CSB330: Super Kong God Super Kong feat. Gene Park

What's up?

Good afternoon, gentlemen.

How's it going?

I haven't seen you guys since the race war.

Oh, yeah, again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that all worked out.

Yeah.

There's a couple of more of those coming.

Wait, hold on, hold on.

Jack is in frame, but where's the

booths?

Oh, yeah.

There you go.

There we go.

Five-way podcast begins.

Hold on.

Let me grab my child.

What do you got?

There.

That's just you, man.

I got my baby over here.

It's all good.

That's not the same.

That's not the same, Wooly.

I'm a little early

for the real thing.

All right.

Here we go.

Yeah.

All right.

So

happy to get you on

for a segment I cannot participate in.

Yeah, I got to ask you, how much of Death Stranding 2 of you put hands on?

Is it nothing?

No, no, no, nothing, nothing, nothing.

I've been way too much.

Well, then that works out.

Because, yeah, no, there's, I have way too much to say.

And like, a lot of it is, like, non-spoilery, but it's so like

mechanically specific that it would still just like go right over your head.

Yeah, and there's also there's a part, there's a place where partial context is actually worse than zero context.

You know, there's a time when you like, if you start a game for like one session and you're like, oh, I kind of know enough to know what you're getting at,

that tells me more than just being like, I have no idea.

So I'm absolutely.

I'm sitting over here.

I feel like we could probably talk around it too, but

that would be no fun.

I definitely don't want to fucking talk around, though.

That's true, yeah.

That would just be no fun for Wooly, too.

Like, I'd rather have Wooly just experience all that fresh exactly.

I'll tell you when I'll leave.

Exactly.

I'll mute my headphones, and then y'all can just give me a thumbs up when it's safe and when the coast is clear.

Hey, this makes up for the non-Death Stranding 1 spoiler cast that you guys never did, except for the five minutes where you guys talked about the.

Good game.

Yeah.

To be fair, I feel like our Death Stranding discussion was spread out over

eight or ten episodes.

Yeah, that's how you would usually do it, right?

We did very minor spoiler casts about, like, are you trucking?

Yeah, I'm trucking.

Yeah.

That's it, you know, so we did get there in eventualities.

But yeah, I mean, before we get to that, and what I assume is going to be some

tongueing it up.

Yeah.

Let's see what's going on with the weeks at the very least.

Well, first up, buddy, how you doing?

Oh, me?

Me?

Yeah, how you doing?

Willie, Willie, yeah.

Oh, yeah, no.

You're getting there.

Oh, it's getting there.

Oh, yeah.

No, no, no, no, no.

Make no mistake.

I have, you know, I know way more about the

crib and a stroller game than I ever did before.

You know,

the benefits of a light stroller that you can carry easily, but the lack of durability in the wheel, you know, the wheels could get a little.

Yeah, no,

it's it's that horrible triangle of like, do you want it to be really sturdy?

Well, it's going to be heavy.

Yep.

Do you want it to be sturdy, but kind of light?

Well, it's going to be really expensive.

And there's that, you know, portability.

And then another thing is, okay, can the bassinet attach straight in,

or do you have to switch to the car seat?

Or what can you do?

And the idea here for us is, let's switch it to the car seat, but then we want the bassinet to be able to come out so that you don't have to wake up baby to to

get her over to bed, you know?

Yeah.

And

I got a tip for you on that.

Yeah.

You want the shittiest, most unhelpful tip ever?

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Most of that depends on your baby.

Right.

And I don't mean, I just mean like their overall temperament.

Because like my guy, when he's asleep, fucking no problem.

No problem.

Getting him asleep?

Oh my God.

But once he's out, I'll fuck it.

Pick him up, hold him upside down.

down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can see.

And the thing is, this is a whole lot of fuss for six months.

You know what I mean?

Bro, that six months is...

It's intense.

It's really intense six months.

There's a very specific criteria for the first six, you know.

But like overall, I think

what I see here is like in terms of what's rated for Canada as well, there's a limitation.

There's stuff that the strollers Americans can have that Canada's like, ah, we don't know about those.

Yeah.

Right?

And we're like, damn, okay, what's going on?

And in the end, we found that, like, okay, the thing that suits all of our needs best for now until we actually hit reality and find out that it's not that at all is a older version of a travel stroller.

Yeah.

Because the older version of the travel stroller fits the car seat we have, allows us to pull out the main seat and put a bassinet in, and is lighter than the big heavy-duty ones.

So, those are what we're going to go with.

You know, getting the crib, looking at that,

and seeing if we can get the drawer together, and like, oh, this one's got a breathable mattress.

So, you don't have to worry about like, you know, the air getting cut off if baby is like facing down on it.

But wait a minute, shouldn't they all be breathable mattresses?

Shouldn't it be a universal feature?

Absolutely.

And it turns out it is, but some more than others, I guess.

And, you know, and then, oh, but if you want the breathability, then you can't really put the piss cover on it, you know.

So if there's a blowout, then, you know, you're going to get a stain on your breathable mattress, and that's going to take forever to dry, which means baby doesn't have an actual,

not yet.

No.

My mom called me up on the phone and be like, make sure you get crib bumpers.

I'm like, mom, those kill kids.

Yeah, okay.

So, no, none of those.

None of those.

Nothing, nothing, nothing to go in the crib.

You know what goes in the crib?

Nothing.

Literally nothing.

The baby goes in the crib.

Yep.

Other than nothing.

You know,

and so on.

But like, it's a lot of it's arriving at the same time.

And, you know, I'm assembling, I'm piecing together, I'm figuring it out.

And, you know, I mean, there's a whole other game to the, like, you know,

there's bottles, and then there's bottle, then there's the milk pumps.

Yeah.

And then there's, like, the side ones that you get so that you're not wasting any effort.

And the preserve sacks for freezing.

Oh, yeah.

And then the bottle sterilizer.

Oh, yes, which cannot be used with anything else.

It must be its own thing.

And then, so my guy's turning two this month.

And

I'm starting to understand the way that the first child and the second child are because, like, he'll drop his thing on the ground.

And if he was, like, a year old, he'd be like oh i gotta sterilize this i gotta

and now it's like ah fucking he'll eat some dirt it's good for him

no

you know not that good for the immune system exactly there's a whole lot of immune system

stuff there where because yeah i remember like even when i saw like when i saw like it's like oh kids are have their little teething keys and then like they'd like throw it on the ground and it's like well you're supposed to like wash that and not have them put that back in their mouth mouth.

But then some folks were like, ah, no, let them experience some dirt.

It'll strengthen the immune system.

People walk by their shoes are on the ground.

What are you talking about?

We were walking in the park the other day, and this kid literally kissed a trash can.

Oh, my God.

Oh.

And, like,

we're like,

put the, you know, he had like a napkin, put the napkin away, and he threw it away.

And we're like, yay.

And he goes,

on the trash can.

How old was the kid?

God.

How old was this kid?

Was it a tiny kid?

Small kid?

How old?

How old?

Small kid?

Yeah.

Turning two.

No, no, no.

The kid that kisses the trash can.

That's mine.

Oh!

That was

my child.

Oh, that was.

That was you.

Oh.

Oh, he went in.

I don't say some other child.

I thought you witnessed the child.

Oh, shit.

Oh, God.

Oh, damn.

Oh, no.

Like, there's, like, raccoon feet going on that thing.

Yeah, and you can't, and, like, here, like, what are your options?

Are you going to freak out and terrify them?

Right?

No, you just got to just hope.

Hope that was the cleanest part of the trash can.

And then he goes in for a kiss, and you're like, no, get away from me.

And you scar them forever.

No, no, no, you can't do that.

Gotta always be available.

Oh, no.

Hey.

You know, as someone who actually watched the Minecraft movie, you guys guys watch the Minecraft movie, did you?

I did not.

Okay.

If you watched a Minecraft movie during the whole the chicken jockey craze, I'm sure you heard of that meme when the when the jack black says chicken jockey and everyone starts throwing food and everything in there.

I went to

meltdowns, yeah.

Yeah, I was at the Washington, D.C.

theater, and I thought, like, oh, it's Washington, D.C.

These are like some prim and proper people, you know, probably some lobbyists or lawyer watching Minecraft the movie or whatever.

And no, no, I went to see with a bunch of kids there and they started throwing food and then they started eating the food off the floor.

Yeah.

These aren't like little baby children too.

These are like 19, 20 year olds or whatever too.

And they're like, chicken jockey, and then they just threw food all over the place.

Okay.

And started eating it.

So that's that's that's what we're raising right now.

Just trash children.

This dog likes to try and steal some of the child's food off his little baby plate.

But if the dog has gone

on the food and then I stop him, baby doesn't care.

So, oh, here it comes.

Oh, here's my soggy dog, Cheerios.

Like, there's nothing to be done.

Like, they don't care.

Yeah, it's

everything.

The real thought bomb is thinking about where dog's tongue has been and then connecting that to the object.

Yeah, well,

what are you going to do?

I know you and I specifically, Pat, are always thinking about George Carlin throwing that rock as a kid into the fucking New York River and

diving into the sewage and trying to avoid the goop and get back to shore and being like, we never got sick a day in our lives.

Immune system strong as hell.

Now, that's obviously not true.

That generation actually got sick and died constantly.

But the idea that he put that out there, you go, oh, wow, immune system's strong.

Okay.

Now, at what age are you okay

to have kid dive into the Hudson?

You know, like, that's the, like, you like, it's like, it's one thing for that story to be told, but then you're just like, okay, but if I can't see the number on that immune system percentage increase when this happens, get the fuck out of here.

That's insane.

I wish I could look and see it.

Here's the thing.

Here's where I'm at.

I try and keep him away from everything gross, but I physically can't.

Sometimes he gets like the kid just leans down and grabs a handful of dirt out of nowhere and just goes

on his body.

What am I supposed to fucking do?

Damn it.

Yeah, I know.

Like, there's a line.

There's a, there's a, not fine, it's a thick and pronounced line between just building up your immune system, building character, et cetera, and just, that's just gross, man.

Stop.

That's just gross.

Oh, man, don't do that.

Oh, come on.

Well, anyway.

Soon it'll happen to you.

Yeah, it'll happen.

I used to be with it once.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, Gene, Gene, Gene, talk to us, talk to us.

How have you been doing that?

Talk to us about your child-free life.

Yeah, I was about to say,

after all the lessons you guys learned about having a guest on the podcast, here you guys talk about the meta of a game that I don't play, which is raising a human well you're raising jack and jack's cute i am raising a child and the closest thing i've had to raising a child is uh all the visits i did to the fertility center of anaheim uh during college um how i got have i got for for yeah yeah for for beer money yeah yeah

okay gotcha

all right 50 50 a pop for twice a week max cap.

So that's $100 a week for a college kid who just go in there to just, you know, do his business.

A literal pop, that is.

Yeah, a literal pop, you know?

$100 a week.

I did that for about

half a year.

So that's probably at least probably like 100 kids running around in Southern California.

I'd like to do that because I'd always be worried that I'd be like my age and then run into a 15-year-old that looks like wildly, suspiciously like me.

Oh, yeah.

You have to have nightmares about it all the time.

Yeah, you have that

moment.

You know, you're just looking a little too hard, like, uh,

you know, yeah, nah.

Yeah, I could be the Genghis Khan of Southern California.

Who knows?

You'd know that by now, right?

Like, that would have, like,

surfaced somehow.

No, I signed papers so there was a known contact rule, so nobody would ever contact me.

Exactly.

All right.

Which I kind of regret, actually.

So, I don't know.

Maybe you don't.

Like, you're doing it now, kind of, but

maybe you would have regretted it in the other direction, depending,

yeah, yeah, yeah, when like dozens of them start showing up at my door, like, wow, like I have 34 kids, and 22 of them are psycho criminals.

Oh, goody, you don't know,

or one of them could be a doctor.

How many, but and then the question is: how many of them will be named after spacecraft?

Zero,

yeah,

yeah, anyway.

Um,

so no, I think uh uh uh the the game of

life and child-rearing aside,

you have a whimsical,

I guess, couple of things you've been up to.

What's on your plate?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, today, actually, I actually had some visitors at the Washington Post.

I just came back from the newsroom, and it was representatives from Sega themselves.

Actual, not the PR agency, just folks from Sega.

They flew over all the way from LA to stop by and swing by and show me a game that I I can't talk about, but isn't like a surprise or anything like that.

Like, it wasn't, it's not like, yeah, I wish it was Stranger Than Heaven, the, you know, the Project Century game,

you know, but it wasn't.

It's a game that, you know, that's being previewed right now.

Do they find Panzer Dragoon Saga in a drawer and bring it to PC?

Oh my gosh, I wish.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

You know, Netflix had a copy of that game sitting in somebody's desk.

Like,

they made a PC port,

and then I think Gamefly got absorbed by Netflix, and the Netflix had like a single copy of a PC port of Panzer Dragoon Saga, and then they just didn't fucking do anything with it.

I forgot that Gamefly was absorbed by Netflix, yeah.

But yeah,

showed some Sega friends around, you know,

and I actually played some games in the newsroom.

That was a lot of fun.

I haven't played a video game in the newsroom in quite a long time, so everybody got to watch me as like a little fishbowl playing a PS5.

It's that stressful.

A little bit.

It's a little weird.

People are just gawking and they're like, haha, look at Gene.

He's just playing video games.

And it's like, yeah, it's my job, dude.

Did you fucking work?

Yeah, well, I was like, look at the TV critic.

She's just watching TV all day.

She's a respected

artistic medium, Gene.

Yeah.

Okay.

She's literally just at her desk and like watching the latest episode of like whatever that you can't like watch because she's she's got all the

you know the the embargoed stuff going on, you know, so

but other than that though play the absolute hell out of Donkey Kong Bonanza.

I don't know if we can talk about that now, but I completed it completely.

A thousand bananas.

Oh, it's a thousand?

I thought it was seven, seven, seven.

Seven, seven, seven is the max that you can find in the game, but then to to to get like the quote-unquote 103% completion, it's it's that you can you can cap it off at a thousand because you can buy them remember

So I just bought all of them once they hit 777 and then also all 696 pieces of fossil bro

Okay, so I can get every single piece of outfit.

Yeah, okay, so what currency is what like what's the what's the star equivalent to for a level versus like all right

gene you want to handle this sure sure so bananas are basically the moons or the stars of this game 120 stars, right?

So you want to get, but there is no minimum star requirement in this game.

This game is completely objective-based.

You go to a level and they'll tell you, oh my god, you know, like the first level is like, hey, the water, the pipes are clogged, so why don't you unclog it?

And then that's how you progress.

I think ideally,

you can actually go through the whole game without collecting a single banana.

You can just ignore them all.

Wow.

Okay.

So there's multiple per stage.

So it's like one banana per objective?

Across the bottom.

There are multiple.

There are four bananas per stage, okay.

Yeah, I mean, like Pat said that he collected like 120 some in just like the first two levels or whatever.

Yeah, the first two levels amount to 118 banana, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gotcha, so but you can collect none of that.

I think I saw the world record speedrun, like like beat it in under like 90 minutes or something, you know.

So the game can be as long as you want.

I spent 80 hours on it, you know.

So there's bananas that are the moons, and then there are there is gold that you can get like literally millions of, and that's to like buy like items and

you can buy,

you can use that, you can fuse that with the banana chips to buy bananas if you need to.

So the bananas

aren't necessary for progression.

They're necessary for this progression through the skill tree.

Yeah.

And if you want every single level in the skill tree, you would need literally about 950 bananas.

Like I like I was like, oh, I need every single banana to hit every single mark on the skill tree.

And then so now it's all completed, too.

So you're going to have to have a skill tree.

You have to buy some to complete the full collection, then

yes, you have to buy some.

You have to buy some if you want to max out the skill tree.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Like that, they will not rely on 777.

Once they hit 777, I was like, wow, I still haven't upgraded

the superpowers.

It's like stuff like punch harder, or you're slap the ground to see where hidden bananas are in the environment gets bigger or

charging punches goes faster or that that surf turf where you slide around on like a piece of rubble like it disintegrates less fast like they're all fantastic like you buy a double jump okay you can do it on water you can buy the double jump with a chunk jump uh there's a spin jump too where you just rotate the stick around and just press jump and he'll go like Mario Galaxy

So yeah, the skill tree is great.

And then also you can do like health upgrades.

So like whenever people say like, oh, the game is like really, really easy, I'm like, how many health upgrades are you buying?

You know, because you can just, because if you buy all the health upgrades, you can just literally just tank through the game easily.

So, you know, I've been seeing this get compared to a lot of different games, of course.

And, you know, how you run through a Breath of the Wild feels different from how you run through a Mario Odyssey or a Kirby game.

But in this case, like, the vibes of like Hulk ultimate destructioning through an environment seem to be what it's about.

Like,

is that kind of the deal for like the whole D, the whole thing?

You're just like able to

the environment is kind of an like incidental as a challenge, and you can just like hit the objective in whichever way you want, under, over, through, left, right, etc.

Or is it kind of like you get locked in at certain points?

I want to hear Pat first.

Okay, so it depends.

Addendum in so, like, uh, Paige and I were playing through it, and uh, parts of like, so you have, you have two sections, right?

You have your free floating bananas that are like just all over the fucking stage, right?

Some of them are just straight up, like

20 feet underneath the dirt.

And you're finding them because you clap and you saw the radar ping, or there was like a suspicious outcropping that like a Korok would be in Breath of the Wild.

You're like, what if I dug right here?

Or maybe there was a little winding cave that ended in a flat wall that was behind it, right?

So just free floating bananas.

And those, man, yeah, no, just fuck the level.

Just fucking bust your way through it.

I can't reach that jump, Whatever.

What if I just busted through the wall on the opposite side that made the jump closer?

I don't know how to climb this.

What if I just jumped over and over and over and just punched upwards and made it like a diagonal slope upwards?

I can't figure out the puzzle to get to Cranky Kong who's hanging out in the sky.

What if I do the roll?

What is it?

It's the roll

double jump into the ground pound, into the punch, cancel, into the roll to get maximum airtime.

Okay, right.

Okay.

Shit like that.

But there's also a lot of tech

like very small little challenge levels that are like, you know, go, you fall through a portal and it's like, okay, this is the challenge level.

This is like a pure platforming level.

This is a pure smash the whole stage challenge, stuff like that.

Okay.

Yeah, there's a challenge where it's like there's just a building and they're like, destroy the building, like rampage style.

Just go just

climb the building

and destroy it in a limited amount of time.

Have either of you tried out the little brother mode or little sister mode?

Yes.

Okay.

I have tried it out with Paige.

Yeah.

And let me tell you,

Paige was the wrong person to try it out.

So

my darling wife, as everybody knows, has the ADHD.

So what we did was we bloodborned it for a little bit where I handed the, you know, we would go banana to banana.

and the

ex

the I'm gonna smash everything

and every single iota of dirt, and it will flash fancy particle effects, and I'll get golden coins out of them.

Made it so that Paige was like 15 minutes in like the first room of the game.

She's like, fuck, I'm gonna get every coin.

And it's like, okay.

So

we switched to Little Brother mode.

And Little Brother mode is like hilariously overtuned for somebody who likes to hit buttons because when Little Brother Mode hits the button, Pauline yells out like a onomatopoeia in like a brick or rock form.

But

she yells them as fast as you can press the button.

Okay.

If the person you're playing with is really excitable and having a great time and they just mash that button like crazy, the screen becomes so flooded with shit

that it becomes completely impossible to play and on a number of occasions 2p can fire those blocks and completely destroy the entire platform you're standing on that you're supposed to be on yeah okay okay

and there's no cooldown whatsoever no cooldown no you just rapid fire it's like a machine gun it's like a contra machine gun children don't need cooldown

I'm gonna fight like the the first big enemy, the crocoids or whatever they're called.

And Paige just like shot it to death in a massive explosion of particle effects.

And I didn't know how it worked for another hour because I didn't run into it at all.

Oh, man.

Yeah, and then Paige

was gone.

And then Pat was like, oh, my God,

I don't know how to fight these guys.

Mechanics.

Because my wife beat the mechanics for me with God mode.

Okay.

So not meant for your first run through.

No.

Okay.

And

you need to be a little more sparing.

It needs to be a communicative effort instead of each player playing by themselves.

Also, player two can control the camera.

Oh, shit.

Okay, okay.

So

if they want to troll on you,

they can just fuck on you.

I mean, Little Brother controller has always been the one that's not plugged in, but it sounds like here, like, Little Brother has dominated and has full control.

The second player is stronger than the player controlling Hong Kong.

Yeah, that's crazy.

That's completely nuts.

Damn.

Okay.

Yeah.

And the level design is interesting because there's a lot of breadcrumbing.

So, like, if you remember, like, in like even DKC1 or DKC2, like, you would, like,

you would see a single banana in like an area, and then you'd be like, what is that banana doing there?

And you would go collect it, and it turned out to be like a hidden barrel or something.

Like,

this game does that a lot.

It takes a lot of the Donkey Kong country design philosophy of like breadcrumbing things around to show you, like, hey, you might want to check out this area

because there might be a banana or something or the other here.

Yeah, so one of the examples is like there's like a stage that's like just a big open field.

It's literally just a big open field with like a couple outcroppings, and you hit select to see, well, how many bananas could it pop?

It has 43 fucking bananas.

Are you serious?

There's fucking nothing out here.

There's nothing.

And so you're like, okay, well, you know what?

I'll go into the big open field.

And oh, there's like, there's like a line of like gold that goes into this tiny cave.

And the cave leads to nothing but like a flat wall.

Okay, punch through the flat wall.

Banana behind there.

Right?

Like it's just like, it's just trying to...

The level of expertise on display in this game at pointing the player's head to where you want them to look is legitimately unbelievable.

It is like a total masterclass of we actually got the player to look where we fucking wanted them to look.

Well, that is the thing that Nintendo was the most experienced at, right?

Like, that is their specialty.

I would imagine, you know, just from,

again, all the previous mentioned examples of open world they've been doing, it's sick to see Donkey Kong finally get a, like, a new entry that's, like, a gameplay update of sorts, because ever since Country, of course, it's been kind of like...

kind of re like when they went back with things like tropical freeze and stuff it was like perfecting the formula you know but like with 64 aside as a as a an exception um, that we kind of, you know, it was there.

Um,

it exists.

This is like a actual, like, oh shit, new gameplay thing for Donkey Kong, which is cool.

Um, how's the Super Kong god Super Kong

stuff?

It's so good.

It's, it's

that is where a lot of the gameplay flexibility happens, and they show this off in the trailers too.

Uh, but uh, there is uh one

the one form that that makes you really jump high, and then you can quick transform into the ostrich form so you can get elevation, and then you can just fly over like so many different solutions, honestly.

Like the ostrich form can break the game, actually.

Yeah, no, there's a lot of like, even with like base level DK, there's a lot of like, ah, I'm gonna sequence break this.

I don't give a shit.

I don't, I'm fucking.

Oh, totally, yeah.

Ignore that.

Yeah, yeah.

Everyone's using this movement.

Like, everyone's doing that tech cancel jump

tech to just leap across like an incredible like distances for no reason.

What was the sequence of moves?

So I haven't gotten super good at it, but it's you roll off an edge because the rolling gives you a burst of speed and lets you jump a little bit after the edge.

Then you do a jump, then you hold the down punch button for the ground slam because the start of that pops you up just a little bit.

Then you punch

horizontally out of it because that makes a spin.

It gives you a little bit of vertical, and then you hit roll again

to push yourself forward.

Damn.

And this doesn't include the chunk jump that you can unlock for the double jump, too.

It doesn't include any of the other forms.

This is like literally XDK.

Yeah.

You'll love this, Wooly, because

the hit stop in this game is immaculate, too.

It's just like, clack, clack, clack.

And you were like the punch god, you know?

So hell yeah.

No, I love this, like, because I mean, you know, old Donka Kung Country would be like, yeah, like, you, you could run off the edge and get that little extra distance, but you're basically describing mirror's edge, speedrun, jump, kick, air tech, you know?

This game has, like, the best game feel of, like, ever, any Nintendo game I have ever played.

Like, jumping, punching, like, hitting things,

rolling, it is, it is, it is, every single thing feels perfect.

All the sound effects are perfectly placed.

Three punches to break up a banana gem so that you can hear that, oh, banana every single time is just fucking delicious.

Every time you hit the banana, it feels like you're slapping meat.

It feels so good every single time, you know.

Again, with that hit stop, which is so perfect.

The controls are so perfect.

Real quick, I think I'm probably biting somebody

from the community here.

I think I read this on a subreddit regarding Astrobot

but I can apply it here

maybe I don't know if like with Astrobot it and also with Donkey Kong Bonanza it feels like the controller is giving your hands a blowjob

wow okay like man this feels so goddamn good

it's it there's like so one of the things that like I what I do is I always turn vibration off in every game because

primarily when I play a game, the controller going,

like remove, it puts me back into my body, right?

Like I want to leave my body and exist in the interior space between my meat and the screen,

right?

And usually Rumble in games causes me to snap back into my disgusting meat sack, right?

Donkey Kong does not do that.

I keep that vibration on.

That game is actually like I'm leaving my meat sack more by keeping Rumble on.

Okay.

It's the only game I can think of.

That and Demon Souls remake.

Yeah.

Which is like super peak vibration.

PS5 special stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Was there like a

first or early boss that's like that culmination of what the design is trying to achieve?

You know, that thesis statement boss kind of thing?

Where you kind of have a really cool fight against like something that shows you like what this game is doing.

That you know what I mean?

I'm not having to fight a boss on my own yet.

Paige, kind of, kind of fucked those bosses.

Oh,

yeah, okay.

Those bosses do exist,

but Pat has not run into them yet.

But there are absolutely a couple of bosses where it's like, okay, this is going to test every single moveset you have, probably the different transformations, and you probably need to be

eventually you're going to need to be switching between God form, you know, Donkey Kong God form modes pretty quickly to be able to adapt to certain situations.

And there are levels like that too, where it's like this level is demanding you to think of your entire moveset

and applying it to that.

I'm about four levels in and the game is like immaculate.

The game is like a shining joy and like a total triumph.

But there's been something that's like been really strange to me and I've put our chat into emote only mode.

in preparation of me talking to Gene about this because prior to the game's release, like right prior, people were like, Be careful, fucking spoilers, careful fucking spoilers for Donkey Kong.

And I went on to social media and was like, Y'all are fucking stupid idiots.

What's the fucking spoiler?

He's gonna get a banana, and Ramby the Rhino is there.

But then as

time has gone on, I'm seeing more and more people go, oh, fuck, the YouTube thumbnails for Donkey Kong are full of fucking.

I can't believe this, and like getting really intense.

And so,

I don't want no details, I don't want no nothing, but like,

does this game actually have spoilers that fucking matter at all?

I was gonna ask about a plot-related question next.

Yeah, go ahead, sure.

Uh, I will say it in the clearest way possible.

Uh, this game has a more surprising plot than Kojima's Death Stranding.

Oh, my God!

Oh, my God!

I know what

Okay.

Yeah.

Pat knows exactly what that means, actually, because you're like, oh, I saw a lot of this coming or whatever.

Yeah, okay.

Because

it wasn't surprising, I guess.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

But there is a lot of surprise.

And like, you know, it's like, wow, I did not know Nintendo had this in them to write like that.

Like, this is like the.

The plot for me is Donkey Kong's like, me want banana.

But but what are the lore implications of young Pauline hanging out while Cranky Kong represents the first Donkey Kong?

Yeah, no, I also had that thought, genuinely.

And that should have been the Pauline that he knows from her age.

What are the implications?

Mega64 asks.

I'm glad I shut everybody up in the chat right now because they won't say anything either.

So, yeah.

Gene is smiling and nodding and not answering and that makes me think we are flying too close to the sun

let me just say there's a surprising amount of writing in this game well there's a lot of narrative design in donkey kong bonenza uh that i did not expect i just haven't seen it yet right because like on like the canyon stage right now i mean you might have seen it by now but i don't know

like i didn't think anything of it There's a lot of, there's a lot of storytelling in the environment, actually.

You might actually have to put on your Vadividia hat.

Are we walking into a room and are we going to meet the nameless Kong?

The forgotten one?

The forgotten son.

You know,

is there some like, it's like, ooh, yeah, there's, there's Diddy and Dixie and, you know, and then all of a sudden, like, the implication of Lanky.

Where did Lanky go?

What happened?

Lanky's dumb.

Or was Lanky just forgotten about at the bottom of the pit?

I'm just

feeling like the forgotten Lord of bananas or some shit.

Also, I gotta say, it's so inspired to

the way that they treat Banandium in this game.

It's like one of my favorite visual motifs I've ever seen in anything.

Because they're mining Banandium gems out of the dirt, but Banandium gems have like that sickly, disgusting, fluorescent yellow-green to them.

And when you get a Banandium chip, which is like a coin,

it's the fucking radiation symbol, but with bananas.

Nice.

And like he's just fucking eating.

Because bananas are rich in potassium, and potassium in high enough amounts are radioactive.

And so like Donkey Kong is just like just...

Just chowing down on banana-themed enriched uranium a thousand times in a row.

Okay, but but but Gene is implying that King K rule is going to try to stop you from linking the flame.

He might.

Right.

So

I wouldn't even be shocked.

I will say one thing.

The villain of this game gives off massive Zant energy.

Yeah.

Oh, Voikong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Voicong.

Oh, the CEO, right?

The company.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It feels like Zant.

That villain group did look kind of cool.

Yeah, there's Poppy Kong, right?

There's a girl one who I didn't think was that attractive at first, but after I've seen her, I'm like, and then there's Grumpy Kong, who I like.

I like Grumpy Kong a lot.

He kind of looks like your favorite character is red-haired and big.

He's like

a wolf.

Her name is Poppy Kong?

Poppy Kong, yeah.

Okay.

I heard anyone refer to her as Poppy Kong.

We'll be putting that in the search history.

Australian slang term of choice, Kong.

Ah, okay.

So then, can we get, is there going to be Candy Kong and Poppy Kong Kong staring each other down like Mai and Chun Lee?

You know?

Hmm.

Having a Tifa slap fight, right?

True.

That game's unbelievable.

That game's like absolutely incredible.

Like,

it is giving the first, like, you remember when you played about eight hours of Expedition 33 and you were like,

just one.

That's the second game I played this year that feels like that.

Okay.

It's the one that Nintendo put all the juice into.

They just concentrated the juice.

They did.

I really like Mario Odyssey a lot.

I think Mario Odyssey is fucking great.

And like, I say that this shit blows Mario Odyssey out of the water immediately.

Like it is a straight upgrade.

There is a small

tiny issue with it, and that is the

119

CAD price point

plus tax.

Yeah.

It is the single most expensive.

Let me check that.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Donkey Kong Bonanza Switch 2.

Well,

it is like the single most expensive game I've ever purchased without any

shit on it.

Is that different from $70

for the U.S.?

It's $70 here in the U.S.

Oh, sorry.

I'm thinking of $109

after tax.

Okay, by mistake.

Yeah, no, it's fucking ridiculous.

Well,

at that price,

PSA, do not paint your cartridge yellow in an attempt to recreate the Kong games of yesteryear,

lest you

break your Switch 2.

Yeah, it's a 99-plus tax Canadian game.

That's ridiculous.

That is crazy.

The fact that it's like the best game I've played since maybe Expedition 33

makes it fucking weird to talk about.

That's big words.

That's crazy.

Yeah, I will say

when I beat it,

it gave me the rare, rare, gave me the extremely rare feeling that I got after I beat the ancient feeling that I got after I beat Super Nintendo.

And I was like, holy shit.

Oh, no.

Interesting.

Interesting.

That was an incredible, perfect video game.

And wow, that was an incredible way to go out too.

Hey, Gene, let me ask you a question.

this is really important because you say there's like a thousand bananas right

so I was playing through the game and I got through about three and a half four levels ish in like one

and a half sittings and I have like 118 bananas which is like you know a full sixth of the pre-post game bananas and I'm like man I'm fucking flying through this shit oh wow this seems really short I'm going to assume bananas get further apart

the further I get into the game, yes?

It'll crawl.

It'll slow to a crawl once you get to like 300 or 400 for sure.

I would say that the first hundred is like two hours, and I couldn't believe it.

I would say those are like pity bananas for sure.

So

front-loaded.

Pity bananas.

There you go.

Feel good about it.

Yeah.

If I could just say, going back to that

fool who painted his cartridge yellow and bricked his fuck and killed, not bricked, but fucked up his Switch too.

I can understand the sentiment that he was getting at.

The desire for that cartridge to be yellow, I do get.

Perhaps sanding.

No.

No, that's stupid.

I get the idea that you're like, oh, the others were yellow.

I wanted this one to be yellow too.

But just

painting it and sticking it in there and rooting the thing is absolutely batshit.

You know,

maybe plus technology.

Bad.

That's the

yeah.

Um,

I mean, it, it, it would have been nice if Nintendo just made it yellow, certainly, but sure, you know, yeah,

I've never been talking shit about cartridges.

Well, yeah, there's that part too, right?

Or just make the digital,

you know, cartridge yellow when you the cartridge is like the size of my thumbnail, man.

Like, how like this isn't a collectible N64 looking like big carts either.

It's a little bit of

it.

It's like when that when the Luigi, super Mario, Super Luigi Wii came out, and you're like, oh, it's a green box, though.

You know, yeah, it's like getting a micro SD SD card with like a special branding on it, and it's like, you're never going to look at the branding.

It doesn't matter.

That's it.

Like, yeah, those Mario Bros

SD cards or whatever.

Yeah, the Mario Micro SD cards, which are the only ones available for the Express versions of the micro SD cards for Switch 2.

So I was like, oh, fuck it.

I'll buy it.

Yeah, so I have a Mario Star SD card in my Switch 2.

Who gives a shit?

It's like the size of

my pinky nail, and you jam it in.

You'll never see it again, ever.

I'll never see it again until I replace it with a terabyte or whatever.

Okay.

So the game is unbelievable.

Yeah, this is the one.

This is the Nintendo file.

It's the one.

He says it might be Game of the Year.

Now, granted, this is the third game I've talked to him about this year that he says might be Game of the Year.

It's been escalating.

Kirby Air Riders is going to close out the year and

it's going to make us throw up.

Have you seen

KCD2 yet?

Yeah.

Oh, KCD2.

I need to start KCD 1.

That's where I need to go.

KCD 1, Game of the Year, 2025.

There you go.

I guess just, well,

I mean, while we're hitting these notes, like,

how much did Expedition 33 rock Eugene?

I'm just curious.

Because that, for me, is a generational game.

I can't say that.

I loved it.

Okay.

But I gave it three and a half out of four stars.

And I've always kind of been there.

Okay.

So.

Okay.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For me, Elder Ring was a generational game.

Oh, I mean, it was.

Yeah.

I understand.

There's a lot of stuff about it that is very specifically tailored to me that I love, you know,

and folks I know as well.

But I hear you.

Everybody in the Xenoblade community

who's played it was like, oh, this is just Xenoblade with French people.

So that's where it comes from.

A lot of the switch.

I don't play Xenoblade.

I'm still waiting for them to announce the Switch 2.

They need to make some Switch 2 upgrades to get there.

Which I feel are coming.

That sounds reductive, I guess, but I wouldn't fully know.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Trust me, it's a lot of

story.

It's a lot of same story.

From the intro to the ending,

it's the same beats.

It's the same thing, basically.

From part one to part three.

From the intro, I was like, oh, this is Xenoblade.

What are we doing here?

How's that Xenoblade parry?

There is no Parry, but I like that.

The reason why I love Xenoblade so much, and the reason why I want Pat to play it so much is because

it is single-player FF-14.

I would love to play FF-14 offline, but I can't ever, so that's why I'll never play it.

So instead, I got Xenon played.

Okay, I hear you on that.

The gameplay bits of Expedition 33 are

as loudly a part of my

enamorment with this game.

That controller blowjob analogy that I made earlier, it's the same thing when I did do like a group parry like in Expedition 33.

Like when everyone goes like boom at the same time, the Expedition 33.

It's like, oh,

you're hitting the spot right there.

Thank you.

Okay.

So

if you don't mind jumping around a little bit, because I mean, I imagine we've got quite a few things, and then y'all are going to get to a Death Strending 2 spoiler cast a little bit later.

Did either of you see Superman?

I did not see Superman.

I did?

Gene?

Okay.

I have.

Yeah.

I would like to jump in.

I saw Superman.

Have you seen Superman, Gene?

He said, yeah.

I have.

All right.

Fucking.

Okay.

Give me a thumbs up.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

Or text message.

All right.

Superman spoiler cast, I guess.

Yeah, here we go.

Wait, let me get ready.

Let me get the.

Oh, geez, I didn't have a pop-up ready for that, but

sure.

Yes.

superman fucking rules dude i love the what a great movie what a what a what a what a what a

um

i okay let me let me just get a quick let me just get a here uh superman

spoiler cast

is on

um

I really,

really enjoyed what James Gunn was doing coming back to this.

The idea of him picking that to work on, it's like, okay, what are you cooking?

You must have some ideas.

There's a reason why you're picking that.

And

yeah, I thought it was phenomenal.

In particular,

the part that

I think it was kind of announced earlier on or so.

And then

you got to, you just feel here is it is just, it is sincere,

right?

It's whimsical, and it has that, that core idea in the line essentially.

What if empathy is punk rock?

What if caring about people

could be considered punk rock, you know?

Oh, God, I love that so much.

It was just, it just really, like,

it stuck that part of it in particular because he's kind of a goober, you know, he's kind of this goofy dude, but you're like, yeah, that's, that's a nice guy, and he's, he's someone you'd want to hang out with.

He's a guy that'll call your his opponent chum.

Like, hey, chum, and it's like, that's perfect.

Yes, yes, and you know, the feeling of him being like out of his time or so, I mean, the overall, like, it's like, I like that it kind of says, nah, fuck the cynical, right?

Fuck the cynical.

Yeah, that's a part of it.

And yes, the world sucks, but like, there is a, there is a part of it here where I'm like, you know,

when Lois Lane is pegging him down, taking him down a peg for his like band choices, and you're like, oh, oh, you're into like pop punk and shit.

Like, you're into some radio garbage.

What?

That's not punk rock.

What the fuck, you know?

And you're like, no, that's not, right?

But you know what is?

Like, actually being somebody that's like, yo, fuck ethnic cleansing.

Like, fuck authoritarian regimes.

And whatever the political climate says, you're like, yeah, people were going to die.

I don't give a shit, right?

Being anti-authoritarian in that way, that is definitionally what punk rock is.

I find that, I find that to be really cool, and I love that part of the movie.

I love that it like carries that pretty loudly.

The

most fucking petty,

the most petty Luther has ever been.

Right?

Like

he is Bezosing it up.

And he knows how much of a little bitch he is.

He's like, I know that envy is controlling all my actions.

I don't give a shit.

I love that you even have him like crying, you know, in his failure as well.

Like,

it was an awesome, just like, what?

Nicholas Holt was amazing.

Yeah.

I wasn't even on the like, oh, he's, he's not that petty until I saw him invent a fucking pocket dimension of monkeys that is talking shit about Superman.

I was just like, okay, well,

I don't know how much more petty you can get than that.

That's crazy.

As an internet person as well, that was an extra, like, fun thing of like, oh, yeah, there's a bunch of monkeys here talking shit about you, creating hashtags, you know?

I

how about the how about the part where crypto is a bad dog for the whole fucking movie?

Right,

crypto's a bad dog, you know?

And then, of course, Supergirl, you meet disaster ass Kesha Supergirl fucking drunkenly stumbling in, and you go, of course he's a bad dog.

That's why.

You know?

Just great.

I love the part where,

you know, James Gunn is going to grab Mr.

Terrific, the obscure character, and make him a beloved one.

You know?

He had the best action sequence.

Like, that was like, I have like two minor gripes about the movie.

Like, one is that I think it could use

two or three jokes less.

Like, that bothers me about James Gunn is that, like, he can never really let an emotional or dramatic moment breathe, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know what you mean.

Yeah, yeah.

But, like, I didn't mind the humor in this, in this movie at all.

I thought, like, most of it was pretty well placed.

It's just like, maybe, like, one or two or three jokes.

So, like, you could have just edited that back.

And then the other thing is, like, the action sequence, because I'm kind of a Snyder bro.

I like the Snyder movies.

I like them a lot.

Yeah.

I love them for the action sequences.

Yes.

Mostly.

You like live action Dragon Ball, right?

And I understand.

I love.

I need live action Dragon Ball.

I love that about Man of Steel, right?

No, make no mistake, that Kryptonian girl, like side shift flash stepping, is the hottest.

Specifically her.

That rules.

Exactly.

No, no, no.

I'm not going to pretend that didn't rule.

That was cool.

The IHOP fight.

The I-HOP fight was sick.

But I can't get over how garbage everything else fucking felt.

Everything else is terrible.

And I can't get over fucking this, this.

Put your hand up, right?

Compare that Paw Kent to this Paw Kent, right?

Oh, my God.

The blubbering, just, he had a couple of lines, but he was full of character.

And Lois gets to establish, like, oh, I get who this dude is from just meeting those parents staring into the phone talking hey there clark

you know it was so charming and fun that the way they set him back on his like childhood bed like and all the like the bedroom is like still like there and it's like like all of that like i wish i had more of that yes but that that already communicated so much that it like moved me very like very very well you know it was perfect yeah and and what i liked too is that it moved it felt like it was moving lois too because initially with lois when she was like, like, having that interview with him and like coming down on him for the Jarhan pour stuff, right?

And I was like, is Lois being the enlightened centrist?

You know what I mean?

Like, is she, I was like, you're coming down on him for some of this stuff.

And I understand that you're asking the questions and kind of being like, you know,

she's a journalist.

Of course, she has to.

As someone who has to be centrists, I get it.

And that's the thing is, I understand.

And then it's like, okay, through actually kind of meeting and getting to see those, get the answers to those questions close up.

She's like, okay, yeah, I see what this is about, right?

This is just really who he is.

But I was initially like,

all right, Lois, let's see where you're going with this.

But no, that is the job.

I do understand.

Also, fucking Guy Gardner.

What a perfect job.

Nathan Phillion.

Perfect James Gunn character, honestly.

James Gunn is really good at making snarky assholes.

And it's like, of course, you have to have Guy Gardner as Green Lighter in your movie.

That's perfect, though.

Do that.

He's led to things like Guy Gardner is a

good guy.

He's just an asshole.

You know, you need to get that like, all right, he's here to save the day.

Fine, but fuck, I hate that he's around.

Like, he gets that energy perfectly with the fucking haircut and everything.

You know,

keeping his guts together with

his powers.

I mean, yeah, he's great.

And it's also nice whenever Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudic are in the same

project together because they're like, ah, it's that little reunion, you know?

Yeah, that's it.

You know, that's all that I I just, I thought it was fantastic.

And I just love that the people of Metropolis got so used to the safety of Superman being that good that they're not even worried about anything.

You know, he's saving squirrels out there.

Yeah.

Incredible.

Yeah, it's like me living in DC and there's just like protests with explosions outside.

I'm just like, that's just another day in DC.

That's right.

Yeah, right, right.

Sure.

You know, so just shout outs to James Gunn for that.

I mean, and yeah, just kind of bringing a sense of like, yeah, you can just be, you can just be a good person.

You can just be, you know,

hopeful.

You can have whimsy.

It doesn't have to be edgy.

Being a good person isn't lame.

And, you know, and just fully embracing that message, like, having hope.

I really liked that.

Also, Superman had a really good feat.

He was able to blow himself away from the void.

True.

True.

Which is like, yeah.

That's massive.

And I've heard people that are like, nah, this sucks.

It's corny.

It's lame.

He gets his ass beat a bunch.

And it's like, nah, man.

Like, the person person who said his powers are the least important the least interesting thing about him was right on point you know like like fuck all that i get if you grew up with christopher reeve and you just are like i want more like no no no no no no no this is this is how you get this interesting i fucking yeah when he's when he said that squirrel i can't believe like like the test uh the test this this is this is where like you know that market testing and test audiences like fucking suck sometimes you know because like he he tested that squirrel scene uh to test audiences and nobody liked it so they took it out and james gunner was was like, no, I want the scroll scene back in.

And it's like, no, that's perfect.

That's the perfect scene.

Fuck that shit.

Yeah, absolutely.

Market testing shit

to homogenous bullcrap is nonsense, you know?

And I'm so glad that he was brave enough to keep that in because that was like one of the best scenes.

Like him just going.

It was refreshing.

I liked that it wasn't a direct counter to this.

It's not like the return or rise of the skywalker to the last Jedi.

It's not like some weird overcorrection of something

in response to like the last movie or whatever, right?

It's just like, no, we're going to do our own thing.

And yet, Superman is going to go out of his way to save

these buildings from falling on people and saving all these people.

And it's not like a direct response to

Snyderverse.

It's just, that's just what this version is.

The complete opposition of like city destruction, 100%.

And look, Henry Cavill was a great casting choice, but I love what they did here.

And like, again, you want to hang out with this dude, you know?

there and and and and there's just that element to of it where you're just like oh we're having we're we're getting ballsy today because we're talking shit to Shmetan Yahoo about Shmizreel

you know you're like oh word oh we're going in then

let's go in

kind of cool actually

I saw the discourse about that I was like it can't be that like it can't be like that and I saw the movie I was like

it's a little hard to not read it that way.

I get it.

Boravia and Jarhanpur are from the original comics.

In 1939, Boravia was introduced, and in 2002, in JLA, we learned about Jarhanpur.

These are, you know, originals countries.

So, anyway, Hawk Girl also was great, and she didn't get that much, but I also feel like James Gunn was like, y'all know her already.

You know, we don't have to establish too much about her.

You already know who she is.

Let's let's go.

It's super strong.

The ones you did.

The only thing that fucked me about her, about her, and it's nothing to do with the movie or no issue at all.

It's just that she's Dina from The Last of Us.

And I just watched Goddamn The Last of Us and now I see her.

I'm just like, Dina, what are you doing here?

That's literally it for me.

Last bit I wanted to mention that was, I think, just kind of represents how much he kind of got what resonates with this character is there's no fucking kryptonite except for a kryptonite problem that must be solved with empathy.

Right?

You want to talk about fully understanding what makes this character interesting and what works here and his struggle.

There is living kryptonite that you have to fucking solve with feelings and being a good person.

That's how you get past the obstacle.

Like, I love that part of it.

The kryptonite is alive this time.

You have to talk to the, you have to talk to the source of this pain.

It's not.

You have to talk down.

It's not.

I don't even think about it that way.

That's cool.

Yeah.

I love that.

And that's his power.

That's what makes him good.

That's the core of why he cares, you know?

The twist of him basically being an invincible type setup and the

Joel Ell and all that is kind of wild.

But I think it makes for a more interesting thing here.

It's fine.

And this being a thing where he's like, yeah, no, what makes him matter is what he learned from his parents here.

And then, of course, that ending with like seeing the visual of them, you know, and all that as the chosen parents.

It makes that type of scene with the Kryptonite matter more.

That's his power.

That's what his strength is.

Not his his ability to be fucking Goku, you know?

All right.

Yeah,

and that's why

he wasn't Goku.

He's like, he's not the Prince of Saiyans, which is what

the Saiyans were supposed to do.

But yeah.

Yeah.

I saw people complaining about the ending shot, and I'm like, nah, man, it's just him and the dog just chilling.

Fuck off.

That was perfect.

That was perfect.

Him and Crypto are chilling, you know?

Beautiful mood.

All right.

Just listening to music, just watching some old vids, you know?

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Spoiler cast over.

The system works.

There you go.

You guys seem to really enjoy talking about Superman.

It was a really good movie.

Oh, I'm glad.

Yeah, that's it.

Highly recommend.

I love it.

I want to see it again.

I want to see it again.

Yeah.

Oh, hey, let me ask you guys: is Lex Luthor a big hater in that movie?

Oh,

all right.

That's all I needed.

That's all I needed.

I got it.

I got what I needed.

Oh, boy.

You love that hater energy.

That's how you got involved in the Kendrick Drake beef.

You got drawn to the hatred, you know, like a moth tool.

Yeah,

Drake level petty.

Drake level petty.

Beyond.

Okay.

Yeah, imagine if Drake was a Superman villain.

It would just be like.

He was just a rap at Hawk Girl or whatever, like that instead.

I feel like the joke here would have made...

It would have just flowed a a little bit better if he was a Batman villain and because then he would just be the diddler.

Sure, yep, correct.

There you go.

That's true.

There you go.

With a big owl costume, you know?

Oh, yeah.

That's right.

The owl court.

Yeah.

At the court of Howl.

Oh, no.

Way to ruin.

Way to ruin.

Yeah, anyways.

All right.

It's so funny when I see your channel and I see the not like us Kendik Kendik Drake brief is like one of your top most viewed like videos I mean podcasts ever the hate the hate is too juicy you know my favorite music journalism podcasts basically

so real quick I wanted to mention two other things

that were kind of that I watched

There was a Takashi Mikke movie that came out that is at Fantasia Film Fest has been happening in Montreal.

It's where they do the

whatchamacallit whatchamacallit uh import films every year and got a couple of those uh including the new Gendi Tartakovsky movie, which is like this wild

about a dog that's like getting

what the dude it's crazy and i didn't know i just bought the tickets because i saw the name gendi and i was like yep i'm in and then i saw

i didn't see it yet it's it's i'm gonna watch it later uh in august but like i bought tickets and then i saw the trailer later going what the is happening Starship.

Idris Elba's in it.

It's called Fixed.

And all I can tell is, because it's just raunchy, animal, fucking R-rated shit, it seems to be, like, all I can tell is it seems to be like he wanted to make a John Kay slash Ralph Bakshi sort of send-up, you know?

A Fritz the Cat style animation

thing.

That's what I'm guessing he was going for.

But apparently he wanted to make this movie for 11 years.

I have no fucking idea what's going on.

I gotta tell you, man, there's this really awesome thing that happens when you like respect somebody.

This is, this is like, and like they put out something or they be like, hey, look, I got my new thing coming out.

And you're like, this looks like a pile of fucking shit.

And because you respect them, you're like, I think they're trying something really

interesting here.

Because Gendi Tartakovsky earned respect with Primal, with Clone Wars, with Dexter's Lab.

I mean, Samurai Jack.

Like, he's earned,

he's earned the benefit of the doubt.

But then you see a dog asshole puckering at you in fucking full 4K.

And it's really well animated.

And you go, oh!

15 years to make this my magnum opus.

You know?

I don't know, man.

We'll find out.

But the fact that I bought those tickets sight unseen and just said, okay, I trust the name, and then saw the trailer,

that name has earned.

It's earned some benefit of the doubt.

So we'll see what happens, you know, getting that star-started cast on it.

But that's not even what I was going to talk about.

There was a Takashi Mika movie called Blazing Fists, and it's kind of a goofy, like it's essentially Takashi Mika's River City ransom.

Street delinquent kids coming out of juvie, and they have family and gang problems, and they can only be solved with fists.

And they gotta, you know, they gotta get over those, and they gotta make their way to the big MMA tournament breaking down, you know.

And you've got characters that look like kind of the scrappy little main character one.

You got the tough, stoic, sharp-eyebrowed one.

You know, the gangster with the shaved head.

All these little like GTO prequel dudes, you know, hanging out and being goofy.

And like the narrative is kind of all over the place, but it's fun to watch them fight and be these pretty boy MMA dudes.

And then then the villain of the movie walks in, and it's Gact.

Really?

And old man Gact

walks in

and he is not in shape for this movie.

He is just

old man body

and he is not Araki.

He is, you can see the makeup crust on his face and he's walking in being the main villain, shirt off, ready to fight.

And you're like,

What the fuck are you doing, old man?

You're gonna die.

Um, Blazing Fists, aka Blue Fight with Gact

as the leader of the Krishna gang.

And

I gotta see this.

It's so goofy.

It's wild, you know?

You have a like hundred-man battle going on with the main characters fighting their way through a sifu level, and Gact is on the couch, leaning back, watching, waiting for his time to enter.

Was he playing Mr.

X?

Yes, yes, you know.

Um, it's it's pure goofy shit, but like, if that if any of that sounds appealing to you, go watch it for some fun.

Um, and that sounds amazing.

I want to see star of a beloved action game, Bujing Gai, the Forgotten City, as

Bujing Gai.

Oh my god, he looks terrible.

Um, and also he looks terrible.

Oh, he is, he is not a timeless vampire, he is aging and doesn't give a fuck.

Um, even in this short clip I'm watching, he is not putting out the energy that this character appears to be supposed to be putting out.

This needs to be a young, dangerous, threatening, like, buff dude.

And, like, he's like, nah, me, though, in the same way that he me thoed his way into FF7, a fucking Zeta Gundam, and uh, Fist of the North Star.

Me Me, though, now.

Anyway, go see that.

Go watch, you know, Blazing Fist says your Japanese never back down, you know.

And also, because it's a Takashi Mika movie,

he makes sure to emphasize no fewer than three to four times that, hey, man, if you get arrested and you're awaiting conviction, don't worry about it.

You're as good as cooked because the conviction rate in Japan is 99%.

You know, that was the core message of the Phoenix Wright movie, of course, and Phoenix Wright, too.

Well, I mean, that's the core message of Phoenix Wright.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But Mikkei has taken that as up as a thing, and he's like, yep, it's pretty fucked up how being accused of a crime in Japan means you did the crime.

You know?

That's a part of it there, too.

And then one last little one, very, very quick, but have you seen or heard of Pokémon Concierge?

That's the one with the psyduck, right?

Yeah.

It's a live.

It's a stop-motion short that was on Netflix, came out about two years ago, and it's really cool.

It's great.

It's just a short mini-series about this stressed-out girl in her 30s who's, you know, got dumped and

her brain is just flowing with work and reports and bullshit, getting a job on an island where Pokemon are there, and it's a little resort, and you just get to enjoy the vibes of a, you Pokemon resort with beautiful stop-motion animation.

What a great boss.

Why does the show love Psyduck?

Psyduck is really cool.

Psychuck is Psyduck.

I love Psyduck.

Oh, Psyduck is there.

And to the point where I'm like, anytime they try to move over to Pikachu, I'm like, get the fuck out of here, brat.

More of that duck bill.

I want to talk to my duck that suffers from permanent migraines, dog.

Yeah,

the big Hollywood movie version had a lot of Psyduck duck in it, and I was like, now this movie is good.

Let's go.

So, yeah, I heard it's getting a season two.

So, I went, yeah, yesterday they announced season two, and that's how I even heard about it.

So, I was like, oh, what is this?

Ooh, this looks great.

And it's just a short, you know, short thing, but it's a fun vibe.

And

it also, like, it has like, so from what I've seen so far, there appears to be like no fighting in it, but it still understands the world of Pokemon and conveys that really well with just slice-of-life Pokemon hangouts, you know?

And yeah, like the stressed out girl is like, you know, filing reports to explain what she did on her vacation job.

And it's like, nah, nah, nah, nah, relax, chill out.

You know, just de-stress.

It's wholesome.

And if that sounds like a good time, go check it out.

Yeah, it's like really short episodes.

And I kind of, it kind of, I don't know if it quietly came out on Netflix a couple years ago or not, but like I missed it entirely.

Really liking it.

I'll check it out.

Yeah.

Also, Gak looks looks pretty cool.

I think he looks pretty cool.

You know what he looks like?

Yeah.

He looks like he's about to produce the next mainline Final Fantasy game.

He looks like he's about to make a Final Fantasy game.

He looks like a Tetsuya Nomura or a Yoshi P.

He's posing and carrying the shirtless energy of a final boss, but he does not look like it at all.

It's wild how much confidence and makeup is projecting.

Anyway, but

what is gacked if not for that, though?

Anyways, anyways.

That's pretty much all I was going to bring up

for my stuff.

So,

hey, that's Woolly versus I am streaming fucking nothing.

Nothing.

Leave me alone.

I got baby shit to get ready for.

He's got baby stuff going on.

Let Let me get the fuck out of here.

Too much baby stuff yet, but soon.

It's coming.

It's coming.

But I put the little video out.

I let people know.

I eagerly, every day, await,

every podcast day, I await a text message that just says no podcast.

There will be a range of time.

No details, no messages back.

There will be a range of time in which, at any given moment, I'm recording here and I might be gotta go.

And

that's it.

You know?

So, yeah, stay tuned.

No podcast today, I'm busy.

All right, um,

Baton Pass.

Yeah,

all right, so

hey, Gene, my friend Gene, you played the Death Stranding 2.

I sure did.

I would like to talk to you about Death Stranding 2 about stuff that Woolly can absolutely be here for.

Okay.

Which is the game's overall

mechanical flow.

I think that this game,

the way it paces its challenges and the way that it paces its level structure, and the way that it paces your upgrade structure, to be a significant step down from the first game.

Would you agree with that?

As one of the crazy people that you mentioned before, that played Death Straining 1 right after finishing Death Training 2, And I went back to the PC part of the base game.

I didn't even play Director's Cut.

Not even the Director's Cut, because I already played the Director's Cut.

But I wanted to start DS1 and not like...

Because in Death Training 1, you can't make multiple saves.

It'll eventually filter out.

And that drives me crazy.

Thankfully, in Death Training 2, one of the many mechanical upgrades is that you can have multiple save files.

So I was like, but I never played the base version of DS1, but I bought it.

And you can't buy it it on Steam anymore.

It's delisted.

So I went back to that one.

And I was like, I like the progression better here still.

It is more natural.

It is kind of more rewarding by the time you get to the end of it.

And this is an old game that I already know well and love.

And I was like,

I see it, though.

I do see that.

So, like, this is so perfect because, like, you, I was talking to Gene in between, like, sessions that I was streaming it.

And I kept hitting him like, am I crazy?

Am I remembering this wrong?

I don't remember trucks being able to go like up a 50 degree slope

I don't remember oh

oh like

it's

the V the vehicles

unfortunately you do not have the requisite video game knowledge to to intrinsically understand the phrase that I'm about to say but you can skyrim your way up mountains in vehicles in this game you can like diagonally pose your truck or trike and just like get enough traction to just wiggle your ass up the most ridiculous of incline with a vehicle.

Okay, okay.

Because the controls are better, though.

The controls are way better for driving.

The controls for driving are much better.

As a result, it allows you to take a truck to places to like

fucking ruin the fucking game's progression.

Just fuck it up.

But is it ruining it or is it kind of meant to be like, you fucking got there, you did it.

Why not?

You know?

So,

the game follows a really similar structure in terms of progression over like environments.

So, it's like flat plains, rocky plains, mountain,

rocky,

watery plains, river, big ice mountain.

It's more or less like the same thing.

Mud.

The ice mountain, which is like your final navigatable challenge, I took two trips on foot, and the rest I just drove just

straight over hills and mountains and just ignored it.

And you're talking about not road building, right?

Like off terrain.

Yeah.

No, just like right over the edge.

Yeah.

Here's the difference in that when I when I was I was driving my truck through the snow mountain, right?

But the truck would die in the middle of a snowstorm while I'm stuck on a mountain.

So I would have to leave and then like it all of a sudden we went back to DS1.

But I think that might have been a consequence of the fact that I was playing it during a review period, and nobody was placing batteries in the area yet.

And then,

nobody had placed zip lights.

Like, I saw your playthrough.

Yeah, and then, like, when you and you just had a fucking zipline network already there, so Jim

and Ludi, friend of the show, Ludvik Vorcell, were in my stream quite a bit.

And one of the things that they both noticed, so one of the upgrades you can get, like, you have a skill tree now.

Games have love skill trees now.

But one of the skills that you can get is more

uh bridges and zip lines from other people will show up in your game

and there's two levels to that okay okay so i don't know if you remember but in the first death stranding uh when you brought in other people's zip lines into your game it would never and i mean never bring in two connected zip lines no it would bring in like zip line from joey And then nothing and then zip line from Timmy.

And often they didn't really line up correctly.

So you had to like place not just the interim one, but you had to place two interim ones.

I had people, I had like zip line networks of three lines in a row perfectly placed in the mountain as soon as I connected the network.

Wow.

I do think they overtuned it.

So what I did is that I had like a mission where I had to go from like the bottom of the mountain to the absolute top.

And

on the way there,

I pre-placed zip lines at like the tips of the network, right?

Just the absolute tips.

And then, once I ran out of network, I couldn't do that.

And then I connected the network, and then

somebody else's zip lines were close enough to the ones that I pre-placed that the whole thing was just completely finished.

One trip in.

Like, I didn't even have to go back out and reconnect them and move them around.

Like, that stretch was just done.

It was done.

It was done.

And

I restarted DS2 and I got back to that point super fast just to see whether the zipline network, well, not just to see.

I enjoyed the game too, but you know, when I got back there, I was like, oh, this is a whole network already here.

Like, they over-tuned it, I think.

Yeah, they're controls are way, way, way better, which means dealing with human enemies is like much easier.

Okay.

The vehicle controls are way, way

better.

And as a result,

a lot of environmental challenges are just like mitigated.

Like, I built roads everywhere.

And then at the end of the game, I stopped because it was like, well, I don't have time.

And that's a different discussion we'll have in a second.

I didn't need the roads.

The game is flat.

Like, the game is like overwhelmingly flat.

Do you remember in Death Stranding 1, near that mule base, near the first mountain on the south side, there was this chasm that would go across the whole map that was like 50 feet deep That if you didn't hit like a jump right, you wouldn't be able to clear it and you'd fall through and all your shit would fall.

I did fall.

That literally never happened to me.

Okay.

Not even one time in the entirety of Death Stranding 2.

Now, part of that is that I am a better player because I beat Death Stranding 1.

Right?

And Death Stranding 2 gives you a million more tools.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But they don't give you any new challenges.

The environment doesn't rise to the occasion of better controls, better tech, more connectivity,

and all the other things you're getting.

God, I want to say like 50 new different, like, cool items, but the enemy, there's only like one new enemy type, and you just shoot them.

You shoot their ass.

It's not a problem.

And there's no environmental challenges, not really.

And in DS1, as I went back to Death Stranding 1, I was like, oh, Conan O'Brien is actually a bitch to get to.

Dude,

I used him as an example.

When I was beating the game, I'm like, there is not a single location in Destranding 2 that is as annoying to reach as Conan O'Brien in DS1.

There is not.

Not a single.

And the collector who collects PlayStation games, whatever.

You actually have to

create a weird ladder or one of the climb anchors to climb down to him.

You can't just drive there.

You can't just walk up there.

The social stuff is crazy overtuned.

I used ladders in my first two sessions playing the game and then never again.

Didn't either.

I think I used two climbing ropes the whole rest of the game after that.

Okay.

I was like, no, I'm just gonna

drive my truck.

I'm gonna drive my motorcycle.

No, like laying flat across a tightrope type of thing.

Not much.

Not really, no.

Or if you did need to, don't worry.

Someone already pre-placed it before you.

I would like open up the network and see

a river formation.

There's,

Gene, you know, the river, the river highway that is to the east of the dunes?

The one that goes to

the Fort Knott near the

city.

I'm driving down the highway that I didn't.

Oh, that river, yeah, yeah.

There were four

community bridges across the river, all next to each other.

Because they all

of them.

I got like 200,000 likes from that bridge.

Like, every time you link up the network, like, the

community buildings just explode and just fill the whole game.

But

on the other hand, though, I kind of like that, though, because I kind of like seeing the Australian landscape just filled with a lot of light up shit or whatever.

I just wish it was like...

I wish there was more to.

Like, mechanically, I think there's a...

Like, there was one moment in...

Well, no, we'll talk about that.

There were two things.

One is, I was complaining about the truck.

I was like really viciously complaining about the truck.

I was complaining really hard about the truck.

I'm like, I've been using the truck the whole game, and yes, I know I control the things that I do in the game, but the game says, hey, you need a truck for this mission.

Like, they literally say, you have too much cargo, you need a truck.

So they give you a truck, right?

You got to come all the way down from the mountain with the truck.

And I'm like, okay.

And I had like the most leisurely trip down the mountain I could imagine.

Like, it was trivial.

It was super easy.

I didn't run into a single problem.

I didn't eat, I didn't even, like, come off.

I didn't even tip the car, right?

And I got to the bottom, and I was like,

all right, well, that was chill.

And then the roar they gave me was snow tires that make the truck be able to climb like a 70-degree angle on the mountain.

And I was like.

What?

It was already too snow.

Are you crazy?

So, like, if you were to, like, like, a lot of that stuff is like, I would assume just hearing it, that you'd be like, okay, so Kojima deliberately decided to de-emphasize the navigation challenge in order to emphasize something else, perhaps, you know?

Yeah, so you do shoot a lot more guns in this game.

Combat.

You shoot way more.

Like, way more.

Okay.

Okay.

But,

and this is one of the other things that really bugged me.

The whole game, I was like, when am I going to deal with more BTs?

Because BTs are cool and scary.

And the answer is never.

I consider that an issue.

Yeah.

Less BTs.

Especially when I went back to DS1, and I was like, DS1 is kind of like a horror game.

DS2 is not.

And then when you think about the trajectory of our favorite horror games, Resident Evil, even Silent Hill, what did they do?

They de-emphasized the horror and the spooks and the scariness and the spookiness to introduce more action.

More More shoot bang, more shoot bang, right?

Well, the end of when what we were talking about in previous weeks, Gene, was that how the end of DS1, or at least the halfway point, you're like, you're, you don't give a fuck about BTs anymore, right?

You're just like playing, you're Barry Sanders, cutting them up on the field, you know, left, right, fake, oh, touchdown.

Like, they'd become a mechanical obstacle more than an actual, you know, scary threat, which is also, to be fair, what zombies do become in your RE-type games as well and stuff, you know?

Yeah, so

this is on the level designers, or I guess the terrain designer, because a lot of folks are like, well, Pat skipped so many BT areas.

There's often like no reason to ever travel through a BT area at all.

And when I did travel through them,

most of the time, I just kept driving in a straight line, and the BTs never were able to catch up to me.

And I just rode right through it.

There's a sequence in the end of the game, during the game's Final Gauntlet, when I'm on a

trike, and the game forces you to go through a BT area, and I just drove through it.

I did that a lot.

I did do that a lot.

I did do that quite a lot.

I was like, I've been into a lot of scenarios which irked poor Ludwig, where he had built up this super cool combat music for a bunch of sequences, and I either launched the motorcycle completely over the sequence, or snuck through it completely and it just causes a cutscene to play and just just like completely like flew through them.

Would you want less freedom or would you want the

challenge of what you're facing brought up, you know?

So one of the things that DS1 I feel did is that like

the way that they funneled me into BT areas was by making the...

I remember there's a spot spot in the mountains in Death Stranding 1 near about the 80% mark where I chose to go through a BT area in the mountains because the mountainous terrains on the outside of that BT area were such a massive fucking pain in the ass to move through that I said, fuck it, I would rather deal with ghosts.

Right?

Here, because vehicles are so fast and strong and you can throw a bunch of guns on them that shoot BTs,

there was never a point where I was like,

I was like, I'll just jive through the BT field, and if they fight me, I'll just take it out

with all my rockets and machine guns in like

five minutes.

There was very little, very little threat from them at all.

Now, I did play on normal,

and supposedly the combat difficulty is significantly higher on Brutal, which I'd imagine.

And supposedly, the penalties to your cargo's gravity on Brutal are also enhanced, so like cargo gets damaged easier.

But unless someone is going to tell me that the traction from your car's tires is different on a different difficulty, I cannot imagine any of my complaints would actually change.

It's so interesting to compare this to like how when we talked about crushing Expedition 33 and breaking its system open, you know, through our style of play, because in this case, you're like, there's a direct, this is a direct sequel to something which had a very different progression through it the first time around.

So you can just right-off mirror that instead of like essentially looking at this as a, yeah, your first time discovering these mechanics and then exploiting it.

Right?

Because like ziplines were unlocked like about halfway through DS1, right?

But like you didn't really get a really good handle on exactly how you should fuck the game up with ziplines until near the end, right?

But ziplines unlock like maybe halfway through DS2, but like I already know how to fuck the game up with ziplines because I did it in DS1.

There's no learning period here.

Like,

you cut that thing together.

And then there's like a really strange problem that I ran into at the end that made me convinced that I was playing the game super incorrectly.

Like as close as I can feel, like Kojima like taking me by the hand and be like, you have played the game wrong.

I'm sorry.

So there's way more roads to build in Death Stranding 2.

Like it's like just the actual landmass is huge by comparison.

So, roads become like premium.

And there's also what's called a monorail.

And a monorail lets you transmit resources from place to place, right?

You can ride it, but you ride it by hand.

And you also get your Metal Gear Rex looking ship called the Magellan.

And the Magellan is your fast travel system.

So you can get in the Magellan and you can fast travel over to any distro center that you've unlocked.

And if you put cargo in the Magellan or are wearing cargo and teleport, then your rating is awful because you just cheated the destination, right?

Yes.

Like if you grabbed something from the collector and then teleported to the government and then, well, I just did it in five seconds.

They're like, well, this shit got fucked up in transit because you cheated, blah, blah, blah.

Right?

Of course.

But what the Magellan has is a more or less infinite storage space for materials.

So by far, the most optimal way to build roads is not to go to mule camps and pick up materials and bring them to road builders.

It's not

to even go to the mines and use the game's monorail system to ship them to places that are convenient.

The most, like, by far efficient way to play is to get like a distro center to like four stars, take every single fucking material, put it in your truck,

drive 15 feet to the Magellan and put it in the Magellan.

Then fly the Magellan over to the closest spot that you want to build roads, take your truck, and do it like that.

And I did that for like 80% of the game.

Right?

Oh, man.

And I was like, there's no way Kojima expects me to drive a truck to the mine,

fill up the truck, drive the truck like 15 minutes real time over to the spot they want the paver to be at, dump it in,

drive back to a different mine, and like spend like an hour to do what I did in four minutes with the Magellan, right?

There's no way, right?

So you get to the end of the game and they disable the Magellan.

They turn off fast travel,

and

after they turn off fast travel, for the first time in the game, you get a tutorial prompt that goes, maybe start building roads.

Maybe you should go get materials to build roads.

Oh, wow, wait,

wait.

So, when you got access to doing that, it wasn't you weren't told to go do that?

No, I was just like, well, this is obviously the fastest is most efficient way to do it.

And it turns out.

You get an early mission that tells you how to build roads.

And M Pat just took that and ran with it.

That's basically what happened.

That's completing the road network.

Yeah, once the game goes into its endgame status,

your fast travel options become highly limited.

And then

the game just goes, What if you built a zipline network or did some roads?

And I go, but the way, the efficient, fast, and fun way to build roads has now been locked off to me.

And also, the game gives you like multiple

points of no return warnings,

but the last one comes after they have locked off fast travel the last point of no return warning comes after it's too late to fly around

in fast travel so then you're stuck doing it the slow way so that i was like well i just gotta beeline forward with the story and you were personally you were correct to do it the fast way first before the game told you to what i should have done is actually the instant i got uh the instant i got fast travel back i but it should have been like i'm gonna finish every road in the fucking game yeah yeah yeah Which, to me, I feel like that's kind of like with the with one, like when I had access to making a road, I would go for it, you know?

Um, did you feel any of this at all, Gene?

Um, so Pat actually mentioned this on his show, uh, where he's like, I guess Gene might have had a better time because he might have played it like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, um, where he just kind of like finished the quest and didn't do all the roads.

And

by the time he got to the end, which is true, that's exactly what happened.

Like, I didn't do, I didn't, I didn't do trucking like Pat did.

I built some roads that might help me in some areas,

but I stopped like halfway through.

And I was like, all right, well, let me just play the game.

So, none of this really bothered me because I played it in what might have been the optimal way.

The same way I played Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, where Pat was doing every single goddamn side quest as he was going through the map.

And what I did was I ignored every single side quest on the map, including the mandatory card game contests where you can decline to do it, and I said I forfeit.

So I just lost.

I didn't see the cutscene at all.

We just got out the boat, and that was it.

You are the opposite ends of this fucking spectrum.

I think it's so

exciting.

But you're

not.

I finished Rebirth in 35 hours, and it was like perfect PASIC.

I was like, oh, I love the PASIC.

This is great.

You are playing for Review and you are playing for Twitch, right?

Well, no,

the infrastructure stuff, and here's the bigger difference, is that the main missions in Death Stranding 2, I found very dull.

To me, the part that I really had a blast with was building up the infrastructure and seeing my model train kit.

fucking go around and be like, oh, look how pretty the road is.

Ooh, it's so orderly and nice.

So one of the things that there was a YouTube comment that really nailed it, which was once the game locked off, like Pat's infrastructure show that put me in a really bad mood like really genuinely bad mood which then set me up to be like like unkind to like the narrative moments that i now had to switch gears over

okay uh

whereas well i guess so because whereas where i beat the game and then so like i had the game like three four weeks in advance sony's really good about giving these these like their big tenpole games in advance.

Like Last of Us Part 2, I had like a whole goddamn month to talk about, to think about how depressing that was, you know?

Whereas Death Strand and 2, I beat the game in like five, six days, and then I spent the next two weeks trucking.

So like my mood was like infinitely better because I was like playing, I was leaving the game off in like the fun part, which is the trucking and the infrastructure building, you know, and the sandbox.

Oh, before I forget, one of the things that drove me up the fucking wall like nuts was at the end of the game, they go, Look, dude, you connected all of Australia, and they show you a fucking map that has massive fucking gaps in it because there's a bunch of zones that you probably can't get to until the post-game.

So they're like, you did it.

You linked up the whole network.

And I'm like, what about that fucking part?

What about this shit?

Is the network just like the southern coast where all the cities are?

Yeah, more.

In real life?

Yeah.

No, it's the whole continent.

They're doing that thing that Death Stranding 1 did, where Death Stranding 1 was like the whole of America.

Okay.

Even though it was like 20 kilometers squared.

Okay.

Yeah.

DS2 is a whole of Australia, even though it has a big snowy mountain in the middle.

Australia doesn't know.

Desert.

It's interesting because, yeah, as you guys had the complete opposite approaches to the playthrough, it feels like

the intended user path is to hit a main mission,

take a little sampler plate of

other things, and then eventually get bored of it, or decide, you know, I like these more than those and then keep going.

You know, you're supposed to like mix and match and then go, like, all right, now we progress.

And they wanted you, they would want you to kind of do a little bit of both in a generalized way.

But there's always going to be people who mainline the thing they love the most.

And yeah, you should be ready to accommodate that and not have it affect your enjoyment, you know?

Yeah.

And people are calling

Pat a coward for like avoiding like the BT parts.

But it's like, again, as someone who did play Death Stranding 1 extremely recently, like two weeks ago, the game

does a really good job feeding you into those BT areas.

Remember, the wind farm in the first area,

there is no other way to get past that area besides going through the BT farm if you want to, if you want to complete the wind farm.

I can imagine there's no wind farm in DS2.

I could see myself voluntarily

hitting up those areas and going into them if there was like new wild world mystery attached to it you know the the the craziness of the lore and the setting and trying to figure out what the fuck is happening is an incentive ds2 does have the ds2 does have side quests that that that expands stuff absolutely so cool um one of the things that uh really was brought to my attention

uh

because ludy was in the chat uh which made me feel bad for him because he did a lot of really good music for him though i will say uh one of my all-time

like favorite streaming moments in my entire career is listening to some really good, like, emotional storyline music and, like, just like, this is killer.

And looking over and seeing, like, Forcell in the chat and be like, wow, chat, this music's incredible.

I think the composer that did this is named Woodkid.

And just seeing him completely crash out in

the chat and just be like, I will fuck you.

I will fight you, you shit.

That's fucking beautiful.

Woodkid was so good in this.

I got him, man.

Woodkid did.

Get his ass.

Which is so funny for me because I've heard of Ludwig Forsale way before I've ever heard of

Woodkids.

The only time I ever heard of Woodkid was he did the iron music video for Assassin's Creed Revelations long.

That's right.

I mean, I'm picturing what you picture is just, it's the what he remember the reaction he re-uploaded when the title of

whatever birth explosion and him just going to boom explosion.

Yeah.

Just closing his eyes and yep, yep, okay.

All right.

Yep.

One of the things that happened, and I'll talk around it a little bit, but

it really puts a lot of

perspective when you have the composer there to talk about the music that you're listening to.

And

I'm not going to talk about what sequence, but the game has like mandatory combat sequences, right?

And in the mandatory combat sequences, the music is like, it's fucking great.

Ludi, you did a great job, right?

But there's a problem, and the problem is, is that if you know how to play video games, those mandatory combat sequences are incredibly poorly paced because you will fly through that shit.

Okay,

this is everything, though.

This is like expedition.

This is all how many games are he's like, slow it down.

You're not going to hear the cool part of the song.

You're going to beat it too fast.

The game has

a bunch of skills, and one of those skills is like a traditional third-person lock.

Like, you hit the left trigger, and if you're kind of looking at an enemy, you'll kind of lock onto them, right?

The game also goes into slowdown when you're discovered, like MGS5.

And it also goes into slowdown when you kill an enemy or knock them out, really.

You're really knocking them out 99 times out of 10, right?

Because lethal is bad, right?

So what ended up happening is that there's these big action set piece moments, and enemies would come into view, and the game would slow down.

So I would hit left trigger and I would lock onto them in the slowdown and then I would hold the trigger to fire the third of a clip that it takes to kill them.

The game would stop slowing down and go into like normal time.

Every bullet would hit them.

They would die and then it would go into slowdown, which I would then use to aim at the guy next to them and blow through the entire encounter like that.

You're playing super hot in the middle of fucking death strategy.

I love that, though.

This is not like, this is not on brutal.

On Brutal, the game is not going to be as intense because enemy combat is like much more difficult, right?

But like on normal, and like I'm playing a third-person shooter, just like vaporize the entire encounter.

And I look over in chat and I see him screaming in all caps.

I worked really hard on music.

Please calm down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But what you're describing describing sounds cool, though, you know?

Yes.

I thought it was cool.

I like slow down

in my shooting action games.

Max Payne is my favorite shooter of all time.

So

when Death Strand 2 is doing the Max Payne, I'm having fun, even though I'm decimating the enemies too.

I thought that maybe there was a little bit of moments robbed by their...

I played every Metal Gear game on their standard difficulties, and this game is trivially easy compared to any Metal Gear game.

Um, yeah, what again, what you're describing is really just it's a widespread problem across multiple games and genres.

Um, I spent a massive amount of cyberpunk just being afraid to walk forward to cut off the dialogue conversation, right, to hit the trigger point, to make an aggro person who's you're someone you're supposed to go meet is going to be having an interesting conversation.

And if you get too close to them, they go, ah, V, you're here, and they interrupt the thing that they were about to say, or even just people talking while you're fighting and then you cut off this the cool shit because you killed them too quickly like it's just a constant problem so oh cyberpunk had a huge problem before the patches because like you'd just be driving and like there would be two phone calls happening at the same time or something because like

the game the game is not able to process like you know like oh you're you're passing by the mission checkpoint so someone has to yap about this but also you're also passing by the boss that does that so Regina has to call it back in too.

That was really bad.

That was a huge mess.

I'm seeing some folks saying that I hate Death Stranding.

No, I think Death Stranding 2 is a very, very good game.

But Death Stranding 2 has a problem that I didn't feel one had quite as strongly, which was the same problem that Witcher 3 has.

And it's the same problem that Expedition 33 has.

And it's this game has a...

Regardless of whatever difficulty you play on, it has a completely inverted difficulty scale.

The first hour of the game is by far the hardest hour of the game.

The second hour is the second hardest, and so on and so far, so forth.

By the time you get to the end, you are just like walking through it.

And regardless of whatever difficulty you're on, if you made it there,

like the end of it is just, and that's a fairly common

problem that they're not like correctly attributing for the increase in player skill.

Donkey Kong Bonanza doesn't have that problem.

It has a perfect difficulty arc.

You can already tell it does not have that problem.

It has a perfect perfect difficulty arc.

Expedition 33 also fucks it up too, because again, I was doing like 1.8 billion damage by the end of the game.

So I was like, there's nothing for me to do here.

So

there's a partial version of this in obviously Devil May Cry games because as you unlock skills and abilities, you can do way more shit later than you can do at first.

But again, the occasion has to be met with an increase in difficulty and a rise to the challenge and new ways to fight things.

You can do more shit, so then the enemies are harder to deal with, is kind of how you have to play that.

So that's all my mechanical complaints.

I do have some narrative complaints.

And there's one narrative complaint I like to talk about before

you leave, Wooly.

And I won't name any names.

This game features the stupidest fucking character that Kojima has ever written.

I thought you mentioned that.

Yeah, from talking

dumbest motherfucker that has ever been.

I have fully surmised your feelings on the character.

Like

a character so stupid that after the reveal of how stupid they are, I screamed at them, shut up every time they talked afterwards.

Gene, do you feel this way about this character?

I actually didn't learn the thing that pissed Pat off so much that he just like just blanked out on the character until after I beat the game.

Oh, wow.

That was an optional story sequence.

It's an optional scene.

Because there's a lot of optional story sequences in the game, which I loved.

I was like, oh, this is not in DS1 at all.

There's so many ways to approach a story.

But I did not see that until after I finished the game and after I wrote my review.

And then I just finally decided to do it.

And I was like, oh,

that's weird.

Okay.

But that character's a fucking dumbass, right?

Like, holy shit.

Like, I'm not

like, this is the dumbest shit ever.

Holy fuck.

Hmm.

Was it,

was that, do you, was that detail discovery after the fact a

paradigm shift for the character?

Uh,

no.

No, well, Gene, Gene, I'm just curious.

Oh, I don't, I don't, I never really care about the character either way.

I actually kind kind of wish that the character would be patched out, honestly.

I didn't feel that way until the reveal, but now I do.

I actually feel that they should just be removed from the game entirely.

Wow.

Okay.

I think it would make sense for you to hit the spoiler cast now, to be honest.

You're already talking about it.

So

let's just go right into it.

So I'm going to hit that.

Bam.

You're ready.

I'll give you a bunch of thumbs ups.

Now I can't.

Yeah, no, I can't mute the Discord because then no one will hear you, but I'll just plug myself out and

go for it.

Okay, so this is the Death Tranny 2 spoiler cast featuring Gene Park.

Hey, Gene, how you doing?

Hey, what's up, man?

Let's yell about Death Tranny 2.

Dollman's the dumbest bitch.

The dumbest bitch.

He kills his kid.

He kills his child.

So here's where I am.

It's funny that you mentioned earlier, like, oh, this person is so talented.

So, whatever bullshit they're doing, I have to kind of figure it out.

That's kind of where I met with Kojima, right?

Always, always with Kojima, right?

So, like, my defense of like even like the doll man's stupidity, because it is stupid, it is objectively stupid, right?

Is that

like, I look at death stranding overall as like a parable, you know?

Like, this is just like,

this is a stupid person.

Like, look at what they did, and now they are being punished with eternal damnation in this doll's body, you know?

And then we just get to live the rest of that life out, basically.

Where was it going with this?

I think it's funny that

because you kept talking about how

Death Stranding 2 feels like it's a game made for stupid people.

There's a sequence near the end, like during the final trip in Mexico, where like Tarman calls you on the phone twice to explain the cutscene you just saw, and he calls you twice.

Yeah.

And I'm like, what, dude?

I just saw that.

And like, in the cutscene, it was like Kojima-style exposition where they were just like,

here's what's going on with the tar occurrence and stuff like that.

Like, I felt talked down to the whole game, which I hadn't felt in the past.

So

here's the interesting thing that I think I've noticed about, and I've talked to you about this, I think, before, about the Death Strand and 2 Discourse, right?

Death Strand and 2 is still a widely popular game.

People are loving it, right?

But when I see the accounts that are praising it, I see that these people also typically love

your Red Dead Redemptions

and

your Ghost of Tsushima.

I'm not saying these are bad games.

These are all fucking awesome games, right?

But these are like the games that like the AAA open world, for lack of a better term, slop.

I hate that term too, but I'm

the slop lovers got to it.

I think so.

So it's like,

I think, like, this is again like my kojima brain defense like like mechanisms going on like this is the same brain that defended kanye for for 13 years until i had to stop right yeah so like for kojima

i

i think kojima is so in tune with the audience that he is like in real time seeing how people how stupid people are because like i'm watching like donkey kong streams or like like or like youtube comments and like people there can't even fucking follow what what the fuck is going on in donkey kong

you know

so what makes you think that they'll follow Death Stranding?

So like, I think Kojima is so tuned into the audience, he actually probably does think that the audience is stupid.

I actually totally agree with you

because the Death Stranding 2 story is told a lot more effectively.

I just think it's a worse story.

Yes, it's told way cleaner, right?

It's much cleaner.

There are some parts that I feel like.

So like, there's some parts that I think fell really flat.

Like,

there's like two or three that I'm like, this, this, I don't think it worked even for like the average audience.

Um,

I think, so Sam Bridges is an audience stand-in.

He's like more than Snake ever was.

Like, he repeats things back to people.

He's like, any, anybody's man.

He's, he's the, you know, blood of the earth, right?

And so you're supposed to, like, embody Sam to a degree.

Yeah.

And

also, Norman Reed is, like, doesn't talk very much in this game.

He, he doesn't have much dialogue at all, which I think led to that kind of conclusion.

So when

a massive third act part of the story relies on a disconnect between player knowledge and Sam knowledge, I was like totally baffled.

Like the game and multiple characters state outright that the BB pod is empty.

Yeah.

And

Dahlman says that to you at the beginning of the game.

it's that thing is empty, and then like

fragile is like covering his mouth.

Yeah, and and like Sam and like there's the part where like uh uh the doctor like scoops in the the camera just to read the serial number and the and you can clearly see that the pod is literally empty and Sam watches that and

Sam doesn't actually interact with the pod

enough

for me to believe that he's like straight up hallucinating.

Like, you don't have tons of moments of him like talking to the pod, and ah, there's only the soothe the pod mechanic for when you fall down.

And so, when Sam was like baffled that the pod was empty, I was baffled that Sam was baffled, which seemed like a really

like I just I feel like there wasn't enough of Sam being like, I love my baby, who's a ghost in the pod?

Like, they never address it other than saying there's nothing in there.

And then 60 hours later, they're like, no, there's still nothing in there, dude.

And then they, that starts a trend that's really strange.

And I will actually say it's like total hack shit of the reason why the plot is happening is people who knew better just decided not to tell Sam.

It's convenient that Fragile like had her memory loss, right?

Like that's like the writing there, you know.

One is probably the worst moment in the entire game where a character actually goes, oh, right, I'm sorry.

I forgot that this person was alive.

I knew the whole time.

My bad.

I think

the more I think about it, the more I think it's like, oh, you could have just written that another way.

Because another issue that I also completely agree with you is the ethics of Lucy and Neil.

It sucks, dude.

It's like that whole storyline sucks and like doesn't need to exist at all.

I like the contours of it, like having like the cuck, the cuck being with the Baba Daboopi, right?

The Baba Daboopi is cucking you, right?

The Baba Baboopi, yeah.

Yeah, the cuck of the cuck of the boopy.

Luca Marinelli is the cuckathon, yeah.

Neil is the other guy, right?

Yeah, but you didn't have to write it in a way where he was also a patient of Lucy's.

They could have just been co-workers.

The worst person in the fiction of Death Stranning.

It's crazy.

They could have just been a coworkers, or they just met at a bar or something like that.

like they could have met a lot more naturally other than lucy also met him at work and that was what's going on

in like a psychotic state like it's absolutely

um

like what is wrong with that bitch holy

like i know dating options in the death stranding world are are fucking like nil right but that's where i kind of thought it's like you know everyone if expedition 33 is fucking because of the gumari so it's like oh the death stranding so like lucy is like well you know luca marinelli is super hot so i might might as well fuck him, too.

You know, I don't know.

I'm not a big fan of how Neil's story is like a one-to-one

mechanical redo of Cliff's story.

Like, it has a different.

But, like, it, like, are we going to do Death Stranding 3, and there's going to be a third ghost military man that ties into

Sam's past.

Robert Pattinson, starring Robert Pattinson.

Yeah.

I'm still trying to figure that out.

And I would love if the chat or like some people on the subreddit would have a discussion about why he needed to be snake.

I keep trying to wrap my head around that.

I have maybe,

I have, I have a thought on this that is so cynical.

I'm kind of surprised by myself.

In terms of

appealing to the average audience kind of thing, I genuinely believe that there are parts of this game that were put in because they remind people of Metal Gear and and they could be put into trailers.

Like, I am absolutely convinced that Luca Babada Boopi

puts on Snake's headband and looks like Solid Snake

so that you could put it into a trailer and people would think it's Metal Gear.

I absolutely 100% believe that there is a Cyborg Ninja in this game that is the single most dropped plot thread possible.

Yeah, he's Dead Man, but he's not Dead Man.

He's actually Higgs the whole time, but Dead Man was able to control him that one time.

No, it's Dead Man, and it's Dead Man's body, but once Deadman jumps into Heartman to go to the final area, Higgs steals the suit.

But Higgs said, I've been controlling this the whole time, though.

So I'm just like, what are you talking about?

Well, so the thing about the Dead Man is Cyborg Ninja reveal is it happened, and I just went, why?

Why didn't he

tell you?

Why did he fight himself?

He could have been on the ship hanging out with us the whole game.

Like, why?

So that's why I don't think he was dead man the whole time, but then it's like, okay, so was Higgs and was Higgs just fighting himself as the samurai and he was just like putting on a fucking show for Sam at the weapons factory?

You see the big body that the ninja goes into in the dead man death scene at the beginning of the game.

So it was dead man's plan, but also dead man hides the fact that he's in heartman, but then you catch him and he's like, hey, what's up?

It's me, Deadman.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah, yeah.

He could have just let people know, by the way, I'm also LARPing as Heartman for three minutes at a time.

And

But why?

Like, why kill the character at all?

He could have just been with us on the ship the whole time.

Like, there was absolutely nothing.

Yeah, but we got that great scene of Dollman peeping up through the great and Sam looking too.

And

I think that Higgs being like

the one-note joker loser, like, I thought I hated it.

Like, I started the, it was so weird.

I started the game and I was like, this is great.

I love that he's just a hater.

And then as he kept coming up into cutscenes with absolutely no depth, I'm like, this sucks actually.

But then

when he sets Sam on fire and all that shit, I'm like, oh, wait, I actually really appreciate how much of a fucking hater this is.

This is crazy.

This is really good.

And for him to just go,

actually,

I'm exactly the same character I was at the end of Death Stranding 1, and the ending of this game is just going to be literally

the post-credits fight scene of Death Stranding 1 again.

I was like, this is so boring.

MGS4.

Like, yeah, and I'm just going to do a MGS4 cosplay at the end, and I'm going to say, kept you waiting, huh?

So that you can be reminded of

Metal Gear.

Yeah, sadly, you missed the best part of the fight, though.

I don't know why the prop didn't show up for you, but

I played this game in a way that I was constantly told by you, by chat, by the game's own staff, dude, how did you even miss that part?

How did you miss that fight?

How did you miss that sequence?

How did you miss the guitar battle?

I don't know.

I checked your feed.

I was like, did it was Pad just dumb, and he just didn't see

the QTE?

And it's like, no, it's just an QTE once, but then I redid it and died, and then I did the fight again, and it never showed up.

It just never showed up, yeah.

And you just like,

and by that time, you were kind of checked out of the game, so you're just kind of barreling through the fight, basically.

Yeah.

But you missed it because it's basically the two bros just

with a JO crystal together.

Yeah.

I think A-Pass

being built up the whole game as the evil AI

only to

get fucking wrecked in the same cutscene that they reveal themselves to be the big bad is.

On the one hand, it's kind of hilarious.

On the other hand, I'm like, you could have just removed this entire plotline and it would have made no difference.

You would have cut out Die Hard Man's Cool Dance Scene, which was awesome.

That was when the the game was starting to turn you around.

You're like, okay, well.

Okay, is this chicken again?

Which is really dumb?

And then it was like, no, it's serious again.

But no, it's dumb.

I

so it's weird because like that second walk in the in the time stream with like Lou on his chest and with the BB's theme playing, that was like really emotive and moving.

And I credit Ludi with a lot for that moment because BB's theme is fucking unbelievable.

BB's theme is the best.

It's the greatest song ever.

And the fact that they bring bring it back for the core thematic purpose of it is awesome.

I think that the single largest plot point in the entire game

being something that Woolly figured out on this podcast upon the game's announcement might have been a mistake.

Now, I know the people that are sitting in this digital studio,

you, me, and Woolly, are Kojima-pilled to hell.

Like, absolutely, massively fucking Kojumboed.

But I don't think that you should be able to, like, see a character literally once

and understand

every single part of that character's story and plot twist, et cetera, for the whole fucking game.

And for that to be your last,

like, dead last story revelation.

Like, there's there's a part where

Higgs is like, she's your daughter, dumb, dumb.

And they stand,

man, she's your daughter.

About like Sam like giving up his sperm for to the government, and like, maybe it's like an extra, and I'm like, and I'm just like, you're all so stupid.

You're all so dumb.

Why are you treating me like I'm dumb?

It's obviously.

What the fuck?

I think you are very valid for being frustrated

the utter lack of plot twists and like how predictable they were because

Kojima has set a precedent his entire fucking career from game one.

Well, not game one, but Metal Gear one.

Metal Gear one on the MSX.

Every single game was about plot twists.

Hey, big boss is actually the bad guy.

Hey, Liquid Snake was this person.

But whatever, you know?

Yeah, and every single.

Like the game is telling me that it's a big twist.

Like the game is acting like, oh, can you believe?

I feel like the game wasn't acting that way.

I didn't get that.

But I was confused the whole time.

I was like, why is Kojima suddenly writing the most anti-spoiler story I've ever seen?

To the point where it's like, you know,

Tomorrow had a bandage on her elbow when she got back out of the case.

And it's like,

what are you doing here?

Like, what?

What is...

Yeah, like,

like, what is going on?

I was like, why is this so predictable?

You You know, there's like no twists or anything.

Hey,

El Fanning baby face with blonde hair and green eyes is here to play an unrelated mystery character immediately after the baby with blonde hair and green eyes gets sent to the shadow realm and die.

Like, are you fucking stupid?

Like, is everyone taking great and that the one that the one that made me like like laugh because it was so like stupid was Dead Man being like, now that tomorrow is on the ship, I gave her all of Lou's vaccines because, I mean, who else is going to get them?

And I'm just like, shut up.

Shut up.

You're stupid.

Don't talk.

I'm not sure why he wrote me like this.

I don't know.

Because he's talking to

the AAA

crowd.

He's trying to appeal to them.

I do think that a lot of the game, including the lack of BTs,

or the lack of like, you know, scary ghost people that you can't see, you know, that's very inaccessible to to people.

The flatter land,

the more emphasis on action, the story that insists on explaining itself.

Not insists on itself.

It insists on itself, too.

It would want it to insist on itself.

Yeah, it should have insisted on itself more.

It should have been.

But it's like all this stuff is, I think, Kojima realizing, fuck, I do have a fiduciary responsibility to these employers that I hired.

I should probably make some money and make a game that will appeal to more people.

I'm not sure why

he gave

that interview or

maybe Woodkid was trying to put that out there where it's like, oh, it's being divisive or whatever.

So I actually don't believe that statement at all.

Because the game really feels like it's been made to make the maximum amount of players happy.

Yeah, and it's sold number one, Sir Khana on PlayStation, after

only nine days on the market, and it was number one on PlayStation.

And it's an excellent game.

Like, don't, don't, folks at home listening, don't take my massive hour-long bitch fest

about this game as proof that it is bad.

No, this game fulfills the same spot in my heart that Dark Souls 2 does,

which is a game that I will bitch about until I die.

Really good game.

Excellent game.

Million things about it that drive me crazy compared to the first one, which I adore.

I feel frustrated that the game that he decided to smooth out for Normies was the super weird delivery man ghost simulator.

Like,

the fucking weird one.

Like,

I think Metal Gear Solid 4 and 5 already did too much of that, and that was like modern military stuff.

I do think it's, well, here's another huge reason why I like the game so much.

MGS5.

Like,

I adore MGS5.

I played 700 hours of MGS5.

I played that game like it was a god.

I played it like a goddamn MMO.

So the fact that DS2 was so MGS5-like, I was like, oh, perfect.

This is hitting all the spots for me.

Oh, yeah, no, there were some moments in that that I was like, I was playing it like, so I never actually, I still never played Nelly's Solid V because the way that we did the LP just left a weird situation there.

That'd be a very fun stream for you.

Destroying too, like there's parts where I was like sneaking.

Like

I was doing a a sneaking mission, right?

I was putting my backpack down, I was beating dudes up, and I was tranquilizing them.

I'm like, this is fucking great.

And

there's actually like fairly little of that, though, like, in the total runtime.

Like, I think I did that to like four bases in like the whole game.

I know, but I'm a, but I'm an MGS5 player, so I'm a sandbox player.

So I'm just like, no, I'm going to keep doing this over and over again.

I love this.

So, yeah, a good game.

I'd give it a four out of five stars.

You do a four-star system, right?

I do four stars.

I gave it four stars.

But I will say one thing about APAS: APAS is very dumb, right?

I do think it's Kojima trying to be a little more hopecore about his view on technology and trying to revisit his view on what MGS2 was like, where MGS2 was like, look at the internet, it's going to be terrible.

And then the internet was terrible.

Everything came true, right?

Yeah.

And then, so, like, I think it's like the purpose of him, Apas, being so fucking stupid and idiotic, and then Die Hartman coming in, Die Hardman,

who is the kind of like the father figure.

He is replacing Cliff.

He's also like the most overtly human character.

Exactly.

He's like the most human, the fleshed out character.

He's out there dancing,

being gay, you know, like awesome.

Literally comes out of the fucking shadow closet.

Of all the characters except for Rainy.

That's true.

He's like touching Sam warmly and everything.

And he dispersed of Apass

by coming in and singing BB's D, which is the song.

Dumb fucks.

You're idiots.

You're stupid.

Which is the song that Cliff was singing to De Norman or Sam

when he was a baby.

And so now Dio Harmon, the now adopted father or whatever, is now coming to save Sam from this evil technology.

And then so like he says it on his face.

He's like, well, you know, we can use

the magic of the chiral network for good, not evil.

So I feel like that's him saying,

maybe we could just use the internet for good, which is not really saying anything new or interesting or cool.

But that's where I'm kind of landing it at.

Do you think it's weird that Kojima keeps casting like super big-name Hollywood actors and giving them like 40 total lines of dialogue?

I think it's great.

I think that's the best part.

Oh, yeah, is it?

Because I think it's like,

Sam is Norman Reedis.

And I'm like, I cannot think of a single line of dialogue that Sam says in the entire game.

All I want is I want the behind-the-scenes footage of Troy Baker and Norman Reedus jacking each other off with the guitar necks and going like Troy Baker going.

It's really homoerotic at the end there.

Very.

Like the facial motion capture on Troy's face is like crazy.

I was like, I feel like I'm there sweating with them, you know?

Like,

and it's weird because it got like homoerotic in a way that I don't think like Snake and

liquid were because snake and liquid were like 80s kind of machismo whereas like higgs is like more slender and like he takes sam's shirt off

yeah like he teleports him in with no shirt because

yeah i don't know are you sure you don't want to kiss are you sure you just don't want to kiss

yeah

Apparently, there's a line in there, and

this is why I'm actually replaying Death Strainer 2, although

Donkey Kong Bonanza completely fucking derailed that, right?

Is that I want to get back to the safe out with that fight because apparently, if you just watch Troy like fuck around during that fight, he'll say how much he loves pizza, but he doesn't love pizza as much as you, Sam.

I want to hear that.

Also, there's a technical makeout scene that I'm not sure

anyone really saw, but there's that too.

Yeah,

I would say, like, this is a very good game,

but I don't think

like my most disliked Kojima game is Metal Gear Solid 4 by like a country mile.

Like I fucking actually hate MGS4.

I was still right that this is the best written game.

I was wrong about Death Stranding 1.

I went back to Death Stranding 1.

I was like, no, Death Stranding 1 is the best written game since MGS3.

But this is still his second best written game.

That's true.

MGS4 and MGS5?

You think it's worse than MGS5?

I'm including the MSX games.

No, no, no, like since Snake Eater.

like, since Snake Eater,

not ever, not ever.

Yeah, then definitely.

MGS4 is a fucking mess.

Yeah.

Nano machines, dude.

People were right to make fun of that as like the catch-all solution to literally every single plot point in that entire series.

Yeah, it sure was.

But yeah, I mean, look, this is a guy that wrote about the arm getting taken over by Liquid, you know?

So I almost expected

that to come back here.

I thought that something like that would happen.

And I'm like, I'm along for the ride.

Fuck it.

Whatever.

Yeah,

I'm already sandy-brained anyway, so it doesn't matter.

That's the issue.

I think I've said everything that I want.

Oh, no, wait, there's one thing.

I think Lou being his real daughter sucks.

I kind of like it.

I was way more interested in that relationship as a sad, lonely man with nothing, finding love in his heart for a dumpster baby.

I absolutely love that too.

But again, I see this as a parable.

I think Kojima is just writing fairy tales and not really real stories, you know?

So it's like, oh, well, after years of suffering, here is your daughter.

Yeah, again.

There is, there is one tiny little thing, and

this is my only complaint as a dad for the whole thing.

So, like, regardless of all the story things, like, there's still like a, there's an implicit like care for BB28 slash Lou slash tomorrow, right?

As like a child figure.

The stinger of the game showing her smoking made me so pissed off because like it's cool for your character, but you would never ever ever want your child to smoke.

Put that out.

That's bad for you.

As a former smoker, there is no other game worse triggering for me than the Death Training series.

Yeah,

because I still want to smoke every day.

I have, I, I, I got a, I have a, I have a fake fucking plastic cigarette here that I put into my mouth because I thought that it would help me, but it doesn't, it just makes it worse.

So I don't use it.

Why would you fucking think that would help you?

Because because I'm because I'm a fucking addict, that's why I need something.

Hold on, we gotta get Wooly back.

I want his opinion on this nonsense.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is nonsense.

Gene Tell tell this man what you just told me

Okay, so we were just talking about how Death Stranding can be triggering for a smoker a former smoker like me

because

Because Kojima makes smoking

Kojima doesn't even fucking smoke himself, but for some reason he makes smoking look so satisfying and good.

Oh, you know, I

literally fingers to his mouth while posing with the other two actors.

Yeah.

Which apparently Ludwig told Pat in the chat that that was his idea.

Ludwig.

He's like, pretend you're smoking.

Ludwig, the great composer, composed that incredible moment for all of us.

Oh, we did.

Which is incredible.

We gave Kojima so much shit over that, and that's Ludwig's fault.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's fucking Ludwig's fault.

Oh, my God.

Wow.

Well, I'm still blaming.

But Kojima makes smoking look so satisfying.

Like when I was playing DS1 and Cliff Unger is like,

and then like Luca Marinelli is doing that.

And then like, you know, you see other characters smoking, fragile smoking in DS2.

And I'm like, it's so bad for me.

Because I like it, it's been eight years since I quit smoking, and I still struggle every day.

So that's why, and

this is what Pat wants to hear, is that I bought fake cigarettes on Amazon for like for for like for like for like a set yeah because I thought that it will help me like with with my with my oral fixation yeah and that would help but it does not it actually makes you want to smoke a cigarette makes it worse

yeah

so I don't use it I just have it in my drawer for no reason because for this bit basically I completely understand because back in the day ever since high school I always used to draw characters smoking simply because secondary animation of smoke looks really cool and anytime you're moving in a direction and the smoke trails with you, it looks awesome.

It's the effect

fetishization of smoking in Death Stranding 2 that borders on the absurd.

You can do it, it's the effect of the lights on the back of the Akira bike.

You know what I mean?

It looks awesome.

It's a great thing.

And when you see certain characters in a certain way, like think of the end of tank, when you see Spike Spiegel, like, like,

right, that one drag that goes all the way up is incredible.

It looks so cool for art, but it's terrible for you.

It's terrible.

It makes you smell.

It's terrible for you.

Let me tell you, I literally fantasize about knowing that the day I will die so I can smoke and have a last stove eat just like big boss.

Don't do it, cheat it.

Literally, just like big boss.

So I can say, this is good, isn't it?

And just fucking check out.

Give him his pack.

Yep, basically.

I'm excited for the day I die, so I could just fucking smoke a cigarette again.

God, dude.

You know, my grandfather, my grandfather got

my grandfather got diagnosed with lung cancer at 87.

He was like, fuck it, I'm not quitting now.

Yeah, yeah, that attitude.

What are you gonna do?

Go through fucking chemo at 87?

Nah, give me my pack.

Give me my puff.

God, that MGS4 loading screen when he's like, they actually have the time to be like, no, put your cigarette away in a little container.

Don't just drop it.

Be polite.

Be considerate about it.

But fucking

oh, get it in there yeah

that's nuts um i don't suppose uh you have the you guys don't have those canadian pack style like look at this lung exploding into into guck look at this baby

look at this

yeah our canadian smoking packs have like nightmare fuel on them to be like this is what it causes and it's just like teeth falling out of mouths and

yeah sadly that wouldn't have worked on me so i remember when i was working at the grocery store,

people, like the anti-smoking ads that featured like diseased lungs and shit,

not only did they not work,

but like people would come in and ask for specific warning packs.

They'd be like, I want the one with the lungs.

Yep, give me the baby.

Yeah, so that's the thing.

That's the only one that worked.

The one with like a sick or dead baby or fetus on them, people didn't want to smoke those ones.

Even men didn't want want to smoke those ones.

That was

one step further.

I remember certain dépaneurs would have

at the cache a cover that you could buy to put right over the pack.

And it was literally just a big text box that was as large as the photo.

And it said, Surgeon General's warning, blah, blah, blah.

It was so crazy.

You're like, oh, oh, we're going so far the other way.

It was nuts, man.

Yeah.

I get it.

But yeah, well,

smoking does make you feel cool.

I used to do that all the time.

I used to have movement, you know?

I'd leave smoke trails, man.

That shit was awesome.

Right.

You know, like punctuating your points when it's in your hand, you know, just lighting up in the cold.

In fact, people going out for smoke breaks when you'd work, they get acceptable.

They get more breaks.

They get more breaks, and it's okay because everyone accepts it.

Also, the boss is smoking, so you guys are getting buddy-buddy while you're going on break constantly throughout the day together.

You don't get to make friends with the people who are not on smoke break and all the higher-ups.

It's garbage all the way around.

100%.

Yeah, you know,

and I would like to treat it like a yakuza, like underling when I would like to light my boss's cigarette for them.

Like, don't worry, boss, I got this.

You know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Death Stranding 2 is a good game.

I have some misgivings.

That's the summation of our thoughts.

Gene really likes it.

Cool.

Cool, cool, cool.

I liked it more.

But

I do like Death Stranding 1 more, though.

I was going to say, is the ultimate, though, that, like, do you feel that one is better?

Do you both feel that way?

Yeah, I feel a little more strongly, but a lot of it is that, like, Death Stranding 2 feels like Death Stranding 1 again, but not quite as interesting.

Pat is right that it is the most iterative Kojima game.

And I realized that immediately when I single as I started playing, I was like, this is just Death Stranding 1 again.

I was like, there's never been a Kojima game like this where Kojima is like, what if I just take the last game and just made it a little bit better?

Right, right, right.

Because I know we've had this conversation where

you've guys have with Pat where we've been talking about how it's like, oh, Metal Gears, Metal Gears, Metal Gear every time.

But thematically, on the broad strokes, there's wild changes.

It's much more similar to Death Stranding 1 than any Metal Gear is to any Metal Gear.

Right.

Exactly.

Mechanically, even from 2 to 3,

it's probably the most similar.

And even then, there's like 3 introduced so much of the level design, the camouflage system, the fucking eating, the melee system.

It's a vastly different game besides the camera angle, basically.

And I guess,

you know, the one last thing I'm wondering, do you...

Does that article about Kojima going, ah, shit, too many people are enjoying this?

It's not divisive enough.

We talked about that.

We think he's lying.

We think Woodkid is a liar.

Well, I didn't say that.

But the game feels smoothed out.

Yeah.

The game feels like

the friction rubbed off.

Okay.

Okay.

So that

whole thing doesn't really track.

It makes no sense.

It doesn't really track.

It makes no sense.

Yeah, as I was playing, I was like, I'm not sure what he's talking about here.

Okay.

All right.

Death Stranding 2 spoiler cast.

over.

All right.

How about we take a quick break, guys?

Yeah, I could use a break.

I'm sure this dog, hey, you hungry?

Yeah, he's hungry.

BRB.

Sounds good.

Stop fake smoking.

You're going to do it to yourself.

You're going to do it.

Don't do it.

But he looks so cool, though.

He does look cool.

He looks so cool.

Look, let's take a quick word from our sponsors

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Alrighty, so a couple things happened this week.

Let's get into it.

On the short end,

just kind of following off with some of the

fun we enjoyed with the Xbox stories and layoffs and AI stuff.

What a fun topic.

A little chaser chaser from

last time around.

Laid-off king staff set to be replaced by the AI tools they helped build.

Okay.

Says sources.

So after a ton of staff was cut,

and we talked about them last time, about 50 people were leaving from the London-based Farms Hero Saga team in particular, getting cut in half there.

And a lot of people,

there were some basic leaks that the staff that is being

cut will directly be replaced by by AI.

And

the stuff that they were forced to use, that they were forced to train in particular.

Obviously, alongside that is also the

morale is described as being in the gutter.

And

yeah,

I have been described as

a specific statement by an employee speaking to me directly last week.

There's morale about worrying if you're fired, and then there's morale about people who don't know if they're actually fired, which is even worse.

Okay, well,

like when you

getting fired is one thing because you look next to you and there's an empty chair.

Looking next to you and seeing a robot sitting there is a completely different thing.

I foresee a really specific scenario occurring for Microsoft with replacing a bunch of game developers and support staff with AI in which the AI will probably do the job quite poorly.

At which point, they will hire contractors to shore it up and then eventually phase out the AI for just contractors.

And because that's how they run every other part of their company, they're going to go, I don't know what's going on with the King purchase.

They used to make good money, but now they don't make good money, and we're saving money on the contractors.

Like just how they ran Halo under the fucking ground.

Microsoft seems wildly obsessed with not having full-time employees.

It seems to be their mandate at every single level of development for every branch.

Like things like the monitor appearing on the wrong side of the screen

in your artwork, perhaps, things like that might start popping up.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God.

That LinkedIn post.

Yeah.

God.

No, I mean, that's pretty much, yeah,

that's your point at the stance for this whole thing is the idea of the cost of hiring back contractors to fix the bad AI work is going to

double blow it up on the back end and make a shittier product

on top of it.

But in the meantime, hey, look, you can look at

the earnings you get from downsizing and just throw that on the quarterly and call it a day.

So

here's the thing, right?

Have you ever tried to fix like a fucking idiot's work?

Like, not an AI, just like a...

Like, you ever have a job and they're like, yeah, a dumber person than you got to it before you got here yeah and not only didn't do it but they it up now you like that's that sucks it's

the class project i have to start from scratch and do it myself

every time yeah it's it's way worse than starting from nothing

so so i i use a i use ai every day for my job specifically transcription for my interviews um so i'm not reflexive reflexively anti-ai because i use ai the ai the ai i use is getting worse.

I just did an interview, like a hosted interviews with Tony Hawk, Kareem Campbell, and Bob Bernquist, like all the

legendary skaters for Tony Hawk Proto Skater 3 and 4 coming out.

And

I just fed all the audio recordings to the AI, and it's just missing entire paragraphs.

So I have to do the whole work again.

I'm in the fucking

early 2000s and just listen to Tony Hawk gab about whatever he's talking about and like

just spend a whole time.

Like, it's helpful for like a couple of lines, but it's like

starting.

How did you get worse?

You were so helpful, like, two years ago.

So, it's kind of like Google, AI, Google search getting worse, also?

Like, it's like

becoming self-aware.

No, it's not.

No,

when you build this kind of loss leader, a loss leader program, like say Uber, right?

What Uber's supposed to do is come in as an excellent

quasi-legal service and totally destabilize the taxi industry in your local town.

Then, once your taxi industry is destabilized in your local town, you could then jack up your Uber prices to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

This is what Amazon does.

This is what Walmart does, right?

AI hasn't even gotten to the point

where it's totally destabilized.

It's like host service yet before becoming worse.

It didn't get good enough to ruin the other thing yet.

And I'm not, and well, I mean,

that particular example, I'm not anti-destabilization because as somebody who was not able to get taxi rides simply by people looking at me and going, fuck you, you're not getting in my car, I absolutely, oh, you know, vibes.

You're too tall?

Failed the vibe check.

I absolutely welcomed the burning down of the taxi industry when the ride apps show up, mind you.

So, you know, there's that aspect of it.

Yeah, now what you get, now what you get is like, he showed up and he's like, damn it.

But

then 4.9 star rating.

I'm doing good.

Like, you look, you know, you go, damn it.

But then, hey, my rating is fine and I'm a generous tipper, you know?

But yeah, yeah.

And you know what?

That's building bridges right there.

Yeah.

Just

accountability, you know?

Anyway,

it's just this story just coming up as a little thing where because you're like, hey, Microsoft, are you guys training and forcing people to use AI more so that you can literally replace them with it?

It's like, yeah, of course.

That's what they just did at King.

So, you know.

In any case.

What else happened?

Okay, so just a PSA on this one.

Secondhand games on the Nintendo Switch 2.

One particular owner bought a bunch of secondhand games and got banned because the person who sold those secondhand games, even though they were legitimate copies, had ripped them.

And once they went online, Nintendo detected that two of the same

copies of the same game were online together and banned both consoles.

So that is something that could happen if somebody is

cloning their cartridges before they sell them.

The person in question did contact Nintendo and

they then were able to prove that their console had they had the cartridge because only one person does the person with the copy doesn't and then they unbanned them but just PSA

you know secondhand if if somebody is cartridge ripping you might have that initial moment of getting your console banned uh bricked remotely because the person the rep that the that they spoke to had all the info on like their their their memory card everything about their full you know uh system pulled up and they're like oh yeah okay we can see you've got it so you're you're fine you know what this reminds me of this reminds me of getting a used cartridge uh that has been used to like upload or use like hacked uh characters in like a monster hunter game like fucking your account your online account up right like if you put down if you bought like monster hunter for you and somebody had used like a game genie or something to massively fuck up all the stats on it and like create like busted items and now you're attached to it Yeah.

There's no way around this.

I don't think Nintendo should be able to brick your fucking console, though.

That's bullshit.

Yeah.

But Donkey Kong's really good, though.

You can play Donkey Kong offline.

It's nice that the person was able to say, hey, they contacted them and they sorted it out within a couple hours.

Yeah, that is nice.

Didn't have to do it.

But somebody just buying a secondhand game and then getting their shit bricked fucking sucks.

but just

FYI, that counts.

Shouldn't be buying secondhand games anyway.

You should be buying them straight from Danny Nintendo.

The sarcasm.

Sarcasm, for those of you who didn't catch that, sarcasm.

Also, we had a...

This was just a little quick one, but

a second instance of an unlaunch has occurred.

Oh, that's right.

I saw this right before we started.

Split Gate 2 has unlaunched.

Let's make FPS games great again.

Yes!

Back to beta!

No!

Shit.

Damn.

Guess that hat didn't really pull it off, did it?

I think the funniest part about all that was like I saw an interview that was like, I will not apologize.

And directly on top of it was his apology.

That was, I think that was IGN.

He stepped down within like a day.

I think it was like an hour later.

I think he told IGN, I will not apologize.

And then he went on Twitter.

Here I am to apologize.

Incredible.

What a disaster.

Yep, hand in hand with a bunch of layoffs, of course.

Apparently, the game was much worse than the first one.

It's yeah,

the new option that exists now after Multiversus in the form of an unlaunch is.

didn't see that one coming, you know?

Put it back in the tube and try again next year appears to be a new way to go.

Anyway, you know, that

I will, from now on, when we talk about, you know, how things are going, like, should Concorde have gotten unlaunched?

Is an unlaunch the way to go?

I think that there's a game we're going to talk about today that will unlaunch to having the longest development cycle ever.

And that game is called 2XKO.

Oh, boy.

So, you know, I,

yeah, what did we get?

We got a couple of announcements for that.

We showed, we saw the Vi gameplay trailer.

And

as much as, here's the thing, I'm just going to come out and say, I fucking love be a boxer, baby.

And as much as she is doing all the weaves and bobbin that you you would expect from your your monk in dnf duel or your akihikos i'm like that's my main that's my main right there so guess what woolly i totally agree with you i love daunt i loved dauntless in rising thunder uh i think vi aside from her level three super i think her level three super looks like shit um i think that character looks great I think the realization of that character is great.

That should have been the first character ever shown for 2xKO, not the last, or not the almost last.

The titular main character, arcane box cover character girl.

Jinx and Arcane.

Yes.

Jinx and box.

Yeah, no, no, no, no.

You got it right.

You got it right the first time.

You got it right.

That is correct.

Jinx and Arcane, yes.

Because

this is like getting to like,

I don't know how to describe it.

This is getting to

the stage seven of Street Fighter 5 and then going Ryu is here!

Kyle!

No, no, no!

Ryu.

Ryu, yeah, Ryu.

Actually just Ryu.

No fucking shit.

Man,

yeah, so there's that.

They there there was there was obviously like these these teases over the years, but all right, we're taking a look.

That's one more character dropped.

I did see that

Tom Cannon, aka Pro Tom Cannon,

did give

some insight as to like what was kind of some of the timeline and what was happening with how long it took and why it got here.

In particular,

he more or less mentioned that the timeline is really weird for the project.

And part of that is because everyone figured out exactly what was going to happen before the game got announced because Radiant was acquired by Riot.

So the timeline begins in everyone's head the moment that acquisition occurs, even though the project was not announced yet, right?

So he's completely right about that.

Yeah, I don't know what the gap is between the two, so that was part of it.

It was a couple of years.

So that made it feel a whole lot longer for sure.

However,

however, I will say, I've never met Tom Cannon.

For all intents and purposes, I've heard nothing but good things.

You've told me you've hung out with Tom Cannon.

That's a good guy.

Good guy.

That is insane cope.

That is

like grade A crazy ass cope because Project L was announced in 2019.

Right.

So like the timeline is obviously like significantly expanded because of the acquisition.

But like,

okay, it's not 10 years.

It's six years.

No, it is.

Regardless, again, the roster launch for that type, for this type of game, that's insane how long it's taken, for sure.

The

other thing you mentioned was, yeah, so there's that part, and then they had a new team starting from scratch with their engine.

Timeline's weird, and that the, you know, with the brand new engine and the new team,

the,

what was it?

Oh, yeah, the 2v2 version of the game has been, that they've been working on it for four years.

So

what what they were working on before that was like, you know, something the end of like a 1v1, I guess, or like an entirely different version or so.

Doesn't matter at the end of the day because, like, when it launches, how it launches, like, people will decide and they'll play it and be like, yo, I want more characters.

And I've said it before.

I feel like the best way to

change opinions on that is to ramp it the fuck up and get characters out there.

Yeah.

And I think

I don't know if this is indicative of like speeding the process up because it looks like

it's going to be coming along.

They've announced

the beta, the closed beta that's coming, new version, and then like the fact that

it's going to stay up after that.

Yeah, so that's how, that's, that's essentially the release date because that's how Ryan's soft launch, right?

They soft-launch them.

And you get in if you were in the others, and then you'll get like a friend invite, and it'll just like propagate.

So there's a thing here where in the Vijay, like, love me a boxer vi looks sick She's a main day one.

I'm locked in I don't care because I I love that style

When she lands her level three like she's kind of punching at nobody

And then you see and then you see Yasimo at the last second kind of get hit you're like okay they kind of that's a inexpensive way of kind of like keeping the reaction of the person getting hit out of the shot there and the animations of their level threes do look really good But like the fact that you don't see the person on the receiving end compared to like Marissa fucking well you know and all that type of shit is a time saver.

And you kind of go, is this a way of speeding the process up that we're seeing with this reveal?

I'm not sure.

So, all almost all the characters have a level three to that.

Just vise just happens to be, because it's punching, it happens to feel a little,

you're right, true, right?

Um, I absolutely believe that you're totally correct.

That that is a way, like, listen, if we make supers that are reaction agnostic, we don't have to change the super every time we put a new character out, right?

And that would make perfect fucking sense for a game with more characters than Street Fighter 2.

Like, like,

if I'm going to see some cut corners,

you need the numbers.

You need the numbers.

You need the numbers.

It needs it.

It needs it.

It needs it.

Like, dude, I had hot dogs for lunch today, okay?

And I got like a shitty hot dog with some cheese thrown on it.

You know how fast that guy got it out to me?

Fucking fast as shit.

And you know how much it cost?

Like almost nothing.

So I was willing to eat that shitty hot dog because it was fast as fuck and cheap.

And

the HKO is cheap as fuck.

It's zero.

So already that's a piece of advantage.

Where's my fast as fuck video game hot dog?

You want to be dipping these characters in water like Kobayashi and going full full hog.

I'm just seeing the the ultimate right now.

Yeah, she's not punching anybody.

What's going on there?

Some of the other supers are like that too, where you don't see who's getting hit.

Slow.

This shit better be the most gourmet chicken-fed feel hot dog I ever eaten.

So

I'm I really enjoy how fun it is to play, and I like the systems and what it's doing.

There's some details about

smaller system changes that

I get, like I feel like there's a lot of stuff they made some changes they made some changes that I thought are cool we don't have to go into them because I don't think

anyone cares right now to go into the specifics but the version I played before was fun we'll see how the version that we play in a couple of months is yeah suffice to say that um a couple of the changes they made were really good for making the fight go faster and making sure less timeouts happen um they did a bunch of stuff to really fix the um the the uh you start like um starting with one bar of super you don't carry meter between rounds.

Gray health takes, you don't regenerate as much health overall.

You can throw people while they're rolling.

A bunch of stuff they did is like going to make the fight just go faster, more immediate.

You're going to die faster.

Consequences matter.

And none of that, like, oh shit, I have one character left.

Why should I fight you?

This is a weird stalemate moment, you know?

They've fixed a lot of the incentive on that regard.

So I'm pretty excited for that stuff.

And

I'm still, you know, I'm looking forward to my team of Vi and Alaui,

but I hope I have a lot more people.

I'm not sure if I can do my team of Vi and Alaui.

Please give me more people to punch.

I think we, like, that's something we talked about.

And I don't mean to belabor the point too much, but, like, me and you have been playing fighting games both by ourselves and with each other on and off for decades now.

It sucks that we're going to play the same team.

When we and we're not not yes, we almost always find a way to find different preferences, despite we kind of there's some stuff we overlap on.

I play Darius too.

I like Darius.

Yeah, I like Darius as well, right?

We do it.

That's my other

like,

you know, Elawi Darius is my current team.

So, yeah,

it well, so that's the thing, right?

And I think this is, yeah, you're right.

That's a great example because for the all the overlap that like we don't have, we don't share, when we have have it here you're like oh but our tastes and it's in tag fighter all we would need is one different fucking character

I like a big character like a Nago Ryuki you like a big character like pot fight we should have a way to express that difference you know

I was about to say is there is it because there's like four people and there's no roster it's it's it's a small it's that's it's the roster size is the issue you know and the thing is is once we're going into this realm of like other tag fighters coming out to compete as well,

it is the reddest ocean.

I think the most damning thing that I saw is a comment that I retweeted was basically people are expecting there to be more characters in Marvel Tokon

in their next trailer

than there will be in 2xKO at launch.

Now, granted, Tokan won't be out, so that's super fair.

There were as many characters in the debut trailer, like on screen, on fucking screen.

And we don't know what the timeline for Tokan is in terms of when it started development and like what the year per character development bit is.

But the feeling of revealing started three months ago in everyone's heart.

In your heart.

In your heart.

That's that's it.

Like, God, this, so much of this podcast and the games we talk about, so much of it just has to do with the feeling of an announcement and the time between that and getting it in your hands.

Right?

It's such an important part of the industry, and it's such a, there's a science to it.

Like a good HR department understands how to not be too early on something, or, you know, like put something out there where even if you have tons of goodwill and excitement, Silk Song, fucking song, it can turn sour.

I remember us talking.

I think we did three of these, a podcast where we're like, Elden Ring hasn't shown off a single goddamn thing ever.

What the fuck is going on with Elden Ring?

It makes me worry that the game is in some kind of development trouble.

And I think at one point I said, I can't, I don't know what I should expect, but for this long to be in development with no news, this game better be the biggest fucking Dark Souls fucking game ever.

And then it came out, and now I will never bitch about From Software's development time ever again.

Ever.

I don't.

I look so stupid.

I don't even remember that part, those conversations anymore.

Those are deleted from memory.

They got memory hold so stupid right yep yep uh 2x kill is in a different situation though because we played it yep um

you know the gameplay characters style all of it you got that you just you need more and when you have yep also there's a second point against them on time i wish i was still able to go online and play rising thunder yeah yeah

well community community edition exists you know what i mean though i know what you mean i know what you mean um no no the the thing i was gonna i I always bring it up is just like when you play a game where you're picking more than one character every time you play it, you feel the roster much faster.

Yeah.

You know, so

they're also going, and this I really feel for the cannons, and I really feel for the team.

I forget the name of the team.

The Project L team.

I don't know.

The Project L team, sure.

I really feel bad for them because they are coming out not just like alongside the expectations of something like Marvel Tokan, but like somehow in fighting games, Marvel Rivals has entered and like

how come you guys aren't putting out a character every six weeks like Marvel Rivals, which is like, that's completely fucking different.

Yep.

But the Marvel Rivals characters look hot as shit.

But it's all vibes.

It's all feeling.

It's all just look at the new, oh my god, Blade, he woke up.

He's not sleeping anymore.

Now look at him.

We're like 8 billion costumes later with everybody at this point.

Yeah, that's it.

It's just a feeling.

That's not the same, but it feels the same.

But it's not the same, but it feels the same.

It's the direct opposite where you're like, the cosmetics are overflowing.

You can't hold all these costumes for your favorite characters.

And like Street Fighter puts out four characters a year, and that's too little.

But when you look at the Sagat trailer, you're like, they've spent a lot of fucking time on that fucking Sagat.

Sagat looks hot as shit.

Sagat looks hot as shit.

Cigar looks amazing.

I was going to jump into into from there.

The Tokan is going to be playable at Evo.

And we saw just a snowy.

That's going to be fucking a big line.

Ooh, yeah.

There's a screenshot of the character select screen.

You got the six characters on it.

And it looks like,

yeah, people started doing some maths.

And they're like, you think you could fit.

Well, no, but here's the thing.

Just because you could fit 35 into that space, it doesn't mean you're going to get that.

It does mean that.

There's a lot of games that came out that never fully filled up the space.

None of those games are by Arc System Works.

Arc System Works fills up the space on their character select screen.

Show me an Arc System Works character select screen that doesn't have every single fucking inch of that space.

Eventually, over time.

I mean,

I feel like the other thing, too, that you see here is

you have your leader, and then you saw

the three slots, right?

You saw

shooter, vertical, and assault, right?

And that was interesting because it looks like basically mechanically what that's going to be is assist-wise, you will all like, I assume a shooter will always be a projectile assist.

I assume vertical will always be a Shoriukin, and assault will always be like a rushdown, you know?

So you kind of are, instead of picking a character and then picking your assist type, you're going to always have them fulfill that role.

So your team will always be balanced for all three things.

It's an interesting, it's a way different way to think about it, but that's cool.

Yeah.

You know, the function, quote-unquote, is filled no matter what your team is.

And if you bring in Star-Lord and you switch out Doom, that's okay.

Someone on your team will have a Shoriyukin, regardless.

Done.

They should be making these characters like

they did for

Fighter Z,

where like they're a little simpler than you would expect so they can have more of them

I could see since you're gonna have four people on a team

I don't think we're getting MVC3 ultimate level depth on any individual character that's a lot that's a lot for people to learn

um I mean we'll have it go it could go either way uh I would like the idea of exactly not overwhelming people because you have the four but if someone wants to stick to one it should feel like a complete character

the director on this is the battle director from Grand Blue Fantasy Versus and the planner on Exerd, right?

So,

you know, you got two completely different sides of the spectrum there, like both anime games, but

some Exerg characters got real complex with their movesets and lists.

And Grand Blue, you know, can definitely simplifies it.

So we'll see.

We'll see.

But yeah, the potential for that spot, that roster size to fill up is there.

I don't think the promise is guaranteed, but it would be smart if they did.

If they dropped characters in

groups of four, so the fantastic four are like all a team, ready to go.

I was just thinking, you know what they could do?

They could do like what Tatsunoko did, and there are certain characters that you just get just them.

Like, Hulk is a team of four.

Oh, God.

That was so busted in that game.

It was the most unbalanced shit ever.

So fucked.

Those characters were way too good.

Yep.

That was my favorite thing about Capcom versus SNG 2: that you can just, you can just have a three-star character versus three one-star characters.

You know, I think that was the right thing to do.

I love that mixing match.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, shout outs to the Psychochronic from Toronto who won the Evo Tatsunoko tournament just using the fucking PTX from Lost Planet.

It's fucking wild that that became like a busted fighting game character.

Nobody gives a shit about that fucking robot.

I love that robot.

I love that robot, but that fucking, nobody gives a shit about Lost Planet 1.

I do.

I love that game.

That game made me care about the PTX, about Soki from Dawn of Dreams.

Oh man, ain't nobody care about Soaki from Dawn of Dreams.

I know, right?

Nobody.

Anyway.

That monster had fucking losers in it.

I enjoy Roll getting slap-chopped by Alex.

We got to move on.

Sagat looks fucking hot.

I love it.

I love the fact that, okay, he's not the beef Sagat anymore, but he's Street Fighter 2 Sagat.

Yeah.

A little lanky.

The lanky guy.

He's been a while, and

he's now.

There's something to like.

Beefy Sagat got introduced in Alpha, right?

I think.

Pretty much.

Yeah, everybody got beefy in Alpha.

Yeah.

Yeah, Bison got super beefy.

But the old live, you know, Tiger, that's the guy that's coming back, you know.

I also like that every time you see him, he's more Muay Thai and less Shoto.

Yeah.

And now it's super aggressive.

It's just like five leg kicks in a row.

Yeah, he's got four versions of a Muay Thai grapple, and his throw is also like a very dedicated Muay Thai grapple

with all these enders to it.

Awesome stuff.

The stage looks fantastic.

And

yeah, they've also Street Fighter 6'd him, which means we don't have six fireballs plus two EX versions to deal with.

You have his L light punch fireball, he shoots it low.

Medium and high, he shoots them high.

And then the OD version is both.

His EX fireball is better than other people's EX fireballs.

And that's it.

Because it's Sagat.

It takes away something from him to take away those extra fireballs, but I get it.

I get it.

And, you know, I guess modern mode is going to be.

You can't live

in a street fire

with this old Sagat world.

Tiger Knee is going to fly right over a fireball now and fuck you up.

So you're fine.

He will be fine.

Plus, a Tiger Uppercut that knees you to the wall, and then you can do shit afterwards.

Oh,

he's going to be fine.

My only thing is, design-wise,

I get the hobo energy, but I do feel like, you know,

like Bison steals some of that thunder with the cloak.

You know, I feel like Bison looks like garbage, like complimentary.

Well, Akuma, Ryu, and Bison all have that same wandering vagrant energy, and they take something away from Sagat now because of that, in a way, you know.

Um, Sagat wouldn't look right in a full-odd outfit of any kind, but the tattered thing is like it's cool, it's fine, it makes sense.

It's just

he should be the one with the cloak, you know, yeah,

anyway.

Um, good stuff there.

Um,

and uh, what was

worth mentioning?

Okay.

The little bit

with

the Outer Worlds 2 getting announced at 70 bucks.

Oh, my God.

Hey, everyone said, fuck that, and they went, never mind, and dropped it back to 60.

So, or rather, 80 to 70, excuse me, for America.

Let me tell you, as somebody played Outer Worlds 1 and really liked it, but that game had very, very, very serious flaws and played a good deal of Avowed and thought it was cool, but also has fairly serious flaws, and I haven't gone back to it.

I think Avowed is much better than Outer Worlds, by the way.

I think they were on fucking drugs to think that people would pay an increased price for Outer Worlds 2.

I think they lost their fucking minds.

So I don't think this type of pressure is going to work for every company in every game, but in this instance, yeah, it worked.

And they went back to, they said, okay, we'll give you your refund on your pre-order if you press it.

So we've seen Borderlands bitch out.

And we've seen

Outer Worlds 2 bitch out.

You remember

when we talked about Nintendo increasing their prices?

And then Microsoft said, you know what, we're going to do it too.

And I said, you're not fucking Nintendo.

Not even Nintendo is fucking Nintendo, but you're sure as fuck not Nintendo?

Yeah, dude, you're not fucking Nintendo.

You're fucking crazy.

Like, I would be bitching super hard about the price of Donkey Kong Bonanza if it wasn't one of the best games I've ever played in my life.

But it is!

So, fuck me.

Meanwhile, Out of Worlds 2, right?

Or Avout.

I finished Avoued,

and

my God, like,

one thing that was mind-blowing about Expedition

33 was the campfire sequences.

Because they are so much better written than the ones in Avout.

I was like, oh my god.

I forgot about to have those.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Avow tries to do a campfire sequence too, where you get to know your party and the party talks, but then like the party doesn't say anything interesting or emotive or anything related to the adventure that's going on.

It's crazy.

See, Pat, I get your sentiment, but I just hate that it indirectly enables the GTA 6 price hike asshole fucking investors out there.

GTA 6 is going to be the worst because

instead of Nintendo, it's going to be like, you're not Grand Theft Auto.

You know who's not Grand Theft Auto?

You know who's not GTA 5?

GTA 6.

It's not even fucking GTA 5.

Okay.

And then it was the fucking GTA game that had its online life cycle during the global motherfucking pandemic.

It will never be like that again.

Never.

I hope not, actually.

They made a production of Hamlet for GTA.

What if it's good enough and everyone forgets?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Crazy.

Sorry.

Crazy people.

They made Hamlet in GTA 5, and they made a movie out of that.

I reviewed it.

It was kind of weird.

Yeah, I bet.

Yeah.

Anyway.

By the way, everybody, your PS5 controllers will finally be able to connect to multiple devices.

That fucking rules.

Because

I have two controllers, two fucking PS5 controllers right here.

This one's for the computer.

This one's for the PlayStation.

I wish I could just use one.

That's stupid.

Syncing, resyncing every time sucks.

So now you're going to be able to hold PS button and press one of the face buttons, and then it'll pick a device so you can get up to four devices.

That's great.

That's great.

Wow.

That's awesome.

It's my game controller.

And my switches

for PC, yeah.

No kidding.

Awesome that that is a feature that can be software updated into the controller.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's really cool.

Wooly, would you like to complain about

quick disconnects for fighting game tournaments and Bluetooth buttons?

Since we're talking about the PlayStation 5 controller?

You know what, Pat?

I would.

Oh, fuck.

Oh,

they just do it.

They could just do it.

Yep.

Now, now I can use my controller at a tournament to simultaneously interrupt four matches at the same time.

Oh, that's so good.

Anyways.

Hey, Shadow Labyrinth,

the Metroidvania Pac-Man game came out.

The Pac-Man part of it looks awesome.

Yeah, the Pac-Man part looks like a really good Pac-Man game.

It looks super sick.

I just wanted to put that out.

I watched that video when you guys were talking about Superman.

It looks really cool.

Yeah, that part looks really cool.

So I want to check that out, Sabra with Shadow Labyrinth.

And then the last thing as well,

a Brazilian

fucking

Godhand game called Forrestero has shown up with Cowboy Godhand.

It's just the same animations, basically.

Oh my God.

That's really fucking funny.

It's really funny.

So this is a one-person project, and it's very blatant because they're like, we want to make Godhand again.

Sure, okay.

Here's the thing.

As much as it's like yo uh uh uh like and i yeah the name means like stranger right like an outsider um it looks like it's this like you know god hand energy thing and we all kind of want more of that and i'm i'm very i've been waiting i'm super down the animations are actually lifted out of godhand like i i recognize them it's it's you're you're you're you're you need to change your homework enough to to not have teacher notice right they're like this is a one-man project look at this thing god hand seeks godhand spiritual successor successor finally.

And it's like,

you can't just take the animations, right?

We learned this with

Icons, the melee, the Project M melee thing where they just took the same animations, guys.

You can't, you can't just take it.

Yeah, no, you gotta, like, granted, working, you know, game in progress, you know, not, not final.

Right?

Uh, you gotta, come on.

We are all very excited for more Godhand, but yes, please.

Same functions.

Everything can just be the same, but the animations just need to be exactly the same.

I think the roulette wheel being a revolver chamber is pretty inspired, though.

That's cute.

More of that.

Stealing an idea and painting over it, I think that's really smart.

More of that.

Just paint over it, yeah.

And the environments and indoors and outdoors still look just as goofy and unlit.

as always, you know, like the energy is right on point.

And the music was like very spaghetti western anyway.

So you could just do that same vibe again, you know.

Yeah.

God, I miss that game.

The only game I have emulated on my my Steam Deck.

Nice.

All right, let's take some letters.

Hey, if you want to send it a letter, send it to CastleSuper Beastmail at gmail.com.

I forgot.

That's CastleSuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

All right.

Let's see.

We got one coming in over here.

Oh, did you see that that guy using my life as his

background stories, that that story has escaped containment update and is like showing up on like business practices websites.

Oh, wow, I didn't see that.

That's amazing.

Because I was like,

that person didn't post anymore, but they were updating the main thread.

So I didn't realize it was like somebody sent it into like a dear abbey, but for like workplace practices.

And

it's getting out.

Hey, dude, I know you're listening.

You need to fucking do something now

i've been telling fucking cooked i've been telling people in real life

that someone listens to this show or reads it or whatever it increases dude telling people in real life about this it's the craziest

i've been telling people in real life about this too like it's becoming viral this becomes a manager.org

oh my god this is like a slow rolling co-play concert moment like i see it i see it i see it sooner or later everyone's gonna know about this child

oh god Oh, my God.

Okay, so.

I mean,

the fact that there's a professional answer to this seems like.

Okay, we got out.

Okay, so the professional answer is all of our advice was bad,

but like,

you can't, you like, they say you can't, like, don't invent a drug problem, but you're never going to tell the truth out of the situation.

You're going to get blacklisted.

You're cooked.

Go to therapy, maybe get a new job.

Okay.

Okay.

I mean,

coming clean being bad advice, it's like, all right, well,

if you got to get a new job, right?

Well, then what's the difference at that point?

The comments all seem to agree that the actual way out is to say that your wife left you and took the kid and took the dog and you don't want to talk about it anymore.

But the guy has an active girlfriend.

I can't.

I can't.

And she doesn't know.

She doesn't know.

Look, so like, that's going to interact.

I don't live in a house of fucking cards and lies that

I can't function in this world of anxiety of the things, the lies I've built.

You can't do it, right?

That's

tough.

It's so stressful.

I can't even begin to project myself.

Fuck, man.

Subreddit, ask advice about this.

I bet he's pretty fucking stressed.

And that's funny.

That's funny.

All right.

All right.

All right.

We got one coming in here, the subject matter.

So he's pussy, right?

Alright.

Okay.

Me and my brother like fighting games.

We play shit like Dragon Ball Fighters, Third Strike, and Battle for the Grid.

He often beats me, but I really don't care about losing.

Winning is not a requirement for me to have fun.

Challenge is the reward by itself, and I'll lose 0-15 and still have fun.

I always run it back.

Even with games, even I've never played before.

I have no skill in.

I go for it

as bitch does not exist inside me.

However, my homie got me into Ninja Storm and Sparking Zero, which I do really enjoy.

I convinced my brother to play, and he didn't even finish the set before he shut the Xbox off and started talking about how the whole game is bullshit and shouldn't matter.

This is pussy behavior, right?

Or am I crazy?

Absolutely.

His character just cannot stand the loss, and his ego crumbled, at least to my perspective.

Y'all ever encountered this level of pussy in those with real bitch in their hearts and cowardice in their actions?

All right, y'all, be good.

That is that your friend.

My friend is a bitch pussy.

This is 100% certified bitch made.

Cowardice.

Oh, absolutely.

Inexcusable.

I remember I was friends with a guy named Gabe in high school.

And I would sometimes go to his house and we play rival schools.

And his brother, James,

would fucking talk the maddest shit at school about how good he was at rival schools.

Not in his own house when I was there, but at school.

And he's like, I could beat anybody at fucking rival schools.

I'm the fucking best.

I'm like, okay, well, let's go.

And so me and fucking James and Gabe and like two other people went and were just going to hang out after school, play rival schools.

And I double perfected him.

And this was in grade nine.

And James never spoke to me again and never talked about rival schools ever again.

He just got up and walked away in his own house.

That's crazy.

Literally never spoke to me for three more years, and then we left off.

Wow.

Man.

The only thing sadder would be if he started telling people that he beat you and won afterwards.

That would be crazy.

That would be nuts.

Especially in an era of newfound social media connection.

The ability to call him out over every single person he knows in his entire life was newly possible.

Newly possible.

Did you know how many people you could tag in a Facebook post?

I did not.

That's crazy.

We discovered things.

All right, let's take one over here.

All right, someone says, I'm not telling you guys to play the game, just please mention the name on the podcast to gauge chat's reaction.

Got it.

AST Libra Revision.

Oh, yeah, that game sucks.

Do you know what that is?

Yeah, Ass Libra.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, no, sorry.

I hate that game.

I don't think it sucks.

Asked Libra is a Metroidvania game made by one guy using entirely store-bought clipart assets.

And it is a super gigantic Metroidvania game that is, according to everyone I've ever talked to who's played it, incredibly excellent.

Wow.

And then I went to play it and was like, this shit is trash.

I hate it.

Okay.

There is a demo.

The demo is like an hour or more long.

It's super, super large.

Like, you can go get Ask Libra's demo right now and decide whether or not I am trash or it is trash.

I bet it's a coin flip.

I bet

there's really a

type of interest in it that is like can move past its jank and be like, like, this is absolute peak.

I have a lot of bandwidth for Metrovania games.

I mean,

you know, I play through Indivisible.

It is extraordinarily well reviewed on Steam.

Okay.

I think it's very positive to overwhelmingly positive.

Fast Libra.

Yeah.

I just don't like how the jump and the action actually feels.

So, like, it's dead in the water to me.

This ring a bell,

Gene don't know anything and I've actually started to kind of admit to myself I think I might be done with Metroidvanias for a while cuz because I I have not finished the Prince of Persia one which is really really good also didn't finish it even though it's absolutely incredible.

It's fantastic the platform is great the combat is great.

I'm like I don't want to finish it.

I'm good.

Do you know why I stopped playing it?

Why?

Because I had to load up the Ubisoft launcher to play it.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's fair.

And I did literally, I got like eight, I got like 70% through.

And then when like,

no, I hate the launcher too much.

I don't even care.

I'll play something else.

Well, so I feel like I've had my itch for Metroidvania scratched by fucking Metroid.

Dread was great.

Now, granted, Gene, you say this

in a pre-skong world.

So

I didn't like Hollow Knight that much.

You get off this podcast.

And that's when I'm gone.

Nah, Nah, that's when

that's when I realized I don't think Metroidvanians are really doing it for me anymore.

Because I was like, this is a great game.

I'm not that into it.

It's really the art style.

It was the hard style.

How did you feel about Hollow Knight 2 and 3, though?

It's funny.

I recently discovered that there's a lot of people whose opinions I really gel with on games that fucking hate Hollow Knight because they think it's three times too long.

And meanwhile, I got to the end of Hollow Knight and was like, this is the only Metroid game that was as long as I wanted it to be.

Interesting.

Like, every Metroid Mania game I had ever finished prior to that, I was like, that's it.

I wanted to keep going for like 200% more.

It's just, it's hitting that Okami place, that weird place of like, I love this, but please, but please, I have a family.

Okami, yeah, Okami was way too long.

Hollow Knight was way too long.

I might revisit it, you know, before Skong, if that ever comes out.

So,

All right, Maria says, Dear Wonder Green and Wonder Pink, I regularly go back to the 2010's demo trailer for Bioshock Infinite and get frustrated at what could have been.

I kind of like the final game.

Sorry, Pat, but I genuinely have more fun watching the trailer than playing what we got.

So this thing, my feelings against that game are part of her sentiment of outrage because that 2010 version looked rad.

A second email follows.

Update.

Actually, I would like to partially amend my previous statement.

I just remembered Shen Lin's section of the released Bioshock Infinite.

Fuck that game.

Wait, what part is that?

It's the part where they go to get the guns from the Chinese guy, and then they get there, and he's dead.

So then they fucking zap to a world where the guns are still there, which isn't the world that needs the guns.

And then they look at the guns and go, how the fuck are we going to get all these guns back?

There's like 4,000 pounds of guns, and then they just leave.

Is that really what happened?

Holy shit.

And they're, and like, what the why would the

like it doesn't even make sense on like a fucking if-then statement on a piece of paper.

The strength of the setting premise was there:

the floating city of racism.

It is a pretty crazy idea about, like, thinking of an America that was racist.

The floating city of racism.

Like, oh, oh, what if, though?

That's the twist.

That's the twist.

You got me with that, bro.

The twist isn't the twist is it's up there.

Oh, wow, wow, that's crazy.

Did you guys know that that fucking CEO that made that Ocean Gate submarine wanted to make a real-life rapture?

Yeah, well, he's obliterated now.

I feel like that's like kind of poetic.

Yeah,

did you watch?

Have you watched those documentaries?

Yeah, dude.

Oh my god, dude.

Hey, cuz that guy was rich.

Everyone's search and rescue thing blew like a billion dollars, even though everybody knew they were fucking vaporized into pancakes.

Yeah,

the kid that was just trying to like reluctantly spend time with his dad fucking.

Oh, absolutely.

But that means the dad gets double ire,

right?

The dad

is double evil and stupid it's just the clicking was like it's seasoning don't worry it's seasoning anyway oh my god that's what he called it yeah the question was do you remember any pre-release builds whether publicly playable or not that you still think about i don't think there's gonna be one that beats bioshock infinite because every pre-release build of that game was a different build and didn't make it in

like

everything that was ever shown of that game never made it in which is crazy

um

the songbird

drop-off from Big Daddy.

It could have been.

What could have been?

I have one, and I say it every time,

but it's not really directly provable in this way.

The early build of Force Unleashed.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, because we didn't see that.

Only you saw that.

So a couple people,

I believe Reggie as well, too, you know, but yeah, I think he was testing at the time.

That was one of the strangest, stupid, wrong things I've ever said.

I was about to say, I didn't know Reggie was around back then.

Like, like,

knowing about him

when he was born.

Right, yes, exactly.

Yes, he, he, he came into existence seconds before I recorded Katamari with him.

Um,

spawned.

Uh, no, the early build of the early builds of The Force Unleashed that were really, really loose and allowed you to air combo and go nuts on the combat system and cancel everything into everything.

So it played like one of those Twitter videos that you never, for games that are never coming out, you know, like those like student projects where you can just kind of go crazy on everything.

You could, it was, it was, it was nuts.

You could force link things together and like dash up to them and just, you know, and they just, they, they calmed it all down.

They restricted stuff.

They took it out.

They took a bunch of it out.

But it played,

like a prototype for some, like not an amazing character action game, but the ability to like string your shit together and unintentionally kind of do more stylish things than the game wanted you to was there.

It kind of reminds me of we talked about Amyler the other day, right?

I'm literally

literally looking at a video of Copernicus right now because I was just going to say Copernicus.

Amylur was like, we tested that too, and I found myself doing these crazy like air combos and juggles in the system that was like not meant for it.

And I was like, whoa, what?

You know, that's a, that's, that's, it's exactly that, like that, you know?

I would have loved to actually see what Copernicus actually was.

The final version.

Well, like, because

I think.

Because it was building off of, it was building off of reckoning, you know?

Well, okay, because Kingdoms of Amalor Reckoning was a completely different game that then that company got bought and then got like the setting changed into something that would tie into the MMO.

But the MMO never actually even got revealed before being canceled by shitbag criminal Kurt Schilling.

But the

GDDs and documentation from back then that we got on the project all talked about Copernicus as a whole and then like the Amoler section of it.

And, you know, gameplay-wise and stuff, it was like, yeah, you're getting a slice of what they want to expand into this bigger thing.

And yeah, when I just remember going into that, and like, I didn't have any expectations for combat on it whatsoever, but queuing it, I was like, this is surprisingly robust.

For me, it's Final Fantasy vs.

13.

Oh, yeah.

Well, I mean, when you play Kingdom Hearts 3,

you'll probably get like a taste of what the fuck that was supposed to be.

Finally.

But like that whole sequence in the palace with Leviathan

shooting in and out of the windows.

He's doing cover.

He's like moving from cover to cover and like

Gladios just comes out.

He's like, hey, watch out, Doctors.

There's this super cinematic.

I mean, that that's really

just so weird because it's like Nomura is clearly obsessed with that game.

Like, he keeps trying to make it.

And he's like, I want to make it.

And Scranix is like, well, then fucking ship it then.

How about you ship it?

How about you fucking do it on time?

Is that impossible?

I kind of still do

think about

the wall running in Metal Gear Rising, not Revengeance.

Oh,

Lightning Bolt Action.

In the original Lightning Bolt Action Metal Gear Rising game,

one

second shot of him

running off the wall.

Yeah, and as a fan of Guns the Duel, I was like, ooh.

But then they couldn't figure out how to make the watermelon slicing into a fun thing.

And then we.

I still think about the

watermelon slicing.

And I'm like, yeah,

that still looked pretty fun to me.

I don't know, man.

All right.

That will do it.

Gene, thank you for hanging out with us.

Thanks for having me again.

You allowed us to talk at length about Superman and Death Stranding in a really

cohesive way that was really helpful.

Thanks, buddy.

Both of you yelled spoilers at me.

It was interesting.

Yeah, we got a double spoiler cast this week.

It was great.

Where can people find you?

Gene.meme?

Yeah, linktree/slash gene.meme.

All my socials and websites and stuff are there.

So

I am trying to play Mind's Eye right now.

Get the fuck out.

It is very, very difficult in that I don't want to play Minds Eye.

It's so bad.

But I'm trying to play.

What the fuck are you doing?

Because I feel like I should write a bad review.

Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, yeah.

No, you're doing God's work.

You're doing God's work.

No, it's always fun to try to figure out a good pan, right?

Game of your mindset coming at you.

Right.

Exactly, yeah.

My recency bias right there.

You know, who knows?

So it's really funny because me and Gene have been talking like, like, all over Discord, and like, like we're both like really desperately trying to fucking fight our recency bias but new things are so good though

i have to say i i mean i don't know much but everything i've seen about mind's eye is just like oh that's a fucking best friend's ass lp

like it really is

right to hell retribution ass piece of shit lp

the controls would even work like when you try to shoot a gun the gun doesn't even shoot like it doesn't it fails at like a very it fails at a fundamental level.

It's crazy, anyways.

All right.

We're going to get out of here.

Take it easy, folks.

Thanks, guys.