Horror show FF14 Is a Shotgun Sony Lawyers: Only An Idiot Would Think Buying Digital Means Ownership NEW CASTLE SUPER BEAST "LEGACY" SHIRT & DESKMAT AVAILABLE NOW: https://www.orchideight.com/collections/castle-super-beast Go to http://BUYRAYCON.com/superbeastOPEN to get 20% off the Essential Open Earbuds! Take control of your income. Start your free trial at http://SHOPIFY.COM/superbeast Go to http://heroforge.com and use code CASTLE to get 5% off on all orders of physical miniatures. Docket: Hi-Fi Rush has been subjected to the DLSS 5 slop filter; the results are about as disturbing as you'd think GTA6 footage The studio behind Star Wars Zero Company, which is currently a Steam bestseller, has reportedly furloughed the majority of its staff Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux on September 10 Sony lawyers argue that nobody is stupid enough to believe they actually own digital games, because then only one person could buy GTA 6 Godzilla DAMM: Remastered dev isn't worried about launching close to GTA VI, knows Godzilla fans will show up. Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered is coming to Switch 2 Nov. 3rd, 2026 EXCLUSIVE-DOOM: The Dark Ages Revelations Faced 'Worst Crunch' in Franchise History - Insider Gaming Onimusha: Way of the Sword Review Thread : r/Games

Sorry. I literally just, I saw, did brutal legend guy see the news? And I'm like, what news? And I clicked on a thing here. And I see right now double fine promises to make brutal legend too, but only if fans give them $100 million. Wait, what? That's about right. That's about right.

What? Is this real? That's the Tim Schaefer way of doing business. Is this actually a Kickstarter? No, there's a, there's a. That's an onion. That's an onion shenanigans. Maybe.

Hold on. No, no, no, no, no. This appears to be real. Amnesia 4-96 reboot Kickstarter. Oh, my goodness. This appears to be real. Second. Well, real as in, real as in, that, no, they're not going to get $100 million.

Okay, it's a stretch goal for their new thing, but it's, yeah, okay, but it's a goofy, That's pretty funny. All right. A stretch goal within the thing is we're going to, yeah, all right, sure. I feel bad for Brutal Legend guy because Brutal Legend guy in our chat loves Brutal legend. He's named himself after a character from Brutal Legend. And he clearly loves Brutal Legend and Brutal Legend has cool stuff in it.

Yeah. But like Brutal Legend is like one of the easiest games I've ever played to just get super mad about and complain. I love the idea of Brutal Legend in so many ways. I love the idea of the brutal legend that was carefully managed to release. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the brutal legend that I played to completion. To be fair, too, it is a bit of a time capsule of that era of Jack Black, you know,

before we started getting the eyebrow memes and the chicken jockey, etc. I'm getting that chicken jockey shit. But I'm not a child, so you know, whatever. Sure, sure. Hey, man. But we did go see fucking Pickett Destiny. Six-seven. I did.

And are able to recite Master Exploder and fucking the showdown with the devil, like word for word. So picket destiny was a. Yeah. Pickett Destiny was a really great movie to see in theaters in the year that it came out. Yeah. Yeah. I tried to rewatch it relatively recently, and boy, outside of that context, it's a slightly rougher watch.

But that's why it's so weird when you're like, I'm not a child, and it's like, oh, I guess that is what Jack Black is now, but that's not what it was for me for a long time. You know, I guess the transition point was, I guess, School of Rock. I haven't seen it, but I hear it's really good. Oh, School of Rock's incredible, but that predates Pick of Destiny. school rock was like his first was it? Oh yeah never mind then

He's very young in that Okay so that it's the Jumanji era Yeah the Jumangi era is is your switch over Right which I remember last time That was a confusing moment of talking about how That that that version of Hollywood is now the anchor of what makes money Um anyways All right brutal legend

Sure also You go, brutal legend. Now with more dead actors or dead talent than living. Okay, so. Ozzie Lemmy. Ozzie Lemmy and Tim are gone now. And the bands. Mm-hmm.

Like the like the musical cast list is... significantly deader than it was 20 years ago, obviously, but like, ooh. Yeah. Dash zero, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are a joking. You are not real. When did Ozzy die? You are not real. Ozzy died like 25 years ago, but he made a deal with the devil to puppet his

skeleton up onto that stage. And then for the last show, he did a big, insane tribute thing basically like going, I'm about to be dead as soon as the show's over and everyone came out and did a huge tribute is a big thing. He died publicly. That's very cool. He died super publicly. Like that is that is very rock star. It was crazy. It was it was exactly what he wanted to do. So much has reached out to me and explained that Kinitzugami is the good version of brutal legend and they're completely right. Oh, really? Did you play Kunits? Canizum no, I meant to after Pragata, but I didn't get to it. I did not get all the way through it. I got about halfway through it before I got distracted by other stuff.

Kunitsugami is like legitimately absolutely amazing. It's, it's incredible. It is what brutal legend like wishes it could be. The, the, big secret to making brutal legend work, like from its RTS stuff,

was to change the camera, was to pull the camera way out and make you a tiny little action guy. I guess. Have the scale be really small. I, but I was like, not, not hundreds versus hundreds, like 10, versus 10. But the genre is the least interesting thing about that game to me.

It's just... That was the problem. Yeah, I was in on obviously the themes and the visuals and everything else going on with it. Like, I would just... I would have been equally as happy at the time with a Brutal Legend movie. Brutal Legend

existed in the time. This is hard to imagine. Where video footage of a game was at a serious premium. Like a very serious premium. And so screenshots were almost all that you had to go off of. And that game looked like it was going to be

an action adventure a la like a Zelda. I remember there was one piece of footage of like a later mission and it was when you get the guys with the speakers on their backs. And it was not clear that that mission was you recruiting them as

units for your army. It looked like, oh, we're going to go find some cool rock star guys. Some cool rock star guys. and do like a Defend Escort Mission or whatever. No, that game is in a world, in an alternate reality, that game is a successful

random movie franchise like Kung Fu Panda style that just comes out every couple years with a bunch of metal characters in a fantasy setting. And, you know, all the energy that went into metal oculips and,

um, uh, fact, you know, just gets transferred into a series show like that or a movie like that. Easy. But that is not to be.

That is not the world we live in. What's going on? A lot. A lot. It's September. Which starts in August, which is strange. Technically, yes. Because so does the week.

Yeah. It's September. Woo! You can go down to my blue sky or my Twitch channel. There's goals. There's many goals for you. As of last night, I'm now contractually obligated to do an earthbound let's play. So that'll be interesting. I've never played more than like 15 minutes of that game. Back in like 1990, whatever. It's really good.

Next up is a fan fix stream of pages choosing, which is going to be awful. The only thing I'll say about earthbound is that, Um, it is, its strength is its vibes. And those vibes can be enhanced or ruined by having a live audience with you as you go through it. Lit. Yeah. We've, we've also hit the goal for a dress-up stream with caboose where we'll get him some costumes. D-a-ha-ha-ha.

And dress him up like a little baby. He looks like he can't wait. Are you a little baby? Uh, there's a lot on that list. There's actually way too many things on that list to go. through right now. But I will say the top goal on that on that thing is an unreasonable goal

that will not be reached unless one of you is particularly nuts which is I'm going to just do an LP of the Witcher 3 remastered in all of its DLCs. So good luck hitting that shit, idiots. You're not gonna. And somehow that's crazier than the other LP on that list.

Oh yeah, which one? There's a couple. There's Okami. Ocami is that shit. Okami is absolutely bad shit. It's not that bad shit. It's not that bad shit. I might have built it up in my head to be this insurmountable. Well, no, no, no. Okami's that shit, but Witcher 3 is like, and its DLCs is like three Okami's. Okay. That's completely unreasonable. It's quite a lot. Fair. I'm not going to do every fucking side quest if we get there. No, fuck that. But like, I think the result of Okami being a punchline for the last 13 years has made it see. like the longest game in the world to me. Yeah.

Because of that. But no, the trick is, the trick is that we keep saying, Okami 1, Okami 2, Okami 3. But the thing is that Okami 1 is 12 hours and Okami 2 is 12 hours. And Okami 3 is 12 hours. Yes, I just realistically, now that we're, you know, living in this world of Eldon Rings and such, I think it's simply that like, and also persona games that fuck with your expectations.

I think it was that Okami was one of the first times I've ever had a game set itself up to 50. feel like it's wrapping up and then not not wrap up for an extremely long time like it feels like you're going through the motions of the closing acts of of everything that's been set up there's a there's credits yeah so that's what it is it's it's it was one of the first times ever feeling that and like that's the only video games you know what i mean do you have that feeling like you're you're you know i don't know that getting to like part way through a book and or even a movie i don't no. It's just in Okami, it really felt like I was satisfied and ready for it to end. And it felt like

we know and we're wrapping it up. And then it just kept going. And now that we've had many games that like have, I'm sure, blown past that length and everything expectation wise, it can't be anywhere near as nuts as it is in my head. But I really was not ready for that. And I also realized in that moment that I don't like that. Even if it's a 20. Yeah. Really? I don't like that feeling. I really hate it. I hated it in every persona game. If it's a 20-hour game, but it feels like it's starting to wrap up at 10 and everything is like, I, hmm, like, it's, if you're doing a like, oh, wait, there's one more thing or like a kind of, if there's a way to do that, I guess, that is not as bad, but the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

really slow rolling credits over the course of hours as you do what feels like, you know, then you mom. You're crazy. You're crazy. You're absolutely nuts. What? You didn't like Neer automata? But I guess that's a different version of it because it had a bunch of short, like complete things that ended before you'd think they would. So I didn't get the same feeling there.

I'm describing not the Neurotomita feeling because that was great. That worked really well. That's not what I mean. And acts coming to a conclusion also works really well. If I feel like something has an act that's closing, that totally is not what I'm describing. I think I'm trying to describe Well, I always think that this is where we fare Say for a Well part from P4 Golden

You know But the feeling of one long thing That has a moment of like You have pretty much completed Almost everything there is to it But now the Simpsons couch gag wall Is stretching back as you try to reach your ending Mm-hmm

That's kind of, it's a different feeling from act has closed we've begun a new act you know it's it's the feeling of those it's all been one but that one won't close it's actually totally disagree

I actually I violently disagree there's a recent game that came out that I won't I won't describe anything about it at all because it I don't want you know this gimmick but you go through what looks to be like a full game and then after

hitting credits you hit the title screen and it says name of the game two. Okay. And it and it starts a brand new game that is larger than the first one. But that's different from what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about you agree with because we know that we, that Okami shit was crazy at the time. Well, here's, here's the thing I'm talking about is the thing that we all didn't like about Okami. It's that feeling. Oh no, no, no, no, hold on, hold on, hold on. Don't say that we all didn't like about Okami. Okay, the thing that we were making fun of about Okami when you go through the tunnel and

then you get to a new, a new map. And you're like, I can't believe this game is not over yet. And the game's like, yeah, I've got another few hours for you. Because the main thing is that Okami didn't fool me. Like, because when you beat the first big boss at the end of Okami 1, you have like four of 12 abilities. Like you can see it on your menu that you just don't have like most of the stuff in the game. And you don't have your Okami heart pieces.

And so I was actually, what happened to me when I'm rolling credits on Okami 1 was I was like confused. I was like, wait, what? I was like, oh, and then I was like, oh, okay, I see how it is. Okay. Well, I just, I mean, I'm going off of whatever the feeling was, whatever that came out, you know. But credit roll or not even, I guess. um yeah it i don't i just i the thing that i'm i'm describing doesn't it doesn't necessarily feel like it doesn't bother me with acts coming to a close like near in fact i loved how near was doing it and i also

um really like the versions from uh zero scape you know um i think those that that method of doing it is really cool too like i'm actually down with that um there's a little bit of this also in some of the day in dangan rompa v1 and v2 um i feel like there's a little bit of this going on as well a little bit of that like pull pull pull pull um but yeah i don't know that's that's that's that's that's the vague description of oh by the way before we get too far away from it i saw a comment just scroll by i was like i think people really oversold how big which or three is to pat no no pat sold it to himself with his 215-hour complete map completion

100% safe file on gog.com. Like, no, Pat, Pat is the source for Pat describing the Witcher 3 stuff. Right. Of course, the best thing that a game that's extremely long can do

is not feel like it's dragging. Yeah. So, you know, and that's all in pacing. and direction, right? I love Okami. Okami's a good game. You know what I don't love about Okami? Mm-hmm.

Like the fucking... Banger Kizui noise. The fucking bleep bloops for every single character. Yeah. That's fine. I feel like there's too much dialogue for that. There's too much of it. That doesn't bug me too much.

I don't mind the Banja Kizui dialogue. Um, but yeah, I don't know. Did, uh, any, anything, uh, particular stand out this week? Yeah, I played the Star Wars Zero Company. I hear that game is really fucking good. Uh, being abbreviated to Z-Com. Mm-hmm. Um, so, uh, that game is really good.

So good that the entire studio got furloughed. Yeah, we're going to talk about that in a second during, during this discussion. So, uh, Star Wars Z company is really, really, really, simple. It is Midnight Suns-ish but Star Wars instead of Marvel. And it's

mixes the X-com gameplay loop of tactical base, hide behind cover, turn-based squad thing, aim 90% oh, you missed it with Star Wars, but in between you are wandering around on your base like a Mass Effect character,

chit-chatting with your squad. And you will will go into missions and you will explore a small version of the level like a mass fact character. So when a stormtrooper shoots and it says 75% and completely whiffs point blank, it's actually canonical because their aim is that bad. So the game, so the game does a lot of things, like a lot of things that are really, really smart additions to the XCOM formula that also work perfectly in Star Wars. So one, yeah, people missing. their shots point blank in Star Wars,

way easier to believe. Way easier to like internalize than, you know, a ballistic weapon in Excom or whatever. Also, when you have a guy with like a repeater or like a heavy blaster or something like that, when they, when they do a shot and they, you know, they,

they fire the blaster and you get like 10 damage, they never, ever, except if it's a sniper rifle or a single, like a hand blaster, whatever. But for all the, the multi-hit assault rifles, they never, ever, ever hit all the shots. They hit, like, half of the shots that they're firing. And a bunch of them go really wide.

Like, really, really wide. Has any Star Wars extended cannon ever come out to be like, no, there's a thing with the tech that makes it super hard to aim? Yes, yes, there is. I knew it. I knew it. I can feel it coming. There's a force disruption that makes aiming hard. The tech is too unwieldy. In one of the Star Wars technical manuals,

they describe a manufacturing defect with like the rifles that were sent to guys on the Death Star. Oh my God. So their shots go super wide. And we always have to do something. It's been fucking decades. And also the helmets are bad. Yeah, of course there'd be a fucking explanation.

But so there's that. But the other thing that they do is that's really smart is that if you if you just beef a shot really bad as long as the character you're shooting at isn't up against a wall or like some other like very hard structure when you miss you'll blow up their cover so and they'll be like standing like out so even if you you beef it you still got something out of it most of the time which is now an enemy that's like very very vulnerable um and the other thing is that every turn somebody on your team gets the ability to call for backup.

So you'll be, you'll say, hey, Cab, I want you to back up my shot. So you select the ability and you go select another party member that it has your target within line of sight. And you go, okay, when I shoot, I want you to shoot as well. And the backup shot is 100%. Oh, nice. Okay.

So there is, there is no turn that you don't hit something, even one. guy, yeah, yeah, okay. Is it, are you creating characters? Are they, like, party members preset? Yes, no. So you start the game with two guys, and then you get a third guy very soon, and they are defined party members that have, like, voice acting and little storyline elements, and they hang out in the base, and you go up and you talk to them, and they have, like,

maybe a mission for them, that kind of thing, right? But you can completely respect them into any class that you want. want and you can respect all their skills. And then you are also hiring extras on top of that, like, you know, to fill out the roster. And those characters also have voice acting. Like the generated characters also have voice acting and will also hang out on the base and talk to people. But you can also customize them top to bottom. And they're random.

And it's not just... They're randomized as they come in. Yeah, pseudo-randomized. There's only so many. Okay. Right. and when I say you can respect them

it's not when you get them you can just like decide I want to be a sniper now I want to be a medic I want to be an assault at any point and it's free respect on everything

and then for all the the characters that you hired you can also change every single part of their look you can change their race their gender every single piece of their clothing etc

in a game with permadeff that makes sense yeah Permadeth is really hard to get in this game Permadeth is there but it is just when your character hits

zero health they get injured and you pick them back up and then they take some accuracy penalties and then they have a second injury and then they have a third injury and if you get injured three times then they're cooked okay okay

but like that you have a big lead time on whether or not a character's in danger. Because Mugenics was like, you go down once, take, and get touched, and you're gone forever. Cooked. Yeah. Okay. The main thing is that the game is super slick. All its disparate elements work really well.

The Star Wars stuff is really interesting. It's just great. It's just great. There's only two problems. One is the performance is terrible. Wow. it runs fucking bad like really bad

I had to install a mod to tweak settings to get it to run properly anybody out there on console I don't know I think I think people are saying it's a little stuttery but it's not so bad on console I got it working all right on PC but I mean I have a beefy PC

the other thing that I could start to feel what was starting to happen is the way that it works is you'll do like little operations that are like you know those little Assassin's Creed Facebook kind of things

where it's just like send an operator Oh you succeeded kind of like dispatchy Yeah just yeah yeah And you do a couple of those Before you have to do a combat mission

And when you do a combat mission The cycle rotates forward And you know That's your time So it's like Ah five days or 13 days or whatever Grab some of your units And you're gone for a while

Or something Yeah Yeah The game's 40 days long. And so when you go to the subreddit, half of the posts are, this game has no endless mode. I beat the game super fast. I wanted to keep playing on that file.

Why can't I keep playing on that file? And so people are hoping for some kind of endless mode or long war mode or, you know, support for it because it's also got a couple of votes here in there. You can't just New Game Plus indefinitely after the fact. No, no. It's a narrative game. which is strange for like this type of thing. And so people are holding out hope for that,

which is tough because, as we now know, almost everybody on the team got furloughed. About 80-ish percent of the team got furloughed. And in looking into this, I have discovered that Bit Reactor is the team. They have come out and said, yeah, this was actually our decision. EA had nothing to do with this.

We ran out of money. We overshot our finances on development for this game, and we just ran out of money a month ago. Once again, we're describing a negative story that is happening to a studio that just

released a successful Star Wars game. I don't know what to say. You released a successful, super huge IP game. They furloughed everybody except the people on hand to do bug support after release and are saying that we hope it does well so that we can hire everybody back with the money that we get from the publisher arrangement. So apparently this was weeks ago. It was.

This was weeks ago. Before the release even. Now, the reason why this came out was because the co-owners of the studio are. suing each other as to who owns the studio. That is also going on. Ah. Well, that complicates things quite a bit. That is a factor in this.

And that definitely takes resources away from the studio itself and thus the employees. Yes. Well, shit. So, EA's off the hook for this one. The Bit Reactor managed itself into the ground. the people steering the ship

just aimed right at the rocks didn't see that coming critically acclaimed everybody loves it doing gangbusters and no it is doing it is doing gangbusters and it is doing extremely well and it's very good so I actually suspect

that those people many of those people will come back off of furlough but well I Um, so there's, there, okay, we talk a lot in, in, in, in, in, in, in the show about how evil the man is. And the man, the man is evil. Yeah. Don't get it twisted. But this is crazy. But this is two weeks in a row right now of us being like, you stay away from the man. But, but like, well, you mentioned Tim Schaefer joking about asking for a hundred million to, uh, make Brutal Legend to. Um, there's a lot of developers out there that are helmed by like artists. who should know more about running a business than nothing? Because like Double Fine spent itself into the ground on every project for like 15 years.

Yeah. Like Psychonauts too was just not going to come out unless they got bought by Microsoft because they just ran out of cash. I always praise the producers and people that we've worked with or rather that back in the QA days. that came from positions like QA or testing or programming and then know the bones of the product and then learn how to do the production side and then use that as momentum to go further, you know, as they basically are like,

I understand how the game works and what the needs are from ground all the way up to the top so I can make better decisions. I, that's the most, that's the best people for those gigs in those situations have always had that pathway. trajectory. But you have to learn how each of those steps works. You know, if you just get into that top position without actually learning how any of the shit works, then the exact opposite problem will happen where, yes, the managing side of things and the ability to not fuck up

the decision making and have a whole team that did a great job now, have to sit on their asses and wonder what the fuck is going on, you know? Like, um, scope creep, which is, is when you just start adding things or refuse to cut things can come from any part of management. It can come from the company publisher side. It can come from the director. It can come from the art lead.

You know, whatever. Oh, what if we just put that in? Or I really don't want to take that out. I don't care if we don't have the money. Well, at some point, in the system that we live, the money has to money or money, no money for your money. Well, I would imagine, speaking of money, that if this game is doing what it's doing,

you would imagine and hope that regardless of what happens with these two co-owners fighting over this team, or fighting over this company, the team of people that made it could be employed anywhere to support this game

and continue doing things that money, money, money, the mouse wants its money. Big Burger Day was a big burger success. Please hire back the burger makers. However. So we have more Big Burger Day. But yes, for two weeks in a row, you stay away from the CEO. You leave my corporation alone.

This was also a Mass Effect Andromeda. This is exactly what happened, Mass Effect Andromeda, where the people running that game had explicit, no interference from EA at all, and ran that game into the ground. And that also happened with Anthem, where the Patrick Soderland played Anthem. It was like, the flying is really cool. but the rest is, uh, and like, the flying was supposed to be like the tutorial only.

And so they're like, oh, shit, the game sucks. Let's just pile everything into the flying thing. And it's like, guys, Jesus Christ. Okay, I need to hang up Anthem forever in my brain. And if you can answer this, the question, this might help me. I believe Anthem's dead, so it's hung up for you. Oh, no, I know. But I'm talking about that thing where I'm like, I just wanted a game where I can make a cool Iron Man suit that I can customize and, and,

that's it, right? And fucking fight and use it. Anthem wasn't even that game at the end. That's the craziest part. You just, you know, so warframes, you don't really, you, you, you, warframes are like, how much customizing can you do of your warframe? It's like, I just want to know. When you put the cool, the cool suit on, it does a bunch of stuff.

Aesthetically, you can, you can change a ton, ton of stuff. A lot. Yeah, okay, cool, cool, cool, all right. Basically, the way, the way that, the way that, the way that warframe works is, So Warframes are free to play game. Yeah. So before we even get in here, the money, like dollars is a factor here on the customization, right? One of Warframes unlocks is pallets where you'll unlock a different type of palette.

And the palette is like hundreds of colors. And those all interact with the thing in a certain way. On top of that, there is a enormous skin system. So there's your base skin. There's the model of the warframe, and then you can change that. And on top of that, there's your Sondana, which is your cape,

which you've probably seen a million warframe characters, have a million different capes. And on top of that, there's the head piece, then there's the shoulder pieces, the knee pieces, the chest piece, and all of these can be mixed and match individually and then colored individually and thrown on. They have ephemeras now, which are footstep effects.

Okay. Um, et cetera. So I made, um, uh, let's see if I can find this pasture. And, and with that information, the final memories of Anthem

have turned to dust in my brain. Like, I'm, okay, I'm not able to find it, but like I made a, um, I made a,

an Aros, which is an Egyptian themed mech into a fairly convincing, uh, Anubis. Okay. From Zone of the Enders. Okay.

Like, uh, like, uh, like, customize the glow, so the glow is red and get the right brown and the right

tan and get the right Egyptian head. Because I feel like the level of cool fucking, the level of cool customization that you can do to like an armored core, but on a power suit is like, that's what I was like... Well, warframes aren't suits. They're weird fucking things.

There's no person in there. That thing is the thing. Oh, it's not power armor. No, it's a, it's a thing. A Warframe is a, is a, is a guy. Like a gross guy. Okay. Well, okay, sure. But for, I mean, for lore purposes, right? But like, aesthetically, it's, it's a power suit, right? Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's no, there's no, it's no person in there. It's goo. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. But it's not a robot. It's, it's a humanoid. And that's a cyborg. Yeah, so of the two categories, you lean, exactly, like you have your, it's

more guyverish, as you said. So those are the two things. I'm like, okay. And so Armored Corps has that level of customization. You go fucking sick and all that stuff. And I remember Anthemos like, oh, cool. You can customize and good things or whatever. But if Warframe is doing that and that, then great.

And then on Warframe, you have your ship. That's your little hub for your character. And you can customize every single thing about that ship and decorate it like, you know, a goddamn Animal Crossing House. Because then there's the ship you have on the loading screen. Then there's your cat or dog or whatever. and then that is like its own system with its, like, it is, it is

crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy on the customization. Okay, yeah, that, that checks out. Because I also remember like, you know, we've talked about it, but like with Destiny, the main thing was I was just like, I just, I wish it wasn't an FPS, but that's the whole point of what that studio does well, so. Like,

on top of that, um, oh, it's leaving. It's, oh, I'm old. Oh, it's gone. Bye. It's gone. Okay, good, that's fine. But yeah, no, making your Warframe pretty is a big part of it.

The main thing is that the frame is always going to have to be recognizable as the frame. Yeah. Like, if you have it in Aros, it's always going to kind of look like a vaguely Egyptian-looking guy. If you have a sarin, it's always going to be kind of bulky and disease-looking. Like, it has to fit its same thing. Oh, they have a program called Tenogen. That's what I wanted to say. So Tenogen is their ongoing customization thing.

And very simply, it is, hey, Warframe fans, would you like to generate assets for Warframe? And then you can license them to us, and then we will put them in the game. So like a huge amount of the Warframe customization is like mods that have been integrated into the game. And then they kick back some money down to the modders. and then it's actually an asset that everyone else is seeing. It's not just local tiers. And the tenogen stuff is like the best stuff, easy. Like the people who make the tenogen stuff are making easily the best stuff in the game.

Okay. Because, yeah, I'm not going to pretend that the Sirius and Orion stuff didn't raise an eyebrow. That shit's super cool. But either way, all right, goodbye Anthem forever and ever and ever. Amen. Yeah, no, honestly, if you want what you thought Anthem was, actually Warframe is. probably the closest to that. It's not the same.

It's ninjas. Yeah, and you're not flying directly just flying. If you're really good, you're flying. But bullet jumping is an approximation of flight. It's supposed to nowadays anyway, emulates like an anime ninja popping off the walls.

Like a like a Shinobi with the red cape. I had a question about the Zcom. are lightsaber Good acronym Good acronym Are lightsaber is 100% accurate?

I don't know Ah I didn't get that far Ah They really They really tickle your balls On that one Because you run into a character

And they're wearing a certain look And you're like Hmm But they don't do anything And then they're like Ah well can we work together And they're maybe But I got to go over here

and then as they leave, they go, may the force be with you, and you're like, oh, it's you. Okay. But melee can't miss. All melee is 100% accuracy, so sure. Fair. Sure.

Done. Yeah. That makes sense. But, yeah, no. Super, super cool game. Seeing every, like, the game needs patches, and it does need, like, maybe an extra mode to keep playing forever. So seeing that everybody is currently.

laid off is not super endearing to keep going. So maybe I'll put that on the shelf until I see what the fuck is going on with that. Maybe. I don't know. Is there a live service team that's still... No, there's a team

that's left for patches. Not those patches are... Not live service, but like, yeah, live support rather. Yes. Okay. Yeah. This is a very bad piece of news alongside a very cool game. Aside from that,

I went back and I've been playing the PC port of the Metal Gear Solid 4. Finally free. Finally free. So the port is excellent. The port is absolutely fantastic. It runs like a dream. It looks

fantastic, etc. The shaky cam in some of the cutscenes goes a little crazy at the higher frame rate I don't know if they tied the shakiness of the camera to like the frame rate or something but

now that it gets a little nuts now that you're in it right now and it's not just in the valley of our memories is the gameplay fun? I remember having fun but I don't know

because I need I need I I don't, I really don't know. I remember enjoying what gameplay there was, but it's a real question. I needed this. So, so I, if you remember vividly,

you borrowed a PS3 from a mutual friend of mine and you played through Metal Gear Solid 4 like a normal person, right? I remember this. Being on the clock. Yeah. Yeah, you're on the clock, but the clock wasn't crazy. Right?

And then I came over and was like, when do you have to give that back? And you're like, tomorrow. And I'm like, okay, can I just hang out in your living room and just blow through it in a single night? Yes. And you went, if I remember correctly, you went, uh, okay. And I went to bed and you sat on my couch. And I blew through it in a single evening. And then you came out and you were like, did you beat it?

And I was like, yeah. So my perception of how Metal Gear Solid 4 has always been like, not inaccurate, but untrustworthy. Yeah. Because that's the way I played it. And that is a very, that's a very weird way to play a game. But I did have my memories. And my memories were that I really liked Act 1 and 2 and I really, really hated Act 3. And I didn't like Act 4 and I didn't like Act 5.

But some of the big pop-offs in the story near the end of the game I really liked. So it left me with a positive impression overall. That game, when you're playing it, is fun. Sneaking around in Act 1 and 2 is fun. You're doing the thing of like, you know, sneaking through an active battlefield. And you have all the cool little tricks you can do and there's like a million little secrets.

The game, the game is just passing. act with shit, but it never gives you any time to actually enjoy it. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was talking about the cutscene to gameplay breakdown with my chat, and I was like, I don't consider turret sequences and long-term pitched battles to be Metal Gear gameplay. So there are multiple long turret sequences in that game. Just riding on the back of the van.

That sucks shit that are. terrible. There's the one in Brazil when you're on the back of the APC and then there's the one in Europe where you're in the side car. It's a cut scene where you spin the camera

around and you can make models drop but yeah. And I also barely count in act one where like the frogs attack you and Merrill and you have this huge long battle in the in the building where Johnny

shitting himself. That thing is terrible. And that fight with the frogs is like a quarter or more of you getting to have your hands on the controls in Act 1. So Act 1, I went through

it. I went through Act 1 in two and a half hours and a very significant amount of that was cutscene. And there are like four sneaking rooms in act one. Like you'd get like zero time at all. And then act two starts out. And act two, it actually lets you roam about.

And it's like a big snake eater level. And the rebels are fighting the PMC. And you're helping the rebels and you're, you're tranking and sneaking around. And I did that in a couple hours. And then I got to the laughing octopus fight. And I'm like, hey, everyone, by the way, if you're not familiar with metal.

your solid four. As far as I'm concerned, the game is now over. Because the core Metal Gear gameplay of sneaking around soldiers and being a spy literally never happens again. Yeah. Little Mark 2 on your with around with you and stuff. That that's the gameplay I'm thinking of. And they're like, well, what do you mean? And like, well, the follow-up mission was the trailing mission where you're following Naomi's footsteps. Going through Europe. And then there's a very long, current sequence. And then we're going to go on to Act 3, which is terrible.

And then we're going to go to Act 4 where you're not dealing with humans, you're dealing with robots. So all the sneaking rules change. So what I think back on it, what I have is like a lot of satisfaction from like franchise and character emotional closure moments, you know, I have these, these whatever, end game feelings, you know? And I remember being very satisfied with that after playing all those games. And then in particular, I really liked the ending.

I really liked the finale, you know? Yeah. So that was a strong like, oh, fuck, Metal Gear Solid 4. But now that you're like, we know the events and now it's just about... I know the events. I'm playing through it. It's just about the video game. So the video game is great when they let you play it and they let you play it very little.

Yeah. Okay. Like what I consider to be like Metal Gear Solid gameplay, which would be defined by one, two, three, Metal Gear One and Two, which I just went through nine months ago. It's over for me at this point. Like I'm 40% through the game and that shit is done with, which sucks ass.

That's terrible. Because it's just not what Kojima wanted to tell, you know, after a certain point. And on top of that, there's a lot of stuff in this game. game that age just really bad. Just aged really bad. And like I was describing it as like me and you are what I would consider have doctorates in co-jumboology. Right. There is there are some stuff that like I remember being annoyed by at the time.

But now I'm like, oh, yo, this sucks actually. Drebben. So Drebben sucks so bad. Like, you're trying to, he's trying to tell you about the war economy, and there's like a fucking monkey with a shiny yellow diaper, fucking dancing around with the background. Oh, yeah. Oh, no. And I remember all that Drebbing shit. I remember all the stupid, like, twerking, laughing octopus, sad stories after you beat them bullshit, beauty and the beast unit nonsense.

It's, it's bad. I remember all that goofy shit. Trebit is bad, bad. I totally remember all that. On top of that, I actually remembered Johnny shitting himself less. Huh. He is like from the moment he appears on screen to the moment he leaves. He is like pooping his pants and like walking around with like massive stained pants.

Just so that you know It's It's crazy Just so that you know who they're talking about And that you don't go Who is this guy You can't possibly mistake who he is It's nuts

Like it's kind of goofy the first time But then when you have to like When you have to defend him from the frogs Because he shits himself unconscious What the fuck? But at the same And at the same time as this You're enjoying your more

of like um Bryden you're enjoying your vamp and you're enjoying your yeah like your silly Metal Gear stuff the idea of Liquid Osolot in its entirety Ray versus Rex and then of course the fucking

the graveyard so there is one very weird thing and I mean very weird thing in Metal Gear Solid 4 which you wouldn't normally expect with a game that takes place in the future so Metal Gear Solid 4 takes place a couple years from now and it has some robot technology and oilix is there. You know, it's it's modern military realism, but obviously it's, it's kicked it forward a couple

notch. And when it came out, it was like 20 or 30 years from now, right? When, when fucking, oh, it's in 2014? Okay. When Naomi is telling Snake about like all the things that are wrong with him with that stuff, it never occurred to me that like the science she's describing doesn't make any sense at all and like that's a known thing with Metal Gear that like Kojima doesn't understand genetics at all

yeah from the moment recessive genes was used the way it was we were on a different trajectory entirely but like he's like oh you're getting old because you were you know natural lifespan or your telomeres and all this stuff right but like

the fucking genomes soldiers at Shadow Moses got like enhanced physical abilities from like a shot and vamp is like full on. Yeah. Like the nanomachines are like rebuilding his whole brain inside his head

after his brain gets knocked out the back of his head. You don't like shots? Yeah. It's it's silly. The game has aged really poorly. That motherfucker ran up a wall and stopped in Metal Gear with his own bare hands. God Damn it.

It's great that it's free and it is the definitive end of that storyline. It is... Funny is cute. Really bad. Like really, really poorly. Like, I had a moment when Drebben was yapping. Whereas just like, brother, this game stinks. Like, holy shit.

So... Because it feels like Metal Gear Solid 4 feels like your older. brother lets you play the game you've been wanting to play all day. And every time you're about to get to a good part, he takes the controller out of your hand and starts telling you about some bullshit he learned in high school that you don't care about. Like, so what does a lot of the heavy lifting? I mean, I don't know if, did you beat it or? No, no, no, okay, okay. We're going to do act three on Thursday. What does a lot of the heavy lifting in my memories too? Is that moment of And it's one of the first times I think I experienced this in media where, like, I loved snake eater so much.

And I loved the ending of that and the boss and everything about how that game concluded rocked my shit. I couldn't fucking believe it. It was so good, so powerful, right? And like the feelings I have for that character, the boss walking away from that game, going, fuck everyone else in this entire franchise, this is the person that matters, right? I was high on that juice. And then having this game and this dust,

and to a degree, this whole franchise, all point to go, yeah, we all know and feel that way too, dude. We are all right there with you going, holy shit. This person was a cut above everything else in this entire franchise. it was so much like catharsis for that moment of like okay we all okay we get it you know that was a really good feeling to be like this all went to shit over that same idea over the fact that everyone loved the boss that much and thought she was so cool that we can't fucking figure out how to live up to her legacy properly you know that was a really like oh my god

what it turns out kojima doesn't know how to live up to her legacy either well that's a whole other story. But in that moment it was so like oh, you get it. You get what was great about that story.

You get what matters here. It felt really good and that's a strong memory for me about why I ended up liking four. Yeah. At the end of the day, like playing through it without the tease of the answers, I'm just left

just like I want to sneak around and deal with soldiers and the game constantly says no. And like even in act one when you're sneaking through the battle that's in act one, the soldiers are engaged in like active front line fighting against each other so often that there's only like a couple of little rooms that you actually get to do any of the, you know, sneak around the environment, hide behind walls, the hold people up, do CQC stuff. Like it's crazy how minimal it is.

And isn't there, I'm sure there, it's one of those things where like, I'm sure Kojima put a ton of actual sneaking options that a lot of people never use. You unlock so many guns and gadgets and shit. And like, when are you supposed to use them? Yeah, yeah, that's it. And like, I'm at the end of chapter two and like, I'm not going to deal with another human enemy for like the entire rest of the game until the final level. And that's one screen.

Yeah. But like, why? The option is there. And it's just like the thought that, you know, um, most people on their first run are going to just take the guns you gave them sneak the path you show them. That is the best gun in that game and Dreben

gives it two for free. And they're going to sneak along the path that you show them and they're going to get to the objective and that'll be how they play it, you know? I mean, and this is where like five and ground zeros and Phantom Pain are like you know, they go above and beyond and then the whole replaying it to show you all the

different ways thing. I have to say. Nobody experienced all those alternate pathways and choices in four. I have to say playing through MGS 4 right now I have now like because my play through of 5 is also the other worst way I could have gone through it which is I didn't play it at all

I've gotten maybe 25 minutes of hands on time on on Phantom Pain. Okay. And the whole time was just waiting for more story and like yeah no actually MGS 5 is the opposite of this game or they're like hey would you like to play

like play Metal Gear Solid? Yeah, I would. I would like to a lot, please. Yeah, the story is like very minimal. You're doing nothing but sneaking around forts and missions. But yes, I would love to play a Metal Gear Solid game that has all of these mechanics. That's all you're doing here. That game is a response to four because like it has all the gameplay stuff that Four has. Almost no story. But Four never gave you anything to do it with. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. Absolutely a response.

So, yeah, no, MGS. My thoughts on MGS4 have crystallized. into the same opinion I had like 15 years ago which was like the cutscenes shit the cutscene split is terrible. It's really bad because it's a 16 hour game with eight hours of cutscenes

but of the gameplay eight hours like half of that is specialty moments or you know action scene of specific type and it's like you really only get to play the game

game, like the game you want to play for like four and a half hours total right, right, right. Out of the whole runtime. And again, to go back to the like, you know, narrative, emotional memory, I'm also thinking about how

this is good, isn't it? Is one of my favorite closers of all time. That shit's up there with the Sopranos with me, man. I fucking love that ending. It's so good. So I'm like, yeah,

none of these memories are attached to gameplay. They're all attached to everything else that was happening. Fuck. Oh, yeah, weird. Yeah, no, that game is a downer. Like, it's, I, I'm doing a Metal Gear Marathon, and I'm definitely

going to go through it because it is a very important, very interesting game. But, um, like, Peace Walker and Five make way more sense to me now. as as like responses to when do I get to go to the fireworks factory here's the here's the gameplay yeah yeah like I forget what it was I I'm trying to remember but there was like an action game that I remember playing on my channel like two three years ago and I did a full stream of going when do I get to fucking fight some guys

because like I like they you know the games would throw like a tutorial at you and you'd fight like three guys and like that's how you do the Perry and then it just doesn't go again like it just goes back in a narrative and building it was like when do I get to fucking do it and Metal Gear Sol 4 feels like that

like when do I fucking get to actually do a thing so I feel like an important note to attach to a game like that is don't forget this game released as the focal point of the entire video game It was F-F-16 That's what it was because you remember you do the

the intro thing and then you go to the bog and you fight those guys, but that's still tutorial-y. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then after the bog, you get the big boss fight, but you don't actually get the real gameplay for a long time after that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then you're stuck talking for a minute. No, there's something else that I want to attach to MGS4, which is like probably

affecting its direction and how much movie watching you're doing, which is this was a also focal point AAA release that the entire industry revolved around like a GTA game releasing when this came out. Nothing was more important than Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of the Patriots release day. Everything clear the fuck out.

And like the production of this, knowing how big it was and important it was, also is like Sony is like, hey, make sure it shows off the power of the PlayStation. You know? It totally did. Make sure it's going to teach everyone discipline

and make them willing to spend $699.99. You know? Yeah. Like this, the whole thing was, uh, it was meant to be a system mover, console shaker, fucking industry impact moment. So it's going to just sit there and make you watch a fucking movie for hours. Because that's also what, um,

Sony wanted the idea of people watching video games from the outside to be drawn in by, you know, the big cinematic, like this can rival the theater's moment. Man, all those drebb and cutscenes are terrible. Like every single one of them. them is god awful. It's fucking crazy. It's, it's,

it's a massive bummer. Hmm. Like, Dreben comes on the screen. I'm like, oh. Also, man, that,

that roster of enemies, the B&B core is like, definitely the worst roster of Metal Gear adjacent enemies ever. Oh, free, free, free, free,

free forever. Like, it's, it's crazy how bad they are compared to even, like, Dead Cell, which I don't particularly care for that cell. Yeah, yeah.

no, oh, no, I used to, like, yell Dead Cell as me just fucking, like I have learned to ironically love dead cell because of how bad and stupid they are. But I'm, I don't even have ironic co-jumbo love for the, for the beauty. I'm fighting a laughing octopus and she's like, ha ha laugh. And I'm like, man, she is like unironically lamer than

fat man. Also, because at least fat man had laugh and grow fat. Laff and grow fat. And Raging Raven is a waste of a cool design. Raging or Raven is a waste. like for real terrible cool cool fucking flying jetpack thing and you just you completely just i think that i think the i think the ultimate and i am not there yet so i'm going off a very very very unreliable memory but like crying uh crying wolf having the sniper battle that's supposed to be a send up to sniper wolf and it being a way way worse sniper battle because frogs are coming into attacking you the whole game like worse than the fight on playstation one man like straight up and say what you will about dead sell but they did have fortune and fortune

had her moment yeah she has he has her moment um yeah oh one last thing to say i i like david hater a lot but like uh oh his his performance in this game is a joke it's really bad the voice is is way too far is it because he was hurting himself to do yes yes it is You're hearing him absolutely torturing himself. Like, like, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is no longer cool guy. It is not even cool old guy. He sounds terrible. And not like, oh, snakes, old snakes are having a rough time.

I'm like, no, like, it sounds, it sounds like the way like ego Raptor would make fun of snake and MGS one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's, it's ridiculous. Right. Right. The, the, the, the, the, the caricature doing the caricature of themselves. Christopher Walken going, oh, you know, himself. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Like, it's just like, you know, he walks up to a, Merle. It's like, fuck off. Yeah. Yeah. No, in the, in the end, in the end, it wasn't worth it.

In the end, I wish he didn't hurt himself to do that. And that, yeah, no. We could have been talking about him just being like, oh, he, he just sounded like snake again. you're like, yeah, well, fucking don't destroy yourself, please. Yeah, MGS4 is a fascinating game from a fascinating time in the games industry. Also, man, it looks

like the avatar of 7th gen video games. Every single stage is like a singular like color, corrected color. Like the fucking first stage is like just brown, gray dust. And then the third, second one is

like this very, very stream shade of green. Yep, yep. And then European brick, I want to say is in my brain. It's a different brown. It's like a dark brown. And then the shadow Moses is blue. All blue.

It's ridiculous. You have like a, you have like a camo system where the octo camo, like I bet you octo camo came about. Not just, not because like switching your camo and the inventory was annoying, but in the first level, if you had to switch your fucking Hamo to suit the environment, people wouldn't know which one to pick because all of the environment has like the same basic color. But I also just never popped off harder for an old man getting his tubes pulled out.

Yeah, yeah. That's the hard. That's the way of it. That's true. That's true. Get him. Get him. Just like.

So that's mainly what's been going on on my end for this week. this coming week, this coming week is going to be for real. So I'm doing the podcast with you today, Woolley. Tomorrow morning, we're going to do 14. We're going to go beat up Garuda. And then I have a Dragon's Dog, but two sponsored stream afterwards.

Then Thursday morning at 6 a.m. is the Sony state of play. Then Thursday morning 8 a.m. is the Konami event. Then I have a Final Fantasy resident sponsored stream at 6 later that. day, then Friday's Onomusha, then Saturday is a cooking stream, and then Sunday is more Onamusha. So, that is, I had somebody, I had somebody respond to my schedule going, no Zeno Blade, and I just responded with, there are 10 streams on this list. Yeah.

There are 10 streams here. So at the, what do you, what, shut up. Back in my college days, at the peak of them abusing their scheduling power was 10 classes to 14 classes a week. So here we are. Odi Musha is fucking cleaning up, by the way. Everyone's like, reviews are like 9 on 10, 10 on 10. Absolutely phenomenal game.

You see, Will Borger was like, I bet I can beat the game, no items. And then it was really hard, but it was worth it. And now I saw that. I'm like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Well, now I'm going to beat the fucking game, no items. I didn't look at the new, obviously. I didn't look at the new demo thing. but like yeah that's the only

discussion point. I also didn't look at the new demo thing. It's too close to the release. Like why would I? And the idea of the again, the difficulty was the only conversation point but yeah.

It's funny because like I'm watching as like Vagabond fans are getting hype. And this is there are dozens of us and they don't get together to say much very often. But every now and then

something like this drops and it's just like oh shit. Because Yeah, get to get to see No, I'm very excited for that Very, very excited for that Cool And what about you, Wolves?

What's going on over at the Woolie versus house? Yeah, I had a bit of a busy week Managed to Get out and catch some Flim Flim Springfield I got to see One, the film Obsession

Have you heard of it? I have heard of it Okay So I I haven't seen it But I have to tell you Watching people on social media You're going

This guy's stupid Here's how you would make a good wish I'm like I can already tell They're missing The point of the movie entirely If you understand that Then you're already halfway there Because the film itself

Takes the entirety of What you're describing And the mechanic of that Is the least important thing in the world Right It doesn't fucking matter. What matters is what's happening, what's it's happening. Very good film. A very good movie.

The main thing is it unfortunately for me was overhyped by some people, some horror fans going like, it's the best thing that's ever come out. And it's the best movie of the year. And people kind of over jat overhyped it a little bit. And I wish I could like, you know, I can go in and kind of more or less try to turn that stuff off. But in the end, I went like, that was pretty good. That was pretty good. That was pretty good. It's not the greatest thing I've ever seen, but it's very, very strong.

And I definitely would have enjoyed it. Like, the less you know, the more I think it's enjoyable. So any info you're getting online in advance, I'd say, is like, you're better off just walking in as cold as possible. It does, like, it's a bit of the same thing with weapons where, like, pretty good. But, like, yeah, you kind of just want to get, like, a friend in real life to be like, have you heard of this? Go check it out. And like, that's it. You don't want to get the wave

of online push, you know? Um, but, uh, it is, it is, yeah, I don't, there's not much, if you haven't seen it yet, then it's definitely, I'd rather just talk around it because it's a single premise, but the premise has done really well. And, um, it leaves you uncomfortable in a number of ways and it leaves you kind of going, you, well, there's, there's, there's a couple questions the movie asks about just like, who gets it the worst is kind of like one of these floating ideas. And I think, I think, I think there's a definitive answer by the end of that. But if you're down for this kind of, what I like, I don't go, like, so for me with horror stuff, especially, I'm like, it's not, because it's not my favorite genre, and the same thing for Punch Mom as

well, we're not going out of our way to like necessarily keep up with the genre, seek it out and stuff. I like it when there's a premise that's more than just big wipeouts if there's something interesting to think about with it. So the Jordan Peel stuff, this has some crazy, interesting things to think about alongside the premise. And I feel like this fits into that category as well. Obviously, I love fucking Alien because that setting is just so interesting, even though, like, regardless of whatever the genre is, that's super fascinating. And I love, I love stuff like that, where the setting premise and whatever's going on, like is leaps and bounds above in terms of what's interesting,

what the actual wipeouts are going to be and the jump scares and stuff like that. So this is one of those things that's good like that. And the other thing I did was I got to go catch The Odyssey. And that is another, that's a, that was, I caught it in 70s. millimeter iMac so i got to see the oh the way it was intended the way it was intended god damn it bro

can I take a second for this what is the point if only 12 people can catch it that way bro there are like 70 movie theaters on the planet that can do fucking iMacs viewing what the fuck you fucking talk and in a few minutes that's going to be 69 because that one is not working the machine

broke right the one in montreal actually broke for a while and like they had to like delay and cancel a number of screenings it's insane It's so insane, man. And you don't have to do this. And it was just, but when I saw the side by side of like how much of the frame is missing, you know, and you go, oh, fuck. Like, crucial amounts of information.

Like 40% of the movie is gone if you go see it in the smaller formats, you know. I don't know what the fuck Nolan's fucking doing. He's just, he's just sitting around going, I want to reinvent four by three. So I watched an interview with him, and the thing with Nolan that makes it all make sense is like he's in love with the idea of the filmmaking process. And when he's like, this is one of the biggest, this is the biggest story ever. It's the traditional epic. And it needs to be big in all ways. So when it comes to the way we shoot it, it needs to be the biggest thing ever.

And when it comes to the cast, it needs to be the biggest thing ever. And so it ends up being, it's an Avengers movie. I don't know. if you know, but it's an Avengers movie. Um, and all of that is like, like, he's,

because he loves. His best movie is Memento. Like, like, which is like deliberately small and normal by comparison. Yeah. Uh, I,

it's one of his best. Is it, isn't my favorite of his? Hmm, it might be second. I think, I think, I think Dark Knight just fucking rules and,

mm-hmm. Inception's good. I didn't see Tenet, but anyway. But yeah, the idea of it is like, you can see he's just in love with the Hollywood machine. He's in love with it. And that's a big part of what you get here. It's a good movie. It's a lot of, like, it's a really, it's a good telling.

And what I'll say is that, like, there's a reason why, because if you're, if you're, there's a reason why he did it. because you're like, it's a pretty straight telling of the traditional odyssey that you read in high school, I'm assuming, or so. But like, but there's a moment at which it's like, here's my take on this lore and here's my, here's the thing I'm adding to it. That is interesting food for thought to the story. That to me is like interesting enough that makes it worth it to have done this, right? And everyone does a good job, performs an acts that, acts their fucking. ass is off. They do a great job with it. But they're all such

A-list fucking Hollywood Avengers fucking ass. It's distracting as shit, man. I understand exactly what you mean. I'm looking at Spider-Man talking to Matt Damon and I'm like, yeah.

And then the fucking pest wanders onto the frame. And I'm like, what are you doing here? A clown? I understand exactly what you mean. it's so distracting oh and it's like

that that's the thing and it's they do a good job but you can't see anything but the the meme faces of these actors and everyone is someone every single person is a big name I have a question for you which is how's the audio mix

is dialogue broadly understandable okay so Dialogue is, it's interesting. If they were doing an act- I just wanted you to say the word yes. That's like, like this conversation already sucks. It's fine.

It's fine. But you would want the dialogue to be louder in any other context. But what they do is instead of mixing down the sound and, and mixing up the dialogue, they just make it so that they're speaking the plainest most modern day English possible so you're not going to mishear what they're saying. There's no accent whatsoever on anyone. Okay, so I have a personal, in my own head,

vendetta against Chris Nolan for him describing that you shouldn't always be able to hear everything someone's saying. That's not real life. And that's why the audio mixing in his fucking movies is so bad. And like it feels like

it feels like he wanted to like break new ground in not being able to hear the movie and now he wants to break new ground in not being able to see the movie. Right. So that's here we are.

Right. This is it. It's like we're, we're not going to change the mix. I refuse to change the mix. So instead my solution is what you can hear is going to be

what is going to be as clear as modern day as possible so that there's no accent to misunderstand anything. And that is not the solution you were hoping for, but it's the one you're fucking getting. And the reality of that is like, okay, like, this is so stupid that whatever, there's even fucking shitty cultural talking points around it. But I like the idea of, like,

I like the idea of new actors getting spotlight, in roles and ways when possible and stuff. That puts at the fringe of movie enjoyers. Most movie people are like, oh my God, Tom Cruise is there. Exactly, exactly, right? So like, and you have to sell

the movie with all the money and the budget and it has to be an Avengers movie to get the kind of release it does. So like that hypothetical movie that you're watching in Greek with Greek actors doing everything or whatever is like that's not going to ever

be put out in the scale that that it's at. But as far as like teleporting to a land and a time and a place and all that stuff goes, like my preference for watching this would have been something like that as opposed to the Avengers. And I

I'm gonna eventually, I don't know. And I need somebody to tell me whether or not it's better than the Wishbone episode of the Odyssey. Because the Wishbone episode of the Odyssey seems like it was actually more accurate than

Nolan or you can go with your your 300 you know style Snyder telling of events if you want to as well but

in the end in the end in the end I liked it and I liked a lot of what they did although they definitely when it comes to like the original story as well

like boy did they de horny a bunch of this to make To make Odysseus and a lot of that that lore, I guess again, more Hollywood and more digestible for Hollywood, it is nowhere near as horny as the source material is, bro. At all, at all. Like, you know that half of those islands they were stopping on, some shit was like, hey, yo, give me that dick. Give me that dick.

When you read the source material, everything is reaching for his dick, bro. And the heroics are being like, no, away from my dick. I have a wife. But then, oh, fuck. Okay, not really. And cut to a few years later.

The source materials is nonstop creatures and witches and beasts lunging for Odysseus' dick. Does it, do you really get the strong feeling? that like an American made this movie when you say that? I get the, not just an American, a Hollywood

like middle of the, you know, like we're, this is the machine doing it. This is end game. It's full Avengers. And even talking about like, the Sirens Cry and like how that scene plays out

and what you're hearing and all of that, it's like, it's not about the lust. It's not about the boner. And you're clawing your, fucking skin off to get to it, you know, it gets, it, it, it cuts deeper than that, you know. So, anyway, all that, all that, uh, uh, uh, aside, like I said, there's, there's, there's, you know, the, the events unfolding are, are handled really well. In particular, I mean, you know,

you know, the Odyssey, right? You know, the events rig, roughly. Yeah, more or less. Okay. Um, there's some, there's some, there's, at one part of that, that fucking got me is like the dog the dog is just a nuke in that movie it's so fucking oh it's great it hits um

and you know then you then you gotta play out the whole like epilogue you know return home saga as well and that stuff that stuff plays out really well do they fight the skeletons in the land of the dead this is they do not jason and the argonauts but they do go to the land of the dead and you do get your haiti scene but they're not quite fighting as much as they are getting the fuck away because what are you going to do? Fight the dead?

You're Kratos now? You think you're Kratos? Yeah. It's more like you, it's more like get the fuck out. But they do, but they're, I,

I, all the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, fucking unfortunate because, like, the very first thing I saw about this film was that they removed, that was a quote from Nolan, where they removed the nobody line from the encounter. They,

the cyclone, the, Like, nobody's whining me. Because he says it wouldn't translate properly into English, despite the fact that that line is from the English translation of the Odyssey. They get rid of the pun.

Absolutely baffling. What I will say is, like, the Hades escape is actually pretty sick. I do like how that plays out. You know, and, um,

yeah, and, The Trojan horse stuff is also done pretty well. I like that stuff. I like the overall fall of Troy is like one of the more interesting parts. I'd say it's the most interesting part of the movie is how they handle the fall of Troy. And like why all of that sort of kind of comes together. The armor stuff is like, as Agamemnon's armor and all that stuff is like,

he's just wearing mecca armor, bro. He's just, he's just wearing power armor and there's no way around it. It's so weird seeing Agamemnon portrayed as this hulking Superman. When like in my mind, Agamemnon is the, is Brian Cox from Troy where he's just like a shitbag war hungry king. Mm. Right? Him being like a physically imposing huge monster man doesn't like resonate with me at all. It pays off.

It works out. What they go, what they do with it and how it ends up, how they end up going with it, pays off and works out, I think, for exactly what you're describing. If, if he was like a big, super strong general, then why did they need Achilles at all to go to Troy? Well, I mean, they needed, uh, uh, they needed a plan and they needed a bunch of shit. And the, anyway, whatever, with, with overall the, overall the way they handle that part, um, yeah, I think it ends up working out. have to, again, look past the Matt Damon running around on screen and just try to buy in, you know. There's an epidemic of iPhone face.

iPhone. In general. iPhone face. Oh, you're not familiar? iPhone face is when you are watching a historical drama that takes place in Victorian England and the ladies in waiting come out and they all look like bitches that just got off their iPhones. Okay, okay, okay. them like you like you look at it and you're like I don't believe okay this person could exist

and the ultimate refusal of iPhone face is Willem Defoe okay Willem Defoe is the anti-Iphone face so this movie has like most of them are pretty solid about that and like even fucking um Lagu Zamo you know is there but calypso charlie's there on is out of of today. Charlie Sterron walked out of a fucking Sephora and onto the set. Like, it's her hair, her fit, everything about her makeup,

everything about the way she looks and how she's dressed. She looks way too modern. It's crazy. Yeah, she absolutely has that. That is 100% true. And it does, and then when you add into the fact that, again, you know, no accent, so you're just hearing what sounds like modern day as well.

and it just is like, yeah, this is, this is the, the, the, 2026. This is taking place right now, actually. But I think that's part of also the bit of like, well, this is the large fantasy. The fantasy is that it is, it is, it, the fantasy, his, his telling of it is that, um, this can be interpreted for your, for your modern take of, of what these concepts are, as opposed to, uh, a George Martin or a fucking Tolkien Journey to another land

Journey to another place Feeling of an event An adventure far far away It's kind of like He wants to bring some of the adventure home For better and for worse, you know? I want to watch movies To feel like I'm at home

Yeah, well I want to watch movies so I can See a fucking movie Different So those are So again, like I said Those are the parts that are That are weaker

about it, but there are, I'm not going to, like, besides that, like, there's some shit that works. The Hades, the battle shootings, they worked out really well. Some of that stuff works out, you know, the, um, again, the, I would say the, the, the final act, it comes together quite strongly. And some of the, um, the, set, look, the locations, set, setting, all of that stuff is just excellently done. They had infinite money to make it look nice, so it looks very nice. In particular, when you're looking at it in, in the full frame, moments where you're, where you're taking in a giant wide kind of panoramic scene, looking around the environment,

like feeling like you're in it type of thing, are handled really well. Cinematography, it's Nolan. He does a great job with all that stuff. So we're not getting into that with what I'm describing, but those are some of the reasons that it's worth checking out as well. Hey, you know what I'm a big fan of? You know how we're talking about like digital media preservation and stuff like that?

I'm so happy that one of the biggest movies of the year will no longer be viewable in its original format in like a couple of months. You want to watch it at home? Well, your house isn't IMAX. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, which is, this is the sense of urgency to guys.

It's not even the right aspect ratio, dumbass. Yeah, I really, like, I know that he's not the kind of director that's like, fuck it, I'll just go digital or whatever. It's got to be, it's got to be traditional. It's got to be the whole thing. But I hate that it's like, you can only catch the full frame like this. Or you're going to have a version of it, that'll be like, you're going letterboxed or you're going like weird crop on your TV,

you know, version of it that just has side letterboxing? Maybe this is an unfair complaint to level at Nolan, but I think he would also say the same thing, so I feel it's fair. I don't want to see a movie and then be like, ah, it was all right, and have somebody go, oh, well, you didn't watch it the right way in the right way, the theater with the thing and it's like well the director himself is also saying that's how you're supposed to fucking watch it and it makes me annoyed to the point where it makes me not want to watch it by default okay do you know what i mean like like i feel like being talked down to by the

director and maybe that's ridiculous well like i don't know i i look i i can i i i'm not trying to push you to or anyone like i don't know what to say besides like it's worth going to Oh, this isn't for you. Yeah. It is worth going to see the thing. It is, there's a, there is, you know, all jokes aside, there's a, it's a good movie that's worth catching. But yeah, you got all that shit about it that, that's, that is dumb and I wish they didn't

do for sure. And, um, it is a, there, there is definitely a fomo agent of like, you, this, this format is, you can only catch this here and now in this way, you know. I gotta be honest. Getting out to the theater is like such a massive pain in the ass. Oh yeah. It was a toddler now that it's just like some like. No, the fact that we, yeah, getting babysitters involved and shit that we, I mean, that's what we had to do. And it's like, yeah, that's a whole, that's a whole other to do on our level with it as well. But just all of the circumstances

aside, that's the movie. And I think it does some things well. And it's worth catching. Is it like four hours long? How long is it? He makes big ones. Three. It's three. At the same time, like, because I'm thinking about like for something like obsession,

you also have to go catch quickly, but for different reasons, because like once it starts being discussed openly or so, like, the more you hear about that, the more that's discussed fully and openly, the less you're going to enjoy the actual experience. at least I know I would. I can't describe that. I'm not going to speak for everybody, but for me, I know that, like,

a big part of the meat and potatoes of, like, what's enjoyable there is, like, being taken for the ride. So knowing a lot about the ride in advance defangs some of the impact moments, I think. So before we move off, there's a comment here from somebody who says, who is saying that,

I am saying that somebody might be an asshole about this in the future. Therefore, the movie is really, ruined it. No, what I'm saying is that I think the director is an asshole about it today. And that doesn't make me excited to go see the movie. Also, I'm literally too busy for the next month to see it in theaters. So the only version I'm going to be able to watch is the worst version for home release at a later date, which knowing that it's the worst version of the movie also doesn't make me excited to go see it. Like, not to mention the like, and depending on where you're at. in terms of like knowing the source and looking at the adaptation.

And if you're open to the changes versus if you're somebody who wants it to be more accurate to the source material and such, that's a whole other thing too. Like, you definitely have to accept that a bunch of that is absolutely twisted in a number of ways. But like I said, there's an overall, an overall, like narrative interpretation that I think is like, the arc of the character and the journey he goes on that I thought was really cool and I'll leave it at that um and then so what else did I do this week uh yo we got we got back into for honor I see thank you for killing the game's Linux support oh man that timing yeah Oh, I'm glad they waited until after the show was over before putting that through.

So we'll talk about that just the way we talked about the furlough. But before we get to that, yeah. So Pedro is someone who's been on the stream many a times before. We've hung out. We've done our getting to fighting game streams for Blasbleu and a couple of the stuff. You know, one of the old FGC members that we used to chill with that's one of the, from the anime side, the Air Dasher Boys. and J.C. was like literally, legit and early homie from the Street Fighter four days.

And we would go, we would always be on the same 3V3 teams for the weeklies. I'd go chill at his house and like we'd be playing sets and practicing back in the days when I was like making arcade sticks and stuff. And, yeah, they just both went on to work on this game, joined the team and have, you know, have, you know, have, been running it and, you know, there. So, yeah, JC's like lead and, and Prejors and Programming. And they both were just like, this is, would you guys want to do something like? We've been trying to make this happen for a while now. And it's literally since like over a year and we finally were able to make it work.

So it was really cool to get them to come hang out because, like, yeah, it's also something where I just, I haven't seen him in a minute and it was nice to catch up. So, J.C.'s an old homie. We popped that game on and booted it up. Reggie had never played it. So we did a little setup here where we had... Ah, okay. We played...

We had the PS5 installation, and I had it on PC, so we could do, like, you know, the local setup. Reggie went through the tutorial, and then we just started pressing some buttons, and fuck me, for honor's crate, man. I just... It was absolutely, like, the reinstall, and then just warming back up

and going, oh yeah, this game's really good. This is really fun. This is a great fighting game, and it's just different. And the way I opened the stream, as I described it, I'm like, you know, after all this time, this thing is doing so well and is continuing to get support. Pardon me. News content, new releases, and has a very, very, uh, uh, there's a healthy ass online presence. A ton of people are jumping on and playing it.

I would describe this game as an interesting success. I would describe it as an, hey, listen, even it has problems, the fact that it's managed this long with this much stuff and still has a very active community in it, I would absolutely describe it as an interesting success. I checked out the Steam reviews for this game for the first time in Ages, and I found a very interesting type of Steam review.

It has a certain candor. which is something you see on like a dead by daylight page, which is it's mixed, it's mixed reviews, and the positive reviews are this game is really fun, right? And the mixed, the negative reviews are so angry. Like they are furious.

And they're all from guys with 500 hours, 1,700 hours, 92 hours and there are guys just like screaming like if I were in a room with Hitler bin Laden in this game and I had a gun with two bullets

I'd shoot the game twice Okay right so just furious and like oh something in the game is attaching to them So to cause this level of intensity So I feel like there's three things Early on the amount of currency You got from the

chest rolling system Was just dog shit And that was a huge problem That we complained about on the on the uh um the fradcast right um then i think the other bits are there's um the like ranked there's like discussions about like how ranked should be past the ranked mode that they have and people not liking how ranked works so i think there's like a whole you know thing about that and and new whatever um and then there's just balancing and just and like characters getting

reworked and you know like kits changing and overall like balancing because um I don't know if you know this, but in the time since, like, you know, your last took a look at it now, the game has 39 characters. I am aware. I looked. It has, it's one of those steam games that when you go look at the DLC, you go, oh, I have to boot the game to actually look at this shit. Like, this is an absolute mess. It has a ton of characters. So you've got the five different factions now, you know, you've got the Vikings, the knights, the samurai. Five factions. Five factions. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's crazy. The other two.

You've got the knights, the Vikings, the samurai, the three that we started with. Then they added China. Oh, right, right. I did play the China. And then the fifth faction is the rest of the world. Oh, it's just everybody else. Everybody else. So the fifth faction is like Egyptian warrior, South American Meso, Meso Warrior,

um, uh, uh, fucking, uh, from the state. Mongolian warrior, you know, all the rest. I see. Yeah, all the warriors are hanging out on that fifth faction. France, fucking, you know, get your rapiers out. Pirates hanging out, fifth faction. So it's really cool to see who they've added over the years because they've just, they just, every class of warrior you can imagine has been, you know, thought up and interpreted.

All the warriors. All the warriors. And it's like the deadliest warrior kind of, you know, that type of show. But like, what if the game was like super-dooper sick and well-designed and stuff? So you got a whole lot of just characters you can just pick up and start pressing buttons with. And if you know, if you learn the basics of, you know, the Kinsei or the, what you call it? The Maiden Knight. Warden.

Warden, then you get a, you got a, you got a, you got a, you got a, that's how the game works. You have three directions to attack from and three directions to guard from, and then everything else is, you know, unblockables or dodges or parries and whatever else, you know. And you got a very, like, simple, basic structure to, like, pick up characters and start swinging in grasping. But, like, they introduced some really cool, like, meta and then ambassing. anti-metta characters. So someone that Reggie started picking up was the Nusia, she's called. So she comes in with two hooks, kind of like, kind of crowbar kind of sword blades. You know, I forgot the name for that type of weapon. Oh, the hook sword. The hook swords, basically, yeah. Yeah, the Cabals weapon. Exactly. And so her deal is she does anti-parries, where if you try to guard something, she can turn her regular source.

swing into a rip your guard open and lock it in place like get get opened up strike you know so like you're get you're you're you're turning your rock into paper by coming with with callouts yeah so again an anti-parry right i do this the moment i think you're about to go for a block and it's not quite a grab it's it's it's different um and uh anti using the system again again and i'm using the system again against itself in a way. I mainly showed up to fuck with the Anakure which is big punch girl.

Japanese fucking thug, big taunfas, spits at you does a lot of beat down moves, a lot of movement and swerves and dodges and all that fun stuff, you know? She gets a rage meter

and as you beat down your opponents, you build it up to do more cool shit that tracks and unblocks and does all fun stuff. So not that straightforward, but a lot of fun to play you can imagine with the kit. What I was not expecting was the Sohei, which is this character that has six weapons. And did you ever play Samurai Showdown for a bit? No.

Not really. Okay. No, I did not. So Samurai Showdown has one of the coolest characters is Yoshitora Tokugawa. And what his deal is he has six swords on his back, and he has to hit you with each one. to unlock a final insanely powerful big slash. That character inspiration was taken and 100% lifted over to this dude

where he has six weapons. This guy looks like Gilgamesh from Final Fantasy. He's got six weapons. He's got light top, light left, light right, heavy top, heavy left, heavy right. And if you can hit with all six, use Zen Kai and unlock your final attack, which if you land this grab and fucking stab them

just annihilates the life bar and that's who I ended up fucking gravitating towards because it was so much fun to just land each and itch knee son like you just you get all six and then cash it out and he literally when you get the sixth one

he literally yells Zen Kui it's super cool I love that shit and they're doing doing it, they're having that kind of weebu fun in the middle of like designing

you know, they're historically accurate and then what if we just like throw in like 40% insane narrative juice for funsies Yeah, it doesn't need to be historically accurate. It just really needs to be cool. That's it. So here's a monk, Shaolin monk. He's got a staff.

He's got the you know, the head, uh, the sixth head dots and does this cool Shaolin stuff and here's an alternate costume where you can use son Wu Kong. You know? How's the, uh, how's the population? Like, how was it getting into matches? So, again, we played a bunch locally and then we grabbed a bunch of people from our chats and a number of players from the community came and hung out. But there's a ton of people playing online. Okay. There's a, um, you can play, you can play two V2s and four V fours and get matches like,

because there's a lot of people on that game now. They have been there. What's the main mode now? Is it still Dominion. So Dominion, if you want to do 4V4, if you want to have the point capture environment play, basically. So Dominion was the main one they show you in the tutorial where you have point A, point B, point C. And A and C are the two points near your base. B is in the middle with the grunts, the minions creeping, basically. And you have to point capture and harden A and C. And for B, you have to kill enough minions to allow your minions to push forward.

Right. and take it. Because it's kind of like a little baby mobile. Exactly. And then once all three points are captured, the enemy team is breaking. So they can no longer be resurrected if you kill them. And then that's the mode, right? Fun, you know, cool mode.

Cool way to have four people in the middle of the mix. And you also get your like perks and buffs and stuff to use against, to use for your team and so on. if you want a more traditional dueling, like, clean fight, items, no items final destination, then 2V2 is the way to do that, where you are, you and your partner are in an environment, you're all on the same map, two duels are happening, and then you can, after, if you finish your duel, you go over and can assist with the other one, or you can go over, or wait, or go over and wait, and let the duel finish. You're, if you remember that, yeah, all right?

Yeah, I remember that. Exactly. Now, 2V1ing is absolutely valid because there's a lot of great shit you can do by outnumbering the opponent. But if somebody is getting 2V1, they get a boost on their defense because if they block outside attacks enough, then they get like a rage mode that makes them stronger, you know? So you can be honorable or you can fucking, you know, you can do this like a fucking Jedi Academy or you could just go all, you know, like free for all go nuts. And I'd like that that's a part of the game. That's a part of the decision. You know, you can play however you want.

And those modes are a lot of fun too. We managed to jump on and get a number of the regulars. And then the team, the devs kind of, they blast it out to the community as well. So we got like a couple of the best players in the fucking world to come hang and jump on and just show us what that game looks like at the peak levels. At the high level. And yeah, shit's crazy.

It's super cool. But overall, especially because I know, like, yeah, Reggie just, he's touching it for the first time and getting the feel for everything, walked away just with the bug, with the itch, going like, oh, man, this, yeah, I really like, there was a period of time where I feel like some, we were like no-lifing this game for a while. And it still feels that fun, but they really, they went back in and did change things design-wise and reworked a bunch as well. So. I assume they changed all that stuff for unlocking. the game, unlocking the camera gave you a bunch of advantages. Yeah, the camera stuff is very different and they changed a bunch around that now.

Also, the game is constantly on sale. So, like, it was like five bucks when I was like going to look at the fucking console version or whatever. Well, when you got 400, when you got fucking,

$1,200 a DLC, the main game on sale, doesn't really matter. Yeah, yeah, well, there's that, right? And also, you go to boot it up on PS5 and you're like, this is a fucking PS4 game. Right. It is not a PS5 port of the game.

It is literally the PS4 version that you're still booting up, that they're still working on, which is just nuts. But yeah, it was just, it was a lot of fun to fucking go back to. And the, yeah, the devs, like, did a really great job, like, walking through the characters. We kind of just went through the character, the character select screen, and talked a little bit about everybody at one point. And they just did a great job breaking all that down.

Yeah, of course they fucking, of course they would. It's their shit. So that was a really fun stream. And I feel like this is something I'm going to want to be play. I'm going to want to play again for sure. So we'll keep an eye on that. I did see as soon as we went live today that a part of the, the, yeah, basically they just updated the anti-cheat. And so what I think happened, because this just happened with Tokon, is easy anti-cheat has a,

version that is Linux compatible if they want it to be and then there's a non-Linix compatible version that is the more secure version and that's the version that I just tried booting up Tocon on my Steam deck and my Steam deck my Steam machine and it didn't work. I think

they're just implementing exactly that which means if you have the Linux version that's running or if you have the Steam Machine version that's running or Steam Deck version that's running it just doesn't support it and shuts that shit out entirely and that is I that sucks because I'm like that's not a, like one, people have been playing it that way, um, the whole, this whole time. That's a

version of the game that, that you sold into people had. Um, the game is on your account and like, it's like, okay, well, you can, you obviously still own it and can boot it on the more, on the other compatible machines, but like, that's not worth it as a sacrifice. That's a crazy thing to, that, that sucks, because, um, for the anti-cheat options, it's not all or nothing. As far, again, as far as I understand, you do have a way to run easy anti-cheat. on Linux. It's just a, you have to enable that. And it's a different level of security, I'm sure. But that versus people not being able to boot the game up anymore that they've been playing is much more reasonable.

Mm-hmm. So, yeah. You have to have the same version of anti-cheat for the whole game. Right? You can't have the Linux players have a different version of the anti-cheat than those. Yeah. Than the non-line. But like between this and the token demo or, version just like kicking me the fuck out.

I want to learn more about like what it specifically is about the version of easy anti-cheat running on Linux that they, that is not secure enough that they're willing to just be like, no, fuck this entire platform. Because a whole lot of people are like Linux is one use case that is like, you know, it's certainly rarer than the number of people running it on Windows. But what's becoming much more common is steam decks and steam machines, you know? a lot of people have a steam deck. So shutting that compatibility off completely is a huge step as well. In discussing that with the gaming space, that's true. In the actual statistical reality of the real world, no, actually. Like compared to PC users and console users, no, not many people have a steam deck or a steam machine.

It's actually very minuscule. Is it just like Vanguard where it's just like it needs to be Colonel Love? at a lot of the lives. Right? Is that the whole discussion? I'm torn on this because that's a security vulnerability of obviously. But on the same wavelength, I can understand why you would want to put that in as a developer because I have seen games just torpedo themselves into the ocean because cheating became a rampant problem that was never solved.

Yeah. So I guess the question, so I'm curious about how bad the cheating is in this game and how rampant. You know, it feels like when I'm my... comparison point, I'm thinking about, like, you know, you run into fucking cheaters on, like, Street Fighter 6. Not constantly, but there's enough out there that it's a problem. And it's also a really bad look whenever one of them is in, like, the top of the leaderboard. And when someone makes it to the top of the leaderboard and sits there for weeks, if not months, that's a really bad look for your game. It's just one of those things, it's like, I think for older games that have smaller,

audiences, locking down on cheating becomes super, super, super important because if I was like, you know what, if I had this discussion and loaded up for honor, which I'm probably going to do, it's downloading on this computer right now. And then went online and had a match where I got killed by a cheater, I would fucking turn the game off and uninstalled it and never go back. Like that, like, because my, it would basically ruin my experience on step one. Yeah. And like, and that's what caused me to quit playing PubG way back in the day, where that new map came out, the desert map, and like I did 10 games in a row, which I died to cheaters.

I'm like, all right, well, that's, I'm fucking done with this. Like cheating being so rampant in Souls games, for example, fucking obviously sucks, and there's like those, the contagions of people being able to invade you and fuck up your save is a horrible fucking thing to have to deal with. At least in those cases, when From Soft is ignores or takes, whatever their policies are, because I know they have, like they do ban and such, but like at least those are games where the PVP is not the entire point of the fucking game, you know?

Yeah. Anytime it's absolutely just, it is a competitive thing and all you're doing is dealing with other people, this becomes a much bigger problem. But now, so yeah, that's, like you said, you're torn. I'm like, I don't know what the numbers are. I don't know how many people are actually being shut out.

I don't know what the rampant number of cheaters are. Are there more cheaters than Linux users? Which of these numbers? Which of these numbers are greater, you know? Like, the answer to that for almost any game is yes, absolutely. That's fucking nuts. That's like, without any doubt at all. That's so nuts.

I would, it would probably be an order of magnitude higher. God. So you are, whichever number is, if you, because you're, you're cutting out more cheaters than you are hurting Linux users, then find, fuck it, install, uh, uh, easy anti-cheat and it's got to be. And also, the longer cheating goes on as a, as a, as, an unresolved problem, the more cheaters get created to, so that they can play the game. Of course. Of course.

And it just, it's a mess. Now, I know that the existing one that, the existing easy antitcheat that works with Linux doesn't use this, but like, is there a world where, does Linux by nature, because again, I don't know it,

make it so that you couldn't apply kernel level protection? I don't think it's that. I think it's that since Linux is open, an OS and you can just go into the best of that thing, that there's no way to actually make it as safe because you could just figure out a novel way to get through it. Yeah, okay. So this is an Android versus Apple ass fucking problem.

A little bit, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, obviously, you know, not great for anybody that has been or cares about running it in those ways. So I'm of the opinion that if you're a Linux user and you enjoy using the Linux OS that like good for you. But I think that an increasing game support for Linux OS is like an absolutely like laudable goal and super interesting. But like 99% of the planet uses Windows and that's always going to be the core audience for any particular game. And in the case in question

With For Honor in particular You can also boot it up on PS4 Yeah, you could There is a PS4 version bootable But still, I don't like that But yeah man Fucking games Just, oh, it's great

And I'm just being fully ripped back You have convinced me Yeah I am at 62% of the Four Honor download Though I have a feeling when I load that game up It's going to hit me with like 10 splash screens. Oh, that's 100%. You're going to be hit with the battle pass. You're going to be hit with the marching fire. You're going to be hit with the latest event and the reveal for the new character.

Oh, boy. But you're going to hit the... But you're going to go to your character select screen, or rather your champions, your heroes screen, and you're just going to see a bunch of icons and you're just going to float around them and be like, oh, what's that? You know, and they're all, again, fairly unique and have different levels of, uh, different levels of, like some of them are just straight up referencing or like going for a character or something you might know already from a different fighting game or from a different

archetype. So very cool for honor. Um, gonna be hopping back on that. Uh, this week, gonna be playing yet 14 tomorrow. Um,

I have done, I have trouble. shot. You've troubleshot? I have trouble shot my controller situation. I'll talk more about it. Oh, good. Tomorrow, but I went on a fucking adventure to get my steam

controller working and eventually did. We played some Dark Souls 2 yesterday. We dealt with the skeleton warriors and the cops. I also learned that some of the invasions occurring are other content creators creating content. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

And yeah, we're going to be playing some fighting games this weekend too as well. I'll let you guys know, but tune in over at Willie versus on YouTube and on Twitch. Quick break. We've got to take a quick break because somebody is probably hungry. Are you hungry? Jesus. Are you hungry? You said the words.

You said the word. It's like he came alive. Look at that. Crazy. Look at that tail go. I forgot to mention. So in the 14 sesh that we did, yes, sir.

What did I get up to? So one, there was that samurai, there was that samurai level 54 job mission. I go check. though basically I ended up, it's the first like wall I hit of like, yeah. Oh shit, this is hard. And so. And you got to come back.

Yeah. And I was like intrigued by that because I was like, oh, okay, this makes me feel like, I'm like, okay, I got to learn to handle my rotation better and I have to be on point to get to, because there's three phases of the fight. And, you know, by getting better at doing the, the rotation and the stuff with samurai, I was able to get through the first two levels. third one just comes along and basically like two shots you or so and you and that's kind of it and everyone at the time was kind of like under the impression that like okay you can do this under leveled with your gear but it's just you have to be perfect and it's going to be really hard uh no it is not possible turns out you literally just cannot even do it um so i'm going to hold up my hand and and just skip forward to the conversation i was preparing to have with you uh yesterday that sorry tomorrow uh which is um It is, at the end of the day, it's a massively multiplayer game with a gear progression. Yeah. Right.

Like, it has, and the main thing that, that is, is not hitting you because you are, you leveled past what would have been the Arumryborn level cap is that in between hitting level 50 and ending level 50, there is an entire monster hunter game's worth of gear progression. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. Like fully like three times as much statistical number for strength. Well, the most important thing I learned about that whole thing was that the amount of people that thought it was possible, but it turns out it's not, tells me just how solved and not solved things are. you know like eyeballing it from a distance with somebody that's at the end cap done their

ultimates and cleared everything like crazy is looking at this going yeah you could do it you can and you fucking can I'm like okay cool so that's where we're at in terms of accuracy of information um but yeah also in terms of of gear stuff like you are at um what do you call it like you don't have any right side accessories because basically every piece of gear on your body adds up to an item level. And like that's just a shorthand for all the numbers combining to hit this much crit, this much health, this much whatever, right? And you're missing 60% of your gear.

Right. So like, now what I will say, though, is like it's the most interesting thing that happened all session. Oh, absolutely. Was like, oh, I have to sit forward and pay attention to what's going on here. Hmm, let's try to figure it out. And that's where I led to looking at the amount of skills I needed to do and then how to play them. And then, oh, oh, the amount of things that I have on the rotation of the thing doesn't work for what I need.

This fight requires me to use skills I haven't used in a long time. And I don't have a quick way to access those, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you know? So there's a whole good thing that came from that. And I do find, like, that idea of, okay, you have the tools. you just have to get your brain sharper at going to where they are is the thing that makes me interested, right? So there's a lot of things happening with... Oh, sorry, after you.

I was going to jump to another place. Oh, okay. There's a lot of things happening with the numbers in 14 that a lot of people genuinely don't understand because there's no in-game understanding of any of it, right? And one of the things that I was explaining to the 14 chat the other day is that levels inside the game's own system have breakpoints statistically. So from level 49 to 50 is like exactly what you would expect, right?

Then there's the beginning of 50, which is the start of like the 2.0 patch. And then there's the end of 50, which is the 2.55 patch, which is actually an 18 month two year cycle, right, where you go from eye level 45 to eye level 130, right? Like three times as much character strength. And is that because people were sitting at the level cap for that long? Well, because when a Realm Reborn came out, you hit level, you hit level cap on your character within a couple of weeks, but then Heaven's Word doesn't come out for two and a half years.

Right, right. So there's no progression, so they have to figure out a way for the game. The progression becomes your equipment. Right. Right? You're doing, you're doing, instead of doing dungeons for XP, you're doing dungeons for equipment. Yeah. Right. And so that, that assumes that when you go into Heaven's Word, you're level 50, but you're also eye level 120 or something like that. And then at the X5 mark for the levels, it changes the,

it changes the stat weights on the items. And what happens is there is a huge leap of what numbers you actually need. and what that basically means is that level X5 in any given dungeon is the last place you're going to be able to use all the gear you had from maxing out your character in the last expansion and it's when you have to start getting the new stuff from this expansion so if you completely like right now in dawn trail my character dark night is level cap and has every single item best in slot right that will carry me to level 1005 because the dungeon gear in level 101 will be worse than what I have and in 103 will be worse than

what I have. Each expansion asks five levels or 10? 10. And then at 105 it'll be identical to what I have but because it assumes that I'm going to have that all the numbers get cranked up. So what happens is for new players is when they start Heaven's Word

or Stormblood or whatever and they get to the X5 dungeon 55, 65 75, 75, new players just get pulverized into the dirt because what used to be an easy heel, an easy tank, I can damage this. All of a sudden, all the stat numbers change. And it goes to like, oh, no, oh, you've got to fucking go on this now. But also, so that, like, you're talking about something where to get to that mission, you have to just go talk to the same guy that's standing there. And it's not like you have to do a bunch of things that progress to, okay, now you can even get to that mission.

It's like, no, no, it's the same, you know, just the same series of John Quest. scenario run. But now you, it's just this much higher. That's a really weird problem to have, but it's based on the way the product is released where you hit a cap and then people have to still have increasing difficulty during this time where their number can't go up. Yeah. So the solution to that is that when the new expansion comes out, like when Heaven's Word came out, the patch quests for a Realm reborn, which is like the 2.1, 2.2, were changed to give, you higher item level gear. So since you're coming to a Realm reborn 10 years late, then when you go through it, it'll just give you, like, level 130 gear. It'll just give it to you.

You don't have to stall for time before you can handle everything that comes after. Because if you hit level cap and they were like, well, in order to get in Heaven's Word, you have to clear this. Waste time before you start to. And fucking good luck with that. Then everyone would get stuck. Also, the point is to get people to catch up faster. than the amount of time it took everyone else that already did it. And also the way that it ends up working out is that you go through like the main scenario quest for like 2.1 and you unlock Leviathan. Well, now that that content is old, they will gear you up to the point where you fighting

Leviathan X is now reasonable instead of the gear that you had at level 50, which fighting Leviathan and that would have been unreasonable. It would have been, right? What a weird math power creep design. The reason, so normally a new player would not encounter this. Like you would actually, you would, you would be ignorant to this system up until like the 80s or the 90s. The reason you're encountering it is because you went like way off script with the intended path. And you're like, well, let's see if I can beat these fucking samurai quests.

And the answer is you should be halfway through fucking heaven's word before you fucking try the samurai quests that you're trying now. Right. It assumes that you're halfway through Heaven's Word. Well, again, I got two of the three, you know, phases of that fight down. But, again, it was interesting. And then what they do, so eye level is, you know, like a Romaryborn eye level goes from 50 to 130, right? That's a pretty big fucking width. And so some encounters, if you were to do it, like, a Labyrinth of the Ancients is a

good example. The thing just fucking falls to pieces. If everybody goes in there at 1.30, oh man, that thing's a joke. Like, that thing's a fucking joke. So what they added was the ability to go, I want everyone in this party to walk in at the absolute minimum clearable level. Right. I want, so it's called a minimum eye level. It shouldn't be impossible. Yeah. So it's like, I want to play this encounter and I want it to feel the way it did on release. No matter how strong everybody else in this party is, you flip that thing on, and then

you have to relearn the fight as if it were 10 years ago or 8 years ago or whatever. Also, you can't put on stuff that's above your level, right? Obviously, like, yeah, there's no clearance for, yeah. That would completely bust the fucking game up. Totally. It'd be fucked

up. Or get access to it, for that matter. Yeah. So even if you take part in a mission or some sort rate or whatever where you can get a reward for something that is above you. It'll just sit there. Rades, Alliance Rage, which is the 24 Mands, and then regular raids, which is normal and savage raids, which are also eight people.

Those all exist at X zero. They always exist exclusively at the level cap of the, of the expansion they came out with. Okay. What I'm actually asking is, can you be in a situation where you're like, I know what's coming with this big, like, hill into a wall, but I have the equipment sitting in my inventory. I can't put it on yet. But as I get up to that point, I'll just, I have everything ready to go.

Never mind what I'm picking up off the ground. So that happens. So what happens is you do like, um, uh, like I have a situation where I have so much of the in game currency. I'll like, I'm just going to buy all the monk gear for level 90. My monk is not level 90, but I'll just buy all the monk gear for level 90. So the instant I hit level 90, go, and then all of a sudden, all the shit turns on, and now I have level 90.

Right. Monk geared up. Okay. So, yeah, that, the, these, that wall of, uh, of having to learn it, you know, is what piques my interest. Yeah, I would have told those people or, are, you told those people that they're crazy. There's no way you can be a little 54 quest with the gear you have on. There's, like, like categorically, like numerically, totally impossible.

But taking two, three swings at it and seeing how it goes. Oh, absolutely. It was interesting. What is not interesting, and this is where I'm learning about the extent of my tolerance for standard content, I suppose, was I checked out that rising adventure. I haven't done The Rising yet. I don't know what it is this year. Okay. Well, I guess I'm curious, do the special events that pop up from time to time like this tend to be, you know, Vash the Stampede meets a new character, hangs out with them for a while,

and then handles their problems and then rolls out of town. It's always some one-off little side story. Okay. And The Rising is unique because Yoshi P. will literally come out of the fucking screen and talk to you for a little bit. Right. So something like that occurred. But what I guess I was waiting on was a cool fight. and that didn't happen

Oh no Rising The Rising doesn't do that The Rising does a cute little dood thing And it's a little bit of filler Or like lore building or whatever And then YoshiP comes to talk to you About the current year

In 14 The crossover quests Occasionally have like bombastic set pieces So like the FF16 crossover effect Had You fight 16's Ifret

and it had mechanics specific to 16 in that fight same thing with 15 you fought Noctus's Garuda and you had the teleport throw that he has but just for that fight The crossover that matters

is Ratholos it's near it's like those are just encounters built into the game and that's why they're not time. Yeah now let's break that down right I do want to you know play game and swing at things and have fun doing that stuff.

However, I am down for character lore or hangout plot only type questing things if they're interesting to me. Right? So... Oh, well, the mileage may vary. Like, there was the little ladies event which is just like, hey, figure out which one of these idols you want to win the competition.

I don't know the fuck about that. So, I checked out midway through the rising because I was looking for like, is there going to be something to find or something to do here? Because I didn't care about the characters and what they were up to and what was going on. If I cared, which I give it a shot initially, and if I'm pulled in and I give a shit, then I'm down to go for it. But when I realize, actually, I don't care, but now I have to spend another 10, 15 minutes with them, I'm out. What the fuck am I doing here, right?

And I also don't have the attachment to Yoshi P or any of the buildup of what they're sending up there so that seeing him and the message from him or whatever doesn't mean shit to me. So that was a colossal waste of my time. There was one a couple of years ago that was like you went into like a fake version of their office. And like Soken was a character and all these things in the background. But yeah, no, it's it's it's just a cool little anniversary event for people who've been playing the game for six months to a year plus. Who would like a check in, et cetera kind of thing. I have no problem. And I am super down for the Uri and the gaze.

I want the character. I want to care about the person. I don't care about those two catgirls. I'll give a shit. I'll take, I'll take fucking Undine and Alphus chilling all day. Give me, give me 20 episodes

of Undine and Alphas hanging out. I don't give me a fuck about those cat girls, bro. 14's a very interesting game because it's a very, um, it's a very big fucking game. Written over a long period of time by many different people.

and job quests are written by individuals and there's no like cohesive writer for that the main story has been written by like three or four different people and you can you definitely get a feel for like wow I really liked these job quests and I really fucking hated these ones I wonder if they were written by different people and they totally were

so the way that it ended up working is that people who liked the dark night job quests at 50 liked them so much. They're like, oh, give that writer more. So they gave that writer a whole zone to do in Stormblood. And that was the most liked zone in Stormblood. So then that lady got to write Shadowbringers. And then as the response to Shadowbringers,

they got to write, and Walker, and so on and so forth. Yeah. Like, whoever wrote the Paladin storyline should be fired. That thing is terrible. Holy fuck. And it's just, and if it's something where, if it's a quest where it's the whole appeal is the hangout. It's got to be a great hang.

I don't know how else to. And this applies, fuck it, let's jump genres here. This applies to cyberpunk. Some side quests in cyberpunk are just hangouts, but they better be interesting. Otherwise,

they're boring dog shit and not worth doing. And some of them were nothing and others were way conceptually more interesting. I think part of the reason why Sinner Man hit so for so many people was, because of that part, exactly, you know, regardless of the combat aspects. So, like, you kind of want to, yeah, I don't know. That's, that's, that's all I'm in on it.

And I will say that, like, you got a, you got a Woclamat, um, fucking, I got a little mini for the rising this year. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, okay. Well, what I will say. So there are also a lot of people who totally agree with you, but you get a new hat for doing it. So this is, this was a, at a certain point, I was like, is there, is there a cool

thing? why am I still doing this? And then it was like, yes, there was the little meeting. But, you know. So like the Yo-Kai Watch thing, the Yo-Kai Watch collab is straight up terrible. It's literally just do fates forever. Like, just do tons of fates. But people want their little Yokai watch minions.

So they do it. Yeah. MMOs are the pinnacle of the genre of we're making a bunch of really cool stuff. But then we also have to make a bunch of mediocre stuff on purpose to keep people subscribed and mentally ill for like. six plus more months. And the most interesting thing about 14 is they go, if you don't want to do that mentally ill busy work for six more months, fucking turn the game off and leave. That's cool. We'll still be here. Yeah. And they offer catch up stuff every patch to be like, okay, so you didn't

play for five months? You can catch up in like fucking four days, five days. Like you'll, you'll be right to fuck back into it. Yeah, those are those, it's just the, that bird feed was, was, uh, kryptonite. I need some bird feed, some bird feed pulls me in, some of it repulses me and pushes me away. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm going to, I'm going to imagine that anytime you walk up to someone with a little icon over their head, um, it's as with 16, it's, you don't know what you're gonna get, right? You'll get a thing. You don't know if that thing is value to you. But at the very least, showing you the reward. awards up front for like, you know. It's nice. You can get a feel, you can be like, I don't give a shit, fuck this.

Or you can be like, oh, let's go do that now. Yes. That is a decent trade-off for, I don't know if I'm going to care about the content of this quest. When I was in that huge group call with everybody, I discovered something that I thought was strange, which was

even amongst Final Fantasy 14 content creators, it is actually super weird and out of the ordinary to have leveled every single job in the game to cap. Oh yeah. I have been doing that for years and years and years. That is way the fringest behavior. I knew it was fringe behavior.

I didn't know quite how fringe behavior. Not everyone takes every character to master in six. Yeah. Content creators, there's a bunch that do. That seems way harder. That seems way harder. Not as hard as you'd think. Not as hard as you'd think.

40% win rate ain't that difficult if you have fundamentals. But it's the similar idea to what you're describing. And what you do get for it is a deep fundamental understanding of 14 now with every single class from every perspective. And now you can apply that empathy to everyone that you're playing with, right? That's the idea, yeah. That is the idea. Absolutely. because like there's only so much

I can blame a sage for not healing enough because I've played sage to cap and sage feels like a struggle like when I played scholar was like comparatively much easier to heal but it also means oh I really do have to be the I really do have to make a bunch of job stuff

content whenever cold comes out because there's there's not that many people with active Twitch streams or YouTube channels that are going to have every single fucking class to cap the day the EC comes out to make like guides on how to fucking fix your hot bars. I will say however, Wally, that empathy, it can be good. It's usually bad.

Because I've played almost every class to cap. And my usual gut reaction is not, oh man, they're trying. It's usually like, this shit isn't that hard. I don't even fucking play samurai But the motivation for the Pleas and while you're playing with them Also changes at the point you're at where I'm like I'm right now I'm just going through the story plot

Whatever The motivation you get is I want the fucking gear at the end of this thing And so I need you to do it properly And that's a completely different motivation For playing the video game It's like well actually At the time that we're at right now Right now it's actually much

much more toxic and granular than that. It's, I am in, I'm running through the Clytem or something like that. And I'm like, these motherfuckers can't even do this in under 14 minutes. What am I fucking playing with amateur? 17 minutes! What am I playing with a bunch of babies? Can't even clear an EX and fucking 50. Get the fuck out of here.

Now, this is words for my own heart and brain and chest. not out my mouth, right? And you're not getting the thing you want as a, as a yay, you're doing your chores. Yeah. You're doing your, so here's the thing. This is going to sound really strange. I was talking to Paige about this yesterday. I was playing, uh, I did, what the fuck was it?

It was an alliance roulette and I got an encounter called Voidark. And Voidark is not tough anymore. It's, it's quite old. And I know it backwards and forward. and I was starting to fall asleep during Voidark and I wasn't falling asleep because I was bored I was falling asleep because it's like a fucking snugly ass warm blanket and it like I will load into Voidark and I just go

good old Voidark all right and I just start to like fucking drift because I'm so relaxed and when somebody fucks the dog on it and fucking doesn't know how to fucking deal with the Ku Kulmin ads or we fucking wipe on the bomb phase and Labyrinth of the agents. I want, okay, for people who play the game, I saw a wipe on the bomb phase and labyrinth of the agents yesterday. That is the first time I've ever seen that in 11 years of playing that fucking game. So I went from like, ah, cozy, relaxed in my blanket, ah, nice to what the fuck are these people doing? What are you doing?

This is crazy because... You've interrupted my cozy time! I am up to my balls in this game right now and you're still describing something that feels a million light years away from me and the shit I care about. Like, it's so nuts. I'm like, this is not the car...

This is not last year. I know every... I'm here now. I'm literally here in it. And I see. still don't give a shit about what you're talking about. So, no, the main thing, the main thing is, is, uh, so mint, actually, she's about to finish Don Trail, right?

Uh, that's Mint Castellow, by the way. Um, and, uh, she's at 400 hours. Like, she is booked it. She's booked it fucking through. Um, so, like, she, she skipped a ton of stuff on the way up, right? Like, uh, the way that I would recommend going through this game is that when you hit, like, the end of a Realm Reborn, you should check out the, what, was offer for hitting the end of a Roman Reborn.

And when you hit the end of Evans Word, you should check out what was on the offer for the end of Heaven's Word. Now, some people don't do that. Some people get all the fucking way to the end of the goddamn game and hit like cap and like the point where your quest log says to be continued. And they go, cool, what raids this game got? And the answer is like a lot across a huge, you know. but as of you describing your balls are into this game,

the scale of a game that has lasted this long is like, no, your ankle deep into it now. Your foot will be in it when you hit credits. Because the game essentially has two games. One is the trip to credits, right? And then there's, so think of Okami, our discussion with Okami earlier.

right? When you finish 2.0 and beat the MSQ 2.0 boss, you get your ending and you get your credits. And it goes, you beat a Rome Reborn. Right? Then you enter into the patch cycle, which is the two-year period,

or sometimes three years period due to COVID, between you finishing the expansion and the next expansion coming out, which is essentially a whole expansion worth of stuff. And the thing that's, that's strange is that they are two fundamentally

different games. The first of which is a MMO-shaped JRPG and the second of which is using the same systems basically a monster hunter style action game

where you're dealing hard encounters and you're dealing with tough stuff and gear progression and stuff like that. And then once the gear progression is done you start the next MMO-shaped JRP. Yeah. And so on and so forth.

So the MMO-shaped JRP is at bare minimum what every type of player is going through. Mandatory. Right. And then outside of that, whatever you want to call that ankle,

whatever level of, is that, if that's 60% passing, then sure, whatever number you want to apply, right? But the player that is not into the monster hunter stuff you just described,

but is actually just doing the, I'm hanging out my friends, I'm doing the housing market stuff. hanging and I'm doing the... Oh, that's a whole different fucking beast. That's a whole... But that beast represents the entirety of that person's time on 14, right? Yes. The friends I have who don't know shit or care, give a fuck about any of the combat stuff

that are just there for dress up, talking to friends, ERPing, etc., etc. Yeah. You know, like they're all... They're MSQ minimum, but they have a full experience that is a whole different game from what you're describing, right? Yeah, the longer a game like this goes on, the more other games, it just absorbs into itself. So what I'm foreseeing here is, or not even foreseeing, what I'm saying is that like, knowing there's a big pie with all these different slices, I can mentally filter out the types of shit I don't give a fuck about and go,

that's right. Well, when it comes to this slice that I do care for and then the MMO-shaped JRP, this is my 100%. Absolutely. That being said, even in that context, man, it's a long, goddamn, there's a lot here. There's a lot. So I don't care about the housing district. I don't do any of that stuff. I don't give a fuck.

The housing, you know what I use the housing district for? I teleport to my free company's house for my friends own a house because it's the closest way to get to a market port. Like, that's my use of that. I don't dress up the fucking the house. I don't do any of that shit. I don't do the Animal Crossing mode that they put in the game. I don't like the PVP in the game at all some people do

I really don't care for it I'm here for the story I'm here for gearing up my character and doing like the what's called mid-core content and just generally vibing in the space right yeah and if I did do the rising

and walked out of there going holy fuck that was a that writing was amazing I'm whoa those characters holy shit. I might have gotten my heart pulled, you know, towards, like, meeting these NPCs and chilling out in the world and doing some of those things more. But it didn't. Oh, that's not why I do the rising.

I do the rising for a highly specific reason. I do the rising so I can talk to my friend Darius about the hints they have hidden in the dialogue for the next expansion. Sure, because that literally, okay, well, I don't know if it's okay to talk about what's in it or not because you haven't done it. I wouldn't worry too much. But the rising of the year before the expansion always includes bits and pieces that are like can be deciphered to get details about the next expansion. Okay.

Because yeah, I did feel that at a certain point that they were looking at the camera going, have you heard the announcements for the new things that are coming? Absolutely. Get ready. Absolutely. Yeah. So like people, people have been able to dig. out like enough of the, because if you're like a lore head and you, you've played enough of the game, you can get little bits of pieces and be like, ah, like, so for example, um, before Dantrail

was announced, people had kind of fucking figured that we were going to go to like a lightning based location. And that ended up being true. Okay. Yeah. And look, before you jumped on my throat, I'm not saying that all quests are. Not me. No, no, but yeah, I'm not saying everything is going to be this, just because I bounced off of this one or whatever. What I am trying to get at is that, like, if I play something in the game that evokes the feeling of hunting for wine and cheese, then that's going to leave a mark that is equally as visible as the marks of the things I would enjoy.

And these tally up at the end of the day, you know? And so there's, I'll hit you with a minor spoiler to, to, for, to get across that, FF14's writers know that. So the weekly currency for all old stuff is called a tome stone of poetic. It's like a little, looks like a USB stick. You can look it up. It's called a tombstone of poetic. Poetics.

And it is basically, you know, old technology, little thing. You trade those in to get gear, right? It's just a standard currency that can be run forever. it has been used for like the entire history of the game at this point and at one point your character enters into a new expansion and somebody goes look we figured out these old things

and and even though you're essentially on a different planet we figured out how to use these to upgrade our things and they show you a tombstone of poetic and your character will physically animate disgust and dismay at seeing the thing follow them to a different planet. Because even the devs are aware, okay, you're probably fucking sick of poetics at this point. Okay, okay, okay.

And that's why the... Sure. That's why the... When they were showing off the slides about, hey, we understand that you are maybe done with the old gearing system. It was the phrase avoiding fatigue with tomestones of poetics raining down behind it. Going, we are aware. We are aware we are going to be changing this as a big deal.

Yeah, I mean, I will say that like I said last session about the like wall of text you don't care about as a punchline. like not the best way to you know get your gag across of like hey we know there's stuff in this game you don't like is like you know not the best approach nine times out of ten but when it lands it lands so there's a thing the f of 14 is best summed up by

so some games use a shotgun approach to content where they're like I'm not going to make a perfect silver bullet like Devil May Cry 5 right Devil Mike Cry 5 is a silver bullet of a video game. If you want to play a character action game and they hit you with it, oh, I'm dead, right? 14 is a shotgun where it has a hundred, a hundred little things. It can be all things to all people.

But the solution to, oh, I only got hit by a little bit of it, is to shoot you again every four months. every four months they will blast you. Can you be right back for a second? Yeah. Yes. So effectively 14 is doing what Fortnite is doing. Yeah. By trying to become a little bit of everything

and hope that you stick around for some of the parts that you care about. So like a really good example is like every single patch, every four months has story content. And okay. Well, good to know the new UPS.

work good to know that that works all right BRB again no no no hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on I got text a guy okay Jesus flashbang the podcast huh well

so basically there's a there's a guy installing some some dimmer switches in the house. And the fucking the way that the switchboards are connected between the two

buildings means. He was like, which of these attaches to your office building? And I'm like, I don't know. Okay. All right. So, hey, the new uninterruptible power supplies totally

work. internet didn't go down the computer never turned off I didn't lose the microphone I set up I set up that the lights aren't attached to the UPS so that I know Ah that you're switching over

Right so if all my lights go out But everything stays on I'm like uh oh I'm running into a power outage right now Cool okay Oopsie Fancy Anyway yeah So yeah, every single four months and then every eight months, sorry, at launch and every eight months after that, there's the eight man raid series. And then every four months and every eight months after that, there's the 24 man raid series.

And then it sprinkled in between those is Palace of the Dead content or crafting content. And they basically spread it out. Now on paper. That would usually mean, though, that like, because you're talking about these. pellets to continue the analogy, not each of these pellets is going to hit that hard compared to the strength of a fucking sniper bullet, right? So exactly. So what happens is, is there are people that play, I'm on Fantasy 14,

and what they do is they go, I don't play odd numbered patches because I do high-end rating. So I only play even numbered patches. Fuck the point-fives. Right? Okay. And then there are other people that are like, I'm not super into it or I like the alliance raids or I like the extra content. So I primarily play the odd numbered patches. Okay. And then there's people that stay, stay, you know, connected.

But all they do is the story every time it comes out. There's a wide level of engagement here. I would guess, I could imagine a large, I can imagine the majority of players being like, I'm here for the story and the occasional crossover content of a, friend of a thing that I care about you know like I'm here I'm here for the the MMO shaped RPG and also Kefka yeah so right now there are seven games here and each game has five major patches so that's 35 so getting into 14 today is 35 gentlemen lining you up with shotguns and then shooting you every 80 hours. Like one of them shoots you every 80 hours. And also I guess each of these things that

you're getting hit with, it's like it might not be as good as the pure version of the thing you're looking for, but you can hang out with your same group of friends and do it together. Sometimes like it's one of those things. There's so much. The quality is never 100% consistent. Some raid series aren't as good as others. Some main stories are way better than others. Like the current Raid series Arcadian is incredible. It has a unique vocal track for every single encounter, and all of those songs are amazing. All the gear looks great. The fights are super interesting. It's a pro wrestling storyline, which people really, really liked. That's cool. Pandemonium sucked ass. I don't care for pandemonium. Just didn't like it. But that's fine,

because that was attached to End Walker, which had my favorite of the storylines, et cetera, you know. and so far and so forth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I'm walking around. I'm looking at each part of this and I'm beholding it or putting it back down on the table. So we'll find out more tomorrow. Then there's the mental illness part, right? So then there's the part where there's content that you hate, but it has a thing that you want.

So I really, really don't like Eureka. Now, I know of some friends of mine that love Eureka. I hate Eureka. Eureka is a what's called a field operation. And what it is is a small scale, older style MMO inside 14. Right? It is you die, you lose levels. It has its own leveling system that's completely separate.

It's like very open world centered, et cetera. But it also has at the very end of it like the coolest. looking Dark Knight Sword in the game. Oh boy. Not me sitting here bitching about the game that I refused to stop playing. Yeah. So I went and fucking loaded up with people on Discord and I did the entirety of Eureka just to get it. And then I wore that fucking look on my character for like three years. And it was super worth it. Boy. To me. Yeah. To me. Because I got the mental illness. Yeah. That is a cliff. I will have to see when I'm standing at its precipice.

Like, you know what one gets people really bad? People who don't like PVP, but like PVP rewards are actually seasonal. Like they leave. So they'll be like, well, this season of PVP, it's still PVP, but it does have that cool amount that will only exist in this content and you have nine months to get it. but oh and then it's like man if I that's yeah that's real if I if you're ever looking at me upset at the thing I'm doing because I have to get the reward I have to get the reward this entire process

like so I that's when my soul is already lost let's already like you know what they're going to do Willie you do not weep for me so remember one of the things they're going to be adding is new animations to the game they are going to put the coolest animation in the game for whatever,

like the coolest teleport animation behind like gold saucer mini games or some shit like that. Because MMOs, you can push people to content by just offering a better incentive. Or like Mahjong or something like that.

You know, not a lot of people. We spent a lot of time on the mahjong in this game and not enough people play it. Fuck it. animation reward for mahjong. I will say right now that like the more normalized it is that like most people are running around with three things following them, the more I kind of want zero things following me. Sure. It's like there's a couple of things to that when it comes to mounts and some other stuff where I'm probably going to be real picky and choosy about. There's definitely like there's definitely a significant contingent of people that want their character not unadorned.

but like clean. I'm leaning in that direction. Yes, I'm leaning in that direction with Joe Guns. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like, I, I, I, you know, there's some people that spend, uh, tens of millions of in-game currency to buy versions of mounts that are just straight up solid gold.

Right? Like, like, it's just like the same mount, but it's, it's like obnoxiously ugly gold. I have seen one in the wild. I have seen one ever. And I know more than one people have them. And I think most people have them because they wanted to have them. Not to use them, but just to have it. What the fuck was Overwatch thinking?

It was stupid fucking golden guns. Just it's so ugly. Gears of War III is still the worst one to me, where the like $100 edition of that game gave you a, a solid gold lancer, which made you, like, easier to see in PVP? Because it's the only, like, golden-looking item in the entire game. It's so garish and awful. God, anyway, yeah.

That White House, though. Ooh. Anyways, let's take a quick word from our sponsors. I love our sponsor. This week, the podcast is sponsored by Castle Super Beast. Oh, it's us? Go get your legacy collection shirt and desk mat available now on Orchid8.com at the Castle Superbeast section, or Orchid8.com slash collections slash castle dash super dash beast.

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Have the desk mat. It looks good. You can bust that out at your card game. I like Bedman featuring Mori Calliope. There she is. There she is. There she is. It works. It works. This week, the podcast is also sponsored by Rocket Money. That is a modern solution to some modern problems.

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All right. We should get a move on with the stories this week. Oh, I got some words to say about one of these. Okay, well, off the top, hey, GTA 6 footage dropped. Sure, it looks like Grand Theft Auto. Yeah, I didn't see all of it. I just saw the first little apartment section where they go into the, the part that, the wire, the part where they do the wire mission. Yeah.

It took out fucking Amazon When it went live I was live I was streaming with girl DM And all of a sudden we noticed Nobody could talk anymore And just fucking took out the whole goddamn website Twitch exploded

Yep That is that is a GTA game Cool Sure Not not much else to it Um The It seems like some folks have gotten their hands on DLSS 5

And Oh yeah I've started fucking around with it And we're seeing insane application on multiple games. So basically NBA 2K7 came out and then people found the DLSS-S-5 DLL in there and they found out that they can transfer that into other games and enable it there. And hey, guess what?

Not only does this tank your performance by like 60-70 percent, it's also like the ugliest goddamn thing I've ever seen in my life. So I'm surprised at how they got it working in the sense that, like, you have to be... I just drag it, drop it. But it has to be like you're online and connecting to their networks and it's pulling... No, it's running a tiny little generative AI pile of shit off of your local device. And it's all local. Oh, I thought it was network required.

That's why it kills your performance so bad. Interesting. Well, so we're seeing... People discovered that you can multi-pass it to increase the effects. Yes, yes. Zeno blade. Just proves that everything that they're saying about how this,

it enhances the structural integrity of the, it's a complete bullshit. It is just a generative AI filter running off your video card on top of the fucking game. That's it. That's all it is. So it's funny because like I, so I'm seeing it applied to like all the anime stuff and like high fire rush looks fucking horrendous.

Tifa's face. You see the Persona 5 stuff? I haven't seen persona. I saw Tifa. Oh, the persona 5 stuff is like a stonement. punishing is fucking terrible. The Zeno Blade double-baked stuff looks nightmarish as well.

Click on that. Let me see. Oh my God. So what's happening here is people are just running it on top of itself like five, ten times. Until you get reality. Yeah. Until you, well, until you try to approach reality. Yes. Yeah. That's crazy.

I saw like it's it's so I saw it turns people sorry after you after you no I was gonna say the the one legit test I saw someone trying to do was running it over Tekken and yeah um yeah it made the again it makes the faces weird and it made the environments look better but the people not worse it's really weird you know environments looked a lot more realistic and nicely lit and people looked fucking crazy yeah no people are annihilated by it because it doesn't understand shadow it doesn't understand anything other than a hyper-realistic art style. And even realistic art styles like Final Fantasy 7 remake aren't realistic enough for the thing to work. But more than that, the characters' heads and faces don't maintain any fucking consistency. Because it's generating it on the fly per frame. So different lighting conditions and different angles turn the characters into different people. I wonder if they would release it to like

With like an exclusion of characters but only background Type of setting or something to that effect Since that's the easiest to sell people on and it still obviously is Dog shit that's wiping out the actual artist's assets But I feel like if you want to not scare people away with this Absolute face nightmare bullshit that it's doing They're gonna need to obfuscate and hide that much more aggressive. Well, you can't because it drops your performance by like 60%. Well, you can't

obfuscate it. So like very similarly to ray tracing and the push towards rate tracing, I like ray tracing as an option in games because if the game is built with ray tracing in mind, it means there's a really easy option to turn off to gain like 40 more frames. It's like, wow, I just turn this motherfucker off right now and wow, game runs way better. This shit will never be able to. So first of all, it looks like garbage, but also it's, it chunks your frame rate into like unplayableness. Like, it's

right now, it's the reason why you're seeing screenshots instead of videos, the video would run too poorly. Glass half full, um, they optimize for it and then you take it off and you're fucking doing, you're doing gangbusters. You're doing great. You know?

Ideally. Um, anyway, yeah, if you want to go see this, this fucking nightmare fuel, go look at all the anime games. Oh man, here's Dangan Rompah times 10. I didn't see it. Just.

No. Oh, no. It's, dude, it's just this thing of like, it's, it's an ongoing thing with all this AI technology where they go, look, isn't it cool? And people go, oh, no. it's not applying it to it looks really bad applying it to anime is nasty work

man okay um beyond that we covered a bunch of some of that other stuff in the earlier part what we didn't talk about is uh Sony's lawyers arguing you're a dumb dumb

nobody is stupid enough to actually believe they own digital games because only one person could buy GTA 6. Reasonable consumers would not be misled. Yeah, so... Bro, when I go to the PlayStation store, it says buy, it doesn't say rent, it doesn't say buy license, it says buy. So they're dealing with their class action lawsuits,

a proposed class action lawsuit, and their legal team is arguing that basically saying, it's not even the quiet part, It's the part that's buried in the terms out loud, you know, but the idea of this whole digital future we're entering and the fact that you don't actually own the thing, you just buy the license to access it. Yeah, they want to use that as their legal grounds.

Yeah, I don't know. Proposing effectively that nobody that buys this would expect that they actually own the product because it is not sold for you to own according to their software licensing agreement. And buried deep inside it, basically outlines that, yeah, you are getting essentially a licensing agreement to the product, but you are not purchasing it for itself. And that, again, nobody would be so stupid as to think

that they were owning something digital. I feel like this, even for, even for corporation in legalese nonsense, I feel like this is, even for that, like pushing this really far, Like in terms of believability. Well, because if they get off the ground with this argument and it's accepted, then the fucking floodgates are open for all forms of, yeah, all money you've spent has led to no ownership. You own absolutely nothing. Nothing digital you own is actually yours. You know, and that is an extremely powerful precedent for them to set by taking all ownership

away from anyone that would want to fight for the fact that they paid for something. If a game shuts down, if a game takes away a, a DLC you've purchased. If it takes away any content you've expressly invested into the thing. Yeah, fuck you. You were licensing that. As somebody in the chat points out, this is the type of argument that got a Steam refund where companies tried to push it too far and the European Union was like,

okay, no, get fucked. You have to be able to refund it. But that's still a platform-specific refund system, you know, that they implemented. That's not going to help you with a PlayStation. that's not going to help you with any of these individual companies that wants to use this type of shit to, again, further take your ownership away. I think they're underestimating how many times people can get burned before they just throw in the towel. I think, so this is, this is it, right? I think it's absolutely a part of just exhaustion, beating you down and, you know, giving into the idea of like, yeah, fucking fine, whatever.

because in many cases the like I'm not like in many cases the holding out is like they're like we can tank that right so people holding out are choosing to not participate in it is nowhere near as effective as a lawsuit or a legal thing that forces their fucking hand I actually meant the opposite I actually meant the opposite I think that they are

they basically are not taking into a account. If you are playing a game and this licensing shit fucks you over, that can only happen X number of times before you're the type of person who just quits or just goes full-scale to piracy.

Hmm. You see, yeah, like if you have that, if you have the means about you and to do that, then I can see that, but I could also see a lot of people that just get mad and just stick to it because whatever, GTA. Yeah, no, that's the assumption. The assumption is, the assumption is,

oh, these people will fucking buy these forever. I don't think that's true. In both cases though, the most effective thing here is the direct, fuck the direct challenge, get something like the Australian board to be like, we don't give a shit, you can't sell that shit like this here.

Right? Um, Chris on Blue Sky, Chris Wolferman. China, with the, with the percentages in the loot boxes and stuff. Made a really good point that's like tangential to this, which was hey, if Sony is going to be, getting rid of physical games. Are they going to improve their store?

Or are they just going to make it so that you can never gift someone a PlayStation game ever again as long as you live? Because the PlayStation store has no gift functionality at all. Right. So for Christmas morning of 2029, if little Timmy wants a PlayStation game, is Santa,

like is the scenario that, well, good morning, Timmy, look, here's a PlayStation. Here's a gift card. card from Santa. Like, are you fucking there's no gift card to go buy. No, here's a gift card to buy the specific game. And this isn't like me going like,

oh, but the nostalgia and the memories or whatever. I'm like, dude, childhood memories of opening up your Nintendo 64 is one of the things that causes people to play games for their whole life. Like by stripping out every possible scenario in which somebody could have a good time interacting with your product.

Hold on a second. Sorry. Mm-hmm. All right. Yeah, so just, you know, whatever. You're going to hear more and more of this type of bullshit. Oh, this bullshit legally is fucking garbage. As we approach the end of physical, they're going to be starting to, they're going to be staking out to stand their ground on not getting sued and being in. Oh, they're going to get sued a punch no matter what.

Of course, of course. but they're going to start trying to, you know, lay the foundation for their, for their bullshit from here. So don't be surprised. And then beyond that, yeah, the only other thing. So there was word coming out that,

doom the Dark Ages, Revelations. Is Revelations the, the DLC? The DLC. It's enormous. It's actually extremely large. Yep. So the DLC had the team faced.

the worst crunch in franchise history, according to Insider Gaming. And apparently the team went through hell, pun intended, for that particular release. This is crazy because... Apparently they built the entire thing in like three months. And like, am I not, like,

is this not the thing that a lot of people checked out from and like have pretty much walked away from Doom on, it feels like, or this did the new game. Crunch, then fired. Yeah. People doing 12-hour days, some people hitting 17-hour days, going, crunching it together for three, four months total.

Yeah, 5 a.m. I mean, that's, that's dog shit. and then ultimately let go in the round of layoffs. Great, good job. Everybody did a great job. Get out. I mean, we talked earlier in the show about the good game that had everybody almost out of work. And now we're talking about a bad one.

Did you notice that like the term quiet quitting came up and then like, can you believe this? And then like it kind of went away as all these. masses of layoffs started to go through because even the dipshits behind quiet quitting couldn't like justify like laying off 10% of your workforce every fucking year is like it's it's see and the and the the article also goes into the um the blur because he's saying it's not an official company mandate but it's work that needs completing and people that work on working on this stuff. If they want it to not just be barely passable, if they want to feel proud of what they're

putting their name on, then it's kind of expected that you're going to come in and push yourself a little bit further. It's pseudo-induced crunch is the term that was used. It's very obvious. It's like, we didn't force it. We just said, you, hey, it's, do you want to feel proud about what your possible deadline? Which is just like, hey, like, as if that makes it any fucking better, manage your team properly and manage your fucking company properly

and if you're gonna force anything again you can force time off in that Nintendo's type of shit you know or work with deadlines that are manageable whatever the case is this sort of like we are not culpable because

people did it to themselves because we softly implied that they ought to is some horses listen I don't want him to die I just want a pound of flesh from somewhere on his body I didn't tell him to kill himself. I just want a singular pound of flesh from somewhere.

Look, you're gonna, you can find whichever 17 of these 24 hours. You can find them wherever you want them to be. We're not telling you where to put them. You can take, you can distribute that 17 however you'd like. You have the freedom to do so. Um, yeah. Well, anyway. the entire games business is obsessed with working hard instead of working smart

because hey guess what when you're doing a 90 hour week your work sucks correct you make you make mistakes and those mistakes have to be fixed and that takes a whatever we said it a million times a million times but you know hey uh did you hear that their that melee is getting remastered man that's not true Godzilla destroy all monsters melee remaster

It's Lisa Wheeling Bart up on the fucking Yeah On the trolley As he leads up And you know what As it's coming out On November 3rd

On the Switch 2 They say They don't give a shit about GTA 6 Godzilla fans are going to show up. Bro, they're so right. They're so right. They don't give a fuck.

They are correct to say that. Godspeed. God bless. Let's take a letter. Hey, if you want to send it to Castle Super Beastmail, Gmail.com. That's Castle Superbeastmail at Gmail.com. All right. Let's take one over here.

name not given, but the remake for the first Trails in the Sky game just had a patch that came out that made various changes. This is super interesting. Including some voice lines. The country that the entire game takes place in is called liberal, pronounced like the word liberal. For this patch, they re-recorded every voice line to include liberal to change the pronunciation to libel, liberal.

That was a lot of lines from a lot of different. actors and the patch came out almost a full year after initial release. What are some of the more interesting changes that haven't that you've seen patched in other the knowledge from SF, which didn't change enough anyway? So this is actually super interesting because there's a way more than that. Basically, Trails in the Sky, first chapter or whatever, the remake was localized again from scratch. However, some of the localization changes and some of the dialogue didn't line up with the

whole rest of the fucking series. Because the trail series is like 20 games. So there were like names of types of like technology. There were names of towns. There were names of organizations and stuff like that that were like inconsistent. And considering they want people to play these remakes and then go on to play all the other trails games, it would get really confusing. Now, if they have been fucking it up for 20 years, would you rather an accurate entry

do a better job or the consistency to fit? No, it's not about, it's not accuracy. It's just consistency. It's about the way that it's being pronounced in English or the way that it was translated to this or that. Is this like a war of the lions thing where like a tactics? No, no, it's like, oh God, I forget.

One of the moves, it's like the difference between like focus arts and like break arts is like the thing. But then it goes on to be break arts for the rest of the fucking series. Okay, so they just did their own weird thing for this one entry that needed fixing. Yeah, yeah. I see, I see. Yeah, it's, uh, Shian says it's the difference between fire three and, sorry,

Firoga and Fire 2. And fire two, yeah, okay. Right. Um, well, and so like, it's, they, they said that for the second chapter, they actually went ahead and, and got it to be consistent with everything. And that's why they needed to go patch the first chapter to change all that stuff. And yeah, it's a massive patch. They re-recorded lines just to get these correct.

it's super cool as far as interesting patches go as outlined yeah I think the most interesting one is Alex from six because I've never seen anything like that or it is a plot patch because of how horrified everybody was with the incest implications and then the fact that whoever wrote it

was so attached to that outcome or to the idea of the relationship being that close that they didn't want to fully give it up and instead of just completely changing it they made it still kind of have the implications of closeness, which is like... They kind of tried to dust it off a little bit, but it's... It feels like the whole, like, okay, the writer's barely described, barely disguised fetish, and then the writer gets called out, and then the writer changes it a little bit to make people

less disgusted, but then they still, they won't let it go because they like it too much. Somebody out there, someone on that team is way too excited about the idea of the childhood friend, a potential cousin angle, romance thing and doesn't want to let it go. They need to be brave and they need to stand up and say it was me. I have my suspicions based on the way they talked about it about which one of those devs on the team. Oh, yeah. There's one dev is speaking out a little bit more than most about the scenario when it comes

to the Alex stuff, you know, and he's doing good work otherwise, but look, man. I just It's more than cultural at this point You know Mm-hmm Anyway We got another one over here Yo, new viewer

And I hear the two of you riffed About that one developer I think Thing from Aspire How come you two don't like them It seems all they ever really do Is make random game ports From CEO of Aspire Oh

It's complicated man, it's complicated, look, me, for me, it's like, look, the sole rea reports, the full report's fine. I enjoy that. Sol revertports are excellent. I had no problems with that. That was cool.

And I love the fact that you can press a button to switch back and forth. Dope shit. My only thing is, one, I remember that Cotor 2 restored content mod bullshit was like a lie. And I don't like when companies just lie about what people are going to get

and then fucking back down from that shit. That sucks. And I also have some memories. of working on some of their games in the QA days and they just had some really shitty ports that were bad to work on. Oh yeah? Well, simple ass. All right. And we'll take one last one over here. Dear quote unquote, Willie and quote unquote Pat,

been slowly dipping my toe into horror as I'm a huge coward, ended up doing a back-to-back with a couple different media. And they all had something that fucked me up more than I thought it would. What is left after someone when they've been? become something else. So what's worse to you? Being replaced altogether, but not knowing that you are no longer you, becoming something being forced to essentially watch as the thing you become pilots your body,

or being something that still has bits and pieces of the real you clearly in there. I don't want nobody piloting me but me. From something named back. That's definitely the worst. Yeah, this is relevant to a bunch of horror I've seen. I think the version of things where you just become the zombie but you're no longer you is sad for everyone else that loved you

but for you, you're just gone. You know? Yeah. The hollowing where... So yeah, I don't know. If you're looking at a Souls game hollowing, if there's anything left of them inside, then that is a nightmare version of events

that is way worse than the one where it's completely empty but their husk is being piloted around. I would like to imagine that the zombie version has zero of the person left in there. Yeah, I don't want no husk situation. Yeah. I am a hero where the thing that you are obsessed with the most in life becomes the last thing

that you are stuck with is fucking horrendous because you are in there, in fact. And, you know, other other relevant recent media. I'm going to go say, I'm going to say, yeah, I much prefer the version where I'm gone, and you're just taking my meat sack and puppeting it around. I'll take that over the prisoner. The version where it's like, I'm not myself, but I don't realize it. I'm much more okay with that than being trapped inside something piloting my body to do ill.

Yeah, yeah. Like, if, because that's very possible. Like, you can just take severe brain damage and just wake up and just become someone else one day. I could. You know, and there is a horror movie where you get Fetterman. That's totally possible, but, but like that is, that is not the same level. I think that's, that's, you can manage that and kind of just look back and go, huh, what

happened? I, but when it comes to the other two, the last thing I could ever possibly ever want to imagine is permanent trapped in a body where you can't get out, you know, and with zero agency. All right. That'll do. That'll do. Have a good one, everybody.

Take it a ace.