Castle Super Beast - CSB390: Sometimes New Thing Bad

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

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Hello. Good morning, Willie. How are you today? Doing good. How are you? I'm doing great. I actually saw pretty well, so that's pretty good. Nice. That's good. That's good. I have a story to tell you that's the cutest thing in the world. Are you ready? Hit me.

All right. So me, Paige, and the boy are walking down the street, right? And he is looking handsome as always, right? Hair flowing in the wind, etc. So we are walking by and we happen to walk by the local elementary school. And at the local elementary school, there's a bunch of six or seven-year-old girls hanging out and they see him. They go, oh, hi. Hi. Wow.

You're so cute. Oh, my goodness. Like, like, fawning. Like, oh, my God, what a cute little man. And he gets real shy, but he gives like a little wave back, right? And we're like, okay, okay, all right. Good for you, buddy. So then we get home and we're like, hey, buddy, did you like it when all the girls, like, waved high at you?

He's like, no, no, I didn't. It made me sad. And I'm like, what? Why? Why did it make you sad? And he's like, because, because I wanted to tell them, I wanted to tell them, go away, girls, go away. You stay, you stay on that bench. Go away.

I just have my mommy. I just want my mommy. Why was that delivered like Morty? Like, you go. I don't know, but that's how he did it. He literally put his, he put his little finger up. He was like, no.

You got to go, no, no, go away. Need you to go, go away. Dude, it's the cutest. And we were like, that's right. You tell those. girls to stay away. Oh, man. Dude.

That's great. Yeah, okay. Well, here we go. I mean, listen, if you are time stamping for the end of dad slop, then you're going to want to jump ahead at least 10 minutes before we get into something. Yeah, how about you jump ahead into hell, you piece of shit? All right? So you just, yeah, you want to just grab that scroll button and just drag it as far as it'll go,

okay? All right. I'm giving you the fair warning. All right. Cool. So, yeah, Star Wars Zero. company. Um, that game is fucking sick, dude. I really am enjoying it. It is. I've actually, yeah, I popped it back in. We took a look, quick look at it. And then I kept playing a little bit more off and got a bit

further in. And I'm, I'm like, I get, I'm getting the X-com bit. You know, I'm getting it. Did you, um, did you meet, uh, the Jedi in that game yet? No, I'm still. So that game, that game does something really mean. Like, it builds up that Jedi. That, and you're like, oh, are you, right? And you're like, oh, shit, is it, is it now? And then they're like, wow, this was great. Maybe I'll see you again later. And then they fucking leave.

And you don't, and you don't get them on the squad. And you're like, no, come back. I'm kind of, I have to say, even though I asked the question before I'm like, ooh, how was the lightsaber going to work? I'm kind of like, eh, I'm just chilling with Cabby and Tr. You know what I mean? Like, we're just bumbling around. Oh, you mean never die trick ever?

I refuse to play by the rules of excom trick. Is that the case? Oh, well, I kept him on the, the, as a, what was it as a soldier? Where his like specialty is just don't die at least once. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. Which is like incredible. And cabby uppercut, uppercut being the name.

This is wonderful. great choice there. Yeah, I feel like even like so far at least like whatever gets introduced, I'm like, no, I'm rolling with these three and, uh, and my droid, man. Like, um, that feels, that feels like the, throwing those grenades, man. The grenades are, are amazing and I want this whole side of the map to just go away. The trajectory, knocking and things into place. Yeah, it's, uh, yeah, like I said, It's a different thing to get used to the chaos of it and the dice roll.

But I am liking it. There's some aspects to Overwatch that I'm still not 100% about, like, what triggers and what doesn't trigger from enemies and things. And I was kind of like trying to do things like, if I set up Overwatch and someone who overwatches and then I make my first guy trigger that first that guy's Overwatch, will my second Overwatch trigger on the first overwatch? Maybe.

It didn't. But I thought I was being smart and the game was like... For me, it's when I found out that if I do an Overwatch and then somebody punches the enemy into that Overwatch, it counts as an Overwatch movement, which is... It feels like it's diabolical when you just have... like, have uppercut somebody into, like, a kill field?

Or you have concussion grenades, and that's what they're actually useful for. Concussion grenades knocking people into death or into those things. into, you know, Overwatch ranges. Now, it's, I do wish that you could Overwatchception. That would be really

cool as a counterplay, but unfortunately you can't. Um, but yeah, no, I'm, I'm, you know, I, I'm definitely like, oh, so you want, you want to overwatch somebody to overwatch so that when you move and they go to overwatch you, your guy goes, oh, I knew you were going to do that shit. Exactly. I'm like, okay.

That's probably, that would probably be way too good. But it's like, I'm, but, But it's like, I know I'm being watched, thus set up and watch the watcher. And when they stick their head out to shoot, you take them out first. Right. I feel like even if it's not, like, explicit in most games, like, I feel like any turn-based game that uses a grid like that is still working off of, like, the D&D assumption that around is six seconds long and that everybody's actually moving simultaneously.

Yeah, sure, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Phantom Brigade Logic. Yeah. What I will say, though, is I'm going to say is the downside here. And I guess I imagine this must be something you feel in XCOM. We talked about it a little bit last week, but it's really true now. The fact that it's not isometric, the fact that it's not on a grid means you got to like futs with getting into cover sometimes.

I don't like free movement in my strategy games. I don't either. I don't like it. I don't like it. I didn't like it in Phantom Brave, the fucking Descaya sequel. I don't like it here. I don't like, I want a fucking bunch of squares,

man. Squares are calm and clean and precise. Like, yeah, you're making combat, I guess, a little more realistic with the open nature of the field, but it makes it a lot messier

when things like cover are governed strictly, right? You have to... Yeah, there's little spots in Zero Company where you're like trying to get somebody in cover

on like a corner and like you have to like really fuck it, like, like, like, nudge it around the corner to get to the right side of the corner. And that's the thing is like, if you're going to make, if you're going to make it not be on a grid, then let the system be more open-ended and have cover be something that's like, okay, if you're standing within this like area, you're considered covered, right?

Let it be loose and then say that there's a one meter, you know, surrounding zone of coverage facing away from the enemy or something like that, right? But instead, what you have is like the exact line where the cover starts and snaps and snaps off is where you choose between. spending one AP or 2 AP, you know, and then you're working, where it's like, the mouse or do I want to be in cover or do I want to be in cover or move one extra inch? Yeah. Or you know, or you're not in cover, but you get an extra action point out of it. And you're right in between that yellow and it's just like, ah, it just makes it kind of

annoying for me to like figure out exactly how far I can move before my character gets their turn. Yeah. And not to mention, like I said before, too, sometimes you have like two cover points, but then Trick took both, you know, and then there was no room to then go next to them. And then you're like, okay, so it's isometric

sometimes for the cover spots, which you generally want to move from point to point on, but not for everything else. And at that point, you're like, you might as well commit to the whole game being grid base. Yeah. That's the thing. Do all of it or do none of it, you know?

We can do hexagons. Hexon. I'll take that. That's fine. I'll take a half. hexagon. My goddamn stream page is filled with the fucking hexagons. I love me a hexagon. Bees love hexagons. But if I'm moving in that direction, though, allow me to then path the way, which we talked about with... What game was it? That had a problem with that recently? Where it's like you can't avoid stepping on the minds because it auto-passes you.

Oh, it was... Oh, fuck. Oh, we both played it a bunch. Something recently had that issue, and we're like... Oh, fuck. It's really annoying that you couldn't navigate around. It was Mugetics. Okay, Mugetics. Thank you. Thank you, people in chat.

Yeah. No, because Mugetics picks the path forward for you. Yeah, yeah. You got to let that be open-ended. You know, there's a way to go about this. But that's, that's one thing. And, like, it certainly helps for when, okay, it's not on a grid, but like things like grenades, you're also going to spend a lot more time getting the exact angle.

I'm like, can I get all three? I got two, but can I get all three? And I'm just like going, so, and there's a two pixel, there's a two pixel, uh, like circle that you can get the grenade into it. Okay, now I got all three enemies. I don't like it.

Um, so when, when droids come in in particular, they come in in a pack of four and they always split the same equidistant, like thing unless cover stops them. Mm-hmm. Right? They always want to spread out just a little bit.

There's always two that are kind of close together and like one off to the side. They're off to the side. Roger Rogers. Yeah, but if there's a, if there's like a piece of cover in their way when they come in on, they'll stop where they're at. And so it pisses me off because I'll be going to throw a grenade. And like you just said, sometimes you could just barely fucking thread it and get three. And then other times you can barely knock. Yeah.

I don't. I don't, anytime basically that you, anytime you have to fight with the targeting system to like get a little. little pixel-based. Yeah, the system is an abstraction of what's going on. I don't want to be fighting with the abstraction of what's going on. Exactly. I want to be fighting the thing that's going on. And a grid would just kind of cut all that through. Is that something that previous X-com games, like, had and deal with? No, X-com. The old X-com games, I believe, functioned on a hex, and then the new X-com games functioned on a square grid. Okay, okay. So this is really just Star Wars Zero Company doing its own, like, loose open

thing. I probably wanted to do their own thing. I can't think of many games that use the full free movement thing. Like there's some Nipanichi games that do it and those are all the bad ones. Even though some of them rule, I don't like them. I want my grid. And then the other thing I'm a bit confused by is that do aim percentages consider cover? Because sometimes they... Yeah, aim percentages consider... Because sometimes I've seen three things happen. I've seen... I've seen... ahead poking out from a really small distance and it said like 90% and then the the laser just hits the cover and goes no yeah right and then I've seen um the I've had cabby hiding behind like a full on covered thing but it's flat and then the laser just goes right through that and then you takes damage shooting through the cover and and then I've seen cover that explodes even though

the shot was missed the cover's gone now right so uh the the cover kicks in on the percentage if the character's back is to cover not if cover is in the way like the rule isn't that there's a physical impediment between you and them unless it's line of sight the rule is it is the

character quote unquote in cover okay if they're clicked onto it well that that makes it even more weird because like I've had again I've had things where it's like oh that shot hit the cover and blew it up and now I'm out of cover but then I

I've had, like I said, I had Cabby getting shot while in cover through a thin. So it's like line of sight and then there's half cover and full cover. Right. Okay. So if you're perpendicular and they're full cover, they're considered to be like out of line of sight. Like your shit is zero. Yeah. If you're at an angle.

People point out that Midnight Suns was free movement, that Midnight Suns used free movement. However, Midnight Sun's levels take place on an. arena the size of like a high school basketball court. Okay. Like midnight sun's levels are small. Are minuscule. They are tiny. Yeah.

Like the maps and the main missions of Zcom are like starting to open up and like have the big front area and then now there's a side thing. And then like you're, they're kind of getting into these larger areas where reinforcements are coming like full turns away. from catching up to you, you know? And I'm assuming like that's deliberate and that things are going to get more complex even though your team size stays the same.

But, but yeah, that's kind of the deal. Is there some, like, there's a couple of times where like the rule of cover kind of confuses me a little bit. And, yeah, and I'm, I guess the things like smoke grenades, for example, are exploding and then like, okay, now this whole whole area. is covered with smoke, but like, enemies running into it are like halfway in,

halfway out, are you in the smoke? Are you, are you, you know, is that considered deep off territory? All these little, all these little, little parts of it are a little like, eh. But, in good news, Zero Company apparently has done really well.

So ideally, that would mean they're going to hire everybody back. They got furloughed. That would be nice. That would be nice. Have you, I've also, like, I guess I should, I'm just playing with the kind of PC settings a bit more, but like, that thing has, like, textures popping in and out and all kinds of resolution issues going off. So that first patch, I haven't loaded up since then, but apparently that first patch does a very significant amount of work to clean that shit up. Okay.

It's one of those first patches that you open it up and, like, the whole screen is just bug fixes. Yeah This needs one of those Onimusha like style screens of just like Okay when you hit the thing on What does it do to the load? How is it looking? Because most of those cuts

Oh nobody does it like Capcom Nobody does that shit like that's what I'm realizing The most of those cut scenes of Like entering You know fucking hyperspace Involve like the ship appearing And then space and then the lighting And you're like

Pop, pop. I was, every time I went to a mission, I was using like a modified, like, config file to, like, clean up some of the settings on the first couple of the days. And every time it went to a new planet, I was like, games totally going to fucking crash. It's, it's absolutely crashing right now. Oh, and then it would go, oh, oh. And it would, like, burst through to the plonet and like, oh, whew. All right, we saved it. Um, what are the benefits of leveling up friendship with the droid besides the obvious your buddies with your cool droid?

The friendship with the droid? Yeah, because you can build bonds with the, with the droid. But the droid's not doing assisting shots. I don't fucking know. I don't know. Okay. Because I'm doing, I've been doing it. I know.

Oh, wait. No, building up bonds with people allows you to do the, the, um, better focus points. The little upgrades that are like a chance to hit or movement speed or whatever. Okay. Like the passives. And like one of the passes is increased grenade radius. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So. So yeah. The focus points are massive because, yeah, they allow you to like buff the whole team and do, you know, large number additions to everything that they do. But like, yeah, I guess. But in battle, there's no point. Like the assisting droid, for example, will not, cannot then be like, yeah, I'll shoot my grenade out as an assist. you know or something like that yeah you're you fucking wish that that that'd be ridiculous of course it would

yeah yeah um just but four droids i'm gonna fucking i'm gonna send out four droids for this mission and they're all gonna assist each other on their grenades i mean six grenades is a lot like you can do a lot with that many it ain't bad yeah um anyways okay yeah so you're just you're just you're building bonds with the droids just because cool um um Oh, hold on. A 50% critical chance bonus to the attacking character instead of firing a physical shot. Oh, so when they help, they dramatically increase the main aimer. The first person's crit.

Oh, that's. That can, in some scenarios, be just as good if not better. Well, if you're already putting a crit bonus on yourself because of that. Yeah. Yeah. That sniper buff. Hmm. Okay.

Big. Yeah, okay. Big crit. Cool. Yes, he comes really good. Yeah, what the fuck? You know what sucks? Discord shut up.

A lot of good games. A lot of good games happening right now. Many good games, in fact. They are. I guess continuing onward there. Yeah, just rounding out and went back to DS2, pushed a little forward, and got some of the funniest, most unexpected progression choices. So Reggie's going through

a scholar of the first sin, of course. And when I don't like this Harvest Valley poison shit. I'm like, oh, the Miyazaki swamp? Of course. Oh, the worst zone in the entire game? Peaked in at

Earth and Peak and saw more poison waiting right at the entrance and went fuck this, I'm going somewhere else. And I was like, and it was like where else do I have to go? And I was like, well, there's, you didn't go to, there's like, let's go back to Majula. There's the well. It's like, yeah, let's go down the well. Oh, yeah. I don't want poison. I don't want to deal with poison. Let's ignore Earth and Peak and go down the fucking hole. Your choices are the shaded woods or the hole, you know? And oh, oh, that's a rough, that's a rough set of decisions. Yeah. So fast forward to running circles in the gutter. man it's like if you hated no man's wharf holy shit get ready for the sequel no the gutter is an interesting area to me because uh the gutter and then the black gulch live in this weird place where

i don't care what's down there you don't want to you don't want to know you just you're like like like that's it like i usually scrape up and hoover up fucking everything and in the gutter i'm like no i'm not even to bother with the fucking torches i'm just going to fucking point A to point B to the other fucking side and go down and get the bonfire and never fucking come back. Straight up. Yep. And of course I'm there getting lost and

completely turned around. Forgot about the zip line. The one time zip line mechanic, mind you. So yeah, that's some nonsense shit. I will say that the Black Gulch, for the bullshit, at least it's a much more

straightforward path with a bunch of annoying things in the way. Whereas the gutter is just like what is even where why it's it's so much worse than blightown because you just don't know where you are at any given moment so blightown's existence in the world exists in a weird like quantum state of awfulness because there's blightown as designed and blightown as it exists today and blight town as it existed the day the dark souls came out like and Like, and gutter was built around the Blight Town that was, not the Blight Town that is. So what I'm talking about, if you've only played Dark Souls on the PC, Dark Souls 1 on the PC, or Dark Souls

remastered, Blightown itself is a really wonderful zone. I think it's maybe the best of the poison zones they've ever made. But because the game was double buffered, it was running at 30 FPS and the water would chunk the FPS down to 15 because that's how double buffering works. But if like an enemy hit you with like a particle effect, the fucking frames would go down to seven while you are platforming over an infinite abyss and poison. And that shit was the worst it ever got in any Souls game. Like seven FPS on a fucking death drop with guys shooting fucking darts at you. That's dog shit.

The game's engine falling apart is as a part of the difficulty is not what should be planned for. Like that... I don't know if you've gone through Dark Souls 1 now that it's on all the platforms at 60 but like Blightown

is like a fucking enjoy... It's not as a normally one you see of course. Yeah, yeah. The, what I will say too about Blacktown

versus like you know, places like the gutter and other sort of like scaffolding, annoying designs and stuff is I,

just as a, as a tension point, I find it way more fun if you fall off something, not into death, but into a fuck zone of, oh, God, wait, oh no,

where the poisons building and things are attacking you. And, like, there's a chance of surviving, but you're just panicking at what's going on, you know, as opposed to just into the abyss. Like, I wish there was more of that going on with the gutter, like, not just falling to your death. But falling onto a new layer of something that you didn't know and you're like, now you're just running around

like a headless chicken panicking. I'm absolutely convinced that the secret giant down in the gutter is intended to be found by you panic rolling off the side and hitting a ledge you didn't know was there. Like, I absolutely refused to believe that, like, they thought people were going to, like, be, like, on the right side going, oh, what's over there? No, like, you're supposed to be running through the center and get, like,

fucking, uh, uh, fuck. And then, like, go off the side and not die. So, so, okay, okay, the first run through in the gulch, it's the, is where they are. Um, the, the, the, the, the serpents knock you over the edge and you let, and, like, and, like, red, landed on the ground there. So it totally is you can get a clean hit that knocks you onto that while just panic running through the, through the zone.

So that, that feels deliberate. The one before that where Lukatiel is hanging out is there's nothing to knock you, hopefully just a sign on the ground. That is up to you to then go, oh, I guess if I can get knocked down here, are there other things along the edge? You know? And then none of that then prepares you for the. last edge right before you round the corner up to the second bonfire, you know? But I think, yes, those snakes are supposed to hit you, make you fall below, and then make you look around below and see if you see a message or something else in the dark to potentially get you to think about

that edge. And yeah, and much to my surprise, like, you know, he's like, okay, let's just push through and then stay down there all up through to the rotten. And I was like, you're dealing with the black gulch and the rotten before Harvest Valley. That's we're that's a that's a that's a sideways way to go about it. But, um, unfortunately after rotten's the bottom of the fucking road. It's got to go back after that. Well, yes. Yeah, exactly.

But, but, but it's like it's not like, it's not even that the rotten too is like, because it's funny to watch all these bosses. Cause you're like, oh, this is their like third outing at some of these enemies. So they're not that complex with their patterns or what they're doing. once you've seen, especially like running through an Eldon Ring thing, you're like, oh, we know this dance so, so well. The nightfall fucking bosses, in comparison to like a demon soul's boss is the funniest shit in the fucking world. Yeah, like watching The Lost Sinner's behavior is like, it's a joke, you know, for after dealing with. You're talking about the rotten.

Yeah. Do you remember the adjudicator, the one in 4-1, the guy, the big fat guy? Yeah, yeah, with the little thing on the bird on his head. Dude, that guy has like two attacks. Yeah, yeah, there's nothing going on there at all. 100%. Once you know the bit, then there's nothing else to it. What ends up happening, though, and where the problems lie is if you're trying to go in there keeping Lukatiel alive.

Because... Yeah, that's always the issue. It's not just going in and kill the rotten, whatever. Go in and keep her from dying when, A, she's getting poisoned on the way down, and B, she might just eat shit, get food. fucking rocked by everything he's doing or stand in lava. You know, and this is a thing. There is, um, you can't just beat the boss and, and, and, um, they can die and still advance the quest.

They have to survive the end of the fight. I hate that. The, the person, you inviting the person in is supposed to help you. Yeah. Like, you, you're inviting them in in Dark Souls 2, and I think three, but definitely two, so that you can babysit them and add a. difficulty layer to the fight. That's fucking stupid. It's not, it's yet. Like, in Eldon Ring, they just gave up. And if the, they invite them in and they die during the quest, they just get back up afterwards and go, wow, that was a great fight. Oh, my quest has progressed to the next stage of the completion. God, and God forbid, like, they both die at the same time. Then you're just like, fuck you. Bye.

Save ruined. You know, it's, it's, you're talking about Dark Souls 2, and we're describing like the gutter and DarkSler and, and Black Gulch layout. And I'm just mentally talking in my head about like Eldon Ring stuff. And it's like, I can't fucking believe how good from software's environment design is and how much of these areas exist as a rotatable 3D model in my head. like it is it is I have not played Dark Souls 2 for fucking I don't know when the last time it's like six seven eight years now but um like I see the black gulch

I can rotate it like some of the details are probably down the hill a couple feet off down the hill and then and forward forward left left left right right right to the bottom right right and it's it's like it's crazy and I guess part of it is that like you're running those fucking maps a couple times yes Okay, for sure. No, the one that that really like activated the neurons was getting to Huntsman's cops. And, okay, from the bonfire under the bridge.

Oh. Hook the right. Hook the right. Cross the bridge. Run past the fatty. Hook the right. Up. Okay.

Cliffside. Okay. Pillar men. Pillarmen. Pillar men. Bridge. Don't dodge the hole. Bridge.

And executioner's chariot. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm. looking at it. Like, I'm looking at it with my eyes open. It's crazy. It's crazy how it's baked in. Yeah, yeah, you know. And that, that's something where I was like, oh my God, dark, like this game, like after having, you know, the most distance between this, like I'm like, fuck, that lives rent free, you know, in my brain as well. And like things like scholar remixing and stuff like doesn't change those moments. There's a couple of those things. Scholar's so weird. Scholars so weird. Some of those areas are way better. I like putting Hayd Knights all over the place.

I think that's a way more fun thing to do. It is. It is. And then some areas, no bad. I have some feelings and thoughts on it. And I'm kind of waiting to see, like, I want to get a little bit more until, like,

the plot and lore start getting disgust and everything like that. But, like, for as much as, like, DS2 is the outlier that, okay, for a long time it came out and then there was the the review that like ripped it apart and then everything after that was like okay this has weird echoes of DS1

that are not really explainable for any reason and stuff and then because of that came the counterbalance of like actually no DS2 is the best it's my favorite and now you kind of have this in between of like it's the weird one but it has some really cool ideas it is the weird one right there's some cool ideas that we appreciate but it stills outside of like the scope of where the rest what the rest are trying to do and all these things.

But I definitely feel that like there's a part of me that goes, for everything that I remember fondly about this and do enjoy, I feel like others are with me here where just thinking about Majula is doing like half of the heavy lifting on your nostalgia. Like Majula is such a great home base. It's like probably the best one that it's holding up the rest of those feelings of ah, it wasn't that bad. It was fine.

Dark Souls 2 is fun. You know? You're thinking of the theme song. You're thinking of that sunset and you're like, yeah. Yeah, Majul is the best one. Yeah, I'm like rotating. Yeah, no, Majul is the best one. It has the best music.

That's it. Yeah, no, it's easily the best one. It feels the most inviting. It's interesting because it's almost like Resident Evil-like, where it's, hey, it's, it's mean out there. We're going to give you one place in the whole world that's safe and for you. So you better nail it. You better just absolutely crush it. Something that. And yeah, Majula. Something else that looking back in time that kind of bums me out about, about, I guess, like past versus future developments. But I really wish that,

because Eldon Ring figured out how to do, to make summons into. to boss fights engaging and better with things like curse you bail and i wish that shit started like oh it's it's so much fun to have things like that exist in elden ring and i'm like god damn it it would be so nice if like you could get dialogue while fighting in other moments in in previous games you know like i would like you got crayton and and um well uh um what you're gonna call it but you know there's a little bit there but overall there's just like no moments like that and it would have been so sick if you had that that just makes me think of a single moment specifically um with uh egon i gone i gone um where i summoned him every single fucking time i fought bail because one bail's a motherfucker and two uh i wanted to hear that every time uh can we get an alternate prompt when you go over a free summon that is summoned this motherfucker every single time. I walk into the room.

I run by and let them pop up like they did in the Redon battle. Let them immediately just like boop. 100%. Like, I'm going to do this fight like 40 times. Can I hit this button once and not have to hit it 39 more times, please? Yeah. Or even just like distinguishing between the NPC summon and the other player summons on that, you know?

Anyway, yeah, it's interesting and kind of funny to revisit and see all these things. More thoughts as we go a little further into it, though. And yeah, that's pretty much the deal. Had some proper sweaty, locked-in avatar sets going down. And not much to say besides I am just feeling the amazing. out of, oh my God, I cannot do what the best players are doing in this game is like... Ooh, that's interesting to hear from you. The chasm is so far.

Because you're good at fighting games. No, the level, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The level of difference between what's possible, what people are discovering, and what I'm, what my brain allows me to do in a fight is insane. Oh, sure, but I'm saying on the bell curve, you are firmly on the right side of that curve. So to hear you go, oh, my God, those guys are so strong. I'm big and I can't do it. It's like, that is a, that is a chasm.

That is enormous to hear for average people. I have had multiple times where I'm just looking with like jaw agape going, fuck me, how, right? Or other times where I went into training mode and tried to do it. I'm like, okay, I guess I'm just not going to be doing that. one. You know, there's a couple of things going on with just the timing of certain setups. See, that's player expression. Fuck.

I'm going to be talking a lot about player expression later, but I think we talked about it last week. When people talk about player expression in a fighting game, that lived in the world of the unsolved fucking game. Well, as we said, you're just playing incorrectly is what that means. Like, when you go on Twitter and you, like, somebody said they saw a Kyoshi combo that was like 93%. Oh, yeah. So that's one of the new ones. And that's actually practical. But let's say it's not practical, right?

Like, you go and you're like, oh, how do I play a Kyoshi? Well, like, here's the bread and butter. And the bread and butter does 90%. And you go, well, it's really hard. I can't do it. Well, it's like, well, you can do these other combos that don't do as much or don't get as much advantage. But that's not you expressing your skill as a player. That's you playing the fucking character bad.

That's what had that. You're doing it bad. Sorry, can you do a, you're doing a desync thing again. Oh, I'm doing a desync thing again. Oh, oh, no. On a Discord call, rejoin the call. And you should be fine. Welcome back to me.

So that's exactly it, right? Because there's, there's, it's, playing Kyoshi in particular, because I was doing, I was looking at some really sick stuff with Toff for a while. And she has the ability to, uh, throw up the walls and lock you in like Agonos and Killer Instinct. And then the top players have figured out how to use that to make it so that A, when you get knocked down, you cannot escape the corner because there's no role because the wall blocks you and then be like you get put into a thing where the wall is up and then she's jumping above you and just coming down left right and you have to just hold the mix you know and um it's it's a

really really strong thing to do but like it takes work and it's very it takes it's high effort to do to get consistent with it and then i just saw some more footage of people doing now like combos with her where she's basically alternating between hitting you with the rock on the ground and then doing a high platform hitting you for off the platform platform and then landing and jumping off and keeping the pressure going. And I'm like, man, my fingers, I can't. I don't have the precision. I just, I know that I can't.

And I try it. Oh, yeah, Unk. It's just not there. You much less than an arcade stick. You, you, can I direct you to a new website I'm creating called Unc combos? Yeah. Combos for Unks. Oh, I mean, and there are characters like that.

Like Kyoshi then is like, okay, Unk, all right, here we go. You want to do big damage for less work? fine, right? Here's a big girl to do it. And I was like, I'll take that. Thank you. I'll buy one Kiyoshi at the store, please. And so I switched over and she's a lot of fun. But now the thing is, is basically like, all right, you have to do Nagoruaki style moments where everything she does costs her, her meter, and you go into burnout super easy if you're not careful, you know. And the cost of being big and doing big damage combos much easier is you can kill yourself if you're not careful about it and um also there's these moments where it's like okay instead of to do to do that big 90%

combo for example that you're you're thinking of um instead of doing like a really high effort azula or zahir a billion marvel hits are happening to you what you're doing is like four things but you need to make sure that you recognize like okay if you stand still for three seconds her fan will start glowing. And if her fan's glowing, then once per match, you can land a heavy button that gets a wall splat. But you have to be aware of that and make sure that you know that her fan is glowing when you land that hit. Okay, also, there's another condition where if you have this moment happen, once per match, you can do that. And if you have that as well, then you can do a very simple combo for a ton of damage, but you have to have the awareness, you know? So it's...

All right. So I play my Mucow card and I place a... down and then I flip it and reverse it to activate dairy time. Like you've activated my track. When I listen to you talk about a fighter that I don't know that specific fighter, but I hear, I'm like, fuck, this shit is hard. So think about the meme where Potemkin and Chip are both there and they're both and like Potemkin has like a little bit of lifeless, no, has a, his life. little bit of life left and Chip has his full bar and they both think, fuck one more touch and I'm dead.

So you have made a mistake, my friend. You have made a, you have made a grand mistake because you described a situation in which Potemkin and Chip are fighting. So I'm Potemkin in the, I put myself in the Potemkin shoes and then you said, now imagine this situation and think, no, no, no. A grappler does not think. A grappler plays with their emotions only and with the other players emotions only. That's why when you're describing, oh man I can't do all this fucking shit,

this is crazy. I know how to do a goddamn throw input. That's all I'm ever going to fucking need for any fighting game I ever play as long as I goddamn live. But what I just, what I do find, what I do find really funny and interesting about like what's, you know, even we're talking about Kyoshi here, but Nagoruaki

has this in Guilty Gear. Aska has this as well. It's like, okay, so you don't want to do these really crazy long, difficult Marvel combos, right? You're like, that's not for me. That shit's too much. I get your... I don't want this optimized internal data charts in my head. Get out of here, Milia Rage.

Get out of here, Chip Zeduff, right? Okay, cool. How about you play cards with Aska? No. And, well, no, but just, but the deal is it's like, you don't have to do combos like that that are really complex. your win condition, you can win just mashing your face against the fucking Hidokin, Hidokin, adokin, adokin, adokin, adokin, right? You can just do anything, right? But what you then have to get good at is not the fighting part, but looking at your cards and like lining up the perfect thing. So you have to get good at something else that's very challenging, right? Or in this case with Nagariki or Kiyosi, burnout, blood meter, etc. Like what you don't like big combos and the difficulty of that? Here's another thing that's really tricky and annoying to manage.

Can you keep your brain focused on that while, can you play chess while also boxing and now adding hopscotch to it and, you know, turning a fidget spinner, you know? How about that? I'm at the point in my life right now that I don't want to play a video, a fighting game unless I'm on the right side of that chart where I go,

I'm just pressing buttons. Just pressing buttons, man. That's, that's where I'm at. That's where I'm at. And I will blame 2XCO for that, actually. Because 2XCO shit, shit's easy to do in that game. Like, it's, it's real, it's real easy to make things go. And I learned a lot of character tech in that game.

And then they were like, hey, hey, this is dead, bitch. I'm like, oh. Well, like, I don't know if you've seen the super weird coverage that Sajam and, like, Diaphone have been doing on 2XCO. Where they're like, yeah, Lux is out. Like your girlfriend. Strud. I'm going to break up with you, but she's got a new dress. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, so the reality of... It's fucking weird. Especially when you're talking about, like, you know, content creation and the thing or like, oh, the numbers of people showing up and sort of tuning into that are a part of whether you're going to choose to do content or not. Then that's a different question you have to ask for certain. But I was just like, yeah, what's Lux about? Let's go pop her in.

And I took a look, you know? And at the end of the day, it is like, okay, well, like, that's a cool character. that can do a bunch of interesting shit and she's there. I was surprised to see in as far as like jumping into a lobby goes and stuff, games pretty packed. Like lobbies are pretty full. People are just in there playing it. And I suspect that's, you know,

going to be the case because it's a free fighter. And it'll just sit there and that like limbo space where there's no active zeitgeist for excitement around it. But like as far as like the existing game being there and being fun to play, it's like, yeah, that that is there. That'll continue to be. have really bad news for people that know of 2XCO. And it's part of the destiny news this week, and it's part of the World of Warcraft

news, and it's part of the Hots news and all this shit. And it's like, there are people out there right now that are like, they're just going to put it on the shelf for a couple of years. Oh. They're just going to put. And then, and then. and then when the time is right, season two and three,

ban. They're going to re-release it. They're going to re-release it with 20 more characters. Just believe. Just believe. Yeah. I mean, what I will say to is that like, that's obviously crazy and not even remotely happening or whatever the case.

Tell that to Hots fans, Wully. They're going to get their new character. But what I think what'll end up happening is that it'll just follow the same trajectory as every other fighter that people bought at retail price that then kind of you stop playing after a while is like yeah for the ones that wanted for the people that want to jump on and and keep it going well after people have moved on from it um it that it's there if you are one of those folks yeah it's it's a slightly more popular in an impact i i um yeah like i was and like the the whole like some of the the cosmetics they threw into that final bundle and stuff i'm like oh my

God, like, Alawi got her two best costumes, in my opinion, and that little, in that bundle at the end. Like, they threw a bunch of cool shit in there that they had planned at the end. But, you know, I mean, in the same way that, you know, if anyone is out there hanging on playing something like an older K-O-F game right now, or, you know, a Sam show, or something like that. It's like, you still, you're going to be able to, you're going to be able to find places where people are going to keep playing that at least until if they decide to pull the servers down, which is another discussion entirely. But in any case, it is a, like, it is a bit of a weird one, though, when it's like,

here comes the stimmy, you got your purchases back. And now here's the, again, the $55, like, you could have just bought this thing, which I was like, yeah, sure, you know, I'm, I got, I got my stimmy back in the middle. And I bought the costume. bundle because I'm like, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to play this. I'm definitely going to enjoy this in the future as well. Anyway, but yeah, I checked out Lux for a bit and there's absolutely the hilariousness of like the most optimistic character being the one that is here to Harold in the end of

the game service, you know? Lux's coming out alongside the dead game thing is so, fuck it. It's weird. bundle of literal sunshine. It's like a crying mother having her lips pushed up into a smile. Yeah. So fucking weird.

No, it's just, it's weird to kind of feel these two things about it where you're like, you know, on the one hand as far as like the product and the success and the live service and the, you know, getting people to be excited about the existence of the thing goes. All of that flubbed and went the way we described

and covered over the last few weeks where it's, that shit sucks. is terrible. And then on the other hand, I'm like, yeah, but I'm also that guy that like fucking jumps on to fight Kate and we'll boot up a random old thing. Yeah, it's a whole different like that type of person. Yeah, and like that's how I treated a lot of these games for a long time before they became what they are now, you know.

I'm trying to think about like, because I have a lot of complicated feelings on that. And it actually ties into like the enormous amount of MMO talk that we're going to engage in later in the news today. Because, like, I'm thinking about, like, why do I just drop to XCO like a rock as soon as the thing? Because I really like playing it. I played it every single day for eight months. But you, it definitely matters for you, like, that,

like, this is where the people are at right now. You, like, the... Yeah, but it's more than that. It's more of, like, a thing of, like, when I'm going to spend an enormous amount of time getting good or knowledgeable about something, okay, okay. I want that, that, that, pay in to

be for something that I can get receipts for in the long term. Right? Like Um, get like 2XCO is a tag fighting game.

I don't really play a lot of tag fighting games, right? And it's also fairly unique. And so when I'm paying into like, like the attention economy and the skill economy of like learning to get good at 2XCO. I'm like, oh, cool. I'll be able to play 2XCO for, Oh, yeah, right?

Where it's like, I've played a shitload of Street Fighter 6. Every time a Street Fighter 6 character comes out that I really like in the DLC, I hop back in, get my fundamentals back on, hit master with that character, and then usually call it a day, comfortable in the assumption that the next time a character comes out that I'm like, oh, that character looks good, I will be able to do that again and again and again and again and again. Street Fighter 6 will have a vibrant active community right up until Streetviter 7 comes out. Ideally. Where those skills will all transfer right the fuck over.

Yeah. Yeah. Putting the work in, you want to be putting it in for a reason. I can definitely, I have an enjoyment of the process itself that is there. But I'm not putting it in for things where I'm like, I know that like I'm very likely never going to touch us again, right? That doesn't do anything. but I also know that my habits do also sometimes mean I might wind up at a event in person somewhere

where the game is where they're running a bracket for a game that I haven't touched in a really long time and I'm like fuck me I guess I'm trying to remember some combos in bloody roar you know or like trying to brush up on some tech in um um fucking what was it called um god damn it just slip my brain, but the,

the, the old, there's an old Capcom mecca fucking, uh, game, you know? Techromance. Not techromance or the, um, god damn it, the other one. Um, anyway. But like, you mentioned, you mentioned Oscar and Guilty Gear and his stupid fucking card nonsense.

Cyberbots. You're sitting there. You're sitting there and you're like, okay, am I, do I play a ton of guilty gear? Like, and the answer for you, for example, would be, you play some guilty gear, right? And so then you go, is this character ever going to come back? Fuck no. Absolutely not. No way. So then it's like, how much do I want to invest in learning this type of character with this unique gameplay system

that will never be again? That will only be for this time. Like, if you're like, I want to learn how to play soul bad guy. Hey, guess what, man, there's going to be another game you can fucking play soul bad guy in in the future. But for me, it's actually like, even if that skill doesn't transfer to the sequel or so. I kind of don't always assume that it will. I want to be somebody that's playing Nago and also this crazy fucking card character in Strive right now. And if I ever get pulled into that game again in the future, I've got that in my back pocket. I like appeal at the time is going to have like, you know, stuff. And then something that also changes it to is like, yeah, nowadays especially is like kind of going like, hey, I'm, I like, I'm putting myself in FGC, whatever,

bridge bridge building you know positions means that like I'm also getting challenged by random people at

random shit all the time so no matter what the game is whether I love it or hated I'm like I gotta have a main and I gotta know

a combo you know I gotta have you're a fighting game streamer that means you're really strong right I gotta have

something ready to go if somebody walks up to me and goes fucking uh blade strangers now

you know then I'm like Like, yeah, I guess I'll pull out a shovel night and see what I can do, you know? Like I want to have that ready to go. And then there's games where like I'm looking at it and there's nothing really wrong with it. But I'm kind of just like, yeah, I guess not for me right now. I don't really have the time or the drive.

But Grand Blue, for example, is doing fine and is pretty solid. And, you know, has new characters coming and shit looks great. And everyone's having fun with that. And that's a game that's like, yeah. There's nothing really wrong with it. I mean, okay, the art style is a little bit, like, bland anime for me, like, overall. It doesn't, like, it doesn't draw me in as strongly as, like... I really quite like it, actually.

I think the watercolor thing is really good. I, I, I, I, what I want, I guess what I'm thinking of is more, like, character designs that, like, are a little more extreme, a little more guilty gear than blaze blue in, in that way, you know, overall, but... Well, it... The designs are Granblue are set in stone. That's what... Like, that's one of those things.

And it's not made, and it's, it's clean fantasy, and it's, it's a... not meant to be anything else and that's okay. But I just mean that as a result of that, it doesn't grab me as strongly as something else might, you know. Um, but, uh, objectively, like the game is, it's, it's fun and doing cool things and there's nothing wrong with it. I could definitely see if I felt like spending the time to like, you know, push into this and get better at it. There's a lot of people that are actively supporting it and playing it. Um, but it just has to be one of those things where it's like, it's a casualty of time and relative interest by comparison to what else is out.

You know? Anyways, that's all happening. And yeah, we'll get into some more of that when the news happens. You know, now that we've done the FF14 thing and I'm playing a lot more MMOs now all of a sudden, like, fighting games are MMOs. Like, there is actually like such an enormous amount of structural overlap with the The only difference being like extrinsic skill climbing and intrinsic skill climbing. I mean, they're super duper not, but I get I get the bit in the sense that like you, how much the community matters here.

In a structural sense in terms of like a long time game project, there's there's like way more overlap than there isn't. But me, but me dealing me reckoning with like me alone fighting against another person versus me and a group fighting against a. the giant PVE. Oh, no, no, no, no. I mean, in terms of like, create different feelings. Investment, audience, life cycle. Like, like, like the, like the bones of like what makes a video game. And, and the weird part is that an MMO is designed to be a long-term live service monthly

subscription from the jump, whereas fighting games were just like arcade things that eventually became like, oh, this lasted longer than a year or two? Fighting games were the first live service game. Weird. They were. They absolutely were. But instead of 15 bucks a month, it was a quarter of play. And guess what? If you sucked ass, you were paying way more than fucking 15 bucks a month to play street fighter at your local arcade.

But that was just born from the fact that like shit was fun enough that people would come back to play it for longer than they would play other things that were meant to be disposable, you know? Um, it really was. It's like a product of being a really fun game means people want to come back to play it, means it evolves into something that's kind of live service, you know? See, it's live because it's in front of you and you're alive. And there's other living people next to you. I mean, if you didn't have Super Nintendo cartridges that had to sell you the same game a second time, the experience walking into the arcade was

oh that old street fighter game got replaced with a newer one with new characters great you know it just you walked in and a better version showed up and it you know this reminds me felt completely different of the ultimate this neighborhood sucks test better than anything is if you walked into an arcade and you walked over to the Tekken 3 cabinet

and the PlayStation controller ports were fucked up with peanut butter or gum or garbage. Tech and five, yeah. It was five. Sorry, it was Tekken five. You could be like, this arcades full of pieces of fucking shit. I should leave.

I mean, I would honestly say that if like you walked in and didn't see like, if it's two years after, I don't know, like, tag is out and you still threw a T3 machine and that's the only one, then you're like, okay, they also don't give a fuck over here, you know, like kind of keeping up.

up with whatever's. There was a, there was a, um, I mean, whatever. Like, we, we, we talk about the, the, the 98 to, to 2000s, 2002 or so era of like, Capcom spitting out a new crazy banger fighting game every two seconds. Um, a good arcade should have someone in there offering to sell me drugs. Not selling me drugs. Ah. Well, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, that was in the foosball room in the back, actually. You know, if you made your way back there, that's where that was going down. But up front, it was mostly soccer and a couple of family-friendly experiences, except for when the cops break in with the dogs to sniff everybody, you know. But anyway, I was always long fucking gone by the time they fucking showed up. The place where I grew up, there was a big fat window on the side of the arcade. you could see the whole goddamn parking lot in front of the Home Depot.

So if you saw the cops roll up, you had plenty of time to fucking walk out. And so I got to be honest, anybody that got fucking pinch standing in the arcade with their drugs, with full view of the cops driving into that parking lot, you deserved it. You're too high to run. You're a fucking morrow. I mean, back in college, the arcade that was attached to the bar, like, you had to go through the bar to get to it. So anytime shit went down, it all happened in the room over there. and anyone that got pulled out in a drunken mess

or anyone that was, anyone that was getting stabbed, it was happening in the bar over there and people back here were just on the cabs like, huh, huh, and you just kept playing, you know, because you were ducking your classes. Some good ambiance. Anyways, anyways, yeah, all of that. Quintessential, quintessential.

That will never be again. That like, like, I remember, like, 10 years ago, like old arcades are never going to come back. And now we're describing this hyper-specific drug police culture in the video game. Wow, that shit will never ever be again, ever.

Yeah. And so now as a result, instead, we've got... So that, the FTC definitely used to be about that, like, oh shit, did the drug bust happen today? It did, but turns out that the package was out, the phone booth down the street. So...

everyone's fine, everything's cool, okay, cool. But now what we do is we tune in so that we can hear Majin Obama yelling at Hook Gang God. I remember one day, my friend told me that he had just had to, he left the arcade and a bunch of people got dragged out of there for like underage drinking. And my first thought was, dude, a bunch of the cabinets are going to be free. And I went right over and it was empty. and I got to fucking play like a bunch of matches on whatever the fuck I wanted. Shoutouts to

places like in Texas they have like side arcade and stuff where they're like, oh, you have you pay the entrance and then all the machines are set to free play. That's a smart way to do it. Yeah, that's great. Anyway, yeah. I don't know if you saw any of that, but

imagine Obama's the best. That dude's great. just assemble the toe cones. I do believe that basically there's a quick discussion where a gang god who fucking one of the best Dragon Ball Fighters players ever was kind of just talking about the lack of motion going on with Tokon and not as many people tuning in to the streams as they used to

and how the PC released like kind of scared everybody away because of how shitty it was. The PC release being fucking really like like kneecapped that whole launch because it just launched it with like kind of a downer feeling. And it did. It did.

It would really hurt things. And on top of that too, like also, he's also mentioning that a lot of the top players are playing, but they don't really like the game that much. They're not talking, they're not really enjoying the process. They're kind of playing because it feels like a job in a way,

which is another sort of like, it sucks to have a world of like disconnected e-sports feelings where you're like, um, this is, it's to collect a paycheck as opposed to it because, you enjoy playing the thing. But that was that was kind of it, you know, and as a result of that, and then like basically Magidobaba just calls it. And it's just like, you got to do it yourself.

Like what, like, like why not just make, if you have a stream, make the event happen, you know, contact some friends, get some players, do basically the first to 100 that Brian F and Idom did for Avatar, which was an exciting event that they made happen and assemble the tow cones, you know, which is funny because. I was like when the, during the token stream, when we did the weekly, I was doing, I was doing a similar bit where every time someone got their like full, like team assemble super, I was like, token is available. Use your token. Do it. You know, and like, and just, it's anyway, at the end of the day, I do believe that he's right. But at the same time, it doesn't like address the fact that like if a bad product is released and has a shitty matchmaking. you're not like no amount of hey we're getting hype and making an event is going to fix that part of it right yeah i can't get matches right yeah i do i definitely agree with the like make the exciting things happen yourself uh part of things but part of things but like if the game can be played and i've played less than 50 matches online since the game came out and i've tried i tried like every day for weeks and it's like yeah they said they're addressing stuff and they said they're got they got new things uh they're working on man i like phoenix cyclops better be the fucking sickest the craziest character that comes out and turns it into a different game at this point, I think,

desperately. Anyways, anyways. So this week, going to continue with... Depends. The plan is to continue with Dark Souls 2. Who's sick right now? Nobody.

Therefore, therefore, Dark Souls 2 or Onimusha will continue. one alive. And then second, the docapocalypse will begin. So that's going to be going down this week. Those germs tried to stop you. They did try to stop us, but we will not be defeated.

Yeah, tune in to Willie versus on Twitch and YouTube for that, as well as some fighting games on Saturday as well. Well, I'm sure you'll talk about this in your side in a little bit, but I am, I have some questions about. but fortunes we've. I have many answers. So you know what? Let's just do it this way. I played a lot of the Fire emblem fortunes we are over the past couple. Black excellence.

Yes. What are your questions about Fire Emblem fortunes weave? Let's just start from that place and then we'll work out. Is a quick look even feasible? No. No. It's not. It took me nine and a half hours to get to time management.

No, it is not possible. A quick, a quick, a quick, a quick, a quick look is fundamentally impossible. Because there are some fucking characters in this game that I want to meet. If you did, if you did a three hour quick look, right? Which like I call a quick look, right? But you have the four hour schedule and you take a little longer than I do. So like, let's say you did a four hour show, right? You would probably just barely clear the prolog.

Which, by the way, is not the game they have been advertising. Okay. I've seen like no promotional material for it. I've just seen character designs and that's it. I haven't watched anything. They did a direct a little while ago in which they spoiled one of the game's plot points. And everyone went, oh, I can't believe they're putting that in the market. Marketing.

They put that in the marketing to make you feel like you got spoiled to hide the bigger secrets of what the game is about underneath it. Ah, okay. It's a very interesting trick. So my understanding is that there is a large prologue and then there is like, then there's different choices you can make to further push different other prologs. Okay, so there is, okay, I'm going to describe the game's structure. I looked at, I had a moment where I looked it up.

to discover what the feasibility of playing more of it was so that I could really get a handle on it. And I'm glad I did because that's why I'm not going to stream it anymore. So you have the prolog. The prolog is the beginning of the larger meta story, right? The larger meta story gives you your intro, your tutorial, your tutorial, your tutorial, your tutorial, than a couple of real battles as part of your prologue, right? That's three to four hours, right? Then you pick a character.

You pick one of the four characters that you would like to play through the game in. Also, of specific note, you remember they showed off like, hey, there's these four statues of the big heroes that you're going to be able to pick as. Okay, well, they showed that off in one of the trailers, right? Opposing those four statues are four other statues. statues of characters that were obviously also going to be full roots. And those four other characters are still in the game going through their roots, just not playable.

The game was totally going to have eight fucking routes. Jeez. Oh, my God. Disgusting. Disgusting amount of green. Now, are you, this is not pick a character and then the story continues along that road. These are different things that you can play, you can switch between on the same save?

Okay, so you do your prologue, and then the prolog goes, bluntly, do you want to go fight Lavos right now? And I said, yes. And I got my fucking shit stomped out. And I went, what are you? Stupid? You can't fight Lavos right now. Correct. And I went, okay.

And then it goes, pick a character. And you have the four, you have Dietrich, the queen, Alita, and Kai. And you pick one. And then the first three chapters of each. of those people's campaign is an old style fire emblem it is walk around a little town a little bit chit chat chit chat move the story will push you to a new map do a battle right story walk around town a little bit chit chat move to a different location do another battle so there's like four fights in that character's chapter one then at the end of that you enter into chapter four and then chapter four of the beginning of each character is your social persona game for eight more chapters. And there's a bunch of internal fights that you could do, like you wander around a map and do like random battles. And then there's a big fight at the end of the month.

Are you going down the path of one character through all the way through? Okay. So I'll use. Are you jumping around? Is this what I'm doing? Okay. You could if you fucking felt like it. You could jump around.

Okay. Okay, okay. So, so I'm playing as Lita. After the first three chapters, they, they dump you into the main capital city. And at that point, you can jump back and forth between any of the characters. Okay. Right. So if you fucking wanted to and were nuts, what you could do is, is chapter one, two, three, chapter one, two, three, chapter one, two, three, chapter one, two, three, then chapter four, four, four, four, five, five, five, six, six, six, et cetera.

Right. Don't do that. That's fucking nuts. But you could. That's, that's an awful fucking way to play the. game. But, okay, so you get to chapter four and then you have your persona style, social link, train up your army, three houses type of thing, which also includes a world map and dungeons with a JRP system and all sorts of fucking knots. It's fucking huge. And then after those 12 chapters

with each character, you have another six chapters with everybody. And then after that, you have the third act of the game and it's like the game's like 140 to 200 like it's it it took me to the middle of my second full length stream to get to the part of the game I thought the game was which was

building up my army and talking to my recruits and stuff like that I mean look if these are great characters and they're fun to hang out with and you are they are and you are a student with no job this is an awesome proposition for the amount of time you have.

But I guess just for my particular needs at the moment, that's... For streaming. Fuck. No. So here's the thing. Okay. I picked the harder difficulty and I died a couple times in the prologue, which was interesting.

The game is an all-you-can-eat buffet of infinite quality of life and functions and additions and extra stuff. to a degree that I cannot believe. It ought to be. It's the latest in the Fire Emblem, which has been going on for ever since it came back, there's been a bunch every couple years, right? This feels like, like, three houses was a big game.

This feels like, I don't know what to call it. This feels like, like, this has been elevated to, like, a pillar of, like, Nintendo's future level of importance. Almost every single interaction in the game is voice acted. even little baby interactions at like social link things. It sounds like a million. It sounds like an Eldon Ring scale jump. Yeah, it does feel like that.

Yeah, it does feel like that. So I'll hit you. So I spent two hours upon unlocking, maybe it's an hour and a half, after you unlock like the free time section, going around the core town and looking at all of the activities. Like it is more types of activities than like Persona 5 offers you. So the first thing that you noted, okay, I'm just going to list it down. Okay, you're ready?

So you're given free time. The first thing you get is you talk to a magic bird, and the magic bird tells you what kind of fight you're going to be having at the end of the month. Like the deadline fight, they're going to be, for my example, they said, you're going to be fighting a lot of guys in heavy armor. So maybe you want people with magic, right? And then it tells you, here's what level you should probably be. here's what weapon level you should probably was bronze weapons right so it gives you like a very clear set up goal then I talk to the bird for a social link

in which the main character that I picked to talk to the bird interacted with them and said man when my mom was little she used when I was little my mom used to sing me a lullaby and then you're given three bird responses and the bird responses is like flap your wings or do a somersault or tweet and when you pick all three of the correct ones you get perfect bird time. And

Perfect bird time flashes on the screen, it goes perfect bird time. And perfect bird time increases the main character's relationship with whatever character you're doing. So like the character that's all in white, the main meta character, the pilot of this game. And then they say, by the way,

if your main character has a really good relationship with the character, they will just jump out of time to save that character from death. if they're about to die. So maybe you should level up the characters you like. So I did that.

Then I checked out the six temples. Well, the six temples have an activity that you can do which increases your relationship with that particular god. It can be done any day of the week. And when you do two of those characters together, they gain social link. Well, what happens when you level up your relationship

with that god? Well, there's the time rewind mechanic from free houses, but you can also use that currency instead of for time rewinds for massive fuck-off buffs. shit like add 50% plus hit to every character or double their speed or let them move an extra turn or let them move first in an enemy's turn. But instead of costing five sand out of 100 for a rewind, it costs like 40.

So leveling these things up is really powerful. Then I went and talked to the 40 to 70 recruits that the game just dumps on the street. Like damn near the whole fucking castor recruitables. just gets thrown on to the fucking street and goes, here's every goddamn character in the game, except for the story added ones. You can go talk to them. It'll tell you what they need for your character's overall level,

your overall level of renown, as well as your support level with them. So what do I do? I went and bought a bunch of gifts, and I gave a bunch of gifts to individual people, and that unlocks mealtime. Okay, now I can go to the inn and do meals with these people, and that raises their social links together,

but it also regenerates, yeah, meal time. And it also increases, your health and magic, which is important because I've been given 58 turns. What am I going to do with my 58 turns? I'm going to leave the city and go to the fully explorable world map that looks like Final Fantasy tactics. And my team is going to be wandering around doing old-fashioned JRP dungeons with like an old-style Final Fantasy paddle system or random tactical battles or in my particular character.

I'll be going to various towns to do side quests to do songs because I'm playing. as the bard and then those side quests will give me renown but now uh-oh it's almost sunday so now i have to go back to the town so i go back to the town to do all the weekly resets and that increased my renown which gave me a new set of side quest to go back out into the world but before i do that i have to talk to this guy which i can now recruit because my renown level is hot like it's it's do you it's select the unit that's horse mounted with a spear to beat the sword and then yes that beats the acts. You also do that. Does that have any point?

Yeah, you do that, yeah. I'm waiting to hear anything remotely fire emblem like in the basic combat sense. Basically, when you do story battles or when you go onto the world map and do random battles, you have a fire emblem fight. Okay. Right. The weapon triangle is gone? Yeah, it's pretty much gone. It's gone.

So, um, it's gone. I thought that was the identity of the brand. Nope. I... Nope. So basically what it is is that when you are out in the world, you can have random battles that...

Well, they're not random. They're placed on the map and you walk into them. They're either, like, pretty easy or, like, medium, right? But the end of month, like, story battles that are, like, the important ones are part of the games, they're pretty fucking tough,

multi-part, like, maps. Like, I did the first one, the first deadline map, and I struggled to get through the first, like, stage. And then the second stage is like, all right, you're not going to win. You now have to escape, and also the enemy has infinite reinforcements. And I really had to push it to get everybody out alive. It was, it was, quite tough. And I was over-prepared. So what does combat, I guess, resemble the most you'd say these days in in Fire

emblem like what is it because I guess I'm okay I mean it's fire emblem you move the guys on the grid and then you try and keep your guys out of the range of enemy moves and then when the enemy goes in you you put your characters next to each other and attack them etc. But you said like I guess sometimes you go in dungeons and it's more like

FF like depending on sometimes you go into a dungeon and it's like a party on the right side of the screen like two. Choose your ability attack thing. I've also found that the dungeons are way harder than the tactical battles, and I don't know why that is. I don't know why that is. But, yeah, no, you are basically constantly doing something different every like 10 minutes in that game. And it is an endless feast of new things.

Okay. Also, it taking place in what looks to be like Spain and Carthage means like, yeah, there's a lot of black people in this game and there's a lot of like Spanish people in this game. Very cool design. This is very, very cool. There's also a lot of people with like visible injuries or disabilities in this game. Like there's a weird theme where every single like number one side character in the game has something wrong with their eyes. Like every single one of them. They either have a burn, an eye patch, a near-sided glasses, or they have a lazy eye. Okay.

And I don't know what's up with that, but it's really interesting. Yeah. I think I should maybe perhaps clarify that I really don't have a whole lot of Fire Emblem experience. To me, the timeline of it is that Nintendo franchise

that was never allowed to leave Japan. And then Roy and Marth showed up in melee and then after a while they started going maybe America might like these games and then they maybe they brought one or two over but it took a really long time after that

and then what was the first one on DS Awakening Yeah and then I played Awakening Awakening like Steered the ship into being popular and made a diehard old Fire Emblem people

get mad at me every time I talk about fire Emblem because when I describe, oh, it's like old fire emblem. I'm talking about old fire emblem, like, awakening. Yes. And I know that a lot of you yelling we know are like, you've been around. I'm saying for anyone who doesn't know, because it's been years since there's three houses and all that stuff. But, and I think I play, so I played Awakening for, I got a few, I got hour, a couple hours in and then just kind of bounced off, didn't end up continuing. And I think that ended up being like the extent of it. I tried a couple of the fan transatlantic. of the older Fire Emblem games when they got ROM dumped with like a fan translation just to see kind of like what it was like a little bit. But overall, yeah, I guess I'm just not really sure what the usual flow is, you know.

This game has a very different flow even to three houses. They've added, adding a world map to the game and like dungeon crawling to the game makes it. huge fucking difference because you're basically just always doing some different shit. You're either managing your gang, you're doing social stuff, you're training your characters, or you are crawling the world map or doing events or dungeon crawling or doing tactical battles. Doing tactical battles is still like the lion's share of the gameplay, but there's like a huge amount of prep that goes into them.

And they're pretty tough on hard anyway. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I will say that like more than any other previously, I'm like, yo, these character designs, I got an eyebrow raised and I want to see what's going on there. I got a white, I got two white blonde women in my party. And when that happened, I was like, whoa, weird. Huh. Look at that.

Yeah, like, like they, like they, they stand the fuck out. Yeah, no, I just, I saw the fucking, just the grid. And I was like, this, these, boo. Yeah. I need to know more. But that's okay. You're talking about a nine-hour minimum commitment to the prolog and then a little bit more. To start.

To you get to the thing, wheels rolling. I was also playing as Alita the Bard. And I can only speak to her storyline because I haven't seen the others. This character fucking rules, dude. This is a character that, ah, a guy killed my dad when I was a little girl. I'm going to take revenge. and then you see her as an adult and like this character

loves revenge like every nice chill conversation they have is clearly fake and has them just simmering for when do I get to kill a motherfucker underneath. Like they are they are such a lust for revenge

well like it's very satisfying If justified, fuck yeah, let's go. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's great. It's great. I'm sure the others are fantastic as well, but I haven't seen them. In fact, I've barely even met them. An interesting note is that you can like become friends and have support links with opposing characters. So like Lita can hang out with Theodora even though they're like opponents in the games. and the reason for that is that when you eventually,

eventually get to the end of the game when your entire armed force becomes one armed force, you'll have those compatibilities when you're doing a fight. Are you jumping around to like, different angles of the same timeline with, like, are the people that you're switching between

like hanging out or are these different country traveling across with different... No, no, so everybody is, in the main city. Everybody's in the main city of Dagseon. Okay. And they are, they have like concurrent events. So there are going to be events in which I am

on the opposite side of a different character. Okay. Okay. And you can play through both of those campaigns and win both of them, even though that doesn't make any sense because we're doing time nonsense. Almost sounds like

how like one of the, like a super robot wars game progresses in some, in some way. A little bit. some ways, yeah. Okay, cool. One of the things that of note is that all the social links and all the support levels will maintain forever across any character that you play. So if I'm playing as Lita and I become very good friends with Theodora and switch over to Theodora and start her campaign, she will start with a high level of support from Lita. Okay, okay.

right um like support levels are universal between everybody and the game even allows you to restart your whole chapter and keep everybody's levels and experience where they are like if you have massively fucked it and done like your 120 turn two month period and just fucked it right um the game will you will go to a menu and you go restart chapter and you could do redo the whole goddamn thing and you'll keep everything you have. Single save slot. Yeah. It is a single safe slot,

so they have to allow you the ability to go back and be like, no, give me more, I fucked it up. But also permadeath, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, true. Right, right.

Unless you restart the chapter. Right. Or rewind time, right? Okay. So you got, before hitting the point where you go, all right, I'm going to have to put this down as far as streaming goes.

Like, what was, you got what was that hour account or what was that like progression? Oh, I did two full streams. It was about 11 hours. 11 hours. Okay. Okay. And then I was like, oh, this is, I've barely made a single fucking step of progress on one character, let alone four. This cannot be streamed. Absolutely no. Absolutely no way. Damn. Yeah, I guess so Fire Emblem is, um,

House? Blah. Which Fire Emblem was like the one that kind of, I guess, escalated this to Nintendo's high priority list as far as franchises go. This one. Because I feel like three houses. Three houses sold like crazy. Yeah.

Three houses like went bananas. It, like, it feels like, I remember hearing about it with like, awakening. I remember like my friends and people that were like, you know, gamers are like all. paying attention and stuff. But like in terms of like, I guess escaping containment level.

Well, so Awakening saved the franchise by changing it and something normal people would like. And that has caused very old Fireman fans to get really mad and pee their pants.

And then three houses took the handheld thing and turned it into a console thing and also did extraordinarily well. I mean, that's the one that I feel like is where I felt, again,

escaped containment. to a degree, like non, not just like, like gamer, Nintendo fans grabbing it, but like everybody at a whole. Okay. Yeah,

cool. And then, and now we're at, now we're at Fortune's Weave, where I'm like, oh, this is like a, a primo,

fucking Nintendo thing alongside, something like Mario or Zelda. Like, it's, it's right to fuck up there. Well, I don't know any other games that have the, the amount that you're describing as far as,

Nintendo first party mainline things go. Like that's the most content you know of anything I can think of that they're putting out. Oh, it's disgusting. Now you can just do one route. If you want it to, you could just do one route in Firem Them, Fortune's Leave.

In fact, people have found you can actually do zero routes. So they will let you fight the final boss at the very beginning. And there is a bunch of freaks that have spent dozens of hours trying to finagle the AI and it is technically possible. But it's not worth it.

It's fucking stupid. It's fucking dumb. Anything else this week? Yes, I watched the Resident Evil movie last night. And how was that? It's absolutely fantastic. Okay. And I will get this part out of the way.

Anybody who is like, I can't believe it didn't have Leon in it. It's barely shut up. I don't shut the fuck up. It's a really great movie. It's a really great movie. Because it stays out of the way of everything that you're like. No, no. I actually mean like it's just a really great movie.

Like if this was not called Resident Evil, it was called. called Zach Craigers House of Spooky Horrors or whatever people would be like oh man I wish they made a Resident Evil movie like Oh interesting okay Right right okay Um

However in terms of In terms of like How do I put this In terms of like faithfulness to the franchise It has made the correct decision Where it is not faithful to events Or characters it's faithful to the feel, tone, and progression.

Vibes. So, more specifically than that. So let's take, for example, there's no Leon Kennedy in this movie. In fact, there's actually very few traditional zombies in this movie at all. The nature of the threat is actually a weird new thing that the trailers have not shown at all. But it is a weird new thing.

And, well, it's barely like Resident Evil. Well, it's actually obsessively like Resident Evil because it follows the perfect path thing through a Resident Evil game. Every single Resident Evil game has an extraordinarily clear progression. That progression is outside house, path to the guardhouse, sewer, lab. every single Resident Evil game follows this formula. It is, it is astonishing how, how similar every single Resident Evil game is for this exact pathing.

And the movie follows that exact pathing too. And it follows it like slavishly. You have characters, you have your main character, Brian, who's a courier going to Raccoon City to deliver a medical thing. solving fucking Resident Evil puzzles

he is searching for keys he is scrounging for ammo he is engaging in first person perspective shots like you know like gun in front of like first part

like peeking around corners and it doesn't look bad in the like it doesn't look no it looks fantastic a huge proportion of the movie is shot from a a RE4 third person perspective. It's not locked to the character,

but the camera is above and a little back. Okay. To try and give like the nice peripheral view that you would get in one of those games. But it doesn't feel forced. No, it looks great. I feel like when the action, video game camera angles,

or the framing requires it. Because I feel like a video game camera angle would be a noticeable like, okay, you're doing it. We get what you're doing here as opposed to just like, does it feel like a natural flowing moment, you know? there's the cinematography is absolutely amazing so for example there's a there's an early scene in the movie in which um there's a car crash and he has to go to a a remote farmhouse right pretty classic survival

horror or horror movie set up anyway so you see him walk from the car to the farmhouse then once he's in the yard you get an establishing shot of where the barn is and in the back you can see the car. Then when he's in the house going through rooms, they make sure to point the camera out the window so you can place where the car is and where the barn is in relation to the house. You always have a really clear feeling

of where the character is in a big, wide open space, like a goddamn video game level. It is really great, and it uses that under, standing of space to create tension. Because when you see something far away, like the movie will have threats spawned like really, really far away from the main character. And you can mentally intuit how long.

I know the path that thing has to take to get here. And so when the show, when the movie takes a little while for the threat to show back up, you can understand that it's having to navigate the path the movie took to get here and how how he can use a shortcut or a whatever to get around it. Okay, okay. It also has what I would describe a Silent Hill film's level of theming with its core themes. The movie very early establishes a core secondary theme for our character, and nearly all the encounters, monsters, monsters, and scenarios deal with that theme in a way that's extremely clear. like a one to one like this the the the cab our main character is worried about x in his life we're now going to see a monster representation of x the character is afraid of why he is now going to encounter a monster representation of y and and so on and so forth and it is absolutely like fascinating and well put together it has one of the best double jump scares i've ever seen

seen. Me and Page both like we've, me and Paige have seen a million fucking horror everything's, right? And it has a perfect jump scare where it sets up a long jump scare, like a very, very long, visible jump scare of like, oh, I can feel the jump scare coming. I can see it. I can see what the camera's doing only for an alternate angle jump scare to attack you. and after your your focus is completely like latched on got our asses got our asses bad really really fucking great

great acting great cinematography really funny script okay like genuinely laugh out loud scripts yeah I've heard that it's was strangely lighthearted in some ways with the main character yeah

great ending that some people don't like because they're stupid. Like, bluntly, like, great ending that people don't like because they are stupid. Any attempt to fit this into any part of the franchise at all? None. Zero. Okay. Couldn't be less.

Yeah. Be it other games or previous movies or any of that shit. No. Nothing. No, this is a, this is a vibe check. Cool. This is, um, you, you, the closest. you could integrate it, which you can't. Like you can't.

Is that this is a storyline of a Resident Evil Outbreak character that you never got to play. Okay. Right? So Resident Evil Outbreak is about non-heroic survivors. Making their way out of the city and whatnot, yeah. And this would be a storyline of like a side character in a side game. I'm like, oh, whatever happened to that guy that left the audio messages. right did he get out

like what what was going on you know that kind of thing to the point where our main character leaves voicemails and audio messages and tape recorders as if they are a character you'd be following in like a bunch of documents in a Resident Evil game a lot of really like wonderful details

in particular one that really stands out and it's the best integration of anything I've ever seen you know when you have a Silent Hill game or whatever and you're like your main character's not really good with guns. And so that's why we're not having like over the shoulder action combat. But and then in the narrative, you still end up having somebody who's like relatively familiar with guns because the games take place in the United States and everybody's, every video game character is a shooting.

Like like, like, take, um, take, um, uh, Heather and sign the hell three, right? It's like, yeah, she's just a girl. She's never shot a gun before. Meanwhile, cut to a boss fight. Cabo! Well, not your boss. No, certainly. Not mine.

You're a boss fights where you, yeah. You know, yeah. Ideally. Our man, Brian, being someone who's never held a gun in his life, is like a major plot thread through the film. This is somebody who doesn't know how to take the safety off, doesn't know how to load a gun,

like doesn't know shit from fuck when it comes to fireups, and it comes up constantly. there's also there's also like little bits and pieces that I think Zach Crager took from like the non-canon

resident evil novelization which I'm like fucking really like really? So that people like you will have moments like this there is a

there is a there is a very long paragraph in RE1 the novelization from S.D. Perry in which Chris Redfield describes how he can't get through a door and he briefly thinks about shooting the lock and then goes on to explain to us and himself that shooting a lock with a gun

doesn't work the way it works in the movies. Like you are very likely to do nothing or kill yourself by accident. reflecting the bullet back into your, yeah, yeah. Right. And that is something that comes up because we have a guy with a gun and no keys. So he routinely attempts to shoot locks and it just utterly fails over and over and over. It is, it is great, great creatures, great creature designs, great creature effects, good use of CG, really good use of practical.

like they go for they go CG for the things that you're like you could never you could fucking never shoot this with the with the puppet but they go puppet for anything that they can get away with I mean the trailer did have something with like limbs

attaching something things that so I'm like yeah you could go practice you could go carpenter with some of that stuff if you needed to and the only two things that I would say that the soundtrack is fantastic.

The background music is stellar and sounds a lot like the thing. Like it has that droning beat speaking of Carpenter.

Like in the background. And last but not least this is not a trigger warning, but like a lot of really bad things happen to lots of different types of people in this movie. Like, astonishingly terrible things happen to a wide variety of people of various types and ages in this movie.

So be warned if that is something that will fuck your shit up that you might want to like get a more detailed description of what you're walking in on because it is super extreme. It is a gory as fuck movie. Feels like you've enjoyed everything Resident Evil related

since the RE3 make. Am I correct in that everything they've been putting out has been working for the last five years, I think. Yeah. Yeah. It's stellar. It's absolutely fantastic. And they also do a really good job of like just just for Goofsies putting green herbs in the backgrounds of shots and health health first aid sprays in the backgrounds of shots. And if there's

a locked door, the locked door happens to have a diamond key symbol on it. You know, stuff like that. Does a motherfucker have to combine herbs at any point? No, no, it doesn't. Okay. Though the overall, their overall feeling is if you were to compare like the Paul W.S. Anderson films as somebody who's speed running Resident Evil games, Zach Craigers' Resident Evil

is you playing Resident Evil one or two for the first time, and you don't know what you're doing. Right. Okay. It is absolutely stellar. It is absolutely fantastic. No complaints. Other than something that is, I don't know how to describe this.

So, Resident Evil games have a very specific problem. You remember when I said every Resident Evil game goes house, guardhouse slash sewer and then mansion. And then lab. Every single one. Outside house, steward lab. Yeah. And like you can replace sewer with cave. And you can replace, if you played R.E.7.

you can place lab with lab inside assault mine or you know stuff like that but it is always the same every Resident Evil game also has a quality dip where the best part of the game is the mansion the second best part of the game is the sewer and the third best part of the game is the lab

and it is like that here the beginning of the movie the first 30 or 40 minutes is an 11 out of 10. The second part of the movie is about a 9 or a 10 out of 10 and the finale is about an 8 or a 9 out of 10. Like it follows the exact same quality progression as a Resident Evil game. And it is fucking fascinating.

And then it ends strong. Okay. Like this is a wizard made Resident Evil not exist as a video game series and instead made it exist as a movie series. I feel like I remember I remember when last time this came up the director was talking about like how much he was like a huge huge fan and like trying to keep slave keep trying to keep slavishly accurate to the vibe but not any of the previous material or any of the things like that like yeah there was there was a conversation where he basically described that like what you're what you're talking about is what his goal was and that he knows it knows the game's inside out it is hyper accurate to the vibe and the feel of playing a Resident Evil game. Like, it is, in my opinion, the single most accurate

video game adaptation in any medium by far, because watching it feels like your spouse is next to you playing a Resident Evil game. Interesting. Like, it is stellar. Now I have to go back and watch fucking Barbarians and Weapons.

like period. And I'll just get a time stamp for the syringe shit and just cover my eyes. Yeah, like based on weapons, I'll say that like the, um, the comedy aspect that of, of everything you're describing,

I can see how one leads to the other where like, there's stuff that's played for laughs that you, you would not expect to be played for laughs. But it, there's only, there's no other way to interpret it with the way the camera is, is depicting. Well,

you have to remember, Zach Craiger is one of the whitest kids you know he is the main character of the 20 gallons of PCP skits like the guy's funny as shit um

it's it's like it's funny enough this is going to sound really stupid it's funny enough that if it was less funny and not being based on a video game it would be up for like awards during award season

as a horror film, but because it's really funny and it's based off a video game, it will not be up for any of those awards. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no. A plus movie.

Really, really stellar. Cool. This would also, and Zach talked about this about not getting a license, this would also be a stellar movie if it was called bioterror. Not related to any way shape before.

in in in uh fucking squirrel city right like uh but then you would be like wow this is a lot like fucking risen evil this wow crazy the idea of like damn i wish they would make an re movie like this and then it just but you skip that they did yeah that's and then where's leon shut up shut up it's it's it's the least interesting thing possible adapting a video game direct directly is so shit compared to adapting the feel of a video game. That's it.

Oh, it's so good. Oh, man. I'm probably going to watch it a couple more times. There are so many fun little directing tricks. You know, the spirits that are happening. Spirits within does capture the vibe of a Final Fantasy game if you really think about it. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't.

A vibe of a Final Fantasy game is a series of adventurers going through trials and getting stronger to defeat the bad guy. The characters in Final Fantasy, the spirits within, don't do anything for the whole movie. The planet is in danger and we need to fight for the planet and... The entire movie of Spirits Within

happens outside of the actions of all the characters. It's a fucking fake movie. It's so weird. This main character will return though and we'll use that model again and again like an actor in different films.

sure you will buddy sure you will you got this so I played I played Fire Emblem which is I called my streams the closest thing

to Shining Force will ever get again and it definitely is if you care about Shining Force if anyone who hears me and loves Shining Force this is as close as you're ever going to get it's stellar

I played that I also played some World of Warcraft forever which I'm going to take a piss before I talk about because I have many thoughts on World of Warcraft forever. Excuse me, I'm going to go piss and feed that dog. Go piss, girl. All right. Let's take the quick word from our sponsors while we're here.

Let's do our sponsors. I love sponsors. All righty. This week, the podcast is sponsored by Factor Meals. Convenience is the name of the game. You are probably, if you're like us, you're probably getting, you know, the feeling that, hey, you can eat a little bit better every now and then. But it is hard to keep up with eating healthy and eating.

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that's 20% off. Any additional pairs when you purchase your pair, when you purchase one pair at W-A-R-B-Y-Parker.com slash castle. Thank you, Warby Parker. Thanks, Warby Parker. Also, fun to say, Warby Parker. Fun name. You were saying. So there's like a strangely huge amount of massively multiplayer online game news this week. It's like very uncommon. I don't know. I guess the fucking. genres coming back from its lull. Well, I think, I think the, the big Blizzard, like, okay, I think the Blizzard unionization

led to Blizzard panic, led to Blizzard announcing everything that would make everybody excited, led to World of Warcraft coming back into the discussion site, guys. So that timeline can't, that timeline doesn't make any sense because, um, wow forever has clearly been in dev for a while. like quite a while. Yeah. You know what else has been in that for a while? The unionization process. That's true.

Ooh, maybe. Maybe. So World of Warcraft Forever is a very strange game. So the quit, the, the, the, the, somebody said I should do a five second, 30 second and then like longer explanation, which I think is actually very interesting. I'm going to give it a try. World of Warcraft forever is World of World of World Craf. We're not polygon.com. What the fuck is this?

I know. But why not? I'll give it. Hey, hey, I'm trying to do things. Sure, sure. It is a, it is a, it is a classic plus. Then bury the lead and then come back with the world of Warcraft forever is classic plus. If you know what that means, you know what that game is.

If you don't know what that means, classic plus basically means that a world of Warcraft became a completely different game over time. Like the chasm between what is the 2004 release and even Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Litch King and what the game is now is, is fundamentally like a completely different genre. I was chit-chatting with people the other day and discovered leveling your character from one to level cap in World of Warcraft retail. Right now, ranges from four hours to a couple of days. Let me take a stab at it.

Yeah, go for. Wow Forever is Mega Man 9. That's pretty close. Thank you. It's pretty close. That's pretty close. That's that's that is close enough to work with most. people.

Basically, the idea is for World of Warcraft Forever is what they want to do is go back and do an alternate timeline path of the way World of Warcraft developed. World of Warcraft developed in a really clear standard

way, way back in the day, where you would get a new expansion and the new expansion would raise the level cap, introduce new features, yada, yada, yada, over time. And then the second expansion would raise the level cap and so on and so forth. The problem happened,

wow, is that was 22 fucking years ago. So we're like 12 expansions deep. There is so much World of Warcraft now and so little like cohesive through line story that when you start a new character, you just pick the expansion you want a level to cap in and then you hit the end of the cap

and all you start doing is like end game stuff. Like right away within like a couple of, days of playing. Scientists with beakers and bunsen burners have been figuring out exactly where people stopped having fun with World of Warcraft and decided in a lab to recreate exactly where that moment is and see if they could change time. So you are, that is, that is a perfect description of what this game is. because that answer is the six months in between wrath of the litch king and cataclysm.

That is the dividing line of when wow went from what people refer to as classic wow and what became what is retail wow. Classic wow is a fundamentally different game and there's a reason why people kept asking, hey, I want you to turn classic wow back on. And that's why we got about eight years ago, we got, hey, it's Classic Wow again, just the same as it was. And then we got Classic Wow has now advanced to Burning Crusade, just the way it was. And so World of Warcraft has existed in a weird quantum state for a while where there's retail,

which is every expansion combined and is a very fast, very different, very weird game to my understanding. Like, to me, I mean. And then you have Classic, and then you have the classic servers that also include Burning Crusade, and then you have the classic servers that also include Lich King. and I believe we also have the classic servers that include the Pandarin expansion. So there's this rolling wave of like, well, what is the era that you personally enjoyed World of Warcraft the most? And based off of that, they said, no, what we're going to do is we're going to make World of Warcraft vanilla, but we're going to have its expansion path turn into a fundamentally completely different type of MMO.

and there are basically two types of MMOs. There's your vertical MMO, which FF14 and Retail Wow are, and then your horizontal MMO, which FF11 and Guild Wars are. And World of Warcraft forever is saying you will never go past level 60, and you will never leave the planet. Like you will never go to other planets, everything will take place in the countries and areas, that you are familiar with

and they are going to build the whole game out horizontally. This includes no flying mounts. This means that there will be new races that are not in retail wow based off of what they would have liked to add to classic.

What a hilarious polar opposite to the Final Fantasy 11 situation where at like with 14 and then a realm reborn, they couldn't get away from the past fast enough. to make new shit that people wanted, whereas Wow completely inverts the trajectory of interest there

and starts going downward instead of up. Final Fantasy said, here's your horizontal game, 11, and here's your vertical game, vertical game, vertical game, vertical game, vertical game, vertical game, vertical game, vertical game, vertical game, vertical game, vertical game, vertical game. Okay, what about a horizontal one? Mm-hmm. and they had

so it's it's vanilla wow like if you've played vanilla wow you know vanilla wow is back in 2004 2005 but they've added things to make it more horizontal and we've been playing the beta and I've only seen a little bits and pieces of it but the things they've added are really really interesting so for example

they have gone on record like Raid Finder and group and uh and uh and and and instance finders not in the game if you want to go do a dungeon go to the fucking dungeon stand outside the fucking dungeon and yell who wants to do this fucking dungeon they are aware that the the current nature of world of warcraft which is something that final fantasy has as well is that if everything is done through an instance finder or a duty finder, there's very little reason to actually go out there and talk to people. Oh yeah, the socialization, I'm sure, just completely evaporates if you just take lines and teleport

into the lens. Ideally, the whole reason you're playing an MMO is so that you're playing with a big group of other people. Which in turn makes the people you're teaming up with more disposable and thus makes you more likely to treat them like shit when mistakes happen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So one of the things they added is they're like, hey, they redid all the professions. I'm talking like leatherworking, skinning, you know, the fishing. You know, you're a little non-combat things. And what they did is they made a campfire system. And the campfire system is really simple.

Hey, you're a blacksmith. You can put down a little campfire and you can build a little blacksmith thing like a sharpening wheel. And people who sit at your campfire get a buff that will last like a full hour to their weapon damage or experience gain

or spell power or whatever. So you are incentivized to set these up and have a bunch of people put down their little crafting items to buff people. And the really smart thing about the campfire is that you have to sit, like your character has to do the sit emote at the campfire for a full fucking minute before you get your buffs. This has resulted in people all over the place putting down campfires and random people walking over and being four, like, forced, incentivized to sit there and what do they do when they're sitting there for a couple of minutes? They chit-chat. They gad. A lot of them shitposts.

Like a lot of them shit posts. Like shit-fucking post. But like players are talking to one another in the MMO, which is really important for a MMO from the 2000s, where the point is to talk to people. Has wow forever. recaptured the feeling of years ago and the enjoyment when the light was still in your eyes? Yes, because they did something else.

They are they all they, first of all, they're adding all a lot of features to promote socialization. Does it play the sound of your parents arguing in the background? My parents were not arguing in the background. I know, but there's a, you can, some people want that on, just click that button. No, does it play that, does it play, does it play, does it play the sound of you skipping your classes? No, no, it does not. Okay, okay. It does two other things of particular note.

that make it very, very interesting. The second of which is they have unsolved the game. Like I watched the presentation, and they use the term unsolving the game very clearly. They have reworked all the itemization. They have made the itemization very strange. Like you can combine very low-level items with very high-level items for set bonuses

that make them stronger than max-level items so that there's more of a use case to go run old dungeons. There is a, for example, there's a ring that is a godlike spellpower ring that you have to fish up with the fishing profession, but only fishers can wear it. Like you have to be the person who have physically fished the fucking thing up and just sprinkled all of these little itemization changes to unsolve the game. Now somebody in the chat says doesn't that mean it? What's that?

Past knowledge means nothing. It means something. Right. But like, does that mean it will be solved again? Of course. But the idea is that after it is solved, they can add things to the game that will then require it to be solved again. Instead of what is currently happening with World of Warcraft Classic is like, that game's been solved for fucking 18 years. Like that, that shit is a known quantity.

Everybody knows exactly the way everything works in the optimal path through everything. So that's cool. And the visually coolest thing they've done is they have combined the whole planet, sorry, your whole region into a mega server. Right. Right, right. So 14 is doing regional matchmaking. This is not that.

This is the world space of the PVE, PVP, RP, and hardcore servers is one server per, like, continent. So like the Americas play together, Europeans play together, Asia plays together, and Oceania plays together. What this means is when they say we haven't seen. numbers like this on the beta since like 17 years ago, it probably means there were like 8 to 15 million people playing this beta, which means

that if I was playing in North America on the primary mega server, I am sharing the Azaroth with like possibly a million people online at a given time. Now they do layers. You're still getting sectioned off, but you're going sectioned off first come first serve

as opposed to... Because if you if you pit 400,000 fucking thousand people and Okramar, like the game will just crash, right? So they layer them off and what you can tell is when you join a party or when you move from one zone to the next, you can see the layering like maybe some one guy

phases out or a mob moves. But what it means is that every single fucking spot in the game is packed with an idealized amount of players at literally all times of the day. I stood in the main city for

about 10, 15 minutes and just watched like an infinite stream of people running into town with groups. And I imagine as well, if you are seeing an area that's underpopulated that will not last long because everyone else, everywhere logging in is all getting dropped into there until it fills up. Yeah. And then you fill up the next cup. Yeah, exactly. So if there's, you know, if you're in the starter zone, right?

And the game just started, there's like a thousand people on the screen. But that means there's also layer two also has a thousand. and layer three also etc. When I played at a starter zone the other day, outside of the first day, there were always

three or four guys within my perspective. Always. So we talked about it. Like it was idealized level of player engagement. So last week we talked a good bit about like what it is

and what they announced and like the why. But like how was it actually getting in there? it was awesome okay they also they also added and this was my promise I said if wow ever adds controller support I will go back

they added controller support and they were very they were very honest hey where's the idea for this controller support oh some of the guys play a lot of ff 14 because that's the way the controller is laid out in World of Warcraft it's like almost exactly the same as playing ff 14

like the way you hold the triggers and hit the buttons like it's the same did you have Now, controller support right now was... Did you have old data? Was that? Did you have old data that was still hanging out? No, this is a completely different game. This is a separate thing.

Control of support works really well. It is currently massively bugged. It is incredibly broken. Like the interface just freaks out all the time and like certain actions are impossible. But for what's there, it's excellent. And so I was chilling with chat or with the girls. chilling in old classic zones and discovering new stuff from that was not there 20 years ago

and with the promise of a very long-term future for this game because there was a question of like, well, how long are they going to support this? And then they come out and do interviews like, we never expected numbers like these. I'm like, okay, this is going to be the other World of Warcraft that has 10 million fucking subscribe. like just the other one.

And it's this weird thing where I don't know if you've ever played a game like this that was like really long term where you start playing a game and they give you like the promise of what the game is going to be in the future. And you kind of misunderstand that promise to mean something completely different and you end up unsatisfied with what it becomes. So when World of Warcraft originally came out and I really, really loved vanilla back in 2004, I kind of thought that's the, the type of game that it was going to be forever and like expand along those lines and then it would feel the same and it didn't. It turned

into like a completely different fucking thing. And this is going back in time to like well what if we made a game that was actually closer to what that type of person thought this was going to be? Okay. I guess the closest thing I could think of is rock band when I was like this will be the forever platform

that you can always just drop songs into. through DLC instead of needing to sell instruments and plastic things again. Kind of like that, yeah. But then it became such a bloated store built on an old platform that navigating it became a nightmare. And it took multiple minutes of loading to find a song you wanted. So it became impossible to work, you know. The other thing is that Wow Forever's got a really strange monetization system where you don't buy it. It's just, it just asks you to have a Wow Sub.

they'll sell you other stuff. Like they'll sell you a race and maybe a class later. But like playing the core game will be just your subscription. Well, you sub to the service and then you pick which one you want to play, right? Yeah. So you sub to wow and you play classic or forever or whatever. It's really cool. I had a really great time playing with a bunch of people and by myself.

It has the old vibe on it. but it is definitely not exactly the same as vanilla. There are a lot of changes. There are a lot of changes. One of which that is the easiest to explain is, you know, the Torin, the big cow guys, they gained a racial ability called planes running that was cut from Wows beta back in 2003 before the game came out, where the longer you run, the faster you move. And so these guys now have a racial bonus where if you just keep running,

you get up to like a 30% movement increase, which is, fucking awesome in a game where you have to hoof it as much as wow it also creates like a really strange player behavior so when you see uh torren um when you see torren turning in quests they're doing like a pee dance like they're gonna piss themselves because if they stop moving the speed stacks fall off so every torren everywhere when they ride an elevator or gives in a in a fucking quest they're just like fucking moving around and vibrating to not get their movement stacks off uh does it it's fast And visually everything is as low poly and as it was?

No. Visually, you can choose between the old graphics or you can choose between all the new character models they added a couple of years ago, which look a lot better. And then they have also completely remade the lighting engine. They have manually placed a shit ton of fancy new lighting everywhere. And they've extended the draw distance to basically infinite. Um, which has allowed lots of parts of the game that you could not see or did not realize were actually connected to be visible from huge distances away. Um, I'm going to try and find a picture of it. But like, for example, the, the Orc City that called Ogremar used to just be like a big cool Ork City.

But nowadays, you can actually see that the mountain is behind it. and you can see the world tree behind it in silhouette and it looks like fucking stellar. Like it looks incredible. Like it really adds a lot to be able to see what like you can you can see you can see like gigantic landmarks from like

you know what would be like a hundred miles away at this point. I'm seeing fancy new lighting that's not in the main game. So yes. Which is super fucking weird. actually. Preferential treat. It's it's fucking strange. So like here's a really good example. I found one where if you're in the Torren zone,

the lighting and the draw distance combines to you being able to see shit that is like genuinely like 100 miles away in the game world, like multiple zones over with nice god rays and bloom and deferred lighting and new shading. As a result, parts of Wow Forever, look way

fucking better than retail. Which is fucking weird. Weird, weird. Yeah. Punishing you. Fucking strange. And they were asked about that

and they basically described that the reason for that is that all the new lighting had to be manually placed. It's all baked in. And since classic is like a very known quantity they were able to do it

on every zone in the game. But retail has like a thousand zone. and since it's not like a systemic lighting it's like a manual thing they're like maybe we'll fucking get it in there eventually

it's a fucking strange game that the chef has committed to versus the one where their actual heart is that they want that they still give a shit about sure it's it is a fucking weird version of the game it is totally fascinating everybody that I know who plays MMOs is it going to be hopping on for at least a couple of months.

Super weird game. So what happens? Really, really interesting. Whatever cold drops is this now a dual ping ponging attention? Oh, what happens is that on Mondays I'll be streaming ever cold with the girls. And then on Thursdays I'll be streaming Wow Forever with Girls is what. And then when Guild Wars comes out and Destiny comes back from the dead, I just put a gun in my mouth. Wow.

It's, I thought, I thought that. like, I guess the idea of what 14 is and all the improvements with it, like completely replaced even the like nostalgia value of World of Warcraft, but I guess not. So the main thing, and I think I described this to you when we're playing 14 is that 14 is strong in the ways that World of Warcraft is weak and vice versa. 14's core narrative and fight design and gameplay feel and stuff like that is night and day over World of Warcraft. Well, World of Warcraft always had was a much, much better explorable world and socialization and class variety. So, like, when you play a class in FF14, like you played monk and samurai.

at the end of the day, the difference between monk and samurai is the mechanics of the way you do your rotation. They're pretty fucking similar. Healers and tanks all function similarly and so do all the DPS and 14. A rogue in World of Warcraft compared to a shaman in World of Warcraft,

you might as well be playing a completely different game compared to the way the classes function in Final Fantasy. It's a night and day difference in the way that the classes function. But the other thing is that most of World of Warcraft, or rather most, of classic world of warcraft is wandering around in a gigantic space with strangers, something that 14 is terrible at, like just god awful.

Final Fantasy 14 is closer to like monster hunter than it is to an old-fashioned MMO in terms of like, let's get the group up and go do content. Though wasn't my like wandering through the world ignoring it mainly as a result of like getting super boosted level wise and doing... No, it's not. The game doesn't have a lot of... Incentive? Like, side quests in 14 give bad experience and are generally, really dull.

Side quests in World of Warcraft are the primary form of experience. The world is like 10 times larger, so exploring it is more interesting. Okay. World of Warcraft also doesn't have teleporting. So... There's no crystal jumping around the place. Okay. No, so like, just think, just think.

about like your trip through 14 but you weren't allowed to teleport. You have to manually go back to the waking sands and all these things each. A huge proportion of World of Warcraft is I'm in Mulgore as a Torin and I would like to go play I would like to do

Rage Fire Casm which is an Ogremar I'm going to have to walk so I'm going to invite my friend to my party and we're going to chit chat in the 15 minutes it's going to take me to fucking walk over there because it's it's a distance and that gigantic

realized world feeling is important like if you're going to have that kind of MMO. Okay. So super weird version of the game super interesting version of the game I can tell that there's a huge proportion of millennials

that have gone this is the World Warcraft I wanted to go back to for 20 or 19 or 18 years. So I have no doubt it'll be extraordinarily successful, though it remains to be seen what they're going to do. Because like the last thing anybody wants is for them like, it's going to be different than retail.

Wow, we're going to go down a different path. And then they start going down the same path again, eventually. That would be horribly disappointing. The idea, do they have a like, this is how often updates will drop? they've been pretty cagey about that the games in beta uh i assume we'll learn more about that in um on launch but they've basically said that it's not going to be expansions it's going to be big patches more often so like every quarter there's going to be like a big patch that adds like this or that or this or that

not two years for a two point oh or something yeah like the world of warcraft um general um expansion thing is really strict, which is, in two years, there's going to be expansion and everything is going to happen in that expansion. And then that's what you play for the two years. Okay. Let me get a Wow Forever roadmap. Okay, here we go. So launch.

If you have people paying monthly, like, it makes way more sense to do that than have it be a fucking, like, you literally don't know when, but wait a year and you might see something. So right now it's launch in November. And then in December, they ultimately. unlock all the raids. And then late December, early Jan, it's the hardcore mode, which is super popular because it's very interesting. Like playing on MMO with one death, your character's deleted is fucking stressful.

It's really fascinating. Then in spring, new raids, new dungeons, new quest, new playable area, something called a legendary quest line and then the new PVP system. And then in summer, they go new raid, new raid, more world content. content, more dungeons, new PVP system, and, quote, professions and legacy updates. Okay. The other thing that is of note, since it's a horizontal game, is they are giving you a meta system for if you play the game a lot.

So the long and short of it is as you level up, you get achievements, either things that you do or level milestones that you hit with a given class or profession milestones. and those, so like hitting level 60 will give you one point, for example. And then in your account, you can decide to add that point to gain rested experience faster. Or no longer need reagents for doing skills that require reagents, or faster movement speed under certain conditions, or you don't take damage to your equipment when you resurrect. Just these types of account-wide bonuses for the freaks that are going to just level up like five, fucking crazy.

But you have a system in place where because it's not about getting past level 60, it doesn't matter if you keep pushing it. Yeah. So now it's like, hey, if you get multiple different classes to level 60, you'll be able to earn rested XP 50% faster. So you can now get alts even faster to level 60, you know, that kind of thing. Okay, okay. Super, super weird game.

Super strange. Yeah. Looks like William might be interested after a taste of 14. No, no, no, I saw that and I ignored it on purpose. I saw that and I ignored it on purpose. No, I despised that shit and would never in a million years even deign to consider it. But I am trying to be a decent... Wully actively hates well.

I actively hate wow, but I'm trying to be a decent podcast host and ask questions and have a conversation about it. Fuck no, never in a million. But hey. No, yeah, regardless of your own personal hatred of the game, them restarting. a 20-year MMO and going, we're going to go and turn it into a completely different game is super interesting. That is interesting.

It's very weird. But yeah, well, the thing that I find the most fascinating here is actually just like what it must feel like to be somebody who stayed on board and is currently playing the main version of the game. Okay. And how dog shit that must be to feel like

you got, you get neglected, ignored, and nothing for sticking by something that everybody else hate. Let's, let's talk about that. that would feel terrible. I think MMO culture is so much more interesting than any MMO game

at all. I think the way that people interact with these and form tribes and shit is so fucking fascinating. So to answer your question, wow players are known to be an ornery bunch. Social skills, not super

great. There has been just the most but shit mad discourse about the nature of these two games going back and forth that is just fucking

fascinating to watch like basically retail players describing that they don't like the resources have been pulled off of their baby to go to this game for old people right this this fucking retirement home for fucking

classic Andes, I think they call them. Retail Andes is a really good name. Yeah. And then you have, then you have actual classic Andes, people who play classic complaining that it's too different. And it's like, what the fuck do you actually want? You're playing classic right now. Like, what? Do you want a classic that's only different in the singular or? second thing that you want to be different and nothing else, you're fucking crazy.

And just watching all of these fucking groups get pissy at each other is fucking fascinating. Yo, third strike online edition is out. Fuck this current shit. I'm out of here. Bye forever. It's actually, it's like, hey, we're bringing back third strike online edition. And instead of moving forward with Street Fighter 4, we're going to actually patch Street Fighter 3 online with fourth hit.

And here's new characters. And guess what, man? If they told me that, I'd take Street Fighter 6 and throw it in the trash. Give me back. I would kill somebody. But thank you for your continued support of the ongoing current version of the game. Yeah. Yeah.

It's so interesting. It's absolutely. And so when you see the Wow developers say, they haven't seen numbers like this in decades. They said specifically 17 years. And 17 years ago was Rath of the Litch King. And Rath of the Lich King was the highest sub count Wow ever had. And the implication is that the beta numbers that you had to pay to get in are approaching the peak that Wow has ever had,

which means this beta may have already leapfrogged the current retail game. which means their cool classic weirdo side project may have accidentally become game one instead of game two. Interesting. That's fucking weird. The Twitch numbers for Wow Forever is the highest viewer numbers of any game ever. And this is supposed to be the weirdo side game. Wait, hold on. That's got to be a Grand Deft Auto that beats that.

Maybe. Maybe in a couple of days. But as of right now, Wow Forever was the first one to break 500K simultaneous. I feel like I can see a future where these Mega Man 9 style things start to become more and more the way where it's like it's not the remake, it's not the reimagination. It is literally going back to the old thing and building new stuff in the old space. Well, that's what Monster Hunter does. Yeah, well, I just talked about, they went back and added the two new classics. is in Darkest Dungeon 2 to Darkest Dungeon 1, you know?

Yeah, that's cool as shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just we're going, we're putting the virtual fighter two models of the Virtual Fighter 5 characters, you know. So, uh, in, in reverse. There's a couple people in the chat describing nostalgia farming and, uh, innovation is dead. Nostalgia is more important. I have a piece of news for you guys that you may not understand because you're not old enough. just because something is new

does not mean it's better. That sounds like an old man talking from his nostalgia, but like sometimes new things aren't as good as the old thing, but more importantly, sometimes new things are so different that they're fundamentally different things and you still want the old thing as well. Right?

I mean, like I remember when people, I don't know, Coca-Cola moved to new Coke, which did better in taste tests. And I said, fuck that. I don't want to drink Coca-Cola anymore. Congratulations, Pat. You have described society.

I have described society. Did you know we're living in one? Believe it or not. It's crazy. And in fact, sometimes old thing combined with, well, so this is the part that was not in the conversation back then, because we've watched as every single time new thing drops, there's always the like,

I miss old thing conversation, but... I mean, we had a version of this in this chat earlier with fire emblem. Exactly, exactly. But the thing that is in the discourse now is the, like, also what were you doing at the time in your life? Where were you at? Were you at a point in your life where things were happier and lighter and less stressful? And you're associating the game or the memories with that thing.

Absolutely. And I think trying to pretend that the point that you were in your life didn't affect your view of something is insane. I think everyone is always affected by whatever's going on in their life at the time. Be it, oh, you only played this, you only love this game because your parents were still together. Or you only love this game because it happened in your college days. You had infinite free time to play it. or whatever, right? And conversely, being aware of that, though, knowing that that's a part of what you are looking for

or what you enjoyed about the time is important as well, especially if you're unable to find that moment or if there's something that feels like it's missing or you just can't quite recreate it. It's because the context of your life might not be the same either. Yeah. But, you know, this is one of those things too where, like, you know, I know people who are much more like,

um rejective of the entire concept of remaking and revisiting and rehashing and so on. Yeah. And nostalgia farming and like, oh, I know how to describe World of Warcraft forever.

World of Warcraft forever is World of Warcraft you cannot redo. You cannot redo. Sure. Sure, sure. That's what it is. Um, there,

I know that we're in a world where, like, nostalgia farming is, one, it scratches the itch a lot of people have for the things they enjoy. And two, it's commercially viable. So that's, we're in this place forever, you know? So knowing that's the case and knowing that I have a preference for newer things, I'm, I think it's, like, acceptable to be like, okay, if we are doing this, can we do it interesting? can you do something that doesn't feel like it's completely pointless to go back and revisit? And we've been finding ways to explore that.

But yeah, I guess it's just you can only get to that point after you. There's only like the era of we remade something so bad. We deleted it from the Xbox Live Arcade Store and you will never see it again. That era is long ago. Like remakes so bad they were deleted and memory hold is bat shit. Yeah. And I never want to be back there again, you know? So I will take this, uh, this version of it, I suppose.

Yeah. Interesting. Uh, so yeah, World Warcraft Forever. Weird game. Strange game. Very excited. Um, it makes for a really great hanging out with people on stream game also. Because a enormous proportion is just grouping up and wandering.

around. It has a really good vibe for just shooting the shit in Discord, like quite excellent. So I will be streaming it come November with a bunch of the gals. I haven't, we haven't locked in on the core group, but I'm trying to, I'm trying to get as many people as I can. Though, hey, did you know that if you get more than six people in a Discord call, it becomes noise? It does come. We've, we experienced that. It becomes like impossible noise. Yeah, yeah. In fact, I attempted my best to control it. And I think did, but that does happen. Also, I would like to prescribe the World of Warcraft Party questing experience as the new ADHD test. Can you get people to sign up for the same quest and aim their bodies in the same direction?

No. No, you cannot. It is impossible. It can't be done. That being said, let the record show that Blizzard offering sloppy topy to everyone everywhere has worked. They have successfully. One of the other things is like we're talking about the wetest mouth. Yeah, like the other thing is like we talked about like getting into something and like, what's its future?

Right. and it's a fucking World of Warcraft spin off. Like there's no doubt that this fucking thing is going to get supported for fucking, fucking, fucking, like, if you want to get in now, like, it'll be around. So what I need to do is actually like go contact my old roommate from back then in the QA days, who you remember, and see him like, hey, if you, are you talking about emotions? No, no, no, no. No, the other one who's the other guy.

And see. sneak. And if he is living his normal life being businessman who has not played games in a long time, if he is going to go, wow, oh my God, and reinstall, you know. No, he's probably playing in retail, man. Oh, I, I am. He's probably out completely. He's probably buttoning up a tie and going to work. Because he was so in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was, like. But I'm no, I bet you, I bet you the time for video games has passed, you know, with him. I wouldn't be surprised. All right. You call him up and like, whatever, you, fucking dork doing your video game show, nerd.

Who are doing business. Yeah. And then boot up and go, oh my God, it's Warsaw and Gulch. Yeah. Anyways, uh, let's, let's jump into some news and, and, and go on with what's happening this week. You want to just go into the other MMO news of the week? Uh, I've got a couple other things, but hit it.

What's going on? Uh, Destiny 2 is uncanceled. Okay, okay, okay, stop. Hold on. So, yes, this happened seconds before we went live. Now, is, are we calling, is Destiny an MMO? Is that the right term? Okay. Is this actively, because, like, focus, focus on my eyes right now, okay, for real.

They will never call Destiny to an MMO. They have done, they, they have been asked a billion times to call an MMO and they refuse. and that makes them bitch cowards who are kidding themselves. Okay. So Destiny 2 is absolutely an MMO. It is an MMO through and through, but they don't want it to be called an MMO because that comes with certain expectations. But in my brain, those expectations involve things such as perhaps vaulting content sometimes.

But the idea of vaulting content in. not an MMO seems so stupid and batch it crazy and dumb as a business idea that I can't understand why they do it. They treat it like an MMO. It is an MMO. But when you're like, hey, other MMOs don't do this. They go, well, we're not an MMO. Sure.

Sure. That's the nature of that. Because like the idea, because every time you just like, oh, an event happened or whatever happened in one of these things, like 14, you just, you're like, oh, yeah, you can go back and do it anytime, whatever. But the core concept of, like, we're going to take, like, story and seasonal quests and weapons and dungeons experience, et cetera, away. The whole point of that is FOMO-based marketing, right?

You're trying to push people into a sense of urgency to play now, less than you never get a chance to ever experience this thing again. It's a fucking shooter where you grind out levels and fucking gear and go on open world fucking zones to do quests with your fucking friends and then do dungeon. It's a fucking MMO! And that being said, now, Pete, you're saying, you know, folks are saying like,

F14 doesn't, doesn't vault, but I was just getting messaged about, hey, jump on now to get your fucking Noctus car. It's coming back for the first time in years, and then it'll be gone forever. Well, you can buy it in the store. Okay.

So, you buy it for cash in the store. So this is just to get it for free then? Is that what that is? This is just to do the quest and get it for free. Okay. In terms of seasonal content, there is,

I think there are like 11 quests in FF14 out of 10, of thousands that are not available because they're seasonal. Like, the seasonal Valentine's Day event is always unique and it's shit. Okay. Similar to like, like basically, think of seasonal or vaulted stuff in 14 as the rising. Which will go away and, and, oh, it's gone. Barizing's gone. Right.

That shit's over. So that's, but like, so the, how valuable to your experience was the rising. Sure. Limited, limited, limited hunt. Like, so that, that's exactly it, right? The FOMO based core of this is to push. the player in. And if it's not an MMO, if you're not, and I guess you're not paying a monthly sub, but it's a loot shooter in which... A sleuter. You remember that term. Of course. I, I, I,

underline that with emphasis for a point. Um, yeah. What, what percentage would you say of destiny content is in a... Has been vaulted. Has been vaulted. What is accessible versus what is it? Um, so I would have to run the math on it. Um, Chat can, so I, I'm not up to date with the new expansions. Because it's, it's, if you, okay, it's minimum, minimum 50%. So, so, because I have a friend who was like, you should get into it and he started showing me some cool stuff and it's like, hey, this is a fight you'd enjoy, did it, whatever, right? If you're trying to get a friend to join you to play at a game and then the things that

they got into the game enjoying are not available to the friend who you're trying to sell the pitch to, what the fuck is the point? Okay, so Destiny 2 has vaulted the first two years of campaigns, half of the game's locations, and 30 seasons of seasonal content. Also, if you include Destiny 1 having never been integrated into Destiny 2, which you should, because every now and then they steal Destiny 1 missions and locations and put them into Destiny 2 as content, and I guess everyone assumed that those games would be integrated, it's closer to like 95%.

And I'm just imagining, like, unlike a situation where you're like, I have the most of my enjoyment happening here, and that's fine. And then there's a thing that's FOMO you got to go deal with and then get back out. I was annoyed when Street Fighter 5 was like, if you want to get these special costumes for Monster Hunter Ken and fucking devil may cry, Ed, you got to go now this week only. That shit sucks. But whatever, the rest of the game is happening around that. Yeah, no, no.

If you're telling me the constant majority of my experience and destiny is, I have to do this now or fuck it, it's gone. Like, you're just being shoved unwillingly through the content. So I'm going to tell you, that's insane. So here's what's up. Here's what's up. I played Destiny for two for a couple of years and I grinded out a ton of guns, right?

Since, and then they sunset those guns. And we've talked about that a lot. They made so that old guns couldn't be powered up to the future. So those, so whatever. So I quit Destiny 2 harder than anything I've ever quit in that I logged in, did a stream, and visibly deleted all of my fucking weapons off the game and trashed them. Like, just I'm out, right? Since that time, I believe, is Shadow Keep still in the game or Shadow Keep gone?

Uh, the answer before I, so. Um, everything that I did in that game, um, you shadow keep still there? Okay. Every single thing I did in that game, except for the shadow keep expansion has been deleted. For the years that I played destiny, there is one remaining story expansion that still exists that I've played. Did you, they deleted the entire base game and they deleted the entirety of the expansion Forsaken, which is the best expansion the game ever had. Did you at least

get a lunar tier on the title screen for your efforts? Like, fucking ending E, that shit. And some of those locations remain, but most of them, most of them are gone. They also removed the Gambit Prime PVP

mode, which I really liked. And all the raids that existed in the game associated with the areas I just described, including the only raid I ever did in Destined, is now gone. Like I, this sounds like like multiple years of not willing enjoyment, but just Fobo-based pressure progress.

So that is a, that is a like, it is torture. Have I ever told you about Luke Smith and the Gates? No, perhaps. I don't know. So, so, so I'm going to, I'm going to go through this. I'm going to go, I'm going to go through this as fast as possible. So Luke Smith gets brought on as the lead on. Destiny 2. And Luke Smith, you know how it's hard to point at one person and be like, you're the person who ruined the game? No, not here. It's actually very easy. Luke Smith ruined Destiny 2, period. Wow. So Luke Smith was an old World of Warcraft player. And he wanted to, by the way, it's not an MMO. But when Luke Smith joined Destiny 2 as the lead, he said, hey, let me tell you a bunch of stories about me playing World of Warcraft and how I want to recreate those feelings in Destiny 2. But it's not an MMO.

So in World Warcraft, there is a big country called Ankaraj, which was like a spider. I think it was like a bug or a spider nation, regardless. It had to be a server-wide effort to make the key that would unlock the gates. And so what would happen is that one person would unlock the gate and that person would get special benefits, right? And they would be known as the server as you're the person who unlocked the gates of An Karaj. And Luke Smith basically talked about how sick and, it was that he was the person who opened it up on his server and how you really had to be there, right? And it was never going to be there again. And he wanted to bring that feeling to destiny.

Now, all things about Luke Smith aside, he forgets that only he got to open it up on his fucking server. He's describing, you had to be there of one. Of one. Right? And so he brought that to fucking destiny too. And it's like, so what we're going to do is we're going to have seasons of content. And you're going to do the season. And after the season, those story events are going to be gone.

So, like, the entire storyline and all the narrative missions of the game became three-month-long timed fucking events. You had to be there. And by there, I mean, inside my brain, me. You had to be me. And then after that, they're like, the game's getting too big and too unstable. So instead of drilling down for a while and, like, shoring up the game's foundations, what we have done is where every time we add a new expansion, we're going to remove the oldest expansion to keep the game size down.

And so they did that a couple of times, and then the beginning of the game was gone. So when you start to play Destiny 2, it would just drop your ass into the hub and be like, go explore and do quests. And you're like, who are these people? What am I? Am I a guardian?

What the fuck is it? Like the worst onboarding known to man. So now when they come out with this thing where the bungee just released a thing on the future of Bungee and they're talking about what they're doing with Marathon and what they're doing with Destiny and basically what I understand here is that it rolls down to bringing back some vaulted content, not necessarily all of it, and describing that, you know. They're actually committing to bringing back everything. Oh, did they? Okay. It's what they're saying. Okay.

Because what they're saying. What I caught was that there. like they said something to the effect of whether or not you agreed with our design decisions at the time. One thing that's clear is people wanted these things and so we're going to go do it. But it's not easy because some of that stuff that was deleted, like vaulted, but deleted, right? It was deleted at a time when the game was very different. So now when you bring it back, you have to basically remake it and balance it for a completely different version of the game. Do you want to know the, do you want to add the inside information of the dev pipeline?

I just, I know. please please because it's a really bad way to make a game it's a really bad way to make a game so when they vaulted the stuff they were like we're going to use this to clean up the engine and what they did is when they made the new expansion beyond light they changed like their lighting pathways

and a lot of the guts under the thing and what they actually did is remake all the areas they kept in their new version of their engine and so the idea was like well when we have time will go back and unvault this and unvault that and unvalt that. But now everything that exists prior to that is an

incompatible version of their fucking engine so they have to remake all that shit from fucking scratch. We vaulted our shame. We've vaulted our shame and the things we don't want you to see anymore actually. So it's like they made a tech decision that they knew was going to

fuck them over and they're like well when we have a surplus of time and resources we'll go back to do the old stuff which has never happened in the history of fuck ever no one at a game studio has ever had you know we got like an extra month on this side of the team to go back and and fix all that old stuff who wants to do that instead of working on the new thing that we're crunching for by the way i have to assume that like with like because of all this because people have been hating destiny for as long as I've been alive. Like, I have kindergarten memories. You know, and truly, I have to imagine that, like, I don't know if, I remember the promise of it coming out with the traveler and the marketing and the whole, like, look at the next evolution of what Halo's team is doing, right?

I don't know if it ever lived up to that feeling or if it was just, like, anger for. from day one, but I have to assume that if these strong feelings even continue to exist to this day, it's because there is a cool game inside of Destiny that is being held back by all this other shit. So here's the problem. There have been points in the game's life cycle for Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 in which it absolutely was everything that it was supposed to be and it was like one of the best games I've ever played my life. And then the new season would come out and it would fucking spike it into the dirt. And I don't mean like the new season is bad.

I mean like they would go back and fuck up shit that was already good. And I say this as someone who actually bought the first one and got at some hours into it before, you know, losing interest. But they keep like there, there has to be something there that's it. So it was it was literally the beginning of the journey. And then everything afterwards. The last year of Destiny 1 and the second year of Destiny 2 were like incredible. Okay. Okay.

And all other years were watching them jam their hard ass cock into a wood chipper going, I don't know what the problem is. Yeah. Like you don't get this reaction unless something had promise, man, like for sure. So now I sent you some screenshots that I picked of their announcement. that makes these guys doing this video look like they just got caught cheating on their spouse and couples therapy. Where they're describing, listen, it's been a long road and there's been a lot of failed promises. And we're not asking for your trust because we know we have to earn it back. And like, what the fuck is this weird ass shit?

Oh, yeah. No. This is creepy. This is weird. apologizing to the wife fucking oh boy yeah that sounds rough okay so from what I can tell

the people in management that ran this fucking ship into the dirt are gone and so the new people feel like they can fix it and they have correctly ascertained that no one will ever give a shit about destiny again unless they put

everything they took out of the game back into the game. Trust will start once a bunch of that shit has gone back in. Okay. Okay. We're super sorry. We apologize. We're so, so sorry. Um, we're so sorry.

Now, I, how will this make money? I don't fucking know. Because I own all the shit they fucking took out. When they put it back in, they can't fucking charge me for it again. Where are they supposed to make money? Okay. Can you?

So here's the second part of this. They're also announcing that they're turning Marathon into a little baby destiny. I don't know if you saw that part of the announcement. I didn't read the Marathon part. So Marathon as being delayed for a couple of, the new patch has been delayed for a couple of months, to add a persistent survival PVE perimeter. map where you can explore and fight enemies and earn gear to your heart's content, almost like a little baby destiny.

Okay. And the reason why they're doing that is because Marathon, despite being the new hot shit and being a pretty good game overall, is still pulling in one-tenth of the numbers that dead-ass Destiny 2 is. It's like killing Destiny. wasn't even enough to let those numbers drop below Marathon. People want Destiny. Marathon like performs a different type of game for a bunch of fucked up weirdos

that want to do fucked up weirdos shooting. And it's really good at it. But people would rather play their MMO space shooter. Man. They just wanted to go back to the way it was. Or at least put the fucking pieces back in. Committing to like FOMO. game design in a retail

full priced thing is so psychotic. I just... Well, Destiny 2's free to play now. You just have to buy every single expansion. Sure. And those... By the way, you can still buy expansions that have been vaulted forever. They're still available to buy on the store. You can buy like Curse of Osiris

on the fucking store and then it'll load up and be like, that shit's vaulted. Thanks for the money, nerd. Yeah. Oh my god Okay Well anyway No you can't

Oh yeah? Yeah, you sure? Okay, hold on Okay Let me go to Amazon Let me go to Amazon Can you quit that game anywhere? Can you be standing on a location

And quit out of the game And then the location gets deleted And then you load back in And your character is like Had to get lifted And moved back to a hub of some kind Because the place is no longer accessible all right destiny 2 PlayStation 4 um on the disc 3168 can buy it now uh everything on that disc is gone

every single thing on that disc is gone physical okay um yeah i i can't believe just how like truly truly I have, I felt the entire life cycle of this game has been nothing but rage from outside. I just kind of, you know, got bored with some parts of it and didn't like other elements and then jumped out during the first one. But, um, okay, that's what's going on there. A couple. So I will be watching that with rapt and critical attention ready to shit on them every time they open their mouths. I want to know how the money is going to come.

I'm very curious. I'm very curious. I want to know what the timeline is because they cut a lot of fucking shit. They cut enough shit that it could take them like three or four fucking years at like a full team's clip to put that shit back in. And Benji is like limping along after a bunch of staff losses. Like, I don't know. What the fuck is? What is the timeline on this?

Okay. A couple other things this week as well. The Capcom TGS spotlight went up because Tokyo game show is happening right. now. A couple trailers are dropping everywhere for new things. And the Capcom Spotlight in particular, one, they showed off some more of Mega Man dual override. And that's a Mega Man game. Dual because you can play as Protoman and override because they get into their big old powered up override mode. But yeah, I'm, hey, yay, Mega Man, run, jump, shoot, nothing to it. I like Mega Man.

Yeah. I kind of, so there is a thought I had while watching it, which is like, might be kind of blasphemous in a way, but like, you know how you, you like,

old back in the day, you'd like pause and then go select a new Mega Man, a new ability for a boss you've killed, or you just cycle on the triggers when, when those came around. Like, I kind of want like, well,

and then eventually you get you split off and then you had like skill button and then like regular or so. Sure. Yeah, I kind of, I think it would be interesting to have, a like menu of different combination weapons you could you could work with two different let's say boss weapons there's something something interesting with the shoot to

basically have like two boss weapons on two buttons and then you can work with that as like a loadout you know like a no I think that'd be something and you're right that is blasphemous you know I do love me some Kirby 64 I do love me some Kirby 64 I think that that would be some kind of a fun idea to just like put it together and get a little bit more out of out of the out of the mega man system because like a lot of the time you get like zero and you're like I get to swing my sword around do cool combos and then do these cool new moves as you add to that move list and with Mega Man it's like it's not it's not a move list that's increasing it's ammo you know so like what if you could like combine and work to make other things happen with that ammo to like commit to different types of of run, gun, jump, shoot, you know? I think that'd be fun. Because in a lot of cases, it's funner to play as the not-Megaman character for various reasons.

I think it's always more fun to play as the not-Megamane character, but that's still blasphemy. Yeah, which is why I think this would help. I think you can do it. You should go to jail for house. Well, I will gladly take the fucking time, because that'd be more fun. Anyway. Like, if you then told me and you know what, you should. have more than one sub weapon at a time

in Castlevania, I'd be like, I should burn your house down. Like, you don't know, no. Because what ends up happening is because you feel it in, whenever Mega Man gets dropped into, like, Smash Brothers or Marvel versus Capcom or something, Mega Man comes, and even in the recent Sega

versus Mega Man game, you see like X drops in, and he kind of just becomes like a character that just throws out a bunch of different colored boomerangs and shots that either go on the ground, go straightforward, go out and back up or straight up and out or down and you're just like oh you're just it doesn't translate into a really interesting kid unfortunately in that genre uh compared to like zero who does

you know or even an axle could you know get more going there but will you can't change megaman because of the way he acts in fighting games that aren't megaman games this is not this is not the point of it i'm just saying it comes to mind when looking at it i'm like oh be cool if you could get two abilities and then like, you know, get something new, a new type of thing that he can do because you combined fucking, you know, these two bosses with each other. And you took these two bosses out and now you get this cool thing. But it's more expensive. So you got to be careful about the ammo when you use the really cool combination thing with it, you know? Anyways. Oh, sorry. I was just reading through some stuff. There is something that we should mention about the destiny thing

that makes a lot more sense. Yeah, sure. Um, they're going to unvault everything. And you're like, well, what's the future of destiny? And they, they, I don't know if it was supposed to be part of their statement, but they said that we have to do this for your trust for future games in the series. So I believe that the destiny, I believe unvaulting all the Destiny 2 stuff is actually the path to, to trust for Destiny 3. It's a goodwill investment. I see, I see. Okay. Sure.

Pick that. Because, yeah, dude, if Destiny 3 came out, you're like, well, what about all that Disney 2 shit? And they're like, don't fucking worry about it. This is a new game. People would not fucking hop on, man. Um, you picked up the crown of, off of the Taken king and put it on your head.

So, so they showed off that. I don't know if you saw the Pragmatta Mega Man outfits. I did. They're horrified. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. So here I have to invent.

I'm going to fucking RP the conversation. Hey, a lot of people think that there's like a Mega Man connection here. And I think that would be a really fun thing to do with this game. We should have a little Mega Man reference. What can we do? Let's have Hugh and Diana dress up as Mega Man and roll. That's cute. Yeah, that's awesome.

Capcom, like lawyers and team and IP brand holders. Do you agree? Well, yes, but we can't actually have them be the characters because they're clearly not. These are, this is Diana and Hugh. So we can have them dress up and cosplay as the character. So let's put the outfit on. Okay, that's fine. So let's make sure it looks like fabric and like kind of like when Frank West dressed up as Mega Man.

Okay, cool. Oh, dear God. Oh, holy shit. Oh, fuck. It looks terrible. Oh, dear God, that's nightmarish. Okay, here's the other costume. You can just be Mega Man and you can just be roll.

So you've got the, you've got the dressed up cosplay. And then you've got the no, no, the model has been replaced with Mega Man in Roll mode. And it looks way better. Yes, the V-Tuber's skin. His head open, like his helmet opens up. So Mega Man's head, like, that's fucking terrible. That's fucking awful. Like, and straight up, I'm seeing that.

And I'm also seeing, like, I'm imagining, like, the Japanese market being, like, get this ugly shit the fuck away from me. That's not Mega Man. That's not Rock. What are you doing? So they now they, so they have the, like, full. on like correct model mode which it looks so much better

so thank God that's there you know but cool that's fun um and then we saw a little bit more of Arjun who uh you know I was he does he looks fucking busted what's going on with that with the chip

damage shit and all like so one last week when we were talking about him uh we were like yeah what's the deal he's got all these cool moves it's wind and base and he's spitting at you he's these vape nash blowing the the fucking vape rings at you. What we didn't see was how the damage worked, where every time you block something that he does,

you build up gray life. And all of that gray life just builds and builds and builds until most of your life bar is recoverable damage that is like slowly coming back. And then if he hits you, you lose all of it. Or if he grabs you, you lose all of it. And then you do the command grab damage. And it's insane because which,

you end up seeing as half of a life bar disappearing for blocking two, three things and then getting grabbed, you know? It appears to be the, like, they looked at Yasmin, they saw how much people were, they loved the character design, but they hated the damage and the fact that she's not as competitive because, like, everything she does is really light and she doesn't really shake anything up. You can't really, you know, uh, uh, play her and get, uh, you know, you're not getting, you're not getting an advantage over any of the, the current like roster dominators. So Arjun is like, nah, fuck that. He's a beast. And what we're, there's got to be some insane weaknesses that we don't know about yet, you know, uh, be it like how slow his buttons are or

bad defense or ante ears. I don't know. There's got to be something. But the amount of damage he's doing in gray life is insane. And like the command grab he does, does no main damage. to you unless you have gray life. But if you do, you're fucking cooked. That's really interesting that the command grab doesn't do shit to you. Unless you have gray life. It's very interesting. That's really interesting.

Yeah. And that's why it ends up looking like this. It looks like the double palm move that he does. And the command grab, they look very similar to each other. I mean, he's a big boy of the command grab. I'll play him. Right? We'll see what's up.

And then, so I was talking about how, like, I love how the Bollywood references are there. And he feels like he's got that energy, you know, when he's doing the dance and everything at the, you know, um, with the, his, his level three, um,

what do you see? Righteousness, wickedness. And, and so now, when you look at everything else, you go, okay,

what's going on with his backstory? Uh, he's an ex cop and here's his dead partner who was murdered. Yeah. And he's out for revenge because he was framed. Huh. That dead partner looks an awful lot like, uh,

Rahman from RR. That's interesting. Okay, cool. what else is going on? Oh, the opening lines of the YouTube description for the trailer are the lyrics from Natu Natu in RRR. Interesting. Huh, literally just the straight up opening lyrics of the song.

What's going on with that? Okay, cool. The fighting pass is out. There's a taunt where your characters now in the World Tour thing get a Natu Natu Dance, where they're doing the full kick now. That's you can do it. right? They're not even remotely

pretending. And then the... Why were they? And the critical art, when he does the gamma crush and jumps off and hits you with the giant fucking meteorite strike, you hear a Singham tiger roaring as he does like the Singham style final hit on you. You know? I mean, it's just clear.

They saw RRR and Singham and a bunch of Bollywood hype shit like Bahobali and all that. And are like, we're delivering that hype now. And it's perfect timing because that's the coolest shit that has been current. Like they could not have hit a better time for it. Um, and he's still a yoga successor style character, but just completely different energy from Delsom. He looks great. Um, yeah, I, I, uh, I was

saying this, you know, on stream the other day, but like, I just, I'm like, this is the type of moment where you're like, okay, now we've had these two characters coming in and these are people who who were being called literally who. And I'm like, just, I wish if someone out there was like the fuck this, I don't know who they are, but now are sold. Just, just, just let people know. Just let people know. Just come out and be honest and say, like, I didn't believe. I owe you, I owe an apology.

This shit turned out to be way hype. The new character was actually sicker than I thought. I just needed a minute to let them cook. You know? Just let up get in your hands. It's always the case. Always. So that's fun.

And I just, yeah, I love the Bollywood angle to it as well. they also showed off Oh yeah There's a Jetman trailer for Mega Man I don't know if that's the character contest boss or not I know they did like a They wanted to do like a fan design or something

But anyway Um We got some news about Final Fantasy 7 revelation Is probably going to be around 200 gigabytes Okay Um, that is fucking psychotic. Uh, that is so big.

I don't, like, can my PS5 even? I don't even know. Uh, I have to go check and see. But, and it's weird, it's weird because it's like, okay, so you're seeing that for a long time. I've been like, I just wish that like, so, so ArchSys is the only company I know that goes back and like compresses their games better and patches it to be smaller. There's a couple, but it's pretty rare. It's the only games. of the games I know.

Yeah, it's pretty rare. It's insanely rare, and it's such an awesome, like, I really appreciate that. If you just have somebody working on that, to just go back and make a game more efficient over time. And so this goes hand in hand with, I guess, there is also news that neural texture compression is going to be something that PS6 games are going to be using,

and it's tech that apparently makes games shrink by potentially 85% of their size. Providing nothing horrible or shitty is involved with the tech there, that sounds promising and good. I sure hope it is not awful in any ways that we have yet to discover. But the idea of going from 150 gigs to 25 gigs is very, very nice and is better, especially in a world where you're selling a, Pardon me.

Whatever version of the hard drive you're selling in the PlayStation, more or less ends up being what you stick with. Like, I know that I can expand the, you know, in my PS5 by plugging in external storage, but I don't want to. All right. So I'd rather not if I could avoid that. Revelations being 200 is not that big of a surprise because FF7 remake is 100 and FF7 rebirth is 155.

So you, my friend. if you were say, I don't know, going to buy the Revelations combo pack, right, which is all three games together, you're looking at 150, 450 gregs, half a terabyte to play the FF7. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see what this NTC tech is going to do for games like that, I suppose, because fuck, man. Like, it should be, it should be an important thing for your game or for someone on the team to be working on compression and making that sane. That should be a thing, you know. By the way, before I forget, there is one thing of note about Revelation, which is if you've actually not played it, or don't have it on the platform you want to play Revelation on.

They are putting out that trilogy bundle. Oh my God. Which is ridiculous. Actually, though. Have you seen what it costs? Actually how? No. Here's what it costs.

The full game is what you would expect from a big AAA game. So it's 90 bucks. The other two are nine bucks and ten bucks. Basically free. Oh. So they're saying, do you want the FF? seven trilogy, pay 20 extra dollars than you would for revelations. Okay.

It's actually a fantastic deal. That's quite reasonable considering how new those games are. Yeah. Please clear two terabytes of installation space for these fucking games, though. Jesus Christ, man. Yeah, like, at least, at least, like, save some space with, like, voice packs for different languages. You know, like, do. No, put them all in there.

Do what you can. Please. Nope. Nope. Okay, beyond that, I guess a couple other things. Metroid Dredd jumped up to the number one spot in the shop after the ravenous reveal, which, yeah, checks out. Makes sense. There have been secret playtests for a new unannounced fighting game that people have been hearing about in whispers in California.

And everyone's like, ooh, what's going on? People are getting, there's something. What are they working on? What are they cooking? And this has been in the background for the last couple weeks. And it seems like the whispers have revealed that they're working on Injustice 3. Anyway, we finally have... Is that a secret?

We finally have some information. Hideo Kajima has revealed what happened a little bit more with the Fizant situation. He sat down to explain. Yeah. Not much to that either, actually. He kind of just said basically that, yeah, you didn't see it coming. Yeah, I've been working. with them for a long time and they just kind of over a Zoom call went nah we're breaking up and

I think they missed like a couple milestones and they asked for a little bit more money and so it was like no and that was that to which and again like I said I'm like yeah you can you can see you can draw a hard line on the details that you need and say I've decided to tighten up the belt after the previous horrible mistakes I've made and and no longer want to have leeway with things like Koji Pro. I get it. And that's that. And though he's like, yeah, whatever. No will, I guess. And then over to Xbox he goes, which, I mean, you know, he sounded very professional about how he was describing things at the end of the day. So to those of you who are like, well, international

development is hard. And obviously a lot of these discussions are going to happen over Zoom. There's a detail to that story that is of note, which is that Kojima Productions is literally directly across the street from Sony Computer Entertainment's Japanese headquarters right there right there they could have literally called him over for lunch and had a sit down

yeah well now that would have been that would have been trivial well now we got to make it awkward when we both leave and hit the same subway stop on the way home from now on like they can see each other from their own windows like into each other's office bro what the fuck

turn the blinds turn the blinds shh. Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's, that's pretty much it, you know, nothing else to it. And it is, what he does describe, like, the inner workings of things, because it does sound like he's like, you know, Kojima doesn't want to describe, uh, the, like, the day in and day out of like, you know, uh, Kojima production's kind of kind of kind of situation. It feels like a lot of like, like, in Western developer cases, you can, you kind of, we'll hear more and see more of that, you know, in like a no clip documentary or something.

But he basically is like, yeah, after Death Stranding 1, we're immediately have to start thinking about how to keep the lights on and how to keep everybody employed and have a bunch of stuff. So they're like, that's where you start working on the sequel, you start working on the movies, you start working on Fisint, you start working on OD and expanding, expanding and whatever.

And then like, you know, to continue being, blah, a studio that doesn't have to gamble on one project. You have to have your finger in many pies and so on, you know? Yeah. So, uh, the, it's it's kind of shitty that it's like well now yes we're picking up and we're going over to Xbox and the project stays alive that way but of all the places you have to trust you know

this is what it's come down to and and then also alongside that is the again the film and all the other thing rights then and do that do they come over at some point and go hey hey Hideo how do you start using AI on your projects. Maybe you should start, maybe, maybe, maybe now you should, you should, you should start using more or more of it and tell our investors about how great it was. Right. And, you know, I don't know. I don't know whatever the conversation with Asha Sharma and then would look like.

But I just don't like the idea that like any of these are all stuck with just whatever Microsoft is doing. In any case, um, I expect that news. You can protect your heart in advance if you expect bad news at all times. I like doing that. I like it. It feels good. Being proven wrong positively actually kicks ass.

And he also in that interview did reveal that like, yeah, he basically was not planning to return to a metal gear type thing because that that was gone and behind him. And he's interested in moving forward. But so many people asked, hey, would you ever make it again? When's more Metal Gear? When's more the thing? And he kind of went, well, I need to make money as a business

with Kojima production. So I suppose offering something that a lot of people are asking me for would be a good idea for that. Yeah, probably. So. Similarly, update to another story. Hey, we're going to be getting updates

to Marvel's Wolverine. So the scent trail. will get less intense. Turn down the farts. Toglable, less intense farts. Turn that fart down. Silent but deadlies will be coming to the game. See, Wolverine takes a little bit of tissue, puts it up to one nostril, and that makes the scent line a little bit less pronounced. Very important. Very important. Yeah, I, I mean, it has definitely eclipsed the conversation, but outside of all that, like the game design, UI, whatever. stuff. Again, I've just, I have heard that like overall, you know, combat is just a bit more lacklester than expected, especially compared to, I guess, Spider-Man or so. Like, it's just,

just not as much going on with it. But, um, they're, they're going to be updating the game. Did you see the trailer for Clive Barker's Hellraiser Revival? I did not, actually. Looks really cool. long. It looks really cool. Look like you are, just in terms of like setting and introducing concept, a fucked up BDSM church. And yeah, and at some point the idea of like, okay, like, we don't even have to go too heavy into the poster titular hellraiser imagery but just the idea of what's going on in this setting is

kind of fucked up and real and interesting looks cool um i'm hearing though that like as great as this as cool as this looks it also is unapologetically unstreamable and has no that makes no attempt to like uh be anything that you can pop up on a twitch stream at any time there's copious amounts of insane blood, gore, nudity, everything, etc. Oh, you can put a lot on there, bud. Like, the girls in Page, they played Outlast Trials.

And Outlast Trials has like a fucking mission where you have to get a bunch of STDs to put it into a vial to inject into some bad man's penis to blow them up. Like, that game's fucking bananas. Like, well, shit. Okay. You can stream almost anything. anything as long as you put a good content descriptor.

And for sexual purposes, you can't make the focus of the stream, the sexual content. So like if I were to play the Witcher on stream, there's like sex scenes and that annuity. But if I was to like, I don't know, zoom the fucking camera in and start huffing and fucking play the scene again, that would be

something different. Okay, well, fair enough. Then again, I get away with fucking dropping hard hours, whatever, and they're, you know, Wait, you're dropping the hard on? I have on this show before.

Oh, wow. Yeah, I'm just saying that, like, I think context, I guess, supposedly might matter or not. I don't know. Maybe if GTA makes it accessible, makes it acceptable, then everything else is fine, right? Fucking bullshit. That's the rule. Fucking GTA changing the fucking YouTube. Like, it's good, but I fucking hate the GTA is what caused it to change it.

Yeah. Anyway, no pinhead or lament configuration, you know, in the trailer even, just, just... I mean, they're holding an evil cube of some nature. Yeah, well, there's stuff, but it's, it's, uh, they're looking cool. And, uh, yeah, what else to have here? Um, new indie game called Knuckle Paradise that looks dope as hell. you are this is

it is it is a woolly bait a bit but you are you playing as a knuckle you are playing as a knuckle girl dropped into a boxing world tournament fight situation and there is a there is a rooster by your side and you and the rooster punch everything and looks dope as fuck

that's cool yeah okay let's take some letters and let's make up for, I suppose, the lack of letters last time. Okay. I suppose. At least one letters. At least one letters.

All right. Let's see over here. No. Okay. Okay. We got, we got a, we got a. Actually, no. We got one over here.

from Mike, aka Restive, how you doing? Hello, Lesser Mason Madden and Adam Eve's dad. That's not very nice. I don't know who that is. That's not very nice. That's very unflattering of view. That is bad for me. It is less flattering for you. Um, yeah. I mean, are you going aesthetic or an attitude because, because, come on. It's a character. It's Adam Eves.

Character from Invincible. Oh, I totally look like that guy. Yeah, you look like that guy. You look like that guy. Yeah, I do look like that guy. But that guy's a piece of shit. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Yeah, that's fine. And also, whether you mean comic book version or adaptation. Anyway, your recent MGS4 discussion has reminded me of my own, um, actually. I'm a bit ashamed of when I'm true. I'm triggered by it. But when people mention Osloat hypnotizing himself using nanomachines like to act like liquid, they seem to misinterpret this as him always doing it to imitate liquid, when Osloat actually was indeed possessed by liquid's arm in MGS2 because of the sorrow and then helped him self-hypnotizing

did not occur until after he chopped the arm off and replaced it with the prosthetic between two and four, lest we forget. They're right. They're right. What are your personal um-actualies that you can't hold yourself back from correcting people about? It is true. There were ghosts before it was brainwashing. It was... And it's like the ghosts are unreliable. I got to go with the hypnotism. Kojima did both. Yeah, it's kind of easy to forget that he did both, but he did do both. There were ghosts. That is actually one of my um-actualies.

sure yeah that like that one uh there's me yelling about the zapping system everybody knows that it's a scenario system guys um actually in bionic commando 2009 rad spencer is actually research and development nathan spencer and super joe is actually the supervisor joseph gipson that sucks oh did you get and the wife are the anyway did you get the wife farm a gag in Onamusha? What was it? I missed it as well, but people told me that, you know, the blind lady that points you to Rashamon, the Wish Warper? Yeah. If you beat Wish Warper and go back to her, she starts talking about how you have a lady in your arm. Maybe she's your wife or something like that.

Oh, man. Yeah. Apparently that was the product. Um, the um actually is apparently that decision was the was made long after grin and Capcom stopped being friendly with each other and just stopped giving a fuck about what was happening in their in their projects and we're just like yeah, who cares do whatever. Um, and man, wait, like, again, it's got its problems, but it's just like that sucks where it could have been an otherwise, like, you know how like Strider came and went to the Strider 27? maybe earlier, 14, 14? I'd say it was earlier. Yeah, where it was like, okay, that was all right.

That was cool. But then, you know, that was it. It was, it wasn't, didn't light the world on fire, but it's pretty cool. Like, like, Bion and Commandos should have been that level, but the YFAR just dominates the conversation, you know. No, I think the fact that, like, a lot of the levels sucked ass actually dominated the conversation. I think learning, learning, learning the swinging at the advanced swinging and mid-air shooting

loop was fun. I think that was pretty cool. I totally agree. However, I think those levels were actually really poorly built to get you to really get good at that stuff. It didn't ask enough of you. Like, you could do too much of that game, just swinging normal. There was the big park where it opened up and did ask you to get it good at midair sniping towards the back half of the game. But like it does it does kind of then streamline right into the finale after that. So anyway, like you know what game doesn't have that fucking problem? Onimusha. Fucking Onamusha.

Yeah. Onamusha, you get to like the fucking last 15% of the game. It's like, hope you learn how to do all this shit. fucker all right here's one from Arka Mergo Leaf

who says hello dad slop one and dad slop four I've been listening to an old podcast where

Pat was complaining about Luke's design and Street Fighter five I was I was worried that

what if Luke was worried about Luke representing the future of Street Fighter and then SF6 would be

a full of would be Fes would be full of bland MMA dudes without any

freaks now we know that wasn't the case because SX six is good and there's proper bullshit in it and freaks.

But it reminds me of another character Pat was complaining about. So there's a question mostly for Pat since Willie wasn't as negative about it. But if six was full of bland MMA dudes, would that be preferable if it meant no Ingrid?

No. Which, in other words, is the extreme away from real, from fight dudes towards God, worse than I can I can fight only,

oops, all crunch berries? I can pick the fly out of my soup but I can't enjoy a soup that's bland and has no flavor. Okay.

Okay. And then what if oops all gods? Well, then that's just not. Then I'll just take a shit on the floor of the restaurant. It's just not even

Street Fighter anymore, I suppose. Yeah. All right. Let's see. We got one over here. Uh, name ungiven.

Letters are shit, huh? Rolls up sleeves, cracks knuckles, spits and spittoo. Here's some shit. Shits uncontrollably. End of letter. Oh, good. Oh. Oh, I guess they got us.

Well, I'm watching in the background like a two or three minute review of somebody playing Bionic Commando in which they described, oh, the game's not so great, but, you know, the swimming is really fun. and I'm watching them just swing like a fucking four-year-old who doesn't know how to use a controller. Like they're swinging and they swing and then they hit the top of the apex and they go and then they let go and try and swing to the next one and it's fucking terrible. Swinging was a skill that had to be learned.

It was and they're running on the ground and then grappling the wall and then trying to jump. And it's fucking embarrassing. I remember the discourse when it came out and people were like, why didn't you make the swinging more automatic? why didn't you make it more you know easy to use and they're like and basically we're like no we want it to be hard because we want you to learn how to get good at it

and then to you know use it later in the game and then for the multiplayer as well you got a good hang on on like fighting other people which had some cool ideas going but that game like quality scales linearly with how good you get at the swing it does

and it goes it goes all the way from a four to like a seven and that's a pretty fucking broad brush that design still sucks ass would I fight for a 7.5 I don't think I would

I don't think I was doing that fight in my mind as I start you could you hear me and it's because it's because of the mid-air snipe in multiplayer mode and resume swing like yeah that demo

had a wave stronger multiplayer life than that goddamn full game. I never, I got into like one match. Like it's, it's just like, like it just felt super cool to manually lock on,

swing through midair, headshot somebody, pull back out and continue to swing around the map and aim for where you're swinging. Like that's a feeling that's fucking locked to that moment. Um, all right. Uh,

let's see. Let's take one more over here. Anthony asks, Dear Roar of Earth and Snapshot King My name is Anthony. That's a long time. Been watching the channel since Kirby's Epic Yarn. I know way too much about the old channel and the current.

So how about some fast easy yes or knows? Woolly, do you still hate eggs? Yes. Pat, do you still hold the whole roll of toilet paper in the bathroom? And did you teach the boy? No, too many mistakes have happened. I don't do that.

Woolly, do you still own that copy of Marvel versus Capcom 3? Yes. Pat, do you still stir your toothbrush in a glass of water? And did you teach the boy? No, I don't stir my toothbrush. We set the boy's toothbrush up for him. Willie, do you still have that atomic purple Game Boy from the mailbag? Yes.

Pat, do you still have the rubber fist? Nope, that was given away to a friend of mine as a gag. and she forgot about it and then her sister found it under her bed and was like, what's the fuck? And then it got thrown away. I can explain. Can you?

Should you? Holy shit. Oh, boy. That's damn. I have questions, but you know what? Yeah. It's better off left as is. Take it easy, everybody.

Have a good one. Oh, wait, go back. Whoa. Oh, I forgot to tell everybody. This week I'm doing a shit ton of streams. In particular, page is streaming in two hours over at Twitch.tv slash peateliva. But also, I'm starting at like 10 a.m. a bunch of days. Because Silent Hill Town fall is out tomorrow morning.

Are you? Because I'm going to buy the fancy edition. Town? Yes. Yes. I am town. Yes, it looks pretty good. Town's in lowercase, actually. So it's actually, are you town?

It looks pretty good. Yeah.