Castle Super Beast - CSB392: Torchwood's Strongest Soldier

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Download MP3 | Watch Video Episode Full Timestamps: https://docs.google.com/document/u/5/d/e/2PACX-1vRXRb7iHbfdUMLpIxhJTJqPVhhD196EF7HIq9c1FP1pqm0MKORGjp5czWlrSSm5h3cUIS0ISS1G-CBL/pub Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive Zero Company Pops Off Why is Ace Combat 8 so Great? Skydance: Somehow, Bobby Kotick Returned Gamestop Scumbag Pricing Letter Time: Post Stall Maneuvers & Wavedashing NEW CASTLE SUPER BEAST "LEGACY" SHIRT & DESKMAT AVAILABLE NOW: https://www.orchideight.com/collections/castle-super-beast Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster at http://rocketmoney.com/SUPERBEAST Go to http://buyraycon.com/superbeast to get 20% off The Everyday Earbuds Classics! Go to http://drinkag1.com/SUPERBEAST and for a limited time, get a free Immune Support Bundle, including a bottle of Omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of Vitamin D3K2, with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro! Docket: Sources: Ape Escape revival in the works from Sonic Mania team | VGC 2XKO would have needed an MAU base "in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions" to succeed | GamesIndustry.biz GameStop Is Now Selling Used PS5 Pros For $1400 Capcom Announces Plans to Transform the RE Engine Into an AI Generation Game Engine — 'Our Goal Is a Future Where We Create Games Together With AI' NBA 2K25 is being delisted later this month, with servers shutting down at the end of the year. All online modes (including the single-player story mode, which is tied to online currency) will no longer be playable. BREAKING: Star Wars Zero Company studio Bit Reactor has brought some of its furloughed workers this week. Most of the studio was furloughed a few weeks before launch Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery will be named Skydance, announces David Ellison | Hollywood David Ellison has shown an official graphic of everything Skydance will own after acquiring Warner Bros and Paramount.  

Good morning. Hi. How you doing, man? Okay. Okay. You know, um, feeling, feeling an improvement and we'll, yeah, feeling good enough to sit and hit the button. So, oh, that's good. That's good.

Ah, so what's up? Um, not, not much. A, um, what's been going on? Uh, there has been a, um, a week of things. I don't know. Did you, did you have a lot on your side? Yeah. You had quite a few things. I had like the busiest weeks of like the past year.

Okay. Well, let's just start, you know, passing the hot potato back and forth. Okay. On my end, I spent a good bit more time with Zcom, aka Zero Company. Where people have now been hired back. Yay! The furlough breaking news. The furlough workers are starting to come back.

That's nice. And it is, I mean, it is extra nice now that I especially have more context here that, like, this game is really good. Really, really good. It's really good. It would have been okay if they got fired if the game was bad. But the game is good, so it's extra, extra good. Anyway, but no, the... So, like, it's hard to make the judgment because we're not there and the game did come out well.

But like, I feel like running the economics of your, of your studio to the point where everyone has to get, like, leave for a couple of weeks because you ran completely out of every single dime is maybe cutting it too close. Yeah, that's, that's worrying. Very worrying. Here's what I can say. It reminds me of a vanillaware does that. Oh, do they Every game they put out No, they don't furlough

But every game Vanillaware puts out They put out a statement Going we are out of money Right The company will go under If this doesn't do well If you don't port it to fucking PC

It will But they don't hit furlough Yeah They don't like They have enough money For like a couple of months Well there was a point in time Where I was like

Vanillaware is George Kamitami And like an office manager Is what it felt like Yeah You know and I don't think That's the case But I know it kind of feels that way Sometimes you see

a company name and then you're like, are you a company or are you just one person? You know? Like if vanillaware is like limping over the finish line, then the zero company devs are like a corpse being dragged over the finish line by a horse. It's like you did it. You did tech. The studio did make it to release. Yeah. Like I mean, I just, another one of those was I saw the, what was the company called?

Evening Star, I believe, is the company that is that made Stonic Mania. And I was like, oh, Christian Whitehead? And it's like, well, there's a game company. There's other people involved in the whole thing. And it's like, oh, of course. Yes, but it's Christian Whitehead's company like the studio.

Yeah, yeah. And like, okay, cool, cool, cool, cool. So they're in the news because they're going to be working on something new coming up. In any case, though, Zero Company, Star Wars. Story and plot wise, fucking, where I stopped talking about it last time. I was around cycle 23 or so.

Boy, it pops the fuck off right after. I was giving some impressions of like, things are pretty good. And immediately after last podcast, I sat and played a bit more and shit starts going. And it goes in a major way that's really, really interesting. It does some very fun things.

you know, with the, with the, with the, the world you're in, the setting you're in, you know, it does some fun things and you're rolling your crew. Oh, you just reconnected? I think you're, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm messing with stuff over here. Don't worry about that. Yeah, and it does some fun things with your character. It does some fun things with just like, overall, like how the story advances. It's cool.

I really, really like what they're doing. And, you know, no spoilers. but it is like gameplay is like only gotten a bit more complex. Like, there we go. Okay, that's important. We're on the boost can. I need to get that correct to do. We're on the boost can.

There we go. Star Wars Wipe. Appropos. I love the Star Wars Wipe. I wish other movies did it. And I wish those movies were the wrong movies. I wish we were watching a thriller with Sam Jackson. And it got really intense and just StarWipe out of the fucking shot.

That would be great. Okay, so Star Wars gets really intense. But what is the, just, you know what? Tell me in the chat. Oh, what is the pop-off? You just want to know? I'm not going to get to that for like a year. I'm not going to get to that for a lot.

Well, there's, I might never get back to that. There are multiple pop-offs. And they're- I'm playing two MMOs right now, Willie. Okay. Okay. I'm, so. I'm at the point where I need to ask. people to spoil me on things

so that I get off my ass and do it. I need, I need, um, I need the, the fictional equivalent of your wife saying fine, I'll go get the groceries. Okay. Okay. Out of the car. Uh, I'll just, I'll just write it out here then.

Yeah, do it, do it, do it. Yo! I'm gonna get back to that. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And then after that point, Um, I, I can't type as a, and, and, and, do, do double whatever. Yeah, that's fine, that's fine, that's all I need. That's all I need it. Okay, yeah.

Oh, that's a, that's, that's, that's a big one. Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna get this dog, excuse me. Yeah, it really, and then there's more after that, right? It's, it's fucking really cool. And then, that is really cool. You have, but what's funny and interesting is that, like, while this is all popping off and things are going in the story,

your gameplay's not getting that much more complex. It's like kind of just bringing out enemies that are, you know, marginally tougher than they were. But overall, the same strategies I've been using are applying and I haven't encountered anything that's been really, really hard so far. I've had, you know, no characters die or anything like that. So I was playing on normal And I didn't play it for as long as you have

But I also found that I was in absolutely no threat Of anyone dying at any point Whatsoever And And you are Yeah okay sorry one second I'm seeing some people talking about I'm horribly out of sync

It's true You look normal on my end in the Discord call So I'm not sure Thank you What that is about Yeah You look very in sync to me. I don't know.

But anyways, the idea is that, like, I guess, yeah, the threat of permadeath is always around the corner, but I've really never felt it. I didn't really feel that threat at all. Especially once you get the ability to, like, bring medics on, you know, your team. Oh, I started. My hawk was a medic. Oh, okay. Interesting. So, like, I was extra not afraid.

Yeah. of having anybody go down. There are, there is a, there is a really cool mechanical like change that happens later on too. But like, yeah, overall, I'm just, I'm not, it seems like the missions where things start to get really overwhelming, your goal is never to kill everybody. It's to just like get the fuck out of there. Escape.

Yeah. So, um, I'm not afraid of like, reinforcements, reinforcements, reinforcements, you know. although there was once or twice where it was like hold the fort for as long as possible type of thing but yeah I'm getting I'm getting along there but like yeah really really cool stuff that game's doing and I

definitely can say that the you know besides the mechanics and such the Star Wars flavoring is being used quite well so kudos to that company which is not Fyraxus right it's Bit Reactor who is former Fireaxus

Fire access employees, but it is not actually a direct ex-com. I thought it was actually direct X-com like spin-off, not spin-off, but I thought it was literally from the same studio, but it's former people, which is, which you explain some of the differences between the game. It's always former people now.

Everyone's getting laid off so fast. It's always from the people who brought you this before they got laid off. Yeah. So, uh, I'm on cycle 31 right now and we're getting up there. It's interesting too because like there's there's some upgrades and things that I'm doing where I'm like I know I'm not doing this optimally but I'm kind of stuck in my ways now.

Like I was sending none of my main mission people out on the secondary expeditions. I would only send the people I don't play with because I was like what if someone dies on the mission? And then that never happens. Literally all they do is get bond up. So I'm like, oh, I missed out on some really good XP by doing that. Sometimes they might get injured, but that seems to be it so far. But I've, yeah, I kind of missed out on that, I suppose.

And there are like really expensive base upgrades that you can choose between like expanding the rooms in your base, making your guns better, or increasing your influence in some rooms. in some areas of space and it's kind of like, or making the black market better. And it definitely feels lopsided in terms of like what your points are spent on. Like buying an amazing grenade that pushes things and does damage

or expanding your weapon slots is way more worth 3,000 credits than what was it? Making your pistols crit a little bit more. I can't imagine anything I'd want more in that game than more and better grenades.

The grenades are just like so good in that fucking game. Sometimes to those missions where you assign people will be like, you're going to need to set, you're going to need to scout out the location and infiltrate

to see whether you can scout for details. Who do you send? Trick again. Or Or sometimes it's literally like There was one that was like A tree planting mission

Need someone to peacefully Grab a tree And escort it to the soil It is going to be planted in Send one Padawan You know, you're like, okay, well I think I think I know who to send You know cab uppercut again

Every time Yeah But no, that game's coming along quite nice and I'm very, very impressed with its narrative and what it's doing. And I'm also, yeah, I dig what their, what their, you know, what Hawk Shepherd is up to as far as as far as leaders got. It's, it's really, like we said it before, it's really, really Hawke Shepherd. And I, and I had a solid like, hold on, she's setting her own path right now. she's stepping away in doing her thing and that's cool.

And then there was another big pop off. And I'm like, no, we're back to Shepard. You know, but it's great. So that's, that's nice. I also, what did I do? Yeah, we did a slop stream. That was a lot of fun. We're taking back the word slop.

That'll be dropping. We'll be getting the edited version. Well, you're taking the word slop back from ourselves who also used the term slop for the other thing. Correct. Correct. But now AI has gotten involved in the usage of the term. But more importantly, I need to take it back from Russia because, uh, oh yeah, that was awesome. Yeah. I was like, hey, what happened to Willie stream? I like, what do you mean what happened a Willie stream? So I went and clicked on the Vod and was like, taken down by Russian state media. So, like, oh, wow. So as funny as that is, it's actually ideal. It's actually ideal because by dual streaming to

YouTube. What happens now is I get to see exactly what needs to be edited or cut around when we do the proper Woolly versus whatever edit, which I release afterwards. And I can see exactly what the problem clips are and we can work around them in advance. So it's all really good information. So I'm actually happy with how that went. I have a pro tip for you, my friend, if you care about monetizing your YouTube videos. You know what? Just don't go ahead. and stream any kingdom hearts at all. Oh boy. Just

Oh boy. Just don't fucking bother. Is it the music or just all of it? It's the music. Yeah, okay. And you're like, oh, you mean it's the Utata Hikaru songs, right? Well, even one second of it gets through, it counts. But also like dozens of songs off the regular soundtrack also clear it. Um, just,

just, f- fucking. Anything even slightly related to Arkham, go fuck yourself. Do not. Oh yeah?

Do not even do. I didn't know that. All of it. All of it. Unless you want to play it silently. What are you going to do? You know? Um,

but you can't do that. But yes, Lops for him, proper edit coming up, uh, your way very soon. As well as some cutout clips because,

you know, we like to do that too. So fun stuff there. Um, played a little bit more of that ony musha got to shootend doji shooting dogy oh man i love shooting dogy yeah man like it just nothing much to say besides hey guess what new week new new new oni musha boss new pop-offs higher than the previous expectations we're soaring to the heavens like more importantly than shooting doji you get your oomusha trigger you get your oomusha trigger

ODITRI. Yeah, you do. And it has one of the best gimmicks for an altered form I could ever, ever see, which is, it just takes the core hard gameplay and just makes it easier so that if you can't ESN in normal gameplay, you can definitely easen with this. And that will get you going, hey, maybe I can, maybe I could easen more often a normal gameplay. That's a nice encouragement. Yes, it's taking, it's giving you the, uh, the 8 frame ESN timing as opposed to

to the two frame on things. And, um... Oh, it's way bigger than eight. Is it? It's way. It's, it's like 30. Okay. It's, it's so easy.

Which reminds me of when it's almost like how, um, gradient counters in Expedition 33 encourage you to try a parry out, you know? Yeah. You get the feeling of a cool parry moment from like a different implementation of the mechanic. Yeah. So like when you have, uh, a oni on a musha mode on you like you you you can trivily fuck you woolly would be able to trivially

ESN like literally everything I noticed I noticed that yeah everything I was going for because I was waiting for some overheads but like everything I was going for seemed to work quite a bit no I don't mean like the ones you think you can go for I mean like like everything like the whole time you're on just go for it every time. And then before it wraps up, make sure to cash out and, and, you know, do your judgment cut end, basically. It is extraordinarily sick.

Very cool. Yeah. And it's a nice, there's an incredible visual detail with that final hit in Oni mode, where the game puts a punch of trees in the environment that weren't there before that you can cut down with the animation. Did it? Okay. I've only, I'm still in the fight. So next time you do it,

pay attention to all the trees you cut down that weren't there before you started the animation. Birds for scale, trees for power. You know, like, hell yeah. And like, depending on where you are, like, it looks really stupid because, like, the trees will be over water and all sorts of shit, but it's like, no,

oh, you sliced them all. It was so cool. Exactly. It's what it represents in your heart. Shut up. The metaphorical trees were sliced. That's sick. I'm extraordinarily happy. Extraordinary.

Extraordinarily happy with the trajectory that game is on. The final boss fights so fucking great, dude. Yeah, we are continuing. That final boss is an order of magnitude harder than all the other bosses. Mm. Mm-mm-mm-mm. Like, like, I was like, all right, let's go. and it is more phases

and it demands much more perfection. Okay. Like I can see why people got to the end of the game and we're like, what the fuck? Because it is, it is like twice as hard as the next most hardest boss. I mean, it's kind of incredible to put this all in one difficulty setting, right?

To have this insane gamut of like starting off super easy and then ending the way you're describing. That's balzy. It's like an eight. hour PS2 game that got stretched out into 35 hours. Like it has the same like, like gradient, but like, but it's long. But I just, I feel like games don't do it like this anymore, right?

They kind of pick a couple lanes and then go like, what speed do you want to stay at? You know? Would you like to have some cream for your vagina or ultimate death nightmare? Are usually the only two options. Stop your dick out. Yeah. Like, really. Um, but like, but in this case, it's like, you start with like, no, tell me a story.

All right. Tell me a story, mommy. And then, uh, I like action games and then punish her and then hurt me more, daddy. Right. Um, in any case, though, um, the, uh, um, speaking of, of stomping you out as well, uh, gotten a little bit further into the iron keep. And it's funny to watch as. Oh. Reggie's making it through the scholastic iron keep, that is, right?

And you get through these enemies and they have a certain agro range, but there's still just so many of them. And they basically... That area was like fucked up in Scholar. That is now the new... Amana was the worst area before, and Iron Keep is the worst area in Scholar. Right, less archers, more dudes up on your ass, more weird. more webes and

yeah like you're that sprint towards the fog gate becomes impossible right you actually it's a it is actually done to it you cannot

you must stop they're like five guys hitting you with katanas yeah which is it's interesting because like it felt like such a deliberate like run placement

it felt like they very much wanted you to in the past be able to run to the smelter door but and I guess that's not the case because the new placement makes it very clear

they don't want you to do that at all, right? Much less run to the cooling fountain and then to the smelter door. And not use too many sips, mind you. But what's interesting is like, yeah, like multiple struggling attempts Reggie was doing on the way through the keep. And then two shots on smelter, called it a day, you know? Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, that is the knowledge of the future coming through, right? Absolutely. Because you, I remember the double digits of fights I had. on Smelter and how insane of a run stopper that was back then, first from soft game ever. And now that you know the bag of tricks, you're like, okay. I brought

this up a couple of times, but have you been back to Demon Souls after any of the other ones? Well, Reggie played through the PS5. No, no, have you? Have you been back to Demon Souls? I played through, right? Yeah, we did an LP. We did an LP of the PS5 version. And I

played through it myself personally, prior to it. It's a joke. Yeah. Absolutely. It's like, it's a joke. Yeah. Like, Flame Lurker is completely, like, ridiculous for all the memes of how difficult it was at the time. It's, it's hilarious how easy and nonsense it was now. Like, the ones that bring to mind is like the old hero and adjudicator and, like, every boss on World Four is. So this is why I'm curious to see because I'm like, I'm remembering all these hard times I had, right? And so the stuff that's coming up in my brain, obviously, are Dark Lurker and. Ramey. I'm like, are those... Dark Larker's still fucked up. Oh, Dark Lerker's fucked up because of the split. But, like, is the overall pattern now more

recognizable because you've seen these patterns before, you know how to handle the duos, the fucking four-skin duos and stuff like that? And the group is not as threatening as it used to be. My understanding is that the bosses that had gimmicks that were like fucked up,

those gimmicks are still fucked up. So Dark Lurker's splitting directly in half and just forcing you to both bosses simultaneously and it being real bosses, that's probably still fucked up. Orphan in Bloodborn, never not going in. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like is still fucked up.

Because I can see, I can see the, I can see Concord Radon forever being a fuck you level of challenge, right? I don't know that we get complacent to that. Well, they said that the Miyazaki said in the interview, I think this is as far as we can push it in this gameplay system. And now what are we doing? We're super jumping and super sprinting and making the character you use more hyperactive to bring the challenge higher.

What if the wolf from Sekiro was in a Dark Souls game? Would they be able to fight bigger? Yeah. Like this is the challenge is the ceiling has now increased because you are a hyper like Souls character. So the thing you're fighting can be fucking Baltaeus, you know? But when when I think. about that and I think about again like Ramey you know I'm just like is this actually going to be as bad as it was now that we know the rules everyone is aware of weight roll back off sip you know everyone everyone has all of that down but it took the entirety of my first Dark Souls 2 play through to really really internalize that patience you know um sip or swing back off don't get greedy rely on if you have a summon with you use that agro if not

then okay, look at the pattern. Don't go in on that attack. You don't know whether it's a fake or not. You know, like all these little things that trivialize a boss like smelter to just become, yeah, roll around the combo. And when he goes to do the explosion in the ground, back off so that it doesn't actually, you don't have to guess. And then only swing on you know for sure, you know?

It's quite, you know, it's interesting to watch. I'm thinking back to Eldon Ring and there's something about Eldon Ring that I feel like it made it like a little easier over time which was Margots your first big big boy wall right and I remember like at neutral if you hit that square button

on frame one of your character's arm coming out you fucking throw knives and I was like oh okay input these these bosses have now gotten to the point where they will like input read me and react with like specific moves. Okay, we can, we can kind of work around this. There are correct times to attack and just not okay times to do anything else.

The roll catch stuff always, it makes me so upset. It mentally makes me so upset. If you go back to like, if you were on hand for something like Dark Souls 1 and 2 right now, you might get into the situation where you're getting anti-anty-roll-catched, where if they swing their arm up, you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, oh, he just swung. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, well, so with Fume, I'm thinking of this.

To me, the first roll catch was this, right? Fumes horizontal, where it's like, oh, it's slower than you think it is, you know? But anyway, we'll find out, we'll find out. as far as the as far as the scholastic changes go, it's interesting to see them not prioritize that, which you thought they would have, you know, and he's still optional too.

You can just roll past it. But yeah, their vision, the director's vision after everything was said and done was fuck you. No, you can't sprint to that door. No,

you're going to actually fight all of these guys every time and you're going to get the armor, god damn it. You're like, but yeah, it's, it's, we're having fun with that. Big Walk, fun stuff. We're seeing a little bit more of that too. And there's some, there's some fun information as you, as you progress. Again, it really feels like embarrassing that the house house was able to come along and not embarrassing.

But it just, they just did this concept that others have tried and not succeeded at and just nailed it. you know, how to have, how to have a, a fun island puzzle setting work. Good stuff, good stuff going on with, with, with big. What did, did House House make anything before this? Untitled Goose game.

Oh, wow, that's quite the fucking jump, isn't it? Yeah. A hundred percent. Super chill and, though I guess it kind of makes sense because Untitled Goose game is just walk around going, I wonder what happens if I do this. That's it.

That's it. That's all. Yep, they bring that energy and it's and it's and it's and it works really, really well. And and lots of, lots of like, uh, a masterclass in signposting because that's all you have in, in a walk around and look at things and consider what they might be kind of game. Um, and, uh, one other thing. Uh, so yeah, I just wanted to double check, but yeah, the, the embargo is up. so this is out. I got sent something over here that you all might have heard of.

Always check your embargoes, folks. You always do them. I got sent the Summer Eternal Manifesto. Really? This book that is, they have announced their whole thing. So you remember Summer Eternal. It's one of the. Disco likes, I believe.

Yes. So when disco split off into all the different fractures and we saw the disco meme, we had the Summer Eternal, which were some of the devs, former Zahom, that went on to found their own studio. And they put out the website that was the insane burning manifesto of art. And it was extreme and it was powerful. And we just sat here being like, oh, man. I sure hope that energy can get turned into a game.

I hope that they figure that out. But boy, are they true believers? The art burns within, and it burns intensely. Now, is that the art burning within that will burn them out? Right, we'll catch fire and burn it down? We will have to find out. We will have to find out. But I know that if you checked out the Argo-Tulik human can opener interview, you're familiar with him.

And so this is the studio that he's working at alongside a number of others ex-employees. And what they decided to do was they have, like, we kind of were like, okay, they've got the writers and they've got the artists. We'll see how programming and some of the other stuff comes together. So what they do is they wrote a book. And this book is the The first half of this book is basically interviews with people in the games industry About the process of making a game and Okay

And in this instance it is It is that plus their manifesto for how they want to run this company And The second half of the book is the announcement of the game that they're making. So they wanted to announce it in this form as opposed to in like a regular press release form. And so

what you have here, the first half of this is also it's kind of, it's crazy. Like so the first half of this is this is the most communist thing I have ever read in my life. It is crazy. It makes Marx

look like Marx. Okay. All right. It's It is wild. And the, so I know you can go, you can grab it. But like the way they have this thing set up to is like,

if you get the book, I believe either the special edition or one of the, the ways it's being sold is like, you also then are part of the, a percentage owner of the company. And you are a part of the collective that has a share in it as well. I believe there's a 5% group shareholder thing going on. So there is already a collective co-op.

thing happening with simply owning the book. And then the back half, which is announcing the game itself is like a really elaborate GDD with art and characters and such. And it also comes with a vinyl of the music that's going to be in the game. So they have the musicians as well. And they've kind of break down the premise of what the game's going to be. Now, I, I am overwhelmed. by this shit is never coming out energy.

I am like, oh, I am like, oh, like it's never going to come out. The art is burning. The art is, the art is burning. And it's there. And the funding of this book directly funds, I believe, the production of the game. And if it does and when it does, it sounds very cool because it's called Project Red Rooster. and I might get some of this wrong as I elevate or pitch it, but like it basically introduces a main character

who's this kind of goofy-looking individual that has been locked up for basically creating a device that made a bunch of people simultaneously go catatonic in a form of mass meditation at some point. Oh, that's not good. And it's a very like, it's an adult person with a very childlike kind of demeanor. Like he's got like a mustache and everything.

There's a little bit of Harryism, but it's like a, it's a different character for sure. And the deal is is that, the premise is that there's a city where, uncontrollable wildfires and arson fires, perhaps,

are being set and burning things down. And, uh, you are being called in to solve the fires that are being set as you'd know a thing or two about them because your character's backstory is that when you were a child at six years old, old, you burnt your house down and your parents were in it and your parents died and you accidentally killed your parents.

And that's pretty heavy. It's very heavy. And they introduced right on like the way that you did it was you snuck into your dad's room and looked at his projector, which had porn projector film on it. And that caught flame and burnt everything down. And that's your fucked up past that you're dealing with as you go into solve the wildfires. So that is your premise to begin. It feels like the start of an am I the asshole for burning down my parents' house by looking at my dad's flammable pornography.

You have, I think perhaps. You have an older brother that is much more on the straight and narrow and they're much more of the heroic being that's there too. And your Kim Katsurugi in this case is like a math, this woman who's a mathematician that calculates better. when she's on opioids. Of course. And this is your, and this is your, your, your, your pitch going forward.

Like all mathematicians. Yeah, yeah. So this is made, you know, being made with, again, the burning spirit in Croatia. They're fucking doing it. And, um, I,

I really, I would, I want this shit to happen. Uh, I hope it can happen. I don't know how you turn all of this into the video game that we play. But my fingers are crossed.

and I would like to see it happen. But yes, it does definitely feel like all the, again, all the assets and all the art and everything is happening there. But like, I want to, I don't know where the programming and the video game are. But if we can, if we can make that part happen, then okay, you know? But announcing the game in the form of a book is fucking crazy. That's not. It's crazy work. And it's really interesting because I was just thinking while you were describing this,

because this is like the burning heart of like the spirit of the disco parts rather than the Elysium. Yes. And zero parades came out. And pretty much everybody, well, some people gave it the time of day, but like that situation was just so messy. Messy that most people didn't. But one of the themes going on in that, is that game is about bootlegs and fake culture and copies and knockoffs.

And the inability to recreate the magic. And it's like that is an incredible theme for the bootleg disco elysium game you have to make. Yeah, the core idea of the one-off media device that can only be played once and never listen to again, right? As far as being like,

you're making a disco-alnesium like 100%. that is there. The thesis statement is will never be Disco-Eleason. You will never. It was a time, it was a moment, it won't happen again. Stop thinking it will, you know?

But in the meantime, can we march under the red burning banner and create something new here? I mean, maybe if the video game part happens, but if you want to get a book and an art book and interviews and music and like again all the people here are able to do all that stuff you know but there's a whole other side that's very very very very hard to do and i i worry

that people that are this intense about fighting the power that still have to make a game under a you know a capitalist system will at some point in development hit the point that many of these groups hit, which is, hey, why are you making all the decisions? Why do you have the power? Aren't we supposed to be a collective? Well, I'm the director. Yeah, but like the infighting potential of this type of ideology is very high. Potentially. I guess if there is a structure that accounts for how much time can be spent hurdling, you know, over protests or over a protestation of towards the direction of where things are going, you know, because if someone is like, hey, I'm going to steer the ship, is everyone okay with that? You know, and everyone's like,

I'm okay with it for now, you know, then, um, yeah, that works. But then if, uh, it's like, eventually you start steering into choppy water and everyone's like, I don't like where you're steering. And then you start debating whether that someone else should start taking, uh, steer of the ship. Do we even need a ship? And then you go, okay, can, well, how, how, is there a time limit, how long do we have to get to our destination? We'll talk about this in a little bit when it comes into XKO news, but there is certainly a time limit when... You can't put a price on art.

When the money runs long and or when people's expectations run long. And it's weird that we're in that place where the moment you announce something, you have... Like I said, you have soft three years before people start getting really like... You have to have special circumstances to get infinite. time. You need to have delivered like for decade plus with all bangers before

people just go, okay. I'm going to say delivered a decade plus length of bangers that are still ongoing where people don't necessarily want the replacement. You know what I mean? Like I think almost like a StarCraft 2 situation where like it's out people are playing the thing and they're continuing to play the thing and no one's really looking for that next one.

StarCraft's biggest competitor was fucking brood for from decades earlier. Right. That's the space you can be in if you're going to take a really long time, I think. But these are all different things. We're talking about a narrative RPG at the end of the day, you know. But I just, yeah, this, I wanted to bring attention because, yeah, I got this. And there's there's some fucking cool ideas in here. I want them to become a reality.

I hope that they will. I'm enthusiastic for it. There is always a chance that they don't, but hey, glass half full. and boy boy the fire though like oh my god like I mean they they I think they stop short of like

full on naming names but like the you know oh oh like the some of the heat is from the tea I just like it feels like game design with guillotine in the backyard

you know it feels kind of nuts Like you get to the credits and it's like, rise up! Like actually, though. Actually. And, you know, again, you are, it starts with you being part shareholder by simply purchasing, you know? So you can look into that shit. Yeah, no, I can see a game like that being like, congratulations.

You understood the message and you're a true comrade. If you would like to talk more, you can reach us at this Discord server. Or perhaps reach out on this signal. Where we just, yeah, yeah, here is a radio signal where we can discuss the revolution further. But they have the sickest slogan ever, though. Yours in every season, Summer Eternal. That's dope. So anyway, that's out.

And you can go, you can go get the announcement of the game in that form. Wild shit. Anyways. So that's the. That's pretty much my week. And yeah, because of feeling sick and pushing things forward a bit, the schedule's all fucked up. So I think we're just going to squeeze in some some Onyusha tomorrow and some fighting games this weekend. Where are you at at Onomusha exactly?

Middle of the shoot and dojee. No, middle of the fight with him. Okay. You have two sessions to go after that. Okay. Unless something stops you Yeah Like that that's that

And I might And I might slow it down and do some Some extraneous stuff too as well But overall yeah I'm hot on that pace And I love the runbacks as well Each time every time So

So tune in for some of that And some fighting games on Saturday There's some fun stuff dropping I think I saw there's like a fan-made Scott Pilgrim fighting game that dropped. So I'm going to investigate what's going on there. I think using some of the sprites from the beat-em-up. And a couple other things.

So that's going to be going down on Woolley versus on YouTube and on Twitch. Oh, also, New versus Wolves is out too as well. Check that out. Okay, do you. What's going on? Okay, so this September is over. It is all done with. That was a long set of streams.

That was, I want to say, 36 days in a row. Capping off with the 24-hour stream, which is, that was a lot. I'm getting a little bit mentally ill there at the end. Getting a little bit. Oh, thanks to everybody for coming out. Very appreciate it. So to anyone who wants to do September and make some goals for like a sub-a-thon, what you should do is not put goals on there that you're like, well, no one's ever going to hit this fucking thing.

Ha-ha, ha. Impossible. And that you can use as like a, well, I told you guys, you could have done it, but you didn't. So ha-ha, I don't have to do it. You have to kind of want to or imagine a whirl. where it would be possible to do the thing. Yeah. So,

due to everyone's extraordinary generosity, in particular that of one Persona EX slash Chris Cross Studios, he got back access to his old Twitch account. I hit all goals, including having to add another goal at the end and hit that goal also.

That's fucking close. So if you want to see what's happening over on Twitch.combe slash Pat Stairsat for the next six to 11 months, there will be Earthbound, a Pokemon Nuzlock, Majora's Mask, Duke Nukeem Forever, Okami, Witcher 2, the other side of Witcher 2, Witcher 3 and all of its DLCs, the FF14 streams are going to have me as a Lollafel

We're going to do a walking pad stream in which age plays a fat guy tuba music behind me. I'm going to have to dye my hair again. And many of these podcasts will feature me in a bonnet with a pacifier dressed up as a tiny baby. I don't like that. I really, I'm not a fan of that. Hey, Wully, would you like to know something? I am also not the biggest fan of that. Because like...

Oh, and Banjo Tui is in there as well. Okay. Because... I will not wear a diaper. I think... But we can't confirm that, right? That's the problem. We cannot confirm that.

I guess you can't confirm that I'm not wearing a diaper right now. And I think, you know, you might... The wrong kind of person might get... the wrong kind of idea. That's all I'm saying, man. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, and Silent Hill 4 as well. So I am going to

I'm going to be planning these out for a bit. We're currently going through Earthbound. And man, Earthbound is such a I love Earthbound. Earthbound is incredible. Hell yeah.

I also hate Earthbound. This is known. There are. what you would call a pain point here and there in Earthbound and those pain points are things that have just been solved for decades

and they are rough as shit in Earthbound and your inventory is the biggest pain point possible. The limitation I'm carrying it's like menu based inventory where it's like what would you like to do with this item

give to Paula okay now Paula has the item and it's like I can't buy a new baseball bat because my inventory is completely full, so I have to actually sell the old baseball bat first. And it's like, okay, well, can I put them into my box? Okay, let me call my sister on the phone. Let me wait around for the minute or two. It takes for a guy to show up.

And then I'll give him like three items. So if I actually want to clear out my inventory, I actually have to like spend like 15 fucking minutes. Yeah, it does. Making delivery service phone calls. It feels like the difficulty is based on not around the idea of like, what if I need it? I'll have to walk with it. And it'll, it's like walk forward and then you hit something and then you get fucks you up. And then you got to reload and change what you're walking with.

You know? Yeah. Like, Ness has like six items that he just has to have on him at all times. It's just, it's, you got your Franklin badge, your receiver phone, your baseball bat, all four. of the fucking things you have equipped. Stock up on bottle rockets. Stock up on, you know, like, do what you can. Um, um, but aside from that, man, even, even from a game like 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, like 25 years ago.

More than, actually, fuck, 30 years ago. Jesus. Like, there's stuff in here that I'm like, oh, wow, this is genuinely super weird and interesting. Like the moonside dungeon. Mm-hmm. Um, with, with all the fucking nonsense teleporting in foreside, after they steal a party member from you?

Uh, yeah, the, um, uh, uh, uh, okay, where, exactly where are you right now? Right now I am standing in front of the monkey dungeon in the desert. Okay, okay, okay, okay, good one. And I am so ready to get super mad about this inventory-based monkey dungeon. Um, But the vibes are making it through. Oh, the vibes are incredible. The vibes are immaculate.

And that's the whole thing. There are, there are so many things going on in this game that are just so funny. Like, I would like, you know, Ness wants to leave town and he just gets jumped by a bunch of cops. Yep.

So I'm like, oh, yeah, so it's like, oh, okay. And that's the thing is like, and you know,

when you go to see everything that came afterwards every Toby Fox, all that stuff. It's like the improvements over the games, the battle system and all that stuff, like step it up and so on. But like the vibes are the main point. The vibes are. There's also enormous value in being first. Like being like, you know,

I played Undertale before I played Earthbound. And so Undertale's tone was like, wow, this is crazy. And now I'm playing Earthbound. And I'm like, wow, that was Earthbound. Yeah. It's what that one. And the only thing you would have been thinking about while playing Earthbound is like movies like E.T.

And, you know, old 80s like hanging out with the boys and running around on your bikes and, you know, type films and shit. Like, that's, that's it. Call your mom because you're homesick. And she tells you that your primary school teacher came around and was like, where the fuck is nest? He has been into school for like weeks. And your mom covers for you and you're like, thanks, mom.

Yeah, stand by me, little rascals, all of that, right? Bro, what the fuck does Ness's dad do for a living? He's busy, but he's proud of him. I know he's busy. I know he's busy, but like, I'm calling him like three, four times a day. And he's like, yeah, yeah, whatever. Here's like $4,000 in 1995 in your fucking ATM. He does work.

That's what matters. He does what, like, he's doing good. Like, he's, it's doing real well. what you thought your dad did back in the day when you were like a kid just doing business business things and money money things that's it you know um it's it's you have an in as much insight into the adult world as you did when you were younger uh and that was such a weird different thing at the time you know especially like we barely were we were starting to catch on to like what like japanese media was kind of up to at the time but like japanese media, but like Japanese

media referencing Western media was like really weird and out of place, you know? I remember in 93 or 94 beating Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and looking at the credits

and they're going, what? And then getting my dad from the kitchen and bringing him in to see Sonic the Hedgehog 2's credits. Like, Dad, what's wrong with all these people's names? Hmm. Why? Like, do they not know how to spell?

And he was like, fuck. Yeah, exposure. No, they're from a different country. That's it. Um, right? And so Earthbound was like a year or two after that. So like, I wasn't knowing nothing about Japanese media at all. I was a baby.

I was like a stupid idiot, moron child. And, and again, there are very few examples like that, right? Where I feel like deadly premonition is also, another Japanese take on looking at Western media and interpreting it back over here, you know? Well, that would be the case of where he had ever seen Twin Feas. If he'd ever seen it, which he clearly has never. And, you know, I would say JetSet Radio to some degree too as well. But there is not many examples of this.

And they're always fascinating as North Americans to us when they do happen. so oh ace combat is that just top gunning all over the place but then becoming even more sincere than humanly possible yes it is okay okay like top gun is sorry not top guy uh ace combat is like basically just i want i wanted you to have cried during top gun i wanted i wanted you have to cried during top gunn also it's just gundam right so it's it's i never it's just I never would have thought about that in the sense that I guess because of the style of plane and air force it is very top gun coded but

there is a world where you know like you go from like Japanese dogfighting history right into pilot stories and you know like it didn't have to go through the top gun lens is what I'm saying like if you're telling me that like there was a bunch of like airplane games. But yeah, it's all, it's, I feel like every time we've seen this, this double filter mirror pointing back at us, it's been really, really interesting.

So, um, no, I, I, I'm glad you're enjoying it. Uh, I think it's really fun. And I'm, I'm so ready to get super mad at this monkey dungeon. I'm so, like, like, that's one of the things is like, like, some of the stuff in Earthbound is so unique and so. so interesting even now. And then other bits and pieces, I'm like, oh, fuck this old shit. God.

Oh, man. And you, oh, I'm glad games stopped doing it like this. Fuck. You can easily just picture again, like, Etoi, the outsider, just being like, yeah, I don't know. These kids want some of this. Well, fuck that. Do it that way instead. Right? Or just having weird observations

about a game or about the way games work and being like, no, that's stupid. Do this. You know, um, there's one or two moments. particular later on that just make fun of games aggressively that are really really funny and like you can only you can only really have that viewpoint if you did not like look at these and go well this is just the way it's we've always done it he came along going what that's dumb why fuck that really like because i don't have to follow the rules i'm a new guy too bad

cool so i've been shot away at earthbound i i ask as whenever you do have to, you know, follow those September promises and the bonnet and pacifier come out. Yeah, yeah. I ask that... I'll try not to come. Okay. Well, just don't make the noises.

Don't pause. Oh, I'm going to do whatever. You know. I'm going to do whatever. And if you pause for any longer than you need to, I'm going to start assuming that something might be happening off camera and that's not good. Yeah, no. No, I'm going to, I'm going to do whatever and you're going to have to deal with it. And I'm sorry.

Like don't, don't hesitate in the middle of any sentence to kind of grunt a little bit, you know? I'm just thinking, like me saying, I'm sorry at the end of that feels so disingenuous when the start of it is like, I'm just going to do whatever. Yeah. It's like the, I'm sorry you feel that way. I'm level apology. I'm worried about the diaper getting one filled one way or another. That's what I'm concerned about, you know. Yeah, all right.

That's fair. That's very fair. I wouldn't worry about that on your end. You're far away. Is that the new arc? Do we start having the most normal, same titles ever? But then when you actually see the video. You get flashbanged with the content therein.

2XCO coming back, Goo Goo Goo Gaga. So Earthbound's great, but old. Chipping away that. I'm exactly halfway through. Pat, don't you have to take a bathroom break? No. No. No.

I've been prepared. I'm prepared. I'm prepared. Also, last week after the podcast, I started to play Ace Combat 8. No, wait, before the podcast last week, right? I briefly mentioned it. You did. You did. You did. And whatever is happening in that game has people in a tizzy because clearly there's big spoilers for big crazy things and everyone is popping off. There's a lot.

So this is a different. That game has an astonishing amount of plot for a game in which 99.9% of the game takes place in an empty sky with you in an airplane. So I know that Ace Combat is nothing but really awesome dogfighting and sincerity and like it's just been solid in the background the whole time. What is it about this entry in particular that is making people react so strongly? Okay, so Ace Combat 8, if you're unfamiliar, Wings of Thieve is a

dog fighting, like arcade dog fighting game where you fly around in planes and engage in a dramatic story, yada, yada, yada. Is it arcade? The tagline of... Is it arcade? It felt more technical Oh, absolutely, when I touched it. Like the, it's, so

you used, you, you, have to, or rather you should roll and pitch and yaw and stuff like that. But compared to a plane simulator, this is like playing a micro machines game. Like it is arcade as shit. This is closer to after burner than a flight. Well, so I was

going to say after burner, I played in the arcades and enjoyed the fuck out of and that was my, that's what I would call an arcade plane game. My plane right now has 150 missiles. Okay. I also just remember like flying the plane wrong and crashing multiple times.

when I played Ace Combat. Yeah, you've got to try it a couple of times before you get there. And Ace Combat, it's the newest in all of these. And the core of the Ace Combat experience is a hyper sincere lock you in your eyes, stare at you, anti-war story. And like, whereas you would have some games like talk to you about how war is bad, I would say the way Ace Combat tells it to you. you is closer to a man walking up to you and grabbing both sides of your face and explaining it

to you from one inch away while you're wondering if he's going to try and kiss you. Yeah. Right. Just like just the level of intensity on absolutely everything is, is a, A, A, like, just hot. Now, while you are being 100% lecture to about the horrors of war in various Gundam series, they also weren't so cool. really zoom in on the new armor and this crazy shoulder pad that fucking shines and check out this sword war is so cool dude it's so oh dude so like before we get into before we get into even answering your

question there's a mission like later on in the game where you're liberating a city um and the city has been blown to bits like there are massive like 10k sized craters all over the city all the planes are being like, all the, all the, all the buildings are in shambles. Like, everyone's evacuated and we're like, we're trying to liberate the city, but like, it's, it's ruined. Like, it is, it looks like a, like a, like a, like a Polish, like post-World War II city in terms of ruins, right? And as your wingmen are, like, expounding on how pointless the war has been and how it's

been the most awful loss of life ever, I'm flying at like twice the speed of sound trying out my new L-cam ground target missiles that blow up like an entire installation with a fucking 5K boom and it's like, oh wow, these things are incredible! And like

just like it forces that dichotomy on you on like every single mission and it's so fucking funny. But as to why Ace Combat 8 now? Ace Combat 8 is way

longer than the other games? I was going to say the cooler the planes get, the badder war has to be. That's right. Yeah. Um, Ace Combat games tend to be about 20-ish missions. Um, Ace Combat 8 is about 30. And they use those 30 missions to do everything you could possibly want in a dog fighting plane game with, uh, a tenuous grasp on reality. Do they ever go full on our type ride-in level? you're fighting an insane, like, armored core boss type shit. Yes. Okay, they do.

In three. You're fighting like, you're fighting like UFO style planes. I've only ever seen other planes, so yeah. Or like, only ships. They do, okay. Well, so the,

the big one in, the big, like, long-term boss that you're fighting in Ace Combat A, it's called the Land Battleship. Um, it is essentially a star destroyer made into a tank. and you're also fighting large scale

um large scale planes that are the size of like aircraft carriers that are just like a hundred kilometers long yeah that's that you just have to shoot down to the air right right um so in terms of your dog fighting you have your you have your helicopters and your sam sites and all this shit and then you have your enemy planes then you have your enemy aces but on top of that you have um like the land battleship, which is a fucking Star Destroyer, you have these gigantic plane installations. You have also, you have a, I don't know what to call it, like some kind of super bomber that can outmaneuver you on a dime. All sorts of crazy fantasy sci-fi shit.

But that's not why people are going so crazy about Ace Combat 8. Ace Combat 8 has like the best, most interesting story by far of any of the ones that I've played. because the theme of Ace Combat is propaganda. It is about lying in war. And they take the theme of what lying during war means to the fucking stratosphere on every single mission. We have missions in which we're faking attacks to divert resources elsewhere. We have missions that end up being pointless because the target wasn't there. We have guys photoshopping entirely fake plane squadrons.

We have your social media guy on the deck making a fan cam of some of your planes to upload on TikTok with like Ace Combat music over it. To like get people excited into the war effort. Because I feel like in my brain I would assume every single Ace Combat game has a false flag mission, which then you have to go avenge, you know? More or less. Something like that. We have on top of that, whenever you're having to deal with the land battleships, the land of battleships can fire from off mission, like, you know, like two, 300, 400 kilometers away. So you'll get Kira Buckland saying, a rail gun warning.

And you will see the targeting laser come from fucking over there. And you have two seconds to get the fuck out of the way before the entire sky explodes right in front of where you were flying. Is it like rusty I won't miss like from way of the fuck? Oh yeah, but but you're the worm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So I'll talk about a mission that is like, um, uh, maybe halfway through the game that really sums up like exactly what I'm talking about. So you have a mission where you have to destroy a immobilized land battleship.

And the only way to do that is have your bombers come in. So the mission is actually you're going to have to go in. and take out all the anti-air defenses in this valley so that the bombers can fly in without getting shot down. The valley is nothing but ravines and valleys and mountains. Well, since the land battleship is on deck, if you fly above the ridge line on the mountains, you will immediately be targeted by the railgun.

So you're having to like Star Wars like trench and get all those. At which point, the bombing run goes off and you're having to fight off like enemy attack planes to protect the bombers. The bombs hit the enemy land battleship and it deflates because it was a balloon. It was a giant balloon

built up around a single rail gun. Okay, okay. And then you find out that the entire mission was a trick to get your squad on the wrong side of the country. Like those painted planes on the parking lot that like yeah, yeah, people were bombing. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

On top of that, I can tell you the specific moment that causes everyone to lock the fuck in on the game's sincerity to the nth degree. And it is mission one. It is the first thing in the game that the game has not shown in any of the trailers. If you would like to know what that is, I will type it to you in the chat. Sure. What is happening here? I did not watch the previous trailers by and you, except for what was shown at the award show where they revealed it. Ah.

Okay. Interesting. I see. Interesting. That's cool. So the sincerity level is quite literally off the charts for this particular reason. It also has, so Ace Combat's like everybody talks about dog fighting and sincerity. That's not why people love Ace Combat.

Ace Combat is the best because it has the best use of music and sound of any game. So you have your mission music, which is incredible. The music has all... Which is, yes. Ace Combat music has, to me, always been the best in the entire video game industry. And it is. It is. There is no qualifier on that statement.

So you have your Ace Combat. music and aside from your Ace Combat music going in the background you're hearing your plain sound effects which are great you have the incessant chatter of your wingmen who are your primary

cast of characters and who are just shooting the shit or doing their mission having a great time yada yada and you love them on top of that you have AWACs announcing missile locks someone's on your tail whether or not you should fire your missiles the missile warning when something's getting too close,

the lock on drill, et cetera. And on top of that, while all of this is going on, you then have your, I don't know what to call it, like special event musical interludes. So you're in the thick of it, and it is a cacophony of noise that is all just perfectly mixing. And then it'll fade out

and you will hear a bunch of guys singing on the intercom because the enemy team of aces, the shadow unit, has their own war chant that they blast over the comms when they show up on the scene. And so,

like the music fades out and you hear, oh, and then it cuts to them and it gets the flyby of them in and it goes the Lux Lune Squadron tactical 11th unit Shadow number 140 and then they'll keep singing that over the comms

as you're about to meet and then the timing of the encounters is so that if you rush your ass off to meet them as your planes pass each other in the air the chant turns into the full version of the theme and then you start your boss fight dog fighting and it's incredible it's incredible

Aztec death whistle type shit. Okay. It's amazing. That's fucking cool. I was playing it quite a bit last night. And it has, I don't know how, I think I described this to you the other day, or maybe it was on my stream. There's like a feeling that only games can bring to you, which is like, you can feel other

characters feel it in a TV show or a movie, but you can't feel it unless you're in control. which is either you're trying to get somewhere and you're going at the, you're redlining top speed and you can't get there any faster or a challenge that you have been waiting for shows up

and you just grip the controller and you're just like, go! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just can't go hard enough. Because it's you doing it. And Ace Combat is just building up to that like over and over and over every two or three missions.

Okay. It's incredible. It's so far right now, it's my game of the year. Like, it's, it's not even close. Holy shit. Like, it is, it is so amazing. It is so amazing. Okay. And this is on the heels of Onyamusha.

Yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah. Onomush is a great game, but I feel, I feel so emotionally invested in this story. these planes. And it also goes like super crazy with the level of sincerity to the point of like absurdity. There is a moment of absurdity of like of sincerity in this that is so out there for even ace combat. Your character even goes, oh man, this seems like a lot.

Like the characters in ace combat. There is a moment where you are in a small village. and a young woman opens up her cupboard and inside her cupboard is the wings of thief painted on the inside of her cupboard and she gets down on her knees to pray Okay, okay. The people.

And then even she turns around and goes, Listen, no, I'm not, I'm not praying to the wings. And you're like, okay, I'm praying to the idea of freedom in the skies. Oh, the people. The people need a hero. Oh, dude. It's, oh, it's incredible.

It's fucking amazing. It's incredible. I love it. It's great. I mean, this all of this. This probably goes without saying, but like, the game is, the gameplay, I assume, is, like, elevating itself in various ways. Oh, yeah. Okay.

There's, there's, there's a, there's a friend, the, the, the, the, the, the, the tagline of team aces is nothing even comes close. Sorry, nothing comes close. And that's correct. It is the most enjoyable, like, feel, like everything has the right movement, everything, like, you have just enough control over your post-stall maneuvers and your roll in your yard.

The missile lock-on has, like, the perfect time. It's just, it's just they've made, fucking 10 of these. This is the only game these guys make. It feels the best to fly a plane in Ace Combat. Okay. Man, I just

I think, I just remember I think I just took off and just fucking went, so for me, there's probably some clips that are out there. It is the only game. The only game series I have ever played, ever

where I am holding the controller and I'm like all the way back. Yeah. I'm like, I'm like gripping it and straining and like turning my whole body like, like, like you, you embody the plane. You become plain. If only plane could plane,

then no war but plain. I think there was, because of that, that, uh, uh, when I tried it, I thought that there was,

enough going on that it was like halfway between Sim and arcade um cause it is halfway between Sim and arcade okay but there was more there was some but it's more on the arcade side right okay yeah I'm trying to remember exactly what it was but I just remember

there was something more to flying besides like point the stick in the direction and gas right there was there's there's so the the the the bits to flying are um roll, which is spinning while maintaining forward.

There's pitch, right, up and down. There's yaw, which is moving left and right while maintaining orientation. Then there is speed. Okay. And that is, that is it. And I say this as somebody who played the fuck out of Chuck Yeager's air combat, X-Wing versus Tie Fighter. and at least a couple others.

Arrowfighters assaults. Yeah. So the main thing is this is really difficult to explain, and I was explaining it to chat, and there was somebody who's in the Air Force that only understood how planes did, like they didn't understand the math of it until I explained to them,

which was really fucking stupid. But the long and short of it is like, the actual control of your plane is pitch, roll, yaw. Like the three directions, right? But what it actually involves in flying is, okay, so I'm chasing this guy down. The optimal firing solution is you are 1,000 meters behind them, directly behind them, and you're both going on parallel lines because that's the easiest way that the missile lock is.

If you come at somebody from a perpendicular angle, the missiles don't have enough tracking. so they'll just fly they'll be able to turn fast enough and they won't catch them right but that also works for you so while you're a dog fighting this guy and on his tail the other guy is behind you on your tail

and you have to look down at your mini map every now and then to see where the missiles are compared to your location and you need to let off the accelerator break or you know decelerate and turn as hard as you can

at an opposing or perpendicular tangent in order for the missiles to fly past you. And then at a higher level is if a guy is on your tail, like an enemy ace, and you have them like right behind you, you can pitch up and slam on the deceleration hard enough that they will actually lose their missile lock because they will fly under you.

And then they will be directly, in front of you and you can get a firing solution on that. And you're not going like hold R down on the C stick and up to do a loop-de-loop behind them. No, you are, you are right trigger is go, left trigger is slow down, analog stick is, you know, inverted controls and left and right pitch, and then L1 and R1 are like, you know, adjustments on yaw. Okay. Um, so one of the things is like, you know, you'll, the fastest way your plane can move is to pitch up, right? So if you are chasing somebody and they're trying to shake you, you're trying to pitch up around them. But if you're in cloud cover, you can fail to see that the ground is actually much closer than you thought it was.

And if you don't have the 1,500 meters to make the whole fucking turn into the ocean you go. Right. Right, right. Okay. And because it's ace combat, it also includes, listen, man, you're just going to have to shoot the glass out of the space elevator and chase that fucking thing up in a 300 meter wide tunnel and do your own little Star Wars trench run. And I'm sure, surely you can do the cool thing where you go like this and then drop back behind them and that's what I just described you. That's what I just describe you. Okay, you're not saying like go up like this.

You're saying like drop back and fall. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And because if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're vertical, you have more drag on your plane. So you, now behind them. And can you ever fly inverted? Oh, all the time. That's because we were inverted.

Okay. Yeah. There is a problem with flying inverted. And the problem is gravity. Because your plane, your plane wants to naturally rise up with its engines. so if you're upside down, it wants to naturally rise down plus gravity. So you naturally drift back towards the ground when you're upside down. But that can be helpful if you are at a very high altitude and you invert before the turn to turn around for your bombing.

You lost me. You lost me on the last bit there. The long and short of it is that when you're playing Ace Combat, the whole thing is you are trying to fly your plane in order to get. good geometric tangents on the targets that you're fighting. Like there are, there, you want to be behind your target at an angle no more than 30 degrees, but according to the Y and Z axis, not just the X axis. Right, okay. Right. And, um, and because then I'm, and you're trying to get out of other people's tangents.

Um, and missile locking and firing. it doesn't, you can't just lock and fire there's certain angles that you need for it to be smart. Oh, you'll always be able to lock and fire. It's just whether or not it has any chance in the world of hitting. Because, God, what was it? There was a dog fighting game I've also played a fuck

ton of, and the name escapes me now. Super Nintendo Space and the aliens were like cat creatures and it was like a bit of a bit X-wing tie-fightery. God, I forgot what it was called. But anyway, a game like that where the moment you lock on fire, set and forget it, right? You don't even have to think about it. It's going to hit type of thing.

Wing Commander, wing commander. I played a bunch of Wing Commander. Yeah. And on top of that, like, for example, like a twist to what I'm describing as like, oh, the ultimate way to hit somebody is to be behind them. Unless you are actually racing towards each other on the same Y axis and you're actually like going directly at them. if you are going directly at them at Mach 2 and you fire your missiles the instant you get a lock, it might actually be too late for them to turn because the missiles are actually going mock 2 plus their own speed.

So like they come at them so fucking fast by comparison. Okay, well, if you're in a car, if you're in a car, if you're going to a car and the car is going to 100 days. Towards each other as opposed to behind, basically. Right. Yeah. Right. And if you were to fire a gun out of that car, it would be going the speed of the car plus the speed of the bullet.

If a car is on the back of a train, then that train is going 100 miles per hour. Right. So you can get into jousts with enemy planes if you get the angles just right. Right. Right. Which allows for the cool. And then if you don't think that the missiles will work, you also have your machine gun. The machine gun has like a false.

off of like 800 meters. But that 800 meters, like it's a real projectile that travels through space. So it's 800 meters on top of whatever fucking speed you're going. And so you have to lead your machine gun fire

to where you think the plane is going to be. Are you in the same? And there was one mission where I had to start using the gun because I ran out of missiles. I came in with 140 missiles and a bunch of ground armaments and I ran the fuck out.

I was down to like 22 missiles. Are you in the same world and countries as all the previous games. Yes, except for Ace Combat Assault Horizon because Ace Combat Assault Horizon takes place in like America. Oh shit, just real life. Okay. Yeah. Yes, you are taking place as the next game

in the strange, real setting. So you run into, you describe people from other countries and that have all been other Ace Combat. And Ace Combat 8, you go back to a couple of the like climactic mission locations from other Ace Combat games. So like there's a mission above the Stonehenge missile facility that was like a big deal in four and stuff like that. And like one of the better examples is that like in Ace Combat 5, the invading force was the Yuc de Bonnians. And in Ace Combat 8, one of your wingmen, Tasha, is

a Yukta Bonnian fighter pilot who does stunt shows. She's a non-combatant. Right. And the events of Ace Combat 5 are in the deep rear-view mirror of the Yuktabanians

going fucking crazy and invading everybody because now the Satoans are a new problem. Okay, but like the... And like, for example, Ace Combat 7... It's the same world. Yeah, Ace Combat 7 takes place in more or less the same location, but it deals with a country to the west instead of a country to the east. Okay.

Damn, that's crazy. Game of the year in a world where you also played like RE9 and everything that's come out. Oh, yeah, that's way better than RE9. Way, way, way better. Way better. Someone in the chat says, Satoans are so evil even compared to the Balkans. Yeah, but they're so cool, though. They have a cool music and their planes are jet black because they're named after.

the moonlight. Don't you get it? Are they? And of course, then after all of this, you have a very charismatic villain in the enemy ace pilot, Shadow 22, which every single game does. There's always the enemy ace.

And you get to actually hang out with Shadow 22 in this game, briefly, and meet them. And yeah, he's a massive fucking asshole. Fucking piece of shit. Love him. He's the best. Okay. I can't wait to play.

Ace Combat 8 being 30 missions is really weird because I just did mission 25 in which I won the war. Well, I mean, then you enter. I have, I have taken out the last invasion and the characters are like, we have objectively won the war and the war is over. Yeah, well, now you enter the phase of like the remnants that are desperate and willing to sacrifice everything to make a point our left to be. cleaned up. I have a stinging suspicion.

There's one more super weapon that the game has not shown us. Sure. Something that was off the charts that even the leader of the

evil company didn't either evil country didn't know about but here it comes at the last second. So there's that. I also watched Kingdom Hearts 358

over two days. No, 358 days over two. The cutscene compilation on the the Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD collection, whatever the fuck you want to call it.

That game has like by far the most interesting Kingdom Art story by far. So this, the gameplay that was removed here was what? It was you played as Roxas and you would go on like daily missions. It was like the Peacewalker of like Kingdom Hearts if that does it for you.

like, like, bite-sized missions. Short portable ops then, yeah. And the idea was that you would do that. And at the end of every set of missions, you would have like, it would be the end of day 122. And then you'd go eat ice cream with the members of the org. And you'd shoot the shit about the day-to-day of being a villain in a Disney square property. Like the day-to-day of enacting the evil plan.

but the main gist of it is that it focuses around Roxas and Axel and Shion who are more interesting than Rikyu or Sora or Kyrie or Mickey or Goofier Donald or any of the non-X like they're they just they just have more going on like they just have more interesting things going on that and it goes in a lot of like really strange places about like identity and legitimacy and the heart of course um really really cool shame that the game is weird and mid like that's the weirdest part is that like oh you just play 358 i'm like oh is it fun and they're like yeah so the decision to watch this instead of play it. It was a good decision. I think so. And it's just to catch up.

Yeah. It's a Nintendo DS game, not a 3DS game. And it never, so it's also like very primitive. And it didn't get remade. No. No, they, they put the cutscene compilation out.

And, uh, and that's that. Um, and then I started on, uh, birth by sleep, which is the prequel. Um, also a handheld game, but it's a PSP game, so it's significantly more advanced from a technical and, like, gameplay perspective. Tara, have you seen Tara Kingdom Hearts?

I don't know. Like the character? I literally don't know. All right. I'll just get a photo of you, Tara Kingdom Hearts. So you play as three characters in that one. And it's like you pick either, you pick anybody's story and then you go through it. Yeah, here's Tara, Kingdom Hearts.

Uh, and, okay. I picked him first. And genuinely. So I think I told you when I went through chain of memories that Sora is the stupidest character I've ever seen in my life across all media. Like, actually the dumbest motherfucker ever. Okay. I can see Tara in the rear view mirror. like catching up.

He he might be the dumbest character to ever live in a way that is like kind of unbelievable and I've only encountered like one instance

but it has set up like oh this character has no brain in that you run the first world with Terra you run into Maleficent it's a prequel so Maleficent's still around right and she goes oh hey lie about you know what she's seen and then you meet aurora who is sleeping right and molyphicent looks at terra and goes blah blah blah you know and activates the darkness

in his heart and takes over his body and he pulls the heart out of aurora and gives it to molyphicent under her mind control and then he snaps out of it and goes, what am I doing? What did you do? And she goes, oh no, you did that. That was all you. And he goes, it was? Why would I do that?

And he just lets her leave. And he's like, oh, why would I do? I must, oh. And it's like, oh my God. You're getting punked out by like single line lies from Maleficent, the most evil looking person to ever exist in the Indian.

entire Disney catalog? Holy shit, it's going to get really bad. Is it a spell that makes you feel like you did do it? No. No, he blacks out, comes to and goes, why would I do this? Must be my fault.

Okay. Just like, just maybe, like, maybe too dumb to live. Like, later season, Patrick Star level stupid. Like, just

awful. Very interested to see what kind of stupid shit he gets into. Birth by Sleep is really complicated. It says it's not, but it is. It has a command deck system, and it also has like, now that I play through Chain of Memories, birth by sleep is like a do-over

on the chain of memories thing where they don't use cards anymore, but they do like your slotting ability into a command deck that you're scrolling through. And then if you use certain abilities in your command deck, you unlock like a completely different gameplay style. It's a whole fucking thing.

Was this remade? And if you want to get really good at the command deck, you got to go play four, you got to play Monopoly. You got to go play Kingdom Hearts Monopoly, which is the site game of it. And it's, oh man, it's fucking weird. Okay. And this is another of the remasters?

Yeah. Okay. They're all remastered now. They're all remastered. Okay. Music in those games. I'm playing a lot of games with just the fucking best music right now. Actually, I'm playing Kingdom Arts, and I'm playing Ace Combat, and I'm playing Earthbound.

And it's like, yeah, that fucking... Yoko Shimamura is the fucking... The best. Oh, I mean, again, I only went like a scratch of the ways in, but Traverse Town still lives in my head. Like, that's an incredible. Oh, all of it's incredible. Like, I believe that. Yeah, it was really good.

And I'm gonna, once, once I'm, I have a little bit more off my personal plate cleared off, I'm going to start over on Fire Emblem. I'm getting really overwhelmed by Lita's campaign because I heard some people say that like different campaigns are less of that feeling and that you would have been. So, you know, Kai, the, the, the, the, the, the blue kid. would have had an easier time just starting with him. So all the tutorials show Kai in them. And I went and asked around and like Kai only gets a control of like a third of the map in his whole campaign. And there's certain social activities he's not allowed to do. And there are tutorials in Kai's campaign that the other characters just don't get.

and it's like, okay, I'm feeling very overwhelmed. I'm going to restart and start on Ka. Yeah. After the big discussion last time, like, the general consensus was that like the characters are not tutorialed evenly and if you just go for what looks cool, you might hit this problem, whereas they kind of... Dietrich is probably the worst one to start as because all his mechanics are just fight more

and he has access to all the hidden side stories. but you don't know that until you play as him. Do they soft push Kai at you in any way? They do soft push Kai. So Kai's the first one on the list. He's the first one you encounter in the story. Every tutorial prompt about how to pick a character has Kai in the photo. Okay.

Like, it's a very soft push, but like the game is like, when you start the game and it shows a picture of Kai. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Okay. Um, though it is weird because there are people in, like, there's a lot of mysteries in each character's story that like you can't get through a story without being spoiled by somebody else's story. Yeah. Right. As intended.

So if one character's like, I hate that person, they might show up in the other story and be totally chill and just tell you what their deal is. But the other person who hates them doesn't know what that deal is till never, maybe. And I beat MGS 4. Okay. That game aged really badly. Like really bad. Like really bad.

And there are things that I hated then that I hate way more now. I think everything, and I quoted you during one of these sequences where I was crashing the fuck out over Merrill and Johnny. I was losing it. And I remember you a long time ago just exclaiming in disbelief, Meril ends up with a guy who just shits

his pants all the time. Yeah. The guy just shits himself. Like my brain remembers the pants getting filled out like animation wise. Yeah. Yeah. I remember their being like a like a you know but do you know what

you forgot you forgot that when Johnny has his mask off and he's like I'm handsome Johnny now when when mailing is giving the briefing he's like trying to like grab her pussy what

yeah you don't remember that like when May Ling walks past him he like zones in on her butt and starts to reach his hand out with his fingers outstretched like this and Meryl has to like slap his hand away. I don't remember that at all. Jesus Christ.

Yeah. Yeah, dude. Like, and then later on he like gooses Meryl when they're getting ready for the, the fight, and she like hits him. Wow. And it's like, okay, so, so Johnny isn't just like a guy who shits his pants all the time and is pathetic. Like, he is also like, like, like, like, sex pesting all the girl. characters in the story. Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's completely gone.

I hate him a lot. Now, I knew in my brain that microwave hallway only works once because of the emotional tension of the moment and the thought that this might be it, right? This might be the end. So I remember, like, after that, it's like, okay, if you know, then suddenly this QT, this prolonged emotional QTE, might not still hit. But I do, but I, what I do

maintain is that like I always really loved the final scene. I really, really liked it. And I'm curious how that all plays out now. So microwave hallway, I'm in the microwave hallway and I'm like, this is

great. Right? Like, the, because earlier in the game when you're fighting the, the fucking dumb ass moo cows while riding and vamp are having their cool fight that you can't see because you're now playing a weekie game and it's cut to the side. And I'm like, I want to see the cool fucking fight, but I got to shoot these stupid cows on the rail gun. When you do the microwave hallway, it does that thing again. But it works because all you're doing in the microwave hallway is mashing. Right.

And so you're like, oh, no, Snake, you can do it. And then you look up and everyone's having like the big fight, right? but because I wasn't getting super emotional and it wasn't the first time what ends up happening is there's a weird moment in the middle of that where Oticon just goes whoa like he's right there with you like like Bill and Ted style okay and it just like knocked my ass I couldn't fucking believe it was so weird um and also what you forget is that before the microwave scene, we have a Riden cringing the fuck out like an edge lord freak where it even rained on

the day I was born. And he does the sword and mouth fighting with the trench coat with his little arm. His arms are where he's all got, all he's got left is his mouth. His arms are gone. And before that, you also get the part where before you even get to the microwave hallway, Snake has to run through a batch of those little shithead hand circle robots. So you're just jumping and running through them. That whole act five is awful.

That last room. It's the fucking lightning. That's cool. No. It's still cool. Shut the fuck up. The jacket and the fucking story. And then when Rose walks in with what obviously his child is with the gray hair and little baby virgin.

and his little cartoon sword and he goes, oh, Campbell's kid, oh, cool. And it's like, every, you're all just stupid. You're all just dumb idiots.

That being said, the fight with Osloat is incredible. Uh, and it ends really strong. And, and big boss having his speech, I think that actually aged the best of almost anything in the game. Thank God.

Because, because big boss is like describing how him and Zero ruin the world. But there's a really strong push to go, me and zero definitely ruin the world because we're stupid old fools,

but mostly zero. But actually it was mostly zero. And like, he's doing everything he possibly can to like, yeah, I was at fault. But this, this, this, this base of shit.

And he was trying to stop him. And his patriot. He was trying to stop him, but he just wasn't good at it. And they all fucking did. But he 100%. Totally for totally the blame. I, yes. It just,

I remember feeling like, well, I described it last time we talked about it. But one, there's the whole like, you know, the deification of the boss. And then there's also the idea like,

like you fucking assholes, what could you possibly say at this point to make it okay? You know? And like after all, this, after all these games, your two protagonists are meeting each other. What do you have to say? And he's like, I suck, man.

I'm like, oh, yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, right. I think there's a rarely strange theme in Metal Gear Solid 4 where there are four characters that would rather kill themselves than live with their mistakes. Like, Ocelot, Eva, Naomi, and Big Boss would rather

die than live in the world that they helped create with their own bullshit. Like, like, Big Boss and Naomi specifically are like, the only way to atone for my sins is to not be here anymore. And I'm like, you could both do nothing. Doing nothing would be a real option or actively attempt to solve any of the problems that you cause. And they're like, no. no I have to purge my genes from the earth it's the only way leave that up to sunny as a teenager in the future let her deal with it it's her fucking world to inherit uh yeah yeah it's it's it's the next generation's responsibility to to get out of the way like what the fuck you fucking pieces of shit you guys are also fucking stupid um revengen's a way better fucking metal gear game than mjs 4 i mean way better way better not even close it goes without saying, but that's a different fucking era, time,

and genre in a million ways, you know, and MGS4 team are those ones that fucked up, lightning bolt action, you know, Metal Gear Rising original, right? So, um, nonetheless,

though, I'm like, okay, that, that finale holding up is what I need. That's what I need out of this franchise. The very finale is, is still great.

the transition through the music and the the fucking fight on the top and how osloat might kiss you a little bit if you hold him i've sent you some pictures just now wow yeah okay he's getting in there johnny's going for it what the fuck johnny um yeah that's not okay johnny and and also like you know that's a bad touch before gin reverted his styles right those life bars went back each game each time as you fought Osolot. Going backwards in HUD and in music and all that shit was also super sick. And Acto pointed out to me because I said that when I was going through the series, I was like I had the mental counter of number of times Osloat has told the truth. And you're like up to most of the way through MGS4 and the counter is at zero?

It's a zero. Wait, no, no, no. hold on, hold on. My name is Adam. We're men with names. That's not his name. Damska. That's not his name either.

That's his code name from the circuit breakers from the NSA. That's not his name. It's at zero. Until the moment he dies and looks at Snake and goes, you're pretty good. That is the first

honest thing. he says in his entire life. I mean, to go back to the entirety of fucking Phantom pain, and there's a lot of, that's the most Oscelot dialogue you're going to get there. Yeah. Okay. Oh, man.

And that's, uh, that's kind of it for me, except that I did watch that new Jojo's bizarre adventure. Oh shit. I didn't get to it yet. The new, new Jojo Bazaar adventure. That outro song is too unfortunate. That is so unfortunate. That is.

Again, I'm, I've said it a couple times though, but I'm like, I am down for the fucking trap house beat. Ain't no problem there. It just, it didn't go. And it easily could have been genuine my pony. It could have been. It could have been, a horse with no name. It could have been dead or alive.

You know? There's a million ways. People looked it up and like Warner Brothers owns the song Horse with No Name. Yeah. So they could have just used it? Visually, visually, it's gorgeous. The thing is, is that apparently the person, I might be repeating myself, but the person who they had that was able to reach out and license the music, the Western music in previous parts, passed away.

And so they don't have that connection anymore. So now they've got, I guess, someone else stepping in and again my guess is the push to um go with japanese artists because i'm sure that was a big thing that they people must have wanted you know what just kind of went through here but it sucks because the tradition has been so sick up to this point you know um yeah there's a million there's any any true any cowboy ass song you know or horse related song could have made for an amazing outro and still can in future uh other than that so i'm totally unfamiliar with most of steel ball run. I was not prepared at how we were going to just have a do-over of the first

half of Stardust Crusaders where every single episode, they're like, we're being attacked by some dipshit ass stand user. I mean, look, steel ball run is a lot of things and it goes a lot of places. And like, you can expect that and more is all I can say. Just expect it all, expect nothing. I just think it's really interesting that the beginning of that story is we're being attacked by fucking weirdo-ass stand users and both of the main characters are like, I got a gun and this ball I can throw. Like having to deal with stand users as like more or less normal people.

I truly enjoy. I truly enjoy this part and the way it goes and how that all, everything about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just phenomenal. I got to catch up. Cool. All right. We got to take a quick break because somebody's going to get hungry.

Oh, oh, oh, no. Don't, don't. All right. Quick word from our sponsors. I love our sponsors. This week, the Castle Super Beast podcast is. sponsored by ourselves. If you go

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Thanks, I do one. All right. This week, there have been a number of stories, and we kind of hinted at it a little earlier. Oh, one last thing. Oh, yeah. One last thing from Pat. Oh, yeah? As of this morning, I have now done almost every single side quest in FF14, including the only thing I'm missing is one fishing quest, the newest Hilda brand.

and some of the role quests. So I went and spent the time and scraped everything off that fucking map. This was not already the case? No. No, that's not the case for almost anybody. But I wanted the map to look clean. And that's it. That's the only reason.

Is this while alternating wow? Oh, no, I'm not playing wow anymore. It's the beta. That's all that all that stuff's going to get deleted. Wow is going to be coming out on November 4. Oh, okay. The Wow classic stuff is not going to stay. But when Wow does come out, I will be every single side quest done and all classes to level cap in 14.

So I will have, I've finished it before January. I, is this, is it really no, this is something no one does? Because I was under the impression that there's a lot. There's a lot. Yeah, but after hearing about like men doing the fucking super crazy two week long practice to get good at Ultra clears. Okay, so here's the deal. By cleaning out all the side quests, I didn't get anything. All my classes were level capped anyway.

Okay. You're just doing it to clear it. All I got was a clean map. Okay. That's it. Okay. And so now, now here's the trick. Here's the trick.

Now, since I've done all of them, whenever cold comes out, the trip between what I have now and all of them again is actually very small. Well, it was a fun time, right? You had a good time. You played the game you like? Yeah. No, I was doing him while shooting the shit with people on Discord. Well, that's all that matters, then. Which is the only time to do that.

Yeah. That's the only time to do that. It's not as crazy as to me, if it's not as crazy as it sounds if you're having fun while you're doing it, then whatever, you know? Back to news. Yes. I'll tell you, there were some people that were not having fun while they were doing it. And that is the, oh, God, okay, we're going to talk about 2XCO one more time. This is definitely actually the last time because all our questions are answered.

That's not true. That's not true because when Samira drops, I'm going to check it out and see what's going on. And I've said this before, but like the game is there and people are on and playing it. So I'm going to pop it in and play it every now and then like I do other games. Yeah, but you play Discord fighters. Yeah. So this is a- You're not a regular person. So this is a game that's there and I'll be playing it sometimes along other people playing it.

You know? Hey, man. If the game, if people are around, if it's got a pulse, I'll check it out. You know, so this interview was basically just, yeah, of all the questions that people kind of had and stuff, the big takeaways here that you got were, sorry, where did that link disappear to? Basically, the idea was from the jump, it was known that there was no real way that to, to excuse. Kio could have succeeded because more or less one pressed for an answer on what it would have took. It looks like it would have needed to have been within the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions of active players to succeed. So let's say 800,000 to 1.2 million people daily or monthly, rather monthly.

Because and this was kind of known, not in terms of like what the goal was set to be from the start, but what it became because of the ongoing bloat over time, right? So, important to say here, that's not that they were looking at it like with the bullshit of like, we expect this to happen. It was more, as time went on and its years went by and as nothing was coming out,

they realized that to make it back and to make it into profitable territory to stay alive, it would have needed to have been impossibly high numbers, right? So I'll go a little bit further into this because Mark Merrill actually spoke on it for like a good length of time because everybody sees that number and goes for a fighting game that's ridiculous but like that's not how it started right like he describes that they bought um radiance is that what they were known as they bought radiant because they saw rising thunder and the explicit goal of 2xKO

was put league characters into rising thunder like have rising thunder have a league of legends skin on it and put it out. And some kind of communication breakdown happened between managerial and the team. Yeah. Well, I can say that like what to fill it a little bit there, he basically described that he's like, riot. One thing that he says that they're not good at is acquiring companies. Clearly. And that they know that that's a weakness they have.

And when it comes to it, they were basically like, you know, left, Radiant was left to their own to kind of go about figuring that goal out, right? Yeah. And so, oh,

they were not happy, like the 2XCO team was not happy with how excited people were to do the playtesting. So they wanted to bring it back into the shop to make something better. But like the explicit pitch

was what everybody thought it was going to be, which is take Rising Thunder as is, and put League of Legends characters in it. And then the other thing he said, timeframe wise was that their hope or the way they saw it was that to be successful, they needed to release before Street Fighter 6. Yeah. So he describes that Street Fighter 5 wasn't even out yet when the game started working.

So Riot acquired Radiant in March 2016, because I went to go check this. They acquired them in March 2016. Street Fighter 5 came out February 2016. Oh, okay. So, well, then he must been talking about like the talks, the first first talks. Exactly, right? They must have been in discussion prior to that point. But 5, SF5 released on a month before the acquisition of Radiant was announced.

So essentially, the timelines begin in our heads the month after five started. And if... So they had the, in the window of what... the entire time of Street Fighter 5 up until 6. And he describes that they could have done successful things in that window. But then they waited until Street Fighter 6 had been out for a year. And now Street Fighter 6 is the king of the fucking mountain. Like it hasn't been since Street Fighter 2.

And he correctly was looking at that pre-Street Fighter 6 window as the time for them to strike because 5 was a disappointment. and even though it cleaned up its act and got to be a much better game at the end of its life cycle, in terms of like garnering all the support that we see six has now, that audience was there for the grabbing right before. And online play, they would have been the best playing fighting game online. If they hit that point. Yeah. And so basically the conversations that you and me have been having over the past six months were all correct.

that there was a good window and the team just kept going back to, oh no, we got to make it better, better, better. There's a quote from Tom Gannon that I can't find again. So take it with a grain of salt. But the early playtest where they had the Rising Thunder version of 2XCO, he said that people saw it and said, oh, that looks cool.

I'll check it out when it comes out. And he decided that that wasn't good enough. He wanted to blow people away. So it had to go back into the shop. But then they went back into the shop for nine more years and came out with a game that people said, oh, that looks good. I'll check it out when it's out. Yeah.

And so if we're looking at the sixth launch as like, at least according to the riot side of things, like their deadline in their head, it was still very generous to say from, if they're talking about conversations before the acquisition was announced. So we're talking early 2016. They're giving it a lead-in and all the time to cook and get it right, so to speak, and let them do the, put the thing together without getting involved and such. That gives them all the way from 2016 to 2023, right? So, like, if they launched... Still a ridiculously generous amount of time. If they launched in 2022, right? six years later, it would have still been like, okay, well, we, we got in before Shoot Fighter Six did, and maybe we can turn this into something.

So, yeah, that's basically what we got from that interview there was just like they had a timeline that more or less revolved around six not being the massive success that it was when it came out. because I think they, I mean, anticipated the idea that like six could come and take all that audience, you know, as it did. And, you know, I think to as well,

like the goal was to be at the premiere, at the front of the genre, right, to take the top spot. Um, they waited until fucking mortal combat got fucking rollback to put out their, their rollback fighting. Like,

and when it comes to, like, think of how many podcasts, you and me sat here, complaining about roll back. back net code not being the norm that they had a game that they could have fucking put out

in some kind of beta state. With the best net play possible. With the best net play possible. With the best it neck like fuck. And when you talk about high hundreds of thousands to millions of people players in a month, like you're talking that's pretty, that's just Mortal Kombat

that temporarily hits that number. And like smash for that period. Yeah. And then give and then they drop it because it's a temporary thing. But that number was reached after looking at how long it was in development. It was not, it was not the other way around. It was not like, okay, it has to hit this, no, therefore keep working

on it. No, but just in terms of like what the attainable version of that looks like, it's Smash or MK. And even, and like again, MK for the brief window of time that people give a shit until eight weeks later when no one cares, right? So yeah, that's,

that's just, those are the answers from the riot side of things. Just the, the team just fumbled it forever. over and over and then management went well this he didn't say this but I know this for a fact management would come back and go so is it going to do crazy numbers and the response from the team would be like absolutely

because if they said no then they the fucking game would have been canceled on the spot right yeah it's it's and so then the game comes out and then the the only chance it had to live is if month to month the line of active players went straight up and instead it was a flat fucking line. It was the people who cared showed up and stayed, but that's it. It wasn't going up at all.

I think that like, you know, if we were left to intuit what happened just from like this interview and the announcements that were made, we would have eventually probably gotten to the conclusion that like, yeah, they were given free reign to do so much and this is what happened without anything pulling it back in.

But it just kind of crazy how much that one path to flip article, like, just laser-focused all of that sentiment that was, like, hypothetical into like, oh, no, this confirms it, you know? And now we have the CEO, the company going, yeah, that confirms it. So. Like, he describes there was like a communications breakdown between the team and the, and, and, riot. And it's like, I bet because if somebody that had managerial control over the two XCO team,

spoke to Pat the Flip and heard any of that shit they would have fucking freaked out and been like you need to get a leash on these guys because there's shit's never going to come out and it also it also definitely like especially with the way things are closing off like so generously

for what you'd expect of a shut it down and burn it all to the ground sort of situation it does feel like the whole like okay we're not they're saying we're not good at acquiring we're not good at like keeping you know a leash on something or we don't want they don't want to be too invasive and that's in many cases you don't want to stifle creativity you want to make something awesome and give them the time to cook and do it

well and all the good things that you would imagine about this um and when wrapping it up even the way it's wrapping up by going full refund here's a big costume pack adding extra costume here are the two characters the servers are staying online we're updating it even past the point that anyone would expect it to and like you can you got the offline launcher like really it's It's the softest off-ramp ever for something like this. And as much as the disappointment we have is massive, it's crazy. It is like you're seeing right, basically go like, okay, yes, this was a fuck-up and we're going to try to soft land this in terms of what the player gets out of it and or how jilted they feel by the entire experience, right? So my disappointment is actually like immeasurable because I liked Rising Thunder better than 2XCO.

So when you tell me that the original version was going to be Rising Thunder, Bud League and have like a shit ton of characters in it, they should have done that. That is what I would have preferred, genuinely. 100%. I liked 2XCO more than Rising Thunder, but I would have wanted a version of this game that had more characters that could continue to exist much sooner. And if that's what it would have taken, that is a absolutely free compromise,

no question trade-off. There's another little piece of this puzzle that hasn't come up in any of this that I was only recently made aware of because I don't watch people's streams. Um, there's a genuine possibility that the push for Roon Terra and the push, uh, the push for 2XCO is because of league behavior. So it has been a long thing for a long time that if you're decent at league, your queue time can range from like 10 to 40 minutes depending. So you play hearthstone during your cue.

Hmm. The idea of queuing up a difference. game in the riot launcher while waiting for the main queue? Yes. Where'd that, where'd this theory come from? People would play hearthstone all the time during Q. Like, Heartstone was a very, very popular second game that you would play during your league queue.

Man. It was like extremely popular on Twitch. And then you have to quit one or the two of them when your cue comes up, right? Like. Yeah. Huh. And like a fighting game lasts about as long around. a match of a fighting game is about as long as you would play for a round of a, of a,

of a, Roon Terra game. I see. I see. Okay. Well, um, that would, that would check out.

That would make sense. And I, and I, and I know, but, like, like, if they're going to play Heartstone,

why not play our card game instead? Mm-hmm. Instead. Right. But, and it also just goes hand in hand to with the, like, clearly there's a point where they decided to expand the league IP into TV and all these other things to,

like, turn it into, you know, more than just League of Legends, right? Like there was a... Yeah, I've known as an arcane lost like $100 million or some shit like that. I mean, like it was a...

It stands now as like a vanity piece. It was good, but I... Yeah, I guess it was too expensive, you know? Well, because it was supposed to be a fucking ad for League of Legends. And it didn't work. Nobody wants to play League of Legends. Other than people who already play League of Legends. If you have other things to go monetize those characters on, though,

then you don't just have to go to league. You can go to tactics or this or that or whatever, you know, else to spend the money. Because like League of Legends has been a big deal for so long that I don't think there is anyone out there that plays games regularly that has heard about League of Legends. Sorry, has not heard about League of Legends and is on the fence as to whether or not they're like the saturation of League of Legends is everyone. No, if you, I imagine, they got everybody they could get. I imagine there is an ideal scenario from marketing.

that is you watch the Arcane show and then you go from there to the riot launcher and there are many ways to spend your money from that spot, you know? That might have helped if the comments on every single thing about Arcane for multiple years was don't play League of Legends as the number one of comment on every single thing. Yeah, we're actively talking that way too. But like that's that. Oh, shit. But I, yeah, I really liked the show, you know, I thought it was great. It served as my connecting point to these characters before 2XCO dropped, you know. So when are you going to play League of Legends?

Uh-huh. We'll get back to you on that one. By the way, I played some deadlock matches the other night with this thing. Yeah. With my PlayStation controller. And I've reached a conclusion. One is you really need gyro on that. you definitely need gyro.

And the second of which is that since I'm not going to be a top player, controller is fine. Like, I picked a variety of characters and was like, well, I'm really bad with these sniper characters that want me to do headshots.

But guess what? I'm bad with sniper characters that want me to do headshots in everything. Okay. Okay. Or not. Therefore. it's fine. Like I was always, always going to be more competent with characters in which shooting is nice

to have, but it's more about positioning or, um, or ability. Someone with melee or someone with auto lock on abilities, for example. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm, I'm scheduled to take another look at that in a, in a few. I'm going to, I'm going to see what's going on with that new stuff. I hear this cool new stuff going on. Um, but there's a lot of cool stuff going on.

Rat King. Rat King is very cool I don't he's just a giant rat Oh it's not like a Not like a Rat tied by its tail together type thing No no he's a giant rat guy from Long Island Who wants to turn Long Island into the principality of Ratania for rats only

Okay And so man deadlock has like Adoration and love poured into it it. He's got like a machine gun and his reload animation is the rats on his back climb off his back to flip up the

gun barrel and then the second rat puts in a new fucking magazine and then the first rat closes it. Very nice. Okay. We're not at the Ninja Turtle's Rat King anymore. That's cool. No. Yeah. More on that next time. All right.

So we have that. the quote unquote final word on 2XCO, but there'll be more. We'll hear about when Samara drops. Me and Willie were really smart and correct, is the final word on 2XCO. Oh, fucking whatever. I talked about it earlier,

but Christian Whitehead and his team, Evening Star, or, yeah, the folks who made Sonic Mania, are apparently working on a revival of ape escape. Uh, so that's coming back. And I don't know how much juice that has in the modern world. So here's the thing, right?

Looking at Sonic Mania, that's fucking super possible. Oh, yeah. Because they know how to do it. They, they absolutely know how to do it. The question, the only question that I, that I can think of here is, do you preserve the control scheme? Or do you fix it? Because I can see a world where...

You need fix it. Are you familiar with the ape escape control scheme? Extremely. Okay. So, so we want to, we want to move the camera around. How are we doing that? Not with the analog stick. You need the analog stick.

So we hitting the D pad? That's the whole game. The whole game. is swinging the fucking tools of the analog stick. That's the whole point. That's why I was going to say, I don't know if this translates well

to the modern era because like the whole point of ape escape is going, whoa, an analog stick. That's crazy. There's the stuff that's going on with like, so D-pad is where you move your camera

and the number of functions that are also on like R3 and L-3 is like, I think, think the games have kind of went, we're not, we're not using those buttons in that way anymore. You use it to run sometimes. And I guess in this case,

it's to crouch or so. But that feels like a wild insane thing to do to bring the ape escape controls into a modern release and leave as is. I think R2 all run jumping, for example, coming up is, it just, it would be accurate as fuck,

but it would, anyone who has never played the game in the past, is going to have an aneurysm upon starting to play the game. Good. Good. All right. No, I disagree very strongly. I think we should have more games with weird controls.

I'm not a huge fan of the hyperstandardization of controls in games. Okay. Well, I would trust the team that made Sonic Mania to make it work. but um i mean that just that i didn't have the hours of playing it to get used to what you're describing but it it just it oh i 100% had fucking apescape one yeah i from just playing a little bit it just it it always struck me as wild with that and it's because okay let me ask you did you play ape escape one it was like when it was like demo disc type shit you know like it must have been or something to that effect like a while um

But it was not on release. It was years after the fact. Because here's the thing. This is the really important thing. It's why I'm afraid that any future for Apiscape doesn't matter. The entire point of Apiscape was the, oh my God, this is a dual analog controller. Like, it was the first game I played with an analog stick controller that wasn't an N64 game. So the idea that I could move around and then, oh, oh, right?

Like crazy. Yeah, like that was crazy. It's like I'm swinging it's like I'm swinging the fucking net. It's unbelievable. No, and I remember, I remember thinking to that like, I was like, oh, fuck, you swing the the sword around with Ryden in Sons of Liberty on the, on the, uh, on the stick. And, and that's nuts. And, um, and then Revengeantz brought it back in a cool way and made it work overall, but

it's not a hundred percent of what it was. It like, it obviously improved over everything, but then kept that aspect of it. So do they just? Keep it 100% of what it was or do they do like part of it and then change other aspects? I don't know. I imagine given the way Sonic Mania played out, you would get something that is faithful plus, you know? But anyway, that's apparently something going on. I trust those guys.

Mm-hmm. dated great um yeah that that era i mean anyway there's a whole discussion about like that era of beginning to seek to get analog for the first time and figuring out how to use it and in what ways you know because prior to that you had to press l1 and r1 to turn the camera or your character right i remember megan man legends i remember playing mario's 64 and being wow this analog thing's incredible. And then I played like a dozen other games on the N64 and be like, oh, oh, fuck, this is so bad. Like, that was a really strange era where the first game to use the analog stick was way better than like multiple follow-up years.

And then Okarina also made it work. You know, Nintendo first party. They figured that shit out. But that was not going to happen with every single release coming out at the time for sure. Um, Oh, what do we got? Okay. Well, so someone saw some, some updates and we are seeing GameStop listing used PS5 pros for $1,400 sometimes more. I wonder why. Well, I mean, there's the overt thought, like, there's the simple because they think they can get away with it. But then there's the underneath, right? Perhaps they're doing good. Perhaps things are going well. Perhaps their acquisitions that they're talking about making are going swimmingly. Oh, no.

Then there's the real reason used PS5 pros are suddenly actually very valuable because you can jailbreak them. Well, not new on. out the box, but like two firmwares ago. So what, but the thing with the new ones out the box, because, though, is that they're, you know, dictated by, um, suggested retail price, MSRP. And the, uh, those are still at the, you know, lower numbers that they would be at. Um, but this is not the first time they've done this type of scumbag shit. Uh, this being tied to the fact that it's jailbroken, that makes a ton of sense.

I didn't realize that that was the case. But yeah, no, there's a lot going on with PlayStation 5 stuff right now on that front. Right now, the PS5 is jailbroken on a fairly recent firmware. And guys that are very mad about the physical game situation have,

like, decompiled and like pulled out like 80-ish percent of the system libraries. and PS5 emulation is getting off the ground. Okay. As a result. You see, I just automatically assume in a situation like that that they're ready to do another Zeno Blade moment, right? Where used copies of the new thing are selling for fucking double or crazy amounts of an inflated price because they can get away with that. with Zeno Blade, they had an exclusivity deal, and they started opening up, because the MSRP was legally binding, they couldn't overcharge for the game, they could sell a used game more expensive.

So they cracked open, used copies of Zeno Blade and put them on the shelves right away as used and put an $80 sticker on them because that was how they could get past the markup. GameStop is so interesting because it's the primary physical game. retailer in North America and them on the down swing only hurts like the argument for physical games. But I don't care. Fuck them. They're the worst. I would rather cut my nose off to spite game spot.

Yeah. Sorry, GameStop. Like, I hate them so much. I feel like the term brick and mortar like should not include them. Yeah, it's the two things you bring to the store. to throw it through the fucking window. You know, you should be able to say brick and mortar or mom and pop or whatever you need to while excluding GameStop from the conversation. Yeah.

Anyway, whatever, other horseshit news, there was that whole Capcom RE engine AI generation game engine article, which the, I mean, it's a dog. announcement anyway, but the phrasing of the announcement makes it even worse. Yeah, I saw some nerds dig into it, and it's actually fairly complex in a way that's infuriating. So the phrasing was Capcom announces plans to transform the Ari engine into an AI generation game engine. Our goal is a future where we create games together with AI. and I saw then people obviously going, that's fucking dog shit, that sucks,

rightfully so. Then I saw what they, on further elaboration, AI generation does not mean generative AI. They're referring to the AI generation time period and saying that the R in, the R. the R.E. engine is going to be made to work with the generation that we are in now.

then I saw that you know you had the the conversation with DLSS-5 and how the REE devs were like yeah fuck that shit versus the like Capcom execs being like we're excited for this and we love it overall makes me feel like another situation where you're basically going this is saying to make Jensen Huang and the investors all very excited Investor Cope is what it is. And then there's the actual people making the games beneath this that are like, fuck this shit, we don't want to use it. Right. And so this is the impression I've gotten from everyone trying to parse this article. The other thing is that it appears to be like some openings in their engine if they want to use Gen. I.

In the future. And like the whole thing just reads, like this is probably Cope on my perspective. But the whole thing reads like shareholder pacification. Yeah, I think, I think, like, look, guys, we, we, we have, we're making progress on our award winning, definitely actually the best engine in video games right now already. And I'm glad that you prefaced that. To shit it up with AI later, huh? And I'm glad that you prefaced that with cope, because it absolutely could be if this turns out to be horse shit down the line. Yeah.

Especially considering they just released a number of banger great games, you know, Pragmat are already. They released. warred in games this year. Pragmatah, R.E. 9, Oni, Musha have been fucking excellent. And Monster Hunter Stories 3 was also great. Right. So that's like a really good return to form. They're on like a Nintendo first party

level of production right now. It's fucking nuts. So, you know, we were, so the idea that once again and looking at, again, the DLSS5 conversation around the fucking Jen face and stuff like that makes me think, yeah, like we're looking at how you get investor speak going, you know, and there's a, there is a gulf between that and develop. Darker isn't comes out tomorrow.

That's fine. But it doesn't matter, well, I mean, cope or not, it doesn't matter if it's just investor speak, if the exec planning and pushing then makes its way down to development, regardless, right? Even if it's one of those things where you're like, okay, are you doing that bit where you can go just do a little something related to AI so we can make them happy, even that type of shit, you know,

which is, which is, you expect to see more and more of if you're expecting to get them, investors all excited over the fact that you're finally doing something with it or whatever, you know. Um, um, have you heard the term,

the new term for, for the, for AI use, uh, Shopify's CEO invented it. It's called the slop grenade. Oh, wow.

No. Because basically they tested out using it and he determined that AI saving you time is just you turning, you lobbing slop grenades over the wall to your coworkers. Because it's saving you time to throw it over. But then the slop explodes on whoever the fuck it lands on. and it's now up to whoever you sent that to to fix it. So I saved time, right? I didn't have to write that email or do that presentation. It took me 10 minutes instead of two hours.

But it's going to take whoever the fuck I sent it to four hours to actually get the information they fucking need out of it. Yeah, I guess all the work you didn't do has been canned and that can has now been kicked. And so when you have everybody in your car, company just kicking larger and larger cans towards each other. Eventually you hurt your feet. Because the camera leave, I suppose. Yeah, in any case

though, like every time I see this, this type of thing, you know, and it's like, is this is this, you know, reflective of what they're actually going to be doing or not, or is it just buzzwords? It's like, it doesn't matter because that could still become the direction. Who can say? But it's just really

stupid going alongside the fact that, again, they just released a fucking stellar, a perfect year, almost, you know, of games. So I did a sponsored thing for a Dragonstalkment 2, uh, the dark horizon stuff, but mainly that they, they cleaned up the engine. Man, they cleaned the fuck out of the engine. Oh, yeah? Like, double the performance.

Like, just absolutely unbelievable. It's fucking ridiculous. Um, yeah. Alongside that. So NBA 2K25 is being delisted later this month, and servers are shutting down at the end of the air, all online modes, including single player mode, which is tied to the online currency,

will no longer be available. So if you're out here playing these 2K games, man. For the two years? I just, like, just, announce the time limit. Just put a death note time limit above the game's head and tell everybody what it is so that the day that they booted up for the first time, they can see, all right, I've got 365 days. And then it's gone. You know?

I also saw there was some, like, there was a group, some fan driven, like, get the old game servers back online type shit or whatever, which got shut down or something. but either way. Yeah, I think less than two years, to be honest. That, it goes without saying. It's like you're talking about paying full price for a retail game with a single player mode. And even that's getting taken away. Fucking psychotic. That's insane.

That's crazy. So that's crazy. That being said, I think if you're the type of person who's buying basketball game that is actually a gambling simulator. I can't have any sympathy for you. That's the thing is you have to kind of know what you're what you're being set up for at this point, I imagine. I don't think those people know anything, Wully. Well, they're pretty mad about this.

But yeah, I'm sure they're pretty mad about Sportman being traded to the team two towns over too. Yeah, it's just, you know, it's a single player mode you can't actually. anymore and the money that you spent is is being stolen. So like, what do you? Anyway. I'm being robbed by the guy with a sign on his chest that says I'm going to rob you. 20, 25.

Ah, got me again every year. All for it again. Oh, look at the ball bounce. Ooh, the ball looks so good this year. I'm like, I can't. I, I've moved from, I've, move from like ignoring the the gun and ball man to active disdain it's just once upon a time there was madden and there was quarterback club and then there was even the games and there were

and not all of them were licensed you know but it was fine you just had the colors you had the two colors and and then it said Detroit and it was white and it was blue you know best best fucking hockey game ever made is nhl p a 93 because since it was only the players association, it was allowed to have blood in it. Much cheaper to get the players association on your side. And it had blood in it. And man,

there's a lot of blood in that game. You'd knock a guy out, blood all over the ice. It was fucking awesome. God, I just remember the... And you couldn't trade players. I remember when the first 2K games

were being revealed over on Dreamcast, and they just looked so much better than all previous sports games that it was just like, holy fuck. The future has arrived. It was such an incredible thing to look at at the time. And, uh,

Wully, have you seen, have you seen the gun and ball man's attempt to reverse this trend? In what way? To the sword and potion gamer as of, as a direct, as a, direct analog to as a mean thing to say.

Derogative. Yeah. Yeah. Derogative tory phrase. And it's like, it doesn't work because like, the whole, When I say gun and ball, I'm talking about Madden or 2K, period.

And Call of Duty. Like, it's actually, you're actually just describing like three games total. If you said sword and potion or sword and spells, that's one, sword and spells is right there. Hell Revers is right. Going to sword and potion, weird. Oh, it's not sword and spell. I was about to say sword and spell. No, it's sword and potion.

Sword and potion. But that's a much smaller window. And the second thing. The second thing is that sword and sword and. Potion covers maybe, I don't know, like 180,000 different games. Like, it covers like 60% of all video games ever released. Like, I'm trying to help, I'm trying to help them, like, dis us. Like, if you said, um, I don't even, like, Perry and

Oh, you're talking about Perry Slop? Perry and Just Frame. Yeah. No, like, because I'm like, I don't even know, I don't even know where you go, but there's got to be something, right? Oh, and also, Perry, Perry and stat. Parry and stats. Right? Parry and stat gamers.

If you really want to fucking get a nice wide range. if you start making fun of us for being parry and stat gamers, you might get some legs on it. Oh yeah, somebody posted the Okami response. Somebody was complaining that Jeff Keeley announced Okami to instead of anything else. And the official Capcom account responded with,

perhaps this is more to your liking. And it's just a picture of Amatirasu with a basketball and a pistol Photoshop next to her. oh man and do we thank you for the thank you for reminding me of that i really appreciate it it's incredible that's big um um uh vanilla wear um special art has been prepared for you energy the only one that i can think of that competes with that is some dumb shit saying i don't like all these new weapons in the doom in doom eternal. Is there a way to turn off

the ice rocket? And their response was will you control the buttons that you press? Just don't press it if you don't like it. Anyway, that was the, that's the situation over at the

2K games. Fuck you. that's that's that's the situation give me your money uh beyond that i mean it's not much but um hey the new warner mount para bros whatever oh they know they own everything it's called sky dance um and sky dance owns everything and they put out a graphic to show you that they own everything TV, TCM, show type adult swim, DC studios, Paramount, Nickelodeon, HBO, Max, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network.

And then all the film rights and everything, it just goes on forever. And Bobby Codick is sitting up top. You know, this is a bit, like, out there for video game podcast. Somehow Codick returned. But I talked about this a little while ago,

and it's like, this is, this is like the, like, this is kind of like the downfall. of the American century, this specific thing. Because American cultural dominance in television, film, and music was so overwhelming for like 80 years. Like American movies just fucking ran the whole goddamn planet in terms of culture. It was completely unavoidable. It helped make English like one of the de facto language of the fucking.

fucking planet. And the response to that unbelievable cultural dominance that like Rome could only jerk off to the idea of was what if we got all the guys together who want to just destroy movies for no reason and just give up that cultural dominance for nothing. For nothing, for like literally nothing. We don't even get any money. Every one of these companies almost goes bankrupt the instant they do the merge. I don't know how the fucking shit works on it. I think it's a scam. But just give it up.

Just completely give it up. Also, Skydance is a stupid name. It's terrible. It's fucking awful. Also that. Um, like, you know why you can see,

like a fucking six-year-old Japanese school child with Arnold Schwarzenegger on their chest or with a t-shirt that says The Terminator because American film dominance was absolute. It was like couldn't

it's never been like that ever in the history of the world even under places that were under total occupation for like a thousand years. I mean America's most valuable export was its culture. Yeah. Well, um, hey, I, I feel like whatever, I don't know what percentage of this podcast is just the sound of grumpy old Ben grumpling, but.

Well, to be, to be fair to myself specifically when I was 25, I was actually grumpier. Fair. Fair. Fair. This is true. I'm actually, I'm actually, less grumpy now than I was. was 15 years ago. We de facto have proof of that with Earthbound. You have lightened up. But I do think that the world be validating the grumping. Yeah. This is just...

Well, I think it's a bad sign for society when I'm a 40-year-old man. I go, man, this thing sucks. And a teenager near me goes, yeah, this does suck. And I go, wait a second. And because it's just... We're not supposed to be complaining about the same things. No. You're supposed to be complaining about your...

dumb teenage bullshit, and I'm supposed to be complaining about my old man bullshit. We're not supposed to be complaining about the earth. And you're like, exactly. Like, we're supposed to not understand the shit that you think is cool. You know? And it's just, yeah, that's what every fucking docket is from here on it. It's just this type of shit. AIDS combat's fun.

I get to fly a plane and there's good music and you do a 3-Eleven in that game. Yeah, and look, no, I'm not going to throw on 80 stories about fucking vibe-coded mods to old shit that have that have popped up in the last 48 hours. I'm just not even. We're just not doing it. So don't do that. Leave it. We're done. That's that. That's get, get out of here with it. No. I don't want to do it. It's a forever docket of garbage. No, instead, I want you to think about Kira Buckland saying the phrase rail gun warning. Why is everyone yelling that in the chat? What's going on?

So, Willie, so like to put a finer point on it, when you are doing the missions against the land battleships, the phrase rail gun warning is literally going off like every four seconds for the whole mission. Like it is a cacophony of noise. And each time it does, you have to do a sick dodge immediately after? Yes, pretty much. Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. That's cool. That's cool. I like that. Like, Ace Combat games are loud as fuck. Did you see Sega had a discord? Do you want to talk about the Sega Discord incident? Not really. They made an official Sonic Discord. It went the way you'd expect. How long? End of story. Yeah. So, so no. No. there's one part to that that is different.

Fine. That is funny. It went the way that you would expect, which makes me wonder what the fuck they expect. That's what I think is funny. Because every single person I know saw that and went, what the fuck? Oh, it's closed. Oh, well, of course it is.

Oh, God. Did they think? Oh, they didn't. They don't know. Whoever made that decision? Didn't know. It's like when Tony the Tigers told people to stop making like gay fan art of him. Do you remember that? Oh, and then Chester was like, yeah.

Yeah, do it. Cheetos stepped up. Hell yeah. Mm-hmm. That was great. Anyways, let's take some letters. Hey, if you want to send it a letter, send it to Castle Super Beastmail at gmail.com. That's Castle Superbeastmail at gmail.com.

By the way, I'm streaming this week over at twitch. Twitch.tv.tv.com slash Pat Stairs at. Woolly is also streaming this week over at Woolley versus. Why do I hate fun? What are you talking about? Let's take a letter. Do you want me to send you a picture of Sonic? Always.

Very much, very much down for that. Only if he's going fast, though. He's going real fast. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, all five toes. Hell yeah. I'm down. I like it.

Get you it. Let's see over here. Let's take one from... Hello. From Matt says, Dear Junkler Fight 1 and Junkler Fight 2. I was finishing up the Ace Combat 8. No Spoilers campaign.

It got me thinking about games where there exist an entire regime of movement abilities that aren't disclosed to the player. Ace Combat, for example. I was talking about post-stall. Ace Combat has post-stall maneuvers, which allow the player to quickly spin the front of the plane around to momentarily fly backwards or drift, all to get better missile shots.

While the system existed for a few games in the series, Ace Combat-Aid is the first time it's explicitly mentioned, but only as an achievement. There are no in-game guides or tutorials on how to pull it off, nor is it needed to beat the campaign, yet it is the movement tech... I'm not good at post-all. That high-level players and harder difficulty bosses use in the series.

For new players, it looks like complete bullshit, but it's all the tech they can learn and perform with practice and labbing. So my question is, what other examples do you have of movement tech that you can think of was intentionally designed by the devs but is not actually explained to the player in any way? I think very much of Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends because respawn is super down to give you insane movement options and then just be like, hey, if you knew of. if your legacy, you know. Where in Titanfall 2, you're slide hopping, which I believe you said tribes might have been the origin of, right? And it's called skiing. And the slide hopping then gives way in Apex Legends to super sliding where you can get like sick bunny hop, crazy speed pickup maneuver is going on. And it's built into the way you move, but it's not.

something that they're going to teach you about. I think people are saying deadlock in the chat and they're super correct. Deadlock's tutorial is super fucking weird because they're like, here's how to jump. Click this button to shoot the gun. But it doesn't like explain how the game works or like how to win a match. It's fucking straight. It's a weird game. That game is so fucking.

Now, my, my big. And bits and pieces of deadlock are built, but then there's like gaping holes in the walls where they just didn't even start. It's such a weird fucking thing. I don't believe Guns the Duel did it on purpose. I feel like butterflying and a lot of the tech that came out of Guns the Duel felt accidental. And slide hopping while not new, I think was put in on purpose because I think respawn likes games that feel that way. you know um yeah anyway uh so what exactly is um the post stall maneuver here i'll i'll i'll show you a a very small clip of it oh video is bad for the for this though just you can just

describe okay basically remember what i was describing how if you get slow enough you can basically jam on the brakes and your your plane will flip yeah straight vertical and slow down to nothing. Okay. And then you can flip back down. That's a post-all maneuver. Okay. Because it involves like basically cutting your engine entirely so that you can stop.

So that, yeah, that cool, I'm going to say top gun slash macros shit. Right where you fucking. Yeah. And if you get good enough at it, you can do like a full 360 in like two seconds, which enables you to turn super, super fucking fast. Cool. uh all right let's and um like for example shadow 22 does it to you in the story oh so you see that the game never the game never explains post post stall maneuver at all but you'll chase shadow 22

and he will just turn on a dime and fly past you and you're like what the fuck but it's there it's like well okay now that's a thing you could do if you were a better pilot Um, okay. Let's see. Chatterbox asks, Hey, dear Woolly Eggs Madden, Madon and Patrick Buttermilk Boyvin. I don't like butter.

These work really well for 1920s-era gangster names. Uh, chatterbox here, as a simple as the title implies, what exactly is a wave dash? I know you tend to use it in the context of essentially teleporting Virgil Shadowstepping. What a great follow up to the last fucking email. Bison's dash. dashing, et cetera, but I'm curious if there is, or if there's more to it mechanically than that. I would say that at least, like, okay, the first original use of the term is specifically

like Smash Brothers dodging into the floor and creating a momentum push where you're invulnerably, quickly moving further than a dash would move you, right? it is a specific thing where you you you it's like create and then what it has come to mean is casually I'd say is finding a way to dash faster or more than like the usual dash mechanical would want you to move often by combining some form of yeah like aerial maneuver and sliding along the ground or something to that effect so people use wave dashing to refer to not wave dashing at this point. But to me, at bare minimum,

it needs to be doing an unintended maneuver, or sometimes it all know, some people program it in to be intended at this point. But you need to be doing something that is like not just a regular dash or hop forward to move further than the basic movement mechanics watching. It's just bunny hopping tech in a, in a, in a two-d environment. It's the same thing as skiing or bunny hopping. It's an unintended.

like movement mechanic due to the bizarre physics of the specific things that you're doing. I feel like bunny hopping though is like it's almost like an ongoing movement sequence and yeah it's the conservation of momentum

a wave dash is like a big it has it's a complete movement that ends but then you put them back to back and you become very hard to touch you know but yeah that's that's kind of it right like a lot of the time

you just the game whether the game intentionally or unintentionally has one of those things. That's how I would define it. People use it short for that. All right. And let's take one last one over here from Justin. Who says, dear dreads and chops. That works.

I was chatting with my brother about a show or a game. When a show or a game is part of an unexpected genre. For example, Doctor Who and Tokusat. have more in common than I thought. Both are beloved mainstays of their country of origin that will seemingly never go away, involve elaborate costumes and wildly varying quality that are often filmed in quarries.

What can you think of that fits into genres that you first wouldn't expect? P.S. Woolley, there's an episode of Doctor Who where they have to fight a time-traveling racist whose master plan is to make sure that there are plenty of free seats on the bus so that Rosa Parks has an untroubled day. and thus ending the U.S. Civil Rights Movement before it can begin.

So in order to thwart the evil time racism and save black history, our heroes have to sit on the bus and watch or get arrested. That's it. That's the plan. I remember hearing about this. It was after I stopped watching.

That was a couple of doctors later. I did hear about Rosa. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. The heroes must cause the depression in order for time to be corrected. That is a wild way to go.

I do, but then I stopped watching it. Yeah, because your body was like stopfully. Your mind said it liked it, but your body knew better. Well, in my timeline, like I was in the middle of David Tennant, and then the next time I saw him, he was the purple man. So that's what happened to the doctor, I suppose. that's horrible. I really like all the actors who are the Doctor Who. They're great.

But then I'll see a clip of Doctor Who and I'm like, this is the worst British thing ever. This is terrible. Like I said, I saw Eccleson. I'm like, damn, he's cool. He's doing it. And then Tenet, I'm like, damn, he's doing it. And then I didn't even stay around until Matt, but then I saw him later and stuff. I'm like, oh, yeah, he's doing it.

Yeah. But yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. That is, that is, Doctor Who is like Toku for Ingerland. This is true. I would say that's accurate.

Well, I mean, isn't that just like Monster of the Week kind of in general? Yeah, it's just like, that's a little broad. It's honestly, it's like long running TV show over the course of multiple generations. That's fairly low budget that, you know, exactly, has a problem solved every week. Because like you could, you could probably actually say that Doctor Who is probably just more like British Star Trek more than anything. But yeah, but Star Trek stops and comes back, right? Like, these are the things that just on go no matter what.

Like, you're never seeing a series end and then another one and then a gap before the next one begins. Didn't, didn't Doctor Who have like decades long gaps? Did they eventually? I guess they, did they start doing that eventually? I mean, I feel like at the time it was like, sorry, not the, the modern Doctor Who, but like the back in the day like old. Doctor Who? I thought it was just like, it just kept going for like the first fucking set of them.

Wasn't there like a gap of Doctor Who for like our entire childhood up until like the aughts? I'm thinking of the old 70 shit. I thought that that stuff just kept going kind of like Toku does. I could be mistaken though. The new ones, I guess yes, it does not apply.

But yeah. Okay. It stopped at the A- I remember having came back for 2005, right. I remember having the worst conversation about Doctor Who possible

with an old mutual friend of ours or I was like, all right, I'll try Doctor Who. Where do I start? And they were like, oh, the revival.

What about the original episodes? And they went, they're gone. And I went, okay, never starting this shit. No, you don't. Okay, not that you would like it.

I wouldn't recommend it because I just don't, I don't think it has the, the vibes you'd be down for. And it's, it's very, very like opium coated, but you don't actually have to care about the old series.

Yeah, but I wanted to be able to see it. Right? Like, this is like describing like Star Trek, the original series. Oh, it's just gone. They taped over it. But I don't think it, I don't think it detracts from the value in that sense, though. Like, it's, it's an option. It sucks that it's removed, but it doesn't devalue the start. but also like for me I'm like wow

if the British people don't care about Doctor who enough that they just taped over it I don't know why they think I should fucking care about it I mean fucking again tell that to old S&K you know but I but I truly like that's one of things are I do I do tell that to old S&K yeah I don't I like I don't see a world where I would ever recommend it to you

but the goblin for something's first media being destroyed, like, would fuck up probably some stuff you might like. I feel like there's some media where that happens. Like, I'm really glad I played Street Fighter 1. I think Street Fighter 1 sucks ass, but I'm glad that I could play it if I felt like it. But did you ever play the version that had the pressure sensitive buttons? I did.

Really? But they were broken. They were broken. Oh. So it said it was pressure sensitive. but it would only register lights because people had just smashed it to fucking bits. Fair enough. All right.

That'll do. Which is why you don't do that in an arcade setting. Wasn't there? No. I was just thinking, I'm like, I feel like, I feel like there's not, there's stuff that's like still exists, but it's just harder to come across. Like, Trigun, for example, is if you're reading the manga, um, I mean, it's already hard to get, but I feel like the first volumes of that prior to Tri-Gun maximum starting are just like, probably ridiculous to track down if you wanted to go acquire those, you know. But in any case, in any case, regardless, something that might be up your more up your alley if you want to get tangentially related on Doctor Who's.

Check out some Torchwood. Did you say it's part of Doctor Who? Yes, I did. How is it part of Doctor Who that it would change in a way that I would be like, oh, cool. Because the main character... Is the doctor not there? Because the main character... Yes.

The doctor is not there, and the main character's name is Jack Harkness. Who you might know from the Harkness test. Oh. So what? Is it about his love affair with a cactus or some shit? With shit that is not of this earth, but is absolutely fuckable. Does a guy come on to the scream and go toimmy, moimmy, bibbidi-bop-dee. And fucking wave a screwdriver around to solve a bunch of...

a stupid bullshit. He's actually American. He's got an American accent, actually. No, does that happen? There isn't a sonic screwdriver, no. It's a very, it's a very American white guy. But yes, there are, there are, because if I watch Torchwood and that shit happens at the end as the big stinger

of like, oh, cool, I'm gonna get so fucking mad. There is no doctor. There is just a super American white dude and he's banging aliens. But the aliens are, very Doctor Who Ingerland coded in that way. So, you know, that's a part of it.

But yeah, there's stuff. Anyway, I don't know. It's been a billion years. We'll leave it there. Why did I think Torchwood was a Western? It's, you're thinking of Deadwood. I am thinking of Deadwood. You're thinking of Deadwood.

Yeah. This is the lone gunman to Doctor Who's X-Files. Yeah. Oh, that's a really bad comparison, because Lone Gunman was like super awful. It was, it was really bad. Well, um, well, there's that. Or Deadwood, just go watch Deadwood. That was, that was cool for a bit.

Oh, did they shoot this on a camcorder? What's up with the British TV? It's a billion years old. It's insane. You shouldn't be looking at any of it, but here we are. I'm looking at Torchwood 2006 TV series trailer with the sound. off, which is all it deserves. I don't...

Look, man, I'm not Torchwood's strongest soldier. Okay? I'm just... I'm just one man. I'm just here telling you about its assistance. It's fine, though. All right. We'll leave it there. Have a good week, everybody. Bye.