Castle Super Beast - SBFC 246: David Uncaged

Episode Date: May 15, 2018

Download for Mobile | Preview Video Is it possible to reset bias and expectations to zero when it comes to Quantic Dream? You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/superbestfriendsplay Outro: DRAGON BALL FIGHTERZ - 「West City」[EPIC METAL COVER] (Little V) Fireball island is one of the most successful kickstarters ever BloodStained gets incredible 8-bit styled game, Curse of the Moon. Coming out this month Brooklyn 99 Gets cancelled and resurrected over the course of 24 hours 90's first person shooter Hellbound launches kickstarter The only Joe worth a damn is getting his own movie First 4 is making a god like True Midna statue Tomb Raider is gonna cost Square Enix Thai horror video game, DreadOut being adapted into a movie Leaks suggest Nintendo's Retro Studios making Star Fox racing spin-off PlatinumGames at work on action title set to 'flip the genre on its head' Original Guilty Gear being ported to Nintendo Switch Resident Evil film director making a Monster Hunter movie starring Milla Jovovich Remaining 3 DLC Persona 4 Arena Characters Leaked for BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle via Datamine The Final Fantasy VII Remake will allegedly be released by 2023 Rumor: Retro Studios working on Star Fox racing game for Switch

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Head to squarespace.com slash super for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use the OfferCurve Super to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We're doing it, guys. It really pisses me off about beyond two holes. Yeah, great. Matt started this. Matt started this up.

And then we had to start the podcast, and now he's starting it back up again. Let's do it. You want to tell the story? Well, no, mysterious. Yeah, you're a mysterious man. Okay, a mysterious man. It really pisses me off about beyond two holes. What pisses you off?

By the way, we're talking about Detroit, not beyond two zones. Oh, right. That's the problem, but yeah. Why is it so bad this time around with the naming? How come we can't say that? Yeah, I don't know. Actually, he's got a good point. It's because it's become...

It's one game too many. Plus, become and beyond. The age. Yeah, the David Cage age, you know, is just... The Cage age? The Cage age has swirled around. We can't say the names anymore. I would say that the number one problem with it is its subtitle is too close

to the name of the last game. Yeah, that's true. Detroit become human, the other one's beyond two souls. Before that subtitle got added, and it was just Detroit in everyone's minds, nobody had a problem remembering that it was Detroit. But as soon as I started to see it, my brain would autocomplete it. I would see Detroit become human, and then it would go autocomplete. Ah, beyond two zones.

Ah, shit. And we're all just so excited. Yeah, yeah. About it, we're talking about the bingo, the David Cage bingo. Beyond become prophecy. And you can only do bingo when something is in a pattern, when you expect things. And... You could do a platinum bingo.

You could do a cajima bingo. But they'll throw some curveballs every now and then. You know it's not a curveball when a guy can just sit in his chair drinking his coffee. Oh, you're doing the Lucas thing now? And just writes a bad story and has other people make it form, time into it. You don't got to get out of your seat if you just do that. And that is like, that's being a director, not a game designer at all. No, but I'm a director.

And like, you could say it's almost like how Japanese like, auteurs do this thing or I'm the head guy. Yeah, one idea man and everyone follows the beck and call. Kojima, I'm looking at your shirt. Kojima will go, I'm going to do a weird different thing now. Because I don't got to do these fucking awful metal gears anymore. Yeah, the bad one. I bet you're going to sneak in Death Stranding though.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I bet you are. And it's just like, it's like when Michael Bay is just, guess what I'm going to do? Explosions, bitches. Guess what I'm going to do? Have women be poorly shown and have plot holes. Because I can just keep doing it until Sony stops paying me. Well, because, hey, did it sell?

Yes, and no need to take risks. Hey, I don't know if this is going to, I don't know if this is going to edge into a podcast story or not. But it's like, hey, you know what I can do? I can put my wife in the new Capcom movie that they're letting me make. Yeah, we'll get there. But that's with the same, with the same movie company and the same producer and we'll film in the same area.

But the thing with that, those, those that like once you switch into that, that's a different industry, right? Like the receiving in like, like whenever you have, you make that jump, the rules change according to the industry. And for the game one for specifically for the David Cain situation, it's like, yeah, they make money and there is a large number as we've discussed many times, number of people out there that legitimately see no problem with these and like are not looking at their, like they're just going like, yeah, that was a cool realistic story

thing. That's really fine. But in my head, I'm like, I'm trying to even Steven Spielberg goes, I'm tired of making this stuff. I'm going to make a Schindler's List. I'm going to make a Lincoln. But like someone that just actually cares about money and just actually wants to be famous. I can just keep doing the same thing until it stops making money.

But other people are like, I'm making shitloads of money. But I'm sick of doing hold on a second. Are you saying that David's David Cage games are all very much the same? I am saying that it's the same movie over and over. But they're so different. One's about a time traveling ghost. One's about a supernatural murder. One's about a different supernatural murder.

And this one's about robots that aren't a slavery analogy. It's no. Don't know. Those are all very different. There's not really anyone else that does this, at least in. Well, here's the thing. Western game development can think of. No.

To this level. The analog in Japanese or otherwise game development would be guys who write visual novels. Right. They don't have the budget, but they write fantastical stories and whatnot. But I'm thinking of stuff like Tanganronpa or 999 or that stuff is the ones that I'm familiar with. And like, those are all weird. Even if you point at Ubisoft, they'll put out weird stuff. Sorry, just like, give me the.

You're trying to hone in on the. Yeah, give me the core of what of what your point is because I have. David Cage sucks. Yes. Yes. That's clear. But like in, but I guess in the specifics of because the type of game because. I mean, he found the thing that he can get away with and keeps doing it.

But what's happening because like this is obvious, right? But what's happening is I feel like it's it's worse not only because of the reasons you stated, but because now tell me the other layer of words. I wasn't aware because when you zoom out, you know, right? When you when you when you look at that, that global map and you're on this, all the game development box arts are appearing all across the globe. And you open up, you leave a chronic dream and you open up to the full global map. What you can see happening is other games like this coming and going and fucking crushing it

when it comes to storytelling and being cinematic experiences. The most like the most recent being a way out a way out is every single beat of a David Cage game. Done successfully and competently at every level until dawn. Yeah. Well, the the biggest one in my mind was because they came out and said, we were really inspired by heavy rain and wanted to make a game like heavy rain make a good game. And it was the first season of The Walking Dead. Really? I don't remember the first season of The Walking Dead. The the leads on that game were like, oh, yeah, we were telltale.

And because you remember, they had made like the Back to the Future Adventure game. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They did that Saturday maximum. We wanted something that was more in like heavy rain style or cinematic. And there was a much bigger emphasis on story. And so the first season of Walking Dead is is a is a clone of heavy rain, but with a good story and good writers and good direction. There's somebody who spaced out over the episode so that if you can see that, hey, maybe that didn't work that great last time.

Let's change it up rather than one whole package game that you can fuck up and not. There's a friend of mine. I don't want to I don't want to blow them up just yet because I don't know if they want this work to be public or whatever. But they're working on a fucking analysis of the direction in Omicron, just the cutscene direction, just like and sent me like this fucking thesis statement about what a mess that very first scene is when you come out of the portal and how continuity of direction is not followed in any way. Not to simplify anybody's work. Couldn't that analysis just say it's bad?

No, that's not enough, man. It's not enough. You see the thing with Omicron and as we go further in and we're going to definitely have to break this down when the time comes, the further away you get from Omicron, the more pure dead I am, the more the 100% uncut David Cage cocaine gets cut. Right. So you get more people around him and you get product. It's a product. It's a brand name. Quantum dream. That's a brand name. There's a difference.

I stand by my product. It's white magic. There's a difference between being funded by Ados as a weird side project and being funded by Sony. So baking soda starts getting sprinkled into it. Especially Ados back there. Detergent starts getting sprinkled into it and then that shit gets cut and cut and cut until eventually you have like what is essentially an insulated version of David Cage, right? Where like you're not seeing the raw talentless hack in its pure, purest form.

You can't see the heights that he would never get to. It's hiding behind amazing mocap. It's hiding behind big name actors, huge name actors. It's hiding behind infinite money. It's hiding behind like length, right? And different systems of like shooting and QTE and you know what I mean? It's hiding behind so much. But that all that insulation is like at the further away we get,

the easier it is for people to not catch that it's still an awful, awful story. I know structure whatsoever. I want to say that even despite all that, and I think you're completely right, that the veil of mystery is starting to fall away from some people. Because in the recent couple weeks, I've noticed people linking me like, Hey, here's an article from this site about weird creepy shit that nobody talked about when heavy rain came out or beyond. Or, oh man, this shit in this trailer is weird and embarrassing.

It's starting to just crumble just a little bit. Yeah, because now there's too much evidence. Now there's too many games. Yeah. Well, no, you know, what it actually is is now the studio has like a weird bad reputation. That's true too. To those French people. There's that stuff too.

Now it becomes like, oh, well, maybe we should actually look at their stuff. What would have been ideal, right? A lot of things would have been ideal. You could fill that with a million punchlines. Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can. I was actually going to say what would be ideal is if Indigo Prophecy didn't shit the bed when it did.

And we're all like, man, Indigo Prophecy, that was good. What a wild time that would have been. And that's not even the world I can envision. But what would have been ideal is if Indigo Prophecy came out and it sucked, but then the people like the games like the Telltale games that took after it and the Dotonaut games now. And then, you know, we're seeing again a way out and such. If all those things started earlier on in that PS2 era where that genre.

Yeah, you can catch on then. You know what I mean? Like it took Indigo Prophecy and then nothing happened. And then heavy rain again. It was honestly really walking dead. Walking dead started it off a lot. All of this. But if that started a little bit earlier, you know what I mean?

It probably would have had a much, we would have been at least two generations further into that type of story by now. But now when Detroit comes out, you're not just going to have, when Indigo Prophecy came out, there's a joke that I'm reminded of during your reboot video woolly. It's like when Indigo Prophecy came out, what did you have to compare it against? You had fucking nothing to compare it against because there was literally nothing. That was a unique genre that had been created.

And then when heavy rain came out, the only thing you can compare it against was Indigo Prophecy. But now, now you have every game that we have mentioned thus far, the games that are going to be coming out that are still inspired by walking dead season one. One thing about it was really like, let's look at point and click games, but how can we get away with doing less? Much less. Like almost nothing. Like just how it's all narrative based and it's a lot of character interaction talking.

But how do we put less work into it? Minimize inventory. Buy almost pretty much nothing. And maximize conversation. Yeah, that's a really quick way to do that. Now, I'm not going to sit here and say the conversation or putting more narrative elements in your game is less work because for example, I love the Mass Effect series and I wish it had more time.

Yeah, but that has a lot more stuff going on. Absolutely. But I think even a game in Mass Effect of just talking could be interesting. Yeah. But how do I put this? It has to be good. Like I don't doubt the amount of effort going into that game, but I do doubt the overall quality of any particular element other than the visuals, which are like amazing.

Remembering that interview where the second hand man at Quantic Dream said that they're putting more talent around David Cage and reining him in, right? It's like, do what that's like. It's like David Cage coming out and he's got all the police around him like Goldberg. Sure. Like just to surround him with more people and hopefully everyone else won't get hurt. Like I'm seeing chains and shackles and they're trying to like bind him down. He's got like an edible Vector mask on.

Yeah, you know, and they're like they're pile bunking them into the ground. I just want David Cage walking out play the Goldberg theme. And like the smoke comes out of his face and he starts coughing. Makes a little comment to a girl on the way to the ring. Yeah, someone holds up a picture of farting balls. No, the guy, what was I even, I was saying, I was saying he's going to put, they're going to put more people around. They're going to put more people around them.

And what this means is we can follow the trend, right? And here's the thing. At some point, at some point, you have to acknowledge that there is going to be a game that has insulated him enough that it's like, you know what, that wasn't bad. I don't have to acknowledge that at all. That's going to happen. I don't know if it's going to be this game. That is by no means.

And I definitely feel like the tone deafness of the robot racism is going to. People found out they're singing like slavery song. Oh, that's right. Yeah, it's not about anything. Oh, no, is it a rumor? No, no, the song that the androids are singing in one of the trailers is an old slave song. Oh, that's great. So I think I was going to say that the androids develop a dance swing where they're dancing

peacefully, but it's actually a fucking fighting style. Coming forth to carry me. Oh, that's bad. I didn't catch that. Oh, dude. So this game, dude, it's not about anything is not going to be the game. This is my story. But but but the next one might you.

Spark every time and might set this every time. It might spark the brain, you know, it might it might be the one that thing. You said where they're putting people around and they're putting all the fucking hockey pads and ballpads. That was supposed to be for beyond. It was the worst one. That was also in terms of story. That was also for heavy rain, which led to no removal.

Yes, well, it's led to the removal of scenes that didn't make sense. But here's why it gets more complicated, though, because the extra hockey pads and what not worse is, but you know why? Because as the budget increases and the stakes get higher, the potential increases, right? So you expect more that given we go further along. All right. There is there is a hidden assumption that you're making here that might be the downfall of your of your theory.

And that is that people who insulate him can there's no breaking point of insulation, right? So here's the problem. David Cage, for all his faults, has become a name in the business. Yes. And he is assuredly a name at his own studio. Yes. There is only so much person who was told to rein him in can actually do if I'm the

name. Of course. I'm the big dick man who made the company. Yes. Also, you can also talk about his fault, his faults as a writer, as a director, as a human being. But I have a suspicion that he's super strong physically. He's like Uffay ball.

Yeah, yeah, I really think if Willie grabbed him, he would power out because I keep thinking of there was something about him like the reigning and I think of like at the end of a James Brown performance where he's all like old and tired out and they put the jacket on him and they're carrying him off the stage and then he just goes and he runs back to the microphone like nah, I'm back. Like he cages up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He smacks the ground.

Bam, he gets back up like TJ Combo. And then like a bad review, a bad review hits his face and he goes like no, no, no, no, absolutely gets up and powers through the bad reviews. And I also think one of the other things is in terms of limiting him, it's like for good or for bad that that studio is aware that that dude's creative vision or whatever has made that company a name for as wild and as crazy and as awful as those games are. A lot of people like them and they are nothing if not interesting. Yeah.

So trying to insulate him too much could end up in the situation everyone would be worried about with Kojima of like no, no, let Kojima do no, let edit him a little bit, but let him do whatever and like that's a fine line to walk. And they're probably not going to walk it very well. And they clearly have not walked it well here. David uncaged when he when he eventually like, I don't know what's going to happen with Quantic Dream. It's it's so tied to him.

So I couldn't absolutely. I cannot leave that. I couldn't see a world where he left and made his own. Kojima pro got turned into like Konami LA or something. Yeah. So like if there's a larger company, like if Sony just decides, OK, well, we're making you whatever, you're no you're now Sony fucking wherever the France, you know, studio or something like that. Then just call it Quantic Dream really.

But either way, either way, I think I think yes. Each time David uncages and shows a little bit more of himself. But there's so much padding around. It's so much money that you can hide it. I can't hide it from us though. No. And that's that's that's our life. Listen, it's possible. That's that's why we were placed on this one.

It's possible to keep reminding everyone that Detroit is a really good game. That's a totally a possibility, you know, when the wool is blinding everyone else. They're going back to they're going back to chronological order. See now there's an improvement. That's a that's a big deal. That's smart. Yeah, all this to say, though, we still very much are going to be able to take it all away, reset to zero and press the start button.

If you if you go back and watch the beyond two souls LP, it takes about 10 episodes before our attempt at fairness starts to chip away. Oh, it's allowed to chip. It's allowed to be it's allowed to feed. No, I'm talking like we start off that LP with one or two sessions going. Yeah, hey, that's cool. Yeah. No, no, no, you have to know like if it fades, it fades.

But you have to reset the clock. Turn it back to zero. I do remember the revenge prompt in us gain hype. Yeah, yeah. It was a lot of fun. And then and then as as story like the he's always been really good at starting threads. That's that's the frustrating thing. The setup is the setup of a David Cage game is near universally awesome,

except for heavy rain, ironically, be even though it's the best of them. It's like you're a you're a time traveling soul that got sucked into a weird cyber dystopia. That's cool. You got forced to commit a murder in a bathroom by a ghost. That's cool. You're a weird ghost lady in the military's after you because I don't know ghosts. That's cool. But as soon as as soon as like, let's say indigo prophecy thread is, oh man,

crazy, crazy murder. I didn't know who did it. It's like, OK, thread two. Oh, we're investigating a crazy murder that some guy did. Those are cool threads. And as soon as they touch any resolution, as soon as there is one answer, the question is he's good at questions. He's bad at answers.

Of course. That's what it is. Every bad director is also bad at questions too. Because every every bad director shares that exact same thing. I'm thinking indigo prophecy. Like even the bugs, even the crazy green. Oh, I forgot. I forgot about the bugs.

Even the bugs are interesting. Business bug. In the first time you see them because like, oh, wow, what kind of alien bug thing. And then the answer is, oh, nothing. I forgot about. So but but while you're wondering, oh man, what what does this mean? But you're not. But you see the thought of trying to figure out why it's there is already going too far

because to him it was wouldn't it be cool if and then that was the end of the thought. Yeah, but you don't know that when you're playing indigo prophecy for the first time. Of course not. But now now we're in a place as much as I want to reset to zero. Yeah. Is that when we play Detroit and we get to the first scene, which I'm going to I'm going to assume is Android manufacturer, much like the Kara short, whatever it is. And there's an element of something that's weird and interesting in that scenario,

like the robot has a vision or whatever. In the back of my mind, I will be unable to go. That might be nothing. Right. Whereas before when I was still learning this, this art, it was like, oh, what could that? Well, where's that going to go? And but now it's like it's ingrained. I can't know the only thing I can't reset.

No, I'm going to maybe it's nothing. I think I think the attempt needs to be made to reset as much as possible in the same way that at the end of a terrible LP, when we start a new one, we get to start fresh and everyone resets their opinions on us. That's correct. But it all brings back to my first point where it's like it's always the same thing. If it was a completely different genre, if they're making a fighting game, that's a reset to zero. It's it's it's weird because despite the eyes of heaven, despite the like head up with this,

despite the superficial differences between all the games in terms of like, look, I just described the opening plot of a bunch of them. They're all really different, right? Yeah. But they don't feel any different. But yeah, well, that's also just because it just so happens that one of his major flaws is his concept of villains can never be confined to a single identity. I don't I don't.

Rain is not different from Indigo prophecy. It's the same. I don't even mean that. I mean, I'm thinking about it. And with a few exceptions in Omicron and beyond. In my mind, when I picture a David Cage game, it's it's like a dark blue. And like a light gray or a white. Yes.

Yes. In fact, look at the screenshot you have up on our television right now. Aside from the David Cage heads, I pasted there. It is. There's a lot of dark blue and gray. It's an image of it's an image from the E3 trailer demo slash where the the hostage and it's like it always like thing. Indigo prophecy takes place in the winter and in the city area.

Beyond had all of its night scenes are a certain shade of blue. Heavy rain is very desaturated. It has a lot of rain minus the desert scene. And that's the one I'm thinking. I'm thinking of the desert and I'm thinking of the jungle area in Omicron are the only two areas I could think of in the jungle level. In the you remember the one with the temple. We had to go underwater to get the thing.

I remember jungle. But like then again, I was in a coma. Like it like why does why does this these are four games that have like do you remember in the in the trailer for Detroit when I got confused and thought they were actually in Ethan's house because it looks exactly the same down from palette to architecture to whatever. Yeah, just reuse what you did in the last game. Why is that? Why are they so?

In terms of art design. So imagine again if you would that I don't know. Let's say because Uwe Ball is not the right analogy. No, it's not. It's it's it's no Uwe Ball goes swings for the fences every time with the room. No, like there's not enough there because what is the comparison you're trying to say? Like like what if you took what if what if the room was successful? I think you're thinking of Ed Wood.

And then you put the and then you but then you just pile money on top of it as time goes on and you start to hide more and more of what whatever what the fuck is his name. Tell what what Tommy Wiseau actually is. I believe that is the movie called Best Friends directed by George. Well, we don't know because it's not it's it's we can't see it. It's not you're not allowed. Paige just awesome because it's it's apparently like going around in secret theaters. But no, give it its proper title.

Best Fiends Friends the act. Give it its proper subtitle. Volume one and volume two. Yeah. So anyway, that that that movie is an attempt at a serious or room. But again, is the room with all the funsies associated with it. But that's what it like. Like perhaps Ed Wood even but that but it's just like as you go further down the line, instead of just like drying up and becoming something that ever.

No, that's terrible. Michael Bay. Michael Bay. Michael Bay. There's always in cities. Michael Bay. There's explosions. There's always steel. There's just money there for him. Non-transformers. When I think when I'm thinking when I'm thinking of Michael Bay, I think of runways. No, I'm thinking of a very specific shade of like sun yellow. Explosions are that color. Yeah, sure. There's a lot of like harsh ass, bright ass sunlight in his movies.

And it's reflecting off of sweaty titties. Yeah. Yeah. The rock, sweaty titties and pain and gain. Yeah, that takes place in Miami. A bunch of transformers takes place in the desert. What's up with directors and color palettes? Michael Bay. Michael Bay is a very, very, yeah. Yeah. That's a very apt one, I would say.

I like this stuff and I keep wanting to do it every time. And everyone wants you to keep making it. Now, here's the thing, though. Yeah. Michael Bay eventually was able to use his powers for evil and just go like, fuck it. Transformers, that's mine now. Ninja Turtles, that's mine now.

Shit, I forgot. Right? He didn't direct them, but yeah. David Cage at no point reached out and like took over another IP. Oh, that's a name. But could you imagine that becoming the next thing? There's a difference. Like he becomes a mentor or a dude.

Or someone says, hey, we're giving Quantic the whatever brand to take over this story. There's also another difference. A Marvel, like, you know what I mean? Or like a DC story or something like that. Like that would be fucking crazy. I would say that Michael Bay is an honest director. Whereas David Cage is not. Yeah, there I can see that.

Michael Bay makes no attempt to hide. No attempt at subterfuge or grandeur. He shows up and goes, man, if he fucking cool, if the thing exploded and you're like, cool, Mike. OK, but no, but no, and David Cage is giving speeches. I think no, no, no. I think you're underselling Michael Bay. Michael Bay's like like shitty moviemaking ability in terms of like they don't forget

about April O'Neill and the pizza and the fucking the way that turtles and all that dumb extra shit that's not explosions gets handled and in the way most of his movies Michael Bay knows he makes popcorn junk. David Cage thinks he's making immaculate works of art that will change the world forever. It's what they do versus what they think they're doing. Right, OK. It's like Kanye versus Donald Glover. Fine, fine, sure.

I'll take that. And David Cage is taking photos with Kojima and hanging out. Look, I'm an actor like these people. I'm amongst the yeah, this is my folks. This is my people. I invented stories in video games. That's a real quote that I made up just now. It is real.

Matt, how was your week? Busy week. A lot of a lot of Sempais noticed me this week. Did you let her win? Or did you kick your ass real? Tommy Tanaka beat me in seven Mario Kart matches. I beat her in one. She's very good at Mario Kart.

So I woke up in a stupor on the couch and couldn't fall asleep. So I was on my computer and I eventually fell asleep. I woke up at 10 a.m. just having no idea what's going on. The first thing I do is log in to Twitter and I see like playing Mario Kart right now. And I'm like, oh, do you have room when your friend codes list for me? What's your friend code? I get a message for him. And you know, I started shaking a little bit or whatever.

And I send my friend code and I'm like, oh, OK. She's like playing now. And I'm like, just give me an Elgato. Where's an Elgato? And I slap it all together and I'm like, I haven't played this six months. Oh, shit. I forgot to do everything. But I had a fun time.

Hitomi and Matt Play will be a video available on my side channel this week. It's pretty silly. I did not play well and I need to play better. Was that with live commentary or post commentary? Live. Live? Oh, man. I might understand that like there were some tag teams were called in for the

the rest of the players in the tag. Well, did you did you not play with like other friends as well? It was just a bunch of people just playing randomly picked tracks. OK, I thought I saw I thought I saw a screenshot with like you, Hitomi, and then a bunch of our other friends at the same time. But like, did that not happen? Were the other the other people you were racing with? You mean friends like all in the same room?

Or do you mean all in the same race with other people that we know? Yeah, but there's no tag teams. It's all. No, and I was just saying like you brought in other people to play again. No, I did not. I did not bring any. OK, are you talking about pornography? Yeah.

OK, tag teams. No, it's like I am playing right now. And if you haven't played Mario Kart 8 online, it's like I will select my friend and I'll just join whatever game they're doing. OK, OK. So it was mostly her friends. It was mostly people that she knows. It was Japanese players.

And yeah, it was a good time. And then later that day, creator Prince of Persia, Jordan Mechner said, hey, I liked your. Oh, wow. Palace of Persia thing. He's like, there's footage of ports I didn't know existed. Wow. Which I hope he meant the Sega CD version that has anime cinemas.

Very cool. Bad voice actors. So that was that was kind of a thrill. Well, aside from that, I beat Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze. Did you beat it the first time? No, he did not. Oh, OK. I got to there's six main worlds and a bonus seventh world.

And then there's the alternate stages you can just miss. So there's a lot more. But I just beat the six worlds and whatever. And I want to go back and do the side of the seventh world. But like the only thing I'm going to say about it in general is just really good. And like a lot of people know it's like an underrated platform in the sense that no one played it because it's on the Wii U. But I really enjoyed there's a couple of stages towards the end that were really,

really awesome. When I'll just describe, which is like you're in a volcano and it's iced up as well. But it's like iced on the surface because of the bad guys that serve power. And as you're going along, you're like slamming into big snowy ice pillars that land in the lava and then cool. So you have to make your platforms as you go on. And then there's a wave of lava. It's just Donkey Kong by retro just does this shit where it's like it's more

high octane than Donkey Kong or any Nintendo platform or has any right to be. Yeah, I think I think your Donkey Kong is my Kirby. I think that's I think there's something to that. I think there's something there. I think there's something to that. I can see that. Yeah. I mean, I hate Donkey Kong 64.

All right. And I'm not a fan of the Donkey Kong Country 3 that much. It's fine. In general, you're going to come back for more. In general, I will always. You're always coming back for more in that Kong. I bought like Donkey Kong Country Returns on the Wii. Then I bought the 3DS version.

OK. And then I bought two both versions of and then compared them side by side. Yeah. Yeah. So it was it was it was a good time. I'm going to I'm going to try to go and do some more. I also played Garage, which is tiny builds a game that they just announced like only like two months ago.

It's a top developed or I think it's either tiny build always publishes. They publish a lot, but they do have an internal team, I believe. But I do believe it was made by another indie little outfit. But it's a top down horror survival game. Like think of Hotline Miami, the more slow paced and like kind of like jump scary where what's in the next door kick kick open the door. Nothing. Kick open the door.

Nothing. Kick open the door to zombies like scream at you. And you either have your fists or right now only have an axe. And it's yeah, it's it's it's quite interesting so far. You just find notes and your character just wakes up in the back in the back of a car in a trunk. And he wakes up in the apocalypse has happened outside. OK.

Oh, yeah. And he's just like, oh, like it's what you're describing sounds like a devolver game. But it does. It does. But yeah. Well, there's no silliness. It seems like pretty like serious in terms of like you just find notes of very resonant and evil style notes of dead people and that they've long since passed.

And then there's the main splash image is like a doberman with two heads that's like has red eyes and snarling like, you know, like saliva shooting out of its mouth. And I haven't found him yet. I'm excited to. So when when you boot it up in the Tony build logo appears, is it the same one? Is it the same one? It's always been. Yeah.

Guy with shades. There's a cool guy with shades. OK, all right. Still haven't changed it. OK. So there's that. I did a stream with Leanne about Soul Calibur Five, where we critique the outfits. I heard I forgot that Soul Calibur Five might be the worst last entry in anything.

Yes. It's it's in in in. I don't mean in terms of gameplay. Sorry. I mean, exactly what you mean. Of of all how well how every I think every single character was treated or modeled or looks visually. And the other thing I forgot is how God like all the art on the character select screen

is very strong. Then when you press a and the model shows up and you're like and I think every single one was an across the board disappointment. This downgrade. There's only one. Cervantes is the worst Cervantes. The art is God like though like all right. There's a rookie is worse.

So the problem is only one character in the entire game that I liked better than their older version. It's lizard man because he gets the two axes and he gets the wings. The downgrade from God like art into a 3D model that can't do it justice though is kind of the name of the game, sadly. Like I don't think anything such the case in two or four. I sure don't like nothing. They didn't surface that are nothing will ever be as bad as

Lament of innocence. Right. Like that character artwork from the fucking beautiful Kojima paintings to the model you get is just a nightmare of downgrade. Speaking of downgrades, nightmare. Doesn't look as good. And I forgot how Sigfried looked in that and I saw him again. I'm like I'm just trying to think like I think

Asteroth his green outfit. I liked another one is green. He's got a Skeletor face. Yeah, it's OK. That one I like. But it's also not a patch. It's also like a weirdo costume instead of a weirdo Tom and Tom that has like yeah, like like slinky legs that are like fuck me boots.

I remember specifically though when the artwork came in for Ein and like we were thought I think you sent it to me in an email at work and we both freaked the fuck out at that design and we're losing our shit over it. So I mean that is that's that's one strong design that doesn't get converted well into 3D and I think that like that's not sometimes like you have to look you have to go back to the character art in a way and see like what was the intention here and does the actual clothing they're wearing later look like that. It's just Raphael was I think the worst.

If you remember in five he's a weird vampire. I do remember that. So he looks in the artwork like you look at it you're like bam vampire hunter D then you look at it you're like you look in the model bit Larper. Yeah, right. OK. He looks so shitty his model. OK.

But his fucking picture looks so cool. It looks all like D like and then it's just the biggest downgrade. So it's just like man, I don't remember this. When I remember being five I mean like yeah the story mode sucks but the game is solid and the game that's the best is my favorite one to play. But it's like disappointing in every other respect. It reminds me Street Fighter V when it first came out honestly. I also forgot that the intro is like is just nightmare and Siegfried just fighting and

shows no other characters and I was just like that's disappointing. I think it's the I think it's also what happens when you go from making your characters as like the only models in the game that you're focused in building off of to you're building like a wrestling game almost of like you have a bunch of characters and then you have their unique accessories but you have a character creator as well and you have to make everything fit. Yeah, I got that feeling. You understand nothing would make me happier than if they came out and said sorry guys there's not going to be a character creator until caliber six because those were always awful.

They were just the worst. It's an expectation now so I doubt they ditch it. The problem I always have with it is that you were unable to make a character that looked anywhere as good as the other fighters. So whenever you had a match between some of these created characters. You get a hater-fistinator. Yeah, oh hater. But like it would look like trash.

It looked like you'd grab something out of a steam game. Some people learned how to make it fucking work though. There's like I think some people really like spent the time to get some crazy shit out there. It's like it's almost so detailed that you can't get anything like you'd almost want to work. Like you can select the characters and accessorize. You can't select the main stable characters and fuck with them and shit. Absolutely. But the ability to do that sorry is what causes like in a way that it means that like you have to

not you have to but if they spent more time just making the model an exclusive thing that was like one-to-one with its artwork it would often stray from a universal template that can be fitted with different accessories and clothing items. Did you remember the fact that they got rid of Ivy's cool second type of costume? I do, yeah. Do you remember what her alternate costume is? I forget. It's latex yellow with the biggest v-cut going down to vaginal land and it has big poofy fur.

But then there's rings of fur down all of her legs. That sounds like shit. I was like oh I saw the little tiny picture when you were sucking the thing but I actually looked at the model I was like oh man that's bad it's not great. But yeah all that to say is that like Soul Calibur 6 whatever it looks so much better. Very excited. In terms of character modeling the character and the slight changes they made to the designs. Still the wrong nightmare but it's a better wrong nightmare.

Yeah. My brain can't even parse. It's a better Siegfried. Yeah. What the all I know is Cervantes like at a certain point lost the hat. And he's not undead anymore and Soul Calibur 5 is for me. Yeah yeah yeah yeah he's back easy is yeah yeah. Fucking stop that.

For whatever plot reason. Go back in there. There's four things you need to do with Cervantes. One two swords. Two pirate. Three hat. Four zombie. Done.

That's it. That's all you need to do. That doesn't even count because that's pirate. And sometimes you're getting not happy you're getting like mask thing. Yeah fine what a pirate. Pirate. And then his alternate costume was he was like an aqua knight. He looked like Aquaman.

He looked like Aquaman and like Injustice 2 if he had every single piece of armor on. Look bad. Anyway Aquaman. That's me. Yeah yeah like Ivy will never get better than that and Nightmare will never get better than Soul Calibur 2 had the best designs. Half and half. Soul Calibur 2 had the best designs.

The half and half was the best it really was. I hope if they have the feature where you can change the character's helmets or whatever that number two on that list for Nightmare is give him his red puff out of the back of his head again. Also something I'm concerned with but not so much Soul Calibur 6 but like I noticed definitely between when we did a critique of Tekken 7 and then but that was you know Tekken 7 was like a couple years ago and it came on our kids. But like Soul Calibur 5 was like maybe a couple like two or three years before that.

I don't know the timeline but I forgot how similar everyone is to Tekken 7. Everyone has tribal tattoos. Everyone has an emblem on their back of whatever animal or element they favor. I just random chains like there's probably some crossover there has to be but I'm like I don't like that especially when it's two completely different time periods. I'm like you should make sure that whoever your art director is character director designer whatever is like let's not make it look like Tekken. But the thing with that is that a lot of the time if someone has a particular style

then they're like my style is what I'm here to do. It's very numerous. So the Nomura comes in and brings Nomura first and then the setting second. And the same could be said of a lot of different artists and character designers that have a particular style. But when I think of Soul Edge. Amano comes and brings Amano first then whatever your world is second. I think of Soul Edge and Soul Calibur and Soul Calibur 2 maybe I think that's when it's

crossing the line where I'm like they are with some craziness with some zaniness they still feel like period costumes. But like I want to say three four and certainly five they're like yeah just who cares make them crazy costumes I don't care anymore. Well I mean six is certainly like toning things down. It is which I'm happy about. Anyway Pat the only thing I'm worried about is Soul Cal 6 is the roster because they're really leaking those out real slow like it's going to be low very low like I feel like it's

going to be like 50s. It'll probably get DLC I'll bring it up there. The timing and ordering of the no shit choices is bizarre right like Mitsurugi, Sofidia, Taki, Killik and Nightmare. Then Zasalamel and someone else were thrown in together in this and the same announcement. It's like you would expect it to go like down the character sheet essentially like Maxi hasn't been announced but just kind of we after that have been announced. Bro was there at launch.

We haven't seen what Astoroth hasn't been announced. Oh I want Rock so bad. Oh yeah and you're going to get him. Astoroth hasn't been announced. But he was in one. So yeah and he made way for the better character Astoroth. They were both in it. I'd like Astoroth that you can have both.

I don't want both I want just Astoroth. Well that's unreasonable. I know. Okay okay um what do I do? I want Killik and Zyba. Who the fuck is Zyba? Yeah. I don't even remember that person.

He's a little kid. The the monkey boy? That replaced Killik. The monkey boy. Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. Is his name fucking Zyba? Z-I-B-A.

Oh wow. Do you remember that? Yeah. Zyba do you remember that there was a girl that was like Talum but not Talum? Yeah. And then you remember the girl that was like Zanwa and then isn't? Yeah and then there was a Takis replacement as well. Natsu?

Well because it's a new generation of kids. A shit generation. Yeah. But I mean they were going for the third strike or the MKX. I feel like SoulCal 5. Like we know that this is a thing that can work. Third strike is like is the only one that holds up to me. MKX.

And Tekken 3. Tekken 3 man. Tekken 3 does. MKX does. MKX I think. It's two of them. The kids are good. The kids are great.

Two of them are good. No no no no. More of them are good than they are bad. The kids are fucking great. The kids are all right. The kids are all right. And Tekken 3 also the kids are all right. In fact, there's more examples of the kids being all right

than there are of the kids being shit. Which game were the kids ain't all right? Which one's the offspring? SoulCal 5 is the number one that drops in my head. It's not all right. Because the main kid is the worst character SoulCal has ever had. The trocholist is the worst. And his sister is almost the worst.

The reason why I don't hate it as much is because I still respect the balls of time jumping. I like when series do that a lot. So do I. I was really excited. So like when I'm like okay it's not. It's clearly not a tacky. But it's a new generation of tacky. But I don't respect it when it's worse.

Yeah that's the problem. Because Sepedia and Cassandra were replaced by two of the worst characters ever in SoulCalibur. Who are annoying and they get a storyline to show you how annoying it is. When you go through their story they're awful characters. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yuri Lowenthal as a trocholist is almost as annoying as Virtua Fighter 2 Leon. But if you're just kind of...

I don't know. I just felt like when I was looking at some of those designs where I was just staring at like this is the new generation of that. And without any plot or ideas of what it was. I'm like yeah okay new staff monkey kid to replace Killik. Okay sure I can see that. New ninja girl. Okay yep.

So Sepedia gets broken down into two people. But where it breaks down for SoulCalibur though. Is that they're the almost the exact character. And they're nearly exclusively or... So their movesets are very similar. So if you're going to do that why not just keep Killik or why not just keep Webber. But their movesets are for people that play them they're like this is not. Yeah but it's like it's a nightmare C3 situation.

At the end of the day it's the same weapon. It's the same weapon yes. The really frustrating part is when Xengua and Xengua and fucking Sepedia's daughters look exactly like them. Cassandra. Yeah so it's like why even bother. Xengua's daughter might as well be the same character model as Xengua. And I don't remember her fucking name.

The stuff with like Cassandra and whatnot though. Like that was before the that was a that was a um that was a successor. Before the series itself moved forward in time. That's true. So there what you understand you were not you're not going to get a drastic jump because Cassandra was supposed to be a replacement. Yeah um kept her around because better. She's cool.

I like Cassandra a lot better than Sepedia. She's cool. But also it is weird as like we're having another staff character but we get rid of the Scythe character. We get rid of the Setsuka's like little dagger sword there. Oh yeah the draw style. You've made a new character but he used the same weapon but you got rid of the other unique weapons. Not everyone can be a slam dunk like Sean Matsuda you know.

Not everyone can be a slam dunk like Sean Matsuda you got a point. That's it man. Not everyone can be a blank like Necro was. Is he? I don't even know. Necro has grown on me over time. But he's a Dalsim too. Necro has grown on me as the weirdest street fighter character.

I still think it's 12. I still think it's 12. Really? Yeah because 12 because Necro still has to like adhere to like human proportions. See that's why I disagree because for me the weirdest part isn't the the ability stuff. It's the look. So 12 while being like a blob monster is a uniform colored like flat blob monster. Yeah but his head is a shape as opposed to a human skull.

Yeah but when you look at Necro he's not only is he all stretchy and electric and he sings all goofy and shit he's also painted like clown and he's wearing like a purple like an asshole. Now I feel like 12 is the villain of the week that Q has to defeat. Yeah totally. Absolutely. That's what I see. Are you saying that Q is in an X-Files style show?

Yeah totally, why not? Or is it a supernatural or like biological weapon? I mean he's a throwback fucking like a robot detective you know. Hey Q do you want to go on an investigation? All right but there's a weird monster you can punch. Yeah yeah yeah. The kids run away. But like there is a lot going on with like Necro and like yes

Necro is a Jojo side villain. That is true. He reminds me of Alessi a little bit. He's a little bit like that. He's a little bit like Dopeo you know. Just like when I look at 12, 12 is like a weird blob monster and everything weird that goes along with that right? Like his head.

But when I look at Necro I look at Hey let's throw some clown shit on the page and then make him electric stretchy. Because he's an electric stretchy clown from Russia and he's five. And we love it better than the Soul Calibre kids. Yeah we do. Absolutely. It just takes time.

In any case. I don't know the first time I ever saw Q I was like damn yeah. It's robot in a trench coat. But remember before even Q had a shot you still had new generation. You had three. And that's where you were just looking at the yun and yang. And that to me was where I was like okay these kids are fucking bad bosses. Because you took Lee and you took Gen and you split him in two

and you turned it into Duo and fucking Trola. Aside from Sean like new generation roster weren't really adhering to past characters. They were just new. They were just new. And Alex was supposed to be. The main character. I wish it had been Dick. What's awesome I still fucking love that the coolest thing about Alex's

like design as a character is in his moveset. His moveset is a tribute to the entire franchise of Street Fighter. Because he's got something. He's got charge moves. He's got motions. And he's got grabs that are like you know. He represents the whole moveset. And that's fucking sick.

The only thing he doesn't have is a mash. But yeah it does have a mash. The hits on his throw during the backturned grab. But other characters have grabs that you have to do that with. But yeah he doesn't have that. But admittedly still like he's moveset is supposed to represent like the everyman Street Fighter. I never actually thought about it that way.

Absolutely it's really good. It's deliberate. Anyway okay so I stopped playing Pillars for now. I'm actually going to wait for a couple patches. I ran into some party dialogue bugs that were a bummer. And the save importing is a little goofy right now. So I'm back to my my rule of get excited for one of these types of games to come out. Play it for about 10 hours.

This seems to happen. Get frustrated with the thing. Put it back on the shelf for six months to a year. And then go back and play the one that this happened to the last time. Which would be Divinity Original Sin 2. That game is amazing in a lot of ways. But there's only really one thing that I want to talk about. And it's how it reminds.

Okay this is going to sound like a really weird thing but follow me here. The way that that game is built it's systemic. So it's almost like a Breath of the Wild analog to like those other computer RPGs. Or instead of say a Pillars which is very it's like pre-render backgrounds. That's very static. Everything is a dialogue check or a mechanics check or what have you. In Divinity everything just kind of works on its own system. And if you want to fuck with it you can just fuck with it.

Fuck with it. And the best example of this is you get a teleport spell in that game. And it's very simple. If you have somebody within a certain I would want to say like 15 meters or something. You can pick them up and you can put them anywhere within 15 meters of yourself in your line of sight. This includes party members and enemies. And once you have two people with this you can bypass massive sections of the map and ignore huge quest lines, how to open up or bypass doors.

You can go to a Gargoyle maze and just start teleporting your party through walls. And ignore every single mechanic and puzzle element of that maze. You can put them up on tall buildings so that they become unreachable by enemies. And thus can just fire arrows for an entire fight because nothing can move them. That sounds pretty busted. If you're on a hill with a little path in front of you and to the left is a sheer cliff wall that goes up and to the right is a cliff wall that goes down. And if an enemy is to your right on the bottom they have to run all the way around.

You can just as soon as they get to you teleport them back to the bottom. And then they are forced to run all the way around as you take potshots at them. But the best this game is built on being able to cheese it is that there is a huge boss fight at the end of the first act which is super tough. You have to fight like it's the kind of game where your party size is either two or four and you're fighting near always groups of four to six enemies like it's very small scale. This one has like eight enemies and then in the middle of the fight a huge monster shows up and attacks and it is crazy, crazy tough.

And I was throwing it myself against it for hours until I thought why don't I just keep everyone outside of the combat arena because it's a little like harbor. Why don't I just teleport the boss behind me as far as he will go. And then before anyone can get their turn I just knock him down and beat on him and kill the boss before any of the other characters can even look at my party. And so I did it and it worked and I there was nothing broke I just did it. And then I ran away and when I ran away I got to loot the thing and then restart the combat encounter with full health and resources like nothing happened and teleported a second person

out of the arena and then beat on them to death. So I was going to ask what's to keep that from being the most OP thing in the world. Nothing. So the thing is. It's as busted as it sounds. So really it's like jumper. It's like it's exactly like so. There are a lot of there are a lot of mechanics like that.

There are a shit ton of environmental effects. It's the kind of game where if you pronounce the e by the way you don't want to do that. Like one of the more useful skills in the game is rain and all it does is make it rain. But raining breaks people's invisibility because the rain hits them. It makes the ground wet. It puts out people's fires and if any enemies are standing and get wet and then you hit them on the ice spell or electric spell they get frozen or shocked and lose their turns. Like it's one of those like all these things.

So the thing is is that the game is super hard. The game is really really really hard. So the answer to what's to stop that from being broken is nothing because the game kind of wants you to break it. It kind of feels like the marvel of Western of Western RPGs where they kind of expect you to use all the busted shit that you can get your hands on in order to do it. You can tell you can use telekinesis and pick up barrels or you know what you can do. You can fill up a crate just a regular crate that you bring around with your entire inventory

of items right. When a teleported item falls it does damage associated with the weight of the item. So if you teleport something containing your entire inventory onto a person they will just die. Wow and that's not intentional. It's just a weird side effect of how the system works and every system in the game is like this. Like I had party members die. So what did I do? I ran away and then I was able to teleport their corpses out of the fight and then resurrect them safely.

Wow. It is. That is awesome. That is ridiculously game breaking. It is so fucking great and everything works like this. The way sneaking works. You can do all sorts of stupid bullshit. You can rob anybody.

You can kill anybody. Actually it works when you break its system and it intends for it because otherwise I don't know how I would have gotten through some of that shit. Like it is fascinating. It is so cool. The Wikipedia article states that it started as a spinoff to jumper. No. Let's build another game off this.

Griffin's story had to be its own. It needed space. I forgot about the subtitle. Griffin's story needed its own space. Did you do pre-sort? Did you actually test that? Because I thought that was early on. I fucking tested it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why didn't we play that instead of 300? Shut up. Oh, next time. It's probably the biggest difference I've seen of this between any of those other games is this is a game that wants you to make your own. Like, you know, these RPGs, like think of, well, you played Mass Effect. I know that one works.

It's like, how are you going to solve this violently or non-violently? And this one is, how are you going to solve this? No, seriously, you can solve it any fucking way you want. Now, I've always heard about like fallout. Within its own mechanics. I've always heard about how fallout's ability to like let you just break shit is the best but also worst part of it. Because it can stop you from being able to complete it.

Yes. And does that like. When I played fallout 3, that thing happened to me where I was like, I couldn't complete a quest because I'd fucked myself over. Yeah, so in fallout 3, I remember vividly and it's a Bethesda thing where plot critical NPCs that are related to the main story. If they're required, you can't kill them. You can only knock them out.

Okay. In New Vegas, I believe they have written around it. So that even if you killed everybody, you would still be able to complete the objectives with like a completely dead world. Okay, okay. Here's a quest I'm giving anybody. Anybody want to take this quest? I'm giving in.

And I'm thinking, I'm thinking about Divinity and I'm like, okay. Say I had killed all those guys and then I killed all these guys and then I killed that and then I skipped that. I still would have been able to complete it. And on a whim, I somebody, I forget where I saw this. There is a one hour and a fucking 30, no, there's a 37 minute speed run of the entire game in which they abuse certain different teleport abilities and the ability to play dead at the start of combat.

And you just, hey, this is a storyline battle. You play dead so that enemies ignore you and then at your first chance, you teleport past the combat and run and that works for the whole game. Wow. You can just do that and just go. The ultimate coward through. So like in this, like, can you kill people and screw their quests up? Absolutely.

It's super easy. In fact, in the starting area, all your companions in many cases have mutually exclusive goals. The Red Prince wants to talk to this guy, but Sibyl wants to kill him. Better talk to him with Red Prince first, because the instant Sibyl gets within a certain distance of him, your party member just goes and kills them without your permission, essentially. It's awesome. It's fucking great. Well, it's way more basic.

I always like that bit of Souls games, just when there's warring factions and guilds and you're just like, you're locked out. Why did you talk to him? I'm not going to talk to you now because you talked to the fucking Cainhurst people or fuck off. But then the randomness that is walking in and seeing the fight go down and you're like, if I let this play out, it can go either way. I need to make a decision in the next minute. Yeah, better back the right horse there.

It's a it's a fascinating game. And every time I sit down and play it, there's some weird new systemic thing that I find like, so it uses a skill book system in which you say, hey, I want to learn fireball. So you buy the fireball skill book and you make a character read it and they learn fireball, right? Well, turns out you can use the crafting system to combine fireball with an earth spell. And then you get a fire earth combination spell of whatever type that you did. And that exists for almost every single school in the game.

And it's like, ah, biggest problem with that game, all the cool shit that I'm describing to you. It's so complicated. It's overwhelmingly complex. It is by far the most difficult game that I've played in order to learn how to build a party or build a character so that they're not shit. And the game is super, super hard. Like I'm playing on normal and there have been three or four fights that I had to spend like hours banging my head against because it's super, super tough.

And they really want you to break it. They want you to make min max fucked up builds. They want you to cheese shit and teleport people out of place or set them on fire, make sure they can't get up. I suppose like a developer just goes, what do people want to do? Just have no restrictions on all this shit. So let's build a game like that. Yeah, as long as you can hit the credits.

There are a bunch of things you can't even access unless you do that teleport shit. Like there are just, you know, like a tower that just has no entrance. And the only way to get up there is to throw physically throw somebody up there with teleport. Get up there. But you can't you just, you can't just huge your way through it. No. You can't numbers through it. No, you can't numbers through it because enemy encounters are fixed.

It's like Kotor. Oh, okay. It's like, did you kill that? Well, they're done. So there's only one way to huge through it. And it's a way that most people are likely to be very uncomfortable with it. Everyone gives you experience. Okay.

So everyone gives you experience. So there was a point where I was having trouble hitting level eight. I couldn't hit level eight. There was just, I just missed just the smidgen. I'm like 300 away. And I'm like, well, I finished Migo and Yaro's quest and they have good items on them. And they're in a really out of the way location. Hey, I hit level eight.

And you're wearing a shirt that says I'm in a bad mood and you like, like just enough XP to level me up. They were just enough XP to level me up. We none of us actually bought any of those hilarious shirts. I'm too much of a coward. Oh, no. If I find the right one, I could never do it. I could never get one of those Vegeta ones.

Oh man. There's a place for me in hell. It's called a throne. Oh my God. That's the worst. I didn't get one of those. That's what it means to be fairy tale. I'm going to get one of those shirts and you'll respect me finally.

I can't. I can't. That that's nothing if it not begs for respect. Oh man. You're just you're just going, man, the respect and balls all give for when someone does a time jump that should apply here too. All right. Aside from that, the only thing I want to say about the game is what Matt,

what's the last RPG you've played of any type? Like a new one. I'm going to have to an old thing. Christ. There's there's I need a point of comparison. Tales of Berseria. Right. So in Tales of Berseria, you have towns, you have a world map, you have dungeons, right?

So in this game, the distinction between those things is very small because the actual world map is overall quite small compared to what you would expect from most games. You spend the whole dance. Well, yeah, that's where I'm getting on. It's like you spend the whole game on foot and it's really, really bizarre because every little intersection in a forest or every little room, it has a fucking gimmick to it. Every single one. So you look at you look at the map and you go, oh, that's the whole map for Act One, Fort Joy.

It's only it's not even it's maybe 500 square feet of the whole fort. The amount of time you spend in that tiny area is astonishing because you go into some cavern that in any other game would be relegated to the NPCs that are in there. What? They're the poor elves. Oh, they're sad. Oh, you talk to them, right? They usually are.

Okay. Well, in the back, there's a huge barricade. If you either physically break down or teleport the barricade away and go back there, there is a mini dungeon with a bunch of electric frogs that attack you and a bunch of loot. And it's like twice the size of the NPC area, but it's not on the map until you go there. Okay, that's cool. I did that. Hey, there's, hey, there's a little shit kid running in circles.

So you talk to shit kid and what does he do? He gives you the fucking hide and seek quest that's in every fucking game. So you follow him because he says, I'm going to go hide and seek and then he just runs away, but like on map and you see him and it's isometric. So you just, you just go over, he's right there. You go over and he talked to me. He goes, okay, great. And then he bamps invisible.

You go, oh, then you really have to actually scrounge for it. Sure enough, you find him. He goes, hey, use this hatch, kicks open a hatch, brings you to another side area where there's a fucking zombie stuck to the wall who's telling you about a quest to destroy his soul jar and tells you about a secret lever that opens up an entire dungeon that you wouldn't find otherwise. And that's just in this tiny little cave. It's so dense. There's so many things happening in the frame that you can't every square matters.

Every square matters. And it's smart because this is a, this is a relatively small studio. Yeah, I know. It's a relatively small studio and they use Kickstarter. They use Kickstarter to help finish this game. And it's a really smart decision to go for less asset creation and less space, but more stuff. Are you doing okay, Matt? Are you doing okay?

That was very fun. Choose your words. No, no, no. I don't need to choose any words. Every single image has so many things going on. It's so dense in the frame. Yeah, it is. It's a great game.

If any of you wanted to play it, I would highly suggest going to Fextralife and looking up build guides because it is so easy to make a terrible character. Why is that site called Fextralife? I have no idea, but they've done Pillars, Divinity, Souls, they do all those big nerd games. Big builds for big boys. Speaking of those, let's take a word for our sponsors. Today, the podcast is sponsored by Squarespace.

It's the place you go for what, Matt? Websites. Damn straight. Good websites. Websites featuring. 24-hour support. Custom layouts. If you needed to make a website of, I don't know, let's say Mortal Kombat fan art.

You know, if you wanted to get your custom combatants pushed out into the world. First you call Kenny to have him draw some fan art, but then you got to put it somewhere. What if you had to dig up some old art that's hosted on some arcade server somewhere? You want to get it presented. An old Soviet bunker. You want to dust it off. What better place to go than Squarespace? You can take your crazy unique ideas and turn them into

a perfectly customized websites from the look to the feel. Everything about it is optimized for mobile and it's easy to use. It's got built-in search engine optimization. If people want to find their custom Mortal Kombat characters, Matt, if they want to find your designs, it would be so easy to search and find them. They want to look for your Da Black Liu Kang's. If they, if they need your Dark Sonia Blades, that's, that's, I wouldn't even, that's pretty good.

All right. Yeah. I mean, quite frankly, what do you got to do? You turn the green into yellow. Bam. Yeah. Character done. That's Mortal Kombat character.

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When you're ready to launch, use the offer code SUPER to save 10% on your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash super offer code SUPER. Matt. Thanks, Squarespace. Thanks, Squarespace. Thank you. Yeah, man.

They got whatever you need. Podcast is also sponsored by Casper Mattresses. Yeah. So after a long night of putting up your website, you got to take a sleep because that's going to dry you out. Did you just say take a sleep? You got to take a sleep. That's not incorrect.

Sometimes. Take a sleep. Sometimes when you're showing the world your inner secrets. You're right. You're when you're showing everybody what your childhood was all about. Yeah. It takes some fortitude and that can be exhausting. And you got it.

It's exhausting to draw the Black Goro. There's so many rings. There's so many fingers. How many like you can have knuckle finger like like like G O R O's, but you got you got three extra hands to go. It's like unity, but you can get all four like it. I'm telling you the point is that when the word catches, ideas like that.

Yeah. Right. You're like innovative ideas. And you're just you're like, man, I'm spent. Bushed. I got to take a sleep and what better place to take a sleep than on a Casper mattress. I think there's a better one. An exceptionally comfortable experience one night at a time.

You got three mattress models. You got the original Casper. You got the wave. You got the essential. They're all perfectly designed to soothe and cradle your natural geometry. Oh, man. And just, you know, and you know what? When you get a good night's sleep,

you wake up ready to address the world with whatever other combatants. Yes. What other other ideas you have for Mortal Kombat characters? Right. But you can't you can't face the world tired and groggy. No, you got to be real. Well, we're rested for that. So, you know, and of course,

it's always delivered straight to your door in a, how do they do that sized box with free shipping and returns to the US and Canada? Not to mention, of course, the breathable design. You sleep cool. It regulates your body temperature throughout the night. That's what I'm big looking forward to when I get mine. Because you're tossing and turning and you're thinking of blacker jacks. Yeah.

Right. And you're like, man, how do I nail this idea? Jackson Briggs shin jacks needs to come to fruition, but I can't figure out how to do it. You're going to be tossing and turning your body heat is getting up there. You need a breathable mattress. Your brain needs to be at a cool level when you need to create true jack. You have to.

The best part, of course, is that you can be sure that your purchase with Casper is has a hundred night risk free sleep on it. Trial. There's no risk. So zero. That's a lot of nights to try it out. And of course, you spend a third of your life sleeping. So why not be comfortable while you're creating in your sleep and you're,

and you're, and you're just coming to that perfect with those ideas. You know, you want to have the best type of mattress underneath you. I know I've still, I'm still got mine. And my Casper mattress is fantastic. You refuse to get any other mattress now. At this point, it's part of the family. He's not also a shill, but he's also a client. It is, it is a beloved part of my night.

I'm going to say family. A beloved part of my night. You can get $50 towards select mattresses by visiting casper.com slash friendcast and using friendcast at checkout. That's casper.com slash friendcast offer code friendcast for $50 off your mattress purchase. Terms and conditions apply. Thanks, Casper. Thank you, Casper.

Oh God. I don't think I'd make it through, but I did it. All right. Just get a medal. So, uh, so many images in the frame. I can't even get it right anymore. Fucking, there's so much going on in every frame. The black reptile is so dense.

There's so many reptiles going on in every frame. Uh, Blacker jacks, calm down. What's going on here? I got some breaking news. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. As of, like, 10 minutes ago, seven minutes ago, a statement from Cliff Blazinski. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.

Sounds fun. As of today, BossKey Productions is no more, effectively no more. Four years ago, I set up to make a world-class video game studio and I hired some of the best talent in the video game industry. They worked tirelessly to produce quality products. And while we had our ups and downs, I'd like to think we had fun doing it. Lawbreakers was a great game that unfortunately failed to gain traction. And in a last-ditch attempt, we scrambled to do our take on the huge battle royale genre with radical heights, which was well received. However, it was a little too late.

As for myself, I'm going to take some time off and reflect. Yay, thanks. I need to focus on myself and my family, as well as my Aussie Teddy, who is slowly fading from us. Video games will forever be a part of who I am, and I hope to make something new and again someday. However, I need to withdraw and take this time. To those of you who have supported myself in the studio these last four years, which is a typo, thank you from the bottom of my heart and everyone who came to work for me. Please note that the server's radical heights will remain up for the near future.

Wow. Wow, that was the- Wow. Okay, so we called that as dead when we saw it. Well, we didn't think that- And we were terrified that it would be a hit. Is that the fastest? That's the fastest I've ever seen.

This is the absolute fastest, right? This killed the studio in under a month. That was weeks. That was actually weeks. The only thing I can think of that's comparable to this is when Smash and Grab came out and no one knew that that studio, United Artists, was like that in the shitter. But like maybe less than a week that came out and they closed. So this is like- 10th of April?

It has been one month and four days. Like they changed. Okay. Okay. Wow. That's the fastest. So he's the fastest. What the signals to me, Boss Key, what publisher are they under?

There are some publishers. Some Chinese thing. What this says to me is that lawbreakers is a massive failure and then their publisher goes, you make this much money for us by this date or the company ceases to exist. And they made radical heights and then it didn't. So now the company ceases to exist. Yeah, that could be it. Or it's something similar.

It's like there's no more money coming. Yeah, and it simply has just been like this is the amount that the number is at and that number is decreasing. We told you we would give you this much and we gave you that much. If you can't pay your employees, what are you going to do? You know, the, yeah, it's better than back in the day when companies had no money, but they wouldn't tell their employees and would just not pay them. Kurt Schilling is the master of that shit. It sucks when people with talent chase trends and do so badly twice.

That sucks. I really wish she hadn't done those interviews where he just really disparaged everything else like I'd be a lot more like, oh, that like it sucks for everyone to lose their job. But I'm like, I mean, when you make a statement like that, like coming from him like, yeah, well, maybe you shouldn't have like constantly shit on your competitors. Yeah, Matt's completely right. It's just a bad look. It's the thing of like Cliffy helped make Gears of War and Gears of War.

It was a monster when he was working on it. It was the hottest shit and he deserves him and everybody who worked with him deserves like huge kudos for that. But the first thing he said coming out of, you know, he took a break. I don't want to call it retirement, but he didn't work on games for a couple of years. The very first like big quote that came out of that interview is, yeah, I came back because I want to make another billion dollar IP and it's like that is the most arrogant thing possible, right?

It'd be less arrogant if you said I wanted to make a, but no, you said I wanted to make another because I do those all the time. It's like, you're not James Cameron, man. You're not like, he's talking like he's James Cameron in the movie industry and he's not. And then as soon as lawbreakers started to get shown, what started to happen was what Matt was saying is that he would disparage games that were not only direct competition, but that looked overtly better than his own game. And that looks like shit.

Well, wasn't it that wasn't a statement, something like there's a space for these top two and we want to be that hard. We referenced this line of time. The first statement was we're not worried about overwatch because overwatch is for the anime crowd. And that one just made everyone just kind of balk their eyes and go fucking what? Okay. See, that's a nineties mentality that worked in the nineties. If you said, Hey kids, you know that thing you like?

Yeah, it sucks. It does. Yeah, you want to play art. Oh shit. Nowadays, it's like, Hey, overwatch fan. Yeah, overwatch sucks. You suck. Fuck you.

Overwatch is the shit. I'm drawing porn of it right now. Yeah. And then later on, he describes like, yeah, we're aware that there is room in any big genre space for two games and he uses League of Legends and Dota as an example. And he's completely right. That is the most accurate thing he's ever said. And then he describes overwatch, call of duty, battlefield and counter strike and says hope

we can, you know, become maybe the, the, you know, small, maybe active third in that group. No. Motherfucker. Are you, are you high? Are you crazy? Are you nuts? What do you think? You seem to be pontificating.

No, I'm just like, I hope that the people at that studio that went down with them can land on their feet at Fortnite or fucking whatever, you know, or wherever else. No, it's just like this. It's like when the creator of Street Fighter left to make Fatal Fury and then Street Fighter two hits him leaving Epic and then they make Fortnite, which is, I don't even know if it's surpass PUBG. Oh, it has. Like that's what it's like.

It's like, holy shit. In fact, Jim did a gym master. Ling did a really, really fantastic video recently about how PUBG is the most successful failure of all time in regards to Fortnite because the, the longest word of it, you should go watch it. It's, it's fantastic. But it's like because, because PUBG is made out of a lot of Unity assets. And even though it, it like nailed that gameplay style that made it super popular,

there's absolutely nothing in that game that is unique to PUBG in any way from art to control to gameplay to anything and the building part of Fortnite. Whereas Fortnite is, hey, if you look at PUBG, you could get it confused with 10 other games. Absolutely. If you look at Fortnite, you're like, oh yeah, it's Fortnite. Yeah. Because it's colorful and it's bright. It's Blizzard-ish.

Yeah. It has, it has all these, these, these specific things like you drop from a bus and stuff like that. And that's probably a big reason of why Fortnite is growing and growing. I thought it was just because it was on consoles. And it's also free. Yes. Yeah.

To me, that was the, that was the end all being all. But it's like, that's, how do I put this? That's why it's, how do I, when you think of Battle Royale, it's easier to think of Fortnite. Like it's just easier because there's stuff there. Fucking Thanos is in fucking Fortnite. Yeah, yeah. He is, he is.

Also, holy shit, Marvel, we can't show fucking people getting beaten up in the Marvel Infinite trailers because it looks bad for Marvel and we need to keep that serious. And then I look at, there's a fucking Fortnite ad playing on Twitch with fucking Thanos dabbing. Doing the, doing the loser dance. That doesn't make Thanos look bad. And then you got, you got Josh Brolin reacting to it in a, in a Deadpool promo. There's a real, oh man, if Marvel was more, if Marvel Infinite was more popular, they would

have been able to do all sorts of fucking Fortnite, dude. Do what you want. Infinity, I love this, this sentiment. Infinity War is really hot. It's the most successful, it's really hot. If only there was a fighting game out when it came out to, you know. If only there was a fighting game where these characters could, I wish there was one with Thanos and involving the Jams.

People seem to like that. Cool, I guess. What a fuck up. What a monumental fuck up in terms of what he's saying. Hey, you know what? Just really quickly, you know what? Boss key and, and, I was about to say, oh look, we've moved on without even realizing it. Not unlike Radical Heights.

You remember what it reminds me of? It's like, man, I'm sick of working on these big games and it's not what I want to do anymore and I'm feeling stifled. I don't work for the man. I know. I'm going to make my own company called Ion Storm. Oh, okay. Okay, okay, hold on though.

I'm going to make Dicatana. It's going to be another $1.00 franchise. Before you make Dicatana, you have to invest in the ground steel logo that goes in your lobby. How much money are we going to spend on that thing? I thought you were going to say, I'm going to make my own indie game and it's going to be called Calling All Cars. There's that too, but that's way that's that's a bigger fail. That's a smaller failure.

Yeah. Then then Dicatana. Well, nothing will ever, ever top that. This is pretty close. It's pretty. Well, it's the speed, which is the speed. At least Ion Storm stayed around for a couple of years and put out fucking Deus Ex. Not the Dicatana, not the that team made it.

It was more inspectors, other Texas team, but whatever. This was so fast. There will always be one. There will always be a Romero that's not Romero. There will always be a spiritual successor. I am fascinated to see Cliffy's career trajectory after this because prior to this, he was able to get a bunch of money for a team and all sorts of shit because he said, I was the creative head behind Gears of War and that made Epic a bajillion dollars.

And so some investors just gave him a bunch of money. Now he doesn't get to do that. But now he could kickstart. No one's going to kickstart. Who the fuck is stupid enough to give the man who was responsible for this bullshit money? That's the dumb question that I asked just now. That's fair. That was a dumb question that I asked just now.

But seriously, though, I think it depends on what they should what he would show. I it depends entirely on what he shows off. I don't think you should give Cliffy be your money if he tries to get your money because he makes a bad game sometimes. I think that's correct. I think you're correct. And I think a lot of people also including myself will agree. However, I'm pretty sure Cliffy B is also generally pretty rich.

And that's always a hard sell when someone goes, hey, fucking TLC, why do you need to kickstart an album? Yeah, he is like and even if they don't have the money for it, it's people's perception. No, you have the money for it. You must. He did quite well off of Gears of War. I think he got royalties off of it. I feel I feel like there could always be an attempt, depending on like what gets slapped

together for the video, what the goal is and so on and so forth. There's always a way to massage it. I guess to get just the right amount of the revival of a revival shooter. I just like the old days and the odds called Cogs of Conflict. I was going to say Cogs of Battle, but Cogs of Conflict is pretty good. So yeah, yeah. I'm not sure you can call it Cogs because Cogs is already a name in Gears. So ratchets of revenge.

Engines of battle. Bring back Jazz Jackrabbit is what he should fucking do. That's what you're trying to say at the end of the day. Bring back One Must Fall 2097. These are all epic IPs, I just realized. Or the fucking one where it's. I don't know if you worked on one. I remember one.

Did you know, did you catch that there was the other one that was like just robot wars where you like programmed AI? Do you remember that one? It was a weird shitty PC One Must Fall that was like. There's a weird One Must Fall sequel. It was not good. And you just programmed. You didn't control your thing at all yet to program its AI routes.

It's garbage. Anyway, you remember when Epic was like, we're getting out of games and focusing on engines. Except for this one game that we've been working on that we're going to ship. And then that'll be done. And that was like whatever. And then also there was a long period in which people didn't believe Fortnite still existed because it got announced.

I was among those. Dumped for years. Things change, huh? They accidentally as a side project made the biggest game in the world. But it didn't come out as the biggest game in the world. They had to rip somebody off first. That's true too. It's just you right place, right time, right ripoff mode is all it takes.

Yeah, your groove. You have to have some guys, right? Which upcoming Battle Royale game are you excited for? The Call of Duty one or the Red Dead one? Oh man, that list keeps growing. That is a tweet that's keeping track and it's fucking growing. I have a firm belief that one of those is Fortnite's unassailable at this point. It's gotten too much momentum.

It's like Counter Strike or Starcraft or some shit right now, right? But there's got to be one of those that comes out that is super, super good. Like genuinely really great. Well, because Battle Royale is a mode that can exist in anything. Like I'm very interested in seeing how Call of Duty mechanics or maps would work with that. That sounds interesting. The battlefield would be cool with the mode like that. Like what was the first capture of the flag game?

Quake? Okay, now if that before that happened, if there were a game called capture the flag, you understand? Like there would totally be a huge genre of that until eventually you're like, you can put capture the flag in a lot of things. Yeah, it became really popular with Halo. It's like Quake had it, but then I remember people who played Halo were huge, huge CTF fans. Yeah, so the secret to Battle Royale is that it's not just that it's a game thing to rip off.

It's an actual mode. You can put it in anything. And as a result, PUBG is Battle Royale video game. It's mode inventor, basically. Yes, yes. And then everything that come after. It's the Street Fighter 1. Right, right.

Yeah, you created it. Now we can take it and use it in our thing. And they're like, no. They're like, well, use your unique characters and story to different. Oh, shit. Man, there's a jungle map coming in that game. Yeah, that looks cool. I heard that too for some reason.

Like I'm waiting for the the. I know this racing game Battle Royale mode where you're in your car with a hundred other people. So Battle Royale. Yeah, so there's maybe I doesn't have a quite mode like that. But there's a game coming out like in the next month called on rush, which is class based. Yes. Class based burnout. I seen we've seen that with like teams of cars that all have different things.

Like we all use our burn like like a nitrometer in different ways. Like if I'm racing on your team and you're next to me, my buff gives you more. And of that thing, I got really into because there's like 12 classes of cars. And I'm like, that's cool. Codemasters. Yeah. Codemasters is there. But it's actually the developers of Motor Storm.

Okay. So that could be good. There's there's some suspicions that Rage 2's announcement tomorrow will include a Battle Royale announcement. I mean, the the gameplay review. Yeah. Okay. Because it's a wide open game with cars and shooting.

Well, that would work. Well, we'll pick this off the list. I'm not particularly excited about that because like the world that it's presenting, which is crazy. Yahoo's in the desert. I'm it's kind of been done a couple of times either in movies or games right now. It's different because the primary color this time is pink. Borderlands or even the Mad Max game or Mad Max in general.

It's like Rage when that thing came out. Like it was like, oh, that's a little bit different than what was shown up at the time. But now it's just kind of like, yeah. I feel very bad for Bethesda that crazy weirdos. I feel very bad for Bethesda that it's software isn't on that trailer. Yeah, it's not. But that Borderlands 3 got leaked by that Walmart shit because everybody that I know is like, who cares about Rage 2?

There's a Borderlands game coming out. It's the same game. It's just going to be better. H1Z1 Battle Royale. Now that is that was that is the one that PUBG ripped off. They ripped off H1Z1. Radical Heights, Darwin Project and Early Access. Maelstrom.

Is that EA's? Oh, is this a ship Battle Royale? Sure is ships. I know of a couple of games on Steam, one called The Culling, which is the exact same thing as Battle Royale, like Jungle based Battle Royale. Survive.io. Survive.io. It's just there's the minimalist.

I guess this is a browser. Yeah, it's a browser based Battle Royale game. SOS. In Early Access. Stand Out Battle Royale. That's a hilarious name for a Battle Royale game. I need to stand out. Stand out.

I'll call myself Battle Royale. Survival Games Battle Royale. That looks like a Minecraft. We got Dying Light, Bad Blood. I didn't even know about that. Oh, what? Seriously? Stemming for numerous fan requests.

Techland's adding Battle Royale. That could be really good. Gameplay mechanics and Dying Light with the movement. That could be really good. The BR mode will feature six players, not a hundred. Does that count? It needs to be higher. Yeah.

It's survival, but that's yeah. Six is not enough. Six is not enough. But yeah, the movement in that would be ridiculous. Also, to get 100 people on a map, you can't just throw that in. No. That's a massive reward. You need its own map.

But yeah, Dying Light's getting that. Islands of Nine. Battle Royale. That's its name. Announced for 2018. Paladins Battle Royale. Did you just say? No, Paladins Realm Royale Battle Grounds.

What? I need to look up more about Paladins, because Paladins has been in the background as this game that is super successful. Surviving all the time. It shows up at every fucking packs. There's always a booth. But like it came out after Overwatch,

but it was in development before Overwatch got revealed. And so everyone who says it's a ripoff, that's not fair. Because genuinely not. Yeah, but when you see this Reinhardt looking not Reinhardt, Shieldman, and then you go, hmm, what? As they tell it, that character was designed before Reinhardt was ever shown.

And that's not Reaper and that's not Widowmaker. Okay, I guess. But like ever since, like weird, that game's big. And you know why it's big? Because it's a free Overwatch. Well, now it's free Overwatch with Battle Royale. Hey, maybe that's gonna be the good one that I like. Who knows?

Battle rights. Battle rights. Royale. By the way, the reason why I say maybe that's the good one that I like is because Fortnite is bad. Okay. MOBA Battle Royale come in in the form of Battle Right Royale. That's weird.

But why not? Because we got the MOBA. And we got the Battle Royale. That's the hot, those two, man. Just how many, how many? And then you can get gunskins for CSGO inside it. 30, 30 times larger maps, 20 players. Yeah, that would work.

In MOBA. That'd be interesting. In MOBA form. There you go. Europa. What about Mag? Didn't Mag have like 60 guys on the map? Mag was 128.

Fuck me. Yeah. Was that not a Battle Royale? No, it was not. It was 14. It was 14. It was 14. Okay, okay.

Tencent's putting out their own. Tencent, what are they? They do everything in China. Yeah, big Chinese company. Tencent might as well be the entire Chinese game development scene. They fucking don't know everything. And yeah, they got theirs called Europa. Got Pavlov VR, another early access Vive thing.

We got Maverick's Proving Grounds. It's gonna be the 400 player. 400 player Battle Royale. That's nuts. Big, big Royale. That's crazy. And yeah. I'm interested.

And that's 2018. I am. So, and here's the thing. Announced. Here's the thing though, because it's a brand new genre. Like I'm actually interested in seeing what most of those are like, right? Because all of, most of those, like there were about half of them actually had zero twist. They're just like, it's our Battle Royale game.

But all the ones that had weird twists to them, like, oh, it's Dying Lights Parkour, or there's 400 people, or it's a MOBA. Like, yeah, sure. I'll look at that. Yeah. Well, because you said like the reaction to Dying Light there. It's like, similarly in my head, the one that moves and or feels like Nello, or you know what I mean? Or something along those lines.

Oh, you mean the character action slash fighting game battle? Battle Royale, yeah. You mean the one where you get dropped into an arcade, and it's a big arcade, and you have to go and win a set with everyone round Robin in an impromptu tournament? On a giant island? Yeah. Oh, God, man. And you get infinity gem bluffs from each person you defeat if they found them on the map?

Fucking, uh, yeah. That was, that was fun. If and whenever that happens, dude. That's what virtual quest was supposed to emulate. And it did. Shut up. Perfectly. Was it?

Yes. It was supposed to emulate the feeling of going on an adventure and beating people up like a fighting game RPG. Okay. Did not. Because it started as supposed to be virtual fighter RPG. And in fact, the closest thing we have to our goddamn idea is the Mortal Kombat deception story mode. I've talked a couple times about it, but and it's had its demos, but it never really came in like full. But do you remember We Shall Wake?

We Shall Wake was, um, it was a character action game that a guy was making and it looked very, it looked, the art looked very simple, but it was because it was all prototype stuff. Over the top, super duper fast, crazy thing that was like over the top action and whatnot. Imagine that on an island dueling set up. And it's like, I know what you would think. You would think, Hey, man, character action because of the way stun locking works and stuff like that. You can't have that be multiplayer. What if you just made the Anarchy Reigns map just 10 times larger than you? That's it.

Oh, this isn't what I was thinking. Um, no, this is a later version. This is a later demo. We're looking at the demo seven trailer. Can we get Anarchy Reigns Battle Royale? Dude. Yeah. Like just the ability to like go ham.

That wasn't even that far. With a hundred people, 12 people in that. Yeah. Before it's time. Yeah. Yeah. Platinum invented Battle Royale. They were too good.

Wait. How many people was that? 12. 12. Yeah. Okay. That's that's more than that's more. That's more.

It is. Um, yeah, it could be done. And you know what? When that eventually did happen, if it ever does happen, then guess what? We're fucking playing that Battle Royale game. A lot. And that's the end of it. Yeah.

There is there is one coming out. It's a steampunk. There is a melee Battle Royale game coming out. We talked about on park asked about three weeks ago. Had like a steampunk aesthetic to it. I forget who's making it. And I forget its name, but and it was action. Yes.

It was melee primarily. Fuck. I forget the fucking name. In any case. We didn't get to your weekend. Yeah. I guess I didn't. Well, I'll very quickly just go over mine.

Um, the two things I did. One was cost. Yes. Um, yeah. I had a cool Haka show and that was really, really, really fun. It's nice to kind of after you like performed or exactly. I went on I went on stage with the group, the Iwi as it's called. And we, yeah, we did a the whole thing and I got the face paint that you kind of saw there.

And it was nice to go all out with it after learning for a couple of weeks and and and getting through everything and picking up every detail of like how to properly do it. It was nice to do it like in the full, I guess, uniform or lack thereof because you're pretty much just wearing a loincloth and like any wardrobe malfunctions. No wardrobe malfunctions, you know. How about that body confidence? Yeah. Okay.

Well, yeah. All right. But anyway, name of the game. That it was. Yeah. Good for you. Thank you. Took a bit to get there, but we got there.

We did it. It was a good time. And yeah, I'm definitely going to be sticking with this, this troop and doing more of this in the future, because it's also a really great workout when you're going to have to do Haka Battle Royale, though. Yeah, you got eventually better be there and then someone gets eliminated and then there's a hundred people and you get it. And you're doing it ever again.

Okay. But while you Haka, you have to run from the sheet of death that is closing in on the map. So you've got to do it real fast. I forgot about that part. Honestly, I'm thinking I would, I am surprised that paintball arenas have not instituted a battle royale. You need a lot of room. And all you need to do is have a red light on your thing.

No, all you have to do. Well, yeah, sure. Have a red light or whatever, but is you have a ability to talk to everybody with a speaker or something and you demarcate because the paintball place I went to was in the forest up north and it was massive. Yeah. It's like just demarcate zones of this is the blue zone. This is yellow.

You just need a little tracker to tell everybody to get closer and closer. Yep. Yep. That would totally work. And there'd be a blast. I did play a game that was like, I talked about it before, but it was like not quite an escape game. It was a little bit different.

You're in a labyrinth and you have a light on you and the light indicates whether you're like, well, it was when it was a zombie game. If you're one color, that means you're a zombie if you're the color of the human. And like, so it has these things where like it forced people to move into different areas by like corrupting spots and things like that. But a large scale version of that would be fantastic where you have to slowly make your way in and over, otherwise you get eliminated automatically. Yeah.

So I found the game I was thinking of. What? It's called Egress. Egress. OK. And it is not character action and they have straight up said, no, we're using Dark Souls combat, stop combat. So that will either be really cool or God awful.

Like I think it depends on their understanding of how that combat should work and how they deal with multiplayer issue and like how they deal with like I'm fighting a guy with lock on and a guy comes in and stabs my ass. Or maybe that's intended. Who knows? Interesting. Yeah. So that's like a lot of my week was just prepping to do that thing, prepping to be cool.

And what I did get to spend some time with was the blaze blue cross tag battle demo. I actually started it up to. Yes. Tell me more. Tell me more. So the feeling of the game when I last tried it at Booth at the Comic Con. I was back in October. I was back at the Comic Con was a little bit weird and not to my liking.

Um, I am sad to report that it's still not to my liking. I'm very. Has it been changed? Um, so now that there's a larger roster to go through, you can feel more of like what they're trying to do. And what they're trying to do is essentially take a generic like there's a new not like like it feels like nothing that it's a part of. So every character from every previous game that it has in it is does not feel anything

like they used to. Okay. And it feels like what they did was they, it's almost like you created a new generic blaze blue cross tag battle character, like a Mugen character template almost. And you replace the sprites with the individuals. Right. So and then you, and then you tweak the little bits and pieces that are like, okay, this character has the ability to run.

This character does not have the ability to run. Walt Steen, for example, has the slow movement because that's part of what he is. But then this whole thing about like no one can walk a bit. Right. It's like, again, it's, it's a character specific thing, but in some cases it's extremely weird. Like, um, uh, Hasama has no real running animation. He just has a dash.

So when you hold forward with him, he just does a bunch of dash, dash, dash, dash things. Do they pause? He keeps going. Like he, he pauses at the end and then does another one and then dashes again and does another one. I only took like two or three characters. That sounds weird. So I'm, and I'm like, I, it's very weird.

Right. And I'm not a fan of that movement aspect of it. Um, there's another thing to where, uh, because so, so a lot of these games, you're like, okay, some games have six buttons. Some games have four, right? Persona is a four button game where you've, you've, you know, There's was a four button. So cross tag battle is essentially a two button game when it comes to your normals.

Yeah. How the persona characters have buttons for persona because the other button is what? Clash. So there's A, B, C, and then, uh, assistant tag, right? And C is like, C has special normal. C is the, the clash button, which is you, you, you land this attack and then you both characters jump out and do a slash, slash, slash and, and whatever and jump out. Um, if you hold down or up, there's like, uh, uh, unique sort of special normals.

Yeah. And then there's a wake up DP button, like, um, persona style, like there's a reversal on your, on your, your, uh, your other combination. But for the most part you're dealing with A and B as all of your normals and all of your attacks on two buttons and it's very weird. This feels like the unfortunate result of taking the head up with us. When you took street fighter characters and King of Fighters characters and you melt, and you melded them into one game, they all use dashes.

They all use running in some cases. They all use supers. They have variations between how they use supers. They shared a pool of, of universal systems. Yeah. They shared a large pool of like throws, right? Those exist in both games. It's just the grooves really.

That changes. And when, and ArcSist has built their entire company on these fucking feature homunculi in which every character and every game has a hundred systems. And now they want to combine multiple of them and they go, well, okay. If the, they probably, they probably prototyped it and said, okay, if we just put the blaze blue characters and have them fight the persona characters with their own systems, one of those sides is horribly broken. Yeah.

Absolutely. And I can, I can break that down a further, like put a little note, but so what you're essentially looking at, like I said, you have to, you have like two, basically two normal buttons and then you have a third C button, which is kind of like dust almost. Yeah, sure. It's the best of a comparison for it. Now there's inherently nothing wrong with having like a lower number of buttons in the sense that like rising thunder had three attack buttons and then it's, it's specials.

And then I'm a fan of also of fantasy strike, which has, you know, minimal in terms of like what the buttons are. But the problem is that this is not original sort of characters coming into this place. These are characters that you kind of like have an expectation of what you're thinking they are and you're slapping them in, right? And you're trying to make these things fit. And then in some cases, like there's moves that are removed in some cases, they're like morphed and just, they're kind of fitting into this thing of like

either a quarter circle forward or a quarter circle back in A or B and throw is as a result of like a throw is down and C. Yeah. It's something we're, what? And it's, and not, and then, and down and C and the character runs forward and then attempts to grab, right? What? So it's almost as if they looked at like the dragon rush mechanic and we're like,

Hey, let's do the thing like that where you have to run forward and go for a throw. Instead of just a normal throw and it feels very odd with that, right? There's also, there's also a thing where like, if you press the normals and then you like, you tilt, you sometimes you'd be like, Oh, I want to get like a special normal. Are you sure that it's down and C? Not. It might be down and C plus something else. It might be down and C plus B.

Okay. Why? No reason. Just had a wondering that it would be B and C instead. Okay. Yeah. It's, I think it was, it was, it was, yeah, down in B or C or down in, whatever the case, you press that and it's not, it's again, it's not a standing grab.

No, you run and then you do that grab, right? So anyway, you do that and then you have this, this sort of like thing where with the tilt, tilt buttons, you're getting a slightly forward moving version of that button, which is kind of interesting, but then you realize it's super necessary in a game where you can't really micro step, right? Yeah. So I'm thinking of a situation in which you're jumping in, but you're jumping in really shallow and you're like, just the tip, tip, tip of your toe is going to hit me and my standing

anti air won't beat it unless I walk forward one step. Well, but you've got your universal anti air button though. Oh, right. Again, you're like persona style. That's in the game. Okay. So there's that. There, what else was there?

There was the, oh, am I wrong about the down input? Is that incorrect? Okay. I might be wrong about that. Just my mistake being odd. Okay. When I, when I booted when I, when I was going through the mechanics and trying to mess up with that, I remember pressing those buttons and then the character would run and grab.

Okay. I might be mistaken about that. I think the real important thing is that you're describing that every way of everything about the way this game moves feels off. So the thing that you mentioned about the mixing of the characters, right? Was that you have to wonder how characters are like from games like persona and whatnot are going to survive against unial characters with hit boxes that are the entire screen. Yeah.

Right. So Waltz Dean again, or God, what's his name? Well, I'm thinking, I'm thinking actually the one is like, let's say a bad matchup for a congee in persona is characters with lots of projectiles and lots of ways to keep them out. What the hell? And if. The Gordo. If, if, if congee's persona takes a single hit and then disappears after five, what the

absolute fuck is congee going to do against characters like new 13 or our Kune? So Gordo, Gordo is the perfect example of a character that just like, like his buttons are all entire screen swinging side of the weird lanky side of the site. Oh, him. And it just everything he does takes up the entire screen and it's fucking ridiculous. Right. Um, and the way that they make that sort of work, the way they balance this out is that in Unius and Unial, there's no air.

Yeah, I had that's what it is. Sorry. Yeah. Under night in birth. Willie has to apologize. EXC late test. Um, the characters don't have air blocking. So, uh, it's a bit much bigger deal jumping in on a giant hit box like that because you're

just going to get fucking destroyed. Yeah. But there's air blocking in this game. So you can jump forward empty, block the thing and then land and then punish what's happening. Right. And in theory, a lot of air blocking makes like larger hit box things mitigated. Um, but anyway, for the most, it sounds like it's, it's a lot more complex to mix games

with super, super ridiculous in depth and universally exclusive systems than it is to say have Capcom and Tekken characters fight each other. Yeah. And then thus you just have to kind of throw those systems out and kind of make your own. And so you get the, again, the persona characters have their buttons and calling out your persona in weird ways that you're not necessarily used to, you know. That's the problem for me because when I went to play CVS2 and I picked up Terry and Gief, I think was the first people I ever picked.

Guess what? They fucking played like Terry and Gief and I was happy because I was playing Terry Bogard, who I think is cool and Gief, who I think is cool. But if I go and pick up Kanji or you, they're not going to, they might as well be different characters. So the meetup, uh, the, uh, the FGC here, basically people were coming together and realizing the anime group very quickly that don't play the character that you used to play. Because they're not the same character.

They're not the same and you're just going to hate, you're just going to be upset. Just play someone you have no loyalty to. Yeah. So that you don't care what it feels like and that's your best bet. So does that mean people who get good at cross tag at first and then go to play like Unial and be like, what the fuck is this shit? Who got that? That would be really weird.

If so, um, and I like considering they just had the leak with Akihiko announced today, like I'm like, oh boy, I can't wait to, oh boy, we have to play that matchup again to see what happens and we'll see how it works. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but, but either way, the point remains that the, the, the movement, the speed and the feeling are just completely different in a way that's just, it's just not quite what I like. This is kind of a, this is kind of a weird thing for me to say, but it's like when I,

when I play a crossover game that is a crossover of different games, right? Not, not like Marvel Infinite where it's properties, right? But of different games. I don't want a synthesis of ideas. I want the guy from this game to play like they were in that game. And I want the guy from this game like, like that's why Akuma is so impressive. That's why. He feels like he's from Street Fighter.

That's why you shouldn't have four games and one of them not even being a game in terms of Ruby. Like that's why I should always be two. Cause that's, those are a bet the assistance you can at least juggle and make some decisions on. Akuma and Geese are, and Noctis are the fucking high mark for this shit. If I may, yes. I would like to remind the room. He is. About Capcom fighting evolution.

I was just thinking about it. The game where everyone's drive was set to their game. Yeah. And everyone was set to their game. If you came from third strike, you had a pattern. We have to play that. We still haven't. I haven't even played it against another human yet.

Yeah, you have. Yeah, you have. You played it against us back in college. I haven't even played it against a human yet. Matt, you were there and I remember because it was the day that we, we, I was playing Geef and I couldn't be stopped because Geef, his, his shenanigans in that game are unstoppable. And then we'll be picked Hanzo and it was a 11 negative one matchup. Okay.

That's not stretching back. But yeah, I was going to say like, that's a game that tried it. I, when I booted it up, it's like at the end of the day, it's like Ruby. I don't understand what Ruby is. We're, we're, well, I don't know what that is still. Well, to you made a thing. Yeah. But I was going to say like, this is a crossover.

It's like, this is not exciting that these characters are being brought together. Mostly because it's like two of them are just ArcSys games that are not even that old. And it's not like Calcum versus and K or even Tekken versus whatever, or even fighters, mega mix. It's like, these are such different styles. It's like, no, they're all ArcSys and Unial is basically just ArcSys. I know it's made by a different company, but it's the same type of game. It's a weird thing too.

And this is going to sound like up my own ass of the story of fighting games or whatever, but like, look at the games that Tekken has crossed over with. And it's, it's, uh, Final Fantasy and it's Fatal Fury and it's, uh, Street Fighter. Right. Yeah. And CVS two happened and all that shit. And it's BlazBlue and Ruby have a weird thing here in that Unial and Persona take place in the real world and the other two don't.

And that's fucking weird, man. It's like Unixman versus Street Fighter was hyper fighting versus Street Fighter, which was not hyper fighting yet, but they made like, well, like when, when, when Chun-Li and Mai were like, I'm the strongest woman in the world. And she's like, nah, nah, nah, it's me. You could just be like, oh, they never ran into each other on the street before. They just happened to at this tournament.

Yeah. Just like, well, the problem is you guys need to think about this game as old sprites last to raw. Yeah. Yeah. It's, hey, suddenly the whole thing makes sense. ArcSys says, Hey, we found this unbelievable, immaculate, amazing. Everyone should suck our dicks. 3D technology that it makes sprites stupid.

So, okay, we're done. Do you remember these arguments around when KOF 12 and BlazBlue were a thing and people were like saying one looked better than the other? Yes, do. Did you have steak on? Yeah. 12 looked way better. They were low resolution.

I don't. The animation count was much higher. People were saying BlazBlue looked better than 12. I'm talking about NeoGaff back in the day. I don't remember that. Resolution on the sprites is way higher in BlazBlue. They're a lot cleaner. Yeah.

Yeah. There is there. You can, you can see the pixels. The people that were saying it. So like, well, I prefer it to be cleaner and more high res. No, the beautiful. Well, I prefer them to look good. The beautiful pixel art in 12.

Also, anime fighters don't like fluid movement because they need to see where the hitbox is in every possible frame and all that stupid shit. Um, the, the, the, yeah. And in either, in either case, like this is pretty much, I see this as like old sprites, lasso raw and everything from here on out is probably going to be like we're making models because we can fucking do that now. We've done it twice. It's been amazing.

Why would we ever go back? The gear has gotten a big, has gotten itself a big roster at this point. Dragon balls. Dragon ball has a big roster. You know, like the, the worry with the models was always like, oh man, it's going to take forever. But like, Sprites take forever too. They figured it out. It's sorted.

It's done. Right. So anyway, are we going to see BlazBlue with these models? It's not impossible. I think the future of the franchise could be a three game. That would get me back interested for a little while anyway. Hmm. Could be.

They'd have to remake a fuck ton of people. But oh no, our Kune is not in this game. Anyway, though, the, the, the main thing is that like, even though the feel is as it is, I think that the game is going to be fine for people that have no, no dog in the race. You know what I mean? Like if you have no horse. That's not who crossover games are for. That's the weird thing.

Yeah, exactly. But if you're, but I mean, you know what, with the exception of if you're a ruby, you have no dog that's riding a horse in this race. Why do you even care? If you're a ruby, maybe you're a ruby fan and you've never played any other fighting games. So I guess maybe that's the end of it. Right. Maybe you're a uniol fan.

And maybe, maybe you exist. Uniists, Matt. Uniists. Uniists. I'll have you know. One of the best tutorials in the biz right now. Oh no, I see a uniol fan in the distance. He's being attacked by multi-blood fans.

And, and, and. How come your game gets respect and our game has to play in the bathroom? Because we can understand the systems when we look at the screen. The fucking like. Also, the uniol characters are cool. There's what, like there's the, I still, oh God, whatever it's called the phase. I don't worry about it. Anyway, whatever.

Multi-blood is dead and gone. And we can all just forget it ever existed. The, the, uh, you say asgoici like lords over the world right now. King of Multi-Blood. There's only two crossovers they even want to see anymore in terms of fighting games. It's just Capcom versus SNK again. Sure. And I want to, and Killering Singh versus Mortal Kombat.

Because as we made a whole video for it, Mortal Kombat versus Street Fighter will never be a thing. Sammy versus Capcom got announced and never happened. I forgot that that did get announced. Yep. Yep. Man, that would have been wild. Really, really wild.

I just want really Street Fighter versus, uh, Guilty Gear. And that's like, what's in Sam's mind? Well, that's what, that's what it would have been. Way, way back, way back in the day. Yeah, they didn't believe we wasn't a thing. I wanted actually, uh, VF versus Dead or Alive. And that pretty much happened. I still stand by KI versus MK.

Yeah. It's a better blend. It's the only. Yeah, it's good. It's a better blend. They totally, anyway, they fit much better. And their combo systems are just. Cyborgs and dinosaurs.

What I was trying to say though, is that if you have no horse in the race, then you, you can have fun with it in a wacky ass weird way. Because there's, there's a lot of craziness going on when you play. Rounds go extremely fast. People die very quickly. It's over the top. It's nutty.

What you're saying is it's anime. It's the anime fighter. And a lot of fighters. And it's, and it plays itself in a lot of ways. Like you don't have to do a whole lot for a lot of things to happen. Oh, it's a lot of auto combo machine. And there's a system too, where you tag in your second character and do like a kind of a cross assault thing, but.

Now that does look cool. Because you're switching between both characters at the same time, but it's not like in Marvel where you're controlling both and then press a button to switch between the two. It's kind of like when Morgan does that super, where her clone appears and they start hitting each other. Like in this case, you can press a button to switch between the two,

but you can't move individually unless you like are doing one at a time. The other just kind of stands still and either does assist based on what you press or other sorts of like predetermined attacks. I actually would like to. Bit limited. Change something I said, which was there's, that's pretty much all I want. No, actually now that I've put, now that I mean, we've all played a bunch of Tekken 7 and we go back to it every now and then.

What they've done with Geese and Akuma is like a plus amazing. I really, really actually want them to do Tekken cross street fighter. Like I would be. The faithfulness they put on, they show you like with each of these guest characters. It is like the difference between Capcom nailing it and Tekken nail as a Herata nailing it is astonishing. Like Akuma is perfect in that game. And Geese is perfect.

There isn't even the most minor of complaints about how they control. I don't like they control. They walked off the street in their respective games and into this roster. That's how they would. That's what would happen. It's amazing. I would want Tekken versus street fighter versus fatal fury slash whatever King of Fighters now. Well, because it's proven but now there's not enough money to go around.

You know what I mean? Your product needs to be able to make a profit for each company. My favorite all time crossover actually is the thing that resulted in what one game, which was the Triforce, which was Namco, Nintendo and Sega. I mean, look, Smash Brothers, like there's a thing is that like Smash Brothers and whatnot can show you it shows you that like guest characters are always a possibility. And you can have tons of guest characters. But when you want a whole chunk of a roster versus another chunk of a roster,

like they got to get they want to get some money. They had that review model that they did a while ago. Yeah. Those never got done. Anyway, so that's never coming out. Whatever. Not much to say. I mean, we'll see what the full thing is like.

And of course, I'm reserving final judgment until I actually really get to sit inside of a training mode. But initial impressions of feeling are just a bit weird to me. But I did like for what it's worth, the the anime FGC were having fun with it. OK. And they were enjoying it in like a what the fuck is this bullshit kind of way? Like it was just a, wow, who cares what's going on? And they all pretty much agreed that like we're just going to not pick anyone we care about

to not get upset. And by doing that, we're having fun. That's what was happening with most of the anime players. That is a weird caveat. I don't think a game has very good legs. It's happened before. You can't take your mains. Dude, when I picked Blanka and Cross Tech in and I was like,

time to play Blunt. No, it's not. No, it's not. That's true. You know, you know, that's just the universe sorting itself out for you. Yeah. So that happens every now and then. Anyway, the game was like, don't talk to me.

We'll be your block of players. We'll see more. But yeah, I definitely don't speak for fucking anyone beyond myself with this. And oh, that Ruby, that Ruby voice acting problem is the fact that all of her moves are long barks that take a while and they're very high-pitched. That is a very classic ARXIS problem slash Athena, King of Fighters 98. But yes, my armor, my armor times a million. My armor Ruby has a lot of things to say.

She's saying them all the time. And a lot of the time she doesn't finish saying the first thing before the second thing comes out. The thing that I don't get is that they solve that problem in Dragon Ball. Dragon Ball is great. Yeah. The barks are short. They're concise. Oftentimes they're like manga accurate.

It's great. Why bad? I don't know. I don't know. It is different teams for sure. And it makes a difference between like, whether it's a high-pitched, like, loud thing versus. Psycho ball.

Psycho ball. Yeah. I hate you, Athena. Psycho ball. That's why I hate Athena, by the way. That's the only reason. Yeah, she's a really good singer. Understandable.

Yeah. Understandable. I would walk by a fucking KOF machine. Psycho ball. Yeah, not even playing Psycho ball. Psycho ball. Psycho ball. Shut the fuck up.

Today in the news, some stuff is going down. Yes. Boss key productions I hear. I hear they died. Went down. Yeah. The company go. You know.

No one unlocked that boss key. Damn. What didn't go down. It unlocks. What went up. Yeah. Is a couple of kickstarter things. Hey, hey, ads, go away.

Hey, hey, hey, hey. Including a. What do we got? Sorry, Kratos is trying to tell me to buy his game. I bought it. No. We play it. Fireball Island is a huge ass kickstarter that.

That's a good name. That continues the. Oh, you remember this? No, I don't. It's an old board game from like. Holy shit. Oh, cool. That looks like a Mighty Max play set.

So this is a remake of it. Continuing the trend of board games doing gangbusters on Kickstarter. Yeah. People give shit about board games. Oh man. Like I like that kingdom death box. That thing's a coffin.

But Fireball Island like doing huge, huge, huge numbers breaking records. This is a yeah, a crazy ass board game that has a whole like island play set to it. And it made what? Two point three million. Good for them. I never had this game as a kid, but I had a friend that did

and was fucking rad. You moved your little like a little explorer guys around the thing and you throw the dice and then you'd put these fireballs into that demon head at the top of the mountain and it would roll down the tracks. Yeah. And knock your dude into it. It's crazy when we look at Kickstarter stuff because

like it's like we're covering the Kickstarter game, but it's actually just a game announcement. Hey, this game's been announced to exist now. As soon as they clear their goals, they become game announcements. So this is a game that actually existed in like. I remember this actually. Is this a new version in any way?

Yeah. Okay. I think I remember that. Similar. Okay. Cool. This is really cool. Imagine a shark attack or like ants in my pants came back.

What if there was like a mousetrap? Mousetrap. Yeah. It was like four layers of mousetraps. It's like regular mousetrap. It's sexy. Don't wake daddy or I'll hit you. From Parker.

Yeah. Don't ways on the electrical fence, etc. Can we get can we get a fucking like wall powered operation? The wacky doctor's game where it just really shocks the shit out of you. Oh, like, uh, like that one. Um, Geez, kingdom death made 12 million. Sure did.

Can you buy kingdom death? Yeah. Mmm. This I've been like, there needs to be a website called can I buy kingdom death and sometimes the answers yes and sometimes the answers. Because like I've been like, I've heard nothing but good things. I'm like, oh, I should. And I'm like, how do I get it?

Yeah. Why answer me? I don't know. I you can. I couldn't support slash buy that Pacific Rim board game. You can try the version on a tabletop simulator, but I can't promise you. You can get your hands on the product that they don't sell.

I don't. It took me. I ordered it a while ago and it finally came and it's a crazy ass ridiculous thing and it took a minute. It's also very expensive. It's a board games will beat video like 12 million. The highest is video game in Shenmue with six. Well, you know why?

I still like because board games have a wider appeal because you can play them with your parents and your kids and all that. And then you can convince people, don't worry, it's not complicated. And board games are way more complicated than video games. And like video games coming out and failing on Kickstarter is like a thing that can happen and it has happened to many, many, many times with board games. Like they can not print the thing and, you know, and like fuck it up. Kind of make it.

But if they print the thing and send it to you, then it worked. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like it's not to trivialize the process. It's a very low, low bar of error. It reminds me when it was blowing up the fucking charts. I forget the name of the game. It was a high bar of error.

No, no, no, no. It was it was a it was a card game made by the guy who does the oatmeal. Yes. Exploding cats. Exploding kittens. Exploding kittens. Exploding kittens. It says it right there. It made eight million dollars.

And and people are like, why is this Kickstarter? It's so much money because you you pledged 20 bucks and he sent you a pack of cards. Yeah. And then you got it and it's done. That's the it's done like the mail order transaction. Unless the sun stops your product from from existing. Unless the sun stops. I always forget it.

Then you're pretty much guaranteed to you're getting your thing and that's that. And you're good. Yeah. You're not you don't have to worry about the like halfway through. We hit some bugs and then our ports to this other platform are not going to exist because that platform is irrelevant now. Mighty number nine. 3ds and Vita still coming two years after the fact.

Every interview with Inafune should start with, hey, when am I going to get my 3ds version of Mighty number nine? I bought a 3ds for that game. And then every time he tries to talk about red ash or some shit, you throw. I don't think no one's talking about that. Man, Inafune just disappeared off the map. Yeah. I was just about to say he doesn't get to do interviews anymore.

Maybe he really did fade away. Yeah. Yeah. There is another Kickstarter, of course, that is not a board game, but this is Hellbound. Yeah. I saw Mac back this the other day. I did. This is playable with a free demo on Steam right now.

So the survival wave based mode. And I think they're asking for 50 K to like really flesh that out, but they they need 100 K to do a full single player. That looks like Quake Doom. Like visually, it does really look like Doom 2016. But like it's even more like old school. Like it's no glory kills, no perks or whatever. Do you want to know, would you like to know the name of your main character?

Hell guy. Hell gore. So close. And yeah, it's quite fun, the survival. That's a really low amount that they're asking for, actually. I have confidence that it will make it. Yeah, it uses Unreal 4. And the developer made a bunch of games.

They made doorways. Do you remember that? I do remember that. They made a bunch of those games. So is there a multiplayer? I believe that's in the list of stretch goals. Yeah. OK.

Yeah, let's see where they're at. Because yeah, this 25 percent of their goal right now. Is Zubat is going to be in the game? No, 13 of 51 K 24 days to go. Yeah, that's Canadian. Oh man, that damn that logo even. Oh yeah. It's over.

Not even trying. Yeah. OK, so there's a survival mode demo that's out now that there's how you're your main character. We're looking at the page for it. It's so ridiculous. And get your weapons. Yeah, that's your that's your quick doom, whatever.

It's it's it's on point. Cool. Hell speed. Yeah. OK, I was looking for the multiplayer thing, but oh well. Yeah, it's all the way down there. Yeah, that's me before. Cool.

Yeah, hopefully it makes it. I pledged on that because I'm like if I played the demo, I'm like, no, but like I don't even like horde survival waves that much. They're fine. But I was like a real soft spot in your heart for that era. Yeah, but like I do really want a single player with like secrets and losses and shit. Like I want a new actual painkiller.

I should play doom again. That game's great. Yeah, I was I was playing the Switch version a few weeks ago. But does it have a battle royale mode? Maybe hopefully you're you're in hell. Yeah. Lots of people down there. That's the ultimate battle royale.

It really and truly is. Speaking of again, more kickstart earth news. This is out of nowhere. Oh, we can kickstart our Ford Escape. No, we can kickstart nothing because it's it's confirmed to exist. It's gotta be an ad that you can't skip to. Every time, of course. That doesn't matter.

What matters is bloodstained curse of the moon. This looks so good. Circle of the crop curse of the I like there was there was a moment when I was watching this trailer that I'm like out of my way bloodstained curse of the moon is here because. Well, it's like out of my way dark void dark void zero is here. This out of my way by on a commando. Like by on a commando rearmed is here. Well, this looks so good.

But also it's like, oh, that is very inspired by games of old. So so this is a bloodstained. This is a bloodstained like mini game that basically is was like a high tier reward for if you backed bloodstained and it effectively looks like circle of the moon. It's Castlevania three ish. It's yeah, it's Dracula's curse kind of with like four playable characters, like a magic user. They all fit.

They all look very similar to. Oh, like, do you like Alucard? No, Gebel. Because he knows you like Alucard because look at him. Alucard all over. There's the Alucard. He turns into a bat. These are all the characters that we were given the voice actor list for not too long.

What cracks me up. The one that gets me the most is the the main characters. I think his name's Zangetsu. He's the exact shades of orange from the Castlevania one. And it's like, oh, man, you can pick the characters on the fly. Yeah, you couldn't do in Dracula's curse. And the other bit, too, of course, as this isn't it, he creates trailer. You're getting that prom night got voice actor guy from the mighty number nine.

Oh, I think the same guy I've been doing is his. Those bosses look so good. They look too good, actually. They actually look kind of like they came out of Shovel Knight. Well, they look like Mega Man bosses, actually, I'd say. To be fair, though, the the prom trailer guy was deep silver and he creates blasted that decision on Twitter. They're like, fuck him.

We did not approve that trailer. I thought that was always funny. Like even what's not supposed to come out properly. Well, a lot of people are saying that if this is coming out now, it's got to be coming out in the next month. Shy at sea on Curse of the Moon because that is coming out in like a week. That makes you feel things. That kid looks good, man.

May 24th. Bloodstained. It's coming on the 3DS and Vita something. Wow, something that in a food. I think it's so so. Yeah. So you guys, you said some Castlevania 3. You said to a little bit.

Does that sprite style act like what does that directly emulate the most? The it depends on the character. The first guy, the guy that's orange, he's from Castlevania one. That that sprite style is Castlevania one for sure. Yeah, I kind of forget what Christopher looks like in Castlevania three. Oh, OK. Are you looking for? I was looking at Circle of the Moon.

It does not look like Circle of the Moon. Because Circle of the Moon is GTA. That is way newer. It looks way more like one and two and three. And which one it looks like depends on the person or sprite. OK. So yeah, there's Simon. Yeah, you look at Castlevania one.

Like that Zen gets who looks like Simon. Those colors. Like 100%. But the stages don't. Right. And the bosses certainly don't. No, the bosses look like they're from the future. Shovel might even.

Right, OK. But the reason I say three is because of the character stuff. The character books. I mean, that's Castlevania three. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's definitely that's Alucard, by the way. Yeah. Count Alucard.

That's that's a fun little bonus card. Dracula backwards. I always miss Captain N. Alucard. Do you remember him? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's sorry. I was thinking of Simon, the asshole with the mirror. You know, Alucard.

The stupid, shitty little kid. Alucard's like this kid with like black sunglasses on. He's scape four. He's like, shut up, dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's got one like whiteish hair. And he's like wearing shirt. Like he's Mark Simpson.

Hey, is that Star Fox shit on the docket? Hold on. Shut up. Oh, he's bringing up the Alucard. Yeah, yeah. That's my Alucard. You're this idiot. That's great.

What the fuck? Look at that bad boombox on his back. Where's my Robbie Belgrade? What is this shit? That's not good. What does the Alucard button do? Alucards. Oh, no.

And then like Draco go, get out of here. I'm the card. The side by side is perfect. That's great. Just just insert 90s rad. And that's what you get. Man, I wish I wish Japanese Alucard could age as gracefully as Captain Anne Alucard.

Why doesn't Konami have the balls to give him his costume? If Capcom will put like shitty boxer mega man, anything, why couldn't Konami have had balls? Konami's not cool, man. These cowards won't give him his bat skateboard back. Oh my god. I didn't even see it. I didn't even notice.

That would be the most unarodynamical skateboard ever. You fucking crashed in one second. You fucking Weenies. What's going on here? He's TPing Alucard. I don't fuck dude. Get an animated gift. No, no.

I can find one. Find one real quick. Hold on. Type animated. Yeah. No. All right. You don't see one.

No, there's Vegeta and Frieza. No, it's not going to work. Oh, it doesn't work. That's too good that it's gone. It's gone. Oh, well, anyway, it doesn't matter. You gave it a try. If you do a Google image search for Captain and Alucard,

you can play along. Yeah. You're going to play along with the stupid shit. You should win things. One satisfaction and knowledge by playing. Well, I'll tell you who won something. What's who won something? Like everyone.

Did I win it? Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans by being loud enough uncancelled the show. This is the coolest thing ever. It's the coolest thing ever for a couple reasons. One, I really like Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I've watched the first two seasons. Did you watch? Yeah, OK.

And then a third season didn't exist. So I fell off, right? But I think the coolest thing about this is how fucking fast it was. It was the weekend. It got uncancelled over a weekend. Even like a day or so. Once it hit like a Twitter moment, basically. It was so ridiculous.

That everyone shouted loud enough that they just went, OK, fuck it. It's like, if the amount of people yelling will watch it, then that confirms it's worth it to come back, I guess. The three hours after I saw like cancel, cancel, canceled, I then saw a story that said Hulu, NBC, and Netflix all screaming on phones. Like calling J. Jonah Jameson. And he's on 50 phones.

Like what? What? How much? I remember seeing that it got canceled. And then I scrolled up on Twitter and then that was Netflix saying, hey, you guys want us to get Brooklyn Nine-Nine like within seconds. Also, the ridiculous speed at which these compilations of why the show should be uncancelled and whatnot coming together and going over

everything that was funny. Like how do you cancel something with this as it's cold open? Stuff like that. I should probably give it more than two episodes. It's really good. No, it's really good. It's Zany. It's Sandberg-y.

Yeah, I love Sandberg. And then there's a will they won't they that's like, right there. That's a rare. That's a rare lonely island win right there. Except Sandberg. I don't feel as the star of that show. I feel like it's an ensemble. I feel like he gets he does pretty well, but I really feel like Terry Cruz

and the guy who plays Commander Holt. Yeah. Steal it from him. At the end of the day, it's like it made it seem like Sandberg was the main character like in the first season or whatever. And then always he not? No. He is in the first season.

He is. It follows him. He's the star cop. Yeah. But then as. But then they stop doing that. Oh, really? Then it becomes like ensemble entirely.

Wow. Okay. He would be I'd say be the same way as Parks and Rec. Parks and Rec with God. I'm trying to blank. Leslie? Yes. Yeah.

Leslie Nope. Leslie Nope. It would be like that. She's the main character. But then but then the ensemble gets too strong. Let's go on the Chris Pratt and Aubrey Plaza adventure for half of the episode. Right.

Okay. Yeah. And I guess speaking of standing out and your ensemble or whatever the fuck. You're trying. I don't know. You're going to try. GI Joe movie. Snake Eyes movie.

All right. Let's move on. That's awesome to me. I didn't watch any of the GI Joe films. Don't. Snake Eyes is the coolest part of all of it. I assume so. That's completely right.

Because A doesn't talk and B that's great because he's played by Ray Park who you don't want to talk. Also he ninjas. Yes. He ninjas good. But but this is a known thing in GI Joe. Yes. Where Snake Eyes is the best part.

But I'm glad. As he always is. As he always is. Recognize this and are fast forwarding this because one of the movies I forget which one they were like here's all of Snake Eyes origin because he's the only guy you care about. That's correct. And here's a bunch of Storm Shadow too. Well the only time it's like that's it.

The only thing about GI Joe is where Snake Eyes and where Snake Eyes and is he fighting Storm Shadow. Is he fighting Storm Shadow right now. That's there's no other questions to ask unfortunately. Yeah. So yeah sure. It's about GI Joe retaliation. It's about Storm Shadow.

I mean if you get to a part where Snake Eyes does anything. I saw the red girl. Remember her. I had her toy. The Baroness. No no the red one. Scarlet. Yeah.

There's Storm Shadow. Yeah yeah. Is the rock in this one. In the in this video. Yes I saw him there. I like the rock. Look there's Snake Eyes. You see him.

I saw Snake Eyes and Rock talked to him. Oh my god the Rock won't stop being in the movies. You know who the Rock play but to be fair this was when he wasn't in nearly as many. But do you know the Rock plays. The Rock plays body massage. Body massage. Oh yeah he's roadblock. Yeah he never says body massage in the movie which everyone's very angry.

Come on let's say body massage. Ask me if I want a body massage. But he's not he's not wearing the roadblock colors even. Not really but no one really is. Oh there are costumes are all pretty different. Again I didn't. Oh there's Ninjas. Oh is that an ally viper.

Oh that's cool. Well let me take out the sword. The yellow the yellow cobra soldiers. No it's not okay. I feel like I watched this movie already. Yeah the Ninjas. Well anyway. Anyway.

I genuinely feel like I watched that movie already. That's weird. I think you did. Body massage. Too bad there was no FENZELER films that centered around snake eyes. Too bad FENZELER films wasn't around in the YouTube era. That'd be that'd be that'd be rich. He'd be viral man.

Speaking of body massage. How about Midna? Well did you watch this video? I didn't. You need to watch this video of this first four figures showing off their true Midna and look at what I think might be the most over the top lavish thing I've ever seen to be with a figure. That's the standard version.

Yeah. And it's just. We're looking and we're looking at we're looking at first four figures making true Midna. Now there's an exclusive addition. As there always is with something glowing. Which her hair glows. As it all looks awesome.

First four always does. All right we are now. Glowing tattoos. We are now two dreams deep. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. There is a third layer. Okay.

That people unveil in this video. The third dream. Begins now. Yeah. Okay. Now the LED light feature on their first four exclusive is over the top. We've got all the full body details. And yep.

Yep. That's the good stuff. Yeah. So now the figure spinning around and we're going to see the transition into the third dream. Are you taking notes? Which is the definitive addition. Okay. Which Willie comes with a display case.

It certainly does. It's premium but we're not done yet. Oh no. Okay. All right. Well it's got the LED hair. Yeah. Yeah.

A shirt. Yep. You got the power brakes. Yep. Okay. Oh whoa. We've got purple lights. You have purple lights.

Purple. High light. They're are they're like black lights. There's UV lights. There is UV lights. Remote controllable. Remote controllable. On the spinning diorama.

Oh it can turn. You can turn your midna. Yeah. It's on a set display case. Okay. The turning base is there. Wow. Wow.

Okay. Jesus fuck. Glowing the dark. Oh yeah. Because the UV lights. Yeah. Of course. Oh and it puts more contrast on the green in our outfit.

Oh man. Because this is ultra violet painted base. As you do. This is fucking outrageous. Dude is this an apology for not making this sooner? Like this is so over the top. This was a statue that they announced they're working on like three years ago. Wow.

So maybe that maybe it is a timed apology. So and it's 17 inches tall. Wow. Well okay. You don't you not want to look at the price of the definitive. I won't. Too expensive to shove up your ass is what you're saying. I just want to ask zone if notes are being taken.

Are you taking notes. On the dimensions. Yeah. This is a lot for a character that's seen for about 14 seconds. It's true. What's wrong. But I'm so beautiful that you can't speak. They use that somewhere in the trailer.

Somewhere. Has my beauty left you speechless or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. At first four used to be pretty shitty back in the day. Like their stuff was actually not all that detailed. No. They're gods now.

I have got that that Amaterasu one with the glowing flames on the mirror. I've still got a. Your state. No. Well besides the not even the statues I have of theirs. I have multiple of theirs. Like three or four. But like I have a tab.

Permanently open. Of course you do. Of just like this is just a list that's got it. I've got to go through at some point. It's it's on beat right now. And I just occasionally go look at Amaterasu or whatever else that's going on. Do you want me to show you some really quickly that I've ordered and it's supposed to come in the next couple of months.

If you can humor me. Well you have to stop thinking about it and then wait for it to suddenly surprise you. No. No. Like it's it's it's coming. All right. Put put put a pop culture shock. Oh no.

And then put poison. Oh boy. Oh boy. All right. Sideshow toys. What you got. What are we looking at here. Oh no.

That's a four hundred dollar. Yeah. That's a poison. That's a poison. So the variant is Roxy. Of course it is. Of course. Because it would.

I got the one where she's smiling because that's the one I wanted. That is that's that's coming in the mail at some point. God damn. Yeah. That is like the best looking version of poison. Like yeah that's amazing. That's really good. So that yeah for scale.

That's enormous. So Leanna's like all right you can't you shouldn't really you should stop buying these things. And I'm like yeah I will but I bought one. It's like what it's poison. All right it's poison. That's fine. Let it rock. Riding crock and all.

God damn. Anyway sorry. No. No don't be sorry. So it's worth there. That's fine. That's fine. What else we got.

Speaking of expensive shit. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is apparently going to cost upwards of a hundred million to make. That's ridiculous. But here's the thing. Nowadays triple to quadruple A. It's not even that surprising. So I recently watched after you. Well it's that the important thing here is like because this is an article right and

my first thing upon hearing this was like okay this is interesting that this is a story because obviously that's a lot more. It's a lot. It's a lot of money. It's a lot. But it's also becoming regular. No I disagree. It's becoming regular for certain studios.

So Taku said they did the math and they projected that some things cost upwards to 200 million. Right. The that that is that is the norm for specific studios. I would say like Bethesda gets that. I'd say certain Capcom projects that they shouldn't have allowed. So there's a lot of that. Yeah. There's a lot of factors that kick in.

Right. And and in particular when you start Rockstar when you start Rockstar gets to say anything. When you what you're developing where you choose to develop it makes a huge difference. Got a warp. Surely got more than that. Right. And Montreal is a city that is like a lot of games studios game studios set up here because there's tax breaks huge tax breaks that allow them to hire more employees.

To make the game bigger which ends up means it means it costs more and more. But anyway so yeah they're in an interview with David Alfonsi. He said that the game's development Shadow of the Tomb Raider will cost between 75 and 100 million dollars and 35 million will be spent on marketing and promotion. And yeah it just kind of like was one of those like eye razors eyebrow razors for folks. It's been a while since we've had a number thrown out there. I guess so.

I guess so. But but yeah to me this is not I'm not shocked by this news. So this is like starting to become the cost of doing business for major studios. I recently watched being developing games in environments with like highly creative and highly paid employees. So the cost of living is high. Recently watched a video on channel called Archipel I believe it is. And it's called ebb and flow the recent rise.

Re what's it called the conversations on the recent momentum of Japanese video games. And it's an interview series in which they go and talk to Yoko Taro. They go and talk to Tsumizu Guchi. They go talk to the head of Team Ninja Negoshi from the Yakuza series. It's all all these these folks. It's like so what what's up with that period of between 2010 and 2016 when Japanese games just you know kind of fucked off really and talks about that and how they make games. But there's one thing that that Yoko Taro talks about in particular

that makes me think about this quite a bit. And he describes the difference between the Japanese development process and the Western development process and goes in the West. Everything has been streamlined and there's kind of a committee structure and everything needs to go smoothly because when you're making a triple A game and the game costs a hundred million dollars there is no room for trouble. Yes. There is no room for mistakes or roadblocks or any of that shit

because it'd be a fucking huge disaster. Which is why UB games are what they are. And it's why Square keeps doing the same thing that Square keeps doing. It's where they want to make games of that size but they never made that structure to make things go smooth. So you get FF15's development and now FF7 remakes development and so on. Oh shit yeah. Like it's the fiscally responsible thing to do.

Right. And he says well Japan doesn't have that. In Japan we never really figured that out and so the director has a lot more control. And as a result Japanese games seem to do a lot better when they are not triple triple triple A. It's why Platinum exists. They are everything between Platinum and let's say near automata.

So in terms of scope and scale and cash money. A couple weeks ago Jimquisition did a special episode specifically on how the reason why everything being triple I. Yeah. Sucks and the fact that that needs to go away. And the fact that in the PS2 era we had a plethora of B games. Which I love. Look at Yakuza series.

Seriously. Like Yakuza series like is very small. It's very dense. It has a lot of detail. But it's not super big. Right. In terms of whatever. And they get some of that money back based on the insane amount of ads

that are in those games. But those ads actually make it better. So it's fine. Because half the time it's just two characters talking to each other for an hour. Whereas like in Tomb Raider it's going to be her destroying a country. There's a need. There is a different cost. There's a wild difference in scale here.

There's a need for that mid-range. And it scratches an itch that like existed during the PS2 era. That never went away. But it just became more less and less. Well it just became more more incentivized for like larger kind of studios to just go like let's go all in on fewer titles that are bigger and bigger every year. Until we can pretty much like take like if each each time we put out a game it takes over a sizable chunk of the market.

Yeah. It's more worth it to just build that one thing into a larger event. Yeah. But like release. The thing with Japanese release is stuff like Persona 5 and Nier. Oh they also spoke to Hoshino from Persona 5 as well. And Breath of Wild. These are all dead ends.

No one wants. They should battle Royale is such green territory. Japan needs to stop this single player bullshit. It's a really fantastic little documentary. I think everybody should take a look at it. My favorite part of it is the way you talk about I think it's who was it. I forget who it was. It was one of the Japanese developers talking to a guy from Ubisoft.

It's a Capcom guy talking to a guy from Ubisoft when they were collaborating on something. And he's like, maybe we should do this because Western players like that. And the Ubisoft guy goes, why are you even talking about that? Why do you care about Western players? You're a Japanese developer and you have your own strengths. You should be focusing on those strengths that I like instead of trying to cater to these people or whatever, right? And like that chase for Western trends led to like quantum theory and all that garbage.

But that's where the money is. Yeah. Well, hey, look at that. A bunch of Japanese games that were Japanese as fuck have done super well recently. Like great automata persona and Yakuza couldn't be more non-Western. And they did great. And I look at Tomb Raider as a hundred millions like, boy, I hope there's no problems on that project. Remember when the reboot?

Every once in a while, though, we encounter modes or features or things where we're like, okay, that's two Japanese back it off a bit. Yeah. Remember when the first Tomb Raider reboot came out and reportedly sold like 3.5 million copies and Square was like, this is a massive disaster. Do you mean the Tomb Raider reboot or the second Tomb Raider reboot? I mean, Square's Tomb Raider. Do you mean Tomb Raider legend?

No, Square's Tomb Raider. Anyway, the first reboot just called Tomb Raider. It sold 3.5 and they're like, this is a disaster. Yeah. And then it turned out fine, I guess. And it's like, oh, yeah, we'll let FF 15 sit in limbo for a decade. Because again, it's the idea that it's like you're dealing with gangbusters development costs. So you need gangbusters sales.

And when they're not, right? Well, yeah, it's 3.4 million sales were considered a financial failure for Tomb Raider. And right. Mankind divided also flopping was the issue. I'm not sure if that's an old quote down there, but it says, Eidos Montreal, we have to try new models or single player games. No, you don't. You just have to make them.

And that is now a new model. Because it doesn't happen as often. That has actually become a new model once again. But if they're not making, if they're not making, like, making ends meet is a thing that you can do with smaller sizes. It is baffling to me that the same company that bankrolled near Automata in its small scope and extra huge success is the company that runs the decisions that gives Tomb Raider a hundred million dollars or is the same company that lets the FF7 remake get scrapped entirely

and then start over. Like it's baffling. And or the one that gladly takes in like maybe a third of their company revenue from their MMO, but then doesn't put any money back into that MMO, which is very frustrating. Like I'm trying to find the right analogy here. And the closest thing I can think of is when you slowly get up and move from table to table when you're playing at the at the casino and you eventually get to your high roller fucking gate and then you go into the high roller gate and you sit down with the big boys.

And now what I'm going to go back to. You can't exactly. And now you're you're just like, well, we're sitting at this table. There is no way shout out of the Tomb Raider would cost less money than rise of this. Like they're like, no, you're putting down as a black chip. Right. We're not going back and that's how that's how shit happens.

Like dead space getting killed. Yeah. That's how that happens. The attempt to make it bigger than it's it than it is. Yes. Yeah. Now granted, it's Tomb Raider. So I don't think there's actually a worry there.

Right. But with other things, this absolutely like the two games that that Square Enix slash Eidos does this with our Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy. You know what? I think those franchises are going to be fine. Like no matter what fucking mistake doesn't quite work with Deus Ex or Thief. Right.

And here's the other issue, too, is that just not even in terms of like keeping your mind on your own project, but thinking about your competition. If you're making mid-sized products, right? As competitions making big ass shit. And they're marketing the fuck out of them. And the idea of you picking some point in the year to come out when you're going up against something that is a beast of a quadruple a product means that your thing is going to sink in the water and die.

I would I would actually like they're afraid of start calling some of these games quadruple a because there's a clear difference between something like God of War and Tomb Raider. Yeah, that is. Yeah, that I've been using. You've been using. No, that is a term. Right. Because like there's a God of War.

Every single time we sit down to play that like money explodes out of the screen at us. And it's like uncomfortable. Yeah. There's so much. No, no, no. That is quadruple a that is the entire video game industry made room. Okay. What's what's triple a nowadays triple a I would say is an Assassin's Creed game.

Triple a is this. Shadow of the Tomb Raider and double a quadruple a and then double a reading an article about how it's the most expensive thing ever. I but it's but okay. Okay. Because the triple a quadruple a there's cost right there's two things. There's cost and then there's impact. Right.

When Tomb Raider games come out, they have an impact, but they don't take over the industry. Yeah, he's got a point. Yeah, but neither did God of War Ascension like Ascension. Things die off. And I think Tomb Raider sells more now than it did before. Maybe I'm not sure. Any cod blops. Any, any, um, any, any, uh, battlefield.

I'd say any. So aside from God of War, what's another quadruple a I just said. Sorry. Any cod blops. Oh, sorry. I thought you were saying that was triple. Yeah. Any battlefield.

That's a triple. Um, anything like, like, like. The more I think about this, the more I realized that the double a category is like all of my favorite games. Yeah. Anything Rockstar is quadruple a. Yes, yes. When Rockstar Redemption two is when Rockstar makes a game and they release it, it is an

event the whole thing. Everyone makes fucking space for this game to drop. That's quadruple a Madden and FIFA as well. Yeah, but that's more of a dude when I used to work at a rate. Well, I worked at a grocery store, but whatever. Fucking Madden day. Every single fucking person that called in sick, like the boss wanted to go to their house and fucking stab them.

It was awful. And then the boss started calling sick on Madden day. Fucking head of certain departments. I'm sick. It's mad. It's debatable whether or not like you'd throw like Breath of the Wild into that. No, I don't. But I don't feel like Nintendo is absolutely not.

I don't feel like Nintendo is the master of making their double a games look like triple a's. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's that's one way to put it. But yeah, that that's what your definition is. It's like the God of War, like the dragon's nail gets a little too close to the camera and you see a billion tiny details that don't need to be there, but they're there because dragon look nice.

Our stories that like never end when you're on the boat. Yeah, man. More than you'll ever need to hear. I did some of that that shit and just like the stories never go. They never stop. There's more and more and more and more and more. He's like a textbook. This one is you're going to have to fill me in here, Matt.

But Pad might know that a little bit about that. Dreadout is getting a movie. Yeah. Oh, that's cool, man. Yeah, Dreadout was a Kickstarter. I think even Indiegogo. Yeah, we played this twice and it was like because there was a bunch of DLC, but like they're yeah, they're seemingly turning this into a movie now called Dreadout Tower of

Hell, which is a good name and it was like one of the scarier games that we play, especially the last version that we played on the shitstorm. Dreadout is very scary. Where is this from? Indonesia? I want to say Indonesia. Indonesia. There it is.

It's cool. It's real cool. Weird Indonesian ghosts. Scary because there's nothing scarier than other cultures. You're not familiar. Yeah, of course. You know how to deal with American ghosts, North American ghosts and British ghosts, but what about that fucking thing with the head and the intestines?

Oh. What do you do with that? What does it do if it touches you? I don't fucking know. We don't know because no one's lived. Okay, all right. But for those that initiated, you kind of played as like one character of a group of that was like a class tour and you're a girl with like a cell phone and that's it.

That's it? And you just go to different ghost dimensions and you solve like there's dark murders that have happened there and you just basically have to figure out everything. I remember there was a human looking guy walking around that looked super horrific and we couldn't figure out what we were looking at kind of thing. And of course they say here in this article, Stemboel added that he would add local cultural influences to make the film uniquely creepier and more terrifying.

Great. If I don't understand your ghost, I don't know. I can't fight that. That's great. Very strong. It's one of the reasons why when I originally watched... That thing. Yeah, right.

When I originally watched like my first Japanese horror movies, it scared the shit out of me because it's like, I don't get it. The ghost just kills you. That's what the ghost does. Like it doesn't stab you. You just die. That's not fair. That's nothing.

What do you wear? Where's the tension? That's a strong stand there. Where's the tension? Yeah. Say, I hope this coalesces and like actually shows us. It's apparently starting to shoot in July of this year, so hopefully. Like what if you were haunted by a gun?

The ghost of a gun or a gun? The ghost of a gun. Oh man. That was a gun bullet. This gun got killed and now it's now it's ghosting. And now it's just shooting for revenge. I'll kill you all. I never got to kill anyone when I was a gun.

But now that I'm a ghost, I'll fulfill my destiny. What do you do? It's hard to stop a gun you can't see. It really is. That's the end of you. Ghost bullets. You run out of ghost bullets eventually. The coolness of destroying ghosts with cell phones makes this concept more in tune with

the current audience. I guess that's true. I forgot that that was a mechanic. That was the main mechanic. That's making it very much fatal framey. Yes. But with your cell phone. I hated that fatal frame movie.

Speaking of movie adaptations and things you forgot. I didn't forget. Well, you're right there. You can see Rambo 5 was originally going to put Sylvester Stallone up against an inhuman monster. Don't worry about that. I didn't forget. I even talked about the test footage about this like three months ago. I saw that test footage.

Here comes Warcraft. What? The Warcraft movie franchise is selling all of its props and costumes in an auction. Wow. They're not going to make a second one of that. A hundred percent confirmation that the end of the movie franchise is now. Wow. Take home your own piece of Azeroth today.

It's that shocking because it is the most successful video game movie of all time. It was also awful. It was awful. But it made $400 million, which I would not think is something you bark at. But I guess when they were probably. Blizzard, man. Assuming that would make a billion dollars and they'd be disappointed. Also how Blizzard do things.

They're probably very embarrassed that was a very bad movie because they want to have the Blizzard call in touch. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall where the Blizzard employees all got together for the first viewing. Yeah. They're they're they're shaking their fists at the sky going. Manson. Yeah.

They're like that. I mean, you recoup something if you if you auction off your props, I suppose. But they're not hurting for money. Is it for charity? See, the thing about this is that it's totally worthless because. Is this way to workshop? Our Arthas is not in that movie. Therefore, you can't get the official replica of Frostmourne.

That's making it pointless. In partnership with Legendary Entertainment, Propstar invites you to Azeroth for an exclusive auction of weapons, props and costumes from Warcraft. The Warcraft auction bid now. Wow. It's not for charity. It's for money. Yeah.

Wow. Big money. But you're not even going to make a lot. So what's the point? It's just trash. It's throwing trash compact. Dude, there's people out there that want their fucking wow items. This is Lothar's official armor.

Someone stole the Iron Man suit. You're not going to make a million dollars. Yeah, somebody did steal the Iron Man suit. Someone stole the Iron Man suit. That guy's cool. Everyone's waiting for him to turn into a villain. No, everyone's waiting for Robert Downey Jr. to come out and ghost me, guys. I stole it.

It was I like it. I like it. I wanted the armor. Yeah, Marvel would let him have it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Anyway, so that's super dead forever. So there you go.

You swerved me. I appreciate that. You made me look silly, but you got me. Apparently, speaking of swerves. When we say Guilty Gear is getting ported to the Switch. Oh, man. It's the original. Who the fuck would have called by your side?

Oh, what? Being the version that we were going to get. Guilty Gear 1. Oh, my God. Guilty Gear. Guilty Gear by your side. What is by your side? Why do you keep saying that?

That's a sub title. Jesus Christ, Matt. Is this the PlayStation one? Yes, it is. Why? Yeah. What is this now? Yeah.

Why so much noise made of Guilty Gear 1? This is the 20th anniversary of Guilty Gear. Guilty Gear. But they just released the better versions. No. Guilty Gear. I've never heard of it. For the PlayStation one, which I don't know.

Have you played it? No. It's it's the version where Vikings the secret character and she's fucking broken. Because she can do her Yozansen on the ground. And it's the best thing in the world. It's so good. It's the best thing in the world.

It'll never come back ever. It's the most busted show ever. The Missing Link. The Missing Link. Okay, I keep saying, I keep, the reason I keep saying by your side is because that's the thing that plays when the intro shows up. But I was talking about something.

Hey, don't yell at me the wrong thing. My mistake. Yeah, but it is Guilty Gear the one. The Missing Link. This this shit fucking from 1998. What, are you ridiculous? Okay, when you do what? Not even the arcade version?

It's like, was there even an arcade release? No, no. This was a straight to straight to PlayStation dude. What was Guilty Gear? I thought Guilty Gear was X. Play the Guilty Gear one. When you do a destroy an instant kill, it ended the set. Yeah, because they were dead.

It didn't end the round. It ended the whole set. That's cool. So if you do it on round one, it's over. We're done. I like realism in my fighting games. That is the weirdest HUD I've never, I don't recognize that.

Everyone has infinite. It's full of the most ridiculous bullshit. You've like, like, like, yeah. Anyway, I can't wait. It's so there's so much endless dumb shit in this game. It's wild. So weird. Yeah, Matt.

Everyone had the same reaction that you did. Where it goes. What? Why? Like, there's cliff. It was it was it was all kinds of goofy shit. Anyway, so yeah, enjoy. This is this is coming to this is coming to switch.

I can't wait for all I'm glad. Every once in a while at the anime meetups, when it's late and people get nice and toasted, we pop on some Guilty Gear infinites videos and just watch the dumb shit you can do. And they're easy too. They're simple. Like, but this makes as much sense as like,

please port dust strikers. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Another DS. Subtitles. Yes, exactly. Or judgment for the PSP featuring the character judgment.

What's the one that is destructors? The one that's like multi tiered. Destructors is the one with different. So we're looking at this infinite video and a shit ton of them are just like a low into a standing into a dash into the low into the standing. And that's it. That's the whole.

But souls got a bunch of volcanic viper loops that just anyway. But wait, there's more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's there's just like, there's something to be said about an infinite. And then there's something to be said about a trivial infinite because that's different. Yeah, like in the back in the days of Marvel, too.

Anyway, enjoy. That's coming. I'm enjoying that. The missing link. Yeah. We've also got apparently promise that. Platinum game says they're going to be setting setting up to flip the genre or the action genre on its head

with their next release. You're going to play as generic monsters trying to fight Dante. I mean, I mean, I mean, Ponte. That would that would flip it on its head. I'm assuming they're meaning a new thing because I wouldn't imagine they mean bayonetta. No, they mean some wild ass new thing. Speaking with press, Kamiya and Inaba revealed that the new

title was a new title was on the works set to flip the action genre on its head with innovation. No more information was hinted at or even forthcoming. You know what I want? You know what I really want? Real bad bad even platinum games employees don't know the details. That makes no sense. But so I want them to come out and be like, because a previous

project didn't come to fruition, you I want whatever new game to be like this is the direct result of the cancellation of Scalebound and the game be incredible. Well, because I think we'll all agree. Well, maybe I would. I'm not sure about Willie, but it's like Scalebound. I was never a hundred percent behind. I was always 90 percent.

I'm like, yes, it's it's platinum, but it was never. Yeah, I was I was I was excited. But I definitely wanted to see like the big reveal of like whatever secret crazy shit was going to be there. Well, hey, man, what if you never know? And when it says even platinum employees don't know, that's like even platinum employees that aren't on the team that are working on it. Don't know.

Like that's like just code. Oh, what? No code code. The only thing the only thing that I could think of that would just that would turn it on its head that would be the wildest, most craziest thing ever. Bandana versus Dante. No, but it would be like a core team of platinum have been working with Capcom to work on the new Delta May Cry game.

And like something like like Kamiya is over there over there hanging out. Oh, yeah. Wow. Yeah, that would be that would be revolutionary. Think of a genre shift or like I'm getting emotional thinking about that. That's not going to happen as monsters. Turn on your head. That's not going to happen.

If they said like this will like this will appease fans that have been clamoring for something for a while, I'll be like, ooh, that could be a crossover. But turn. Turn things on its head just makes me think like there's a really unique gameplay. OK, so what if it's it's about a hero that can that can stand on his head and he turns around like never dead. So what if instead of like fighting the monsters like usual, you fight the monsters as Milya Jovovich Jovovich Jovovich Jovovich

Jovovich, Mily Jovovich, the Jovovich. Sorry, it's it's with a why Mily Jovovich. Milya director's wife. Oh, so for those that don't know this movie was actually announced like a long time ago. And then just everyone forgot that. Oh, man, it was announced a hell of a lot longer than that because there's like years old footage of a Rathalos fighting a Gormagala in a cityscape. And I remember hearing about this years ago when the script shit came out of the script

treatment kind of stuff came out. And I talked about it then and you guys forgot because I don't fucking blame you. And we talked about it a few months ago when that shit came back up. And hey, listen, I brought it up when we were talking about Monster Hunter World. Capcom has Paul W.S. Anderson's number on speed dial. Yeah. Because why wouldn't they he made a lot of money. So why not?

For those people. So why not hand over the next franchise to do the same thing? To be fair to Paul W.S. Anderson, despite making terrible movies and casting his wife in every single movie regardless of anything. He made a lot of money based off of no money with those Resident Evil movies. He made cheap movies that brought in way more like Titanic money. I think together all the Resident Evil movies have made a billion dollars. Now I'm going to like I'm waiting.

I think specific ones even made a billion dollars. No, not a billion. Yeah. Not specific ones. No. I'm waiting for the trailer to say from the people that brought you my wife franchise. Now, do you remember when the franchise brought you my wife? Now, here's here's here's the thing.

And this is important. Do you remember what the premise of this movie is? Was it that the monsters are attacking modern day and they meet the monster hunter? It's a forget the other. Yeah. Okay. That's what you say.

Regular average Joe learns that he's actually a fabled monster hunter. It has to go to a different world to learn how to fight monsters before they ruin ours. That's a very 80s premise to be fair. So here's the thing. It's average Joe American. Yeah. So who's Mila going to play? She's not the main character.

She's a Rappalo. Is she going to be? Yeah. She's mo capping it. She's the mo cap the Rappalo. She's the hunter. She is probably going to be the Obi-Wan like mentor hunter lady character. So it's shocking that this movie has a lower budget than Tomb Raider.

Yeah. Sixty million. It's like nothing for a movie nowadays. Monster Hunter is a giant ass franchise. Yeah. But they don't want to spend a giant ass amount of money on it. It's going to look. I'm telling you right now, it's going to look really bad.

She's the voice of the Palico. It's going to look like trash. Well, you've played a bunch of Monster Hunter World now. Transport that into a lowish budget CG like live action film. That is going to look so fucking bad. Okay. But here's the thing though. Did Resident Evil ever not look terrible?

The CG in the last two, like they're fine. Because I only saw the first one and it was terrible. No, the first one's the best looking one. No, it's not. I watched it again. Oh, yeah? Shit. I remember it being the only one I've ever seen and boy, oh boy.

It ain't great. You can't. That's not fair because it came out in 2002. Whereas the last one came out like two years ago. So it's like bite. Yeah. But at least that was like monsters and zombies with makeup and shit. Like this is going to be like this is going to be like a kid with a CG sword hitting a CG monster.

At least the franchise is one where it's kind of like a who gives a shit what the story is going to be thing. And you know the worst part? It's very easy to do the same thing you did to Resident Evil to a franchise like this. I just realized what the actual worst part of this is going to be is that our main character is going to be a sword and shield user. And sword and shield is for losers because it's great sword or charge blade or insect lave or hammer. It's the dumbest insight thing ever.

No, it's not. No, it is not. I don't think anyone making the movies or you're going to care about that. OK, there's going to be one person with each weapon somewhere in the background. And that's going to be cool. I guess there might. There's a possibility that the poster and main character and main promotion will be someone with a great sword. They better.

And it'll be the only way that movies were watching. And it'll be the first time I can think of that a great sword makes an appearance in like a mainstream Hollywood thing as the main weapon. Sword and shield is for dums. Has there ever been a fucking guts ass, guts blade in a movie that has the main weapon? If you can't, if you can't add Ben, children did have a theatrical release. And it did. It did.

I didn't even know that. It did. Yeah. When do you think that movie is coming out? What? That movie? Yeah. Yeah.

In another year. Yeah. Somewhere over the next day. Do you know why the thing about the Resident Evil movies? They film them fucking quick. And then the CG also takes a lot less time than other movies. Paul W.S. Anderson had to bang out a fucking movie like nobody's supposed to. So you think we might see part two by maybe like 2020?

Maybe Monster Hunter 3 by like 2022? And we'll hear the announcement. Does anything happen in 2023? Well, that's the one I'm trying to figure out here. I think the franchise Monster Hunter might be on its fourth entry by the time we get the Final Fantasy VII remake. Now, is this a rumor? So what happened was that there was an interview with some Square Enix folks. Yes, this is what I was going to talk about.

Interview with some Square Enix guys about Final Fantasy VII remake. And the statement that came out after a quick translation was, we're hoping to get the game out by Final Fantasy's 35th anniversary, which is in 2023, also is five years from now. Everybody picked this up and ran with it. And the guy who runs the fan site that translated this interview came out and was like, Hey, man. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

That was a rough translation. That dude was joking. It's really clear that he's joking about the game taking a while to develop. There is no one at Square who is actually saying we hope it's out by 2023. Now, it will be. No. But they're not saying that. Has anyone pointed at a WrestleMania sign five years away?

No, because in advance, because even versus 13 thought it was happening for the one that's that year. Fabula Nova Cristales. Absolutely. Like from fucking five years away. I don't know. No, the only way we could do that is go in the back where they make all the signs and said, are you working for the one five years from now?

Yes. Then I'll point to that. That's the way it works. It doesn't exist yet. Point at the concept artist that's that's thinking of the thinking of what the sign might look like. Point three point. So according to this article here, yeah, that so that that comment is. A joke.

Not to be taken seriously. And everyone ran with it as if it were real and led to the translator in question going, well, hold on, whoa. You know, this reminds me of that story where like some devs were working on some warhammer game. And then like, oh, no, it's taken a bit longer. Don't worry to make up for. We're going to work 90 hour weeks. And then stories were like, oh my god, like horrible warhammer.

This is the problem with toxic crunch culture. Shame. The developers and now the development. No, no. And then like we were joking. It was a joke. We're not going to work 90 hours. We're not working 90 hours.

OK, well, an actual rumor. It's not not that it's an actual big rumor. Actual big, big rumor. Retro studio is working on a Star Fox racing look at that fake piece of paper. That's some asshole Photoshopped or printed out his own. It's it's it's one of them fucking like like like phone cell phone photos for sure. But this article claims that rumors of a Star Fox racing game popped up over the weekend on Reddit and other places with something.

And none of this is confirmed. According to the post, I'm Nintendo. When has a Nintendo leak ever been real except for maybe like when they're putting up their E3 shit and then someone takes a photo of what's clearly a draped blanket over a logo file. Yeah, I don't remember any Nintendo stuff ever becoming real file this under process, probably bullshit. It's like I'm torn as to whether or not I actually don't believe this or I hate the idea so much that I refuse to believe it.

I don't particularly like this idea if it's real, which is not if this is if this is what replaces zero. Not only that, but it's like Nintendo is not going to go back to Star Fox after the fucking zero bombs. Oh, they'll go back. But not not soon. They won't go back in the same way. So to me, it's like they'd go back, but in a different way.

I'd rather you just fucking make a new zero. Yeah, some people, a lot of people would. But but like this is the exact same rumor. Like when retro was making metroid. Which was always the biggest stinkiest piece of bullshit. OK, what if it was Star Fox plus rabbits? OK, you keep keep going. Think of more.

And I'll say yes eventually. And then there's amiibos that you use to put on your your label box. You put the label box amiibo you build your own car. You put your amiibo inside of it. OK. And that's the pilot. And then you can put in the the the joy cons and you can steer with that. And then you can play the game.

Is Ravenblade any part of this? No, but Project Hammer is. All right. Yes. All right. Yes, yes. You brought it back. Good job.

That's very good. Good wooly. That was that was good. Because I fucking want Project Hammer so bad. That game looks like shit. Yeah, you look like shit. Oh, no. You've got a new guy.

Why are you so defensive about Project Hammer? It's the only one I'm not defensive about. If you've got an email, you can send it in. Yeah, you got an email. Where you send it in, man? To Super Best Project Hammer. No, no, no, no, no. Super Best Friendcast at gmail.com.

That's Super Best Friendcast at gmail.com. Fucking Project Hammer is so goddamn cool. All right, let's see. Let's take one from here. Dear reasons for my last anxiety attack. I'm not an anxious man, but in my 38 years, I've discovered one surefire trick to get my heart palpitating. And that's whenever I hear someone say a word I'm familiar

with in a different pronunciation. I start worrying every time I've used it if I've been an asshole or if something like an idiot and the anxiety spirals from there. I absolutely have had the same thing where I'm like, wait, wait, have I been saying that wrong for 20 years? So my question is, how do you say P-L-E-T-H-O-R-A? Plethora. Plethora.

Okay. Plethora. I have also pronounced it as plethora, depending on the context. They're both valid. I learned it as plethora. And I've since adapted plethora based on just hearing other people say that. I change the pronunciation of a lot of words, if I think both of them are correct, based on how I think it's going to sound in the sentence.

Yeah. I don't know which is correct, but I was taught plethora. Like if I want to rush through a sentence, I'll say a plethora of the objects of yadda, yadda, yadda, but if I'm like, oh man, there's so many, it's like a huge plethora of things. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Just enunciate it just a little bit more. Make fun of them for this, but my father-in-law, he likes movies a lot.

He likes specific types of movies. Now, if you're going to say specific types of movies, what would you categorize them under? They're in a genre. No, that's incorrect. Sorry. Genres? Genres? Genre.

Every time. There's no D in that word, father-in-law. Genre. So now we're going to watch Netflix like, what's genre D? We want to look at. And that, I never said anything, but like. There is a couple that just brute-forced their way into existing. There's definitely, like people do say pay homage to things.

I said homage for a while. Amage is a thing that people say as opposed to homage. Now I say homage. So there's a bunch, and we will say terrace until we die. Fuck off. The one that really, the one that really rustles my jimmies is when people. It's the pronunciation of jimmies. No, it's not, it's not mispronunciations.

It's misunderstanding of colloquialisms. So when people say, man, it's a doggy dog world out there. So the anxiety attack that this guy started, I start to get like just fucking violently upset like what? Fuck. I could care less for, I could care less is technically correct. But people don't use it that way. And the one, the one, the one that makes me like laugh slash freak my shit is for all

intensive purposes. Makes me want to die. Yeah. It's so bad. It's so fucking bad. Not mine per se, but I know, I know of a funny one where Oh, stubby reviews were talking about like, remember, we're an economics class and that fucking girl got up and said, well, would the same be true of beefed burgers?

And everyone turned around like, what the fuck is happening in the room right now? What is that? Beefed burgers. What is that? Why are they beefed? Oh, how about I would like some nice iced cream. The spitting image. Oh, I've heard that before.

Right. Yeah. And we all probably say a million of them all day. Oh, yeah. We also invent new ones that don't work. That don't work, yeah. We've done worse. We've done worse.

You can't get mad. You can't get angry, upset or mad because there's always worse. Oh, and I did pronounce Balogna correctly. That's how you're supposed to say it. Sincerely, someone who's content letting Canadians butcher French. Oh, that's how we do. Well, French Canadians don't butcher French. They speak a different French.

Yeah. If he means like Parisian French, then yeah, Quebec French butchers it all the time. Yeah. And Parisians trying to speak Quebec French, they don't know what to do. Oh, that's a different language. For all the shit that I want to throw at Parisians, like they're basically different languages at this point.

Like there's about as much overlap with that as like English and German. Yeah. But then you, everyone's while you hear like someone American saying a menage a traw or something like that. And you're like, yeah, okay, buddy. And you're like, sure, man, you try. You know, like page up until a couple of months ago to be able to say my last name correctly.

We have like languages and words and we learned them and then things happen. I only speak two languages. I wish I spoke more, but I'm too old and dumb now. I wish I spoke Spanish. Okay. Spanish is easy to pick up if you know French. Better French I will. Joseph Johnson asks, what sliding animation do you prefer

and which is the coolest? Okay. Sliding. What are our options here? Belly slide, baseball slide, full legs extended, power slide on bent knees, sliding with one knee bent and the other stretched out. That's the one. Forearm slide, like in the meet and meet the Spartans.

I don't know why he used that one. I think of Roberto from Project Justice. The one that's on the Banquetian special. Power slide. Absolutely. The Warframe uses that slide as well. The one leg out and the one bent. Or no, Sam does the power slide too, both knees.

That's why I'm using the one on the box art. Because that's the one he's doing on the box. Yeah. Okay. I'm down for both knees. One knee bent is good. Two knees bent. You need a certain sound to it.

But here's the thing. There's two versions of this because there's one missing here. Because there's one knee bent, one leg stretched out. But there's legs in front of you or legs behind you. Right. And both of those are my favorite because one of them is Mega Man X. And the other one is K-dash. So you either Mega Man-dash or Blackout.

And they're both rad as fuck. Yeah, you're right. Sliding like fucking K-dash is amazing. Just asymmetry between the legs is important. It's good. I misread this whole thing. I thought he's going to mean like Princess Peach's secret slide. And shit like that.

But I know. I thought. That Penguin shit was the worst. Not quite. Right. Shameful, display level maximum. Dear best friends, have you ever had a piece of media that you really like? Because of its presentation or context, you're embarrassed sharing it with others.

For example. Anime. My hero academia is what I love. But I'm trying to share it with my fairly wife who only watches dubs. I immediately started dying of cringe at how much I hated the dubbed version of Deku. It's not as good as the dub. Don't particularly care for the dub. I had to change the show to something else.

I'm going to say anime in general. Yeah, that's always embarrassing. A little depends who you're talking to, but love it. No, you should be embarrassed when you watch anime. It's part of the experience. No, I think it's like anime is based on the anime in question. But if you're like, okay, I know what's in here. I know the person I'm showing it to.

I shouldn't bother or I know they're going to be fine with it. But you can't do that with Godzilla movies. Every time I show anyone, they're asleep. They're on their phone. They're just doing it as a courtesy to me. And I just accept it and I sit there and I just watch it by myself. The particular of this question, this question doesn't necessarily apply to its example though, because it's someone that's already watching it.

It's just the difference between dubs and subs. All I know is that it reminds me of when I loaned my old boy DVD to a friend who watched it and handed it back and went, yeah, that was garbage. And I was like, oh, damn, shit. I didn't even see an old boy. Where was he? And I was like, you didn't find it awesome how everything progressed and then the things happened and whatnot.

And she was like, yeah, but they telegraphed it a mile away. It was super obvious what this movie was about and what was happening. I was like, what? And then it was only way later into the conversation. We were talking about how we were talking and then basically she popped it in and it automatically plays the dub and not the subtitle version and the English translated version of old boy on the DVD that's dubbed over fucking spoils the movie in its English lines really well in advance of anything happening.

So tell me what that actually is over because I'm very interested in what the hell that I don't even have specifics, okay, but the lines basically just really nobody knows what the hell the specifics are. Contact me on Twitter because I'm super interested in what the fuck that is and it's a bummer and just ruins it. And it's like it's what it auto plays when you pop it in, you know, and I was like, god damn it. I didn't I remember once I burned an anime DVD for a friend of mine and I gave it to her and it was growing login and because of the downloads I had gotten from various sources

and they were all different file types. When she popped it into her fucking video player machine or something, the only one that the fucking machine would read was episode eight. So that was the first two episodes. I remember this. I remember this. I remember this. Yeah.

And she's like, oh, get it. This show is really confusing and sad. They're like, I have the reverse example where I'm like, I really want to embarrass this person with or make them feel a certain way with some type of thing I consume. So a friend Rocky was like, who's this woman you're playing Mario Kart with? And I go here, here's a picture. He just writes, oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, no, I got to delete that.

Can't let my wife see. There you go. Yeah. Why is Matt sending you pornography? And he's like, no, that's mine. I mean, I just want to get him in trouble. Connor asks, what's the first game you played to 100% completion? Mid thing.

Super Metroid. 100% completion. Donkey Kong Country one. Probably Rocket Knight. Because it's one of those side scrollers that like you don't get to play the ending unless you play it on hard or normal, I think. And lastly, we'll take one. Midori asks, if Big Show was black, would he be Black Show or Big Black?

I think Big Black. No, he'd be Paul Black. Oh, that's good, too. But we're going for the Big Show. He'd be the Big Show, Paul Black. I disregard all of these answers and steamroll ahead with the Big Black Show. That's what I enjoy. That's fine, too.

That's not bad. Black Show is not bad. Big Black is all right. But you would make sure that your Black Show would have the fucking neck brace on that you love so much. And it would contrast. Well, you get a white neck brace and a big black one. It wasn't even my toy.

Shut up. It was in your room. That's yours. And then when your cousins destroyed your Hulk doll, you tried to take the neck brace and put it on Hulk and try it. It wasn't even a doll. You can get better with your neck brace. What made you say a doll?

Kevin, because he likes the doll. What made you say doll? Because action figures are dolls. Because he likes the disparage action figures. It's a toy. It's a doll. So you can admit that it's a doll. That's fine.

When I play Warframe, I don't say I'm dressing up my cool Warframe. I say I'm dressing up my dolls because they're dolls. At the end of the day, though, the packaging says action figure, not doll. If there's no fabric on it, then I'm not calling it a doll. If there's fabric on it, it's a doll. I'm not calling it a doll if there's no fabric. There's a shit ton of action figures with fabric on it. Now, I own dolls.

Yeah. But I own not dolls. Is Harlock a doll? Harlock is a doll. Skull is a doll. This distinction is totally pointless. They're all dolls. Play with your dollies.

I don't have a doll. First four figures are not dolls. Thousands of dolls. No, I have action figures and statues. You like to play with your dinosaur dolls. There's toys. Sure. There's certainly toys.

Dolls are toys, man. Dolls are dolls. Are you telling me that when you go to a toy store and buy a doll that that's not a toy? I'm saying that a doll is a category. A toy is a general term. That's like saying video games. A doll is absolutely a category of toy. An action figure is a category of toy.

A figure, a statue is not necessarily a type of toy. Yeah, statues are in a weird place. But for me, it's like it's got to have fabric. That's that's that's my line. That is a really specific thing. That's my line. That's my metric. What about what if it's digital fabric?

Like what if it's a robot in a game, but the robot has a coat made out of fabric on it? No, no. Because if you're spending time dressing it up, that's all. Because okay, I have Disney, right, which is a mecca that has fabric, but it's made of plastic. It's not actual fabric. So the plastic, but it's not because it's all hard plastic. It's whatever, man. No.

Play with the dolls. No. So Hulk, he has pants. Hulk doll. But they're plastic. They're hard plastic on them. That's not a doll. It's a factor figure.

It's the biggest doll ever. The word doll is nowhere on that box. Yeah. Hulk is the strongest doll there is. Strongest action figure. And that's how he got there. But yeah. You know, I think back, and I remember my brother made the distinction.

What's coming up? What's coming out? Between dolls. Damn it. No, hold on. I'm getting somewhere. I thought I could. Between dolls and action figures.

Because for whatever reason, my brother, when he was younger, had a compulsion in which he would chew the feet off of any doll in the house. That's weird. But not the action figures. Drove my sister crazy because she would cry because her Barbies could put their shoes on because they just had stumps. Yeah, they had little nubs. That's fucking weird.

It's fucking weird, man. I had a friend who would always take the weapons and arms off of his toys and like are from broken ones. And he'd tape them onto other ones to give them like long Dalsym limbs. That's so fucked up. And so it'd just be like, like imagine like a ninja turtle, but it had like long tape arms. Who is it? A friend?

Yeah. And had like long tape arms. But then at the end of it was like a wolverine claw. I don't like that. You should check up on Facebook or something. He's like a criminal. And like, and I remember when I went over to his house and I was going to play with toys, his toys with him, it was the weirdest thing.

And I remember finding a bunch of them and I was like, dude, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? And he was like, no, shut up, though. I really wish I had met you and we're all playing with toys and shit. Eddie real. But he was super embarrassed by it. Like, that's the thing is like, that's like a weird sex compulsive. He didn't think it was weird until I pointed it out and then he realized and then he got embarrassed

and he had to like figure out how to react to it. Well, you feel all right. You're just sounding raspy. I haven't been talking for a while. OK. That's good. It's fucking weird. I was like, when I was playing with this kid, he would always put his action figures,

bases and weird places that I didn't really want to go like in his parents room. Oh. I'm like, I don't feel like going to your parents room. That's not cool. We play in the basement or in the yard. Don't do that. Those are safe places. You don't want to let somebody else's parents room.

That's fucking creepy. What if I accidentally find their dildo gun? I don't want to see it. It's like, remember a fucking Toy Story 1 and the shitty kid that would fuck with his toys? Totally. That. It's just that. And I'm like, you're ruining, like, how am I supposed to?

What is this weird Raphael with a Wolverine claw? What character is that? How am I supposed to play with that? He's like ahead of the curve on getting O.C.'s out and shit. Yeah. You didn't have that. It was upsetting because I just wanted Raphael. Yeah.

I was trying to think about that. I just want my thing. What is this weird amalgam? This DC Marvel amalgam character. Your friend went on to help design cross-blast battle. Right. Yeah. Cross-blast battle.

There you go. O.C. do not steal. Cross-blast battle. There we go. What's coming up? What's coming out? A bunch of games come out. Are the games coming out this week?

Someone's I'm interested in. Give us a second. What do we got? What do you got? I'm pulling up a thing. What's coming out on the channel? What's coming out on the channel where there's more God of War and more Tokyo Mara sessions.

And I believe there are still some wayouts to go as. The last episode is going to be episode 10. Is it? Yeah. Okay. That's a good episode. So when a way out finishes, we're just going to kind of go ahead with God of War and Tokyo Mirage until Detroit comes out.

Because Detroit's coming soon. Yeah. It's not eight weeks away. In fact, it's like a week and a half away. That's around the corner. Yeah. No, in terms of game releases, Dragon's Crown Pro comes out. Fucking finally.

God damn. Something I'm interested in is Horizon Chase Turbo. The actual like if you want to play Top Gear again. On Top Gear one and Top Gear two play this. And then Omen's Sight is actually really, really cool. Omen's Sight is. That was at PAX East all over the place. Yes.

Those are the folks that made stories. Yes. And they're Montreal based. The game looks actually really cool. Like if I could describe it, it's like, okay, cool. Yeah. It's like almost like Sly Raccoon World, but more fantasy based. It's building off of what stories was and it takes place in the same universe.

And it's a straight up action game. But things are different. Yeah. Yeah. There's some interesting stuff going on with that. Yeah, that's what's going on. What about your streams? Yeah, yeah.

Hey, Matt. Hey, you got, you sent, I saw on your Twitter, you're like big fucking video coming. It's the Hotomi one, I assume. No, that'll be coming like maybe Wednesday. Tonight I'm putting out a cruising USA retrospective. Fuck. Which is the most me thing I can think of because I'm like,

this is this video is for me. Did you tilt it like Kaz did? The cart? No. Like I don't know what this is. Remember that old video where he tilts the fucking cart and he plays that fucking nightmare version of cruising? Oh, no, that was San Francisco Rush.

That was San Francisco Rush. I'm sorry. Yes, yes, but no, no, I didn't. That's my favorite. That's my favorite internet video. Yeah, no, it's a good one. But yeah, the man that told me plays will be out on Wednesday. And then after that will be William Matt playing 300 on the bugger.

Oh, my God. On the bug report. I fucking forgot. I had to delay that for a bit because that got stuck and limited ad health for a while. Matt beats Woolly into submission, chains him up and makes him play this game from his QA days. Do you want to play 300 days? Sure. Yeah, that's what happens.

That was the chain nothing. My burning blade. Changed you up with expectations of you would do a thing. And on Thursday night, I'll be streaming at Matthew McMossels. What are you going to be streaming? Maybe either the deadly premonition board game or Pokemon Snap. Okay. I know those are vastly different.

There's kind of a wild difference between those two. I got to see if one of them is is is is filmable. Audiences might might be very distinct. I'm probably going to stream some stuff this week. I don't have any set dates. It's very whimsical. I will have a whim and then I will do it and what I will do. I don't know.

But that's over at Angriest Pat. So I'll check the Twitter and I'll tell you I'll be like, Hey, I'm going to stream this game. You don't care about and then you can come and watch it maybe. Man, I'm going to buy Dragon's Crown. I'm probably not going to play it. I'm going to play it once. Yeah.

And then I'm going to go. Yeah, man. Ask combos. Yeah. What's their game? You're never going to get it. You're never going to never going to actually like do the proper. I beat the game the first time.

Did you? Yeah. Wow. I couldn't. I couldn't. I tried. I really wanted it. It is.

But it's the it's the vanilla ware. And when you beat the game the first time. But I beat Muramasa. Yeah. When you beat the game the first time. I never beat Otis. Do you know what actually unlocks? No.

The primary gameplay mode actually unlocks and it is a randomizer per screen. And it is go play this and then randomize all the levels in a big jumble and just play. And as you level up to beat and get the next difficulty. It kind of turns into like a beat them up Diablo. Honestly. It's really good.

You would have loved as an extra feature for Dragon's Crown Pro. And I know this is like I'd like an arcade mode. That is basically the same game just truncated and shorter. And that's it. Like as an extra. Just haven't work as like instead of having all the levels in a row haven't be different paths like Shadows of Mestara. Exactly.

Like I just I just Shadows of Mestara. In fact, in fact, like I think it's probably would have benefited from being random on from the get go problem. Right. With like set bosses. Yeah. Set bosses, but like a lot of randomized path like like gameplay to it would have made a huge difference.

And you don't have to worry about the whole like oh no, it's too short problem. Let's talk about Clumps about this. And he did a video on it of Odensphere Life Tresil. And you you're are you aware of all the changes that went into that? Yes. No, I bought it. I played it.

Yeah. But I'm looking at Willie because he didn't he got all the way to the end of the game. It's a way better version. It's I've heard radically different. I've heard like the McCann like the combat mechanics. I don't know the specifics, though. But like there's there's a lot of extra moves and things you can do. And there's a lot of shortcuts that they made to make the whole thing way less

grinding like it's a better game overall. Like you might actually want to go back and check that out. I do. I do. So one of the one of great tragedies in terms of vanilla games is like what got what got HD versions of Odensphere and what else? Dragon's Crown. Right.

The only two games done by Atlas. Muramasa will never get an HD thing because that was not by Atlas. I was done by Ignition. Oh, sorry. So you know who's holding the keys to the game? Shane Benton. How is it? Oh, great.

Thanks. He doesn't still work there. But I just want to say that to get you. But like that like that's never going to come out because I don't even think that publisher like exists anymore. Maybe not. That's a real bummer because when they did all the changes to Life Trusil and made it a way better game, Muramasa could have benefited.

You could make like four or five tweaks to Muramasa and that game would be great. Yeah. Like not just like good, but with flaws, but it could be great. God, a fucking vanilla war fighting game. Wait, what? No, when did the merge? That would be hard to read. Who put up a Muramasa game for Vita?

But the art is there. Yeah, but it would be you would not get the art because of vanilla war games. Their art stretchy stuff works really, really, really well when they have time to let everything breathe and stretch, having it be a fast fighting game. Like Dragon's Crown is this fast? No, no, no, it would be slow. It would be slow. Yeah.

I'm thinking of a slow fighting game that like the hits done on is huge on games that are from vanilla. Okay. Axis put out Muramasa on Vita, which had like some DLC characters, but like didn't change the main game that much. So I don't know what's the deal with Axis. I never understood. I thought Axis and Arxis were the like the same thing.

They're totally different. Sorry, not the same thing, but I thought it was like a partnership. Nope. No, they work together on things, but Axis and Arc System Works are two different companies. It's so weird. They're two different. I just meant like I thought it was like Sega Sammy.

Yeah, whatever. They publish a lot of visual novels and stuff like that. Yeah. Maybe they can do it. I've got some dumb shit. I might. Yeah. I might post it.

I might not. How dumb is that? It's pretty dumb. It's really dumb. Is the part, is the posting of it, whether it is like, what's holding that back? Is it you looking at it going like, man, this is dumb? Or is it like, you just don't feel like it? Like, are you embarrassed by its dumbness?

I am. Okay. So here you go. I don't understand the look I'm getting right now. It's weird. I did. It's like, I got some dumb shit. I might post it.

We'll see. Yeah. That's it. That's it. Am I going to think it's dumb? Oh, it's dumb. Oh, yeah. Is it dumber than the sending to the podcast?

It's real bad. It's real dumb. I don't know. I'm not even trying to tease it. I'm just telling you, it's fucking, I might not even post it. Is it, is it dumber than your Naruto run over the mountains? It's dumb. I don't understand the look I'm getting right now.

I don't understand the look I'm getting right now.