Castle Super Beast - SBFC 120: Super Bunny Dumps (feat. SuperBunnyHop)

Episode Date: November 24, 2015

The Metal Gear Solid V spoilercast. (Starts at 2:36:32)

How many, how many bathroom breaks do we have? Pretty much, we pretty much don't take any, in fact, if I didn't indicate, we're actually rolling right now, George. Oh, really? Yeah, we're in. See, bathroom breaks are not customary. Here's what happens. I've been guest on this podcast before.

You know how this rolls. George, let me explain the bathroom situation here. If I start talking about an RPG that I'm into, that nobody else is playing, Matt is spoiling a bunch of movies, or Liam is doing an anime rundown, you can feel free to leave the room and take a long shit. Star Trek and whatever Marvel movies match on this week, that's my cue to just scurry off. Absolutely, and I will be too when Star Trek comes up.

And don't say, don't say if you scuttle off. Just scuttle off quietly, but aim the mic at the bathroom. If you really want to kick it up a notch in the process of getting up to leaving, kind of accidentally hit the table with the microphone on it with your leg, and that way we'll know that you're leaving. That's what you do. Yeah, perfect, perfect. And make sure to angle towards the bathroom so we can hear some super bunny domes.

Some mega hamster craps. Yeah, exactly. Oh man, that's your right. You got it. That's crazy. Hey buddy, welcome to the podcast. Hi. Hey.

It's so comfortable in here. It's so comfortable in here. Well, you're at your own fucking house, you lazy prick. Thanks for inviting me to the space. Oh, you're quite welcome. Internet space. Yeah, you've been here before though. Yeah, during Construct-a-Con.

Last time we did this, it was in a crowded, sweaty press room with the background noise and people scurrying it out. And then we cut it and did it again, as as as as they were moving tanks in that room. It was being deconstructed around us. It was like indigo prophecy. The apartment just started flying off into space. Getting torn asunder. Hey, you guys got to move, because this thing will kill you.

Okay. I couldn't have been happier with the way that went down. It was so great, because like I couldn't contain my laughter. I just just just started giggling my ass off and all of you guys were just looking at me weird, because you didn't know what was going on. And from my perspective, on the other side of the couch, I was seeing like crane pick up and drop things behind you while you were trying to take it apart while we're trying to do it.

Oh, it was, it was, it was hopefully we don't have that good time to repeat itself. Hopefully this is nice and dry. My building just gets blown up. Yeah. Like what would really happen is that the peasant uprising would throw a brick through your window. Yeah. All those peasants are dead.

They're dead. They killed the the the Royal Canadian super government killed our peasant uprising. There we go. With kindness. All right. The bed height was expanded. Brother Yukon. Yeah.

That sent in there. So, buddy, why are you here? Well, before we get into that, I just, I just do want to remind, buddy, that in order to get a word in edgewise, you've really got to elbow it. You've got to throw some bows and just cut right in whenever you want. We tend to give people. Because I can't slap you guys this time. No, exactly.

Just like, like put my finger on top of your mouth and be like, no, shh, shh, shh, shh. Or kick us in the shins. Don't spoil it. We tend to give people on Skype a lot more leeway than we do people in person. Yeah. We know there's a slight delay. Yeah. And it gets really awkward if you try and fight them.

But it's still a lot less than an average person. So it's either the Skype delay or the unannounced bathroom break. Yeah. And when you're like, hey, bunny hop, what's a patriot? And there's no answer. Well, buddy, you know, considering you're at home, like you could just, you could just, you know, shit in your chair and no one would know. No, exactly.

Yeah. And ruin my great. Because he says as he shits in his chair. Yeah. What kind of a person was shitting a chair? Not me. You should make that the podcast title Super Bunny Hop. Shit in his chair.

Super Bunny Dumps is our best. Super Bunny Dumps. Yeah. Dude, you don't have to, like, this is 120. This is 120 to humiliate him with his, oh. This is 120. All right. You guys hate me.

Oh, no, no, this is our form of affection. Yeah. Yeah. We have to do it here. So I guess if we're doing the introduction, Woolly. Yeah. What's an interesting, interesting, fun fact about the number 120? Well.

Because this is podcast 120. And you're stealing Liam's bit. You're stealing Liam's bit that he didn't want to do. Oh, I'm sorry. You didn't want to do it? No, I don't want to. Oh, you don't know. Okay.

I need Liam to feel the burn. Because he hates doing it. I need him to suffer. What's our esoteric fact about the number 120? Well, 120. Stupid. This week stands for Asuka 120%, which you may or may not have heard of. That is the shojo fighting game that we'll do sometime in the near future.

One day. Yeah, Asuka 120% burning fest. Every time you mention a fighting game, we put it at the bottom of the pile. That's correct. The pile is like. Didn't we also use a percentage on our make-believe Skullgirl game? That's exactly where it came from. Did we also call that 120% or we call it another percentage?

We called it, I think we called it, Neko Musume-Chan's Climax 250%. Yeah. Oh, no, sorry. 250%. Yes. I think that's what it was, which got some officials fan art, which is really cool. But yeah, Asuka 120% is going to be a fighting game we play in the near future. That's crazy.

That's a terrific fact. And before Ultimax. I don't know why 120% specifically. It's mathematically impossible. It's a good round. But okay. You know, it's like all the sports players that come out and say, like, yo, we came out, we did our best.

We gave it 110%. Yeah. Exactly. They never say 120. So I don't know what that's about. It's George. Like you said, it's not mathematically possible, even if you hypnotize people into thinking it.

It just can't be done. Yeah, no, exactly. No matter how much you do it, you can't be at 100%. He's not wrong. It's the truth. No, he's wrong. You can. Oh, my God.

It just, no, it just means you're an idiot and don't know what you were capable of and your former 100% was like 30. Embarrassed. There's too much of a good thing. George, why are you here? Because I hear that you feel it too, don't you? That and Liam finally, yeah, there's, there's, okay, okay, you guys finally beat Metal Gear Solid 5, right?

Yeah, we did. And Metal Gear Solid V. I've been dipping in and out of the Let's Play series every now and again. I did not get to see the reaction to the ending. Well, that's because it's not up yet. Okay. Well, that would make sense. I think the last, the last part I saw was just like the chapter two videos you guys

put up are just looking at the screen of tapes and not doing any, it's, it's such a weird situation. That game is weird. It's troublesome. It's weird for Let's Playing and it's weird for Metal Gear. It's troublesome because like one of the ways was, okay, we'll play for half an hour and then we'll have 10 minutes of downtime listening to tapes. And we, we talked about it and we said, no, it'd be better to just condense it all into

one. A bunch of tape episodes. Quarantine tape episodes. Cause people that don't care or don't want to listen to the tapes can have episodes they can just skip. Yeah, basically. So I was, I was trying to think of a way to weasel myself on again and you know, just like rub myself into the ribs of one of the best friends and be like, hey, you guys like

me, right? Right? No, no. Please, please drink from our essential oils. Oh, no, buddy, you can, you can come on any time. You are the only person that plays some of the games that I like that none of these fuckers will listen to me talk about. The, the, the dole ass warpages.

Yeah. Like, like pillars and, um, uh, wasteland. Yeah. That's, yeah. I'm, I'm way less, what you tried to say is that you and I, we're, we're, we're, we're trying to say is that you and I are way less of a fucking weeb than these chumps, right? I'm a pretty big weeb sometimes. Okay.

Well, yeah. When you want to be. When I want to be. That new one punch man episode is the shit. Even though with that being said, I, a long as time ago after I finished Metal Gear Solid, and I think after I 100% of Metal Gear Solid, which was like a month and a half ago, I, I, um, asked if you guys were going to do a spoiler cast and Pat was like, yeah, sure. Come on.

And, uh, yeah. I'm here. I am. Yeah. You sound really happy to be here. Yeah. I, uh, it's so weird knowing that, that, um, also the delay in terms of beating the game, like that's, that's real.

That's not just the time it takes to have the game up. Like I was talking to you after I beat it and you're like, no, I just got to the part where the child soldiers for the first time and I'm like, what? We're not there yet. Yeah. Yeah. We're there. That's the cost of the let's playing some times.

So are we, are we into the segment? Cause I know. No, no, no. We're going to have breaks here, but yeah. So what I want to do is protests, uh, no, but Matt, we don't, we don't want to spoil it format. Uh, who hasn't hit the end yet. So we're going to do, uh, we're going to, well, for the listeners, their last cast is

going to be at the end, all the way at the end of this episode of podcasts are, so you don't want to get Metal Gear spoilers, which I bet some of you don't because the LP is not done yet. Yeah. That's true. You want it more pressing matter. After the watch is when you want to stop listening. Yeah.

But for now we're still in the peaceful, uh, uh, they taunt from a nod that is, that is the intro. Chapter one. So, uh, George, I want to congratulate you on two Jimquisition mentions in a row. Oh, yeah. They just keep coming. Yeah. And I'm not even like doing it.

I'm just living my life as normal and they just keep happening. Yeah. No, this reminds me of when you were telling us about like when Konami attacked your video, but you were out of, you on a plane or some shit. Yeah. And you touched down and the whole problem had completed itself. Oh, yeah. By the time I got home and it's, it's, everything's so weird.

Everything good that happens to you happens completely out of your control and without your knowledge until it's over. Yeah. You're being held up. Your videos being held up as a, uh, an example of like publishers fucking with, uh, what Jim is calling, you know, good journalism and digging. Yeah. Like you're, you're getting novelty oversize checks in the mail.

Like you've really made it from audible from audible, really. Yeah. Yeah. Though that thing really panned out. Like, how come they don't send us big novelty checks? They just send us dumb paper. Yeah. No.

Yeah. But that's literally a big novelty check, but it is breaking my heart because breaking my heart. George, how am I breaking your heart? If sponsors can't send us big novelty checks, then we don't take them. No, basically. I want to, I want to check. I can't hide inside my body when a mugger tries to take it.

There you go. Is that what you do when you get mugged? You're like, hang on, give me a second. Let me just swallow all my possessions. I didn't say I was going to swallow it. Depending on the integrity of the big novelty check, you could also use it as a type of escape device if it's windy outside. Yeah.

All right. Here's where we'll make the extremely natural transition into our weeks. Get lost. This is going to be a very natural transition right into our weeks. Into our weeks. Right now. Now. So that was our seamless transition into the weeks.

That's totally seamless. I'm sure the energy won't be super weird at all. No, not at all. Hey, Matt. Hey. The park has just started. Hey, Matt just sat down again. No, we've been here all the time.

This is the beginning. We're not into it at all. Not at all. And so now I'm going to go, hey. You saw me glitch out for a second. But I'm back. And we're just wearing the animal. Zach like did a double step bit.

But deja vu. Bunny hop. Yes, yes. How was your week? My week is pretty fantastic. Did you have one? I had a week. I did exist.

Seven days of current. That's good. That's good. So what I've been doing for the past couple of weekends, I've been having some friends over to play some video games on a steam link that I bought. Anyone, anyone here care about the steam link? No, no. I don't care.

I'm the only one that really plays PC games, really does to an extent, but not nearly as much as I do. And I will never tolerate any compromise on like image quality. So no matter how good the steam link is, it's not good enough. It's not as good as an HDMI cable. Yeah, I was about to say, you're the kind of person who's just going to tell me, no, buy a 50 foot HDMI cable with a 50 foot USB extension cables. Just put your PC next to your television.

That's what I'm running. I'm running the computer. People that want to play games on their PC, people like George have houses with seven rooms in them and it just doesn't work for them. Alternatively, put a laptop into the TV. Yeah. Sure. Okay, anyway.

Anyway. No, no, no. The bunny hop ranch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my God. The bunny is the steam link perfect with no latency and no macro blocking. It's pretty damn fucking good. I mean, Jesus Christ.

What are your standards? No, it has to be perfect and seamless. We were playing third strike and KOF 13 on it. But did you notice any latency? No. But would me or Wally notice any latency? Maybe, but then you'd get used to it. And what a piece of shit.

How tight was your rib parry game? Pat, you're fucking up the rolls. He is the no fun allowed, but you're not allowed to not have fun for people like me. No, you don't. Don't have fun. I already have the, what is he slapping around about? I'm enjoying it. That's my day.

So if you're anything like me, you already have a hard wire LAN connection going through the house. Absolutely. You have a super shitty living room computer that you hate and want to throw away. No, that's my big PC is. So that's just a George thing. You don't have a good laptop to fall back on either. Anyone?

I do have a good laptop. Okay, Pat. So I guess that's another George thing. Also you don't got time to unplug your real computer, carry it across rooms, plug it into the TV, and then put it all the way back at the end of the party all the time hoping that people don't get your SGR. If you do have a separate PC, like a proper good PC that's in a separate room, that is a totally absurd thing to have to do.

Justifiably not fun. Yes. Absurd. That's why you get a 50 foot HDMI cable. Or a steam link. Okay. So the thing is, it's a compromise. Is a cheapskate compromise.

You could buy $50. How much is it cost? $50. That's okay. Wow, that's a lot cheaper. Super cheap. And that's why it's like a compromise. You could either buy a pack of all these cables and then deal with potentially more trouble

because then you'd have to like disable the monitor and disable the USB devices when you have the party over and then run that through the house or put a steam box next to your TV where my router is. It's like a super specific on an individual basis. This thing may or may not work for you. And I happen to be falling in the line where it's like amazing. It's opening all sorts of doors for me. I need to ask a usability question here.

When you use the steam link, does only steam stuff work or is it literally just, you can project any image and it's just adding it to a monitor itself? It streams your whole PC over. However. Okay. Okay. Well, okay. Well, because my use case would be in reverse where I would keep the big good PC next to

the television so that all games I play are uncompromised and then I would use the steam link to put that to a monitor in a different room for like work purposes. So you would want the input lag for your work? Yeah. Well, that's not important. I can just, I can just do it better. Okay. Well, can't have any.

We already do our video editing on like phones and stuff. Yeah. Well, I have a laptop for that now. So. Record it on an iPhone. That's exactly it. Recorded by my iPhone. That should be on the bottom of every video.

How latency sensitive are you, Bunny? I don't know because that's a super hard subjective thing to measure. Because I think, I think like. You can only have fun with a certain amount. Because he said he said he was playing Third Strike, which is the perfect game. Exactly. Totally. Unless you're shit at Third Strike.

And I'm probably calling Bunny shit at Third Strike. I bet he's shitter than us. He is charged, I guess. Am I supposed to feel bad? Yeah. You fucking cowards. I'm sorry. I'm too busy having fun with other things.

Yeah. Sorry he doesn't do three fucking Super Junior Ropes. Yeah. It's great. How is it? As far as I know, it works great. However, this is the big however, is that this thing does not handle emulators well. And a lot of my friends got really mad at me for caring about this.

Wait, why? So I want to ask you. Yeah. Is it unreasonable for wanting the Steam Link to have good emulator support? No. Wait, why wasn't it working? I'm confused. Like, when you load up an emulator, it just breaks?

This is the big however. It changes your inputs. If you launch a game from Steam Big Picture mode and it launches a new full screen menu directly into the game, you're totally good. It's a perfect seamless experience. There's literally like four frames of input lag on my camera that was recording 30 frames per second. There's really eight frames of input lag if you're running at 60 frames per second.

That's on a wired connection. And I think that's pretty damn good. That's terrible. I literally, oh my God. The TV itself, that's 5mm. It's acceptable for most games. It's unacceptable for rhythm and fighting for everything else. Like, my TV only has 12mm and that's under one frame.

Twitch shooters, fighters, and rhythm games can't round that. I didn't test it with rhythm games, but I like schmups a lot and I couldn't tell if they were in the box. It's fine for like 90% of games. Yeah, for people that want a $50 box, that'll put the thing, but I'm still confused about the emulator game. Yeah, yeah. It's because when you're playing, sorry, because when you're playing like Guilty Gear

Exert and it shows you how much lag is running, when you see eight, it's like, off. Yeah, totally. It's the worst. Yeah, no. So eight frames are a deal breaker? Absolutely. Underfighters? Eight frames is like absurd.

It's like underwater. Underwater fighter. Yeah. Go play your baby games like Galactic Civilization. Yeah, that's a fucking crazy ale. They're turn-based strategy games that are really fun for parties too that I've had a lot of fun with out there in the living room. No, absolutely.

Okay, so it... Wait, wait, a long time ago I said there was a big however and that's the deal with the emulators. Okay, yeah. Because when you exit out of big picture mode after turning on the steam link and getting it booted up, you go to your desktop and it works fine, it functions fine. However, you'll notice when you use your controller in desktop mode, your analog stick is bound to your mouse cursor.

A, on an Xbox pad, is Enter. B is a K. Okay. And left and right clicks are bound to your left and right clickers. So it does more controller emulation. Yes, and that is what breaks the emulators because then you go to set up your inputs on the emulators and you're like, oh, okay, I want X on the PlayStation to be A on the Xbox pad.

That's... No, you pressed Enter, not A. That was escape, yeah. That seems super weird. It's super weird because it's a feature that acts more like a bug when it's in action. Have you tested games that are modern PC games that aren't on Steam? Yeah, I was going to say that's not emulators. That could apply to anything.

My copy of Witcher 3 is a GOG version. And I did have some trouble launching that up. The input wasn't working right, and it was displaying a black screen. However, there's an easy solution for that. And that is just add it as a non-Steam program to Steam. Because once you launch something from Steam, that's how the Steam link knows which window it's supposed to hook into. And that also determines how the inputs work.

And the big, however, launching non-Steam games like GOG is fine. It's the emulators that fuck everything up. Because the moment, if you launch from Steam, big picture, into a full-screen window of the emulator running, you're good. It interprets all the inputs properly. But the moment you open a configuration window, it thinks you're in desktop mode. It's Windows Explorer. Which means that the ideal solution is to only use emulators that both launch into and

can be configured from the same full-screen window. That's fair. And of all the ones that I've tried, there are only two of them. And one's ZSNES, which everyone knows, right? Everybody knows it. Yeah. Mednafin, for the PlayStation 1, is a little bit more of a rare emulator. It's focused on accuracy.

And the thing is, that's a command-line-only emulator. Yeah. So what you do is you make shortcuts in your Steam library to launch each specific game. Of text files. Yeah. As a batch file, so that it boots it up into full-screen, and then you can set up your controller just fine. But with other emulators, like a Dreamcast emulator, we were playing ThirstRicon, which

probably also makes you guys really mad, because there's a little bit of input lag in the Dreamcast is that... There's better versions to play, yeah. Disclaimer. There is slightly more fun. It's fine. No, it's fine. Yeah.

You set up the controls on your host PC first, and then unplug those controllers and bring them over to the Steam link, and then launch the emulator, and then run back to the host PC, and tab out of that window so you can unlock your cursor from the window that the Steam link is hooked into. Yeah. It sounds like a good time. So run Dreamcast, and then you're good, and your friends can relax and have fun. So, Bunny, what you're saying is that this serves a very specific purpose for a moderate

user, because the crazy Psycho Power users like me are going to find any compromise totally unacceptable, and there's a certain level of dedication you need to the whole process in the first place to even care about playing your PC games on your television. Really. And it really worries me, because this thing, in terms of streaming games that aren't genres you care that much about having perfect input latency, it's fantastic. Yeah. Well, when you were talking about it, maybe think of stuff like PlayStation Now and Remote

Play, which work fucking excellently, but it's the same thing. I hate those, though. I try to keep it on live and put it on with garbage, and this is a totally different, much, much more faster response time. Well, I mean, yeah, of course, it's in the same, it's in the same. Between eight frames and like, 25 frames. Okay, that's a bit much. That's what I was saying.

Nothing has 25 frames of fucking input, like, that's crazy. The game is going backwards at that point. Also, I live in Atlanta. Our version of the only real choice for internet, which is Comcast, we have a 300 gigabyte data cap, so streaming games over the internet is something I hate and despise and I'm super scared of for a lot of reasons. Oh, me too. I just had to know.

While you were talking, potential solution came to mind, Joy2Key. Well, that's still an issue because the other person's controllers, if you're playing, this is, emulating a single-player game on the Steam link is fine because then, what do you have to do in that case that is disable the keyboard shortcuts for the emulator, but you can still do that by yourself and you're not wasting anyone's time. But when you have friends over and you're setting up multiple controllers, there literally is not a fast solution. You have to plan ahead.

And no fun is happening during this section. No. The whole point of the thing is ease of use and he's describing a very complicated technical workaround to make something just work. Which makes me worried because I want this thing to succeed. Well, what you actually would need is just, because the problem is that basically once Steam is not running, it treats it as a keyboard and you just need a workaround for that to bring back to exit.

You can figure out those workarounds and only a scant minority of games, 99% of which are going to be emulators, are going to require those workarounds in the first place. But if you want to play duck game, if you want to play like Towerfall, Samurai Gun, there's a huge genre of excellent PC party multiplayer games. It's a super perfect, easy to work with box that supports like every controller out there. I tried it on Xbox 360, Xbox One, they work with the wire, not with wireless. You need to buy the dongle for Xbox 360 and for Xbox One you just fucked. PS3 and 4 pads, PS3 doesn't work wirelessly, but if you have a wire it's fine.

But the PS4 pad, it works flawlessly straight out of the gate. And so does the Wii U Pro pad, which really, really had me giggling. Because that's just like, whoa, out of, straight out of left field. Let me ask you, do you have to use Steam Big Picture mode for this? You don't have to, but it is recommended because it helps the Steam Link know which window it should be. Because one of my biggest problems with the Steam Controller is that it only properly works in Steam Big Picture mode, and it only properly works if you have notifications still turned on. What the fuck?

Yeah, did you listen to the public ask where I described my issues? I remember complaining about the Steam Controller and my reaction was like, this guy bought a Steam Controller. I had a problem with the Steam Controller where none of the presets would work. Like I would load up games and the controller was like broken, just completely fucked up. And I eventually figured out that if you have Steam notifications turned off, no, Steam Overlay. Sorry, Steam Overlay turned off, which I turn off on everything. Like, it needs the overlay to work. Dude, for fuck's sakes, Portal 2 doesn't work out of the box with the controller.

For fuck's sake, I booted it up with a controller I borrowed from Pat, and I started it up and the controls weren't fucking mapped. It's fucking Portal 2. I think if you want to get into this brave new future that Valve has in store, ignore the fucking future. It's a silly new future. I think the Steam Link, I really would like to see this thing catch on, but I don't see it happening because the whole purpose in the first place is not for casual users. Like streaming PC games on a separate screen through your home, that's weird. Like, Grandma's not gonna even know what that is.

Well, I don't know, I feel like the current slate of Valve products are all for casual users. The Steam Box, the Steam Controller, and the Steam Link. The Steam Box, given that why would you buy that when you can make a better computer for the same amount of money? Probably the most extreme of all of them. The Steam Controller, because it is a jack of all trades, definite master of none, and you get better performance from any specific device. And the Steam Link, because yeah, you're accepting latency, which is fine. Again, I play games on remote play all the time, but all of these are not for power users. Yeah, I think they're shooting for that large audience of casual PC game players.

Well, they're trying to break into it. Well, because the thing is, they want to get that stuff, they are getting that stuff in stores. And with the existence of a lot of Android boxes and Chromecast and stuff like that and what not, nowadays, I feel like, yeah, a lot of these devices coming out that are just an HDMI plug are actually for casual users. They're really looking for full penetration into the comfy couch. I'm worried that the audience they're trying to get, like, barely exists. Yeah, and that's the thing, is because I think it's fine, but my setup is so weird, and it depends on what hardware I already have. I have a living room computer from 2008 that won't play duck game at a smooth frame rate.

That was a desire, because I fucking love duck game. I have fun with duck game, it's an objective fact. It's a game of ducks. Yeah, yeah. And so, there was like one night where we were playing this stupid pixel art indie game that looks like it's from ten years ago, and my living room computer from 2008 was like, oh, and I was like, oh, and I just ordered a steam link, and I'm super duper happy about it, even though if I had to list the problems, there really would just be one big one, and that's the stupid keyboard mouse emulation that controls it on desktop.

Yeah, if you're running Nidhog and you've got to go to the video settings and dumb them down, you might have a problem. I've got to turn off the shadows and tessellation at Nidhog. It was playing Nidhog at half speed. That living room computer has got to go, and the steam link is such a great replacement. It's only 50 bucks. I'd imagine that the video settings of Nidhog say, why are you even here? It's hard video settings.

I don't think they're hard video settings. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, 50 bucks for the steam link is definitely a fantastic amount. In the future, I might actually bring my PC to a proper desk and get a G-Sync monitor, and that would be the only thing that gets it away from the television, and then I would just use the steam link to the television for media. And yeah, it would work fine for that too. You don't have to worry a bit about media, because you don't input anything.

What input? Yeah, exactly. The play button? The play button? There was a lag between when True Detective started, and I don't like that. Oh, I don't like Woody Harrelson's character anymore. I feel like I'm behind in this episode. Yeah, that's another thing.

It's great for cable cutting too. One last thing, and then we can move on, because I don't want to take up time with my stupid problems. Was the steam link all over the place? That's the most exciting thing I did with my week. But one last question that is, can you guys back me up? Is this thing being able to support emulators good, an important feature? Yes, no. Oh, totally.

Absolutely. There are legit reasons in my opinion. I'll speak for myself. I'll speak for myself. That's awesome. I love it. I love it. You shit, Taylor.

It's a fucking device to let you play PC games on a television. Emulators are a non-insignificant part of playing PC games. And there are legit reasons why emulators should work for legit purposes. I think it's the kind of thing that'll get fixed over time, such as the steam controller not being able to fucking turn itself off without putting the steam back up. I can't believe that. Which got fixed. That's another much more minor problem.

The steam link doesn't have an off button. Nice. But yeah, I don't know. Like expecting emulator support. Well, it's not emulator support, it's outside of Steam X input support. Right. It needs to be broader and better implemented or dumber and not implemented at all. Literally get rid of keyboard shortcuts when Steam is closed.

Well, like the case he's describing, that's what the steam controller does when you're not in Steam. It works exactly like that, the way he's describing it. And I was browsing the internet for a little bit and I was like, yeah, this works. The problem is that it wants to turn your regular good controller into a shitty steam controller. And or PC navigation. I'm sure it's the kind of thing that'll get fixed, but like the choice.

I don't know. Yeah, I guess we're down on the steam controller. Is that all you had to say about that bunny? Yeah, I just wanted to, you know, take a jab at Taylor. No, fair enough. Taylor sounds like a bitch cat. Get fucked. He's not good at video games.

Bunny, I want to ask you, do you like Fallout? Fallout, which one? Fallout 4? The new one. Yeah, I like it. It's super easy to talk shit about, but it's still okay. Like it's fine. Yeah, it's a super easy game to talk shit about.

Super easy. Bunny? Oh, okay. So I'm okay. You idiot. That shit that I want to talk about is that's also what I love about this game is just putting down furniture on the ground. Load in the air.

It'll lock the entryway to your bed hive. I can't stop. Like I literally like port 18 hours into the town building part of this game. So I had a point where the bed hive wasn't cutting in anymore because the bed hive was causing everyone to spawn in weird locations because they couldn't actually go sleep in their beds. So I decided to unbed hive the bed hive, and now the beds are in regular, normal locations. I think you're better up with the bed tower.

And then what happened was, because I'm such a high level now, I started to get attacked. My maces started to get attacked by death claws. And wanted to sleep in your beds. And like my shitty defenses, even though the defense stat was high enough, wasn't going to cut it. So I decided to put walls around my bases. And holy shit, the fucking interface for building walls around your base in this game is hilarious.

It's the worst. They just like, they don't tilt or rotate. They only raise or lower on the y-axis. Yeah. So you have like these, these accordion looking walls like floating above the air or clipping below the ground. There's no middle ground. You have to use the shitty wall and if you have weird spots in fucking elevation.

And you end up, there are two situations in which a settlement I have as an incline. And I started the wall up at the top of the incline only to find out that there was so much fucking space. That you should have a hole in the wall. That like moving it left because they clip to each other that I could walk underneath the wall. And then I had to put another full set of walls in front of it. Could you just like plug the hole with chairs or something?

Well that's, that's a lazy solution. The other thing, and this is, this is the biggest problem with the base building defense thing. I was so upset and disappointed when this happened. So Bunny, did you unlock the castle? Oh yeah, definitely. Okay. So eventually you get to, there's some old civil war fort in Boston that is a pentagon.

And a couple of the walls are destroyed, but it's mainly a proper like pentagon style for high walls, castle. From like 1700s. Yeah. And you can use the concrete foundation thing to literally plug up the walls so that you have a proper walled in castle. And I set up proper defenses around the entrance and there's only one entrance and I was like, and everything was great.

It's like, man, this place is a fucking fort. It's Fort Knox. Nobody can get in here. And then I fast traveled to it and raiders spawned inside my base. Yeah, they do that. Enemies spawned inside your walls. So what do you do? It seems fine.

I'm counterintuitive. So the strongest thing you can do is have all your turrets face the inside the raiders. Face the inside of your settlement. Wait, did you just build cages so that hopefully they'll spawn inside them? No, unfortunately not. Like the best two defensive things you can do is build your turrets on all your walls facing inwards. Oh my God.

Or build a foundation, a tower in the direct center of your base with your turrets all facing outwards. I've defended a lot of bases in my days. In your time. I've seen more enemies spawn outside the build zone than inside. Your mileage may vary. Yes. But there is still value to building regular walls.

But you do have to come up with some... Like creative counters. ...counters. ...molds. Building walls. And the idea that that's a possibility is kind of baffling. Well, both of those issues you just listed are super clear. I can see right now the bug in the database for both of them with like 40 comments back

and forth between tester, lead, and developer. I had raiders spawn on top of my wall on the castle in a place that I couldn't physically reach. Now that being said, is it fallout the only game where bugs existing is actually a good thing because people were fans of how the older games let you fuck yourself over with bugs? It's really funny. You kill NPCs that give quests and they never come back.

No, no. That's a feature. Yeah. Which fallouts are we talking about? He's talking about by fall one, two. One and two. There's the 2008 line. Because killing quest givers...

Yeah, that's not a glitch for a second. It's not a glitch. You're supposed to be able to do that, but Bethesda often doesn't let you do it. If it's the main quest, the person will just fall down and get right back up. You know, they should get more credit for the writing. Yeah. There is an abundance of essential NPCs in this one. And let me tell you about bugs.

I had goofy ha-ha glitches for most of the game until I ran into and Bunny, you remember Preston Garvey gives you that quest to go to the castle, right? I hate Preston so much. I hate him too. He's a robot? He's a black guy. Oh. And I hate him.

With the way the story works, he might be. Okay. So, yeah. Anybody could be a robot at any time. You never know. You could be a robot. I don't know. I beat the independence thing and then I sent him to Red Rocket where all my companions

live in that shithole gas station. And then I got, like, I finished a quest that's like, go liberate a settlement. Like, okay. And then I went to go turn it into Preston and I clicked on him and he wasn't submerged underneath the river like he is sometimes and he wasn't on a roof where I couldn't reach him. He was just hanging out at Red Rocket and I sent him. He's like, hey, good job, General.

And he gave me the quest. So far so good. And then I clicked on him again because I wanted to level up his companionship thing so that I could max him out and get his perk. I said, hello. And I kept clicking on him and he was locked into like NPC mode and could never be talked to again as a companion. And he gives you main quests.

He gives you Minutemen. Until he starts giving you the never ending procedurally generated. Yeah. I've heard of another settlement that needs help that you just turn around and run the hell away. Bunny, I don't understand your obsession with not having the quest in your log. You don't have to do it if it's in your log. Yeah, but I still have to click past it and be reminded of my failures.

Most of them are in the Selenia. Anyway, point is he was locked out like all content in this character was locked out forever. And I had to look on to Reddit and ended up finding a console command to remove him from an NPC faction that he apparently joins in that mission so that he can't be killed. And like then the next day I saw a statement from Bethesda saying, don't use console commands. It'll fuck up your save file. Like fuck you. You fucked up my save file.

You did it. It was you. It was you. On the other hand, we did get the dialogue mod. Nice and quick within about some days. Tell people about this dialogue mod. I saw that today on the news pop up. It's the fucking shit.

And you found it and I'm grateful. It's a solid like 25% upgrade of horrible, horrible decisions that were made in the conceptualization of this game. And that is the, it's not quite Mass Effect. Mass Effect does it way better. Yeah. It's not a wheel. It's a dialogue control pad where you always have no more or no less than four options. One is, yeah, definitely one is asked more questions.

One is no, I don't want to do it kind of. And one of his sarcastic, you saw that review. Yeah. Bunny hops review. I made that review. Oh, that was on the, yeah. Because someone made, someone linked to the Steam. I don't think Bunny knows anything about Metal Gear or Fallout.

No. The Steam comment, someone linked to that on our subreddit. Yeah. No, it's his review. Okay. Okay. The problem with the sarcastic, you guys talked about this last time. Yeah.

I talked about it at last time. I listened to the first 30 minutes. What a game shit. The thing is, there's no more than four options, no less than four options. And they have two words at most paraphrasing what those are. Somehow one. It starts at one and stops at two. Sometimes there are two.

And those are the good ones because you might have a slightly better idea. A 200% more clear. Two words is a rich description. Yeah. And the thing that's hilarious comparing it to Mass Effect. Sometimes has two options and situations where that makes sense. You walk up to a trader. You either trade with them or you don't.

In Fallout 4, there are two maybe options. You have maybe an unsure barter and no. Yeah. And it's like so weird because even when you install this dialogue mod that spells out the full line in front of you. So you don't have the all caps two word paraphrase. So what the mod does specifically is it takes the text string that the character says. And then puts that in the place. So you get to see the entire thing they're actually going to say.

How did they do it? If you use the console version, it can overlap with the screen. But his version becomes a vertical list. And the spot size becomes smaller so there's always enough room. Instead of saying glass him, it says hit him in the head with a glass. Yes. It is placed in size a lot like the Witcher. Except even then in the Witcher.

It's so weird because there's always one through four. There's never one through three or one through six. They were very adamant about that. They're so adamant about the four choices. And I don't understand it because that means you have to record more lines. I think it definitely just feels like it's to its detriment because sometimes you want more, sometimes you want less. And she wanting four all the time is not great. Well, it's Fallout 4, huh?

But I think I hit the worst of those dialogue prompts in the entire game. And it's when you catch the guy, the bald guy, you catch him at the fort. Bald guy at the fort. You catch the guy who took your son. Oh, yeah, Kellogg. Yeah, Kellogg. And you confront him and your character is mad. And already there's a problem because I don't care about the stupid kid at all.

I care about him less than you do. The main quest tells me to care. And your character, when he runs into this, he is furious. He's spitting mad. And you have four options and all four are variants of, fuck you, I'm gonna kill you. But one slightly sarcastic. Yeah, no.

And every single one of those ends in a fight. And then after... He's disappointed. And afterwards, whoever's with you goes, oh, you really killed him. You can't convince Kellogg to kill himself. Why do you even have an option in that dialogue scenario? Instead, they should have just written it of, like, your character goes, fuck you, I'm gonna kill you, you bitch.

And then hostile encounter begins. Or they could have known it. But it just seems so, like, unfallout to just dictate how you have to feel. Yes, it is very unfallout. It's writing a wide possibility of options and skill checks that allow the player to have a unique personal experience. It's a bummer to me that there's no skill checks. Like, my favorite thing in New Vegas would be that I hit speech and medicine

to their max right away. And you constantly run into situations where, like, are you a doctor and your speech check passes and go, yes, I am a doctor. But now you say yes and there's a 50% chance that you succeed. Oh, the save scumming on that shit is the fucking worst. But I think we're all missing the big picture, which is that there are over a thousand names that you can put in. And they will save five or so times throughout the game.

Bonnie, you've beaten the game. How many times have you been called? What's your character's name? Bort. Bort. Is Bort one of the ones that they say? Come on, Bort. No.

And what is the deal with that? Did they have Bort? They did not have Bort. No, like, okay, so you can't answer me. Mommy, mommy, they have my character in fallout. No, come along, Bort. God, I wish they would have had Bort. Bonnie wasted.

I'm maybe 50 hours into the game. And Cogsworth, the robot? Yeah, from the very beginning. Occasionally, like, he's called me Pat twice. That means there's no one in the game named Pat. There's no single Pat out there in the wasteland. So Piper is probably the biggest thing of like, oh, you guys fucking pussied out on this shit.

So Piper is a really awesome character that is a journalist. She's like from a different game, it feels like. She's her and Nick. She the girl with the hat? Yeah, yeah. And Nick is the crazy Roboman that looks awesome. Those two characters are amazing. And Nick never calls you anything other than hey, guy.

And Piper's the worst because Piper and Garvey call you nicknames. Blue. And blue and general. See, it seems like it would be more jarring rather than more immersive considering the percentage of the time they actually cut your name. Like the fact, like why if blue and general are built

in case your name doesn't register or whatever. No. But my name does. And you just did the name thing for no one. I think you're all about something on the internet. What? She calls you blue no matter what your name is. That's my point.

She's the only NPC who ever says that. That's funny. That's my point. Let's be realistic. They'd have to record like tens of thousands. No, no, that's exactly his point. That's my point. Why is this feature even in the game if only your robot

says it twice? So you can giggle at the robot calling you Mr. Boobies and be like, oh, that's neat. And then move on with your life. And then quit the game and make a new save file with a real name. It sucks. It's super stupid. I maintain.

I think it's more jarring. It's a mask because it's right at the beginning. Like Cogsworth says in the opening cut scene. And then later when you meet him again, he says, hey, Pat. And I go, oh, that's cool. And it's never happened again. I think it's a vanity nothing feature that I couldn't care less. And that's probably because they don't have BORT.

Yeah. But they had it. They had that fucking presentation that's like, we recorded 10,000 lines of dialogue for every name. They didn't record 10,000. They just recorded 10,000 names. Yeah. Just like mathematically speaking, that shit is stupid.

And if they call you at five times out of the thousand times you get referred to, it's a statistical anomaly. Yeah. And it's not like it doesn't make sense. And the worst part about it is that fall. I've spoken only about this in the past fall has this awesome thing and Skyrim does it. And so does oblivion, I guess, where because your player character is

not a person, they're not a named person. They get they get their title from something. Yeah. In Fallout 2, you have the Vault Dweller. In Fallout 1, you have the Vault Dweller. In Fallout 2, you have the Chosen One. In Fallout 3, you have the Lone Wanderer. In Fallout New Vegas, you have the Courier.

And then in this one, the character's title is the Soul Survivor. I've never heard. You barely hear that. They call you it like a couple of times and then forget. Yeah. But that's the Soul Survivor. And the Soul Survivor is a cool character title, but it's fairly used and characters call you the Vault Dweller.

Yeah. And characters call you blue. You dwelled in a vault. Give me nothing or make my character a character. Okay. What? I just, what is, how, how does, how is this ruining it for you? It's just, it's just a nitpick that really, really bugs me.

It's like they, they, they want it to go havesies with a character that's a character and a character that can be anyone. But like, it has, it has that problem. Remember in Red Dead Redemption, like you could be a monster or not, but John Marston in the cut scenes was like a generally open guy. I think, I think what you're saying is there's a dissonance. We're going to let you name yourself and we're going to place importance on the idea that you are yourself, but you're going to have to feel

these emotions at least. Hey, no matter what, you're going to love your son. Yeah. You're going to, you're going to like it. Like to love him. You're going to want to be a thief. He has horrible murderer that does drugs all the time. The cut scenes where you're like, my son, I love him.

Give him back to me. Don't make any sense. Fortunately, you have four other Fallout games to go play. It's a lot more like unfocused and, and jangly than the previous games. But in other respects, I kind of, I don't mind what they've done with the skills. But I went into that middle school and went into the vault and they were doing combat training and they all rebelled.

It was cool. It's all forgiven. Your best vault you guys have seen so far. Ever? No in four. Aren't that many of them? I've only, I've only been to that one. Shit.

Damn it. There's, um, there's construction. There's one that, uh, Oh no, I've been to two. Yeah. Clean and operational and fun. Yeah, there aren't that many. The best Fallout vault to my knowledge is, I forget the number,

but it's in New Vegas. It's the one where it's the lottery. Yeah. And no one wants to win the lottery because the lottery is sacrificing itself for the greater good. That's right. The, the, the simulation one in Fallout three was pretty fucking strong too.

Yeah, but the one, the lottery one in New Vegas is, if you want to be the overseer, you get to be the overseer for a couple of years, but they, you die at the end to maintain resources and you go into a room and they play this nice little video. It's like, so you're about to die and then a bunch of machine guns kill the overseer. Yeah.

And the fault starts to get crazy and they devolve it into a lottery and they all start having civil wars over who's going to have the lottery. And if you go down and refuse to send someone down, like the last, like survivor refuses to go down, the program unlocks and says, congratulations, you've determined that sacrificing one life for many is a morally repugnant and the, the, the system unlocks and all the doors unlock and everything

is fine. And then that person shoots themselves. The irony is that no one has done that until you. Yeah. It took over a hundred years. Yeah. The, the, the, the data pad or whatever you find it on as a guy said, fuck this, we're not going to do it.

And then everything unlocks and like the, the one, I think it's one or two people that are left, like kill themselves cause they can't handle the fact that they, they killed everyone over this whole period for literally no reason. It's fucking awesome. And, and. Yeah, I want to play this fall. Fallout 4 really misses the mark on like super good side stories

like that, which is what's so fun about New Vegas. It's like a TV series video game. You were right when you said on Twitter that the most exciting thing about fall off 4 is the idea that Obsidian might make a new fallout with this engine. Cause it's, it's like a good base to start with. Yeah. Like I really, really like a lot of improvements that are there

in terms of the inventory, not the inventory, the, um, like pit boy functionality. Yeah. Um, not the dialogue. I mean, at least the face is like general shooting mechanics. Oh yeah. General shooting mechanics, just like the sense of movement and control is still not great, but it's better than it was before.

Okay. We can't, we can't take up too much of the podcast with the fall cause Wally's literally lying down and going to sleep. Yeah. No, I'm, I'm just, I'm going to. You did lie down though. I did lie down cause I want to get comfy. I'm a little bit cold right now.

But I want to know what Matt's into. Yeah. Matt, would you do this week? Um, well, I do some stuff, but, uh, just generally really shocked at like how well received the, um, wedding video was. You put up, you know, your little vacation videos or whatever, you just go, ah, for fun and stuff. And just shocked at the amount of like everyone just really,

really. Cause wedding videos have feels in them. They have feels. If there's one thing the internet fucking loves, it's the feels. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so I just wanted to thank everyone just for, you know, checking that out and, and write a nice congratulations to

the comments stuff. Uh, bearing that, we've, we've just kind of decided where we want to have a big vacation next year. Um, anyone want to take a stab at just the first place that comes to your mind. This is honeymoon second impact. No, no honeymoon second impact. Just our big next vacation.

Cause remember if you recall, you said the place that we went to. Can you give me a hemisphere? It's, um, southern hemisphere. Cape Cod. Cape Cod. Metro city. Brazil. Metro city.

Brazil. And you said what? I said Brazil. You said Brazil. Yeah. Australia. Ah. Jamaica.

Oh. Okay. That's the sample. Yeah. Yeah. Because we, Yeah. That doesn't hit woolly nearly as hard as I thought it would.

Cuba, Jamaica. Same thing. I wish, I wish it ended with Grenada. Grenada. Don't come back up. The sage house. It's pretty similar to what she did. That's, that's, that's why I'm kind of like,

Exactly. Oh, oh, you really liked it. You just want a better version. You really wanted a better, like, you know, better, nicer. That's not expensive. Jamaica. You want a beachfront resort. Sorry.

Experience. You want the beach together. Yeah. But you need, like a better one, because Kurt Tersenke goes way more expensive than Jamaica. Why not? Not Russia. What?

I would love to visit Russia one day. Like no fooling. Now's not a good time. You know, now's not such a good time. Not great. So yeah, there's that. And, um, we also kind of decided for how, like for our actual anniversary,

we're going to just go somewhere to the U.S. and just do a tour of haunted houses. Nice. At some, at some point in October. Haunted fish house. Haunted fish house. The only ones if you recall. The only fish died in there.

What? If you recall me talking, the ones I don't want to do are the ones where they beat you up and like tie you down. Yeah. The ones that really want to. Deep down you want it,

but you know you can't handle it. I can't handle it. Yeah. We're going to try to do that once a year and at some, like, indeterminate point in October, because there's still, we want to do,

we don't want to get locked down on actual Halloween. I hear, I hear the upstate New York is pretty scary. It's pretty spooky. Yeah. Stephen King's like that. Um, I saw a 007 Spectre,

actually like way in the West Island for a change. Um, and then I realized, man, I don't want to do that again. Yeah. Because fucking West Island. That's right. Uh, I saw 007.

It was fairly disappointed in it, actually. I heard it was kind of long and it didn't really go places. For all the, the gravitas and stuff that like James, it was all me and it was all this and it's coming to a head.

It didn't seem, it didn't have a sense of importance that much. Worse than Quantum of Solace? No, no, no. Okay. So much so that that's not fair.

One thing the movie doesn't really cool is that they shit on Quantum of Solace. Okay. How? I won't really say, but they mentioned previous plots like James, we were behind this and that,

and they don't even mention Quantum of Solace. Oh no. It's pretty funny because they know, they know. So it was much better than Quantum of Solace but still below Casino Rao and well before, and also one of the weakest songs and opening intros ever.

That's a bummer because they've been killing it lately like Sky's the Killend, or friends, Sky's the Killend. Well, because Quantum of Solace was super forgettable. That was the Jack White one. That was Jack White,

Alicia Keys or something. Yeah. That's all right. This one was just like... There was no Chris Cornell. Yeah, no, it wasn't. So I was a little bit disappointed in that, but it's still great, you know?

Is it super serious and grim-dark or is it stupid and fun? It's not. I was going to say, it's a bit more fun and a lot more jokes, actually. Because that's... Some jokes made me laugh out loud.

That's what I want out of a James Bond movie but all the Daniel Craig's ones are like... This one's a little bit more silly, actually. Especially when Batista shows up. Oh yeah? And doesn't have a single word of dialogue except for one, which was a gag. And that's very classic Bond.

Casino Royale. That's very Jaws. Casino Royale isn't really grim-dark buddy. Like, I think... I think it's grim-dark. No, it's probably sad James Bond. That scene where they're crying in the shower after they kill people

and I'm like, oh, come on. James Bond is a cool, happen-nerd-round guy. Sadistic asshole, yeah. I'm James Bond. I'm not the real person. I don't want to see how the sausage is made. You want Pierce back?

I think Pierce could be better. You want surfing on Giant Tidal Wave? Everyone just wants Sean Connery back. Exactly, exactly. Those are so... Yeah man, all these women are getting punched. Let's bring Sean Connery back. Hey Ed Green, you betrayed me.

Punched! Bring Sean Connery back with Halle Berry. Oh. I also started and finished Jessica Jones just blasted through it and I said it to you guys before that we started the podcast but I was just going to say it's fighting and like

showing of superpowers is really cheap. Like, they kind of cut away a lot of the time. Like the focus isn't on that at all. The focus really isn't on that. And the budget. So, yeah, kind of budget but they're not doing crazy things. Like, these are street level heroes

so you can punch a guy really hard and they hit a wall really hard but it's still not shown a lot and that was kind of a little bit disappointing where I don't... There's not a single fight scene that kind of like I remember very well but unlike Daredevil

when things aren't really cool and things aren't... Nobody's fighting. All the in-between stuff where they're reading attacks papers and going article three, section five and the industries did what... All the foggy scenes.

Everything with foggy, I hated, right? I was just like, let's just get on with it. And in this, it's much better. It's actually the focus of the show. And the focus of the show is, man, this villain sure is the strongest fucking villain ever. How are we losers going to beat him? How could...

Well, you just... How can Punch Girl and Black Man beat her? You know, beat him rather. Like, the guys got powers that are more at home in like a goddamn proper X-Men or Marvel movie. Well, I looked up Purple Man and he is an X-Men in the sense that he's a mutant. Just as he's a mutant.

But of course, they're not allowed to say mutant here. But like, he's fighting street-level punks on like Punisher's level. I mean, fucking Power Man Luke Cage is a badass. Like, make no mistake. Dude, the dude that like, they... They know. Luke Cage?

You have to. You can't fuck that up. This guy has the role now forever. You can't fuck that up. He is so good. Like... What's Luke Cage's powers? He's fucking powerful!

Unbreakable skin. You can't cut him. You can't shoot him. You can't really do anything. Oh. And super strength. Okay. So that's why he's street-level, obviously.

Okay, yeah. But I wasn't gonna say, as attractive as the girl that plays Jessica Jones is and is like, spunky and sexy as she is, like, whatever. My chocolate man-pop, Luke Cage, has so many sexies. Thank you.

And he's like, you're gonna break. And she's like, no, I can't. Like, Luke Cage puts shaft on notice. Really does. That's what I want. Is Luke Cage like new super black man? Yes. Yes.

But he's not new. He's been around forever. It's the 70s. Pop, I mean, pop culture-ness. Before he was like, when he had the tiara. When he had the tiara. And the sweater.

And the open shirts. And the yellow shirt. He doesn't wear a lick of yellow. Fuck yeah. Making it the first black character in pop media that has not worn a yellow thing at some point. Sounds good. Every Mortal Kombat character.

And also watch more of Master of None. Sweet Christmas? Yeah. Sweet Christmas all the time, Luke Cage. Yeah. Master of None, surprising with even more street fighter footage. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I couldn't believe it. They brought back street fighter from where? Yeah. I made it to like episode six or so. That's about where we got to. I like where he's going with it. It's getting gutter. It's the new Aziz Ansari show.

Yeah. And it was really hard to peg where he was going with this. What the show is going to be about and stuff. But it's really just his version of like Louis. You know? It's like. Not nearly as cringed, but in approaches. No, no, no.

It's not cringed. It's a manic weirdo. Oh God. The dude that plays. But it's different topics every week. That could be kind of whatever. Yeah. The dude that plays the black guy that gets cut up by the lasers

in Resident Evil 1. I love that guy. He's like, he plays. He's like, oh, I lost my beloved cat. When I went to the premiere of AVP. Shakespeare. Yeah. Yeah.

My heart goes out to you. And Aziz is like, okay, man. And walks away. And then the camera just stays on the guy as he looks off to the distance for a full minute. That's a good Aziz impression. I'm pretty decent at Aziz. And the last kind of thing is I already talked to William and

Pat about it. It's like, for whatever reason, and everything except playing it. I'm like super into Bloodborne for whatever reason. Well, it's right in your wheelhouse from a content perspective because it's all old gods and Cthulhu shit. Yeah. Because I remember when I first told you guys I was playing. I was like, so I saw a portal just kind of open up and a tentacle

kind of whacked me a little bit. And I was like, huh. And then Pat just kind of goes, yeah. More of that happens. That game's, that game's mid, that game's antagonism twist of from werewolves and monsters to not fuck off. It's the elder beings. Cthulhu Cthulhu is the best.

Hang it out on the church. There are few games that do. It was Aliens all along really well. Yeah. And Bloodborne's like might be the one. I watched your video about the Lovecraft influences in Bloodborne. Yeah. It actually made me go, yeah, let me, let me look more,

more Bloodborne stuff up. What did I miss? Is that I found a documentary on HP Lovecraft and you look and you find lots of crappy like fan ones that are done in like on their phones and stuff. But I found one. It says like Lovecraft, Fear of the Unknown. And I'm watching it and the narrator starts up and I'm like,

I know this narrator and it's just fucking Miller. Oh, it's Robert Atkins. It's just Robert Atkins downs. And he does his Lovecraft impression. Like he reads passages. I'm like, oh, this is so good because it's just Miller. Can you send me that? I will.

It's just on YouTube. Yeah, that's weird. It's a very good documentary and it's just really weird. You know what Cthulhu loves? He loves a good chemical burger. Good burgers. God. Did you see that?

No preservatives. That fifth tape. I saw what Zone did. Yeah. Okay. Wait, wait. Is there like a Zone tentacle burger? Zone put up a hidden tape.

Of Kotalker having sex with the burgers. I highly recommend it. The editing is on. It took me like multiple minutes to figure out it was fake. I can't believe what I am googling. It's fantastic. So yeah, I was just engrossed in Bloodborne and Laura fight the last little while and I watched like the speed runs

breaking the game and stuff. So I'm like super, super into that. It's the coolest game. Well, you described a moment that made me go like, okay, shit. No, I need to see this now. Yeah. Where you're like, this one guy is deal fending a bunch of invaders.

Yeah, I know. I saw the William Liam lesson. They had already seen it. So I was really glad that you were like, whoa. Oh, he's talking about the ladder drop? Yeah, the ladder drop. It's super crazy. For those who don't know, a guy fights off a bunch of invaders

climbing a ladder by waiting at the top of the ladder. And when they're all in a row, he jumps off and backs through them and kills them all. And then you see all the bodies falling down behind them one after another. That's stupid. It's amazing. So yeah, that was my week so far.

Cool. It's still cute. Not much. We're kind of on a one track thing for what kind of TV we watch. I also watched another Netflix exclusive show. I watched with Bob and David, which is a sketch comedy show with Bob Owen Kirk and David Frost. And I don't know if you've ever seen Mr. Show.

It was an older HBO thing they did. But this is almost a continuation of that. And it's only four episodes long. And it's weird. It's super good. It's super tight. I watched the meat lover sketch. That show is fucking weird.

That's the opening. That show is so fucking weird. There's a sequence I really like where they're talking about how, well, in a sketch, they're talking about how because they're with Netflix, they can do stuff they wouldn't be able to do on TV. And they make one of the most offensive series of jokes about the Middle East and the Prophet Muhammad. It's fucking fantastic.

Really, really good show. Only four episodes long if you have... How long is that? I want to say half an hour. Okay, so they're 22 to 30 minutes. Four episode orders, strange. No, I know. But it's really strong.

It's really good. And there is a fifth episode, but it's actually like a 40 minute documentary. It's good content. Well, because it's not actually... What it is is all behind the scenes and stuff. And you get lots of recordings of them discussing and talking about stuff. And it's kind of an interesting watch. It's not, you know, sketch comedy anymore.

And it's not even funny. But it's just like, they have a full making of that they made at the same time. That you can just watch immediately after. It's pretty cool. I popped in Bloodborne just to make sure I was in the right spot to go into... Yeah, I did the same thing. I am furrowing in the right spot. That's with that, oh God.

You know how I said I have a 300 gigabyte data cap? Yeah. I want Bloodborne DLC so bad and I can't have it until next month. Really? It's nine gigs. Yeah, but that will throw me over the cap. I'm at 90% of my 300 gigabyte internet ration. So you still have 30 gigs left.

Can you just not download that or you just pay extra? I could pay $35 extra or I could wait a week. Dude, why don't you bring your PS4 and we'll download it for you and mail it back. What if you delete PT? That'll be cheaper. Yeah, I did the same thing. I was grinding a character last night to get all my minimum stats up so I could equip all the fucking weapons.

Dude, that game's so good. It's so good. Yeah, so I barely played it but I booted it up and I just felt how it moved and I was all got pledged a little bit. It's so good. It's a little bit really good. Have they done much with improving the frame rate? No.

Shit. I mean a little but not perceptible. They made one patch for the loading times and that was a serious loading like improvement. There has been no frame rate patch whatsoever. If there were any frame rate fixes they're completely imperceptible. In fact, it performs fine. The weirdest thing is that when I was replaying through some areas they did put a patch out that changes how the co-op works and there was a new character in the base game.

Yeah, that's the new patch that just came out. That is supposed to be basically Soler again and you can also summon NPC fighters for all of the top boss knights. Yeah, that was part of what I did last night. I was just looking at the new stuff and I was like, super cool. There's a new Hunter's Tool as well that went in the patch. Really? Yeah.

What is it? It's a whistle. It's a little whistle. Where is it? Ooh, you'll have to find out, won't you? No, I can just look it up. Oh, fuck you. It's in the forest.

It warps you to level eight. Oh, fuck the forest. The forest. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. What's your lips on this whistle? And the other game I played a lot of this week, I played a Sword Art Online Lost song. Of course you did.

Yeah, of course I did. Of course you would say that. No one forced you. No one forced me. Well, no, nothing wrong with the games. You know, the show, like, fuck. So it's by Art Dink who did a lot of Dragon Ball Z games and Gundam and Metcross. I'm not gonna say Artune.

Yeah, no, not Artune. Oh, Yoshi games. And it's pretty solid. It's completely different from the previous game. The previous one was like an RPG. This one is more of an action game where flight is the main thing. It takes place in like the second season of the show. It's all right.

It's, you know, nothing to write home about. But I have one, like, real qualm with the game. And at a certain point... It's based on Sword Art. Actually, no. Shockingly, no. So this whistle's the coolest. So you get to switch between, like, pretty much all the main cast of the game at any point you want.

In any place, whoever you want. They're all different weapon sets and stuff. And at a certain point in the game, they let you enter a character editor. Because there's a huge multiplayer suite in this game. Okay. And you get to the character editor and you immediately wish there was no character editor because you see the potential and they just axed it at the starting line. So there's six races.

Each race, you only get to pick one gender. Oh, fuck off. Each... Each... Every one of those characters after that set has two different hairstyles. No more. They have two different skin tones. Dude, why even bother?

It's a fake MMO character creator. And there are three voices per gender. Not even per race. Yeah, so it's just fake. It's not real. It's just super shitty. And the end result is you can make any one of the NPCs that you can see in the town. And that's all it is.

That should have just been a character select screen. Well, what's shitty about it is the previous Sword Art game had a pretty great character editor. And this is by a different company. That one was, I believe, just internal Namco Bandai. This one is, of course, not Artoon. And it's just a bomber character editor. It should have been a thing. Considering a multiplayer focus, like fuck off.

But otherwise, the game's fun. It's fun to have the ability to fly around from the get-go. You don't have to bullshit around and level up. You can just fly wherever you want. Which world does this take place in Alphine? It takes place in Alphine Online. The second one. That is Alphine, right?

Yeah. You can't go back to Sword Art? No, no, no. The next game coming out next year is back to that. Because so... I want to be able to fly in the Sword Art universe. You can fly in Alphine and... Alphine sucks.

It's all forests. And blow butterfly kisses at your sister and stuff. It's great. Her boobs are so big. Her boobs are outrageous. It's crazy. Yeah. But it's a good game, actually.

I've been drawing myself not too long, about 10 hours long. Maybe I'm fast approaching the end. But it's fun stuff. I was pretty much all I did with my week, I think. Oh, well, he's getting back up. He's awoken from his slumber waves. Yeah, no. I had a pretty busy week.

Okay. I did a lot, and I'm going to, like, truncate. But finished off the Sopranos. How's that ending? Yeah. Well, I already knew. Everyone knows, obviously. Impossible to avoid.

But at this point, now that I've seen the full context prior to... You don't know about the Sopranos ending. I don't think I know the ending. Oh, wow. Okay. It was a big controversy at the time. I might have heard the ending, but I don't know the ending. If I do know it, it's not the Sopranos.

The ending is not flocked up from a plot perspective. It's flocked up from, I can't believe you put this on TV perspective. Is it good? The ending? I'm okay with it. I'm okay with it. I just don't know. And it's an old show, I think.

Yeah, I guess Statute of Limitations. So I'm going to say what it is. What if I ever want to watch it? Then it won't affect your enjoyment at all. Because I knew what it was, and I watched the whole show and still enjoyed it forever. I don't mind anyway. I don't know what happened. I've heard all about it back then.

Yeah, it was a massive controversy because the final scene of the show is Tony Soprano goes to a diner, and this family is all meeting him up there, and then a bunch of suspicious looking characters are around, but you don't really know, and they kind of are just suspicious. They're just hanging out. Yeah, and one guy kind of walks by and stuff. And then Tony's eating some onion rings, and then it just cuts the black. And that's it, and then the credits roll. And then you're done.

Wow. You're out of the Sopranos world. You're not allowed to see anymore. And there's a bunch of, like, kind of theories. Is that supposed to mean, like, you could die at any time? That's him getting shot, or, you know? You're having a heart attack from eating onion rings. Yeah, and David Chase, you know, like, has his over the years opted to not answer, and

at one time it's like, oh, we thought he gave an answer, but then he backtracked on that. The smartest thing to do is saying nothing. Leave it alone, right? Because any reason you give will be terrible compared to whatever people came up with. Now that I've got full context behind it, I think that, yeah, it's totally left up to interpretation, but my interpretation is that he did die, and there's some signs in the scene and some things that relate to earlier events in that season that basically make you feel that way.

Yeah. And the coolest thing about it that has nothing to do with, like, earlier evidence, it's just the way the scene is directed, is he's eating the food, and then every time, like, he's sitting there first, and then his wife comes in, and then his kids, right? And so when the wife comes in, he looks up, and then you catch to his point of view, and you see the wife come in, right? And then she sits down, then they talk a little, then Dora rings again. He looks up at his point of view, and you see the son come in.

And then when his daughter's coming in the last time, the Dora rings, he looks up, and then cuts to black. So to me, it's like, that's the jumping into his point of view. It could go either way. Exactly. It's cool. And I like it. I think it's fine.

That's pretty cool. And I finished that show fucking thirsty, so I immediately went right into watching, are rewatching Casino, right after that. And then I was, like, still thirsty. Casino, how could you possibly be thirsty after Casino? Because you watch Casino, and you see, like, a bunch of the characters and actors from, that are in the Sopranos, and you see where they came from and stuff, and this is fucking Scorsese.

Did you just roll right in to Goodfellas? I rolled right into Goodfellas, right after that, and watched the Adventures of Billy Bats, and fuck it. Billy, I'll invite you to Christmas down at the Italian. Yeah, I'm ready, man. You can just sit on the walls and listen. Oh, go get your fucking shine box. I'm so in.

I did the full Scorsese. Okay, so you just watched these movies. You have a good frame of reference to answer something for me. It's something that I've struggled with forever. Which is scarier, like, what do you think? Am I a clown to you? Or what did you say to my friend here? Pesci.

Yeah, it's the dinner confrontation over what am I a clown, how am I funny? Or what did you say to my friend here, where then he kills that guy with a pen in the fucking lobby? Yeah. Which of those is more horrific? Pesci in Goodfellas is more terrifying. Okay. Pesci in Casino. Okay.

Pesci in Casino is clearly nuts, and you know it immediately, and there's never any sort of eh, but Pesci in Goodfellas is funny guy that's cool to hang out with until he explodes and scares the shit. Over nothing. Over nothing. Yeah. And it happens multiple times. That's what I thought, but I always felt like that in Casino where the pen was nuts.

The pen was nuts. Yeah. Random and out of nowhere. Like, no, we're having a fun time, and I'm going to shoot at your feet to make you dance like the old cowboys, and then I actually shoot your feet, and then you're like what, the poor spider man, he fucking gets it. You know, and then he comes back with his feet all busted up, and he tells Pesci, he's joking around with him, whatever, and he's like, you shot me in the foot, and he's like,

I added that, and he's like, yeah, go fuck yourself. And everyone's like, oh, oh, this guy's getting the backbone, ah, good for you kid. Good for you to let anyone tell you shit or whatever, and Pesci gets his feelings hurt so he blows the kid away. And it's like, that is way more terrifying, because like, yeah, let's go back to our game of cards. You really need to follow this up with like, try to analyze Pesci's performance, which is very similar, in Home Alone, and see how his other third monster, the soda, stacks

up. He says he will eat a child towards the end. He threatens Kevin by eating his fingers raw. It's really a trilogy when you think about it. After those two movies, he then decided to just burgle. Yeah, man. And you know, I think, whatever, I think that Goodfellas is a better movie than Casino when you put the two together.

I think you're right. But yeah, now I'm sated. I'm sated on the monster kick. I've gotten it out of the system. Other things I did was, I didn't follow the full series, but I read the ending sequence of Shin Mazinger Zero, specifically because, I'll spare you guys the details, but it seems random and weird that you just went straight into the thing. Because the ending of this series, it's a really cool series where I talked about it

in Mecha Week. It pays homage to a lot of Go Nagai stuff, and it starts bringing in a lot of his other creations and whatnot. And it's really cool. And towards the end, it starts paying reference to things that are not just his works. And the final defeat the bad guy moment in this is nuts, because it's like, the bad guy in Shin Mazinger Zero is basically Mazinger itself become God, a God of the universe that gets unbeatable and whatnot.

And the effort to defeat it meant looping back through time, infinite amounts of times, and it just never really worked. And anything that's kind of a Mazinger can't defeat one. So blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The only way to defeat it is to use spings that are strong enough to fight something that powerful that are inspired by Mazinger, but are not Mazinger. What does that mean? That means the likes of Gundams in silhouette form, Gun Buster, Ava, Gao Gaigar, Gurren Lagann,

and Deter and Guy King and fucking everybody up to a page where you see a silhouette and you're like, is that? Yeah, that's Gypsy Danger for the final fucking breastfire and the final defeat the bad guy moment. And it's the fucking sickest. It's really cool. So that was nuts. Gypsy Danger.

Gypsy Danger, getting a nod in a Mazinger story. It was pretty cool. So there's that. I finished off Lisa the Painful RPG. Yes. Okay. Have you played this? Yes.

Yes. This is finally something I can talk about. Yeah. And that's where I said, that's where I said, I know that this is something you're, you're, you've touched on, George. Now I beat it and then I immediately went back and played Lisa the First. I did not go that far. And then completed Lisa the Joyful.

So the full trilogy. If you would. There's three games here? There's three games actually. I didn't know that. Well, the other two are like really small, right? Small. Yeah.

Their companion. Yeah. Lisa the First is actually about an hour long. Oh, okay. That's it. And Lisa the Joyful is about four. Okay. Yeah.

It's, it's, it's a full extra game basically. Yeah. So I felt that like Lisa the Painful, I thought, you know, I was going through, I told you guys how I felt going through it and that it was like, it was all right, you know, I'm not like where this is going, but let's see. I felt that it ends up pretty strong. It's just, it's a really solid RPG. It's probably the best thing I've ever seen made an RPG maker.

Um, it, uh, is, it's the only problem is by nature of how it was released so close to Undertale. Oh, no. I was making. It wasn't. It came out. Yeah. Sorry.

But how I played it. I have the same problem. Yeah. Not sure. Not that it was released. Yeah. But when I played it rather. I was getting way more weight into decisions that didn't matter as much as I thought they

did because of my experience with Undertale. Yeah. And the other thing was there, the moments that were, there's really impactful moments in the writing that's really like, oh wow, that, that hits hard. It has a lot of good gut punches in there. A lot of really good things. Absolutely. Um, but there are some that are robbed, uh, of how strong they should be because the,

the device they use to, to make you, I guess, catch the feels. That you empathize. Is that they. Catch the feels. They have English words for that. Yes. We have new English words. And we're talking, we're talking to people who know what we mean.

Um, they, they rob you of your agency, uh, uh, and they do that by, um, basically having the character be forced to act and do the things that this is the only way to progress forward in the story. And no matter what you try to do, it won't let you, you have no choice. Like you have to do this thing. And I feel like that's really strong when used properly. Best example of that being the final button press in, uh, snake eater. Yeah.

Right. Um, but George, towards the end of the game, I'm sure you can think of like two particularly strong moments where you have no choice but to press X to continue forward. Yeah. And it. Always. I mean, you know, there's a lot of violence that you're like, wait, did I really press that button?

Yeah. And in those moments, I kind of felt like I was robbed of a agency. I felt like I wasn't, uh, able to, I've always like found the, the desire or like the discussion around agency and choices in video games to always be kind of, I don't know, a little bit confusing and infuriating because in all of these RPGs and like any kind of video game ever is as, as open as they can be, they are still closed systems. Definitely. Where, where the decisions or even something that you do straight out of the game and breaking

it and modding it are still systems put in place by the developer. Well, yeah. It's, it's like not all games have that kind of agency. Not all games you're supposed to role play. Yeah. The you. You know what I mean? Yeah.

And in this case. You are definitely not. It leases back at least as case, like the, the, the removal of the ability to do anything else in these moments is justified by the fact that the character, not you is that kind of person. Yeah. He's, he's, he's a dummy and is, and is, and has problems and is not okay. You know, so it is, it is justified this, this, but I just, this reminds me of some

people that were unsatisfied by the ending of the last of us because they did not agree with Joel's decision and that most people don't agree with this decision. Right. It's a, it's very similar. And, and resented having to do all the dirt that you do at the end of the last of us. It's like, I happen to totally agree with him and that makes me a psycho apparently, but like it's not the point that it's not your decision. It's that character.

It's that character's decision. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I just, it's very, very small because it's like, I feel like the character, there's ways where it could have been written to achieve similar, if not the same results by. Right. Wait, wait. If you want to not care about your child and fall out.

Your child would fall out to a baby that doesn't speak and is like a fucking. Yeah. But it, the baby's important to that guy. Sure. There's a, lots of games do this. Yeah. But fall out is all about choice. Whatever you want.

It's all about choice. But. There's a mod that what? You can replace the fat boy projectiles with the baby. Yeah. Yeah. And that gives you a reason to care. It's called Adam Bond baby, I think.

I guess so. Yeah. You can follow. Sorry. The last one doesn't have like a, a, b choices throughout the game. No, I has no idea. To me, it's kind of has. It's completely unnecessary.

Shoot that guy with a gun or hit him with a stick. And then you can see why some people might be like, well, this is the most important decision ever and I wasn't given it. But the gameplay didn't have anything to facilitate it. And Lisa, this doesn't, this moment that, if I'm thinking of the right moment, it doesn't happen with the dialogue prompt. Like you have one button to press and it basically makes a cutscene play. I think that's more okay than like showing a dialogue prompt, but the cutscene plays

no matter, the cutscene plays the same no matter which option you pick. Well, it was that, but then there was the other moment was an actual battle sequence that plays out. Oh yeah. I remember those two. And it's like, this is a full on battle sequence that is like, ah, but that, that being said, like, I think it's, it's, it's okay to do this, but I find, I think there's ways that you can handle writing in these situations where again, you could achieve the same sort

of end result, but allow you to feel somewhat that you came to that conclusion on your own, still being truthful to who the character is. Soma does that very well. There's a thing that happened in Soma where I always thought I was making the right decision until about, until the next decision. And I looked back on my last one and when I made a mistake and went, looked and back on all of them, I'm, all of these are mistakes, but I'm going to try and do my best this time. And then you get to the end of the game and it's like, everything I did was wrong.

And, and, and the game is expertly like, like tricking you. You're a fucking hypocrite. And yeah, totally. How, how do you like narrow down and identify the particular trick? So such a like weird thing to talk about because it always sounds so vague, which is why I think it's important to differentiate between there being a dialogue prompt or they're not being a dialogue prompt. Uh-huh.

Yeah. And well, they're, they're two, there's two, there's two key examples, but they're, they're, I'm going somewhere with this, right? Because I, I then beat it and then I played Lisa the first and I'll be, sorry, at least, no, Lisa the first. Sorry. You said Lisa the first and then, and then you kind of meandered your sentence. So I went to correct to fill in joyful there.

So no, no, no, no, no, I played Lisa the first. And uh, I'll be honest, it's not super duper great. No, Lisa's better along. Lisa the first is, uh, I think the term is a Yume Nikki style adventure game. It's basically- I wouldn't call that a term, but I'm sure some people call it that. Whatever people, yeah. Like that, that's like, that's like calling Phantom Pain a, a Grand Theft Auto style adventure

game. I wouldn't, I wouldn't know what else to say. I don't know what else. I have no- No, technically it's not. I've got nothing then Liam. I don't know. But I'm just, you know, that seems to be the, the, the image that comes to mind.

But uh, yeah, and it's, and it's kind of just like, it's abstract in a way that's like, okay, this is kind of like someone's first, you know, try at like putting this type of game together. But it did what it needed to do. It delivered its message and, you know, but, but then I played the joyful and holy shit the epilogue game, Lisa the Joyful is fucking awesome. I really like that. I might want to give that a try then.

I still have to go play joyful, but I've only heard good things. I like it so much more than like the painful and I thought the painful was good. Yeah. I, I'm, I'm living up to my stereotype, I guess. I didn't think Lisa the painful was, was that good. I, I had, did you guys have- I thought it was, I thought it was good, but like, yeah, nothing, nothing. Like, like, I had, I had fun with it.

I really enjoyed the writings, the joke, the wrestling arena subplot was great. The wrestling was so strong, but I just found the game a real chore to play and it's mostly because I don't know if you guys had this problem or not. I had a really hard time with navigation, like it's a side scroller with a lot of verticality and it's like hard to really put based on- If it's like a European platform or whatever. If someone, it's not. If someone told me they played through Lisa and never had any problem navigating the world,

they're liars. They are huge liars. I learned my lesson falling off the pic, the cliffside that one time and then I, it didn't happen after that, you know? It's the thing, I just got lost and ended up backtracking a lot and there were like entire, there was an entire hour of this when I was playing it and trying to get a video out on time, which is like a super specific George problem, but I still feel like there's an issue when in any given screenshot of Lisa, I don't think you could tell where in the

game that screenshot was taken because so much of the game is the same tile set with different colors and it has a very, remember Super Mario Bros. 2 vertically stacked side scroller with doors that lead to a new area with the same tile set. That fucked me. It might just be me and my weird George quirks, but holy crap, I could not find my way around in this game until the end when I developed a methodology. Yeah, you do write about the tile set repeating a bit too much. Yeah.

And like the oftentimes most of the time you go through a door, it would lead to a different tile set, but there were some repeating ones, absolutely. And I'll have you know that I accidentally went through the game on pain mode. And it's already pretty painful. Yeah. So I went through the game on the mode where you use a save point once and it destroys itself. Oh my God.

You get one bonfire, basically, type of thing, you know. But yeah, no, the joyful in my opinion, and you know, this is like, to me, it represents so much of what I applied to other mediums where I'm like, that show was good, but long, and it would have been so much better if they made it shorter and tighter. You didn't need 52 episodes, you could have done it in six. That's what the joyful is. It's compressing Buddy's story into four hours. Because then there's less room to get lost.

And yeah, and it just feels and plays better, fixes a lot of the things. And one of the first, actually the first decision you made. You come up before or after it's painful. The joyful came out afterwards. Oh, shit. Because I never heard of it until you mentioned it now, I only ever hear of painful, most likely because me and Pat are joyful actually came out somewhat near undertale. And when you buy them on Steam, you can buy a bundle of the two of them together.

And yeah, it fixes so many of the issues, and the first decision you make in the game is exactly the type of thing I'm talking about, where the character acts out the way they should, because Buddy would make this type of decision, either way you go with it. And it leads back to something that canonically makes sense, but you don't lose your sense of agency. And that's the exact fix for the thing I was talking about. And it's at the beginning of JoyFix. And it's at the beginning of JoyFix.

You don't have to play that. Then also it's a nice little tight story, it's a lot funner. They add a couple of cool things where it's like you can do kills on the overworld and some other interesting mechanics. It's like if they're too weak, you can just kill them. No, Buddy can jump off of higher cliff sides and not take damage. And you can just a run button. So if you run and jump off a cliff and you land on top of someone on the overworld, you

fucking, you assassins creed them. Another thing that really frustrated me about the first hour of the painful, maybe two hours, until you get that bicycle, you are painfully slowly moving through these areas that all look the same. And I was just lost. Yeah, they definitely fix a bunch of that with, I think Joyful is like, it shows that the creator Brad Jorgensen, he totally, like, yeah, Dingaling, right? That's Dingaling Games.

It shows that, yeah, from this point out, he knows what he's doing, I really enjoyed it. I don't shoot a day, why do you do that so well? Yeah, all I can say is that if you did not check out that, do it. It's a short play. And the other cool thing about it is that it's got different layers of endings. And everybody's got lots of them. It's very, it's very, it's totally, I'm okay with this.

It's totally Kojima-esque in that you can get extra extra codec sequences, post credits type of thing. And the full, full lore runs pretty deep. Good. I was impressed. So yeah, shout outs to Brad Jorgensen and you guys, you, Matt, Matt and Pat, you showed them. You said, you're saying that?

Also, it's a lot closer to Mother than Undertale is. Like, I remember a lot of people saying like, oh, these games are all so much like Earthbound and it's like, this game has charged. Way closer to Earthbound than Undertale Everett. Like Undertale is not really- Maybe like, I'm not sure if you saw the bunny made in the video, like, this exact stuff. Talking about all that stuff. Which one is more akin to Undertale.

And definitely, like, Lisa is way close to Mother. I think at surface level, when people look at it, like, clearly it doesn't. Hang on, I heard Bunny Scoff just there. Yeah, yeah. From a visual standpoint, someone would look at both games, one looks exactly like Mother and one doesn't. When you walk through the town in the beginning, you can see that stuff. You can see that feel there.

But- I feel like- Not the whole game. That shitload of room for argument. I feel like Undertale is closer thematically and intonally, whereas Lisa is just the ending of Earthbound. Like, 3% of Earthbound fully explored. I mean, in non-surface level stuff like combat, you have a first person crazy interface with

health rollers, Undertale's this weird S&T thing. I felt like Lisa's writing was closer to Mother's in style, not in terms of tone. And I felt like in style, but not tone, the writing. And Undertale's writing is closer in tone, but not in style. Can you give like- Undertale is like off the walls, quirky. I think every piece of text with very few exceptions and Undertale, there's a focus on it's gotta be quirk, it's gotta be quirk, it's gotta be quirk.

It'll be clever. Earthbound and Mother is like that, but it's a lot more pulled back and I felt like that was a bit closer to Lisa in that regard, where the writing style was similar. It's not as constantly, almost needlessly quirky, but yeah, the tone is vastly- I don't know. I think something that was originally done in Japanese and translated like 20 years ago. There's no way something that's rimmed today can even approach. So many like degrees and variations of things are what resulted in Mother's scripts, you

know what I mean? I would say- It's hard to even- No, I mean, I think you can write anything at any point in time. I think nothing in Lisa is middle of the road in terms of its tone. I think it's either funny, goofy, or super dark. Yeah. And it's one or the other.

It's one or the other. For sure. For sure. Let me ask you guys a question. Is Lisa the Painful RPG a good game? It's a good game. It's a good game. Okay.

Thank you, George. And Undertale's a good game. Undertale's a good game. So I guess not- Lisa's a good game, but I could see you not enjoying it if you played it on pain mode. I'm surprised you persevered with that. So I guess neither of them are very much like Earthbound then. Sorry.

What? He's trying to say that Earthbound's a bad game. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Anyway, let's continue and forget about that. This is our podcast. Get out of your podcast. Yeah. Anyway.

Anyway. It's quite worked the way you thought. Command me, earthbro. Command me, Earthbro. You know, I- It's a recommendation. What can I say? And now that that is all out of my system and taken care of, I finally jumped back into Frontmission 3.

Yeah! Popped it in another five hours, god. This is a game! The fucking shit! It's just so good! It's just so un-fucking brilliant! I wish I could have that much fun. Woolly...

I should finish recording two of these days and then play that. Woolly... I hit... Shut up. I left Japan and I fucking hit Australia and I got to the black market and then they opened up a tutorial on me and I was like, you're showing me a tutorial, nine hours into this game and it's more met customization? Fuck you, this rules.

That's cool. The game is so good. It is my trick to get guys to eject from their seats now, slightly more- Super-working. Yeah. Super-working. Isn't it the best? Yeah, you do. Yeah, you do.

Not to the same level, giving tutorials nine hours into it, but that's almost like if we get to the last boss in the con and a new button appears called the final con. And it's like, there's the tutorial in the last fight, god-con! You can now see why there's a lot of people like me that have been singing this game's praises for forever. Can you imagine playing this game when it came out? I couldn't. I bet you it would be less special.

No. At the time, I think this is something that's like you relish more now because you're like, go, look, it holds up so well. There's two appeals here and you can only get one. The one that I got was, I can't believe this game exists right now. This is so in-depth. This is so amazing. But the one that Woolly is getting is, I can't believe that I missed this game.

This game was just around the whole time. And now I get to have it, it would have defined me, my personality a lot if I played this back when it first came out. I would have perhaps steered more into the genre than other things. It's the fucking shit. I've never actually touched a front-mission game, but what you're describing is the best part of being an adult, is when you find something that has aged so well that you know if you played it as a kid, you would have been a better adult.

You can still vicariously, that's what I was getting when I was playing Metal Gear 2 on the MSX. It's like, why is this so good, oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. How have I not been playing this since I was eight? It's one of those things that when you see comments on videos that are like, oh, how could you guys care this old game, it looks so bad.

Fuck that guy. I feel sorry for that person. The ability to appreciate something in its own context in its own time is valuable, and it's awesome. Says the guy who says Earthbound is terrible. I played it when it came out, and I didn't like it then. Okay. So you were like, this game stinks.

Like what, like, what do you want from me? I went over to a friend's place, and we played it for like 10 hours, and I couldn't understand why you liked it. Sure. I initially got super overwhelmed by the Front Mission 3 Internet, and just lost it. Because it starts off small, and it's overwhelming, and then it opens all the way up. Well, it's like, it's a feature that you can choose to ignore, but the more you ignore it, the bigger it gets.

And so now I'm looking at it, and my eyes are glazing over, but I've spent like, you know, a good 40 minutes just digging around that shit as well. Oh my God. Oh my God. And getting, reading through their fucking mission statement, and finding like a special password to type in at a military manufacturer, and they will send you the parts like, I think, I must be remembering it wrong, but they like, you bullshit your way around a bunch of shit, and they send you the parts by accident.

Oh my God. And the fact that you branch off early in the game into one of two story paths that are insanely... You're in Australia now? Yeah. You're halfway through half of the game. Okay. 25 to 7.

The other path is longer considerably. So you branch off, right, and it's all based on one super minor decision, and like, as you're going through it, you're getting more branches here. Yeah. Well, have you, have you, uh, encountered, have you encountered the methane lasers? Not yet. Okay.

Uh, have you attacked a base where Midas was at? That's where I'm on. Okay. In the other scenario, you're defending that base from that force. Oh my God. Who, who owns Front Mission? Square. Square really does.

Always. Yeah. Dude. All, all the major plot points are reversed. Are, are reversed, and the missions are totally different because it's like, no, we have it. We have to protect it from the other side. That's so interesting.

Okay. Yeah. I, I got nothing except like, and you haven't even gotten to the numbers yet. Okay. Yeah. And, and three was made by From. Yeah. Uh, no, what?

By From. What? Front Mission 3 is what you're talking about. Yeah, Front Mission 3 is Square. But it's made by From. Square. Square. Square.

Okay. Didn't From Software make a couple of Front Missions? Nope. No, they made Armored Core. Armored Core. Armored Core, actually. Yeah, no. It's, it's the, there's an enemy type in this game, and the first one is the real numbers,

and they're pretty strong, and then you run into the imaginary numbers, and they are the shit. Yeah. Okay. No, I, that's, that's, that's it, man. Okay. Uh, how do we do it? Thanks for joining us.

Well, well, here's, here's, here's, we gotta figure this out. Is there any news that can't wait till next week? Uh, just. Just, just about everything can wait till next week, except for, uh, two, I'll say. Okay. Let's blow through these news. Maybe three. Alright.

Maybe the top three. The, the big, quote unquote. Because we're at like over three hours. We are. So we, so, uh, George, we're just gonna cover the three stories. Real quick, like. Real quick. Okay.

Get into some letters, and then, uh, end it off with the spoiler cast. All right. Yeah. All right. I'll be real snippy. I'm just, Sony confirming PS2 emulation on PS4. Fucking thank God. Yay.

Question mark. Can you say confirm you mean like, yeah, I guess. Well, they, they, I, I imagine, I imagine they wanted to wait till PlayStation experience, but some timing issue ended up with the Star Wars thing is what actually caused it. Because the Star Wars are running this, I mean, I mean, is like why there's, like some people are weirded out why there's no like big announcement of like launch titles. I imagine. George, did you play any of those Star Wars PS2 games?

I rented two of the three of them. No, I mean, the, the, the new versions of them. Oh, no, no. Spoiler alert. They look amazing. The emulation is, is putting them up to 108060. Good. It's amazing.

Cause that's, that's why I'm like, yay, I'm like question mark because, oh, they might try to like push some downloadable. I want to put my disc in there and just go. I don't. I wish, I wish that could happen to happen. And that makes me dis, yeah, and you guys wonder why I'm so depraved. I'm going to, I'm going to contend, I'm going to fight you on that one real quick on putting the disc in because I would agree.

I would rather be able to put my disc in and just end it and be like, yeah, I am playing the games I own for these titles. They are actually going back in and doing more work to get them running like this to add trophy support and stuff. They are actually doing new stuff on them. But the one you're losing out on is some titles that'll never make the jump. No, for sure. But what I mean to say is.

A thousand or two. I don't feel so entitled to being able to put my disc in because I know they're not just dragging and dropping a folder and calling it a day. So, so Xbox 360, you put the disc in, downloaded a patch and you go Xbox one. Now they've rolled this thing out where you. Ah, that's your fatal mistake, George. They're adding new features to, no, no, you're, no, that is, that's not accurate. They're adding new features to this, whereas that is straight porting or not.

That's actually sorry. Not straight porting. That's just straight emulation. It's either an Xbox or 360, depending which. This is like, like that is like specific case by case testing, where they're just doing testing to make sure it works. This is closer to what virtual console should have been. This is like, actually, they're going to have to go in case by case and make sure stuff

works properly. And remember, they are upscaling stuff in a, in a new way. So, but still, like, how does that negate the possibility of them just giving out patches per game and when you put your disc in? Well, because then. That's a lot of work. You're asking them to do a lot of work for free. Then how is Microsoft getting away with it?

Because that's a, that's a one size fits all emulator. Without the treatment. That is tweaked for each individual game, whereas this is not. Right. And Liam, while I do, while I definitely see that that means more work and it's, and it's a, it's a, it's a different service being offered. I, in an ideal world personally, I prefer the library instead of the, the. That was my opening statement.

Yeah. Well, I would prefer to have it. It'd be nice. But I'm willing, this is the reason. I'm willing to take the hit because the games look way better. Um, they, the Sony Europe came out and said, Hey, what games do you want to see on PS2 emulation? Well, to start, I'd like the ones that I own on PS3, like Nocturne and fucking Persona

4 would be a good one. Atlas seems like the type of company to get in there as soon as they possibly can. And for me, I'd, I'd eventually concede to I want my full library because I have like PS2 is what I have the most of every console. Yeah. I have like 300 PS2 games and 95% of them will never be on the service, of course. Because they're all dumb, stupid games that we could play. Oh, you know what you can do until then is put the disc in your computer and it'll look

amazing and play amazing. There you go. There's no guarantee. Depending on the game, it will. Yeah. Hey, guess what? Bunny Hop, the fucking Silent Hill 2 and 3 emulation is still shit. But what they could do.

You could just get the PC versions of those. Those ones are, are, are, no, they can be improved dramatically. Okay. I thought they were determined. But they're, they're impossible to buy because they were never released digital anywhere. And they require shit ton of work. And if you wanted to get a non-legitimate version, that doesn't work with the fixes people have created.

If they ever wanted to, though, they definitely could just let your PS2 disc be ripped to your PS4 and then run the ISO. Like they could do that. But yeah, I think we're going to get a select list. I want to, I want to see a big list. I want to see a huge list. Here's the thing. It's like, I remember the 360 backwards capability with Xbox got like some plaque here in the

game. It emulated like the majority of titles, but there's lots of amazing ones. They never did. A togi too. And then there's other ones where people went, why? Barbie horse adventures. Barbie horse adventures. And they would go, I remember the official response is, eh, some games.

While Barbie, Barbie horse adventures, you slap into the emulator and it works. And it works. But, you know, fucking MK and Shaolin monks. Yeah. Or like Riddick would not. And that's why they offered those as Xbox one. Fuck. Original Xbox, what does it say?

Xbox one. Original Xbox downloads. Remember when you got your 360? Yeah. On the store there would be like. Yeah. Crash Bandicoot. Yeah.

I guess that's why, like, sorry if I can't often ask, but as an ask. But I guess that's why I'm so like okay with the new way they're going. Cause like on, like even on the Wii on the virtual console, I think a lot of people think they just dragged a drop of ROM and that wasn't it. They had M2 go in and tweak stuff and it, it was just little tweaks. Same with 360, they just tweak stuff to make it work. And with virtual console, that's why I always give it the hardest time because it's like it was not a better version than the emulator.

Yeah. With this, with this solution, the game is actually better. It's better. With the minimum possible work, but it still takes a lot of work because they're improving. It's not just a little better, it's considerably better. Yeah. Like, was it Bounty Hunter? Now runs at a rock solid 16?

108060. Because before it, it couldn't even hold 16. Like 16 by nine though. Still letter box? Still letter box. Oh yeah. That, that you can't fix. But I'll never get to play my graffiti kingdom in 108060.

No. When, when the competition is offering a better service for cheaper, is it? They're offering a different service, man. Like, I really want to hear it to you, but there are, there are noticeable differences. Bounty, that's, that's, that's a difference of opinion. That's subjective. I think making the games better is a better service. How about this?

Uh, a preferable. But do we even notice this even costs money? Because what we played, I had to buy. Wait, you have to buy all the games? And I would prefer not to rebuy stuff I already have. Well, there's an option for you, and it's not rebuying them. The option is not to do it. I stick it in my computer and run it on the Steam link.

See, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, yeah. Well, I'm just saying, like, you're not forced to rebuy it. And I'm gonna say that, like, I'm gonna take a, uh, Bounty site here and that. I still, I still, I still stand by- Like, he's saying a better service, but you could replace the word better with preferable. I still wish you'd know. Right? My ideal would still be I want to put a disc in.

I totally agree. But- I want that to be an option. But ultimately, given having to rebuy stuff, I'm, I'm perfectly content with the fact that the games are gonna be better. Like, I, my PS2 is sitting over there, right? Matt? That's literally your PS2. And I have a PS2 that still works.

Yeah. And if I really wanted to play these games as they were, I have a PS2 right over there. Yeah. But I can't get them running flawlessly and perfectly without having to go through a fucking million emulator bullshit. And I, I find the making the games better to be a way preferable option. Absolutely. Even if there's less games. Yeah.

Okay, yeah, I disagree with that. Okay. Yeah, it's just, like, it doesn't, it's, there's no reason to complain because there's a benefit on both sides. Yeah. I'm, I'm on the side that I want the backlog. But you, you do just put in your PS2. That hasn't been taken away from you. That's so weird that you're even considering that an option because that's not the news story.

What? What? The news story is that PlayStation 2 emulation is being supported on PS4. What are they gonna do with it? Yeah. And then you're like saying an option is let's just not do anything with it. No, we're, no, we said our thing and you guys said how you don't like it and we're providing an alternative option. No, it's not that I don't like it.

It's just I like the version of it better where I could just run everything that I own. I like my fantasy version better. And it's, but, and both of them amount to just convenience. Yeah. Right. So, no, no, the version that's better, like the improved versions, that's not just convenience. Like there will be some games that are improved in this transition that will, that are probably emulate like shit for, for PCS2. And a lot of people don't have PCs that can emulate PS2 games as well.

Honestly, though, when you really think about, we can't get the nitty gritty of talking about this. Until there's prices. So to actually release A prices, B the initial list of games. And it's right now all of the Star Wars. Two dollars, Star Wars, bounty hunter, fine, whatever. I have nothing to complain about. It'll be ten. It'll all be five and ten.

Oh God. Five, five, ten's a little. I'd say two for shit and five for good. Five for shit, ten for good. It's going to be ten. It's gonna be ten. If it's a list that I have to use my scroll wheel to get to the end of, then that's fine. I don't think it's going to be a big list because they have to actually do work on each title.

It's going to be a small list. And Apescape 2 is going to be on it. I would rather stick it in my computer. Than do it. Try my luck with that. And that is always fun. That's the story. Just put it all in your computer.

Don't dumb it down with your shitty steaming. I'll be totally like down with that service. Remember that we get some weird Japanese only games on the PS3 Star? Yeah. Like you get Double Dragon, the fighting game. If they start releasing like, I don't know, Forbidden Siren 2, which we never got. That'd be cool. The European version, we got that all of that.

That's a good service. God Hand is going to be one of these games. Don't even joke. Dude, God Hand's a PS2 classic. Sure. I have it on my PS3. Yeah, you can download it on your PS3. Okay, well, I'm crossing my fingers.

Well, it's not a given, but I think it's likely that Atlas is going to want to go through there. The ones that already exist seem like they would be obvious. Well, but what about Odin Sphere? What about it? Well, they're re-making Odin Sphere entirely. They're not going to put a PS2 version, you know what I mean? Yeah. I think it's almost a walk.

So the other story is... Nanobreaker. It's not blood. It's Robot Juice. The other story is the Kotaku article and the response to the Kotaku article called... What was it? A Price of Game Journalism. A Price of Game Journalism.

It's about them getting blacklisted by Bethesda and by Ubisoft over the last two years due to them breaking the news on their games. Yeah, no shit. Before they were announced. I'm shocked Activision didn't blacklist them after they blew up in Modern Warfare 3. In Disney, yeah. So, yeah, buddy kind of hinted that some lines in the sand might be drawn here. But as far as that goes, to me, it's not that blacklisting is something that's good and is something that should be praised or defended. Because it's like, okay, Kotaku's Kotaku.

I don't like Kotaku. But, you know, the idea of blacklisting is like, it's not a great thing in general. But my problem is not with that. My problem is with the way Totillo wrote that piece and the way he... Or he's jerking himself off. He was... I think... Let me just...

Okay, okay. Calm down, buddy. Yeah. Really? I felt that the way Steve handled that was when he was talking about the way they needed to deliver truth in games. Truth in games journalism. And that they would never count out to the demands of a big publisher and so on. And they have a responsibility to their viewers and so on.

And it's like, I understand that. And when you're talking about shady things happening in the offices of a given bad developer... So like the EA's house thing, for example. Or things with 22 cans and things like that. Yeah, that's absolutely one thing that fits with the narrative you're painting. But to describe leaking news about a game announcement before it came out as the same level of truth and integrity... You deserve to know the truth like Destiny's coming. That's specious.

And I think it's a bit pompous to put it up there and use that as your... Because it's two different styles of story. Your defense. One is, yeah, you're actually exposing something that you might not know versus something that you're not supposed to know. Because there's like a whole year of marketing and shit ahead. And people will actually... We actually know a person or two in marketing and you can imagine that person just pulling their eyes out. Then it's wanting to yell at whoever...

And do it by all means, but just be honest there. You're doing it and it gets you a lot of attention and people click on the thing they should have an exclusive. There is a large difference between a story in which you go, I found out the ending to Star Wars. Here's a clip, right? The new Star Wars movie. And a video that is... Sorry, a clip that is like, Here is the fact that there are workers' rights abuses on the set of Star Wars The Force Awakens.

One is like a pop blurb in your magazine and the other is like a story. And if you get blacklisted for exposing the shitty work conditions, then fuck the company that blacklisted you. But in the other case, it's like, come on, you can TMZ it. What do you think is going to happen? They would have more reason to blacklist you if you exposed the horrible truths versus revealing unannounced projects. You're correct, but then... Okay, okay. Go ahead, go ahead.

I'll gear up my Kotaku defense force argument while letting you guys simmer up. No, for sure. You're right that they'd have more reason to block a company after they out something dirty. But ultimately, I mean, guess what? The companies just don't give a shit about that. They don't have to change. The product getting spoiled is the thing that matters because that's where the money actually is. I listed my opinion. I don't know how the rest of you guys feel. You black companies can blacklist who they want and whatever. Yeah.

Like, guess what? Journalists have to work with blacklists all the time. Real journalists have to work with them. I think this is a totally natural end result if you publish something that somebody doesn't like. They have every right to blacklist you and look super shitty doing it. And writing yourself a jerk-off piece about what a bunch of heroes you are just makes you look like an idiot. What I see this editorial as, and I read it from beginning to end, is a acknowledgement of a perceived overreaction of how these publishers are considering the value of what I, and I'm sure you guys do, but maybe not Steven Totillo, consider completely inconsequential news pieces in the greater scheme of things.

Yes. Because when you're dealing with games journalism, there aren't really that many scandals to cover that often. Nope. There's very little. The entire industry's under India. And 90% of the bread and butter of writing news stories about video games is basically what's coming out and what do we think of it. Yeah. And of course, when you have to dig for that, because that's what you have to write if you don't want to write non-essential garbage trash, and you're going to dig for stuff that they don't want to reveal is what's coming out, or what they don't want people to think of. And ultimately, in the grand scheme of your life, a piece of that is just, you throw it away, whatever.

On the other hand, a piece of news coming out about companies firing their star developers and treating their employees like crap, like that affects stock prices. Yeah. Like that affects a very real financially valuable piece of that company's property that they should care way more about than just... Yeah, a lot of these companies have totally fucked up misguided priorities in terms of... And Bethesda one really confused me, because Fallout 4 coming, that's good news. Posting that probably made a shitload of people happy. Stock prices don't matter as much as the raw dollars they make off of games, though.

Like that's kind of the... Tell that to the stockholders. So how do these marketers like objectively measure the sales lost, if not gained, from exciting news being leaked, and then decide that that's worth getting less coverage with? It might even be a more personal thing, because Kotaku or whatever site might get their stories, or like little exclusives or whatever, directly from said marketing team of whatever publisher. That's usually the case. Yeah, so it could just come down to like, yeah, this guy, like whoever is in contact with anybody at Kotaku,

and they said, oh yeah, here's a story or whatever. And then, yes, just that journalism. No. No. But if that one marketing guy said, oh man, they fucking posted this thing, oh man, I'm pissed off. And that one marketing guy could very well be the one that's saying, I think we should blacklist this company. A massive amount of this power rests in whoever Paul Marketing is at whatever company is. Someone who very well probably has no stake in journalism.

A couple weeks ago, John Baum got an email asking about like, hey, what's the deal with embargoes, and why do companies sometimes do embargoes this way or that way, or give weeks ahead or whatever, and the answer is it fucking depends on whatever the person at the place just thinks, and sometimes they leave and get replaced, and the rules all completely change. And most of the time, shocking secret, you can break an embargo and... If you're strong enough. The world will go on. What?

No. Yeah, no, like very, very rarely will you be signing some kind of legal requirement that they will care enough about for you to actually have some degree of accountability to uphold the indie. It's seriously the honor system. No, it's a, hey, don't tell anybody, if you tell somebody we're going to be really mad at you. They're going to be so mad they won't send you their free games. And this is another layer of the story. Blacklist, I don't give a shit.

Am I blacklisted by Konami? I don't give a shit. I thought I was blacklisted by Bethesda because they didn't send me review copies of Wolfenstein, but they did send me a review copy of Fallout 4. Oh, they unblacklisted you. But even that maybe, I don't know, like fucking whatever, just buy the game on launch, power through it, get your review out day two maybe. Yeah, well, like blacklist doesn't matter.

Literally don't fucking matter, because if you're a journalist, do your goddamn job and report anyway. Well, blacklist should be this little badge you get to wear. Exactly, that means that you're pissing off the right people. So if you get blacklisted by Bethesda or by Ubisoft, and there's some shocking story about either A, game coming out that people don't know about yet, or B, some horrible scandal happening inside the company, you shouldn't be talking to Paul Marketing anyway. You should be talking to the people who are leaking it.

Their blacklist is not going to stop you from doing your job. It doesn't really matter in the long term of things. It's a ridiculous system that is so much less important than people think it is. It comes across as them just slapping them on the hand or something. They're doing the only thing they can, right? I guess so. We're not going to send you a preview code. And it's totally yet.

And it's very much like, you know, Sterling mentioned it. It's a very egocentric way to think about yourself as a company. Yeah, Sterling's been blacklisted by a totem. And nothing beats Sega telling him, Nothing beats Sega telling him, like, we would blacklist you, but we know you'd just buy the game and shit on it anyway. So who cares, right? Maybe that was the new Sonic guy.

I think for sexual whatever, it's like they want that preview code or get invited to a preview event because everyone else is, and they're like, well, that's a story that we don't, aw, shucks. I think that's the only thing where they feel that's like bad. Hey, I don't care because we don't do that, but... And the reasons why the article was written where he mentioned that, like this, a lot of people were asking where's their early fallout coverage, early sadistic coverage, and he's like, I have to explain why we're not showing us

much of that stuff as in the other game. It's totally justified, but I just, I do think that the way he described it and the reasons, I just kind of went like, it's a bit melodramatic. Really? I don't know, but I also have to wonder how much of, how much of that reaction is because it's Kotaku. Kotaku has such a stigma. Oh, absolutely. People are siding with the publishers on this.

Oh, yeah, no, I'm coming. George, heavy bias. I'm coming. Heavy bias, guns loaded, blazin'. Like, oh, really? Yeah, I'm totally on the fucking... No, not impartial at all. I'm wondering, I've seen comments where they're like, oh, well, if they blacklisted them over some shitty reviews, yeah, I'd be hating the publishers. And I'm like, not if it's Kotaku you probably wouldn't be.

It is kind of fucked up seeing people cheering for companies blacklisting certain media outlets. And like, it's an over what? To me, it really plays like, when a review thread will go up on the old guy. Oh, yeah. And you'll get the errant review from someone who gave it a bit of a lower score. Games beat, gave it a three. And you'll have pages... Well, the best example in my mind is GameSpot giving Persona 4 Dancing all night a five.

No, the best score I firmly agree with. The best example ever is Eurogamer giving Uncharted 3 the eight. Yeah, okay, or that one's a really good example. It's Meltdowns. And like, people have Meltdowns and lambast stuff just because it doesn't fit their narrative. Just fucking Europeans don't open games. Guess what? Everyone's hyperbiased and is going to wish ill will upon whatever... A review is you writing down your stupid shitty opinion.

No, exactly. Well, like fucking Gershman on Fallout just happened. Yeah. You should listen to the podcast where they talk about review scores and they describe the old GameSpot system being formulaic. Reviewers didn't pick the scores. You would type in eight for graphics and gameplay and they were waiting. And the system didn't let him go underneath 8.8 for Twilight Princess. Interesting.

He would have put it at like a six, but because the review scores on that era of GameSpot were done by math, that's the lowest it could possibly go. Wow. And the system was busted and they overhauled it when they realized that a shit ton of games, like AAA games all came out to 8.6 because the sound and graphics were of a certain quality and required and nothing else in the fucking work could dip it hard enough to... At least I'm kind of pissed that's not 8.8 because that would have been perfect. 8.8 out of 8.8.

You can arrange GameSpot's review archive by score. Yeah. And when you get to the eights, the list never fucking explodes. Like there's two pages of 9s and 10s and then 400 pages of 8s and then like 15 pages of lower. Liam and I have blown away entire days of work just talking about how no one uses the full scale. Yeah. Like entire fucking work days. And I kind of get that.

Like when you write a paper in school and you get an 8 on a test or something or a B on a paper, that's like, yeah, it's okay, whatever. It's not exciting. And that's just what most of the non-exciting talk is. It's only exciting if you're stupid and bad at school. Yeah. And if you're stupid and bad at making games and get an 8, you're probably excited about that. What an unexciting score.

Yeah, and the only other... ...quantic dream is just the jury like, oh my god, we got eights? Oh my god. I can't believe it. What's the problem though? Like they shouldn't be getting eights. Because eights are reserved for games that are rather good. They should be getting sixes.

You know what I mean? Yeah, they should be getting sixes. So what familiar system... I should be getting a five. What other grading system in real life can you easily compare? Because I've always compared it to schools, grades in schools, and I've been like okay with that whole life. Five stars. Five stars are solid and...

No, no. A wrong. It's about how hype the little game pro guy gets. Yeah. That's the best story in history. The contractor at five, that guy looks like he's going to die. That's how I know. And should we reveal the one that we workshopped some time ago?

Just use a word. Use a single word at the bottom that describes what you feel. No, for a while. And it's blue. You hit your review and then at the bottom you say memorable. And if anyone tries to put a number in your mouth, they're full of shit. Because that number doesn't mean anything. You've got to read it.

The word I'm saying is what matters. Alternatively, you could do... Pick a word. You could do what some of the guys over at CNET do and create a completely meaningless review scale for every review. Sure. Like this is an 11 out of potatoes. Yeah, okay. You could do a Clueless Gamer.

But if we ever got into reviewing games, we'd go with the pick a word. I think five stars is the perfect system. Five stars is really good. If you have to pick a numeric system... Is it great? Is it really good? Is it okay? Is it kind of shitty?

Is it terrible? But it sucks because that gets upscaled onto Metacritic. Well, we're never going to get on Metacritic. But even then, that's kind of like a super simplistic generalization of these incredibly complicated video game... No, they're all really simple and shitty. You've been wasting your life. You know, you're all wrong. The best kind of industry system is colors.

I think that kind of has its value. The one thing I really appreciate about review scores, as stupid as I agree that they are, is that they're great for getting game recommendations that are completely spoiler free. Yes. Like back before I started the channel and I wasn't following video game news super closely, I would just buy games based off of the Metacritic rating. It's useful. It was a super solid one because anything over like the 92, they generally do a pretty good job.

What's the difference between the 92 and the 91 though? I don't fucking... Aggregate. And is two stars a 40? Yeah. But going into something knowing nothing is such a great experience, I think. And that's why I made the E3 video. Because I love, I fucking love the feeling of going into a game and just not knowing what I'm into.

Oh yeah, we like this. We love it so much that you hate all of our fun. Our version of it, our version of it is you turn the page in GamePro and it says out now! And you're like, what is this game? That's our version of it, but I agree. That was awesome. Should review with hand motions. Oh yeah?

No, that's not going to play well upon it. There's probably more you can read into hand motions than little numbers. A facial expression to go with it, yeah. No, because it's just... Performance art game review. Let's do it. Pat the Amass punk when he does Flea Market Madness, he'll ask you, ask a dealer, like, what can you do for me on this?

And he'll say, for a GameCube, $100. And he literally has a clip of himself going, ugh, ugh, like Larry David, like, ugh, whatever. And then other, other, like, oh, how much for this copy of this sealed grotto trigger? And the guy'll go, I don't know, five bucks. And then it shows him going, ugh, like freaking out. That's a good review system. Not bad.

The only other story, it's not even that important. Say it, we'll dismiss it. Sure. Overkill, apologized. What a non-apologize. That's a shitty apology. But it was, it didn't specify what they apologized for. Hey, guys, we're really sorry we're gonna work on it.

But they apologized for upsetting people. Wiping the tear with the dollars. But there was no actual... You know what that apology read like to me? It read like a fight with a spouse and go, honey, I'm sorry that you're upset. Things were said. I was wrong, not all trying to prove.

I'm sorry that you're mad. That's unfortunate that you're mad. And the contrast to this is Val fucking up the other day on Steam and then coming out apologizing and then immediately saying what they were gonna change and so on and so forth. Here you kind of just got the, we upset people and we're sorry, but no actual specification of what they're apologizing for. I think all they really did was point to their December update

which they made sure to highlight was free, but I don't even know the details. Well, you had to scroll down for that and scroll past all the tournaments that you could stream on Hitbox by following this link. Yeah, it was very weird. It was a very weird way to damage control because you did not control the damage.

In fact, you just kind of pissed people off even more, idiots. Yep, that's the opposite of damage control. You put your hand out to like mitigate and then the fire just blew past you. Let me put the fire out with this cloth covered in gasoline. Oh no. Oh no, the cloth has caught fire too. Shocking. Yeah.

Alright, let's go on an email. That's that. That's that. Let's get one email. At least. One good one. Oh, go look at the drift stage soundtrack on a car shaped vinyl. It's amazing.

Hey, if you want to send in an email about how these podcasts are getting really long sent, and I don't mind. It's the first long one in a while. Superbestfriendcastatgmail.com. What was that Pat? Superbestfriendcastatgmail.com. Actually, bunny hop, one more time. At this, oh sorry, bunny hop.

Subpartbuttbuddiesathotmail.com. Alright, that works. Nailed it. I like the hot man. At Angel Fire. Jack, come to think of it, like at this point, the friendly viewer or listener, the podcast isn't actually that long. Yeah, it's true.

Just because we recorded the thing in the middle. What? Anyway, so you got at least one good email. We're going to take a short one and a medium one. Short one is Jonah letting us know that we probably don't want to hear this, but Boruto has 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. Great. The movie, right?

Oh wow. Well, we got to watch it now. Boruto movie. Just to let you know. Hey, bunny, you want to fly out to Montreal and we can all watch Boruto? I don't know. What's a Boruto? Boruto's son?

That's not a joke. As someone who really likes Boruto. I'd rather go over and download the Bloodborne DLC and go back home. As somebody who's a big Bort fan, I can't believe you're not into Boruto. Yeah, he uses the Boruto game. If you guys recall, it wasn't too long ago where you're like, yeah, Boruto, Boruto, Boruto. And I went, what the fuck are you talking about? And they were like, it's Noruto's son.

I was like, is this fan fiction? You have to explain to me. Is this a gimmick? Is this a gimmick? Is this a gimmick? Is this a gimmick? You thought I'd buy a human being. Yeah.

I have some bad news for you guys. What's that? The 97 is the audience score, not the critics score. Oh, well that's, that's... Shocker. Yeah, shocker. The nothing score. Blow it away.

Oh, so Naruto fans like Boruto. Shocker. All right. And we got one coming in from Travis from the SA thread. Uh, I take it that's something awful. It's usually... What a goon. What a goon.

Yeah. He's got ten bucks. Okay. Uh, Hayes, I've asked a cast. Recently you guys have been talking about censorship in games. A big topic around this was changing a character design from beta to a new one that was revised in some shape. The argument that gets brought up all the time on both sides is, do you like people fucking

with a creative vision? Yes, because this is literally part of my job, he italicizes. Okay. I do illustrations, art for stuff, so let me fill you in a bit on how this goes. I go through dozens and dozens of character art for my director slash producer. And through every round of characters, we pick out what the best designs are for both thematic and marketing purposes. I'm going to assume this is quite similar to many other creative people in non-finance

industries. That sounds like it. Every design you see in a game has probably gone through multiple iterations, dozens, if not hundreds, depending on the scope of the game. Yeah. It's all fine and dandy to stick up for people like me, but when you go, but creative vision, the reality is that creative vision was curated from pretty much the beginning. It rings incredibly futile and hollow.

The creative vision argument is exactly as he puts it. It's hollow in a lot of cases, and I stand by what I said before, which is just fucking make your games for one region from the beginning. And you won't have to change nothing! Because it's annoying on principle when I get the game and I know there was an aspect of it that was too hot for my eyes. That's a good way to put it. If you're making something that has parts of it that are morally unacceptable in certain

parts of the world, maybe give that another pass before you give it another shot. People are going to paint this as a tremendous double standard, but I also still stand by what I said by, okay, if there's a swastika, maybe you will have to change it for Germany. Germany might be a special case. If there is a literally naked four-year-old, that might not get by the ratings board. Maybe you should not have that character. But by agarist war. So, here's the thing.

That game got by unscathed. The warrior intent creator's vision argument always falls apart if you're charging money, because the only things that have real, pure, authorial intent are ones that are made with no monetary considerations at all and are purely creative works. Everything else, either from the creator themselves or alternative factors, such as the people they work with, they're going to change something so that it sells. What about, like, wonderful 101? Well, the game that didn't sell?

That's what I'm saying. Yes. That's like, or like, paprika. No. These things are artistic visions. Those things, they got their money, and they're like, this thing's not going to sell no matter what we do. So, fuck it. It'll be pure.

I always go like vanity projects in general. Too many cooks spoil the broth sometimes. Yeah. The guy goes off to say, he says, it's fantastic when dudes like Alex Ahad can get damn near every design into the game. Yeah. But even then, there's tons of shit left on the cutting room floor. Definitely. It really all depends on, you know, case by case basis.

But I like how the sausage was made before. Nice term. What's up with you? Sorry, go ahead, buddy. The whole concept of self-censorship, just like the term, kind of confounds me. Yeah. Because I make stuff on the internet. You guys make stuff on the internet.

You edit it. When you make it, you want it to be good, and not everything that comes out of the creator's vision. We usually edit out all the, like, just crazy racism. The abhorrent use of racial slurs, we usually cut those out. Like, what you guys were doing at The Vortex in Atlanta, my shocking fortuneeers. I'm sorry to bring back those slimy, exaggerated worries. And every time people think they hear a cut in an episode of the podcast, it's like, what was said over there? What would this mean?

No, we took a break to go to the bathroom. Oh! But would you rather listen to us pissing ourselves? Yes, actually. If we get really weird one day? I would love to listen to some of this stuff. No, that's exactly it. It's no way.

No, I take that back. The thought that something might have changed from what it originally was, we reacted that way. And we reacted to Street Fighter when we saw, like, oh, you moved the camera from the butt. I'm always going to say that this is how this goes for me. If I'm shown two screenshots of the thing, I will side with the thing that I like more. That's usually what was first. Not what was the original. If I like, I like this better.

That's the one. And if it's on either side, that's for me. If a game comes to the West and it has improvements, that's one thing that I can get behind, where it's a different version, but it's better. And it's like, I appreciate that because I get the better version. That's wonderful. Did you guys ever talk about the Fatal Frame 5 costumes? Yeah, we did.

Because that's like something that, oh, I couldn't believe how much people cared. That's the best example of Matt's point is that like, and Liam's, honestly, it's like too hot for your eyes, but at the same time, like, I think those new costumes are better. I would rather have Samus than Japanese anime bikini girl. Exactly. Exactly. You mean Japanese anime bikini girl and other Japanese anime bikini girl? Like, I think the new costumes are nicer, don't get me wrong.

But I don't like it on principle. Because there is no other reason for it other than censorship, right? Well, then again, I think the censorship line is drawn if an outside body is making a change. Yeah, that's the thing. It's not if the developers themselves. Do you mean the company is censoring the creators? No, like if the Australian board of classification... Let me put it this way.

They released it in one region, and it was rated probably 0D or Z, and it had those costumes. In our region, there is a perfectly suitable rating for it at M. That is the rating the game got anyway. Because it's a ghost murder game. That would have been fine. It's shitty that it was dictated by a third party that I just... A third party in this game. Doesn't matter.

But how do you know it wasn't the developers? You're right, we don't. But this is such a... Because that's what the letters defend. This happens so continually in Nintendo games. Yes. That it's hard to believe that all of these companies independently are doing it. It's possible.

This is one of those things. And there's another good example of the Yokai Watch cartoon recently. Really? There was a scene in which there were some male bodybuilders, and they swapped it for a generic chef. Because... Can't show that on TV. Weird. Even...

Like just... If it is... You're doing it, buddy. I'm doing it. Yeah. Okay, if there is changes being made by Nintendo, then that's like still... I don't know... That's...

The government of Germany will not allow you to release your game if it... That's... Compared to Nintendo deciding on their own terms as a private company, what they are free to do, versus having those freedoms imposed by... Yeah, sorry, I'm not saying they're not free to do it. They really have no control over. No, like I'm not saying they're not free to do it. You know, if a Wolfenstein...

That's where I draw my censorship line. Like if a Wolfenstein game were to come out, I wouldn't want it to not release in Germany, but I get why they have to block that, because that's just... I believe the new Wolfenstein did come out in Germany. Yeah, they had to change the art, though. Yeah, you changed the art from Swastikas to the art of Cross. Because that's like legitimately against the law there. Yeah, I was testing when I was testing Call of Duty 3, we had to...

Yeah, you go check in for the Iron Cross on the... And it's shitty, because in an ideal world, every country would be open to everything that goes on these discs. And that's the ultimate ideal. Taking a step back from that is what's legal in those countries, and then a step back from that is when companies determine what you're allowed to have, not based on legalities or anything. An ideal world would have this cultural standard in every country. No, I'm saying an ideal world would allow any cultural standard in any country.

That's still a standard. Well, sorry, but any cultural standard is not... We have now entered into morally relativistic semantics. I think it's time to wrap this conversation up. Are you sure you don't want to talk about replacing Indian headdresses with cowboy hats? That shit is dumb, because the old costume looks better. Yeah, when I saw Indian headdress... I'm going over to Matt's side.

When I saw Indian headdress in the thing, right? In the text, I went, oh man, Japan probably really fucked up here. It's probably so rare. Oh, it's so cool-looking and tasteful. What game is this? There's a job class that's called Tomahawk. It's called Tomahawk, and you look at it. Hashtag team poop-a-peeple.

No one would get that. Look at the cowboy one, and it's so lame-looking. Also, in their attempts to be non-offensive, replacing a Native American character with cowboys is maybe not the best angle you wanted to go with. No, but if you didn't know about it, if you didn't know about this change at all, you'd just play the game. You know what I mean?

The transformation from headdress to cowboy hat. The thing that frustrates me about censorship is the knowledge that something was censored more than anything. And the only things you're censoring are things that only the core audience is ever going to perceive. And so you're just stirring a pot that doesn't need to be censored. I have a linguistic question here for you. Because a lot of the things that you call censorship,

I call localization. Well, okay, we've got to get rid of the breast slider. We've got to cover up these bikinis. Yes. You know, that's censorship, I think? No, that's localization. Yes, it is changing it, and it is hiding that for a different audience. But a company, quote-unquote, self-censoring themselves

for a different region, that's localization. Censorship in its classic form is like... Moneyhop is saying stuff like this. It's purely outside body, like the government. You're actually correct. On a linguistic standpoint, you're actually correct. And I'm not... I don't want to argue, because the point stayed the same.

You're actually right. But that's something that we've butted heads on like a dozen times and wanted to clear that up, that we do mean the same thing. No, linguistically speaking, you're actually correct, and I didn't think about it. It is actually that. But I still don't agree with it, because just make your games one way.

I ever feel like the argument goes from what is a censorship argument to a this localization sucks argument. Yeah, let's argue about that instead. And it's just like, hey, if the games were region free, it wouldn't matter anyway. I was going to say, I was going to give you guys an example of a game and tell me what you think it is. In Splatterhouse, from the arcade version to the Genesis version,

there's a boss that's an inverted cross with severed heads. Yeah. That sounds amazing. That sounds cool. In the arcade version, and if it flies around... Well, actually, you're wrong. I know, this is a joke again. Right.

But it flies around, and you kill it, and it's in a church, and a church hymn plays after you've killed it, and you wander off to go to the next level. In the Genesis version, all religious imagery in the church, like as much as they could get rid of without changing the toss, it is gone. There's no cross, and it's just the heads. And also, there's no church hymn, so the game just stops,

and they're just standing there as the non-present music plays, and then you rush off. So if you played it, is that censorship or is that localization? I think it's actually both. It's both in that case. Well, it's technically, like, port. It's a shitty port. Yeah, no, it is.

Right? It's not censorship or localization, because I don't think it's a different region, even. It's a super shitty port from the arcade version to the port. Well, that's the difference between translating swear words, bleeping them, and just deleting them from the subtitles entirely, so there's just nothing there. It's dumb.

Like, you're just getting a version that's not as good, so... Well, it depends. I'm not familiar with it, maybe. Like, it's possible that the way he describes it, that's actually way cooler. If it's literally... Like, the technical limits of the porting process. Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, I don't know if that's the same issue. Well, you could render a cross on a Genesis. No, you couldn't. It could render a Metal Gear on a Nintendo. Yeah, the computer instead. What's coming out on your channel, man? I am fucking off for this week, because Thanksgiving, that's the thing to be proud of.

They're doing Thanksgiving at the wrong time again. Way to knock it out of the park. I sold her to you. Well, I'm thinking of doing a thing... Go check out the old shitty videos, like the E3 thing. Well, in early December, I'm going to do a game for my inbox, which is always fun. Yeah.

Because, straight up, like, games I've never heard of that are only in press releases in my inbox. I just go through a bunch of weird shit and pick out the good stuff. But I'm also thinking of making a quickie before I leave for Thanksgiving. If I can squeeze the time out for this. It would only be, like, five minute long.

It would basically be a plead for Bethesda to make fallout spin-offs and not leave this avenue untouched. Give it to other companies if they're not too scared to work with you because you're a bunch of cheating scumbags. Well, maybe it would still... New Vegas ended up great. Yeah, not for Obsidian, they almost went bankrupt. Yeah.

But the rest of us are fucked up. We got New Vegas out of it. Oh, yeah. There you go. Obsidian's fine right now. Barely. Pillars of Eternity was awesome. They got lucky that Kickstarter blew up.

Yeah. Yeah, everything worked out. Half their staff. Don't worry about it. It's fine. All right. But yeah, there's a whole lot of potential for them to be exploring with it. Fallout Town Builder, I would love to see.

Yeah, I bet you would. An isometric 2D shadow-run return style. Do you really like Fallout Shelter? Not for cell phones. Not for cell phones, but concepts like that. Like a Sims thing. Or like an adventure game. NCR Simulator 2287.

Oh, man, that'd be cool. SimPrims. And then NCR Simulator would be really interesting. It's that 4 Nose and Shitty. Death Claws versus... Yeah, no, shut up. Fuck all of you. It's a good idea.

Well, you know how well... No, they should have a fucking basketball game, and it's fucking East Coast Sims versus West Coast Super Mutants. Not the fucking East Coast Super Mutants. You just want tactics bowler. Yeah, I do. You guys know about those Lara Croft Diablo-like spinoffs that are isometric, right? Yeah.

Yeah, Lara Croft. How are we doing that? I bet they heard. Do you mean Lara Croft Go? No, no, he means... No, they're called Lara Croft and the... Oh, Temple of Osiris. Yeah, did you guys ever hear of those?

Yeah, absolutely. The Guardian of Light. They all worked on this. How are they doing it? That's what I want to see them doing with Fallout. Make it isometric. Oh, that'd be cool. Like 2.5D spin-off on the cheap.

Old fans like me would... Oh, I would... Hey, here's a crazy spin-off idea. Give Obsidian the license and let them make a 2.5D top-down isometric RPG. What? That's crazy. Why is that so hard? They have a sick engine they could use for it.

And they're making so much money off of this, they can throw some of that around. Yeah, whatever. Okay. Good argument. All right. Okay. Lara, what's coming up on our channel? Mirror's Edge continues.

We have a brand new LP starting this week. That is starting this week, you know? Okay. We have a brand new LP starting on Thursday, but if you go to Vessel, I think it just started up. So there you go. That should be a good time. Lots of alcohol consumed, lots of cookies eaten.

Yep. Oh, by the way, Pat, you found out that the non-replenishable resource is actually replenishable. Oh, totally. And then I use it for five hours and then realize I hate power armor in this game. All right. I hate walking around in it. You're super slow. Okay.

Oh, okay. We... Eat shit, Bunny. Well, anything else? Oh, there's potential... Let's watch. Let's watch. There's a yes.

There's a... I'm looking at... I'm looking at... I'm sorry, I'm looking over my producer here and he's waving at me. Yeah, we have a Let's Watch coming up on the website. There'll be a link on our channel, on our YouTube channel. That's today for listeners, Tuesday, rather, depending on how early you're listening to this.

This one's... It was pretty hot. It was pretty hot. It's an advance that Willie and I will actually be in LA from the 1st of December to the 5th. And if we can... We'll be there for the game awards. We'll be there for the game awards. Oh, my God.

Did you guys get an invite or are you going for fun? No, we got an invite, but we're actually going for multiple times. And we got an invite, so we're going for fun. Yeah. Mainly to go hang out with some friends. Yeah. If possible, if possible, we'll try to see if there's a place available for a quickie fan meetup, but it's not a sure thing.

We have to talk to some people. I can't. It's possible. Celebrating my birthday in LA. It's going to be a reward. It's going to be good. By the way, that trip is your birthday gift. Oh, shucks.

Don't worry about it. Thank you. Go get yourself something nice. Buy yourself something nice. Buy yourself something nice. There you go. Yeah, I guess that's it. Anything we were looking forward to.

Yeah, sometimes we forget it. Oh, I don't know. The old hunters. Yeah, old hunters. Old hunters, yeah. I'm grossing myself in fucking front mission. Go read that internet. Hubbunny, are you looking forward to Thanksgiving?

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's nice getting out of the house. Celebrating it the wrong time of year. If I can't, okay. Oh, yeah. And then obviously we're going to finish off Game of Thrones. Yeah, yeah. We're going to do Game of Thrones.

All right. So that's, we did it. We did it. We beat the Hamster Jumps. Yeah. No matter. Why do you guys hate me so much? Because we love you, buddy.

That makes no sense. The more we love you, the more you're a shit. If you take us to Vortex a couple more times, I'll love you more. Yeah. No, you can see that the problem was is that when we hung out with Bunny and we were mean to him, there was no one else in that gang. Because if we saw the other people that we knew, like Curtis or Shane or whatever, or Austin, you'd see it as being just as mean to them and then being just fucking Takahata

with that egregious shit. It's as much as my life. But he could see that because we were all together at Screw Attack Gaming Convention and all those guys were there. And Bunny spent most of it drunk. Yeah, and he was in that bathtub, right? Yeah, that's what it was. MacFest is coming up soon.

If you guys are going, we can make another shower video. And I mean, you know, we had some fun with that, right? Yeah. Shower bits. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm good. I'm glad. Ben, you must.

Oh, yes. Right. You were there for the fun. That's true. Yeah. You didn't make the shower video with us. I hate fun. I had fun once.

It was terrible. Yeah. All right. We're going to jump into the spoiler cast with that. Oh, yeah. No. Yeah. The podcast isn't over.

It's still got nothing. Holy shit. Oh, yeah. The hour. We're so on point. We're so on point. We're ready to talk about the story. All right.

We're going into the spoiler cast. Okay. I'm dead for the rest of it, I guess. So, here's where Matt's going to take you. Yeah. I'm at you. If you want to avoid Metal Gear spoilers, you're going to have to... And I'm fine with that, because I'm sure I'll have lots to say when we do our best,

most disappointing games of 2010 segment at the end of the year. Yeah, sure. I'll keep everything I have to say until then. Do you... Oh, he can't hear you anymore, but he's gone. Bye, my name's Ari. Are you dead? Are you just going to go in the room and put headphones on?

Yeah. I'm going to work on videos. So, wait, while he's running off, can you very quickly ask him, like, does he actually plan on finishing it? Yeah, do you plan on finishing it? He's making a weird face. He made a sign. Oh, I guess that's an I don't know.

That's probably not. I don't feel like it. It's an I don't know. Oh, God. And you know what? That's shameful, because it's a fucking Metal Gear Solid game. Indeed. Bunny, that is the worst reason for anything ever.

I think, no, considering how much I know that Matt loves the Metal Gear Solid series, that's a sad thing to consider. You know, let's be real. And that applies to all of us. Like, all of us, I assume, including you, George, haven't played every game in the series. And they are typically, 90% of Metal Gear Anything is the cream of the crop. No, but George, like, my point is, is that, like, having the statement of, it's a blind is like, if I went and saw Phantom Menace and then didn't go see Attack of the Clones

and somebody went, but it's Star Wars, though. Like, that's the exact same argument. Like, I'm not saying Phantom Pain is fucking Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones. It's just, yeah. Not an equitable, fair comparison. You see my point, right? I know. Because Metal Gear Solid 3 exists and it's like, come on, it's the best game ever.

Alright, for sure. For sure. So here we are. We're in the spoiler cast for Metal Gear Solid V. Yeah, we can stop calling it 5. Lean was smart. He never, he tried to get away from calling it 5. Once Kojima put out that tweet that said, it's Ko-V not 5, that was the big clue.

And, like, he corrected me when I was putting up videos with the number 5 and he was like, no, you put a V. It's different from the others for a reason. Up to, I guess, Plague had a lot to say over the course of this week and one of the things was- I don't want to be on the podcast. I was like, do me a favor and run through the timeline of Metal Gear. Basic, no bullshit specifics.

Okay. As you'd be there for hours. I.e. Philosophers have baby joy. Kill one another, lose all the money. Snake goes looking for the money, kills joy. Sad, interprets what she wanted to do in shitty ways. Very shit.

There's a lot. Brainwashes himself like nine times and is a sex tuple agent who has no motivation other than to betray other people. AI gets invented. Nine big bosses show up and one of them may or may not have my face. You get the idea. Yeah, that's a good breakdown. That's a pretty solid breakdown.

So where do we want to start on this? Do we want to just talk about the spoilery bits or like the game in general? I think the game discussion, buddy, will just come about. But I think the juicy bit to talk about is the conclusion. The truth. Yeah. I would like to know how you guys reacted. That video is not up yet, of course.

Yeah, of course. We were very excited. It was like, oh, like a lot of knee slapping and going like, yeah. Your journey through the game was. A bell curve in reverse. A huge bell curve. A reverse bell curve. Yeah.

Started off really excited, got really not excited. And then right at the end, like, oh, yeah, everything, everything after the quarantine mission is like, except for the quiet thing, but the quarantine mission and then the finale or fucking thumbs ups. Here's, here's a thought that I didn't have that, but go on, George, to to get ready for this podcast. I went through the whole thing yesterday. Wow.

You said you were going to like, re familiarize, but you literally went through it all. And here's how I did it. I played, I looked through the list of missions and I played what I felt were story necessary missions. Yeah. And if you go down that list, you'll see like a definite line between the missions that feel like a super fleshed out, thought out, well designed, detailed, hour long journeys and missions that feel a lot closer to side ops, but they'll still be on the main ops

list. So yeah, you've got to eliminate all the cipher cut out. And it's such an obvious distinction when, when you go through them and chop them all out because I was able to go through the whole thing and get the gist of everything and even listen to all the important tapes while I was doing it in about seven to nine hours. Yeah. So when Liam and I were playing it, we would finish off a session, right? Like we'd go through four or five missions or whatever.

And then there were two sessions like a couple of weeks ago where we went, this game feels weird. Okay. And we went down the mission list and went like, well, how many of these are good missions? How many? No, it was how many are genuinely different? How many of these are, are designed missions and how many of them are what in any other game would be a side-up or something like 13 or 14?

We were missing the last couple of it. It was, it was, it ended up, I think being out total, like 16 out of like, it's like a third or half. Yeah. Definitely under half, especially because in the second act, you just have the replays. Yeah. I'm not even counting the other thing too is that like, we, I think we all had very different experiences in how much of the game we played at a time and what we played and so on.

So I think it's important to go around and just, you know, put out there how we experienced the game. So you guys recorded sessions of like two, three hours, two to three hours at a time over a period of two months with no audience, no listening to tapes, until an explosion of listening to tapes and then back to nothing. But for the most part, most tapes unlistens pretty much, right? Okay. And you liked the ending.

If I was getting the gist from earlier, right? We liked a lot. Okay. For me, it was started out really excited, really enjoyed the beginning sequence, played through the game in like, perhaps 12 hour blocks. Yeah. Binges. Massive binges.

Yeah. With tapes playing listen to without the whole thing. And ultimately I had not a bell curve, but I had a W shape where I can see down and then there was a big peak of like, oh, shit, here we go. So they're pressing and then going to Africa and then there was a valley again. And then I hit the truth and then that valley stayed for a little bit and then I hit the truth again. Yes.

And then it spiked back up. Yeah. So that's where I, that's where I stood. Yeah. And you did like what, like 60% of the game in like two weeks or something like that? Maybe more. And I got, I remember the last, the first week I got almost to the end and then the second week I was just doing side ops.

Did you like it? How were you feeling when you saw that ending? When I saw the ending and I got to the ending, I initially did not like it. Hey, we're in a spoiler cast. We can just say. Exactly. So I initially, when Venom was revealed, I initially thought that that was a very like basic and like silly kind of trophy move to make.

And then I also couldn't let go of the fact and I mentioned this when I was hinting at it earlier, but I couldn't let go of the fact that the changing, the reveal of Venom takes away what I thought was a pivotal emotional moment for Big Boss, which is the, what should we call it? Blowing the dudes away in the quarantine. Yeah. The quarantine, right? The quarantine where you're blowing your own dudes away was such an emotional moment.

And to think that that didn't happen to Big Boss, I ended up like, at first I was like, fuck, it sucks that that didn't happen to him. That was such a strong thing. And then in retrospect, playing through it again, and actually like taking a moment to think about the implications of what this ending means, I actually love it. Because when I first had that reaction, I was holding on to the idea that Big Boss was actually still a hero and that we wanted to see him turn and turn dark and all these things we've been waiting for over the years.

But then I was waiting for that moment and I thought that he already did that. And I thought the quarantine was going to be another big build up to the turn. But it's like, no, none of that matters. I've, oops, sorry. After you buddy. What? What? Yeah, okay.

Just end my thought. Just end my thought. This is a fucking Skype lag. Yes, sorry. I just want to very quickly say you can keep on going now. But I have like a really hard time dealing with Peace Walker in some respects and a lot of like the fan adoration of that game and specifically Big Boss in that game. Because Big Boss at the very end of MGS3 and all throughout Peace Walker is like the

villain has already happened. They kind of gussy it up because like you don't want to play a super duper depressing grimdark game in a series known for being kind of wacky and fun about its spy fiction. And in MGS5, they still kind of ride that precarious line. But yeah, like child soldiers building a nuke starting a base of mercenaries. And then getting like weirdly, strangely nationalistic about it and then calling it Outer Heaven at the end of the game. Like they build MGS5 as being Big Boss' descent into madness and villainy and men will become

demons in Outer Heaven. But he already did that shit. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Venom's Descent. It's one of many games. The Descent of the Demon really takes place between Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain more than anything.

And it was actually like, like, I always felt that the moment we saw him, the moment we saw the handshake moment at the end of Snake Eater, that's all you needed. It was such a good way to like hint at it, too, because whatever you're thinking in your imagination is going to be better and more suited for you than whatever actually officiates it. It was better to leave it slightly open with the arrow and then a blank and then you know, as the years went on and as the franchise needed to continue existing, there was more and more details to fill in there.

And the one thing I was always afraid of was don't fuck with the boss. Please don't fuck with her. Wait, the boss or big boss? The boss. Because I would love that World War II prequel game. Me and you both, buddy. Yeah. And Matt would like that as well.

He's talked about it. But I'm afraid of anything with her ruining what we had. Absolutely. That's where I am, right? So, but what you just said about Peace Walker is so important because that's exactly it. That's the thing that actually, you know, every one of all four of us are in a place where we look at Peace Walker and go, God damn it. Why does that have to be important in the story, you know, when we really want to put

the weight on the main number games, right? When you take the story and the characters of Peace Walker alone, like it, I feel like it adds a lot to it. Like particularly Miller and like getting Miller in the plot is a big thing in the end. Like Miller ends up being a net addition to the series by the end of it. Sure. The way they treat the joy and the boss as like a reproduction, you know, the AI version of it makes a lot of sense and especially the ending events of that.

Because of how it ties in, right? Yeah, exactly. And like a lot of people don't like Paz, but I think a lot of people don't take into consideration that she's really just being a double, like she is Pacific Ocean, the double agent. You know what I mean? Like Paz is literally fake. So sugary sweet.

It's like impossible to notice it. When you go back through Peace Walker again after knowing it, you're like, how, of course, yeah. Yeah. But just finishing that same thought again, I think that the ending, the truth ending, what it does is it underlines the epilogue of peace. No, the ending of V and underlines the epilogue in Peace Walker, right? And while I was waiting, that initial dislike I had waiting for the turn, it was like, no,

no, no, no, no. The turn happened when Zeke took itself down into the water and said, and basically, according to Big Boss, she laid down her arms and she betrayed them, right? Which is an insane, like rationalization, right? And so what we end up seeing here with the reveal of Venom and the mission and he gets everything and we go from Diamond Dogs to Outer Heaven and we're in 1995 at that point. And when you look at that and consider what happens to Venom at that point, he gets his mission is set, is to be sent to be forgotten and to die in history and to be used as a

part. His mission is to fill space. Yeah. In five, two. And that, to me, is what makes it a good ending is because you go, stop it, wait, Big Boss is not a hero. He's a piece of shit. He's a hypocrite and legend is fucking inflated and it's garbage.

The legend is the legend. And the legend is the legend. Right. He came all the way around, right? From Boss being a villain to, and he was a secret hero to no weight, he was actually a villain. He's a piece of shit. At the end of four, you wanted to like him despite him saying, you don't want to like

me. I'm a shitty guy. You still wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. And then when you realize that he literally does the exact same thing to Venom that everyone does to the joy and you make someone be forgotten because you want to use them towards your own ends, you are the worst kind of hypocrite and a piece of shit. And I think that's the ultimate tie in and like wrap up to quote unquote the legend. Brings his story like completely full circle in a really beautiful way.

The problem though is the execution of that ending. Oh yeah. And then it takes time and a lot of thinking to get to that level when we know it's Koji. This guy made Metal Gear Solid 3. He could have, he could have written it so much better. I got to skip a lot of that because right after we beat it, Willie told everything he just told to you and to you guys at home to us. And I was like, oh, and you basically did a lot of my diving deep on that for me and

I appreciate that. As to thoughts on the ending, particularly the reveal of Venom, do you want to say anything Liam? Yeah. Because I have something very strongly to say. Early, well early in the game. Early in the game, you notice that like, okay, this can't be Big Boss. There's so many things pointing to that.

The eyeball. Right away. You notice that within the first episode. Yeah, exactly. You're talking to yourself. Yeah. No, there's too much. There was a point, I want to say like pretty early in the game where I said to Pat like

it makes like one of my favorite things that I think this game is going to do is it's going to fix having two big bosses that die. And like, regardless of anything else, I just want to say, yeah, I'm so happy that they fixed having two dead big bosses and making that make sense. I really appreciate that. Yeah. Have you guys played the MSX games? Only at a cursory level, not to completion, the beginning, but not to completion.

Metal Gear 2 on the MSX 2, which is on a subsistence or HD subsistence version of MGS3, it's on God, it is excellent. It's like a super solid, it would be a super solid of Metal Gear Solid if it wasn't actually, it makes you realize what a remake of Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear Solid is. It's almost the same story. But the gameplay is so excellent and there's such a, there's also a definitive lack of spy fiction from the 16-bit era that it fills really nicely, too. I finished the game a couple years ago and I was like, I really wish there was more like

in it. Maybe you want to play Shadow Run or something like Cyberpunk spy fiction games from the 16-bit era. There aren't that many good ones and the one fucking excellent example of that never got a proper release stateside. I love that game and I really wish they would put it up on a downloadable market somewhere. Yeah, it's weird that the only subsistence does. But take us through your experience with going through the ending.

And it was similar to Woolley's experience. I went through the game in two weeks for a review. The first time I went through the ending, it actually left me genuinely depressed for like a week. Is that when you made the video? It took me about, it was a week later when I made the video and that was after I started thinking about it and going through it again, I was like, you know what, it makes sense. But it still really bummed me out for a week because this is Metal Gear Solid and this

is what I've always typically regarded as like the cream of the crop of good, entertaining, rollicking, video game storytelling. And it's sad that this game totally isn't that at all. I just have to come to accept it. It's still a good game. But in terms of the legacy and the legacy and expectations that Metal Gear Solid have set up for this caters to a wildly different set of what you get out of a video game. And kind of the reason why I would want a prequel game where you play as the boss going

on wild adventures in World War II is because it feels like there's more room for a fun rollicking cinematic action movie there. Also that story doesn't have to be tied down into the continuity or the canon. It can be its own thing all by itself. The reason, that's why I think MGS3 is so good is because there's less prequel baggage on that one. This is an ending that, it reminds me of the most of two in the sense that it wasn't, at least for me, immediately good.

Oh yeah, oh no. It was only good hours. You gotta work that ending. Whereas all the other MGS games were like, is like, it might be the best one. Oh yeah, we can go on and on about that. Except that two years after the game came out. I said it, like the day I finished it, the day of release. It was the only one then.

Yeah, you were nuts at the time. I love that shit. It was my favorite when I finished it. It was so fucking, anyway, so I really like the reveal and I really like the high level talk about what you were saying, they lost this piece of shit and I like the truth tapes where it fills in a lot of stuff. The truth tapes are so good. That's my favorite thing about this one.

That's part two. I'm gonna paraphrase something Plague said to me as soon as I told him we beat the game and I think it sums up my feeling on the reveal that Venom is a different person. He said, Pat, how do you feel that you were completely right and completely wrong at the same time and it didn't matter? He wasn't great. I was fucking like, I am so disappointed that Venom is a nameless character that didn't exist before.

I am so disappointed because it could be anyone. But that's kind of the point. The point is that if it was Grey Fox, eventually he would have to pull out and become Grey Fox. But anyone. The entire point of Venom in my eyes was that he was made specifically to pat out Big Boss's legacy and just fill Big Boss's future. And he's also you, the player.

Well, that's... It's a little bad as I think, but I'm... Like that bit, I couldn't give less of a shit about it. That bit honestly doesn't matter because it could be anyone. You could put John Doe in there and it doesn't matter if it's you or whatever bullshit. No, I don't want to get part of the story. He's a guy who died and they brought him back to life just to fill his shoes to give him time.

Other part of that that I have a serious problem, there's two things. One is the pacing of the truth mission sucks. Yeah, the hospital mission and the truth mission are garbage. They suck. Like you get the reveal right away and then you do this super long mission with no variation in it at all until a cutscene at the end. But you're looking for variations that aren't there. There should be!

It's like you're feeling for something that's not there. You should play that mission as Ishmael. Yeah, exactly. I really, when the camera pulls away from the crashed ambulance and it shows the actual real big boss with the leather jacket and the motorcycle riding up to the lighthouse, I was so hoping that the camera would just like stick on his backside and let us roll up to the lighthouse just like a courtesy, a fucking courtesy. I'm not talking about that, I'm talking everything from falling out of the bed to leaving the

front door of the hospital is exactly the same with no variation. There's no value in making you do that whole mission over again when nothing changes at all. Yeah. It absolutely should have been from Ishmael's point of view. Or shorter or something. And the third problem that I have with it, and I don't know how much to put this on the game or not, but the video that I saw in March of this year, I believe, it was After

Ground Zero's release, was a guy on YouTube purporting the medic theory of Phantom Pain. It was a guy going, man, look at the cutscene at the end of Ground Zero's how you can't see the medic's face. Isn't that suspicious? He's crazy at the time, but they were totally right. His voice credit is Kiefer. Yeah. And just like, I don't know, but there's two problems with that.

One, I think that a Metal Gear game that could have its plot guessed like nine months in advance is a failure. Yeah. I'm kind of with you there too. The second thing is that the player can... I would stand that that's not the plot, that's just the twist. Sure. Whatever.

Because you have to... Like, there's still a lot of bits missing there. Sure. That's fair. Exactly. That's the end-night Shyamalan. I mean, then the twist. That's not fine.

But to me, if your game is only riding on that one type of thing to be considered a success, that's bullshit to begin with. No, I'm not saying that it is, but I'm saying the fact that it could be figured out and deduced way before the game ever came out, that's screwed up. Yeah. I don't like that. It hurts, but it doesn't devalue it so strongly that it becomes pointless. No.

But it does hurt it. Because the other part of this ending that I think... You're taking my thing as way too harsh of a condemnation. I don't like that. Okay. I think that that sucks, and I think that that twist, because it can be seen ahead, is a failure. Well, you said the word failure.

A twist that can be foreseen fails. I feel like... It's not that the game fails. No. All of this is going to be easier to handle in the future when we're not dealing with the fan theories or the marketing or the tag lines, because in all the trailers, the game was marketed as Big Boss' descent into hell, and of course, it's a marketing bait and switch because it's Metal Gear Solid, and they started that thing with MGS2, and

the game's more about the resisting a descent into hell. It's like when the quarantine mission, which is excellent, when that happens, and Big Boss has to shoot a bunch of his own guys, he feels genuinely remorseful. He breaks down and cries and gives them the most badass memorial ever. Before we continue. I was so shook doing that mission. I hadn't felt that way in anything since doing The Boss. Meanwhile, when Big Boss finds himself in control of one of his men's life, he's like,

hey, free body double. Yeah. I'll take him. Well, I had one more complaint about the Venom Twist, and that's even if you can't see Venom's face in Ground Zeroes, you do see that he's a white guy with short hair. So the character creator shit, like, will he do it? Not my Venom. In Ground Zeroes?

Oh, sorry. Okay, I was saying. That's the problem. Okay. Isn't he wearing a... No. He is a white guy with short brown hair. Yeah.

Okay, because my Venom's black. That's exactly my point. That's stupid. That makes no sense. And I was also wondering, like, at the first, like, why can't they make this a girl? Yeah, no, it's a little... Yeah, for the same reason that they hand-waved the other thing. Like, that really, really bugs me.

That kind of, like, blatant inconsistency, because they show the flashback in Ground Zeroes of your guy, and I think that one changes depending on what your character looks like. But the one in Ground Zeroes, there's a character model that exists. Yes. Now, George, the second part of this ending that I think makes it successful, and, you know, tell me how you feel about this, is the Zero Tapes. I think... That's my favorite thing about this game.

I think the Zero Tapes are so fucking fantastic. They're really well-made, well-performed, and making it real again, wrapping it up. The most amazing accomplishment of this game, for as much as it fumbles and fucks up cool ideas that it does have, the one thing that is amazing that it actually manages to do is make the Zero vs. Big Boss split actually make sense. Like, it makes convoluted prequel Metal Gear Solid lore all of a sudden seem crystal clear, and I was... How?

How did they do that? What a magical thing to do, you know? In Four, you had the moment where you found out that Zero is the leader of the Patriots, and you go, what? You're like, fuck that. Bullshit. You should just take that on faith, and you opened Siggins in Paramedic or Evil? What?

Yeah, you're just like, no, bullshit. Show me proof. I don't believe it. And like, no, here you go. Listen to it. Yeah. It took them ten years. Well, not ten.

It took them like seven years. It took a while, yeah. But they finally came up with a good way to do it, and it seems so elegant in retrospect, because really all they had to do to do it was humanize the characters behind it. Like you hear Zero, and he doesn't sound like a maniacal evil leader. He sounds like an old British man who really likes spy stuff. And when you think back on MGS3, you're like, wow, that makes a lot of sense. And his voice actor does a fantastic job.

The production of those tapes is fantastic. Yeah, fantastic. They're like creepy homes in the background. They're beautiful to listen to. Yeah, all the tapes across the entire game are recorded super well. And I guess with that ending stuff, then, let's get into the actual meat of the game itself. Well, there's more ending.

Oh, yeah. Okay. The cut ending? The Kingdom of the Fies. Yeah, okay, we can talk about that. I think that that not being in the game is a shame, despite the technical insanity that it would have required. Who cares?

To have every one of your mother-based soldiers live in a battle. If they were going to cut that shit out, then liquid shouldn't steal salanthropus at the end of the game and fuck off with no resolution. Okay, okay, there's some fan theories going around. And of course, the first one that was going around when the game came out is that the game's literally called The Phantom Pain, and it feels like something's missing. Oh, shut up. Yeah, I know.

And I was like, oh, shut up. They didn't finish the game, period. The analogies with Moby Dick fold into that. The first few editions of Moby Dick were slammed from critics for not having a proper epilogue chapter. And Moby Dick itself is like a really boring book to read, that for some reason is considered like a great American classic literature. It starts off as a rollicking high seas adventure with the guy wanting unfulfilling revenge,

but then it goes into this weird encyclopedia chapter that's like a good chunk of the middle of the book. And I feel like if Kojima was deliberately trying to make a boring game that felt unfulfilling and satisfying, that might not have been a good idea. I was actually going to say earlier that if anyone read into Moby Dick as they're supposed to be their clue into what spoilers were going to be, it's like you got dunked on. Because it was an analogy that the themes are present, but you can't take anything literal.

It was a red herring, in a sense. It was thematically matched, but only thematically. No, exactly. So kind of a red herring. There's still like ground to dig in there, I feel like. Definitely. Because there's this weird fetishization of animal facts that the game has going for it.

It turns into kind of a boring encyclopedia in the middle of it. All the games had animal facts after a certain point. That is true, especially in G.S.R. And it's starting with Metal Gear Solid 1. To me, the weirder part of the ending, even weirder than that missing bit there, was Miller and Ocelot basically going, alright, well here's how the future's going to play out, and here's what we're going to do. P.S.

Fuck you. I thought that was like, really, you guys are end-gaming it this hard, this early out? That seems interesting. I got to ask. Well, they're end-gaming it, but their end-game doesn't pan out in any way. They end up doing it. No, but like they say, I'm going to take this guy, I'm going to take this guy, and that's going to be...

And we're going to hate each other. Duke out in MGS 1. In MGS 1. Like it doesn't pan out at all. It pans out very poorly for Miller. And Miller at least. Yeah, off camera. Off camera.

What a way to... It's like watching the prequel movies, and Obi-Wan gets, and then Star Wars, and Obi-Wan is built up as this amazing character who just gets plopped in the first real movie. I felt that... And you hear it over Miller's death. Like was always weirdly unjustified by being off camera, and now that you find out that Miller sucks, like, okay, fine, Liquid just murdered him in his bed, in his house, off camera.

I thought Miller was a good character. Why do you think he sucks? He's an asshole. He's a fucking psycho. He's a paranoid... Yeah, he's a psycho, and a traitor, and a fucking piece of shit. Well, okay, okay, let's start with Peace Walker first, because that's actually important to Miller's character.

He starts off, he wants to make MSF, they succeed at making MSF. They have a goal in mind, and he's great. Yeah, Miller starts off sane. And then he works for Scythe Heroes, and Ground Zeroes, everything goes to shit, it goes really bad, nine years of fucking terrible everything. I can't... But that'll do that to him. Here's the deal.

And even if you don't like it, it's like Kenny in The Walking Dead, even if you don't like it, he's still a good character. No, I don't think he's a bad character, I think he's a great character. I think he's a piece of shit, as a human. So here's actually what I... My problem with Miller is very simple. He is constantly torturing people on your team, because they might work for Cypher. You worked for Cypher!

You're a piece of shit! He's just defected, though. But like... Now, I need to confirm some things. You were a traitor first, traitor! I wasn't talking to you, Liam, when this was happening, but I heard that up until the last minute, you were on Huey's side. No, no, no, that is a very black and white guy.

And I don't know the truth. No, no, no. It was... There's still a lot of plausible deniability. Yeah. Okay. Fucking 10-missions in the game. I feel like the internet's giving Huey way too hard of a time.

So people were kind of ruining it for me? Yeah. Because at the beginning, you can't tell. Yeah. And anybody saying you can tell at the beginning is foolish, and there's no evidence. The first cutscene that they're beating his ass, and eventually the evidence stacks up to a point where there's a pretty damn good chance that Huey did what he did. But there's no smoking gun.

Yeah, there's no smoking gun. They never actually... There's never a 100% piece of proof, right? George, I'm not crazy on that, right? No, you are. I've like, gone through it and argued with... I was like, Huey did nothing wrong! Yeah.

So it is ultimately unclear to the end, although it does get more and more slanted against him. And everyone coming out and saying, you know, you're defending Huey kind of ruined it for me, because then I knew from then that, oh, Huey's the bad guy, which it didn't end up being. What do we have against him? The idea that he sabotaged the parasite to make a new strain that was resistant to Wolbachia comes from him being on the phone with a biotech company who Miller thinks is connected to Cypher.

And also, what do we have against him in the murder of Strangelove? We don't hear him putting her in the pod. We hear her banging on the pod and asking for him to get her out. But we don't know where she is at the time. And let's not forget, what do we have on him with the inspections that led to the destruction of the original mother? Nothing. But the problem...

It checks out for the inspection. But the problem is that they all are not the smoking gun, but it's too close. And I feel like... You're calling it a problem, but it's not a problem. That's great, actually. I think that's so interesting. Because I think that for me, even though when I saw it, I was like, when they talked to him, and it's like, what happened, who was the traitor here and whatnot, I thought Huey

was lying through his teeth the entire time. And you know, when each of these problems gets possibly pegged back to him in a way where it's like, maybe he did this, maybe he didn't, and at the end you get one sort of confirmation. Kind of. And in a way, you kind of look at that and go, that could have justified... What's the confirmation? It's just the mammal pod.

Look, tape. Yeah, no. I don't consider that... Because you hear her banging on the wall saying, Huey, let me out, then it cuts and she says, kill me, and then it cuts and she goes on for nine minutes about boss waifu. You still love me, right, stuff? It's super weird. But like, any evidence...

Sorry, George. Can you hold on a second? We just had a doorbell ring. Okay, no problem. Sorry about that, George. Go on. Okay, okay. So, in the AI pod tape, you hear strange love say, Huey, let me out, cut, kill me, and

then cut, and then it's nine minutes of bullshit. But it's a good tape. But the nine minutes aren't relevant to Huey's guilt or innocence. Yeah, nine minutes of her dying. You don't hear the process of her getting stuffed in there. You don't know who does it. And Huey's first story, that Skullface puts her in there and then puts the pod in his office without him knowing, there's nothing in that tape contradicting that story.

He changes all his stories. But don't you think the fact that he changes them makes him kind of suspect? He is on a floating oil rig surrounded by men with guns who are not accountable by any nation's law, like, who already have a case against them. Yeah, so maybe you shouldn't lie to them. Yeah, at the end, I kind of felt like, I kind of looked at it and thought, you know, there definitely was no smoking gun and it was interesting that there never was. But the fact that he would change his story so often and it was clearly like forced into

exposing more than one truth kind of made me look at it and go, like, if he was responsible for all these things, wow, fuck this guy. But at the same time, he's under an extraordinary amount of pressure to just say whatever these people who are making him balance his robot legs on a needle of metal acid. I think this is part of... There's a very good example of that, actually, George. And it's the events of the end of Ground Zeroes where a boss tells him to put everything on the...

Well, no, he puts everything on the seafloor and then they get, what's the fucking group to come in? XLF. No, the UN inspection. The inspection agency whose name I forget and gets them to come in. IAEA. Yeah, IAEA. They come in and the moment you get Huey in Phantom Pain, they start, or even before

you get Huey, Miller assumes Huey was the guy who did it and he did it. And then you get Huey in and there's absolutely no evidence that Huey actually called in XLF. No, there's nothing. You know what I mean? But he did call it in without their permission. No, exactly, exactly. So like there is reason to suspect, but at the same time, there's never actually a piece of evidence.

It's actually really interestingly... That was the moment that I turned on Miller and that's very early because like you walk in and they're beating Huey's ass and the dialogue implies they've been beating his ass for like five hours over nothing. And based on how they're treating him, why should he treat them with respect back? Over a hunch, right? And like you're right because they're dicks, like especially Miller. And he's also floating in the ocean surrounded by Miller.

But I have to agree with Willie. The fact that he changes his stories, like all of his stories, like ten times. And you're again pulling him. Every story has like three months of exhibit. And you also are pulling him from the bad guys after him getting like pulled over to them. Also, look at how they treat Code Talker by comparison. Who they pull from the bad guys, who was forced to do work or else they'd kill him.

Code Talker is eating lobster and just like burger soup. While Huey is balancing his leg against a needle. Right. And then they go out of their way to play that tape for you to show you like a skull face fucking with him and the whole bell thing. Yeah. Right. And then it's like, yeah, Code Talker also like having an inside knowledge about quiet

that the others don't know is definitely something that, you know, it's suspicious. But it's not on the level of Huey where every interaction with him is like, you got to shift your eyebrows around a little bit. I agree. But like, let's put it this way. Like Phantom Pain is undeniably one of, if not the most talked about game this year. Right. Yeah.

If there was a binary answer, you'd know it by now. Yeah. And I will agree with all of you guys and say that it's great that you can't 100% it. I'm not saying I lean on the side of doubt. That's fair. That's fair. He's a liar. The thing is, he is super shifty and weird and awkward.

He's like a, he's the proto-Otacon. Yeah. And also in MGS4, Otacon talks about his father as a fuck up and all, and Ground Zero's in this game and Peace Walker to an extent, he's kind of a fuck up. There's nothing disproving the idea that he could just be accidentally causing horrific shit rather than deliberately causing horrific shit. I find that hard to believe. Well, okay, but the thing is, there's no smoking gun, there's nothing proving his guilt.

There's no actual evidence, I agree. And Miller comes into it already assuming he's guilty. And Peace Walker, sorry, Peace Walker also establishes that Huey isn't a trustworthy guy because his entire premise was based on stolen material. He, Peace Walker, because I went back and listened to a whole bunch of, almost all of his tapes actually at Peace Walker as well. And him taking credit for, for Grandin's Tech, exactly. And pretending that it was his and whatnot until forced into strong, until strong armed

into telling the truth is something that they just, you know, it's like, it was established already. He was lying until forced to tell the truth. And that's what we continue to see from him here. I feel that like Huey, I think the treatment of Huey and that character and all this stuff is my favorite part of the game by far. Like I like it way more than the big boss stuff because I think that has issues or I think the Huey stuff is executed perfectly.

And in particular, I feel a lot about Huey the way I felt about Miller, where this game made me hate Miller as a person, not as a character, but as a person. I think Miller's a fucking monster. I think he's up there with the other villains. Infected pain? Yeah. Descending to hell. Because he constantly tortures Pete over nothing.

Yeah, he does get that. Right? And Huey ends up saying a bunch of weird, shady shit while under torture. And I feel like this kind of like folds into the super kind of anti-America, or at least anti-George Bush politics that the game's made. Yeah, sure. Totally. But keep in mind, the last game in the series had you rescuing prisoners from Guantanamo

Bay. Yeah, but yeah. And this game has this like fuck up dorky scientist ruining everything, possibly because they're putting him under a tremendous amount of torture. The thing about like, it's the same as Miller in that Miller died off camera and that sucked, but now I can live with that because fuck Miller, Huey had the most brutal, undignified death of anyone in this series. He drowns himself in a fucking pool and tries to take his new wife's fucking little girl

with him to die in the pool because he catches his son fucking his wife. And based on this character, that's so easy to imagine now. That is a complete nervous breakdown. That is the most brutal, like undignified, shameful end for anyone ever, right? He just keeps fucking everything up. And I always remembered when they showed off Huey in Peace Walker, all I could think about was that. Yeah.

Like how could this character possibly deserve that level of horrible end? It's the same thing as boss. Like what's the path for boss from here to there? How do you fall that far? When you get to the end of Phantom Pain and they literally kick him off the island and he has to throw his fucking legs into the water and everyone on Mother Base is hoping that he drowns. And Miller's like, you know, he's going to make it, right?

He is fucking it. It's not our problem. Like, yes. At this moment, I fully believe that he is a traitor and a mass murderer and a fuckup. And in that mentality, you come out of the quarantine and he's the first guy and he's talking shit. And he's like, how could you? And you're like, oh, oh, even if he's not responsible for the quarantine, there was

a moment in the quarantine where I said, or before he started to do that, I look at Liam and I said, if Huey fucking starts giving a shit about that, he's dead forever. I remember in that scene, I was like, he's not right. And what is Venom's say there? Yeah. Venom says he's right. And that shows a lot about Venom's character and how he's not dissented. Like he has an overwhelming amount of guilt for what he's being put through.

And there's like so many great moments in this game that despite the taglines and the darker tone of it, like they try really hard to show Venom being a super cool guy. Like, remember when you're rescuing the kids from the mine? Remember when you don't shoot all those kids in the mine? Okay. Do you? Okay. I feel, I think this game pussied out on the treatment of child soldiers and I think

it could have been a lot more powerful for me. Okay. Compared to Beast Walker. Dude, there was, as soon as we saw the trailer at E3 a few years ago where the child soldiers were confirmed. Yeah. Okay. And we kind of knew it was going to be a bit of a darker game in that regard.

I immediately had images in my mind of the MGS4 sequence where you're driving Drebben's APC, but there's children around and you have to avoid the children because it's a fuck. And for them to puss you out so hard, I mean it isn't, but for them to like fucking snap a game over when you so much as like sneeze on the child. All child murder boners aside. I think it could have had a couple of really, really gripping moments by actually going the distance with that. Yeah.

Like they never did. The imagery of him loading starving African children onto a helicopter under gunfire, like that is propaganda, that is a U.S. Army recruitment commercial. That's a picture. Whoever is doing that is most definitely like the good guy in the situation. So Venom is a better person than Big Boss because I fully believe, knowing everything that we know now, that if Big Boss had been there, he would have blown those kids away, no problem.

Or he just would have not. Yeah. Oh my God. Because a big, a big stickling point I had with Peace Walker that a lot of fans were kind of sort of rightly want to argue with me about is the deal with child soldiers. Paz and Chico are actually on your spreadsheet, granted Paz is like a 30 year old, but you don't know that and then Boss doesn't know that. And you can only put her on the galley, fair enough.

But Chico goes on the recon team. Same with Chico, right? No, no. He's totally okay with that. Oh yeah, he can recon. Yeah, true. And the thing, he is gathering information out in the field on Big Boss's enemies, which makes him a target in ground zeroes.

He gets blown up in a helicopter because Big Boss is recruiting child soldiers. Meanwhile, Venom is like rescuing child soldiers and he thinks about recruiting them and Miller and a rare show of Miller humanity is like, no, we want to put them in school and get educated. You got to educate the kids and not put them on the battlefield. But the whole thing with young liquid and all that is literally pulling them out of a situation that the actual Big Boss would put them in. So here's the problem with the whole child soldier plot line.

The chapter two is called race, right? What does that part of the game have to do with race? Nothing. There's nothing in that part of the game that has anything to do with race. I think that a huge portion of the child soldier, well, the ending to the quote unquote child soldier stuff would have been Mission 51 with Kingdom of the Flies, right? But even before that, like, you know that cutscene of the African soldiers doing target practice and then the bigger guy comes up and slaps their guns.

Yeah, readjusting their guns. Yeah. That's not in the game. Actually, it is. It is. It is. It's in the first mission that they show up and you can do it on. But the cutscene is not in the game.

No. But that moment happens in engine while you're playing. No, we saw it. But I'm saying that that cutscene and the cutscene in which Big Boss is in the helicopter that's fucking destroyed. Well, that goes for Ground Zero as well. There was unused guns. But both of those are gone.

And I have a strong feeling that even with the Kingdom of the Flies ending, it still feels like there was supposed to be more. Definitely. I actually noticed that doing what I was doing last night. Chapter One ends like that. It ends just as it's getting good. And that's when you have the infection on your staff and you're actually micromanaging your staff for a greater cause, which is cool.

That was cool. That was a nice little gameplay mechanic. So you go find Code Talker and at that point, Chapter One's pretty much over because once you find Code Talker, it's a race to kill the Skulls and then sneak into OKB Zero and then kill Solanthropus. Did you have the moment when the credits were rolling for Chapter One where you were like, OK, but no, come on. Yeah.

Yeah, they did that in a few moments. Absolutely. It's easy to see it coming. Yeah. OK. In this game, it's the easiest it's ever been a season. However, at the end of the truth mission, after he smashes the mirror in the credits roll, my reaction was more like, no, come on, no.

Well, the whole time we were doing that, I was just yelling at the when he smashes the thing like where I'm alternating between, oh, he's going to record and three, one, three. Oh, that's so crazy. Wait, what about Liquid stole a Metal Gear? Yeah. Isn't that important? Yeah.

No, they got to. I guess it's not. I guess it's not. Cut the budget. Yeah. It's going to be explored in the Pachinko version. I'm glad we got the Blue Letter rather than nothing. Yeah.

But it's still so. For all the shit that I will throw at that stuff now and probably over time, like I completely agree with you. I think it's shocking and amazing that that Blu-ray exists and that you can actually see what that was supposed to be. I think a lot of companies wouldn't. I mean, obviously, I think it was someone fought tooth and nail to get to exist. Oh, yeah.

Oh, totally. But the fact that that mission. It also helps for me in that tape flip moment. The music that plays there is my favorite song on the entire soundtrack. The Man Who Stole the World? Not The Man Who Stole the World. No, it's a variation. No, it's a variation of a song.

It's not actually on the soundtrack. You have to do it. It's only in the game. Where it goes. At that moment. Yeah. Exactly. That little, the build up to him looking in the mirror and smiling is, I fucking can't

get enough of that. Well, cool detail that I noticed doing a, I need to come up with a good word for it. I guess story necessary missions only run. Yeah. Seven to eight hours. You should give it a try if you're bored. Call it a core run. Core run.

Yeah. Sure. It's a theme popping up again and again because you're going through the very few cutscenes in this game in rapid order and that song keeps happening and it keeps happening in places where it shouldn't. Like at the funeral after the quarantine, they do that, those same beats, but with the alt version though. Yeah.

That is the game's theme. That's the version you can hear. It follows it from the beginning to the end and just gets like more. It's not Sins of the Father. It should be Sins of the Father. But it's not. Yeah. Dude, that fucking.

I can't get over the fact that. So I knew there was cut content and we beat the game and we got the truth, right? I'm like, oh, that's nuts. What about all that shit? This game feels unfinished. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Liam gives me the Blu-ray and I'm like, oh, wow, that's nuts. Take a look at it.

It still feels unfinished because that feels like it loses, it finishes up that thread. Yeah. I kind of hated the Darth Vader scream at the end though. I'm glad we didn't have that. Why does he even care if this is shot liquid? It's because he cares about children. Yeah. I'm like big boss.

But Venom does. Yeah. Thing that almost ruined the fucking thing, the entire thing for me was the possible undoing of Paz dying in the helicopter. Oh, Paz in this game. Yeah. So we did not see that. You guys didn't get this in the LPL.

But I thought afterwards. I thought afterwards. Okay. I got this naturally through playing and you can like ask Liam. I was so upset. Yeah. And I was so upset because I was like, this is my problem with like the shittiest things out there that I hate like Gundam Sea where it's like you undo dramatic moments because

you think it's too harsh. You pussie out as well. And I thought that that's what they were doing. Yeah. They're arguing that like they can't be pussying out. There must be a reason for it. And when you find out that Venom was the medic, it instantly makes sense because only he would have been able to see that.

It is the opposite of pussying out. They drive the nail in even harder. Even harder. Uh-oh. It's a hallucination. I'm crazy. Yeah. I'm glad for that.

And again, redone it down on the medic specifically. Well, I had the exact same reaction, maybe a little stronger because the parts that we see pause in the medic. I think the description I wrote for that video is what the fuck? This is bullshit. Yeah, exactly. And that's what you think at first and bullshit. But by metal gear, this is metal gear we're talking about.

It could have actually happened. But it was such a strong setup to have that happen to her, the way it went down in Ground Zeroes when you got that tape and you listened to it and you went, holy fuck, Skullface is evil. Right? You're like, oh my god, established, villain established immediately. And if that didn't end up happening, that's a table flip, man. Man, Skullface is great.

It's a huge shame he's not in the game anymore. I remember, I mentioned that in an earlier part, I think that he's criminally underused. And I had people telling me on Twitter, he's actually in a lot of the tapes. He's not in that many of the tapes. He's not. He's very underutilized. You know, I thought about it a lot and I know me and Willie have spoken about this before where that's the problem with games that take place between three and metal gear is that

you know what the end game is. He has to die. And working Skullface into there doesn't, and it's a shame because Skullface is great, but it doesn't work because you know he has to die. You know his plan has to fail. You know all that. It has to fail so utterly that you never hear about it again. Exactly.

And the only way this game does succeed in the end is because in the end it's not about Skullface. It's about boss and extending the legend of Big Boss and stuff. And that bit plays off fabulously, but the Skullface bit doesn't work so well. He deserved better. Because he has to be completely erased from everything for the first game. But that's why it works though. And the reason why it works in one regard.

Exactly. The reason why I think it works so well actually is because Skullface is another venom is another joy. He's another forgotten phantom of history that just becomes nothing. Doing things all for revenge. Except in this case he was on zeroes orders. Yeah, no it works really well in that one regard. I actually do.

He's literally exactly the same as Venom. But other than that, like it never really, it never amounts to anything, which is a shame because he's such a good character. I felt very disappointed. Also Huey fucking shooting the body, man. It was great. Oh my god. It shows how like mal-adjusted Huey is.

Yeah, it's a person, dude. I felt so disappointed. George, go ahead, man. Skullface deserved better. I was going to say a really long time ago that you actually get more of Skullface in chapter two after he's dead and gone than you do in chapter one. He only talks in like a grand total of maybe one minute of cutscenes in chapter one. Then you get the Jeep ride where he gets some more and then he's done.

That Jeep ride is terrible. Did you guys notice? It's not until he throws the bell down the stairs where you're like, yeah, that's a fucking person right there. Did you guys notice, this is so cool, that if you pay attention, Psycho Mantis. Yes, somebody sent me a screenshot once we passed that. Psycho Mantis, actually you can tell who's controlling Psycho Mantis. Yeah, it's fucking awesome.

Which makes the replays really valuable too. It's really fascinating to see. I'm so happy with how that worked out. It's so hard to... This super hard to read story part of the element where it's like, why? Who is he? What? What is it?

Once you know, it's so easy. It's like... You feel like an idiot for not figuring it out. There's a learning curve to just watching the cutscenes. I love that detail. I love everything about it. He responds to the strongest emotion. Yeah, I think the whole thing of Mantis was really superbly handled in that regard.

Think about how fucked up someone like that would grow up. Yeah, I mentioned it when we saw that. When you get the reveal, that explains why Psycho Mantis is such a nutcase in MGS1 and why he just wants to kill everyone. Because he's just being overpowered by fucking revenge motivations for like a decade or whatever. He's just a puppet. And he finally gets the mask that shuts it all out, but he's nuts at that point. There's bits I was like, I remember we dipped our toes into the crazy theory pool at one

point. We were like, what if he feeds off of the revenge of the Wolbachia? Because there's a whole tape about how they have the most deep-seated revenge, or vengeance towards humanity. Because we fucked with them. Because they got fucked over. Yeah, exactly. And that was before the end of the game and we were like, ah, what if, what if, but that,

yeah, it didn't pan out or anything. The big thing that I think ended up kneecapping this game for a lot of fans is Chapter 2, right? And I think Chapter 2 is a really, really cool idea. Because Chapter 2 is like the avant, borderline avant-garde action movie satire that MGS is so good at being, in which you have a rollicking cinematic adventure with the big bad guy and a hero who saves the day. And then the second half of the game is basically both you and the characters asking, now what? You just wander through the desert trying to find something to do.

Until something happens. You just fill space until Big Boss has to come back into the scene. The problem is that there's just such little there for how long it takes to go through. You can't even trigger the cutscenes on replaying it because they're all returned to mother-based cutscenes. They are, yeah. How did you feel about a quiet exit? It was so easy last night and I remember that mission being like, ah, the first time.

It was a cool story point. It was a terrible mission. It was the fucking hardest mission. So first of all, the biggest problem is the mission preps you for stealth and says, go stealth and get quiet and then throws 30 tanks at you. So there were situations where I was wearing the battle dress and I was fully kitted out and a random tank shell would one shot me from pretty much all the way across the map and that was just not fun.

And ultimately, I lost like four P-quads. Oh god. I still haven't yet to see one go down but I could see how that could happen for sure. When I was doing it last night, I ended up going through it super easy on try number two and I'm wondering if it's either the upgraded weapons or if I just knew better or if I didn't care as much because this time I was blowing them up. So you had the upgraded weapons and you knew every location that they were going to come from.

And like laying traps if you want. Also my first time I was trying to extract the vehicles. Oh god, yeah. That ended up being the winning strategy for us but like it wasn't. So a quiet exit, like there's the mission and then there's the finale. How do you feel about the story? I, Liam said it first and I completely agree with him. Like that bit where, okay quiet, here it comes.

She's going to talk. She's talking. Holy shit. And what is she saying? She's saying the most boring, like she's saying nothing of value for five minutes. Like five minutes? She's just telling the helicopter how to find them. One or two minutes, yeah.

But nonetheless, since that's the only thing you can look at and listen to, I felt like it lost almost all impact. Yeah, totally. After the initial like, oh shit she's talking, it immediately went to waiting, waiting ten seconds between single words. It was poor. I found. Like I just didn't, I didn't get that experience out of it.

First words out of that girl's mouth should have been either a big plot reveal or like her dying words or something. Not like, okay to the left, you know what I mean? The first words were great. We need help. Whatever. But then when it got to the bit where she was just standing and listening and guiding it and saying adjust ten degrees to what like it was nothing.

You know what got into my head when we were looking at that, now I think about it. You remember in Zone of the Enders 2, second runner, where you go to Lloyd's lab and you have to dodge the mines and you're tilting Jotie and Ken is saying to the left, to the left. Perfect. That's what she's doing and that part sucked when you could play it in a cool game. And you're just watching someone do it here and it's so boring. Yeah, I don't know.

Something about that just, it didn't seem, I didn't notice that it felt longer or tired to me. I ended up, I was fine with it. And in the end I actually respected the decision to have her permanently gone. Yeah, absolutely. Since the story reasons for her. The phantom pain. It's right there in the name.

I think it's fantastic. PC version, I know. No, no, no. It passed it so you can get her back. Oh. I think it's actually fantastic that they brought her back in the way they did. So it requires you to play Quiet's Mission seven times in a row, but not in a row. But to beat it seven times and it changes from replay to, what was it, to reunion.

And it's like, in my head, it's like, yeah, okay, it's the idea of a guy who's desperately trying to. You have to look that up. You're not going to figure it out on your own. Is there now, but like in this reunion version does it change the cutscene? No, no, no. You just get her back in your party. Oh, okay.

That's a gameplay. Like when they patched that and I was like, yeah, that really echoes to me the guy who's just slamming his head against the game, trying to get Quiet back. And that's fine. But I do, I agree that I really like how they take her away from you. And I do like how it takes a lot of menial work to get her back. That being said. And it's not canon.

Quiet in general. I really, I think she makes the game trivial. It's such a, it's a joke going through the missions with her. I really like Quiet, although the fucking frolicking cutscenes are just like, oh my god, could you? I feel like she had to find words and deeds. Oh my god. Could you?

Ready to like Quiet during her mission because that cutscene where she beats up the dudes is so great. Yeah. She like bursts out of a trailer with a rocket launcher in one hand and a giant like anti material. It was pretty strong with pretty strong camera firmly centered on jiggling boobs. And I'm like, fuck yeah, quiet. And then she goes and she's like, now back her up to the left, to the left, no, you're

too far. And I'm like, oh no, quiet, god. I'm glad that the character replacement hacks of cutscenes came out. Oh yeah. Just to make you feel as awkward as you should. Did you see it? The whole thing with Quiet just comes off as a massive disappointment. It's like, you know, the initial reveal where it was like, all right, whatever.

And then eventually Kojima like standing firm and saying like, no, this is going to be good. He did stand. He said nothing. This character is awesome. And all you people who think that I'm just putting a character for their boobs in this game are idiots. Yeah.

And you're going to feel ashamed. You know exactly how it turns out. To any other game, it would be completely unfair to compare the two. But considering this is Metal Gear, I feel very comfortable saying it's, it's crazy how near did the same thing and succeeded with Kine. And with Metal Gear Phantom Pain specifically, it is a complete failure with Quiet. And I like Quiet's design. She's adorable.

She's sexy. But that's not, that's not a particularly, that's not tasteful. There's no need for it. And the fact that when she's kicking, when she's stretching and that when she's stretching and I mean when she's in the helicopter, it's quiet in your butt and your face. Yeah. You got this girl. It's like, you know what?

I do feel ashamed of my words indeed. And like, again, you look at near and it's got the same thing, sexy character wearing lingerie. And they fucking nail it. I expected the second coming of Sniper Wolf and that's what I got. Yeah. Kind of, yeah. Yeah.

I don't, it's really weird going back. I played MGS 1 with a friend a couple nights ago and it's so weird like comparing, okay fine, women in these games going from MGS 1 to MGS 5 back and forth, it's like a shocking difference. Yeah. And MGS 1 for the first hour there are more women on your radio than men. You have, you have Nastasha, Mailing, Naomi, and then later on Sniper Wolf and Meryl. And in MGS 5, there's Paz and Quiet.

And in MGS 2, you get Rose for 90% of the game, just yak and atcha. And a little bit of Emma. And MGS 3 is like... And then in MGS 3, Eva is like the boss of our character in the game. Eva is like my favorite bikini video game girl ever. I fucking love Eva. Yeah. No, she's great and all her, all her intentions are super well rationalized.

Yeah. I'm, you know, on, on, on the rung, I, she's not super high for me, but she's great. I like Big Mama more than Eva. That's weird. Yeah. But okay. Um, okay. We obviously like can't go, we can't do this all day, but we actually could do this all

day. Yeah. I'm pretty much done. But I think the games really, the being released in the state where like it feels like a full half of that game is gone is fucking embarrassing. If this is the furwell, if this is the furwell, I'm okay with it because I'm okay with the unmaking of the legend. Sure.

Being the first. I'll, I'll, I'll. That's so cool to me. That I'm, I'm happy. The closure is really, really good. It's just a bummer that like, you can look at this game and you can clearly see that like over a year in advance, they must have known they can't deliver everything. And the game came out super polished, super good feeling.

Everything worked. But. So much missing. And in terms of impressing like reviewers and normal people, it's fine, but it's still like a little sad. If you're a huge dweeb and into Metal Gear, it's still a little, a little depressing. Like it's, it's really obvious that a bunch of those missions that are main ops that are just side missions were supposed to be side missions and there were supposed to be real

missions in their place. Yeah. No, the idea, and I said this to the guys early on, but the idea of the Metal Gear franchise becoming more about ops and less about a contained, a call way story. Boom. I, unfortunately, I don't like that as much, you know. But Ground Zeroes was such a nice medium between them. Ground Zeroes is fantastic.

Yeah, it was. And that was, that's what like, it kind of girded the expectations for, and what we got was a game where there are Ground Zeroes style missions, but that's just a third of all of them. Well, because Ground Zeroes is, is just tight. It's incredibly tight from beginning to end. There's the only filler is in the post game, you know what I mean? And even then, it's not really like that much, where the filler should be.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, and like when you look at it, you actually, I think you actually get a similar percentage where you get one story mission for every five not story missions in Phantom Tank. It's about a third. Yeah. But like, yeah, no, that game's just like ultra, ultra tight and Phantom Pain, because

it has all these fucking Cypher cut out fighting missions, that's the number one takeaway. It's always a cut out from Cypher. Everything is a cut out from Cypher. But because it has all this shit that you don't care about, like, it's just, if Ground Zeroes came, you could easily slash 20 missions and just tie the plot together a little bit and it would probably work. And chat. It could have gone.

It's so weird. Every time I've gone through these missions again, and you do go through them again for the 100% because you got an S rank and, yeah, you have to finish all the objectives. And that's actually really fun. I really enjoyed doing that. Me too. The, the gameplay is like superb. I'm at like 80 plus, I think I'm at 81 or 82% and I'm still taking away.

When you go back to chapter two, you'll notice that they're the two missions of the four missions in chapter two. The two of them that are original chapter two missions where you get the containers and rescue the CIA agent, they are, oh, and the photograph. So there are three of them. But the photograph and the containers are almost like tutorial level, easy, phone in a mission, bullshit design, and it's so weird to have that so late in the game. Remember that speech where code talkers like, feel the roots, the enemy, they will feel

the roots too. And it's like, what, what, what is he talking about? Is he talking about a gameplay feature that's not there? Cause that's what it sounds like he's talking about. I, I wish, I wish that ground zero was part of the final thing altogether. Yeah. I wish it was all one, one. Well, it was supposed to be.

You were supposed to be able to go back. I think that, I think that would have like, massively, Here's, here's my you mean you wish you got them at the same time? Yeah. Yeah. My, my proposed fix for Metal Gear Solid five, here we go. Act one, ground zeros, act two, revenge, act three, race. There you go.

Fixed it. Okay. Cause I was going to say, like, like me and Pat discussed it, like when we finished the game, which of course you couldn't have possibly seen that video. And we said it's unfortunate because before you propose any fixes, the actual fixes let them finish the game. Finish the game. Act three piece.

I don't think, all you have going for act three piece is like an image file, deep, deep Well, there's a video. The video. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever it exists. We haven't talked to, we can't like, there's a video of the piece cutscene. Yeah.

Oh, oh, where you disarmed the nukes. Yeah. That could potentially happen in the game we have right now if players figure out how to activate it. Yeah. We haven't touched on FOBs at all. And I don't think we should. I don't think we should.

And the game is getting worse over time, which is exactly it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth. And that's all there is. The last thing I want to say before you wrap it up for us, Bunny, is you got to wrap it up. I just want to say that, like, I also think it's really, really weird, not jarring, but just like odd that this version of Ocelot has no personality. That's sad.

He's a fucking Ocelot is such a fucking goofball in the original. It's an old game. And at the end, and then you can see how he goes from that cocky little prick dude into that conceited fucking gunslinger. Yeah. And in the middle, you're like, what happened? You all your condiments are gone. You're completely right.

Like me and Liam were had multiple moments where we were spazzing out over like, ha ha, Troy Baker. No, Troy Baker is perfect for Ocelot in this game. Shut up. He is perfectly edge like, yeah, his, his, his, his performance is good. His script is not bridging the gap perfectly with his voice between the Ocelot and three and the old gunslinger older man in one, like it fits perfectly in that and his performance is great.

But Ocelot's use in this game, he does nothing. It's, it's, it's like, he's a tutorial, but that only does one tutorial. It's so weird. I went through another layer of mental gymnastics to justify that, that I did with enjoying the ending, right? I was like thinking about it for a couple of days and I'm like, okay, why is this so underwhelming? And the thing is, Ocelot is a huge big boss fan, right?

Yeah. And in every other game in the series, he bees, he is a big boss fan through some sort of cover role. This is the only game where he can be himself and that is why he's not the Ocelot we know and love because the Ocelot we know and love is just a phantom perpetuated by the legend. I came to that. I came to this conclusion that I was going to say that I was thinking about the possibility as well of is Ocelot just, he has no personality and then the one that we see is only when

he's in the undercover and I don't think that follows through. I don't, I think it's on it because the truth is, is that we do get to see what real Adam is like at the end of Snaper and we do get to see some of that as well in Guns of the Patriots. So I think that like the boring guy thing though is like, it still doesn't, I don't know, I think that's too much of a story, I consider it the point though. I think it's a flaw ultimately. I think they just didn't write him to be like a realistic version of what that character

would be at that age, you know, and he was still undercover. He was still acting with knowledge that the others didn't have at that point. Like he's never really actually been his true self. In Venom's presence, he's still putting up a farce. To be fair though, his cover this time is a lot more easier to understand than his cover. In this one, we basically- Because he straight out tells you in plain English. He's convincing himself.

In the other ones, he's like, it's a little more of a deliberate ruse. In this one, even he is falling for his own, well in MGS4 he kind of does as well. Yeah. But I think that's one thing, that's one part of the game where I'm like, to explain that away by going, no, he's just Rey Ayanami, I'm like, no, that's a stretch. I'm not going to give it that much credit. It was a mistake. All right, so Bunny, wrap up Metal Gear Solid 5 for us.

Hey, Pat, the first thing you said to me about Metal Gear Solid 5 was fuck you for spoiling it because I named my video Disassociative Disorder. Yes. And you got really mad at me because you thought Big Boss had, or Venom in this case, had Disassociative Disorder at the end. Dude, I was so- Fuck you, you were wrong. I was so worried.

So wrong. I mentioned this to Liam in the LP, I was so, so, so worried that the end of this game was going to be, it was all in your head. He's got multiple personalities, ha, ha, ha. And when I saw that your video was named that, I was like, oh my god, this game is the worst. No, I didn't think of people interpreting that out of it because the idea is that- Because nobody knows what Disassociative Me means. The idea is that it's reflective of the game's juggling between these really cool and really

shitty ideas and also plays on DD, Dino Dogs, D-Rogs. You were right, Bunny. I was wrong. Ha, ha. Yeah. There we go. That's a good wrap-up. Ha, ha, ha.

Fuck you, Pat. It's the best wrap-up we have. How do we get to talk about Cat Schwitz? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Once we start- Once we go back to our weeks. I guess there was one thing that is worth using as a wrap-up, like someone wrote in

a letter that- Oh, we're just going into emails. No, just one. Just one. Okay. And it was Elric. He wrote in asking, in anticipation of the spoiler cast, with everything said and done, what does Phantom Pain say about Kojima as a creator?

It says that he spends a lot of money and pisses off his bosses, and he aims too high, and I would have much preferred a much smaller game with a much smaller scope that had everything he was supposed to have in it. You can never really tell. Like, you know, what does our podcast say about us as creators? Well, you can never really tell. You don't know enough about us, you know what I mean? We fly by night.

But even then, only on certain- The other thing is that, like, Kojima doesn't always handle tough topics with the most amount of class, and the one time that people explicitly called him out on it, and he said, fuck you, you're going to see, I'm going to show you, and then it turned out that everyone was completely right. Then if he ever does that again, if he's ever like, hey, I'm going to deal with race in my game, and it's going to be a big thing, and people go, I don't know, what we're seeing on the trailer looks really bad, and he goes, no, you'll see, like, I'm not going to trust

him. MGSV teaches me that Kojima is not the king, not the best, but a god at making it up as you go along. That's- Yeah, that's without a doubt something you can glean from that. That's a takeaway. That's for sure something you can glean from that. Yeah, absolutely.

I thought this was going more in the way of, like, I've seen people call him lazy and stuff for not getting the game finished. Oh, come on, that's out of his control. That's not his control. Yeah, exactly. No, like, amazing, and making shit up, you're totally right. Yeah, totally. His ability to take disparate plot points that make no sense at all.

No, just direct people directing their hate mail over FOB insurance at Kojima's Twitter directly. Like, come on, he didn't- Fuck. I still think some of the inspiration is there, evidence A being the truth tapes. The truth tapes are just, oh, they're so good. They're great. All right.

Thanks for coming on the podcast, man. Yeah, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. This was a lot of fun. I know it took a while, but we're only going to do one of these. We had to get it all out. I think we did. I had a lot of fun talking to you.

It keeps a lot enough. I'll fuck off. I'll catch you later, man. Bye. Have a good day. Thanks. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye.