Castle Super Beast - CSB388: Ocarina of Wet: Boners Kerjumbo

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

Download MP3 | Watch Video Episode Full Timestamps: https://docs.google.com/document/u/5/d/e/2PACX-1vSq38_4I3-PAbIFmlAH7yLfUj2UVlD2QjeTAqqzNt4D3Y9Dc6mZn0C31AODu2Uu6Wq6C06AVYju0oij/pub Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive Onimusha: Keep Boat Oar Issening That Manic Twink Legend of Vaseline: Ocarina of Wet More Like RRR-jun Frank n Pete's Brand New Day Sega vs Capcom: Woolie.gif Remains Undefeated NEW CASTLE SUPER BEAST "LEGACY" SHIRT & DESKMAT AVAILABLE NOW: https://www.orchideight.com/collections/castle-super-beast Visit http://drinkag1.com/SUPERBEAST to save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro! Go to http://brooklynbedding.com/ and use my promo code SUPERBEAST for 30% off sitewide Docket: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time releases November 5, 2026 – The Legend of Zelda 40th Anniversary Direct 9.8.2026 Street Fighter 6 - Arjun Gameplay Trailer Gorr the God-Butcher joins Marvel Rivals Season 10: Butcher's Blasphemy Trailer 18 years after Metal Gear Solid 4 first launched, a modder has shown off its first custom map, MGS3's Groznyj Grad Metal Gear Solid Coop Mod (Alpha) Trailer Monolith Soft Listed as Developer of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Norwegian retailer Nintendo Life: "There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that Monolith Soft is behind the upcoming [OoT] remake." 'SPIDER-NOIR', starring Nicolas Cage, has been canceled after one season. YouTube has updated its monetization guidelines for graphic gaming violence just months before GTA 6 launches SteamDB Joins Nexus Mods  

I can see the expression on your face. I can see the expression. Oh, bro. I'm just, I'm just like nonstop giggling about this fucking photo of New Link next to fucking Rinesme, the fucking vampire baby with her fucking spaced out freak bitch eyes. Yeah, okay. Oh, fuck.

Literally the trailer for Okerina just dropped like I want to say a few one or two hours ago. I mean, it, they appear to be, it's kind of interesting because for such a long time, the buildup towards the Okorita of Time remake, I've always wondered, I'm like, are they just going to pull the trigger on a fairly, just a beautiful environment and just kind of have it all. Yeah, yeah, they are. And yeah, it does look like that. It does look like Nintendo hired this man and it looks gorgeous. It's, Focus, L. Focus up, L. You got this.

That's all, that's all there. And honestly, like, no, I think, I think what they got is working, but there is a really clear thing. They were like, I feel like everybody's kind of wet. Okay, Paige. All the, I feel like Link is kind of wet. Why? That's my only thing. Is just the models, like they're going for a kind of more, almost like, you know, Pinocchio puppet, like, aesthetic to it.

But they just, they look kind of wet. That's all I can say. Link is wet and I had the exact same reaction, which like everyone looks like greased up. Grease. Okay. Okay. I say, yeah, I'm like everyone's moist. I don't know.

It's fucking weird. It's fucking weird as shit. And I mean, and you know, they're like the, the models are like are nice, you know. There's just, but there is a lighting and or texture thing happening where it just looks kind of wet. Wet link It's just You know He's sopping it up also

And to be fair There is the There is the scene Where you know It is raining at night time When Yeah where you were they They're supposed to be wet

Out of the town exactly And then everyone should be wet there But then they should be wet But then they just never dried off You know Yeah it's It's fucking weird It's also

I forget who I saw Posted it But man they agree the ever-loving shit out of Link. They greebled him to death. So, Gribling is like adding small, extraneous details to existing things

or structures to add details. Like, I don't think fucking Link's boots and tunics should have every single millimeter covered with, it was definitely Pyro. Yeah, should be covered with little intricate designs and

twirls and shit. It's like fucking my greased up grebele boy okay yeah I'd have to look at some of the finer details on the on the on the thing I didn't see a ton of the extra fabric stuff that they're doing oh yeah here's here's page's interaction why is everyone in this is Zelda so wet yeah some guy would you rather it have been creepy page it is creepy like it is it's actually kind of off-footing um so yeah there's a couple I'm sure there's a couple different, you know, designs they could have gone with.

If they, the FF7R kind of just like approach reality and then like stylize it kind of look. And then back it off a little bit. Yeah. That was another way to go with it. And, you know, I think they, in the little, in the video, like Aounma said, like they wanted it to be nostalgic, but then with kind of its own, they wanted to add some flare to nostalgia. So I don't think they wanted the shape of Link or adult Lake or any of the characters to look

off from the shape you remember. Honestly, I think it's, honestly, like, like, I'd be, I'd be, I think it's fine. It's just a little wet. That's all. I don't, I want to give a shout out. Lost in the saucer, but it's just, it's just a little moist. And if they, if he dried off and towel down a little bit, I think it'd be fine. I want to give Haddock a shout out as well, because they posted that like, the way

Nintendo talks about their fucking games, like, nobody, like, they don't fucking tell you anything that matters for shit about anything. Like they were sitting there, they're standing there and they're in the middle of town, they're like, oh, the time of day is changing. Isn't that crazy? Fucking no. Dude? Yeah, yeah. No, well,

that was that, that wasn't crazy 30 years ago. I mean, the, the thing was like, the camera can rotate, but like it couldn't before. And it's like, that's true. This was an N64 controller. More than anything, more than wetness, more than moisture. I would say what is nuts is a fucking jump button. What do you mean I'm not going to hop when I run to the edge of that? I just started I just like, Odi Musha has like Ocarino of time jumping in it.

It's, it's really funny because like a bunch of all the both of the details that we've mentioned and others as well are basically them trying to spin the phrase. Wow, the N64 controller was like a fucking piece of shit, huh? Like, we couldn't, we did, oh, man, we decided on two buttons for the whole game. Crazy, huh? A and B, and then a bunch of other bullshit. Why would you need more than A and B? That's crazy.

Well, more than anything, I mean, the, it, it really, the shape of that controller and the weirdness of it is like, the, uh, at the end of the day, just making shit so that you could access the stick and the D pad without having to do a full hand switch. A full grip switch is what everyone kind of realized is what you should be going for. Having an analog stick is good. Having to pull your hand off to switch to it is bad. And designing for D-pad exclusively or stick exclusively was not my preference.

So that thing looks weird. Hey man, I was playing fighting games with those C buttons. That was a mistake. I was playing Mace the Dark Age and Dark Rift and fucking flying dragon with sea left, see up. That's terrible. That's really bad. You shouldn't have done it. You will you do what you got to do when times are tough?

No, you didn't have to. You didn't. But you did. But you did because there's nothing else for you. So you had to buy Gasp fighters next stream because you needed a fighting game and you didn't have a PlayStation. You didn't need. You needed to do it. You did.

No. And that's- You're using the word, you're using the word need a lot. But I need it. I don't think that's a true version. I needed to play some fighting games. And I did, I looked around and I did not have them available to me on my Nintendo platform.

And that smash. Was that not all part of God's plan? I mean, it was, it was part of our fucking, it was part of our, our, whatever, I don't know, our welfare plan. Yeah, yeah. We do what we can. Sanity intervention. You know. If I don't have any fighting games, I'm going to start worshiping the devil.

I swear. I'm going to do it. I mean, it was just, it was like, it was the one, like I was happy, I was a happy Nintendo kid, and I was very, very much on that side, and I had been for my entire life. But the one thing that I could not ignore was my friend was popping in his fucking games and getting that Capcom logo with the guitar strum on it. And I was like, fuck me. That's a really good Capcom logo and there's an amazing game that's about to happen.

Or when you see the sky, when you see the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. You know, you know an amazing game is about to boot up when you see that fucking logo. And it's one that's going to be loading on a disc that I don't have because I'm putting in cartridges. Like the craziest thing I can think of about like the Nintendo Kid thing for my childhood is that me and my brother wanted a Genesis because we wanted to play sports games. Yeah. And the sports games on the Genentee's. Genesis just fucking kicked ass. Yeah.

We're so good. Genesis won in the hood. You know, that was it. Oh, man. Well, anyways, hey, this is a loaded one. There's a lot going on. A lot going on this week. You can say it.

You can say it's loaded. You can say things. Ocarina of Way. I'm so ready for a loaded podcast right now. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I'm highly ready. I'm good.

I'm good to go. I'm strong. Yeah. No. I mean, we're doing wonderful. I love it when, um, middle of the night refusing to sleep, wake up moments are evolving into, it's not middle of the night crying. Um, it's just middle of the night.

I'm just like sitting up. Oh, I'm just out. Hey, man. What's up? Are you guys up? Are you guys up? I'm good. I'm good for now.

Let's hang out. Yeah, dude. That's awesome. What do you what the fuck you mean? Bab, ba, ba, ba, ba. Yeah. bed and just like No

No it's time It's time Fuck it's time now Yeah that shit's brutal Because it's not like Like it's when you know there's a need When you know there's a crying And you're like okay

Milk Milk done Pass out Need meet met And back to rest And this is a like No actually I'm just up and ready to play And hang out

What do you mean you're not ready to play What 5 o'clock doesn't cut it for you 4 o'clock doesn't cut it for you 4 o'clock doesn't cut it for you? What's the problem? Let's go upstairs, guys. Come on. That's good. I like that. That was a good phase.

Anyway. All right. So I'm at the phase right now where the wake up at that time is, I want more blanket. Give me more blanket. Okay, here's more blanket. No, I don't want the blanket. Okay. Jesus.

Oh, my God. It's three in the morning. I can't do. Okay, here's a little bit of blanket. The same amount of blanket you had before you woke up. Yeah. There you go, bud. No, I, I get, there you go.

It's just funny because like, for every moment, because like we got, um, we got to the, we got, we got to like a nice phase of like, hey, yo, some sign language is starting to kick in. We're doing the baby. Yeah, that's a good one. Communication. We're getting, we're getting the, the, the mores and the, on the little things like that, you know. Yeah. But then your story.

is literally every every story you tell is like and then when words are there they're saying they say the exact opposite of reality and then and then challenge you when you deign to correct it you know

so language will not facilitate really we had an argument the other day where he was adamant that he wasn't wearing his shoes but he was and that was that was the whole That was the whole discussion.

Like the fallacy is thinking that like, oh, they're babbling because they want to communicate, but they just don't have the words yet. So there's thoughts and then they're coming out as like, I don't know how to express myself. And that is not at all what is happening even remotely. Their brain is babbling. Yeah. It's not just a mouth that's going bad, bad, bad because the thoughts can't filter out. The whole thought is bad, bad, bad, bad.

He was wearing his shoes. And he's like, where are my shoes I want to put on my shoes? And I'm like, we've already put your shoes on. And I pointed at his shoes and he looked at the shoes and he looked at me. And he went, no. Where are they? And I'm like, I don't know what to. I don't want.

Yeah. And so then I have to start to figure out, do you want different shoes or? are you trying to delay leaving the house? Or are you mimicking something you saw someone else do where you're like, where, what are you guys looking for your shoes at some point? You're like, this is just what we do now. We look for our shoes before we leave or.

Yeah, no, in fact, what it ended up being is that he wanted to put his shoes back on and he wanted to do his own Velcro buckles himself. Okay, well, then now we're cooking. Yes. No, cutting through to find an actual ounce of logic in there is pretty satisfying. Mm-hmm.

Like while the sign language is starting to work out and it's really cool that it is, it also means that like it took a second, but like I'm like, oh, you are now waving bye-bye to the concept of eating. Yeah, isn't that cute? You are waving bye-bye to like playtime and everything. Yeah, I only have like four concepts I can work with, so I'm just going to have to apply them on every scenario. After a meal when you just start going, bye, bye, it's like, are you saying bye to the food? You're done? And it's like, yeah, I guess so. You know, that might be a thing.

So, anyways. Okay, full week, big stuff, a lot going on. Let's, I'm going to start out with, I went to go see the Spoder Man for. It is the fourth one, isn't that? It's the fourth one. You think a trilogy. That's crazy. We don't think in trilogies anymore, you know?

Yeah. No, now we're thinking Sony has to make one of these every couple of years or else they lose the license. And they have to get the top billing. The first logo you have to see needs to be theirs. It needs to last the longest. And Marvel is like, whatever, man, fine. Yeah, like, like the level of like that deal we signed is the worst deal ever. We're lending him back to you.

And sure, you can make the good ones now. But you better put that fucking Sony logo all over this shit. It's crazy how bad that deal is. It's like legit. There's no end date on it. It's in perpetuity, man. It's fucking unbelievable. The Fox deal and the Sony deal for Spider-Men and the X-Men are the deals of a desperate crackhead being like, I will top you the fuck off.

I will suck you off right now for whatever you got in your pockets. What do you got? Sony's like Ah Sure man We'll take Spider-Man Marvel's like Please

Wow yeah But hey So You didn't Right So I I haven't Even seen the trailer

For this Okay Well here's Here's what you need to know So It's well it's pretty good It's a good, it's a good Spider-Man movie. And, like, the fact that they're doing-

I only, I literally only know one, one thing about the movie at all. And that I saw somebody use a name. I did not expect to be used in a Spider-Man movie. Yeah, okay. In a discussion about it. And I went, huh, okay. Yeah, I think, I think so for a part four. Because, like, that's the thing is like, you know, when you, I feel like,

the Lord of the Rings was like, the trilogy is how you make your money. And then Harry Potter is like, hold my fucking beer. Hold my butter beer. and came along, and now everybody's going for the multi-parter thing. And I feel like around five is where the actor, the lead involved, starts going, hmm, okay, you know. It's when the actor starts to go, I got too much money. But you kind of get that, like, Daniel Craig is like,

am I going to be doing this another one, or can I piece now? Have I done it? We done it. Am I out? We out, right? You kind of start to feel that way around part five of a thing, I think. But in this case, what I will say is like, yeah, this is part four with Spider-Man brand-new day. Tom Holland, in my opinion, this is probably, I think it's my favorite performance of his in the film so far.

I think he does his best job as just in terms of acting as Peter Parker. He's being sad Spider-Man now, yes? He is being sad, sad Spider-Man. He is being sad. Okay. That gives you room to be a sad actor. Yes. You can't tell him done to cry because he always cry. Fuck, dude.

That, that, fuck. But just, but it is, he doesn't pout his lips up, you know. But it is, it is noteworthy that like he does a, he does a great job with his performance. Like that, that, that is something that's good. And again, the other things that are pretty strong about it are one aspect that is, you know, is out there is, hey guess what uh frank is showing up you got we got punisher hanging out oh my god he's got his van right yeah and the dynamic between spider man and punisher the spidey and frank dynamic is really good it's a fun it's a little weird considering it's this spidey and this frank because this frank

is like a really extreme violent murderer yeah that's why it's so good this this frank is like Oh, fucking, bro! Like, the roid veins are popping out off the side of his head, you know, and little, and little fucking Tom is just like, all right, man. Like, yeah, hey, you know, it works quite well. It's a very funny dynamic they have, and I enjoyed it, especially considering, you know, the origins of Punisher as well. It's always fun to play off of that.

he he debuted in a spider-man comic right that's literally so i have a question here um and it's kind of important because frank is there but this is a spider-man movie and and frank is a as i just described particularly this frank is like an extremely extremely violent murderer in his own tv show and the daredevil tv show and it is that guy right Yeah. Does Frank Castle R-rated violently murder people in the Spider-Man movie? He tries to. He tries.

Okay. But Spider-Man is there and says, hey. He actively keeps trying to. All right. See? All right. Okay. That's the dynamic.

I feel like a lot of the dynamic with Frank and all the other guys is he's doing his thing. And everybody's like, Frank, can you just not for like a second? No, Frank, Frank needs to kill. He needs to kill. You know, and Pete's like, bro. Can you take a day off for like a minute? And that's it. Please.

That's what that's why it's fun. That's why it's fun. Right. Um Also At one point Just Pete goes and sits and talks to Uh fucking

Just some some lady And then Like he And then they spend some time with her Like giving her as like set up in like a couple of punch lines and you're And stuff you're like what are we What are we doing? And it's like oh this new lady is black widow

and it's like, oh, okay, whatever. Sure, man. Like, yeah, I don't know. The new Black Widow. Yeah. What? They just, there's, there's, there's, the blonde one from the thing?

No, the other one. No, the, like, no, the, the other blonde one that was in the Thunderbolts. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, I guess, I guess. I, it, bro, I got to, I got to be. real. Like, the Spidey Man movie is part of the big MCU thing or whatever, but

like, I haven't watched like fucking 70, 80% of this fucking stuff. Like, and now I'm hearing that they're like, we don't need to shoot with a script. Our actors are all really good improvving on set for Doomsday. I'm like, man, fucking, okay.

Um, that's going to be, oh, was she also, was she also in the Black Widow movie? Was she the one in the one? She probably was in the black widow movie. the white outfit or was that it's a Thunderbolts thing set of Thunderbolts was the setup all right I didn't watch Thunderbolts so I didn't know

I have a special so I'm sure I heard that movie was terrible I heard Thunderbolts was good I heard the black middle movie was terrible yeah I heard the Thunderbolts was good however I have a special small point of ire that I know someone's going to be like that's not that big of a deal just watch

it but like I don't feel like watching it in the first place. So the small point of IRA is just an extra bullet point. I was not a fan that Marvel decided for me that I didn't watch Thunderbolts fast enough. Right, right, right, right. To not get spoiled. Oh.

Because they didn't even make it out of the weekend before changing the name of the movie. Oh. It was Sunday when they started putting up new banners for what the actual name of the movie was. And I'm like, really, man? I don't even know what you're talking about. So Thunderbolts, the name of that movie got changed

to the new Avengers. Like the Sunday of its release. Yeah, okay. Okay. Gotcha. And like billboards and all the ads and I'm like, what the fuck, dude? Okay. Um, well, in any case,

um, they, that does get dropped in the conversation or so. Well, here's what I will say, I guess. If she works really well in the Thunderbolts movie and they establish her, that's cool. As someone who hasn't seen it,

this is my first exposure to seeing her. The scene that she's in, I don't feel like it does much to land. Like, I feel like it felt kind of just like, hey, we're cutting to another franchise for a minute and back out for a bit. Whereas like, it doesn't feel as well integrated as say Frank does

where that plays along much much tighter and I didn't watch the I saw Frank in the his Daredevil parts but I didn't see his own Punisher series but still like I'd say that's a thing of like well here's two comparable moments of like this integration works a lot better than this one in my opinion

yeah but anyways So there's that aspect to it And yeah There's beyond that I won't talk about or spoil what else is happening It but there's definitely a reason why like it's marketed the way it is Without like talking too much about what's going on in it

And it's it's cool like what's going on But also it makes you kind of think like And this is the one thing I'll say that is like This is cool but this is all like a setup movie basically. And you get the feeling that you're like probably in the long run this is going to be seen as just like a setup

thing. So it's going to be almost like not as memorable because it's mainly about what it's placing as opposed to what it's doing itself. I feel like that's been the big problem with all the recent stuff. And it's one of the reason that I haven't had an interest in watching most of them is they all

feel like setups. So you don't. They all just feel like. like putting pieces on the board for the next big show. And like there's a, you don't, like, I don't, I don't think they all do, but I think that when it does, it's, it's definitely like something that is, it's less satisfying than when it feels like it's its own thing. And then there's elements that, that are threads that you can pull on to go elsewhere, you know, um, I, I feel like, uh, you want, probably like a healthy

mix of it. I feel like Dr. Strange was like a pretty good mix of that of like, he's in his own world, he's doing his thing, he's solving his problem. And then you see how it relates to some of the other stuff, you know? In this case, like, when you talk about this movie in future, it's going to be difficult to describe anything besides setup, you know? But that being said, what it is doing and, like, how it plays around with stuff and what it is setting up is cool and it's interesting and it's well done, and I'm curious to see what they're going to do with it.

But you're going to see this as a almost like Infinity War versus Endgame, you know? where like you don't really talk about Infinity War as much because Endgame was the one that fucking hit and get all the stuff and you're... Oh, I don't. Okay. In general. Sure. But I think...

Yeah, all that like, all that excitement for all those movies just like left my body as I left the end game theater. Like my, my, I was like, wow. And now we're done. and then they were like, no more. And I was like, ah. Yeah, I think, I think, I think it's, um, yeah, and like I said, in the end, it's a good Spider-Man movie and it, it spends a lot of time with the character and, and shows good stuff. But, um, I am curious if like future, like, the, the, the bigger dominoes that fall later, I'm wondering if the feeling of, of those,

Domino's will kind of like be the main focus of what is being remembered because of like the setup being slighter. Yeah, I get it. Like I feel, you know what? I'm starting to zero in on why I feel like this. I feel about the Marvel MCU the same way I do when I don't finish off a battle pass. Okay. Where as soon as I'm not up to date with absolutely everything, the illusion just instantly breaks

and it becomes like I don't want to feel like I should I have to grind out a bunch of shitty TV series that may or may not be removed from canon now and then I think they kind of know and I think there's definitely an awareness of like there's a lot of people that literally just tapped out after end game and

you know what? Maybe that'll be okay. Please tune in for the big big ones, here's Doomsday, here's the Spidey, and, you know, we got some stuff coming down the pipe that you'll probably be excited for. But I think there's at least an understanding that, like, we're not getting all the big names back for each one of these entries, you know? And you can tell, too, like, some, some Avengers are more willing to show up in, in, in, cameo form in some of these movies than others, you know, I don't know.

Some are willing, some are like, yeah, sure, I'm not doing anything. Why not? You know, throw me a bone. I'll hang out. And others are like, fucking quadruple my number. Like, I have an example. And this is a spoiler for a Secret War, I guess. Where I remember seeing people talk about there was a reveal in the Secret War TV series that was really bad. That Rodey's been a scroll the whole time. And then I never saw anyone bring that up ever again.

And that was like five years ago. and it's just never come up, even though you think that would, that's fucking, you think that would go somewhere. I'm sure there was some, I'm sure there was some, undo button that got hit there.

Yeah, but, but you can't, you have to come out, you have to come out and say, by the way, that show sucked. It didn't count.

I'm, if you want to do that. I was just, well, just the other day I was wondering. I was like, oh yeah, I remember hearing about the whole,

um, a, uh, Bucky and, Bucky and, uh, cap, Bucky and, um, Falcon show. Uh, that, yeah, so that's what ruined it for me, by the way. Right, because that, all this, like, I heard it, I just remember it's like, like, all this interesting setup for like, like, political and, and, and, and racial and other dynamics, and then it just goes nowhere. I, so, so I talked to, I talked about it at the time, but they have all this set up for, um, the Flag Smashers and about like what their goal is.

And then you can feel it. I think it's like from episode five to six where they're building up to something. And then they change what that thing was going to be into nothing. And then the flag smashers have no goal. Yeah. Like they have no goal. Yeah. And so the, your heroes are fighting.

a group that has no plan to stop them from killing some people for nothing and it's like the whole show just completely falls apart and then Sam gives a speech and everyone in the show goes yeah your speech doesn't make any shit it's in sense it's fucking awful

it's awful it's terrible and it's like oh cool this is the fucking future of the MCU they don't know what the fuck they're doing and they're rewriting things while they're recording them is it that is it that the villains were spitting some shit and then they had to swerve off of it? Or is it that thing?

It felt like that. Okay. Okay. It felt like a thing where the Flag Smasher, like actual argument was really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it was actually a really, really good argument. Yep, yo. And then they just swerve to, we're going to bomb the planet with a virus.

You hit him with a killmonger, right? the killmonger every time. It's like, oh my God, why is he so right, though? No, hold on a minute though, but wait, but wait, at what point is he wrong? And it's like, okay, when he's willing to like sacrifice his own people and kill innocent people and that's when he's, ah, you know? It's been like, it's been a thing for a long time. You're like, hold on, wait, he's super right. What the fuck are you doing, Wakanda? A really, really, really long time where you're, you're, ideological villain has to be able to give a speech about their ideology. And the problem is, is that a lot of the times the methods they have chosen are immoral,

but the actual ideology that they're behind has, like, validity to it. So you have to always have them just, like, shoot a puppy for a boner. Like, like, just do something like wildly evil for no reason. Exactly. Exactly. And, and like, with the, the flag smashers in Bucky and Winterman or whatever the fuck that thing was called. Like they, they, it's the most obvious I've ever fucking seen it.

Or they're just like, we have to blow up a hospital. I was like, why. Yeah, yeah. They don't even give a reason. You need a hypocritical,

just out and out evil, like, like part of that mentality to be, to surface, you know, you can't just have it be like the thing that you actually super get. Like every, every 25 minutes on screen.

sorry, every like 18 to 25 minutes on screen, Killmonger has to do a quote unquote bad thing to make sure that you remember that he evil, even though like most of what he says in that movie is like dead on. He's like, there's a bunch of shit on a bunch of things, but the core concept of what the fuck are you doing while we're out here suffering is super real. And like, that's a great point.

And then the movie does something really strange, which is the main character also agrees with him. him. But not like this. But no, but not like this, though. I'm gonna go on

to do nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What up, Auntie. God damn it. Yeah, okay. So they gotta pull the killmonger on it. So we're gonna talk about another one of those actually this week

because another one that you gotta kind of do that for. For Marvel rivals, I don't know if you see, do they just announced. Yeah, they announced Gore of the God Butchers. joining and you're just like, yeah, the dude who's super justified watching his fucking family. Oh, yeah.

Right? Like the whole beginning of that sequence of just, you know, you absolutely deserve to go kill those gods. You are the most justified here, you know? And then you're like, yeah, but then your, your justification extends too far. There's always a moment. But at the start, you're like, go for it. Get those heads, bro. There is a...

Out of line, but totally right. In FF14, the Garleyan Empire has like a very strong ideological basis despite being like an imperialistic expansion nation. And the longer you listen to them talk

and the further you get into the story, the more valid a bunch of their points are. And there is a point where you there's a very specific scene in Stormblood where everyone's sitting at a table arguing and then it fades out and it fades back in and in between those fadeouts you can see the decision was made to make one of the characters start being crazy. Okay, okay. Like you can actually see that they wrote it and they were like, oh, people are going to really want to be on this guy's side. we have to have him come back in and just start going nuts.

I mean, I will, or else, like, the story won't work. I mean, I'll say from all the way out here that if you have a bunch of people that have their gods and access to magic and then one group over here is not allowed because fuck you, you don't get magic, sit there and eat shit, then yeah, they're going to be rightfully salty about it. That's not fair, though. That's not fair, guys. And then also, while we're at it, fuck your gods. How about that? Yeah. They're not real.

that right like environmental catastrophes you know so I get it I 100% get that aspect of it from from like Magneto is probably the best example of this of like the thinnest line possible

and it's like you're just like hey Magneto why are you so mad and then Magneto goes the 80 years of comics and movie like holy shit and then you go but Magneto how could you kill that cop and he goes I don't care

Yeah. Because you're like, you're like, okay, Holocaust, right, absolutely. Yeah. Then Malcolm X. Uh-huh. Right. And now. And then all that.

And now Genoa. Genocia shit. You know, like, right on. Okay. Yes. And now we're shifting the fucking planetary alignment and. That's like, hey, man. Like the only argument that works with Magneto is like, hey, Mags, do you think that you like

shifting the alignment of the planet and like endangering all. life might have made people a little bit more scared of mutants. Like, do you think that that might have, like, not helped? It always, that's it. You always, you got to, you can't let it be too relatable. The same thing that pulls you in and gets you interested in the villain to begin with. You got to shove it over the line to get everyone on the hero's side morally, you know? Man, yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And I've only, I've heard about the Krakowa arc and everything with that. And I've heard that it's, it's, um, all your, your worst political island nightmares coming true. Mm-hmm. So, um, interesting stuff. Well, at the very least, I walked out and I got this cool poster. Oh, that's cool.

There's a spy. I see it's a spider. Yeah. They're handing these out. It's a really nice poster. It's a very cool poster they were handing out on the way out. That's nice. And there's no details of anything on it whatsoever.

just a nice mandala flower and some cool fabrics that he's hanging from. Very nice. Anyway, brand new day. Good stuff. And hey, guess what? Characters hanging out with each other continues to be the funnest way to experience them as opposed to, you know, punching monsters in the face and stopping stopping world explosions and shit. Kevin Smith was right about his idea for a Green Hornet movie.

Green Hornet and Cato hanging out on the hood of the car for two hours is more interesting than them fighting a villain. Age of Ultron, but it's just the party scene. Like an hour long. And then they beat up Ultron of like 22 minutes. It's just the party the whole time. Yeah. All right, so that was what I did.

Also, got a round two playing a couple hours of Onimusha, way of the sword. I've also played a little bit of Onamusha. About how many sessions did you do? I've done three and a half sessions, I would say. Okay. I am about 50% of the way through the game. That game is fucking phenomenal. that game is phenomenal, and there's a couple of little asterix on it, but they're not big asterisks.

So the thing that we both talked about from the demo was the difficulty and the feeling that the grunts that walked up to you took way too long to do anything and that you couldn't do the main thing you wanted to do, which is counter pari, ESN shit coming out of you. Yeah, the game has four defensive systems. I need somebody to attack me to engage in the defense. Yes, and there's no difficulty selection right off the bat at least that lets you put it up to that, right? What I've been told and what I've started to see a little bit as well is that they want that full, they want it to ramp up to that so that you have those training dummy dudes standing around staring at you. Excuse me, but you have bosses that are real and then you have enemies that are going to be more aggressive and they want it to all be part of the same journey. So I've been going through it.

The game's quite long. It's like 30 to 40. So it's quite long. And it feels like it has the exact same action game curve of a nine-hour PlayStation 2 action game that has merely been elongated out to a 30 to 40-hour action adventure. So that hero map is a big part of that. So that first level in your PS2 action game that teaches you the ropes has now been expanded to like three and a half four hours. Right.

I also felt very similarly. The first level, which is the demo area, is very, there's the two difficulties. We're talking about action mode, but there's also story mode, which is quite, quite easy. that first demo area that's the shrine and gan ryu it's it's pretty it's pretty chill it's it's very chill like there's that there's a very early fight where like ten like swordsmen attack you but they are all very polite and all very calmly wait their turn and it takes maybe four or five seconds in between each guy attacking you side notes just from a lore side of things because i'm a fucking what I'm a vagabond mark

starting on Sejoro starting with the Yoshioka school like right off the bat which is his biggest feet is kind of nuts as a tutorial and like it is but it is an interesting point of just like okay the thing that he's known for fighting off a bunch of assholes after

taken out their leader is where this all starts and this is also where we deviate into fantasy bullshit realm into magic into big magic realm Yeah, and I'm curious to see if they're going to do any of his... Are we just Musashi transported to Issaquai demon world now, or are we doing like... No, no, you spend most of the game in the Kyoto outskirts, but the Kyoto outskirts are being attacked by demons and it's the ongoing, like, invasion situation.

So the main thing that Musashi is going to be doing is just trying not to kiss Gun Ryu. Yeah. Like trying. How you like... You like those fucking manic twinks, bro. You like a manic twink? You want a motherfucker who's coming out saying the name of the main character. And if it's a manga panel, you're seeing his eye turn into a single dot.

You know, that psycho look. People are talking about theirs from, apparently Zeno Saga has one. Oh, yeah. For me, I went straight back to Escaflone, DeLandau. Just the full-on freak out, son of a bitch that needs to fucking, stop that ass-le-old. like to land out a lot. I thought it was great.

So Onamush's structure, if you haven't played the demo, or if you've played the game, but you haven't gotten past like the second level, the basic gist is that you're going to go through your linear area or pseudo-linear area. The map is kind of built like... It's literally a hallway. It shows you.

You know, you'll have a left or right here and there, you know, like a side room here and there, but it's like mostly linear. And it's kind of like a Resident Evil style, like a modern Resident Evil. style presentation. And those areas are great. And then you go to the Kyoto open area.

And the Kyoto open area is going to be a big wander around place that has just roaming packs of enemies all over. But it's also going to have a little side quest here, which is like, hey, go fight this enemy or go fight this mini boss or, hey, go find this, this, you know, we're going to give you a picture of an area and you got to go find where the hidden chest is. Very, like, standard stuff. So glad. So glad the gameplay style is not just Kyoto.

You know, that I'm really happy. That's not the case. And like, it makes sense that the game gives you, like, a very significant ramp up because there are four defensive options that all do something different. Yes. Right. So you have a, you have a block, right, which is standard video game block. Your stamina goes down when you block it.

You have a parry, which is a well-timed block, which will push the enemy over to the side, unless they're doing like an attack chain at which point you'll push them to the side but they'll still manage to spin around and continue the chain. You have a perfect dodge and then you have... Oh, there's five actually. Issen and deflect, I would say. Then you have ESEN, which is a perfect counter,

which is quite hard. It feels like it's eight frames. And then you have deflect, which is holding block and then hitting X on perfect timing. And that does... That's harder than a parry, but it does more stamina damage to enemies. And so you have this huge amount of defensive options.

Design-wise, too, that's a really smart way to get people that want to get their timing down. But it's like a half commitment because you're holding block to do it, you know, but you get, but you're getting the impact of it down. It's like kind of like with Expedition with Dodges versus Perry's. It's really, really smart. Hey. Hey, buddy. So there's a lot of defensive options.

options. And they all have different strengths, right? There's unarmed attacks. It's better to dodge. There's a skill tree underneath each one. Yeah, there's, you know, deflexs are way, way better for breaking pose damage, but they don't do any damage themselves. They only do

stamina. You know, all these different things. East End is the best option in every situation, but it's really hard. Like, it's really hard. The timing is late. It's super late. So, it's, it's, it's, the, the blade is hidden, is in, side your character.

Yeah. But the hit hasn't registered. I think it's eight frames. So it's quite tough, right? In terms of hitting an ESEN. On top of that, I found out, I would dug around in it. There is variable ESN timing. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The longer the wind up, the larger the window is to ESN. Which makes perfect sense because I noticed that the grunts grabbing you, the grab counter timing is really forgiving on them. But when a boss grabs you, it's much tighter. So the blue glow does not mean the same thing every time you see it. Therefore, variable timing depending on the attack you're doing it to is probably going to apply to other things. So I can tell you the blue glow, the way that it seems to function, the blue glow for throws, is that the game wants your dodge hitbox to touch the enemy while the blue glow is happening.

Yeah. Because I have dodged backwards and to the side and not triggered like the throw. but if you dodge forwards and your hitbox touches them, then you'll do this. But on some more basic enemies, I was really early and it still gave me the counter, right? So it's forgiving on those. For e-sending stuff that's coming at you vertically,

like, or horizontally rather, I guess like, yeah, I saw some tips of like move into it to get a better feel for when it's about to hit you so that you can time it yourself as opposed to just waiting for the wheel to come at you because the information you're getting all coming directly towards you is harder to read than like a swipe from left to right of the screen, you know? So it has all these very deep interactions with defense.

And so it makes sense that it takes a while for you to actually learn them. The first boss, the first two bosses are a joke. The third boss has some teeth to it. and then the game gets into like this very strange pacing with the difficulty. So one of the things that we talked about during the demo, and I'm pretty sure that was on story mode, is the enemies really wait their turn.

They will chill out and wait for you to learn how to do your defensive option. I've heard that if you absorb souls that they get more aggressive, I haven't seen that myself. But I was told that. So I was told that, and that's, not true. Okay. Um, so what, what it actually is, is the instant you hit an attack button, all enemies near you become more aggressive. Okay. Because when you're attacking, the, your brain is less focused on defense. You're, you're focused on attacking. And so I found that

the enemies won't do anything, won't do anything, don't do anything. And then I hit square. And then the instant, like my character's arm starts to move, I can see that somebody starts running towards me. You know that Batman run that a character is like way off there and then they start running straight towards you and they're like I'm gonna hit I'm gonna do an attack. There's like a little bounce first and then they start

yeah. Yes. So there's that and as I've been going through it the difficulty of the bosses has been increasing and it takes a while for them to get to something like Sekaro. I would say it takes about 40% of the game to hit like Sekiro's like first boss level of

actual challenge. Um, what is, but the, the, the default goobers actually still like really, really take their time, even like a full halfway through the game. Like they, they will, they will give them each other space. So what's really, they will let you chill. Well, so what's really interesting. And, um, well, one, something that I love that this game clearly is aware of. And they, they like this. The people behind this are, they love the action that we love. And in the same way that, parrying and deflecting and all these defensive mechanics have been getting their shine

in recent years. This game loves the idea of the ORAFAR moment in the middle of the fight. Oh yeah. And this is literally the only reason why I love any of these mechanics, why all of this stuff is even cool to me at all, is for those moments. That's the whole

point of even playing the game. So when the boss stops to slowly walk sideways and it's like inviting you to join in and do it to and then resume the action, that's the whole, that's the reason why I'm even sitting here paying the money to grab a controller to begin with. So, so while those moments are happening, though, I've noticed that like, oh, you're letting that stamina go back up, by the way. So if you are a farm, I hope,

get in there. I hope you want to, I hope you're down to commit to it because they're getting something out of it, you know? Um, but what goes hand in hand with that is that it feels to me like maybe their design intent here and I still need to see what happens because I got to so I beat the third boss and that's basically where I stopped. The third boss is the first one that was like all right, okay, okay, you got

something going on here, right? But I do feel like... Very cool boss also. Awesome. Very cool. Incredible. I love the way the bosses get introduced in a silhouette form and then they reveal their full form later but the silhouette still looks super fucking sick. Real just, yeah,

amazing design stuff going on. The overall vibe I'm getting here is that, like, they're thinking that you can, if you want to, run up to anything and just swing at it until it dies and it will die, right? Yeah, I will. But if you want to be cool, you're going to make it harder for yourself and you're going to probably take more damage trying to use the stylish stuff. so you are self-imposing in a way the challenge because by fucking up that ESEN you took a massive hit and now your life is lower and you're about to die right i died trying to do cool shit as opposed to just running up and making the life go down you know yeah so the game does something really really interesting with the generic enemies so like ESN you if you fuck up an ESN you're going to take a hit right and so it's just it's deflecting and parrying in these things and perfect dodging are safer. So as I said, everybody kind of waits their turn and continues to wait their turn. But what happens is you'll fight a boss that introduces unblockable attacks.

Attacks that can't be dodged, can't be eased, must be parried. Okay. Like, you start getting attacks that must be dealt with a certain way. Specific defense, yeah. And the very first, you fight a boss that does that. And it's attacks that have like a pink glow on them to denote, hey, no, you, you will parry this or you'll get hit. And once you fight that, every regular enemy in the game will add that to their repertoire. Okay.

Like all the generic goobers will now have a mandatory pariable. So you're unlocking the full move set for even the grunts as you go. that makes sense. And what the game's difficulty is basically doing is that what it's doing is instead and you run into versions of the enemies that are, you know, the big sword guy or the generic samurai guy with more health or maybe they're wearing armor and or they suck souls up more than that. You know, just, just ancillary upgrades.

And they get larger movesets. So you have to think a little bit harder when you're running into them and you have to be on the ball. But they still wait their turn. I'm really far into the game. I'm 50-ish percent. And everybody is still like calmly waiting their turn. And as somebody who's played a plethora of action games over the years,

it does not take me long to recognize what type of attack is coming in and deal with it. So Will Borgor, who wrote the review for IGN, basically, in his review described that he liked the combat so much that he issued the concept of items and that is all the items that buff you and the Estes equivalent and he said that it gave him some trouble

at a given point but that it was a really satisfying way because the game does allow for perfect play yeah in fact like the large variety of options like kind of incentivize you doing encounters perfect Well, what makes all of that click is when you do land your ESEN and when you do land your stamina, your break ESN or your stamina drain, all of that stuff results in a whole lot of souls popping out that when you absorb, you heal.

So, if you are being stylish, you are healing your fuckups as well. Yeah, ESEN's increased the likelihood of you getting hit. But when you kill somebody with ESN, they drop health orbs. So it's like, it's incentivizing you to use that system. Um, I think to as well, the, um, the, the, the thing about enemies waiting their turn, I had a, um, quite a few moments of like, I'm surrounded and I'm kind of having that moment of like, okay, we're doing the stare down. And then I'd be like, okay, I'm getting impatient, you know? Um, and I, so start swinging. And as soon as you start swinging, some guy just, just, just going to,

but I think that like the, there's a, there's a right feeling for how long those moments should take. and I remember having that little hesitation moment in a game like Tsushima, right? Or Yote. But Yote has them go, fuck this, I'm coming at you much sooner. So you never get that like, okay, what are we doing?

You know, it never feels like the game has come to a standstill completely. And like there are times where a group of enemies will be less aggressive surrounding you in those games, but they're rarer so they don't feel as

like every encounter is we're going to stand here for 30 seconds, you know? I wish that that's what was the case here. I don't mind when we have a stare down moment, but like it's got to be a tense one that breaks the flow of otherwise more intense encounters as opposed to the average encounter is going to be a 30 second stare down. Yeah, so what ends up happening or happened to me because I jelled with the game quite well is that once I got to the Kyoto area, I, was essentially playing two different games.

One was a game where the boss fights were well-tuned and, like, really, really fun fights. Yeah. And every enemy encounter that was not a genuine boss was a snooze. Right. Was... Because it's a game with solvable encounters. Like, every enemy action has a perfect reaction that you can do. And if you can do them consistently, then the enemy just becomes solved.

And so they, you know, they throw different groups at you, but the enemy's, like, kind of refusal to attack you simultaneously, like, kind of leads to that problem. So I went from basically no items and no healing. And why was using the celestial knives that give you extra healing? Oh, yeah. The items, the only weapon? Because I'm not using items. And then I stopped using them entirely. I switched to a different one that doesn't give heels.

Okay. And then I got about to about the 50% mark where I was fighting some bosses that were like pretty tough. And like, we're giving me a good go ahead. But all of the regular encounters were a joke. And that was the point and that was late last night where I went to the Nexus, the mod Nexus. And I installed aggressive enemy AI. Oh, mods are out. Okay.

And this was a mod that was created for the demo. to deal with it in the demo. And what aggressive enemy AI does is that there is a value in the game that is how likely enemies are willing to attack you simultaneously. Right? Because at the very end of the game, they'll start to do it. And what this does is it randomizes that value every single second. So you will get like a camera. occasionally like two, three or four people attacking you simultaneously, which if you perfect

parry it or perfect dodge it is fine because you gain invincibility on all the correct uses of your defensive abilities. And the reason why I use that is because I would, people were watching my stream, I would basically wait for a guy to come in and do the correct solution to their attack and it would just go one, one, one, one, one. But also, you start to get really, strong defensive abilities. So I was about to say, like, you get chain ESEN. Yeah, chain ESEN. So that's the thing is I was coming across the zoning bats and like you don't have

the deflect yet. So you can't knock it back yet, much less. Yeah, which was weird that you don't start with. So then you're like, oh, I can't do, I can't solve this enemy yet, you know? Yeah. And then I know that later you get zoning ESEN. So both of those are like, that's an, that's a. encounter deleter, but, uh, yeah, at least right now, it's like, yeah, you can't,

you just can't do the thing yet, you know? So I'm imagining later on, you can just stand there and no matter what is attacking you from anywhere, you just can fly through it. Um, um, so basically what ends up happening is that, you know, there's only so many moves that the enemies have, right? And I discovered that there's certain windups that I can easen with like 99% confidence. which means that if I hit that, then three quarters of the enemy group is going down in one second. Okay.

And so, like, fights were turning into that. So I just, because I'm not, you know, people, they'd have to wind up and they'd be the one guy. Yeah. And so now that I've installed the aggression mod, I'm still looking for that, but I'm also being attacked by two other guys simultaneously. So I'm still, yeah, I'm not there yet in the sense that I noted that there's about

six default swings that the grunts will come at you with because there's like, um, stab, delay, stab slash delay slash kick delay kick, you know, and those are different timings that you have to recognize based on the run. Um, and I'm not sure if there's other details about them that are, that I have to see and what I'm sure if I go lab, I'll, I'll learn. Um, which you get, you get things by lab, you get rewards for labing. Love it. You do, you do. Um, really happy to that you could go back and do the boss fights immediately because as I've done every single boss twice in this game well because there's so much cool shit you can do because of all the defensive mechanics that you have to use and you or you could use none of those mechanics and just run up to it and swing at it until

the life bar goes down but like you almost like you you you don't get that cool aura you don't get that fun vibe to it if you don't use those things so letting you go back in to see what you missed in the encounter is a great option right off the bat, and I would have loved if Sekiro had that, for example. I know you get it later, but like, I just mean like right now, right away, I went right back to fight, Ganyahu and the second dude, you know. I'm just calling him Kojero, by the way, because it's fucking Kojero. But anyway, I really, I really love that you have all these different defensive aspects

that evoke what appear to be different types of breaks on the boss? Yeah, so you have your deflect and you have your parry and like, they all do different things. Like the parry doesn't do as much stamina damage, but it's easier. But on top of that, it throws the enemy to the side. So if they hit another enemy or hit a wall, it does tons. There's value in everything. But you see those moments of you standing around and like, yeah, so they just said it there. Like, if you were able to like taunt and be like, I'm going to make you mad and make you come swing at me now,

that would solve the problem too, right? There would be just a button to be like, let's hurry up the engagement, let's make you more angry, let's make you more aggressive. I still want to see what they're going for with it. So like, I don't want to, I don't know that I'd want to throw a mod on right away.

I'm pretty deep in there. Yeah. And the reason why I did that was that as new enemies were getting introduced, the game was still getting easier instead of harder. Right? They'd be introducing a new enemy. enemy type with a new move and I'd be like I'm going through it faster and faster as I get through

the game instead of slower. Yeah. I again, I just, I want to see. And I don't know what comes at the other end of new game plus two or whatever gets unlocked at the other end. It's pretty new. So I think everybody's kind of learning right now. So I can tell you, there's a harder difficulty that gets unlocked.

Okay. Where all the damage is juiced up like a lot. Okay. So that's the basic gist of it. Okay. And I think enemies might be a little more aggressive. Because I do get the feeling of like when I was, when I'm doing what I'd call, I guess, like, Royal Guard training, you know, where like you're like, hey, instead of just going in and like styling the fuck off of everything that's, that breathes, you actually have to get used to their timing a bit and like look at their attacks and get used and figure out when and how to parry and stuff. So you kind of go in a little more passively, you know, and letting the game's pace come at you by being more defensive.

The, I just saw a really good comment, which was I would rather play this game vanilla to better experience what the game wants from you. I actually agree with that in almost every example. The problem is what this game wants for me is something that I can do highly reliably. So I talked about this. If people watch my Silent Hill F play through, I taught. I think I mentioned it here on the podcast. Silent Hill F has a dodge, but it also has a perfect dodge, which requires a certain frame timing to get,

and you get like a big slowdown, and it's a better dodge. If you have the reflexes to get the perfect dodge for Silent Hill F, a huge proportion of the game's combat encounters break, because I don't think you're supposed to be able to do the perfect dodge every single time. Like not on every single attack in the game But you can Right and similarly here I don't think they intended for the average person

To be able to chain ESN The beginning of every single mob fight in the game Like not every single one I feel like the way chain easen supposed to work Is like I really have it I'm locked in I got it woo instead of like being the first move in every combat encounter. Right.

So I'll have to see because I've only done one session. So, you know, like I said, I did one session. I got to that third boss and I'm like, now I'm, you know, now the world has opened up a little bit. So I'll, and I didn't choose chain ESSEN. I chose chain dodge because it just looks so. You're going to have enough points to get all of them. Yeah.

It just looks super sick to see the, what, what, what, what, the boxing, you know, like evaded into the slash. but yeah my desire strongly would be to not throw on something like a mod on the first run through just to see what's going on. But I don't know. You know, I also know too that like in for stuff like, and I know some of you're probably thinking, oh, what about like a game like Mass Effect or so? Or I would say that's a game where I know. That's not difficulty though. That's like. Well, one, you just want to.

Yeah, one, it's the, you're RPGing it. Right. But, but, but there's still. But there's still an action gameplay loop there. But that's more so a thing where I'm like, that's not a brand new game. That's a game that I know people like you and Asina and everyone else have solved top to fucking bottom. So this is a brand new game that just came out that we're all still learning about right now, you know? Yeah.

So it's a little bit different in that like there could be things that I don't foresee coming that we're going to learn soon. But I'm hoping. It's a little strange, honestly. So Capcom does this. And like me talking about, because at this point, I'm on no heels, no items, no regenerating health moves, extra AI. And I'm also beating every single boss with an ESN or a perfect parry. Right? And like, I'm just adding, I'm just adding more and more conditions as I go.

And there were some people in my show last night that were like, Pat, you're being fucking ridiculous. and they should have just let me picked hard mode when I started the game. That would have been ideal. Based on playing the demo, based on feeling how the demos went, it would have been absolutely ideal to just be like, story, action, hard, right?

For sure. Capcom does this. With Devil May Cry, they do Resident Evil and all of these things. And like each time it's like, hey, I've played a Resident Evil game before, man. Can I, can we just, can I get fucking start on the hard difficulty please?

I'd appreciate it. But my, but my main difference here is I'll say that like, because I died trying to do cool shit, I'm kind of going, okay, there is my personal learning curve. For me, I know that like anytime I walk up to an encounter

and I just like hack the enemy, I combo the enemy enemy enemy to death. Yeah. X, X, X, Y. And then they drop. I go, ah, that sucked, right? But if I go for a cool thing and then land it or don't land it,

that gets the fucking neurons firing. Yeah, what I mean? And I want every encounter to feel that way. So you're already self-imposing because the game is already to some degree asking you to do that. But you could do those boss fights. Like, you're talking about, like,

using the systems to perfectly delete the encounters. But even if you didn't use the systems, you could delete the encounters too. You know? Yeah. It's almost like... It would just take longer.

Yeah. It's almost like if you're playing a Souls game, and the default is you run into a boss room and two summons appear with you. And you have to opt to not use, you know, use them or so. Like, it's a bit like that. Like, you can just play it like plain action. But, like, it's asking you to engage with these systems. This has kind of been like an annoyance of mine with like a wide variety of Capcom games for a while.

I was very annoyed as far back as like when we got the Devil May Cry 5 review codes that I couldn't start on Son of Sparta. And then I wish I could have played like a harder difficulty in Resident Evil 9 earlier and like so on and so forth. And it's just this thing of like, bro, it's Capcom. Like I can react to most drive rushes. I can fucking react to this fucking Goober Samurai swing. It's funny because, like, it's for DMC in particular, it's not the difficulty. For me, it's the move set. I know it's the whole point, but God, it sucks to be like, I don't have air hike.

You know, like, oh, like that. The problem that I'm kind of worried about is that I don't know if anybody has figured this out yet. People in chat, if you're aware, do enemies, get new moves and patterns on carnage. The reason I worry about that is because, so I have, I have re-fought every boss in the game immediately after defeating them. And most of the bosses have taken me two to five tries, right? The rematch after I beat them is a joke.

Like once you have them unlock, they are fucking downloaded. Like, they are nothing to you. And the game knows that because they start, throwing bosses at you as like mini bosses to just approach and appear in regular scenarios. The other thing too I noticed is that like a combo

a combo sequence from like boss three who hits you like swings at you like maybe four or five times right in one. And he has that turn around goes over his head move. That's really interesting. And if you deflect each hit of one string that's the whole stamina bar.

Yeah they're cooked. Yeah they're absolutely so it's not asking you to do like endless paris. It's asking you to do like four, five really good ones. And then you get in there and then you can choose the purple the purple ESSEN instead of the red one.

So you get resources instead of damage, you know? Love that system too, by the way. The worry that I'm feeling is that I'm going to beat the game as is and I'm going to load it up on carnage. But I feel like unless enemy

patterns change, it doesn't matter what they do to the numbers because I will have solved these encounters on the easier difficulty. Right? Like, I want to be able to pick hard mode from the get-go so that my learning process on how to deal with this boss is the hard version instead of learning, like, practicing essentially with the normal version of the game and then passing the text quite easily. For me, what it is is

There's The there's the The baseline swinging at the enemy That like, you know, is kind of like, I don't want to do that as much And then there's the Deflect and Parry and Dodge Base defense, which I'd say is like where I'm at where I feel really comfortable And then the ESN only stuff where the timing is fucking tight

Where I'm like, okay, if I want this to be as hard as possible I will be attempting to as soon as that's available to me, you know, and then you eat the consequences there because I feel like if you were to play the game in an ESEN everything way, now you're just playing a feast or famine game, right?

Mm-hmm. So that'll be the regulator, I suppose, you know. I also had a charm that was like, yo, 25% on follow-up attacks, 25% damage on follow-up attacks. Yeah, I refuse to use those. And you can buff them too, as well, which were just like, oh my God, you can crank those numbers up even higher.

So like the equipment that you put on to makes a huge difference as well. But overall, yeah, I think that's kind of what I'm expecting it to be. I'm expecting the progression to be like, as I'm as I get maximally comfortable with the type of enemy, I'm going to ramp up the amount of ESS I'm going for as opposed to deflects. or dodges, you know? Yeah, I'm watching a fight with one of the mini bosses, and the only thing that appears to have changed here is the numbers. So I'll tell you what, if I run into,

if I get to like the 75% mark and I still think it's like too easy, I'm going to install the other mod that I have, which is to force the game's hardest difficulty off the bat. Oh, my God. before I go into the final because I want more that feels more

reasonable to me than the other one because that's still that's an intended flow but it's just getting you there earlier the main thing is that one mod only affects the enemy aggressive mod only affects the random goobers

not the bosses it doesn't affect the bosses at all because the bosses don't have ads okay okay okay right right right right um yeah this is this is a crazy conversation to be having on top of it you know but uh the game is excellent beyond this and oh it's it's stellar and for and most people aren't going to have this problem because most people don't stream video games and specifically action games for a living yeah well like so right we just front loaded the first 10 minutes of talking about this game with like the difficulty issue but like that but that is by by doing so we are glazing over what is

fucking really fun awesome action uh capcom doing a great job on this one right out of the game i just want to say that as somebody who has very famously encountered easy mode is now selectable if games are willing to go wow bro you're like a little baby do you want to make it maybe easier games should also go wow man you're fucking crushing this do you want to kick it up a notch agreed agreed yeah I like, please.

And Capcom made that first. The first video game that ever had adaptive difficulty is Resident Evil 4, where the game will go up and down depending on how well you're doing. And isn't it, isn't it what your resources are as well, like what you found and things like that? Yeah. Okay. No, absolutely.

And then Godhand, obviously. Dynamic. Dynamic is cool. And that's what I was thinking, was happening here. Because if you're saying that the grunts get more attacks towards the end of the game, you know, does the final grunt not have like a whole bunch more things they're doing that fill in that? They absolutely do.

You know, that fill in that stuff. They have, they have more grabs, they have unblockables, they have fake outs, they're more likely to clash and have you mix up your attack. They have armor.

They'll steal souls. And it doesn't matter because they all get chaney since to death in the very first hit of the fucking fight. I was going to say, but do they keep up with your power growth? No, no, they really don't. Okay, okay. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think I'm where you're at on it, and I'm going to have to play a few more sessions to see.

But, like, if it does feel that way, that would be a bit of a bummer. But, like, I think the fact that it does, like, cranking it up to a preset, established the highest difficulty would be, to me that's that's more normal because it's just kind of like just it's just skipping your first time around and going like yeah give me give me the other version of this that you balanced as opposed to the one that a version of it that you never did you know i do think there is a a really cool thematic uh through line if you're playing the game the same way that i am because uh musashi talks about the encounters you do quite often um and so i'll just absolutely stomp out a fight in like 15 seconds and shizaka will be like wow that was incredible and he'll just go they were shit so i was i was i was saying what if this game has a secret style ranking you know only to find out that chisuka says how you did at the end of the fight and i was like oh my god i was joking there's another moment where i fought a boss and i defeated it quite handily and then the story was setting up to fight a second boss immediately without even leaving the room.

And when they instead chicken out, Musashi's like kicking his feet and going, oh, man. And I was like, no, let me fight him now. I got this. Yeah. How many, because they're like in terms of lines, you're all talk. You're all talk. You're all talk. You know, you got to vary that up a bit more.

But I do like that she has a secret, a secret like, ooh, smoke and sick. at the end of your fight. Yeah. Wow, you did that without a scratch. Oh, you're completely unharmed. Oh, are you okay? Are you, that was taught, you know, etc. Now, no, it's just because of a great secret style meter.

I, I am going to say that like, you know, these are not fools. They know what they're doing. And I think that this is them reintroducing a franchise. This is basically the launch of Onishu's been dormant for a long time. Yeah, this is basically the launch of Oni Musha to this generation. and the Latin, and previous, you know what I mean? Yeah, I'm also, like, far enough into it. Yeah, don't worry about those other games.

They're pretty decisively not canon to this. So they're starting this franchise over more or less. And in doing so, comes with this sort of, like, idea of balance and, like, safe introduction, I would imagine. Yeah. I would not be surprised if, with an update with DLC or whatever, comes go fuck yourself Musashi mode

right I will I will say die is probably already on incoming I will say that while I absolutely love the ability to rematch any boss whenever the fuck you feel like it for kicks

the game has no bloody palace equivalent which is nuts to me that is absolutely nuts because that's not a no There's no bloody palates. Because that's not an ony musha thing, right? It is an onemusch thing.

It was called the Dark Realms. Oh. And they would be secret mission equivalents, but you would fight like 10, 20, 30 floors. Oh. Okay. Yeah, that is absolutely an on a musha thing. Was that started in three or four? It was started in one.

Really? Oh, I don't remember that at all. Damn. Okay. And, yeah, they all have them. So that's what the practice area is. It's a dark realm, but you don't, you just like, like, I want a hundred fucking floors of fighting these motherfuckers. I can go.

I can fucking do it, coach. Did I do some of it? Wow. That was old. You did. It's mandatory. Shit. You just completely fucking forgot.

But that's fine. Oh, some of it is mandatory. And then you go back up, but then you can keep going if you wanted to do it on your own type thing. Okay. Vague recollection. vague recollection. Okay, all right. Well, yeah, that's all great. I also, it's like, it's interesting. Yeah, so hold on, dark realms predate Bloody Palace. Cool. Like, like we call it Bloody Palace, but Onamusha 1 was 2001 and DMC2 was 2003. Okay. So we should be calling that mode dark realms, but we're not going to do that. Again, no,

Bloody Palace and DMC 5 either, right? Until they added it. Oh, was that not launch? No. It wasn't? No. Oh, that's insane. They added that later. So I'm...

That's insane. I would not be surprised if we're looking at a similar situation here. Oh yeah, then please, please. Please, give me, give me, give me, give me, give me bloody realm or whatever. Also, the game sold fucking tons of copies. Million in a day. Million in a day. Doing super well. Capcom's like, Hey, yo, what the fuck other old franchises we got?

What's going on on that shelf over there? Okami already dusted it off. What else is going on? So they're clearly looking back at this shit going, oh, fuck. People like this old shit, huh? Resident Evil, Tree Fighter, this, that, you know, they're bringing it all. They're bringing it back. Dino Crisis, maybe soon.

I want to give a shout out to whoever the hell is working on the motion cap on the RE engine because this is the best facial capture of anything. I've ever seen. The expressions and the goofy faces they have Musashi-Make are so perfectly realized, it's unbelievable. But it makes so funny because to hear, the one thing is I'll say like the British version of them, it doesn't fit the character fantasy in my head as much, you know?

Because when you switch it to Japanese and you kind of hear he's a bit of, he's a rough around the edges kind of street kid as he ought to be. What is like, more, you know, like, he's got these, like,

he's got that kind of like gruntishness to him, which is a Toshiro Mufune, like style energy to him, to then turn him into a street urchin. Oh, you know, is not quite the same energy there. So I know they go for like British fantasy Japan,

but, um, and the performances are incredibly British. It's very weird. And they're doing, they're totally fine. But like, a lot of the facial expressions,

make more sense hearing the Japanese recording of them. Oh, yeah. As opposed to the English, you know? Yeah, it's weird to say, but it's almost like I wish he was not British, but like perhaps the other haughtier characters ought to be, you know? Because, but whatever, it's a, neither here nor there. The, what else is there, I guess? Yeah. the overall flow of like, okay, go into a side realm.

The lighting in the Oni realm is so much better. I don't know, like, like just having an actual sky, a sun in the sky and like lighting from the top that surrounds as opposed to the fog and kind of, um, uh, uh, dust in Kyoto just makes everything look a whole lot nicer. And yeah, I guess right now we're just in that phase of like everyone on the Capcom roster is going to get their crack at the RE engine. Oh, good. It's an incredible engine and it runs insanely well. It's amazing. I wonder if we're going to see a RE engine logo for Mega Man dual override. Like is it even for something like that?

Maybe, maybe, maybe. It might be a bit much. But yeah, yeah, no, this is a fucking, this is a great one. Yeah, an emotion away of the sword is probably like a game of the year contender. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The only reason I'm talking about the difficulty in it is that I love it so much. I want to engage with it more deeply. Yes.

No, like I said, I feel like that's a problem. That's a problem on this podcast is like we'll bunker down on one like thing. And the weight of the discussion around that flaw will then make it seem like that's the whole impression. And I don't want that to be the case because I have nothing. but good things to say about this game otherwise from just one session in a demo. And I know that based on what they've been doing, especially with the demo where they came back

and they released an extra encounter with it and like juiced it up and stuff. You know what's really weird about that version? Did you do the extra demo? I didn't, no. So the extra demo has you fight a mini boss called Biaku and I ran into that boss in the main game and I didn't do the extra demo either.

I was like, the game's coming out in five days. whatever. And I didn't really have that much problem for the miniboss. And people in chat were like, that's really strange. The yaku from the demo is like way more intense than the one you fight in the base game. When you beat certain mini bosses in the rematch, you unlock them and then them enhanced. Like it's a separate boss fight. And the enhanced version is them starting the fight at phase three.

Oh. Interesting. Okay. In the lab specifically. Yeah. For Bex, and it appears to be a version that only exists on rematch. That's interesting.

Okay. Well, cool. Love that you can go do that at will and get stuff for doing it. Um, I'm, I would fucking bet an arm that, uh, you're going to see a, big patch

DLC release because again it's doing super well and I'm sure they're working on it already and with that you'll get your bloody palace you'll get a massive difficulty spike you'll probably get two difficulties you know something that's like go fuck yourself pat mode again just like you know I want that and

yeah everything else to support what we're talking about I can 100% see that coming in short order but yeah and then you know what Sure, and some extra skins while you're at it. Because you can already dress them up as Samanoske. But I want, I want, I actually, it's funny. When I went through the outfits, I want my musashi to look more peasant because I want,

I want my, I want to get that vagabond going. I want like, like, the cape is super cool, what's like when he droops it over. But I'm like, I just want the fucking basic robes. And the first thing I did was I'm like, get this sort out of here. I'm taking my, but ore. Give me my fucking bocan. So I, I, I, I, I would switch back and forth between a different wet.

Like, you know, I unlocked a purple. He's a bum. I want to play the Sashi the bum. I unlocked a purple cape and then I unlocked a purple sword. So I'm like, all right, I like purple. I'll do that. But the game gives you like a really huge heads up when the Gun Ryu rematches are coming in. So you go down there and you're like, you switch back to the goddamn ore for the

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Like I saw the lightning blade in this flame. blade. I'm like, I just get the fuck out of here with this god weapon FF14. Wow. Those are Onomusha won weapons. Yeah, but I'm just like, no, we're not that. We can't start here. Give me my fucking

plank of wood. You know? And that's the whole thing with Musashi is like, people are like you're disrespecting me by not pulling out your blade. You bring a wooden ore to this fight or you bring a fucking bocan to this fight and then he cracks it over your head and you die.

Yeah. That's the whole thing. so yeah I want a grimy bum that barely understands that it's just like I'm fighting to survive I don't give a fuck about your honor that's what I want yeah no the game the game is stellar the only the only other thing

I would even utter even a tiny complaint is that the open world stuff is not as good as the linear stuff that's it that's it yep like you know you basically ping you just ping pong between open world stuff which is fun and then the linear levels and the linear levels are just way more interesting and have a lot more going on.

And a worse action game would build out a Kyoto and put mobs hanging around and call that the game. You know? Like a worse action game would just leave it at that. Big map, a bunch of shit to fight, here it is, it comes at you in this open city. And fuck that.

Give me the hallway with a bunch of cool shit going on and a really awesome boss at the end of that hallway. Way more... I will say there's something in this game that really stands out as being a deeply personal artistic creation. Because real great works of art are made by perverts. And there is a lady in this game that is very attractive. And while talking, you have lots of zoom-ins. like weirdly close zoom-ins on the face

and they went to the trouble of during her dialogue she'll like purse her lips occasionally and you will hear a perfectly mic this close mouth parting wet noise when she's talking I see SMR like and every cut scene featuring her has it like a clean moment

of her going, hmm, and then the very loud open your mouth noise and I'm like, someone on this team's a fucking pervert. They really wanted that, that lip noise in there. Interesting. Good for them. Well, I'll

have you know that Musashi wants none of it. Musashi says, get the away from me, wench. Gross. Think only of your art. Think only of your art. That's it. That's all. No Outsu. I'm sitting in a cave.

I'm carving my statues. Leave me alone. Hate this boner. Hate it. There's a, so, you know, Masashi's going to grow

as an action game protagonist does. I actually really love how much of the game he's just a careless brute moron. He, like,

he is a, he is a barbarian. barbarian. That's like he is an absolute classless loser. Yep. For like at least half the game. Yep. In fact, a good Musashi depiction should have him any time he has a moment of like

awareness or awakening. It's like a fleeting state you attain and then you go back to being an absolute puts. That should be. That is what is perfect for him because you don't ever. hold it. You don't stay there. You have these moments of clarity and you go, oh, fuck, huh. And then you go right back to being like, you know, um, the, yeah, just like this, this aspect, well, whatever. I'm not just going to go into fucking an hour of vagabond posting, but like the obsession with being the coolest, strongest

sword guy. Like, even when you feel you're above it, you have these moments of being like, No, but I'm cool. The wait, stop it. Fuck, stop. Chill, you know, I love that. You don't, you don't get away from that putts. That putts is core to him. Yeah, this is great.

And also, while we're on it, something else I want to give a shout out to is when I go into the options and I check out the display settings and I check out the options on PC, you're seeing a Team Ninja Neo amount of. camera is tweaking and controls and settings that I want to say that they brought to the table and made acceptable, right? They're like team ninja and everything they've done quality of lifewise with Neo and those games. Watching others bring that to the table now is really satisfying and nice. Every single possible option you could want camera wise is there except for FOV.

There was nothing for that. And also in the In the PC settings You see a GPU load bar Which maybe I just don't do this enough Maybe I'm not playing enough of That is every RE engine game Okay

I have because I'm like has that I have and it's great I have not seen that in anywhere else And I was like oh I can see exactly the impact Of each setting And then I can see where it says Hey probably don't want to go over this limit

Otherwise, you're going to get performance issues. Capcom has the best engine. It's not just that it looks gorgeous and that it runs well. It also scales excellently. And the options make it very clear, hey, what does what, what? That's why it was so weird when Monster Hunter and Dragon's Dogma came out and ran so poorly. Yeah, I think, I think, I mean, besides having not played a couple of the, the recent Capcom games.

I especially had them on console. I had them on PS5 as opposed to PC. So that is a really cool bar that I would love to see every other intense PC game use. A game like cyberpunk could drastically benefit from something like that. Speaking of, and I was sponsored to tell people this, so keep that with a grain of salt. Dragons Dogma recently got a big patch before their expansion coming out. They massively increased performance gains. Like they patched it.

It's like 40% higher frame rate. It's a night and day difference. Okay. And on top of that, they also did something super weird, which is they added two more skill slots to your character. So you can equip six skills instead of four, which I can't think of many games to give you more buttons to use. Oh, my God, it's been a while.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The four directions. Yes. Okay. Where are the other ones now? How do you... There are...

So you have your default one, which is R1, which is the class one. And then you have holding down the button and it's square triangle X... Sorry, square triangle X circle. Those are your, you know, your four face buttons. And the two extra ones are triangle and circle and square and X. Oh, the combos. Okay. Yeah.

They should never have to remove... two skills from Dark Arisen. Dragan Zama 1 had 6 skills and they brought it down to 4 for DD2. I don't know why. But hey, good job putting it back. Okay. Yeah, surprised that game's getting

anything after all this time. Well, it's getting an expansion in like three weeks. Right, right, right. No, it's been silent for a while. But yeah, Onimusha Wei the Sword fucking sick super duper great game so far

um well if you'll excuse me it's noon which means it's about that time caboose are you hungry are you hungry? Yes yes he is hungry you see he is starving BRB he is starving

I will have to be right okedoke so couple other things actually we gotta get a move on because there's a lot yeah we gotta get a move on we own a mocher dude though. Think about it. That's it. That's all I had to say.

Onamushir. I just want to say, Onomusher. That's it. Yeah. I'm like a child. I got in, I have been missing out on quite a few indie fighters I've been meaning to catch up on, so I decided to do them all in one stream.

I did an indie fighter gauntlet of six games. Did you win? I did win. That's good. So, yeah, games that will continue to have support long after 2XCO is gone. Well, games that come out and then they're out.

Right. You don't have to have any sort of, you know, scheme to them. They're just out. Including. Do they require servers to run? Some of them do. And in fact, not all of the games here are going to continue to exist.

At least one of them. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Isn't like that? Has been nuked in a similar fashion. So, okay. Up first, Origin of Storms. This is a, it's demo, two-character demo that being made by Ark Forged, the people behind Sonic Smackdown, the really fun Sonic game that we got really hype playing, Sonic Fighting Game, that is to say. There was, they also helped with Core Upped and they made head to head.

A couple of other indie fighters. Basically, they put the juice in to make things, just feel really good, fun. They got a lot of that Marvel sauce to everything they make. And so they have two characters in this demo. And not much to say besides, it's really sick so far. The little jack on those models overall, the feeling of playing as the characters leaves the impression that there's a lot you can do with them.

You get the feeling that you do a combo, you hit a couple buttons, you land a super, and then you're like, ooh, I have an idea. What if I could do this after that or that after that? And then you hit the R1 button, and you activate your beasterizer and then... And then you're using so one of the main characters

is this like night girl Adelaide, you know, big night armor she's got like storm colors as well if you want on one of the costumes then you hit the button and then she pops her fucking absolute beast mode and then turns into like a giant Digimon combo thing

and you're like yeah okay Bloody Roar was pretty cool Bloody Roar was really cool and then you got this old man with his daggers and then you pop his beastor eyes form and then he turns into like this demon again Digimon thing that can go nuts

and you're like all right sick Bloody Roar welcome back what's up Origin of Storm is very cool next thing I missed on the insect I've talked a couple episodes about Sega versus Capcom the next level a fan game oh you mean the next level

of being fucking shut down well hey guess what the moment I have told you about its existence That should be all you need to know. What's a bit crazy too here is that... So this is the fighting game that had Vice from Skies of Arcadia, Lynn Kurosawa from the Capcom Alien versus Predator Fighter, and Awe from Sakara Wars in it.

Deep cuts going into some of that. And you're like, yeah, this is a fun roster that only a fan would come up with for sure. Because... Oh, absolutely. You know, you know that you're not getting fucking... There's no, like, current bias here at all. You're not getting cutless fury on the cast of a Sega fighting game, you know, versus Capcom if that were to ever happen.

Sega notoriously pretty chill about... Not notorious. Sega famously pretty chill about fan games overall. Capcom, it depends. Right? They have been, but they have also not been. And it feels like pure pressure will sometimes force them into, a situation like

Street Fighter Cross Mega Man where they begrudgingly were like, okay, we will sort of accept this as official. We won't be too down on it. Overall, they're okay with mods a bit more so because

you know, I think whether it's Maximilian just using the Clout Hammer or the Marvel 3 Community Edition, at least those games have something where they're like, by the original game, please go support and purchase the game, and then install this file to mod it and have fun. But Sega versus Capcom was running on E.K. Men, which is the Mugin engine derivative,

and it was... You don't have to buy anything. You don't have to buy anything here. To NeoG, the one of the famous battle planners for lots of fighting games you love, was pretty much on Twitter just going like, yeah, there's no way this is okay. You're also taking assets from Tatsunoko versus Capcom like clearly. Um, and some backgrounds as well. This was always built to die. And then third, it wasn't just uploaded to like itch.io or like a, um, GitHub page or something.

It was uploaded to a site where you had to register and sign up for a unique, uh, account. And then there was also like a PayPal thing involved where you didn't have to pay for it, but it was kind of like sort of imply, you know, it was kind of there a little bit. And it was like, yeah, you made a couple of decisions here that were the wrong ones. And this was born to die, born to die a billion percent. But more than all of those was the one where, unfortunately, woolly dot MP3 still yet to be defeated. If you go back to that video I made, people are updating in the comments every time something comes out, get cease and desisted, and then dropping the end date for it. in the same way that I read it out

on the PSA message to fan game creators I went back and I was like oh was there a bionical game that got blown up apparently so maybe a year or two ago because yeah I'm looking and I'm seeing just like people are adding to that list I made if you are talking about the fan game that you're making

you've already fucked up I don't know what to tell you over and over and over and over and over I don't know what to tell you you know and uh i mean you told them yeah yeah you know hey you know what game came out lynx awakening hd was a fan remake that came out and it dropped and then it was done and remember that pc port of fucking pt that came out one day and it just came out and a bunch of people downloaded it and you can find it if you want and there it is out there it is right yeah um it is it is it is just

again, if you're looking to expand to get work, to find people to work with, I understand that. But if it's just to get the pat on the back, then I, you have to know that you're blowing your own spot up. And I want to say there was a Kotaku article

where, no, who was it? Someone did an interview and basically confirmed with the legal teams at um, was it Capcom? Some were, basically, there was like the lawyer confirmed one million percent we're looking at content creators and news websites

reporting on fan games. Oh, absolutely. That is exactly how we find out about them. Like, you know what I mean? It's just, I don't know what to say. It's Nintendo. A Nintendo lawyer. Nintendo lawyer saying, yeah, yeah, we rely on people talking about these games to find

them. Yes. It's crazy how the same thing happens every time. And like, it's been like, like 30 years. of this. It's just, it's a good nature. I have to assume the best, and I'm saying it's a good nature naivete that also

wants people to get excited for what they're working on, and the same excitement that goes into starting the project also wants people to see it and be like, wow, how cool. But that's your, that's your, that's the nail in your coffin. What's the first game that you saw get killed by this? For me, it was Chrono resurrection.

Chrono resurrection. Yeah. The first biggest thing is. And then I, and then I, despite not making any of these, learn the lesson immediately. And then I got to watch for decades. People just keep making the same mistake over and over and over and over. The part that really

cemented it for me was watching the multiple games that got officially sanctioned and then still cease and desisted. There were multiple that got a blessing in one way or another and then got killed anyways. So yeah, Sega versus Capcom.

Anyway, all that to say though, for what it's worth, it's like, yeah, okay, you had a, there's kind of a cool thing going on. They're definitely unfinished. Um, you know, and it's far from balanced, but you can judge a game on its Ryu and they, there was, there was a very basic kind of, uh, um, kind of fun idea here. A lot of work put into the presentation. The problem, though, definitely is that like a lot of fan games do with a fighting game especially, there's no sense of hit stop. So it's just about doing as many things as fast as possible in a crazy long combo. And the impact on the thing you're hitting is minimized in exchange for how many buttons you can get.

And it's kind of just like, okay, you got to. You got to let the pits feel like they're hitting, you know? There are two fighting game roguelikes coming out that have the same idea of like, what if you had to fight the spire? What if you slayed the spire by round one fighting it? Shot 1 Fighters is the first one I've talked about It has the one that looks like a rival school's logo Cool design for a girl wearing all yellow with an eye patch

And The other is called Poly Fighter and it's all polygonal Style Fathers Oh right, sorry No, not the other Why don't all the characters look like that? And they basically do

Like the overall the concept works The what I would say in both cases is that gaining a move as you go through the game is like it's a fun thing that works the difficulty of what you're fighting and the AI of the CPU is like a huge factor

in how fun these games are going to be so like having it be repetitive or having it be too armored some of like those world tour bosses that were in Street Fighter 6th. If you're offering up a bunch of fighting game powers in a rogue like if the enemy can't deal with the infinite that you're going to fucking find because the game's randomizing your power set, then the shit's going to fucking fall apart. Yeah, it's not so much randomizing your power set.

You start with the same base and then like what you're picking up, you choose from one of three and then you kind of go through it. Overall, I would say like they're pretty good. You know, I did enjoy the basic idea of them, but I want to see the AI get a little more, either like more dynamic in how they fight or in the case of, Shot 1 fighters, I would say that like it was too just tanky at times. It was too like, I'm going to do a bunch of moves that have infinite armor on them and there's nothing you can do about it. But overall, I think

it's a super cool idea. And in Shot 1's fighters' case, it has a versus mode so you can just jump in and play. The other one I want to point out is a fighter's Nova Mindara, which is a, it had a Kickstarter that thankfully succeeded from the people that made

Checkmate Showdown. So the fighting game, chess game. that I was talking about a couple years ago made here in Montreal. That was a lot of fun and they've moved on to what is a full-on JRP. And when you get into fights and then it becomes, you go side view and you tails of and you fight. You got your little, good idea. You got your little girl, Maya and you got Mindara, this kind of like beast man. They're out of the 90s

anime school of design. They look like from the world of Lena Inverse and Slayers a little bit and checking out the art style. I really like what they got going there. The story is told through like you're looking at the RPG text

dialogue but then manga panels of the action are popping in the whole time. Mindara is the name of the title. M-I-N-D-A-R-A. It succeeded on Kickstarter so it's happening but you can go in and support for extra stuff if you'd like. They got the composer of

Seken Densetsu. So they got the mana composer on it as well. So the music sounds really nice. Environment's pretty. And hey, if you wanted your PVE JRP tag slop, but it's quality and it's good,

check it out. I did some juggles. I did some combos. Had a good time with that. They, um, yeah, overall there's a,

uh, what? I'm just like, I've, my brain is just attaching itself to that fucking asshole in Sonic 06. I've created the new word. I've combined the word tag slop and fight slop into slops. Yeah. It's, it has everything that you would, all the markings of like a little JRP adventure with cool character designs. And you see, every time I see a redhead with Spunker.

with spunky hair and then a blue outfit. I'm like, I will take that crono colored pro tag forever. It just works. It's up there with the Ava colors. It just fucking works. So yeah, Bandara was cool. We played a little homie fighter

that someone made called Star Dust Rain. Stardust Rain, huh? I call it, okay, so I call it the Hobie Fighter because anytime... You call it a homie fighter, all right. Because... All right, so Stardust Rain is not coming up. anything else to call it? That's literally the only thing you can... Oh, the SEO on this

is bad. You're going to need to look at straight at the Steam page for it. Okay, hold on. I got it. I got it. I found a YouTube short. I mean, look, all you need to know... I see what you mean. I see what you mean by all right. I know exactly what you mean. Someone in high school wanted to make a fighting game and put all the homies in it and they drew all the art themselves and they programmed the game

themselves and they did it all. But most importantly, they got their best friend Eric Williams in the game. And they got, you know, like, everybody's got their own homie. And like, you just, you know, you're doing it. I see it. You're doing it. And it's got, um, it's got, the four buttons are strike, burst, clash, and Rengee, I believe. Oh, shut up, dude.

And you press your Rengue button and every attack has like a ton of frames of animation. But they're, they're dragon ball in it. You sound like a pro z-D bit Describing the Rengue button. It's a Rengue button and you do Rengue combos and you tilt and do Rengue attacks. And I mean, look, man, you just, you go look at it and you'll get what I mean.

It's a homie fighter. And does everyone have an infinite immediately by pressing jab dash, jab, dash, jab? Of course they do. Why if it wouldn't be a homie fighter if they didn't? So we checked out Star Dust Rade as well. It's there. It's doing it. The homies are in.

Yeah, that was our little Indy Fighter gauntlet. That's quite a lot. Yeah, yeah, we blew six games one night. It was pretty crazy. Anyways, this week, what do we got? I played Simone Musha yesterday. It's good. It's really good.

Dark Souls 2 is taking a break. and That game's so fucking long, dude. Not, not I just realize as soon as I say that people are going to go, what do you mean, you're stopping? No, no, no. I meant yesterday, instead of playing Dark Souls 2,

we played Donaamusha, it'll be back next week. And then tomorrow we're going to be playing what might be wrapping up 14? It would be, it would be wrapping up a Romeroon. We were going to, we've cleared the, we've cleared the schedule.

and I have no doubt at all that you can clear the solo trials ahead of you I have absolutely no doubt at all that you're gonna have it if you're gonna throw yourself with like the fucking heaven sword samurai shit and like almost do it like yeah you'll you'll clear the solo shit it is a little strange that you get to like what would have been the level cap and then they throw like two solo encounters that are like fucking real at you like at the finish line

Like the game kind of babies you for like 10 weeks And goes okay, okay We'll see what's going on for real reals Well, that's a 10 a.m. Pacific tomorrow morning Please look forward as I drag Joe Guns into the recycling bin live on stream I saw that you said that and I saw people react to it And I'm like calm the fuck down people

That's just that's just needlessly antagonistic, even for Woolly. It's so callous. It's so crazy. Even for Woolley, that's so, like, that's heartful. It's for no reason. It's just a reason. Like, because you just spent 10 weeks going,

I love all the art you guys made. I'm so appreciative. It's amazing. Now, excuse me while I put this old girl out of her misery. Like, that's, oh, man, it's sadistic. Yeah, it's, it's... But we all know, as we learned from Riot, that the destruction garners way more attention

than the actual thing itself. I... Oh, we'll have a little bit to talk about Riot in a bit. Drown this kitten live on stream. So that's what's going on over at the Woolly Verses. I have a little bit extra to talk about my week, but nothing too crazy. Um, uh, I, I, uh, but whatever. another bit. On Thursday, on Thursday, we'll be starting a new LP, the title of which is

The Docappocalypse, Act 1. Ah, yes. Peace. Oh, yes. Okay. It's this. The big walk. Yes. That will begin on Thursday. Please enjoy. No, I will not elaborate. I'm going to have to tune in to see what the hell that's going to be like. Very much so. Very interesting. That's it. If you have questions, I have no answers for you.

you. Pete, so, well, we'll wait, before, before we move on, and because there's only one day left for people to bother us about this, people have been, uh, hassling my ass so bad about the 14th stream tomorrow,

about what's going to happen. And I have said every single day this week, that I have gone way out of my way to not talk to you. Because it is so much more fun to not. ask you anything.

About what's coming? About what is going to happen to that like after tomorrow. Okay. Okay. In any possible direction. Hey Pat, do you think this? I don't think anything. In fact, I've avoided speaking to the man for like 10 days specifically to avoid the temptation of asking. I did. There's a whole pocket of feelings that I was not aware

out there that I caught wind of a little bit. But overall, who the fuck knows? You know? Who the fuck knows? Let's see. Moving on from that, because we'll get to that tomorrow, because we're not going to be thinking about that. What else do I do?

I wonder if I could like make a backup character, delete that, and then just record the video, and then just play that. So you could. you could you could do that just play the video a full screen and then like oh like you

you could do that you could not do that by tomorrow you would have to go make the same exact character on a different server and then you would have to go through the whole fucking thing again

and then when you did the delete thing you would have to like hide the server that you're on, like you'd have to crop the video a little bit so people didn't see that it was on a different server. Well, everybody, you could. How about this? I've got one September goal. Yeah.

If you want this cat to survive. Yeah. All right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you want this cat to survive that's smart. That's smart. Fuck up. Do you know how to use the new subgoal thing on Twitch? I don't.

all right here look i'll send you it on to video manager i have one goal for the month and if you want this cat to fucking make it then you better let me know yeah here we go here i'm sending you the the the location of the goal button yeah it's it's it's it's the star on the star outline on stream manager So pick a number and put it in tomorrow morning. Gun to Guns head.

Gun to Joe's head. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gun to Joe's head. That's really smart. Perfect. Tune in. All right. What else have I been doing?

I did a sponsored stream for Final Fantasy Residence, which is the de-gatchified Final Fantasy game. Yes, yes, yes. Um, it, so it's, okay, sponsored opinion. I was, I'm being paid cash to have shown everybody the game. It makes me super pissed off that this was a Gatcha game at all. Mm-hmm. Because it was real in underneath it.

Have you seen like the opening story sequence? Nothing, nothing, no idea what it is. It is, it is, it is, it is the, the, the visual opinion. of HD2D, right? It is the newest in the Octopath like style of, of video game graphics.

And it is a legitimate successor to the directing style of Mario Ball Z. Sorry, yeah, Super Mario Bros. Z. Off of Newgrounds.

Okay. It is the most dynamic, exciting, effects-laden, flash animated little pixel cutscene direction. Zau-s-show shit? No, like Super Mario Bros. Z. Hold on. Give me a second. I got to find live...

Where is it? Resonance. Here, I'll just grab you a cutscene. Turn the sound off because I'll be there. Yeah, well, I'm going to just do it on the phone. Post Pat. It is a really, really solid, excellent classic Final Fantasy game with a very, very old-fashioned, like, narrative direction. Hey man, the crystals. Right. Right. The crystals are they're up to no good again and or they are up to good. Evil Magitech Empire. Did this come out? Et cetera. fucking Thursday? No, no, no. When did the Gatcha version come out?

Oh, years and years ago. It's called Final Fantasy Brave X-Bus. Ex-Vis. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, okay, okay. I was like, why? I'm like, Resonance doesn't ring a bell at all. This is Brave XVis re-released without Gacha.

Gosh. Let me get a. Yes, yes, okay. I remember that name now. Here we go. Here's a, here's a, what I'm talking about in terms of cutscene stuff. This is the very first cutscene in the game. in terms of like narrative,

a battle between two characters. And it is shot like a goddamn action fucking flash games. This is Newgrounds. This is peak of Newgrounds. Yeah. Pixels with explosions behind them doing... And like there's a specific moment

that you're probably going to get to where he dashes out of the flames. And you're like, oh my God, that looks just like a Newgrounds animation. pixels on flaming backgrounds doing Monty Oom shit. Yeah. Yeah. So didn't expect this level of action directing from tiny little 16-bit pixel characters.

That's really funny. It's also like mixed media. So they'll also have very large expensive CG cutscenes a la Final Fantasy. And what they will also have is slightly less expensive CG cutscenes that they've run through a filter to make it like 140p. so it's grained out and pixelated. It's like using all sorts of mixed media shit. I bet you there's one person who's like the animator behind that stuff that they pulled in. You know,

like they called it a specialist to do that particular fluff like Newgrounds look. But it's also got your like a like a bravely default style like break system where you're breaking enemy stamina by hitting their weaknesses. It's not turnpressed, but it's kind of like that. And then your job system is you getting little visual. of either classic Final Fantasy jobs or classic Final Fantasy characters. So like Cloud is a vision in this game that functions as a job to unlock a bunch of abilities. And that was the Gatcha system.

But now it's been turned into like go to this location and unlock X, Y, and Z like FF5 does, where you get to the crystal and it unlocks like four jobs. It's super cool. Has really excellent full voice acting. It looks gorgeous. It's super cool. He said, but it's a,

it's a class. You can... No, Cloud himself is there. Okay. I would... As a vision. I would love to see...

He doesn't talk. I would love to see somewhere, somehow, just a, like someone put together a cloud's perspective of falling into the life stream.

Just the blip of him flashing through every world and every adventure and everything that happened to him. I would like, man... Okay, so first I went to, went to Kingdom Hearts

and then I went to Final Fantasy 14 and then I went to tactics and then oh you do it in order right so it'd be tactics first then Kingdom Hearts just like the flash of realities from one to the other I would love to see what that looks like it's probably worse than instrumentality

you know what that is that's when Tifa's piecing his brain back together once she fixes him but before he actually rises up out of the goop in that in that 10 second period that's when he does all the cross over stuff yeah yeah that yeah like at least shingi like it it it kind of happens in a way where you're like but did he actually experience that or was that all of us you know yes right the answer to all evangelicalian questions of that nature is yes but but with cloud it's like no no no he is going through each

individual one of these. And it's back to back to back to back. You know what was a... He popped out in Smash Brothers, did a fucking helped kill fucking whatever, taboo, and then jumped back in the life stream. Fought a Sephiroth while he's at it. No, it's gone. I lost it.

Imagine coming out feeling as good as you do on the Smash Brothers roster, right? Defeating the evil and then Sephora. authors there and then you jump back in and then the next time you see each other you're in her guys imagine what that feels like oh it came back it feels like shit that fucking game sucks dude um you know what was a fun moment so we had the sony state of play where they showed off like the last gameplay trailer for um ff seven revelations and they were like look you can play is this and air drop out and all this stuff and i got to see my favorite comment i've seen almost to to act to anything in years, which is why aren't they showing any more cloud gameplay? Where's cloud?

I guess this would be the new player going through for the first time then. Yeah, there are people who are just like, why didn't they show any cloud? I want to see his new moves and his, is like what he looks like in his new outfits. Why they keep showing Yuffy and Sid and Tifa? interesting and I was like rub my tummy in satisfaction I was talking to so apparently you can

get a whole bunch of cool shit in P3 reload with Shinji if you put the time in you put the time in there's a bunch of cool shit there you got to earn it's you got to earn it shit but it's there's mean as fuck dude um Anyways, that's

That's funny. Uh, yeah, come on down to Twitch.com past stares at and YouTube.com slash pat stares at tomorrow I'm doing 14 with Willie. Thursday, we're doing Elderfield and then, uh, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is more Unumusha. But I'll be starting tomorrow at 6.30 a.m. Cause of the second goddamn Nintendo direct.

Those motherfuckers doing it twice in a row. Why couldn't they put the Zelda one in front of the other Nintendo direct and just do both of them tomorrow. They're not going to let Zelda have to compete with anything else. They're not going to... But I have to wake up early two days in a row. That's not nice to do. Fuck you. Direct to you, bitch. Direct to your schedule.

Direct to your fucking balls. Fuck you. They don't care. What's new in the world? Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. That's what's new. This week, the podcast is sponsored by the podcast.

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Thanks, AG1. This week, the podcast is sponsored by Brooklyn Bedding. And that is a nice way to, you want to, invest in your back if you are sleeping on a bed that is not supportive that is going to potentially come back to haunt you in the long run. You spend a lot, you spend a third, I believe, of your life sleeping, if not more. It's crazy. You should anyway. The quality of your bed makes a huge difference and it's not just a better night's sleep. I've had bad back problems get exacerbated by poor choices with that.

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Yo, that game sucks. Oh, no. What happened? That... Once's the last time you played? No, we... We talked about it, but like the tailing mission? So, hey, would you believe the tailing mission was actually way, way worse than I remembered?

Really? Okay. Yeah, so... Here's a thing. Way worse. I have a positive memory because I was like, oh, cool, we're homageing Snatcher. Sure. And I felt that was a fun thing to do. The aesthetic is cool, right?

Like the, yeah, finding out that if the guy you're tailing sees you, sees any enemy on patrol, sees an unconscious guy, which you have to take some guys out to let him progress. His AI freaks out and goes all the way back to the start of his path, which will often trigger new enemies, which cause him to freak out and run all the way back to the start of his path.

And I got the resistance guy that you're following into like a fucking enemy alert loop by himself. Man, okay. Dude, it, it sucks. So I, and then, yeah, I, I just sat there for like an hour and a half watching a bunch of cutscenes and with all the years of me, like, thinking about the story and the reveals and being like, yeah, a lot of this doesn't hit at all. I mean, I remember a couple. One, I liked the snatcher thing and I liked the aesthetic of it. And I thought it was a cool change of pace to, like, go from the war zones into a completely different, like, I had.

agree. I do agree. I remember that. And I'm also remembering the second and third bullet points were, oh, shit, that's what Ava's been up to. And also, holy fuck, I didn't know that Solidus played a role in this. I didn't expect that. Sure. You know? The main thing is that the actual mechanics of the tailing mission is really bad.

Right. And then it's followed by a turret sequence on the back of the car. the back of a jeep, which is like 10 and a half minutes long, which is also really bad. And then the boss fight against Raging Raven is terrible. In the top of the tower. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the whole chapter.

Like, it's terrible. Like, it, like, it trades on you finding out answers to a shit ton of questions in those cutscenes. And genuinely, the awesome. some finger guns moment. Yeah, I guess. To distract you from how miserable the actual acting. Because the urban environment is a cool switchup, but they're not going to go for like a full on combat war zone in that setting.

So the thought is probably like, okay, let's do like a hitman mission. But there's so much more you can do in one of those because you're not stuck following one line. right also um you know how there's also the little god the little robot following you and you can look behind you and see the robot following you oh oh the tail the tail the one tailing you yeah yeah so um that that magic breaks super hard when you see him and go to walk up to him and he just clips out of existence seriously yeah he doesn't like he doesn't hide behind the wall and disappear, he just blips out as soon as you get within a certain range. Man.

So it just, like, the, that, that, I'm being tailed, like, evaporates because the guy just fucking blips out of existence like he's magic. I didn't revisit, you know? I just, I'm just thinking about the, the, the, the change of, of mood and aesthetic. Yeah. Also, yeah, hey, the B&B core got way creepier and less appropriate over. time. Like the farther we get away from them and like them just being head to toe skin tight camera zooming up their hoo-haz while Drebben's telling you about how they were abused as children,

it's it's fucking, it's not good. Did you engage the photo shoot mode? Yes, yes I did because people in chat did not know what I was talking about. So I'm like, all right, let's go. And then as as as Raging Raven is like screaming about it. dead family and the Ravens, all of a sudden we transition to sex noises and J-pop dances and shit like that. And it's fucking weird. And the funny part is like, I can imagine exactly how that happened because when I saw

what it was and I saw that mode and you kind of saw how they filmed the unit to begin with, it was like, oh, right. This is a little omake we're putting in the game because the actual mocap models are fashion models. And because they're fashion models, this is something, like it fits into like what they're used to and stuff. And like something that's a fun thing for,

you know, the performance capture would be like, oh, they're doing something that is kind of like what the fashion models usually do. So let's have fun with it, right? But then you put it in the context of who they are and what they are in the setting

and the role they're playing and not just for the actors themselves. And you get this super insane fucking, a cognitive dissonance between them. There is no way that that is the order of events. You just described the benefit of the doubt order of events. I'm going to describe the cynical order, which is, hey, I want to do all this weird, creepy shit.

Let me go hire a bunch of fashion models to play these characters. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. From step one, I mean, look, again, Quiet's playing in the water. What are we talking about, right? A million percent, the Boner Kerr jumbo was the beginning of the timeline. Right? Right. When you go down...

Did you say Boner Kerr jumbo? When you see the fucking timeline scrolling and it says Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of the Patriots, bullet point one in 1974 is Boner Kerjumbo. A million percent. And then the rest follows. But it, yeah, but, but it, but it, but like more than that, the fight is fucking terrible. Yeah. Like, it's like, that's my reward.

My reward is I take the photo shoot of the sexy lady. And I'm like, that fuck, this whole fucking sequence is miserable. It's terrible. Ah, man. Yeah, it's just. And now I get to go sneak around Shadow Moses while hiding from robots that don't interact with the game's stealth systems at all. Well, if you didn't enjoy it, would you? like it if it was more like, I don't know,

Grozny Gride? I, yeah. So, bro, I, the more I play MGS4, the more I'm like, oh, wow, MGS5 makes way more sense. Because, like, I'm, I'm coming off of MGS4 levels going, wow, this is a super deep gameplay system. And the game will never let me actually use it

against anything. What the fuck? And so MGS5 is the result of like, hey, you want to fucking just do a bunch of sneaking missions for hours and hours and hours? Yeah, sure. Fuck it. Let me sneak around, please. Thank you. Well, guess what? The modding community has immediately jumped on it,

and they're showing off the first custom map in MGS4, in which they just inserted Grozny Gride. Cool. That's a thing you can, that's a thing that they're doing now. Awesome. MGS4 mods are happening. Great.

Not to mention alongside that MGS 1 and 2 co-op mods. So. That's weird. Yeah. You see Maryland Snake running around the, fucking Alaska. I'm doing it. It's pretty cool.

Merle. That's, man, yeah. That is a, that is a, that is, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that's, I already knew. I already knew, I already knew not to look too close back, you know? I, um, I, I set it on my stream. And I'll say it here. Because in act three, Johnny pulls off his mask. And it shows off that he's really handsome.

And he saves Merrill's life with. with CPR and then they make out a bit and I pause the cut scene to be like hey I want everyone to know that I hate this and I hate this a lot this might be the thing I hate the most that's ever happened in Metal Gear it's the worst

that Merrill ended up with poop man it's it's the worst it is legitimately so awful you don't like Merrill ending up canonically with hot poop men also there's like a really sketchy thing going on with what the romance in MGS. That's hot poopman.

There's something really sketchy going on here where Johnny ends up with Merrill despite the fact that he shits his pants all the time and then Naomi's like, hey, Oticon, I hear you pissed yourself. You want to do it in the back of the

helicopter? Like, what is up with this? What's up with the scat and piss gang being the only ones getting love in the Metal Gear Solid for it's fucking weird. And you have to wonder if like the beginning of that thought was, oh, we can't have Merrill just get shafted. You know, we gotta

have her have a nice story to close No, she got shafted too much. So let's, they need to deshaft that woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and then May Ling got a boat. I don't know. Yeah. Whatever. So that game sucks, dude.

No. That like, no. It was good, isn't it? This is good? No. This is good. The problem is it's one of those games where the cool stuff that happens at the end of the story blinds you to all the stuff that sucked when you played it. You know what I mean, right?

The story ends very strong and so that's your lasting impression instead of the part where the game never lets you play. It was a movie. It was a movie that wrapped up the story. It was a movie that wrapped up all the things that we had been building towards. Like, I think that the people like making fun of it because it's a movie is like kind of missing it a little bit because it's not that it has lots of cutscenes. It has lots of cutscenes. It's that every time the game starts to get going, Kojima walks into the classroom and rolls the TV in and says, okay, stop having fun. We're going to watch a cutscene.

Was it the first that? like big send-up finale like thing that you can think of media-wise that was before Mass Effect 3 it was before yeah I definitely feels like like for me steel ball run I read afterwards you know so for sure that like

probably probably for me it might have been the first like this is the big send-up conclusion to all of it also because I'm playing it you know for the second time after going through all the earlier ones. What's crystallized in my mind is me going like people in chat, we're chit chatting about various plot details as Ava's explaining it. And I'm like, by the way, don't think about anything Ossolot has ever done for even a second when we're talking about the current plan because you can't apply any information you

have now back to those other games because the character makes no fucking sense at all. It couldn't make less sense. I think you want to... I think Kojima himself up to the last second wasn't sure whether or not he wanted ghosts to be real. I think he was fighting the nanomachine. Yeah, because at the very end, it's like the final reveal of the game that the arm is fake.

He didn't know whether he wanted to do it or not until the last possible second. Oh, God. Ah! That's foundational. It's so important to understanding, to understanding the man, while also looking at riding from the cuck chair,

you know? Yeah. Now you are the one who wants to be riding, but you cannot. Anyway. That's, that's great. Maybe,

maybe Kojima benefited from the game not being ported. Yeah, maybe he did. Maybe he did. Maybe he did. Maybe he did. Maybe he did.

On the PlayStation. for all these years. That's so dire. Holy shit, dude. Oh, fuck. God damn. Nah, I'm sorry. What else we got on the news, though?

You know what? But the moment my brain hears that fucking theme of love, it's, you're going to, like, everything you're saying gets erased by those first guitar strums. As soon as I hear that, you're letting your brain chemistry. As soon as you say that, I don't care. I don't care. It's too good. it's too good

old snake theme man come on all right anyway yeah let's get to move on so we touched on is there any news there is and it sucks hey legend of Zelda okarina of wet

is coming out sure everybody's wet really soon November 5th yeah it's the only game that has the balls to compete with GTA 6 and no shit it does it's okreina time god damn also is this this the fastest, like, first reveal to drop?

Oh, yeah, probably. Yeah, absolutely. This is a, this is crazy. It's one month. It's like, here it is the thing you've been waiting on for decades. And it's happening in like a couple weeks from now. Bob. We'll see what's going on with that. And then, I'm sure you got to see it. But how about that? Arjun.

Arjunn looks like a bunch of characters that I have played and have subsequently died. Righteousness. Wickedness. He looks like he's got some stuff from Agonos. He looks like he's got stuff from Abigail. He looks like he has a little bit of stuff from Hakkan. And I look at him and I go, wow, all my favorite dead guys have been combined into another. later dead guy

but he's here for now Street Fighter 5 somehow survived yeah so I feel I was wondering about this I was like are they doing a character to be like hey India here's an actual not Dalsam kind of crazy

here's a real dude right this feels like some people on the team watched RRR I think they watched Singham and RRR and I think they checked out a bunch of cool Bollywood things and went Because, like, that's the genesis of Dalsam, which is like, like, Legend of the Flying Guillotine or whatever that movie's called.

Right, right, from the character from that. But, like, but Dalsam doesn't feel, like, he's an India representative and he's very important to the plot, but it doesn't feel like an actual guy, you know? Feels like a mystical, like, kind of being. So, like, here comes an actual guy. And the moment he, you get the eye glow, you see the exhale of the vape smoke. And he goes, move. I'm like,

In, sold, done. Yeah, he's cool. Nailed it. He's very cool. And the artwork of him being like the big exhaling goofy kind of thing is like, no, no, no, no, that's not what was going on. This dude is going to murder the fuck out of you because that's how they roll. Because again, ex-cop, partner murdered, out for revenge. Okay, cool. You know how this movie ends?

With a splat of blood landing on the British flag. is how this ends. That's how this story goes. Uh, yeah, Arjun looks super sick. Giant. It appears like they, they just gave him Marissa's, like, a bunch of Marissa target combos and punches and kicks. Yeah. You know, Narbacular drop, all that stuff.

He's a real, he's a really, really big body. Massive. Like, I think he's probably the biggest guy in the game. For some reason, his skin texture looks kind of, like, not full. I think that's because it's. It's supposed to inflate all the time. Like his body distends quite a lot. There's something about the skin texture that looks a little bit shiny and odd to it.

But he's got stretch marks from the inflation as well. And yeah, in terms of like as a character, what are you selling? What's his whole deal? He has vape smoke bubbles that he's blowing out and then punching at you. And the vape trails are blasting him into tackles across the screen. He's blowing them at you or he's hitting the ground and a big old volcanic vape thing pops up and he grabs that and swings it at you. Like those big, you know the Iron Sheik with the big heavyweight giant man kind of exercise bars? He has like one of those essentially and he just swings at you.

Looks like he's going to be more complex going in in terms of like what you can do with him than Yasmin, which is cool. Yeah. For a character like this, you want to have a lot of really accessible, understandable things right off the bat, and then another layer of depth to him. And it seems like that's what he has with the smoke setups and with the things that pop up under the ground. He's putting pillars down and then he has a projectile that he sets and then he fires off like K-Dash. Yeah. He's got a lot. Persian clubs. There you go. Those things. Yeah. And I just, I love the shit he's doing and saying and the mood he has. Like he is end of movie Singham. right and that's the protagonist I don't know if y'all have seen a Bollywood or Tollywood movie at all recently but there's one thing

you should probably know about that the bad guys don't get away no there is a very different sense of heroic justice in these movies and the way they treat villains is like yeah we're gonna just murder you and everyone's gonna cheer when we do it

and that's it of saying I'm so nuts is like What are you going to do? Just kill all of us? And then he spends the rest of the movie just killing all of them in a big fight. Like there's the like the idea of a Frank Castle getting a murder burner going is like, yeah. And of course, what are you talking about? Of course we murder the evil. Why wouldn't we?

That's it. Done. Like who? For what reason? You know? The other thing I'm reminded of is like when the hair is down and the eyes are glowing and he's got that like kind of boom bass in his voice to him, it reminds me of in our RRR. the moment that Rahman specifically upgrades

into the hero and he's quoting the Sanskrit writings in the jail cell and he starts speaking with a different echo behind him. There's a trans, there's a super-sayan transformation that occurs

and I'm like, that is what they're pulling off with this character. Talking about righteousness, wickedness, are they not both one and two, one of the same? Is there not one

without the other? Answer me. Like, that shit hits. It's super sick. I once again, I'm like, okay, Yasmin was an absolute fucking, they nailed it like with the,

with the character, with the Filipino rep, with the style and everything. It just came down to like the damage and the character sort of viability was not as hype as we're hoping for. But they nailed it with the design of making a new street fighter.

Same thing for this. This is a new fucking street fighter. He's doing the Zankeef, walk. He's got all great. He's got all this shit. And I'm like, guys, the new character is cool. Can we, can we make space for an awesome new character? Nailed it. Super awesome, man. Real happy they're doing that. And, um, you just need to let it exist before you love it. I like the amount of shock I saw in

the comments and people responded going, okay, wait, hold up. Hold up. They, they, they got something going. Arjun looks fucking sick, man. Yeah, he looks really good. He's next week, right? October. What was the date on him? October. Oh, no, wait.

He's in the month. Sorry. November? It's September. It's September now. Okay. Yes. So he's October 13th.

Yeah. The returning faves are always welcome, but you got to make room for cool shit like this to happen. And also as well, like, I like the, okay, we can get something a little bit more cultural, like getting get the accuracy of that in place a little bit more because again dalcum is just a Gandalfe magic man kind of thing he's cool but they're not they're they're going off in a different direction with that uh we talked about gore the god butcher uh that's a that's a fucking sick character i'm glad he's dropping in the game i didn't expect that pull but um dope as hell and justified in his big murder of gods so

Hell yeah. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. There was a rumor right before this announcement for Okorina that MonolithSoft was going to be the developer. And... We didn't get heads or tails or confirmation on that in one way or anywhere. Nintendo Lifo says there's no evidence to support that, but it was a Norwegian retailer that put them listed as the dev. That was just, yeah, I think it was just a random rumor or so.

I mean, that's the kind of thing where, like, besides the Zeno games, the only other things I know of are battenkaitos they did disaster in project cross zone but like Nintendo has them working on those Xeno things like fucking round the clock right um it'd be but I don't know actually if they were up their other stuff oh splatoon and animal crossing they oh my god I didn't know I didn't know okay they were working out they're helping out with some of those other stuff oh okay well they fucking all right Nintendo's what a turnaround from a bunch of guys who could never finish a game Nintendo's fucking, yeah. Well, hey, when you're a Nintendo studio, like, if that's, you're either getting that treatment or you're getting the like, are we all gone tomorrow?

Is it this week? Is it next week? When can we do? What's rare up to? I don't know. Or the, um, um, um, um, fucking, what is it? Um, Metroid Prime. Um, um, uh, blanking on the name.

Hunters? No, Metroid Prime. the dev, um, retro, retro, retro, uh,

uh, right. Okay. So, other things going on. Um, this is a weird one. So Spider noir

apparently canceled after one season, but everyone's like, yeah, that's fine. It was an excellent season and it is self-contained, wraps up perfectly. Also nominated for 11 Emmys and

insanely high rating across the board on all reviews. So everyone's just like, yeah, that's cool. No problem. End it there. Thanks, Nick Cage. Bye. Like, it's canceled, but everyone is totally okay with it because what they did works for what it was. Very interesting. I got to go check. That, that, that's the kind of thing that gets my eyebrow raised. I'm like, ooh, a self-contained thing that wraps up and is ready and done? Fuck it. Let's go. I hear really good things about it, so I got to go check that out. I like Nick Cage when he's allowed to Nick Cage all over the place.

And Spider-Man Noir was cool, especially in like Spider-Verse and stuff. That's a fun character. Yeah, only other things were the GTA6 is what it takes for YouTube to update its monetization guidelines. Surprise, surprise. This is good, but also, fuck. off. It takes that level of cultural, like, content drop for them to finally move on something. YouTube will no longer demonetize your video of video game stuff having violence within the first seven seconds or whatever the fucking is. Because we want our money and GTA 6 is big, so there's

nothing we can do about that. Hey, can you go back in time and like give everybody who made Mortal Combat content the money they should have earned all that, all those years ago? black and white footage or whatever the shit. It's like, yeah, sorry, those games didn't matter as much. So our policies stand. But if a game comes out that matters more that you guys care more about, then I guess we'll fucking change what we... Also, I'd like to point out that this is super fucked up

because most content creators aren't going to get any of that money because Grand Theft Auto has licensed music playing constantly. All over the place. I wouldn't be surprised. So, like, actually, like, Russian knockoff fake music companies that are content claiming your video, they're the ones that are going to get the increase to add revenue from this. After the seven second mark, graphic gameplay scenes can now fall under a standard ad eligible category. And, yeah, anyone who made any MK related content fucking sucks, sucks. sucks rough deal bad beats

but now well now to be fair that's what you get making content for fucking moral combat but but I mean I mean you know like

yeah well I mean when you think people are actually fucking playing it what are you talking about oh to play it oh fuck no absolutely not

oh absolutely we are watching a fatality compilation and we're out forever um And there's one other one here. I don't know what this means long term per se,

but I saw that SteamDB was bought by Nexus Mods. And I don't know if that's good or not. It's probably bad. So it seems like Nexus Mods got acquired by another company recently that basically has been doing the fandom style monetization thing. So basically expecting SteamDB to start rolling out a bunch of ads where there were none before. I bet they're super...

That Wikia style shit where you load it up in a Twitch fucking stream starts playing without you do without you asking for it. Nexus is super mad that I have a lifetime account there. You know how I know they're mad? There's no way to recover your account.

If you have two factor on it you can't, they disabled SMS to your telephone and they don't allow backup codes. Sorry, make a new one. They want you to eventually lose your account. That's funny. No, you have to assume that any time a site buys another site or something like this,

the only reason why you would do that is so that you can monetize it. You know, you can put ads where there weren't on it. You can have a giant opening splash page and embedded Twitch streams. So it's, yeah, like, I don't know if it's going to be to that fandom level, but everyone pretty much seems to be like, you know, clear that like, yeah, what they've been doing recent months has been just upping that and you're going to get hit with more per page. Again, I challenge you to load up your, load up a fucking fandom wiki on your phone and then fry an egg off the back of it. You've never felt your phone get hotter than trying to scroll down a fandom wiki.

And then you know what, though? If you're trying to get to SteamDB so that you can post your fucking fighting game arguments for how many active players are there, then maybe you deserve to get your hand burnt. Maybe you deserve a worse experience. Hey, do you have the Riot CEO quote on here? The 2XCO stuff? No. Which one? The MMO stuff.

No. So, one of the CEOs named Mark Merrill was talking about the MMO that they're working on at Riot. So to catch everybody up, Rune Terra, maintenance mode, TFT currently very buggy and hasn't had an update in a while, and to XKO dead. right so they're their expansions out from league and also arcane lost money but did you see the lux trailer yeah i saw it she looks really cool so i somebody asked me if i had seen that trailer and my response was insert and that loading up that trailer is like watching an ad for your own coffin sure the one i saw was um it's your girlfriend uh that says she's going to break up with you in a few months wearing a new dress.

Yeah. Sure. Like it's it. That trailer and the enthusiasm behind it like the tone feels fucking weird. It's so strange. It is a it is a dissonance we have never experienced which is I've never seen like this. For a thing that is being.

Actually no. Ever crisis is still advertising new events even though Evercris is going to close down at the end of the year. And I think whenever there's a whenever there's an end of service thing because it's moving on to the next thing that's often like oh yeah. while they're closing it out and like Darkest Dungeon, you know, they wrapped up and then came back to it a few times actually. And they're like, well, we're doing two now. But obviously that's not what's happening here. And it's going to be even crazier with Samira because Samira's going to be dropping with like a month to go, you know.

So all these projects basically got shot because they wouldn't dominate the genre that they're in. So here comes the MMO that has been fully restarted development at least once and has been in dead for five. years. Sorry, I'm just going to say, as we move out of that, side note, I think that the, like, hey, 40 bucks, all the costumes, like, ending deal that they're walking out on. Because, did you get your riot stimmy? I got the stimmy, right?

And I'm guessing that that's going to be the, like, pay this to keep the servers online for... Hey, I have an idea. What if they had just done that? To jump, walking in. Walking in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I saw that it's like, oh, Riot doesn't usually do paid things. all the games they do are free, so that's usually their model.

But I did see that there was like a series of mini arcane, not arcane, mini, like, mini games that were sold for a set price that were like League of Legends adjacent backstory kind of like things, like small games. They had double A games. I did a sponsorship for one called Ruin King. It was cool. It was made by the Battle Chasers guys. Right. So they had a bunch of smaller games. Those all did fairly poorly.

Okay. But overall, yeah. I think basically the... Like saleswise. I think the big skin bundle they're going to sell is basically just... That was called Riot Forge. Right Forge is the name I was trying to remember. And it also...

So basically, everything they've done aside from league has been a failure. So the final project... TNT is doing really well. Is that... Okay. Is that not part of league? Team Fight Tactics? It's a different game, but it's...

Yeah, it's doing quite well. So here comes the MMO, which is... Oh, Valeran. I forgot that valour was them. The MMO is, as everyone knows, a very non-competitive space with a lot of room to grow. And the quote is, Merrill said Riot jokingly calls the MMO the quote, grail because, quote, fuck it. Many a brave knight are going to die on the grail quest. But fuck it.

It's the grail. So let's go, end quote. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, we're just marching into the meat grinder. Yeah. So, yeah, no, that thing's going to... Holy shit.

It doesn't have to go for it. So that game's going to take another couple of years to come out. And they're probably going to drop support for it under a year. Wow. Hey, I have a question for you, Wully. As a fighting game man, but as a new, let's say, tertiary MMO guy who's touch in MMO recently, right? MMOs are long-term time investments, right? Sure are. How trustworthy do you feel that this MMO is going to be supportive after they've

just shot every project in the past five years in the head? Well, I guess the question really depends on when did they start development? Five years ago. Have you seen a screenshot? Not me either. they restarted development two or three years ago. I think there's a time limit and I think we now know what that time limit is. I'm not going to be able to, I'm not going to be able to find the exact quote because it was a couple days ago. But Chris Wolfheart, very funny guy on Blue Sky, was responding to the 2X GAO stuff and basically said, It's crazy how when you make a skinner box that forces people who play it to resist escape,

they have trouble resisting the skinner box that causes you to not be able to escape. Right? Like, League of Legend is a game that addicks you and then turns you into a bad person. It makes it difficult for you to actually leave the pull of league. Because now you're addicted and you're a bad person. So that Holy Grail analogy is kind of nuts for its framing of just like we're going on a death march and we're going to lose a lot of people along the way towards the goal. Some of you may die. That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Like, for real. For real, dude. I can't imagine anybody in their right mind would sit down and be like actually attempting an MMO. the in this day and age with 14 the way it is without 14 and wow a scoop that well mark it up if you're going to do it i have to imagine that you're coming at this with surgical precision systematically going after each of the things that people are drawn to and having a way to do that you know what i mean like you're going to do what fortnight does to everything that it swallows by dropping something that is like a direct uh dark matter to the matter that this current game takes up. Filling every hole and then expanding once you're in there. World of Warcraft and Final

Fantasy 14 focus on the opposite ends of what the class, what would now be called the classic MMO. Here's our old style of MMO which is everything FF11 and before. But 14 and wow just cover that whole spectrum. Guild Wars

over here, still doing quite well, covers the action MMO pvp spectrum of things. So when ArenaNet says, hey, we're making Guild Wars 3, and it's going to be much more action-oriented and smaller scale and more like, they talked a lot about it this week. And basically, when I said it was probably going to be more like Monster Hunter, I was correct. There's a spot for that because it is not the same type of MMO that World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 are. It is a new, like, black desert kind of thing.

But what if you made black desert for human beings, basically? Riot's fucking thing, the last I heard, it got restarted because it was just Riot's World of Warcraft. But it wasn't better than World of Warcraft. And I have to imagine that there's leeway for MMOs to be built as you play them. that seems to be like you know par for the course in the genre they're they're always being built as you play them it's a weird genre but I

what will make a big difference here between the comparison points to other things they've killed off you know or or so will be what are you paying for it is this going well what are you walking is it a free plus you know monetization options offer or is there a monthly subscription also this is quite rare

to say, but because Riot has canceled a bunch of their high profile projects, I would kind of expect them to come out and be like, we promise to support this for a minimum X number of years. 2XCO was supported for eight months.

I mean, would they ever... I think Runtara had 18 months. Would they ever want to put those handcuffs on? Would they ever want to like make a promise like that? Yeah, but, you know, but hey man, So I'll give you a secret about MMOs. And it's a secret that a lot of people don't know anymore because there isn't as much competition. Do you want to know when most people start playing an MMO when the first expansion comes out?

Because then you know that it's solid and people like it and it'll stick around for a while. Because the zeitgeist is clearly paying off. Because it's going to continue to. exist. There's a lot of fucking MMOs that you jump on and then three to six months later, you're like, oh, this thing's cooked. I have totally wasted my fucking time. Oh, man.

Yeah, okay. That, say I get it. That just activated the thing in me where I'm just like, even if the game is great before that, it doesn't matter. It's got to be about where it's got to be about the, it's about the crowd around the watering hole and you walking up to go. hey, what's going on here? The social component is like an enormous proportion.

So, so like, think about it this way, right? So, like, you know, fighting game comes out. You can always play a fighting game. You can always play an action game, right? But, like, the crowd is the value, right? So MMOs used to last like five or six years. And there was a bunch of them. So, well, what happened?

Well, you, like, hey, did this again expansion? Oh, it's really good. Okay, it's going to make it to five years. we're in a different time now. The games that are out now have been out for 13 or 20 plus years now. I think I have a like a sting reaction because like people that are playing with other genres when I see that kind of like, oh like are other people, what's going on with this? Are other people on this or so?

And it's like, is it good? Do you enjoy it? Is the game good? Are you having fun? I just want to know who is it. How popular is it? What's the Steam DB? What are the numbers?

And it's kind of like, okay, but just that doesn't matter. matter. So MMOs are unique. Because that's a more popular your game is, the better it gets. It's directly tied to it. A million percent. The only reason Yoshi P got to make demands of monotonous of like of extra assets and extra time for Evercold was because FF14 is popular enough that it makes like the quarterly income of Square Inix for multiple quarters in a row. If it was middling on, then it would have gotten middling updates. Right. Right. FF11 could have been turned off years ago. But FF11's community is nuts and won't stop playing FF11. So we're now like 25 years out and they're

still doing updates. Every now and then, there's still minor updates for 11 because they won't stop. If your MMO starts to downslide in popularity, you're not just dealing with like, oh, they might turn it off. You're also dealing with like, okay, well, this patch is going to have basically nothing in it because the sub numbers are down so they don't have the numbers to build. These missions no longer work. Duty finding starts to fall apart. Things like all the different subsystems. There's like a break point, right? And there's a, there's a, there's a line because like the maximum level of insanity is walking up to a single player game and going dead game. and it's like, what the fuck is you talking about?

Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. And there's a gradient. Yeah. Like 14 and wow have been doing so well for so long. There is absolutely no reason for you to believe anything other that they will still exist in more or less the same state 10 years from now. But with the right MMO, if you're thinking about getting in on that one, you have doubts that it'll be. six months from its release, which is probably in three to five years.

Okay, so what do you think is happening with Deadlock? Because Deadlock is... Oh, very... I can tell you what's happening. From the moment it announced its existence. That's correct. It has made zero dollars. And they're continuing to, like, aggressively update and, like, talk about balance,

balance and patches and things going with that. And it's rolling into what appears to be, like, active season life cycle. but it's still not actually making any money, right? So I have a couple of things happening here. One, Deadlock is by Ice Frog. It's Dota 3 is what Deadlock actually is, right? It's those guys making the new fucking thing, right? So here's what Deadlock requires you to do.

Have a Steam account right off the bat. It has made money. It has made money directly. Get on our platform. By getting people who don't have steam to get on steam. Second, it's building up a community of like long-term knowledge and addiction. So that when the game comes out, it will have a mature community that's been working on it for years. Already there in place.

And because it'll be free and they'll have built, they've worked on it for so long, it'll basically hit the ground running. Oh, hey, here's the hot shooter that's been active and popular for years. How long have they been working on it? And how long before we got our head? A couple of years now? Working on it? A while.

What's the time frame before we got to play it? And then what's the time frame since it's been played? That game also got a full... Because that matters. A full restart. Okay. From the art. It did not used to look like the film of the film of us.

before it became it was playable? 2018? I believe so. Okay. I think we're talking about six years total. 2018 is pretty fucking long. That's, that's eight, right?

They are, they are working on, so Valve has the money to waste. So you can't, that's what I was going to get, that's what I was getting at, is that you cannot look at every studio and go, you can tank that level of zero income on a game,

or zero profit on a game or revenue. Yeah. without the scope of a valve, you know, to handle. And so when, when deadlock's ready to quote unquote come out and turn on monetization, it's going to be, like, it's already doing well player number wise, because all they're doing is focusing on quality. And Valve will support things forever. So people don't worry about it disappearing.

Valve is also testing out all of their new technology as to how this shit works with the build guide with the steam controller with the you know all this shit on it but like it is it is a money pit that they're building and the idea is going to be that at the flip of a switch people will throw enough money into the pit to fill it back up to zero

and then a mountain or it'll be a hot, extraordinarily popular game that doesn't make much money that brings millions of people to the Steam platform that haven't already got on. And what's the value of that when compared? Then it becomes what's the value of 500,000 extra people looking at the Steam store every day? Right. So you know what? Not the same as pulling people onto your riot launcher or something to that effect, but still

a value in and of itself. Not to mention, I forgot what the word for it was, but there's a term nowadays for like lost leading software that or social media platforms that don't, it's not that they're making money, but they keep you from going elsewhere. There's a specific term for that. I mean, it's kind of a captive audience, but

MK2 points out correctly, since Valve owns Steam and Steam is all PC games, every PC game funds deadlock like on a me

me and you buying onamusha fucking whatever funds deadlock right because that's an inch because just deadlock is an interesting one in the conversation about these riot games dying where like here's a game that expressly has made zero dollars and has been in development for a very long time but here's the thing and this

is what this is what really matters dota two was like a free-to-play game that they worked on for a long time and they put out. And then Dota 2 became like one of two mobas and that's the whole genre. Like Moba people or Dota people or leak people. Period. That's it.

The entire Moba infrastructure just goes to one of those two. Even Blizzard, back when Blizzard made games, couldn't compete with fucking. fucking Valve and Lee. Like, so yeah, they want, they want their valerance or they base it or they want their new counterstrike or they want their new Dota or however you want to phrase it or look at it. Yeah, Deadlock just has, it has the freedom to actually fail. Hmm.

And then just keep going anyway. And it's, and it's still like gamble development, right? You're still rolling on this, but, but in this case, like, again, Valve has infinite money. They actually have infinite money for game development. Like they like the possible return on deadlock is

like industry changing. So why not? All right. Let's take a letter or two. If I could play that game without hurting my wrists, I would. But I can't. So like that's the one thing

that's like stopping me playing a bunch of deadlock is that it physically harms me. I enjoyed, I enjoyed it a bit, but it did definitely feel, I got, I got the systems overwhelmed, but what was there was, was all right. If you got a letter, you can send it over a Castle Super Beastmail at gmail.com. Let's see over here. Send a good letter. All right, well, here's one.

Dear boring success and interesting failure. Oh, yeah. Leon Strife. Oh, can we just put that on a wall somewhere, dude? With 2XCO announcing its ending, and I'm noticing a pattern of recent big failures that seem to be in development for 8 to 10 years, Concord, High Guard, etc.

And it got me wondering, have there been success stories where games have had long development? The only ones I can think of are StarCraft 2 and Silk Song. I feel like there's more failures than successes. I've got one. Silk Song is definitely the one that comes to mind. StarCraft 2.

word on the street is I'm not sure because I feel like StarCraft 1 players hated it so I've got one for you there was a game that we talked about on this very podcast or actually maybe it was

the super best friend cast in which it was unveiled and took so long to show any footage that we started to have discussions about whether or not the game was fucked up

and in trouble. And that was Eldon Ring. Eldon Ring was in death for like six and a half years. And then it came out and it was goddamn Eldon Ring. Well, the moment they showed that first trailer, I think, like, all of that disappeared, right? Like, people just got, the hype cycled again. And so the thing about Eldon Ring, about like, why was Eldon Ring so successful with the, you know, that thing? Well, the From Software people was pretty much the same.

development team through Demon Souls, Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3, Beast Souls. Cethora. Bloodborn. And so they got really, really fucking good at making this very specific type of game and decided what if we just made that

type of game really big and good? Yeah. Hey, Shocker, big success. Preinstalled audience waiting for it. Silk Song, to some degree, same boat, right? Like Hollow Night hit, had a bunch of people waiting on that, right? But yeah, then we have your bayonetta threes. You know, you have your things that just like that was 10 years and we don't even talk about it.

Stuff that is live service or like that's meant to on go for a long time dying out like after that much time feels way, way more brutal. because like you know that they were getting ready for the long haul, you know, as opposed to like, I'm done the opinion. The deadlock is really smart because 2XCO would have probably had a longer life if we just got earlier versions of the game that were more jank and just as free. And perhaps even the opportunity to monetize earlier, you know. I don't. So if they were goofing around. with 2XCO for years and years. Why weren't we just playing it and able to offer up our criticism and or likes

three years ago back when the game definitely existed? Well, I think the version, like the same level of scale maybe not. But if I think if they're, if you're looking at everyone's done their post analysis on it. But I think when things clear is that like something that was faster to, everybody's hands that delivered what their expectations were at the bare minimum and like could start making money as a platform um earlier on especially during covid when lockdown was was happening and everyone is ready to play a fucking fighting game from with rollback on it um they could have started building money and going from there a million percent well that that could have been possible um yeah

i i uh fuck i had a another point about, oh yeah, like, shit like Concord and all these things or whatever. Like, you get that. So, I was just going to say you get that, you get that, like that countergoing. And then you go, all right, I assume this studio is able to withstand this many years of just heavy investment into something without seeing a return whatsoever expecting for it to pay back. But like even with something like deadlock, I mean, we say all of this. the infinite money and stuff. But really, there is a point at which they would look at it and go,

this is no longer a good idea. Like there is a point. We don't know what it is. You can't ever know behind the scenes with that. But there is a point at which you can hit and go like, yeah, actually, this is a problem. I don't think that the people who made a new form of video game addiction with Team Fortress hats is worried about not being able to correctly monetize deadlock. But like in the case of the game is.

not, there's no monetization option yet to begin with, right? All you really have right now is like player count to go off of and then whenever it, the count, the button gets flipped, there will be a timer that they're hoping to see monetization go up by X amount within a certain time frame, right? For all the investment, for all the time in, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, even if they stabilize and have this amount of experts that are all there in a population that is used to the culture by this point and it's ready to go. So they're still going to be a within our first year. We want to see this type of growth.

Yeah, so Valve did that with Artifact. Artifact was like a genuine disaster. And they pulled support on that. I don't remember how long it lasted. But that was their Valve's card game. And it just did very poorly. All right, we got another one in here. Whoa, what's going on?

Hello, Quib and Queeb expat. Will here. Went to Montreal and had my first ever bagel at St. Vieter. That's a good bagel. One of the most delicious foods I've ever had there, but getting to the middle part of the bagel was weird, and it changed how I was eating the bagel to account for the whole and all the ingredients nestled within. True. That's true. And it got me thinking, how do you like your tempo in video games? For example, break and stagger mechanics are used a lot in games nowadays, which serve as a clear example of tempo. When you hit a boss enough,

they stagger and you get a chance to recover or deal free damage. Sometimes, this can be a good change of pace, but you'll also get something like Final Fantasy 16, where to me it felt like it favored just saving the big icon skills to cash out a burst phase during Stagger. It really did. How do you feel about break and stagger

shifting the tempo in games? Do you like how particular game manages tempo, excluding PVP games like fighters? Particularly fond of the tempo in Monster Hunter games. Onomusha has the best tempo of any game that I've had in terms of combat because it is slow, then fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, and then the parry like staggers the enemy so that they're like actually turned off for a second. You have a breather, unless it's an attack

chain at which point they're going to turn out of your parry. And so the speed actually maintains. It's it's it's it's slow fast, slow fast, but the change up between those times is variable. It's not consistent, which makes it exciting. Most importantly, you dictate the pace of that flow. I said it earlier in the podcast. The thing I want to do in

every action video game, not even action. I'll take, fuck that. Take that disclaimer off. The thing I want to do in every video game with combat in it of any kind is feel a choreographed fight

and not watch it but be the one allowing it to happen. Be the one controlling it and directing it. It's why I love defensive mechanics. It's why I love the walk, the stare down, the aura farm, all that, whatever, all that. I want to do the thing that I know I would love to watch cinematically, but I'm making it happen myself is the most exciting thing. And anything you can do in your game that's in service of that,

in this case, deflecting and break mechanics and having a moment where the boss gets knocked over and you lay into them and then they get back up and return form to you is a great way to do that, right? Phases activating in a From Soft Boss is a really great way of doing that as well. Like, they don't, though From Soft bosses don't really do that whole crumple and fall down moment, you know, they kind of just stay on their shit and like, um, ask you to find the gaps in between. Uh, I mean, like Flame Lurker was like one of the times early, early on were like,

oh shit, it actually staggers when I, hit it, wow. That's, you know, that's crazy. But as long as whatever you're doing in that moment, you feel like you can control it. And if you want it to go more intense, you make that happen, or you want the pace to slow down, you let that happen. That to me is succeeding. And I'm in favor of any mechanic that does that. To a degree, even if you cut to like a QTE, I have to, I'm like, I don't want too much of it, but I have tolerance for it when it's controlled well and has a payoff moment. Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, case in point, you know? A awesome QTE in the middle of a sequence that you have choreographed and danced through and controlled magically will work wonders.

But you have to make sure that, like, I feel like I'm doing the sequence that is in my brain that is a hype Sakuga moment. number one. I agree with everything you just said with one minor addendum. There is another type of pacing that I want at the very end. Once I have gone through peaks and valleys and peaks and valleys and pushing the peak and moving the valley, I want the very end to just fucking go and never stop until it's over. So the final boss of Sekiro. is a really good example

where you've been going like on a back and forth for the whole game and then the final boss of Sekerell is just go! Like just get them. Vanquish is the same where you're vanquish,

you're going fast and then you're doing your slowdown, but then you get to the last second of vanquish and it's go as fast as you can. And even though this example was used counter to this point earlier on, in FF16,

fighting Omega the last thing that Omega does is start doing its its nuke, its final phase, and it's basically like lay everything you have in before this meter hits zero. That was exciting. I was like, oh fuck, go go, go, go, go, go, go.

Like now's the time. Unleashed the limiterers, etc. Right? The aura farming is over. You've done it. This is the end of the fight. Do everything you've got. I want that moment right before the end too as well to just, yeah, have a big Nice finale. That's it.

That's it. I need to be, I need to feel like I am the one choreographing and having that cinematic moment. Like I want. Good question. Well, thank you. I want the final sprint of any given encounter to be everyone screaming at Gohan to just fucking

push the camea high harder. Yeah. Yeah. however you want to do it you know um and like if you happen and if you are also like how do I put this

if you are doing all of that while the game has like appropriately ramped up and hit its peak and then broke through the ceiling of that and kept going then what you should be doing while that's happening you've been in a flow state the whole time like as it's escalating and pushing

everything you've got, that beat of sweat is dropping, but you're locked in beyond locked in. You know, this is, this is the peak of why I want to play a video game, pick up a controller to begin with no matter what genre we're talking about. Yeah, that's it. Good question. Great question. All right.

Gonna leave it there, everybody. Take good news. Have a good week, everybody. See ya.